Last fall I completed a master gardener pre-requisite course and finally, two Saturdays ago, I clocked my first volunteer hours as a trainee. I went with the Detroit Bird Alliance (formerly Detroit Audubon) to a city park for fall cleanup. A few years back a prairie was installed there, but without prairie-grazing wildlife, we humans are the ones who have to go in and cull the saplings to prevent encroachment by the surrounding woodland. I also snipped and bagged seedheads belonging to invasive teasel and thistle, and came out with a flannel covered in stowaway tickseed (not invasive, just annoying).
This is true with birds and many other things: The best way to cement your knowledge of plants is to see them in person. Many (all?) species of plants I can identify are ones I associate with specific places: the copper beech at the end of the boulevard, where we stop and turn around on our walks with Rufus; the stand of spicebush on Belle Isle that a new birder friend sent a dropped pin to; the vernal witch hazel, with its profuse pale yellow flowers first blooming in late October, planted in our own front yard.
My approach to learning more about plants is to volunteer for as many different opportunities as I can. But – most of that will have to wait till spring, because the temperature window for outdoor work has pretty much closed.
Other happenings: Wrapped up my first semester as an Antioch MFA mentor. Edited some videos for the side gig I mentioned in my last letter (which I will refer to henceforth as CLOVER). Recovered (mostly) from a cold Rufus brought home from daycare. Went up north for Thanksgiving and saw Julia’s parents, and the nieces, who are exhibiting (frighteningly) early signs of tween-agedom.
Gave in and got a Boox Palma. Craig and David are both right on this one. I’m was reading exclusively from it over the break and have already finished three books. A big downside, though, is that there’s no Android version of Bebop (and will not be one anytime soon). Which make me want to prioritize, at the very least, a WatchOS app? We’ll see.
Those three books: The Summer of the Mariposas, a sibling road-trip odyssey woven with Mesoamerican folklore, written my Antioch faculty mentor, Guadalupe Garcia McCall. Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, which I enthusiastically recommend to Slow Web fans. And Richard Powers’ newest, Playground.
Playground reminded me of this bit about multi-character film plots from Walter Murch (mentioned in issue #418):
What I call the divergent method is when you start with all the characters in the same time and space—an Aristotelian structure. After that you can follow them individually whereever they go—as long as you’ve seen them all together at one point, right at the beginning. That allows you to pungently characterize these people in relationship to one another in time and space: physically, we get to see them standing next to each other and judge how they carry themselves, but also emotionally, how they relate to one another. Once the audience has that imprint, if it’s well done, then the film is free to have different points of view […]
The opposite approach is convergent: two or three stories that start separately and then flow together. The English Patient is a good example. It starts out with two mysterious figures in a plane, flying across the desert. The plane gets shot down by the Germans and then—cut—you’re on a train, with a young woman, a nurse, in a completely different situation: bantering with wounded soldiers. The two stories appear to have nothing to do with each other, but the audience trusts that these two rivers are going to come together.
To me, a lot of the joy of reading Playground (and The Overstory) is experiencing Powers’s mastery over this kind of cinematic divergence. You don’t know how the storylines will converge, just that they are sure to do so. The fun is in discovering the how. Part of me wonders about Powers’s process – how much he intentionally starts with characters who are each interesting in their own right – and then finds the story that braids them together.
This bit from a PBS interview doesn’t hold the answer, but it did raise my eyebrows:
Before writing “The Overstory,” I stuck to a fairly rigorous routine of starting in early after breakfast — usually around 7am — and writing until I had a thousand words that pleased me. That could take anywhere from three to 12 hours. I did that almost every weekday for a third of a century, when I had no other obligations.
Three to 12 hours!
Speaking of process: Over the summer, I interviewed Newbery-winning author Linda Sue Park for BookSmitten and loved her abbreviated version of the Pomodoro Technique:
12 minutes. Way on the other end of the spectrum from Powers! When I relayed this to A.W. over lunch, he had a great name for it: the Cherry Tomato Technique.
Speaking of BookSmitten: Saw a good friend, Jeff (who did the music for the podcast), perform at a new cafe/music venue in our neighborhood. He opened for Melanie A. Davis, who played songs off her new album Noctalgia, named after the astronomical term for “sky grief” – or the lament of stars disappearing to light pollution.
Another friend (and super-talented artist), Francis Vallejo has a new newsletter, Tabula Rasa. Francis was an OG art blogger who I first met at a kidlit conference. He’s responsible for the drop-dead gorgeous illustrations in Jazz Day, among other things! I’m looking forward to getting these in my inbox.
Speaking of Jazzy picture books: Julia’s saxophone teacher gifted us Charlie Parker Played Be Bop (you know I like that title, too) at our baby shower. Right now I’m especially fond of, for obvious reasons, picture books that are short and fun to read, especially to a four-month-old who doesn’t understand much (but maybe knows he’s being read to). This is one of them!
Ending on babies – A new thing I’ve discovered about parenting is that you end up doing and saying things that probably seem batshit crazy to non-parents. And you could care less. A couple months ago, I said to Julia at a dog park, completely casually, “You have poop on your skirt.” – to the horrified stares of the people at the table next to us.
And lately, we’ve both been singing to Rufus, while changing his diaper, this little ditty:
Welcome to the butt spa
Welcome to the butt spa
Welcome to the butt spa
The butt spa, yeah!
Charlie Parker played bebop. We go to the butt spa.