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The Life of the Skies, by Jonathan Rosen, is subtitled “Birding at the End of Nature”. It is nominally about bird-watching, but really about a symbolic interaction with nature.  The author points out that birds are the only wild animals that most people ever see, which is not exactly true.  Squirrels are an easy counter-example, and depending on where one lives, one may see deer, or lizards, or whales.  However, birds can fly over fences and across borders, so the bird in your back yard may have come from thousands of miles away.  I think it would be more accurate to say that there is not much wilderness left, and migratory birds are the closest connection that most of us have with that wilderness.

And so the author touches on poetry, literature and philosophy.  He rambles from Thoreau to Whitman to Frost, from Audobon’s drawings to Darwin’s finches, from Adam’s naming the birds in Eden to modern birders with their classification, nomenclature and life lists.  In between the more abstract discussions, he takes us on canoe trips through Louisiana and Arkansas looking for the ivory-billed woodpecker.  And yet, even here the birds are symbolic.  The search is real enough, but the birds may or may not exist.

About the only the thing he doesn’t discuss is the symbolism of dreams.  For example, I don’t dream about birds, or about being a bird, but I do dream about flying.  Maybe I like birds just because they can fly, and it has nothing to do with a connection with nature.  Flying symbolizes freedom, as in free as a you-know-what. 

Well.  My review is all over the place, which is appropriate because Rosen’s book is all over the place.  It’s a fantastic book, but it’s not for everybody.  I hope I’ve either piqued your interest or warned you off.

I’ve been reading “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”, by Thomas Frank. This is the book-length version of Obama’s pithy remark about “bitter” voters clinging to guns and religion. TTB provides a link to an article-length rant.

The common theme is that there is something wrong with people who vote Republican. There is a vast right-wing conspiracy to get people agitated with religious issues so they will vote against their own economic interests while big business ships their jobs to Mexico, while Wal-Mart destroys small businesses, and while big agriculture destroys the family farm.

Meanwhile, there is a mirror image of this narrative: there is a vast left-wing conspiracy which has taken over the universities, controls Hollywood, and is systematically undermining traditional values. Thomas Frank says there is no liberal conspiracy; television is driven by advertising (business), and Hollywood is simply giving people what they want (the market in action).

I say there are conspiracies all over the place. It is somewhat amusing to try to explain the behavior of others in terms of what is wrong with them, but mostly I see myself making relatively simple decisions. I can watch reality TV or not watch reality TV, I can vote or not vote, just decide and move on to something more interesting.

The subtitle to Shelby Steele’s A Bound Man was irresistible: “Why we are excited about Obama and why he can’t win”. Oh, really? Right or wrong, this is a fascinating book.

Steele is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and has written extensively on race relations and cultural issues. Like Obama, he is the product of a black father and a white mother. Right or wrong, the book is exceptionally well-written, insightful, and autobiographical in places.

Steele’s view is that there are two ways for black Americans to make their way in a white-dominated society: as bargainers or as challengers. The bargainers say “I’ll overlook your history of racism if you’ll overlook my race”, and Steele gives as examples Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey and Colin Powell. The challengers say “you OWE us” and the examples are Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

Steele’s thesis is first, that we are excited about Obama, because as the first black bargainer on the national political stage, he offers white Americans absolution, and second, that he can’t win because black American culture is predominantly in the challenger mode and will not support a bargainer.

I can see echoes of this theme in the criticisms of Obama as “not black enough”, in Bill Clinton’s effort to label Obama as the “black candidate” and even in Hillary’s goading Obama to “reject and denounce” Louis Farrakhan.

Since the book’s publication in December 2007, Obama has shown that blacks will vote for him in large numbers, so it looks like Steele is wrong.

I’ve been reading Plain Secrets, Joe Mackall’s account of his friendship with his Amish neighbors. Here I’d like to focus on one particular issue, namely the use of the bright orange triangle, the “slow-moving vehicle” sign, on Amish buggies. Amish life has a lot of rules, called the Ordnung, set by the church. Different churches have somewhat different rules.

Mackall’s Amish friends belong to a church that does not allow its members to put the orange triangles on their buggies. This is a serious enough matter that anyone who uses the orange triangle is excommunicated and has to join a different church. It’s serious enough that a man from the orange-triangle church can’t marry a woman from the no-orange-triangle church. (There is a parallel issue regarding lights on buggies; some Amish will use battery-powered lights, others will use kerosene lanterns. The Amish who use the kerosene lanterns tend to the be the same ones who don’t use the orange triangles.)

Meanwhile, one to the main causes of Amish mortality is… buggy accidents, typically when a fast-moving car runs into a slow-moving buggy. The Amish attitude is that the accidents are God’s will.

My view is that orange triangles should be a matter of individual choice, neither forbidden nor required by the community. I suppose that would be almost incomprehensible to the Amish. Maybe, just maybe, the church could change the orange triangles from forbidden to mandatory. After all, the church ten miles down the road did that, so it’s possible. But people thinking for themselves and making decisions on their own? First it’s orange triangles, then it’s belts instead of suspenders, and pretty soon the community falls apart.

Who can resist a book with such a title? And with a lemur on the cover? Not I.

Searching is an ancient problem, going back to our hunting and gathering days. This book turns the problem inside out and examines it from the point of view of the objects being searched for.

How do we organize things so we can find them? I’ve written a lot of database retrieval systems, and the process is fairly simple. The customer says “we need to search by name or account number”. The account number is simple, the name is more complicated due to inconsistent spelling, but the solutions are well known.

Nowadays our information is on the web, and most of it is found by search engine, not by going to the home page and looking in the table of contents. A lot of information is found serendipitously while looking for something else. How do we organize for findability when we don’t know who the searchers are, or what they’re looking for, and someone else wrote the search engine?

The book has more questions than answers. In fact, the author begins by asking the reader how he found the book. I was looking for something else. I looked up something in the card catalog at the library, and didn’t find it, but I browsed the shelves above and below the shelf that didn’t have what I was looking for. The title, with its juxtaposition of two unusual words, jumped out at me.