Margaret Renkl looks like her brother, Billy Renkl. But they are not twins, having been born 18 months apart. She has longer hair and wears glasses. Her new book is called “The Comfort of Crows,” and it was reviewed in yesterday’s NYT by Dina Gachman. Her brother created the cover art for it, as well as 52 original full-color collages that appear within it, one per essay.
Renkl sees things in the natural world that most of us don’t, and is able to express what she sees in words. Her line about water buckets, below, is what drew me to chat about it in Owl Chatter. Here are two paragraphs from Gachman’s review:
All 52 essays are meditations on the changing seasons of the natural world. She writes about growing older, watching her sons move away and coming to terms with the fact that she may have more life behind her than ahead. Paying attention to the living things in her backyard helps her cope with climate change, political strife and cultural upheaval — and she hopes it will help the reader, too.
“The world is burning, and there is no time to put down the water buckets,” Renkl writes in a chapter called “Wild Joy.” “For just an hour, put down the water buckets anyway.”
Here’s what she (and her brother) look like:
Ellin Johnson of Portland OR, wrote this letter (to the NYT) that appeared yesterday:
As a child, Matthew Perry was a strong Canadian junior tennis player. In the early 2000s, he enlisted the help of my son, a teaching pro, to be a hitting partner.
In late 2001 my son died unexpectedly. We had a service for him and invited Matthew to be a reader. Not only did he come and do a lovely job as a reader along with a few others, but after I returned to Portland, he sent a large check “to defray expenses” incurred, a lovely and thoughtful gift.
When Matthew’s sad book recounting his drug and alcohol addictions came out, I wrote him of my concerns for him but praise for his candor.
Our family has never forgotten both the happy connection my son had with Matthew as well as his graciousness in our time of sorrow.
*********
Perry never married. He was engaged to literary manager Molly Hurwitz in 2020, but it ended in 2021.
He also dated actress/model Yasmine Bleeth for a time. That’s her real name: not a typo. What in the world did he see in her?
He went out with Julia Roberts after Yasmine.
His Wikipedia site notes: Perry had a perfectionist and obsessive personality, e.g., spending many hours perfecting his answering machine message.
Beep!
This poem by C.K. Williams from today’s Writer’s Almanac is called “Peace.” The warring couple in it breaks the rule that says, “Never go to bed mad.” But it works out.
We fight for hours, through dinner, through the endless evening, who
even knows now what about,
what could be so dire to have to suffer so for, stuck in one another’s craws
like fishbones,
the cadavers of our argument dissected, flayed, but we go on with it, to
bed, and through the night,
feigning sleep, dreaming sleep, hardly sleeping, so precisely never touch-
ing, back to back,
the blanket bridged across us for the wintry air to tunnel down, to keep
us lifting, turning,
through the angry dark that holds us in its cup of pain, the aching dark,
the weary dark,
then, toward dawn, I can’t help it, though justice won’t I know be served,
I pull her to me,
and with such accurate, graceful deftness she rolls to me that we arrive
embracing our entire lengths.
There’s a new sheriff in town. Well, actually, it’s a new coffeemaker that’s in town. Sam (who is obsessed with coffeemakers) sent it to us as a gift. So far, I’ve taken it out of the box. It’s a little daunting. But I hope to have it up and running by the weekend.
Frank Bruni shared two football quotes in his “For the love of sentences” feature this week:
In WAPO, Rick Reilly put Mike McDaniel, the sunny head coach of the Miami Dolphins, and Bill Belichick, the gloomy head coach of the New England Patriots, side by side: “One is as open as a new Safeway, and the other is as closed up as an old submarine. One will tell you anything you want; the other will hand out information on a need-to-go-screw-yourself basis. One looks like a nerd who got lost on a stadium tour and wound up as head coach. The other looks like an Easter Island statue nursing a grudge.”
And in The Athletic, Jason Lloyd described how Kevin Stefanski, the head coach of the Cleveland Browns, almost — but not quite — continued that pro football team’s magic streak of improbable victories in a game last weekend against the Seattle Seahawks: “He nearly had the lady sawed in half when he hit an artery.”
And, speaking of hitting arteries, — on the medical research front, The Onion reports: Study Finds Drinking Children’s Blood No More Effective Than Regular Blood At Achieving Eternal Life.
If you’ve heard of “Boolean” algebra but have no idea what it means or that it was named for some guy named Boole, welcome to the club. But, then again, I’m the guy who doesn’t know what a logarithm is.
Today is the birthday of George Boole (1815, Lincoln, Lincolnshire, England), the mathematician responsible for Boolean algebra, whose three basic operations of AND, OR and NOT, became the basis of comparing sets of things mathematically. He also composed all-important algebraic identities like: (X or Y) = (Y or X); not (not X) = X; not (X and Y) = (not X) or (not Y), which became the stuff of nightmares for many teenagers. I had no idea the word “not” could be indecipherable.
He also came up with the expression: “That’s Boole-shit!” for ideas with which he strongly disagreed. [No he didn’t.]
Boole was self-taught; the son of a shoe-maker. He was the first math professor at Queens College, in Cork, Ireland. He met Mary Everest there, whom he married. [Editor’s note: Several dreadful jokes on “climbing Everest” have been removed, for obvious reasons. Don’t ask.] They had five daughters. The oldest, Mary Ellen, had four sons, the youngest of whom, Sebastian, invented the jungle gym. The fourth daughter, Lucy, was the first female chemistry professor in England.
Boole was only 49 when he died in Cork, Ireland, falling off a jungle gym.
Special thanks to our incredible photographer Phil and the entire Owl Chatter staff, who work tirelessly, wait — make that tiredly — to crank out this nonsense. This is our 350th post! Kinahora!
See you tomorrow.
The Wellington Files 