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Zoobiquity

Zoobiquity

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Authors Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, M.D., and Kathryn Bowers coined the word “zoobiquity” to describe their efforts to use animal behavior and the latest finds of veterinary science to solve some of the great puzzles of human medicine.

Take fainting, for instance. Turns out that animals faint, too, and can better elude predators when they do. It’s not just “flight or fight,” then, but “flight, fight or faint.” A important lesson — that stillness is another way to fight stress.

Or take obesity. It’s common in the animal world, and studies on dragonflies raise the possibility that the condition might be caused by a parasite, raising the more intriguing possibility that obesity might be infectious.

Natterson-Horowitz, a cardiologist and psychiatrist, has observed first-hand what fear can do to the human heart — and she honed her theories by learning about animal hearts, how restraint or fear of capture can kill an otherwise healthy bird or beast. She then applies this to what is known about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, and a study that found a threefold greater risk of this among swaddled (i.e., restrained) babies put to sleep on their stomachs and exposed to a loud noise. The combination of noise and restraint triggers a slowdown of the heart in the young of many species, Natterson-Horowitz says, and calls for more collaboration among animal physiologists and pediatricians. “Powerful yet vulnerable, the heart-brain alliance usually saves lives,” the authors write. “But every once in a while, it can also end one.”

Zoobiquity is big-picture thinking at its best.

Technical Difficulties

Technical Difficulties

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I wonder if anyone has done a study of the time spent trying to learn, operate and repair the electronic items in our possession. I wonder this because in the time I’ve spent trying to download a book on my much-neglected Kindle, I could have driven to the store and bought the book. (If I could find a bookstore and if the bookstore carried this book.)

The culprit: a new wireless network in our house, which means Netflix streams intermittently now, if at all, and the e-reader that worked with the old network and password is balking at the new one.

At these moments I inevitably anthropomorphize the gizmo, tell myself that it’s a creature of habit, doesn’t like the vibes given off by the new network, is a bit set in its ways. (Speaking of set in its ways, has it ever considered what it took for me to come around to reading on it?)

But no, apparently it hasn’t. And now the book I was planning to start for book group tonight is still up there in the ether and I’m reading something else entirely.

Everything is fast and easy these days. Until it isn’t.

(Ready to read — if only I could download the novel!)

Twisted

Twisted

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In this season of flower and shoot, consider the redbud tree. Its bloom is not red at all, but a vivid  shade of lilac. Like jewel-tone azaleas, this plant does not mess around with pale pastel. It is bold.

But it’s not the bud of the redbud I want to talk about, it’s the trunk — often gnarled, like the most venerable of the Yoshino cherries.

When I see a twisted trunk I think of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio:

On the trees are only a few gnarled apples that the pickers have rejected. … One nibbles at them and they are delicious. Into a little round place at the side
of the apple has been gathered all of its sweetness. One runs from tree to tree over the frosted ground
picking the gnarled, twisted apples and filling his pockets with them. Only the few know the sweetness of
the twisted apples.

In spring our eyes are drawn to extravagant bloom and brilliant color. But underneath are the crooked trunks, which are beautiful all year long. They are sturdy in their imperfections. They are as sweet as twisted apples.

Unbroken

Unbroken

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I finally read the book Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand. Published in 2010, this is the story of Louis Zamperini, Olympic athlete and World War II airman who was shot down over the Pacific.

Zamperini and two other crew members drifted thousands of miles (47 days with sharks constantly encircling their flimsy raft) before being captured by the Japanese — and their real troubles began.

Beaten, starved, humiliated — but somehow never giving in — Zamperini survived the war and the first difficult years that followed. He has lived a rich, full life.

It’s an old-fashioned good read, and it stays with you. Not the details of plot, but the lessons of character. Read a book like Unbroken and it’s difficult to feel sorry for yourself.

Double Duty

Double Duty

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In the midst of a long-postponed office clean-up, looking through every file folder, feeling virtuous about the growing pile of to-be-recycled papers, I learn that my e-mail is being upgraded. Quick, I have to purge my electronic files, too.

Are we the only generation who will straddle this digital divide? What does it mean to live with one foot in the world of paper, books, interview notes printed and stapled, marked-up manuscripts — and the other in e-mail, text messages, tweets, jpeg and mp3 files?

Does it make us more tolerant? More inventive?

Or does it just make us more tired?

Empty Shelves

Empty Shelves

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I walked into our local bookstore a few days ago to find an empty space where most of the books used to be. Shelving stacked in corners. A few sections still intact, history, business, religion. But fiction? Gone. Children’s books? Decimated.

The bookstore in Union Station, my go-to place from the office, that one is closing, too.

It’s enough to make a print person crazy! I know the codex is doomed. I know that three-year-olds have kindles.  I know that libraries have become “media centers.”

But can’t we take this a little more slowly? Aren’t these transformations supposed to take generations?

I guess even change is changing.

People and Places and Things

People and Places and Things

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In his book The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss, Edmund de Waal tells the story of 264 small Japanese figurines called netsuke that generations of his family collected, displayed, lost and found. Made of ivory or wood, these tiny carvings of people or animals are delicate but strong. A cooper making his wheel. A rat with a curved tail. A hare with amber eyes. If you carry one around in your pocket, it “migrates and almost disappears amongst your keys and change. You simply forget it is there.”

The netsuke are by no means the most valuable artifacts the Ephrussi family possesses, and when the Nazis storm their Vienna home in April of 1938, a loyal maid with an ample apron manages to smuggle the statues out of the house. Everything else — the paintings, silver, porcelain, jewelry, an entire library of cherished incunabula — “the accumulation of all the diligence of the family, a hundred years of possessions” — was taken.

I’ve read other accounts of the Holocaust. This one moved me more than almost any other. The objects people touch and cherish are the keenest and saddest reminders of their absence.

After the war, the maid, Anna, gives the netsuke back to the family, and de Waal eventually inherits them. He treasures the figurines, but he also finds them an affront. “Why should they have got through this war in a hiding place, when so many hidden people did not? I can’t make people and places and things fit together any more.”

This book is not only about people and places and things; it’s also about love and loss and endurance.

(I cherish our old cuckoo clock, and — even though my family disparages me for it —the worn wallpaper, too.)

Vote of Confidence

Vote of Confidence

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It’s no secret that the printed book is under siege, that newspapers and magazines are ceasing publication or becoming online only, that information delivery is being revolutionized before our (increasingly blurry) eyes. Any doubts the Kindle may have left behind, the iPad is dispelling.

Which made reading the following all the more delightful: “The book is like the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be bettered,” according to author Umberto Eco in a new book about the book called (appropriately and straightforwardly) This is Not the End of the Book.

The book, which was reviewed today by Michael Dirda in the Washington Post, is essentially a conversation between Eco and French screenwriter and bibliophile Jean-Claude Carriere. The Internet gives us “gross information, with almost no sense of order or hierarchy,” Carriere says. “As soon as you click on the next page you forget what you’ve just read,” Eco says.

And I thought it was just me. I flipped through Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending the other day and could summon almost no memory of reading it, despite the fact that I definitely did read it earlier this year — though, it must be noted, on a Kindle.

I’ve written about this before, and probably will again (and again and again). But reading this review (and, I hope soon, the book itself) made me feel less alone in my Luddite ways. Maybe the codex isn’t really in danger. Maybe the book really will survive. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Gift from the Sea

Gift from the Sea

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I spent the early morning hours (the fruits of insomnia) copying out passages from a book that must go back to the library today. It’s a posthumous collection of the letters and diaries of Anne Morrow Lindbergh called Against Wind and Tide.

I read the book before I went to the beach, and I was delighted to find in it the seeds of her Gift from the Sea, a favorite of mine that Against Wind and Tide prompted me to re-read. How illuminating to come across her original thoughts — thoughts she would later hone into the book that sold three million copies — on solitude, relationships and what it means to be a woman and a writer.

On that topic,  Lindbergh quotes a nineteenth-century writer who says that a woman writer is “rowing against wind and tide” — hence the title of this collection.

As I push against a steady current of my own, I’m happy to row for a few moments with Lindbergh’s words, words like these: “I feel a hunger now — a real hunger  — for letting the pool still itself and seeing the reflections. I feel a hunger for the kind of writing that I feel is truly mine: observation plus reflection.”

There were many passages like this one. My fingers are sore from typing them. But my mind is dancing with thoughts and images.

Weighty Toil

Weighty Toil

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It’s harvest time — in more ways than one. In the last few weeks the magazine, brochures and booklets I worked on this summer have been delivered to the office.  I’ve been busy with what we used to call “fulfillment.” Which is another way of saying I’ve been schlepping boxes around.

As print publications are replaced by electronic ones, I assemble evidence to defend the hard copy. But I have to laugh. Even as I tally the numbers and build my case, nothing on paper tells the story as well as handing someone a box of magazines and asking him to hold it for a minute. A box of magazines weighs 30 pounds. It is real. It is tangible. There is no way to overlook it.

Once our lives were filled with real tasks. Toting water, splitting wood, wringing clothes.  For many of us now, a day’s work consists of tapping a keyboard or touching a screen. We’re active only from the wrist down. I liked carrying those 30-pound magazine boxes. It was the least I could do for them.  My mind’s labor had helped to produce them. Now it was time for my arms and legs to take charge.

Would I want to do this all day long? Absolutely not. When the arms are carrying 30 pounds the mind can think of little else. Still, I enjoyed this weighty toil. It made me tired in the evening, and it gave me something to think about.

Photo: bestcardboardboxes.com