Even in winter

There is a tree next to my house. I’m not sure what kind of tree it is, but each year I think it’s dead. It drops its leaves earlier than I would expect, branches fall out of it, etc. Each year I’m sure that it’s the end.

But, so far, each Spring it wakes up and explodes in almost pure white blossoms. For several days it is spectacularly beautiful, and it remains beautiful as it drops the white petals and the yard looks like it snowed in the night.

The tree doesn’t have a lot of leaves, and what it has are often covered in rusty spots that look like a disease. Each year I’m sure that it’s the end. But each year (so far!) it makes lots of small, hard red berries or fruits of some kind. The leaves fall, but many berries stay on the tree into winter, although they shrivel up and look like they forgot to fall.

Birds in a tree in winter

At some point, the snows come. And then birds flock to the tree and eat the berries. They come in groups, sometimes robins, sometimes other kinds. Turns out that the berries didn’t forget to fall. They were just waiting.

More movies

The movie watching spree continued this week with THX 1138 (1971) and the six minute long Planet X (2006). I have absolutely no idea what to make of the latter.

Started reading The Simulacra by Philip K. Dick. Ken Layne recommended it on one of the Desert Oracle programs/podcasts and I picked it up a while ago. I started it back in early December but got sidetracked, so I started it from scratch this week. I’m hooked so far.

Books and films

The Criterion Channel had a 25% off sale a month or so ago, so I bought a yearly subscription. It is nice to have a huge library of movies worth watching. Quite a difference from Hulu and Netflix …

I’ve also read a few books over the past month. We had an extra long holiday break from school this year so I had lots of time.

Recently watched: North by Northwest (1959), Strangers on a Train (1951), Double Indemnity (1944), The 39 Steps (1953), Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto (1954), Gente del Po (1947), Kiru (1962), Kenki (1965).

Recently read: The Passenger and Stella Maris (Cormac McCarthy), The Shape of a Pocket (John Berger), Nova Express: The Restored Text (William Burroughs, edited by Oliver Harris), Notes on Nothing: The Joy of Being Nobody (Anonymous).

Here we go

Made a pot of beans, did two loads of laundry, cooked lunch, cooked dinner, shoveled the driveway. First day of 2025. Here we go.

Morally abhorrent

Our elites have not suddenly become morally abhorrent; the financial globalization that [Martin] Wolf championed has allowed them to remove themselves from democratic accountability, state regulation, and communities of obligation. It has also decimated countervailing powers such as organized labor, working-class political parties, and capital controls. The market never was “permeated” by the values of duty, fairness, and decency: it was constrained by nonmarket forces. Wolf has spent his career arguing that reason and freedom demanded the removal of those constraints. And here we are.

Trevor Jackson (2025, January 16). Never Too Much [Review of the book The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, by Martin Wolf]. The New York Review of Books.