Janis Norton

Welcome fellow reader

 

I am fascinated by relationships. And not just human relationships, knotty and mercurial as they are. Relationships under the ground—tree roots, fungi—and relationships in the night sky—the three body problem—and the relationship every individual has with self, family and earth. The list is long and growing (I just learned that way back before the Holocene two chromosomes formed a novel relationship to make chromosome 2, and voila, the human emerged. Now that’s an important relationship). The connectedness of all things has become almost a trope, one I believe, but  what does this mean? 

 

The arts offer closely drawn examples of what it means to live in the networked universe. Some of the literary masters are Jane Austen, Anton Chekhov, Isabelle Strout, Carol Shields. And let’s not forget the humorists and  storytellers.  Mike Birbiglia, Ira Glass and Nick Galifanakis whose cartoons pack a punch in a small square space. The best fiction can show us how to fail miserably with our people and how to succeed in the grit of mature love.    
 

In these pages I offer thoughts and questions churned by novels, plays, movies, science, poetry. If everyday life is a laboratory of behavior, the arts are a magnifying mirror of immense usefulness, not to mention entertainment. 
 

Drop in and we can keep each other company while some wondering goes on about the trajectory of the human through a most consequential time. Recent decades, especially this one, offer rare observational opportunities. Everything is “more.” More society-wide anxiety, more technology for connection and also for cut off, more rage, more extraordinary creative beauty.  Are we gonna make it thought this extinction epoch? Can we sharpen our understanding of human nature just enough to slip through?
 

In all the right places, there are creative guides. Let’s spend time with some of them.