Lest we not forget our namesake

Recent little Orion blog entry by my delightful author-friend Brian Doyle. A brief ode to otters.

In the Hall of North American Mammals

March 13, 2012, by Brian Doyle

Recently I was standing in the delicious dim of a museum I had not savored since I was a small boy, many years ago, when the dinosaurs were young; I was staring at the otters in a sort of trance, remembering being in this exact reverie nearly fifty years ago, and thinking Manhattanish thoughts of salted pretzels bigger than your hand, and slightly burnt, and roasted chestnuts, and taxicab drivers cursing in Urdu, and drifts of straw near the horse carriages, and the whistle of hotel guys flagging cabs in their long gray cossack coats, when I noticed a small girl gaping at the otters also, and an eternity went by like a meditative freight train, and we have been absorbed by otters for many thousands of years, right?

Certainly thousands of us have stared at them thinking meat thoughts, and how to steal their excellent coats, and how to persuade them to harvest fish for us, perhaps, but I’d bet far more millions of hours we gawked at them in sheer wonder, a quiet crush, a sort of yearning astonishment, as if they are our smaller cousins, easier in the world, muddy and playful, water-addled, never still for a moment, until they’re stuffed and frozen in time in the Hall of North American Mammals.

After a while an uncle or dad comes to reclaim the small girl, and she leaves reluctantly, and she is me, and it is my father saying do you want to spend your whole day with the otters?

Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, and the author of ten books, including, most recently, the novel Mink River.

In This Light

"Davina, seventeen, and good enough for Julliard, but she wants to live in the wild, meet the snow leopard face-to-face, hear its still, small voice high in the Himalayas--she wants to follow caribou across mountains and tundra, record the sounds they hear on their way to the edge of the world--Davina wants to sing as elephants sing when they visit the bones of their ancestors." 

Peep my latest review for High Country News:

In This Light: New and Selected Stories
By Melanie Rae Thon
Graywolf Press, 2011

I wouldn't call Thon's haunting collection of short stories summer reading, but it is some damn fine writing. This woman has some serious chops.

The Painful Beauty of Love
By Kathleen Yale

Utah author Melanie Rae Thon maintains a seat beside fellow literary powerhouses Annie Proulx and Maile Meloy as she paints a portrait of a West that is at once desolate and tender. Written in fierce and unflinching prose, the stories in her third collection are about the dispossessed, the wild and searching. Every story is one that "could turn the hard of heart into believers, or the most trusting souls into cynics." In This Light will make you feel achingly old and cold to the bone as you link arms with the narrators, limping toward some sense of peace.

Thon slips into the skins of her flawed, long-suffering characters with astonishing ease and authenticity. Her characters are hungry, and for more than just food. Two runaway kids break into a house one night and gorge themselves. One says, "You don't know how it hurt us to eat this way, our shriveled stomachs stretching; you don't know why we couldn't stop." Her people are loners, addicts, outcasts, misfits stuck in too-small towns and reservations. They lose fingers to frostbite and steal coats that are too thin. In one story, Thon describes a horde of runaway children who haunt the woods outside of Kalispell, Mont., as being glued together "from broken sleds and headless dolls and bits of fur and scraps of plastic. Their bones were splintered wood. Their hearts were chicken hearts. Their little hands were rubber."

Though this collection weighs heavy on the heart, it also provides a strange comfort. For anyone who has wrestled, as her characters do, with the questions "Why were you whole? Why were they shattered?" this book flickers like a small campfire in a black night. If these characters are abandoned, they are also saved -- reaching for redemption, however imperfect. Thon describes a ragged, scarred Chippewa man as "scorched like the earth itself, a face that revealed the suffering of a thousand homeless Indians"  and then writes, "Yours was a face to love: without love, there was no way to look at you."

She bears witness, she takes names, she makes the details shine, but when specifics fade, when blame disappears, the human condition remains. To a homeless junkie kid, to a Vietnam vet, to a Holocaust survivor, to an orphaned teenage mother, to the reader of this book, pain is pain, love is love. Even the driest heart can still recognize beauty.

Roomies

Henry

Grendel

The Micronaut

A Kiwi in Venice

Today I am thinking of the Kiwi artist Graham Percy (1938-2008) who I first stumbled upon in Wellington's City Gallery museum. On that particular day, I was wandering around the museum, and could see that a new exhibit was about to go in. I saw a few pieces outside of the gated main room, and they were enough to get me hooked. Loitering in front of the gate like an arty creeper, I peered around it from various angles, crouching, and craning my neck, trying to get a better view inside. I went back the next day, when The Imaginative Life and Times exhibit opened for real.

Then I really fell in love.

His art and illustrations are the embodiment of creative whimsy, of imagination, wit, humor, and wonder. All qualities I continually strive for. Looking through my New Zealand journal the other day, I found a quote from the exhibit, written in red ink and an enthusiastic script:

"Percy's approach remained very much that of a wonder-struck child, whom the educationalist Fredrich Froebel once characterized as the archetypal "micronaut"--an explorer of the small things, the textures and borders of the everyday and the immediate."

I would consider my life well lived indeed, if this was in part how I was described at the end of it.

The Trojan Moa

These are all imagined histories about famous composers. (Sorry about the poor picture quality.)

His titles are half of the fun. The following match the above illustrations, clockwise, starting at the top right:

- Franz Schubert emerges from a stream near to Crear with a trout he has caught. This, along with the five watching rabbits, has given him the idea for a quintet. (1891).

- Dvorak, Dohnanyi and Schumann discuss a concert of their works with local residents at Crear.

- Within a Rachel Whiteread installation Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy is reminded of Fingal's Cave.

- Cuckoo with hunting horn. Crear - early evening.

Stan the Man

"The fiercest hearts are in love with a wild perfection." —Stanley Kunitz

Stanley was such a poetry god.
He also lived to be 100 years old, which is pretty impressive.
His lines often wiggle their way out of my memory, into my forebrain at unexpected times.
I have always loved this one.

Foxy Lady

Speaking of wild perfection and things to love. . .
I am in love with Rick Allen's giclees, like the one above.
Check them out at The Kenspeckle Letter Press.
If you are like me, you may start panting.

Alas, Poor Yorick....

Skulls! Bones! Y'arrghh!

The other day I found a little mouse skull resting at the base of an oak tree. As I cradled the lightweight, delicate curve in my open palm--the white bone nearly transparent, thin enough for light to pass through--I marveled at both the strength and fragility of that most vital of structures. Though as a symbol it was long ago hijacked by pirates and Poe, I have always liked skulls. During my work as a wildlife field biologist, I have often come across skulls and bones in the woods. (Okay, I've also hacked and sawed skulls and bones off of the rest of their respective skeleton bodies for various data collection purposes. You can read about the joys of Bone Boiling elk legs in Yellowstone in my essay featured in the anthology from Solas House/Traveler's Tales Press,  A Mile in Her Boots.) But I digress.

When I worked on the Yellowstone Wolf Project, if we located a dead wolf, we would often collect the animal's skull to add to the project's extensive collection of wolf skulls. 

Among other things, these skulls are studied and measured by Dr. Blair Van Valkenburgh of UCLA. She is a vertebrate paleobiologist who focuses on the evolution of form, function, and ecology in organisms, both living and extinct. Her work is one example of what skulls can teach us about how and why large carnivores have evolved over centuries to better fit into, shape, and adapt to their environments.

Check out this amazing collection of high-res three-dimensional Bird Skulls, like this sweet, sweet shoebill stork skull. These birds look like living dinosaurs. And they love nothing more than to stalk and eat the lungfish. With a name like lungfish, you can assume the beast ain't going to be pretty. If you're really and truly  interested in shoebills, Peep This Nat Geo video. Although their attempt at kid wit falls a bit short, the footage is cool.

Anyway, back to skulls...

Just in time for the holidays, I bring you skull-related gift ideas for your dramatic, scientific, or gothic friends and families. No pirates. No skateboards. No Urban Outfitters.

Stephanie Metz creates incredible felted skulls and other beautiful and creepy oddities.

And Moon Raven Designs makes gorgeous casts and replicas of various skulls, bones, talons, and teeth. Daniel once gave me the life-sized hummingbird skull, which I often happily wear around my neck. Here is their little brown bat:

Indeed.

The Lovely Sparrows - Year of the Dog