Skunks

We've been watching the old TV series M*A*S*H, and come mid-season 3, Radar O'Reilly has a little menagerie. One of his animals is a baby black-and-white striped skunk. 

We have skunks where we live. Our dog Milo has had a couple of run-ins with them in our yard, which ended up with a treatment of hydrogen pyroxide + baking soda + Dawn dishwashing soap (1 quart @ 3%, 1/4 cup, 1 tsp) to neutralize the pungent smell of their defensive spray. It worked pretty well. And lately, thanks to new fences, we don't seem to have much skunk traffic.

Radar was snuggling with a striped skunk, which is what we typically see. I've also, once, encountered a spotted skunk at our nearby Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Reserve. That's two kinds of skunk. I wondered how many more there were. Turns out, ten! Twelve species of skunk altogether, worldwide. Who knew? (Well, mephitid researchers, no doubt.)

Here are a few skunk facts. In case you were wondering.

• Skunks prefer to dine on insects (beetles, small grasshoppers, wasps, bees) and grubs, but they are opportunistic and will also gobble up bird eggs, small rodents, frogs, berries, and mushrooms. 
• Skunks are nocturnal. Although they don't hibernate, they tend to be inactive during the coldest months of the year, when they gather in communal dens for warmth. Otherwise, they are solitary.
• Skunks have litters of one to seven young in late April through early June, after a gestation of 60–75 days.  
• A skunk's sulfuric spray has a range of up to 10 feet, and its odor can be detected up to 1.5 miles.
  
• Skunks are immune to rattlesnake venom.
• A group of skunks is called a surfeit.

Skunks occur in four genera in the family Mephitidae. The twelve species are (because names!) the striped skunk and hooded skunk (Mephitis); the western spotted skunk, eastern spotted skunk, southern spotted skunk, and pygmy spotted skunk (Spilogale); the American hog-nosed skunk, striped hog-nosed skunk, Humboldt’s hog-nosed skunk, and Molina’s hog-nosed skunk (Conepatus); and the Indonesian stink badger and Palawan stink badger (Mydaus). The stink badgers are found in Indonesia, but otherwise home sweet home for skunks is North America.

Here are some pictures of these beautiful (if occasionally stinky—they're just protecting themselves!) animals.

A Sunda stink badger

A spotted skunk doing a handstand, prior to spraying

A striped skunk

Gerald Stern, poet

Gerald Stern died yesterday, age 97. The New York Times called him a poet of "wistfulness, anger, and humor." I have not read too much of his work (something that needs to change; I do have his National Book Award winner This Time), but I will never forget the very first time I encountered him, in a poem titled 

Behaving Like a Jew

When I got there the dead opossum looked like

an enormous baby sleeping on the road.

It took me only a few seconds—just

seeing him there—with the hole in his back

and the wind blowing through his hair

to get back again into my animal sorrow.

I am sick of the country, the bloodstained

bumpers, the stiff hairs sticking through the grilles,

the slimy highways, the heavy birds

refusing to move;

I am sick of the spirit of Lindbergh over everything,

that joy in death, that philosophical

understanding of carnage, that

concentration on the species.

—I am going to be unappeased at the opossum’s death.

I am going to behave like a Jew

and touch his face, and stare into his eyes,

and pull him off the road.

I am not going to stand in a wet ditch

with the Toyotas and the Chevys passing over me

at sixty miles an hour

and praise the beauty and the balance

and lose myself in the immortal lifestream

when my hands are still a little shaky

from his stiffness and his bulk

and my eyes are still weak and misty

from his round belly and his curved fingers

and his black whiskers and his little dancing feet.

 

 

Wanderlust

I started traveling when I was two. I have lived on four continents, and visited all seven, multiple times in all cases but Antarctica. Travel lights me up, reminds me of the beautiful diversity of life, and ways of life, out there. 

Lately, given the dismal state of politics in this country, I've been thinking about moving. But where? So many of the places I would ordinarily consider are also trending into authoritarianism, distrust, fear. (Or in the case of Portugal, I'll never be able to learn the language. Or in the case of Canada, they just don't want us.)

But what about uprooting every so often and heading out, far and wide, as a... traveler? I don't need to buy a cottage in Brittany, a flat in Auckland, an apartment in Tokyo. I can pay rent as I go, and see the world on the march.

This will all have to wait until Milo the wonderdog has crossed over the rainbow bridge (he turned 13 yesterday; it won't be too much longer, even though at the moment he is spry and full of energy). What we do with the cats, well... that remains to be seen. We've been using a great online service, TrustedHousesitters.com, and it may just continue to do the trick. Or if we set off for extended travel, we can rent the house out, the cats with it. Why not?

We are not getting any younger, is the thing. I'd like to test my boundaries—and what better way than to put ourselves in unfamiliar settings. Bump up against people and realize, again and again, that we're all human, that we all want the same things. (Naive, okay, maybe. But I have to insist.)

A few years ago, in a pub in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, David and I sat at the bar and wrote separate "bucket lists" of the places we'd most like to visit before we die. Those lists, which overlapped well as I recall, have gone missing, sadly, but I'm pretty sure the last few years have taken care of a few of the entries: Antarctica, the Galápagos, Madagascar. 

What's next?

Book Report: Luster

24. Raven Leilani, Luster (2020) (10/25/2022)

Two years ago I participated in a reading series with University of Houston professor Pete Turchi. I reported on most of those books, all of which centered on the theme of "Border Crossings." (The first report is here.) One of the books we read, A Cowrie of Hope, kept jumping into my head as I traveled recently through Madagascar, where I witnessed so much of what it described (though there in the context of Zambia), such as extreme poverty and scraping an existence from the land, a desire for a brighter future for a beloved child, the narrow dirt paths heading off into a seemingly empty landscape. It was a book I would never have happened upon on my own. So when I got home I wrote Pete and asked if he'd done another such series, and whether he'd share the reading list. He responded quickly and generously. He said the most recent theme had been "Passion," and he listed these books:

Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior
Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl
Raven Leilani, Luster
Javier Marias, A Heart So White
Fernanda Melchor, Hurricane Season
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor
Michael Ondaatje, Coming through Slaughter
Charles Portis, True Grit

He also mentioned that "there was a lot of excitement around Hurricane Season and A Heart So White, as well as Luster and Paul... With Lolita we read a recent collection of essays called Lolita in the Afterlife."

Well! I had my work cut out for me, didn't I? I had heard of only a few of these books. So off to the virtual bookstore I went.

Leilani's Luster is narrated by 23-year-old Edie, a Black editorial coordinator of children's books. It starts with her talking about sex, with a man twenty years older than her, Eric, married, white, whom she met (of course) online. The story line might not be especially relevant to 67-year-old me, but the writing sparkled. I kept going. Soon we meet Eric's wife, Rebecca. He's an archivist, she performs autopsies at the VA hospital. It turns out they have an adopted daughter, also Black, Akila. The marriage is an "open" one. Edie loses her apartment and is invited to move in and serve as a sort of mentor to Akila. She also loses her job, and returns (insecurely, self-consciously) to her real love, painting.

Those are the bare bones, but the book is about much more than plot. It is replete with incisive social detail and compelling introspection. Though I must say, by about page 150—75 pages from the end—I was growing a bit weary of the barrage. To be in the head of this woman and never able to just relax, it was a lot. 

But I'm glad I read Luster. Edie is a force. Engaged, aware, accepting no nonsense. People like her—and I know they are actually out there, not just in fiction—will make this world a better, fiercer place. 

For my quote, I'll give you the last paragraph of the book—which doesn't really give away anything. Edie has just painted a last portrait of Rebecca, naked and potent.

When she is gone, I stow the painting in a place I am unlikely to notice it regularly, and for a moment, I feel like I've forgotten how to be alone. It is not that I want company, but that I want to be affirmed by another pair of eyes. The acceptable interval for which I can be embarrassed for what I said to the [abortion] doctor has passed, but I still think about it for weeks, what I meant when I said I was an artist. I think about the painting in the clinic [Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth] and the canvas fibers curled beneath the oil. All the raw materials that are gathered and processed into shadow and light. The pigments drawn from sand and Canterbury bells, the carbon black drawn from fire and spread onto slick cave walls. A way is always made to document how we manage to survive, or in some cases, how we don't. So I've tried to reproduce an inscrutable thing. I've made my own hunger into a practice, made everyone who passes through my life subject to a close and inappropriate reading that occasionally finds its way, often insufficiently, into paint. And when I am alone with myself, this is what I am waiting for someone to do to me, with merciless, deliberate hands, to put me down onto the canvas so that when I'm gone, there will be a record, proof that I was here.

Pete says his next reading series will be about place, and will be called "Road Trips." I'm already excited. But in the meantime, I've got a few others about passion waiting for me.

Book Report: Bring Out the Dog

23. Will Mackin, Bring Out the Dog (2022) (10/18/22)

I'm not sure where I heard about this book, but it may have been a mention by George Saunders somewhere, in a podcast perhaps. Saunders was Mackin's teacher. Saunders wrote an enthusiastic blurb for this book, calling it a "near-miraculous, brilliant debut." I'm not crazy about hyperbole, and I would not echo Saunders here—but I would say, this is a darn good book.

I do, for some reason I can't pin down, like war fiction. Movies, novels. It's maybe easier for me to identify with WWII fiction than any other kind, but I appreciate Vietnam, I appreciate Afghanistan. In extremis. There's a state I'll never experience—and never would want to experience—except through fiction. Maybe I think it's important to glimpse it.

Bring Out the Dog comprises eleven stories, mostly set in Afghanistan around 2008, 2009. The stories are all told by a basically nameless narrator (he's identified by his radio call sign as Yankee Two late on), a JTAC (joint terminal attack controller) attached to a Navy SEAL team. The stories don't describe a traditional "arc," with instigating event, development, denouement, and resolution. More often than not, the final paragraphs just leave you thinking about "it all." The stories describe a time and place, and people in it, and lived circumstance. From a unique point of view.

I flagged four bits of text, though I could have flagged so many more. Here's one of them, which takes place at the memorial service for a Belgian malanois named Mir, killed accidentally by one of the troop:

Chuck wandered in and sat next to me.
     Chuck was a civilian contractor in his sixties. His last war had been Vietnam, where he'd done PSYOP, which, as far as I could gather from the stories he told, had entailed walking through villages naked and unarmed in broad daylight and spray-painting oxen gold. Afterward he'd gone off to a ranch in Texas, where he'd cleared brush, watered cattle, and driven the plow. Now he was our camp commandant, responsible for the day-to-day upkeep of our tiny compound within the larger FOB, and arguably the best one we'd ever had. Because Chuck knew the difference between those things we needed (hot water, clean shitters, 120 VAC) and those things we wanted (NFL cheerleaders, broadband, tins of bear meat) and those things we didn't even know we wanted.
     Chuck leaned over. "Who wants an orange whip?" he whispered.
     "Me," I said.
     "We'll go right after this."

Orange whip, it turns out, is a drug obtained from the local vet. Mir probably would have approved.

War is senseless, inconceivable, bizarre. And yet it's happening right now. I am fascinated by the efforts, by people who have experienced the chaos, to explain to the rest of us what it means. 

Book Report: Easy Beauty

22. Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty: A Memoir (2022) (10/14/22)

[Apologies in advance for this report, which does not feel like one of my best. I read the book on Kindle. I blame that. Kindle and I do not get along...]

I learned about this book through Ezra Klein's podcast, which that week was hosted by the sociologist and columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom. Her guest, the philosopher and journalist Chloé Cooper Jones, suffers from a disability known as sacral agenesis. As Jones explains,

People usually notice my height first. I’m short. Then they notice the way I walk, then that my legs from the knees down and my feet are underdeveloped and disproportionate to the rest of my body. My spine is curved, which makes my back arch forward. I have hip dysplasia, which means my hip joints are misaligned and unstable—the ball part of the joint grinds on a flat plane of bone in search of a socket that never formed. This hurts and I’m never not aware of it; pain plays a note I hear in all my waking moments. I walk by rolling my hips, which gives me a side-to-side gait. If I wear my hair in a long ponytail, it whips back and forth like a pendulum. I move slowly. I’m slow on stairs, but I can go up them if there is a railing. My arms are strong and I pull myself up as much as walk up stairs. The medical name for my disability is sacral agenesis. I was born without a sacrum, the bone that connects the spine to the pelvis. Agenesis, from the Greek, meaning a lack or failure to generate. My missing sacrum, my omitted element.

I put that explanation upfront, because the rest of this beautiful book is not really about her disability per se. It's about being human. Because don't we all have doubts, insecurities, failings, pains? But that said, Jones's disability is part of who she is, it marks her visually, and physically, as different—and she has to grapple with people's insensitivity. Or what she sometimes assumes is insensitivity, but in fact is something else—some slight that she has manufactured, having little to do with her at all. How do we escape our preconceptions, our reactiveness? A thing I appreciated about this book is the depth of self-awareness, of self-inquisitiveness. Nothing is necessarily as it at first seems.

Except, perhaps, beauty. The thread of beauty as a sort of savior, as a thing that can take us out of ourselves, "unself" us and set us free, even if momentarily, is woven throughout the various stories told here. Which begin in Rome with a visit to a museum and some thoughts about the sculptor Bernini. We are not told why Jones is in Italy, but we follow her willingly on her peregrinations, which she narrates interspersed with flashbacks to recent conversations, to scenes from her home in Brooklyn with her husband and son, to memories of her departed father and still-present mother. Eventually she lands in Milan, at a Beyoncé concert: surprise! But it also makes perfect sense. Beauty, confidence, connection: these are some of the themes of this book. Also patience and acceptance.

Along the overall journey of the book she also encounters Peter Dinklage, the essayist Geoff Dyer, Roger Federer (and I mean all of those in an in-person kind of way), and travels to Lake Como, Miami, and the Killing Fields of Cambodia.

Here's a conversation with her husband near the end of the book after she's had an epiphany or two, or three. It's followed immediately by a scene with her son and another musing on beauty. I really enjoyed the way she hopscotched from thought to thought, each one connected in its own way.

“Do you think I can change?”
     “Yes,” he says. . . . “We’ve both changed. . . . Remember who I was when we met? I was eating one large pepperoni pizza a day and smoking too many cigarettes and playing video games all night. Do you remember who you were? We’ve both changed, but the difference is that I didn’t know who I wanted to become, and you did, that was clear, and so I knew I needed to stay out of your way and just let you become the version of yourself you wanted to be, which I knew was, at its core, good. I knew you wanted to be good.”
     “How did you know that, and I didn’t?”
     “I can see you,” he says.
     “So, you didn’t care that I left?”
     “I care if you are happy. I’m in love with your happiness. My focus is on how you feel, not what you do,” he says.
     We stay in each other’s arms for a long time. Our breathing synchs. A car alarm, a siren, people shout on the street.
     “You could have made me come home,” I say.
     “No, I can only try to be the person you want to come home to.”

Wolfgang [Jones's son] and I stand below a sulking sky. He’s done with school for the day but wants to stay on the playground with his friends for a while before I haul him off to the bodega and then home. I let him have ten more minutes and watch him hurl his body around a jungle gym. He plays easily and happily with other children. Clouds form above. They make shapes upon which I can force a category—pig, shoe, hat—but the categories don’t stick. Shapes dissolve; reality remains in restless motion; it was beautiful, it was Beauty, this engagement, this grasp and release, this brief but real discerning of the fleeting and how it redirects my focus from myself and toward the world.
     We get our groceries. Wolfgang clutches a frozen pizza to his chest on our walk home.
     “What shapes do you see in the clouds?” I ask.
     “Just a buncha Pikachus,” says Wolfgang.

Now I'm kind of interested in seeking out Jones's journalism. And as a bonus, here's a LitHub interview with Jones about her memoir.