Doing Things

 In Ann Arbor

A cup of coffee at Argus

… we told them to find another way to trim the trees away from the power lines!

Favorite News Item

In the Salish Sea near Seattle — AP photo:
A little seal escapes a pod of orcas that wanted to have it for dinner.

Story of the seal in the Guardian.

When we were there…

We saw seals furiously barking at a pod of orcas when we took a National Geographic cruise
 there: my photo (© 2018).

From Miriam in China

A mural on a street in Shanghai. More of Miriam’s photos will be posted here.

Recent Reading

The narrator of Zadie Smith’s Swing Time (published 2014) seemed very unsympathetic to me, and so did almost all the other characters. The narrator was an assistant to a famous (obviously fictitious) pop singer: a woman with an enormous ego and not much else to her. The other assistants and employees were uniformly impressed by their employer, and utterly empty-headed. A major theme of the novel is race and its importance to the narrator, her friend, her employer and quite a few others, all of them brown or black individuals dealing with the emerging racism in England towards the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century.

The novel alternates between the narrator’s description of her relationship with her employer and her childhood and friendship with a girl who eventually became a successful dancer and then a failure. Here’s her eventual insight into her friend, around half way through the book:

“She was a dancer: she’d found her tribe. I, meanwhile, was caught completely unawares by adolescence, still humming Gershwin songs at the back of the classroom as the friendship rings began to form and harden around me, defined by color, class, money, postcode, nation, music, drugs, politics, sports, aspirations, languages, sexualities . . . In that huge game of musical chairs I turned round one day and found I had no place to sit. At a loss, I became a Goth—it was where people who had nowhere else to go ended up.” (p. 215)

 I had to force myself to keep reading. In fact, I don’t know why I did, but I persisted. I remember liking her earlier book White Teeth.

Blog post © 2025 mae sander

Shared with Eileen’s Critters,

Sami’s Monday Murals, and 

Deb’s Sunday Salon