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Weekly Post Of Week
- Some random links about animals! Foxes may use magnetic fields in order to judge both direction and distance when hunting prey. Actual paper, or at least abstract and how to find it, is here. Speaking of direction sense, while this is almost certainly just a crazy fluke, a cat found her way home after fourteen years missing --- and after her home moved something like thirty miles. Total fluff feel-good story, but, cats. <3 Finally: Confronted by a hunter who injured them, a fox shot the hunter and escaped. No, really. (I don't think this is a case of British Aristocrat-Hunting a la Sacred Book of the Werewolf, but who knows!) While I advocate nonviolent resolution to interspecies tensions whenever possible, I would still like to give that fox a treat.
- Speaking of cats, I have a new cat! He is big and chill and fluffy and Siamese. His name is Leo. He used to live with my aunt and uncle; they had to let him go because their other cats turned on him and they did not have enough space in their home for everyone to live comfortably. This is a sad story but I hope that I can give it a happy ending; they're close enough that they can still visit Leo sometimes and I do have enough space in my house for Selene and Leo to have time to get used to each other without Leo being confined to a single room. (He'll probably be confined to three rooms for a while unless they really get along, but those three rooms are four or five times the space he had at my uncle's place.) I am sure he looks forward to meeting many of you once he gets over the AAAA NEW EVERYTHING AAAAA. Selene is unhappy but not as unhappy as I expected. Here is a picture of Selene sulking, and a picture of Leo hiding in the ceiling because he is scared and likes high places:
- I may have a third cat in another month or two, because I got two offers of cat within five minutes of each other last week. Stay tuned, if you care about me and cats.
- I accidentally cleaned my kitchen and reorganized all the dry goods yesterday. (Well, it was a combined effort with my housemate Mark.) We were all "Oh let's put a couple of things away and then we can play a quick game before we get to work on homework" and three hours later it was "I guess we've reorganized the whole thing and I'll make dinner with these lentils in order to free up these jars now." I think I've even cleaned the bread machine! I'm gonna try making another loaf today, I think.
- A colleague of mine is putting together an undergrad literature class with the theme of "Animal Crossings," looking at both human/animal hybridity and human/animal interactions. I suggested some things, but if you have any other suggestions, please chime in! Even if he doesn't end up using them, I'd love to have more texts for me to work with, since...
- It looks like my dissertation is going to be about this whole molar becoming-animal thing I keep rambling about, or at least, that's going to be the throughline between diverse methods and archives, because I am too
flightyawesome to use one method and one archive for an entire project. (If you've ever read any of my papers, this is so completely true; I went back and looked at a couple and wow, it's kinda ridiculous.) Some of this is still up in the air, but way less than I would have expected the second semester of my first year; I guess I already have an MA, though, and experience outside of school, so I'm not quite as adrift as I might be. And who knows --- other classes and readings and experiences may shift my direction. Although I don't expect them to. It will be interesting negotiating what the academy delicately calls "participant-observer status" if I end up doing ethnography. - Does anyone know the proper way to dispose of a bad MacBook battery?
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Bread maker: Remember to use less yeast this time. You don't want it quite as loafy as last time... :-)
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Oh, and Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov. Mmmmaybe some of the Underpeople stories by Cordwainer Smith, but I'm not sure they're what you what.
I suppose Animal Farm is too obvious.
Remember, we mentioned Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut at the con, though the devolution theme doesn't become hugely relevant towards near the end IIRC.
We3 by Grant Morrison. Hell, maybe even some Animal Man excerpts.
There was a chapter in one of Oliver Sacks's books -- I think it was The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat -- about a med student who overdosed on amphetamines and somehow acquired canine-like olfactory sensitivity for a month.
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Also: yaaaaaay you have kitties! Good luck with all of the Cat Stuff and Fox Stuff. <3 (http://www.pendorwright.com/other/The_Only_Fair_Game.html)
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This part of the article confused me. Why would someone pick up a stray cat and randomly move it somewhere else? Did they mean the person took it home with them? Maybe it's just because it's bedtime here, but reading this it seems to imply somebody just... moved it.
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If your colleague isn't familiar with the work of Cordwainer Smith, he may want to look into it.
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Outside spec fic, James Herriot and Jim Kjelgard seem to me to be prototypical of two different strains of literature about human relations with animals. Rascal, by Sterling North; a lot of stuff by Farley Mowat.
Vis-a-vis human/animal hybrids, the Animorphs series by K.A. Applegate and Eva by Peter Dickinson are the things which come first to mind, though The Island of Dr. Moreau is probably where the hybrid entered modern fiction. (Except inasumch as Frankenstein's monster is portrayed as a human/animal hybrid.)