17. Phil Klay, Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War (2022) (10/21/26)

I have read and admired Phil Klay in the past: Redeployment (2014), a collection of short fiction about soldiers that won the National Book Award, and the sprawling novel of ideas Missionaries (2020), set in the chaos of drug cartel–riddled Colombia. So I was excited to stumble on this book, which is nonfiction: short op-eds and blog posts as well as longer essays. As he states in the introduction, “War remains a large part of who we are as Americans, with almost a sixth of our federal budget going to defense, keeping troops deployed in 800 military bases around the world and engaging in counterterror missions in 85 countries. And yet, thanks to a series of political and strategic choices, to the average American that’s mostly invisible.”

I trust Klay to try to make our wars, especially more recent ones, at least visible, if not completely understandable (which is surely not even possible), to us noncombatant Americans. As a former Marine himself, he doesn't go into policy and decisionmaking so much as he attempts to uncover the dilemmas and contradictions of actually serving in a war, or coming back home from a war, or losing comrades and living with their memory, or questioning the leadership or one's faith. I'm a little sorry this book is already four years old, so didn't get to cover Iran, or (ffs) Hegseth—about which I'm sure Klay has opinions. Though a quick search of the New York Times recently gets me what I want, to wit:

"Pete Hegseth's Bloodlust Doesn't Hide His Military Failures," from October 13, about Hegseth's desire for a livestream presentation of the Fort Hood shooter's execution (which now, thankfully—adultly—has been bagged)
"Trump Has Made a Fatal Miscalculation about Iran," from March 22
"What Trump Is Really Doing with His Boat Strikes," from December 5 of last year
"Security Breaches Can Be Fixed. People Without Honor Can't Be Trusted," from March 28, 2025
And more, which can be found on this page. 

So yes, Klay is our envoy from a place of sanity in an otherwise insane world. These 22 pieces, arranged under four headings—Soldiers, Citizens, Writing, and Faith—consist of very short takes (like the ones just listed, usually situation-specific) and—the ones I found most effective—longer musings about such topics as gun violence, starting with the evolution of such weaponry; the perspective-giving influence of religious faith (Klay is Catholic); and the invisibility of our "citizen soldiers," those Americans who have worn the uniform. In his fiction, Klay makes those individuals complexly real; in these essays, we get the moral bedrock of someone who takes their (and his own) service seriously. 

Now I'd like to do a more thorough Google search and see if Klay has posted any more of those longer essays. I appreciate knowing what, and how, he thinks.

A day in the life

As I do occasionally of a Friday, I thought I'd recap this day—which as usual got going with my English learner at the library. We hadn't seen each other in a few weeks, so we caught up. We'd both been traveling, she to a birthday party in Los Angeles, me north to Seattle. Then we spent some time perusing our local weekly throwaway, talking about what's going on locally, and finishing with the weekly Rob Brezsny horoscope (we're both Sag), which suggested "bring[ing] together qualities that seem at odds: fierceness and tenderness, a wild spirit and a protective instinct, boldness and love." I now know the Spanish terms for those qualities.

Back home, I did some work: proofreading a Getty Museum catalogue for an upcoming exhibition of Spanish drawings. The sun chased me across my desk—October light, so beautiful. I took my one picture of the day (for my Flickr project):

It's nothing, but I liked the lines and textures, the rounded edges, the negative spaces, and of course the light and shadows. Today was day 320 of my 365 project. Only 45 more days/pictures to go.

At 3:30 we went to our friend Lynn's house for an afternoon of game-playing. She'd bought a new game, meant to be played only once (it involves cutting some of the paper pieces up with scissors, plus there's only one solution). It's like an escape room, only done in the comfort of your own living room. We did not do very well, sadly. The puzzles very much required the "hints" provided, and then we messed up a key component toward the end. I mean, we finished the game, but only because it allowed us to cheat like crazy. Which y'know? Isn't so very satisfying. When I got home, I looked the game up, and it supposedly takes only 45–60 minutes. What??? It took us three and a half hours! But: we had a good time. Mostly because we got to laugh at our bumbling. (The puzzles were really hard. Honest!) And we got to drink gin & tonics. And visit and catch up. That's really what it's all about, no?

Dinner was defrosted pasta leftovers with leftover roasted root veggies—yay for leftovers! And then we watched The Lincoln Lawyer, Veronica Mars, and two episodes of Schitt's Creek. Ending up with our evening chat: David perhaps abandoning a Terry Pratchett book (too much fantasy); death and dying (we don't have enough time left to waste it on a book we don't enjoy); how reading about history makes me feel a little less awful about how awful this country's government is right now; and finally, Heather Cox Richardson on said government. 

I have a FB friend, Leslie, whom I originally met through Flickr—I've never met her in person—and every day she posts a (beautiful) photo and writes in detail about her day. I find her posts fascinating. It's just so interesting, and beautiful, to get a glimpse into the lived life of a kindred spirit. I hope my occasional "day in the life" posts provide that for you too. . . .

Thanks for reading. Whoever you are. (I mean, the real people out there. The bots, well, pffffttttt.)

Road trip!

We spent the last almost two weeks on a road trip: north along the California and Oregon coasts, then a swing inland and up to Edmonds, Washington (just north of Seattle), to visit David's sister. On the way back we took I-5, over a few days. All this included visits with our nephew and his wife, a great-nephew and his girlfriend, a writing friend, my niece's ex, an old singing and dancing friend, and another singing friend. And some exploring, though we also realized that we really need several months, not just two weeks, to really do a road trip justice. It was a lot of driving . . . I'd rather do more walking and poking around. Next time! But all in all, it was wonderful to do so much connecting over these few days. Worth all the miles, for sure.

On the first day, we headed north along US101, ending up in Eureka, 385 miles away.

Day 2 was more driving: another 340 miles, to Lincoln City, OR. 

On day 3 we finally slowed down, our goal for the night, Astoria, being but 120 miles, though we took a couple of detours. It ended up being a several-parter. Part one, morning.

Part two, the Tillamook cheese factory—well worth a visit.

Part three, onward to Astoria.

And part four, our evening in beautiful Astoria.

On day 4 we spent the morning in Astoria, hiking up to the Column—a great viewpoint, and fortunately the fog cleared by the time we got there—then headed north to Edmonds and David's delightful sister, Patty.

Day 5 was a stick-close-to-home day. I spent much of it bonding with Patty's 12yo poodle Maggie.

On day 6 we headed via lightrail into Seattle—Pike Place Market and an amazing art exhibit.

The art show got its own post.

On day 7 we headed to the University of Washington to meet up with our writing friend Andrea and for a stroll along the watery edge of the Arboretum.

Day 8 took us to downtown Edmonds, on the Puget Sound, and a stroll around to see some murals.

On day 9 we hung out with our niece's ex, took a nice walk.

Day 10 was the end of our Seattle stay—though we stopped to visit our friend Thelma, and go for a walk in the rain. Then: on to Salem, Oregon!

Day 11 included a stop in Corvallis to visit our friend Spencer, a walk in a wildlife refuge, then on down to Ashland, with its Shakespeare Festival.

And so we come to the end of the trip, day 12, in Ashland, where we went for a nice long walk, and finished things off with a magical production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." So good!

Day 13 (no pictures) was a remarkably easy six-and-a-half-hour trip from Ashland to home, with virtually no slowdowns whatsoever. We got home at two. And now, it's back to real life. 

Book Report: The Typing Lady

16. Ruth Ozeki, The Typing Lady—and Other Fictions (2026) (9/22/26)

Continuing on in the alphabet, I picked up another hardback book that mysteriously arrived on my doorstep not too long ago. (Okay, not so mysterious. I can't help myself.) I've read two other Ruth Ozeki books (review of her last one here and an extended quote from an earlier one here, and by the way, I can't believe it's been eleven years since I first discovered her—where does the time go?) and very much enjoy her sensibility, a sort of grounded whimsy. 

This book comprises eleven short stories, many of them featuring, at least in passing, typewriters, many of them also featuring, I'm fairly certain, a thinly veiled version of Ozeki herself. The characters range from children figuring out friendship and connection, to a young woman falling in love, to adults searching for ambition or grappling with an elder's dementia, to a widowed grandmother considering the inevitable future. There's nothing fancy about Ozeki's style; it's straightforward and comforting. 

"The Typing Lady," which opens the book, is subtitled "An Author's Note" and it ends like this:

This author's note is not really about [the typing lady's stories]. It's about yours and mine, about how, when we read a story, we bring our own lives to bear on it and make it ours, no matter what the writer might have intended. Stories are like that. They are collaborations between people who read and people who type. They are how we co-create each other and dream ourselves into being.

And this book held a couple of ancillary surprises as well, tied to the bigger world. The first relates to a FB post by a friend of mine, who was considering cause and effect, and concluded: 

It is turtles all the way down.  That’s the answer but I can’t remember the question. A giant turtle carries the earth on it’s back and it is endless turtles all the way down. We will never know the causes of life.

Bladder cancer is supposedly caused by smoking at home, or maybe second hand smoke in the office, or maybe past radiation treatments, or something eaten, or nuclear bombs tests near my mother’s Arizona home. The correct answer is, bladder cancer is really caused by turtles and there are turtles all the way down. 

So imagine my surprise when, in the final story of this collection, "The Problem of the Body," I arrived at this line: It's turtles all the way down. Ha! The context here is not cancer, but a couple of actual box turtles, Ebeneezer and Evelyn. But given that Ozeki is an ordained Buddhist priest, I'm sure she was winking at the old Hindu (etc.) concept of the Cosmic Turtle.  

Then as I was settling into bed, having finished the book, I opened my email and found one of my daily poetry messages. And this one contained the poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins "Spring and Fall, to a young child." Which was referenced in Ozeki's story "One Art," about an unrequited love. "I found a poem," the protagonist writes. 

"It's very sad, I've been thinking about it all day. I can't work for thinking about it. I dreamed about it. It won't go away."
     "Don't be sad. What's the poem. Tell it to me."
     "It's by Hopkins. It's about Margaret. Do you know . . ."
     "Margaret. I know that. Of course. I found that poem a long time ago. Someone showed it to me. I can't remember . . ."
     "'Margaret,' it goes, 'Margaret, are you grieving, Over Goldengrove unleaving . . .' It has all the accents so I can't say it right. It's so sad. I don't know what it means, but the sounds are so sad."

The remark about the accents is what caught my attention, because the emailed poem had—all these accents!

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older . . .

Anyway. These little coincidences made me like the book all the more. Not only could I identify with some of the characters in the stories, and appreciate the connection between myself and Ozeki the author, but then elements of her imagination showed up in my very own lived life. Which is exactly what's she's getting at.

P.S. One last synchronicity, from later in the same day that I posted this: a post by a poet (whom I don't actually know, but I enjoy his irascibility) on FB:

Just finished Absalom, Absalom, and have seen Faulkner once again as a great innovator. He was doing things that no one else was doing except maybe Ralph Ellison and Flannery O'Connor. I think of the Battle Royale sequence in Invisible Man as being profoundly innovative and thematically as complicated as Faulkner. I think of Flannery O'Connor and the way she could tilt the magnifying glass of her vision just so and set the very paper on fire. Now I think of how someone like Faulkner would be laughed out of most agents' offices, and how no contemporary publisher would touch him, so unconfident are they about most Americans ability to read and sustain concentration. Who are the present innovators; I mean, formal innovators? I think of Ruth Ozeki as getting away with things nobody else could get away with, but no one else. Of course I haven't read everybody.

There she is! I am already looking forward to whatever she offers us next. Or . . . I could go seek out Flannery O'Connor, Ralph Ellison, or (this one terrifies me a little) Faulkner. I could do that.

Book Report: Switzy

15. Emma Cline, Switzy (2025) (9/19/26)

I'm not sure where I read about this novel—some review somewhere—but it sounded intriguing. And if I was going to get back to my alphabetical-order reading project, I needed an S. Switzy certainly works. And yes, I enjoyed this book very much. 

Though it's a sad book. Not simply because it's about a man, David Hastings, heading to Switzerland to end his life through assisted suicide. And not only because this man, who is 70-something (and I write this at age 71), has growing dementia. But because even as he confronts the end, it feels as if he's barely lived.

Sure, sure, he was a businessman, a CFO of a presumably large American company—until he started making 8-figure errors. He had had a wife (now ex), and together they have a daughter, who now lives in London. On his way to Zurich, he will visit said daughter and his grandson, and they will have a stilted, final visit (though he doesn't reveal to her his future plans). He also intends to visit his boarding school roommate, though they are estranged. He wants to say he's sorry for an incident now long in the past. 

David is traveling with a 30-something man, Cody, his hired companion, who remains attentive and (mostly) unfrustrated as he shepherds his employer in and out of hotels and to his various assignations. Cody will have a life past this job, after all; now, it's his task to be organized—and kind. David, meanwhile, alternates between lucidity and mental ramblings, often into a fragmented past, and sometimes just into the confusing detail of a room or a face in the present. 

Here's one (lucid, and sad) paragraph I flagged:

The first time he had gone to the Philharmonic, David had mistaken the racket of the players tuning their instruments for a strange, avant-garde song. He had listened attentively, tried to detect some kind of shape in the sonic junk. David, the dutiful student. He had never shaken the sense of checking a box. Straining to be moved in some way. And even as the music had started, the actual music, he wanted to be elsewhere. Perhaps his entire life had been a form of that wish. To be somewhere else. To hurry this along.
     There was some back way, wasn't there? Some workaround?

The more confused parts are conveyed through staccato sentences and short paragraphs that bounce from one thought to another, with white space in between. And Cline does an admirable job of inhabiting this character. Of course, it's impossible for us to know how people with dementia actually experience their dimming, or shattering, faculties, so it makes for a brave act of imagination on Cline's part (plus, of course, taking on an older male character). And it is the gist of the book. The visits with his daughter, with the old roommate, with the doctor at the Swiss facility, feel jerky, uncomfortable, because we're seeing them through David's eyes, and he's unable to process them himself. Cline does hint, through words or facial and bodily expression, at what the other characters might be thinking, feeling, but the POV remains consistent. Making the end somewhat of a relief. Now all those other characters can get on with their lives. Which, of course, they were doing anyway. It was just David who was skidding to a halt. And was ready to. Now he can find peace.

More than just a story, it's a reckoning, of course. What is a life well lived? And it's a nudge: to focus on living better ourselves, to be more present. Because we'll all run out of time eventually. 

My last several weeks

...in one collage of photos:

One reason I enjoy doing photo-a-day projects is that when I look at a composite like this, I recognize how rich my life is.

Though curiously, there are only two human beings in all these shots. And they're both in the one. 

Maybe I'm happy keeping my own company? Well, yes, I am. And I enjoy people too. I just don't like taking pictures of people.

A day in the life

It's 12:20 a.m., and I'm hearing the neighbors across the street, sitting on their porch or deck, talking animatedly. The last two days were hot, but today was merely warm (70s), and the night air is refreshing. I kind of like the somewhat distant sound of friends spending time together.

This evening David and I chatted about this and that—perfectionism, bad writing, politics (unavoidable), ship figureheads, maggots crawling on deer tongues (sorry, but real life)—after our usual round of TV: Veronica Mars, partway through season one (for the second time); and we started in on The Lincoln Lawyer, which neither of us remembers having seen. TV followed a heaping plate of leftover cauliflower pasta and sautéed spinach, yum.

It's funny recounting a day backwards. "Then" doesn't work. There is no real counterpart. "Before that"? Clunky. But I'm happy that we've started this new habit of "just chatting" after our evening TV dose. There's so much to talk about.

Before dinner, I worked on the bad writing—which in fact is a proofreading job for the Getty Museum, about a Gabinete de Porcelana, a porcelain room in a Spanish palace from the 1700s. I keep thinking I might stop working, but then I keep getting offered jobs that sound interesting. Did I ever even imagine that there were dozens of rooms made of porcelain in castles all over Europe? It sort of puts our present-day billionaires in perspective. People with too much power, money, or what have you. They've always been with us. And they have to prove their worldliness, or do I mean worth. Materially. At least in the past it was materially. I don't know how those trillionaires "prove" their "worth" nowadays...

David and I also contracted for our burial. Or rather, "soil transformation." I kept thinking of my mother, who sometime in her later years contracted with the Neptune Society to be cremated and have her ashes tossed into the Pacific. I bless her for that—though I also feel sad that she left this world somewhat as she entered it, all alone. In any case, now we've done similarly, only rather than being burnt, our bodies will be composted into dirt (it takes 30 to 45 days), and that dirt—soil—will be spread on some conservancy land or other. Ashes to ashes, flesh to soil. I'm glad that, whoever of us goes first, the other simply needs to pick up a phone and it will all be taken care of. 

This afternoon I spent a few hours with my good friend Barb walking at Elkhorn Slough and having lunch in Moss Landing. A fat little ground squirrel wandered the restaurant deck begging for scraps. And mighty Cosmo, a brown-and-white doodle, chased the little ground squirrel. So much action! The special listed on the board at the restaurant's entrance was "crab roll and potato chips," but when I asked the price I was dissuaded: $36! So I went for a $16 bowl of artichoke soup instead. Barb got the crab, and then treated me to lunch. I think we both ended up happy? (I was certainly happy to nibble on her chips.)

The slough was beautiful, and the tide was high, so when we got to the path spanning the open water and the inner lagoon, it was flooded! Which meant we had to turn around and retrace our steps. Still, when you go the opposite direction, you always notice something new. It was a beautiful day in that watery place.

At 10 I met my English learner, Marina, at the library as usual of a Friday morning. We read a children's book she'd picked up somewhere ("Free!"), about a couple of beavers, Pudgy and Polly. I don't feel like she's making any progress—in fact, it feels like she's regressing. I don't know how to improve her odds. Languages are pretty easy for me. I like them. They're like puzzles I want to figure out. She lives in a place where people speak English everywhere, and yet she doesn't seek out the opportunity to just go listen. But . . . she seems to enjoy our friendship, and our chats about life. I guess that's something.

And that was my day. Though I should note that it started with a deuce in Wordle! Promising great things to come!