The title of Lydia Millet’s last novel - Dinosaurs - seems to wink at the threat of human extinction, and, yet, its explicit referent in the book is to birds, those sometimes-alien creatures who survived the impact of the asteroid that wiped out most of their kind. This kind of double meaning, something like a sign that points in multiple directions, abounds in Dinosaurs, which is at once a moving human narrative and a reflection on the ways in which our frailty puts us at the mercy of our shortcomings as a species but also, ultimately, serves as an opening to discovering how much we care about the natural world. It was, as always, a great pleasure to talk to Lydia Millet about these and other matters. I hope you too will enjoy our conversation.

A continuation of my earlier episode in which Trevien Stanger - instructor of environmental studies at St. Michael's College in Vermont - and I discuss Abram's book, which, I think it's fair to say, has had a profound effect on both of us. This time, we focus on Abram's argument about the impact of the invention of the alphabet on our relationship with the natural world. 

If you'd like to listen to part 1 of this discussion - https://www.buzzsprout.com/356774/11992722

If you'd like to listen to my conversation with Johanna Drucker about the invention of the alphabet - 
https://www.buzzsprout.com/356774/11826284

There’s a funny little corridor tucked away behind a park in the Village of Pleasantville, New York where I live, where bears and bobcats amble through, walking atop the Catskill Aqueduct, the 100-year-old artery that delivers water from the Catskill mountains to New York City. Fellow resident, Michael Inglis, who has been hiking this patch of semi-wilderness for the past twenty-five years, has recently written a book about it, Woods and Water: Walking New York’s Nanny Hagen Brook. He calls this a “liminal space,” existing as it does at the margins of a human-dominated landscape. After reading his book, I asked him if we could take a walk along the Nanny Hagen brook together. As we explored off-trail, he pointed out the surprising number of native plants but also the corrosive effects of human influence, including the predominance of invasive plants that have escaped from suburban backyards into the wild. What ensued for me was a reflection on how human culture literally shapes the natural world, but also the ways in which nature can push back and be surprisingly resilient, when given the chance.