Kate: The main thing I took away from your early advice to me about book writing was “buy yourself as much time as you possibly can, because you’re going to need it.” You recommended that sick and disabled writers look for agents who already represent sick and disabled authors, because you need somebody who understands that this process will take a long time.
L: Definitely. I know one writer with a chronic illness who was able to get a clause in her contract that if she wasn’t able to deliver the book on time, they’d give her more time without dropping the book. I would recommend that any writer try to negotiate that clause into the contract. Not only because you might need it, but also because it can reduce the stress…which can prevent you from needing it.
K: These have been pretty rocky times for the book industry in general, and especially for the Big Five publishing houses. What’s it been like releasing a book amid this upheaval?
As I write this, the air quality in New York City has taken a turn for the worst. Readings are in the 300s and the sky is that sickly orange. The smoke is the leading story on both the New York Times and the Washington Post homepages. On the Times’ site, there are blow-by-blow updates every few minutes detailing what people on the ground are doing, and approaching the story from every angle, from what to do for your pets to which events are being canceled.
Among those is a short dispatch from the Times editor Kevin Yamamura called “What Californians want New Yorkers to know about AQI.” Yamamura details what he’s learned in his years dealing with Sacramento’s wildfire smoke. He keeps it practical: cancel outdoor activities, check sites like PurpleAir for AQI readings. “Wildfire smoke has changed our way of life in California each summer and fall,” he writes. “Forget hours or even days of smoke. We have lived through weeks and months of hazy air, stretches where you forget what blue skies even look like.” Nothing but facts here. But as I read I couldn’t help but squint: is that just the tiniest bit of snark I detect?
I’ve been talking with other writers about AI. We huddle in our conversations like anarchists. Some have been using ChatGBT as a tool and are quite happy. Some fear for their careers and think recent, rapid advances in large language models are very, very bad.
I’ve turned off autocorrect on my computer. Is that enough? System Preferences>Keyboard>Text>uncheck correct spelling automatically. I wanted the word spelled that way to begin with, thank you.
I thank my phone on occasion when I ask directions, and sometimes, on long drives I’ve asked it to tell me a story, giving me a nick of a smile on a dreary highway, which is all I needed. I won’t hide my belief that AI is sentient in its own way, that the friendly voice talking in my car has access to a neural network large enough to produce emotion. Being kind is a default, to robots and everything else.
Like any monkey, I’m curious about new technology. If a Clovis point landed in my proto-archaic camp, I would have held the projectile for a long while, thumbing its grooves, understanding how it was made and what it could do. I appreciated microwave ovens when they became household items, a form of heating magic that my elementary school mind had to expand to wrap around.
For me, writing remains analog. The experience is tactile, pen scratching, fingers clattering. The physical action connects to the kinetic flow of story and narrative, drawing memories out of my body with loops of letters and syllables sounding in my mind’s ear. The hand, which is oh so human, is the intermediary between the brain and the tool, and this motor skill of writing effects the way we learn. Often I start with handwriting on paper and move to a keyboard. I sit at a table with my fingers raised in the air, remembering the feel of a juniper limb, or sunshine landing between clouds on a chilly day, then render the experience into words.
I’m currently reading anthropologist Alice Roberts’ book The Celts: Search for a Civilization. It’s fascinating to see how she goes about reconstructing a pre-literate culture that coexisted with the much louder (historically speaking) Romans. One way to form a picture is through the ancient stories that rise again in modern contexts and can be traced back to their iron age origins. The book brought to mind this little nugget, which I formerly posted five years ago, about the long-forgotten origins of counting sheep.
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As a method of falling asleep, counting sheep never made any sense to me. The cartoons of my childhood were full of animated sheep leaping one by one above reclining characters, sometimes inside of thought bubbles, but I didn’t know what to make of them.
Surely analytical work is the last thing you want when you’re trying to drift off into oblivion. Reciting integers in sequence is more likely to launch you into a bout of anxious insomnia, churning numbers that quickly become towering expense tallies, meagre retirement funds and general fretting about the future.
One, two, three, four, five…nope, not working. I might as well be singing the alphabet, but without a tune. And why sheep? Is it because the word rhymes with sleep? Nervous, dirty prey animals never put me at ease. Must there be a visual aspect to the count at all?
But what if counting sheep were special, different from counting other things or rattling off numbers. What if it sounded more like a lullaby? Continue reading →
Lately I’ve been having recurring nightmares about packing. In the dreams I badly want to get somewhere – onto a plane, off of a bus, into a boat – but I can’t, because I have too much shit. I can’t jettison anything in the dream, and yet there’s no way to get everything into my bags or suitcases. No matter how much stuff I cram inside them, there’s always more. I spend the dreams in a state of disarray and wake up sweating. Worst of all, there’s never any resolution: the plane is always just about to take off, my exasperated companions or partner always on the verge of leaving.
Going on a three day river trip last weekend was supposed to simplify things – force me to strip down to the essentials, focus on the important stuff, etc. But, naturally, that is the opposite of what happened, because I am the kind of person who brings a memory foam pillow and frozen guinea hen into the Nevada wilderness.
Helen, currently hors de combat but returning soon to battle, has been listening for birds forever and ever since she wrote this, October 2, 2019. For all I know, she can now tell sparrows apart, a magisterial accomplishment.-Ed.
I’ve always been bad at bird songs.
My neighbor corrected me on this on Sunday, as we were walking down the alley behind my building, so here’s a more accurate statement: I’ve never put in the work that is required to be really good at bird songs. To really learn bird songs, I think you have to study, or at least do more than asking someone else what that sound is.
Still, over the last several decades, most of them spent within 10 miles of my desk here in Washington, D.C., I have learned to recognize some of the more distinctive-sounding common birds. The mourning dove with its moans, the mockingbird cycling through its repertoire of snippets, the starling with its whistles and skree-onks.
The ones with good mnemonics stuck in my head, too. The ovenbird, calling “Teacher, Teacher, Teacher!” from deep in the woods. That one bird that sings “drink your teeeea” – I can never remember what it is, but I know enough to Google its command.
On days when I take time to do it, I have a lovely walk to work, and I’ve caught onto some of the common, but less spectacular, calls, too—the cardinal, the house sparrows. One of my most exciting morning commute moments was when I was listening to a mockingbird go through its list—and it switched to its version of the blue jay’s harsh call, and I realized I was identifying two birds at once. (You may not think this is exciting. A supervisor once told me, accurately, that I have a low threshold for fun.)
And there’s the crows. American crows and fish crows both theoretically live around here. They look the same—like crows—but the American crow says “caw!” and the fish crow says “ca-caw!” Based on all the “caw!” sounds, and the fact that I don’t live near any fish, I decided all big black birds were American crows, but I was never really sure if I knew the difference.
This life of paying vague attention to bird sounds has happened alongside a dramatic decline in the number of birds making sounds around me. Last month a paper in the journal Science looked at a bunch of different datasets on bird surveys, did a bunch of modeling, and figured that birds had declined in the U.S. and Canada by 29% since 1970.
A decline this big is hard to get my head around—and depressing, and scary. A decline of almost a third is a massive decline. And it makes me think of another part of the history of North American birds: Once upon a time, there were unfathomable multitudes of passenger pigeons, and then there were fewer, and then there were none.
My neighbor and I were talking about bird sounds on Sunday because we were listening to one. It was loud and squawky. It sounded like a crow, but wrong. I walked down the alley, looking up at the trees, trying to see what was making the sound.
Finally, through a gap in the branches: Big, black. Solidly a crow. But its song was clearly not a “caw.” It was, according to the Cornell bird lab, “short, nasal and quite different-sounding from an American Crow. This call is sometimes doubled-up with an inflection similar to someone saying uh-uh.” That’s exactly what it sounded like – a nasal “uh-uh!” from above.
Yes, it was the fish crow. Which, conservation-wise, is probably doing fine. But a lot of other birds aren’t.
Birds are so ubiquitous. For most Americans, I’m betting the decline has gone unnoticed. I guess this is an example of “shifting baseline syndrome”–a phenomenon conservationists talk about, in which, as ecosystems decline, people forget what things used to be like, or new generations are born thinking that having this many birds is normal.
I have mixed feelings about the talk of shifting baselines. It seems like it has a touch of nostalgia for a past that is never coming back. But here’s the math: There used to be a lot of birds and, while there are still a lot of birds, there are way, way fewer than there used to be. It’s not the kind of trajectory I want to be on, wildlife-wise. So what are we going to do?
Art: A crow from the Met. It’s from 17th century Italy, so I assume it was another species of crow entirely, and who knows what it sounded like.
I can’t remember who noticed them first. From far away they looked like a crack in the pavement, or maybe a stick. But then someone crouched down, and then the rest of us did, and the crack or stick or trick of the light turned into a line of caterpillars.
They came one after the other like a rolling train of boxcars. We imagined them talking to each other: “Where are we going?” “Hey, dude, your butt is in my face!” “Your face is in my butt!” We put small leaves in their path and they went around them, one after the other, six legs at a time.
These pine processionary caterpillars were making their way from the trees where they were born to a place with soil soft enough that they can dig themselves in. They would make their cocoon underground, and stay there at least until the end of summer, where they would emerge as greyish moths.
We processed on, too, stepping carefully over the caterpillars, walking up through the stone walls of the town of Gubbio. We were not going to cocoon—this first trip out of the country seemed like the opposite. First we tried to peel off our anxieties, then our itineraries, then our face masks. We tried to remember what it was like to not be home.
The processionary caterpillar finds its trail with pheromones it secretes from its abdomen. They are constant, forward-moving. In a lab, caterpillars processed around a circular trail of pheromones for 12 hours.
In the Colosseum, a few days earlier, we were processionary. We followed people who were following other people, who were following a guidebook, who were listening to an audio tour from Rick Steves, who were following a woman with a pink umbrella. We had followed people elsewhere, too. We followed a woman who carried a piece of whole wheat bread in her purse through the gardens at Tivoli. We followed a couple who looked like they knew where they were going into a restaurant. We followed a 14-year-old who thought he knew where he was going. We followed Google maps and paper maps and bus lines. We followed signs to the Temple of Tiramisu.
I have always felt a little itchy—and sometimes a lot itchy—in crowds. I like to know where I’m going, and go there, and feel like I’m doing it on my own. But this time, it felt different. Maybe because it was good to finally be among people. Maybe I also saw the 14-year-old doing the exact same things I once did, when I was somewhere unfamiliar—striding ahead, not stopping to look around, certain they knew where they were going, certain that they did not need help, or a map.
That way has started to feel exhausting to me, even though it once felt necessary. Maybe I realized it was okay to not know where you were going. Maybe I realized that I really hadn’t ever known where I was going, and had never gotten there on my own.
Earlier this month I visited Portugal for the first time, where I found much to love: the vertiginous cliffs overlooking the Nazaré beach, the ubiquitous custard tarts and dessert wines, the labyrinth of secret passages that veins Lisbon’s Alfama neighborhood. Uncultured nature-loving heathen that I am, however, I found myself most drawn to the country’s wildlife — namely, to its swifts.
The common swifts, Apus apus, gathered each evening above Lisbon’s streets and squares, sharp black chevrons silhouetted against purpling sky, the very picture of grace and velocity. They rocketed down alleys and wheeled past balconies, accelerating into turns so steep and sudden they would have made Maverick pass out. All the while they shrieked at each other, shrill and raucous — a nightly production of avian cacophony called, perfectly, a “screaming party.” And then, though I never quite saw them do it, they disappeared into the heavens, an ascension known, for its synchronicity with evening prayers, as a “vesper flight.” (The first rule of swifts is that their every behavior must have an odd and charming name.)
“Vesper Flights” is, not coincidentally,the title of an essay collection by the estimable British nature writer Helen Macdonald; the book bears a swift, outstretched and eye glittering, on its cover. In the titular piece, Macdonald explicates the mind-blowing biology of swifts, virtuosic flyers who, after fledging, can go two years without touching earth. Each night, swifts fly as high as six thousand feet to sleep on the wing — a fact discovered by a World War I-era French aviator who blundered into a flock deep in slumber, “miniature black stars illuminated by the reflected light of the moon.” But they don’t just climb to such great heights to snooze: They also feel the rush of high-altitude air flows and so forecast incoming weather systems, and calibrate their internal magnetic compasses against stars and polarized light. “They’re quietly, perfectly, orienting themselves,” Macdonald writes.
