1. Ancient Nigerian art

Yesterday I posted an extract from Teju Cole's book Every Day Is for the Thief. In that passage he mentioned "Ife bronzes, the fine Benin brass plaques and figures, Nok terra-cottas, the roped vessels of Igbo-Ukwu." Today I share a few of those creations.

Here's an Ife bronze head (12th–13th c.):

A Benin bronze plaque (ca. 1400?) and head (ca. 1550–1680):

Nok terracotta (date unclear, but maybe 500 BCE–200 CE):

And an Igbo-Ukwu roped vessel (9th–10th c.):

Also, because I found a thorough discussion of Igbo art (with many examples) and liked these artifacts as well:

A leopard riding a shell (in bronze)

A mask worn in purification
performances at funerals

Bronze pendant found at a gravesite

These are so beautiful. And so ancient. 

In his book, Cole talks about the general lack of awareness that present-day Nigerians have of their history, their past—of which these relics are a testament. Maybe that's true of all humans. We live in the moment, the now. We can't even envision, and plan for, much less create, a future more than a year or two out. We sure don't seem to care about the lessons of the past—as they apply to all of us humans, communally, anyway. (There seem to be no shortage of us-versus-the rest of you lessons that people cling to.) We are such silly beings.  But we are capable of beauty. I guess that's something.

N.B. I retroactively numbered this post 1: because yes, I think I'm going to give another 100 or 365 or some damn number of consecutive daily posts a go. It keeps me paying attention and learning and thinking. What the hell. I'm the only one who cares. Let's do it!

Book Report: Every Day Is for the Thief

6. Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief (2007, 2014) (April 23, 2025)

I read Teju Cole's Known and Strange Things, a collection of essays and criticism, a couple of years ago and was impressed. So in scanning my shelves recently for something short to read—short being about what my attention span can handle these days—when I spotted this book it was an easy choice.

And he did it again. This book is his first, a "novella" of 27 short chapters detailing the first-person protagonist's visit back to Lagos, Nigeria, after fifteen years living in the States. It feels like it must be autobiographical, but it is called fiction—and there are a few discrepancies between the narrator and Cole, beginning with the fact that the narrator has a white mother, though not much is made of that fact, and that the narrator is a psychiatrist, not a writer/photographer/art critic (though Cole did go to medical school for a while). Otherwise, perhaps he invented the family members and old friends he tells us about, and some of the places he visits, but they all feel 100 percent real. 

Cole is a wonderfully clear-eyed observer. He doesn't compare Nigeria and the U.S. exactly, but his experience allows him to see aspects of his homeland that its residents can't—the corruption, the dangers, the annoyances, the ways people get by, hopefulness in the midst of resignation. 

In one of the longer chapters, he visits the National Museum in old Lagos, a place he remembers visiting as a schoolboy. When he walks through its empty galleries, though, he is met with disappointment. 

I am the only guest in each of the interlinked galleries I enter. The rooms are indeed silent, save for the chattering of two museum staff in one room, and the solitary singing by another in the next room. The woman sits in a corner and sings from a hymnal as if, for all the world, she were not at a place of work. She ignores me until, standing at the end of a long row of cases, I take out my camera and capture an image.
     —Is not allowed!
     —Excuse me?
     —Is not allowed. Forbidden. No photo.
     She points at the offending contraption, flaps a hand at it, and fixes me with a withering stare. Her tone is acidic. But the voice changes back immediately as she picks up the verse were she left off and resumes sweetly singing the glories of her Lord. Her disconnection from the environment is absolute. A victorious Christian among the idols. Her voice floats through the rooms. The galleries, cramped, are spatially unlike what I remember or had imagined, and the artifacts are caked in dust and under dirty plastic screens. The whole place has a tired, improvised air about it, like a secondary school assignment finished years ago and never touched since. The deepest disappointment, though, is not in presentation. It is in content. I honestly expected to find the glory of Nigerian archaeology and art history on display here. I had hoped to see the best of the Ife bronzes, the fine Benin brass plaques and figures, Nok terra-cottas, the roped vessels of Igbo-Ukwu, the art for which Nigeria is justly admired in academies and museums the world over.
     It is not to be. Though there are examples of each kind of art, they are few, are rarely of the best quality, and are meagerly documented. The whole enterprise is clotted with a weird reticence. It is clear that no one cares about the artifacts. There are such gaps in the collection that one can only imagine that there has been recent plunder.

Cole's b&w photos, uncaptioned, punctuate the book. 

Cole has a website that lists his more recent writings, including regular pieces for the New York Times Magazine. His latest books are Black Paper, "thematically unified essays on the senses, photography, darkness, and ethics," and the novel Tremor, about a photographer living in Massachusetts (again, much like Cole himself). I will definitely be reading more of him.

Book Report: Dead Lions

5. Mick Herron, Dead Lions (2013) (4/16/25)

A couple of years ago I reported on the first book in this series of, now, nine about the "slow horses"—somehow disgraced members of MI5 who've been sent out to pasture, the useless work they're assigned to do meant to inspire them to just quit, saving HMG (Their Majesty's Government) paperwork and money. Only, they keep stumbling onto actual spy stuff that the Park, as HQ is known, manages to miss.

In this second installment, a long-forgotten informant is found dead on a bus, and Jackson Lamb, head slow horse, sniffs a link to Cold War carryings-on and a possible sleeper cell ensconced in a bucolic English village. Codeword "cicada," as in: coming to life only every seventeen years or so. 

It's impossible to summarize the book, nor would I want to try. The delight in reading it is partly in the structure: very short episodes, as little as half a page up to a few pages, each shifting perspective on the story—or stories, all of which add up to a rollicking good finish. Each protagonist, and the villains too, are cut out of whole cloth, with their various petty foibles and concerns and aches and pains and—in some cases, crucially—pasts. There is a lot of intelligence in how many of the slow horses behave—and some stupidity too, which in one instance leads to the character's demise. Or maybe he just had very bad luck?

The dénouement almost involves a plane flying into a skyscraper, and certainly includes a mass protest on the streets of London, and could have seen a huge explosion in the little English village. Diamonds play a role. And Russians, of course, though these days are long past the old spycraft of the 70s. Or are they?

I really enjoy Mick Herron's writing. He carries you along, gets you to laugh, gets you to care, gets you to root for these misfits to carry the day. 

I might just have to continue on a slow horses binge-fest. This volume actually had me reading again, without too much distraction. It's been a while. 

I did dog-ear one passage, though there are many, many I could have chosen. But here, just for a flavor of the language, the character interaction. It's a conversation between Catherine Standish, former drunk and very wise second to emotionally parsimonious Lamb, and Roddy Ho, a data nerd who has, for once, taken some initiative and found useful information:

"This is good, Roddy."
     "Yeah."
     And maybe she'd been hanging around Lamb too much, because she added: "Makes a change from just surfing the net."
     "Yeah, well." He looked away, colour rising. "All that archive crap, I could pull an all-nighter, get it finished in a sitting. This is different."
      She waited until his gaze met hers again. "Good point," she said. "Thanks." She glanced at her watch. It was nine. Louisa and Marcus would be on their way to pick up Arkady Pashkin, which reminded her: "Did you do the background on Pashkin?"
     And now his expression became the more familiar put-upon scowl. Spending a life among computers had a way of prolonging adolescence. There was probably a study on it. It was probably online. "Been kind of busy?"
     "Yes. But do it now."
     Shame to leave him on a sour note, but Roddy Ho had a way of sticking to his own script.

Yeah. I think I'll check and see if Real Tigers is at the library. I could stand more of this brand of storytelling, language craft, and... humanity.

Book Report: Case Histories

4. Kate Atkinson, Case Histories (2004) (4/3/25)

This book is the first of six featuring private investigator Jackson Brodie. I had read Kate Atkinson before (Transcription and Life after Life) and enjoyed her lively style. This time, I confess, about halfway through I was growing rather weary of the liveliness. Maybe I just wanted a straightforward mystery, which this, featuring three separate cases spread over several decades, is not—though we do learn, in each case, what happened (it's not entirely clear whether Brodie himself did, though I presume so), and in several instances otherwise unrelated characters come to overlap in the present, often subtly. Atkinson is nothing if not inventive.

I did enjoy Brodie and the father of a murdered girl, Theo, but the main female characters got a bit tedious, almost caricature-ish (as if written by a man). The chapters jump from one character, one case, to another, Brodie being the only thing holding them together. If I hadn't found him so sympathetic, I probably would have abandoned the book. As it is, I'm glad I finished—though I may choose not to read any more of Atkinson. I noted in my earlier reviews that she is perhaps too clever. Maybe I just prefer simple intelligence to cleverness? Or... maybe I'll get a hankering to find out what Mr. Brodie is up to, now that—thanks to a subplot of this book—he's wealthy, and we trust still wise, and can be more a man of leisure, a man more in charge of his own fate? Time will tell.

Poet Frank X. Gaspar

The final prompt poem for my six-session workshop with Mark Doty. Frank X. Gaspar is an Angeleno, and I feel the place in his poem, especially at the end.

The Lemons

Forget the sun and the dizzy moths.
Forget the pieces of mockingbird that the cats have left by the side gate.
Forget the hose running under the honeysuckle:
the lemons are offering us holiness again.
They are making us go down on our knees to smell them.
They are making us think of our old loves, to grieve over them.
They are singing every little song, they are conjuring every temptation.
They are having sex with the oranges and the tangerines, the yard
is rife with their pollens, they are sweeter than they even know.
They speak together. They are amazing me with their navels and nipples.
How they flaunt themselves on the spider-veined limbs all pained with thorn.
They are trying to make me lazy, to turn me against my simple work—
they do not want to be plucked from their own dreaming.
They are telling us again how they come each year. Bringing secrets
from their other world, and we are never able to decipher them.
How long now before we put up the aluminum ladder
and pull on the leather-palmed gloves? How long with the shape
and heft of lemon voluptuous in my hand? How long
with the summer in its steep track, and the low cars cruising
out on the avenues, and the drone of small airplanes
like bees over the far houses?

Ashland, Oregon

I got together with my wonderful sister-in-law Patty this weekend in Ashland, Oregon, to write—but also to hike, to dine, to gab, to attend the theater (Ashland is home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival). Here are some photos I took. In no order whatsoever, except the last one belongs last.

Maple seeds

Moss

Madrone

Patty and a big boulder

Madrone woodleand

Madrone (oh how I love madrones)

Lower Wonder Trail

Madrone up close

We went to see a play, Fat Ham

It was a sendup of Hamlet—but only one person
died at the end, and then from natural causes...

Sulfur-water drinking fountains

Our final meal, of many wonderful meals,
ended with chocolate. Fittingly.

Book Report: The Salt Path

3. Raynor Winn, The Salt Path (2018) (3/18/25)

I'm not sure how I heard about this book—maybe in an article about books being made into movies, since this one is about to be released as such (end of April in the UK), starring Gillian Anderson. Maybe in an article about long-distance walking? As I say, I don't know, but I'm glad I did.

It's the true story of a couple, Ray and Moth Winn, 50 and 53, who, in 2013, through a series of unfortunate events, lose their home—a farm in Wales; and then, the same week they are compelled to move everything out, Moth is diagnosed with corticobasal degeneration (CBD), signaling ongoing deterioration and, normally, only so long to live. Virtually penniless—they believe they can count on a bank deposit of £48 every week, but as the story goes on it seems they're lucky to see that much in a month—they cast about for options. Hoping against hope for affordable council housing is one possibility, but then what? Or: they can start walking, heading out on the 260-mile South West Path of England, which hugs the coast from Somerset, through Cornwall and Devon, to Dorset.  

They buy packs and stuff them full of what they think they might need, including the one and only guidebook of the path, and set off. And so this book takes off too, detailing an array of stunning geography, encounters with locals and with fellow walkers, and hardships galore. They struggle to find proper flat spaces to camp on; they are very often hungry, subsisting on noodles and tea; they must battle the elements, whether extreme heat or lashing rain. And there's Moth's illness to contend with, which sometimes flares up, but for the most part the walk, the exercise, the fresh air, the effort, seem to do him good. They are heading into the unknown—they don't even know how far they'll go, maybe Land's End, maybe farther—but they're together and they're alive, and that's enough, even if they are homeless. 

The fact that they are, in fact, homeless, and not by choice—they didn't just up and sell everything, bank the proceeds, and set off on a lark—lends weight to this account. They have nothing, and the future is uncertain—not just where they will end up, what they will do for income, but Moth's fate, and so Ray's as well. They must live in the moment, with inventiveness and resilience. 

Considering how tedious a simple "we walked the South West Path" tale could be, the adversity this couple faced adds a lot to the stew. And some rhythm is added by the fact that they break off partway along the trail (well along, actually) to go live for the winter in a small cottage provided by a friend, then resume the path from the opposite direction—and only after Moth has decided to return to university to study to become a teacher. Now they have an actual goal.

I thought the book could have been pared back some in the first 180 pages (by chapter 16 I was rather weary of the path), but chapters 17–20 move along at a brisk pace and I was re-enthralled. Even the three rather exquisite coincidences in the final few pages seemed somehow perfect. So much magic happened over their several months on the path. Can't we just believe?

(And apparently Moth is still with us. They've settled in Cornwall, where Ray continues to write and advocate for the homeless.)