In a Cynical World, Birds Are My Happy Place

I was born a skeptic squinting up at cynicism. In the upside-down America of 2018, I’m a skeptic dangling over the chasm of cynicism, willing myself to hang on a little longer. But you know what makes me happy in that immediate, blank-out-everything-else, grin-with-pure-joy kind of way?

Birds.

Well, not just birds. Any non-human species visiting my little slice of paved-over suburbia is bound to get a gleeful “ooh, look!” out of me. The rabbit committee that meets every dawn and dusk outside the vegetable garden gate. The squirrel that, in this summer drought, has taken to straddling our little patio fountain like a drinking fountain, and darting off again when he’s had his fill. The chipmunk who lives under the back step, stepping out to slick back his ears with tongue-dampened paws and chirp plaintively for his lover. I treed a young raccoon one evening; she’s wasn’t aggressive, just curious and hungry. Happily, the monarchs have been frequent this year.

It’s like a never-ending episode of Wild Kingdom over here. And they’re all my friends.

But more than all the others, it’s the birds that delight and comfort me.

What is it about putting out a block of suet, a column of mixed seed, a globe of sugar water, and then sitting back to watch the avian pride parade, a riot of color and joy, swooping in, whooping it up, and leaving feathers in their wake?

Bird visitations are better than gifts. I’d rather catch a little buddy dipping into the blue basin of my bird bath than get $100 in the mail.

The goldfinches are among the most social species in my neighborhood. Sometimes just a single, radiant male drops by for a snack. But often it’s a throuple sharing a longer meal. They squeak up-turned questions at me as they pluck seeds from the coneflower heads. Did you know finches can be taught to speak? I hear that unless you’ve raised them by hand, they’re not likely to use your words, but I still respond with a high-low “hello” each time they make eye contact with me. Maybe someday we’ll get beyond a surface conversation.

I do commune with the chickadees, though. They’re quick to tap at the window and let me know if the feeder is running low. And they keep up a running commentary on everyone else’s behavior.

I hear the white-breasted nuthatches in the tree cover before I see them. Those staccato beeps clear traffic just long enough to snatch a seed from the feeder and dash back to their preferred seed-cracking branch.

The rose-breasted grosbeak doesn’t make a sound, just waits majestically for a turn at the suet.

Are ducks smart? The pair of Mallards that nested in my ornamental grasses near the alley weren’t, but with the neighborhood watch on the job, their brood made it safely out of the nest. And for a few weeks we all got to enjoy the sight of Mr. and Mrs. Mallard sharing a short sunset flight together every evening.

The Eastern bluebird box was a pipedream, since the post I put it on isn’t meadow-adjacent. But the wrens found it to their liking, which is fine by me since they make daily rent payments in virtuosic singing.

Sparrows come in flocks of three or five or nine—always an odd number. Do they even know what it means to be alone?

The cardinals come in pairs, except for a brief window in the late spring when they sometimes bring a reluctant junior, his crest awkwardly too big for his body like a teenager’s nose.

And time just stops if the ruby-throated hummingbird comes to rest long enough for me to make out the scarlet sequins on her collar.

The ratio of work to reward is ridiculously low when it comes to welcoming nature to the backyard.

I don’t have much control over global politics or the fires burning through my beloved Glacier National Park. I vote. Protest. Email my senators. The skeptic in me reminds me not to get my hopes up while I do my small part to effect change.

But then I go out to the patio and lose myself watching birds.

Featured Photo Credit: Brandon Withrow

18. December 2019 by Mindy
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Vulnerable and Dangerous: A Review of On Immunity

For the last several years I’ve taken a flu shot, for the simple reason that I don’t want to get the flu. But I hadn’t given much thought to the ethical choice that I was making for myself and for others who would encounter me during the flu season, until I read Eula Biss’s provocatively welcoming On Immunity.

The book has been widely reviewed, and Biss rightly praised for her careful handling of the scientific literature and medical history, her creative readings of Voltaire and the novel Dracula, and her imminently empathetic approach, all of which I second. There’s not a lot to say about the book that hasn’t already been said elsewhere, except what I’ve gained personally from the reading.

What I find most interesting about On Immunity is the author’s own story, the way an unexpected situation led her to dig into the science and the history and the philosophy, ultimately leading her to change her own mind about vaccination. She doesn’t frame the book around her story—it’s more of a series of tightly-related essays—but flashes of her story are revealed in her reflections, and they imbue her conclusions with a winsomeness not found in many discussions on this topic.

Biss is a middle-class American mom, with friends of the vaccinating and non-vaccinating kind, a mom with the relative good fortune of having some time and resources to devote to pondering the purity of her water, her air, and the toys in her playroom. Before the birth of her son, she planned to exercise her right to forego the standard vaccination schedule, for many of the reasons shared by other non-vaccinating parents. But complications during his birth required her to receive a blood transfusion, which meant that by the time she put him to her breast for the first time, her cells were already no longer their own.

But had they ever been?

This realization that her breast milk, while produced by her body, was being aided in this production by the foreign material she had received from an unknown donor, pushed her to start vetting some of her assumptions about what was in and out of her control, not just as a mom but as a human being.

“Our breast milk, it turns out, is as polluted as our environment at large,” she writes. She quotes from a report that “if human milk were sold at the local Piggly Wiggly, some stock would exceed federal food-safety levels for DDT residues and PCBs.”

These facts are not an argument for or against breastfeeding (or vaccinating, for that matter) but a simple, irrefutable statement that “natural” and “pure” are not synonymous, as she once thought they were. The notion that we are pure at birth—or that our state at birth is even somehow preferable to maintain—may be a lovely idea, but it’s a fallacy.

We are no cleaner, even at birth, than our environment at large. We are all already polluted. We have more microorganisms in our guts than we have cells in our bodies—we are crawling with bacteria and we are full of chemicals. We are, in other words, continuous with everything here on earth. Including, and especially, each other.

It’s this continuity between bodies—this permeable state that we think of as a border that is anything but—that draws out the incredibly important ethical problems of vaccination.

Thanks to today’s Ebola-saturated media, we’re well aware of how vulnerable we are, but many of us in the so-called first world forget that we are also, as Biss writes, “just by virtue of having bodies, dangerous.” We’re vulnerable and dangerous. Applying this to myself is uncomfortable, but Biss challenges me to do it.

When I get a flu shot to protect myself against the flu, I’m thinking of myself from a position of vulnerability: because I come in contact with people who might have the flu, I am susceptible to getting the flu, and therefore must protect myself from it. But I’m not thinking of myself from a position of contagion: that when I come into contact with people, I unknowingly might be carrying the flu to them. This realization puts the responsibility on me, because the person to whom I transmit the virus may have taken a precaution (a flu shot), may have opted not to take a precaution (their choice), or may have impaired immunity (not their choice) who could suffer greatly as a result of my choice. This is sobering.

While Biss digs into a number of studies and reports that have played significant roles in the internet debates and celebrity shouting matches, she makes it clear that the conversation should not be about taking one “side” over another. Instead, it should be an agreement between all parties to choose to understand the complexity of our relationships to others and our environment. And then take these relationships seriously.

“Debates over vaccination,” she says, “are often cast as debates over the integrity of science, though they could just as easily be understood as conversations about power.” And herein lies the heart of the matter.

The power of fear: “We do not tend to be afraid of the things that are most likely to harm us” (like the cars and bicycles we ride and the alcohol we drink and how much sitting we do), but paranoia is a contagion that “knows some things well and others poorly.”

The power of government: “We resist vaccination in part because we want to rule ourselves.” But biology is not a democracy.

The power of information: It’s a reality of the human condition that we tend to seek out sources that will “lend false credibility to an idea that we want to believe for other reasons.”

The power of community: “Immunity is a public space. And it can be occupied by those who choose not to carry immunity.”

Ultimately, it’s about the power of conscience.

One of the mercies of immunity produced by vaccination is that a small number of people can forgo vaccination without putting themselves or others at greatly increased risk. But the exact number of people this might be—the threshold at which herd immunity is lost and the risk of disease rises dramatically for both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated—varies depending on the disease and the vaccine and the population in question. We know the threshold, in many cases, only after we’ve exceeded it. And so this puts the conscientious objector in the precarious position of potentially contributing to an epidemic. Here we may suffer what economists call moral hazard, a tendency to take unwise risks when we are protected by insurance. Our laws allow for some people to exempt themselves from vaccination, for reasons medical or religious or philosophical. But deciding for ourselves whether we ought to be among that number is indeed a matter of conscience.

For me, the significance of Biss’s contribution to the conversation is the clarity with which she knocks down illusions of independence and raises the moral questions of vaccination: If you’re in a position to put yourself (or your children) before the rest of your community, should you? Would you make the same choice if you were extremely poor? Had a compromised immune system? Had no access to health care?

In the end, Biss decides for herself that it is morally wrong to put the burden of inoculation on others, and has her son vaccinated. Many of Biss’s friends tell her they can’t in good conscience do the same. But when she asks one friend how she would feel if her non-vaccinated child led to another child’s death, her friend admits she’s never thought about that. Biss doesn’t try to change her friend’s mind, but she does insist how vital it is for this woman to thoughtfully consider the question and come to an answer that can she can live with.

This book is as much for people who don’t understand why a parent might choose not to vaccinate a child as it is for parents who are not vaccinating their kids. It’s slim but weighty, thoughtful but not sentimental. It forced me, as much as I like to think of myself as a loner, to grapple with what it means to be simultaneously vulnerable and dangerous, one small part of a larger organism with which I am, for better or worse, interdependent.

18. December 2019 by Mindy
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Chance Encounters: A Review of The Last Nude

Paris in the Jazz Age. A backdrop to art, literature, fashion, music, sparkling cocktails, catty society, public sexuality, political intrigue, and parties so lavish that the famous guests compete to be the entertainment. Rafaela Fano, American and seventeen, arrives in Paris not of her own will. But soon she is in love. The light, the architecture, the dresses—it’s thrillingly more than she anticipated when she was forcibly shipped off to marry a now-lost cousin. Doing what she must to stay and survive, she accepts anonymity in the glittering city—until she becomes the most famous model of artist Tamara de Lempicka.

The Last Nude, Ellis Avery’s second novel, re-imagines the relationship between the celebrated Art Deco artist and her most inspiring muse. Part One, and the bulk of the novel, is told from Rafaela’s point of view, sixteen years after they meet. She recounts their chance connection, Tamara’s offer to earn a little money modeling for her, the understated elegance of her apartment, the artistic discipline and brilliance she observes, and her own shock at being sexually aroused by this mysterious, self-possessed woman. Their passion is transferred to the canvas, where Tamara’s paintings of Rafaela win her recognition and a line of collectors. But their expectations are not shared. Rafaela recognizes, looking back, the naïveté of her youth, the clarifying lessons of first love and the seeds of the confidence she will live by later.

Part Two, much shorter and darker than the first, is Tamara’s story. It is decades later, and in her final days of decline she reflects on her achievements and her lost relationships. The structure is unusual; the shift in perspective is abrupt, and Rafaela’s story as told in the middle distance already feels complete. But then Tamara’s wandering memories—like light from an unexpected angle—reveal significant later encounters that changed the story, if her memory and her willful revisions can be trusted.

Avery’s writing is strikingly simple, spare sentences vibrating with the language of color and texture, occasionally flecked with French. The story is fiction, erotica, history. A handful of settings—Rafaela’s flat, Tamara’s apartment, an art gallery, a bridge on the Seine—evoke the intimacy of a stage. The cultural icons of the 1920s walk on and off; a few simply are mentioned in the wings. Some scenes are quiet tableaus, accompanied only by the flick of a paintbrush or the turn of a page, while others unfurl cinematically in silk and peacock feathers.

The Last Nude is a love story between two women, between an artist and her muse, between an artist’s skill and her admirers, and between a vivacious city at the end of era and her most memorable residents. It asks the unanswerable questions: What is the elusive quality that makes a painting art? How can a person’s essence be so completely depicted by another? How do the events of our past add up to a life? How do the hurts of our youth become sweet memories of age? And who would we be if we had never met the other?

04. May 2018 by Mindy
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Darkness is Cheap: A Review of Winter

The daffodils are starting to emerge in Northwest Ohio, but I know not to let them fool me. It’s still cold, still mostly gray skies, still swaths of road salt in my wheel wells. Trump is still president, Brexit is still proceeding, and assault weapons are still mowing down schoolchildren. I want to see the #neveragain and the #metoo movements—like those eager daffodils—as harbingers of an awakening. But it’s still winter and “darkness is cheap,” as Ali Smith attributes to Charles Dickens in the epigraph of her latest novel.

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15. March 2018 by Mindy
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Women’s March Week: The Life Obscured: A Review of Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin

What would it mean to write the history of an age not only from what has been saved but also from what has been lost? What would it mean to write a history concerned not only with the lives of the famous but also with the lives of the obscure?

These are the questions that led Harvard historian Jill Lepore to dig into the personal history of Jane Franklin, sister of the great statesman. What she found is that while Ben was establishing a free press, fostering a revolution, and experimenting and inventing, Jane was raising (or burying) 12 children and a host of grandchildren, taking in boarders and sewing to pay off her husband’s debts, and working her extended family connections to help children and grandchildren get set up in trades. And for decades, it was the letters they wrote to each other that contained “Benny’s and Jenny’s” truest affections and opinions.

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24. January 2018 by Mindy
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