Salman Rushdie, Great Literature, and Sex in Books

On my most recent jaunt to the library, I picked up the latest book by Salman Rushdie (The Enchantress of Florence).  Rushdie, you will recall, is the writer for whom the late Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, death sentence, over his book The Satanic Verses, which according to the Ayatollah insulted the prophet Mohammed (Peace Be Upon Him).   Rushdie went into hiding for 10 years, but now lives rather openly.  Once the Ayatollah Khomeini died, Rushdie applied for a reprieve from the new Ayatollah.  After careful consideration the new Ayatollah concluded that only the person who issued the fatwa could lift it, which was hard for Khomeini to do, being dead.  Therefore, the fatwa still stands but it seems the interest in killing Rushdie has waned, what with radical extremist Muslims having so much on their plate these days.   

I was under the impression all these years that Rushdie was Iranian, since they were paying so much attention to him, but in fact he is British-Indian, born in Mumbai of Indian Muslim parents who were British citizens.  Rushdie seems to be an atheist, despite a little white lie to the new Ayatollah saying he had converted to Islam. 

I was a little reticent to get Rushdie’s book, because I generally try to avoid anything that seems to fall into the category of “great literature”.  That hasn’t always been the case.  There was the summer I decided to read all the books by the great Russian writers, although I did draw the line at Tolstoy, because I had no intention of ever reading War and Peace.  I had already read almost everything by Dostoyevsky, so I moved on to Gogol and Solsenitzyn.  About the time I finished the latter’s book Cancer Ward I found myself thinking that being struck by lightning would be better than reading another one of his books, or anything else that smacked of great literature.  Danielle Steele was looking really good. 

I am sort of kidding.  I have never actually read anything by Danielle Steele.  But I did move on to popular fiction writers, and many of them are amazingly good.  I appreciate good writing and a good story, and not every book has to address the existential crises of life. 

But once in a while I get this twinge of conscience that says I need to read something significant, so that’s why I picked up Rushdie’s book.  At the same time I picked up Walter Mosley’s Cinnamon Kiss and read it first.  Mosley is most well known for writing Devil in a Blue Dress, which was made into a movie starring Denzel Washington.  I had forgotten all about Mosley, but since last week it was still Black History month, he was one of the featured writers on the featured table of black writers. 

Which brings us to sex in books.  My friend Judith and I were discussing this recently, I think as a result of her having read The Horse Whisperer, which I recommended.  It was good, except for the sex parts.  And that’s the genius of good writers.  You probably can’t name a good book in the last 200 years that didn’t have sex in it.  But almost nobody does it right.  Most of the time it’s the very definition of “gratuitous”.  You’re following a good story, then all of a sudden you have to take time out to read about two people gazing into one another’s eyes, and a spark flames, and they are totally overcome by passion.  Give me a break.  The truth is, that actually does happen, but 99% of writers aren’t able to get it right.  More often than not, when I read sex scenes in books I feel like I’m watching a commercial for Johnny Walker Red. 

Not so with Mosley.  And who knew…not so with Salman Rushdie.  The Enchantress of  Florence takes place partially in 16th century India, during the reign of Akbar the Great, who was a real person, ruler of the Mughal Empire from 1556 until his death in 1605.  It also switches at times to Florence.  The reviewer for the NY Times Book Review, who is either normally clinically depressed, or who was having a very bad day, panned the book.  In essence he said the language in it is too flowery and Rushdie is full of himself.  In fact, it’s a treasure of a book.  It is poetic, it’s dreamlike, it’s fantastical, weaving the real and the unreal together, but it never gets too far afield from the story.  It’s also often very subtly funny.  Take this passage:   

“Simonetta possessed a pale, fair beauty so intense that no man could look at her without falling into a state of molten adoration, and nor could any woman, and the same went for most of the city’s cats and dogs, and maybe diseases loved her too, which was why she was dead before she was twenty-four years old.”

In another great passage, one of Akbar’s ministers says that an atheist only believes in one god less than anyone else.  Since all religions argue that their god is the only god, between them, he says, they give him all the arguments for believing in none. 

So…funny, philosophical, surreal, and sensual.  What’s not to like?  This is my first Rushdie novel, it will not be my last.

Bad News for Bobby

I have some really bad news for Bobby Jindal, but first, a few words for the Republicans:  Is this the best you got? I mean I realize that President Obama is a hard act to follow, but.  Bobby Jindal as the “Republican response” to the President’s speech last night was the lamest thing I’ve seen since the last episode of American Idol. 

The bad news I have for Bobby actually has nothing to do with his response last night, which was earnest, but nerdy.  It has to do with his earlier statements that he is thinking of rejecting the portion of the stimulus bill that provides additional funds for unemployment to states.  As I understand it, he is thinking of rejecting it, because there are rules attached that expand eligibility.  He says he believes the rules will become permanent, but not the money flow–so once the federal money dries up, it will result in higher business taxes in Louisiana.  So let me get this straight:  you are the governor of a state whose signature city is still a rotting corpse in some areas.  Unemployment in Louisiana is not that bad compared to other states at this moment…that’s because a lot of the citizens of New Orleans are still in Texas, and elsewhere, and so are on other state’s unemployment rolls.  And you are going to stand on “principle”? 

The news tonight reveals that the New Orleans office of FEMA is under investigation, because for one thing, over half of the funds earmarked for it’s recovery are yet unspent.  And how long has it been?  Hello?

The bad news I have for Bobby is that he is still the governor of the state of Louisiana.  Nobody in Louisiana, least of all a governor, has ever turned down money.  From anywhere.  Is he confused?  Does he think he’s the governor of like, Vermont, or Montana, or something?

In 1991, as I was preparing to move to New Orleans from Memphis, there was a runoff for the governor’s race between Edwin Edwards and David Duke.  Which spawned the slogan “Vote For the Crook”.  It’s a sad state of affairs when you breathe a sigh of relief that the Klansman lost and the criminal won. 

In 1995, David Duke ran again.  (Note:  Edwards did not, by that time he was under federal indictment for corruption and is currently in federal prison, scheduled for release in 2011 if he lives that long.) This time Duke didn’t make the runoff , but I did see a debate between him and the other top seven candidates at the time, one of whom was William Jefferson.  Yes, that William Jefferson…the congressman with $90,000 of FBI sting money stuffed in his freezer.  David Duke spent the time baiting Jefferson, never once referring to his race, but what he would say is “Jefferson is a Harvard educated lawyer who is pals with Jesse Jackson”.  Jefferson took it as long as he could, but eventually said, “Yes, I did go to Harvard.  That’s a word David Duke can’t spell.”  You had to love it. 

But Bobby is about to turn down money, and that may play well with the Republican party, but it isn’t going to work in Louisiana.  Louisiana has always been in a close race with Illinois for the title of Miss Most Corrupt (currently, Illinois is winning, but that could change). 

As we speak, politicians in Louisiana are scratching their heads, saying, “Bobby Jindal says he isn’t going to take money from the federal government?”

My advice to Governor Jindal is this:  hope that they nominate you for something in 2012.  President, Veep, Secretary of State, Ambassador to the Ukraine, because my prediction is that your days as governor of Louisiana are numbered.  This was your big moment in the spotlight.  Won’t be another.

Conservative Friends

The words “conservative” and “Fakename” do not  belong in the same sentence.  Fakename does not have conservative friends.  Fakename’s friends fall into two categories:  politically liberal (I’m throwing anarchists into that pot), and Don’t Know, Don’t Care.  The second group is actually often a refreshing change of pace.

But last week I realized I do have a conservative friend!  This is a guy I know from work, whom we will call “Chris” for the purposes of this blog.  I guess you would actually have to call him an acquaintance, because I haven’t seen him for probably a year, until last week.  I used to see him fairly often and was wondering why he dropped out of sight:  The answer is that the size of his company has quadrupled (how often is that happening, in this economy?) and he was promoted.  So he’s now a supervisor and no longer does the worker bee stuff that was the occasion for my seeing him in the past.  But he is a conservative and I actually missed our sparring matches.  Except for here on WordPress, I rarely run into anyone who keeps track of current events the way I do. 

So last week when he showed up, after giving me a big hug (that was a surprise, first time that ever happened–guess he missed me too), we stood outside my office and talked for…an hour and a half.  I think we were both shocked when we realized what time it was.  But after the hug, his first words to me were, “Well, you got your Democrat in the White House!”  Lol, some things never change. 

In that time we covered every conceivable topic related to politics that either of us could think of.  Obama….Chris:  very intelligent, but not enough experience to have good judgement, maybe, but he’s willing to wait and see and hopes it works out.  Obama is the President, and he will support him.  McCain…Chris:  What an awful alternative to have had.  Voting…Chris: Remember the words “secret ballot”, and that nobody would tell you who they voted for?  Now they can’t wait to be on TV and tell you.  The media…I mentioned the New York Times, and Chris’s eyes rolled up in his head.  That’s when I said, do you have a blog on WordPress under the name Ptfan1?  More media…I mentioned Rush Limbaugh.  Chris replied:  Keith Olbermann.  More media…Me:  Katie Couric.  Chris:  Lightweight.  Me:  She did a number on Sarah Palin to be a lightweight.  Chris:  That wasn’t too hard to do.  Abortion….Chris is not against it but doesn’t think he should have to pay for it.  Closing Guantanamo….Chris:  Bad idea, these are really bad guys.  Me:  What are we doing with a prison in Cuba?  A country we won’t even speak to?  The octuplet mom…Chris:  The doctor should be shot (which he later amended to, the doctor should lose his license).  Me: ditto.  See if you talk long enough and don’t automatically dismiss the other person as stupid, you will eventually find areas where you agree.     

Now here’s the big surprise.  At the end of the conversation, Chris revealed that he is a lifelong registered Democrat.  I made the immediate inference that he did that so he could vote in the Democratic primary and choose the person he deemed most likely to lose to the Republican candidate.  It turns out, that isn’t the case at all.  In the most recent primary, he voted for Clinton, because of all the contenders, Republican and Democrat alike, he thought she would make the best president.  That goes to show that you should not make broad assumptions about people. 

Of course, I did already have a clue that Chris is not quite as rigid as he may appear:  he listens to NPR.  Maybe when we have our next conversation he’ll confess that he secretly reads the New York Times.  Which I suspect Ptfan1 does too.  Cheers, Pt!

Exotic Pet Ownership

The death of Travis the chimp in Connecticut is sensational, in the bad sense of the word, and has been unfortunately overshadowed by the cartoon in the New York Post which obviously referred to his death.  But let’s talk about Travis himself.  Supposedly living a life of privilege, drinking wine from a stemmed glass (say what?).    I guess it’s but a small step from wine to Xanax.  But neither wild nor domesticated animals should be given alcohol or unprescribed drugs, nor in any other way treated as if they are human.  Not that I haven’t done it.  In an emergency, I’ve given a dog Benadryl a couple of times, for pain, until I could get them to the vet.  Even that was a bad idea, although it didn’t hurt.  But it could have.   

We may love animals as if they were human.  We may, in some cases, love them more than humans.  But they are not human, and it is a tragedy and it borders on abuse to treat them as if they were. 

The real story is, this woman, Sandy Herold, should never have had a chimp in her home, even if he had his own bedroom.  Chimps are incredibly bright, and they are very social animals.  Also, they are aggressive and are fierce hunters in the wild.  So no matter how much Ms. Herold “loved” him, she could never replace the companionship of other chimps.  She deluded herself if she believed that her “love” for him was returned in kind. 

Notice that I put the word love in quotation marks.  Ms. Herold reminds me of animal hoarders, who “love” animals so much that they can’t bear to turn one away.  The inevitable end to that story is that they end up with more animals than they can afford to care for, and the animals begin to starve.  Not being able to bear the thought of an animal dying, they begin to cause dying by a more painful method.  The parallel here is that Ms. Herold had only one animal, but an animal she could not control or properly care for, and the attack on her friend was not the first clue.  Among the chilling aspects of the story (Ms. Herold stabbing Travis with a butcher knife, for example), is the 911 call, in which she says about Travis attacking her friend that “He’s eating her”. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2009/02/17/2009-02-17_911_tape_captures_chimpanzee_owners_horr-2.html  Well, that’s what they do.  He’s a chimp. 

Now that I’ve been all self-righteous about it, time for some revelation.  In the early ’70’s, I impulsively bought an owl monkey from an exotic pet store (which I’m happy to say, was eventually shut down).  I named him Spock.  They sort of have Spockish ears. 

No matter how fierce they may look, they are tiny things…weighing between 2 1/2 and 4 1/2 pounds.  I bought monkey food for him, which he wouldn’t eat.  The only thing he would eat was fruit cocktail, except for the cherries.  He lived in a large cage in my bedroom.  He got sick, and had diarrhea.  I took him to the vet.  This was the first clue I had that maybe I had done a bad thing–the vet yelled at me about having an exotic pet.  I had to give Spock medicine from an eyedropper, and he hated it.  I would have to trick him.  I had two eyedroppers—one with milk, and one with the medicine.  He loved the milk (but he never knew what he was getting…), so I would put my hand around his tiny head to force open his jaws, and give him a dropperful of milk.  Then he would keep his tiny mouth open and I would blindside him with the medicine. 

He got better, but still refused to eat what he needed.  I “loved” Spock, but I realized he was going to die if I kept him.  So I donated him to the zoo. 

As it turned out, the zoo didn’t know any more about owl monkeys than I did.  That first winter, they put him out on what they called “Monkey Island”, an artificial island with an artificial moat around it, with all the other monkeys.  It’s amazing that he survived and that the other monkeys didn’t eat him.  He did survive, but his tail froze and they had to amputate most of it. 

But there is a happy ending here.  Spock turned out to be one of the only male owl monkeys in captivity, and he was sold to the Chicago zoo for breeding purposes.  I was sad, because I could no longer visit him, but happy for him that he got to live out his days as a stud.  These days, owl monkeys are an endangered species.  Hopefully, not for a lack of trying by Spock. 

The moral of the story is that I learned my lesson.  I don’t want to “love” an animal to death.  I did have one more encounter with an exotic pet, which was more in the nature of a rescue, but that’s food for another post.  I think Sandy Herold is in for some hard times ahead, and honestly, I don’t have much sympathy for her.

Fakename Goes Digital

First, a pox on the local CBS Affiliate for sticking with the original date for switching from analog to digital, which they did on February 17th, thereby creating a TV emergency for me.  I have digital cable services, but only one cable-friendly TV.  The console TV in the main room died some years back, or, as I like to say, turned itself into a table.  I was making do with a small analog TV with rabbit ears.  With foil on the end of the rabbit ears.  Sitting on the old TV/new table.

Going digital was not that easy for me.  To begin with, as a general rule, Fakename and electronic devices do not belong in the same sentence, unless the devices are very simple.  Here’s what I mean by simple:  it must have only one cord.  One end of the cord plugs into a wall socket.  The other end plugs into some hole in the back of the device.  If there is more than one hole in the back of the device, that end of the plug must fit in only one of them.  (Colors and pictures welcome.) Alternatively, the device can operate on batteries.  I can install an unlimited number of batteries, since I’ve learned to recognize the positive and negative ends of batteries, and where they fit always has nice little plus and minus signs. 

There should be a limited number of buttons or switches on the device, preferably only one which says “On/Off”.  There must not be any button called “Menu”.    Therefore, I’m an ace at the installation and operation of coffee pots. 

So yesterday I took the plunge.  Since I have digital cable, I really didn’t need to buy a digital TV, but the three models I had a choice of at the place where I chose to shop each looked like they weighed at least 250 pounds.  So I went with digital, all of which were flat screen and had a high portability factor for 114 pound weakling owners.

Step One in the installment process is getting it out of the box, which has been put together with Superglue and a nuclear-powered staple gun.  I always allot four hours for this part.

So I got the new TV out of the box last night, set it up, and plugged it in.  That wasn’t too hard.  It doesn’t quite fit my definition of “simple”, since in addition to the power cords, you have the cable issue to deal with.  Cable from wall to cable box.  Second cable from cable box to TV.  Only one place on TV that cable will fit.  So far so good.  I did learn during this process that besides “Menu”, I don’t want any appliance which uses the word “Coaxial”. Then I turned on the TV.

The first thing that comes up automatically is the menu, and it asks you to choose a language.  English, which came up first, was my first choice.  It told me if that was OK, that I should press OK.  I can grasp that concept.  So I pressed OK…and the language changed.  After several presses of OK and language changes, I believe my menu is now in Ukrainian.  Mercifully, after a brief period of inactivity, the menu turned itself off.  Then the TV told me it had no signal.  That message moved around from place to place on the screen.  I guess in case my attention span was so short that  I missed it in the upper right corner, I would catch it when it moved into the lower left corner. 

I was pretty sure I had everything connected correctly.  I resigned myself to the idea that I would have to call Comcast to have them check the signal.  Calling Comcast is one of my favorite things to do, next to setting my hair on fire. 

This morning in the shower, I was like, Wait.  Doesn’t the TV have to be on Channel 3 to get the cable signal?  Dripping wet, I ran into the room and pressed “Power” then “3″ on the remote control (good thing you can’t get electrocuted by remotes).  And Shazam!  We have TV.

I’m thinking the picture quality needs a little tweaking.   I’ll be doing that as soon as I learn to speak Ukrainian.

Book Review: The Worst Hard Time

This book is subtitled “The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl” and focuses primarily on the stories of people who stayed and tried to make a go of it, in most cases because they had nowhere else to go.  In many other cases it was misplaced optimism; in spite of the evidence, they kept hoping next year would be better, until they lost everything and were trapped in hell with no way out. 

The Dust Bowl encompassed parts of 6 states:  Kansas and Texas certainly had the largest areas, but in between Kansas and Texas was the Panhandle of Oklahoma.  To the north of Kansas, a small part of Nebraska.  To the west, bordering Kansas, a small part of Colorado.  To the west of the Oklahoma Panhandle and Texas, a narrow part of New Mexico.  All part of the “High Plains”.  This is an area characterized by extreme temperature changes from winter to summer–sometimes below zero in the winter and over 100 in the summer, and very high winds in both seasons.  In good years it gets maybe 20 inches of rain, but is prone to long droughts.  In the entire area there are 5 rivers, which range from trickles to raging floods in the rare wet periods. 

To make a long story short, it’s perfect for grass and buffalo.  But through a sort of perfect storm of conditions, the Dust Bowl was created.  First, it was the idea that the middle of America should not be inhabited by Indians, but by the white man.  And the Homestead Act made it possible for people to go there and cheaply get their own land–the American dream then as it is now.  The real estate people and the government said it was perfect farming land and that the land was an inexhaustible resource.  They planted wheat, and made very good money, and when WWI came along, the price of wheat skyrocketed.  So they plowed up more land and planted more wheat, until eventually 100 million acres of grassland had been plowed.  Then came the Depression.  The price of wheat fell, and the demand fell.  Farmers were still planting wheat and more wheat while last year’s wheat was mildewing, unsold.  And the final nail in the coffin was the drought.  With no more grass–grasses that had adapted to the high plains over thousands of years–to hold down the soil, and wheat that was dying from the lack of rain and from the blazing temperatures, the soil went on the move.   

There is a hero in the story, a man named Hugh Hammond Bennett, who as early as the 1920’s started sounding the alarm that the land was being killed, perhaps permanently.  He later created the concept of soil conservation districts, and managed to restore some of the land.  Apparently he was more successful at getting farmers to change their ways than he was at getting his boss, FDR, to see the light.  FDR thought the solution was to plant trees as windbreaks.   His Civilian Conservation Corps planted millions of trees on the High Plains, most of which are now dead.  Bennett told him they would not survive.  But it put a lot of people to work planting trees, which was a short-term stimulus package that worked. 

The prairie is still not restored fully, and here’s the bad part:  now it appears we are doing new bad things to it.  The author, Timothy Egan, says that now they are pulling water from the Oglalla Aquifer, the largest in North America, which runs from North Dakota to Texas.  At the time of the Dust Bowl, that was one of their hopes to save themselves, but they did not yet have the technology to bring it up, because it’s 500 to 700 feet deep.  Water is being pulled from the Aquifer 8 times faster than it can be replaced by nature, and it’s thought it will run out in 100 years.   And what is that saying about being doomed to repeat history?

Any good book, fiction or non-fiction, will make the setting and the people real for you.  In this book, which is filled with real people, the horror of the Dust Bowl was brought home to me by one scene.  The dust storms started in 1932, but in 1937, in the tiny town of Dalhart, Texas, they got a little rain that spring.  A man named Bam White planted some grass, some alfalfa (to feed his two surviving horses), and a little corn.  Then a grasshopper swarm arrived.  At first they thought it was another dust storm.  Later, it was estimated that there were 23,000 grasshoppers per acre, 14 million per square mile, in the swarm.  At Bam’s farm, the grasshoppers ate everything down to the ground in minutes, and then moved on, but not before his son tried to sweep them off the grass with a broom.  They landed on him and tried to eat his shirt.  They tried to eat fences and the wooden handles of tools. 

But that scene, of Bam’s son trying to sweep a swarm of locusts off the grass will forever be the picture I have of the Dust Bowl–the folly and the desperation, but a sort of defiance and courage too.

Republican Mental Illness

I’ve been meaning to post about this topic since last weekend, and I wish I had, since now it will only look like I am echoing Frank Rich of the NY Times.  Apparently he read my mind, but the real kicker is that he said what I’ve been thinking better than I’m about to.  I guess that’s why he gets paid for his opinions. 

In any case, I’ve decided that the Republicans in Congress have all lost their minds.  Week before last, there was John McCain on TV saying, “This isn’t a stimulus bill, it’s a spending bill”.  Well, duh, John.  I think we all pretty much knew it was a spending bill, what was your first clue?  Then I saw him on Face the Nation last Sunday (I think–is that the one with Bob Schieffer?) And Bob, who is pretty neutral usually–he’s no Tim Russert–said, well, pretty much everyone agrees that something needs to be done, are you going to support such a bill even if it’s in a revised form?  And John said, “I just can’t”.

Then there were the various Republican members of Congress using phrases like “mortgaging our children’s future” and “generational theft”.  I try hard not to curse, because I’m in the business world and don’t want such language to become so habitual that I “slip” at an inappropriate moment.  Also, I do subscribe to the theory that you should make the effort to say what you really mean, and curse words are a mere shortcut.  But in this case, I’m making a deliberate exception.  To the “generational theft” charge, I say, Who the fuck cares?  Is there a generation that did not inherit debt in this country?  As far as I’m concerned, your children and your children’s children are on their own.  Show me the rule that says we have to suffer so that our children and children’s children can tiptoe through the tulips without worry, debt, or pain.  What you should be worried about now is keeping your children alive, by actually putting food on the table. 

So now the Republicans are actually congratulating themselves.  It’s a badge of honor that not a single Republican in the House voted for the bill.  That’s how I know they’re crazy.  If I were a Republican (which is kind of like saying “if I were an aardvark”), here’s what I would have said.  Okay, look, there’s some really stupid stuff in this bill.  Let’s work to get those parts cut.  But in the end, we need to vote yes, because if we don’t, the majority of the American people are going to think we don’t care about them. 

This time the Republicans didn’t just shoot themselves in the foot, they shot themselves in the head.  What they did, probably convincing themselves they were doing the right thing even if it was unpopular, wasn’t even smart on a crass political level.  They are for all the world acting like the wide receiver who runs a pass into the end zone, doing the little victory dance, only to realize that it’s the end zone of the opposing team.  I’m at a loss to understand this mass delusion.  But I’m thinking maybe it isn’t safe to drink the water in D.C. 

For Frank’s far more imposing take on the subject:  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/opinion/15rich.html?ref=opinion

Drama in the Fakename Household

I recently did a post, on February 1st, called The Nature of the Beast, in which basically I expressed my disgust for the increased aggressiveness of my smallest dog, who is nevertheless the Alpha.  You have to sort of reluctantly admire him.  It’s probably that aggressiveness that saved his life when he was out on the streets.  I can only imagine the scene when he was captured and taken to the shelter at Port St. Joe, where he lived for 6 months.  Even now, he’s about one step away from being a wild animal. He has to be muzzled to get his annual vaccinations.  His plan is that if you attempt to touch him without his consent, you get the death penalty. 

Back when I was involved in dog rescue, which is how I came to have Pippin the Beast, I somehow got a reputation for having the ability to take in wild dogs and aggressive breeds and have them live in harmony.  Mostly.   There are several notable exceptions.  Not to be too immodest, but I do seem to have a sort of gift for it, which I can’t really explain.  I’ll never forget, once I was visiting Fakesister and taking pictures of her riding at her horse barn.  One of the barn cats jumped into my lap, a cat who was never known to have previously been touched by human hands.  Fakesister was astonished.  So that’s me…the Cat Whisperer.   But I’m a bit of a Dog Whisperer too.  I don’t want to get too mysterious and New Agey about it all, because there’s a scientific explanation for it, I think.  So I will step out on this limb and say that dogs, and cats, seem to sense that I’m safe, at the very least. 

But on February 10th, this past Tuesday, just 10 days after I expressed concern about Pippin’s aggression, the worst happened.  Pippin and Fakedog and Abigail (aka, the Girl Dog) were all clustered at the fence in a corner of the yard, where they were boxed in on one side by the fence corner, and on the other by a tree.  They were doing dog communications with the three neighbor dogs on the other side of the fence, a beautiful male Rottie who is just now coming out of puppyhood and his two female yard-mates, whom I guess are German Shepard/yellow lab mixes. 

I don’t know what happened then.  My guess is that somebody stepped on somebody else’s foot, then somebody growled, then somebody growled back.  Normally that’s enough to end it all, because someone always cries Uncle.  In this case, they were in a confined space and couldn’t seperate fast enough.  Fakedog tried backing up, and then the worst possible thing happened to him.  He tripped, and fell down.  Abigail and Pippin then jumped on him with a vengeance, and without a doubt would have killed him if they could.  Never mind that he’s been their friend and playmate for more than three years.  It’s like they failed to recognize him.  Also, they go deaf.  They don’t recognize their own names, or the word “No”.  Abigail, who is a complete wuss about most things, waits to see who is winning when there is a spat and jumps in on the winning side.  She is quite the puzzle.  It’s probably the pitbull side of her genetics trying to come out. 

This all took place in seconds, and the screaming (me) and the growling (them) was over in just a few more seconds.  But at the end, Troughton had been bitten, by who is a mystery.  A flap of skin was hanging off his leg.  Needless to say, you can’t stitch up dogs while they’re awake.  So Fakedog had surgery on Thursday, and came home on Friday.  Pippin and Abigail were just delighted to see him.  This is how you know dogs have short memories.  They don’t seem to have any idea why he was gone, or that they played any role in it.  Too bad I can’t bill them for the $838 it took to fix him. 

And now today, here they are, along with Stormy the Cat.  The vacant spot by the pillow is the absence of Abigail, who ran away when she heard the ping of the camera coming on.  She’s very scared of the camera, and shadows, and helicopters and geese flying over the back yard, but would be perfectly happy to kill one of her best friends.  This is how you know that the loyalty of dogs is not all it’s cracked up to be. 

At The Library These Days

Once I left the small town where I mostly grew up, I went often to the college library for research, then when I graduated from college, somehow libraries just dropped off my radar.  I never stopped reading, but I bought books, almost always paperbacks, and borrowed them from friends, but I bet I didn’t check a book out from a library from 1973 until maybe 2004.  I think that’s when I got my library card in Tallahassee.  I think the reason I chose to do it was a rare impulse to be frugal…I could save money by not buying books.

But the minute I went up the second floor of the main library and was among the stacks, there was that smell.  That smell of old paper and the promise of adventures yet to be experienced.  I was home again. 

My friend Judith told me that when you get a library card, that’s when you’ve decided to stay.  Buying a house, which I did in 2002, is one thing, but it’s a thing you can do anywhere.  When you get a library card, she said, you’ve put down roots. 

Libraries are far different now, of course.  There are computers to search for books, which I really appreciate, since the days of card catalogs and memorizing the Dewey Decimal System (yes, I did a bit of that) are over.  There are computers to connect to the Internet.  You can rent movies, and music, and audio books.  I understand why that is, but I would be happiest if they had a separate library for all that.  I’d like the library of my childhood, nothing but books. 

“My” library, the main library in downtown Tallahassee, has a few tables which display books on various themes.  I salute the valiant attempts by the librarians to be brave in the face of budget cuts, threats of closures, staff reductions and reductions in the hours of operations.  If it ever comes to it, I will volunteer for the library, but I don’t want to do it if it means someone will lose their job.  My point is that in this harried environment, someone at “my” library is taking the time to create these little displays…a loving and maybe futile tribute to what may be the lost art of reading. 

For instance.  Just after you enter the front door, to your left is a table called “Recently Returned”–in case you are intrigued by what other people are reading, which I’m not.  And yet…it’s on this table that I found one of the best non-fiction books I ever read:  Young Men and Fire, an account of the most famous wildfire ever, the Mann Gulch fire. 

Upstairs on the second floor, there is a table to the right of the elevators which has a changeable theme.  Once it was books about sea-faring, so it is on this table that I found another wonderful non-fiction book:  In The Heart Of The Sea, the true story of the sinking of the whaleship Essex..by a whale. 

This month, since it’s black history month, that table is featuring works by prominent black authors.  I realized that in all my extensive reading, I’d never read anything by Toni Morrison.  There were two on the table–the one I selected was Beloved.  Good choice.  This is the book for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988.

I finished it early this week, and meanwhile, last weekend I watched, for at least the second time, the PBS program entitled “Slavery and the Making of America”.  I saw, for the umpty-jillionth time, the Birmingham police turrning the hoses and the German Shepard dogs loose on a group of teenagers.  While it never fails to infuriate me still, this year I had a new thought.  While there is an aspect to it of “Never forget” that has value, just as reminders of the Holocaust are necessary, for the first time, I asked myself whether this program and others like it inflame old angers that we are trying to get past.  While it may still infuriate me, it has lost a bit of its shock value.  Not so with Beloved.

The torture and the creative methods of degradation described are unthinkable, but what this book does is bring home the soul-killing nature of slavery.  In it, the woman Sethe and Paul D are reunited after 18 years, when both are now free.  They started as slaves on Mr. Garner’s farm.  Mr. Garner was a “good” master.  He let his slaves carry guns (so they could hunt and supplement their food).  He asked their opinions and listened to them.  He never beat them.  But towards the end, Paul D reflects on what it means to be a man.  Because he was treated well, he thought that made him a man.  There is a point where he realizes that isn’t true…that he was only as much of a man as Mr. Garner allowed him to be.  He could never decide to be one way or another.  Of all the horrific scenes in the book, this is the one that made me cry. 

Now I am reading another non-fiction book (two in the same year!  In two months, even!)  This book is The Worst Hard Time, by Timothy Egan.  Its subtitle is “The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl”.  Egan focuses on the people who stayed, not those who left, a la The Grapes of Wrath.  I began reading it because it takes place during the Great Depression, which I thought was a timely topic.  The Dust Bowl is the greatest ecological disaster ever to happen in America, and possibly on the planet.  The two events are completely intertwined.  When I say it’s the worst ecological disaster in our history, consider these facts:  dust storms at times rose to a height of 10,000 feet.  Cattle suffocated where they stood.  In 1934, a dust storm dumped 12 million tons of dust on Chicago.  Tons.  Think of it. 

So thanks to the library, I’m able to indulge my passion for understanding, thinking, learning, and feeling, and the actual subjects range far and wide.  It’s who I am.   If I ever lose that, please shoot me.

At The Library With Fakename

I can’t remember when I first fell in love with reading; it could be when I first learned to read at the age of 5 in first grade.  It was just such an accomplishment, and I was really proud of it.  Maybe that was it…I could read, and I could read really well, and I was striving to be the best at something, and get some kind of recognition. 

But the first time I ran into a problem with reading, I was 13.  I had burned through pretty much every book I could think of in our junior high school library–I was in the 8th grade–and I asked my teacher for a recommendation.  He chose The Good Earth, by Pearl Buck.  When I brought it home, my mother said I couldn’t read it.  It was inappropriate for a girl my age, and I was to take it back and turn it in immediately.  So I took it back to school and read it during study hall, then I turned it in.  Little did she know that I had already disobeyed instructions, turned the lock on the home bookcase and read her copy of Forever Amber.

Somewhere around this time, we moved to an apartment that was next door to the town’s public library, and I have to say that that changed my life.  I was always kept on a tight leash, but the library was the one place I was allowed to go, every Saturday once my chores were done.  The library was my salvation.  The library was the place where I was free, where I could roam at will.  The books I got let me roam even further.  When I was reading, I wasn’t trapped in a small town, living with a mother who hated me.  For a time, I could be in Alaska, or Africa, and I could dream, and I did. 

I loved most of all the smell of the library, and the hush of it.  The quiet.  The reverence.  The smell brings it back to me every time I enter the library.  It’s the smell of old paper, in a way, but it’s more than that.  It’s the smell of the ages.  It’s the smell of freedom.