Closing tabs

“A body-temperature wallet is a petri dish.” (Via Tyler Cowen.)

Also: the private lives of public bathrooms (via I.H.D.).

Snails.

Upcoming: Little Women/Girls mashup - see it while you can!

Good but busy week upcoming (still have slightly implausible amount of work to do between now and Wednesday morning): a dissertation defense, an oral exam, the regular weekly meetings and seminars, but also tickets to various friends' artistic enterprises (this, this and this).

I am sad to have finished all three books of Jane Gardam's Old Filth trilogy! And surprised I didn't read them sooner. They are perhaps not quite as much to my taste as Susan Howatch's Church of England books (I prefer a novel's span to be defined by a period of crisis rather than the entirety of the character's life), but they are very good indeed - I will certainly read her other ones. Have been reading a lot of top-secret books for the Tenure Review Advisory Committee - I suppose at the end of the year I could make a few recommendations, as committee membership is public and so is fact of tenuring, once it's gone through final stages of approval.

Highlight of the week: IMAX 3D Island of Lemurs: Madagascar! Only was able to stay for the first two segments of The Mysteries on Thursday evening (I got home at 11pm and still had a couple more hours of work I had to do before Friday morning meetings, really couldn't face getting home a couple hours later than that with remaining work ditto!); not sure it is quite as transcendent as the Sophocles marathon a few years ago (there is unevenness in the switch from one playwright to another, also too many of them want to make the same sophomoric jokes), but many great aspects, and I definitely recommend it.

My family and other animals

At the FT, Ben Martynoga visits Jane Goodall in her family home at Bournemouth. Really enchanting picture at the bottom of Goodall's "favorite thing":

As a 12-year-old, she joined eight matchboxes together to make a stack of small drawers and filled them with dozens of handwritten scrolls; each slip of paper contains a quote from the Bible. Goodall made this Bible box as a gift for her grandmother and, for more than 50 years, the family have used it as an inspirational lottery.

(Photo credit: Victoria Birkenshaw.)

It is difficult to overstate the extent of my youthful obsession with Goodall: I really thought for many years that it would be my vocation in life to go and study chimpanzees (or perhaps gorillas) in their natural habitats. I can't pin the date down exclusively, but the book that was my utter obsession the year I turned eight was In the Shadow of Man. I read it again and again - and in fact in childhood times of stress and trouble I would retire to my room and contemplate the chimpanzee family trees on the endpapers and think about how much better life would be if I were living with a tribe of chimpanzees instead of a human family!

Closing tabs

Miscellaneous light reading: Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (very good); and, inevitably, 'Robert Galbraith,' The Cuckoo Calling. It is quite decent, but feels very artificial: just as the Potter books were curiously redolent of Enid Blyton, so this one recalls a lost Agatha Christie world of 'mansion flats' and high-end women's accessories! (I think, too, of the Margery Allingham novel set in similar fashion-world environs only of 1930s; and there is a touch of course of Brat Farrar also.) I will read further installments with enthusiasm, and I commiserate wholeheartedly with Rowling's desire to write and publish a book with no pressure or expectations.

Unrelated, though perhaps touching on some of the same underlying questions about fame and expectations and pressure: Andrew Hultkrans gives me a strong desire to see the Big Star documentary.

The legendary immolation scene

I have spent the week in a strange variety of activities conducted through a haze of mild to moderate fatigue: 

• A miscellany of doctor and dentist appointments, each minor/inconsequential in its own right but cumulatively onerous (and I would say that the pharmacy at the Rite Aid on 110th and Broadway is the worst, except that I switched there a few years ago from the Duane Reade across the street because that one really and truly was the worst!); 
• a large amount of opera (about which more, perhaps, anon - final installment tomorrow); 
• and a lot of whacking of the zombie book review that would not die, though I think I have sent its final incarnation to my editor just now.  The issue closes today, so that is pretty much going to have to be it!  

Will be very glad to see the back of that one: those who review regularly know that some pieces come together beautifully in the first draft whereas others have to be monstrously hacked about and rewritten again and again.  Not for the first time, I wonder whether it really is a good idea for me to write reviews: I feel that though reviewing comes as a sort of side benefit of my main reading-and-writing skill set, it's not my true metier.  However it is likely that soon I will have forgotten the pains of this week and will accept whatever invitation next comes my way....

The activity that should loom larger on that list but that I'm very behind on: grading!  Must make some more headway today as grades for graduating seniors are due by the end of the day.

Read two very good novels around the edges, Heath Lowrance's demented and captivating The Bastard Hand and Lavie Tidhar's haunting Osama.  I can't recommend these two highly enough: really unusual and high-quality neo-noir in two quite different inflections, very good stuff.

Miscellaneous linkage:

"Glass Gem" corn.  (Via Elatia Harris.)

Charles Peterson has a long and dispiriting two-part piece at n+1 on the devastation of the research mission at the New York Public Library.

Hawkcam!  (Courtesy of Brent.)

Widely linked to already, but orangutans like iPads too...

"The fungibility of animal stars"

Was Cheeta the real Cheeta?

Swingers

RIP Cheeta.

"Box 58 is Death"

The game of Nim and other ruses (via literary Eds).

Helen DeWitt: "A-free, C-free and G-visited".

It has been another odd week - I was only in Cayman for a few days before we went ahead and scheduled a trip to Miami for a nuclear stress test. There was no true worst-case scenario, I was pretty sure everything would be fine or (if not) eminently fixable (a term my more precise traveling companion corrected to "treatable!"), but I was nonetheless rather discombobulated and on tenterhooks until late Thursday afternoon, when the cardiologist declared him in the pink of health (not his exact words, but that was the gist of it). This is good!

So it was a week of airports and hotels and junk food and highway travel; we saw Inception and The Karate Kid at the mall opposite our hotel, and had a very good (but hot!) trip to the Miami Zoo on Saturday (the Amazon exhibits are particularly recommended - delightful venomous frogs and slinky snakes and lizards! - but I also particularly enjoyed the cotton-topped tamarins, always a favorite of mine, and a comical series of interactions between a bunch of lemurs that clearly demonstrated the dominance of the ringtailed over the red-ruffed when they share a single enclosure).

Had a bunch of light reading to while away the hours: first of all some fairly trivial stuff from the Humane Society Book Loft (it is not an infinitely renewable resources, alas, despite its excellence), Amanda Craig's Love in Idleness (very glad I am not the sort of English person she describes!) and Eileen Dreyer's Head Games (not as good as early Patricia Cornwell) and Lynda LaPlante's Red Dahlia (highly formulaic) and a pair of novels by Tonya Huff (the first of which it turned out I had read before, and the second of which mildly displeased me by failing to satisfy the obligations of a crime novel as opposed to "romantic suspense").

It was with delight that I then buried myself in another Humane Society find, Donna Tartt's wonderful novel The Little Friend. I loved it - the use of language is so much more vivid and interesting and appealing than everything else I've been reading recently - not to knock the other stuff - but really, it is something very special! Very funny in parts - and now I cannot stop using the word chunking - I chunked my duffel bag into the back of the SUV in the airport parking lot when we got back to Cayman a few hours ago...

And I had a bookstore splurge at the mall in Florida too (it was the slightly dubious-sounding Books-A-Million), and got a few things I've been coveting that made today's travels pass fairly quickly: Tana French's Faithful Place (not perhaps quite as good as the first two, and I was still expecting one more twist when the book quite abruptly came to an end, but still very good) and Joe Hill's Horns, which I am enjoying very much indeed and will finish as soon as I put a period to this excessively lengthy post.

Linkage

It is a minor stroke of genius for the TLS to assign Ian McEwan's novel to M. John Harrison for review. Interesting and thought-provoking review, too - the irk is kept relatively well in check!

Maggie Gee's new memoir sounds highly worthwhile.

The Denisova Child would make a great name for a novel...

3 other influential books

These three made a huge impression on me starting when I was seven or eight through about eleven or so - I was a precocious reader, but they were topics of serious interest to me! In those days I thought I would be a primatologist when I grew up. Only later did I realize that the most interesting and complex primate is the human being...

1. Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man. I read it again and again, and knew the chimpanzee genealogies by heart.

2. Harlan Lane, The Wild Boy of Aveyron. The discussions of language in this book burst upon me like an explosion.

3. Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind.

Other influential books at this age, excluding fiction: the D'Aulaires' books of Greek and Norse myths; David Macaulay's castle and cathedral books.

Les carbonisateurs

An extraordinary piece by Daniel Howden at the Independent on the attempt to preserve gorilla habitat in Virunga National Park.

The snake-and-primate nexus

Snake Detection Theory!

"Sad stories of the death of kings"

Titus the gorilla king is dead (link courtesy of Carrie).

"Little showers of flats and sharps"

A particularly wonderful interview with Oliver Sacks at the TED blog (link courtesy of the excellent Dave Lull). The conversation wanders far afield, but returns periodically to Sacks' own loss of vision in one eye following surgery for a melanoma. Here are two bits that particularly captivated me:

I had a tumor in the right eye, which has been irradiated and lasered, and I hope laid to rest. But that has taken most of the retina with it on that side and so I’ve only got a little sliver of peripheral vision and the rest is a great black area of scotoma, which changes its appearance as soon as I look up at the ceiling -- then it camouflages and turns white, or turns blue if I look at the sky. And it tends to be full of tiny things, of tiny letters and numbers, which look rather like incised hieroglyphics to me, along with a few other simple things like chessboards and spirals and spiders’ webs. So I’m just having fairly simple geometrical hallucinations. I’m not having faces or anything like this, and don’t expect to have them.

But they’re very easy to separate from reality?

Um, yes. Mostly. Although occasionally, I confess, certainly in the early days, when I would perhaps go in to someone’s apartment, I might think, “What an interesting … what a curious stippled wallpaper.” And I’d mention this. And the person would say, “What do you mean stippled? It’s not stippled.” So, now I realize the stippling comes from me, from the visual areas of my brain which area trying to fill in this rather large blind spot.

--

But still, I was absolutely terrified with this melanoma at first. I didn’t even know one could have ocular melanomas, let alone that they were much more benign than other sorts. When it was diagnosed, the surgeon brought out a model of an eye and he put in it something that looked like a little, shriveled, black cauliflower. And my immediate thought was that, in England, when a judge is going to pass a death sentence, he puts on a black cap and I saw this thing as the equivalent. I thought, “It’s my death sentence.”

(I would like to go and see the lemur colony in North Carolina!)

Happy monkey music

Species-specific music?

The researchers played each piece, as well as several samples of human music, for 14 tamarin monkeys that hadn’t heard music before. An independent observer recorded monkey behavior for five minutes before and after playing each selection. The monkeys didn’t respond at all to Nine-Inch Nails, Tool or Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” but oddly enough, they did become slightly calmer after listening to “Of Wolf and Man” by Metallica.

(I am certain there are more commercial applications in the Music for Cats business...)

Rogue woolly monkeys

Books written by people who have raised apes in their homes! (Link courtesy of Brent.)

I also note that Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood has made the Booker longlist - hmmm, I feel an Amazon splurge coming on... - pity so many of them haven't been published in the US yet. Some years ago I was very full of the notion that I'd like to do a frenetic Booker longlist August blog bit, but really I would only do it if someone would send me the books for free! But perhaps I will read the few of them that are actually alluring and convenient to get hold of...

Aquatic dialogues

At the LA Times, some good Oliver Sacks linkage (happy birthday, Dr. Sacks!) from Carolyn Kellogg: the National Review of Medicine interview is especially appealing. (Link courtesy of the excellent Dave Lull.)

Irrelevant, but the phrase Sacks linkage reminds me of something that happened to me the other day. I was running off the path in Riverside Park, and crunching lumpily under my feet were a whole host of the little things that as children growing up in Wilmington, Delaware we used to call monkey balls (I think they are these, or something similar): I ruminated on the fact that at age five I do not think I knew the word balls as a synonym for testicles, I just thought of it as being balls that monkeys might throw at one another, but it seems more likely to me now that whoever coined the expression had the other sense in mind...

Natural histories

Chimpanzees should not be kept as house pets.

Able Baker

Plaintive space monkeys (via BoingBoing).

"And also, I didn't want the pigs to eat her"

Jane Goodall interviewed at Salon. (Thanks to Shanna for the link.)

Thagomizer, HSK, quark

At the Telegraph, Tim Martin on some matters of terminology left unplumbed by the excellent-sounding Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction (here is the blog post by author Jeff Prucher that seems to have spurred Martin's piece):

The present collective nouns for a group of baboons – by rights, either a troop or congress – are, it seems, under threat from an interloper to their territory that comes straight from an old episode of Not the Nine O’Clock News. The sketch in question, featuring a talking gorilla called Gerald who rips his captor and teacher to intellectual shreds on a television show (“It’s a whoop, professor, a whoop of gorillas. It’s a flange of baboons”), has proved so popular online that its central gag has merged with serious primatology. The lexicologists at the OED’s Ask Oxford website now cheerfully list “flange” in first place as a collective noun for baboons.