* Children & Animal Extinction

* SPEAKING of EXTINCTION (and morbid children's books)--here's an ad from the BITS & PIECES gifts catalogue (Holiday 2007). How casually the young are indoctrined into an "everything's-all-right" attitude regarding the extinction of other species. The phrase "don't exist in the wild anymore" even intimates that these animals are still safe, in zoos or in rich people's backyards, perhaps. The Dodo on the cover is especially ironic in this regard, as perhaps the most famous species driven to extinction by humankind's own handiwork. But, "whatever": it's "Hours of dot-to-dot fun," all the same!

* Call Me Ishi. Or Buddy.

Ishi (the last Yana Indian) has been best memorialized by Native critic Gerald Vizenor, I think, in an essay called "Ishi Obscura." The marvelous first sentence is —"Ishi was never his real name." Ergo my serendipity here, dog-loving as my whole life has been:

* RADIO RANT: Birds as Symbols

I only caught snippets of Michael Savage last night (8/29), but his discussion (or rather, rant, as usual) about the Senator Craig affair had somehow wandered to the bird calling in the background of the Senator's "I am not gay" press conference. Yes, it was a Red-winged Blackbird (its "cong-er-ee" call), as a caller or two told him; but Savage's immediate reaction was so typically Western, and by the way, so typically traditional-lit-crit: he asked, "What does the blackbird symbolize in literature?!" Yikes! The very subject, really, of my book-manuscript-at-the-press. I couldn't handle the ideational pain and fled to sports talk radio.

I suppose that at least one caller fed Savage the standard freshman-in-college answer—"the blackbird stands for death"—and that our good Doctor applied it "cleverly" to the Senator's doomed career. But again, how symptomatic of mainstream anthropocentric culture to see other species as "all about us," as if God had put other species here to remind humans of our own mortality. (Geez, was there ever a real, honest-to-goodness snake in the Garden of Eden?) There was a real, individual Red-winged Blackbird calling there, with as much "reason" and worth to do so as the human fellow frantically trying to save his political ass. A deconstructive reversal of foreground & background might be instructive here: "What's that stupid primate sputtering about while Mr. Blackbird sings his wonderful tune?"

Finally, the old "death" equation hardly works with the red-wing, anyway. The "black birds" traditionally demonized in Western folklore are the crow and raven, not even loosely related to the red-wing. Closer, ornithologically, are Wallace Steven's grackles, sometimes read by critics as symbols of death (though symbols of sheer mundanity, of "reality" itself, works better for me in the context of Stevens' corpus). In contrast, though—if I HAVE to talk "symbolism"—the red-wing has always suggested to me the jouissance of the new spring, a powerfully ebullient paean to (and epitome of) nature's general rejuvenation. But as a poem I wrote as a much younger fellow reminds me, even this is sheer homocentric projection:

        AFTER LORCA   (c. 1986; rev. 1992)

the red-winged blackbird
sings, but not to call his pied-brown mate
or a cattail congerie--
he sings to be singing: he sings

the red-winged blackbird
sings, but not for the ever-returning spring,
or other springs, gone by--
he sings to be singing: he sings

the red-winged blackbird
sings, not to recall in us some preter-
natural nature of things:
he sings

* John & Martha X; Barbaric Discourse

* RADIO RANT: Women's Rights vs. Animal Rights?

Paul Zeise, a beat writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, has created a new round of controversy in the Michael Vick saga by uttering the following on a Pittsburg talk show: "It's really a sad day in this country when . . . Michael Vick would have been better off raping a woman [rather than running a vicious dog-fighting racket] . . . . Had he done that, he probably would have been suspended for [only] four games [rather than a year] and he'd be back on the field." To me, the meat of this new controversy is that several national sports commentators have come to Zeise's defense (e.g., John Fricke), via at least the implication that the current atmosphere of "political correctness" has led to a privileging of wild animals over our own women.

On one important level, these people are right, of course: Kobe Bryant and the legion of athletes charged with rape and spousal abuse have been getting mere hand-slaps from their leagues & teams, as the patriarchal game of wink-wink continues. They should be getting much more severe penalties. However, this issue is really independent of the Michael Vick episode; and the stance above, in its ostensible attempt to be anti-sexist, reveals once again an utter anthropocentrism: i.e., a human (woman) is more important than another animal. I, for one, believe that being instrumental in the violent deaths of many individuals of another species is a greater crime than the sexual abuse of any single member of our one species (whatever the gender). There, I've said it. Zeise, Fricke, et al. are wrong; it is hardly a "sad day," but a positive evolution in the general consciousness, in my mind. What is sad is that this debate seems to force one to pick & choose between women's rights and animal rights. But again, they're separate issues.

Of course I'm completely wrong in the "separate issue" thing, but this twist of an admission takes the argument to entirely different level. A major tenet of ecofeminism is that what the patriarchy does to women and "animals" (and to Natives and the environment) comes from the same source, an imperialist White male need to identify and ostracize an Other, including a propensity to commit violence against "her"—to maintain at last a master/slave, Self/Other, civilization/nature hierarchal binary, to reassure the Self of its superior status. What is truly surprising, then, is that these commentators are speaking of the two crimes as if they were fundamentally different things!

* Thinking Happy Thoughts

Quot. of the Day:

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.
    --Jean-Paul Sartre

* RADIO RANT: Dog Eat Dog; Rich Wear Fur

The outrage by the talking heads on sports talk radio and cable news regarding the Michael Vick dog-fighting scandal was understandably vehement—but so self-righteous. That is, all these people can be "right," but for the wrong reasons. "How inhumane! I'm a dog lover! All Americans love dogs!" But when the occasional "nut" called in suggesting that shooting deer and pheasants is no less barbaric, such discourse was dismissed as beyond the pale. Worst has been the pompous&supercilious attitude of ESPN Radio's Colin Cowherd, whose elitist/urbanite biases distinguished themselves: pit-bull fighting is a despicable sport practiced especially by the poor, the rural, and the Southern (and the—shshshsh—black). You're so right, Colin. You city folk are immune to such first-hand visceral cruelty, with enough money to distance yourself from the inhumane (such an ironic term) factory farming that provides you with your veal parmesan and chicken Kiev, while your pasty-skinned lazy Euro-jet-trash-of-a-wife can't decide whether to wear a dead fox or mink, to cover her pastiness.

All this outrage is also completely anthropocentric: that is, it's all about us humans—including "man's best friend." There would certainly have been less outrage if Vick had been involved in cockfighting. Or how about terrapin matches? (Yeh, probably very lengthy affairs.) Or cricket bouts, to the death?! My point is that, if humankind has an innate biophilia (love of all life), it's still quite mammalo-centric: we love the animals that remind us most of us, that have fur, and cuddly babies . . . and maybe milk that we can feed to our own babies. And so, following my niece & nephew around the zoo gift shop last week, I wasn't surprised to see that nearly all of the stuffed animals were mammals. The few birds seemed unnatural and stiff and "distant"; the reptiles and insects were intentionally rubbery and "alien."

In fact, though my book-in-manuscript spends pages on end explaining the poets' age-old obsession with birds, I'm still rather surprised when people actually grow attached to them as pets. (I refuse to do so, being against caged birds in general.) But my wife, for one, treats her budgie as her best friend, though it shits on her shoulder all the time and bites the hell out of me when I show up. (Well, at least we and birds are both vertebrates: so, yeh, birds still kick ass on locusts as pets.) But I wonder if the average human mourns as much when his/her lovebird flies out the window in the middle of winter and never returns, compared to when old Fido gets run over by the neighbor's car. Birds, I guess, are somewhere between our mammal-compatriot dogs and cats—and that goldfish whose tombstone is the toilet-bowl lid. ("Mom! Where's Jimmy? He's not in his bowl!")

I've wandered far from Michael Vick to illustrate how problematic "animal rights" is. I don't even like that term ("rights" is a human legal construct, after all), preferring Lawrence Buell's phrase, "nonanthropocentric ethics." But that won't fit into a talking point or on a bumper sticker.

[Added same night:] Wow: it's pretty fascinating to learn, then, that Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank's reaction to his quarterback's legal problems has been belated because the fellow has been on vacation. In Africa. On safari.

* Humane Slaughter Wins!

I'm not even awake yet, really, but I just heard on the radio that those bastards at PETA have once again maligned our good people at Omaha Beef (or someplace like that, business-wise): those godless radicals are wrong again! Our good local meat people have been judged by the authorities to have "done nothing wrong against the 'Inhumane Slaughter Act'"! (God, I never knew there WAS such a law. . . . and thank the Good Lord once again for all acts of HUMANE slaughter, wherever they occur. . . .)

But then, I do have a problem w/ PETA, as I do w/ most so-called "animal rights" groups: they are often so damned "mammalo-centric" (to quote a term coined in my book manuscript), and/or so infatuated w/ the "big" animals of either size or number that I gladly prefer the even greater (and truer) radicalism of Deep Ecology. . . .

[P.S., later this morning: I'm not even sure that there is such a thing as the "Inhumane Slaughter Act" now; I may well have been (partly?) dreaming? This quit-smoking nicotine stuff says that it may cause "vivid dreams"—in which case, one should stop using it immediately and consult a physician. Huh?? What civilization/culture before/besides ours has been so dead-set against "vivid dreams"?!

But a web search for the "Inhumane Slaughter Act"(!) confirms the fact: I manufactured an entire blog entry—complete with initial satire and and subsequent arguments of some vehemence—around a nicotine hallucination, apparently, around two or three heard or misheard words on the morning radio news as I was just waking up. But it all seemed so real!

And of course and finally—those on the right could well claim that I've only been tilting at windmills all along, and chasing chimeras from day one; but then they must have missed the poetic truth of everything written above. And below.]

* A New ZOO Review

With my brother & family's advent to Lincoln this last week, I got to re-appreciate Lincoln's Folsom Children's Zoo and to see (hurriedly) Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo for the first time. If "NATURE" = a FOX enterprise ("When Animals Attack"), the ZOO, to coin another phrase, is "Where Animals . . . Lie Around & Look Miserable." Of course, this is a vast over-generalization, the eco-issues involved are inordinately complex, and more specific "photo-journalist reports" will be forthcoming. But one pict for now (for fans of Rilke's Der Panther sonnet):

* John & Martha II

* Custer Lives

I'm back from a week w/ my daughter Emma; I picked her up in Denver and took her to visit her grandma, uncle, & cousins in "the Black mining Hills of Dakota." I grew up in the Black Hills, and it struck me on this visit how we longtime locals take the place names for granted, seldom or never considering their origins.

Take the town—and the state park—called Custer, for instance. We camped out at Custer State Park last Friday night—oh, the Mountain Bluebirds & Western Tanagers—and attended a "camp-ranger" presentation that evening, on the park's "Wildlife Management," that is, the state's control of the big-game populations, mostly. When the college student/intern finished her talk, Tom the Terrible raised his—er, my—hand: "I was just curious about the origin of the Park's name. Why Custer? I do recall that he ordered over 700 Indian ponies to be put to death on the spot at one point in his storied career. Is this an example of good 'wildlife management,' perhaps inspiring the name choice?" (Thankfully, most people there got the sarcasm.) She hemmed and hawed, and did her best at disavowing such past behavior, until I actually felt sorry for her. But then, Custer's bloodlust continued into the 20th century in western SoDak, so much so that most of the Park's vaunted large mammals are (re-)imports, including the bison. And at least one, the (Rocky Mountain) Bighorn Sheep, is a "surrogate" for a similar Black-Hills-native animal that was hunted to extinction (Audubon's Bighorn Sheep, all individuals gone to animal heaven by 1916).

* RADIO RANT: "fair & balanced," stupid & wrong

Never mind that their top-of-the-hour radio news already offers the least content of any radio network, FOX News has now added these minute-or-so "human interest" segments at the end of (some of) their news feeds, apparently to placate or anaesthetize those who can barely stand more than a minute or two of world-news reality. Each one ends with—"from the audio archives of Fox News Talk," but they sound more like new segments made expressly for this purpose, as epilogue to their news. (For one thing, none of the voices are recognizable as known talk-radio people. [And, for better or worse, I should know!])

Well, the only two of these segments I've heard are just plain "stupid & wrong." #1: a fluff interview of Serena Williams, in which the interviewer begins, "You're probably the favorite at Wimbleton this year . . . ." Well, sentimental favorite, maybe, and perhaps the only woman tennis player the person-on-the-street knows, but I doubt if she'll even be seeded in the top four this year, unless she kicks ass at the French. Or—IF this is truly a dated archive from, say, two years ago, no such context is provided, and so the interview/story remains problematically misleading in its ostensible timeliness.

If #1 was a mere quibble, perhaps, witness #2. "Archive from the past" or not, in this segment, FOX truly shines: it's another fluff piece, this time on Ernest Hemingway, in which the speaker "ernest-ly" tells us that the famous American novelist and big-game hunter won the "Nobel Peace Prize" in 1954. (I have heard this segment at least three times, so I'm not mistaken.) Hmmm. No, his Nobel was for Literature. His major efforts at "peace" seemed to have consisted mainly in displacing his own internal battles into an external war upon other species.

[Added 6/6/07:] I've now heard several other of these segments, including a hard-hitting exposé (NOT) on the 1960's cartoon, The Banana Splits.

* News from the Zoo

Some [much reduced in size] photos from my "shoot" (what a lovely metaphor) today at the Folsom Children's Zoo: Bearded Barbet; Red-crested Cardinal; East African Crowned Crane (3 shots); and Bald Eagle. Oh, the cage wires in some of the backgrounds! Indeed, taking photos of zoo birds is pretty much amateur night: I felt like Dick Cheney on a quail hunt. But I am an amateur, obviously, and my camera isn't up to many good pictures of (small) birds in the wild, unless I'm lucky (never have been) or patient (never have been, or will be). As further evidence of my amateur status, I thought "12x optical zoom" meant 12x magnification, as with binoculars. (Nope—turns out to be focal length, er somethin'.) Magnification-wise, the lens seem closer to a antique pair of 3x or 4x field glasses. I see now that I should have paid just a hundred or two more for an entry-level DSLR camera, but I wasn't sure my interest would match the investment, and—hey—I've always been "cheap."

But the real story here is that this zoo is another venue that brings back fond memories of daughter Emma & me. Oh, how she loved that baby Pygmy Marmocet! Better yet, oh, how she squealed in pre-teen shock-plus-delight as we watched a Euro. White Stork catch a ground squirrel, spear at it for minutes, then swish it around in a water dish, and then—(repeat steps 1 & 2 several x's)—then finally, with a back-thrust-of-the-head, gulp it down in a flash! . . . "Solid, dude." . . . I'm probably projecting, but it seemed that the new dark twinkle in Emma's eye was of a new awareness & acceptance, of a Darwinian stork-eat-squirrel world, of some sado-masochistic cosmos in which the animals of Disney are the worst of pale simulations.

Finally, on a(n even) sadder note: I'd forgotten that these places are somehow allowed to keep native birds (and not just endangered ones)—e.g., the egrets (2 species) and stilts, and the pair of pathetic Bald Eagles, so miserable in the 100-degree day when Emma and I were there. . . . (Hey, they weren't too happy today, either!—see photo above again. [You noble—you poor, bedraggled—one.])

* God's "Lesser Creatures"

So there I was, listening to CNN today, as two Christian theologians fought it out: an ultra-conservative evangelist combatting a "progressive" pastor who believed in global warming, etc. Kudos to the latter. However, the latter's seemingly positive phrase, [in defense of] "our lesser creatures," is so totally Biblically hierarchal & demeaning that it makes one wonder if any brand of Christianity can ever be truly eco-egalitarian. . . . (Ditto you, Mr. Coleridge, and your damned "Mariner" poem, with its moralizing conflation of—yet still implicit distinction between—"all creatures great and small.")

* "Back in the Day"—of the Internet

Back in my day {get off the grass, punk!}, when the Internet was young—the early 90's—there was email, there were USENET groups (of specialized interests), and there were web pages written with the textual content paramount—since graphics, etc., were pretty bandwidth prohibitive. It was then that a person {get off the grass!} measured his/her words, to make them worthy verbal entries in a Brave New Digital World; it was then that "written" discourse (if you will) still mattered. {Get off the grass!} Sure, acronyms soon became rampant (e.g., ROTFLMAO) and type-emoticons were popular (   :-{  ). But, given the bandwidth investment, an email was often more an essay than some toss-off casual affair, and a web page was an original contribution to the world of knowledge, not a mere digital appendage to a capitalist enterprise, or a report to the world on one's children and pets.

Now I can barely READ my email, without a plethora of misspellings, comma splices, et al. (and oh, yeh—sex for sale). Now I can't access a web site for information purposes, without gaudy & mindless graphics, commercial banners (and misspellings & comma splices), etc., etc. {Get off the grass!} Supposedly, the democratization of the 'Net has been a good thing—that is, if Fortune 500 companies and pornography are your forte. They're not mine. {Get off the grass!}

So—humankind IS the "rational animal"?! Some sociologist should do a content analysis of email spam and/or web pages to document once again—what Nietzsche & Freud already well knew—that we are ultimately arational and, above all, animals.

And then there's the irrational stupidity of the boxing match I just saw on ESPN2 tonight: a "bloody, brutal TKO win!"—as the announcer said . . . and I loved it, ANIMAL that I am. (But isn't this also the human sacrifice that many of the world's religions require?)

* Turkey Vultures (cartoon)

My [much reduced in size] photo of Turkey Vultures at Canyon Lake, Rapid City, SD. (Cartoon "balloon" added w/ Comic Life 1.3.) . . .

My wife keeps telling me what ugly birds Turkey Vultures are. "The eye of the beholder," etc., and an anthropocentric projection of human valuations regarding baldness, and wrinkles, et al. Having watched this species all my life—in flight, and yes, even scavenging on the ground—I find these birds to be one of the most "beautiful" in the world. (The birds in the photo are performing the morning ritual of drying their wings out, under a sun that will also create the thermals upon which they will eventually take flight.)

Oh, of course the cartoon blurbs per se involve a satire on that warped ideal of female beauty perpetrated by the pop media. ("Don't hate me because I'm beautiful" is the fairly famous line uttered by a brunette "vixen" in a long-running shampoo commercial [late 1980's?].)

* RADIO RANT: VA Tech/Savaged Again

Last night [4/17/07], Michael Savage—or, as I think I'll start calling him, Sergeant Slaughter—was excoriating the memorial convocation at Virginia Tech, especially the performance of a certain Nikki Giovanni. It turns out that Dr. Savage, self-proclaimed man of letters, didn't even know who Giovanni was, until one of his callers told him. (Indeed, this male college student helpfully informed him that "we had to read her" in one of those "feminist/womanist" courses!) Now aware that she might be a writer of some reputation, Savage still went on to call her a "clownish creature," an "idiot so-called poet," and "an intellectual dwarf." But Savage never did understand that her "speech," as he called it, was actually a poem. And what most dismayed him (and his ditto-head callers) was Giovanni's audacity to apparently speak of the plight of elephants as somehow on par with human life. (This in spite of the fact that Savage, in other moods, calls himself an "animal lover.")

As for "intellectual dwarfs," it seems that Savage, like some of the commentators on cable news, hasn't been on a university campus since his own salad days, when the campus was apparently the size of a bullhorn-manageable youth camp or a one-building high school with an intercom system. Thus our good Doctor also calls the President of Virginia Tech a "felonious moron" who should be behind bars for not alerting the entire student body sooner. How? Via "loudspeakers," or the like, Savage smugly assures his listeners.

Several of Savage's diatribes regarding the VA Tech massacre last night revealed a similar ignorance of facts that had been circulating on the news all day—facts that his callers often better knew than he (e.g., Savage's assumption that Cho would have had to drive to the post office). But the facts were hardly the point here: at bottom, the incident provided him fodder for yet another knee-jerk attack on a woman of color, and against the "liberal" academia that so deeply wronged him years ago (as he ceaselessly reminds his listeners) for being the superior white male that he is.

* Bald Eagle (photo/cartoon)

My photo of a Bald Eagle in a Lincoln, NE zoo. (Cartoon "balloon" added w/ Comic Life 1.3.)

* Beyond Humanism

Oh, to get beyond all the politics, and literature, and literature about politics, and politics about literature, to get outside of my skin, of my species. . . .

Quots. of the Day:

WAXWINGS

Four Tao philosophers as cedar waxwings
chat on a February berrybush
in sun, and I am one.

Such merriment and such sobriety—
the small wild fruit on the tall stalk—
was this not always my true style?

Above an elegance of snow, beneath
a silk-blue sky a brotherhood of four
birds. Can you mistake us?

To sun, to feast, and to converse
and all together—for this I have abandoned
all my other lives.
    --Robert Francis (1960)


from AVIAN NIGHTS

The babies screamed to greet the morning light.
What could they've been so excited about?
What is starling joy? When a starling finds
A shiny button, does it dance and shout?

Do starlings celebrate their day of birth?
Do they lust and take each other to bed?
Are they birds of infinite jest, of mirth
And merry? How do they bury their dead? . . .
    --Sherman Alexie (2003)