A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

This week I finished two books that I’ve been working on for ages: Judith Flanders’ Christmas: A Biography, which I started last Christmas, and Brian Switek’s My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road with Old Bones, New Science, and Our Favorite Dinosaurs, which I’ve been reading intermittently since… possibly before the pandemic, God help us all.

I’ve loved some of Flanders’ other books (Inside the Victorian Home was my gateway drug to the nineteenth century), but I found Christmas: A Biography a slog. However, I was interested to learn that possibly the oldest extant Christmas tradition is “complaining that Christmas is too secular these days.” Apparently churchmen have been complaining about that essentially since the beginning of Christmas, whereas almost all the other age-old Christmas traditions (Christmas trees, carols, mummers’ plays, even Yule logs) are of more recent origin.

In contrast, I enjoyed My Beloved Brontosaurus while I was reading it… but once I put it down I never felt any impetus to pick it back up, hence the fact that it languished for months at a time. However, it is a good update on What’s New in Dinosaur Science since I was seven. (Probably a bit outdated now, as the book was published in 2013.) I was particularly delighted when Switek name-checked my younger self’s very FAVORITE dinosaur documentary, the 1992 PBS four-parter The Dinosaurs!, featuring such luminaries as Jack Horner and Bob Bakker. (The latter of whom gave a talk at the local university when I was eleven or so, which I of course attended spellbound.)

I also read Howard Caldwell’s The Golden Age of Indianapolis Theaters, partly as research for my Depression-era tramps book (thus discovering that my heroes could not have attended a summer matinee at the Indiana theater in 1937, as it was closed that summer, clearly a question which will animate MANY readers) but also as more general research for a possible Indianapolis book. Plans for this still extremely nascent!

What I’m Reading Now

skygiants' wonderful review of Aoka Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are reminded me what a good job the translator Polly Barton did, so I thought I’d check if the library had any of her other translations. It does, sort of! Izumi Suzuki’s Terminal Boredom is a collection of seven stories, translated by six different translators, so potentially this is a good way to find more translators I like?

I must admit that the first story does not bode well for the rest of the collection. It’s called “Women and Women,” and the heroine lives in a society where the dwindling supply of men are kept locked away in prison-like hospitals, but one night she sees a ~boy outside her window and even though she’s never seen a man before she can tell he’s a boy because of his ~ineluctable masculinity~, etc. etc., and also technology and infrastructure are crumbling because the men used up all the resources before going into decline (isn’t that just like them?) and also maybe women just don’t know how to repair roads. Has anyone read this book? Are the other short stories worth it or should I cut my losses?

I’m also about halfway through James Otis’s Toby Tyler: Or, Ten Weeks with a Circus, which is heavier on “running away to join the circus is awful, actually,” than I was hoping, although there are a certain amount of madcap circus hijinks. Young Toby has been befriended by the Living Skeleton and his wife, the circus’s fat lady, an adorable couple.

What I Plan to Read Next

In my final Wednesday Reading Meme of 2020, I mused, “I need to attend more to what I want to read at this moment, and trust that the time will come for any book I really need to read,” and this philosophy has really worked out for me in 2021. It’s been truly a gem of a reading year and I hope I can keep that momentum going in 2022.

Authors at the top of my mind for further exploration: Mary Renault, Kazuo Ishiguro (I loved Klara and the Sun but have yet to follow up on his other books), D. K. Broster, D. E. Stevenson. I also intend to return to Japanese novels in translation. As well as Terminal Boredom, one came through the library just the other day: Natsuko Imamura’s The Woman in the Purple Skirt. Has anyone read it? Did you like it?

My latest NetGalley book is Suzanne O'Sullivan's Is It All in Your Head?, which I found interesting but frustrating, although the fact that it's frustrating is not really the book's fault.

The first reason that I found it frustrating is that I expected it to be about hypochondria, but there's actually only one chapter about that; most of the book is about psychosomatic disorders, which is interesting in a different way, but it's still frustrating to get a book you think will be about one thing and discover it's about another. (In hypochondria, while there are often physical symptoms, it's the anxiety and not the physical symptoms that are debilitating; a psychosomatic disorder has debilitating physical symptoms with a psychological cause.)

But it's also frustrating, and O'Sullivan herself is clearly frustrated with this, that the medical community doesn't understand psychosomatic problems at all and also doesn't seem to be interested in understanding, despite the fact that something like 20% of patients have problems that may be psychosomatic in origin. If 20% of patients presented with any other problem you'd think the medical community would be falling all over itself to figure out exactly how it worked, but as it's just psychosomatic, well then! Why bother?

The medical community (and indeed the lay community) tend to believe that the only "real" causes are physical causes, so if someone is for instance having debilitating seizures, it's only "real" if it's epilepsy. The fact that the sufferer is debilitated by their seizures apparently isn't real enough.

O'Sullivan is a neurologist, and neurologists have very clear and specific tests they can do to detect different kinds of seizures, so she can diagnose with a great deal of accuracy whether a seizure is epileptic or dissociative (which is another word for psychosomatic in this case). And in fact many of her patients with dissociative seizures do stop having seizures, sometimes as soon as they receive the diagnosis and sometimes after getting psychiatric help, and after they've been taken off their epilepsy medication. The cure seems to me to prove O'Sullivan's diagnosis was correct.

In fact, it struck me that a psychiatric cure seems like the only way, at the moment, to prove that an illness is psychosomatic: otherwise it's not clear at all whether it's psychosomatic or caused by some physical problem that we can't measure. I particularly wondered this in the cases of medically inexplicable paralysis that O'Sullivan examined: the medical establishment couldn't find a cause, but unlike with the dissociative seizures, the diagnosis of a psychosomatic complaint didn't help the paralysis sufferers.

But at the same time I wonder if my doubt is simply that paralysis seems so dramatically debilitating that it's hard to believe that it could be psychosomatic. And yet if you'd asked me before I read this book, I would have been doubtful that someone could have a psychosomatic seizure disorder, because seizures also seem so dramatic. So the fact that it seems to defy common sense may not prove anything except that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.

In any case, all this seems like yet another good reason why the medical establishment ought to seriously investigate psychosomatic complaints: not only could they help sufferers, but they could probably also get better at distinguishing psychosomatic illness and illness with a physical cause we don't know how to find yet.

But at the moment psychosomatic symptoms seem to have fallen between the two stools of physical and psychiatric medicine.

***

The book also talked briefly about Munchausen's syndrome, and O'Sullivan made the point that in fact people with Munchausen's are sick, that it is a mental illness, and that most of us don't consider that fact because basically we find the idea of pretending to be sick so disgusting.

Here's a cool link for you today: Beluga Whale "Makes Human-like Sounds" It's about a beluga whale which, yes, taught itself to make human-like noises. And there's audio! And indeed, it sounds very human-like.

Not, mind you, intelligibly human-like yet. There are no actual words. But after all, babies don't start with actual words either; they, like the whale, babble.

Maybe someday we'll be able chat with whales! Using words! Wouldn't that be amazing? It would be even cooler than sign language with apes. Because whales. Talking whales. We could exchange poetry! (You know whales must have poetry.) Also possibly apologize for that whole whaling thing in the nineteenth century.

English may have too many consonant strings to be a good candidate for interspecies communication. Maybe Spanish or Japanese?

A couple of books I’ve been reading, about fossils and England and elephants and Rome.

The Dragon Seekers: How an Extraordinary Circle of Fossilists Discovered the Dinosaur and Paved the Way for Darwin, by Christopher McGowan

This book has the most misleading title ever. If the fossilists were ever seeking dragons, they’d certainly gotten over it by the early 19th century; but for the title page, the word dragon never appears in the book.

Tragic lack of dragons aside, this is actually a pretty good book. I mean, it’s got DINOSAURS. Which are not dragons, but still, a good consolation prize. Plus, nineteenth century scientists are a marvelously eccentric bunch. McGowan does a great job conveying their personalities, kindly but without sentimentality toward their flaws, and balancing their personal stories with the tales of their discoveries.


The Cowboy and His Elephant: The Story of a Remarkable Friendship, Malcolm MacPherson

Short version: too much cowboy, not enough elephant.

Longer version: This really ought to be called The Hagiographic Account of the Saintly but Nonetheless Awesomely Manly Cowboy Who Took in an Orphaned Baby Elephant. Bob Norris, the cowboy in question, may indeed be all that and a bag of chips, but breathlessly adoring accounts of flawless people are awfully boring.

Especially when they take up space that could otherwise be occupied by elephants. Because elephants are awesome.

A tragic and beautiful elephant story, from Marina Belozerskaya’s The Medici Giraffe, and Other Tales of Exotic Animals and Power (which I meant to review, but never got around to; it’s fascinating but unnecessarily meandering):

Hoping to restore his fading prestige, the Roman general Pompey put up a four-day-long games extravaganza at the Circus Maximus. He brought in gladiators, lions, leopards, giraffes, exotic animals of every kind, with a few dozen elephants as his piece de resistance.

But the elephants, realizing that they were doomed, refused to fight. Instead they trumpeted in such despair that the bloodthirsty crowd pitied them, and demanded that they be spared.

Pompey had the elephants slaughtered anyway. When he fell from power soon after, the people of Rome said it was the curse of the elephants on him.

Did you know that there's a mollusc that secretes a fiber that can be knitted into gloves? That kangaroo rats, gerbil-like creatures with kangaroo legs, really exist? And that aye-ayes look like they are the messengers of Satan?

All these things and more I learned yesterday, because we went to La Specola - the Florentice Museum of Zoology and Natural History, which is COMPLETELY AMAZING. They have tens of thousands of specimens, which are interesting purely in themselves, but also little side exhibits that show all kinds of fascinating things.

Camouflage butterflies, in situ on the bark and branches they use to hide.

Examples of all the different shapes of eggs, accompanied by different shapes of nests. (Some of them look like baskets. I wonder if this is where people got the basket idea.)

A primates display, with a plexiglass case for the great apes: gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutangs - and an open case, for the visitor to get in and complete the set.

We went because my friends who were here are both med students, and wanted to see the wax anatomical models. It's not an obvious thing to do in Florence, but it's been my favorite so far.

Evolutionarily speaking, birds are dinosaurs, mushrooms are animals, and fish don't exist. (Or cows are a fish. Take your pick.)

In the eyes of the Rofaifo of New Guinea, the giant flightless cassowary bird is a mammal.

And the face of Linnaeus, the creator of the first scientific taxonomic system - a man so egregiously in love with himself that he pronounced his system "a masterpiece that no one can read too often or admire too much" - is sold in Sweden, sculpted in marzipan, for your dining pleasure.

I've been reading Carol Kaesuk Yoon's Naming Nature: The Clash between Instinct and Science, an entertaining, eminently readable overview of the much-neglected art and science of taxonomy. It's full of delicious trivia like this, and gives a swift overview of basically everything about taxonomy ever besides.

She covers the history of scientific taxonomy, the different (but surprisingly similar) folk taxonomies in use all around the world, psychological studies of people who through brain damage have lost their ability to recognize living things, and posits the existence of an innate human ability - like Noam Chomsky's universal grammar, but for taxonomy - to order plants and animals into usable hierarchies, an ability she calls the "umwelt."

( The umwelt )

I picked this up on a lark, but I ended up enjoying the foray into popular science so much that I'm looking for more books in the genre. Does anyone have recommendations?