Poetry Sunday: October by Robert Frost

We've been having very mild and pleasant weather over the past week. It's almost as if fall is actually here.

October is, in fact, right near the top of my favorite months list. It is generally a time of mild days and relatively cool nights. The temperature actually got down to 59 degrees Fahrenheit one night last week. 

Robert Frost celebrated such days in this poem which he titled, simply, "October"; the days seem all too brief and we long for them to linger, and in the early morning the sun is shrouded by a "gentle mist." It will be many weeks yet until our leaves are "burnt with frost." We will enjoy October while we can. Maybe even into November.

October

by Robert Frost

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away.
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—
For the grapes’ sake along the wall.

This week in birds - #324

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment:

A tiny Brown-headed Nuthatch, a permanent resident in our area, visits a feeder in my backyard.

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The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its report this week. It was not expected to be good news, but, in fact, it was even worse than expected. With global emissions showing few signs of slowing and the United States — the world’s second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide — rolling back a suite of Obama-era climate measures, the prospects for meeting the most ambitious goals of the 2015 Paris agreement look increasingly slim. The good news is that it is still possible to reverse the trend but the world has just over ten years to take the actions that are needed to do it.

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Global warming is already having catastrophic effects on some species of birds and will affect even more, increasing rates of extinction, if present trends continue.

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And, of course, warmer waters in the ocean are increasing the power of hurricanes, as the people of Florida experienced this week. It seems that we are past the time when we can continue to deny that individual weather events, like hurricanes, are affected by climate change. 

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The California Condor continues slowly inching its way back from the brink of extinction, and the captive breeding program continues to aid in that recovery. Puppets play a very large role in that program.

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Brazil is in turmoil for many reasons these days and that is creating problems for the environment there. Recently, in the state of Rondonia, the government essentially removed protections for 11 preserved areas in the Amazon region, areas covering 2316 square miles.

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Cemeteries can be good places for birding. The areas are protected from development and, especially if there are trees and hedges, they are very attractive to birds.

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The population of cougars in the West is continuing to grow and, as it does, young cougars are dispersing farther east into the Midwest and even beyond.

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The privately run National Aviary of Colombia serves as a refuge in which birds representing 165 different species have a second chance at life after escaping the hands of illegal wildlife traffickers. So far in 2018, Colombian authorities have rescued nearly 4,000 birds — victims of a trafficking industry that has become the third-largest illicit economy in the country.

*~*~*~*

Over the past 60 years, the Mariana Crow, or Aga, has completely disappeared from the island of Guam and has rapidly declined on neighboring Rota. Now, a captive-breeding program is producing chicks to return to the islands to try to reintegrate the species into the ecosystem. 

*~*~*~*

In Canada, a vast region of the Northwest Territories that local Indigenous people call their “breadbasket” because of the abundance of wildlife has been declared permanently off limits to resource development, eight years after the federal government tried to open it to mining. 

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Gentoo Penguin image by BAS.

A study of Gentoo Penguin colonies on an island in the Antarctic shows a decline of 25% in the number of breeding pairs over the last twenty-one years. The reasons for the decline are not entirely clear and are probably due to a combination of factors.

*~*~*~*

The chain of life has many links and everything in Nature is connected, a fact which we ignore at our peril. It turns out that the forest elephants of Africa are an important link in that chain and their extinction would adversely affect many species, including humans.

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How does one write about a vanishing world? How can one adequately chronicle ecological destruction? Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction, has some thoughts.

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Most of the seasonal invasion of boreal species of birds from Canada has not happened yet, but Red-breasted Nuthatches are already irrupting into the Northeast in droves this fall.

Transcription by Kate Atkinson: A review

No one or nothing in Kate Atkinson's new novel is exactly what it seems. There are double agents, double crosses and secrets galore. It is, as Winston Churchill once said in another context, a riddle inside a mystery inside an enigma. It is literary fiction, historical fiction masquerading as a mystery/spy thriller.

Moreover, Atkinson uses much the same technique as she employed so successfully in Life After Life to take us back and forth through the life history of her main character, Juliet Armstrong.

We meet Miss Armstrong on the day of her death. It is 1981 and she is 60 years old. She is crossing a street in London when she is struck by a car. She knows she is dying as she lies on the pavement surrounded by concerned passersby who try to help.

Flashback to 1940 when she was still only 18 and an orphan. She is recruited by the British intelligence agency, MI5, to work as a transcriptionist. She is to listen to the conversations between an MI5 agent, Godfrey Toby, and a group of British Nazi sympathizers, the so-called fifth column, and then transcribe those recorded conversations on paper. Her workplace is an apartment next door to the apartment where the agent meets with the Nazi sympathizers and attempts to get them to reveal their activities. Finally, she is recruited to do some spy work on her own, to infiltrate another group of fifth columnists. She continues working for MI5 throughout the war. 

We next meet her in 1950 when she is 28 and working for the BBC. London is still under the pall of the recent war. One day, on her lunch break, she sees Godfrey Toby on the street, but when she rushes to greet him, he denies that he is Toby and insists that she has mistaken him for someone else. She is shaken by the experience and is more shaken still when she receives an unsigned note saying that she will pay for what she did. What could the note be referring to?

Back we go again to wartime and Juliet's relationship with her boss Peregrine (Perry) Gibbons. She entertains erotic fantasies about Gibbons and when he invites her on a weekend excursion to the country, her hopes are high. Those hopes are dashed when it transpires that her boss is an amateur naturalist and he has invited Juliet along to observe the birds and beasts in their natural habitats! A certain amount of hilarity ensues.

In fact, one of the charms of this book is its humor, much of it expressed in Juliet's irreverent and sarcastic asides. At times the humor borders on the madcap as Juliet proves to be quite a capricious and careless spy.

There is tragedy as well - it is wartime, after all - and Juliet participates in her share of it. It is this which makes her fear retribution when she receives that note in 1950.

But who is this Juliet Armstrong really? Is she who and what she seems, or is she, too, hiding something? Atkinson keeps the cards on Juliet very close to her vest and only reveals them toward the end. When they are laid on the table for all to see, of course, it all makes sense. And we remember what Juliet's boss in MI5 once told her: "The mark of a good agent is when you have no idea which side they're on."

Atkinson has spun a rousing good tale. Call it a spy thriller, a mystery, or literary fiction, or better yet, don't try to categorize it at all; just go where the narrative takes you.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars   

Wordless Wednesday: Tawny Emperor on lantana

"It's a scary time for young men in America."

"...it will go the way it always goes in the press when it all comes out: it will have been my fault, all of it because men's crimes are always ours in the final analysis, aren't they, Mr. Strike? Ultimate responsibility always lies with the woman, who should have stopped it, who should have acted, who must have known. 

                                      - A female client speaking to detective Cormoran Strike in Lethal White by Robert Galbraith

I had actually intended to use that quote from Lethal White in my review of the book last week, but then I forgot. However, it sure seems to fit here.

Our current president is very, very concerned about young men at this time in America; it is a very scary time for them, he says.

His words have inspired all kinds of responses on social media as well as in the real world. Here is just one of those responses.

A young woman called Lynzy Lab Stewart wrote a song about the "scary time" which has made its way around the internet. If you have problems (as I did at times) understanding all the words to her song, the written lyrics follow.

I CAN’T WALK TO MY CAR LATE AT NIGHT WHILE ON THE PHONE

I CAN’T OPEN UP MY WINDOWS WHEN I’M HOME ALONE

I CAN’T GO TO A BAR WITHOUT A CHAPERONE

AND I CAN’T WEAR A MINI SKIRT IF ITS THE ONLY ONE I OWN

I CAN’T USE PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION AFTER 7 PM

I CAN’T BE BRUTALLY HONEST WHEN YOU SLIDE INTO MY DMS

I CAN’T GO TO THE CLUB JUST TO DANCE WITH MY FRIENDS

AND I CAN’T EVER LEAVE MY DRINK UNATTENDED

BUT IT SURE IS A SCARY TIME FOR BOYS

YEAH GENTLEMEN! BAND TOGETHER, MAKE SOME NOISE

ITS REALLY TOUGH WHEN YOUR REPUTATION’S ON THE LINE

AND ANY WOMAN YOU’VE ASSAULTED COULD TURN UP ANYTIME

YEAH, IT SURE IS A SCARY TIME FOR GUYS

CAN’T SPEAK TO ANY WOMEN OR LOOK THEM IN THE EYES

ITS SO CONFUSING, IS IT RAPE OR IS IT JUST BEING NICE?

SO INCONVENIENT THAT YOU EVEN HAVE TO THINK TWICE

I CAN’T LIVE IN AN APARTMENT IF IT'S ON THE FIRST FLOOR
  
I CAN’T BE WEARING SILK PAJAMAS WHEN I ANSWER THE DOOR

I CAN’T HAVE ANOTHER DRINK EVEN IF I WANT MORE

I CAN’T MAKE YOU FEEL INVALID, UNSEEN, OR IGNORED

I CAN’T JOG AROUND THE CITY WITH HEADPHONES ON MY EARS

I CAN’T SPEAK OUT AGAINST MY RAPIST AFTER 35 YEARS

I CAN’T BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY IF I'M HOLDING BACK TEARS

AND I CAN’T EVER SPEAK EARNESTLY ABOUT ALL MY FEARS

BUT IT SURE IS A SCARY TIME FOR DUDES

CAN’T TEXT A GIRL REPEATEDLY ASKING FOR NUDES

CAN’T MAKE HER HAVE SEX WHEN SHE’S NOT IN THE MOOD

AND WHAT GIVES HER THE RIGHT TO GIVE YOU ATTITUDE??

YEAH, IT SURE IS A SCARY TIME FOR MEN

GIRLS LIKE TO ACT LIKE YOU’RE TO BLAME AND THEY’RE THE VICTIMS

HER DRESS WAS SHORT AND SHE WAS DRUNK, SHE’S NOT SO INNOCENT

THANK GOD YOUR DAD’S THE JUDGE AND YOU WON’T BE CONVICTED

OH WAIT...THAT’S RIGHT… IT’S NOT SUCH A SCARY TIME FOR BOYS

THEY’VE ALWAYS HAD THE UPPER HAND, THEY’VE ALWAYS HAD A CHOICE

IT’S TIME FOR WOMEN TO RISE UP,  USE OUR COLLECTIVE VOICE

THE DAY TO VOTE’S NOVEMBER 6, SO LET’S GO MAKE SOME NOISE

~~~

I think it would be hard to overstate the absolute fury that the past week to ten days have generated among a large cross-section of the women of this country. Let us hope that that fury can be sustained through the next month and that all those angry women will speak through their votes. It's the only thing that really counts and can change things.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh: A review

What a strange yet captivating novel. The unnamed narrator is a beautiful (as she frequently reminds us), privileged, blonde, skinny (size 2) woman living the life of many people's dreams in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She is a recent graduate of Columbia and has an undemanding job at a hip art gallery, but she doesn't really need the job because all her needs are met by an inheritance from her recently deceased parents.

And about those parents: Our narrator was their only child but she was not close to either of them, and yet their deaths seem to have untethered her mooring to any sort of need to have a productive life or to be a part of a larger society. There has been a rip in the fabric of her soul and her essence seems to be leaking away in the year 2000. Both her parents were narcissists focused on their own needs and comforts and in this their daughter is very much like them. She sees herself as the focus of the world and everything that happens in it is a reaction to her.

"Everyone I knew at school hated me because I was so pretty."

As she faces the general unraveling of her life and an inability (or lack of desire and will) to cope with it, she makes a drastic decision: She will use the wonders of pharmacology and psychotropic drugs to sleep for an entire year, at the end of which she hopes she will be able to shed ennui and rebuild her life.

Her first step in fulfilling her plan is to find a compliant psychiatrist who will prescribe the necessary pills. She goes looking through the yellow pages of the phone book and comes up with Dr. Tuttle, who is possibly my favorite character in the narrative. She is a terrible psychiatrist! She is a bumbler who is all too easily led by her "patient" to provide the cocktail of drugs that she needs to achieve her plan to zonk out for a year.

This may sound like the premise of a grim and claustrophobic tale, but in fact it isn't. It is a bit of a page-turner. It is by turns disgusting and hilarious but never dull.

The writer, Ottessa Moshfegh, is of Croatian and Iranian descent and this is her second novel. She had previously written a novella and a short story collection. Her fiction typically features misfits and loners and, for that description, our narrator is a prime example. Her only sort-of friend is Reva, a young Jewish woman (size 4) who is envious of our narrator's thinness and blonde beauty, or at least that's what we are told. In the midst of the narrator's "year of sleep," Reva receives a promotion in her job and moves to her new office in the Twin Towers and, of course, we can see what is coming.

“On September 11, I went out and bought a new TV/VCR at Best Buy so I could record the news coverage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. Trevor was on a honeymoon in Barbados, I'd later learn, but Reva was lost. Reva was gone. I watched the videotape over and over to soothe myself that day. And I continue to watch it, usually on a lonely afternoon, or any other time I doubt that life is worth living, or when I need courage, or when I am bored. Each time I see the woman leap off the Seventy-eighth floor of the North Tower—one high-heeled shoe slipping off and hovering up over her, the other stuck on her foot as though it were too small, her blouse untucked, hair flailing, limbs stiff as she plummets down, one arm raised, like a dive into a summer lake—I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it's her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I'll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.”  

Finally, the narcissistic narrator is able to acknowledge that someone else is beautiful, even in dying. Now, perhaps, she, too, is wide awake.  

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

 

Poetry Sunday: The Facts of Art by Natalie Diaz

The MacArthur Grants, the so-called "genius grants," were announced last week. There, tucked away on the list of twenty-five recipients of the grants, all those scientists and activists, was the name of a poet, Natalie Diaz. I was intrigued.

Natalie Diaz was not a name that was known to me and so I had to learn about her. Her familial and cultural background is Mojave and Latina. She is an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe and an associate professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University. She uses her personal background as a source to create a personal mythology that conveys "the oppression and violence that continue to indigenous Americans in a variety of forms." 

I read several of her poems and was moved by them all. Violence, both societal and individual, is a continuing theme in her writing. This poem, "The Facts of Art," explores a clash of cultures on the mesas of Arizona and the violence through lack of understanding and respect that a dominant culture can do to another. 

The Facts of Art

by Natalie Diaz                                         

The Arizona highway sailed across the desert—

     a gray battleship drawing a black wake,

            halting at the foot of the orange mesa,

                  unwilling to go around.

Hopi men and women—brown, and small, and claylike

      —peered down from their tabletops at yellow tractors, water trucks,

            and white men blistered with sun—red as fire ants—towing

                  sunscreen-slathered wives in glinting Airstream trailers

                         in caravans behind them.

Elders knew these bia roads were bad medicine—knew too

     that young men listen less and less, and these young Hopi men

           needed work, hence set aside their tools, blocks of cottonwood root

                 and half-finished Koshari the clown katsinas, then

                        signed on with the Department of Transportation,

were hired to stab drills deep into the earth’s thick red flesh

     on First Mesa, drive giant sparking blades across the mesas’ faces,

           run the drill bits so deep they smoked, bearding all the Hopi men

                 in white—Bad spirits, said the Elders—

The blades caught fire, burned out—Ma’saw is angry, the Elders said.

     New blades were flown in by helicopter. While Elders dreamed

            their arms and legs had been cleaved off and their torsos were flung

                  over the edge of a dinner table, the young Hopi men went

                         back to work cutting the land into large chunks of rust.

Nobody noticed at first—not the white workers,

     not the Indian workers—but in the mounds of dismantled mesa,

           among the clods and piles of sand,

                 lay the small gray bowls of babies’ skulls.

Not until they climbed to the bottom did they see

     the silvered bones glinting from the freshly sliced dirt-and-rock wall—

           a mausoleum mosaic, a sick tapestry: the tiny remains

                 roused from death’s dusty cradle, cut in half, cracked,

                        wrapped in time-tattered scraps of blankets.

Let’s call it a day, the white foreman said.

     That night, all the Indian workers got sad-drunk—got sick

          —while Elders sank to their kivas in prayer. Next morning,

                as dawn festered on the horizon, state workers scaled the mesas,

                        knocked at the doors of pueblos that had them, hollered

                               into those without them,

demanding the Hopi men come back to work—then begging them—

     then buying them whiskey—begging again—finally sending their white

          wives up the dangerous trail etched into the steep sides

                to buy baskets from Hopi wives and grandmothers

                       as a sign of treaty.

When that didn’t work, the state workers called the Indians lazy,

      sent their sunhat-wearing wives back up to buy more baskets—

           katsinas too—then called the Hopis good-for-nothings, 

                 before begging them back once more.

We’ll try again in the morning, the foreman said.

     But the Indian workers never returned—

          The bias and dots calls to work went unanswered,

                as the fevered Hopis stayed huddled inside.

The small bones half-buried in the crevices of mesa—

     in the once-holy darkness of silent earth and always-night—

          smiled or sighed beneath the moonlight, while white women

                in Airstream trailers wrote letters home

praising their husbands’ patience, describing the lazy savages:

     such squalor in their stone and plaster homes—cobs of corn stacked

         floor to ceiling against crumbling walls—their devilish ceremonies

               and the barbaric way they buried their babies,

                      oh, and those beautiful, beautiful baskets.