A film I loved: Mostly I don’t watch television. My excuse is that I don’t have the metabolism to easily sit still while images fill the screen in front of me, where suspense is often central to the story, and where background music nudges at my nervous system. But I make exceptions when I know there’s something I am truly interested in. I’d read about Sophy Romvari’s first feature length film. Blue Heron (2025), and asked John to find it on the various services he has access to. And what a moving experience. A film about a family living on Vancouver Island, a loving family, with a photographer father who documents the dailiness of their lives, and how the mental illness of one of the children impacts the family as a whole and the young daughter in particular as her older self revisits memories, experiences, and legacy. A film that is constructed like a poem in that the strands of story are often allusive, understated, even lyrical. It’s worth searching out and if you watch it, try to find Romvari’s earlier short film, Still Processing, for a kind of primer on the narrative.
A small November adventure: I went into Vancouver earlier this week to have dinner with members of a book club who’d read The Art of Looking Back: A painter, an obsession, and reclaiming the gaze. One of the group’s members, an artist, invited me to stay overnight. She hosted the dinner and how wonderful it was to sit at her table with intelligent women, talking about everything, surrounded by art, leaves strewn on the table among stones and apples, and then to move into the cosy living room lit entirely with candles to continue the discussion about my book and its resonances. Later, in my bed at the top of the house, I could see lights on the North Shore in the distance, and I fell asleep in the glow of excellent food, lively conversation, and the warmth of the kind of deep connection you don’t expect in your 70s.
A loved sound: Rain on the blue metal roof of our house. It was a dry October and now the rain, which of course has a colour and a code in today’s meteorological circles, is filling the creeks, soaking into the earth, making its percussive music all night while I sleep, and all day while I’m awake.
A book that I read all through two nights: I don’t often sleep well and I’ve learned (mostly) not to fight this but to use the time well. When I was staying with J. in Vancouver, she gave me a book, Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps, by Ted Kooser, whose poetry I was familiar with (he was the 13th Poet Laureate of the US). A book about the Czech Republic, I wondered? But no, it’s about an area of southeast Nebraska, settled (I guess) by people from Central Europe. And it’s quietly wonderful. It’s filled with Czech proverbs and it’s filled with open-hearted curiosity and attention and quirky humour.
I have been sitting outside tonight getting the very old news from the stars: what happened to them a hundred million years ago. I followed their lesson, of course, and now I ache all over from being reminded of how small and insignificant I am, that life is as brief as a spark, etc. The universe is always so patronizing, like a high school guidance counselor, like Woodrow Wilson looking down on the world through twinkling glasses, pursing his lips, knowing his history
Compared to the dreary life of any star, flaring up to collapse into nothing, my life is rich with happenings. For example, a bat like a small black rag has been fluttering back and forth through the yard light all evening, harvesting the stars of tiny moths, catching one tiny star in its teeth with each pass. They jerkily fly this way and that, but they can’t escape this hungry little piece of darkness. Local wonders.
Sightings from the bathroom window: twice after midnight, up to pee, I’ve looked out the window to see two planets, Mars and Jupiter (I think), nicely spaced over Mount Hallowell, and somehow that’s more wondrous than any news of space probes.
