Nibbles (11/6/17)

A few years ago, my husband and I had the great pleasure of adopting a trio of rat siblings whom we named Geddy, Alex, and Pratt-rat after the best of all possible bands. The best things about owning a trio of rats is watching them eat. A rat with a spaghetti noodle? Solid entertainment! I even made them pumpkin muffins on their birthday. In honor of my trio (heart-breakingly short-lived as rodents are) I've decided to name these small posts "nibbles." And wherever the souls of rats go, I hope they have many yogurt treats there!

So why do I need a "nibbles" post? Well, I'm reading a lot of books at once, so I'm reading too slowly for a full post. But I've been in school too long as both professor and teacher to read aimlessly, so I'm given to jotting down observations and questions - and they may as well have some final destination!

Reading The Line of Beauty by Richard Pini I am struck - as I usually am in these cases - by the ability of an individual to talk frankly about the good and the bad of their family lives, to find catharsis in recounting personal history. I am not that type of writer at all and it amazes me that people can make such beautiful art out of remembered pain.

This bejeweled skeleton certainly represents the "morbid elegance" ascribed to ossuaries in Empire of Death by Paul Koudonuaris! I was drawn in by the notion that people once held rather literal dialogues with the dead, asking them for advice, and that urban planning was, at one time, concerned with bodies and with clarifying the boundaries between the dead and the living, sequestering everyday life from the natural processes of death and dying.

I read Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale almost every year to be struck down by the beauty of its language. This time around I paused on the Baymen's decision that one "must know bitterness in order to survive the city." I remembered crossing one of the bridges into New York City and found myself wondering what my heart carried in it as the towers gleamed silver and green?

In Wages of Destruction Adam Tooze describes the impact of war on growth and the economy. I had previously understood that there was an economic aspect to the Second World War but I had never thought about how losing a war (WWI) affected growth. I had never considered the impact of reparations and rebuilding and how it might shape one's response to someone who promised a change. There's a lesson there for my own rural, Appalachian community that has been promised a (impossible) renewal of coal...

 I read natural history like Nick Jans' Wolf Called Romeo slowly these days because the endings are often unhappy ones. In this early part of the book I've learned that the dark coloring seen in the wolf here is actually a result of breeding between wolves and dogs and rarely appears in European wolves. Who knew?

In the same vein, I am reading The Heart of a Lion where the natural impulse of young male lions to travel and establish territory is described by the author as "a suicide quest" that often ends in results like those pictured here.

In class, we have been reading Jim Corbett's Man-eaters of Kumaon and I found myself thinking of his relationship with the Indian villagers. He clearly feels compassion for those who have lost a family member; he even lets them "help" with the hunting as a way of getting revenge. But he clearly doesn't think of them as equal members of the British Empire. They are subjects of the crown... but are not subjects all at once.

Another oft-read title, Middlemarch got my attention with the line: "a woman's need to rule beneficently by making joy of another soul." This sounds complimentary, but I'm not entirely sure that we should aspire to rule - even through compassion!



More nibbles soon!