Books & Ideas
For a couple of the coldest months each year, for more than 30 years, Ward Just and his wife, Sarah Catchpole, have escaped to Paris They need some city time and anyway, their beautiful West Tisbury home is not so well insulated. And Paris fires the imagination.
Poet’s Corner at Library
Cape Cod poets Elizabeth Bradfield and Nancy K. Pearson join Island poet Lisa Vunk in a reading on Sunday, May 1 at 4 p.m. at the West Tisbury Library.
Elizabeth Bradfield’s Approaching Ice (Persea Books 2010), was a finalist for the James Laughlin Award. Her book Interpretive Work (Arktoi Books 2008) was winner of the Audre Lorde Prize and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, she has an MFA from the University of Alaska and works as a naturalist.
Trainings for Islanders who want to learn more about becoming a volunteer for Red Cross disaster services — and become a member of the Vineyard’s disaster assistance team — will be offered by the Red Cross on Friday, April 29, from 6 to 9 p,m, and Saturday, April 30, beginning at 8:30 a.m. They will take place at the Oak Bluffs Council on Aging located at 21 Wamsutta avenue. Beverages and snacks will be provided.
Jane’s Beautiful Soul
to experience the Vineyard’s magical majesty
to see the idiosyncracies of each backyard tree
to look at our Island’s night sky as always new
to talk to her dog, Mac, as though to me and you
in one of Jane’s poems entitled My Trees
she hears “screeching sound of saws on trees”
so roads can be made and houses built
in forest where she and a boy once walked
British neurologist and bestselling author Oliver (Awakenings) Sacks noted that enjoying art is not just a visual experience — it’s an emotional one: “In an informal way I have often seen quite demented patients recognize and respond vividly to paintings and delight in painting at a time when they are scarcely responsive to words and disoriented and out of it. I think that recognition of visual art can be very deep.”
“Each food item in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average of 1,500 miles,” writes Steven L. Hopp, Barbara Kingsolver’s husband, in the first of a series of sidebars sprinkled throughout her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, the account of their family’s attempts to eat locally. “If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country’s oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week.”