My Skeleton

Surely one of your new year's resolutions is to buy more books of poetry, no? Here's one worth your investment.

My Skeleton

By Jane Hirshfield

My skeleton,

you who once ached

with your own growing larger

are now,

each year

imperceptibly smaller,

lighter,

absorbed by your own

concentration.

When I danced,

you danced.

When you broke,

I.

And so it was lying down,

walking,

climbing the tiring stairs.

Your jaws. My bread.

Someday you,

what is left of you,

will be flensed of this marriage.

Angular wristbone's arthritis,

cracked harp of ribcage,

blunt of heel,

opened bowl of the skull,

twin platters of pelvis—

each of you will leave me behind,

at last serene.

What did I know of your days,

your nights,

I who held you all my life

inside my hands

and thought they were empty?

You who held me all my life

inside your hands

as a new mother holds

her own unblanketed child,

not thinking at all.

Can Music Be Perfect? Vol. 99

Had forgotten about this one until the kids reminded me how great the Rough Guide to Bhangra is... worthy of #99, if not #100, I think... 

Slow Horses

London Rules
Mick Herron

Laura and I have been watching "Slow Horses" on Apple TV, based on Mick Herron's Slough House spy novels. The show is not a classic, but it's pretty good, mostly because of Gary Oldman's portrayal of Jackson Lamb, the profane, acerbic, abusive, flatulent, chain-smoking, burnt-out, brilliant, and fallen MI5 spymaster. Laura gave me a recent novel from the series for Christmas, and I devoured it in about a day. Funny and thrilling, Herron's storytelling is something of a cross between le Carré and Elmore Leonard– you may have your doubts about that, but Herron proves it can be done. Oldman is so perfect in the role that I heard his voice throughout my reading– normally I find that an annoyance, but not in this case. Recommended.

Snow
John Banville

It's County Wexford, Ireland, 1957, and the "popular" parish priest has been murdered and disfigured in a rather rococo fashion. It won't be very long before you figure out that Father Tom had some moral lapses, to put it mildly, and made a few enemies. Banville's Protestant detective St. John Strafford is an appealing outsider protagonist, and the story unfolds nicely, even if some of it is a bit too predictable. Banville's prose is a pleasure to read.

Short novels of anomie

Sojourn
Amit Chaudhuri

First Love 
Gwendolyn Riley

These are both short– novellas more than novels, really– and are narrated in the first person by alienated protagonists lost in the modern world and searching for... love? ... meaning? Well written both, but for me more admirable than compelling. 

Merry Crustmas from the California Lichen Society

From their latest email: "Winter is lichen season. The lichens are living their best lives, and there are few experiences more sublime in life than observing thriving lichens." 

I couldn't agree more!

 

Take. Away. All. The. Guns.

Oops, I said it.  

Childhood’s Greatest Danger:

 

The Data on Kids and Gun Violence

. 

Rockford

Yes. One of the best TV shows ever.

Solar rooftop Hunger Games

The Cal PUC gives in to misguided rooftop solar advocates and special interests. Severin Borenstein: 

The new PD [proposed decision] recognizes that solar customers receive compensation many times higher than the value they deliver to the grid, that this excess compensation causes a large cost shift onto households without solar, and that those solar-less residents are disproportionately poorer than solar adopters. Yes, some lucky low-income households benefit from targeted solar incentives, but the vast majority won’t have solar for a decade, if ever. So their rates will pay for all of the solar subsidies, a kind of solar rooftop Hunger Games.

More great ways to exercise your 2nd Amendment rights

Political intimidation! Sheesh.

A Thanksgiving with 49,000 empty chairs

The Times justifiably laments the loss of 14 individuals killed in recent mass shootings. The CDC provisionally puts total firearm deaths in 2021 at just under 49,000. More than half of those are likely to have been suicides. The price we pay for the right to keep and bear.

Literary rogue males

Some novels recently read, accidentally sharing a theme, from the most recommended to the least. 

Rogue Male
Geoffrey Household

Jason Bourne meets Robinson Crusoe... in the English countryside. This NYRB reissue (first published in 1939) is an exciting and well-written if at times implausible yarn, narrated by its highly capable hero, a professional game hunter and gentleman of considerable means who finds himself being pursued by foreign agents with very bad intentions. Why this predicament? As the novel opens, our hero is on a hunting trip in Central Europe, and on a whim decides to see whether he and his long gun could get within shooting range of a certain unnamed tyrant. Just curious, you know. After that, the chase is on, back across rural England, and down a rabbit hole... almost literally. 

Our hero proves himself quite capable of violence, when necessary, but by and large he shares Bourne's conscience, and a sense of fairness and generosity that gets him into trouble on more than one occasion. He considers himself to be a member of "Class X"– defined vaguely as gentlemen of any economic means who share a certain code of honor– i.e., a mensch. This is the kind of novel that is just about perfect for a cross-country plane ride.

Silverview 
John Le Carré

This was the master's last completed novel, published posthumously, and it offers little that's new for anyone who has read most of his books, as I have. There is a rogue male here too, as there usually is: a disaffected former agent who has with justification aplenty broken faith with the English intelligence services, and now may be up to no good. There is a typical cast of Le Carré characters, and enough suspense and revelations to keep your attention. But what kept me turning the pages was one final helping of a prose stylist with a voice like no other. 

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
Haruki Murakami

I was a big Murakami fan some years ago, gobbling up his blend of storytelling, appealing protagonists, and quirky take on magic realism. But at some point I left him behind, until not long ago I found myself in Bell's Books wanting to buy something and standing in front of a display of Murakami's books. This one was... disappointingly colorless. Tsukuru's "colorless" life has been dominated by the emotional scars of a trauma experienced as a young adult– a trauma with a mystery at its core. The most compelling passages of the book feature Tsukuru's relationship with his swimming partner and roommate for a brief time, with intimations of homosexual attraction brought to vivid life in a fevered dream sequence (or is it just a dream?). Yet in the end, Murakami squanders the opportunity to steer the novel in a deeper (and darker) direction, and we are left with a too-tidy wrapping up of the mystery, even if Tsukuru's future is unresolved. 

The Sense of an Ending 
Julian Barnes

A short novel that to a degree warrants comparison with Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, though I can't say it comes close to the latter book's artistry. It does share the theme of Remains: an older man looks back on his life and tries to come to terms with his unreliable memories and questionable self-justifications. In its turn, this is a sub-theme of what I view as the grand theme of almost all great English novels: self-deception– from Austen to Forster to Ishiguro. Barnes comes close when the novel introduces a twisty revelation that causes both the reader's and the narrator's hearts to skip a beat– now that's great writing. But from there, Barnes rushes to an ending that seems contrived and pat at the same time. Was he under contract for 163 pages and no more? 

Arastradero

A couple of shots from Arastradero Preserve today. The sky was lovely, even without the cheesy enhancements. Most plants are still summer-dormant, with the exception of the fuzzy fruiting coyote bush... the recent chilly rains should perk things up soon. 

Gal Costa, RIP

One of the greats...

Candidates Make Final Pitches on Economy, Abortion, and Democracy

Apparently there are differences of opinion on all three... NYT.

Geoff Nuttall, RIP

To hear him play with SLSQ was to be transported. He was, among other things, a committed California native plant gardener.

Congrats, Steve Ruggles!

Recipient of a 2022 MacArthur "genius" grant– unexpected but richly deserved. Where would I be without IPUMS? 

Congrats, Ben!

Ben Bernanke is now the second Nobel-prize winner who taught me during my first year as a PhD student in Econ at Stanford. The first was the late Kenneth Arrow. Bernanke is not in the same league as Arrow in terms of his contributions to the discipline, but really almost nobody is. Bernanke is a very smart guy who wrote some really important papers in macroeconomics based on his careful studies of the Great Depression. Some people think the wisdom he gained from those studies prepared him to take actions that prevented a second Great Depression during the 2008 financial crisis. I incline toward that view myself. Sure, he may have been too friendly toward the banksters, but who is the counterfactual Fed Chair who does it better? He was also, in my experience, an excellent teacher– one of the best I had in the program.

Gordon Ramsay cooks

His enthusiasm is undeniable, his technique impeccable, his advice solid and simple, his recipes look awesome, production values high, youtube videos abundant, informative, and free. He knows he's good but disarms his vanity with a wink and a nod. I cook a lot and consider myself pretty good at it, but I suspect I'll get better and better with each ten minutes I spend with Mr. Ramsay.

Pharoah Sanders, RIP

One of the paths leading from Coltrane, not explored by enough great musicians, was taken by Sanders, who then continued beyond with some fellow travelers.

Hilary Mantel, RIP

She wrote two of my all-time favorite novels– specifically, the first two in the Cromwell trilogy. The third installment was, for me at least, a disappointment, but she was clearly still at the peak of her formidable powers as a novelist when it appeared in 2020. 

What makes a great novel? Storytelling, of course. Storytelling is sometimes reduced to plot or, to be fancier, narrative drive. But at least as important is worldbuilding. That term is most often applied to science fiction and fantasy, but it is equally relevant to any good fiction. You the reader must be dropped into a new place and reside there. That place might be a 25th-Century asteroid belt, 1970s Oakland, or 16th-Century England. If you are not transported to an amazing place you have never been, it is not great storytelling. 

Plus: great characters. Real, flawed, heroic humans. Nobody should be (only) a monster or a caricature. Cromwell, More, Boleyn.

Plus: a theme that makes you think about things. 

Plus: Poetry, music. Sentences you want to read over and over again, just to hear them in your mind's ear.

She had it all, in abundance, and died way too young.

Two more from NYRB Classics

On the scale from meh to wow, both a little closer to meh... 

Sleepless Nights
Elizabeth Hardwick

A critic's critic and editor's editor, she must also have been a writer's writer, which may have something to do with my inability to get very far into this artfully written novel/memoir before... well... overcoming my own sleeplessness! 

A Way of Life, Like Any Other 
Darcy O'Brien

This is a somewhat dated Hollywood coming-of-age story. It's quite amusing in parts, but for me it didn't add up to much more than a diversion.

A High Wind in Jamaica

I had started to read Richard Hughes's acclaimed 1929 novel a couple of times before, and it failed to take hold. This time was different. I could barely put it down. Exquisitely written, by turns funny, exciting, and quite deeply disturbing. Several children are kidnapped (maybe?) by pirates... adventure on the high seas and all that. The novel has been compared with Lord of the Flies in terms of its cynical depiction of children's a/im/morality, but Jamaica is ten times more subtle and well-written than what I remember of that book. The protagonist, ten-year-old Emily, is a character for the ages. As for her a/im/morality, along with that of the other kids and all the grownups around them... well, read it and judge for yourself. 

Bullet Train

Kotaro Isaka's thriller, first published in Japan in 2010, is, as the cliche goes, a wild ride. It's also now appearing at a theatre near you, to mixed reviews. Haven't seen the movie, but I can recommend the book, which I devoured in about one day. It is exciting, funny, and very well translated by Sam Malissa. Our assassin/hero is Nanao– also known as Ladybug– who suffers from terrible luck, but somehow keeps getting rehired because, all things considered, he's damn good at what he does. Our 14-year-old villain is The Prince, and he is convincingly evil. Aside from Ladybug, the favorite character of every parent of a certain age is bound to be Lemon, another thug who happens to have encyclopedic knowledge of all matters Thomas the Tank Engine.

As for the film (unseen), I have to say that casting Brad Pitt as Ladybug is not half bad, although I tend to think of Brad as more the lucky bumbler than the unlucky master. Anyway, if you find yourself on a long train (or plane) ride, the book would be a great way to pass the time. And yes, there is a snake.

Gooseberries!

Seems late in the season to me. In Sam McDonald County Park. It's named for Sam McDonald. 

The late-summer color palette...

... in Foothills Park. Poison oak, buckeyes, and elderberries.

Fiction catch-up

Just so's I don't forget, some other novels I have read recently. .. 

The Netanhayus
Joshua Cohen

Very much in Rothian mode, from its academic satire to its farcical set-pieces and mix of fictional and historical characters– not to mention its engagement with Jewish identity and assimilation. Yes, it is about those Netanyahus: Bibi is here, but just as a kid; the main Netanyahu is Bibi's dad Benzion, and the (based-on-a-true) story recounts incidents surrounding his effort to land an academic position in the United States circa 1960. The novel veers from slapstick to Netanyahu's wide-ranging and shall we say unconventional lectures on Jewish history. It's a dark comedy with nary a shred of sympathy for the Netanyahu family's behavior and views, but more than a hint of admiration for their crass, chaotic energy.

The Mountain Lion 
Jean Stafford

A disturbing novel about two siblings coming of age; it begins as an idyll and ends as... well, I won't give it away, although I feel that the climax is telegraphed a bit too much. Still, a very good read. 

The Topeka School
Ben Lerner

Therapy
David Lodge

Eat the Document
Dana Spiotta

What Hetty Did
J.L. Carr

I found these four were worth reading "at the margin," as we economists like to say, but don't go out of your way.

Recent reading

A View of the Harbour
Elizabeth Taylor

Taylor's Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont was one of my favorite reads in recent memory, and A View of the Harbour (1947) is even better. Whereas Mrs. Palfrey revolves almost entirely around its title character, A View of the Harbour is populated by a larger ensemble of characters living in a down-at-the-heels seaside town. The chapters of the book weave their way from one short set piece to another, inhabiting each character's thoughts along the way. Taylor's ability to draw so many vivid and fully formed characters in such a compact novel is, in my reading experience, a rare thing. 

The book's multiple and interconnected plot lines are set in motion by the arrival of Bertram, a retired seaman and aspiring painter, who quickly involves himself in everyone's business. Among those affected by his arrival are the book's other two main characters: Tory Foyle, a divorcee with a wild streak, and Mrs. Bracey, a bedridden busybody. But you'll get to know many others along the way. The drama is understated, the humor abundant, and the writing... simply brilliant. Most of the time Taylor employs an efficient prose style with striking descriptions and convincing dialogue. But once in a while she spreads her wings; I can't think of another writer who could compose a sentence as wickedly yet tellingly convoluted as the second in this paragraph. 

Lily Wilson sat behind the lace curtains with Lady Audley's Secret on her lap, but it was too dark to read. Although awaited, the first flash of the lighthouse was always surprising and made of the moment something enchanting and miraculous, sweeping over the pigeon-coloured evening with condescension and negligence, half-returning, withdrawing, and then, almost forgotten, opening its fan again across the water, encircled, so Lily thought, all the summer through by mazed birds and moths, betrayed, as some creatures are preserved, by that caprice of nature which cherishes the ermine, the chameleon, the stick-insect, but lays sly traps for others, the moths and lemmings. 'And women?' Lily wondered, and she turned down a corner of Lady Audley's Secret to mark the place, and stood up yawning. 

Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neal Hurston

Somehow I had never read this until now. It's a fine and important novel, although in parts ethnography takes over for narrative. The use of dialect lends a music to the dialogue, although I can imagine it would be a challenge teaching it today.

When We Cease to Understand the World
Benjamín Labatut

A very meta mashup of fact and fiction, it was critically acclaimed. The vignettes about 20th-century mathematicians and physicists become increasingly speculative and even fantastical as the book progresses. It left me pretty cold, but your mileage may vary.

The Big Clock
Kenneth Fearing

An enjoyable, well-written noir with a pretty contrived plot. It will definitely get you through a decent plane ride. 

Postcards from the Big Island

My first visit. I hope to return before too long.

We stayed on the west coast near Captain Cook, up the road from Pebbles Beach. Ancient trails extend north and south from the beach, across lava flows from Mauna Loa. Lava flows are a dominant feature of Hawaii, which of course is still growing, although apparently there is a new baby island on the way in a few hundred thousand years...

Pu'uhonua O Honaunau National Historical Park. Wikipedia: "The historical park preserves the site where, up until the early 19th century, Hawaiians who broke a kapu (one of the ancient laws) could avoid certain death by fleeing to this place of refuge or puʻuhonua. The offender would be absolved by a priest and freed to leave. Defeated warriors and non-combatants could also find refuge here during times of battle. The grounds just outside the Great Wall that encloses the puʻuhonua were home to several generations of powerful chiefs."

Kilauea Iki Trail / Crater. An awesome hike across the floor of a crater that last erupted in 1959, right next door to the active crater at Kilauea. The native ʻōhiʻa lehua tree is trying its best to colonize every nook and cranny.

Makuala O'oma Trail. Fantastic trail through the cloud forest above Kona. The native hāpuʻu tree fern is abundant here, lending a Jurassic Park quality to the place. Invasive ginger plants are a real problem, though their flowers are pretty and fragrant.

Mangos of many varieties and awesome smoothies can be had at the South Kona Fruit Stand. Don't miss it.

South Point, the southern-most point in the United States, is thought to be the first place of landing and settlement of the original Polynesian voyagers to Hawaii. It's a pretty windswept and bleak part of the island, but apparently the fishing is good.

Economic malaise and blame

This post from Paul Romer sums up my own impression of current macroeconomic conditions in the United States, which are not all that bad but widely perceived to be so, and for which it is predicted that Biden will be blamed by the voters even though little of it is his fault or under his control. The Fed appears to be planning to make matters worse. Grrr.

Carson Pass country, again

Last week MK and I camped for a couple nights up at Woods Lake CG. I try to go every year, and this year for the third time I hiked what may be my favorite "day hike" in the Sierras: From Woods Lake up to Lake Winnemucca, then to Round Top and 4th of July Lakes, down into the Summit City Canyon, up to Forestdale Divide, and finally returning around the base of Elephant's Back to Woods Lake. "Day hike" is in scare quotes because this is a 16.5 mile round trip, with a total elevation gain of somewhere around 3,000 feet– a combo that pushes my physical limits, at least at my current level of non-conditioning. That said, the vistas and abundant and diverse wildflowers and other plants are breathtaking nearly every step of the way. Along the deep, rugged, and spectacular Summit City Canyon, you are alone in the wilderness– we encountered not another human soul after Round Top until we reached the Pacific Crest Trail at Forestdale many miles later.

Photos can't really do it justice, but here a few snapshots with the Pixel anyway. The lichen picture is a cheat, having been taken near the Meiss Col on the other side of Highway 88... but such lichens!

Granite

A few pictures taken along the Murphy Creek Trail in Yosemite a couple weeks ago. Please click on the photos to see what they really look like... Blogger has trouble with B&W for some reason...

Two novels about old ladies

Two older women, each formidable in her own manner, are at the center of gravity of two NYRB re-issues that I recently read and highly recommend: Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (1971) and Joan Chase's During the Reign of the Queen of Persia (1983). That similarity notwithstanding, the two novels could hardly be more different in tone and style. Mrs. Palfrey is a near-perfect comedy of manners, gentle and sad but with just the right touch of acid. Mrs. Palfrey herself is a widow who has just moved into a small London residential hotel for older folks of limited means. Loneliness afflicts every character, including Mrs. Palfrey. What she does about it constitutes a small act of heroism, laughable on its face but brave and audacious in its context. Taylor's descriptive writing is crisp and concise, and the dialogue pitch-perfect. An unexpected delight.

The "Queen of Persia" character in Chase's novel is the embittered, aging matriarch of a family of daughters and granddaughters living on and around the family farm estate in 1950s Ohio. Loneliness is not their problem– as often as not, hell is other people, including one's mother or sisters. The novel is narrated collectively– sometimes permutationally– in the first-person plural by the four granddaughters, two each by two of the daughters. This odd contrivance works brilliantly and somehow adds to the unsettled mood created by the nonlinear arc of the story through time. The introduction tells us that Faulkner was a major influence on Chase, and that certainly comes through, but her strikingly unconventional metaphors and lyrical, crowded descriptions are a style all her own.

During the Reign is unquestionably a book about women and girls– mothers, daughters, and sisters; the handful of men in the story inhabit the peripheries and range from kind and ineffectual to menacing. Like the women, the men are a source of curiosity for the granddaughters, who observe the grownups warily throughout the book. A vibrant, angry, poetic, and haunted novel. 

Do read them both!

Ackerson Meadow flowers

I recently spent three nights car camping with a couple of good friends/colleagues at the quite pleasant Dimond O National Forest campground just outside the western edge of Yosemite. About this time every year we head up to Yosemite for a couple of killer day hikes, and this time was no different. Something new for me was taking a little time to ramble around a small bit of Ackerson Meadow, a big chunk of which was added to Yosemite NP not long ago, and some of which spans Evergreen Rd. on the way to Dimond O. 

Right now views of the meadow are dominated by the vibrant colors of blue-violet lupines, emerald bracken ferns, and golden yellow madias. But if you seek out the edges of damp depressions and look down at the ground, you'll see some amazing itsy flowers. I took a few pictures with my phone.

The first photo features the aptly named yellow-lipped pansy monkeyflower (Diplacus pulchellus) as well as Downingia montana (the latter was I think misidentified by my Seek app as a different downingia... Seek is amazing, but is often overconfident in its plant IDs... then again, all of my plant IDs are provisional!). The second shot is more of the downingia, a splendid little flower. Finally, a not very good shot of another tiny monkey, Erythranthe filicaulis. 

Beautiful Clintonia

Mingus on states' rights

In honor of Justice Alito's "opinion." Lyrics here. 

Turkeys

 

After the rain

We got a mid-April splash after the driest January-March on record... the plants and lichens at Russian Ridge and Skyline Ridge were reveling in the moisture. The flowers are near their peak... not bad for a dry year. And why had I never noticed the mortar holes at Skyline Ridge? Folks lived in this spectacular place for many generations.

It's rather a beautiful photo

But it's not my country...

Jazz these days

I do love big-band music from the swing era: Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie, Duke, etc. Post-bebop big bands never did much for me, with the partial exception of some of the more out-there collectives– Sun Ra's Arkestra, or Muhal Richard Abrams. But Maria Schneider's orchestra has gotten a lot of critical attention, and Laura and I went to check them out when they played at Stanford's Bing Concert Hall this weekend.

Schneider's music is pretty high-concept, with lots of complex rhythms and harmonies, and at times it was interesting and exciting to hear, but more often cluttered and over-composed. Certainly she has assembled a fine group of musicians, including Donny McCaslin on tenor sax and Ben Monder on guitar, but they were seldom given an opportunity to really stretch out. A revelation for me was drummer Johnathan Blake, who plays with subtlety and color. Unfortunately, subtlety didn't help overcome the clamorous acoustics of Bing Hall. When alto sax player Dave Pietro finally got the chance to tear into an extended, high-energy solo, he was completely drowned out, especially by eight brass players at high volume. Will Stanford ever get the acoustics right in this place? 

When all is said and done, small-group jazz in an intimate setting is way more my cup of tea. And what could be more intimate than someone's living room? Emmet Cohen is an awesome pianist with a great trio and some very talented friends, who drop by for jam sessions that he kindly shares on YouTube. Check out Marcus Strickland's swinging, modal solo to kick things off, and Christian McBride's extended, virtuosic solo later on. The trio's regular bassist, Russell Hall, is no slouch, but his expressions while listening to McBride are priceless. Drummer Kyle Poole barely seems to be moving his wrists while he propels the music forward. Plenty more where this came from on Emmet's channel.

SFJazz Founder / Director Randall Kline stepping down

It's his baby. Has anyone done more to enhance the cultural life of San Francisco over the past 40 years?

I've had my occasional quibble with some of the programming choices – one could imagine them being a little more adventurous – but one cannot argue with his taste overall: the residencies by many of the unquestioned greats, the openness to global sounds, to women, and to sympathetic jazz fellow travelers like Rosanne Cash. The SF Jazz Collective! And a great, big-hearted space for the music... damned if it's not the place I most often find myself wanting to go to in "the City." Three big cheers to you, Randall.

Ron Miles, RIP

NY Times obit. His duet with the also underappreciated drummer Ted Poor starts around 1:20.

A Hero

The title of Asghar Farhadi's latest film is descriptive, not ironic (at least not exactly), but it is a Farhadi movie after all, so nothing is simple, especially when it comes to judgments of behavior and morality. Our hero, played by Amir Jadidi, is on a short release from debtor's prison, from which he is hoping to gain a more permanent release with the approval of his Shylock-like creditor and brother-in-law, played by Mohsen Tanabandeh. You'll have to see how that goes. 

This is not Farhadi's very best (that would be A Separation, in my view), but it is better than 95% of movies you will see. Jadidi is excellent as a man wronged who wants to do right, but who is also a little shifty and passive-aggressive, and a hot-head (though not without reason!). Although going to jail for an unpaid private debt seems like an atavism, it still happens in Iran and other countries and, as my friend MK reminded me, was common in the "civilized" English legal tradition until not so long ago. As is the case with other Farhadi movies, his main goal is not to condemn such structural injustices but to understand how real people might behave in that context.  

Perhaps the best thing about A Hero is the way it grapples with the role of modern media in making or breaking personal reputations. It seems like a game until prison time and your relationship with your lover and your struggling, beautiful son are at stake.

Do watch it.

Windy Hill OSP

Took one of my very favorite local hikes today with MK, up Razorback Ridge, across the Lost Trail, and back down Hamms Gulch. Even as it is drying out most places, under the trees and along the seeps of Windy Hill there is still plenty of moisture, and the ferns and early spring flowers are looking lush. In addition to the bee plants (some of which are being devoured by hungry caterpillars), the trilliums (T. chloropetalum) are at their peak and the Heucheras (micrantha?) are leafing out, in this case nestled in a bed of bedstraw (Galium aparine). The last photo may be notchleaf clover (Trifolium bifidum)?

Some very hungry caterpillars...

... making quick work of the bee plants (Scrophularia californica) along the Lost Trail in Windy Hill OSP. One day they will grow up to be one of our most lovely and abundant local butterflies, the variable checkerspot (Euphydryas chalcedona). Wikipedia informs us that their most common food is the monkeyflower, but that bee plants are tastier and more nutritious!

"Another less common host plant for variable checkerspot larvae is Scrophularia californica, which lacks the resin defense system found in D. aurantiacus and is thus easier for larvae to digest. Larvae that feed on S. californica grow faster and larger than those that feed on D. aurantiacus." Source.

Everyone Should Pay a "Solar Tax"

Read it and judge for yourself. 

June-like...

... Weather-wise, anyway. Not what we need right now. But who can really complain?

June 

Alex Dimitrov

There will never be more of summer 

than there is now. Walking alone 

through Union Square I am carrying flowers 

and the first rosé to a party where I’m expected. 

It’s Sunday and the trains run on time 

but today death feels so far, it’s impossible 

to go underground. I would like to say 

something to everyone I see (an entire 

city) but I’m unsure what it is yet. 

Each time I leave my apartment 

there’s at least one person crying, 

reading, or shouting after a stranger 

anywhere along my commute. 

It’s possible to be happy alone, 

I say out loud and to no one 

so it’s obvious, and now here 

in the middle of this poem. 

Rarely have I felt more charmed 

than on Ninth Street, watching a woman 

stop in the middle of the sidewalk 

to pull up her hair like it’s 

an emergency—and it is. 

People do know they’re alive. 

They hardly know what to do with themselves. 

I almost want to invite her with me 

but I’ve passed and yes it’d be crazy 

like trying to be a poet, trying to be anyone here. 

How do you continue to love New York, 

my friend who left for California asks me. 

It’s awful in the summer and winter, 

and spring and fall last maybe two weeks. 

This is true. It’s all true, of course, 

like my preference for difficult men 

which I had until recently 

because at last, for one summer 

the only difficulty I’m willing to imagine 

is walking through this first humid day 

with my hands full, not at all peaceful 

but entirely possible and real.

Buy the book: Love and Other Poems

Recent inequality trends: wealth vs. income

Paul Krugman has a nice piece reminding us that we should pay attention to income inequality, despite a recent focus on wealth in popular discourse. The trends can look rather different.

Harlem Shuffle

Up to now I had read only one of Colson Whitehead's novels: The Intuitionist, his debut. I found that book ambitious but contrived, a flawed first try; somehow I had not sampled another until his latest, Harlem Shuffle. Harlem Shuffle is a pretty straight-ahead literary crime novel, set between 1959 and 1964 in– good guess!– Harlem and environs. The crime genre imposes its own set of rules on storytelling, and Whitehead embraces the discipline with gusto.

Our hero is Ray Carney, who owns a successful furniture store catering to the growing if tenuous postwar Black middle class. Despite having grown up around crooks, including his truly bad-guy father, Carney runs a legitimate business– well, mostly legit, at least most of the time, at least in the beginning. As often happens in such books, one thing leads to another, and Carney finds it increasingly difficult to escape his criminal connections and relations– especially his trouble-making cousin Freddie– not to mention the demands of his own ambition as a "striver." The story is deftly told, the main characters are vividly drawn, and the writing is first-rate. 

Whitehead is particularly good on the everyday corruption of life in the city. Even as an upstanding businessman, Carney is forced to count various payoffs as a cost of doing business: an envelope for the beat cop, an envelope for mob protection. Most galling, and consequential, is the envelope for the Harlem banker to ease Carney's way into membership of the Black elite's Dumas Club. Corruption and criminality are baked into the Manhattan economy for Blacks and whites alike, so fencing a few items of questionable provenance is less a matter of crossing a line than a choice of product lines and assessing risk vs. return. 

If you are a regular reader of crime fiction, Harlem Shuffle's characters and themes will call to mind the recent crop of excellent historically informed crime and suspense novels about complex Black characters struggling to keep their moral compass while navigating the waters of racist America– novels written by such "genre" writers as Walter Mosley, of course, and more recently Attica Locke and S.A. Cosby. It's no insult to be listed in that company. Although Colson Whitehead is renowned as a writer of "serious" literature, and I'm eager to explore more of his contributions there, if there's a sequel to Harlem Shuffle, I'm on it.

Bir Başkadır

Bir Başkadır, a title that someone at Netflix somehow decided to translate as Ethos (?!), is the best TV show I have seen in a long time. The Netflix site's capsulized description is: "A group of individuals in Istanbul transcend sociocultural boundaries and find connection as their fears and wishes intertwine." Fair enough. And Citizen Kane was about a boy and his sled.

For me Bir Başkadır brought to mind the works of great directors of family-based dramas like Ozu and Farhadi; the Farhadi connection is particularly apt given Bir Başkadır's explorations of gender and family dynamics in the context of a nominally Muslim society roiled by tensions between traditional/religious and modern/secular. Like Farhadi, the show's creator Berkun Oya uses the sociological backdrop to explore individual psychology and universal human themes. 

Oya has his own cinematic language. The show is built on dialogues, in the quite literal sense of two people talking. Each episode is constructed as a network of dyads: We sit in the room as A talks with B, then maybe B with C, and A with C, and B with D, etc. The camera focuses on the faces, almost always one at a time, in close-up. As they speak we ponder, are they talking with the other, or at the other, or to themselves, or against themselves? Some of the dialogues involve psychiatrists/ analysts... but who is analyzing whom, and which direction is the transference going?

As the old cliché would have it, the eyes are the windows of the soul, and Bir Başkadır certainly draws your attention to the eyes of its talking heads. But the camera also ranges around outside, whether downtown, or in the suburbs or countryside, and Oya finds beauty and mystery in the actual windows of the homes and vehicles in which his characters live and interact. 

In all of this Oya is assisted by an outstanding cast– most of all by Öykü Karayel, who plays the central character Meryem, a housekeeper living with her angry, frustrated, and not very bright brother and his damaged, possibly suicidal wife. All the dyads connect to Meryem, within one or two degrees of separation. Meryem is observant in more ways than one, and she is clever and funny. Karayel's eyes blaze, and her lips are plastic enough to express wonder, sadness, disdain, and ironic amusement within a span of moments. 

If I have a criticism, it is that the music can be obtrusive at times. But you know where the volume control is, and you will probably be reading the subtitles rather than following the talking anyway. 

Wisdom from Zeynep

"What if better is worse? Well, you know what? Better is almost never worse." It's painful to read her litany of Biden failures and own-goals in the fight against covid, but she seems to be right. Too bad the political alternative is an insane death cult. 

Whither inflation?

Today's New York Times headline and graph bugged me– nothing new there. The headline inflation number for December is 7.1%, which is calculated comparing prices (CPI) to December a year ago. Given the volatility of monthly inflation rates, smoothing by cumulating over 12 months of changes is not necessarily a bad idea, but it can give a very misleading idea of what inflation is doing right now. For example, if inflation had come to a screeching halt, and between November and December prices had not increased at all, the headline number compared to a year ago would still be about 6.5%, which looks pretty bad compared to the recent past. In fact, inflation for the month of December was still significant and concerning, running at over 5% annually, but it shows some evidence of having peaked. Kevin Drum has a nice graph illustrating this, which I reproduce below (see the blue line for monthly changes). I don't have a strong opinion about what will happen with inflation in the coming months, but the way the Times frames the numbers is alarmist and feeds a gloomy narrative that is not needed or warranted right now. [Addendum: More detail from Menzie Chinn]

First-person narrators – unreliable, delusional, or just plain bad

It seems as if almost all the novels I read these days are narrated in the first person by flawed characters whose motives, morals, perceptions, or grip on reality are seriously subject to question. These narrators are out to manipulate you, the reader, even as they delude themselves. You get to see their world through their eyes, but sometimes you get to see right through them to what they want to conceal or are themselves unwilling to acknowledge. That's an effect that can really only be achieved in literature.

The Good Soldier
Ford Madox Ford

This is considered the archetype in the genre of unreliable narrator novels, and its reputation is deserved, although the characters are pretty consistently unlikeable and unsympathetic– especially its very unreliable narrator, John Dowell. I'm not sure I can recommend it.

Good Behaviour
Molly Keane

Good Behaviour is a dark comedy in the grand tradition of novels about aristocratic families in decline, living off their creditors and the loyalty– or desperation– of the help, whose wages are chronically in arrears. Because the story begins at the end, it's not really a spoiler to say that the novel opens with our narrator Aroon St. Charles having just murdered (maybe!) her mother with (hmm) rabbit quenelles. The rest of the book fills in the back story. Aroon appears to be a blend of deep cynicism and piteous self-deception. I'm not sure the two are compatible, which leads me to believe that Aroon may be having us on about the self-deception. In that case she is even more cynical than I thought. Read it and tell me what you think.

A Pale View of Hills
Kazuo Ishiguro

Ishiguro's first novel is one of his very best, chilling and dreamlike, a ghost story of sorts. I plan to read it again soon and report back.

Bina: A Novel in Warnings
Anakana Schofield

This extraordinary novel– or is it a book-length poem?– deserves its own blog post. And its narrator, Bina, is deserving of better adjectives than "unreliable, delusional, or just plain bad." She's angry, confused and possibly suffering from incipient dementia, virtuous, and utterly delightful... anything but unreliable. More coming soon.

Audie Cornish

Working from home and driving rather little these days, I have not been listening to NPR nearly as much as I was two years ago. I haven't missed it much, largely because the hosts of the news shows I listened to, particularly "All Things Considered," had become nearly insufferable to me: breathless or sing-songy delivery, hearts on their sleeves when the news was bad, fawning in interviews with their personal faves, an annoying habit of repeating back what was just said in an interview, treating the audience as if we were children, or not paying attention: "Vaccination rates are 70% in X-land and only 50% in Y-land..." "Oh, so you're saying vaccination rates are actually higher in X-land?!"

Audie Cornish was always a welcome exception. Smart, professional, no-nonsense reporting. Treating the listeners like grown-ups, letting the story speak for itself. She'll be missed.