To Read & To Write

  While perhaps lacking the political urgency of the present in connecting the dots between economic instability, racial injustice, and climate change on a local and global scale, The Way of Coyote: Shared Journeys in the Urban Wilds by Gavin Van Horn (2018) nevertheless brings an overarching, holistic point of view to the contradictory landscape of Chicago, Illinois. Chicago, one of the most well known cities around the globe, albeit notorious, is spared its grimier history and violent present in a sweeping narrative about the interconnections, oppositions, and magnetism between the biological and the industrial, the natural and the technological. Van Horn presents less of an attempt to merge the two oppositions and instead gives more of a push towards a revelation of a greener, lusher, wilder, woodier, more Arcadian world that seeps through Chicago's crevices, cracks, potholes, and crumbled houses, buildings, and towers, reminding the audience that despite the city's push fo...

The title is “H Is For Hawk” because, like in those children’s picture books in which C is for cat and M is for mouse (and on and on), the hawk is an animal. And the underlying question is *what, exactly, is a hawk*? What does it look like, what does it do, where does it come from, how does it live? In her novel “H Is For Hawk” (2014) Helen MacDonald writes about the field of falconry (her profession) and readers learn answers to those questions about hawks. Her narrative answers those questions in different ways. Partly through her uncanny fascination with the famous T.H. White (author of “The Once and Future King” and a lesser known book, “The Goshawk”) and her experiences while reclaiming her life after her father, her guiding light, suddenly passes. It is a goshawk, one of the deadliest kinds of hawk, she connects to afterwards: “There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realize that is not how it will be at...

Reminiscent in style of Ludwig Bemelmans' "Madeline" children's books and an obvious source of inspiration for the Broadway musical "CATS", "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" by T.S. Eliot is a complete riot. I don't know how *practical* the cats presented within these humorous poems really are, but most of them are wizened, playful, and shrewd observers of the world. Eliot's cats are mostly street cats, who are somehow both feral and domesticated at once. Their names (Rumpleteaser and Macavity, to name only two) and doings are very funny, and Edward Gorey's drawings of these cats are even funnier: cats mocking what it is to be human - and - fully clothed. Suffice it to say, "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" is a pleasure to read and would be really fun to read out loud too, even to children, if you don't mind the mention of alcohol and some scheming escapades of mischievous cats, including theft. More ...

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” – Henry David Thoreau As it turns out, Henry David Thoreau, considered by many to be a quintessential American writer, is not as quaint as I may have originally believed. My initial impression of Thoreau was just that – an initial impression - which did not keep me from reading one of his most famous works, “Walden”, even when I came across his more personally disagreeable ideals. The best places to go are places where one does not have to purchase any new clothes, he writes, or the idea that one should maximize (if you will) the concept of minimalism itself. I love clothes as a form of expression as do I love objects (particularly related to artistry), so his ideas seemed *quaint* to me. However, as I started to really contemplate Thoreau’s “Walden”, it became clear that Thoreau actually set a great example in that he came at the world, and the peop...