Finished a TV Series

 

We have now watched all the episodes of Marble Hall Murders, featuring the detective Atticus Pundt in the embedded story written by fictional author Susan Ryeland. The plot is very complicated! 

The Marlow Murder Club

 

We have watched the first episode. Looking forward to the rest of the 2026 season.

Watching TV and Reading

Netflix: A History of the New Yorker Magazine 

Watching a documentary about the famous New Yorker magazine.
It brought back memories of reading it since I was in college.
I haven’t read it recently as much as I used to. Maybe start again?

Reading This Week

Concentrating on this book seemed very challenging as I read it, because the authors range widely through history. The seven cheap things are: “nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives.” (p. 7) The time frame is the last several hundred years. The geographic extent of the phenomena that the authors cover is also broad: “although Europe features in it, capitalism’s story isn’t a Eurocentric one. The rise of capitalism integrated life and power from Potosí to Manila, from Goa to Amsterdam.” (p. 90) I’ve tried to select some quotes to capture some of the key points of the book, though I admit that I’m very challenged by reading it, and I might not understand it very well.

Cheap money is at the heart of history, say the authors: “Although, as Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1789, ‘in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes,’ cheap money links the two. The modern art of war became a way to turn gold and blood into capital.” (p. 80)

The authors think in terms of categories of people, mainly binary categories that defined humanity and all its activities: “At the origins of capitalism, strategies used to corral Indigenous Peoples into the pen of Nature were also used to create and manage a category of humans who would perform unpaid care work: women. Human bodies were forced, sometimes medically and always juridically, into one of two inescapable categories: man and woman. The resulting entangled binaries—of Society-Nature, Man-Woman, and paid work–unpaid work—have left us with a way of thinking that has committed humans in capitalism’s world-ecology to making spectacular oversights: we continue to think of ‘real work’ solely as wage work and forget the care work that makes it all possible.” (p. 116)

Food to feed the people who did the work is another important consideration: “Cheap food is ‘cheap’ in a specific sense: more calories produced with less average labor time in the commodity system.” (p. 143) Through cheap food, societies succeed. Hunger in contrast “began to matter politically only when the poor came to the cities and translated it into anger, and thence potentially into insurrection and a challenge to the rule of cheap nature.” (p. 149) However, “cheap food regimes … guarantee neither that people are fed nor that they are fed well—as the global persistence of diet-related ill health and malnutrition can attest.” (p. 158)

“Capitalism may have claimed the New World with guns, germs, and steel, but the New World’s order was kept through race, police, and profits. …  Capitalism’s ecology has shaped the modern nation-state and vice versa, through the colonial frontier, through the interactions between early capitalists and ‘savages,’ and through the technologies of communication that capitalism fostered at its inception.” (p. 180-181)

All in all, I’m overwhelmed by the enormous amount of detail in this book. Do I really understand it? 

Blog post © 2026 mae sander

Watching TV and One Boring Book

 Watching a lot of TV

The Great British Baking Show is winding down for the year. I like watching, but mostly
I’m not tempted by the pastries they bake. The meringues sounded pretty good, though. 
We have faithfully watched each week as it’s being released.

“Elsbeth” Season 3 is much more comical than the previous seasons — we watched one more this week.
The effective detective still wears unusual hats and carries 3 shopping bags. A very fun series!

Nero Wolfe and his trusty sidekick Archie now speak Italian (with subtitles).
It’s a little strange, but watchable. I’ve only seen one episode.

One Boring Book

The Hollow Man: by John Dixon Carr: A Classic.
Also a very boring book. I forced myself to at least scan to the end.

One Intriguing Short Story

Anticipating Halloween

Halloween signs from a web search — for Sami’s weekly murals.

From Andy Borowitz’s commentary.

… and more Halloween from another walk around the neighborhood.

Blog post © 2025 mae sander

Weekend Fun

French Detectives

“Murder In…” — a very long series that we just started.

“L’Art du Crime” — sometimes far-fetched, but usually fun.

Both of these series have subtitles, of course, but I can still sometimes understand what they are saying in French. Both have tons of local color! French provincial towns and cities or Paris and the Louvre. All great to see.

Celebrating the Fourth of July

More Fireworks Photos

I love fireworks! So glad for this unofficial display in our local park.

Saturday Afternoon Ride in the Countryside

The corn is growing in the fields not far from our small city.

Reading fiction and essays 

Homage to Kafka: Ten Short Stories

a cage went in search of a bird

I can’t read all these stories one-after-another, the way I read a regular anthology, because the writers were doing homage to Kafka. Therefore most of the selections are very weird, surreal, and frightening. Characters are trapped or they are uncomprehending, or they are desperate to control their own circumstances which have gotten away from them. The fear and dislocations expressed here seem to outdo Kafka, whose 100th death anniversary they were written to celebrate — he died on June 3, 1924. Some of the stories seem more like Italo Calvino than like Kafka because they are not only surreal but they double back on themselves in a self-referential way.

If somehow you decide to read this collection, consider yourself warned!

Homage to Nobody: Essays by Rebecca Solnit

Essays by Rebecca Solnit: all written before the current administration took over.

The world was already becoming strange and disastrous when these collected essays were written a few years ago, many during or just after the pandemic. The book was published in 2025, but the author’s position of cautious optimism about the future of a number of issues (even climate change) and about the possibility of political action to mitigate them seem depressingly retro. I can’t bear this optimism in view of this past six months of rapid decommissioning of positive endeavors of the US government and the replacement of responsible officials with lackeys who oppose the earlier policies and are only destructive.

The more I read these essays from the past, even with a few author’s notes written in 2025, the more I simply find them painfully obsolete. The small possible changes played up in Solnit’s essays are now obliterated by our newly powerful backwards-looking and kleptocratic government. The possibility, for example, that there could be some way to counter fossil fuel dominance has been utterly cancelled along with the defunding of most government-funded projects to overcome it and the re-empowering of the interests of the fossil fuel industry. Ditto social change. Ditto environmentalism. Optimism is now simply crazy.

The more I read, the more I find myself speed reading because Solnit’s rosy view that small changes will counter big trends has become so impossible. Virtually all positive actions for racial and social justice, environmental protection, higher education, and many other virtuous initiatives once taken by our nation have been brutally cancelled in just half a year by the new administration. Horrifying!

Some depressing quotes:

“A standard complaint of the right: the real victim is the racist who has been called a racist, not the victim of his racism; the real oppression is to be impeded in your freedom to oppress.” (p. 81)

  

“The Covid-19 pandemic was, like the climate crisis, a reminder that we are interconnected and that what we do as individuals and together affects the whole; that’s a scientific fact rather than a political position, but those who reject the facts treat them as political opinions (and in some versions of the libertarian worldview, everyone gets to have their own facts).” (p. 59)

“Of course, in the face of the climate crisis, sticking with the status quo isn’t an option. We either make the changes science has shown are necessary and engineering has made possible, or we let runaway change of the worst kind devastate people and places.” (p. 155) 

“All mining needs to be done with respect for the land and people in the vicinity, but the impact of mining for renewables needs to be weighed against the far more devastating impact of mining for and burning fossil fuel.” (p. 144) 

Don’t bother to read this book — it no longer speaks to our current situation, and there are much more important issues to think about! Of course I hope that some miracle will stop the current effort to create a totalitarian and anti-progressive government in Washington, but I have no rational reason to expect this outcome.

Quote for Today

“More than 80 years ago, as France was under occupation and repression, America welcomed exiled researchers, offering them a helping hand and allowing them to keep science alive. And now, in a sad reversal of history, some American scientists have arrived in France in search of a space for freedom, thought and research.” — Éric Berton, president of  Aix-Marseille University, quoted in the Guardian.

Sunday Morning In My Garden 

Blog post © 2025 mae sander

Quiet Times, Good Times

Reading

Like many fantasy novels, The Bird King is around one third longer than it should be, as if the author didn’t quite know how to end it. Set in the historic era in Grenada, at the end of the fifteenth century, when the Moors were just being expelled from Spain, the book has a lot of interesting ideas about the relationship of Moslems and Christians at that time. I enjoyed these historic or almost-historic elements of the book. The presence of supernatural creatures was ok until it wasn’t.

This book seems more like a reference work than a readable history.
I read only parts of it. The author has written better books!

High Island Blues is set in the exact locations where we were birding in Texas in April.

This book was a gift from Deb at Readerbuzz, which was wonderful of her! Not only the setting, but the activity of birding and the goals of the characters in High Island Blues are very much like the goals of the birders that we traveled with. Obviously, the major difference is that no one on our tour —that I know of — was motivated to murder anyone. The birding sites named in the novel are the same ones we visited. Two characters in the novel at one point go into Houston to have lunch at the Galleria Shopping Center, which was the location of our hotel at after the tour. As the characters drive through Houston and around the birding areas, I could picture just these places where we drove on our tour.

At one point, we saw an old motel in Winnie, Texas, near the birding sites. This motel was mentioned by name in the novel. We were told that our tour company used to have people stay there, but it has declined in quality. We stayed in a much newer hotel, happily.

The characters in the novel in fact stayed at an old house with a colorful landlady, which I suspect was entirely fictitious, and which enabled the author to create a conventional plot of the English Country House genre, but of course set in Texas. A very successful artistic decision!

As mysteries go, this is a great read. The author has written many successful books, some of which are also TV shows. I’ve loved the “Vera” TV series based on another series of books by the author, Ann Cleeves.

High Island — site of the action in the novel. Our birding trip to Texas in April visited
there, and the experience was just like the description in the book, despite the gap of 30 years.

A Swainson’s Warbler that we saw in Texas when birding in the sites noted in the novel.
Just before finding the body, the key witness was searching for this bird.
(Len’s Photo)

What’s on TV?

Blog post © 2025 mae sander

Shared with Eileen’s critters