In the literary world, blurbs are a fraught business. These days they’re an industry standard, and writers and publishers need them to promote their books, but they are, above all else, a favor economy, and lots of people sort of wish they didn’t exist. But no matter your take on the blurb, we all have to admit that the word for them is perfect: a little ugly, a little like a puddle, but juicy, taking up space, defiant and happy to be here. So where did the word come from?
Enjoying magic means welcoming bafflement, committing to feeling dumb. I feel dumb a lot these days. I don’t know when schools will reopen, what work will look like next month, whether my family has had the virus, what I should think or want or do. But after midnight, on my laptop, Guimarães flipped over one named card and then another and another and another and another until each window showed one or more spectators, collectively losing their minds on mute.
I don’t know how he did it. And for the first time in a long time, not knowing felt pretty good.
Houses can be welcoming or forbidding; they might express their owners or oppress them. Sometimes they imprison or haunt or even inhabit their inhabitants. Catherine House does a little of all these things.
Elisabeth Thomas’s debut novel, also called “Catherine House,” is about an exclusive private university, but you might say it’s also about an experiment in social distancing: Here it’s done among one group of students and faculty over a period of three years. The outside world is kept at arm’s length, although, as it turns out, the sickness is inside the house.
God only knows when it began, but I can tell you this: it is never going to end. I don’t mean the pandemic, the origins of which are more or less clear, temporally if not yet biologically, and I don’t mean our great national hunkering-down, which hadn’t even started back on the Groundhog Day it now so resembles. I mean a minor, unexpected, and vexing byproduct of them both: the feel-good chain e-mail, some version of which you have almost certainly received since you’ve been stuck at home. Friends! I know these are trying times, so, in the interest of bringing a little joy into all of our lives, I’m inviting you to join in sharing a beloved poem/recipe/Bible verse/inspiring quote/home workout/elephant joke/photo of yourself in your favorite Renaissance Faire outfit/drawing of a cat in a litter box. This is meant to be FUN!, so please don’t spend too much time on it. It shouldn’t take more than fifty hours of wondering how to graciously decline this request followed by another thirty hours of ignoring it followed by six hours of obsessively refining your recipe for microwave chocolate-chip cheesecake in a mug. When you’re done, simply add your name to the seventh empty slot below, copy and paste this note into a new e-mail, move my name to the third slot above your own, hit “reply all” to send your response to the non-blind-carbon-copied strangers on this note, then forward it to twenty friends you never want to speak to again.
In this superbly articulate cri de coeur, Safina gives us a new way of looking at the natural world that is radically different from our usual anthropocentric perspective. “Becoming Wild” demands that we wake up and realize that we are intrinsically linked to our other-than-human neighbors. We are not alone in loving our families. Having an aesthetic sensibility, both visual and musical, is both shared and can be perceived by many other species while war-prone humans are not the only ones who would generally prefer to live peaceably with one another.
She has a fascination with the eerie, empty city, which is “quiet and beautiful, almost majestic,” as long as you aren’t sick. Watching the sanitation workers stoically going about their tasks fills her with emotion.
At the same time, she writes, “You begin to see things you never imagined humans were capable of.” With hospitals full, the sick wander the streets looking for help. Some of those trapped in Wuhan from elsewhere end up living in tunnels.
There's seed in the feeder
Black oil...sunflower...
They won't eat any other
Snub it, spit it, kick it all over