The Nature of Things

The latest in Louise Penny's Inspector Gamache series takes the inspector and his wife out of their little Quebec village of Three Pines and on to Paris. They have gone there to be with their daughter Annie who is about to give birth to their granddaughter. Both of the Gamache's children and their families live in Paris now and Annie's husband Jean-Guy Beauvoir, Gamache's former second in command, has left police work and is employed in the private sector. Also in Paris is Gamache's elderly godfather, billionaire Stephen Horowitz. So, it is family reunion time in Gay Paree. The happy times come to a brutal end when Horowitz is run down by a van while crossing the street. The driver then speeds away. It was all witnessed by Gamache who is sure the "accident" was no accident. Horowitz survives, just barely, and is taken to the hospital in critical condition. When the Paris police seem skeptical that the hit and run was a deliberate attempt on Horowitz's ...

American poet Louise  Glück was announced as the winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature this week. The Nobel committee cited her " unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal." She is considered by many to be one of America's most talented contemporary poets. Her poetry is marked by technical precision, sensitivity, and insight into loneliness, family relationships, divorce, and death. Here is one of her most famous poems which describes what it means to live, die, and be reborn again an endless number of times as a flower. A wild iris.   The Wild Iris by Louise  Glück At the end of my suffering there was a door. Hear me out: that which you call death I remember. Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting. Then nothing. The weak sun flickered over the dry surface. It is terrible to survive as consciousness buried in the dark earth. Then it was over: that which you fear, being a soul and unable to speak, ending a...

  A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : A Northern Mockingbird sits on the post holding up my muscadine grape trellis. Mockingbirds do love those muscadines and they keep a close eye on the vines at this time of year as the grapes begin to ripen. *~*~*~* Up to 1500 migrating birds were killed in a single 24-hour period last Friday as they collided with skyscrapers in Philadelphia. The deaths might have been prevented by the simple act of turning off lights at night. *~*~*~* The current administration's plans to drill for oil off the Atlantic Coast using seismic blasts that could harm wildlife were opposed by states all along that coast. The battles were fought in courts and the government's permits for allowing that seismic blasting will expire next month. They are not being renewed so it appears the plan is dead at least for now.  *~*~*~* Exxon, one of the largest corporate emitters of greenhouse gases, has plans to increase its emissions by as mu...

Not a lot is known about William Shakespeare's family life, but from a cache of bare-bones facts, Maggie O'Farrell has constructed an exceptional historical novel the main action of which is set in Stratford-Upon-Avon in 1596. Among those bare-bones facts is Shakespeare's marriage to a woman older than himself called Anne, or in some documents Agnes, Hathaway. In her story, O'Farrell chooses to call her Agnes. The marriage produced three children, first a daughter and then twins, a boy and a girl. The older girl was called Susanna and the twins were Hamnet and Judith. Before all that, Shakespeare, in O'Farrell's telling, suffered from an abusive father. The father was a glover who for a while was successful but by the time Shakespeare reached adulthood, his father had been disgraced by some of his shady practices. In order to retire some of his debts, the father sent his son to serve as a Latin tutor for the Hathaway household and it was there he met Agnes, a fr...

Ruth Ware's homage to Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None is set in a remote chalet in the French Alps instead of on a mysterious island, but the air of mystery and dread that slowly descends on the place is much the same. In this case, the chalet is cut off from civilization by an avalanche that knocks out the electricity and phone service and the wi-fi connection to the outside world. Thus a weekend that was meant to be an off-site retreat for a tech company in order to promote mindfulness and collaboration becomes a struggle for survival, made more urgent when people start dying. It is soon evident that the deaths are not natural or accidents and there is a killer among the group. Who will be left alive when the weekend ends or when rescuers manage to make it to the chalet? The chalet is staffed by a chef and a concierge who are good friends. They and the group of co-workers from the tech company are the only people on site. It is soon evident that there are strains i...

Do you have a landline telephone? I realize that Millenials think of that as something from a distant stone age of technology, but we have held on to ours, even as we use our cell phones for most things. It's a mostly innocuous instrument. Except during election season. Our landline phone rings fairly constantly these days, and it's not our friends calling. No, it's people who want us to take opinion surveys or they want money from us for their campaigns, as well as a fair number of scams that try to trick us into doing something we don't want to do. Mostly, it's robocalls.  And as for those cell phones, mine dings throughout the day announcing texts from campaigns that need just a few dollars more from me to put them over the top. Otherwise, all will be lost. And not to forget my email box that fills up with their messages every day. In other words, there is no escape unless one wants to totally take a detour off the information highway. But the robocalls are the w...

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : A Black-crowned Night Heron strikes for a fish for its meal a Brazos Bend State Park.    *~*~*~* You might say that birds are on the ballot this November. At least their protections are. The present administration keeps trying to roll back the Migratory Bird Treaty Act as well as other statutory measures that help to keep birds safe. A change in administration could be crucial to keeping or even strengthening those protections. *~*~*~* Wolves are also on the ballot, at least in Colorado. Voters there will have the opportunity to express their opinion on whether or not gray wolves should be reintroduced into the environment.  *~*~*~* Global warming is thickening layers of warm water in the world's oceans thus altering ocean currents, hindering the absorption of carbon, intensifying storms, and disrupting biological cycles. *~*~*~* Based on what we know of her judicial philosophy, the addition of Amy Coney Barr...