On the subjects of climate change and extinction we don’t have the luxury of genrefication, with its thrilling rejections of social reality and its reliance on satisfyingly happy endings. All that’s written about these matters of survival, all that’s imagined and supposed — inside our dreams, outside them or in the gray areas between — demands our collective attention.
But the story you want to tell will choose its own form, in a way; it has to be the guide. You just have to listen and, hopefully, be ready.
The American anthropologist Laura Bohannan once tried to paraphrase “Hamlet” for a tribe of West African bush people. Convinced that “human nature is pretty much the same the whole world over,” Bohannan chose “Hamlet” as a reliable universal archetype. It sounds good on paper, but at practically every sentence, she found her listeners raising objections and interpolations wholly outside her frame of reference.
It’s impossible, unless you’re blind or a LeRoy Neiman collector, to confront a work by Al Hirschfeld (1903-2003) without sneaking one more furtive squint at the perfection of line that flowed so fluidly from his crow quill pen. Looping, swooping arabesques, bodies sinuously elongated and twisted, never a graceless line — virtually every Broadway star from Sacha Guitry, his first, to Tommy Tune, his last, is rendered in heart-stabbingly valid likenesses halfway between design and portraiture.
In an isolated mountain valley in Montana, Catherine Raven and a wild red fox meet, take each other's measure, and gradually become friends.
This summary of Raven's nature memoir may seem to hint at a simple story. On the contrary, Fox and I: An Uncommon Friendship is a multi-layered exploration of a world in which humans honor rather than dominate nature.
The bridesmaids in yellow silk harvesting pears
is when. Love set you going is why.