My Books of 2020

Although I had plenty of time to read this year, since I wasn't busy flitting about, I only managed to knock off 35 books (only 14 of them by women). Though that's better than last year. Maybe 30 to 40 is my natural limit. (She said, eyeing 2021 and wondering how much "better" she can do.) Though really, what is "natural" when it comes to reading? I'm still working, and I do read for a living—so chalk up another ten or so books there. And in truth, I tend not to read for pleasure when I'm reading for work. What will happen when I finally do hang up my spurs? Maybe my "natural" limit will change. 

It's not something that concerns me. It's just interesting to observe.

Anyway, here are my 35 books of 2020 (favorites):

1. Louise Penny, The Brutal Telling (January)
2. Louise Penny, Bury Your Dead (February)
3. Peter Matthiessen, End of the Earth: Voyages to Antarctica
4. E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News
5. Jane Harper, The Lost Man (March)
6. Peter Heller, The River
7. Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (April)
8. Fiona Robinson: The Bluest of Blues: Anna Atkins and the First Book of Photographs
9. Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (May)
10. John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History
11. Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
12. Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World (June)
13. Jason Reynolds, Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks
14. James Brown, The Los Angeles Diaries: A Memoir
15. Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys
16. Castle Freeman Jr., All That I Have
17. Ezra Jack Keats, The Snowy Day
18. Hernán Díaz, In the Distance (July)
19. Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy
20. Michele de Kretser, On Shirley Hazzard (August)
21. Jo Nesbø, The Bat
22. Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time (September)
23. Mohsin Hamid, Exit West
24. Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story
25. Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive (October)
26. Halon Habila, Travelers
27. Jenny Erpenbeck, Gehen, ging, gegangen
28. Castle Freeman, Old Number Five
29. Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life
30. Binwell Sinyangwe, A Cowrie of Hope
31. Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police (November)
32. Richard Powers, The Overstory (December)
33. Allie Brosh: Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened
34. Ian McGuire, The North Water
35. Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

Book Report: The Art of the Wasted Day

35. Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day (2020) (12/30/2020)

This lovely book is part travelogue (sort of), part memoir (sort of)—an assemblage of "vignettes" that take us, and more importantly the author, all over the world as she summons up memories that don't tell a coherent story per se, but rather contribute to the patchwork of experiences that make her precisely who she is. Invoking the essai-ist Montaigne (shown below), who famously said, "I do not portray being: I portray passing" (Je ne peints pas l’estre. Je peints le passage)—by which, as Hampl puts it, he means "the inner tick-tock of thought"—she muses on the nature of memory, of constructing a life, of paying attention, of finding meaning. It's philosophy, but it is firmly rooted in specific instances of joy and understanding.

The book is, in a way, a love letter to Hampl's husband of 27 years, Terrence Williams, who died suddenly in 2015 at age 86 (Hampl herself is now 74)—for he is the refrain of the "you" who is sometimes on the page and otherwise never far from it. The moment of their meeting, when she moved into a new apartment and the downstairs neighbor called to introduce himself and show her the location of the garbage cans, is part of the patchwork. Trips she takes to her family homeland of Czechoslovakia, to research Gregor Mendel and his patient effort to find pattern in the natural world; to Wales, to learn about "the Ladies of Llangollen," a pair of well-to-do young Irish women who in 1778 "eloped" from the claustrophobia of their Kilkenny homes to create their own "life of the mind" together; a visit to Montaigne's tower; a trip with Terrence by Chris-Craft cabin cruiser from their home of St. Paul, Minnesota, to Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. But together with these goal-oriented excursions, we learn of things that happen along the way—conversations with friends and family, chance encounters, serendipitous stopovers, small delights. Virginia Woolf and Henry James, Rilke and James Wright, Chaucer and Colette, F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce, Dickinson and Whitman, Debussy and Schubert, Linnaeus and Rousseau, Proust and Kobe Bryant, are referenced, enlarging the ideas being explored. 

Here's a philosophical passage that nibbles at one aspect of the overarching project of this book:

The final page of any novel is a destination, the creation of form offering the illusion of inevitability, the denial of chaos. We don't love novels because they are like life, but because they are unlike it—deftly organized, filled with the satisfaction of shape. This shapeliness isn't "closure," a modern comfort word too airlessly psychological for the deep gratifications storytelling provides. The great carapace of the novel puts a bridle on the stampede of detail.
     And yet the great unsorted pile of detail—that's what a life is. Not the organization of details into shape (that's the novel), but the recognition of the welter of life—notetaking, James's ineluctable consequence of one's greatest inward energy . . . to take them . . . as natural as to look, to think, to feel, to recognize, to remember.
     You understood—I think you did—that I didn't think of notetaking as material, bricks for the great architecture of a book, even if Henry James did. I was taking them for themselves. Life is not a story, a settled version. It's an unsorted heap of images we keep going through, the familiar snaps taken up and regarded, then tossed back until, unbidden, they rise again, images that float to the surface of the mind, rise, fall, drift—and return only to drift away again in shadow. They never quite die, and they never achieve form. They are the makings of a life, not a narrative. Not art, but life trailing its poignant desire for art. Call them vignettes, these things we finger and drop again into their shoebox.

Those thoughts in no way encapsulate the book, though. It is bursting with life, curiosity, and appreciations. What we are privy to in this book are precisely the snaps that she has lifted out of the shoebox, shuffled now this way, now that, as they all fit together in ever enlarging ways. 

Wallace Stevens, poet

Posting this today because (a) I just stumbled on XIII on a friend's mournful tribute post to Barry Lopez and the Wounded Knee Massacre, perpetrated 130 years ago today, and (b) I've never actually read it before, and it's beautiful. So much pain, so much sorrow, so much beauty in the world.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
by Wallace Stevens

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV

A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI

Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII

O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X

At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI

He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII

The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I've been posting Monterey County's Covid-19 statistics ever since March, but I am going to discontinue--for no good reason except that I'm tired of this pandemic. And I expect my few readers don't much care. I know, not posting stats won't make it go away. But I am hoping for some sunshine in 2021. I will note that deaths today from the virus stand at 190: they keep creeping upward. 

Stay healthy. Stay safe. Look toward the light.

Book Report: The North Water

34. Ian McGuire, The North Water (2016) (12/25/2020)

This is a dark, bleak book, replete with violence, and yet I found it strangely compelling. It concerns the dying days of the whaling trade out of Hull, England, and a final voyage of the not-so-good ship Volunteer in the late 1850s. In the first several chapters we meet the main characters: Drax, a harpooner and a thoroughly bad man—he kills a man and knocks out and rapes a boy within the first nine pages; Sumner, the ship's physician, a man with a checkered past in the army in India, where luck both saves him and betrays him; Brownlee, the ship's captain, known for having lost another ship and most of his crew—he's bad luck all round; and Baxter, the owner of the Volunteer, who probably doesn't believe in any such thing as luck. 

Early on we learn that there is a plot afoot to sink the ship high in the Arctic waters of Canada—for the insurance money. Indeed, we readers are made selectively privy to much information that the characters themselves are not necessarily aware of, which makes it not quite a book of suspense but more an exploration of persona. Though that said, the only real backstory we get is Sumner's. The other characters are rather shadowy figures, most of whom (we presume) simply want to make some money and get back home. 

There are brutal scenes in which the crew club baby seals; kill a polar bear mother and take her cub on board, to be sold (assuming it survives) at a zoo back in Europe; and of course catch, kill, and flense whales. A man dies by accident, a boy dies by murder. Violence is a way of life for these men.

Midway through the book, the second mate, Otto—a Swedenborgian, allowing for a bit of spiritual conversation as the story progresses—has a dream: a prophecy of sorts. In it, he learns that the entire crew of the Volunteer save Sumner will die, and Sumner himself "will be killed by a bear. . . . Eaten, swallowed up somehow." This comes to pass, more or less: though one other crew member survives—you can probably guess who—leading to a couple of final, pivotal interactions at the very end. I don't want to give too much away, but suffice to say, Sumner's luck stays with him. ("Killed" and "eaten" may turn out to be metaphorical?)

The descriptions and details in the book are thoroughly researched and beautifully told. McGuire has quite a way with the language, and I learned (or at least jotted down) many new words to me: quim, krang, crump, snickle, bonce, swarf, trew, gisant. His descriptions of landscapes, be it the hardscrabble waterfront of Hull, the vast whiteness of the far north, or the changing countryside of England, are vivid. He also manages to delve into hearts and minds. For example, here is Sumner ruminating in a pub (under the influence of a few drops of laudanum) before he boards the Volunteer:

Perhaps he is free, he thinks. . . . Perhaps that is the best way to understand his present state. After all that has beset him: betrayal, humiliation, poverty, disgrace; the death of his parents from typhus; the death of [his guardian] William Harper from the drink; the many efforts misdirected or abandoned; the many chances lost and plans gone awry. After all of that, all of it, he is still alive at least. The worst has happened—hasn't it?—yet he is still intact, still warm, still breathing. He is nothing now, admittedly (a surgeon on a Yorkshire whaling ship—what kind of reward is that for his long labors?) but to be nothing is also, looked at from a different angle, to be anything at all. Is that not the case? Not lost then, but at liberty? Free? And this fear he currently feels, this feeling of perpetual uncertainty, that must be—he decides—just a surprising symptom of his current unbounded state. . . . And what does free even mean? Such words are paper-thin, they crumble and tear under the slightest pressure. Only actions count, he things for the ten-thousandth time, only events. All the rest is vapor, fog. . . . It is a grave mistake to think too much, he reminds himself, a grave mistake. Life will not be puzzled out, or blathered into submission; it must be lived through, survived, in whatever fashion a man can manage.

This notion of "action" versus words or thoughts plays out again and again in the book. It ties in with the recurring theme of bears—of wildness, of pure physical being and instinct—as well. 

Surprisingly, for all the hard manliness of this book, I enjoyed it. It was an unusual read, a journey unto itself.

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Covid-19 stats for Monterey County today: 24,538 confirmed cases, 155 current hospitalizations, 185 deaths—up, respectively 2,055, 4, and 8 since last Friday; but the change since yesterday is 0, −10, 0, so there's that. 

Stay safe. Stay warm. Happy Christmas.

The Great Jupiter-Saturn Conjunction

The past couple of evenings David has gotten our little spotting scope out and trained it on the amazing meeting in the sky of be-ringed Saturn and Jupiter, with four of its moons clearly visible. Here is the phenomenon rendered photographically. The first photo, taken by David Scharf in Tampa, Florida, on 12/15, is in fact a blended image, and the planets appear too close together--but still, it conveys the phenomenal view of these two wanderers in one eyeful. As I said to a friend who complained that I posted something "false" on FB, let's just consider it poetry, rather than documentary. The view of both Saturn and Jupiter together, with the four pinpricks of moons, is what matters to my heart. I saw it with my own eyes, though maybe not in this exact configuration (Click to see the photos larger.)

The progression of the planets as they move toward each other:

The winter sky on the night of the solstice:

And a couple of photos by my FB friend Geraint Smith in New Mexico, from the 16th:

And last but certainly not least, this from my friend Bob Fugate, with the following description (he originally posted two images: one without labels, one with--which seems to be what he's referring to here): "This is a composite - the blending of two images. One is [an] image of the planets . . . made by stacking 74 RAW frames exposed for 1/20 sec at ISO 800. This image blends a 3 second exposure at ISO 1600 to reveal a few of Saturn’s 82 moons - they are everywhere it seems. Jupiter’s moons appear large because they are overexposed. Ganymede was shy and hiding behind Jupiter. In the second graphic I have labeled the moons detected - along with a 8.9 magnitude star. The image is oriented approximately how it appeared in the sky from Albuquerque, NM, USA at 5:20 PM local time December 21, 2020. The angular distance between Jupiter and Saturn is 6 arc min or 0.1 degree, 1/5 the diameter of the full moon. Jupiter is 553 million miles from Earth and Saturn is 1.013 billion miles from Earth (light travel time is 90 minutes). This composite was made with a Meade 7” Maksutov telescope, focal length equal to 2670mm and a Nikon D850 camera."

I forget to look up. I should look up more often.

Book Report: Hyperbole and a Half

33. Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened (2013) (12/19/2020)

And so for something completely different--from yesterday's book report, at any rate. Well, and yes: Allie Brosh is something else. This illustrated romp through childhood, coping (sometimes just barely), and self-deprecatory self-exploration is taken from Brosh's award-winning blog of the same name. Her drawing style is, with the rare exception, deliberately crude, but the stories she tells are funny, sometimes winsome or sneaky, always self-aware and wise.

The book is also multicolored! Each of the eighteen stories is printed on a different color of paper, making for a whole rainbow of experience. There are chapters about her dogs, the "simple" one and the "helper" (not); chapters about sometimes humiliating childhood events involving, variously, cake, getting lost in the woods, hot sauce, a toy parrot, and tooth surgery/a birthday party; and about depression, identity, thoughts and feelings. There is a hilarious encounter with a goose:

I had never taken birds seriously. They've always seemed like silly, innocuous creatures. I mean, their most recognizable traits are flitting about and singing, which is adorable. In school, I learned that birds are direct descendants of dinosaurs, though I never really saw the resemblance. But when I walked into my living room and found this thing chasing [husband] Duncan, I finally recognized it: the predatory gleam in its eyes and its jerky, robotic movements were straight out of the dinosaur documentaries I used to watch as a child.
     The goose stopped and slowly shifted its reptilian gaze onto me and I understood with startling clarity exactly what it must have felt like to be a baby stegosaurus. I froze and whispered, "Oh no, what do I do?"

Here she is getting things done, in the chapter titled "This Is Why I'll Never Be an Adult":

The industriousness does not last . . .

I very much enjoyed the chapters about her "special" dogs, 

which you can also find on her blog, such as here ("The Simple Dog") and here ("Dogs Don't Understand Basic Concepts, Like Moving"). 

All right. I managed to wash away the heaviness of The Overstory with this book. What's next? Something halfway in between perhaps?

(Here is a probably better review of this book, in case you're not convinced.)

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Today's Covid-19 stats for Monterey County: 22,483 total confirmed cases (up 228 since yesterday--that's more like it)*, 151 current hospitalizations (up 6), and 177 deaths (up 7). 

* By that I mean, yesterday's stats involved a lot of data manipulation/catching up on the part of the state and county, such that the one-day rise in reported illnesses was a whopping 3,304. So while 228 still isn't good, at least it's not in the thousands.

Stay safe. Remember: this pandemic gives us time to read. Find a good book and relax. We've got a ways to go.

Book Report: The Overstory

32. Richard Powers, The Overstory (2018) (12/17/2020)

The Overstory is a magisterial work and definitely deserving of the Pulitzer Prize. As the Pulitzer website characterizes it, the book is "an ingeniously structured narrative that branches and canopies like the trees at the core of the story whose wonder and connectivity echo those of the humans living amongst them."

It's also an exhausting book and took me way too long to finish. At the heart of the story is a certain despair for the planet—or maybe the despair is for stupid, feckless humankind. Or maybe both. There is a lot of sadness and futility as activists try to save trees, both ancient and not. 

That said, the writing is amazing. Powers manages to present a wealth of information without it seeming overly didactic (for the most part). And his way with words! Just gorgeous.

The book is divided into four parts: Roots (these ~150 pages comprise eight chapters devoted to the nine individuals who weave throughout the rest of the book), Trunk (200 pages), Crown (120), and Seeds (30). The first chapter, concerning several generations of the Hoel family, immigrants from Denmark who, back in the 1800s, settled in Iowa, planted a chestnut tree, and documented it photographically over many decades, is a gem unto itself. In part 2, very gradually, some of the people we've come to know from part 1 find one another and become Earth First–style activists. Some don't ever meet any of the others, but serve other narrative functions. In part 3, things catch up with our scattered heroes. And in part 4, perhaps, things begin anew. Most of the book is told in relatively short sections, creating a good sense of forward momentum. No one in this book emerges unscathed. Not everyone who is introduced in "Roots" makes it to the end of the book. Of those who remain, all are radically changed. 

Here are a couple of quotes, randomly chosen (my book is bristling with flags):

Watching the man [her father], hard-of-hearing, hard-of-speech Patty learns that real joy consists of knowing that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a breeze. As certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.

Patty goes on to become an acclaimed professor, Dr. Patricia Westerford, who discovers the ways in which trees communicate, protect each other, fend off assailants, relate to the world: negotiation, reciprocity, and selflessness are their hallmarks. (She is based on a University of British Columbia ecologist, Dr. Suzanne Simard.)

Here's the thing about an apple: it sticks in the throat. It's a package deal: lust and understanding. Immortality and death. Sweet pulp with cyanide seeds. It's a bang on the head that births up whole sciences. A golden delicious discord, that kind of gift chucked into a wedding feast that leads to endless war. It's the fruit that keeps the gods alive. The first, worst crime, but a fortunate windfall. Blessed be the time that apple taken was.
     And here's the thing about an apple's seeds: they're unpredictable. Offspring might be anything. Staid parents generate a wild child. Sweet can go sour, or bitter turn buttery. The only way to preserve a variety's taste is to graft a cutting onto new rootstock. It would surprise Olivia Vandergriff to learn: every apple with a name goes back to the same tree. Jonathan, McIntosh, Empire: lucky rolls in Malus's Monte Carlo game. 

Olivia goes on to heed the call of trees (literally: she hears them speaking to her in her head) and lead a movement to protect a thousand-year-old giant sequoia named Mimas. 

There is so very much more to this book, but I will leave it at that. I am glad I read it. It is complex and full of life. And now I'm ready for something less weighty, and something rather shorter.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Today's Covid-19 case numbers for Monterey County: 22,255 active cases, 151 current hospitalizations, and 170 deaths--up 3,304, 6, and 3. Yes, that's right, 3,304: apparently there was a big backlog of data from the state prison system, and the County Health Department yesterday conducted an extensive data cleaning process that raked out a lot of cases that had gone unreported over a period of days. It's a statistical anomaly. Still: that's a lot of cases, for a county with a population of 434,000: 2 percent of total residents have been affected by Covid-19. 

Stay safe. Go hug a tree. After all, they provide us with life in their breathing.

Ross Gay, poet

I have just finished listening to a wonderful conversation between Pam Houston and Ross Gay, after he read a nice chunk of his new book, Be Holding. (Here is an excerpt from that work, which constitutes a single 88-page poem written in couplets, sort of about Dr. J's mind-blowing scoop shot in the 1980 NBA finals, 76ers vs. Lakers. Even so [I do not do sports], I am eager to read the poem--basketball or not. Because of course, it's about so very much more. But heck, I'm open to appreciating basketball perfection as metaphor. Maybe I'll learn something.) 

The event reminded me how much I enjoy Ross's poetry and prose. And spirit and generosity: he's full of joy and depth, and looks at life straight on. I offered up one of his poems back four years ago (find it here), but it's been a while, so here's another one, from his first book of poetry, Against Which (2006):

Thank You

If you find yourself half naked
and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing,
again, the earth's great, sonorous moan that says
you are the air of the now and gone, that says
all you love will turn to dust,
and will meet you there, do not
raise your fist. Do not raise
your small voice against it. And do not
take cover. Instead, curl your toes
into the grass, watch the cloud
ascending from your lips. Walk
through the garden's dormant splendor.
Say only, thank you.
Thank you.

And here is Ross in conversation with Krista Tippett of On Being in July 2019. She introduces him thus: "The ephemeral nature of our being allows him to find delight in all sorts of places (especially his community garden [or as he refers to it, orchard]). To be with Gay is to train your gaze to see the wonderful alongside the terrible; to attend to and meditate on what you love, even in the midst of difficult realities and as part of working for justice."

Here is a link to today's reading and conversation. I will be going back to it. He is such a delight, and Pam asked some really good questions. (Indeed, I have just now scanned the entire archive of Readings x Writers, all of which I missed--and I'll be checking out a bunch of them. What a gift!)

Finally, why not, although I supplied a link to Ross reading this poem in that earlier post, here is a different one, easily clickable: "Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude."

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Today's Covid-19 stats (they're not getting rosier yet, but the first shipment of vaccines just arrived in county, so here's hoping): 18,951 total cases, 145 current hospitalizations, 167 deaths--up 444, down 3 (yay!), and no change (yay), respectively, since yesterday.

Stay safe. Stay connected. Keep reaching out.

My Books of 2019

Apparently I never made a master list of the books I read in 2019, so . . . here it is. The challenge began on February 19, and I finished up having read only 30 books--as opposed to 50 the year before, and 61 the year before that. But that year (like this one) I didn't set myself a goal. I figured I'd just read, and see what happened. So, this is what happened. It was not an especially highbrow year. But 19 of the 30 were by women, which I'm happy about.

1. Stephen King, The Stand 💙
2. Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of Craft
3. Chigozie Obioma, The Fishermen 💙
4. C. J. Sansom, Dissolution
5. Emily Bernard, Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine
6. Sigrid Nuñez, The Friend
7. Donna Leon, Death in a Strange Country
8. Louise Penny, The Cruelest Month
9. Astrid Lindgren, Pippi går om bord
10. Michael Connelly, The Black Echo
11. Laura Marx Fitzgerald, Under the Egg
12. Pema Chödrön, Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears
13. Michael Connelly, The Black Ice
14. Kate Atkinson, Life after Life
15. Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See 💙
16. Cynthia Newberry Martin, Tidal Flats
17. Louise Penny, A Rule against Murder
18. Brian Fies, A Fire Story: A Graphic Memoir 💙
19. Jacqueline Woodson, Each Kindness
20. Joan Silber, Improvement
21. James Lasdun, Afternoon of a Faun
22. Hannah Hinchman, Little Things in a Big Country: An Artist and Her Dog on the Rocky Mountain Front 💙
23. Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead 💙
24. Donna Leon, The Anonymous Venetian
25. Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention
Economy 💙
26. Martin Walker, Bruno, Chief of Police
27. Susie Steiner, Missing, Presumed
28. Michael Connelly, The Concrete Blonde
29. Louise Penny, The Brutal Telling
30. Louise Penny, Bury Your Dead

It occurs to me that I could add the various books that I proofread and edit during the year. But I wouldn't exactly call that "reading." So, no. But I have actually enjoyed some of the jobs I've worked on lately. Which keeps me focused, and keeps a little money flowing in. So that's a good thing.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Monterey County's Covid-19 stats for today: 18,221 confirmed cases, 133 current hospitalizations, 165 deaths--up, respectively, 295, 6, and 7 since yesterday. 

Stay safe. Reading shlock is just fine.

Creative Process / Elizabeth Bishop, poet and artist

I attended a webinar today on the creative process. As part of it, the presenter, Brad Kessler, included some images of Proust's and Elizabeth Bishop's first drafts of Remembrance of Things Past and "One Art":

He also talked about kintsugi and wabi-sabi; pentimento; walking in the wilderness; Michelangelo's non-finitos; Tibetan mandala sand paintings; and the artists Mark Rothko, Frida Kahlo, and Albert Pinkham Ryder. Among other things. Including a rock tumbler as the perfect metaphor for the creative process: take raw material—a piece of malachite, say; add grit, time, intention, wildness, energy, intention. Put them in the tumbler and turn it on. And you end up with a crafted piece. Most of the presentation centered on imagery (the Rothko sequence of paintings was mind-boggling: such variety, until he finally shed enough skins to find his signature mode of expression), but I enjoyed seeing, again (I keep encountering her, it, lately), Bishop's struggle with her now-iconic poem, or ars lachrymosa. Here is the final product:

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

And she also did watercolors. Here are a few:

Cabin with Porthole

County Courthouse

Interior with Extension Cord

Tombstone for Sale

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Today in Monterey County, 17,926 confirmed cases of Covid-19, 127 current hospitalizations, 158 deaths—up, respectively, 547, 8, and 5 since the day before yesterday. This evening I heard that the daughter and son-in-law of a friend I was going to meet tomorrow for a walk have come down with the virus. My niece and great-nephew are still down with it, though I hope recovering (I haven't had news lately). No one in my immediate small circle of loved ones has died, thank goodness. But I know plenty of people who cannot say the same thing. I'm glad the vaccine is on the way, even if I'm not optimistic that I'll get one anytime soon. But still: normal life may be on the distant horizon.

Stay safe. Please.

Jane Hirshfield, poet

I am reading Richard Powers's The Overstory. It is long, and slow. There will be a book report one of these days. But in the interim, here is a poem, one that relates to that book.

Today, Another Universe

by Jane Hirshfield

The arborist has determined:
senescence        beetles        canker
quickened by drought
                                   but in any case
not prunable    not treatable     not to be propped.

And so.

The branch from which the sharp-shinned hawks and their mate-
cries.

The trunk where the ant.

The red squirrels' eighty-foot playground.

The bark    cambium    pine-sap    cluster of needles.

The Japanese patterns        the ink-net.

The dapple on certain fish.

Today, for some, a universe will vanish.
First noisily,
then just another silence.

The silence of after, once the theater has emptied.

Of bewilderment after the glacier,
the species, the star.

Something else, in the scale of quickening things,
will replace it,

this hole of light in the light, the puzzled birds swerving around it.

The tree pictured above is Luna, a 1,000-to-1,500-year-old tree which Julia Butterfly Hill occupied for 738 days between December 10, 1997, and December 18, 1999, ultimately saving her from loggers. The patched scar in the base of the tree was caused by a vandal in 2000, but the repairs were successful and Luna remains healthy and protected today, her location on private land undisclosed to the public.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Monterey County Covid-19 stats for yesterday: 17,379 confirmed cases, 119 current hospitalizations, and 153 deaths--up 222, 5, and 5 since the day before; up 1,180, 29, and 13 since I last posted a week ago. The daily average number of cases over the last 14 days is 241, which translates to 55 per 100,000 residents; over the duration of the pandemic, 1 in 24 residents have been infected (if I'm understanding the NYT maps correctly). Today we go into another Shelter-in-Place period, with all but essential services severely limited.

Stay healthy. Appreciate the trees and the length of time, for some beings at least.

 

Stephen McMillan, artist

We went to our friend Lynn's today to play some Rummikub (I lost). I've only been to her house a couple of times, and had not really  taken a good look. Today, a photograph--which turned out to be an aquatint--hanging on her wall caught my attention. It was of oak trees, maybe in fog--though she says that when it's a bright sunny day outside, the trees also seem to be bathed in light. A trick of the eye. 

The artist is Stephen McMillan. He was raised in Berkeley, studied art at UC Santa Cruz, lived many years in Petaluma, and a few years ago moved to Bellingham,Washington. His work certainly captures the western landscape. Here are a few of his prints:

Forest Walk, 2012

Marina Reflections, 2019

Winter Oaks, 2001

Red Sky, 2013

Solstice, 2015

Wild Mustard #2, 2002

Haiku, 2013

Pelicans, 2014

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Today's statistics, as case numbers rise dramatically statewide, and Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley are ordered to shut down (the following numbers are for Monterey County only): 16,190 confirmed cases, 90 current hospitalizations, and 140 deaths--up, respectively, 425, 5, and 12 (12!) since Thursday, yikes. 

Stay safe. Wear a mask when you go out in public. Find beauty to soothe your soul.

Spencer Reece, poet

I was introduced to this beautiful, sad poem in the workshop I'm participating in with Mark Doty and seven talented poets. It's been such a treat—though it's also taught me that I have a lot of work to do, not so much to "be a poet" (that will never happen), but to experience this life more fully (a poetic task if ever there was one). 

The poet here, Spencer Reece, is an Episcopalian priest who lives in Madrid. He also worked for many years at Brooks Brothers in the Mall of America, an experience that he captured in his poem "The Clerk's Tale," which in turn was translated into a short film by James Franco. From what little I've seen, Reece is a wonderful poet. I will be reading more of him.

ICU

  For A. J. Verdelle

Those mornings I traveled north on I91,
passing below the basalt cliff of East Rock
where the elms discussed their genealogies.
I was a chaplain at Hartford Hospital,
took the Myers-Briggs with Sister Margaret,
learned I was an I drawn to Es.
In small group I said, "I do not like it—
the way so many young black men die here
unrecognized, their gurneys stripped,
their belongings catalogued and unclaimed."
On the neonatal ICU, newborns breathed,
blue, spider-delicate in a nest of tubes.
A Sunday of themselves, their tissue purpled,
their eyelids the film on old water in a well,
their faces resigned in their see-through attics,
their skin mottled mildewed wallpaper.
It is correct to love even at the wrong time.
On rounds, the newborns eyed me, each one
like Orpheus in his dark hallway, saying:
I knew I would find you, I knew I would lose you.

Image is a microphotograph of dried tears by Maurice Mikkers. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Covid-19 numbers are on the rise in Monterey County, as shown in this graph ☛

Today's numbers are 15,765 confirmed cases (up 974 since November 28), 85 current hospitalizations (a new statistic, and a more meaningful one than "total" hospitalizations), and 128 deaths (up 7).

Words

As we drove down the road on our way to find some geocaches and take the dog for his walk, a beautifully kept up low-slung deep blue jalopy passed by going in the opposite direction. I wondered out loud where the word jalopy comes from. Out came the phone, and David informed me that it first appeared in print in 1924. "It is possible," Wikipedia says, "that the longshoremen in New Orleans referred to the scrapped autos destined for scrapyards in Jalapa, Mexico, according to this destination, in which they of course also pronounced the letter J as in English." It also told us that what I had seen wasn't a jalopy—which is a "battered old automobile"—so now I'm on the hunt for the proper term for that well cared for relic. It looked very much like this:

And I found that photo in a publication called The Jalopy Journal. So there! But on skimming said journal, I see other photos of similar cars, and they're referred to as hot rods. So there's that too. Wikipedia again: "Hot rods are typically old, classic, or modern American cars that have been rebuilt or modified with large engines modified for more speed and acceleration. One definition is: 'a car that's been stripped down, souped up and made to go much faster.' However, there is no definition of the term that is universally accepted and the term is attached to a wide range of vehicles."

Anyway, this got me wondering about other words whose etymology is unclear. Many of them are surprisingly common words. To wit:

dog
bad
big
girl
boy
donkey
bird
surf
fuss
blight
log
tantrum
toad
curse
kick

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Covid-19 cases continue to rise nationwide. Today's stats for Monterey County: 14,791 confirmed cases, 797 hospitalizations, 121 deaths—up, respectively, 422, 6, and 5 since Thursday. 

Stay safe. Wear a mask.

Turkeys

I have always thought there was just one turkey, the North American wild turkey, which, if Ben Franklin had had his way, would today be the national bird of the United States. Proud Meleagris gallopavo, a cousin of pheasants, partridges, grouse, chickens, quail, and peafowl (the species name of the North American wild turkey means rooster-peacock, go figure). 

This afternoon on our walk-the-dog walk, we encountered our local gang of turkeys, eight of them: one tom with his handsome breast beard, several females, and a few adolescents.They were browsing a neighbor's planting strip:

Four of the eight

Long ago, I was surprised to see a gang of turkeys in Turkey, and more recently (like, tonight), there they were in an episode of The Durrells in Corfu. Apparently they were brought to Europe in the 15th century by the Spanish conquistadores. They've gotten around. 

But the last couple of days I've learned that there's a second species of turkey, Meleagris ocellata, native to the Yucatán Peninsula. It's smaller than the wild turkey, but it makes up for its size in technicolor. It's a stunner! (The species name refers to the eye-shaped spots, or "ocelli," on its tail.) 

And of course, there is also the domesticated turkey, Meleagris gallopavo domesticus. A few thighs of which we had for Thanksgiving dinner tonight, braised in butter with lemon and herbs, and topped with red onion–cranberry relish. A far cry from their doughty wild counterparts. And yet....

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Today's Covid-19 stats for Monterey County: 14,369 confirmed cases, 791 hospitalizations, and 116 deaths; up, respectively, 501, 16, and 2 since I last posted five days ago, on the 21st. Among the last ten deaths was someone I didn't know personally, but whom my husband knew, a beloved member of the Monterey contradance community, Craig Lee Hemphill. 

Stay safe.

Almaden Quicksilver

We had another great day of geocaching with our friend Alastair/Mimring today. In another one of the many county parks/open spaces in the south San Jose Area. I know my own Monterey County pretty well, but every time we venture up for another in the 100-Mile Hike challenge, I see how very small my world is. I'm glad to be expanding it.

On each of these outings, we've had some sort of truck with the Mount Umunhum tower, overlooking us in all its monolithicness. See it there?

Today we hiked almost 12 miles, over 8 hours. We found maybe 37 geocaches (two are in question), didn't find one, and didn't complete one (a multicache that would have required a rigorous 1.5-mile r/t hike).

It was a really nice day, not too warm. And it's always good to spend a day with Alastair. Plus, it was his birthday! I feel honored that he chose to spend it with us.   

Here are some pictures I took. They're in reverse order, but I don't have the energy to unreverse them, and anyway, you won't care. Click on them if you'd like to see them larger.

The view over the greater Bay Area today
was stupendous.

 

We saw many clusters of these... winged ants?

David aka Fifi Bonacci is always happy
when he has to climb a tree to retrieve a cache.

In the foreground, a fallen acorn woodpecker tree,
in the distance, Alastair.

Our first cache of the day was at the top
of the hill.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The next day's Covid-19 statistics for Monterey County: 13,868 confirmed cases, 775 hospitalizations, 114 deaths--up 458, 13, and 3 since Friday. 

Stay healthy. Get outdoors. Be safe.

Over the Rainbow

I thought the election would put my angst to rest, but Mr. Trump has been doing a good job of just upping it. I fully expect that the democratic process will prevail and he will soon be out on his ass, but I really wish it were already January 20, 2021, for crying out loud.

But anyway, here, as a little antidote to angst, are a few lovely renditions of "Over the Rainbow." Just because. Yo-Yo, Iz, and Judy. They soothe my soul.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Meanwhile, on the Covid front, current numbers for my county are 13,410 confirmed cases, 762 hospitalizations, and 111 deaths; up, respectively, since last I posted on the 12th, so a week ago, 804, 35, and 8. 

Stay safe. Stay sane. Find a rainbow, even if it's metaphorical.

Book Report: The Memory Police

31. Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police, translated by Stephen Snyder (1994; trans. 2019) (11/12/2020)

The Memory Police is the eighth book in Pete Turchi's series of discussions on the theme "Border Crossings." I skipped the seventh, Toni Morrison's A Mercy: it was too difficult; I wasn't in the mood to challenge myself; I'm too impatient, or maybe just too stupid. (In this link Pete discusses A Mercy. As he notes, sometimes you pick up a book, and it's just not the right time for it. I'm not sure it'll ever be the right time for me to engage Morrison, but at least now I've read a half dozen pages of her work. That's enough. For now, anyway. Maybe for good. She demands a willingness to go along and let things be revealed that I'm not sure I possess. But all that said, I did listen in on the discussion of the book by those braver and more patient than me.)

In contrast, The Memory Police was very easy to read, written in disarmingly plain language. It's speculative fiction, about an island where things are gradually "being disappeared"—things as commonplace as ribbons, harmonicas, and lemon sweets, but also roses and birds and ferry boats, calendars and maps, and eventually . . . well, over time, life as we know it simply seems to vanish. And along with the material objects, the islanders' memories of those things, and of the meaning that they represent in a lived life, also disappear. 

Braided into the simple account of the nameless narrator, a novelist; her friend "the old man"; and her editor, R, is a book that the narrator is working on, about a typist who loses her voice—not to laryngitis; she loses her very ability to speak out loud. Indeed, all of the narrator's books revolve around existential loss.

The Memory Police are the authoritarian regime's enforcers. They make sure that when, for example, novels are disappeared, all the people on the island set about burning their books. They also hunt down and arrest all those random few whose memories remain intact—such as R, whom the narrator shelters in a hidden room in her house. (The shade of Anne Frank is no coincidence.)

Throughout all these disappearances, the narrator and the old man continue to adapt, becoming more emotionally attached to each other, less materially invested in their past, while R continues to insist that the vanished items—many of which they are able to recover thanks to the narrator's mother, who was taken away and killed fifteen years before the story's events take place—will still be able to provoke memories. It is as if he simply can't conceive of a world without myriad specific and interconnected remembrances.

Nor can I. The disappearances, the stripping away of memories and meaning, that this novel outlines are horrifying.

And yet as I read, I wondered if, in some way, what is described isn't akin to death itself—cumulative little losses that we, perforce, adjust to as the fullness of life begins to recede. It's also a reminder to pay attention to just those small things that might not seem important, but what if they disappeared? Certainly—because we do have memories—we would miss them. They are all part of the fabric of our lives, our histories, our experience of the world.

Here is a passage I flagged. The narrator is visiting R in the little room that he has recently come to inhabit, and in which he remains throughout the book, never exiting:

"May I ask you something?" I said, still looking at him.
 "Of course," he answered.
 "How does it feel to remember everything? To have everything that the rest of us have lost saved up in your heart?"
 "That's a difficult question," he said, using his forefinger to push up the frames of his glasses and then leaving his hand at his throat.
 "I'd imagine you'd be uncomfortable, with your heart full of so many forgotten things."
 "No, that's not really a problem. A heart has no shape, no limits. That's why you can put almost any kind of thing in it, why it can hold so much. It's much like your memory, in that sense."
 "So you have everything inside you that has disappeared from the island?"
 "I'm not sure about everything. Memories don't just pile up—they also change over time. And sometimes they fade of their own accord. Though the process, for me, is quite different from what happens to the rest of you when something disappears from the island."
 "Different how?" I asked, rubbing my fingernails.
 "My memories don't feel as though they've been pulled up by the root. Even if they fade, something remains. Like tiny seeds that might germinate again if the rain falls. And even if a memory disappears completely, the heart retains something. A slight tremor or pain, some bit of joy, a tear."
 He chose his words carefully, as though weighing each one on his tongue before pronouncing it.

In August, Yoko Ogawa wrote a piece called "How We Retain the Memory of Japan's Atomic Bombings: Books," which Pete referenced for our discussion tomorrow—"retaining memory" of important events being crucial to the continuance of civilized society. 

And here is a good discussion by Jia Tolentino of The Memory Police, in conjunction with Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railway and Mohsin Hamid's Exit West (the latter the first book Turchi had us read in this series), about the transformation of familiar metaphor into imaginative truth about the real world. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Today's Covid-19 statistics for Monterey County: 12,606 confirmed cases, up 72 since yesterday; hospitalizations and deaths remains steady at 727 and 103. 

Stay healthy. Be safe. Safeguard your memories too.

Seamus Heaney, poet

Chorus from The Cure at Troy

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.

History says, Don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme. 

                     ***

You may have heard President-Elect Joe Biden recite these words, and others by the revered Irish poet Seamus Heaney. (Here is a New Yorker profile of Heaney from last year, and here is one from 2013.) The following clip was aired on Irish television last Saturday evening November 7 after Biden's election was projected:

There is another YouTube version, with the same voice-over, which I believe was used as an ad for Biden's campaign. Here is an article from the Guardian, "Joe Biden's Love for Seamus Heaney Reveals a Soul You Can Trust." Yes indeed. I am so glad to have an intelligent, literate, caring person back in the Oval Office. I just hope he can do good work
. . . which is far from assured, given the obstructionism of the GOP. But I suppose if anyone can make things happen, it'll be Joe Biden.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Today's Covid-19 numbers for Monterey County: 12,534, 727, 103—cases hospitalizations, deaths. Up 168, 5, and 2 since yesterday or the day before.

Stay safe. Read some poetry. Here's another by Heaney, one of my all-time favorites, "Postscript."