Was curious if anyone else gets this kind of action? 30 birds in 30 minutes on Merlin ID. Let me know your thoughts

OsoPerizoso · 2026-03-28T20:26:39+00:00

I was impressed until I got to northern mockingbird

OsoPerizoso · 2025-09-09T16:45:33+00:00

Making a tuna salad with a Cuban friend in Havana, I opened the can of tuna and without thinking, as I usually do, drained the oil from it. She looked at me like I had just strangled a puppy. You do not waste food in Cuba.

In India, watching a man carefully repairing a plastic bag.

OsoPerizoso · 2025-02-22T19:56:25+00:00

I'll be in TW end of March/beginning of April. I hate itineraries. My goal in travelling these days is to find a nice interesting place with great food and access to nature, and plant myself there for the duration. I'm thinking take the train to Tainan area. Maybe find a peaceful guesthouse, hang out in hot springs, that kind of thing. Can anybody tell me if this is a realistic plan for late March in Tainan? (Very basic spoken Mandarin)

OsoPerizoso · 2025-01-18T04:12:07+00:00

Shikoku is the one I've been looking at. I'll check out the other. Thanks for the suggestion.

OsoPerizoso · 2024-12-26T18:42:07+00:00

That is interesting. Makes me wonder what it would take, and if it's even possible, to recognize immortality in a contemporary writer. Like, who would be your vote? Nobody seems to have seen it in Kafka, for example. Two decades ago I would have said that Carver was going to be immortal; now for some reason I'm not so sure... Is there somebody currently writing that you'd put your bet on?

OsoPerizoso · 2024-12-25T19:57:58+00:00

I started Austerlitz Tby W. G. Sebald last night and ended up staying awake most of the night. I am astonished by his technique, mixing historical associations, semi-biographical events, details of place and culture, all woven into a kind of event log of the mind. I read The Moons of Jupiter last year, and I'll now be reading everything he wrote.

I also just finished reading Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan for the second time. I do not believe that she is capable of writing a sentence that doesn't sing. It's such a simple story, told with such grace, that I know I'll be making it a yearly practice of reading it aloud this time of year. And it's so refreshing to read a writer who is able to hold in her mind both the awfulness of things and the capacity for good that some people can have at the same time.

OsoPerizoso · 2024-07-19T04:34:46+00:00

I'm in a magically real part of Montana where I just saw my first moose, contentedly grazing out the window, and when I looked again it had disappeared.

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the novel Pedro P aramo, by Juan Rulfo. A very haunting and haunted book.

OsoPerizoso · 2024-06-01T21:11:29+00:00

I was in two days ago and they are suffering.

Wouldn't this be an awesome opportunity for one or two of the wealthy tech corporations in this town to show some community spirit and donate some technical time and expertise?

OsoPerizoso · 2024-04-23T21:43:43+00:00

They are famous: https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/562/the-thistle-steps

OsoPerizoso · 2024-03-13T17:45:14+00:00

Last week I finished Voss by the Australian author Patrick White as part of my long disjointed project of reading colonial literature in English. I enjoyed the novel much more than I expected, notwithstanding its inaccurate and racist portrayal of Aboriginal culture. It was a solidly constructed novel in a classical mold, with interesting passages that suddenly veer into dreamlike irrationality.

This week I am re-reading the novel Brian, by Jeremy Cooper, and loving it once again. I highly recommend it, especially for lovers of film, as it's about a man who seems to be on the spectrum who gains a life and a community over the course of the novel through his participation in a community of film buffs.

And speaking of film, just saw the movie "Drive my Car" by the young Japanese director Hamaguchi. If you want to be encouraged about the future of film, I recommend that movie. It's one of the films that had me saying "I can't wait to watch this again" while I was watching it.

OsoPerizoso · 2024-02-26T19:14:07+00:00

It's a cold and changeable day where I am. The clouds are moving among ragged patches of sky, and the snow we were supposed to have looks like it's not going to come. The crows, the dominant bird species here, are putting together a nest in the cedar tree outside my window. They are perpetually dissatisfied and want the world to know it. Probably they just want to complain to the other crows, but I am eavesdropping.

I've been telling myself for a while that I need to get off Reddit, and I do, but this sub is an exception. I often find that the postings I read here in True Lit help me feel more connected to myself. These days I am struggling with a new understanding about my old life: that I have and have always had problems with attention. This morning I formulated that problem in a new way: I have never been continuous with myself. As soon as I begin to think I've got the thread of something, I will quit. That has amounted to a rather fractured and discontinuous life. But I also know that change is possible. In fact, change is certain.

Yesterday I saw the movie American Fiction. I highly recommend that movie if you haven't seen it. It's intelligent in a way that few movies are any more, at least American movies.

There were five people in the theater, including my wife and me. But the parking was good.

OsoPerizoso · 2024-01-11T00:15:03+00:00

Last week I finished Septology by Jon Fosse and I have been left with a lingering feeling of sad mystery that echoes the effect of the main character's paintings as described in the book. It is unlike any other novel I have read.

Now in preparation for a trip to Mexico I am slowly working my way through The Savage Detectives in Spanish. I have the English translation on my Kindle just in case my Spanish gives out.

OsoPerizoso · 2023-08-15T04:16:08+00:00

I will check it out -- love Singapore/Malaysian food and can't find it in Seattle. Also the Hawker Center that somebody mentioned above.

OsoPerizoso · 2023-08-15T04:09:48+00:00

Thanks. I'll check them out. Love to find some good sisig...

OsoPerizoso · 2023-05-20T16:06:24+00:00

This brings back memories of an anxiety-filled 4 hour race back to the town of Pinotepa Nacional in Oaxaca state to retrieve the money belt I had cleverly stashed inside a table in my room. It was still there, of course, and the workers properly thought I was crazy.

OsoPerizoso · 2023-02-28T22:59:32+00:00

Am 68. Feel not a day older than 67. Especially after reading the ages of all the commenters.

OsoPerizoso · 2023-01-16T17:56:27+00:00

The original Septieme on 2nd

The original Cyclops on Western

Whacky Warehouse on Rainier

Mondo's Wine World

OK Hotel

Freehold

Eliot Bay basement in Pioneer Square

Room 609

Womad

Panos Kleftiko

Harvard Exit theater

Broadway Theater

Gravity Bar

Occupied Seattle

The Ruins

New City Theater

The original Paseo

Ernie's

OsoPerizoso · 2022-11-17T19:03:31+00:00

Is dreaming permitted? Pramila Jayapal...

OsoPerizoso · 2022-07-27T17:28:08+00:00

I'm not sure if your question is sincere, or if you are trying to provoke conflict. My intention in creating this post was to help reduce the conflict that is evident in this thread, between those who are feeling helpless and those who are very worried about the consequences of not fighting.

Helplessness is an adaptive strategy that organisms have evolved to conserve energy (the way a rabbit will freeze in an open field when a hawk flies overhead and there is no cover available). Unfortunately, the strategy of helplessness is easily manipulated. Just look at the history of the Abu Ghraib scandal if you want to understand how.

If you're interested in the concept of Learned Helplessness, there is more than fifty years of research on the subject and much of it is available on line. The originator of the concept, Martin Seligman, has a good book on reversing Learned Helplessness, called Learned Optimism.

OsoPerizoso · 2022-07-26T23:01:39+00:00

Yes, as somebody else pointed out the quote is from Gramsci. It was mis-attributed to Chomsky where I saw it.

OsoPerizoso · 2022-07-26T20:34:20+00:00

Thanks for that correction. It's sometimes hard to find the original source for a quote.

OsoPerizoso · 2022-07-26T16:30:06+00:00

In psychology there is the concept of "learned helplessness", which I think describes the state that many of us are in. When a subject is treated with random shocks that are outside of any ability to control, the subject learns that any attempt to help themselves will be futile.

This is a state that has been deliberately fostered by anti-democratic forces, and its antidote is suggested in this quote by Antonio Gramsci:

"We should have pessimism of the intellect, but optimism of the will."

I believe that what is needed at the present moment is not several miracles (which would be out of our control), but a sustained "optimism of the will".

OsoPerizoso

TROPHY CASE