A few flowers

On the trails above Hidden Villa. Elegant clarkia, wind poppies and blue dicks, false babystars, and yellow Mariposa lily, respectively. So nice.

Reading roundup

The Eye in the Door
Pat Barker

This was the sequel to Regeneration, Barker's excellent anti-war novel of WWI. A psychological thriller of a sort, The Eye in the Door keeps a lot of balls in the air in its tightly written 277 pages, with its portrayal of the oppression and repression of homosexuality, pacifism, and leftism in wartime Britain, the psychological trauma associated with trench warfare as well as subterfuge, and the inner turmoil of characters navigating complex moral dilemmas. A justly celebrated book. I'll eagerly move on to the third in the trilogy.

The Feral Detective
Jonathan Lethem

A dystopian novel of post-Trump America, it takes place in the desert hinterland east of Los Angeles, and features competing tribes of off-the-gridders: the (male) Bears and the (female) Rabbits. Pitched as an edgy detective novel, it is also a fairly ham-handed allegory of Trumpian America and our gendered political and cultural divide. Lethem still seems to be phoning it in, compared to the brilliant promise of some of his earlier work, and only five years after its publication, The Feral Detective's message seems more stale than insightful. Still, Lethem phoning it in is a better writer than many: If you're in the market for a detective story as well as a quirky love story, you could do worse. 

The City Inside
Samit Basu

William Gibson goes to Delhi in this high-energy, near-future romp. I liked the characters, and I liked the buzzy language and plausibly bleak but somehow still hopeful vision of authoritarian India after post-Modi fundamentalist turmoil. 

Infinity Gate
M.R. Carey

It's the multiverse. Travel between dimensions is a bit like travel between planets or galaxies, but all you have to do is step on a platform and shazam! you appear in the same place and time, but in an alternative history. Alternative evolutionary paths across these histories have made some people look more like cats or bunnies than humans. Huh. Apparently a lot of people liked this book. Maybe it improves after the point where I turned off my kindle and re-joined the here and now... 

The Mercy
Philip Levine

Levine's poetic voice was disarmingly plain. One page of Levine is a good antidote to 150 pages of M.R. Carey. It will restore your faith in the beauty and power of the written word.

Amanita velosa

Quite a perfect late-season specimen... eminently edible... but be sure of your ID. I let it be.

Joe Biden Has Given Us the Greatest Economy Ever

Dean Baker says so. He's probably correct. Maybe this helps explain why the Republican Party is hellbent on tanking the global economy by refusing to raise the debt limit. 

Starting with unemployment, the current unemployment rate of 3.4 percent is the lowest in more than half a century. More than any time in this period, people who want a job are able to get one. The unemployment rate for Blacks is at 4.7 percent, the lowest number on record. 

Frogs won't actually stay in the pot as the water temperature rises... but humans?

So, the GOP and maybe some conservative Democrats plan to hold the economy hostage in order to repeal key climate provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act (and take food away from poor people).

Ocean surface temperature... nothing to see here...

Reading roundup

Days Without End
Sebastian Barry

As I read this splendidly written western, I was somehow reminded of the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, who as one limb after another is lopped off scoffs, "only a flesh wound," and carries on with the fight. If at some point you think everything bad that could possibly happen to Thomas McNulty has happened, and that it is time for him to give up, well, keep on reading. And you will, because in addition to being an exciting if brutal depiction of the violence of white America's expansion into indigenous territory, it is a quirky and affecting love story, and a celebration of the English language in the manner of which only Irish writers seem capable. If in the end the battle scenes are a bit excessive, the plot twists a bit far-fetched, and the wokeness occasionally obtrusive, you will still be glad you read it.

A New Life
Bernard Malamud

Sy Levin has left New York City and moved out west to start over as a professor of literature at Cascadia College, which he assumes, erroneously, is a liberal arts school. Instead, it turns out to be a state ag/technical college, where he is assigned as an adjunct instructor of freshman comp. Levin is lonely, horny, and a little troubled, but gamely tries to make the best of it. Misadventures both sexual and departmental ensue, in the typical fashion of academic satire. What sets this book apart, unexpectedly, is its lovely description of the Pacific Northwest– its forests, contours, moisture. Malamud himself was an instructor of freshman comp at Oregon State from 1949 to 1961, and the place left its mark. The overall tone of the book is amusing to outright funny, with occasional somewhat jarring intrusions of serious melancholy and sentiment. Worth reading.

Deep River
Shusaku Endo

Many years ago I read and admired what many consider Endo's masterpiece, Silence, as well as his twisted thriller, Scandal. In his late (1993) novel Deep River, four Japanese characters find themselves on the same tour to the Hindu pilgrimage site Varanasi, India– none a Hindu, each with a past of suffering or emotional turmoil that has led them to seek some kind of spiritual reckoning or meaning. Endo's voice is channeled through Ōtsu, a Christ-like Catholic priest who ministers to the dead and dying along the banks of the Ganges, and former lover of Mitsuko, one of the travelers. The reader, like the book's tourists, is left without much closure. One might suppose Endo believes his non-Christian characters are truly lost without salvation through Christ– but then, as the Jesuit missionaries in Silence and Deep River's Ōtsu illustrate, Christian faith provides little solace in the face of human cruelty and suffering. 

Joe Country; Slough House
Mick Herron

Books 6 and 7 in the Slough House series. Am I getting just a little tired of the formula after having read my fourth? Not so tired that I won't snarf up #8 as soon as the price drops...

The Lighthouse
P.D. James

This was one of her last Dalgliesh novels, and it is a good one. A locked-room mystery set not in a locked room but on a windswept, secluded island off the Cornish coast, the setup is exactly what you would expect: Just about everyone has a motive to murder the famous author Nathan Oliver, and somebody does. And as always, the fun is not in guessing who done it but in seeing how Dalgliesh and his comrades go about solving it. As usual, much of the work is accomplished in interviews with the suspects. The denouement is, unfortunately, contrived and over-plotted, but you'll want to continue to the happy and hopeful ending for the poet-detective AD, who deserves all the best.

Our classy once and future (?) king

I suppose those who voted for him are angry rather than embarrassed... I assume they know that there was a "porn star payment," but being in the position to make a porn star payment is something they admire, if not aspire to? But is it what they aspire to for their children? To be a profane, entitled, mean-spirited bully and bigot? His appeal still puzzles me...

Crazy nature, part 3

This is a cage stinkhorn (Clathrus ruber), which appeared as if by magic in my front yard under manzanita after the rains... It could be a kid's bike helmet, or a whiffle ball, but in fact it is a fungus, adapted for attracting flies as if to carrion. Lovely!