gall and gumption

Friday, September 17, 2010

A Mystery Solved

My evening routine has developed in such a way that I feed the dogs separately. That is because when we come back from our evening walk Sweetie insists on being tied up in front of the apartment so she can continue her archaeological research. Misha, having had as much of the big wide world as her nerves can stand, comes inside and waits while I fix her dinner. Once she is fed I go out and sit with Sweetie and write and have a single beer. Then Sweetie comes in, and she gets fed and then I fix something for myself. Sweetie likes to hang out near the entrance to the kitchen while I'm cooking my dinner. Misha will not come near, except occasionally she musters her courage and comes and lurks, slightly embarrassed, near the fridge. Because she is afraid of Sweetie at dinnertime. I have been aware of the fear but not really of what communication passes between them to prompt it.

Tonight I had eggs for dinner and offered the shells to the dogs as a treat. I put one eggshell in Misha's dish, and another in Sweetie's dish. Misha sniffed sadly at hers and Did Not Want, even when I held them out to her. Sweetie condescended to take hers by hand, so she was licking at the inside of the shells, while Misha watched from a distance looking despondent. I mean, her eggshell was still in her dish, I had offered it to her, she hadn't wanted it, and now that Sweetie was eating hers she was all like "Nobody loves me." I looked back at Sweetie for a second, she had paused in the egg-licking, and she was giving Misha that Look. It's her "Come an inch closer and you will learn a few new things about crazy, beeyotch." I'd seen her do it before, but never at home and never to Misha. It's the look Sweetie gets when she and I visit my aunt and uncle and she takes command of any area where food and attention are dispensed. She sort of quietly composes herself into a ball near the table and looks deranged. The intent is to frighten the bejabers out of their two standard poodles. It works too, which is remarkable considering that she backs it up with nothing but the most bloodcurdling snarls, and considering that the poodles each weigh twice what she does. Also she did it at once or twice at the Tick Ranch when she suspected that there was a critter's nest under the shed. Sat there like that, curled up, with the Look, in the boiling sun, for hours, and would not be induced to come inside.

Once we all went out on an outing to the Eastern Shore--my aunt, my uncle, my mother, the two poodles, and Sweetie. The others went off to lunch but I opted to stay, with Sweetie, in this nearby park and paint. I wasn't keen to spend two hours in a restaurant and I didn't want to leave Sweetie in the car with the other dogs. I set up my easel and Sweetie dug herself a little nest in some dirt a few feet away. We were quite content, the two of us, for the next couple of hours. The others came back, the two poodles bounding across the grass ahead of the people. They got within about ten feet of the easel and Sweetie, snarling, just sort of herded them out of the vicinity. She had apparently created a perimeter around herself and me, and these two poodles were not to be allowed into it. She sat back in her nest with the Look on her face, and whenever any of them ventured too near, Sweetie would spring up and escort him away.

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Sermonette

Friday, September 10, 2010

Cool Hand Kia

I could eat fifty eggs.

Or I could read Jonathan Franzen's new book, Freedom. I like the title. It's so--Freedom! Just think: Freedom. Wow.

FREEDOM!!! HAAAGH!!! Freedom. Freedom.

That's really all that needs to be said, isn't it? Doesn't it just scream Great American Novel at you?

Gosh. I wonder what people are saying about it. Oh look here's Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times.

You know, it's odd, I almost never read Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times. Why is that, I wonder?

Wait here, I'll be right back. I'm gonna go see.

Call me prejudiced but I feel certain that a sentence that begins like this

Whereas Mr. Franzen’s first novel, “The Twenty-Seventh City,” borrowed liberally from the likes of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo to create a dark, splashy picture of a futuristic St. Louis...


cannot possibly end well for any of the parties concerned.

...his 2001 bestseller, “The Corrections,” signaled his determination to write an American sort of “Buddenbrooks,” to conjure contemporary America — not by going for a cartoonish, zeitgeist-y epic but by deconstructing a family’s history to give us a wide-angled portrait of the country as it rumbled into the materialistic 1990s.


No, not this time either.

You may think I'm talking about sentence structure. But when I read a little further along, I am not a bit surprised to learn that Jonathan Franzen's second novel, The Corrections,

...felt, at times, as if he were self-importantly inflating the symbolic meaning of his characters’ experiences, even as he condescendingly attributed to them every venal quality from hypocrisy and vanity to paranoia and Machiavellian conniving.


Yes, but have you seen what he looks like? just look at his hair. Or that jawline. Or those goggly black intellectual glasses on his handsome preppy face. How his new maturity becomes him! In the photo that comes with this piece it looks like he's hurrying from one Deep Thought to another. "What was that you were saying, New York Times photographer?"

As the novel proceeds, however, Mr. Franzen delves further into the state of mind of his creations, developing them into fully imagined human beings — not Nietzschean stereotypes easily divided into categories of “hard” (shameless, ambitious brutes) or “soft” (pathetic, sniveling doormats); not bitter patsies fueled by ancient grudges, but confused, searching people capable of change and perhaps even transcendence.


Roll over, Leo Tolstoy and tell D.H. Lawrence the news!

Here. Let me help.

++++++@@@@@@**T*R*A*N*S*C*E*N*D*E*N*C*E**@@@@@@++++++

Can you feel anything yet?

What?

I said, "CAN YOU FEEL ANYTHING YET?"

I DON'T KNOW IF I CAN CRANK IT UP ANY HIGHER. IT OVERHEATED LAST TIME. DO YOU HEAR THAT SORT OF PANG-PANG-PANG NOISE?

WHAT?

WHAT?

WAIT A MINUTE LET ME TURN THIS THING DOWN...

Watch out don't lean on that; it's still hot.

No, no, I can see what you're saying about the noise. And the diesel fumes, of course. How about starbursts? How about two sort of Christmas card angels with the really long trumpets and the page-boy haircuts? I saw something in Martha Stewart Magazine. And some of that gold ribbon with the wires in it.

The thing is I'm flexible, is what I'm saying. I can work with you.

Just tell me what you want.

Do you know, that is the first time I have ever seen a book review written entirely in glurge? High-class glurge, the Pottery Barn of glurge, as it were.

It is not really a profile at all, it is some sort of blessing, a ritual in a debased language in which the speaker no longer even understands that words refer to things, or ever did. Meaning has been T*R*A*N*S*C*E*N*D*E*D.

It's cargo cult book reviewing. And yet, somehow, the gods deliver this time. Tom emails to ask me why Jonathan Franzen's new book seems to be turning up everywhere.

And so fearing to peer into its ineffable brightness, I, like a cargo cult theologian, the St. Augustine of literary T*R*A*N*S*C*E*N*D*E*N*C*E (yeah I toned it down a bit--the glare was beginning to bother me), I make inquiry of the divine. I suppose someone is reading it--who? Maybe it' on a bunch of Kindles. Does the book that the reviewer describes actually resemble the book that was written? Does the author that the reviewer describe actually resemble the author? How can we know? Do I have to read the book to find out? Why not? What are the odds that the book will be as awful as this review suggests?

No, I know she is praising it, thank you. That is my point.

Update: John Dolan at Exiled Online has actually read a Franzen novel. Not this one but the previous Great American Novel, The Corrections.

Friday, September 03, 2010

Inside of a Dog It's Too Dark to Read

This non-review review by Alex Beam of the new movie of J. R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip has been irritating me. He describes the book as "preeminently disgusting."

And furthermore:

The first half is filled with graphic descriptions of the German shepherd’s bathroom habits. “Meaningless filth about dogs,’’ Dame Edith Sitwell wrote in 1956. The second half of the book is devoted to Tulip’s sexual encounters, in which Ackerley — a middle-age Brit bachelor then working for the BBC in London — enthusiastically participates.


Maybe he thinks you will take his word for the "preeminently disgusting," and that you therefore won't check up on what he says here. If you read the book for yourself and are capable of making judgments instead of taking them from critics unquestioning, you will see that it's really a stretch to suggest, as Beam does, that "the second half of the book is devoted to Tulip's sexual encounters...in which Ackerley...enthusiastically participates." It's either a deliberate misrepresentation or it is thoughtless, stupid carelessness about the obvious inference that the reader will have to deal with. And does anybody even read Edith Sitwell any more?

The fact that Queenie/Tulip was a shepherd is significant, because German shepherds are not quite like other dogs. A German shepherd forms an intense, single-minded bond with one person, and it's like a marriage, like Plato's idea of marriage where the two people are just each a half of a person until they meet and become complete. That's how it is for the German shepherd at any rate: two become one. This passionate devotion is the basis for the next nutty thing about German shepherds, their need to have a job, to show that they know the rules and obey them. In the absence of clear guidance on this they get even more nutty, because they will make up rules and make up jobs that involve the enforcement of rules and the relationship structures that give them their identity and their sanity.

One of the challenges of living with Misha, who is probably about 75 percent shepherd, is the need to continually disrupt the patterns that she is always looking for or trying to establish. My feeling about it is that we will have rules, all right, but they will be my rules, not hers.

All this is in context of intense connection; whatever she wants, she wants it with you. It's all about relationship with them.

My Dad has been away on another one of his long trips overseas, hopping around Europe with his new girlfriend. (Why are you looking at me like that? What? Well I am sure if I felt like making more of an effort I might--just shut up OK? Thank you.)

The dogs are consequently back to the routine of very long days at home without the walk in the middle of the day that they get when he's here. For Sweetie this means she can't spend the entire day perfecting her earthworks in the flowerbeds in front of the apartment. And Misha makes it through the day about 50 percent of the time. I keep plastic sheeting on the floor of my room because somehow it has become the emergency dog bathroom. Sweetie used to use my Dad's room as her emergency dog bathroom--I think you can see the symmetry of the thing--and then, because she is fastidious and dainty, would cover her poop up with any items of laundry such as socks that my Dad might have conveniently left on the floor. What Misha lacks in discretion she makes up in volume. I came home to a major cleanup project Friday, the second day in a row. And then we went out for a walk and there was still more poop, and I looked at her while she was getting into position (which always involves a fair amount of drama) and in my mind's eye for a minute she was just an overweight, furry, excitable, incontinent, tightly packed tube of poop with pointy ears and a nose at one end and a tail at the other.

I have started taking them out in Nature again, on hiking trails near here, hitting a new one each weekend. But they're both older and they have gotten very accustomed to their urban life, which they rather like. As dogs get older they get a greater and greater appreciation for routine. So on these excursions everyone is a bit jittery at things like, for instance, dragonflies and frogs. Also they think I am going to get them lost. It is nearly impossible to get lost because 1) Misha always knows where the car is and 2) after half an hour she is campaigning madly to get us all back to it. Nevertheless, let them come across a dead mouse, an owl pellet or other unusual animal droppings, and this gleam comes into their eyes, and the next thing you know they're rolling in it. They will eat disgusting things if you don't watch them; the only reason I can figure why some parts of our neighborhood appeal to them is that they are still thinking about discarded chicken bones even though they know there's hell to pay if they pick one up.

Did you know that dogs have these scent glands under their tails (well basically on either side of where the poop comes out) that make this fearful fug? It's what they are sniffing at when they sniff each other's butts. The amount of smell these glands normally produce is not really noticeable to humans but I took the late lamented Linus to the vet once and the vet wanted to check them to see if they were infected, and suggested I might like to leave the room. I got just outside the door when there was a single outraged yelp from Linus, and I almost fainted from the smell. The examination of the glands involved squeezing them to get them to express some of the liquid they produce.

Last year at a party I met a woman, probably not 10 years older than I am, who told me that she wipes her Jack Russell Terrier's bottom every time the dog poops. And she won't take it to the dog park because she doesn't know where all those other dogs' noses have been.

This is what happens when you have an open and honest face. You learn things.

I loathe most books about dogs--that is, most fiction and most memoirs about dogs. First off, I can't bear any depiction of the suffering of animals in any form, and the least intimation of it causes me distress that I don't really know how to deal with. And there's a certain kind of sentimentality about animals that I dislike intensely, especially now that I have a crazy dog to manage. Like all sentimentality it's self-serving. And in those sorts of books the dog always dies so the kid can Learn a Lesson About Life which lesson I guess is learn to be a heartless bastard early and get it over with.

I never seem to have the kind of dog that wants to learn tricks, though Misha, when she's feeling good, will sometimes show me that she can sit up on her hind legs. It moves me almost to tears, as it's a little offering from her memories of happier days before her trust was broken. Both dogs, if they have any other tricks, have come up with them on their own, behind my back, like sneaking onto my bed or discreetly picking up a chicken bone on the sidewalk and sort of oh I dunno just what with one thing and another, absentmindedly dropping back behind me on our walk and then, busted anyhow, pretending the whole thing was a joke. It's clear to me that their intelligence in these and other mischief that they get up to is just as real as it would be if I taught them--or got some trainer to teach them--to walk on their hind legs or fetch a ball. I am content to see the way they employ their intelligence to make themselves happy. I feel guilt towards them anyway because their life with me is constrained. I realize, though, that dogs get in their own way quite as persistently as people do. Misha can't enjoy herself at the dog park because she thinks it's a gulag. And Sweetie--well, her moods in relation to other dogs are a complete mystery, totally unpredictable. You never know if she's going to have a nice game of tag, decide to power-hump a cocker spaniel, huddle nervously next to my leg, or take exception to some big dog, steal his toy and then go all ghetto when he tries to get it back.

I also dislike the kind of story where the dog is a sort of agent of disruption and subversion--his lack of inhibition standing in for the owner's social courage.

My favorite dog book, and the only one I like, is My Dog Tulip. Queenie/Tulip is not one of these fictional dogs. She is a dog seen through the unillusioned eyes of love. Ackerley appreciated her great love for him and saw love as the only just return. And then, too, she was so beautiful and spirited, bathroom habits and all. If you live with a dog you have to recognize that for dogs, life with humans means forgoing some important dog experiences. Free access to sex, for instance; roaming and hunting in packs for another. Even though our two species have lived together for so long, we are different. And the burden of adaptation falls more heavily on the dog, who can't satisfy all its social needs and its instincts, and who can't talk itself out of them the way humans can.

So when Queenie comes into heat, she's frantically horny and he does what he can to relieve her. He gives her what help he can with his hands, and at last arranges for her to get laid. The partner of (Queenie's) choice is not an expensive stud (note that arranging sexual intercourse between dogs is perfectly unobjectionable when money, in the form of stud fees, is involved), but a disreputable-looking mutt who knocks her up for free. Ackerley is relieved, because he has been experiencing her distress. She has one litter of puppies, and once they grow up she's mainly rather bored with them. This is what Beam calls "enthusiastic participation."

Ackerley's last book, My Father and Myself, was published posthumously, for reasons that are clear from the the first page. It is a beautiful book, containing many startling disclosures. To write about such things he had to be free from worry about how the book would affect people's opinions of him. At the time of writing it, he was a well-known public figure. He was arts editor of The Listener, the BBC's radio programming guide. This might not seem like a big deal, but to get some idea of what this meant in England at that time you have to listen to someone like my stepfather, who grew up on the BBC's arts programming during the same period, and who still regards it as one of the great achievements of British culture. It was the medium through which countless people (including my stepfather, who is a chartered accountant and didn't get any postsecondary schooling in the liberal arts) got his education.

Ackerley, who died in 1967, was also openly, unambiguously, and promiscuously gay. He was a man of real, original moral courage and truthful self-awareness. One of the reasons why a lot of his love life was conducted in what I suppose then was called "rough trade" was because he was so smart. He had this fearsome lucidity, which made him totally unsusceptible to false feeling. And of course the terrible truth is that a lot of relationships are a sort of traffic in false feeling, in little agreements and conspiracies and temporary allegiances, an acting out of feeling that we think we ought to have and hope and believe we do have.

"My dear friend, clear your mind of cant. You may talk as other people do: you may say to a man, 'Sir, I am your most humble servant.' You are not his most humble servant. You may say, 'These are sad times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved to such times.' You don't mind the times. You tell a man, 'I am sorry you had such bad weather the last day of your journey, and were so much wet.' You don't care sixpence whether he was wet or dry. You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in Society: but don't think foolishly." [Samuel Johnson to Boswell, in the Life of Johnson


Ackerley is remarkable for a mind that was almost completely clear of cant. Whatever he may have hidden from other people, he never hid it from himself. And this made it almost impossible for him to have any kind of lasting romantic relationship. He couldn't lie to himself about it, and eventually--as happens so often in relationships--the rivets would start wiggling loose. Knowing himself, he accepted his limitations. There is not a trace of self-pity in his work. The only intense, committed love bond he had was with the dog, and he describes that successful relationship with the same sparkling clarity with which, in My Father and Myself, he treats the failures of his other relationships.

But it was real love. I have to say that the mind of the reviewer who could read this book and not see that, could look at the scrupulous truthfulness of this book about a dog and feel disgust because it happens to mention dog poop , is really just unknown country to me. Beam writes as if the book is something that happened to him: "I opened the book and it was full of poop!" And the nasty suggestion that Ackerley was a dogfucker. There was something to get here that was infinitely better than that cheap laugh.