71. Yuri Norstein, animator

You know how sometimes you discover something so wonderful, you wonder how or why it's been withheld from your consciousness, your understanding of the world, for so long? So many fabulous people, activities, creations, etc. etc. out there, of course you can't bump into them all, or even a tiny fraction of them. But/and, oh how lovely to have your world thus enlarged at least every so often.

That happened to me today as I read an essay in the book I'm currently tackling, Brian Phillips's Impossible Owls (the title alone enlarges my world), which I will report on anon. The essay in question is titled "The Little Gray Wolf Will Come," and it concerns a Russian animator named Yuri Norstein, considered by some to be the greatest animator in the world. His output is relatively small, just a handful of short films. Phillips became interested in him when he encountered a reference to a project Norstein had been working on, about the great Gogol short story "The Overcoat," for thirty-seven years. And that was as of 2013. 

I just want to keep him alive in my consciousness, so I'll post a few videos and links. 

First, what he engages in here is astonishing cut-out animation, which he accomplishes together with his wife, Francheska Yarbusova. It is briefly described in this introduction to his corpus:

Here is his 1975 film Hedgehog in the Fog (Ёжик в тумане). (In addition to the visuals, I love listening to the Russian narration.) It's quite possible that the first word I ever learned in Russian—besides da, nyet, dosvidanya, and (thank you, Clockwork Orange) kharasho—was yozhik, or hedgehog. That from David, who took Russian in high school, and they'd throw a little stuffed hedgehog around the room to tag the next one up to read or respond to the assignment. And who doesn't love a yozhik?

Then, Tale of Tales (Сказка сказок) from 1979, about "the way memory is conjured up." (The version here is fairly low-res, but it has English subtitles. For a high-res rendering, go here.)

A few years ago, the Atrocity Guide posted a short film about Norstein and Yarbusova's "Overcoat" project (Шинель), titled The Animators Who've Spent Forty Years on a Single Film:

And here are 5 minutes of clips from the project. As one commentator notes, it takes 200 hours to animate 12 seconds. So far, he's finished about 25 minutes of what might end up being an hour-long project. That is dedication. Obsession. Genius or madness, or both.

You can read an interview with Norstein from 2020. In 2021 the Moscow Times commemorated his 80th birthday. And here is a 2005 article from the Washington Post about The Overcoat. He was also featured in a 2005 book by Clare Kitson, former head of animation at BBC 4.

I've just now stumbled on this creator. But from the bits I've seen so far, I would have to agree that Yuri Norstein is one hell of an animator. And he seems to have a beautiful heart and soul as well.

70. The path to happiness

I was scrolling through the internet just now, as I try not to do... One thing I found ludicrous:

I mean, seriously, ha ha and HA, using AI to "save time by reading a summary"? Of a poem??? Sure, sure, it's a long poem. But... a summary??? And mostly, mostly, mostly—AI is upon us. How will we maintain our humanity?

But then I came across this bit of fluff, in the Washington Post:

And I of course did take the quiz, the questions being something along the lines of "Are you happy?" "Are you leading a meaningful life"—on a scale from 1 to 10. 

How the heck am I supposed to know? You're supposed to tell me!

Here's question #13, with my answer (given only three choices to define one's ideal life):

And here's the upshot, from this 13-point questionnaire:

You are part of a small — but substantial — group of people who preferred the psychologically rich life, including 13.2 percent of Americans, according to a 2020 study with participants from nine countries — the United States, Germany, Norway, Portugal, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, India and Angola.... Germans were most likely to endorse seeking a life of psychological richness at around 17 percent, while Singaporeans were least likely to prefer this path, at less than 7 percent.

Here’s how to cultivate more psychological richness in your everyday life:

Embrace more playfulness, curiosity and spontaneity. This can be something as simple as taking a different route to work or home and noticing the newness around you. “Find something new from the familiar, and change your routines a little bit here and there.... Have a certain time that you can be spontaneous every day.”

Try a new activity. There is discomfort in not being good at something, but pushing past your comfort zone is a way to grow into the new and (previously) unknown. “Start by reaching for richer experiences and becoming a little bit more comfortable with tolerating negative feelings, tolerating discomfort,” Westgate said.

Journal and reflect on your experiences. Psychological richness is more akin to career highlights, but even the most profound memories can fade with time. Writing them down and even sharing them with others can help you hold onto your life-changing experiences.

Honestly, all that is not bad advice. I already journal. I like new activities. I do keep exhorting myself to play more. But seriously: a certain time of day to be spontaneous??? Do these quiz fabricators not know what spontaneity means?

Still, the idea that I'm "furthest down the path to Happiness" gives me some comfort. We need to celebrate our victories, no matter how they come dressed.

69. Motivation by lists and structure

The other day I wrote about my Project 365s—a way of continuing to move forward, and to stay somewhat focused, by doing a particular task, no matter how small, every day. That day I (hopefully—as in, full of hope) started a new daily photo project, and so far, ten days in, I'm doing it. I already took a picture for today ☞, but I will see how the rest of the day plays out, it being early (8:45) yet. Something better may come along. (Later: it did.)

A friend of mine (one of the Howlers) has what seems to be a long list of actions she tries to accomplish every day, a daily haiku and journal entry among them, but I'm sure I've heard her mention more.  

Me, I'm good with one expected activity a day. 

But I also like list projects. Just now—that time of year when lists are sprouting up everywhere—I got sidetracked by a NYT list of the best thrillers of 2025, which steered me to the writer William Boyd, whom I've heard of but not read, and who seems to be highly admired, and who I decided I probably must read, and oh! he has a new series just started, and yes! I do love book series... and then the Amazon page I'd gotten steered to to find out more about Boyd mentioned a book by Michael Connelly, whose Harry Bosch books I'd started reading one by one, and I got to wondering how far I'd gotten. 

I happen to have a handy list of all my blog entries, which includes the book reports I started doing with regularity back in 2016. So I searched for Connelly, and it turns out the last one I read in the series was the seventh (having somehow skipped the sixth), in May 2023. That report also mentioned that I was trying to read books in alphabetical order:

Martha Wells, All Systems Red (loved that one)

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives

Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land (also loved)

John McPhee, Draft No. 4

Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life 

Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers (this one too)

Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet (as well)

And then, right about the time of that seventh Bosch book, I forgot about that project, distracted by something or other. But just now I'm thinking, hmmm, I still like that idea. It can be tricky to find a new title among the many (many) hundreds that I own. The alphabet can be a handy filter/decider. So I scanned my shelves, and found a fetching title starting with I: Impossible Owls, a collection of essays. Only it turns out that the novel I picked up just yesterday—coincidentally? providently? eerily?—also starts with I: Imagine Me Gone. 

So yes, I think I'll head back to that project, after a little gap of a year and a half. Let's see how far I can make it this time. 

My other alphabetical list project, which is still but an idea—I've only ever tackled A—is a cooking endeavor: the national dishes (loosely defined) of the world. A was for Aruba and its wacky keshi yena, or meat-stuffed cheese. Maybe I'll pick that up in the new year: one letter every two weeks. Starting with B... is for... Belgium (moules-frites, or perhaps stoofvlees aka Flemish stew)? Burundi, Bahrain, Bermuda? Bosnia (Bosanski lonac aka Bosnian stew)? I'll think about it. One project at a time is probably more than enough for my poor distractable self...

Book Report: What My Last Man Did

23. Andrea Lewis, What My Last Man Did (2017) (12/9/25)

This book is by a friend of my sister-in-law, who can't speak highly enough about Lewis's writing. In January the three of us will be participating in an online workshop together, and I thought it would be instructive to read this book by way of introduction. 

Comprising ten linked stories, it begins with two sisters, narrator Hannah, 23 years old, and her older, reclusive genius sister Iris, in 1975 in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and a year later, Galveston, Texas. The action then goes back in time to 1895 New Orleans, from there hopscotching to 1901, 1917, and 1932, all still in Louisiana; 1945 Sacramento; 1948 London; and 1962 Galveston. The final chapter brings us full circle back to Las Cruces and 1976, where Hannah is still casting about for some direction, some grounding, while Iris stumbles into (we hope) happiness. In the meantime, we've met their grandparents, their parents, the beloved foreman of the family's Texas rancho, and various other key (or merely interesting) characters. 

One chapter is entirely epistolary. Most are written in the first person, as told by various individuals. Lewis has an amazing grasp of place and time, and every detail helps paint a picture. In some chapters all the detail became a bit exhausting for me, and all I could think of was the research Lewis must have done to come up with, for example, the very specific Fiat-Allis 16-B tractor or the Beech D17 Staggerwing bi-plane, built in 1945, or the Caminada Hotel on Grand Isle, Louisiana, which Lewis may have invented, but I wouldn't be surprised if it actually existed and actually was destroyed in the actual hurricane of August 12, 1901. To name but a few examples. 

Craft guides talk about the "telling detail": rather than describing every last feature of a person, say, you pick out one or two that encapsulate a character. Here's where Lewis, to my mind, sometimes goes a bit too far. For example:  

[Five-year-old] Angelica twirled six rows of pearlescent pop-beads she wore on one wrist. She had on a Superman t-shirt and a skirt with a print of yellow light bulbs and green telephones. Her fine, white-blonde hair hung limply around her shoulders. "Can you say hi?" Rick [her father] asked.
     "I have a pet tarantula," Angelica said. "Her name's Mabel."
     "Really?"
     "I have dirt in my sandals." She sat down and took off one white plastic sandal and shook it.

It's a thorough picture, to be sure, and there's nothing at all wrong with it. It just felt a little... too much. Not a complaint, really. Lewis is a masterful writer. But now I can't get the light bulbs and telephones out of my head, and it leaves me wondering what the skirt's background color was. I've settled on white.

Overall I very much enjoyed this erudite and clever book—the linkages among characters, the times and places past. I understand that Lewis is now working mostly in flash. On her website, she includes a humorous set of writing instructions titled "Flying High: Better Writing through Simple Fixes by K. Hart Undertwis" where she (deliberately) takes some of those craft guides' suggestions several steps too far. 

Now that I've managed to break myself out of the thriller/mystery genre, maybe another work of literary fiction is in order before I march back to the atomic bomb. Let's see. There must be an enticing book around here somewhere!

68. Listening to podcasts while I walk Gen. Jim Moore Blvd.

I am trying to get out for long walks every day or so, and today I succeeded: 14,642 steps (when I happened to have the phone, my current step tracker, in my pocket). And when I go for long walks, I tend to listen to podcasts.

Today I started with Grammar Girl, talking with editor Peter Sokolowski about the very recent release of the 12th Collegiate Merriam-Webster Dictionary, an actual print edition. It's been 22 years since the 11th. This is a big deal. Okay, okay, it may only be a big deal for a language nerd like me, but seriously: big deal! Here's what I may have listened to:

I then moved on to Ezra Klein, which as always was interesting. It was his end-of-year ask-me-anything wrap-up. 

And I finished with the Because Language podcast, and a conversation with Douglas Harper of the Online Etymology Dictionary. I learned interesting things about the words bulldozer, algorithm, and silhouette. For a couple of examples. 

I do love thinking about language, how it works, how it means, how it distorts, how it evolves. 

And if that's not enough, here's what I learned about the word algorithm:

algorithm(n.)

1690s, "Arabic system of computation," from French algorithme, refashioned (under mistaken connection with Greek arithmos "number") from Old French algorisme "the Arabic numeral system" (13c.), from Medieval Latin algorismus, a mangled transliteration of Arabic al-Khwarizmi "native of Khwarazm" (modern Khiva in Uzbekistan), surname of the mathematician whose works introduced sophisticated mathematics to the West (see algebra). The earlier form in Middle English was algorism (early 13c.), from Old French. The meaning broadened to any method of computation; from mid-20c. especially with reference to computing.

Book Report: Spook Street

22. Mick Herron, Spook Street (2017) (12/3/25)

I've been moving slowly through a book I've had on my shelves since 1988, the multiply award-winning tome The Making of the Atomic Bomb—700-plus densely packed, small-typeface pages, with big personalities and complex physics (not my strong suit, to the say the least). A little over 100 pages in, I felt the need for something fast-paced, and amusing. 

What better choice than a Slow Horses book? The next in the series (I finished the third back in June) was Spook Street, which in the TV adaptation features Hugo Weaving as a bad guy. This time, I especially enjoyed, in addition to Herron's consummate style and the various now-familiar characters, comparing in my mind the written version to the visual one. Because in certain respects they are quite different, as befits the different media. 

Beginning with the prologue, which brings us very slowly into a shopping mall (or "cavernous retail pleasure dome"), and into the consciousness of a security guard, who is watching the crowds, and soon notices larger-than-usual groups of teenagers approaching from all directions, and he goes on the alert—only to realize it's a flash mob! Innocuous! Fun! Ah, but not everyone approaching is in that mob. One person in particular is anything but innocuous. Decidedly not up to fun. 

The very slow buildup of those few pages was probably presented in the series (I'd have to go back and watch the beginning again) over one or two minutes, at best. We would see the moving crowds, the security guard, and yes, we'd experience the explosion, but the beauty of words is that it can slow down action, give small details. Just try and show "the air was damp and miserable, a tickle at the back of Samit's throat suggested an oncoming cold, and he was wondering where he might cadge a cup of tea"—and the evocation of character (a minor, short-lived character) thus conveyed. Even the description of the flash mob getting going is at once a bit threatening—"it started—at the same precise moment the whole crowd, dozens upon dozens of kids, milling by the fountain, blocking the entrances to shops, climbing on the water feature's surround"—until the scene transforms into something joyous: "every single one of them, it seemed, stripped off their jackets and coats to reveal bright happy shirts beneath, all lurid primaries and swirls of colour." 

As I recall, the TV show made a plot element in France much more central than it is in the book—or rather, in the show we see a particular house in France, and the people who lived in it, and how they interacted, and we go back in time to do so: we spend quite a bit of time in France. Whereas in the book, the house burned down several days previous to a certain character's visit to it, and he quickly returns to the UK; the story of the house, its significance, is then related in snatches as the facts are stitched together by Lamb and his slow horses. The house is important, yes, but we learn its importance in different ways depending on the medium. 

I love that.

In the end, most of the slow horses emerge unscathed (most, not all), and the bad guys get their just deserts. Well, again, mostly—because apt punishment would be inconvenient for the intelligence service in the long run. As Jackson Lamb comments on hearing this news, "Plus ça bloody change. I swear to God I'd defect, if there was anywhere worth defecting to these days."

A few chapters in, MI5's operations chief, Diana Taverner, is waiting on the Thames bank to talk to Emma Flyte, the new head of the Dogs, the get-your-hands-dirty security branch of the service. Talk to, or make sure Flyte knows her place. I enjoyed the way this scene featured a garbage barge (here I've extracted just those bits):

A barge was puttering down the Thames, rubbish piled high in its middle, and there were seagulls all over it, a great boiling mass of them, arguing and scrapping for riches. Earth has not anything to show more fair. For Diana Taverner, it looked like politics as usual. . . . 
     The barge, some hundred yards downriver now, let out a whistle; a curiously jaunty note for what was basically a waterborne dustbin. The gulls ballooned away, scrambled for purchase in the air, then renewed their cackling onslaught. . . .
     The seagulls' cries were ever more distant. You moved the rubbish somewhere else, and the racket followed it. It all seemed so simple, put like that. Complications only set in once you moved away from the metaphorical.
     Free from observation she awarded herself a cigarette, willing her mind into a blank: no plots, no plans, no corkscrew machinations. Around her, the world carried on: business as usual on a January morning, and London recovering from the seismic shock of violence. In front of her, only the river; grey, and endlessly travelling elsewhere.

Okay, I said virtually nothing about the plot. You'll just have to read the book yourself. It's worth it. I love the Slow Horses books.

And I will resist the temptation to dive straight into the next one, London Rules—which we just two weeks ago finished watching. Then again, since the TV version is still fresh in my mind, wouldn't it be instructive to compare?

No no. Back to the atomic bomb. Due diligence.

67. Red Rocks

In my lazy way, I tried searching for photos I've taken on December 2's past, thinking I'd take the easy way out today and post old photos from Flickr. And the only hit was this one:

My climbing partner Mike at Red Rocks outside Las Vegas. 2007. I remember those rocks. They reside still in my fingertips.

Here are some photos I took on our couple of trips to Red Rocks. Marvelous memories of balancing on rock.

Those are my rock shoes dangling down there, in case you're wondering. They are 5.10s, pink. 

66. Project 365

I've undertaken several blogpost-a-day projects over the past decade-plus—of which this here is a shortened, sputtering version. In the past, I've actually managed to follow through—every day, for 365 days—some four or five times. It's a good practice for me. I don't know why it's become so difficult. Or rather, why I've become so lackadaisical. I mean, sure, it doesn't really matter if I succeed. But it's the principle of the thing. It's a way of paying attention, staying engaged. Surely that matters. 

Years ago, beginning in 2007, I undertook a few photo-a-day projects, which I posted on Flickr—where, back before FB sunk its hooks into me, I was quite active. Here are the links:

Project 365 (begun on May 23, 2007—my mother's birthday, her last one with us—with the above photo)
Project 365, Take 2 (begun January 1, 2009)
365:3 (begun August 9, 2010)
Photo-a-Day, Take 4 (begun December 23, 2012, in the days when I was enamored with Snapseed tools)

The daily blogpost projects are, I suppose, an elaborate version of those daily photos-plus-captions.  

As Mary Oliver famously wrote:

Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

I guess that's what I'm trying to do with all of these projects: pay attention, find something fascinating or beautiful or moving or funny (etc.), and tell about it. 

Today I created a new album on Flickr, Project 365 Take 5, and posted this shot, from breakfast out while we waited for our car to be serviced. (I love condiment caddies, what can I say?) Perhaps heading back to simpler expectations is good for me just now, when my daily to-do list manages to be all over the place. If I manage to make one at all.

It's possible I will remember tomorrow, and post a second photo. And then, continue following through until next November 30. Wish me luck!