Maybe This Year Will Be Better Than the Last

Things the Crows will forgive in 2025

How long do crows hold a grudge? Dr. Marzluff believes he has now answered the question: around 17 years. --If You Think You Can Hold a Grudge, Consider the Crow, New York Times, 10/28/24

While crows still regret the shiny things they invested with Bernie Madoff, we will grudgingly admit that we should have recognized at the time that promised returns were unrealistic and they bear some responsibility for their own financial impropriety.

Crows had heard the Grand Theft Auto IV video game referred to as a “murder simulator,” so several of us pooled together $59.99 to purchase the game on PlayStation.  (We also had to steal a PlayStation and figure out how to assemble ourselves in a way that we could poke many buttons on the controller to make the game work.)  Turns out, it had nothing to do with the social communion of crows but instead was concerned with cartoons dispatching each other at a distance. That, and sexual violence.  Total rip-off, but we’re over it.

The crows have come to accept that the movie Iron Man, which kicked off the Marvel Cinematic Universe and led to the oversaturation of superhero franchises at the expense of adult-oriented comedies, can at least be viewed as a credibility-reset for Robert Downey Jr., who was pretty good in Oppenheimer.

While we crows are not a monolith, many of us felt that candidate Obama had not sufficiently paid his political dues and that all his hopey-changey stuff stole the spotlight from Hiliary Clinton in a way that ultimately influenced the 2016 election.  But, I mean, a lot has gone on since then – how naïve we were then!!!

My fellow crows and I did not appreciate that Paul Krugman received 2008’s Nobel Prize in Economics. Crow Fourth-Branch from the Top on That Weird Tree on the Southwest Corner of Yosemite had done excellent work that year in demonstrating beneficial resource sharing with wolves, but its work was entirely overlooked by the Nobel Committee in favor of Krugman’s BS about determinants of trade or whatever.  But you know what? That isn’t Krugman’s fault.  He's alright.  Good manners, nice beard.  Sometimes we crows get to feeling like success is a zero sum game, y'know? Krugman's success does not mean we failed.  And anyway, we've been pointing our resentment in the wrong direction -- it's the Nobel Committee who have done us dirty, right?  Right?

Cameron Crowe has been separated from his wife, Nancy Wilson of the band Heart, for nearly 17 years now, and he can now admit that maybe he bears most of the blame there.  Maybe.

Russell Crowe is nearly ready to return to the Melbourne combined KFC-Taco Bell that he once claimed he’d never return to, following extreme gastric distress in February 2008.

And you? Consider that your transgression today, however small, won't be forgiven by the crows until this date in 2042.  By that time, we crows will have come to terms with so many other things -- the final season of Game of Thrones, the time they were passed over for a promotion, even Joe Biden's refusal to remove himself from consideration for re-election until far too late in 2024.  But when that day comes -- this very day some seventeen years hence -- we will settle on the power lines visible from your back window and our inscrutable dark monocular eyes will settle on you (one side or the other, as we do). Given time, and perhaps a soft wind in the right direction, we will caw out to you in a spirit of charity, reconciliation, and grace.  See you then.

I've Got Calling Cards From 20 Years Ago

 Sorry -- I stepped away for the better part of 9 years. During my time away, my kids entered middle school and exited high school, the pandemic happened, I went through treatment for cancer, there were three seasons of The White Lotus, my dad died, and there was all kinds of mess about the presidency.  (It's astonishing to me that the kids pictured in the banner are 19 years old now.)  Anyway... I came to kind of miss this online book review / photo album / humor 'zine / diary, all of which are really -- in the absence of any audience -- letters to my future self.

Here are some notes on some of the best books I've read in the last decade:

Red Rabbit, Alex Grecian. There's an excitement and an energy to works of art that muddles up genres and mixes them together. It's an act of creation that can produce great results (Hamilton, Paul's Boutique, Black Mirror), but also carries a degree of risk: when you empty all the Play-Doh blobs out of color-topped pots and mash them together, you get a psychedelic swirl that very quickly -- under continued mashing and kneading -- becomes a lifeless gray nothing.  Or: you pull the cardboard dividers in the decorative holiday popcorn tin so that you can combine the butter popcorn with the cheese and the caramel corn, but then you regret that there's no returning to their original pure states.  Anyway, this book is like the Magnificent Seven-ish stagecoach Western except with a demon and ghosts and an actual witch, which might sound like a butter/cheese/caramel mélange but is weird, sometimes gory, always compelling and terrific. The book's blurb calls this "folk horror," so go figure.

Nicked, M.T. Anderson. I was so taken with Anderson's "The Pox Party (The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation)" in 2006 that I've read everything since, no matter the genre or format or intended audience.  "Nicked" is billed as Anderson's first novel for adults -- but there's no way you can convince me that his biography of Shostakovich or his dystopic novel about the lure of social media feeds aren't as adult as any book comes.  Here's a book about an 11th century monk seeking the bones of the historical (and pre-Santa) St. Nicholas, which are said to exude a kind of healing sap.  Delightfully, it also includes the bizarrely accurate-to-the-Middle-Ages dog-headed cynocephalics. I read this in a couple of sittings, but I wish I'd savored it more.  I wish I was reading it still.

The Blacktongue Thief, Christopher Buehlman. A plot recap would likely come off as a standard high-fantasy quest novel, but the narrator's sly humor and sarcasm makes this stand out as great fun.  This is world in the aftermath of vicious war, with hints of the history and cultures it has ravaged, and its characters have a gallows wit that will have you rooting for them.  Buehlman's follow-up (a prequel), The Daughter's War is equally strong, if somewhat more brutal and tragic.

The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead.  Worth a second Pulitzer, even better than The Underground Railroad.  It's a short and stark historically rooted novel concerning a mid-century Florida reform school but stays with me -- its final moments knocked the breath out of me.

These Truths: A History of the United States, Jill Lepore. Lepore is my favorite historian and essayist.  This is a one-volume 960-page history of the American experiment, and there may still be time to read it before the experiment ends.  Lepore touches on what's great and what's troubling about our history, with a particular sensitivity towards vulnerable populations that probably didn't factor into the history textbooks that it could compete with.  Although it wouldn't have gotten to the troubles of 2016 and afterwards, I wish it had come out when my boys were younger.  In 2015, when I was still reading to them every night, I read aloud James West Davidson's "A Little History of the United States" from Yale University Press, which was quite good -- but Lepore is even better, with a deep humanist heart.

Slow Horses (and everything else), Mick Herron.  After watching the first half of the first episode of the "Slow Horses" Apple+ series (and a New Yorker profile of Herron by Lepore), I picked up the book it was based on and ripped through it.  By the time my wife and I had watched all 8 episodes of the first season, I'd read 7 books in the series, followed by the 8th when it arrived.  A 9th book is on the way this summer; Herron's also published related novellas and tangential novels set in the London spy world he's created.  These books zip along, they zig when you expect a zag, and both the characters and their dialog are crisp and acerbic.  Always surprising and always excellent, Herron quickly joined the "I don't want to miss anything he writes" list.

Dinner, Melissa Clark.  I always enjoyed cooking, but I don't think I got really skilled at cooking until I started following Melissa Clark. I make dinner for my family most nights, and easily half of the recipes I've followed in the last five years have been Clark's.  Only one of them had results that couldn't be described as delicious, and I think that had more to do with the salmon I used than the recipe that called for it.  There's a fair number of meatless recipes in Clark's cookbooks, but if you're a carnivore, she'll probably make you a convert for bone-in chicken thighs. Dinner is a great place to start, but I also recommend checking out "Dinner In One," which minimizes dishes you'll need to wash, and her two books focusing around Instant Pots.  (Other excellent cookbooks I go to often: "Easy Weeknight Dinners" from Emily Weinstein and New York Times Cooking, Deb Perelman's "Smitten Kitchen," Caroline Chambers' "What to Cook When You Don't Feel Like Cooking," and for vegan or vegetarian Asian meals, Meera Sodha's "East." I also aspire to, one day, read the complete "Joy of Cooking" cover-to-cover -- there's a lot of lore and instruction in that text, and I'm certain it will bear out Talmudic study.)

Washington Black, Esi Edugyan.  A cousin to Anderson's Octavian Nothing, or a kind of mash-up of Whitehead's Underground Railroad and a Jules Verne-ian adventure novel, ranging across the American continent from the Carribean to the Canadian north.

Island of Point Nemo, Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès. A surreal and very French novel that harkens back to the role of lectors in cigar factories, who read aloud from novels (like Jules Verne's) to keep the workers focused and motivated.  It's almost as if those novels swirled into each other like so many colors of Play-Doh and recombined into this book -- in which a French inspector and a Holmesian detective race around the world among opulent passenger trains, sea monsters, guerilla warfare, and a bio-domed circus. Or maybe this is the output of an eReader affected by a virus that jumbles together classic texts from Poe and Lovecraft and Melville -- plus one really great brick joke.  It's madness and I loved it.

Note on all of the above: Your satisfaction may vary. Please mentally adjust for recency bias, as well as the significant need (2016-present) for escapism.

More -- one hopes -- to come.