Europe '23

Although I didn't post photos here from our recent trip to Denmark, Norway, and Brittany, I did post photos on Facebook. Here are the daily links. With commentary, and the occasional odd photo.

Departure from SFO (5/12)

We landed at our friends Jan & Catharina's, just north of Copenhagen, and took an afternoon stroll to the little lake nearby:

A beautiful day on the water in J&C's sailboat, and a visit to the Swedish island of Hven, home of astronomer Tycho Brahe

A rest day—i.e., a hike around Sjælsø, the lake pictured above

A day in Copenhagen, wandering about the town

Another day in Copenhagen, visiting museums 

An excursion to the island of Møn

Helsingør and the Louisiana Museum of Art

Our last full day in Denmark: more sailing (sort of), a walk along the shore, and a last luscious dinner out  

A final morning walk, then . . . on to Norway, by ferry!

A walkabout in Oslo, geocaching 

And another wander, close to home, including the botanical garden 

Frognerparken, one of my favorite spots in Oslo, and downtown Oslo

And then we flew to Kirkenes in the far north (Finnmark) for a week of birds and beautiful stark landscapes 

May 26, our first full day in Finnmark, in three parts: buying shrimp at the dock in the morning, traveling up the coast to see birds and witches, and the midnight sun

A trip to the end of the world—or at least the end of the road 

A day hanging around our little peninsula of Ekkerøy

Last day in Finnmark, with a visit to the Russian border—and our flight back to Oslo 

One last day wandering around Oslo

And so we move on to new surroundings: Brittany, by way of Alençon, Normandie

A driving day through Normandie and Brittany as we head toward St-Benôit-des-Ondes

A walk up the coast while we await our niece, Erica, and her husband, Terry 

A visit to St-Malo

A coastal walk at Pointe du Grouin, near Cancale 

Dinan, a charming medieval town

Cap Fréhel, another coastal walk 

Mont St-Michel

La Plage des Chevrets and Île Besnard 

Moving on to our final week, in the southwest of Brittany near Quimper 

The forest of Huelgoat, followed by a visit to the church of Pleyben

A ramble along the Bélon estuary 

Carnac 

Point du Van to Pointe du Raz—another coastal walk

Pointe de la Torche and Bigourne Bay

Quimper and one last geocaching excursion  

Heading to CDG and home

Book Report: The Plot

13. Jean Hanff Korelitz, The Plot (2021) (7/23/23)

I keep trying to read these novels that are touted as "breathtakingly suspenseful," hoping they really will be, but I'm always disappointed. (Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train.) Not only that, but I end up feeling cheap and dirty. This was another of those. Yes, I want a page-turner, and yes, this one was (in part because, finally, I just wanted to get it over with), but I also want something where there's redemption, not merely trickery. In any case, the moment the "bad guy" appeared, I had my suspicions, and there was no one else it could ever have been. Totally predictable. And the plot itself? utterly preposterous. When will I learn my lesson? With this one? Can I hope?

All that said, the writing itself was good (except for the excessive parenthetical asides), and there are moments when it works as literary satire. But that's not enough. As the protagonist of this book would have agreed. 

For the record, I read this because of something I read online—a book review, I think—by the author, and liked what she had to say, so thought I'd check out one of her own works. It got good reviews, and was on the New York Times 100 Notable Books 2021 list. Apparently, this genre just isn't my cuppa.

Two poems

I have been neglecting the blog, busy traveling. Though why I don't blog when I'm traveling, I just don't know. Instead I post everything on Facebook. Soon I'm going to provide the links to my daily travelogues here, so I can find them again, if for no other reason. But for today, I wanted to share a couple of poems that are, sort of, related, also not. 

The first is by Ross Gay, writing in honor of Eric Garner on the first anniversary of his murder on July 14, 2014. He was killed by police in a prohibited chokehold, and left us the immortal phrase, "I can't breathe." (As did George Floyd.) The second, by Philip Larkin, I heard read in a movie, Empire of Light, which I watched flying from Paris to Toronto last Friday. 

A Small Needful Fact

Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe. 

                                —Ross Gay

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh. 

                                —Philip Larkin

 

Book Report: The Nature of the Beast

12. Louise Penny, The Nature of the Beast ( 2015) (5/11/23)

Continuing my need to dip into something with a driving plot, I picked up this, the eleventh in the Chief Inspector (now Monsieur) Gamache series (I read the tenth last November). It carried me along nicely, introducing a few new characters—one of whom may end up being recurring, but mostly not—and a fantastic story of a giant missile launcher hidden in the forest near Three Pines for some forty years, with possible ties to Saddam Hussein. A cold-blooded serial killer who wrote a play that kicks the story off also figures in. There are two murders: a young boy and the director of the play. An old war crime is uncovered.

Every mystery writer has something different to offer. With Penny, I especially enjoy the development of the lead characters, both in the police force and among the Quebecois villagers. The plots themselves often have me shaking my head, but that's okay. Mysteries aren't meant to be believable per se. They're meant to carry us along. And this one did that. Although the murderer's motive is rather weak to my mind, there was plenty to keep one guessing about as the story progressed. Who doesn't love a red herring or two?

Nothing to quote this time. It is apple season, though, and Penny likes to throw in lots of food allusions—in this book, every single dish seems to be made of or with apples. Including the potato chips!

Random artists

Various people I follow on FB post imagery by artists I've never heard of, and I'm often intrigued enough to search them out. Then I forget their names and they fade from view. So I thought today I'd devote a post of my own to some of the artists I've encountered recently, so they won't disappear on me. I've linked their names to a little more about them and their work. There's so much beautifully inspired art out in the world. It makes my heart glad. (Click on the images to see them large on black.)

Akiyama Iwao, Japanese, 1921–2014

Wheat in Autumn, 1968

Owl, 1979

Gala Porras-Kim, Colombian-born, Los Angeles–based, b. 1984

Four Mourners on a Mantel, 2017

Nayarit Index, 2017

Julia Loken, British

Spring Cabbage, 2009

 
Billy Missi, Torres Strait Islander (Australia), 1970–2012

Waru thural (turtle tracks), 2009

Mudhaw warul (sheltered turtles
behind the reef), 2007

Matthijs Röling, Dutch, b. 1943

1969

Lente / Spring, 1975

Reza Derakshani, Iranian, b. 1952

Every Green Day and Every Red Night, 2010

Graceful Red Hunt, 2018

I have plenty to feast on from my friends' posts. I may well do a repeat random medley hodgepodge as a future post, to celebrate all the good creative energy swirling around us.

 

Book Report: A Darkness More Than Night

11. Michael Connelly, A Darkness More Than Night (2000) (5/2/23)

I've been slowly making my way through the next book in my alphabet project (I'm up to "I")—so slowly that I felt I needed a boost, and what better than a good mystery? I googled the Michael Connelly Bosch books, which I am also trying to read in order, then searched my shelves, and yes! I had the next one up, the seventh in the series. Or so I thought. Turns out, I skipped one. It had been part of the recent TV series, so the story was fresh in my mind, which made me think I'd read it. Oh well! 

This one brought together various characters from past non-Bosch Connelly books—FBI agent (now former) Terry McCaleb and Sheriff's Department detective Jaye Winston, from Blood Work, and tangentially the journalist protagonist of The Poet, Jack McEvoy. The story is a double one, involving the murder trial of a cocky Hollywood director, in which Bosch is the key witness for the prosecution, and a different recent murder, of a man suspected of yet another murder several years earlier but never caught, which Winston brings McCaleb in on for his professional opinion as a profiler. For a while, Bosch becomes the chief suspect in the second murder, because of evidence at the scene evoking the paintings of the darker-than-night 15th–16th-century Netherlandish artist Hieronymus Bosch. 

Too simplistic? Well, yeah. The reader of course knows it wasn't Bosch, that he was set up. I mean seriously, would he actually leave behind such blatant clues pointing at his own self? Though the outcome—successful: they get the new killer and the director both—does have a dark tinge that underscores the fraught nature of bringing justice in a slippery world of evil. 

Nuff said. It's a Harry Bosch mystery—nothing deep, but entertaining enough. And now, back to my "I" book. Maybe now that I'm on a reading roll, I can polish it off quickly. 

Jays

The other day on our usual evening TV date, we watched an episode of The Big Bang Theory that featured a bird—a "blue jay," as Sheldon called it. But that warn't no blue jay. 

That got me wondering—of course—how many "jays" exist in the world. Turns out, a lot.

The one in the BBT episode is a Mexican black-throated magpie-jay (Calocitta colliei). There's a white-throated one too. They and the other jays are all corvids (in the crow family).

There are, apparently, 46 species of jays, according to the above image (though Encyclopedia Brittanica says 35–40, so who really knows). Ten species, for sure, are found in the US: blue, green, gray, pinyon, Canada, Mexican, and Steller's, plus three scrub jays, California, Florida, and island. Where I live, we have California scrub jays and Steller's jays, and I have communed on the Channel Islands in southern California with island scrub jays:

But look at this one, the green jay (Cyanocorax yncas), which is found on the coasts of Mexico and down into western South America:

Beautiful!

Then there's the Lidth's jay, endemic to the islands of southern Japan:

Also beautiful!

Or just look at the Mongolian ground-jay:

Okay. I'll end this little jaystravaganza with the actual blue jay, Cyanocitta cristata:

I have grown so used to our two local and very raucous species, it never occurred to me that these birds could have insinuated themselves globally. Or that they could take on so many lovely guises. Or that they all like to look off to the right. The island scrub jay being the lone, stalwart exception.