Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation by Kyo Maclear
A few days ago – which will be many days ago by the time you read this – I watched robins, red-winged blackbirds, mallards, and a pair of swallows darting through shadows making them difficult to identify. Birds Art Life is a book I’ve read and re-read, in times of difficulty and in times of relative ease. It always brings me comfort.
I have been reading with fascination The Equivalents, by Maggie Doherty. It is the story of a visionary program instituted at Boston’s Radcliffe College in 1960 that was designed to rescue select, few, women of privilege from the drudgery of American housewifery.
Forster (1879-1970) is one of my favorite novelists, and I particularly like Howards End. The film version starring Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins and Helena Bonham-Carter is superb, and it captures some of the subtlety of perception and insight of the novel itself. The same might be said of A Room with a View, also adapted to the screen. Forster’s work shares some similarities with Virginia Woolf’s work, particularly with Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Both novelists are as much concerned with sensibility as with incidents, the building blocks of plot. Though both outlived the Edwardian age—Woolf died in 1941, Forster in 1970—and even though Woolf is commonly spoken of as a modernist, I think there is something Edwardian about both their sensibilities. Both treat emotional states and the shared opinions that typify particular social classes in particular historical periods almost as a painter would do—as colours, tones, atmospheres. Clearly both of them write with something of a poetic feeling.
Except for hip hop or the occasional R&B-inflected jazz, I don’t really listen to much music with vocals. Last year, though, I started listening to the jazz vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant. Her latest album is Mélusine (2023) but I remain mired in and moved by Ghost Song (2022). I don’t just love her voice, its tone and timbre, I also love her intelligent lyricism, her confident pastiches of different musical eras, her jarring dissections of power in intimate relations, her masterful takes on great artists from Gregory Porter to Kate Bush.
Don Quixote!
I have already read it 28 times, in English, French (once), and Spanish. Every time I read it, I dig a little bit deeper and discover a little bit more about the art of narrative and the craft of fiction.
I always assume that everyone has seen the classic cult film Harold and Maude, featuring iconic performances by Ruth Gordon and Bud Cort and a fabulous soundtrack by the young Cat Stevens. But when I mention the film now to my students, often no one in the room has even heard of the movie, let alone watched it. It is a unique and unparalleled love story that is very much of its time and place (California at the start of the 70s—Vietnam, ecology, weed, all manner of cultural and social revolution) but is very
Phil Hall’s new book, The Ash Bell, undoes me. His work makes me read below the below and out the corners of my eyes. Drops me down under understanding, echos of words like backlit other words waving their fronds. I read the word “worship" and see “warship." It's blunt, raw, funny and true. Cumulative. I do not understand, I stand under, happily.
The literary lives of us rural folks can be overly shaped by whatever happened to be available at our local library, or that one random anthology we found in a "free books" pile. I was extremely fortunate to have that anthology be The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, edited by Donald Allen. What a revelation! Kenneth Koch's sense of play, Frank O'Hara's "I do this I do that" poems, the whole New York School in general -- the Beats -- it just blew my head off. I had no idea you could do this stuff.
Though it was only released a month ago as I write this, Kelela’s album Raven has been on constant rotation: whether it’s the summery “On the Run,” the piercingly erotic “Sorbet,” or the emotionally expansive “Enough for Love.” Her fusion of R&B, house, and electronica is like no one else. Unlike a lot of contemporary albums, I tend to listen to Raven from start to finish. It asks you to immerse yourself.
For my birthday a few years ago—August, 2020, just months into the pandemic—my partner Tiina bought me a projector, so we could watch films on our living room wall, and a subscription to the Criterion Channel. I’d always been a film lover, but this put me over the top. Since then I’ve been watching at least four or five old classic movies per week.
