The Nature of Things

I recently came across this post that I wrote almost ten years ago in December 2009. It blew me away to remember that I once felt like this; to remember that I had utter confidence in the leader of our country to try to do what was right and just, whether or not I agreed with his interpretation of that. Those were simpler, more innocent times. ~~~  Wednesday, December 16, 2009 Confronting evil I'm not a big fan of David Brooks and I admit I don't often read his column in  The New York Times , but a couple of days ago, he wrote one which had a title that intrigued me. It was  "Obama's Christian Realism." The gist of the column was that President Obama's thought processes are revealed by his speeches and that his public speeches, taken as a whole, have reflected a remarkably consistent philosophy throughout. It is essentially that there is evil in the world which must be confronted, and, as Brooks states it, that "life is a struggle to push back against the...

I have read several books this year that have dealt in some way, at times just tangentially, with the 2016 presidential election. And now here's Nell Zink's contribution to the oeuvre, although that portion of her story comes at the end of a fairly long novel dealing with the history of American politics and culture beginning in the late 1980s, as experienced by two fairly clueless young people who moved individually to New York City from different parts of the country. Pamela grew up in an upper-middle-class white family in Washington, D.C. She had all the privilege that such an upbringing entails, but as she neared the end of her high school years, she rebelled against the plans her parents had for her. She did not want to go to any of the colleges they suggested; she had a different vision for her life. And so she packed a few things, took what money she could scrape together, and took off to New York to pursue her vision. She had no contact with her parents after that for m...

I spent much of last week reading Olga Tokarozuk's Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead in which the narrator is obsessed with the poetry of William Blake. As I was reading the book, I often dipped into the poetry of Blake to better understand certain quotations and the atmosphere of the book. Blake was a visionary of his times and, like most visionaries, the world was not ready for him. He was unappreciated in his lifetime. Today he is considered a seminal figure in the history of English poetry. His poem that I am featuring here is longer than the ones I usually present, but I found it irresistible. It perfectly expresses the sentiments of the narrator Tokarozuk's book. It contains several very well known lines that I didn't necessarily know came from Blake. Enjoy!   Auguries of Innocence by William Blake To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower  Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand  And Eternity in an hour A Robin Red breast in a Ca...

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : A flight of White Ibises off South Padre Island, Texas.  *~*~*~* More than 11,000 scientists from around the world are once again attempting to get the attention of governments and persuade them to take effective action to fight climate change. In a report published this week, the scientists declare a "climate emergency" and outline six major steps that could be taken to address the situation.  *~*~*~* However, the denialists currently in charge of our country's government refuse to acknowledge any such emergency. This week, they took the first steps to quit the Paris Climate Agreement. *~*~*~* In the U.K., the government has halted shale gas extraction (fracking) because of fears of generating earthquakes . *~*~*~* A warmer and wetter climate, the result of global climate change, is benefiting some species of birds on the grasslands of the Canadian prairie. *~*~*~* A contagious form of cancer that affect...

Olga Tokarozuk, Polish writer, feminist, and activist, was belatedly awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature, announced earlier this year. She also won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her previous novel, Flights . This latest novel made it to the shortlist for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize. The woman is obviously on a roll so it was time I made her acquaintance and I decided to start with the intriguingly titled Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead .  I learned that the title is a quotation from William Blake's Proverbs of Hell . The narrator of Tokarozuk's book is a part-time English teacher who is obsessed with Blake and is engaged, with a partner, in translating his works to Polish. The narrator is Janina Duszejko who hates her own name as well as the names of her neighbors. She prefers the nicknames that she gives them. Names like Oddball, Bigfoot, and Dizzy. Our narrator was a civil engineer by profession. She is now in her 60s and, in addit...

Jacqueline Woodson's new book is a small treasure. Short enough that it could be called a novella rather than a novel, it still manages to address, as NPR noted in its review, "issues  of class, education, ambition, racial prejudice, sexual desire and orientation, identity, mother-daughter relationships, parenthood and loss." In spare language with no wasted words, she tells a story of a family, of mothers and daughters, that will resonate with anyone who has ever lived in a family. This is actually a story of two families from two very different backgrounds and social classes. There is Iris, the fifteen-year-old daughter of a middle class, upwardly striving African-American family in Brooklyn and Aubrey, son of a single mother barely managing to support herself and her teenage son with a combination of part-time jobs and the assistance of food stamps. The two teenagers come together compelled by their irrepressible sexual desire. Even though they try to be careful and ta...

I haven't visited Venice and the Brunetti family for a while, so let's hop a vaporetto and check out what the good Commissario Brunetti is up to. Well, it seems he's up to the same old thing - fighting the good fight (usually a losing fight) against the endemic corruption in Venetian and Italian society. This is the thirteenth in Donna Leon's popular series and it was published in 2004, so we are slowly getting closer to the current day. The case that is drawing Brunetti's attention this time around is the brutal murder of an old woman in her apartment. The murder had happened a few weeks before and had been quickly "solved" by the odious Lieutenant Scarpa. It was determined that the woman's Romanian carer had killed her and then she herself had been killed when struck by a train while fleeing police. Brunetti's fatuous superior, Patta, is, of course, delighted with the quick result. Then a neighbor who has been out of the country contacts the poli...