What We’ve Liked: Films/TVs

By: | December 15, 2021

We’ve done this before, talked about the books we’ve liked. Here are our lists from years gone by. And if you should be so moved, we also offer books we ourselves have written.

Cameron:  Maybe this is boring, but I liked a lot of the new seasons of Netflix series this summer. Especially Lupin (Omar Sy!!!!!!!) and Never Have I Ever (high school love triangles, which I love almost as much as Omar Sy as Lupin!!!!!!). Also: Loki. I guess I’m a target audience? Or several target audiences?

Ann:  Yes, I liked the Netflix series too.  I watched The Two Popes twice because those actors are such that I am totally convinced I’m watching Benedict and Francis real life; I’ll watch it again.  I also watched Queens Gambit twice, mostly for the impeccable visual artistry in the colors, costumes, wallpaper, and the main character’s makeup — which somehow work together to create the unreal, intense, windowless focus that must be a chess champion’s mind.  Plus, The Dig which I’ll watch again to see if those actors can make me get obsessed with the Anglo-Saxon treasures all over again; and the book is just as good.

Ben:  I recently watched Squid Game, and was disappointed to learn that it was not, in fact, another captivating documentary about cephalopod play-behavior. I didn’t love it; Hunger Games has a similar plot but more heart (not to mention better games!), and Parasite explores class warfare in South Korea much more cleverly. One thing I did appreciate about Game of Squids, though, was its careful attention to the role of labor on its little island. We see the infamous pink-costumed guards sleeping in their cubicles, stirring sugar into big vats, washing away blood, and disposing of bodies. It’s all gruesome, of course (well, not the sugar part so much) but it does seem like the show’s creators put a lot of thought into the mechanics of their grisly world. 

Jane:  Forgive me if I’m being presumptuous, but I would be willing to bet that the esteemed readers of LWON are not the kind of people who are into reality television. But did you like Bad Art Friend? If so, I invite you to join me in watching terrible shows like The Bachelorette and Selling Sunset. At heart, they deal with the same theme: people treating each other horribly while trying to make meaning in their own, silly lives — all while the story is told through a seemingly omniscient, “objective” lens, but one which is in itself biased and telling about its creators and about US culture in general. I particularly enjoy looking for moments of accidental authenticity in the show; if you get sucked in, too, let’s discuss the rich text of these reality stars’ Instagram accounts (as some sociologists have done!).  

Helen:  The confluence of a large selection of great TV and a freaking pandemic means that I’ve enjoyed many series over the last year and a half. It’s hard to even know where to start. So I’ll just stick to my most recent love: Only Murders in the Building on Hulu. It stars Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez as New Yorkers who decide to create a podcast when someone in their building is murdered. It combines cozy mystery and physical comedy and avoids the obvious jokes about young people these days. (Selena Gomez: 100% holding her own.) Nathan Lane is in it, and Sting, and Tina Fey. It’s just a delight. Worth a one-month subscription to Hulu. 

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What We’ve Liked: Books

By: | December 13, 2021

We’ve done this before, talked about the books we’ve liked. Here are our lists from years gone by. And if you should be so moved, we also offer books we ourselves have written.

Helen: The most entertaining reading I’ve done lately is a pair of young adult novels set in the near future: Catfishing on CatNet and its sequel, Chaos on CatNet. In the first book, a teenage girl keeps getting moved around to different small towns by her mom, who’s trying to hide them from her dad, who may or may not be evil. Since she moves so much, all of her friends are on the internet – specifically, on a website devoted to cat photos. The friends have real-life adventures with danger and cats. A sentient AI narrates some of the chapters. The high school’s sex ed class is taught by a robot. I started the first book out of a sense of obligation, because I went to college with the author, Naomi Kritzer, then raced through it in a few days and immediately got hold of the second one.  

Jane:  My favorite way to read is to receive a recommendation and then resolve to know absolutely nothing about the book before I start reading. This is how I came upon Beth Morgan’s A Touch of Jen, so I will do you the same favor: just dive in, because it’s much better if you know nothing to start. The only thing I’ll say is that at no point did I know where the book was going, and I dropped everything for 48 hours to finish it. Morgan is darkly funny, and her characters are so deliciously hateable, yet uncomfortably relatable. Just be prepared to make little noises of surprise or disgust as you’re reading and set aside an hour to process once you’ve finished reading. 

Ann:  I just read Colm Toibin’s The Magician because I read all his novels. His range is rangier than any writer except maybe Penelope Fitzgerald: he has Brooklyn/Ireland novels, antiquity novels; and now with The Magician, novels whose main characters are novelists telling not other peoples’ stories but their own real lives.  The other novel like this is The Master.  In these two, master and magician, the characters are Henry James and Thomas Mann, respectively — and Toibin is good enough to get away with this.  But The Magician, the Mann book, seemed rote, as though Toibin was working card by card through his research notes. So I reread The Master, the James book, to see if it was also rote and no, it’s not, not a bit of it.  Now I have a theory that Toibin crawled inside his characters, and the Henry James character talks with James’ real voice — wordy, over-subtle, way too perceptive, personally reserved. And the Thomas Mann character uses Mann’s real voice which is also wordy and reserved, but not subtle, not perceptive, plus self-impressed, pontifical, and pedantic, like he’s talking from note cards. Or maybe Toibin just got tired, sometimes a person can get tired.  Still, both books are fascinating and I like them better than I do the biographies that satisfy the same need: who are these people, these authors?

Rebecca: Giving birth and then raising a baby is the most primal thing I’ve ever done, twice. So many times in the past few months, I have held my infant daughter and thought, “Look at this primate.” That’s what she is, just another in the chain of primates, repeating the cycle. I have felt in my bones that I am a mammal. I realized that all of the mammals who have gone before me have held and beheld their children in just the same way that I do. Nothing has changed through all of human evolution, except maybe the clothing. We are all just mammals. So I was drawn to the concept of this book Nightbitch, which, I thought, was about a mother who turns into a werewolf. Nightbitch, by Rachel Yoder, is actually about much more than the animalistic experience of becoming a mother and raising a baby. It’s about expectations, the patriarchy, solitude, fear, love, dogs, meat, despair, anger, mommy cliques, and the necessity of art. I don’t want to give anything else away; I’ll just say that I bookmarked every other page until I finally gave up and just started telling every mother I know to read it, as soon as possible.  

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Science Poem: Watasenia Scintillans Addresses the New Graduates

By: | December 10, 2021
A modern triptych painting of bioluminescent squid, their cells all lit up.

Watasenia scintillans, also known as the sparkling enope or firefly squid, grows to about 3 inches long and lives only one or two years.

The firefly squid’s body is covered with bioluminescent cells that serve many different functions. The glowing cells on a squid’s arms help it signal and communicate with its peers. The cells on its belly act as counter-illumination, rendering the squid near-invisible while it’s hunting. But when it’s courting, the squid lights up its entire body, and sparkles with everything it’s got.

This poem imagines one of these tiny animals sharing her wisdom in a commencement speech.

(A note for my fellow pedants: in the audio recording below, you will hear me say “podium” instead of “lectern,” because I recorded this before realizing my error. I have since corrected the text. A talking squid stands on a podium, at a lectern. Obviously.)

And now, the poem:

Watasenia Scintillans Addresses the New Graduates

She clutches the lectern with translucent arms.
She is older than her picture.
She closes her eyes slowly.
We all lean in.
“Life…” she says, tasting each costly letter,

“Life is short. Light your whole self up
every chance you get.”



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Firefly squid painting by Katie Schuler; music and audio production by Grant Balfour.

Golden Boy

By: | December 8, 2021

I wrote this essay two years ago. We had just gotten back from Japan, and I was still basking in the warm glow of the trip. Now, of course, the trip seems even sweeter. I also like this essay because the first time I posted it, I spelled ginkgo wrong throughout, as kindly pointed out by reader Tom. So here’s a do-over, with hopes for future travel gold for all of us.

I fell in love in Japan. He was older, and so very tall. There was a glow about him, warm as sunshine. I could have sat and watched him for hours. Even though we didn’t have that much time together, I knew I would never forget him. He was so present, so grounded. Resilient after years of living, marked by all of the storms, both meteorologic and political, that he had weathered.

And so alone—not just on that path near Nijo Castle, but in the world. He had no living relatives. On a family tree, he would sit on a distant, dangling branch, separated from his kin by millions of years.  And there was something about this solitude that was irresistible, too.

The ginkgo tree is an island in the arboreal world. Ginkgo flourished during the Cretaceous, with five or six species growing in the Northern Hemisphere. But as time passed, the number of species shrank to a single species with fan shaped leaves. It disappeared from Europe and North America. The survivors found themselves in China, where, years and years later, humans began to protect and cultivate them, and ultimately, bring them elsewhere—to Japan, to Korea, to Berlin and Central Park.  There is even one on my street, growing out of the planting strip, coming up to my shoulder.

Ginkgos are known to be resilient, thriving in urban areas that cause other trees to wither. In Hiroshima, ginkgo trees began growing new shoots in the days after the atomic bomb killed 70,000 people instantly. People would continue to die in the months and years that followed, but the ginkgo trees unfurled their green fans again the next spring. They still do. About 170 trees, known as hibakujumoku, survive today.

But none is so appealing than my dear tree, thousands of miles away now. I’m not sure what drew me to him above all other ginkgos. Perhaps he was the first one who helped me feel the deep time of a tree that extends further backward and forward than I can ever imagine. Time that feels like golden autumn light.

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Photo: Cameron Walker

What Do We Owe Our Octopus Teachers?

By: | December 6, 2021

Two weeks ago, late to the zeitgeist as ever, I watched My Octopus Teacher, the Oscar-winning documentary about a relationship between a human and a cephalopod. Probably you’ve seen it (and if not, you should!), but, in brief, it’s about the yearlong friendship filmmaker Craig Foster strikes up with a female common octopus who lives in a South African kelp forest. The fascination (and, dare I say, affection) is mutual: The film’s most stirring shots depict the octopus clinging to Foster’s hand and sprawling against his chest, a pose that’s hard to describe as anything other than “cuddling.” It’s a gorgeous movie, and, as an octopus-loving diver myself, I watched it with a lump in my throat, both admiring and envious of Foster’s interspecies connection.

That said, there were two scenes that left me dismayed, and have continued to rankle since I watched the film. I’m talking about the shark attacks, and, specifically, Foster’s refusal to protect the octopus.

For the uninitiated (spoilers to follow), the kelp forest is also inhabited by packs of pyjama sharks, beautiful little black-and-white predators with a sense of smell that would awe a bloodhound. The sharks are the greatest threat to the octopus’s survival; they’re constantly sniffing around her rocky lair and trying to pry her out. Twice, they nearly succeed in killing her. The first time, one seizes her in his jaws, goes into a death roll, and rips off one of her arms. The octopus survives, but on death’s door (happily, she recovers and eventually regrows the arm). During the second attack, the film’s most astonishing sequence, the octopus reaches deep into her bag of tricks to escape: She crawls on land, camouflages herself beneath shells, and, incredibly, rides on the oblivious shark’s back. The scene has the vibe of Jerry outwitting Tom; all she needs is a falling anvil.

In the end, the octopus endures the attacks and lives long enough to breed. No harm, no foul, I guess. Still, I was disturbed that Foster never chased away the sharks. (Pyjama sharks aren’t exactly great whites; he could’ve run them off at no personal risk.) His friend, or at least his playmate, was assaulted, and he did nothing to save her.

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Following Shadows Around the Room

By: | December 3, 2021

Daylight Savings Time swapped out almost a month ago and I’m still off kilter. Who thought of such an assault on the senses? We’re sapiens and all, masters of adaptation, but mind and body don’t like to be parted.

I prefer watching light shift day by day, squares of sunshine stepping forward and back across the floor, a waltz of seasons luring the body’s rhythms. Autumn shadows are coaxed out of their corners like shy rabbits, and then we slam an hour ahead and it feels like the entire house shudders. It takes weeks for me to match the sun’s movement to my own. Shadows and light are all over the place and I feel like I’m running around trying to collect all the hopping rabbits. It’s now dark before I start thinking about dinner.

On the plus side, my morning drive taking my kid to school on winding rural roads leads us into the shadow of a nearby 11,000-foot-tall mountain. The apex of the shadow lands exactly on an intersection at the time we drive through, margin of error hardly a minute. We know the pinnacle casting the shade because we’ve climbed it, so we both marvel each morning as we pass through this intersection. We can almost see ourselves up there. Thanks, Daylight Savings for that. An hour earlier and we’d miss it entirely.

The shadow of Mount Lamborn in western Colorado is, of course, transient. The sun is rolling south, rising a minute later every day and farther out on the winter horizon. By next week, our alignment will be over. We won’t see it again until shadows swing back into February, the summit pointing onto our intersection, and then Daylight Savings Time will slam us again.

Once or twice a year, I come out with a post about time and seasons because I can’t help noticing the second hand of the moon pushing the big hands of sun and stars. Maybe we all notice, but I feel the need to stand up and say something, which we’ve been doing as a species for a long time. A few months ago, Autumnal Equinox light fell on ancient rock art near where I live. Just across the way in Utah, a thousand-year-old bird petroglyph releases an egg of sunlight, the bird pecked into red rock to line up with the sun twice a year, March 21 and September 21. A friend sent me pictures this year, letting me know it was still happening. This isn’t an isolated occurrence. The desert out here is littered with prehistoric imagery lined up with seasonal light and shadow patterns. The study is called archaeoastronomy. Summer Solstice in June is like a fireworks show across the whole of the Southwest, an arrowhead of light piercing a petroglyph snake in Utah, light dagger through the middle of a spiral in Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. On that same day, northernmost position of the sun, the final minute of sunset lands squarely on a piece of framed art made by our own Person of LWON, Sarah Gilman (her art on that day is pictured above). It wasn’t planned that way, and it lasts only for a few days in our house. Serendipity, I believe it is called. Synchronicity for those so inclined.

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Live-Tweeting🚀the🛰️Space💥War😠

By: | November 29, 2021

Twitter, 11/15/2021, 7:42 a.m.  [Time zone? Who knows.] 

A German satellite watcher says Russia hit one of its own old spy satellites, Kosmos 1408, with a missile and blew it to bits.  I wanted to say “blew it out of the sky” but the satellite was of course in orbit so the exploded bits don’t fall down, they stay in the sky, still orbiting. 

The German watcher says 14 bits, debris objects, have been tracked and though “my  unofficial source has been pretty reliable on topics like this in the past,” the whole event is still unconfirmed.  An American satellite watcher who’s also an astronomer adds that Kosmos 1408 was, and all its pieces might be, in a 465 x 490 km orbit.  The debris, he added, will almost certainly intersect with the orbit of the International Space. 

And, as it turns out, the ISS crew had already been told to expect eight minutes-worth of “debris field transit,” to get out of the space station and into their little lifeboat modules, every 93 minutes.  NASA later posts an audio with the usual flat, factual voices, “ Hey Mark, good morning sorry for the early call, we were recently informed of a satellite breakup, need you to review safe haven procedure; read back; that’s a good read, we’ll let you know when to start; sounds good,” and another flat voice says, “thanks for the heads-up.” 

And finally confirmation: a newspaper space reporter writes that a commercial satellite company called LeoLabs “spots a field of objects where the Kosmos 1408 satellite used to be.”  The U.S. Space Command issues a press release, saying it’s working on it and it’s notifying everybody else with satellites not all of which can maneuver out of the way.

Then a good fraction of Twitter notes that other countries, including ours, have done this kind of satellite skeet shooting before, which accounts for the million billion gazillion pieces of debris going over 17,000 mph, circling the earth like a giant cloud of bats out of hell.  If you run into one of these bats, depending on its size, it can either knock a hole in you or turn you into another debris event.

This kind of thing is against the rules which are more like “we really should avoid doing these kinds of things shouldn’t we” than they are enforceable regulations in real treaties.  Turns out neither the U.S. nor Russia can get treaty discussions on their busy calendars.

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