The Nature of Things

We've been having very mild and pleasant weather over the past week. It's almost as if fall is actually here. October is, in fact, right near the top of my favorite months list. It is generally a time of mild days and relatively cool nights. The temperature actually got down to 59 degrees Fahrenheit one night last week.  Robert Frost celebrated such days in this poem which he titled, simply, "October"; the days seem all too brief and we long for them to linger, and in the early morning the sun is shrouded by a "gentle mist." It will be many weeks yet until our leaves are "burnt with frost." We will enjoy October while we can. Maybe even into November. October by Robert Frost O hushed October morning mild, Thy leaves have ripened to the fall; Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild, Should waste them all. The crows above the forest call; Tomorrow they may form and go. O hushed October morning mild, Begin the hours of this day slow. Make the day seem to us le...

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : A tiny Brown-headed Nuthatch , a permanent resident in our area, visits a feeder in my backyard. *~*~*~* The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its report this week. It was not expected to be good news, but, in fact, it was even worse than expected .  With global emissions showing  few signs of slowing  and the United States — the world’s second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide — rolling back a suite of Obama-era climate measures, the prospects for meeting the most ambitious goals of the 2015 Paris agreement look increasingly slim. The good news is that it is still possible to reverse the trend but the world has just over ten years to take the actions that are needed to do it. *~*~*~* Global warming is already having catastrophic effects on some species of birds and will affect even more, increasing rates of extinction, if present trends continue. *~*~*~* And, of course, warmer waters in the o...

No one or nothing in Kate Atkinson's new novel is exactly what it seems. There are double agents, double crosses and secrets galore. It is, as Winston Churchill once said in another context, a riddle inside a mystery inside an enigma. It is literary fiction, historical fiction masquerading as a mystery/spy thriller. Moreover, Atkinson uses much the same technique as she employed so successfully in Life After Life to take us back and forth through the life history of her main character, Juliet Armstrong. We meet Miss Armstrong on the day of her death. It is 1981 and she is 60 years old. She is crossing a street in London when she is struck by a car. She knows she is dying as she lies on the pavement surrounded by concerned passersby who try to help. Flashback to 1940 when she was still only 18 and an orphan. She is recruited by the British intelligence agency, MI5, to work as a transcriptionist. She is to listen to the conversations between an MI5 agent, Godfrey Toby, and a group o...

"...it will go the way it always goes in the press when it all comes out: it will have been my fault, all of it because men's crimes are always ours in the final analysis, aren't they, Mr. Strike? Ultimate responsibility always lies with the woman, who should have stopped it, who should have acted, who must have known .                                         - A female client speaking to detective Cormoran Strike in Lethal White by Robert Galbraith I had actually intended to use that quote from Lethal White in my review of the book last week, but then I forgot. However, it sure seems to fit here . Our current president is very, very concerned about young men at this time in America; it is a very scary time for them, he says. His words have inspired all kinds of responses on social media as well as in the real world. Here is just one of those responses. A young woman called Lynzy Lab S...

What a strange yet captivating novel. The unnamed narrator is a beautiful (as she frequently reminds us), privileged, blonde, skinny (size 2) woman living the life of many people's dreams in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She is a recent graduate of Columbia and has an undemanding job at a hip art gallery, but she doesn't really need the job because all her needs are met by an inheritance from her recently deceased parents. And about those parents: Our narrator was their only child but she was not close to either of them, and yet their deaths seem to have untethered her mooring to any sort of need to have a productive life or to be a part of a larger society. There has been a rip in the fabric of her soul and her essence seems to be leaking away in the year 2000. Both her parents were narcissists focused on their own needs and comforts and in this their daughter is very much like them. She sees herself as the focus of the world and everything that happens in ...

The MacArthur Grants, the so-called "genius grants," were announced last week. There, tucked away on the list of twenty-five recipients of the grants, all those scientists and activists, was the name of a poet, Natalie Diaz. I was intrigued. Natalie Diaz was not a name that was known to me and so I had to learn about her. Her familial and cultural background is Mojave and Latina. She is an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe and an associate professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University. She uses her personal background as a source to create a personal mythology that conveys "the oppression and violence that continue to indigenous Americans in a variety of forms."  I read several of her poems and was moved by them all. Violence, both societal and individual, is a continuing theme in her writing. This poem, "The Facts of Art," explores a clash of cultures on the mesas of Arizona and the violence through lack of understanding ...