Motherhood: The Second Child

By: | May 12, 2023

Back in 2017, I wrote a post debating whether I should have a second child. I almost didn’t. We tried and tried. We even went to a fertility clinic. And then we decided it probably wasn’t meant to be. I was already 40. “Let’s give it two more months and then call it quits,” I told my husband.  

And then there it was, the plus sign. I looked at it with mistrust. This had happened before. A plus and then, nothing. I went about my life. But the plus didn’t fade. The baby was real and (fuck!) a boy.

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“People need to know we’re here.” A Conversation with Jennifer Lunden

By: | May 10, 2023
A beam of light falls on an unmade bed in a dark room.

Jennifer Lunden is the author of the astounding new book American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life. She’s also a good friend. This is Part 1 of our conversation about work, exhaustion, and writing while ill.

Kate: I know American Breakdown has been a very long time in the making. When did you start writing this book?

Lunden: In some ways, it started when I found a biography of Alice James in a used bookstore in 1994. Alice was the sister of the writer Henry James and the psychologist William James, and she was, most of her life, bedridden with an illness that felt very similar to the one that I was dealing with. Hers was called neurasthenia; I had been diagnosed with what we now call myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Reading that book was the seed, because I felt like I’d found my soulmate or kindred spirit, this person who completely understood in an embodied way what it was like to be as sick as I was.

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Bring the World to Its Senses

By: | May 8, 2023

Under a spring sky in the high desert of Western Colorado, we had a little gathering at our house. My wife’s childhood friend, awarded author and translator of Lithuanian poetry Laima Vince, stood on our wooden deck discussing a Jewish poet who was executed along with her family at the age of 19 in 1941 outside of the small Lithuanian town where they lived. Laima translated the young woman’s work into a beautiful book, including reproductions of journal pages revealing a swooning love life complete with teenage heartbreak, ink on two of the pages dotted with three drops of tears.

Matilda Olkinaitė’s journals and poems were hidden in a church and hardly seen by anyone until they were unpacked from a dresser and shown to Laima in 2017. Otherwise, they would have easily disappeared, and the young poet’s name would be lost. As war rose around her, the poems became dark with premonitions as, Laima wrote, “she wished she could bring the world back to its senses.” Less than a year before she was murdered and buried in an unmarked weedy peat bog, Matilda wrote:

It is so difficult for me. I wish I could utter that one word.

Just one word for the crowds and for the nations.

The processions would pause. Time would come to a halt.

All the generations would stop and listen.

Several months ago, my wife Daiva and I traveled to her family’s homeland in Lithuania, where she’s been returning since she was a teenager when the country was still under Soviet occupation. As we drove the countryside we came on sign after sign indicating a tragedy had happened in one place or another, mass graves where a village burned to the ground, murders unspeakable, concrete bunkers old enough to have become part of the landscape. The numbers of the dead at each site range far and wide; 105, 49, 50,000.

Daiva took me down a gravel road puddled with rain to a place she’d visited before, a haunting and beautiful scene for her. We parked and walked up a hill in birch trees and damp grass where 40-some residents of the massacred village of Ablinga are memorialized. They were killed by Nazis in World War II, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, sisters, brothers. What was left of them and their village was burned. Trees have been carved into remembrances, and walking through their renderings I felt crushed. In one wooden trunk, a father held his arms around a mother who held onto their two daughters, the youngest turned to face inward as if hiding from something. She had two braids tied with ribbons down her back, now cracked where the wood had split from age. The father’s hands, oversized, as if they could hold off anything, were placed so they made contact with everyone in the family. It was impossible not to cry. 

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Podcasting

By: | May 5, 2023

Freshly back from my annual pilgrimage to TED, I’m taking stock of the brain-fizzing input that came my way all week in Vancouver. Each year has its own balance of technology, entertainment and design, and this year all three had a distinctly artificial intelligence flavor. The conference is built on ‘ideas worth spreading’, but the one that seems to be sticking with me now is not one of the talks, per se, but an idea for a future TED talk: one delivered by an animal.

You see, TED used to have an annual prize of a million dollars given to one person – Bill Clinton, say, for his health infrastructure project in Rwanda. This year, they gave away one billion dollars to ten people, each a leader of what it dubs an Audacious Project. It’s money donated by the usual suspects, the Gates Foundation, MacKenzie Scott, and others. And one of those Audacious Projects is, I kid you not, honest-to-goodness translating whales.

I talked to the leader of Project CETI (the Cetacean Translation Initiative), a marine biologist who described to me his sperm whale subjects. They spend a few minutes at the surface before they dive down to the depths of the ocean and break all of his listening equipment for hours. Through natural language processing (yes, more AI) his team has been able to decipher the phonetic alphabet of these whales’ combinatorial language – something only humans had been thought to possess. A few minutes into their time at the surface, he says, these whale pods start chatting amongst themselves about diving. That’s the first concept his analysis was able to identify in the language. And then, after a distinctive series of clicks, they all dive together.

It would be great to hear a whale’s ideas on the TED stage one day soon, even if there are ethical questions around whether we should be acting like Amy Adams in Arrival, communicating back to animals in their own languages and disrupting them in yet another way. But a TED friend pointed out that it would actually be a lot easier to train an AI model to converse with those animals directly, in the same way GPT-4 interacts with us. Except that we would then understand neither the AI nor the whales. And that, to me, would feel like a more fitting gift.

A Handful of Frog

By: | May 3, 2023

I was in Borneo last fall, in a very wild place called Gunung Palung National Park, following orangutans and macaques and leaf monkeys, oh my. Being around primates is always very exciting, and nobody threw poop, which was a nice change from some primate-viewing experiences I’ve had.

And yet, even considering the droopy-cheeked orange apes, this frog might have been my favorite thing. I mean, look at her! [I’m guessing she was a she because the shes are bigger than the hes and she was pretty big.] Such a giant frog in the hand feels amazing. Check out her webbed feet and those front toes with the knobs on the end! And get this: She could fly.

Locals told me she was a Wallace’s flying frog (named for biologist Alfred Russell Wallace, who is said to have collected the first specimen, though apparently a Chinese laborer actually found the frog so really that laborer should get all the credit, but that’s not how these things go). I sat on a log for quite a while waiting for her to fling herself from one tree to another, legs spread and wacky feet splayed. When she finally obliged, it was a glorious sight, though it was less flight than a sort of awkward gliding or parachuting, with a gentle but still downward trajectory. Gravity and everything.

Then, poked by a student, she flew again, this time landing FULLY ON MY FACE. A perfect cartoon SPLAT, that was. Unfortunately, nobody got a picture, and I wasn’t quick enough for a selfie. Such a missed opportunity.

There’s an illustration of this kind of frog that’s really great, but I don’t know if I need permission to include it here. So, here’s a link to it. Revel in its adorableness before the paywall pops up.

Happily, these particular rainforest frogs seem to be hanging in there; they’re considered “of least concern” by the IUCN, whose list of endangered and threatened species tends toward bad news.

There were other incredibly lovable frogs in the park, and I might share them in another post later. For now, here’s my girl once again.



A Neighbor’s Shrub, or The Passage of Time

By: | May 1, 2023
dirt road, shrubbery
My neighbor’s shrub looks nothing like this random vegetation in England

The other night I was on a walk and a shrub attacked me. Not an attack, really. We were on the sidewalk and it was claiming part of the airspace above. Of the two of us humans on the walk, I was on the shrub’s side, and the shrub and I had a temporary encounter in the same space. Its leafy branch tips plucked at my hair and my sleeve.

My companion commented on its aggression. I expressed surprise that the shrubs had gotten so big. I’ve been by them many times over the years, in multiple directions; walking by on the sidewalk in both directions, and also passing through the gap in the middle to pick figs or drop off baked goods or attend an art class. The shrubs used to be small. Now they’re taller than me.

I had a similar thought the other day, walking down the street toward the local grocery store, seeing a woman carrying her toddler, and thinking – the kids who were that size when I moved here, who I used to see being carried by their moms – how old are they now? They are seniors in high school. They’re driving. They’re making decisions about what college to go to.

When I was walking by those kids, at that age, my current age minus 15, I was working at a job that I hated and I was probably singing in way too many choirs and I still owned a car. In fact, I probably wasn’t even walking by those kids most of the time; I was probably driving.

I only sing in one or two choirs now and my job is ok, and I walk way more than I drive.

Photo: Dave Thompson, Wikimedia Commons

Penspective: Looking up

By: | April 28, 2023

This post ran a few springs ago, in appreciation and imitation of Craig’s ‘penspective’ series, but with less effective photography. Spring seems like a wonderful time for cloud-spotting here. Last week, there was an amazing lenticular cloud in the shape of a cigar. I didn’t have my pen with me, but I can still remember it floating there, the edges turning pink as the sun began to set.

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I saw these clouds in November and it has taken me six months to figure out how to upload the photo. But I’m glad, in a way, because I have a new perspective on clouds. (I am not sure that I have a new perspective on pens: the Pilot Precise V5 is still my favorite.)

Earlier this spring, I found out about The Cloud Collector’s Handbook, a guide to cloud types that also includes points for spotting various clouds and a scorecard. The book is delightful—it has approachable descriptions of the science behind how different cloud types form, and it also gives you 20 bonus points for a Brocken spectre and explains the rainbow-ringed mountaintop glory like this: “The perspective can make the legs of your shadow flare out so, what with the multicolored halo, it looks like a ghost from the 1970s.”

I looked around for more information about the book’s author, Gavin Pretor-Pinney, and found an excellent story about him and the Cloud Appreciation Society, which he founded somewhat by accident in 2004. (If you are tired of reading things online and need to go do the dishes, there’s also an audio version of the story.)

Now, using this book, I think I can figure out what kinds of clouds these are. Because the clouds make that small, wave-like pattern, they’re called undulatus and created by interacting air currents. And even though it’s not a very good photo, the pen helps. It can be difficult to tell the more common Altocumulus (mid-level clouds) from the higher Cirrocumulus, which are made primarily of ice crystals. Pretor-Pinney says that you can distinguish the two by holding out a finger (or, in my case, a pen) at arm’s length—if the cloudlets are no larger than a finger width, they are likely Cirrocumulus.

The “rare and fleeting” Cirrocumulus is worth 40 points, while the Altocumulus is 30. Points are at stake here, my friends. The wavy variety of either cloud, the undulatus, is 20 points. So I could have 70 points worth of clouds in this very small collection!

I know, I know, the points don’t really mean anything, it’s the remembering to look up. As Pretor-Pinney writes about the undulatus, “Their presence is a reminder, to any who might forget, that the atmosphere around us is just as much an ocean as is the sea below.”

Redux: Total Immersion

By: | April 26, 2023
IMG_0117

How could it happen? Was it the wrath of God or the malice of Poland? Was the crew drunk or was the Vasa wrongly built? The town was alive with rumours.

I’ll bet it was. On August 10, 1628, the warship Vasa—the pride of Sweden, the talk of Stockholm—set sail on its maiden voyage. It didn’t even get out of the harbor. The Vasa plugged along for 1300 yards, or about 4/5 of a mile, and then ran smack into a viciously gentle breeze, after which it toppled over and sank.

Divers managed to salvage some cannons, but otherwise the Vasa lay at the bottom of the harbor until it was rediscovered in the 1950s and raised in 1961. To say that today it is the centerpiece of the Vasamuseet, a museum on the harbor in Stockholm, is an understatement. The ship—226 feet in length, 38 feet at its maximum width—certainly does dominate the vast modernist structure. But as I made my way around the museum this past August, I couldn’t help thinking that something was odd here. The experience was unlike any I’ve had in a museum. And then, as I stood before a life-size sculpture of two women talking, and as I read in the explanatory plaque on a nearby wall that the “town was alive with rumours,” I realized what distinguishes the museum.

It’s not that its subject is a ship. It’s that its subject is a thing.

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