eponymous #1

3/1/11, 1:00am: Totally revised because I was half asleep when wrote this the first and second times.

What's the point of this blog if I don't post anything for months on end? So here are some things I bookmarked (or yes, dogeared) the last couple days, in no particular order:

• "When do domestic dogs, Canis familiaris, start to understand human pointing?" (sub. req. - sorry!) There's been a lot of scientific literature - and media attention - on the ability of dogs to comprehend human social gestures, particularly pointing. This study takes a skeptical look at theories that, through the millennia-long process of domestication, dogs have evolved a "human-like" social cognition that's distinct not only from wolves, their closest relatives, but also from chimps, our closest animal kin. To make this point, the authors take a two-pronged approach, questioning the wolf's supposed insensitivity to human social forms on one hand and, on the other, reminding us of dogs who don't quite fit the ideal of the perfectly accommodating Fido, e.g. shelter dogs, ferals, etc. Do we learn more about dogs if we stop assuming they're predisposed, in an evolutionary or even cosmic sense, to be "our" best friends?
     
•  "Activists fight plan to deport Moscow's stray dogs": Speaking of dogs who live on the fringe of human society: I first read about Moscow's famous subway-riding dogs in this widely circulated 2010 article. These dogs are going places, at least virtually: they even have their own wikipedia entry. In the analog world, it looks as though they are facing the grim reality of a cull.

Photo by Vladimir Filonov

• "Man's Best Friend" and "Peacocks": two sculpture series on animal forms by the artist Laurel Roth, whom I randomly discovered this weekend (how did I not know her work before). The artificial selection of dogs has never seemed... so artificial. Neither have avian courtship and sexual selection. 

Laurel Roth, Great Dane, 2008

walnut, gold leaf, swarovski crystal

• Mary Gaitskill, "The Other Place": Short story in the New Yorker about a creepy guy who fantasizes about killing women in an incongruously, unsettlingly philosophical voice. Here's a very Gaitskillian sentence that captivated me: "He is interested in crows because he heard on a nature show that they are one of the only species that are more intelligent than they need to be to survive. He does beautiful, precise drawings of crows."

That's it for now. I hope this gets me back in the habit of writing and posting...

sarah palin & the aesthetics of violence

A startling 2009 portrait of Sarah Palin by painter Daisy Rockwell (aka Lapata), based on this photograph.  Rockwell's statement about the work is eerily prescient in light of recent events:

The rasa of violence, featuring Sarah Palin

Himsa means ‘violence’ in Hindi/Sanskrit. These paintings depict the disturbing and fascinating former/future politician and television personality Sarah Palin in poses of violence, one of her preferred rasas. Though it is amusing to see an attractive woman posing with guns or dead animals, we must also remember that her iconography is far more powerful than her less than coherent use of language. For those who adore Palin, it is images such as these that speak louder than words, and her self-presentation as a warrior princess that could have disturbing consequences in the era of the War on Terror.

Other images from the series here. Related: the difference between Sarah Palin and pit bulls.

lost

Shuichi Nakano, "Searching for Paradise" - more at my Tumblr outpost and at the always excellent Pink Tentacles

dog links: antiquarian & posthuman

Two totally disparate recent discoveries:

* The National Sporting Library in Virginia has just opened an exhibit of their canine-relate materials, Lives of Dogs Viewed Through Literature, Art and Ephemera.

* Experimental musician/performance artist Laurie Anderson has composed a 20-minute musical piece for dogs - it will debut at the Sydney Opera House on June 5 for a mixed human and canine audience. 

quality of mercy

* originally titled "dead dogs" - revised March 20, 2011

Things I've been reading recently, about the precarity of dogs in human society, especially those branded as "vicious," "unadoptable," or plainly, "pit bull":

* "Dead Dogs: Breed bans, euthanasia, preemptive justice" by Colin (aka Joan) Dayan: in grad school I read some of Dayan's work on race, slavery, and prisons. I also saw her give an amazing talk on "cruel and unusual punishment": still the only time I've heard an academic speaker whisper to mark points of emphasis, in almost mesmeric decrescendos that pull the audience forward, body and all. Then I discovered that she is a dog person via an elegant, unflinching essay simply titled "The Dogs." Part memoir, part philosophy, the essay tracks the liminality of dogs in Judeo-Christian thought through a terrible personal memory: under disorienting circumstances, Dayan had agreed to have her 11-year-old dog Dogie put down for a sudden, mysterious illness, a "good death" she later came to doubt. She's one of a small handful of critics/writers I know who has grappled with the fact of dehumanization under racism - of people being treated "like dogs," "like animals" as a matter of state policy and coordinated race and species violence - while treating animals as well as humans as social beings.  [Updated May 2: forgot to note that the "Dead Dogs" article mentions the case of Oreo, the pit bull who survived being thrown from a six-story building only to be diagnosed with terminal aggression by the ASPCA and put to death.]

* Pit Bull Patriarchy: a tough and beautiful blog which explores the life-and-death consequences of breed phobias, co-authored by spotted dog farm (also a photographer - Flickr stream here) and redvelvetfemme. Mulling over SDF's recent post on her "dog bite embroidery" project, it strikes me that maybe pit bull fear is, at bottom, a fear of non-human sociality, of a sociality acted out with bodies that are irreconcilably alien to our own, despite our attempts to make them conform to human desires:

A bite is a most basic form of communication. I mean, dogs don't have hands, or English. What are they trying to say? I've seen dogs bite out of love. Extreme love, and the desire to be close, and to play. My dog bite embroidery is a series of linens that have been "altered" by Kaya, the artist, and then embroidered with phrases that I think she might be feeling while she's shredding my linens. The words are a reminder that dogs want family, a lifelong commitment; they are not bodies to be dumped when mistakes have been made, fear sets in and anger shows its teeth.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

eyes that have looked at jim crow

In the timeless traditions of the internet, I stumbled upon a wonderful digital collection of early 20th-century African American photography at the august institution where I work (see credits below - also see this related post on historical photos of Chinese dogs). The website doesn't provide too much information about the photographer, Michael Francis Blake - only that he opened the first one of the first black photo studios in Charleston, South Carolina. Which, of course, is saying quite bit. {Corrected & updated: 1:12am, June 17, 2009}

I was delighted to see that two of the ~170 photos in the collection feature dogs. I love the shadow of the photographer (?) in this one:

The vast majority of the images of the collection are posed portraits, studio or outdoors. Without exception, Blake's clients were impeccably dressed for the occasion. This is a beautiful image that makes me almost want to cry: the elegance of the women, the sweet openness of the boy's face, the alertness of the little dog.

In these images, to paraphrase Roland Barthes, we are looking at eyes that have looked at Jim Crow. Or, in the case of the unidentified woman below, stared back and perhap even glared at it at choice moments. This is my favorite dogless photo in the lot. I just love the tilting of the chair, the insousiance of the gesture.

Image credits (from top): "snapshot, dog lying down, unidentified," "Seated elderly woman holding a small dog, standing child and two standing women, unidentified," "Standing woman outdoors, unidentified" from Michael Francis Blake Photographs, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University.

baboons

An image from A Journey around My Skull, a wonderful blog on illustrated books I recently discovered via twitter. More where this came from...

animal - technology

I happened to be looking through the comics artist Anders Nilsen's blog (as compensation for not having read nearly enough of his print work), and came upon this eerie and beautiful image by his friend and collaborator Todd Baxter:

The encounter Baxter stages here - between the curious, gently nudging tapirs and the somewhat ridiculous shipwrecked astronauts, lumbering around with their age-of-plastic milk crate - reminded me of the recent finale of Battlestar Galactica, where space-age humans also find themselves, unexpectedly, in the midst of wild animals. But of course, I mean "reminder" only in the sense that Baxter's diorama is an elegant counter-example to the absurdly unreconstructed, colonial safari vision that BSG foisted upon us.

Here's another image I found on Baxter's own website:


Revised March 29, 2009, 2:21pm EST.

president dog

From the flickr photostream of the comic artist and illustrator Andrice Arp.

sunday renee french

Not sure if this is a dog or, maybe, a mouse? See more images here.