At some point, the impossibility of paying attention to the discrete category “birds” became apparent. There were simply too many relationships determining what I was seeing—verb conjugations instead of nouns. Birds, trees, bugs, and everything else were impossible to extricate from one another not only physically but conceptually. Sometimes I would learn about a relationship that involved many different kinds of organisms that I would never think were associated. For example, a 2016 study showed that woodpeckers’ holes helped disperse fungi throughout the trees, which in turn softened the wood and made it easier for other animals to find homes within the trees.
This context, of course, also included me. I remember going for a walk near my parents’ house once and hearing a scrub jay shrieking in a valley oak tree. It was such a good example of a scrub jay shriek that I was about to get out my phone and record it, when I realized that it was shrieking at me (to go away). As Pauline Oliveros writes in Deep Listening, “When you enter an environment where there are birds, insects or animals, they are listening to you completely. You are received. Your presence may be the difference between life and death for the creatures of the environment. Listening is survival!”
As I have worked with my own gang of eccentrics to build a print magazine, UHF has been an enduring inspiration. It is one of the great parables of egalitarianism, a story of why collectivism will triumph over self-interest. Set aside the humor, which some people will love and some people will hate. The central lesson of UHF, whether Weird Al intended it or not, is that socialism is good.
Of all the germs kids are exposed to on the playground, there’s one they freak out about more than any other: cooties.
The word first appeared during World War I as soldiers’ slang for the painful body lice that infested the trenches. It went mainstream in 1919 when a Chicago company incorporated the pest into the Cootie Game, in which a player maneuvered colored “cootie” capsules across a painted battlefield into a cage. The cooties concept has been evolving ever since.
In her study of European political development over more than 200 years, Berman, a professor of political science at Barnard, shows that the story of democracy in Europe is complicated. The ultimate goal, she believes, is liberal democracy, with elections, respect for the rule of law, individual liberties and minority rights. But that’s a rare, and hard-won, achievement. A step forward is often followed by a step back.
From the hearth, focus:
the earth, hot and still
in its instance.