Twenty-one scientific discoveries – in other words, the year has not been entirely about the plague, even if the headlines might indicate that it has been so. Obviously, vaccine news – both about COVID and malaria – is at the forefront, but there is more. What I find particularly fascinating (and not unrelated to Kennewick Man):
Between 23,000 and 21,000 years ago, a teen ambled across wet sand near the shores of an ancient lake in what is now New Mexico’s White Sands National Park. The fossilized prints from this slightly flat-footed youth are challenging theories of when humans first crossed into the Americas. The prints, described in September in the journal Science, date to a time when scientists think towering glaciers had walled off human passage to the continent from Asia.
Some new; some old. Stories I’ve bookmarked and forgot about…until now, the bizarre lost week between Christmas and New Year’s Day.
Antarctic penguin shows up in New Zealand. They re-released him more or less where they found him, which struck me as ungenerous. Why not give him a little boat or plane trip back home?
The remains of a Catholic priest who died as a prisoner-of-war in Korea were identified earlier this year. Bless his memory. (Thousands turned out for his funeral in September.)
The guy who inspired Joni Mitchell’s “Carey.” This profile confirms my contempt for Baby Boomers/hippies. Seriously, the worst group of people. That said, some of ’em (like Mitchell) were/are crazy-talented.
Finally, a joining together of two of my most beloved things: grammar and Christmas! Enjoy:
I always look for different versions of this, a song that would suit Easter as much as (or maybe more than) Christmas. One I posted in 2015; one in 2018; and there was another version I had put up, with Kathleen Ferrier singing, that has been removed from YouTube, sadly. Below, a singer and musicians from Ghana. This young woman, Francisca Kusi-Ababio, is sublime. What is bittersweet here is that there are people who would see this clip and be bothered that African musicians are performing work by a dead white male who enjoyed the fruits of imperialism and blah blah blah zzzzzzzzzzzz. (That people can fail to see this as glorious – this sharing of cultures – is beyond me.)
My mother was a bolter, to use the UK term. Like Princess Diana’s and Sarah Ferguson’s mothers (and yes, many other kids’ mums), she flew the coop, leaving husband and children. I was 13 when it happened. She had not warned me. I came home from school one day and was informed that she had gone. She did not leave my life, I should add, but the whole thing was handled terribly. Years later, she and my father got back together, but it was not, I think, a romantic reunion. My mother carried enormous guilt and financial worries everywhere and I think returning to her marriage alleviated some of those. At any rate, she left me with my dad. He was, at the time, at the height of his (impressive) drinking and life with him was frightening, often violent, unpredictable and sad. One song he used to listen to during this period, over and over, was Send in the Clowns. Usually the Sinatra version but sometimes the Judy Collins version. It took me years to separate the song from the emotions of those years but it did happen and now I can appreciate both the song and the power music can have on memory. (As powerful as certain smells? More so?) I can also appreciate my parents’ struggles and what the lyrics must have meant to my father.
I give you the Sinatra version because it’s a million times better than any other.
Some people have the gifts of the gods – Sinatra, of course, and, among others, Stephen Sondheim. Another great one from him, now in the spotlight again due to the remake of West Side Story, is this gem. Imagine being able to write lyrics like this when you are only 27. (Or at any age.) I love the mockery of liberal/lefty pieties here. Such wit.
And so many more songs. So much more that he left us.
As Charles McNulty writes: No one can feign shock when a nonagenarian shuffles off his mortal coil, but the magnitude of Sondheim’s death feels seismic. I’ve been called upon to write postmortem appreciations of Arthur Miller, August Wilson and Edward Albee — and only their legacies come close.
This is me, trying to finish another book during lockdown:
The science fiction writer Jon Courtenay Grimwood sees the irony: “It’s weird as all hell. We spent our lives saying if only we could be locked away in a cave then inspiration and deadlines would be no problem and then it happens and it’s a disaster.”
…about my book. The woman writing is the daughter of one of Norman’s university friends.
They [the letters] are amazing. And I had no idea about the poems. They all put my concept of Norman in a completely different light. I had always thought about Norm’s death as so tragic — as an extinguished candle. But that he was able to write what he did, explicitly to reflect upon and articulate his life and his relation to others so fully, makes me feel less the tragedy and more the celebration of a life astonishingly well lived and, in the Socratic sense, well-examined. I was amazed at his ability to write “yet my heart and life are whole” — so beautiful! — and then to follow it with “I hope” — which returns us to grounded life as he lived it, and to the humility that he showed alongside his amazing strength of character. It left me speechless. He lived so well. And the letters to Rigmore are amazing — the love for a sister, but also a sort of fellow artist, wanting her to know the truth without having to experience it all. Alcohol, the comic version, and wolves — those were just great — and how he wanted her to be honest in confronting life while protecting her from it. And that letter to his parents … Not many people, however long they live, ever get to put into words what he was able to write. These words of his, which live on, which you have preserved and offered to the world, really changed my whole picture of what it can mean for a life to be cut short. Too short, yes — but also lived so fully…Whether or not you issue further editions, what you have done in offering these letters to the world is wonderful beyond words. Your book so honors Norman and all the hopes and spirit reflected in all that he wrote — and so many other men (and women) who were part of his story, and beyond it.
On this 80th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, I think back to my time in Japan. There was so much I loved and a few things I didn’t like all that much. One of the latter was the belief of many of my students (Japanese adults) that not only were they (Japanese people) merely victims – not perpetrators – of the war, but that they were the war’s primary victims. Of course, some of them were victims, but they did not see their country as being in the wrong, or as being an aggressor, or as having been the driving force behind the laying waste to at least one continent.
There was much we could not discuss with them – it was not verboten, but it wasn’t worth the tension it caused and it potentially could have given us grief with our bosses, both Japanese and Canadian. The Japanese didn’t seem to have achieved German levels of ownership on the matter. (A post on the Japanese surrender here.) Why discuss such things? Good question, and for the most part I tried to avoid it, but adults love talking politics and, of course, on certain anniversaries it would be a natural topic. This was in the 1990s, but I have friends still in Japan who say it remains a touchy matter.
