1. Last Sunday I left the Fox Theater wanting to go back in, sit down, and hear the entire Spokane Symphony program again. I knew, however, that Spokane Public Radio station's KSFC 91.9 would play the entire concert again today at noon.
I tuned in. I listened to the entire concert again. I absorbed much more of the music than I did a week ago and thoroughly enjoyed the experience.
2. Maybe I've mentioned in earlier posts that until I cracked open The Dog Stars, I had never read a post-apocalyptic novel before. Peter Heller's book is turning out to be such a compelling exploration of love, loyalty, friendship, death, survival, memory, and other human experiences that I'm beginning to wonder if I've missed out on some good material by not checking out books, movies, and television shows in this genre.
3. Debbie paid some visits uptown late this afternoon. Before she left, she said she asked me to find a podcast for us to listen to when she returned.
I found an episode in the podcast The American West entitled "John James Audubon and Vanishing America". I chose this episode because we had both recently read Kenn Kaufman's book The Birds That Audubon Missed for book club and wanted to hear what retired University of Montana professor Dan Flores had to say about Audubon.
The podcast episode ended up focusing on Audubon's deep dismay that so many birds and animals were being killed, often indiscriminately by settlers throughout the USA. Entire species of birds, for example, the passenger pigeon, were rendered extinct and other birds and animals were decimated to near extinction.
Like so many of the books we are reading in the Science/Nature book club we have joined, Flores examines the relationship between humans and the non-human world of nature, why humans have seen themselves as having license to kill birds and animals (and often do it cruelly and voraciously), and how Audubon (and Henry David Thoreau, among others) grieved the loss of so much life, beauty, and variety in our world.
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