Book Report: Wolf Time

1. Barbara J. Moritsch, Wolf Time (2020) (1/2/21)

This book begins with a death. Yet it is not a mystery. It is, in part, a sad story of ongoing hatred and decimation. But the book is also very much a celebration of an amazing species—communicative, playful, intelligent, social, and, as a top predator, a crucial part of the ecosystem. The goal of the book is both to instill appreciation for these exquisite creatures and to raise awareness of all that wolves are up against.

The story is told in two main strands. It begins (after a 2014 prologue) in 2018 as Sage, a wildlife biologist living outside Yosemite National Park, is roused by a scratching at her front door: two wolves, Issa and Tish. Not just any wolves, but old-soul wolves, who are able to speak to Sage, and she to them; they are also able to "merge" her into them and carry her to places and times where they can instruct her on just what it means to be a wolf in the wild. They need help, and Sage has been chosen to write their story. We then switch to 2010 and a household in Salmon, Idaho. Almost-twelve-year-old Blue has discovered a wolf den, which he shares with his younger, "special" sister, Sunny. Fascinated, they fall in love, and ultimately are called upon to help an injured wolf. The chapters proceed to alternate, Sage's continuing in real time in the present, Blue and Sunny's progressing through the years, until ultimately they merge. 

In the meantime, wolf hatred is all around, and we learn of ongoing, senseless death. The numbers of wolves in the United States have been plummeting, protections vanishing. Fear of wolves is deep within the human psyche, and violence is the result.

The book ends on a hopeful note, though I wonder if facts don't belie this optimism: On October 29, 2020, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service finalized a rule that removes all protections from gray wolves in the lower 48 states. As the Center for Biological Diversity put it in a news release, "The Service made its decision despite the fact that wolves are still functionally extinct in the vast majority of their former range across the continental United States." Here is a timeline for the rocky road that wolves have endured since they were first declared virtually extinguished in 1933, and then were officially listed as endangered in 1974—later, in 2003, reclassified as threatened, thanks to ongoing and successful reintroduction programs. A mere 6,000 wolves exist in the lower 48 today, on less than 10 percent of their historic range—down from 250,000 to as many as 2 million individuals historically. They honestly do need all the help they can get. (A portion of the proceeds from this book is being donated to the Center for Biological Diversity for their ongoing work on behalf of wolves.)

But back to Wolf Time, a book full of imagination and soul. Here are the opening three paragraphs of the book, to give an idea of the lovely lyricism of some of the writing:

A sharp-tipped crescent moon cast its pale glow over a solo wolf, a well-used deer path, and a remote mountain lake in central Idaho. Snow had fallen intermittently over the past three days, and the large, fluffy flakes muted the sounds of the night and softened the edges of the pines and rock outcrops that framed the lake.
     Moving at a steady trot, Tierra pushed easily through the soft blanket of snow that covered the path and wondered if the spring storm would ever end. The early spring conditions forced her to take the long way around the big lake; the ice was no longer thick enough to hold her weight. In a hurry, she'd travelled the better part of the day and stopped only for short breaks to catch her breath. Her family was waiting for her, relying on her to bring food.
     The rendezvous with the other members of the Blackline Pack lasted longer than expected. She'd been surprised to learn most of the wolves in the area already were on the move to get out of Idaho, heading east and south to the region called the Yellow Stone, which was rumored to be safe.

The book's epigraph, too, bears quoting, and heeding:

If you talk to the animals they will talk with you and you will know each other. If you do not talk to them you will not know them, and what you do not know you will fear. What one fears one destroys.
                                        —Chief Dan George

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.

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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.

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

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.)

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

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.