From smooth paddling to wind-whipped waves

What happens when you go canoeing after a too-long hiatus and get so enthralled by the beauty of the river that you paddle upstream much farther than you'd expected and then have to battle high winds on the way back?

Pain--that's what happens. Also happiness, peace, exhaustion, exuberance, fear, comfort, and a sense of gratitude for the wonders of nature, but now that it's over I'm mostly feeling pain. In the arms, shoulders, wrists, neck, and back. Plus I'd like to sleep for about a week--and then find another wonderful place to go canoeing.

The reasons we haven't had the canoe out since last August are complicated and boring, and getting out today almost didn't happen because of a wave of storms moving through the area. However, we managed to slip into the upper end of Dillon Lake during a long break between storms and paddled up into the Licking River under blue skies. Because of our long hiatus and the still-fresh memories of flipping the canoe in the Ohio River last summer, it took me a while to reach that essential sense of oneness with the canoe; I started out feeling wobbly and klutzy and on the verge of disaster every moment. I don't know exactly when mind and body started working together to make it all feel natural again, but at one point I got distracted by a bird and forgot to feel nervous anymore, and that was that.

I'd like to share some pictures of all the wonderfulness we saw, but I didn't take the camera because of the volatile weather. But there's something about the muddy upper end of Dillon Lake that is particularly attractive to great blue herons, so I can't begin to estimate how many we saw--fishing in the shallows, perched on branches, gliding across the water right in front of our faces. Such majestic birds! 

And then further up the river we saw kingfishers, more around every curve, and two bald eagles. In a quiet cove we started three wild turkeys--one adult and two juveniles--which exploded out of the bushes and disappeared into the woods.

We paddled upstream in gorgeous weather until we reached a spot where the river was choked with debris, and then we turned back downstream, expecting to glide easily with the current, which we did for a while. Then the clouds started rolling in again and the wind whipped up: sometimes it pushed us from behind so we flew downstream, and then we'd round a sharp curve and find the wind shoving us to the side and then pushing in our faces, so staying on course took every ounce of energy.

And then we hit the lake. With no trees to moderate the wind's power, we faced it head on. By that point we'd been paddling pretty steadily for nearly three hours, but we had to keep moving our tired muscles just to keep the canoe from being pushed off into the mud flats or into the massive stands of poison ivy on shore.

I noticed, though, that the herons were unfazed by the sharp wind. While we were flailing and struggling to keep the canoe from foundering, the herons still stood there fishing in the shallows or perching on tree limbs or gliding effortlessly across the water. Do their muscles every get sore? If so, what would they take?

Me? I'm living on Aleve.

Midweek mini-rants

1. So my dentist's office is switching to a new electronic records system which should decrease the number of forms patients have to fill out (good!), but in order to make the switch, they need every patient to fill out a big pile of forms (bad!) that required me to write my name, address, phone number, and other common info four or five different times in spaces too small to hold all the necessary information (very bad!). By the fifth time I wrote my address, it looked like what would happen if a mouse scampered across an ink pad and then danced across the page. I drew the line, however, at writing down all those incomprehensible numbers from the back of my insurance card, primarily because I don't carry a magnifying glass with me. Let someone with younger eyes decipher those numbers.

2. I'm reading a new and very interesting bit of academic prose that does not, thankfully, indulge in my least favorite kind of thesis statement: "In this book I argue that blah blah blah." Instead, it keeps making the title of the book the subject of sentences. Suppose the book is named "Extremely Clever Title"; repeatedly--like at least once per page--the author writes something like "Extremely Clever Title argues this..." or "Extremely Clever Title considers that...." Which, I suppose, would be a helpful reminder for readers incapable of remembering the title of the book, but on every page? How dumb does Extremely Clever Title think its readers are?

3. And speaking of dumb, what kind of action-movie-addicted idiot thinks that all it takes  to take over a country's government is a hijacked helicopter and a few hand grenades? Helicopter dude says "Hand over the government or I'll toss another grenade at this big imposing building"; are the Powers That Be going to fold up and say, "Oh okay, if you insist, land your helicopter right here and we'll give you the keys to all the important offices. Just put the grenades away and we'll forget this ever happened." 

Who would do that? More likely helicopter guy lands the helicopter and hands over the grenades and then the PTBs hand him a big pile of medical forms and ask him to read the numbers off the back of his insurance card. That'll show him who's boss!

Bumper crop of berries hiding in the weeds

I needed a break this morning from bend-and-stoop gardening so I wandered over to the berry patch to see what was up.

"Weeds" would be the obvious answer; in fact, anyone observing from a distance would wonder why we're cultivating that massive patch of jewelweed, ironweed, and other tall gangly wildflowers.

But as I pulled out a few of those tall stalks, I immediately started noticing something else: berries--lots of 'em. They're not ripe yet, but we're well on the way to a bumper crop of blackberries.

Pulling weeds in the blackberry patch can be very rewarding: you can do it standing up, which gives the bend-and-stoop muscles a break, and many of the tall weeds slide right up out of the ground without a fuss. Jewelweed is especially easy to pull, the only disadvantage being that the flowers smell like rotting vegetation. But as I reached further into the patch and pulled out weed after weed, I felt a tremendous sense of accomplishment: in just a short time I'd revealed the hidden wonders of the berry patch, which promises much deliciousness later on.

Of course there's much more to do--I just cleared one corner of the blackberry patch, leaving behind some especially tough weeds too slick to pull up without gloves, and I'm not going into the raspberry section without long sleeves and long pants. (And maybe eye protection--ask me sometime about the guy we know who had to get six stitches in his EYEBALL after an errant raspberry vine whipped across his face and tore it open.) But I made a visible dent in the problem simply by pulling up one weed and then another and another.

Now I need to do the same with my journal article. The goal is to produce a complete draft by the end of the week--but the only way to get there is to tackle one little bit at a time. I just hope the final result will be as rewarding as the seven ripe raspberries I picked this morning. Not quite a bumper crop, but there's plenty more on the way.

Just how boring is my summer?

I'm sitting on my back deck on a sunny morning, watching the bluejays get all bossy up in the tulip poplar while hummingbirds whizz past my ears, and over toward the neighbors' property I hear the sound of distance weed-whackers. After weeks of persistent wet, it's time to take advantage of the sunshine and bring some order to the green stuff that has been thriving amidst all this rain.

I went out early to trim the tall weeds along the driveway and then pulled a few weeds amongst the eggplants in our garden--but just a few, because weed-whacking on hills wears me out and some parts of the garden are still too wet for walking on. Right now our garden looks like waves of green weeds broken occasionally by tomato plants or corn stalks, but we have a warm, dry week ahead so we ought to be able to beat the weeds into submission soon.

And once the local rivers go down below flood stage, maybe we'll even get the canoe out, finally. Here we are halfway through the summer without having done any canoeing, but we've been hampered by weather, work commitments, conferences, and travel. Now it's time to settle down into a good summer routine of weeding, weed-whacking, writing, and canoeing, which ought to work just fine as long as the sunshine stays with us.

Boring? Yes, but soothingly so.

  

Famous quotes reconsidered (after a long meeting)

"Hell is other people--who didn't bother to read their e-mail before the meeting."--Jean-Paul Sartre

"Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee--and read your e-mail before the meeting."--Muhammad Ali

"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark--probably because nobody read their e-mail before the meeting."--William Shakespeare

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times-- but it would have been a lot better if everyone had read their e-mail before the meeting."--Charles Dickens

"When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin eager to nibble on the eyeballs of anyone who had failed to read the e-mail before the meeting." --Franz Kafka

"Meeting? What meeting?"--Me (in my nightmares)

 

Honestly never intended to create a monster but now that it's here, let's put it to work

A great idea recently came wafting my way, but I greeted it with a combination of gratitude and dismay. On the one hand, it's not every day that I get a chance to grab hold of the kind of insight that could transform a boring writing project into something really spectacular; on the other hand, making the great idea behave will require a ton of work.

I thought this summer's writing projects wouldn't be too demanding, but one of them recently exploded in my face. The plan was simple: add a new section to a conference paper to expand it into a publishable article, based on research and notes I'd already assembled. Piece of cake.

Except it wasn't. As I wrote the new section, one interesting idea kept coming to the forefront and demanding further attention, overshadowing everything that had come before. My neat, tidy little analysis started to look like the Elephant Man, growing new bony appendages that could not be ignored and would not fit into the neatly tailored outline of the original paper.
 
But here's the thing: this demanding and unruly idea is really cool. The more I wrote, the more I appreciated the possibilities: I could reject the new idea and end up with yet another clever analysis of interest to about three specialists in the field, or I could develop the new idea in depth and end up with the kind of article that shines new light on a topic of interest to a much wider range of readers.

But it won't be easy. I've already had to dump my existing introduction and thesis and replace them with something more compelling, but now I have to try to make all those bony protuberances work together to create an elegant profile for the essay as a whole. I shove a section into line over here only to see it bulge out over there, and then I have to stitch in another section with sutures that look like they belong on the neck of Frankenstein's monster.

Yes: I seem to have created a monster. I just hope it doesn't consume my entire summer.

Summer colors

Today's lesson: if you just stop, stand still, and be silent, sometimes the thing you've been chasing will appear right in front of your face.

It works for butterflies and sometimes for birds, but I'm not making any guarantees about anything else. 

Language as unruly child: Kory Stamper's Word by Word

"We think of English as a fortress to be defended," writes Kory Stamper, "but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don't want it to go....We dress it in fancy clothes and tell it to behave, and it comes home with its underwear on its head and wearing someone else's socks."

Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries is Stamper's love song to the English language, written by a Merriam-Webster lexicographer skilled at explaining how the world of dictionaries works. Stamper explores the history of dictionaries and their cultural impact along with the nitpicky work required to construct them, but this wealth of detail does not weigh down the volume because Stamper infuses her stories with freshness and verve.

Her love affair with language takes into account etymology, grammar, spelling, and sound, sometimes separated from meaning--Stamper defies readers "to say the word 'hootamaganzy' aloud and not immediately fall in love with it, regardless of what it means." (I'll let you have the pleasure of looking it up.) But even the process of researching and describing nuances of meaning becomes compelling in Stamper's telling, as when she devotes an entire chapter to the many weeks she once spent updating the definition of the word "take." 


Stamper admits that lexicography has its occupational hazards, among them a tendency to develop a clinical approach to language. "When you spend all day looking carefully at words," she writes, "you develop a very detached and unnatural relationship with them. It's much like being a doctor, I imagine: a beautiful person walks into your office and takes off all their clothes, and you spend all your time staring at the sphygmomanometer."

Despite spending her working days surrounded by "the fusty glut of old papers bunged hastily into metal bookshelves," Stamper maintains a sense of wonder at the quirks of an ever-evolving language. If language is an unruly child that insists on going its own way, studying language can turn lexicographers into curious toddlers intent on examining everything: 

A job where you read all day can be a pleasure, to be sure, but it can also ruin you. Words cease to be casual, tossed off, and able to be left alone. You are that toddler on a walk, the one who wants to pick up every bit of detritus and gunk and dead insect and dog crap on the sidewalk, asking, "What's that, what's that, what's that?' while a parent with better things to do tries to haul your over-inquisitive butt away.

And while the lexicographer's work requires long hours spent in solitude and silence with only words for company, some of the more compelling chapters in the book describe the interactions between lexicographers and the public.  Stamper faced a firestorm of abuse after Merriam-Webster updated its definition of "marriage," but a more mundane task is tackling the constant stream of letters from readers demanding that the dictionary give them credit for inventing certain words, or that it recognize their pet peeves or cherished folk etymologies, or that it remove certain words because they are ungrammatical or hurtful or "made-up":

Of course 'irregardless' is a made-up word that was entered into the dictionary through constant use; that's pretty much how this racket works. All words are made-up. Do you think we find them fully formed on the ocean floor, or mine for them in some remote part of Wales?

Further, she feels the need to point out that "removing a word from the dictionary doesn't do away with the thing that word refers to specifically, or even tangentially." In response to demands that the dictionary police grammar rules rather than describing the way language is actually used, she asserts, "Humanity sets up rules to govern English, but English rolls onward, a juggernaut crushing all in its path."

In Word by Word, English is a juggernaut, an unruly child, a patient, a "murky swamp," and the ocean in which we're plunged, says Stamper, and 

Lexicographers spend a lifetime swimming through the English language in a way that no one else does; the very nature of lexicography demands it. English is a beautiful, bewildering language, and the deeper you dive in, the more effort it takes to come up to the surface for air.

I wanted to remain plunged beneath the surface of Stamper's work, but alas, all good books must come to an end. Fortunately, though, the work of creating dictionaries is never complete, because "A dictionary is out of date the minute that it's done." This is good news for lexicographers like Kory Stamper, who calls herself a "drudge" but makes her drudgery feel vibrant and vital. "English bounds onward," she concludes, "and we drudges will continue our chase after it, a little ragged for the rough terrain, perhaps, but ever tracking, eyes wide with quiet and reverence."

Sherman Alexie's memoir: love, loss, and breathing room

In the first chapter of  You Don't Have to Say You Love Me, Sherman Alexie presents a bit of dialogue with a former writing teacher who finally tells Alexie, "Since you've just invented this entire conversation about storytelling and truth that you and I never had and put it in the first chapter of your memoir, then I'm just going to call you the unreliable narrator of your own life."

This metanarrative play is just one of many indications that this is not the ordinary memoir. Sparked by Alexie's mother's sudden death in 2015, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me is an angry, joyful, bitter, free-wheeling roller-coaster ride through Alexie's attempt to understand his complex relationship with his mother and his heritage. Prose chapters alternate with poetry in a dizzying variety of forms including free verse, couplets, prose poems, haiku, ceremonial chants, sestinas, and a highly unconventional "Sonnet, with Fabric Softener." Any poet could congratulate himself for having written one really good villanelle, but I lost track of how many villanelles Alexie included in this volume.

Alexie admits that his verbal dexterity is a coping mechanism helping him transform personal pain and anger into art--but my goodness, what wonders his pain creates. "I am always in pain," he writes, "But I always find my way to the story. And I always find my way home."

"Home" was a never-finished house on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington, where Alexie lived until he left for college and a writing career. He vividly portrays the poverty and uncertainty of his early life; in a poem called "Eulogize Rhymes with Disguise," he describes a time when fear of his mother's irrational and uncontrollable anger led the young Alexie to sleep on the porch with the dogs: 

I never stopped

Being afraid of her. I never left
That dark porch. I am still
Sleeping with those dogs.
Yes, I am always cold and curled

Like a question mark
Among those animal bodies.

The question marks multiply as Alexie tries to separate reality from fabulation, admitting that he has inherited his mother's facility with lying. He clearly admired his mother, describing her once as "so beautiful and verbose and brilliant she could have played a fictional version of herself in a screwball Hollywood comedy if Hollywood had ever bothered to cast real Indians as fictional Indians." However, her best qualities seem intricately intertwined with her worst. Nowhere is this more evident than in "The Quilting," a long haiku cycle portraying Lillian Alexie's tenacity in supporting her family by her skill as a quilter, a skill that created warmth and beauty intermingled with neglect and pain. The poem ends thus:

Square by square by square,
She punched anger through our skin
And turned us into quilts.

Wrapped around our mom,
We quilts absorbed her anger
And her fear and pain.

Wrapped around our mom,
We quilts absorbed her courage
And her love and grace.

Square by square by square,
We quilts honor our mother
And her strange genius.

She taught us survival
With needle, thread, and thimble
All stained with her blood.

Like a quilt, Alexie's memoir juxtaposes apparently unrelated fragments to create a composite picture that nevertheless remains blurry. Part of this blurriness results from a lack of reliable information: given conflicting stories about his mother's birth, which should he believe? Given an absence of historical records about his ancestors on the reservation, what can he know about their lives? "I suppose I could really dig into the research and get stuff as accurate as possible," he writes, "but I like the blank spaces. I like how they feel. I want readers to feel how I feel. I want them to feel the loss. I want them to know how guilty I feel for not knowing this stuff."

Alexie plays with this sense of absence by presenting alternate versions of the same event and inventing new clan names to describe his heritage, including "the Clan of Doing Our Best to Re-Create and Replicate the Sacred Things That Were Brutally Stolen from Us," in a chapter that concludes with a statement of identity founded on absence: "My name is Sherman Alexie and I was born from loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss and loss. And loss."

Among the losses Alexie explores is the loss of certainty after his surgery for a benign brain tumor in 2016, which led him to drastically limit his pace of travel; the chapter describing his drugged-up conversation with his nurse is among the most amusing in the book. The comedy, however, is sharpened by the fear of further loss (of life or brain function), which helps explain why this book sometimes feels like a frantic pouring forth of words before it's too late. 

Out of all those losses he creates a memoir that is equal parts beautiful and disturbing. "I return to her, my mother," he writes, "who, in these pages, dies and dies and dies and is continually reborn." He resurrects her as a wolf, a ghost, or even a tree, as in the poem "Pine," in which he prays that his Mother Tree will 

Turn every toxin
Into oxygen.


So that my siblings
And I can finally
And simply breathe.

I hear Alexie breathing in You Don't Have to Say You Love Me,  but I also hear him screaming with anger and laughing with joy. What better epitaph could a mother ever ask for?
 

Signs of absence or absence of signs?

I set out in a light rain to hike through Black Hand Gorge, a nature preserve named for a Native American petroglyph, a giant black hand that once adorned a cliff face along this scenic stretch of the Licking River. In 1828 the petroglyph was blasted to smithereens to make room for a towpath. Naming a place for what we've destroyed in order to possess it: typical.

As I stood reading the sign explaining the destruction of the petroglyph, I wanted to go back in time and remind those gung-ho developers that progress does not require erasing everything created by those who preceded us. But they're all gone now: the quarries once humming with activity are now silent and filled with stagnant water; the rail line has been transformed into a hiking trail and portions of the towpath are still visible, but the only sign of the black hand that once guided Native Americans is a sign pointing to the absence of a sign. Baudrillard would have fun with that.

I've been wanting to get our canoe on the Licking River and so I decided to scope out the possibilities. I found two promising places to launch the canoe, and then I hit the trail to check water conditions. I've been in that gorge when the water barreled through at flood stage but as the summer wears on it tends to get low. Downstream toward Dillon Lake the Licking spreads out across shallow mud flats, but the gorge squeezes the river into a channel that appears deep enough to float a canoe.

Of course I didn't put my canoe in today because I was lacking three elements essential to a good canoe trip: (1) canoe; (2) husband; (3) good weather. Yes: the light rain that did not deter my setting out on the trail eventually turned into a serious downpour, so that I finally arrived back at my car feeling as if I'd been in for a swim. But now I know a few more things about canoeing the Licking River, so when the signs are right, we'll go.

My hike kept reminding me of Martin Espada's poem "The Monsters at the Edge of the World," where a brain scan becomes "a map drawn by conquerors / flying the banner of exploration / and misnaming all the islands," but the map points only to damage: "stroke, hemorrhage / as if saying that monsters dwell here / at the edge of the world." More significant is what the map leaves out:

                               nowhere

do we see the lake where one night

we drifted in a wooden boat

with a bottle of wine

and dangled sparklers

over the starry water.

The scan that reveals the damage in the brain simultaneously conceals what machines cannot see: the memories and images, convictions and connections that make us who we are

What did that missing petroglyph mean to the people who created it? Even if the sign had been preserved, we're not equipped to read it. And so the conqueror moves in, flying the flag of exploration, and shoves aside what he cannot understand, considering the unknown uncivilized--even monstrous--and consigning the monsters to the edge of the world.  

Close encounters of the cacti kind

This evening I had to call my husband long-distance and confess to having destroyed one of his beloved cacti--but only in self-defense. Honest, it tried to murder me first!

How did I get into this mess? I think it started back in 1982, when I married a man whose love for succulents led him to station massive cacti in pots all over our house, so that I can't wash the big front picture window without getting spines in my arms--and don't even ask my son about the time he fell onto a cactus at about the age of four. (Meaning he was four. I don't know how old the cactus was.) Have you ever tried to remove hundreds of tiny cactus spines from the buttocks of a squirmy four-year-old? I don't recommend it.

But that's ancient history. Today's mishap begins with a peculiar fact: there are some cleaning projects I prefer to do when my husband is out of town. I don't want to suggest that he gets in the way, but, for instance, it's much easier to shampoo carpets when they're not covered with size-12 shoes and stacks of books and husbands who have just come in from the garden and urgently need to fetch things from rooms where the carpets are still wet.  

So I shampooed the bedroom carpets last week while my husband was at one conference and I have a whole different set of annoying household tasks lined up this week while he's at another. Today I tackled the worst one: cleaning the bookshelves in the basement.

It sounds simple enough, but only if you don't know our basement. It's a walk-out basement with deep windows on one side, and those window sills are covered with house plants that support a spider-intensive ecosystem. Further, the four (!) bookshelves down there have not been moved since we moved in to this house 13 years ago, so I wanted to empty them all out, pull 'em away from the walls, and clean up whatever messes I found.

I did it right: washed the walls, cleaned the shelves, dusted the books before putting them back (in alphabetical order by author!), cleaned up what looked like a massive mouse nest, vacuumed up untold numbers of spiders and egg sacs and dead ladybugs and plant detritus.

And I was nearly done--the end was in sight!--when I went to pull a small two-drawer filing cabinet away from the wall and one of the casters fell off, causing the whole thing to tip sideways and take me with it.

Now a really smart person would have taken the cacti off the top of the filing cabinet before trying to move it, but I was, as I've mentioned, nearly done with a nasty, dirty, dusty, sweaty job and so exhausted that I wasn't thinking straight. Which is just the time when I need someone else to do the thinking for me, but no one else was here, so over we all went, filing cabinet, cacti, spiders, dirt, and me.
 
It took a while, but I fixed the filing cabinet and rescued the giant aloe, which is, I think, unkillable. The other cactus, however, bit the dust, and then I had to scoop up and sweep up and vacuum up the dirt and then scrub that bit of carpet so I can eventually move the filing cabinet back where it belongs.

I'm still picking cactus spines out of my hands but aside from that, I'm fine. And the basement is fine, or it will be when I get a few things back in place. And the giant aloe is fine. So what if I killed a cactus? It's not as if we're suffering any lack of succulents.

But I'm really glad I got that awful nasty cleaning task out of the way early in the week. Do you know what I intend to clean tomorrow? 

Absolutely nothing.
 

Summer reading: just the tip of the iceberg

Opportunity of a lifetime, folks: Who wants to read a tepid review of a book I've already decided against assigning in class next year? 

What, no one wants to read that review? Good thing, because I don't want to write it.

Summer is when I catch up on all the books I haven't had time for during the semester, but so far, most of the stuff I've been plowing through has been, um, adequate at best. Occasionally interesting, moderately significant, possibly suitable for use in a footnote, but I could sum up the bulk of my reading so far this summer in a single word: Meh.

Which makes the highlights shine all the brighter. Here are two books that have made me want to grab people by the sleeve and say, "You've got to read this!"

Outline by Rachel Cusk, a novel featuring an almost nonexistent plot: a woman goes to Athens to lead a writing workshop and talks to a bunch of people--or, more accurately, listens as they tell their stories. The writing is hypnotic, the voices seeming to arrive from a great distance but striking close to the heart; Cusk's unadorned prose takes a leaf from W.G. Sebald and hums with the subterranean pain Sebald specialized in. 

At one point the narrator confides that she had not noticed a friend's floundering "any more than the mountain notices the climber that loses his footing and falls down one of its ravines." In fact, she continues, "Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one's own destiny by what one doesn't notice or feel compassion for; that what you don't know and don't make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of."

But later another character claims that compassion is not enough, for even the most attentive and loving people can urge others into impossible situations: "Perhaps, he said, we are all like animals in the zoo, and once we see that one of us has got out of the enclosure we shout at him to run like mad, even though it will only result in him becoming lost."

Outline brings together a menagerie of such lost people, providing only the vaguest outline of the great loss that lies at the center. For the rest of the story, I'll have to read the sequel, Transit.

And speaking of lost people: I have to confess that I gobbled down the entire 514 pages of David Sedaris's Theft by Finding over a 48-hour span. I don't know whether these excerpts from Sedaris's diaries (from 1977-2002) are more like a bag of Lay's potato chips (no one can eat just one!) or like a multi-car pileup that won't let you look away. The entries are occasionally tedious and at times I wanted to take Sedaris by the shoulders and urge him to for heaven's sake just grow up, but what an amazing book. 

I'm not saying it's gorgeously written or an instant classic or socially redeeming or anything like that, but this book will be enjoyed by the kind of person who enjoys this kind of book. And I am not ashamed to be that kind of person. (Well, maybe a little.) 

Sedaris's keen observing eye focuses on mundane details of daily life--the fluctuating price of chicken parts, the very specific and sometimes bizarre demands of urban beggars, the endearing or embarrassing foibles of his friends and family members--but the cumulative effect reveals the immense effort required to create a coherent life from the disparate and ill-matched parts we're born with. Becoming a self-sustaining adult requires a massive amount of hard work, some of it for minimum wage and some in the company of reprehensible people, but the work itself is suffused with dignity, even if you sometimes have to shove a bucket of chicken parts out of the way to see it.

In the introduction, Sedaris comments on the interaction between living and writing: "In order to record your life, you sort of need to live it. Not at your desk, but beyond it. Out in the world where it's so beautiful and complex and painful that sometimes you just need to sit down and write about it." And if someone with as keen an eye as David Sedaris sits down and writes about his world, I for one am going to read it.

In Outline Rachel Cusk maintains exquisite control--there is not an ill-chosen word, not a clumsy line, and every ounce of pain lies submerged like the hidden bulk of an iceberg. David Sedaris, on the other hand, hefts the iceberg out of the water and slaps you across the face with it--or he intends to slap you but instead slips and falls and comes up gasping, and then he turns the whole thing into a funny story. 

I can't imagine two more different writers, but what can I say? I like my icebergs both ways.

A little external motivation

What I saw crossing the road this morning: a deer, three wild turkeys, four box turtles, and a skunk that moved fluidly like a black-and-white wave. Beautiful! But you won't see me giving it a big ol' hug.

The kestrel I spotted did not cross the road but sat on the shoulder looking stunned, the way birds do after they slam into our big picture window. Injured? Maybe: it let me walk right up close before finally flying off. 

In a brief hour of birding between storms, I saw grasshopper sparrows, meadowlarks, brown thrashers, killdeer, turkey vultures, phoebes, and some others I can't recall, and I heard Henslow's sparrows and common yellowthroats. I had just about given up on bobolinks when one popped up on a fencepost right beside the road, almost close enough to touch, but it flew off before I got the camera in hand.

This morning's birding outing was a reward I'd promised myself after painting the small spare room last week, and after birding I came home with a rented carpet cleaner and cleaned all the bedroom carpets, which wore me out. Now I need to move the furniture back where it belongs. Where's my reward for that annoying chore? 

kestrel

grasshopper sparrow

 

Gail Godwin on the aging writer's brain

In an interview on Weekend Edition yesterday (click here), Gail Godwin, nearing 80 and still writing, offered a compelling metaphor for the aging writer's brain:

As you get older not only do you get more picky with your words, but you lose them. You used to have lots of servants. And you just pulled the bell like in "Downton Abbey," and they'd all rush up with trays full of things. And now you pull the bell, and you wait for this very arthritic old butler who's your only servant left. And he comes up with his wooden tray, and there's one word on it. But it's a good word.

I hope my butler's still working that well when I'm 80!


 

Barbed wire is for the birds

Eastern bluebird and friend

How far would I be willing to go to get close to a cerulean warbler in the wild?

I would trespass on my neighbor's property without a qualm, and the neighbor's cows would not deter me. What holds me back is the barbed-wire fence.

Barbed wire conveys a pretty clear message: Stay away! A person as klutzy as I am has no business even contemplating crossing a barbed-wire fence, but nevertheless  I stood and stared at that fence for quite some time this morning, trying to imagine a way to get past it so I could cross the cow pasture to the copse of trees where the cerulean warbler was singing clear and strong.

I could not see it from where I stood--too far away, well hidden among the leaves. But I could hear it. The song stopped me in my tracks and kept me still long enough to confuse Hopeful, who kept coming back as if to ask why I wasn't walking.

What would happen, I wondered, if I managed to cross the barbed wire without impaling myself? I would glide slowly across the pasture, stepping carefully and trying not to startle the cows, and when I arrived at the other side, I would slowly lift the camera to my eyes--just in time to see the cerulean warbler fly off out of sight. And then, given my luck, I would end up stuck on the barbed wire with blood dripping down my legs and shoes full of manure.

So I finally turned away from the fence and the sound of the cerulean warbler and walked back home. The trip was not a total loss, however: I brought home a big glob of bird droppings on my shirt.

Indigo bunting

Bluejay