Larry’s Comments (group member since Nov 23, 2020)

Larry’s comments from the Nonfiction Reading - Only the Best group.

Carol wrote: "Larry wrote: "Carol wrote: "When I visit the US I am always amazed by the amount of woodland you have, particularly in New England. It is amazing to think forests once stretched unbroken from the A..."

Carol, And here's another good article about the threat to our aspens. Aspens often look like a collection of many trees when in fact they are a single tree.

https://bigthink.com/life/worlds-larg...

Carol wrote: "Extremely interesting articles on the chestnut and heart pine. Here, yew trees are often very old- perhaps 1 or 2,000 years in some cases. The Druids used to worship by yew trees, then Christian churches replaced the pagan site, and so there are often very ancient yew trees today near to churches. "

Carol,

When my wife and I were walking in our neighborhood yesterday (this was before I read your message about the life of yew trees), we got into a discussion about the life expectancy of different trees. Basically we both were just saying we didn't know what it was. We do have a lot of big sycamores in our our neighborhood, and we hope that they have many more decades left, but some have been attacked by invasive species of insects, inclduing emerald ash borers.

John wrote: "Thanks Larry. I would like to look at both systems. I only know the Research Triangle from what I have read about it. I have been satisfied with my care in the Wilmington area. ."

If you have a good internist, that is great. And Wilmington is big enough to have a good hospital. What makes for a good or a bad hospital--in an American context--is thoroughly explored in Marty Makary's The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care--and How to Fix It. I probably have recommended this book more than any other one over the last year. The author, Marty Makary is a Johns Hopkins physician and also editor-in-chief for MEDPAGE TODAY.

Carol wrote: "When I visit the US I am always amazed by the amount of woodland you have, particularly in New England. It is amazing to think forests once stretched unbroken from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. ..."

Carol, here's another amazing fact. The Northeastern United States--actually from Maryland north--is more forested now than it was a hundred years ago. A hundred years ago a lot of the land was devoted to small farms, but as more and more food came from the farms of the Central U.S. and the Great Plains, the small farms of the Northeast returned to woodland. It's not the same as it was ... with the wonderful primeval forests with magnificent trees that were originally there. But some of those trees may come back. Some won't ... without a lot of help. The biggest loss is probably the loss of our chestnut trees. See this great website: https://acf.org/the-american-chestnut...

And we have also lost our large old pine trees that produced heart pine. But those trees can come back ... if we just don't cut them for 100 or 200 years. :-)

https://www.woodweb.com/knowledge_bas...

Larry

John wrote: "Larry, I am covered by Blue Cross/Blue Shield, which is very much prevalent here and seems to offer access to quality care. I have not heard specifically about Duke or UNC systems, but a lot of the doctors here came from either of those two. My eye doctor is out of Johns Hopkins. I think the advice about being near a hospital is a good idea in retirement. I think for me I should just read as much nature books and poetry, and live it vicariously. .."

John,

We also have BC/BS and it's been great for us, particularly through my wife's cancer treatments.

As for the Duke and UNC Health Care systems, take a look at these websites (mainly just for informative reasons in your case):

https://www.dukehealth.org/

https://www.unchealthcare.org/

The people who live in the Research Triangle are amazingly well-served when it comes to health care and choices for their health care.

So this ...

Health
Rafael Campo - 1964-

While jogging on the treadmill at the gym,
that exercise in getting nowhere fast,
I realized we need a health pandemic.
Obesity writ large no more, Alzheimer's
forgotten, we could live carefree again.
We'd chant the painted shaman's sweaty oaths,
We'd kiss the awful relics of the saints,
we'd sip the bitter tea from twisted roots,
we'd listen to our grandmothers' advice.
We'd understand the moonlight's whispering.
We'd exercise by making love outside,
and afterwards, while thinking only of
how much we'd lived in just one moment's time,
forgive ourselves for wanting something more:
to praise the memory of long-lost need,
or not to live forever in a world
made painless by our incurable joy.

John wrote: "I sometimes wish to move to a more rural location. I like woods and hills and quiet. The county where I live is getting destroyed by development, and large tracts of beautiful woods are now just ho..."

John,

I used to manage a division for the Foreign Agricultural Service of USDA which had both Civil Service Employees and Foreign Service Officers. The latter had much better retirement planning with a week long retirement seminar, which they were encouraged to take as early as three years before retirement. One of the things that they were advised was to locate within 30 minutes of a good hospital in their retirement location. That rules out a lot of the United States, but it puts them close to medical care for those things like torn retinas, etc. Are you in the Duke or UNC medical care system? We have friends who moved down from the DC area to Raleigh about two years ago ... and one of their decisions was to choose which one of those two good medical care systems to join. I can't remember which one they chose.

Carol wrote: "Sometimes I wonder what Pope, Donne and Shakespeare would have made of our poetry today. The above is so, so different from their writing.
The subject touches all of our hearts- we want to help, b..."

Carol, I think in some cases, they would have argued that it's not even poetry. And for them, if they so argued, they would be right. It's in the eye or the ear of the beholder at times.

In North America, before the Europeans arrived there were parts of the continent where the forests proceeded unbroken from the Atlantic shore to the Mississippi River. I am glad that some organizations have started that tree replanting. It is one important step toward returning parts of the planet to a better state.

Upon Hearing the U.N.’s Report That One
Million Animal and Plant Species Are at Risk
of Extinction Due to Climate Change and
Human Activity
by Meghan Sterling

Winter comes later, and the grass
never fills in the front yard,
small brown rings like a pox.
After nights of heavy sky and heat,
cows and dogs bow low
as if weather carried weight.
We watch our daughter,
painted white with zinc
in rough grass, make believe she is a cow
and laugh up the dying trees.
Pretends now she is a squirrel
she remembers from The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin,
laughs into the echo.
She gathers and piles dried oak leaves,
threads them together in the crumbling crown
she places on my head.


SOURCE: Meghan Sterling, “Upon Hearing the U.N.’s Report That One Million Animal and Plant Species Are at Risk of Extinction Due to Climate Change and Human Activity” from These Few Seeds. ©2021 Meghan Sterling published by Terrapin Books.

Steven wrote: "Cannot go wrong I think with Mary Doria Russell. I had no idea of Wyatt Earp's later life, living until 1929 - simply fascinating. I also read The Sparrow, which was not only a good r..."

I think I first encountered parts of Wyatt Earp's later life when I was reading about John Ford and the movie MY DARLING CLEMENTINE. Ford and Earp played poker regularly in Los Angeles, and Ford picked Earp's brain to help with the creation of that movie. I think The Sparrow is brilliant, but the sequel, Children of God, suffers in comparison. It's good but not great.

But back to China ... I do think that the biggest problem facing the West is how to deal with China ... how to reframe the relationship where we accept that China is our adversary and antagonist at times but not necessarily our enemy ... and in doing that to try to get China to think along the same lines.

John wrote: "As fate would have it, I am reading What the Twilight Says: Essays by Derek Walcott. There is a chapter about Larkin, who Walcott says is the master of the ordinary. Walcott also says..."


John,

I find that Billy Collins is the anti-Larkin for me ... after reading most poems by Billy Collins, my mood is lifted. And Collins is also the master of the ordinary.

Larry

Steven, I see that you are reading Epitaph. How are you liking it? And if you like Mary Doria Russell generally, here's a link (first through Facebook and then a direct link) to her local bookshop that carries almost all of her books as signed copies.

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.ph...

https://www.macsbacks.com/search/site...

Steven wrote: "Thanks Larry. I am sure it is a big hit with the politburo. (ha) I do, however, think that it is not outside the realm of possibilities that Xi will over stretch and become vulnerable if there is a..."

Yeah, members of the Standing Committee who are actually named as coup participants and the Politburo generally won't like this book. When I first heard of this book, even though I knew a little about Roger Garside's past work, I wasn't very interested. It was actually the publication by the University of California Press that drew me in. Xi's prosecution of over one million Party members for corruption may be correct in terms of their malfeasance, but it leaves him with a growing number of enemies ... along with the ones you suggest.

Do you know about Wang Huning, who "is arguably the single most influential “public intellectual” alive today. ... A member of the CCP’s seven-man Politburo Standing Committee, he is China’s top ideological theorist, quietly credited as being the “ideas man” behind each of Xi’s signature political concepts, including the “China Dream,” the anti-corruption campaign, the Belt and Road Initiative, a more assertive foreign policy, and even “Xi Jinping Thought.” Scrutinize any photograph of Xi on an important trip or at a key meeting and one is likely to spot Wang there in the background, never far from the leader’s side."

SOURCE: https://palladiummag.com/2021/10/11/t...

Glad to see some activity here. I think it's important to mention Roger Garside's China Coup: The Great Leap to Freedom, which begins as a fiction work for a few chapters--that sounds weird but it works--with President Xi overthrown by other members of the Standing Committee, who recognize his actions threaten the long term progress of China and the Chinese people. It was published this year by the University of California Press. I found it fascinating.

Carol wrote: "It won't be known for about 3 weeks the nature of the new Omicron variant, however, I was heartened to read this morning of the words of Professor Karl Lauterbach, a clinical epidemiologist who might be the next German Minister of Health. He said that 'it has so many mutations it could be optimised to infect more but be less severe, which is how most respiratory viruses evolve.
.."

Others have speculated the same about its possible reduced lethality. Let's hope they're right.

But John, there is this:

"“What will survive of us is love.” Perhaps Larkin’s most frequently quoted line comes from “An Arundel Tomb”, in the volume of verse that made him famous, The Whitsun Weddings (1964). The poem evokes the tomb of an earl and countess and celebrates their “faithfulness in effigy”. "

SOURCE: https://www.thearticle.com/what-will-...

John wrote: "Carol wrote: "I have not read many Larkin poems but his view of life strikes me as very much that of a depressive- a valuable and articulate way of looking at our world but not one I find uplifting..."


John,

You are so right about Larkin, and that is why I can only read a few of his poems at a time.

Larry

John wrote: "I wonder if that is one of his uncollected poems that did not appear in books like High Windows. It does have his rather jaundiced outlook, which touched all that he wrote. ..."

John, it really does, although the last verse seems to reflect a change in tone, with a loss in humor that is evident in the first three verses.

Money, by Philip Larkin

Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:
“Why do you let me lie here wastefully?
I am all you never had of goods and sex.
You could get them still by writing a few cheques.”

So I look at others, what they do with theirs:
They certainly don’t keep it upstairs.
By now they’ve a second house and car and wife:
Clearly money has something to do with life

—In fact, they’ve a lot in common, if you enquire:
You can’t put off being young until you retire,
And however you bank your screw, the money you save
Won’t in the end buy you more than a shave.

I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down
From long french windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

Every year my wife's cousin posts a different poem by Mary Oliver for Thanksgiving ... this is what he posted this morning:

Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches
Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches of other lives --
tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey, hanging
from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning, feel like?
Do you think this world was only an entertainment for you?
Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides
with perfect courtesy, to let you in!
Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass!
Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over the dark acorn of your heart!
No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint
that something is missing from your life!
Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch?
Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot
in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself
continually?
Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed
with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?
Well, there is time left --
fields everywhere invite you into them.
And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away
from wherever you are, to look for your soul?
Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!
To put one's foot into the door of the grass, which is
the mystery, which is death as well as life, and
not be afraid!
To set one's foot in the door of death, and be overcome
with amazement!
To sit down in front of the weeds, and imagine
god the ten-fingered, sailing out of his house of straw,
nodding this way and that way, to the flowers of the
present hour,
to the song falling out of the mockingbird's pink mouth,
to the tippets of the honeysuckle, that have opened
in the night
To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and rustle in the wind!
Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
While the soul, after all, is only a window,
and the opening of the window no more difficult
than the wakening from a little sleep.
Only last week I went out among the thorns and said
to the wild roses:
deny me not,
but suffer my devotion.
Then, all afternoon, I sat among them. Maybe
I even heard a curl or tow of music, damp and rouge red,
hurrying from their stubby buds, from their delicate watery bodies.
For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters,
caution and prudence?
Fall in! Fall in!
A woman standing in the weeds.
A small boat flounders in the deep waves, and what's coming next
is coming with its own heave and grace.
Meanwhile, once in a while, I have chanced, among the quick things,
upon the immutable.
What more could one ask?
And I would touch the faces of the daises,
and I would bow down
to think about it.
That was then, which hasn't ended yet.
Now the sun begins to swing down. Under the peach-light,
I cross the fields and the dunes, I follow the ocean's edge.
I climb, I backtrack.
I float.
I ramble my way home.