Can Music Be Perfect? Vol. 110

I'm a sucker for Earth, Wind, & Fire (I added the Oxford comma!), and this is their best song. The slow groove, the syncopated whole-tone horn riff, the sweet vocals, the five-bar repeats at the end. The perfect pop-funk song.

Meanwhile, over at the Weirsdale Community Cemetery

The 300 yards of dirt track that connect Forest Hill Cemetery (the "white" cemetery) to the Weirsdale Community Cemetery (the "Black" cemetery) were particularly overgrown on my recent visit. Not much traffic, it seems, heads to this very quiet corner of central Florida. As I waded through the grass and weeds I worried just a little about the coral snakes that inhabit these parts – Dad saw one out here once – but these potentially deadly snakes are too small and shy to be a menace. And it really is a pleasant stroll, even on a muggy late afternoon in August. To your left, the currently vacant cattle pasture with its seasonal marshy pond, greened up after the recent thunderstorms; to your right, the back yards of Stonecrest's comfortable and well-maintained ranch houses for the 55 and over. They enjoy their active lifestyle, with golf and pickleball, but I wonder how many appreciate the quiet beauty of their local graveyards.

Florida's hills are pretty humble, being flattened old sand dunes as far as I can tell, but the contours create their own micro-habitats. Forest Hill Cemetery, for example, on its little rise, is shaded by pines. The Weirsdale Community Cemetery, more flat and low-lying, is shaded by live oaks draped in Spanish moss. I'm an oak man myself. The mushrooms agree. 

The dead and the gone

On my recent visit with the parents, I dropped by the cemeteries located near their former house in Summerfield, FL. The folks have moved to a more convenient and accommodating apartment building nearby, but their old neighborhood beckons. Their house was located in the Stonecrest gated community, and, being gated, it is now off-limits to me. But the cemeteries lie just outside Stonecrest, with access via bumpy SE 170th St., which skirts the development's northern periphery and is maintained by... who knows?

Forest Hill Cemetery, the "white" cemetery, occupies a little slope up from the road's dead end just outside my parents' old back yard. For the roughly 15 years my folks lived there, a pair of bald eagles maintained a nest near the top of a longleaf pine in the cemetery and raised cohorts of eaglets. I say "a pair," but there was some turnover, as at least once the female apparently died from one cause or another, and the forlorn widower had to find another mate. Or at least, that's what the human eagle-watchers inferred. My parents watched them daily, if not hourly, from the back porch.

In recent years the pine died, and the enormous, untidy nest in a crook of the tree's skeleton finally succumbed to hurricanes and decay as did, ultimately, the tree itself. The eagles, who fed on fish from nearby Lake Weir, have moved on. It was some comfort to me that my parents departed before their beloved eagles... or around the same time, in one of those strange coincidences. 

Forest Hill has graves dating back to the late 19th century, and is still used today. Graves are fascinating, and sad, of course. On this visit, a couple in particular struck me, along with the memorial placed at the stump of the eagle tree. Mattie Barker's marker is in too good condition to be the original. One wonders who is maintaining the grave of an infant who died 136 years ago. It is only few miles from the location of "Ma" Barker's famous last shootout across Lake Weir in Ocklawaha... another coincidence.

Reading roundup

Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel García Márquez

My second reading of this one. It's a wonderful book, exquisitely translated by Edith Grossman. Although Márquez is famous for his magical realism, there is not much magic here. Behavior and incidents are occasionally implausible, but hardly fantastical. The battle between the powerful and capricious forces of inevitable death and uncertain love drives the narrative, along with numerous picaresque set pieces.

The Beauty of the Death Cap
Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze

Knowing my love of all things mushroom, MK couldn't resist gifting this one to me. It's a novella in the tradition of French noir thrillers about nasty characters, a la Jean-Patrick Manchette. Our protagonist narrator Nikonor is indeed a nasty fellow who loves mushrooms too. His obsession, it turns out, is not with the death cap, but with the highly prized edible cep (porcini), although he doesn't eat mushrooms himself. That doesn't prevent him from putting the death cap to other purposes. Funny and well-written, if not up to Manchette's standard.

Good People
Patmina Sabit

This is a novel about a crime (maybe) and assimilation (or maybe not), taking place in a fictional Afghan-American family/ community. Was it an accident or an honor killing? Was the investigation driven by a search for truth and justice, or by racism and xenophobia? Written as a sequence of interviews with acquaintances and witnesses, it has a Rashomon vibe that won it a good bit of praise. Although the plot will keep you going, I found the style and tone of the "interviews" implausible, and the characterizations a bit one-dimensional. 

'Sierra Blue,' RIP

This Ceanothus 'Sierra Blue' was one of the first California native shrubs I planted in the yard, about 20 years ago, and one of my favorites. Last year it started looking a little rough, and this spring it simply expired, after its final impressive display of the large sky-blue flowers that were always as popular with the pollinators as they were with me. There was no obvious event or disease that did it in – perhaps simply old age. It always received my benign neglect: no summer water, no fertilizer, limited pruning. Just what is supposed to keep a ceanothus happy. I'll miss it.

James Blood Ulmer, RIP

His synthesis of blues and free jazz was unique. Like many jazz guitarists, it seems, he followed an inner flame.

Anthony Head, RIP

Giles, to most of us. 

Sonny Rollins, RIP

At the risk of playing a stupid game, I would place him in the top three jazz instrumentalists, with Louis and Bird. Here he is live, in 1986. And what a band... Bob Cranshaw on bass in particular.

Reading roundup

City of Glass
Paul Auster

A postmodern meta riff on the suspense novel. Overall I enjoyed it, even if in the end it seemed too clever by half. It shares with some other novels I have read a denouement that places the protagonist(s) in a shrinking universe, partly of their own making, including John Williams's Stoner, E.L. Doctorow's Homer and Langley, and Kafka's story A Hunger Artist. 

The Keeper
Tana French

This completes her Ardnakelty crime trilogy, featuring the transplanted American cop Cal Hooper and his constructed Irish family. As in the previous installments, the village of Ardnakelty forms a collective character, often manifested in the person of Mart Lavin, Cal's crusty and not entirely trustworthy neighbor and confidante. French is the master of this kind of psychological and anthropological entertainment, and for the most part The Keeper does not disappoint. I could have wished for a little more of Trey, Cal's tough-as-nails, more-or-less adopted teenage daughter; and I found the resolution of the suspicious death at the center of the plot not entirely credible. But none of those quibbles will stop me from snapping up the fourth installment, if there is one, or whatever French's next book happens to be. 

A Fool's Kabbalah
Steve Stern

This is about as entertaining as a historical novel about the Holocaust by bullets could be. The book switches between twin narratives. One follows Gershom Scholem as he travels through eastern Europe after the War, attempting to gather and save Jewish books looted by the Nazis, including historical documents relating to Jewish mysticism. The other narrative features the antics of the village fool Menke Klepfisch, as the Nazis occupy his shtetl and visit one atrocity after another on the hapless and superstitious residents. 

The book is ultimately about the futility of some of the most deeply human defenses against the vicissitudes of life – whether religious mysticism, rational philosophy, or humor – in the face of the ultimate evil. But it is often touching and very funny. Stern surely wants us to feel discomfort when we chuckle, given the horrors he rather graphically describes. He succeeds.

Babe

April showers are unusual in San Jose. They spritz up even Babe's muffler shop. That's Babe to the right, I believe.

Monte Bello Open Space Preserve

Beautiful all times of year, but especially in spring, with the flowers blooming and the oaks leafing out. Photos in order: the elegant Pacific trillium (T. ovatum); the very spiny fuchsiaflower gooseberry (Ribes speciosum); the fetching red vetchling (Lathyrus cicera). And lastly, dog-vomit slime mold (Fuligo septica): Visually speaking it is aptly named, but olfactorily speaking it is actually neutral to pleasant in odor; it is known as caca de luna (moon poop!) in parts of Mexico, where some folks eat it. I have not tried it... yet...

William E. Connolly, RIP

Bill Connolly's political theory course at UMass was my very favorite class of all time. I was reminded of him with the recent news of Jürgen Habermas's death, and was saddened to learn of Connolly's own passing less than a month ago. Connolly was deeply influenced by Habermas, but he was his own thinker. Over the years my own intellectual trajectory moved away from abstract political philosophy into empirical economics, with all its reductionism and reification. Connolly would not have approved, but I am certain he left a mark on my politics and thought. 

He was an old-school professor, ad-lib lecturing with his take on the intricate arguments of Rousseau, Hegel, Althusser. Perhaps I was actually as lost as many of my fellow students said they were, but it felt like I was being let in on something profound, that ideas matter, and that with enough attention and concentration, I could participate in the discourse. Connolly lived long enough to witness the triumph of cruelty, selfishness, and irrationality over the pluralism and humanism that defined his worldview. If we overcome those trends, it is sad to think that he will not be here to witness. 

Another short appreciation can be found here.

The world's deadliest animals, part 2

Well, deadly if you are a checkerspot butterfly, anyway. There are birds and various other critters that will be eager to gobble you up, including crab spiders. Something about this webby dried up weed must have attracted the attention of the checkerspot... its last mistake, alas.

The world's deadliest animals...

... according to Our World in Data. Mosquitoes come in first, and humans second. Snakes are a distant third, followed by dogs. All of that is plausible to me. These guys do good work, and I trust their research, but I was surprised that neither fleas nor the rodents that carry them made the list. Surely the plague, tamed though it may be, still carries off more humans than the sharks that account for only six fatalities per year. And ticks? Nada? 

(Image: Wikipedia)

Willie Colón, RIP

Siembra may be my favorite album, period. ¡El Mejor!

Pulgas Ridge Open Space Preserve

Today I walked the longer loop around the preserve on the Dusky-Footed Woodrat Trail; with a moderate drizzle coming down I had this splendid park almost entirely to myself. In the plant department, it is overshadowed by its neighbor immediately to the south, Edgewood County Park, which is renowned for its springtime wildflower display and unusual native species, thanks to its serpentine soils. But Pulgas is not without its attractions, including some beautiful chaparral, populated with ceanothus and manzanitas, and classic oak woodlands. In one gully shaded by live oaks and buckeyes you will find the uncommon and attractive fetid adder's tongue, or slinkpod (Scoliopus bigelovii). I have never found it particularly fetid, myself, even when I bend down and stick my nose into that striking little flower. This time of year one is also rewarded by the glowing emerald green of our native meadow rue.

Reading shorts

Pnin
Vladimir Nabokov

On one level, this is an academic satire, and a very good one indeed. Pnin, a rather ridiculous absent-minded professor, comes in for mostly gentle mocking. The set pieces and depictions of academia are at times laugh-out-loud funny. But soon enough we discern an undercurrent of deep melancholy and even tragedy, and various indications that the omniscient narrator may not be completely reliable. Who is this narrator? And who is this Pnin? Fool, or modest hero? And the prose: Many sentences and passages will make you catch your breath. As close to perfect as a little novel can be.

The Surgeon's Mate
Patrick O'Brian

This one finds intrepid Aubrey and Maturin on a clever and successful mission in the Baltic Sea, later shipwrecked in Brittany and imprisoned in Paris, with an escape and wedding to close out the yarn. Maybe too much plot?... but never too much Aubrey, Maturin, or seafaring adventure.

Can Music Be Perfect? Vol. 109

We were listening to this one in the Subaru this weekend, on a CD (!) of Joni M's favorite tunes. Of course she has great taste. It's possible that I have listened to this recording of this song more times than any other. My mind anticipates every note, but my heart feels a little thrill every time. Rodgers's tune is undeniably great, and Hart's so-sad poetry is lurking, even in the absence of a singer. Miles's extreme blue notes – including the closing note on the what is it... quarter-tone sharp dominant? – are the "hook" here, but Red Garland's piano solo is the core of this masterpiece, meandering in melancholy before taking a wistful stroll through an English country garden, only to return to the somber close. Play it again!

The Donroe Doctrine

David Cole on the Maduro operation in historical perspective:

But in other respects Trump’s “brilliant operation” is unprecedented in modern US history. These earlier strikes were in response to actual or threatened attacks on the US. By contrast, Trump’s unilateral actions against Venezuela were entirely unprovoked. The implication of the administration’s reasoning is that countries can use military force anytime they are unhappy with how another country regulates or fails to regulate conduct within its borders that could have injurious effects elsewhere. But this is ludicrous. By the administration’s logic, Canada could start shooting Americans suspected of carrying drugs over the US–Canada border, or bomb buildings in the US that it claimed were being used to manufacture the drugs. Mexico could do the same with respect to American manufacturers of guns that are routinely used in gang violence, which kills many thousands of Mexicans each year.

Perhaps we should be relieved if it really is just about taking their oil. Or perhaps not...

Confession

I like to cook marinara sauce. It's pretty easy, you can control the seasoning, and if you use high-quality canned tomatoes it's almost always better than what you could buy in a jar. Well, so I used to think, until I discovered this stuff. Very simple, very bright-tasting and tomato-y, well seasoned but letting the tomatoes shine, not too sweet, not chunky, but not pureed either. You can augment with more veggies, mushrooms, or meat. You can also add it to a simple soup made from leftovers. During tomato season, I plan to continue buying bargain "sort-outs" from the farmers' market and making sauce from scratch. Off season... this stuff.