June 29, 2010

Yesterday I wrote about some older dog books — all published more than 50 years ago. Today, four books published in the last couple of years, all non-fiction, all dealing with how pets fit into our world or their interior lives.

Top of the pile — and I mean that literally, not in terms of it being the best, or even the first I read — is Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know. It came out last year and changed the way I watched dogs play. Author Alexandra Horowitz took her experience as a zoologist and applied it to dogs, often looking at film frame by frame to analyze the body language of dogs, particularly the language they speak to each other in play. I came away from the book feeling like I knew my own dog better, and wished it had been available before the tail end of her life, when she did a lot less playing and a lot more sleeping. Horowitz has strong opinions about dog training, all based on her sense of the dog view of the world, how they communicate, how they learn. When the time comes for us to get another dog, I’ll be reading it again. And probably keeping it in arms reach — it just has that much to teach us about the animals we share our lives with.

Also published in 2009, Animals Make Us Human is the latest work by Temple Grandin, perhaps the most famous autist in the world, and certainly the most published. Known for her work with large animals and in making slaughter houses less stressful for cattle, Grandin takes her research into stressors of those animals and applies it animals we’re more likely to have contact with: dogs, cats, rabbits, as well as farm and zoo animals and wildlife. Each animal or group of animals is treated in its own chapter. Her goal is the same as with those cattle walking to their death in a slaughterhouse: how to  make animals in whatever environment as content as possible. This is another book that will be pulled from the shelf when there’s another dog in the house. Grandin is that insightful.

Tell Me Where It Hurts is the memoir of a vet, Nick Trout, that came out in paperback last year. If you love animals, like watching the emergency vet and animal police shows on the Animal Planet network, you’ll like this book. It’s pegged as a day-in-the-life, but the author quickly admits that he did a little cherry picking of his cases to give readers the idea of what a typical day might look like. I suppose if you’re thinking of getting into the animal care business — as a vet or a vet tech — this would be beneficial. I liked it well enough. It was entertaining and I learned a little. But it wasn’t like a spotlight shining in an area of darkness.

More along those lines — and in kind of a scary way at times — is One Nation Under Dog. This book, by Michael Schaffer, is something of an expose on the business of pet keeping as it has morphed over the years. We’ve gone from keeping dogs in the yard as some mix between security and companion to seeing entire shops pop up that are devoted to doggie treat. People put their dogs in clothes that cost more than their own, in bags that would cover a week’s worth of groceries. There are dog funerals and graveyards, and drug companies look as hard for new pharmaceutical treatments for pet diseases real and imagined as they do for treatments for humans — after all, as Nick Trout can attest, people often do spend thousands of dollars on pet health. There’s even pet health insurance to help cover the costs.

Given the 2007 dog food recalls, looking a little more harshly at the pet business isn’t a bad thing. Schaffer has done a mitzvah writing the book. We can all do a good deed for our companion animals by reading it.

June 28, 2010

I was shelving the books I wrote about in part I of my latest dog pile book reviews and I came upon a cornered page in the very back of my copy of My Dog Tulip by JR Ackerley.  The quote says everything about what is wrong with the way dogs were so often kept 60 years ago, and too often are kept now:

Stupidly loved, stupidly hated, acquired without thought, reared and ruled without understanding, passed on or “put to sleep” without care…

The quote goes on, talking about what dogs do or do not suffer and how we do or do not console them. In rereading the entire appendix, I was reminded of something I read about Ackerley and his relationship with Queenie, the Tulip of the book title. He never found true love and companionship. Although homosexual acts were illegal for the duration of his life, he never wanted for sexual companionship. He was friends with many of the famous gay men of his time. But he never found that kind of quiet companionship that comes of a good marriage forged over years until he had Queenie. He talks about wanting the dog to have a sexual experience, as if it should be as natural a part of a dog’s life as it is of a human’s. He writes wistfully, wanting to understand why people would disdain, deny, view with disgust the notion of dogs copulating (he refers to it sweetly: “Has your dog ever been married?”) It’s as if he is projecting his lack of understanding why anyone would deny any creature their chance at love.

Indeed, I wonder, why would anyone.

But I still think you should spay and neuter your pets.

June 27, 2010

I read a lot of dog books. Fiction with dogs as characters; books about dog psychology; tomes that cover the history of the relationship between people and dogs. I’ve written here before about some of the great dog books I’ve read. Now, a few months later I find I have another stack of eight books about our four-legged friends. Half of them are quite old — somepublished more than 50 years ago. Others are newer. None of them suck. Today’s post: the older books.

My Dog Tulip is the 1956 memoir of unwilling dog ownership that led to unfathomable dog love by JR Ackerley, a British literary icon and one of the first employees of the BBC in the 1920s. Openly gay, he named the dog he didn’t really want to call his book My Dog Tulip, but My Dog Queenie — the dog’s real name. But his editors thought that it was a little too in your face for the time. The book chronicles the growing love affair between dog and person, and Ackerley’s attempts to breed her, understand her, and give her back a measure of the happiness she provided for him in his middle years.  The difference in how we treat dogs now, versus then, is evident in his descriptions — letting dogs run off leash, not spaying or neutering, letting dogs poop on the street, encouraging the huntress in your dog to have at the local squirrel population. But there is also something of our current love of companion animals in his writing that is very different from how most animals lived in the middle of the last century. Ackerley loved Queenie/Tulip as a family member. She wasn’t a pet who lived outside and was tossed some kibble now and then.

Similar in his attitude to dogs was Nobel prize winning Konrad Lorenz. A founder of modern ethology, Lorenz’ book Man Meets Dog published in 1950 and evoking the kind of love for his animals that most scientists of his era try to avoid talking about. The man is both scientist and pet lover. His opinions about training are more akin to the positive reinforcement of now than the punishment based training of his own era. It’s rare that you can read a book about animal behavior written a couple of generations ago and still get some good ideas for how to choose and raise an animal. This book is one. Added bonus: cute little drawings he did of his own pets permeate the book.

I’ve talked before about how hard it is to give dogs a major voice in a work of fiction and have it seem more adult than a Clifford the Big Red Dog book. But there are two old ones that I love — love enough to read one of them a second time and laugh all over again. First is Flush, a biography of Elizabeth Barret Browning’s dog published in 1933 by Virginia Wolf. I could drop another famous literary name here, but why bother? Okay, I will: the dog was originally owned by one of the famous Mitford girls (think Hons & Rebels and Love in a Cold Climate). The story is told from the point of view of the dog, but not in his voice. It is an endearing book and the best thing by Virginia Wolf I’ve read. Keep in mind I’ve only read A Room of One’s Own.

The book I like best of the two is The Ugly Dachshund by one of my favorite authors of the early to mid-20th century, GB Stern. The author of the Mosaic trilogy — The Matriarch is the best of the three — Stern writes the kind of comedies of manners that made Jane Austen famous. She was also a big player in early Hollywood. I’ve read most of what she’s written — it can be hard to find. But The Ugly Dachshund, published first in 1938, is one the few of her books that remains available. Told from the perspective of a group of dogs — who charmingly refer to people as the Legs (Master Legs, Supreme Legs) — it focuses on the poor perception of a very large Great Dane who hasn’t figured out that he isn’t a dachshund, like most of the other dogs in his family. He doesn’t know why he can’t fit under things, why the Legs don’t let him on their laps. He’s something of a puppy dressed in a really big dog suit. His eventual metamorphosis, which you can guess at given the title and its relationship to a fairy tale of a similar name, is a delight to read. There are some particularly wry observations by the aptly named visiting terrier, Voltaire, who makes jokes than none but himself (and the reader) can understand.

The book makes me want to go find a big dog and offer him or her a place on my lap. But just for a minute.

Tomorrow: newer books about dogs.

May 31, 2010

If you count the last post I did in April — on April 30 — then really, this is my 32nd straight day blogging as part of the Third Annual Wordcount Blogathon. It’s been hard. Often I’ll have to reach deep to come up with something to blog about, usually in the evening after my tween is in bed. Not the ideal time to write, but the time that I have available. I hope that I have always been relevant to people other than myself. In particular, I hope that my blogs about books have made some of you broaden your reading horizons or pick up something I recommended.

This last blog was supposed to be about three old dog books that have either recently been reissued or are so popular, they haven’t been out of print in decades. However, Husband and Son, who went to Vancouver, BC for an all-school field trip last Thursday, appear to have come home with a norovirus. Husband has recovered and Son just got sick. Everywhere. I am as yet uninfected and because I take immunosuppressents for my arthritis, it’s kind of important that I try to stay that way. So rather than blogging about dogs, I’m going to go buy some Lysol and spray everything in the house. I’m also stocking up on PeptoBismol and some candied ginger.

So look for dog books at a later date. And cross your fingers.

May 30, 2010

I don’t often purchase books of short stories. I’m more likely to get a book of essays based on someone’s real life — most recently Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs, a fine book of essays on fatherhood, that included the piece “A Textbook Father” that was so real and so funny on the subject of fathers and daughters and sex that I sent it to my brother. I also enjoyed Sherman Alexie’s War Dances, which I can’t decide whether to put in the essay section or the fiction section of my bookshelves. Part poetry, part stories, part essays that seem more like Alexie’s view of his reality, it’s a book that moved me deeply. And I’m not even a poetry fan.

Occasionally, I do buy short fiction. Something on the cover or a review just gets me. Sometimes it’s only because the book is by an author I’ve already come to love. That’s the case with Bailey White’s Nothing with Strings. She tells stories of the south that make it sound like a place I’d like to visit, with people I’d like to meet. She is a fine writer, who tells stories that are touching without being cloying, like “Lonesome Without You”, which details a loving tribute from a boy to a nurse who helped his mother when she was ill.

The best two books of short stories that I’ve read lately are very different from each other. The first one I picked up because I saw it advertised in an issue of Heeb magazine, a publication for young Jews. I’m probably too old for the magazine’s demographics, and the book cover screams “Generation Y”, but I still ordered it. The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God by Etgar Keret has been critically acclaimed in the writer’s native Israel and the United States, and his stories have been made into films that have been likewise critically acclaimed.

I enjoyed some of the stories — particularly “Kneller’s Happy Campers”, which was made into the film Wristcutters: A Love Story. But half the time I felt too old for them and not nearly hip enough. Still, it was nice to see what was out there that fans of Jonathan Safran Foer and his of-the-moment counterparts might be reading. Oh, and I like Foer, particularly Everything is Illuminated.

But my favorite recent short story acquisition so far has been The People on Privilege Hill, a series of stories by Jane Gardam that includes some of the characters from her novel Old Filth. I haven’t read the novel yet, but plan to do so because I so enjoyed the characters (and writing) in the former book. The stories weren’t linked, except in that sometimes they included some of the same people living in the same town in England. It reminds me in tone of Jane Austen, so you know I’m going to like it.

They are stories about manners, behavior, the distance between young and old that is often more than years. When I think of the book as a whole, it reminds me of when I lived in Ireland — days that were grey and drizzly and seemed on the surface to be dull and dreary, but were really full of texture and gradations of color and sensations of warm and cold right next to each other. They aren’t necessarily happy stories, but they aren’t sad. They aren’t grim, but not really funny. They are many things all at once.

I know there will be other books of short stories in my future — any book by Alice Munro or Garrison Keillor or David Sedaris. But when my shelves are full at the end of my life and someone is packing up all my books to ship to some under-served rural library, most of the boxes will be full of long fiction. There are only so many hours in the day to read (unfortunately), so I’ll stick mostly to the thing I love best.

May 27, 2010

Maybe there were more than four things, but these stood out:

1. The design isn’t intelligent if the parts wear out before the productive life of the unit is over. Teeth were not meant for a life of 80 or 90 years, and dentists make a living off this fact.

2. It’s not fun getting up at 5 a.m. to see your husband and son off on a daylong field trip to Vancouver BC when you know you’ll be in a dental chair for two hours.

3. Even if you can choose whatever you want for dinner, it’s not as much fun eating it alone as something less tasty is when you dine with said husband and son.

4. The house remains exceptionally quiet without my dog. And since the boys won’t be home until after 10 p.m., I imagine the silence will only grow more pervasive.

And here’s a bonus. Here I sit missing the noise and I know with a certainty that I will be upset with the noise of tomorrow morning or tomorrow night. I will forget that I had this time to myself and all I could think of was how much I missed my family.

You see, we’re back to unintelligent design again.

May 26, 2010

First, my mom called today and left a message that I had to correct the record: in my post about Books my Mom Gave Me a few days back I forgot to mention that she practically had to force me to read Gone With The Wind, which I then devoured. Let the record show that I don’t recall not wanting to read the book, I do recall being ticked off that the movie left so much out that was really important to understanding Scarlett O’Hara. Also, thank you Edgar for making her read my blog.

Interesting question from a Stoli ad that I think everyone should ask themselves: would you have a drink with you? I would totally drink with me. I find myself very funny. Particularly when drunk. But I’d rather have a drink with my brother, because he’s hysterical when drunk.

Why don’t pubescent children hear well? What happens between ear and brain that stops them from reacting? I swear my son must be deaf sometimes. He genuinely doesn’t hear half the stuff I say. I think he’s listening to his hormones fluctuate.

Next, I’m trying to understand why on my recommendations list, Amazon.com put up a list of books that included one by Glenn Beck. Do I really strike anyone who knows me or who has read anything I’ve ever written as a Glenn Beck fan?

My son thinks it’s strange that I silver-plated my late dog’s tag and am wearing it on a chain around my neck. Is it? I’m I turning into one of those strange cat people, only with a dead dog?

Why do conservatives, libertarians, populists or whatever they want to be called today denigrate anyone who has been to an Ivy League school? Since when is the best education in the world something to be embarrassed about? I’m happy our president is the smartest one in the room, unless Michelle happens to be about. Smart is good. Education is good. And dumb isn’t sexy.

Finally, do you think if I asked JJ Abrams all the lingering questions about Lost, including, but not limited to, these, could he answer them?

May 24, 2010

It is haiku day

for Blogathon 20-10

Need more syllables

***

One lonely bagel

Sits among seven croissants

It begs to be ate

***

Three people need more

than one working computer

Need adapter quick

***

Bar Mitzvah countown

Just 19 days to finish

Will it all be done?

***

Two months without Kate

I miss her soft ears, wet tongue

The clank of her chain

***

It’s quiet up here

Just soft snores from the next room

And one machine hums

***

Banana shampoo

Pomegranate wrinkle cream

Food is for beauty

***

I ask: how long tired?

She says: When does college start?

I answer: early.

May 20, 2010

I think the first book I remember my mom giving me was a big yellow hardcover of Maybelle the Cable Car by Virginia Lee Burton (she also wrote Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel). I loved that book and kept it until I was a parent myself. I gave it to my son. He ripped it, which nearly broke my heart. I think that was the first time I yelled at him. It gives you an idea of my rather intense relationship with books.

Over the years, my mom has suggested books to me and I’ve pulled them off her shelves. We don’t always have the same taste. She really likes mysteries, I’m really into Lit-Ra-Chur and books on the biology of the brain and animal behavior. There have been some successes — we do have some common loves, like Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott.

When I was nine or 10, I belonged to this library group called the Bookworms (you can imagine how cool the members were) and every week we’d talk about a book we read. When we had read 20 books we’d get to pick a free one from a group chosen by the children’s librarian. None of them really interested me. For about a half hour after each session, we could browse the library. I’d spend my time in the adult section — usually history, usually looking at books about World War II with topics like Hitler’s Ayran breeding program. I was a weird kid. Often, the librarians would try to shoo me back to the kids section, but there wasn’t a lot there I liked.

Next stop: my mom’s bookshelves. There was a book there called The Best of Both Worlds that had short stories and bits of novels from both adult and children’s literature. She gave me Betty Smith’s novel Maggie Now, and then A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, also by Betty Smith. Giant came next, and then To Kill a Mockingbird. The day that The Thorn Birds arrived from her book club, I took it upstairs and started it and came back down at dinner, having devoured it in one gulp. I was around 13 or 14.

After I decimated my mom’s shelves, I moved to her sister’s. My Aunt Carol is probably the only one I know who comes close to reading as much as I do. I borrowed books every Rosh Hashana, Passover and Thanksgiving. The Shoes of the Fisherman was one of hers. So was a pair of books about the Holocaust, but by that time I was of a more appropriate age to read about them. They were All But My Life, the story of a survivor named Gerda Weissman Klein. She is perhaps best known for hijacking the microphone at the Oscar’s after a documentary about her life won an award. The second was Hannah Senesh: Her Life and Diary, the story of a Hungarian Jew who trained in Israel as a partisan and ran secret missions into Hungary before being captured, imprisoned, and executed. It’s a story widely known in Israel and a lot of the Jewish community here knows of her through one of her poems, Eili, which was turned into a song.

But I digress from my mother. After college, my mom would occasionally suggest a book she loved, but it didn’t usually speak to me. She did give me one book recently which I really liked — and it was a mystery. Death in the Garden by Elizabeth Ironside, the pseudonym of Lady Catherine Manning, the wife of a former ambassador to Britain. It’s a good book. Well devised plot, intelligent language, interesting characters. It’s the first time in a long time that my mom has directed me to a book whose author I’d like to seek out again.

So what about the other way? Do I recommend to my mom? Sometimes. But like I said, our tastes are different. I once told her to read Schindler’s Ark (the original name of Schindler’s List) because I found it uplifting. She called me and was horrified that I related that book to that word. But I did. Schindler should have been a model Nazi, but he was redeemed. That redemption, the ability of someone to go against all that is around him, and to do so when it is a grave danger, is uplifting.

I do have other ideas that are more Austen-esque. First I’d like to introduce her to the 13 or 14 novels by Molly Keane, also known as MJ Farrell (I can’t be sure how many books she wrote precisely because titles differ between the US and Ireland). She wrote novels of manners, told from a female perspective, set in the decaying Anglo-Irish community after the creation of the Irish Free State and subsequent Republic of Ireland. Some are comic, some more serious. Another good author that reminds me of Austen is GB Stern. I think her book The Matriarch would especially resonate. It’s the first part of a trilogy called Mosaic. I think it’s the best of the bunch.

More recent books would be good for my mom, too. One is a modern take on Sense and Sensibility called The Three Weissmanns of Westport. I dare someone not to make a movie of it. A woman and her daughters, all in various stages of being down on their luck move to a dilapidated house by the sea. Really nice read.

A book by a freelance friend of mine, Allison Winn Scotch called Time of My Life might also appeal. It’s about a woman who gets a chance to return to a fork in her road and see what might have been. It was a very pleasant book — not too light, not too heavy. Good for airplanes and soaks in the tub. Her next book is due out in June, The One that I Want.

My last recommendation made me think of my mom nearly the whole time I read it — not because of the content, but because I kept thinking she’d like it. Jane Hamilton’s book Laura Rider’s Masterpiece. It’s about a marriage gone platonic, the way the Internet has changed relationships, and how we can find happiness at any time of life.

So, Mom, should you decide to read my blog (I know, you don’t read blogs — but if you do this time because Edgar calls you and says you have to…), here’s some reading for you this summer. When you’re done with that list, I’ll have more for you. Just read the blog.

May 19, 2010

The smartest thing I’ve heard recently is a line from In Plain Sight.

Everything counts. Everything you say, everything you think, and especially, everything you do. It all counts.

Sometimes, the truth hurts, doesn’t it? Sometimes, it can give you a new sense of purpose. I’m hoping it’s the latter for that statement, even if it does hurt.

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