The Roseledge Books Blog

 Weather here was record-setting and almost intolerable for 3 days, but Charlie stretched out on the exercise equipment in the AC-ed  gym and I read (Val McDermid’s latest Karen Pirie mystery, Still Life.) liked it, and wilted  and we survived.  My dad’s hassock fan from the 1940′ s moved a lot of canal breeze and made a lot of noise and the nights were almost good.  Best thing about the 100 degree heat was it made this week’s 80+ days welcome.  Ah-h- h- h!

 IDEA ALERT;     So many thoughts, so little tolerance for dragging finger-pads and  resulting typos that lead to emails.  So I am blogging and YouTubing this group email.  Just skip over any ho-hummers and wonder who on earth would be interested in THAT?                             

Ah, summertime!  When the days are hot, hot, hot, and so are the books. Sigh.

Some joyful notes or noise:   Two of my NYT faves, Zeynep Tufecki and Siobhan Roberts, with food for thought:                                                           

Zeynep Tufecki noted how viruses move, evolve, and spread through scientists, labs, production facilities, testing, delivery, and, finally, guarded captivity, all  within a cloud of government policy and funding.  Life doesn’t get much better than this for a perpetual  student of moving information.    An unexpected but equally pertinent treasure is Errol Morris’s essay on Donald Rumsfeld’s memos which, can support or refute a point, as need for evidence demands   This is good, but nothing beats his book, Seeing is Believing, which is about photographs and perception and the search tactics such an analysis requires.   So-o-o important in this era of screen time and multi- or mixed media reporting.

Siobhan Roberts wrote lucidly, again, about math, this time about MIT ‘s “Artist in Residence” (I love that MIT has one,) and his computer scientist son who make fonts from in this case, a math provocateur’s completed sudoku puzzles.  I love fonts and the colored graphics.

My latest favorite reader is Bill Bratton, former NYPD Commissioner.  His “By the Book” interview reveals a raised, maybe born, reader of all kinds and matters broadly related to policing  He is a lifelong, if varied user of public libraries.  He reads 3 or 4 different books at any one time.  He always finds time to read, especially with his Kindle in his pocket  He  likes murder mysteries, and his favorite detective is Harry Bosch.  Oh my.  Swoon.

I love Nina Katchadourian’s art.   At it’s heart, this mega-mutlti-mediated artist’s work  gathers, sorts and arranges information “into projects that are witty, sometimes even guffaw-inducing. But underneath the playfulness lurk some pretty fundamental questions about how we organize knowledge to make sense of our past and present.”  It reminds me of rearranging my books as each became differently important.  She clearly agrees with my downsized, story-filled art that covers my walls and that, for lack of Larry, is often askew.

Pictures, pictures everywhere,

And all with tales to tell.  Vlog?  Charlie, HELP!

Three fret-ables:

 Aesthetic evolution:  Who decides which art is fittest to survive?  “Here [at Cranbrook Museum, holdings ] are loosely arranged by curators to tell stories of aesthetic evolution.”  How about telling stories of aesthetic expansion instead?  I don’t want to miss something that someone else deemed “less fit.”

Group laughs:  “[P]eople laugh five times as often when they’re with others as when they’re alone.”  Good grief!  I have always laughed alone, especially at my own jokes.  My mother thought it was a good thing and meant I was okay.  I just hope grumpy others don’t use this as an excuse to remain grumpy.

Group think:  What is wrong with people?  ‘The problem,” writes Zeynep Tufecki, ” is that when we encounter opposing views in the age and context of social media,…  [w]e bond with our team by yelling at the fans of the other one….  In an ecosystem where that sense of identity conflict is all-consuming, belonging is stronger than facts.” Arise, I say ARISE, public libraries and share your multi-faceted information and air conditioning with the hot and hungry crowd.  Re-create the independent thinker.  This is your time.

My fingers are threatening evermore errors.  So I have YouTube-d the rest:                             Charlie’s least favorite ways of being awakened,

and a livestream picture from my window of the Ship’s Canal (available on my youtube channel), on which something is most likely to occur around weekend midday Pacific Daylight Time, when pleasure boats line up to go through the Locks.

That’s all folks,…well, until next month’s news of note collects.

TODAY’S JOYS

I love the idea of “graffiti-ed graffiti,” the public adding to public art and making the art better, like scientists doing great work by “standing on the shoulders of giants” who came before them.  But what happens when the unsuspecting public “added” to a signed work of “abstract expressionist graffiti” in a shopping mall, and the irate artist thought it defaced his $400,000.00 work and wanted $9,000.00 to de-deface it, but I, for oe critic, thought it looked better with add-ons?   

I would show you the articles with art , but Charlie tells me it’s illegal for me to put them in my blog on the ultra slim chance that it might make money, even though a readership of six and  a blog wjth nothing to buy makes it seem unlikely.

 Instead, I have pictures of my latest Seattle public art finds which, I assure you, I can’t add to and Charlie won’t. 

Right caption haiku:                       Octopus as teacher.  Kraken, mascot.  Squid bike rack, usefully odd.  

Two books I loved that came to mind as I wrote this were The Double Helix by James D. Watson (discovering the structure of DNA)  and On the Shoulders of Giants by Robert K. Merton (tracing concept’s history and use).

……………………………………………………….

Left caption haiku:                                          Bridge mural is great.  So is real thing, a mile more on bike path.

I love Heather Cox Richardson.   She is a historian whose “Letters from an American” are like a lovely conversation that gives perspective with footnotes to the day’s events.  She is a 4th-generation Mainer and lives on the coast, which I also  love, and is a superstar on Substack,  which I am glad exists, but don’t know much about.

I love the advice, “Teach children not to talk to strangers, then teach them not to believe what they read on the internet,” but hate that it came from a slander spreader who was a big part of  false-information spreader-networks.  Why should we care so much?

Because “Information warfare threat to the United States is different from past threats, and it has the potential to destroy reason and reality as a basis for societal discourse, replacing them with rage and fantasy. [ Sounds like daily headlines.  VERY WORRISOME.  Emphasis added.] Perpetual civil war, political extremism, waged in  the information sphere and egged on by our adversaries is every bit as much of an existential threat to American civilization and democracy as any military threat imaginable,” says a cyber policy and national security expert to U.S. lawmakers and noted by Dr. Richardson    

So what makes a better prepared searcher, chooser, and user of information?  Attack the algorithms, Farhad Manjoo, whom I love, sort of suggests.  “The internet [which includes social media]  is still ruled by viral algorithms and advertising metrics that prize outrage over truth.”  For example, Amazon’s algorithms, which favor their owned or otherwise linked  works, have never suggested anything ese I might like to read or buy.   Now I need to learn more about the “politics” of algorithms.  As good mothering would have it, she sort of humble-bragged, I have raised a math guy who does not believe I passed a statistics prelim or that there is a “politics” of algorithms.  The challenge is ON.

A bib?  A scarf?  IT’S A BARF!   Dribblers, barf up and make your son proud!

I love Poetry Club, especially the enlightening, but time-consuming search for the perfect poems and poet[s].  I did many Internet searches for and through too few individual poems, too few digitized books, bios, reviews and serendipitous  Poetry Month gems.  I purchased six 1-click books  —  2 collections, 3 individual volumes, and 1 ho-hum murder mystery [ See last post]  —  scanned them all and stumbled across 2 articles.  Then I chose my “World Class” poets and poems.

Two poems by Wislawa Szymborska:   A Word on or A Contribution to Statistics  [thoughtful, wry’] and  Vietnam [powerful; says it all.].                                                                Two poems by Billy Collins:  To My Favorite 17-year old  Girl [wry, wise, and loving] and My Hero [perfect; I love the tortoise; copied below].

My Hero   By Billy Collins 

Just as the hare is zipping across the finish Line,                                                                        the tortoise has stopped once again by the roadside,                                                                this time to stick out his neck                                                                                                        and nibble a bit of sweet grass,                                                                                                     unlike the previous time                                                                                                                   when he was distracted by a bee humming in the heart of a wildflower.   

I love libraries, all and forever, where minds past and present meet  to become.  My latest library love is the becoming Obama Presidential Library.  Imagine it as a hub that connects usefully all the records in all the places  and formats pertinent to an an Obama quest and that houses, maybe a changing, body of works to keep it lively.  Maya Lin’s re-do of the Smith College Library is wonderful and rests on many similar ideas.  I love Maya Lin.  And, though I do not love it in the same way, Google’s new designs for work [and study?] spaces area fraught with potentially useful expectations and possibilities.

And where were the libraries and librarians in the Nashville Schools plan to spend 200 million COVID 19 relief dollars?  New or more counselors and social workers, okay,  but where are the phys. ed. teachers and librarians? I fumed.  Where are the fitness and options people that foster healthy bodies and healthy minds?  Bring on PE and librarians for a better tomorrow.  I love libraries and librarians who keep them vital.  The Nashville Super needs work.

I love Maine’s always special wildflowers and Scott’s story-filled pictures.  Can you see Andrew Wyeth painting or Lilius Gilchrist Grace in her glory days?

“I willll frolic in the phlox with friends,” said the tortoise, and the hare hared.

I am the tortoise.

OKAY, I didn’t win the balloon boat race.

Dee’s boat is clearly hyper. My boat lives the good like, moored, with lattes.

But surprise! surprise!  I’m not filled with hot air, either. 

POETRY CLUB IS BACK,  GROWING, AND ALWAYS A GOOD TIME!   With more than 5, but fewer than 10, we literati of the Landmark, led by the unflappable Gary, met on St Patrick’s Day. We were to have found to read three children’s poems. The fuss about Dr. Seuss was in the news and Irish-ness was in the air, so, I chose to read Kermit The Frog’s “It’s Not Easy Being Green” and handed out carefully untouched green gummy frogs.  Both were big hits. 

Then, I was in trouble.

I mean, who knows what makes a poem a children’s poem?  I know zippo about what children get or remember from poems written by and read to them by adults.  With much luck and little skill, I found and read John Kenney’s “Quiet Time.”  If my memories of Charlie are any measure and he is the best ever and only measure I have, then Dad-Poet Kenney hit it spot on.  His italics could be Charlie-speak..  And he is LOL funny.

Quiet time by John Kenney (from his Love Poems for People with Children)  

 Late now and light low.                                                                                                              Stories read, time for bed. 

Dad, you whisper, why do sumo wrestlers wear diapers?                                                       No one knows, buddy.  Shhh.                                                                                                       Why does the emperor stand behind the catcher?                                                             Umpire, pal. Not emperor.  Shhh.                                                                                               What happened to the boy who cried wolf?                                                                                     He grew up and works in real estate. Go to sleep.  

Sleep finally comes.                                                                                                                            For me                                                                                                                                           briefly.                                                                                                                                                       I wake with a start                                                                                                                               move like a cat                                                                                                                                 head to the door.                                                                                                                                 Wine Time.

Dad?                                                                                                                                                  (Shit! Damn it! Little bastard!)

Yes, buddy?                                                                                                                                            In “Rock-a-bye Baby,” why is the baby on top of a tree?                                               Because he wouldn’t go to sleep.                                                                                                    The baby fell out of the tree?                                                                                                           He did, yes.                                                                                                                                        And the cradle fell, too?                                                                                                                  The whole thing. Crashed to the ground. I won’t lie, it was bad.                                            Why do we sing that?                                                                                                                 Because it teaches us an important lesson.                                                                              What’s the lesson?                                                                                                                              Be quiet or we put you in a tree.  Shhh.         

I sort of lost it at the ‘real estate,’ line and the last line.  A Public Display of Uncontrolled Laughter, especially with a Santa belly, borders on shameless,  but fun.  Gary suggested I might want to leave the room and compose myself.  I nodded “No,” gulped some air, and sort of kept on reading.  John Kenney is The Man.

Egg or no egg? Only
bunny and cat know. HAPPY EASTER TO ALL.

Next month “foreign poets” are the stars.  After some discussion,  the concept of a “foreign” poet remains iffy.  Is a foreign poet an alien, weird, or strange or, as Mainers say, “from away?”  Is place of birth key or  current residence and for  how long?  If the poems are translated into English, is the translator considered a co-poet?

Gary changed it to  “Great Poets of the World.”

I knew one fitting poem that I loved, “Possibilities” by Polish born, Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymbroska.  Whew!  Finding perfect poems is never easy and only rarely casual, especially as my recent computer dependence calls for a trickiness I am new to.  I knew  “Possibilities,” with its litany of likes and dislikes, from Umberto Eco’s wonderful report of his time in the Louvre, An Infinity of Lists, which I had happened on, knew well and remembered from my page- turning days..

Looking for variety and a second poet, I spotted mention of a murder mystery by Polish-born Nobelist Olga Tokarczuk titled , Drive Your  Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, and thought “Aha! I’ll bet She wrote poems, too.”  And she did.  Cities of Mirrors was her early and only book of poems. Apparently and unfortunately,  only the title was translated, as the book is not available for my Kindle or in Amazon.  This may have been a blessing, because Chapter 1 of the well-reviewed murder mystery about an aging loner’s world, where all animals do or should live respected and respectfully, was a big ho-hummer.  Blame it on COVID crankiness.  So I ordered Wislawa Szymborska’s collection titled Monologue of a Dog and have found several I like for poem 2.

That leaves poem number 3.  W.B. Yeats was suggested, but he was too Anglo-Irish for me, and I like his brother Jack’s paintings more than I like his poems.  Seamus Heaney, another Irish Nobleist was born six months before me [!] and describes marvelously, but I’m not sure he thinks life is worth it.  His poem  “Blackberry-Picking” has both qualities and, so, is just okay, but maybe.  I can choose another Wislawa Szyrmborska poem or sneak in my variation as a homage to the poet and my dead sister, but mostly to my older and only sister.

My sister died unexpectedly in NY and I was mostly chair-bound in Minnesota.  I wanted to have something of our sibling-ness at her memorial service..  So I used “Possibilities'”  litany as an outline of a life, a list of topics the poet and my sister might use to get acquainted — or to be remembered and “Channeling my sister, Charyl Coghlan Pollard, while reading the poem, “Possibilities” by Wislawa Szymbroska” was born.  An excerpt:

Well, she said modestly, it was a hit!  A big demand called for 50 more copies.  A SECOND PRINTING!  YES!

“Lobster Buoys” by Charlie.  Oh, buoy! I love this.  Ignore the glare.

Charlie has been part of my sister’s and his dad’s memorial services.  Ours is now a family of two, and he frets about not knowing enough of or about my stories, but when I, obligingly, try to tell him, the stories either zigzag into a maze of asides, provoke gasping, unexplainable laughter, put me to sleep trying to be organized or all of the above.  “Channeling Conversations” could be an obituary interview outline for family fretters.  I’ll try it out on Charlie and let you know how it goes.

I love Poetry Club.

SEATTLE HAD SNOW, 6 inches of snow.  That was Saturday and Sunday.  Charlie and I frolicked in the snow.  See picture below.

Mom runs into snowbank. Son takes picture, then unsticks mom. Latte time.

Today is Tuesday.  SEATTLE HAS SLUSH and, maybe 50 degrees.  Pray for a drying wind. But snow is in the air and frequently on my mind.  It’s a pandemic luxury.

A SENSE OF SNOW

As a 4th generation North Dakotan who has lived the last 50 years in Minneapolis, I have some sense of snow, which in my experience, is so much more than a builder of character and reason for nostalgia, though it is those things, too. Remember the excellent book, Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg?  I loved the book and the “snow art” paintings in a recent NYT article mostly about  snowy day memories.

I sent it to Kathy, who liked it, especially the snowing Doig and replied with snowy, likeable, Claude Monet’s “Sandvika, Norway“ from an issue of The Norwegian American(!).    This shamed me both for her breadth of search and it’s Norwegian pertinence.  Charlie my #1, favorite, and only son, you may recall, is half almost pure Norwegian.  My mother said I was a “duke’s mixture”, more likely a “prairie mix”, but surely not a “Irish mongrel”, as some ding dongs would have it.  My dad only acknowledged the Irish, and I am my father’s daughter.  But I digress.

So, looking at  Peter Doig’s “Cobourg 3 plus 1” probably painted from Canadian memories, and the Monet from his time in Norway, I concluded that Kathy liked “blurry air” paintings, but not, it turned out, falling snow jigsaw puzzles, and that to continue this pandemic lifelong learning conversation, I should think about what I liked and why.  This is fun, I have the time, I wasn’t going anywhere, and the baa-ing “Sheep in the Shafer Vineyard”   on YouTube were good company.

In the NYT article, I liked Kandinsky’s “Winter Landscape” for the exuberant colors which made me think of hooked rugs, fiendish jigsaw puzzles, and the many colors in and of snow, and Monet’s ‘The Magpie,” for it’s stillness and prospects, and/or maybe because a “Wyeth sense” (the Spidey sense gone amok?) had osmosed in me  during my 35 summers in Wyeth country.

 AN ASIDE

I love Jamie Wyeth’s snow art.  His “A Murder of Crows” sits on my desk reminding me of Tenants Harbor’s Southern Island with snow fallen and illustrating his use of blues in snow shadows, apparently in the spirit of Rockwell Kent, but I don’t understand Jamie’s yellow shadows.  One day in Maine I was  standing next to him in front of his newly finished  painting of a glorious window filled with sunlight on a snow- topped rock with some yellow, which, now I think, was probably kelp.  The window was framed by the dark innards of a rustic wall.  I liked it a lot.  He asked what I thought.   “Well,” I said, repeating an art critique of fifty years earlier “I know something of snow.”  I know; I am an idiot.  But Jamie was my neighbor and a really good guy, so we talked of snow.  Now I consider thusly repeating myself a sure sign of diminishing returns.  AARRGGHH!

My earlier  “snow art” critique was in a do-over essay, assigned  by my college writing professor, who did not think my childhood memory of Edna Peschel’s hand-painted mural on her family’s garage door was sufficiently artful for an art review assignment, though he did admit he’d like to see it.  He told me to find something else.  So, in the Boston Store’s Framing Department, with it’s sale table piled high with reprints, I found  Utrillo’s “Winter in Montmarte” which I chose because “I knew something of snow.”  I passed the course, the teacher probably SIGHED and good times followed.

 AND SO….

All these years later, I still know only what I do like and nothing of what I should like, but who cares?   I have great fun deciding.  I think it’s a pandemic gift to lighten up.  Right now I’m making and putting together snowy jigsaw puzzles.  Falling snowflakes are  a pain.  I turned Scott’s picture of whites with Roseledge bushes into a ho-hummer puzzle of “many shades of gray”. Tee-hee.

Scott’s glory of whites —  snow, clouds, house and hall —

becomes a dreary of grays.

No eyes of Kandinsky lurking in that snow.  But with that frolic of thought, let me welcome you to the good-time world of the ever curious, enjoying a long, learning life made more “interesting”, as we say in Minnesota,” by living through a pandemic.  Good friends,               ZOOM, and a sometimes obliging son help.

PANDMIC AND OTHR DAY BRIGHTENERS:

Read only those things that continue to be engaging, switch when they stop, and, later, maybe wonder what it’s all about, Alfie.  So I put down Val McDiarmid’s latest, Still Life, in Scotland with Karen Pirie, always engaging, but this time not so much, and started Jane Harper’s latest, The Survivors, in Australia with Aaron Faulk.

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Figure out how to get Charlie more excited about my caddying for him.  My poker threat is no longer enough.  I could haul both clubs and drinks.  What a deal, I say.  I might need “monster truck” tires for my wheelchair to save the fairways.

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I am totally vaccinated!   This calls for a celebratory haiku.

Life’s a game of tag and I’m in “free”,                                                                                                   well, almost free.                                                                                                                                       COVID begone!

For a celebration of haikus and a million other reasons, watch “The Hunt for the Wilder People” on Netflix  I love this movie.

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The daffodil sprang up.  “Free at last.  It’s spring.”  Then it snowed.  “I’ll be back.”

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A ZOOM quote for the ages: “I am not a cat, Judge,” said the cat-filtered lawyer on a Zoomed legal proceeding.  But who knew?     I laughed so hard that Charlie, sleeping on the sofa, woke up thinking I was choking to death.  Then I played it again and laughed until my stomach hurt.  Self harming?

Thank heavens!  It’s a New Year and a  a new beginning.       Here’s to all the good that portends.

Salish greeter in robe or nifty sweater says, “Hi!” I’m glad we met.

Good news is we’ve made it this far.  We just need to get through the next two weeks of muzzling a crazed loser and his dangerously demented followers, after which civility and competence will again be in charge.  For other millions who are not awful, though often wrong — and sometimes LOUD, there is always valued space at the table for reasonable differences with good governance.  Until then, how about one more listen to Leonard Cohen’s Democracy Is Comin’ to the USA. 

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But the good news remains: OUR CIRCUMSTANCES HAVE CHANGED!   Welcome to Joe, Kamala, and Georgia Senators.  And if it’s not yet time to smell the roses, it is time to start remembering what the roses look like.  For sure they look like good people doing good things, like the Wakemans taking time to tend the sheep on nearby, otherwise uninhabited Maine islands.  What an upper this article and great pictures is.  Raised in small town North Dakotan, I first met  an island, Baker, in Maine, off Acadia in 1971.  It was love at first footfall on the rocks. I spent some of three summers on Monhegan, and  I might be there still, but I came to learn that rocky trails and cane-supported, increasingly awkward walkers do not mix.  Thus it was that in 1979, I “found Tenants Harbor”, — an island-like peninsula with the Mainers of my dreams and Roseledge cottage — the place and people of my heart for nearly 40 years.  What wonderful “rosy” rlated memories the island sheep-tending article evoked.  But less rosy is remembering that, as on Monhegan, there are limits  that even a willing and able adapter finally has to face to live in a rustic cottage surrounded by uneven, sometimes rocky, largely undiscovered terrain.

So I, very grudgingly, sold Roseledge.  Louis Jenkins hit it spot on in his poem, Football:  

I take the snap from the center, fake to the right, fade back…
I’ve got protection. I’ve got a receiver open downfield…
What the hell is this? This isn’t a football, it’s a shoe, a man’s
brown leather oxford. A cousin to a football maybe, the same
skin, but not the same, a thing made for the earth, not the air.
I realize that this is a world where anything is possible and I
understand, also, that one often has to make do with what one
has. I have eaten pancakes, for instance, with that clear corn
syrup on them because there was no maple syrup and they
weren’t very good. Well, anyway, this is different. (My man
downfield is waving his arms.) One has certain responsibilities,
one has to make choices. This isn’t right and I’m not going
to throw it. [Emphasis added.]

So it was that I learned adapting, like reading, had changed from being a hobby to being a way of life.  And now that I’m thinking about being adaptable, I find examples of it everywhere.  One such is Tara French’s The Searcher, which is a novel about a retired cop from Chicago who buys a fixer-upper in the rural west of Ireland.  Both how he adapts as a newcomer and how he adapts his official cop skills to a local problem are key.  From the title I knew I would enjoy Tara French’s book, just as, years ago, I enjoyed Naguib Mahfouz’s book, The Searcher, which was about his search for his father.  I liked his Cairo trilogy more though.  Several other “adapting books” come to mind:  Fishing with John by Edith Iglauer, Frankie’s Place by Jim Sterba, or Lilian Beckwith’s “semi-autobiographical novels set in the Hebrides. 

Wooden, eye-height railings require x- ray vision. Working on it

As a long-time major adapter, I have two major enablers:  Charlie, who re-engineers my world to keep me more independent and sassy longer, and Kathy, who keeps me on top of all that matters and fuss free.  Charlie humphs.  He thinks I still fuss.

Charlie helped me turn a great idea, a prairie twig tree, into a Christmas twig tree, which might have won the Best of Floor prize if Mary hadn’t used her end of the hall site for her life-sized, stuffed Santa to sit in a real rocker, by a faux fireplace.  So I turned the Christmas twig tree into a winter twig tree with a faux snowflake tree alongside, but Charlie said “Enough!” when I asked him to fluff the flake-flowers into a ball.  I’m already thinking candy hearts for Valentine Day, but I’m keeping it to myself, for now.

Winter twig tree has memorable, if unfluffed, snowflake-flower tree near.

Kathy knows there are few jigsaw puzzles of a leas 350 pieces that fit the 10″x 20″ lazy-susan top and table that Charlie re-configured for me, so she found and forwarded an           online puzzle site with lots of choices, no pieces to reach for or pick up and lots of shadow-people applauding.  I love it, especially the applause.  It’s easy to play on my Charlie-adapted computer.  Charlie says I’m addicted and neglecting my blog.  He’s not wrong, but   I have no shame.  And you can make a puzzle from your own pictures, which Charlie did.

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A rose by any other name is a NYTimes  information article by Farhad Manjoo.  Today he offers a really good and readable explanation of QANON, and why we should be wary, watchful, maybe worried by it’s insidiousness.  I needed this because I am so not in that silo or bubble or whatever one’s information environment is called,  but no matter the topic, Farhad Manjoo is always worth a read.  ( Note:  This article mattes more  after Wednesday’s insurrectionist melee in Washington D.C.) Equally rose worthy is any NYTimes Science article by Siobhan Roberts, but I like especially those linked to John Conway.  I started reading this one not knowing what his Game if Life was and ended up trying to find the documentary about it that he narrated.                                  Herein, the Game’s  50th birthday celebration lead to  the following thoughts:                               a)”I was hooked [by] watching complexity rise out of simplicity.”(Brian En0)   This may help to explain my preference for daily-ness over abstraction in poetry, e.g. Wislawa Szymborska’s poem, “Possibilities.”                                                                                                  b) “[As]  John Allen Paulos so eloquently said, ‘Uncertainty is the only certainty there is, and knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security.””(Melanie Mitchel)  Maira Kalman, in her memoir, The Principles of Uncertainty, agrees, I think. So do I.                c) “[Game of Life] is the purest example I know of the dynamics of collective human innovation.” (Stephen Wolfram)  And doesn’t the world need humans working together to see, then ask, the questions and search for answers?  Yes it does, but who is best to do that?  Well. you don’t have to be a philosophy major to know how to ask questions, or a librarian to know how to find an array of answers, but maybe it helps.  Hint, hint.

That’s it until next time, which I am going  to try to post every other Friday.  I’ll have my latest, favorite, jigsaw puzzle report then.

Charlie won’t set my hair on fire. I’ll find better lighting and fuss. Good days and better tomorrows are coming. Join us in making them.

O HAPPY THANKSGIVING DAY!

Most significantly, I am thankful for the half of the voters who gave us a generous future and for the other half who, but for a few, didn’t try to kill our democracy.

I am hugely relieved that we we are going to go — eventually — with Joe.  (Refs:  BIDEN BEATS TRUMP! (NY Times)  and WHEW!  (From Scott, who, like the NYTimes crossword puzzle people, misspelled the word as “PHEW!“, but with either of which sentiments, whew’s release of inner tension, or phew’s relief or fatigue, I heartily agree.    (Source: WikiDiff.)  Hard to justify including the following poems here, but I like them, it’s my blog, and I thought the poet might be related to Helene Hanff, whom I love, but she’s not, “ARE YOU AWAKE?” and “WOW!” are “lead-line” poems by Jean Hanff Korlitz from unadulterated Trump campaign emails. Clever idea, bit snarky.)

…………………………………………………………………

Then it seemed like the worst of times.  Trump won’t concede, which is horrible all by itself.  Then, I read that half the voters wanted to continue the catastrophe that is the last four years.  AARRGGHH!  Who knew the greed, the hate, and the disdain for reason, democracy, and others were so much among us?

…………………………………………………………………………..

But then, my ever hopeful friends, midst the pandemic, awful Trump Tweets, the slowing of an already damaged economy, the weather extremes, the coming flu season, ill-equipped schools, shrinking worldview, fraying tempers, and invading murder hornets, but then, my friends some glimmers gleam.  

 Thanks for neighbors and information technology and, always, good ideas. (Beyond Zoom, information technology for which I am very grateful, even as my tonsure grows,  think convolutional neural network tracking.)

Thanks for “legacy media”, for keeping reliably good information moving, especially  the Wall Street Journal editors who kept Hunter Biden’s unworthy emails from taking up newsworthy space and the NYT reporters who wrote about it.

Thanks for intrepid searchers who found nearly 2oo unknown copies of Isaac Newton’s hugely significant  Principles (pub.1687) mostly in Eastern European libraries, suggesting the world of learning was broader and more connected than we thought.  By 17th C standards, Isaac Newton was an international bestseller!  I hope a publisher finds or can make the scholars’100 page report an ENGAGING read, because I’d love to be one with  their travels and search strategies, and an appreciator of their findings about the journey of each book these past nearly 350 years.  Wouldn’t tours of the libraries, archives, and personal collections be fun?  Or how about about “work tours”, somehow enlisting curious and energetic novice searchers, as a kind of archeological diggers?  I intend to have  a hover-craft wheelchair by then, so I’ll be good to go, airline restrictions and the pandemic willing.

Thanks for considerations of  trees, always a gleaming glimmer. Puzzle: Is it always a good time to think about trees, or does thinking about trees make it a good time?  How about making  good memories? From my perch on Roseledge’s porch, I listened long, often, and carefully to see if I could distinguish the types of trees from the sounds of leaves rustling.  After several summers, I could distinguish between cottonwoods and maples, and I knew when the rustling trees were neither.  Too little for two much, you think?  Then your interior life is, clearly, insufficiently rich.

More recently, I walked along Ballard streets with mostly leafless trees, beautiful in their structures, and discovered a found-art tree with fish.

Think Ballard:  found art, trees with or without fish, near dry-docked boats.  Perfect.

For more tree pondering and a shout-out to libraries, love with me Maira Kalman’s paintings of trees and Leanne Shapton’s Sunday walks with trees or, more accurately, tree trunks, sans mention of libraries.  I also love her book, Native Trees of Canada, wherein each page is a leaf from a different kind of tree.  With the book on a bookstand, I turn to a different page each month and enjoy — God and Charlie willing.  Sometimes a miracle would be the faster.

…………………………………………………………….

Thanks for Kindle and the 1-click buying option, which I use a lot and Charlie threatens to dismantle.  I promise to talk more, and the threats are no more.  Whew.

Rule for reading during COVID stay at-home times:                                            Every book of careful reading deserves 4-6 books of comfort reading.

Currently am reading carefully:                                                                                                      Bernard  Bailyn’s Illuminating History: A Retrospective of Seven Decades is, according to his NYTimes obit “an intellectual self-portrait that eschews conventional memoir in favor of a series of essays.”  Historian Bailyn explains why each of seven documents interests him and how he uses that interest to further his work.  So far, good search parts, but mostly exciting for watching an idea happen, take root,  and grow.

Currently have read, am reading, or will soon to read less carefully:                                            Brad Park’s Interference is a mystery involving several physics professors, Dartmouth, and quantum mechanics.  I liked it and learned from it, much as I did from Michael Crichton’s Timeline.

Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club is set in a retirement community with residents who interact with each other and the world.  Th book is gentle, generous, good-natured, and sometimes funny, but I was bored and stopped halfway through.  I live the book and would rather learn about new things.

Peter Colt’s Back Bay Blues is small town New England noir, reminiscent of the Tom Selleck/Jesse Stone TV adaptations of books by Robert B. Parker.  I liked the book and learned a lot from the Vietnam War vet thread.

Elly Griffith’s The Lantern Men is her 12th book in the forensic anthropologist Dr. Ruth Galloway series.  I love them all.  Pure comfort reading.

Paul Doiron’s  The Last Lie explores Maine’s north woods, yet another part of Maine I know too little about.  He knows well the outdoor terrain and understands it’s people.  I especially liked traipsing about the landscape with the knowledgeable author

Scott Carpenter’s French Like Moi reports this college professor’s time renting a Paris apartment.  From Kathy’s comments, the tone and adventures sound like those in Nicolas Kilmer’s A Place in Normandy, which I loved and during which he was deciding whether or not to spend the money and make habitable the very old farmhouse his grandfather had bought in 1920.  So I am hopeful.

………………………………………………………………………………….

Thanks again, and always, for good times with Charlie, who, again, declared me a difficult person.  And this was before we wore masks that hugged my eyelashes with each sidewalk bump, of which there are many, and, thus blinded, I was about to cause a disaster and become a public disgrace, and so called,  “Charlie, HELP!” which he did and always does, sometimes with a  VERY LOUD “[sigh]” “tsk tsk” or “Again?”

Finally, thanks for everything better that is just ahead and now possible to expect. 

It’s best to read yesterday’s post first because this one mostly builds on QAnon comments therein.  Herein, I am quoting at length from Farhad Manjoo’s NYT article because I worry that my links don’t always go through, and no one says it better than Farhad Manjoo.  I like his sources, too.  So, onto his latest QANON comments.

First, a bit about why we should worry about QANN:

Farhad Manjoo talked about QAnon with “Joan Donovan, a pioneering scholar of misinformation and media manipulation [who] is very worried.  [She studies] the way that activists, extremists and propagandists surf currents in our fragmented, poorly moderated media ecosystem to gain attention and influence society,…  [but especially to reach] “people who have been ‘Q-pilled,’ QAnon plays a much deeper role in their lives; it has elements of a support group, a political party, a lifestyle brand, a collective delusion, a religion, a cult, a huge multiplayer game and an extremist network….”

Then, a bit about how QANON morphs and spreads, which is necessary to understand in order to diminish it:

“Donovan thinks QAnon represents a new, flexible infrastructure for conspiracy. QAnon has origins in a tinfoil-hat story about a D.C.-area pizza shop, but over the years it has adapted to include theories about the “deep state” and the Mueller probe, Jeffrey Epstein, and a wild variety of misinformation about face masks, miracle cures, and other hoaxes regarding the coronavirus. QAnon has been linked to many instances of violence, and law enforcement and terrorism researchers discuss it as a growing security threat….  ‘[QANON] is now a densely networked conspiracy theory that is extendible, adaptable, flexible and resilient to take down,’ Donovan said of QAnon.”

VERY SCARY STUFF!   What to do?  When in doubt, I VOTE AND HOPE AND PLAN!

I vote, you vote, we all vote and democracy lives.  BLUE WAVE ALERT

To be fair or maybe to be an idiot, I should note that in the Manjoo article, “Donovan compares QAnon to the Rev. Charles Coughlin, the priest whose radio show spread anti-Semitism in the Depression-era United States. Stopping Coughlin’s hate took a concerted effort,…”

FULL DISCLOSURE:  My dad was Charles J[ohn] Coghlan [hard “g”], a good and generous man, who had not a bigoted bone in his body.  On at least one occasion, he did sign a Father Coughlin picture,  but, he didn’t look anything like the priest, and he signed as he was, Charles J. Coghlan.  My dad was an amiable man, former Wahpeton mayor, and soon thereafter, a Richland County Commissioner. Thus, like his four uncles who served in the ND state legislature and his dad who was mayor of St. John, Chair of the Board of Education, and founder of the local chapter of the Isaac Walton League, he served though elective office.  I don’t know who some people thought they were voting for, but if they voted for Charles J. Coghlan, a father only to his family, they got the best.

It’s a little exciting.

Two of you asked what I have been reading during COVID.  Among my faithful readers, two requesters is Legion.  So this is a little exciting.  But let’s face it: COVID or not, I read a lot. I’ve always read a lot.  A high school friend, Shirley with whom I had not spoken for more than 30 years, called to tell me about our friend Gayle’s death.  Then, because, she said, she knew I would be, she asked, “What are you reading?” and we had a great good time reminiscing and re-connecting through book-talk. Reading is my way of life. 

 Getting a grip on my enthusiasm,  I am separating reading newspapers from books, even though it is not a clean break. Newspapers are a lifelong pleasure, my tether to the greater world, a place of surprise.  They can cover anything, and sometimes do.  But be prepared for my choices, as you are in the company of one who has “information eyes.” 

Here I am in Maine, with hair, reading newspapers. Millie says, “Classic.”

ARTCLES

In “The code: how genetic  science helped expose a secret coronavirus outbreak [in Iowa]”,  Paraic Kenny, a tumor geneticist turned viral geneticist, became a disease detective, a genome tracker, in fact, a genetic epidemiologist.  Its all searching to me, and I have loved searchers, strategies, or search results and reports  forever.  Now I’ll add tracking, investigating, even detecting, and become an “information epidemiologist”.  See?  Exciting!  And what’s up with Iowa and secrets?  That’s just plain un-Midwestern-ness.     

I came across another  timely “case study” of information tracking titled   “How sexist, racist, attacks on Kamala Harris spread online.”  I read this  and learned of too many [massive sigh]  social media sources I’ve never met, but which, when distributed, include the concepts of “spread” and “influence” and “sequence” which I do know [whew!].

Now it’s QAnon I don’t get.  It promotes a conspiracy of drivel, amorphously,  without rhyme or reason or structure — at least to me.  I don’t know what or who it is or how it’s information spreads, changes, infects or influences. I do wonder how so many naive  people could have so much easy access to dangerous nonsense  and so little ability to recognize the nonsense.  Doing my best to thwart this pestilence by knowing more about QAnon’s paths to the gullible, I read recently and recommend: “How QAnon is spreading during the pandemic...”, and  “Following Falsehoods–A Reporter’s Approach….”

Here I am in Seattle, reading the New York Times…uh, differently.

Too much?  Well, I warned you about reading with an “info nerd,” Barb’s wonderful name for a group I want to be part of.  Just to remind you all of my very useful liberal arts degree, I read a VERY interesting wide-ranging article  about Edward Hopper’s early work.  As re-envisioned by a grad student in art history who found old magazines for amateur artists which had some pictures the adolescent Hopper copied for his early paintings.  So given his copying, is Hopper less a teenage genius that gave meaning to “American-ness?”  Is there even such a distinction as “American-ness”?  With that, I’m enjoying a few minutes of canal watching, a mug of vegetable broth, and remembering American Studies’ friends.

Somewhat similarly, I am newly sitting in Seattle and wondering if there is such a thing as a Midwestern sense of humor.  I cracked a really funny joke in the poetry group ( Robert Frost transgendered as Roberta ?), and only the physicist/jazz pianist, who had to find an aide to make his laptop stop playing a song he had brought to illustrate a point at an earlier meeting, only he got it, — finally.

And my spidey senses must have been on high alert when I decided to read about James Murdoch, Rupert’s younger son who has left the fold because he has a brain and principles and decided instead to invest “in start-ups created to combat fake news and the spread of disinformation, having found the proliferation of deep fakes ‘terrifying’ because they ‘undermine our ability to discern what’s true and what’s not’ and it ‘is only at the beginning as far as I can tell.”   Where we you James Murdoch all those years I was always looking for funding for my next project?  AARRGGH!

NY Times PUZZLES:

I still think there might be number patterns in Sudoku (Charlie says there aren’t), and I still don’t like the Thursday NYT crossword, though I did “get” the last two rebuses.  And Rex Parker’s blog remains a vent-worthy read.

NY Times COLUMNISTS:

My list of favorites grows:  Gail Collins, smart, bit snarky, good natured, usually politics;  Paul Krugman, broadly-read and -interested economist;  Thomas Friedman, Middle East thinker about actions, connections, and implications (I also like novels by Daniel Silva and David Ignatius), and he, like Al Franken and the Coen brothers, is from Minneapolis-plus; Timothy Egan, usually writes about the West but I’ll read anything he wants to write about, and… he lives in Seattle; most recent  fav Siobhan Roberts, writes interestingly and knowingly about math, surely a miracle;  and Farad Manjoo and, until the Atlantic “contracted” her away, Zeynep Tufecki both of whom write broadly and knowingly  about information matters. 

WHEW!  Enough.  Be ready for more joy and curse of newspaper reading.

SORT OF HAIKUS, always 17 syllables, or

HOW I SPEND MY VIRAL CONTAGION

1.  The lobby statue / sits with ears up, moving eyes, / and masked m-utterings.
2.  It’s a statue. It’s / a bot. No; it’s a chair-full / of performance art.
3.  Flowers flourish. Some / tending, no trimming. Mother / Nature dresses up.
4.  Bistro coffee is / gone. Charlie’s bittery blend / makes me twittery.
5.  Today we can go / outside again, but it is / raining and cold. Sigh.
6.  Masks take away lip / reading, a big loss for those / who need it to hear.
7.  YOU TUBE’s vinyard sheep / by day; BBC radio / all night Soothers.
8.  No mask. VIOLATION! / Too close. VIOLATION! / Too far. VIO…punch!
9.  Hall walkers think we baa, /  like sheep, or “drop [gaseous, / disastrous] roses”.           10. My apartment door / always stays open, so I /can always get out.

The Good Life: Kindle-d book, filled mug, outdoors near, CHARLIE here, old friends’ ties.

11. Pier beckons. Wheel / chair totes new flag lawn-chair, so / Charlie can sit, too.
12. Charlie says I’m a /  very difficult person. / Goodness knows, I try.
13. Nothing will ever / be the same again, but then / it never was. Sigh.
14. No groups, no outsiders, / delivered meals. / Wear masks, scrub hands often.
15. Deaf-ish, masked colleagues / eat breakfast and talk six feet / apart. It’s loud.                           “WHAT?”
16. With long life, some wisdom, / and 20/20 vision, / we shout, GO, JOE!
17. People meets are few. / Roof seagull “soaps” are many.  I watch. I’m so hooked.
18. Charlie and I read / newspapers differently. / He is good company.
19. My wheelchair could / tote golf-bag and drinks on course / paths. Ready, Charlie?
20. Honeycrisp, I’m over you. / It’s Envy now, / until Cosmic Crisp comes.                              21.  VOTE HIM OUT!        VOTE HIM / OUT!        VOTE HIM OUT!        VOTE                  HIM OUT! / VOTE HIM OUT!      VOTE!        VOTE!

I’ve doodled all my days.  Does that make it a way of life? Or worse, a way of thinking?  Can you imagine an epitaph worse than, “She thought in 17-syllable ideas?”  Probably more, later.

It’s a dark, very dark day…  Charlie says the apocalypse is upon us; the viral and wildfire smokey particulates are winning.  Disaster Trump  lurks.  And wonderful RBG dies.  I call it the big unpleasantness, because I am his mother.                                                 …but then a gleam of bright right happens.  Looking out our view-full window, we see the Yacht Club-boat with tugboat float by, on it’s  way to be tended.  We waved.  Surely, they smiled.

We waved.  Slight breeze.  Boat people waved.  Tugboats made waves.  Wavelets danced.  No wake.                   (Photo: Mike Siegel/Seattle Times)

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If you, as I, think  Trump was elected and still has a chance to be re-elected because too few people know how to tell sense from nonsense, then, if ever, it is time to act.  A read or re-read of The Thread: A Mathematical Yarn by Philip J. Dorian will remind you of how much fun and learning go into a search for information.  Josephine Tey’s mystery,  A Daughter of Time demonstrates the impact of poorly chosen sources.  Then it is time to act.

DAY DIMMERS are among us.  Social media and data science have made finding, choosing and using good sources harder, but… some just know too-little; others are outright info- sinners, e.g.,                                                                                                                      The mask-less who justify themselves with:  “God will protect me.”                                            The racism denier who argues: ” Nothing  has ever happened to me and I am a Latin American.”                                                                                                                                           The patient who disagrees with the MD’s diagnosis or treatment and argues:  “That’s not what it said on Facebook.”                                                                                                          Trump listing “his” “accomplishments”.                                                                                               Attorney General Barr who says that mail-in voting leads to fraud  and, when asked by a reporter why he thought fraud was involved, answered:  “Logic.”

But then,DAY BRIGHTENERS arrive.  HEADLINES say it all.                                         “Getting wise to Fake News [Misinformation on Social Media]” includes health information and online courses.                                                                                “Misinformation is ‘it’s own pandemic’ Among Parents“includes techniques for pushing back on social media and in person.                                                                                         “What I Learned From Trump’s Accomplishments:  Facts are vital.  But they are not sufficient” argues for context, with good examples.                                                                  Barr needs so much. Start with the common sense of logical argument needs evidence, e.g. sources, and bad sources will kill argument.  Then how about a day trip to the library where sources abound.

(Okay, I just wanted to sneak in the biggest Day Brightener Headline of all:  “How Libraries Can Save the 220 Election“, and the conclusion:  “It’s already clear that neither the president nor Congress nor the Postal Service will do what’s necessary to ensure the integrity of the 2020 election. The library, still among the most revered institutions in our fragile democratic experiment, may well be our best hope.”  YES!  But Barr does need sources, and libraries have lots of them.

So, social media and data science have made finding, choosing and using good sources harder, but..remote learning with it’s connecting capability may be a plus, maybe even a saving grace for those who want to know how to find good sources in today’s world of inter-connectivity, erased records, ever new technologies.

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WOEFUL DAY DIMMER:   It’s time to say goodbye to Roseledge.  The days of wine and roses, and blueberries, of morning coffee and pre-and post-dusk parties before the bats meet and eat the mosquitoes, of books and bookish-ness, of Sea Street strolls and harbor life and friends to share all this and more,  those days are over.    Thanks for the memories.  I have sold Roseledge to my neighbor who owns it’s frontage.  It’s time.

It’s true.  I sold Roseledge, place of my heart.  Blame my unwilling body.  (Photo by Charlie)

Un-rosed Roseledge morphs into white cottage-plus outbuilding on Sea Street.  (Photo by Ralph)

And no, I don’t know anything about the long, one-windowed, concrete block behemoth behind it.  Fun, but surely inappropriate, to speculate.  Probably not a “harbor” to store a replica of the medieval Irish boat that preceded the Viking voyages, but maybe.

DAY BRIGHTENER:  Charlie and I, with Scott’s help, are making a Roseledge documentary, ala Ken Burns.  Aim high, I say.   Surely, it will go through many iterations, as Charlie and I disagree, often, about who is in control.  He says I am a difficult person.  Goodness knows, I try.  I almost put myself to sleep on my first three-minute effort.  Being peppier might help.  AARRGGHH!  More later.