Nibbles (11/6/17)

A few years ago, my husband and I had the great pleasure of adopting a trio of rat siblings whom we named Geddy, Alex, and Pratt-rat after the best of all possible bands. The best things about owning a trio of rats is watching them eat. A rat with a spaghetti noodle? Solid entertainment! I even made them pumpkin muffins on their birthday. In honor of my trio (heart-breakingly short-lived as rodents are) I've decided to name these small posts "nibbles." And wherever the souls of rats go, I hope they have many yogurt treats there!

So why do I need a "nibbles" post? Well, I'm reading a lot of books at once, so I'm reading too slowly for a full post. But I've been in school too long as both professor and teacher to read aimlessly, so I'm given to jotting down observations and questions - and they may as well have some final destination!

Reading The Line of Beauty by Richard Pini I am struck - as I usually am in these cases - by the ability of an individual to talk frankly about the good and the bad of their family lives, to find catharsis in recounting personal history. I am not that type of writer at all and it amazes me that people can make such beautiful art out of remembered pain.

This bejeweled skeleton certainly represents the "morbid elegance" ascribed to ossuaries in Empire of Death by Paul Koudonuaris! I was drawn in by the notion that people once held rather literal dialogues with the dead, asking them for advice, and that urban planning was, at one time, concerned with bodies and with clarifying the boundaries between the dead and the living, sequestering everyday life from the natural processes of death and dying.

I read Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale almost every year to be struck down by the beauty of its language. This time around I paused on the Baymen's decision that one "must know bitterness in order to survive the city." I remembered crossing one of the bridges into New York City and found myself wondering what my heart carried in it as the towers gleamed silver and green?

In Wages of Destruction Adam Tooze describes the impact of war on growth and the economy. I had previously understood that there was an economic aspect to the Second World War but I had never thought about how losing a war (WWI) affected growth. I had never considered the impact of reparations and rebuilding and how it might shape one's response to someone who promised a change. There's a lesson there for my own rural, Appalachian community that has been promised a (impossible) renewal of coal...

 I read natural history like Nick Jans' Wolf Called Romeo slowly these days because the endings are often unhappy ones. In this early part of the book I've learned that the dark coloring seen in the wolf here is actually a result of breeding between wolves and dogs and rarely appears in European wolves. Who knew?

In the same vein, I am reading The Heart of a Lion where the natural impulse of young male lions to travel and establish territory is described by the author as "a suicide quest" that often ends in results like those pictured here.

In class, we have been reading Jim Corbett's Man-eaters of Kumaon and I found myself thinking of his relationship with the Indian villagers. He clearly feels compassion for those who have lost a family member; he even lets them "help" with the hunting as a way of getting revenge. But he clearly doesn't think of them as equal members of the British Empire. They are subjects of the crown... but are not subjects all at once.

Another oft-read title, Middlemarch got my attention with the line: "a woman's need to rule beneficently by making joy of another soul." This sounds complimentary, but I'm not entirely sure that we should aspire to rule - even through compassion!



More nibbles soon! 

Birthdays are better with books (part 9): An Explosion of Ethology

I couldn't find an image that captured the full range of animal behavior, so I've made my own from shots found around the interwebs! Ethology is the study of animal behavior and brings together scholars from psychology, biology, and ecology. I don't know how they would feel about my company (being from the dreaded humanities side of things), but I very much like to read the books they produce! These are the ethology books that make it onto my shelves this birthday season, with some generous help from my mom, my sister, my best friend, my fairy godmother (she's real - promise!), my husband, and my in-laws!

 So often I am frustrated to find out how much I don't know, and this book is representative of that phenomenon! Despite lots of reading about animals, I'd never heard of animal cognition as such. When heard about the concept, I set out to learn more and this was recommended to me as the best starting place!

As I've noted in other posts, I am particularly drawn to the majesty of
predators. I am especially fascinated by those that dwell right in our midst or those who successfully cross the border between urban carnivore and carnivore-in-nature! These books look at the overlap between the wild world and the one we've shaped.

One of the best things about animals is how they seem to arrest us so completely. I was out bird-watching with my wonderful husband last night and froze as a squirrel raced across the path, as a flock of ducks lifted from the water, and as a pair of herons soared over the water. What is it about animals (which we are, after all) that draws us out of ourselves? Why do we want to reach for them and connect with them? Why does this seem to impact some of us so much more strongly than others (so-called animal people)? I hope this book will provide some of the answers!

I've seen quite a few books on motherhood in the animal kingdom (there's a new one coming in April called Wild Moms) but very few about fathers. I was very excited when the research of Sooyong Park pointed to the fact that Siberian tiger dads may play a more active role than was believed, and I'm eager to read what else animal dads do!

One of my current research interests is intraspecific strife - when members of one species attack and kill their own members. I first heard about it in relation to wolves and wanted to know more. There's little written so far but I thought this title might give me some starting points!

My best friend got this book for me during this birthday season. It called to me because it is set in Siberia (home of the best tigers) and because I've seen the research in it (speeding up evolution in fox populations) referenced in several other books. Now if I could only have a silky, friendly fox pup of my very own!

This is one of the key ethology texts that always gets mentioned in other works, so my library didn't feel complete without it. More than that, I could relate to the author's palpable yearning to know animals and be around/with them. I have to settle for reading about the adventures of others, but the yearning is still there!

I have an addictive, obsessive personality. I was doing some research the other day (I now forget exactly what I was trying to figure out) and I learned about bush vipers. They have ridge-like scales, are venomous, are polymorphic in their colors... and apparently no one writes about them. [A secret dream of mine is to win the lottery and start a small nature press to write about the animals I want to learn more about]. After searching all over the place for these deadly (and yet cute?) creatures that had so attracted my attention, I settled on Venomous snakes in general in hopes that my little vipers will make an appearance.

It's impossible to read about the study of animals and animal behavior without running into some difficult questions about food and raising animals to be eaten. I hope this book will introduce me to the behaviors and psychology of those animals we most commonly raise for slaughter.

By the same author, this is one of those other ethology touchstone books that come up in all the best-of lists. I think I tried to read it once before and got exasperated about something, so I'll keep you posted on round two!

I may shop at Amazon too often. I have actually learned a trick with third party booksellers, wherein I place a book in my shopping cart and leave it there to see if they lower the price as an incentive to get me to buy (digital bartering, anyone?) I didn't intend to do that with this title; I just forgot it was in the cart. The seller ended up lower the price $1.50 so I felt obligated at that point. Welcome to my life, invasive pythons! I really do find them fascinating, though. My husband once rescued a pair of ball pythons that loved to ride around in my hoodie pockets for warmth. My favorite python story involves one I saw at Alligator Adventure. It was such a large animal that my mouth dropped open and I believed in manticores for a moment!

This is another instance where something on the cover hooked me. I'm not usually a fan of millennial made-up speak, but there's something satisfying about the word "frenemy." It may appeal to me because I'm very black and white when it comes to people. I tend to adore them or want to stay far away from them, but I'm not Machiavellian enough for the maneuvers that would permit me a frenemy. Animals, however, apparently are and I can't wait to read all about the complexity of these relationships!