The Nature of Things

"God was dead." These are the words with which Ali Smith begins the second in her seasonal fiction series, Winter . And not only was God dead; so were a lot of other things that had been taken for granted. This is the Brexit/Trump era and the world has gone wrong. The truth is turned on its head. Winter is no longer winter; it is a shortened lukewarm interlude. The first book in this series, Autumn , was the first book that I read last year and I loved it. This book is not a sequel in the sense that it uses the same characters as vehicles to tell the story. These are entirely new characters and new relationships to explore, but the time period is still the present in England and people are still as unsettled and anxious. As one of the characters opines: “The people in this country are in furious rages at each other after the last vote, she said, and the government we’ve got has done nothing to assuage it and instead is using people’s rage for its own political expediency. Whi...

I've had Haruki Murakami's latest book in my reading queue for several months, but I was daunted by its length of over seven hundred pages and by my previous experience of reading Murakami. His tales can be complex and demanding of the reader.  But finally, I felt I had stalled as long as I could and I just needed to read the damned book. Some reviews that I had read of the book when it came out last year had mentioned Murakami's love of F. Scott Fitgerald and particularly of The Great Gatsby . This book was said to be an homage to Fitzgerald's masterpiece. Looking back on it now with the perspective of a few days' time, I can see that there are similarities in the storyline, but I admit these were not necessarily evident to me at the time of reading. Murakami's narrator is a painter of portraits who has been fairly successful in his trade. He lives in an apartment in Tokyo with his office-worker wife of six years. On the surface, the marriage appears to be a su...

It seems that my husband and I are taking turns being sick this spring. Unfortunately, his is a bit more serious than mine was. Sometime in the next few days, he will be having heart surgery. The exact time hasn't been scheduled yet. So I will be preoccupied with other matters for a while and blogging will be very sporadic if it happens at all. Don't forget about me - I'll be back. And in the meantime, send your positive thoughts and energy our way. Thank you!

I read recently that a remake of the movie Dune is in the works and will be released next year. The first version, released in 1984, was not a great success. I remember seeing it in the theater and being rather underwhelmed, but I saw it several years later on television and actually sort of liked it. It's a bit of a cult favorite these days. The books were quite another matter. I LOVED the books! I read all in the series authored by Frank Herbert, though I never moved on to the ones authored by his son after Herbert's death. They were great works of the imagination and there seemed to be quite a bit of truth there that was relevant to our own society. That relevance may be even more evident today than it was when the books were first published. In 2015 for the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the first book, I reread it and wrote my review. I was just as gobsmacked by the book the second time around as when I first read it all those years ago. ~~~   Friday, August ...

Walls are very much in the news these days. In 2005, Ray Gonzalez imagined some walls. Some of them were real; others were a product of magical realism.  Gonzalez was born and raised in El Paso on the Mexico/Texas border and walls feature in many of his poems. Perhaps there is a connection there.  What do these walls represent? That depends on your perspective, I suppose.  The Walls by Ray Gonzalez Julius Caesar’s head was cut off and fed to the barbarians waiting outside the walls of Rome. Salvador Dali wore one orange sock and a white one on days he went to eat breakfast in cafes. On days he stared at the wall, he did not wear socks. Yukio Mishima sheathed his knives in wall of whale oil, claiming such creatures were the only ones that understood the art of sacrifice. The last thing John Lennon saw before he was gunned down was the brick wall of his apartment house. Sitting Bull had fourteen wives he lined up against the cliff walls. He would close his eyes and walk bli...

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : Yellow-breasted Chat image courtesy of Houston Audubon Society. I heard my first Yellow-breasted Chat of the season on Thursday. "Heard" is the operative word; I never actually saw the bird. It was in the shrubbery in my next-door neighbor's yard and, as is typical of the birds, was giving its strange hooting, whistling, laughing calls as it skulked about scouring the leaves for insects. I've always been fascinated by chats, partly I think because I remember them well from my childhood. Their behavior, as well as their calls, is unique and memorable. But the birds are fascinating for other reasons as well, mainly because ornithologists can't agree on what they are! For more than a century, they were classified as members of the wood warbler ( Parulidae ) family, even though they are more than twice the size of some members of that family and their behavior is not typical of wood warblers. In 2017, af...

It's been quite a while since I traveled to Botswana, land of eternal sunshine and many-colored cattle, to have red bush tea with Precious Ramotswe. I was feeling a bit thirsty for that tea and so I decided to check in with Precious and see what was happening in the little town of Gaborone. It turned out Precious had gone into politics! It was a most un-Precious-like thing to do but she had been pushed into it by her great friend Mma Potokwane, head of the local orphanage and a woman who knows how to get people to do her bidding. An opening had come up on the Gaborone city council and the word was out that the council was to soon vote on whether to allow the building of the flashy Big Fun Hotel next to the city cemetery. Mma Potokwane was appalled at this effrontery and disrespect to the "late" people who reside in the cemetery. Mma Ramotswe was equally appalled when her friend told her about it, but she didn't see that there was anything to be done about it. That...