The Nature of Things

I've featured this poem here at least a couple of times before, but it is a favorite of mine and, frankly, it has never seemed more appropriate than now when one has reason to fear that the ideal of America may be lost forever. Langston Hughes was an African-American poet of the 20th century, and he was well aware that America had not lived up to the ideal imagined for it by our founding documents. It is an ideal that still eludes women and minorities in this "homeland of the free."  On this weekend when we celebrate the life of another great African-American, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and as we anticipate the inauguration of a demagogue as our president, all our hopes and all our efforts should be directed toward letting America be America again. (The emphasis on the last three stanzas is my own.) Let America Be America Again by Langston Hughes (1935) Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home whe...

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : First-winter male Vermilion Flycatcher photographed in January at Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge. He hasn't come into his full glorious colors yet. When he reaches maturity, he'll be looking more like this: *~*~*~* Researchers at the University of Guleph have been analyzing the chemical fingerprint of Monarch butterflies in scientific collections in order to determine the areas where they originated . It is expected that this information will aid conservationists in being better able to protect the vulnerable butterfly. *~*~*~* Male Pectoral Sandpipers give every indication of being sex addicts. These birds that are smaller than your common city pigeon have been recorded flying as many as 8,000 miles in one month in order to have sex with as many females as possible . Some of the birds traveled to as many as 24 different breeding sites in northern Alaska in a single season. *~*~*~* Photo courtesy of The New Yor...

This is another of those books that I've long intended to read but somehow never got around to. My resolution for 2017 is to rectify some of that neglect. The Woman in White is in the grand tradition of the densely plotted Victorian novel. It is, in fact, downright Dickensian or Jamesian in its wordiness. Modern readers who have not been exposed to the circuitous descriptions and verbiage of such writers may falter over its 600+ pages. But lovers of the language may find themselves drooling, as I did, over its skillful use. The story starts with a young drawing master, Walter Hartwright, encountering a mysterious woman dressed all in white as he walks along a moonlit London road. The woman is in distress and asks for directions which Walter gives her and sends her on her way. Soon after, he hears a policeman asking if anyone has seen the woman, who, he says, has escaped from an asylum. Walter keeps quiet and the policeman's search is unsuccessful. Walter has been engaged to te...

The opening of Congress this week brought to mind a blog post that I wrote back in 2010. Specifically, it was December 30, 2010, just over a month after a Republican majority had been elected to Congress.  There was much anticipation about what that majority would do with its power. Of course, at that time, there was still a Democratic majority in the Senate and a Democratic President as checks on the worst impulses of that Congress. Today, those impediments have been removed. Republican philosophy has remained unchanged in the interim, except perhaps to become even harder and more extreme. Once again one can only say, God help us.   ~~~ December 30, 2010 Reality Shrugged The intellectual hero of the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives is Rep. Paul Ryan. He is hailed by the Washington media as a Very Serious Person, someone who thinks long and deeply about all things related to the national debt. He is said to have a Plan for reducing the deficit and puttin...

Our honeymoon of tropical winters without freezing weather ended last weekend. Actually, it had ended a couple of weeks before that when temperatures tippy-toed slightly to the freezing mark and a degree or two below, but this time the old mercury in the thermometer sank like a stone right through that barrier and went straight on down to the low 20s. It was territory that my garden had not visited in a few years. It left its mark. The Cape honeysuckle was still in full bloom and feeding the passing hummingbirds and butterflies when the low temperatures hit. Now its bright orange blossoms are frostbit and turning brown along with the leaves. And the bright little Sulphur butterflies that sipped from them all day long will have to find other sustenance. The clumps of lemon grass were just about to bloom, but the cold put the kibosh on that. Last year, these clumps grew right through winter, never slowing down, but this year I'll be cutting them back and letting them grow afresh from...

Jen Sorensen nails it again.

The Bell Jar is Sylvia Plath's only published novel. It was originally published under a pseudonym in 1963 and only under the author's real name in Britain in 1967. She committed suicide about a month after that. Publication in the United States was delayed until 1971, at the request of her family.  Since that time, it has attained the status of a classic and is often cited as one of the most influential feminist works of that period. But I had never read it. Time to remedy that oversight. As all the reading world is most likely aware, the book is written in the form of a memoir of a young woman's descent into madness and is apparently based on Plath's own experience. I was mesmerized by it almost from the first page. It is unlike any other book I have ever read. The story is told in simple, declarative sentences. The prose is both precise, crisp, and seems utterly dispassionate in its descriptions of the most harrowing personal experiences, including her traumatic los...