May 2019 books read

  • Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History – Dan Flores, 2016.
  • Lincoln in the Bardo – George Saunders, 2017. Quotes pulled, post tbd.
  • The Book of Delights – Ross Gay, 2019.
  • Whoredom in Kimmage: Irish Women Coming of Age  – Rosemary Mahoney, 1993 (later subtitle changed to The Private Lives of Irish Women).
  • Annihilation – Jeff VanderMeer, 2014. I saw the movie when it came out and then read the book (March 2018) but I had completely forgotten the experience of reading it. The Forbes Far-Out Film group watched the movie and so I picked up the book (again); it took me a while to remember I’d already read it, but the biologist’s nickname of “ghost bird” (love that!) and the Crawler generating text in the “tower” woke up the memory. I still prefer the movie but enjoyed the book enough this time that I’ll plan on reading at least the second in the Southern Reach trilogy.
  • Silence – Shūsaku Endō, 1966; translated by William Johnston. Quotes pulled, post tbd.
  • Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams – Matthew Walker, 2017. Oh man oh man. I read William Dement’s The Promise of Sleep shortly after it came out in 1999, and it got me to change my behavior to truly prioritize sleep; the content of this book makes that one look like a mild argument in favor. Unfortunately some of the writing is a little cutesy, but my annoyance at that was totally drowned out by the galvanizing message that enough sleep daily is critical to every part of our physical and mental health. One of the few books I’ve been recommending to everyone!

The Book of Delights – Ross Gay, 2019

It may have been through Gretchen Rubin that I first heard of this book, but it’s been popping up everywhere. I loved these “essayettes”! So many delightful little and large observations on pleasures to be found in the everyday. His existence as a black man in America informs the book in fascinating ways but it’s also universal, an embrace of the world as it is in all its flawed beauty without sugar-coating. Very funny too; one of my favorite stories is of a TSA worker who is so impressed that Ross is being flown somewhere to “read palms.” I love that he wanted to do one essay per day but gave up on that goal and ended up with about 100 for the year—easygoing in the best way, not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, and still succeeding in savoring and sharing so many experiences.

He’s great with images like “A fly, its wings hauling all the light in the room” and with pile-on sentences that romp around an idea:

It is a sweet correction this computer keeps making, turning pawpaw into papaw, which means, for those of you not from this neck of the woods, papa or grandpa, which a pawpaw grove can feel like, especially standing inside of it midday, when the light limns the big leaves like stained glass and suddenly you’re inside something ancient and protective.

But what I have learned is the worry one might have about one’s child, perhaps most especially one’s black or brown child, speaking “improper” English, wearing “improper” colors, having “improper” etiquette, or displaying “improper” tastes, which, in the case of my dad and I, really meant behaving in the style or manner of black people, the idea of black people, which really meant one’s black or brown child being perceived as the idea of black people, the prospect of which, for my father, thought I never heard him say it plainly, must have been a terror.

He extrapolates wonderful metaphors from the natural world:

…It has occurred to me that among other things—the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this—joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our lives and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will look like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flowers and food. Might be joy.

And if I think I’m in a hurry, or think I ought to be, and quickly walk by to peek at the beds, the teeny bindweed sprouts will sing out to me, “Stay in the garden! Stay in the garden!” And I often oblige, despite my obligations, getting back on my hands and knees, my thumb and forefinger caressing the emergent things free, all of us rooting around for the light.

I particularly enjoyed the chapter on loitering, and its lovely synonyms “linger, loaf, laze, lounge, lollygag, dawdle, amble, saunter, meander, putter, dillydally, and mosey“:

…another of the synonyms for loitering, which I wrote as delight: taking one’s time. For while the previous list of synonyms allude to time, taking one’s time makes it kind of plain, for the crime of loitering, the idea of it, is about ownership of one’s own time, which must be, sometimes, wrested from the assumed owners of it, who are not you, back to the rightful, who is.

Gay will read at the Juniper Institute next month, and I hope to go!

Whoredom in Kimmage: Irish Women Coming of Age – Rosemary Mahoney, 1993

Irish Writers selection. I was hooked on the first page, Mahoney’s story of working for Lillian Hellman one summer: “I was as ornery at seventeen as Lillian Hellman was at seventy-three.” A very well-written book but ultimately somewhat infuriating to read (the topic, not the book itself).

In this book I learned about

[Francis MacNamara’s] speech was slow and drawling, and there was a great sense of confidentiality in everything he said, for he spoke with his head inclined toward his listener, and often, when shifting the direction of his ideas, he said softly and urgently, “But come here to me,” which was the Irish was of saying, ‘Listen carefully and keep this between us.” Francis sighed heavily when he spoke, as though he had been too long deprived of fresh air.

The conversational competition [in the pub] was fierce and reached far beyond that evening. It was a matter of intellectual hierarchy, who fit where, who was sharpest and most knowledgeable, and who, therefore, deserved the greatest share of attention.

It delighted me that a lone woman could stand at the side of the road and put out her thumb without trepidation. To me, hitching was a bygone freedom, and that I was able to do it here contributed to my feeling that Ireland lay just beyond the corrupting reach of the modern world.

There seemed to be no conventional concept of time here, no concept of having made a promise or a commitment, and they showed not the slightest embarrassment or remorse over their tardiness. Too, the Irish were always delighted to put things off to a later date, even the most pleasurable things—vacations, parties, picnics. Procrastination, indecision, and stalling were symptoms of a chronic national disease that seemed related to a deeper fear of allowing themselves any expectations at all, and I thought it was as a result of this fear that the Irish appeared so deceptively supple and easygoing.

“Sigh sios agus do scith a ligean! Nil aon tintean mar do thintean fhein! La bhrea buiochas le Dia!” Sit down and rest yourself! There’s no fireplace like your own fireplace! It’s a fine day, thank God! These were the platitudinous sayings that people flung out with bold authority when their Irish was rusty or incomplete. The habit was known as the cupla focail, the few words.

Rosemary volunteers with teenagers and is asked her age. She’s already said “thirty” three times before this exchange:

“Rose! I’m askin’ ya how old are ya?”
“I’m thirty, Una,” I said.
Una brought her face around to look at mine again. She was utterly puzzled. Abandoning all pretense at a whisper, she screeched, “What are ya sayin’ to me, Rose?”
Karen, two seats away, saw the problem. “She said she’s torty, Una. Are ya feckin’ deaf?”
“Torty!” Una exclaimed. “Shite! Older dan me mudder.”

“Are you from Dorchester, Massachusets?”
“Very close,” I said and kept walking.
“I have friends and relatives in Dorchester,” he said, following behind me.
“I know,” I said.
“How do you know?”
“Every Irish person has friends and relatives in Dorchester.”
At this the man laughed loudly and gave me a friendly slug on the arm. The ease with which Irish people laid their hands on strangers always impressed me.

Subsequent encounter with another guy:

He spoke as though he had known me for years—the way many Irish people speak to strangers with an ease born of a presupposed universal understanding, as though we were all passing through life together, as though my plight couldn’t possibly be any better or worse than his and therefore I couldn’t possibly reject him.

Though fundamentally at odds, religion and superstition served the same ordering, protecting purpose, and in Ireland the two seemed particularly intertwined.

I saw then that … as a foreigner I was beyond his rural purview. That was what [Mick Pat] and the other villagers appreciated about me: I didn’t have to obey their rules, didn’t have to be watched or reined in. I could live alone in a creepy castle without annoying local sensibilities and without being termed mad or brash. Mick Pat had never asked me whether I had a husband or children. I had come from across the ocean and so was exempt from the question.

As I made my way back into the castle I had a powerful feeling of déjà vu. The evening’s familiar display [of shouting conflict] had recalled an entire habit of existence, a vehement, mistrustful, precipitate way of relating that I had witnessed in Ireland but that I had also grown up with and was part of whether I liked it or not.

Greeted with “Lovely morning” on a cool, drizzly day:

I checked his face to see if he was kidding, though I should have known he wasn’t. The Irish always thought this sort of day was beautiful. As long as there was no wind, the rain wasn’t too hard, and the temperature wasn’t too low, the day was beautiful.

Coyote America – Dan Flores, 2016

In this book I learned about

  • “Species cleansing” (eradication, e.g. of rats)
  • Mouse invasion in 1927 Kern County (California), after coyotes and hawks had been eliminated, which “left highways grossly slick, and ultimately undriveable, after traffic flattened unbelievable swarms of mice”
  • Scapegoating coyotes after the wolves were gone
  • The Coyote’s Lament (Disney, 1961)

Legendary federal coyote nemesis Stanley Young characterized the animal as the Biological Survey’s most frustrating opponent, an enemy members of the agency actually lumped in with fascism as a threat to the American Way.

Most predators are either solitary or social, not both. But like us, the coyote gets to have it both ways.

Coyote power: surviving by one’s intelligence and wits when others cannot; embracing existence in a mad, dancing, laughing, sympathetic expression of pure joy at evading the grimmest of fates; exulting in sheer aliveness; recognizing our shortcomings with rueful chagrin. These are the values Old Man America has embodied for thousands of years.

In my view the coyote’s howl is the original national anthem of North America … [but] The coyote’s cry, for many Americans riveted by the sound, did not intone the ballad of the continent—America’s ancient native song—that some of us hear today. …

A sense that so much about North America was strange and frightening and that we ought to terraform and remake it extended to every element of continental ecology, from grasses to animals of all kinds. But in truth, almost no other creature reaped the whirlwind of condescension and hostility toward “alien” American nature in quite the way coyotes did. We campaigned to erase those “manic, lunatic” howls for all time and good riddance. And even as evidence mounted of the wrongheadedness and futility of that course, we spent more than half a century in furious pursuit of it.

Chemists and researchers in the Eradication Methods Laboratory [making strychnine and other poisons in huge volume], with government jobs and benefits, presumably realized the American Dream in the 1920s, buying houses, automobiles, radios, and washing machines, all the latest technologies of the decade. Their products, meanwhile, destroyed America’s wild animals, the foundations of an ecology that 20,000 years of evolution had perfected, as if their victims were of no consequence whatsoever.

[Ernest Thompson] Seton has taken his licks across the years as a fellow traveler of the “Nature Faker” writers of the early twentieth century … One critic of Seton’s book Animals I Have Known even wrote, sarcastically, that its proper title ought to have been Animals I Alone Have Known.

The average coyote litter size is 5.7 pups, but that number can range from as low as 2 to as high as 19. The reason for such variability is that coyotes possess an autogenic trait that allows them to assess the ecological possibilities around them. If not persecuted, they saturate a landscape to carrying capacity, then usually have small litters that produce only a couple of surviving pups. But if they sense a suppressed coyote population relative to available resources, they give birth to very large littlers. The coyote’s yipping howl … has several functions, one very important one of which is to assess the size of the surrounding coyote population.

[Olaus] Murie knew that once, in his Yellowstone research, his brother had stood rapt, watching a coyote trot along a trail with a sprig of sagebrush in its mouth. At repeated intervals it had tossed the sprig joyously into the air, caught it, then trotted on. Why had so many in the [Bureau of Biological Survey], without any science to back them up, so hated an animal that took that kind of pleasure in being alive in the world? Why had they encouraged hatred for coyotes among the public? It was not an attitude or a culture Olaus cared to be associated with. He ended up leaving the bureau for the Wilderness Society.

“Biocentrism” in one sense was actually evolutionary. It implied yet another extension of the circle of ethical treatment that had begun long ago in human affairs, when we first moved beyond kinship and our own genetics and granted rights to others outside our families.

.Acme’s overconfidence rivaled that of the Coyote. In these classic cartoons the promise of the technological fix took the form of Acme Jet-Propelled Roller Skates, an Acme Batman Outfit, Acme Leg Muscle Vitamins, and the Acme Burmese Tiger Trap, so many mad-genius devices of pursuit that today an online poster … totals up more than one hundred of them. In iconic, American style, Wile E. trusted every one of those contraptions naively, optimistically, wonderfully. A corporation offers it for sale? Then of course it’s going to work!