. . . but I’m not going to tell you what my policies will be if I’m elected. I promise to be nice, though.
Monthly Archives: August 2007
A Hundred Bluejays
Carole & I were standing out on the deck a couple of evenings ago. The deck faces the river, though the water is mostly screened by trees. We’re deep in the woods here, so we have lots of birds & the jays have been active lately, calling & rattling around in the trees, but there seemed to be even more activity than usual. In a period of ten minutes, we saw at least a hundred jays fly from the maples by the river, over the house, to the pines by the road & then into the deeper woods. Clearly, we were witnessing the jays’ fall migration from the higher mountains down to our foothills. At least some of them will hang around all winter. Here are some historical accounts of such migrations going back to the 19th century from Life Histories of North American Birds.
Alice in Wonderland
I’m rereading Alice this week because I’m going to teach it in my first-year course this semester. What has struck me on this reading is not just the irrationality of the adult world from Alice’s point of view, but its stupidity & ugliness. The main themes of the course are childhood & adulthood, chaos & order, authenticity & alienation. Before Wonderland, though, we are going to spend a few days with Blake’s Songs of Innocence & Experience & Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” & T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which carries Wordsworth’s poem to its logical conclusion. I’ll then use Alice & Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees as a way into Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time & Nick Hornby’s About a Boy. We’ll conclude with Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower. Alice, though, is the pivot upon which the course will turn.
Liam Rector (1949 – 2007)
I knew Liam a little when I was on the board of the Associated Writing Programs. Liam’s political instincts were always on the side of freedom & imagination. He was a lovely man. His suicide comes as a shock, though he had stoically endured poor health for many years. I also knew Tree Swenson through the same organization, to whom I send my deepest sympathy. I feel as if I’ve lost an older cousin, someone I should have been more attentive to, but now it is too late.
Loon & Chikadees
I noticed yesterday that the chickadees have come down from the higher mountains. Saw them nosing around the empty feeders. And this morning early we heard a loon fly over, laughing. A cool wind out of the north. Fall.