#brad kessler

In pointing us to a "new sentence" from Annie Proulx, Sam Anderson at The New York Times Magazine writes:

Proulx is particularly good with how her sentences sound. She understands that words are not antiseptic little meaning-cubes to be stacked neatly into sturdy towers of logic. They are wild; they make noise. They force the humans reading them to slurp and click and hoot and pop and tap their tongues. Such sounds, combined carefully, can carry their own meaning.

“She stood and unzippered her knapsack. She’d brought hardly any clothing—just a long print dress. She was still wearing the same sweater, the same Levi’s, the same bra she’d worn since leaving New York City. Somehow to change her clothes, to shower (even to eat) seemed a kind of betrayal, an acceptance; and if she could only ignore the exigencies of her own body, she might outwit the deadly hours that kept slipping past.”

A plane crashes off the coast of a small island. As the search for survivors surges, the victims’ relatives gather at an inn near the crash site to hope, wonder, and come to terms with new loss and old memories.

In Birds of Fall, author Brad Kessler turns a story of tragedy into a lighter beast; while the characters despair and move numbly through their pain—it doesn’t cripple the reader’s emotional reality. Instead, while wandering through their stories, you remain an observer; the struggle, encapsulated in moments of beautiful description, is softened, for better or worse.

Because I want stories to sing off the page, lift and strike—smoke becoming stone. Stories that grab me by the hair, the pain so real I can’t focus on my breakfast until I’ve found out the next twenty pages. This book lacked the gravity of a real tragedy, but, surprisingly, I still enjoyed reading it. It had a predictable nature, which is almost welcome in the aftermath of a crash, anyways? It’s soothing to have security in knowing. I didn’t fear or feel uncomfortable at anytime during the book—which means I can lay it down (not simply cast it aside)—but on the other hand, I wasn’t gripping the pages at midnight, unable to sleep, or tearing up near the end because I couldn’t simply leave these characters to an unknown fate, and it simply hasn’t become a must-read to quote and pass on to my friends. Actually, when people asked me what I was reading this week, I shrugged, “a library book” it didn’t really matter to tell them, you know?

But the birds, the birds—put a bird in it—and the metaphor will be applauded; by me, too. Though Kessler could have played on this on a deeper level. Ana, the ornithologist, loses her husband in the crash. She leaves her lab of sparrows, and spreads her thoughts on migration to the fellow mourners. It’s a type of solace, I suppose, but so closely linked to the images of flight and travel that Kessler missed an opportunity to bind them more closely. Did he sidestep it on purpose, so as to not be heavy-handed? I think I would have rather liked it though; how this scientific study of travelling birds could commiserate with the patterns of human loss.

But it was pretty, the story. Not beautiful, not sexy, not striking. It was pretty. And if you’re in a pretty mood—it’ll definitely hold true.

Pasteurization was one method of assuring safe milk; another was strict inspection and certification of dairies. Each method had its advocates. But certification - a process of making sure the animals were healthy and the dairies spotless - lost out to the quicker fix: pasteurization. People no longer died from drinking milk. Yet pasteurization often became an excuse for dairies to sell, not clean milk from healthy animals, but filthy milk from sick animals whose milk had been cooked clean of its impurities. Rather than rigorously certify raw-milk dairies - as is done in Europe today - it was less costly for the American dairy industry to simply zap their milk. Throughout the twentieth century, compulsory pasteurization laws in the United States expanded state by state, until it became nearly impossible for Americans to find anything but pasteurized - and effectively dead - milk.

Today in North America the typical industrial cow (organic or not) lives in a slurry of manure. She never walks on pasture or eats grass. She’s fed what she was never intended to eat - high-energy grain. She will produce twice as much milk by eating grain instead of grass, but she’ll become chronically sick from it. A diet of grain will lead to knotted guts, bloat, abscessed livers, ulcerated rumens, rotten hoofs, udder inflammation, shock, and eventually death. The average industrial milk cow lives less than five years. A cow allowed to eat grass on pasture can live fifteen or longer.

In a tiny operation like our own, there’s no need to pasteurize the milk. We know beforehand if a doe is sick, and the quality of the milk is obvious because it sits right beneath our noses…The further milk has to travel from the teat, the greater the chances it can degrade. If our own raw milk was trucked out of the valley and traveled a few hours and sat in traffic on a city street and then on a shelf somewhere in a store, we couldn’t vouch for its safety. Note because of what happened here in situ, but what might’ve happened once it left the valley. All this argues for a local source: an animal and a farmer one actually knows.