"After Our Daughter's Wedding"

While the remnants of cake
and half-empty champagne glasses
lay on the lawn like sunbathers lingering
in the slanting light, we left the house guests
and drove to Antonelli's pond.
On a log by the bank I sat in my flowered dress and cried.
A lone fisherman drifted by, casting his ribbon of light.
"Do you feel like you've given her away?" you asked.
But no, it was that she made it
to here, that she didn't 
drown in a well or die
of pneumonia or take the pills.
She wasn't crushed 
under the mammoth wheels of a semi
on highway 17, wasn't found 
lying in the alley
that night after rehearsal
when I got the time wrong.
It's animal. The egg
not eaten by a weasel. Turtles
crossing the beach, exposed 
in the moonlight. And we
have so few to start with.
And that long gestation—
like carrying your soul out in front of you.
All those years of feeding
and watching. The vulnerable hollow
at the back of the neck. Never knowing
what could pick them off—a seagull
swooping down for a clam.
Our most basic imperative:
for them to survive.
And there's never been a moment
we could count on it.

by Ellen Bass from Mules of Love. © BOA Editions, 2002. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-wednesday-november-19-2025/

So he’ll plant a tree

94-year-old William Shatner finds himself considering the question, "Where do we go when we die?" more often.

"All my life is fertile," he says. "And I don't want to leave it. And that's the sadness. I don't want to go."

https://www.threads.com/@cbssundaymorning/post/DRNUybqEoRo?xmt=AQF0_7WVI-tPtHuERym1Sx7zkJPjSD4lwn8DNg6RUHDIrwGYaLxXu8D5rQ3us-5Z66c18lhD&slof=1

Captain Kirk is 94!

When "Star Trek" legend William Shatner and America's favorite astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson share the stage, sparks can fly on an astronomical level.

They talk with Luke Burbank about their bromance built on an appreciation of science; the two-man show ("The Universe Is Absurd!") that grew out of a trip to the South Pole; and how curiosity about the cosmos can help keep one young.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/william-shatner-and-neil-degrasse-tyson-when-stars-collide/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_lDOpiqI_g&t=1727s

The Auburn Conference by Tom Piazza

This is delightful. And so is Tom's latest book about his friendship with John Prine, late  in John's life. Met him at the southern festival of books this past October. 

It is 1883, and America is at a crossroads. At a tiny college in Upstate New York, an idealistic young professor has managed to convince Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Confederate memoirist Forrest Taylor, and romance novelist Lucy Comstock to participate in the first (and last) Auburn Writers' Conference for a public discussion about the future of the nation. By turns brilliantly comic and startlingly prescient, The Auburn Conference vibrates with questions as alive and urgent today as they were in 1883—the chronic American conundrums of race, class, and gender, and the fate of the democratic ideal.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63920580-the-auburn-conference

Best dog books

"Whereas the wolf is a generalist, the dog has been selectively bred by man over some 15,000 years to specialize in traits important to humans"

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/dogs-jose-castello/

The case for AI thinking

...My worry is not that these models are similar to us. It's that we are similar to these models." If simple training techniques can enable a program to behave like a human, maybe humans aren't as special as we thought. Could it also mean that A.I. will surpass us not only in knowledge but also in judgment, ingenuity, cunning—and, as a result, power? To my surprise, Hasson told me that he is "worried these days that we might succeed in understanding how the brain works. Pursuing this question may have been a colossal mistake for humanity." He likened A.I. researchers to nuclear scientists in the nineteenthirties: "This is the most interesting time in the life of these people. And, at the same time, they know that what they are working on has grave implications for humanity. But they cannot stop because of the curiosity to learn."

One of my favorite books by Hofstadter is a nerdy volume called "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought." When I was in college, it electrified me. The premise was that a question such as "What is thinking?" was not merely philosophical but, rather, had a real answer. In 1995, when the book was published, Hofstadter and his research group could only gesture at what the answer might be. Thinking back on the book, I wondered whether Hofstadter would feel excited that A.I. researchers may have attained what he had yearned for: a mechanical account of the rudiments of thinking. When we spoke, however, he sounded profoundly disappointed—and frightened. Current A.I. research "confirms a lot of my ideas, but it also takes away from the beauty of what humanity is," he told me. "When I was younger, much younger, I wanted to know what underlay creativity, the mechanisms of creativity. That was a holy grail for me. But now I want it to remain a mystery." Perhaps the secrets of thinking are simpler than anyone expected—the kind of thing that a high schooler, or even a machine, could understand. ■

New Yorker, Nov '25

On walking

"That something exists outside ourselves and our preoccupations, so near, so readily available, is our greatest blessing."

https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/12/18/in-praise-of-walking-thomas-a-clark/

Dodgers on Jimmy Kimmel

The @Dodgers break down the craziest moments of Game 7 in the World Series!

https://www.threads.com/@jimmykimmellive/post/DQqYv2YETl1?xmt=AQF0mwHmXhgx49HscYsuUzBQ9bcmATwx91AhKZ3DWEd4DvaQhbWPD0jch4edNhnJpMZjrHoB&slof=1

Ken Burns on America's continuing revolution

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/these-united-states-ken-burns-on-americas-continuing-revolution/

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Gotta have❤️

Dodgers in seven. Take heart from Bart, Jays fans, and look forward to spring.

"Baseball breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, & it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops." - Bart Giamatti.