The Nature of Things

The story is well known by all the literate or movie-going world. It's a story told by Nick Carraway, a young man from the Midwest who moves to New York in the early 1920s to seek his fortune in the city selling bonds. He rents a cottage in a (fictional) village called West Egg on Long Island. That cottage just happens to be next door to a gaudy mansion belonging to an entrepreneur named Jay Gatsby. Just across the water in the village of East Egg is another mansion which belongs to fabulously wealthy Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Daisy, serendipitously, turns out to be a cousin of Nick's.  And Daisy is the first love of Jay Gatsby. The time is 1922 and the Great War is over, but five years before and before Gatsby went off to fight in that war, he and Daisy had a passionate affair and were deeply in love and planned to spend their lives together. But once Gatsby went away, they gradually lost touch and Daisy met Tom and married him and they had a daughter together. Now Gatsby is bac...

I read the first Harry Bosch mystery, The Black Echo , five years ago, in August 2013 and I was hooked. I came late to my addiction because that book had been published more than twenty years before in 1992, but I've been chasing Harry ever since, usually reading three or four of the books each year.  And now I've finally caught him! Two Kinds of Truth is the most current entry in the series, so now I'll have to wait around until Michael Connelly produces another one.  Harry is well past his time with the LAPD and well into his 60s. He's working now for the police department in the small city of San Fernando, a suburb of Los Angeles, reviewing cold cases. But, one way or another, he keeps getting pulled back to his days with the LAPD. This time an old case of his, one that he had cleared thirty years before, is being reviewed.  The man he arrested for the rape and murder of a young woman was convicted and sent to death row where he has remained for the last thirty year...

Mary Oliver is a much-honored American poet, having won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. She is also very popular, which does not always follow from being honored by critics and their like. I think her popularity comes, at least in part, from the fact that her poems honestly celebrate pure pleasure and the intelligence of the senses. This is one of her poems that I particularly like. She speaks for/to me when she writes, "I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention..." If I have learned nothing else in my life, I have learned how to pay attention.  Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? The Summer Day by Mary Oliver Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean- the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down- who is gazing ar...

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : Eastern Kingbird photographed at Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge on the Texas Coast. *~*~*~* The Weather Channel has a series running about the effects of climate change and the potential for conflict and the migration of people as a result of water shortages caused by those effects, particularly in places like the Middle East. *~*~*~* The current administration in Washington has rescinded an Obama-era ban on the use of pesticides linked to declining bee populations.  Environmentalists, who had sued to bring about the two-year-old ban, said on Friday that lifting the restriction poses a grave threat to pollinating insects and other sensitive creatures relying on toxic-free habitats. *~*~*~* Climate change is responsible for many new and difficult conditions for both man and beast, but wind is one of the most overlooked of those elements. An increase in the force of spring winds is not yet the stuff of earnest discussio...

Hidden somewhere in Walt Longmire's closet must be one of those special suits that cartoon superheroes wear. A red, white, and blue cape with matching tights perhaps. He certainly gives every indication of being one of the Indestructibles in this entry of Craig Johnson's series about the sheriff of Absaroka County, Wyoming. He endures a blizzard with gale-force winds and temperatures of forty degrees below zero, a forest fire that traps him in a lake and forces him to go underwater to survive, days with little food and less sleep, confronting a mountain lion, being shot, nearly falling off a mountain - the list goes on and on. But, in the end, he's left alive, sitting on his front porch enjoying pleasant spring weather with his friend Henry Standing Bear, his deputy/lover Vic Moretti, and his daughter Cady. We only get that one glimpse of pleasant weather. It seems that all of these Walt Longmire stories take place in winter when a blizzard is blowing through the Wyoming mo...

I loved Willa Drake, the protagonist in Anne Tyler's latest book, Clock Dance . I confess I totally identified with her, which, of course, means she is perfect in every way. And she is perfectly drawn by the author. We first meet Willa at age eleven. She is the older of two daughters. Her sister is six. Her father is the stolid, dependable parent. Her mother is the drama queen, often making theatrical exits from the family whenever she's feeling unappreciated or misunderstood. She always comes back eventually, but her unpredictability marks the lives of her children forever and makes Willa vow that she will be a good mother, "which to her meant a predictable mother," Tyler writes. Willa grows up in Pennsylvania, eventually goes off to college in the midwest, cuts short her education for an early marriage to a native Californian and moves to California where they raise their two sons. Then, when her first husband dies as a result of his own road rage bullying, she lat...

James Whitcomb Riley was an American poet of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He was extremely popular in his day. He was known as the "Hoosier Poet" because he was from Indiana and his poems often reflected the rustic landscape and country values of that mostly rural state. He's fallen out of favor a bit today, but when I was in elementary school we still read his poems and I remember some of them quite fondly.  This is not one that I remember but I came across it when searching for a poem to feature today and it seemed a perfect evocation of a hot August day. I hope you agree. August by James Whitcomb Riley A day of torpor in the sullen heat Of Summer's passion: In the sluggish stream The panting cattle lave their lazy feet, With drowsy eyes, and dream. Long since the winds have died, and in the sky There lives no cloud to hint of Nature's grief; The sun glares ever like an evil eye, And withers flower and leaf. Upon the gleaming harvest-field re...