Dogs and Language

An interesting tidbit I ran into today:

We're all somewhat familiar with the body language dogs display when they greet each other. The dominant alpha male approaches directly, asserting his authority, while the beta male genuflects, crouches, tucks his tail, and may even end up on his back, exposing his neck in acquiescence, making sure the alpha male knows he has no intention of challenging him. With his "we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist" opening to the world's dictators, the President is exhibiting classic beta male behavior, in essence rolling over on his back and exposing his throat to them to make sure they know he has no intention of challenging their authority.

On Reading

Some books, I'm talking about novels now, knock you off your feet in their own way. I'm reading one of them, title unimportant, I want to come back to this post 6 months, a year from now, not knowing what book it was.   How does he do that, I am asking, about the author's knack for constructing the narrative, so that it keeps the reader wanting more, always unsatisfied, always hungry.  And I'm not sure how to describe it.

More than anything, I am wondering at the make up of the narrative where the author announces some action, hints of it, and then leaves without explaining what happened next until much later.   That is the mystery to me of how he does it and gets away with it.   Not many writers do it, know how to do it  (I reckon).

From reading Amazon one star reviews I see that many readers hate this kind of narrative, are frustrated by it,  demanding straightforward stories which proceed from A to Z, with little if any ambiguity.  I'm not talking about the mystery genre either, which to me is still a straight through narrative most of the time, with a few easy to see though and digest tricks.

It's one of those things when you cannot say, oh, I see what he's doing here, and cannot think that you can do as well or better.   Although it sometimes looks easy, or gives the impression that the author was careless or forgetful,  I suspect that it took a lot of intricate effort to construct such complex stories.

Tattoos and Telephones

I was with a friend, a woman of 60, and four others, 60 to 75 years old, sitting under a parasol at a long rectangular table, chomping on hot dogs, sipping Coca-Cola and warm beer, talking about nothing in particular, when I made the mistake of offering a remark about sailors and tattoos vaguely apropos something somebody said.  Immediately, the conversation topic derailed onto the old  track of how awful these young people are nowadays.   Tattoos, cellphones and obnoxious music! Heaven help us! We were heard by other patrons sitting nearby in this outdoor cafe, and I felt so embarrassed for myself and the group, that I discreetly scooted over to the edge of the bench in a vain attempt  to show the accidental witnesses around us that I'm not with these people, I don't know them, I just happened to be sitting here.

At last, my friend rescued me, quite unexpectedly so, unexpectedly because I had known her to pick up another old folks talk theme in her conversations, that of exchanging complaints about one's aches and pains, and offering the names of pharmacological remedies, and so she rescued us this time by ordering in a commanding voice of a high school teacher, "Stop you all kvetching like a bunch of old people!"   After a brief silence, conversation returned  to the safe topic of nothing, and all was well again.

I was thinking about this incident the other day as I read Joseph Epstein's essay in the Weekly Standard "Toting the Dumb Phone".   Yes, Epstein, a noted critic and writer,  is old, and yes, he kvetches about young people and their smartphone cellphone mania,  but doesn't he make a few interesting points?

I own a cellphone that Mr Epstein would have described as a dumb homeless model, the number of which I don't remember,  known to only a handful of people, a cellphone that never rings, except as on two recent occasions when I'm in the company of someone whom I've just told that no, my cellphone never rings.

I sometimes bet myself five dollars walking down a busy street that for the next two blocks I won't see a young woman who's not talking or typing on her smartphone, and I often win and have to  transfer a five dollar bill from my left to the right jeans pocket.   But thinking some more about it, it occurred to me, that this new phenomenon of people, mostly women, on the phone in public places is perhaps not due to women's well known tendency to chat and talk endlessly,  but it is a fashion statement and a status symbol to be demonstrated to everyone around like a new hairdo or a pair of earrings.  Look, I can afford a smartphone, I have friends to talk to.

Can't Think of a Title

The Last Hand

I hang around in the space  between the low art of popular music, not even what is considered the high art of the low art, such as Broadway or Cabaret song, but country, folk and Americana,  commercial stuff, and the high art of top shelf literature.  It's been always this way and I won't change it.

And so, I'm looking forward to the new/old album of Bob Dylan's Another Self Portrait, heretofore unreleased recordings from 1969-71.   This release tells me that Dylan, who unlike many artists, retains complete control over his catalog, must be going through another period of writer's block, and has no new material  to show us (his last album Spirit was a collaboration with the Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter.)

A writer I've read before is having a novel published in two weeks, its title "The Last Hand", as in a card game, you won't see it on a bestseller list, so stop looking, and he has some interesting things to say in a recent interview.

He argues that there is no present and no future, that only past exists for us, or at least for him.  He writes in pencil, and erases, doesn't cross out, because by crossing out a sentence, he says, he couldn't write the sentence any better.  Why does he writes so little?  Because, he says, after he finishes a novel, he has to throw its weight off, has to stop liking it, to avoid repeating himself.  And when he starts thinking of a new novel, he has to think of it as a beginner who doesn't know how to write. Because being convinced that one knows how to write, he tells the interviewer, is the first step toward defeat.

A Ghost in This House

Every couple of weeks or so during a weekend I meet some friends, or better said, acquaintances, in a park for two or three hours. The children play, adults talk, I take photographs of the group.   Later at home I upload the photos to my computer, and e-mail the best ones in batches of five.  Two weeks ago I took 65 shots, yesterday, while thinking that I was taking fewer, I ended up pressing the shutter 85 times.  Well, three pics were of shadows on a wall and not of these friends/acquaintances.

You're never in those pictures, I was told.  Indeed, the photographer is never in the picture, and in the roughly 15,000 I have taken in recent years, I'm in only a handful.  A ghost.  I am a ghost in this house, as the minor hit song by a long forgotten country band Shenandoah  said, a song that gained its well deserved reputation, when diva Alison Krauss loaned it her weight and with her band which includes the great Jerry Douglas recorded it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKXhIMgTsrE

And there, in the background of one of the photographs I snapped yesterday, is a young mother I noticed in the park, pushing her son,  one year old, I estimate, on a baby swing.   I was standing above our group's blanket with a baby and a mom on it, looking in the direction of that swing, and noticing the graceful movements of this mother 30 feet away from us.  She must be a dancer, I thought, or had trained as a dancer.  She was unself-conscious, unaffected, even after she apparently noticed (or not) my rude gaze.   I didn't get a chance to speak to her, she was later joined by an older couple, her parents probably, and they soon walked away, while I tried to verify or discredit my above observation by watching other young mothers there.   And in  doing it I remembered what I had already known, that most of us move about gracelessly, as if we were carrying the weight of all our troubles and tragedies on our shoulders.

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