A Book Review Where I Also Let Myself Talk About Birding
A Book Review Where I Also Let Myself Talk About Birding (originally written 4/13/26)
I have been birding and I have been reading a book. The book is called The Most Famous Short Film of All Time by Tucker Lieberman. The cover looks like this:
The birding was last weekend. I go birding pretty much once or twice a week at this point. Three times on a good week. I went on Saturday 4/11 at KGY Point in Olympia. KGY Point is basically where you end up if you drive north from downtown Olympia, WA until you hit water. There's an abandoned radio station headquarters there, and some coastline they've turned into a trail that goes along the shore without touching the sand (likely because it's a vital bird habitat).
I have been reading The Most Famous Short Film of All Time every night for weeks now. I read slowly, bit by bit before bed. Sometimes when a book is very plot-intensive it will catch me and I won't be able to sleep because the book hooked me. There were times when The Most Famous Short Film of All Time caused me to lose sleep in this way. There were also times when I fell asleep very quickly because I picked it up and didn't remember where I was and fell asleep before I could really orient myself in the narrative again. Not a criticism, a description of the kind of book it is.
Here is a dispassionate list of every bird I saw at KGY Point on 4/11:
•Mallard
•Greater Scaup
•Surf Scoter
•Bufflehead
•Hooded Merganser
•Rock Pigeon
•Anna's Hummingbird
•Killdeer
•Greater Yellowlegs
•Pigeon Guillemot
•Bonaparte's Gull
•Short-Billed Gull
•Ring-Billed Gull
•Glaucous-winged Gull
•Western x Glaucous-Winged Gull
•Double-crested Cormorant
•Osprey
•Northern Flicker
•American Crow (Covered in Thatching Ants)
•European Starling
•White-Crowned Sparrow
•Song Sparrow
Here is a passionate list of things that I have in common with either Lev, the narrator of The Most Famous Short Film of All Time, or Tucker Liebermann, the author. These are separate people (well one is fictional) so I am specifying here which one I'm speaking about for ease of describing similarities to me. (I am used here for comparison because I am writing this and also I am the person I know the best.):
•Lev & Tucker & I are all Jewish
•Tucker & I both wrote long oddly formatted books that are antagonistic toward time, skeptical of consensus reality, have pictures in them, have unreliable narrators, contain lots of quotes, have stuff about being trans and stuff about suicide.
•Lev & Tucker & I are all trans.
•Lev & I both have at points in our life had different versions of something Lev calls "Speculirium" which is part pathology and part imagination and ends up with you perceiving and interacting with parts of the world that other people do not perceive or interact with.
•Lev & I were both born in mid-late November in the early 80s.
•Lev & I both find life to be a fairly baffling experience.
•Tucker & I have both written books that express feelings about life being a baffling experience.
•Tucker & I have both published a book with tRaum Books, the publisher of The Most Famous Short Film of All Time.
•Tucker's book and mine both have a character named Sara (without an 'h').
I had never been to KGY Point before, and upon arriving was immediately very excited, because the beach in front of me was covered in interesting gulls (Short-Billed, Ring-Billed) and a Greater Yellowlegs or two. A Killdeer and a Bonaparte's Gull was not far away from this, I just didn't see them immediately.
Killdeer!
I talked to a birding man who asked if I had seen anything cool and I said I just got there but yes, a Greater Yellowlegs and some Bonaparte's Gulls. He asked if I had seen the Osprey and I said no, that I had driven the 45 minutes down from Mason County to see the Osprey and the Purple Martins that people had been reporting on Ebird. He showed me the Osprey nest and gestured to the area where the Purple Martins usually are. He also told me that there was a Pigeon Guillemot over by the abandoned KGY radio station building earlier, but it was gone now.
Community has always been hard for me, and it is hard for Lev too. Lev has two close friends that he deeply depends on. One is a work friend and one is a trans friend. The work friend is named Aparna and the trans friend is named Stanley. Lev sees a ghost named Chad who died around the turn of the century (19th to 20th, not 20th to 21st). Lev is reading Chad's papers and trying to figure Chad out. How did he die? Why is he haunting Lev?
Lev sees goddesses and ghosts. All the women are goddesses and all the men are ghosts. Lev sees a lot more goddesses & ghosts when he touches paperclips. This is something that came about one time when he was young, when an odd incident ended up giving him a superstition that has real world effects. He has pills that help him see fewer goddesses & ghosts. They are like anti-paperclips and so Lev labels the pills PILCREPAP, which is "paperclip" spelled backwards. Lev is fascinated by the most famous short film of all time, The Zapruder Film of JFK getting shot. The book is organized by placing small chapters under a picture of each frame of the Zapruder Film. Lev sees JFK in a dream one time and JFK makes him vice president. Aparna, Lev's co-worker sometimes gets worried about Lev and Stanley, Lev's trans friend, can speak with Lev on the same level. He does not act like Lev is acting crazy, but engages as if everything Lev is saying makes sense, because to Stanley, it does make sense.
I haven't ever published a book review other than something short on goodreads. I find that reading books with the idea of evaluation makes it harder for me to experience them fully. I try to go into books with no thoughts of evaluation. Sometimes in place of evaluation I end up approaching the book from a place of relation, where I'm comparing the book to myself and my experiences, letting it show me new things about myself and my life. I don't know if this is a useful way of looking at books, but it is one I tend to have sometimes. I wanted to write a review of this book but I don't know how to do that, I know how to write about birds. So I am writing about birds about this book.
I went into a parking lot and saw the Osprey nesting. There were two of them, sitting on the nest. It on platform on a pole, very high up. I don't know if the platform was put there specifically to let Osprey nest on it or not. But it sure seems to work for them. I can't see what is happening in the nest. My 500mm camera lens can only take a photo like this, which I already zoomed in, which is why it's a little pixely:
I walked along the beach. I saw a lot of Killdeer and Yellowlegs. I saw many beautiful Buffleheads and some Hooded Mergansers. (Those are diving ducks!)
Despite the passionate list above there are ways I am very different from Lev and Tucker and I can list some of those too. These ways also made me interested in and excited by the book [This list is also passionate (Just assume a list is passionate unless I say otherwise.).].
•Tucker & Lev are trans men and I am a trans woman.
•Tucker & Lev were born Jewish and I am a convert.
•Lev sees ghosts & goddesses through his Speculirium and mine was mostly about not seeing things clearly, about missing things that should have been obvious, about having a distorted view of the world, of my connections to other people, of myself, of which things are safe and which were not, of paranoia.
•Lev does not have much community and is not very close to anyone other than his two people. I tend to swing wildly from being very involved in various social worlds and then completely withdrawing, disappearing and only talking to my one or two or three people.
•Lev's speculirium book is organized into super short chapters called "Flyleaf"--which are mini-essays, "Flashbulb"--which is grounded/concrete consensus reality narrative, and "Fog"--which is speculirius narrative. These connect with the frames of the Zapruder film on every page which form the structure of the book. My book is organized into flash-length works titled "Sea-Witch", "Trans Memoir," and "Bone Death."
I am beginning to feel like this essay is too much about me and not enough about The Most Famous Short Film of All Time and so I will talk more about birds.
I walked down to the docks and there was a public pier. Immediately I see some water birds. What are those water birds? OH. No big deal! It's the Pigeon Guillemot that the birder man told me about! DANG. Oh and what's that behind him? The best view I've ever had of a Surf Scoter and it's a whole line of them just floating? YEP.
Pigeon Guillemot...My favorite kind of pigeon (don't tell the rest of the pigeons)
Surf Scoters! Check out the delightfully colored beak
Honestly what a beautiful day. I spent a bunch more time after this taking photos of hummingbirds that didn't turn out and trying to chase down the mythical Purple Martins I had heard were around, and no dice on either, but honestly it just felt amazing being out! A gorgeous day, new birds, everything feeling fine. Turns out I really love birding at KGY Point. Turns out I really love birding.
And do you know what else I love?
I loved this book.
Kisses, Sara