Okay, okay … it’s still a few months before he gets the Nobel, but still… it’s heartening to know that even world-famous writers get “no thanks” letters, and on New Yorker letterhead no less. Roger Angell‘s 1981 letter to Gabriel García Márquez comes to us courtesy the University of Texas’s Ransome Center and is making the rounds on Twitter.

Lunchtime guest Bob Hass

One of the little-known pleasures of Bay Area life is the Heyday Books lunchtime conversations series in Berkeley. Great company, light lunch, and excellent speakers – Robert Alter, David Ulin, among them. Because of the series, I’m running up my mileage back and forth to Berkeley, which, apart from rising gas costs and wear-and-tear on my old Honda, is always a good thing.

And so I made the trek last month to hear Robert Hass, whose latest collection, Summer Snow, is getting a lot of attention. I wrote about that here.

I recognize that not everyone will be able to zap over to San Pablo Boulevard on a weekday. So I have coaxed publisher Steve Wasserman and his assistant, Emmerich Anklam, to provide an alternative, and they have. Lucky for all of us, the Hass event is the debut entry on the Heyday’s brand new Soundcloud page here. Steve moderates the discussion.

You never lose some friends.

Bob is always a fascinating speaker, and he spoke about the dangers to our environment, friends who have died, and the unusual process of putting together Summer Snow. One of his favorite topics is Czesław Miłosz, in fact, that’s how we met. I get plenty of opportunities to talk, so I generally like to be quietly inconspicuous at these events, but an hour into the talk about lost friends and the poems of Summer Snow, he asked for one last question and I couldn’t resist the chance.

My own trepidatious question around the 59 minute mark. Could he read one of his poems about Milosz? In particular, the one about the Miłosz’s tomb at Na Skałce? He hesitated. It was long, he said, counting the five pages. But then, with the encouragement of the crowd, he read the poem, “An Argument About Poetics Imagined at Squaw Valley After a Night Walk Under the Mountain.”

It was an astonishing, dare I say unforgettable, reading. Everyone was moved. One person was crying. Listen for yourself.

One hitch: the battery on the recording device died before the poem ends. So I include the final lines for you below:

One small fly in the ointment:
You described headlights sweeping a field
On a summer night, do you remember? I can quote to you
The lines. You said you could sense the heartbeat
Of the living and the dead. It was a night in July, he said,
In Pennsylvania – to me then an almost inconceivably romantic name –
And then the air was humid and smelled of wet earth after rain.
I remember this night very well. Those lines not so much.

In school, character is fate.” (Courtesy Vassar Archives)

You think the coronavirus is bad? Novelist Mary McCarthy will tell you about about one of the epic plagues of modern times.

Both her indulgent, fun-loving parents died during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. Then she and her three brothers were shuttled among relatives, some of them abusive. In her 1957 book, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, she describes it all with merciless wit and frankness.

Now her book is coming to Stanford. It will be discussed at the Another Look winter event at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, February 19, at the Bechtel Conference Center in Encina Hall.

She was first sent to a Catholic convent school in Seattle, later to an Episcopalian seminary in Tacoma. While appreciating the classical foundation her Catholic education gave her, she defiantly and publicly lost her faith during those years – first as a stunt, then in earnest. She eventually graduated from Vassar.

Toby is leading the discussion.

“She never spares herself at all,” wrote Charles Poore in The New York Times. “The vanities and ambitions, the resentments and misunderstandings, the small triumphs and the scarring disasters that marked her early years are set forth with remarkable candor, so that her book is the most incisive contribution to the story of her development as an artist that we shall ever have.” She was “harshly given every opportunity to become one of the lost, and yet went on to create in modern idioms a style based on classic Latin satire.”

The conversation will be led by author Tobias Wolff, founding director of Another Look and a National Medal of Arts winner. Panelists include his wife, the author Catherine Wolff and Another Look regular Inga Pierson, a former Stanford fellow who brings some personal experience to bear on the subject: she is  an English teacher at Sacred Heart Preparatory in Menlo Park.

Inga’s coming, too.

The event is free and open to the public. Come early for best seats. And Stanford Bookstore on campus, Kepler’s in Menlo Park, and Bell’s Books in Palo Alto are carrying the books.

The Another Look book club focuses on short classics that have been forgotten, neglected, or overlooked—or may simply not have received the attention they merit. The selected works are short, in order to encourage the involvement of Bay Area readers whose time may be limited. Subscription at anotherlook.stanford.edu is encouraged for regular updates and details on the selected books and events.

A new video from a powerful advocate for reading. We’ve written about the children’s author, Mary Pope Osborne, before here. She is the author of the Magic Tree House series, which has sold more than 100 million copies and been translated into 30 languages – success by any standards. The series has been awarded by the National Council of Teachers of English, the American Booksellers Association, and she also received the Ludington Memorial Award from the Educational Paperback Association and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Random House Sales Force.

In the video, she’s discusses the first books that form a bridge into the rest of your life. “I feel like the first books are some of the most important things that fall into your lap in your life. And you have to treasure them for what they did for you. …They were eye-opening and stayed with me. To this day, I can recreate the thrill I had when I first heard them, when I was just three or four years old. In high school, I wouldn’t have survived without reading.”

Full video “The Magic of Reading” here. It’s short. Three minutes. (Hat tip to Paul Caringella)

At Waverley and Forest: “We were simply amazed to see so many parrots on one true, and more flying in the sky. The tree was full of them and they were eating berries,” says Melonie Chang Brophy, who took the photo.

One of my favorite memories in São Paulo was how the trees in the neighborhood were filled with brilliantly colored chattering parakeets. I didn’t think I’d see them this in North America, even on the warmer side of the continent. But here we are. You’ve heard of San Francisco’s The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill? Welcome to the parrots of Palo Alto!

There were several sightings this month. From NextDoor:

•  “They were on a tree on Middlefield and Channing this past Wednesday. My daughter was in awe in her walk to school! So fun to see!”

•  “They must have a thing about Waverley Street. I’ve seen (but mostly heard) them in Johnson Park, in a tree at the corner of Waverley and Everett. Persimmon tree.”

•  “We saw a flock of them in midtown a couple of weeks ago. They used to hang around the church on Colorado. It was great to see them back!”

San Francisco species (Photo: Dan_H/Flickr)

•  “I just saw a bunch at 4 p.m. today the corner of Lytton and Middlefield. It was pretty awesome to see it in person.”

• “I see (and hear) them on Cowper between Lytton and Everett at least once a week. They showed up around here about 2 years ago. They are so beautiful!”

•  “Thank you for the parrot report! For many years, up until maybe 2016, we had a huge green parrot flock living in the trees next to the Church at Colorado and Cowper. And then they disappeared. So glad to learn they have migrated.”

• “That’s so beautiful. I wish I had my phone with me last year when I saw them at El dorado and Waverley going from tree to tree a whole flock. It was so beautiful!!! I had never seen anything like that before. I had never seen a wild parrot before, I thought maybe I was wrong about it. But I guess I was right about what I saw.”

• “They come to my backyard all the time. I have not paid attention this year though. They are really noisy (but so pretty) and they like the plum tree in my backyard.”

(Photo: Melonie Chang Brophy)

Sunnyvale apparently has some birds just like these, too. … But parrots? Not so fast. According to one comment, “These are mitred parakeets [i.e., Psittacara mitratus – ED] a different species from the ones in San Francisco. Probably spread up the peninsula from Sunnyvale. Very cool!”

But … but… but… the mitred parakeets look just like the mitred conures to me. And both, apparently, are famous for screeching. Could these birds be both? Could we be developing whole North American subspecies?

Here’s what KQED has to say about San Francisco’s birds: “The wild parrots in and around San Francisco are called cherry-headed conures. At one point, a mitred conure joined the flock and bred with the cherry heads. Now the flock is dotted with hybrids.  There are a couple ways to differentiate the breeds. Cherry heads have slightly smaller bodies and a red helmet pattern on their heads, whereas mitred conures have a more blotchy pattern of red and feet that are a slightly darker hue.”

More from KQED:

Where Are They From?
The cherry-headed conures come from a small territory spanning Ecuador and Peru. The mitred conures originated from a large territory ranging from Peru through Bolivia down to northern Argentina.

Wild for Palo Alto persimmons. (Photo: Maureen Bard)

How Did They Get Here?
They were brought here to be sold as pets in the exotic pet trade. The U.S. was the largest importer of birds in the world before the government banned the trade of wild exotic birds in 1992.

How Did They Get Out?
The founders of the wild flock of conures either escaped or were released.

***

So what about the Palo Alto birds? They are said to be escapees from Monette’s Pet Shop on California Avenue. I remember it well from years ago. According to one post, a few took shelter in trees just on the south side of Oregon Expressway. Could these be these rugged birds?

Beware! Beware! They are not as innocuous as they might seem:

“Years ago there was a flock of about a dozen who were all over the place in our city. Two local churches had to have work done on their roofs to evict the parrot flock from carving out little caves in the eaves.”

And this: “Many years ago we heard the sound of ripping wood in our attic. I thought it was some aggressive rodent, but when I took a look a saw… a conure I guess making a nest !?!?”

On October 30, Stanford’s Another Look book club took on Alfred Hayes‘s My Face for the World to See, a tough look at Hollywood by a film industry insider.

Author Alfred Hayes with friend

Photographer David Schwartz preserved the a terrific night for us – with four panelists, including David Thomson, the film critic and author who wrote the introduction to the NYRB Classics edition we were reading.

We had another surprise guest that evening, the author’s daughter, Josephine Hayes Dean, flew out to join us for the evening. David took a photo of that, too.

From left to right above: Another Look director Robert Harrison; the author’s daughter, Josephine Dean; novelist Terry Gamble; National Medal of Arts winner Tobias Wolff, and film critic David Thomson.

If you missed the stellar event, you can join us after-the-fact with the podcast here. It really was a lively and incisive discussion about a world where talent is chewed up and discarded, where thousands come to follow a dream that so rarely and randomly gets fulfilled.

Panelists in discussion below, from left to right: Robert Harrison, Tobias Wolff, Terry Gamble, and David Thomson.