A voice for animals at The Lancet

An editorial in vol. 373, issue 9679 (June 2009) of The Lancet emphasizes the need to think carefully about the rights of animals before designing experiments. Only in England, the birthplace of the animal rights movement, would such a compassionate essay appear in a leading medical journal.

Though their results are of dubious value, many scientists now use transgenic mice to study human diseases. It seems that transgenic primates are next up for slicing and dicing. I am opposed to all animal testing, so I was heartened when the author of the editorial mentioned Pope's great essay, "Against Barbarity to Animals" in which appears the following precept: "The more entirely the inferior creation is submitted to our power, the more answerable we should seem for our mismanagement of it."

My backpack

In 1986 I went to Taiwan for the first time. A few months after my arrival, I bought a blue Rhino brand backpack from a shop near the Taipei train station. I can't remember owning a backpack before that time, but I suppose I must have. Still, for me the Rhino bag was the first backpack in my life that mattered. When I traveled to China with my sister Jenny in 1988, I carried only that backpack, often with an enamel cup dangling from a clip. The bag imposed a limit on what I could take, and I respected that limit, even when I realized that I'd need to buy warm gloves and boots in Chengdu if I was going to spend time with pandas in Jiuzhaigou. The only thing I did not manage to fit into the backpack was the Tibetan coat two American women I met in the Sichuan alps insisted I buy; that was fine, since it was so cold I was always either wearing the coat or sleeping under it.

In Los Angeles the backpack served me well. Every day I rode my old ten-speed from Lincoln and Cedar to UCLA, showered, took my change of clothes out of my bag, went to class, changed back to my shorts and t-shirt, and rode home. Sometimes, on the way home, I stopped at Rhino Records, where the backpack often elicited happy comment.

In 1996 I went to Taiwan for the third time. I had no money. The point was to do nothing but study at the Stanford Center, and had it not been for my friends Jennifer Rudolph and 祝平一, I'd have subsisted on little but soymilk and rice porridge that summer. I brought the Rhino bag, carried it from Yonghe to Tai Da every day, and then, at the end of the school term, I retired a very weary backpack and, at that store near the train station, bought a second blue Rhino backpack.

The second bag has been to New Zealand with me, back to Taiwan, to France, to New York, and has carried my groceries from stores in Venice, Santa Monica, West Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Petaluma. Not just groceries: loads of laundry, sacks of horse shit, library books, duct tape and fabric for capture the flag, bottles of wine, and my pruning equipment. More than once I've repaired it, passing a very large needle through the seam where shoulder straps meet bag, and those straps are not going to come undone any time soon. I need the thing to work because I'm one of those people who rarely leaves the house without draping a backpack over my shoulders, though I'll admit it does not go well with my old Peter Tilton suits.

The zipper that fastens the main compartment is not what it once was. This may mean retiring the bag. I am loath to do this, and it is not likely that I'll be making a trip to Taipei this summer. I managed to coax the zipper into sealing a load of laundry last night, but I was anxious that at any moment my turtlenecks would spring from the bag with the impetus of a parachute. For now I'm using an old bag of my dad's to carry my lunch to work, and even that feels a bit like betrayal. The old Rhino bag, limp, a jellyfish on the beach, lies on the bedroom floor, beseeching me to make a decision. But I can't.

ADDENDUM: I bought this:

Dolphins are still neat

The following is a passage from one of John C. Lilly's early studies of bottlenose dolphins:

"When a female and a male dolphin are confined in a relatively small area in captivity, the courting behavior is rather violent. If they are isolated with a movable barrier between them, they will resolve all kinds of problems in order to be together, e.g., opening a gate to gain access to another pool and closing it behind them. As soon as they are together they start pursuit games. The initial phases of this behavior appear violent and can continue for the first 24 hours. If the female is not receptive, the male continues to chase her, exhibits erections, rubs against her, and tries to induce her to accept him. They bite one another, they scratch each other's bodies with their teeth. During the mating procedure; they will develop lesions practically everywhere on their bodies specifically on the flippers, on the back, on the flukes, on the peduncle, and around the head region.

"The erection in the male occurs with extreme rapidity. We have observed and timed it in our own tanks: it is something on the order of three seconds to completion, from the time the penis first appears in the slit. It can collapse almost as rapidly, and it looks almost as if it were being done in a voluntary fashion. It is very easy to condition a dolphin to have an erection. The stimulus, for example, can be a single visual signal. One trainer chose to raise his arm vertically as a signal, and the dolphin would turn over and erect his penis in response. If Elvar, one of our dolphins, is alone and a small ring, about a foot in diameter and an inch thick, is tossed into the water, he will have an erection, with his penis lift it off the bottom and tow it around the tank."

Heroism

I don't have many heroes. Thoreau I revere for his love of truth and of beauty; Coleridge I think the greater for all his shortcomings. But I do have a passionate belief that heroes must be courageous. And I do not call shooting three men who pose no threat to you courageous. The assassins aboard the USS Bainbridge were not heroes; they were technicians. Their performance was not daring; it was as routine as a city worker emptying a garbage can. Only a nation obsessed with carnage and starved for military success could celebrate Easter by cheering the deaths of three thieves.

The Alexandria Quartet

I read Durrell's collection when I was in my mid-twenties and was ravished. Today I am less naive, less satisfied by the lazy repetitions, the obsessive obsessing. Still, the achievement, the singularly narcissistic—in its way, far more narcissistic than the unreadable diaries of Nin—quartet, with its mirrors, its scrapbook approach to novelizing, is impossible to dismiss. It is one of the last great acts of Orientalism.

Recognition

It's like seeing sky after years in a closet. Suddenly it's there, and you know it's sky, and it can't be anything else but sky, and there is absolutely nothing better. That's what it means to experience a work of art made by hands born to the task. Often the finished product is far from perfect: so it is with the movie I watched tonight, after quitting a piece of hack work with not a convincing moment in it. It makes little sense to say that someone was born to make movies: it's like saying a cat was born to curl up on my lap. But certain sensibilities do find their finest expression, today, in making people move around and make sounds in front of a camera and some lights and a team of people holding their breath until the scene is over. Tavernier is a recent discovery of mine, and Coup de torchon is a far better work than Ça commence aujourd'hui, which is often preachy and relies too much on cute kids and extreme situations, but it is also wonderful, real, impassioned, hopeful, sad. Still, I felt a disappointment every time the immaculately beautiful Maria Pitarresi appeared: she belonged on a billboard advertising lipstick, and making her a sculptor was another false note. Her looks clashed painfully with the utterly convincing homeliness of the schoolteachers and the slatternly mothers of the kindergarteners. One longed for her scenes to end, so that we might see the scarred and cloud-smeared sky again.

With

Things I have:

lamps
books in foreign tongues
a Tibetan coat
an automobile
100 bottles of wine
preserved lemons
cross-country skis
two bicycles
pens
50 cookbooks
a diploma
deer antler
a vacuum cleaner
2 cleavers bought in Taipei in 1986
spices
teas
photocopied Qing military examination records
lots of records and compact discs
a MiniDisc recorder
dozens of videotapes and DVDs
a sleeping bag
5 pillows
dog toys
the lock from Fred's storage unit in southern California
pictures of Eloise and Lucy and Itzhak
nice cotton shirts
a Brioni suit
other suits
bow ties
a garden hose

Without

Things I do not have:

a cellular telephone
a Blackberry
an iPod
a Wii
a laptop
a big TV
a cable connection
a dog
a baby
debt
a digital camera
a garage
a washing machine
a dishwasher
hired help
self-control
trackmarks
a tattoo
a piercing
discursive flexibility
a table saw
a Ph.D.
Harry Potter books
a couch
a pocket knife
a pirate costume
facial hair
a brother
a leather jacket
a yoga mat
cocktail glasses
a firearm
issues

Baboon vocalizations

Thanks to a kind communication from Dorothy Cheney, one of the authors of the magisterial and utterly fascinating Baboon Metaphysics, I've been listening to a variety of calls made by male and female baboons.

Males use forceful and deep vocalizations, called "wahoos," to assert dominance: rather than attack each other, two males in conflict launch into wahoo contests. The animal who can produce sustained, resonant calls while leaping about is fitter, and this display settles differences without the need for high-risk fights.

Here is a wahoo or two, both from Cheney's research section of the University of Pennsylvania website.

(The second compares a high-ranking male's call with that of a low-ranking male.)

Cheney and Robert Seyfarth's long-term study is a remarkable example of profoundly humane science. No animals are intentionally harmed: the scholars and their assistants observe baboons in the wild, relying on stool samples, for instance, to analyze stress levels in individuals.

Poem

By a Roadside

Waking from drear dreams, a dozen robins
In a bare tree.

To count them all, without wanton addition,
Address their silhouettes.

Their shivers and upruffled shoulders
Speak of spring.

An engine throbs past, robbing them
Of something spoken.

A scrub jay peers through lead leaves
Cocking his mutter.

Half a dozen now, no wetter, no colder,
Waiting for an ending.

Allen Ginsberg writing about fucking boys

All Ye Brave Boys

Come all you young men that proudly display
Your torsos to the sun on upper Broadway
Come sweet hearties so mighty with girls
So lithe and naked to kiss their gold curls
Come beautiful boys with breasts bright gold
Lie down with me in bed ere ye grow old,
Take down your blue jeans, we'll have some raw fun
Lie down on your bellies I'll fuck your soft bun.

And so on for three more stanzas full of "studs," "sturdy cocks," "tight assed," "come in your butt" et cetera. He really did produce a lot of tosh, that Ginsberg. And there's no excuse in his remark that he wrote this at 4 a.m. It's simply not a civilized time to be writing a poem.

Twenty-two years later he wrote

I am the King of the Universe
I am the Messiah with a new dispensation
Excuse me I stepped on a nail.

This is possibly even worse. He's like a photographer who elaborately printed and framed every single out-of-focus snapshot he ever took.

Destroy your cell phone

Evidence is increasing that cellular telephones are a direct line to Satan. (More fun if you start the two clips at the same time.)

Saint Valentine's Day entry

For as long as he could remember, Sam had accompanied every meal worthy of the name with a small salad of julienned baked tofu and cilantro dressed with lime juice, sesame oil, soy sauce, salt and black pepper. Today is no exception.

Last night's dream: a love affair with a soft blond woman whose front yard needed work and afterward was bare dirt and tree trunks. She knew her neighbors. I kissed her by drawing her lips into my mouth and holding them there. When I went inside she and Bono were watching her music video, which was a single close-up black and white shot of her hair being blown about. I said something about her fans.

John Updike was a fussy writer, but unlike so many of his epigones, he was able to write the occasional sentence that did not have the padding of artistic adjectives. Memories of the Ford Administration.

Is there an English word that does not rhyme with "pish"?

What Nat and I cooked

(1) Cucumber onion salad
(2) Watercress sesame salad
(3) Taro watercress soup
(4) Braised shiitakes with Shaoxing wine
(5) Lotus root stew with tomato and fennel
(6) Noodles with bean paste and shiitake sauce

We drank California wines with dinner, after Nat and I swilled a Nigl grüner veltliner as we cooked.

恭喜發財

一帆風順， 二龍騰飛，三羊開泰， 四季平安， 五福臨門， 六六大順， 七星高 照，八方來財， 九九同心， 十全十美，百事亨通， 千事吉祥，萬事如意

fuggery, aka "In the great bowling alley of your mind, I am your pinboy"

Last year I bought a biography of Allen Ginsberg and a big, handsome collection of his poems. The poetry is magnificent, funny, wild, and it goes on and on. Reading about AG, I saw he was a gentle apostle of love and pot, a tamer of Hells Angels, traveler, experimenter. One has to love him.

Two days ago, home from work a bit early, I walked over to Vinyl Planet and bought some videotapes (The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, 9 1/2 Weeks, Who Am I?) and some records (Bob Dorough, Enrico Rava, X). I got an album by The Fugs, and Allen Ginsberg, who used to open every poetry reading by chanting "Hare Krishna," does just that on this marvelous Fugs record. (It also has a picture of a naked AG inside.)

I think The Fugs are good.

Edges

I am drawn to the places where built meets natural. Gardens, the surfaces of buildings, the tidal zone under bayside houses. Such places are forever incomplete: I take on the role of finishing. Sometimes gardens work different degrees of built into a web. The statues of Cervantes, Emmet, Verdi and Key, no matter how rusticated their plinths, impress me as more fashioned even than the pollarded London plane trees on the music concourse.

New year's resolutions

During 2009 I hope to write an opera entitled "The Marbles," write a screenplay entitled "The Lynx," find a new job, read "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," Boswell's journals and as much as I can stand of "Capital," see spring blossoms in Point Reyes and Ring Mountain, listen most attentively to Purcell and Haydn, and look the world in the face.

A certain angle

I want to present a new ethics that responds to biological and cultural drives. I don't believe that an appeal to nature justifies human behavior. We stand outside nature, though our shadows are sucked into it. Culture with a history that stands outside of our genes, culture that involves planning and reflecting, is possible only when we forget much of our animal being. Animals are not peaceful. Animals are not wise. Animals do not settle for a reasonable amount. Animals simply are: there is no point assigning emotional descriptors to them.

I also want to appeal to scholars to remember that every document is produced for a different audience and with a different attitude toward that document. People who study books and words too often forget that it is extremely difficult to compare a book Virginia Woolf wrote when she was young to one she wrote when she was no longer young: not only had Woolf changed, her attitude toward what she was writing and who was reading it changed. This must be considered at every turn.

Not I

Ballast installation

Click on subject heading.

The sheet looks marvelously shiny in the rain.

When I saw it yesterday, the surface details were beautiful, especially along the edges on the eastern sheet.