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.