House and garden:
Errands
Lisaism
Reading:
Exercise
When I began this book, I thought it was going to read like a self-published book: too personal, with an axe to grind (somehow bitterness against the publishing business always leeches out), riddled with errors. In the first chapters especially are noticeable typos--lie for lay, e.g.--and it was overtly and perhaps excessively personal, intimately personal, early on. But this, I realized, was because Mark Bittner needed to set up why he was able to arrange his life around the parrots--no steady job, few commitments, a high tolerance for filth.
Lou saw that I was reading it and asked whether I liked it--she'd also seen the trailer--and I said I liked it a lot, but then I'm a parrot person (which she is not, definitively). Even as a parrot person, if I had not seen some of the flock moments before buying the book in City Lights, I might not have liked it as much.
Reading it alongside Blink was interesting: Bittner practices the intuition Gladwell promotes. Bittner ties his ability to connect with the parrots (and his responsibility, if any, to them to return, like the Little Prince's fox) to Taoism but also to intuition and the oneness of the world, a concept I cannot describe justly or aptly but which rang true to me.
All books continued to be one book because in Blink, Gladwell mentions the ecotone, the area in which two distinct ecologies overlap; (and it was the title of that Sunday's episode of "Six Feet Under";) also Bittner just by paying attention found how much more overlap there is between "the natural world" and San Francisco, and how to move between them.