The Order of Wolves!

Our book today is Richard Fiennes' wonderfully informative 1976 volume The Order of Wolves, a kind of follow-up to his equally-authoritative 1968 book The Natural History of Dogs, which I read with keen interest while surrounded by sleeping dogs. Even though I currently only have two dogs, it's still easy to feel surrounded when one of them is an, um, rubenesque basset hound, and so it was that I read The Order of Wolves also surrounded by sleeping dogs.

Fiennes covers every aspect of wolves in the world, from the emergence of their most distant ancestor the creodonts, somewhere around 60 million years ago (the creodonts also gave rise to a whole slew of other furry critters, from raccoons and bears to ... echh ... cats) to their establishment in roughly the form we know them today, around 30 million years ago, from their hunting methods to the methods used to hunt them, from their interactions with other members of their species (Fiennes stops short of calling this a culture, but then, most people do) to the vast literature of their interaction with mankind. He admits that few other animals have such a rich history of false impressions (when it comes to humans) than the wolf, and his book calmly and methodically sets out to correct that.

The task necessarily requires a certain amount of big-picture thinking, and Fiennes tries to make this as painless as possible:

At the border of any habitat favourable to a particular life form, there is always a 'tension zone' where different habitats merge. These form the outer limits, where the 'ecotypes' change, but there is inevitably some overlap where the species from the one habitat compete with those from the other... In such areas, species tend to change their ways of life to compete with the demands of the shifting habitat boundaries. Wolves are so resilient, and can survive on such a wide variety of foods, that when their way of life has been threatened they adapt themselves to altered conditions with an unusual degree of success. At the end of the Ice Age wolves survived in forested and mountainous areas in the face of persecution by man. The forests replaced the tundra with such great rapidity - a matter of a few hundred years - that no other large predator emerged to challenge his dominance.

The slight but appreciable tone of advocacy you might detect in that passage runs through the whole of this book. In Fiennes view, wolves have always been far more sinned against than sinning when it comes to their dealings with man. This may not seem so revelatory a stance in 2011, but forty years ago Barry Lopez's Of Wolves and Men and Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf had barely begun the work of changing the public's mind. Fiction is always stronger, and well into the 1980s the wolf was still being portrayed in novels as a harbinger of destruction. If even ten percent of the millions of people who read Anne Rice's rip-snorting The Vampire Lestat (in which young, headstrong, and still-living Lestat fights off a ravening wolf-pack in one of the book's arresting opening scenes), you can see the size of the job conservationists had in front of them.

At many points throughout his book, Fiennes takes pains to point out that the wolf is not what its press releases would have wary hikers believe:

What we have learned for certain is what the wolf is not: he is not a voracious, ravening predator, who roams the plains and snowscapes in great packs, licking blood-stained lips, tearing down every living thing he can get hold of, and devouring innocent travellers.

Quite coincidentally, Fiennes' book is yet another of those oversized heavily illustrated hardcovers I seem to be mentioning quite often so far this year. There are fascinating black-and-white and color photos on every page - shots of wolves moving through the snowy forests and tundra that are their new favorite hunting-grounds, shots of wolves playing (something they crucially do not only in puppyhood but all through their lives - I've seen adult wolves in the wild play dog-stupid games for an hour at a stretch), and shots of all the wide array of facial and body posture expressions that underscore the main characteristic wolves share in common with humans: they are inveterate and consummate communicators with each other - it's one of the key secrets of their success as a species, and it couldn't be achieved without considerable intelligence:

The brain of the wolf is small by human standards, but nevertheless, if it is compared to the brains of herbivorous animals, it will be seen that the cerebral hemispheres are prolonged at the back so as to cover most of the cerebellum. Wolves are undoubtedly extremely intelligent, and this is probably correlated with the large cerebrum.

The Order of Wolves tries its best to take us inside the world of its subject - not an easy thing to do when that subject orients itself to the world utilizing enormously different primary senses from those of humans. We are so familiar with the fact of these animals' existence that we tend to forget the gap between their senses and our own (the same thing is true in spades about dogs, the full range of whose senses would flat-out astonish even most of the humans who live with them every day). Wolves share with dogs a millennia-old propensity to encourage that forgetting - they require comparatively very little conditioning to become entirely friendly with humans, and that friendliness is always based on accommodation. No cat has ever accommodated a human owner in the history of the world, so it's easier for cats to retain an aura of the mysterious. Dogs - and wolves - are every bit as strange and different from the humans who for good or ill define their existence, but since they're happy to fawn and goof around, the strangeness isn't stressed.

Fiennes revels in it; to him, the magnificent other-ness of wolves is their quintessential charm. Even when he's describing the mechanics of their hunting techniques, he's an obviously avid fan:

Prey animals are followed against the wind, not because the scent carries better but because they are heard better. This may, at first, surprise us from our knowledge of our own hunting dogs, one group of which hunts by sight (in the greyhound group), the other hunting by scent like foxhounds. Yet, fancy a dog lying by the fireside apparently asleep. Suddenly he stirs and cocks his ears. The family has head nothing, but the faithful dog has heard the sounds of his master's car. More, he has distinguished that one care from all the other traffic on the road. So with wolves ...

Despite passages like this one, the ultimate message you take from The Order of Wolves is how different they are from their dog cousins. These are the dogs who didn't come in from the cold, who refused to be changed by human fire and will. Fiennes knows his subject backwards and forwards, and he's too much the scientist to indulge in more than the occasional touch of poetic insight. But nevertheless, he clearly shares the same opinion that so many wolf-experts can't help but have: that in trading their wildness for security, does somehow debased their common heritage with wolves.

No matter where you stand on such an opinion, it seems pretty clear that some are more debased than others ...

A Room of One's Own!

Ah,  the two faces of home!





Now,  let the posting resume!

The Red Hourglass!

Our book today is Gordon Grice’s mesmerizing 1998 thriller The Red Hourglass: The Lives of Predators. This is electrifying, horrifying stuff – Grice takes a close look at the predatory tactics and the encounter-lore of a few common predators in the natural world: spiders, snakes, mantids, and, interestingly, pigs and dogs. We get brief, intense natural histories of the black widow, the tarantula, the rattlesnake, and – in this great book’s most indelible chapter, the brown recluse spider. And like all the best strong, impressive writing, it has unintended side-effects: after you finish The Red Hourglass, you won’t pay an anxiety-free visit to your basement, patio, or attic – to say nothing of the great outdoors – for about a year. And this effect is evergreen: reread the book after many months, and you’ll still be out for another full year.

Part of the secret to this dark magic is the fact that Grice picks omnipresent creatures as his subjects, rather than, say, the great white shark or the grizzly bear. He picks animals you often don’t have to make any special effort to meet (especially if you live in the American West and Southwest). In fact, reading his book you’re reminded of that old saw of natural history books, that no matter where you’re doing your reading, you’re probably not more than five feet from a spider of one variety or another. In the grip of The Red Hourglass, you’ll become certain all of those watching spiders are venomous.

He studies the black widow spider as a passionate amateur who’s caught and kept several throughout his life and never been bitten. He recounts in fearful detail the agonies healthy adults tend to experience upon being bitten, and you can tell he revels in the fact that genuine mysteries lurk in the exact method of that agony:

The venom contains a neurotoxin that accounts for the pain and the system-wide effects like roller-coaster blood pressure. But this chemical explanation only opens the door to deeper mysteries. A dose of the venom contains only a few molecules of the neurotoxin, which has a high molecular weight – in fact, the molecules are large enough to be seen under an ordinary microscope. How do these few molecules manage to affect the entire body of an animal weighing hundreds or even thousands of pounds? No one has explained the specific mechanism. It seems to involve a neural cascade, a series of reactions initiated by the toxin, but with the toxin not directly involved in any but the first steps of the process. The toxin somehow flips a switch that activates a self-torture mechanism.

There’s the same grisly, respectful fascination in the chapter on rattlesnakes – he points out what anybody who’s spent any time in out west will confirm: each rattler’s personality is different. Some will go out of their way to avoid even indirect proximity with humans, while others will seek out a confrontation. Some are meek, others flagrantly aggressive (although Grice keeps his focus pretty much squarely on the United States, this same dichotomy is true of the cobras of India – except for the part about any of them being meek). And all are potentially harmful, even the young:

Rattlesnakes are born venomous. They can already hunt for themselves. My father once reached into a patch of grass and was struck on the fingernail by a baby rattlesnake. The nail eventually blackened and fell off. He suffered no other effects. Some people claim young rattlesnakes are more toxic than adults. Possibly the explanation for this paradox is that young rattlesnakes show less restraint in using up their supplies of venom when biting defensively. A certain medical student, assuming the young harmless, handled one. He showed off for friends, telling them how ironic it is that such an emblem of fear could be handled freely. That’s the way most people get bitten: an urge to handle fire. These days the young doctor has nine fingers.

The curveball of The Red Hourglass is its inclusion of pigs and dogs, two species most people might not at first classify as predators. The chapter on pigs does scarce justice to their gentle intelligence, but to be fair, Grice spends most of its pages talking about wild boars. And the chapter on dogs … well, it has some interesting personal recollections about sharing a town with a large pack of feral dogs, but as for the rest-let’s just say Man’s Best Friend continues to be one of natural history’s most persistent mysteries (which is another way of saying what we’ve said many times before here at Stevereads: dog-writing done by people who aren’t me tends to have lots of problems). My biggest chuckle is always the part where Grice interviews a man in Special Forces training who talks to him about facing a canine guard dog in mano-a-pawo combat:

Your big dogs go for the throat. I’m talking Doberman, German shepherd, most of the ones used as attack dogs. You put your arm up to protect your throat. You let him bite your arm, but you fall back with his momentum. As you fall, you put your other forearm just behind his head. As your back hits the ground, you’re bringing your knees and feet up to push him up over your head. Basically you’re giving him a monkey flip, and you’re holding your arms rigid. His mouth is hooked onto one arm, the other’s behind his neck, and as he flips his momentum snaps his spine. One dead dog. Not hard to do, but you have to sacrifice your arm. You’re okay if you’re wearing a thick jacket. If not, your arm gets pretty torn up. You could bleed to death.

Hee. See? I’m chuckling again. So the thing you learn in Special Forces training is that when you’re attacked by a large guard dog (the elasticity of whose neck muscles and tendons is roughly four times that of a human), the first thing you should do is lay down on your back and expose your abdomen and genitals. Why, that’s downright sensible! You know, sometimes I think the much-vaunted ‘Special Forces training’ we civilians hear so much about consists entirely of learning how to bullshit on epic levels. I’m 100 percent certain no Special Forces op ever used this preposterous ‘let me wrestle with you before you disembowel me’ tactic, but I’m equally certain the guy Grice interviewed told it all to him with a straight face and an earnest voice. That’s expert training for you.

Grice accurately reports that dogs are second only to humans as killers of humans – their sheer ubiquity makes virtually every human around them careless, so the fatalities are much higher than those of black widows or tarantulas or rattlesnakes. And fatalities aren’t really even the main issue in the book’s most grotesque and striking chapter, on the humble brown recluse spider. The brown recluse is exactly the kind of crack-and-crevice-dwelling creature you could almost certainly find in your room right there at home, if you were foolish enough to go looking. It’s a shy, retiring creature, but its venom contains an even bigger mystery than the extreme toxicity of the black widow’s bite. The bite of the brown recluse doesn’t poison flesh: it kills it. And the toxins involved somehow prevent the body’s natural systems from cleaning the wound – with the result that bite victims often have an open, suppurating gap of dead flesh to deal with for the rest of their lives, from a bite so tiny nobody ever remembers getting bitten. Grice finishes his gruesome, hypnotic book with his account of this animal and its bizarre defense:

The flesh affected by a recluse’s necrosis never heals. Somehow, the venom turns off the immune system and the body’s capacity for repairing itself in that patch of flesh. The victim can only hope the dead area stays small. But sometimes it doesn’t.

Despite its disturbing subject matter, The Red Hourglass is a book you should most definitely read. Grice is a master prose stylist with a perfect ear for the pace of drama. Just be prepared, once you’re done with the book, to live in a less comfortable world for about a year.

Yearning to Herd Sheep in the Penny Press!

Boy, it’s been quite a week in the good old Penny Press, hasn’t it? My reporting has been so consistent certain less steadfast members of the Silent Majority have expressed concern that I’ve given up on boring old books altogether. I assure you, that’s not the case – I still have plenty of tedium to unload on you all (including our next installment of Penguins on Parade), but I still read lots of periodicals, and this is still where I talk about what I read (swankier OLM-sponsored digs notwithstanding), so bear with me.

And besides, how could I of all people ignore the cover story of the 1 February issue of New York? “A Dog Is Not a Human Being, Right?” blares the cover, but the adorable little critter whose portrait (yet more stunning work by Jill Greenberg, the greatest portrait artist of our age) accompanies those words seems mighty uncomfortable with all the attention.



That critter is lucky not to be able to read, because the article in question, written by John Homans (and I’m accused of using flimsy aliases!), is very often very damn annoying – and as some of you will recall, I consider the ‘annoying’ bar set pretty damn high when it comes to anybody but myself talking about dogs.

I realize Homans can’t be held accountable for the stuff the copy editors attach to his piece, so the article’s subtitle, “Dogs are increasingly rootless souls, country bumpkins in city apartments. But is a vegan pup still an animal?” can’t be held against him, but the actual text of his piece isn’t all that much better.

The problem, as always, is one of focus. Homans’ shifts all over the map. At one point he’s making withering observations about the insane world of high price-tag dog-pampering, and at other points he’s talking about how all dogs are somehow mystically attuned to life in ‘the country’ and are only making compromises by enduring suburb, city, or apartment life:

The apartment is a far from perfect place for the dog. Still, they’re camp followers of our microtribes, the only beings that fully understand the customs. And unlike children, they’ll never reject them.

He’s not sure how to describe the hazy area dogs occupy in human (in his view, this always equates with “American Northeast Caucasian,” which gets a little irritating in its own right), even though that very area is the ostensible subject of his article. So at one point he says “The dog is an honorary human,” and at another he insists “Treating your dog as a person is nothing more or less than an aesthetic error.” Part of the problem stems from a doggie-fact of which Homans seems entirely unaware. See if you can spot it:

As the relationship [between humans and dogs] developed, specific canine qualities – the dog’s gaze, its unending adolescence, its uncanny responsiveness to human clues – evolved … What was created was not, precisely, a human child, but it certainly was able to push some of the same buttons.

Yes, those of you who know anything at all about dogs will have seen it immediately: our modern dogs didn’t evolve any of those qualities Homans is going on about. Those qualities – and plenty of others, intended and otherwise – were eugenically implanted into dogs by humans, who have controlled canine breeding lines (with varying degrees of intentionality, of course) for thousands of years. Dogs have been made to be childlike; they’ve been shaped to gaze upon humans with undivided attention. Once you learn this (or recall it), most of Homans’ talk about dogs yearning to get out to the country and herd things becomes just exactly the same kind of blather that usually irritates me when anybody other than myself talks about dogs. But that’s not what irritates me the most about Homans’ piece, oh no! That would be one single line, the seeming answer to the question on the issue’s cover:

No one believes, in his conscious mind, that the dog is a person.

In an article that takes pains to describe the vast strides various animal rights groups have made over the decades, such a sentence is almost vile, and it instantly begs the question: what is a person? It’s Homans’ persistent conflating of ‘human’ and ‘person’ that rubs salt in a very old wound. And Homans just won’t let up:

The dog’s innocence amplifies empathy, because there’s no ethical static, no human otherness to contend with. It’s less complicated to love a pet than a person.

This, to put it mildly, is just so much sheep-dip. As some of you will know, I’ve had many, many dogs. Some were angels of affability, perfectly happy just to lap up all the ease and comfort I could give them. Others were earnest little misses, always over-eager to please everyone. I’ve had gregarious dogs and the occasional tangled, haunted introvert. I’ve had happy-go-lucky dogs and those who were more remote (including one – my favorite, the best friend I’ve ever had – who behaved like a king and treated everybody but me – canine or human – with sometimes very visible disdain). I’ve had dog who were better at logical solutions to problems than I am, and I’ve had dogs who were (you should pardon the expression) barking insane.



I can tell you two things they all had in common:

First, they were all ‘persons’ – in that they were themselves and nobody else, every bit as individual as any humans I’ve known.

And second, they were all complicated to love. Loving anything living is complicated, and even the dogs who make it simple with their personalities make it more complex with one other canine trait (one humans almost never have to deal with amongst themselves), which Homans gets around to at the close of his essay:

In a footnote to one of his poems about the deaths of his dogs, John Updike wrote, “Sometimes it seems the whole purpose of pets is to bring death into the house,” a sensationally cruel observation because there’s truth in it. The dog’s mortality is never far from an owner’s mind – it’s the central flaw in this best-friend business. No one is ready for their dog to go. And the dog doesn’t know where it’s going – the dog joke turned into a tragedy.

It’s confusing that Homans could be so clear on this point and yet make that preposterous ‘the dog is not a person’ stance. He gets love, individuality, devotion, variety, humor, and now grief – and still he says the being who evoke all those things are somehow less than his fellow humans, even if those fellow humans don’t evoke them. All dog-owners know this contradiction for the shortsighted silliness it is … but Homans is a dog-owner (that's his gorgeous dog at the top), and yet he appears not to see it. I’m hoping he sees it just fine and is merely stirring the soup to make an article chat-worthy. And considering how scatterbrained that article is, I’m really hoping he entirely cleans it up if he ever decides to expand it into a book. We don’t need any more dumbass dog-books out there – especially since we’re already dealing with a flood-tide of dumbass dog- articles.

Second Chances in the Penny Press!

The cover story of last week's Sports Illustrated goes some way toward undoing the damage done by Sports Illustrated in 1987 when they ran their now-infamous cover showing a pit bull and bannered with "Beware of This Dog." I wrote them a nasty letter in response to that earlier cover (I was one of thousands who did), taking them to task for perpetuating the evil myth that some dogs - pit bulls in particular - are inherently dangerous, naturally prone to violence. I pointed out that, all other factors being equal, there's no more reason their readers should 'beware' of a pit bull than they should any dog big enough harm a human; the only reason a pit bull on the cover would resonate with their readers was because pit bulls are more often than other dogs warped by the bad handling of humans. The cover should have had a picture of one of those humans with a banner saying "Beware of This Asshole."

Of course, that was back in 1987, when that asshole didn't have a public, recognizable face. Now he does: Michael Vick, former Atlanta Falcons quarterback and convicted dog fighter, abuser, and murderer. In 2007, law enforcement officials broke up Bad News Kennels, a dog-fighting operation Vick had run for years on a property he owned in Virginia, and Vick was sent to jail - and also ordered to pay nearly a million dollars in what the presiding judge all but explicitly characterized as restitution. To say the least, the decision will be a crucial landmark in future prosecutions for cruelty to animals, and I recognize the good in that. The good in the fact that Vick himself will be free in three or four years to pursue a fourth-tier football career in Italy or Portugal ... well, I see less good in that. He confessed to personally beating, stabbing, dragging, and even electrocuting dogs whose only fault was that they weren't vicious enough - there should be no paychecks after that, no endorsement contracts, no freedom, no sunlight. I think it's generous just to let such a person keep living, when so many of his victims are dead.

So many, but not all - and that's the bright little miracle at the heart of this current SI article: 47 of the 51 dogs taken from Bad Newz were ultimately saved. Many animal welfare groups - including PETA - advocated that all the dogs be killed, not only to end their own suffering but to prevent them from hurting other dogs or humans. Back in 2007, I advocated that myself. The trauma done to these poor dogs was so deep and systematic (several of the animals were born into Vick's operation and knew no other life), I thought, that you could never know with complete certainty that someday one of your other pets or one of your children wouldn't trigger something - resulting in yet another headline-grabbing mauling or fatality, which would only further hurt the image of the breed in general. Short of adopting all of Vick's dogs myself and carefully restoring them, I said at the time, the only humane thing to do is put them all to death.

Turns out I was wrong, and good thing too: Hundreds of concerned, passionate, patient people came forward in the course of Vick's arrest and trial, volunteering their time and money in an attempt to save these dogs. Pit bull advocacy groups, animal welfare groups, dog-rehabilitation groups of all kinds offered their services, and as a result, this SI article was able to accompany its text with some of the most heart-glowingly wonderful photos the magazine has ever published. This story, written by Jim Gorant and titled "Happy New Year," is a testament not only to the hope of the humans involved but also to the incredible, dopey recuperative powers most dogs enjoy as a matter of course.



Not all the dogs recovered fully. About half of them were too emotionally damaged by what Vick and his asshole cronies did to them to ever regain emotional stability (the ones born into the operation very likely never had it in the first place) - these are in permanent foster care situations and rehab facilities where a trained staff can love and monitor them, safeguard them from all further trauma, and try to give them some measure of happiness for the rest of their lives.

But the half that recovered did so with a vivacity and thoroughness - with an innocence, really - that not only makes me smile but also, paradoxically, increases my desire to see Vick publicly racked, electrocuted, and then beaten to death. Pit bulls have an enormous generosity of spirit, even by the yardstick of dogs, who are a generous species to begin with; thinking about that spirit being chained and warped into mindless vicious aggression for the sport of spectators is blood-curdlingly infuriating. The canker is salved only by the happy endings that very generosity of spirit makes possible - other breeds (the more froward working dogs, for instance, and certainly the more, shall we say, idiosyncratic hounds) might not have bounced back so well, or at all - "goofy" is a word used by more than one of these dogs' new families. Goofy is a thing all dogs should get to be in their lives - and before Vick's arrest, when Bad Newz was a going concern, it was as far away from dogs there as Heaven is to a Unitarian.

So despite the tens of thousands of other dogs languishing in shelters all across the country, this particular issue of Sports Illustrated tells of happy tidings for one small group of dogs who had almost no hope. I was happy to read it, and that happiness was dimmed by only two things: first, like I said, you just know Michael Vick himself is going to land on his feet next year, or the year after that, and second, a point not mentioned in Gorant's upbeat article: Bad Newz was a strictly small-time operation. It was the dog-fighting equivalent of a mom-and-pop store. What the article doesn't mention - what most American pet-owners don't want to think about - is that there are Wal-Marts out there, operating in virtually every major city and hundreds of rural locations throughout the country. Agents for these operations regularly patrol suburban neighborhoods in innocuous-looking vans, snatching up strolling or sleeping pet dogs from their streets or yards. These hapless dogs, totally confused and miserable, are used as "bait dogs" for the fighting animals to practice on, or as warm-up events to get the basement betting crowd in the mood. And that betting brings in lots of money - dog-fighting is big business in America and around the world.



Still, Vick was convicted and heavily fined, despite his celebrity (and despite noxious attempts by his lawyers to portray dog-fighting as some sort of "cultural" legacy - a tactic that just flat-out appalled me, since it was attempted in a Virginia courthouse and concerned a good-looking well-built young black man who, a hundred and fifty years ago, would himself have been part of a not-all-that-different "cultural" legacy), and the stigma of what he did is likely to stick with him forever, and many of the dogs his tortures would otherwise have condemned are now clowning around and sleeping and face-slurping in the middle of loving families.

So it's a small miracle, and that will have to be enough for now.

The Dog!

Our book today is The Dog: 5000 Years of the Dog in Art, written by Tamsin Pickeral and sumptuously, gorgeously published by Merrell. This is far more than a decorative coffee table book - it's the single best visual book-tribute I've ever seen (and I've seen them all) to dogs, an amazing compendium of all the ways canines for six thousand years have worked their way into the visual representations humans make of their world.

There are primitive cave paintings, Egyptian tomb decorations, ancient murals from the Asian steppes, delicate depictions from the Far East, plus an exhaustive collection of more familiar styles and treatments from the last 400 years in the Western world. It's an epic journey and the ultimate treat for any dog enthusiast, as full of well-researched text as it is of beautiful pictures.

Here's a sampling:


2nd century Roman statue




Few surviving works from ancient Rome depict the dog with such tenderness. This small sculpture is exquisite, in rendition, form, and feeling. The anatomical accuracy of the work is absolute, and this, combined with the profound emotion instilled in the cool marble dogs, suggests that the original subjects might have belonged, or at least been well known, to the artist.


the dog-headed St. Christopher


Pictures that portray St. Christopher as dog-headed are seen relatively rarely in modern times; most commonly, he is depicted in a more acceptable way, as a giant of a man carrying Jesus across a swollen river. There are, however, a number of Byzantine icons that depict the saint as dog-headed, an idea deriving from one of the several ancient myths that surround him.



James Stuart, 4th Duke of Lennox and 1st Duke of Richmond, by Anthony van Dyck



Van Dyck was one of the finest painters of dogs of all time, and this magnificent greyhound is perhaps his crowning achievement in the field. There are few images that touch the soul quite like this. The dog leans into its master, James Stuart, its head pressed against the man's side, while Stuart rests his hand on the dog's brow in a gesture of infinite tenderness ... the gesture speaks volumes about the intimacy and tenderness that exist between dog and master.

Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond, by Girolamo Pompeo Batoni



There is great feeling in this work, which depicts the young Charles Lennox with two fine spaniel-type dogs against a Classical background. His demonstrative pose, caressing the silky ears of the dark-brown dog with both hands, is unusual in male portraiture, the traditional gesture being one hand resting, often with a degree of detachment, on the dog's head. It is touching to see the young man, who would become one of the great parliamentary reformists, expressing such obvious sentiment towards the dog.



After the Battue, by Charles Edward Stewart


This is a particularly atmospheric painting by the relatively unknown artist Charles Edward Stewart, depicting hounds returning to the kennel after the hunt. Here the hounds, led by a perky terrier, trudge along the wet, muddy track. Stewart effectively creates an 'end of day' feeling through the hounds' expressions; with their heads mostly down, showing little anticipation, these are tired dogs that have done their job and are not interested in anything but a warm, dry kennel. The sky is heavy with moisture - it is a chilly scene, with the wind whipping the attendant's coat back, but there is also a sense of accomplishment, of a job done and the anticipation of finding comforting shelter from the elements.

Eos, by Edwin Landseer




This image of the superlative greyhound bitch Eos must rank among the greatest dog paintings in history, and it is entirely unsurprising that the clear, beautiful lines and striking composition were the work of Edwin Landseer, favourite artist of Queen Victoria. The picture was a surprise for Prince Albert, so Landseer is rumoured to have had to borrow the prince's hat and gloves without his knowledge and rapidly return them to their rightful place before they were missed. On the table lies a cane, artfully projecting over the edge, but it is perhaps the brilliant, simple background of the red cloth, combined with the restrained black and white of the other elements, that makes the work so distinctive - against this the fluid form of Eos is aesthetically unsurpassable.

to which I'll add two pictures not included in this book - the first is my favorite (for reasons some of you will probably find obvious) of all Norman Rockwell's many paintings featuring dogs:

Home on Leave



And the second is a far more ominous work from the early 20th century, a painting whose surface portrays only peace and gay frivolity - but lurking within the picture is an insidious evil rank enough to topple a monarchy. I'll leave you to spot it on your own, if you dare:



Such a dire depiction notwithstanding, it's a pleasure to kick off 2009 here at Stevereads with such a whole-hearted recommendation! The Dog is a beautiful, endlessly fascinating book every dog-person should own.

Aristocrats

Our book today is Aristocrats by Stella Tillyard, a pleasant and entirely diverting look at nearly a century in the lives of the vain, shallow, clever, artful, silly, and mostly sincere world of the Lennox family, whose distaff noble line descends from Louise de Keroualle, a snub-nosed buxom-breasted slut who never took her eyes off the prize while she was one of Charles II’s mistresses. In exchange for services rendered, the dear little oaf was made Duchess of Portsmouth, and the bastard she gave her bastard of a lover was made Duke of Richmond, Earl of March, Duke of Lennox, and a baker’s dozen other things, all to overcompensate for the bar sinister.

Tillyard follows the ups and downs of the Duchess’ darling descendants in the Lennox line, mainly the sisters Caroline, Emily, Louisa, and Sarah, from 1740 to 1832, and the resultant book, Aristocrats shouldn’t be dismissed just because it sparkles like fine champagne. It does sparkle, Tillyard has worked hard to make it the splendid, effortless read it is … but there’s a lot of research here too, and a positively dismaying amount of digging through mounds of Lennox family letters and documents. Tillyard must have known the great story she could fashion from such materials (and she might have had some accurate foresight as to how well it would sell to a perpetually glamour-starved reading public), otherwise the tedium of the spadework would have sent her running from the archives.

She stuck with it, however, and we readers are the better for it. She introduces her four central sisters amidst the splendor of the British and Scottish uppercrust in the Hanoverian age, and page after page gleams with gigantic family manors, important state functions (the sisters were related by blood or marriage to a whole slew of movers and shakers in government and royal circles), and, thanks to Tillyard’s considerable skill, memorable character-sketches. For instance, she quotes Caroline’s estimate of her own inner state of mind:

“Living alone suits my disposition best, at least passing a good deal of my time so. I love to saunter about the gardens, looking at the plants etc by myself or being shut up in my dressing room reading or writing.”

But Tillyard has read everything about Caroline and cannot be deceived by such claims – indeed, she might be said to know Caroline better than Caroline knew herself:

There was another side to this intelligent, worried, poised, and slightly pedantic young woman – an irresistible pull towards those things she professed to dislike: wit, recklessness, bustle, and ambition. … wit fascinated her, and so did excess, that quality of her grandfather’s which her father had worked so hard to suppress in himself and his family.

So thorough has been Tillyard’s research that readers may occasionally feel swamped by all the names and bloodlines, like being force-fed Burke’s Peerage with a cement-mixer. Usually Tillyard keeps this under control, but every so often there’s a deafening blast of breeding that reads more like an extract from Debbie’s Diaries than a passage from sober history:

Several of Emily’s or Sarah’s children married within the family, or within the family circle, and with these weddings came a sense of time coming round again. Lord Henry Fitzgerald married Charlotte, Baroness de Rof, the granddaughter of Henry Fox’s faithful friend Charles Hanbury Williams. Mimi Ogilvie also married into the Holland House circle. Her husband was Charles Beauclerk, son of the notorious Topham Beauclerk and his saintly wife, Lady Di. Sarah’s fifth son, Henry, married his cousin Caroline Bennett, one of the Duke of Richmond’s illegitimate daughters. William Napier married Caroline Amelia Fox, daughter of General Henry Fox, Caroline’s “little Harry.” Richard Napier married into the extended Conolly family. The most unlikely circle was completed several years after Sarah’s death when her daughter Emily married Sir Henry Bunbury, nephew and heir of her first husband, Sir Charles Bunbury.

Yeesh.

But such passages are anomalies in an otherwise nearly flawless book that dances the reader through a century of changing social tides and violent, often engrossing family feuds (the source of many of those feuds was the Duke of Richmond buried in that above paragraph, Charles Lennox, the brother of these Lennox sisters, the inheritor of mind-bogglingly vast estates and wealth who in later life ossified into a moron but who was, in his youth, the most startlingly handsome teen who ever rod-and-sceptre’d a barmaid and who, his whole life long, cherished an affection for dogs far, far deeper than that which he ever felt for any fellow human being)(a fact which successive generations of portrait-painters, as you can see, took pains to commemorate).

In any study like this one, the British aristocracy can’t help but come off as a bit of a paradox – a bunch of sniveling ninnies who nevertheless did a rather good job of running a country – and Tillyard makes no attempt in Aristocrats to resolve that paradox. But once you’ve spent the whole book under her spell, you won’t care if she does or not – you’ll be fascinated by these glittering creatures, and you’ll want to stay in their world. Fortunately, Aristocrats will always be right there on your shelf, ready to take you there.

In the Penny Press!

It need hardly be said that we here at Stevereads smiled approvingly at the cover story of the latest issue of National Geographic "Minds of Their Own," written by Virginia Morell and including magnificent photographs by Vincent Musi. Natioal Geographic is of course the world's greatest magazine by such a wide margin that direct comparisons are embarrassing, but even so, this has been a significantly fantastic last roughly ten months, and this issue - and this marvellous, thought-provoking (no pun intended) article only continues the streak.

Morell's piece is refreshingly almost entirely free of humanocentricisms - which makes it incredibly rare when it comes to any writing on this particular subject. Oh, don't get us wrong - there's still quite a bit of making nonhuman animals learn new languages, decipher spatial problems in sequence, talk in English, etc. - in other words, equating particularly human intelligence for all kinds of intelligence - but mercifully, there's quite a bit of better thinking in the article too, thinking that tries to step outside the age-old paradigm of chimps wearing human clothes.

The story is structured to have stars, and there they all are, in Musi's amazing photos, set against calm white backgrounds, looking out at human readers with clear, inhuman beauty and directness. The minds behind those inscrutible faces remain a mystery, but the playfulness - and the ease - with which these stars bemusedly try to bridge the gap between their worlds and man's world is as obvious as it is shaming. They are entire alternate civilizations, and their kinds have been whipped, train-carted, butchered, food-processed, machine-gunned, castrated, mocked, tortured, and mass-executed by humans (who've been no gentler with their own kind as well) - and yet, looking at these miraculous pictures, we see no rage, no resentment ... only an elementary curiosity and perhaps an abiding desire that mankind's awakening awareness of their potentials maybe prevent mankind from wiping them out entirely.

We see Azy the orangutan (currently residing in Iowa, of all places), who can easily out-think most chimpanzees. We see Shanthi the Asian elephant, who's in captivity in a zoo and yet still manages to display some fraction of her species' vast capacities for sociability and gestalt thinking. We see Edward, a Black Leicester longwool sheep, who's as good at recognizing human faces as any human reading the article. We see JB, a giant Pacific octopus, currently held in captivity in a Baltimore aquarium, who, we're confidently told, has a "distinct personality" and enjoys squirting the scientists who study him every day. We see Maya, a bottlenose dolphin, currently in captivity in Baltimore aquarium, whose beautiful face shows all the grace and forebearance so characteristic of tursiops truncatus. We see Alex, the African Gray Parrot, who not only knew a large vocabulary but wasn't shy about advertising that fact to other birds in the lab where he lived, telling the younger ones, in English, to "Talk clearly!" when they made some mistake in their new language.

And there's our cover girl, Betsy the Border Collie, who has a vocabulary of 340 words and routinely out-performs all the higher primates when it comes to intuiting human behavior. Her owners are glowingly proud, of course, and she continues to add to her 'verbal' acquisitions.

In reality, none of those learned behaviors is technically verbal. at least not in Betsy's case. Betsy's exemplary performance has nothing to do with what humans call intelligence - dogs by and large are strangers to that function, as it's known to humans or any other species that legitimately retains it (manatees, needless to say, aren't mentioned in the article). Dogs are amazingly elastic observers of all moving things, and as for humankind - well, man has no more devoted spectator nor could have than this species, these creatures who've mapped their own genetic future to that of mankind. It's their business to intuit what humans want, and they do it better than anybody else - in reality, that's what Betsy's doing, not learning words and really knowing what they mean, or even what it means for them to mean anything.

But this is a small quibble; the article itself does a fantastic job of exploring the concepts of intellect and selfhood - exploring just how universal those concepts might be among the living creatures on this planet. We whole-heartedly recommend you rush right out and buy a copy, read this revelatory article, and then politely introduce yourself to the next non-human you meet, even if it's the Reichmarshall.

Of course, this being National Geographic, there's a lot more worth in the issue than this one story. There's a very good article on the modern ecological problems faced by Iceland, and the article on new attempts to bring democracy to the beautiful landlocked Asian nation of Bhutan has enough surrealism in it to satisfy your inner Joseph Heller. The country's revered monarch, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, recently abdicated in favor of his son, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, who is introducing Western-style democracy to his land. One village woman is quoted as being confused by this: "We have a good and wise king," she says. "Why do we need democracy?"

To which we here at Stevereads would only add, "Amen," but the surrealism gets better:

Even Bhutan's chief election commissioner concedes that he would prefer not to have elections. "Given the choice, of course, we'd want to continue to be guided by the monarchy," he says. So why change? "It's a simple thing: The king wants it."

Hee.

And if quandaries like that start to make you wonder if humans aren't the least rational beings on Earth, turn back to "Minds of Their Own" and read it again - it'll only get better the second time.

Don't Let This Happen To You

Poised as we are on the eve of the venerable Westminster Dog Show, some of you out there might find yourselves thinking about getting a dog. Perhaps you'll watch the show - one of the oldest sporting events in the modern world - with an eye towards sizing up each breed. About this we here at Stevereads have two pieces of advice:

1. Recall that all the dogs you'll be seeing are champions, carefully trained not only to meet their breed's specifications but also for tractability, for the ease with which they obey commands. Without that training, you could be left with a dog who's angry, truculent, froward, bossy, brick-stupid, and as gassy as a Louisiana peat-bog.

2. Even after you've considered that point, skip the whole idea. Don't even think about contacting breeders; go to your local dog pound and take your pick from a dozen wonderful dogs waiting for the welcoming home most of them have never known.

The Uncommon Reader

Our book today is a little delight we here at Stevereads never dared to hope we'd encounter: "The Uncommon Reader," a novella by Alan Bennett, the English national treasure and author of "The History Boys." The thing appeared in virtually unaltered form in the London Review of Books some months ago, and although we here at Stevereads saved it and photocopied it and assiduously handed it around, we thought we'd be dealing with clumsy xeroxes forever. But lo, here it is, bound as a neat little booklet of its own.

The story is classic Bennett in its beguiling simplicity of plot: owing to the mischief of her dogs, the Queen discovers one day that the palace is regularly visited by a 'travelling library' of a type that was once popular in rural America. Her Majesty feels a little awkward and so borrows a book. And what follows is a sweet, wondrous little story: the Queen gradually comes to love reading.

At first she must snatch time in between her official duties, but bit by bit, she works more and more reading into her days in exactly the same wayall book-people do. In this endeavor she's aided by Norman, the smart young man she met at the travelling library and who, for the first part of the book, acts as her text-procurer and overall amanuensis. Bennett handles their relationship with his customary pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, as in the wry passage in which the Queen assesses her strengths in the least likely of venues:

"'Do you know,' she said one afternoon as they were reading in her study, 'do you know the area in which one would truly excel?'
'No, ma'am?'
'The pub quiz. One has been everywhere, seen everything, and though one might have difficulty with pop music and some sport, when it comes to the capital of Zimbabwe, say, or the principal exports of New South Wales, I have all that at my fingertips.'
'And I could do the pop,' said Norman.
'Yes,' said the Queen. 'We would make a good team. Ah well. The road not travelled.'"

Anybody who's read Bennett's always-engrossing diaries knows him to be a diehard reader himself, and in "The Uncommon Reader" he distills some of his thoughts about the process of reading itself. In doing this, he has the perfect foil in the person of Her Majesty:

"The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, was a commonwealth; letters a republic. Actually she had heard this phrase, the republic of letters, used before, at graduation ceremonies, honorary degrees and the like, though without knowing what it meant. At that time talk of a republic of any sort she had thought mildly insulting and in her actual presence tactless to say the least. It was only now she understood what it meant. Books did not defer."

The Queen's newfound love of reading creates consternation in those around her, who are unused to any changes in the living institution she represents. And the most flustered by the change? Why, the dogs of course, little tyrants that they are:

"Indulged and bad tempered though they were, the dogs were not unintelligent, so it was not surprising that in a short space of time they came to hate books as the spoilsports they were (and always have been).
Did Her Majesty ever let a book fall to the carpet it would straightaway be leaped on by any attendant dog, worried and slavered over and borne to the distant reaches of the palace or wherever so that it could be satisfyingly torn apart. The James Tait Black Memorial prize notwithstanding, Ian McEwan had ended up like this and even A.S. Byatt. Patron of the London Library though she was, Her Majesty regularly found herself on the phone apologizing to the renewals clerk for the loss of yet another volume."

Bennett is also shrewd in assessing what kind of a reader the Queen would be - that, for instance, she would have a hard time empathizing with the minute social distinctions that abound in Jane Austen. Broader subjects too get examined in this wonderfully insightful way:

"Feminism, too, got short shrift, at least to begin with and for the same reason, the separations of gender like the differences of class as nothing compared with the gulf that separated the Queen from the rest of humanity."

Bennett doesn't forget his dramatist's duties - even in a hundred pages, he manages to serve up for the reader lots more humor, palace intrigue, a happy ending, and a surprise twist at the end that will have the reader clapping. We here at Stevereads encounter entirely unsuccessful novels that ramble on to five or six hundred pages - this little book should stand as quietly eloquent proof of what a sure craftsman can do with a lot less space.

No Bad Dogs

Our book today is "No Bad Dogs" by Barbara Woodhouse, a bestseller from the early '80s that puts us in mind of the great Renaissance painter who sent home apprentice after frustrated apprentice because, when they asked his advice on how to paint, he'd spend three days creating a little masterpiece in front of them and then say, "Do that."

Some people have a 'knack' with dogs. We've all seen it: dogs act differently around these people, show an almost immediate acceptance of them while still being wary around all others. Dogs have not been forthcoming on the reason for this; it's the single way in which they are inscrutable (although it almost certainly has its ultimate roots in smell, as does virtually everything else in their world).

This 'knack' very probably derives from a lack of fear. Almost all human beings retain just enough contact with their prehistoric cell-memories to feel just the slightest hitch of fear, just the slightest internal pause, when confronted with even the most benign of dogs. This is on one level understandable, since dogs - even in their current profusion of eugenically engineered shapes and sizes - are quite obviously predators (cat people will talk your ear off about how cats are still 'feral,' but nevertheless, cats all bear the most important genetic modification of all: they're all small). Their muzzles are full of teeth - both fangs and great grinders - their bodies are covered in quite visible muscle, and they display every day the vastly superior span of their senses, senses fitted for hunting.

It stands to reason, then, that dogs - even those most pathetically beset by overbred domesticity - would retain the essential hunter's ability to sense fear. In the wild, after all, fear engenders mistakes, and mistakes are invaluable to a hunter: the antelope whose fear prompts it to separate from the herd is the antelope who merits the pack's attention. Even attenuated by generations of interbreeding, that instinct lives in every dog.

People with a 'knack' for dogs have either never had that essential tic of fear or have unlearned it through a lifetime of dogs liking them, obeying them. In any case, they approach dogs differently from the vast majority of mankind, and this is a singular joy for them.

Unless of course they decide to write a dog-training book. A book in which they inevitably end up saying, "Do that" to people who can't possibly do so.

Barbara Woodhouse had a 'knack' with dogs. We here at Stevereads had the pleasure of meeting her, during a book-tour of hers in the mid-'80s. She was a proper, earthy, thatcherite British lady, sure of herself to an extent ungiven to unlanded peoples, and it was clear at once: she had an amazing connection with dogs. They loved her on sight, saw her instinctively as pack-mother, and wanted nothing more than to do what she requested, no matter what.

The 'no matter what' here encompasses a great deal, since if asked Mrs. Woodhouse would sum up her success in dog-training with one word: choke-chains.

Mrs. Woodhouse never met a dog-problem a choke-chain wouldn't help. Oh, not the small-link choke-chains, she quickly assures her readers, no: the large-link versions, which 'cause the dog no discomfort.' Only sayable by someone who's never had one around their own neck.

In truth, as we here at Stevereads can report, choke-chains of any diameter pinch like holy Hell. They are no different whatsoever from today's more popular electronic 'bark collars': in both cases, well-meaning young dog owners have spent their money on a device of torture.

Let's get this straight, for definition's sake: an implement of torture is any device that enables someone to compel another person's behavior or compliance by physically coercive means.

The lady likes choke-chains. She likes them just as our current nine-days-wonder Cesar Milan likes kicking dogs onto their backs and kneeling on them. In both cases, an individual with a genuine knack for dealing with dogs refuses to simply say that and instead push a product, an approach, as the secret of their success.

For Mrs. Woodhouse, the secret is the choke-chain, wide-linked and used with great discretion, mainly to startle the dog into knowing you mean business. In example after example, she's given a problem dog by the dog's owners, applies her choke chain approach and achieves nearly instantaneous results, much to the wonderment of her human clients.

Reading these stories now, thirty years and thirty fads later, it's clear what's happening in them: the dogs, frightened, stubborn, and disoriented, meet Mrs. Woodhouse, almost instantly attune to her (in her books, she refers to this as 'telepathy'), do what she's asking because it's suddenly important to them to do so, get the blissful reward of her thanks, and then get returned to their still-clueless owners. They get the same ill-behaved dog they started with, and Mrs. Woodhouse gets another statistic to pad her success-rate.

The ironic thing, of course, is that her books - especially "No Bad Dogs" -make it clear that she deeply, personally loves dogs (not a claim we'd say is really tenable with Cesar Milan). And not only does she love them, she revels in her connection with them, clearly sensing on some level that this connection is extremely rare:

"I find the chattering that goes on in class by those people who don't concentrate very hampering to this mind communication. It is like constant interference on the radio. But then I don't suppose many people know what a thrill it is to be on the same wavelength as a dog."

This is simply put and undoubtedly true. It isn't a particularly exalted wavelength, it must be admitted - it's mostly about poop and food and endless, endless sleeping, but shot through it all is a talent for affection so strong and pure it puts almost every other species on Earth to shame, and it IS thrilling when you feel it instead of only guessing at it.

That Mrs. Woodhouse could feel all that - that she could sense on some level how rare it is to feel all that - and still champion something as barbaric as a choke-chain is ... well, it's a serious indictment. Who knows, who can count, how many dogs over the last thirty years have been choke-chained into absolute misery because of Mrs. Woodhouse's wrongheaded teachings? We hold the suffering of every single one of them against her.

And yet, as her writings clearly show, she's one of us. Catch her when she's not talking about torture devices, and this couldn't be clearer:

"Why do hundreds of us give up our holidays to stay with them, cry our eyes out when we lose them, defend them against all those horrid people who don't love them and on our deathbeds make provisions for them in preference to our needy families? It is because there is something about a dog that gets to you. Even if you own a problem dog imbued with all the evil the devil himself invented, you still know that, inside that dog, there is something very lovable - a dog that will never criticize you, a dog that doesn't care whether you are from the top or bottom drawer, a dog that doesn't care whether you are clever or stupid, beautiful or hideous, rich or poor. He is yours and you are his."

And there's quite a bit of good old-fashioned rock-solid advice about dog ownership hidden in Mrs. Woodhouse's books, especially "No Bad Dogs." It's just the central theme we must discard, and we must discard it for the same reason we discard 'bark collars' and 'alpha male' nonsense and Cesar Milan's weird attempts to establish physical dominance over a species who could, to an individual, eviscerate him in an instant if they wished to.

It's not that there aren't biologically incorrigible dogs; there are, we've loved more than a few of them and seen them to their tragic ends. But they are not the same as the non-biologically incorrigible dogs, the willful ones, the stupid ones, the stubborn ones, the impossibly entitled ones. These dogs can be argued with, pleaded with, negotiated with ... but at the end of the day, they love us and should be given their way. Victories over the indisciplines of such dear, pigheaded creatures are paltry victories indeed; only a species as neurotic as man would seek them in the first place.

Mrs. Woodhouse's title is entirely right: there are no bad dogs. And since that's true, surely there's no need for choke-chains?

Poetry Class! 2007!

I readily admit, I've got a soft spot for dog-poetry. I've read yards and yards of it, and I've written yards and yards of it, and I don't view it as a poor cousin the verse in general. Men have forged their relationships with dogs for as long as there've BEEN men, or dogs - such a relationship is surely worthy of a song or two. I wish that 'dog' and 'doggerel' weren't so closely linked, but there's nothing I can do about that.

So let's try this one out for our panel of severe judges and see what they make of it:

Elisabetta


The old dog lifts his head, snaps at an insect;
Roused, attempts to get up, raggedly does so,
Hind-legs sprawling on the polished travertine,
Back hunched from lying, and pads across the floor
To find a cooler, more comfortable place.
Where would that be? Here, or else here? He noses
Beneath the curtained windows ... Nowhere pleases,
And he collapses randomly, breathing hard,
With a muffled knock of bones, out of the sun
At least.

Sunburned, robust, Elisabetta
Follows him with her eyes, leaning on a broom
(Her sweeping interrupted to let him pass),
And comments, "Ha bisogno della morte!"


That's by Robert Wells, and I kind of like it. Now let's hear why I shouldn't.

In the Penny Press! ME ME ME

Obviously, INCREDIBLY obviously, the most interesting thing in the latest Atlantic is ME. Specifically, my letter in the letters page:

In his reply to Alecia Flores, who chided him for taking a gratuitous potshot at President Kennedy, Christopher Hitchens - apparently riding is one-trick pony into the ground - takes yet more potshots at a man who can't fire back!

For instance, he refers to JFK as 'the boy president' - a potshot that also has the virtue of being incomprehensible, since Kennedy was forty-three when he was elected president and had already been a congressman, a father, and a combat veteran. How much, one wonders, had Mr. Hitchens done by that age? How would he have liked being called a boy?

And then there's the old favorite: the smirking insinuation that Ted Sorensen, not JFK, wrote 'Profiles in Courage.' We have mountains of sworn statements; we have eyewitness testimony to the actual act of writing (JFK was in the hospital during part of the book's composition, and, predictably, he was a great favorite of the nurses); we have handwritten and annotated drafts of every single page of the book. But does any of that matter? No! Not when a nod and a wink can pass for knowledge of a subject.

And how many witnesses, how many long-suffering dinner guests trapped in mini-lectures by the commander in chief, how many subsequent references and remarks made by JFK himself, does Mr. Hitchens need before he can refrain from implying that Kennedy wouldn't have read such books as Cecil's 'Melbourne' or Agar's 'Price of Union'?

Finally, Mr. Hitchens gets his dramatis personae wrong. JFK wouldn't have been 'the Galahad of Camelot' - of course, he'd have been the king. One wonders how much patience he'd have had with bargain-basement Mordreds.

Of course Hitchens offers no reply - honestly, how could he? Nevertheless, his silence bespeaks a maturity I thought he'd all but lost! That, plus the superb piece in this selfsame issue on Jessica Mitford - at once fervently enthusiastic and coolly appraising - prompts me to declare an end to our nascent blood-feud!

Also in this issue was yet another wonderful, funny article by Sandra Tsing Loh, this one about uber-parents and the grotesque lengths they go to in order to get their little kids into the right grade schools, high schools, and colleges. The whole thing is a delight, but one tasty quote should suffice:

On the one hand, I worry that unless they join some sort of MTV-sponsored witness-protection program, such children have no hope of ever getting laid. (One imagines [the kids and their parents] years down the road, sharing a lone Zima at a vast granite kitchen island as the pair of them nostaligically go through old torts). On the other hand, I have to admit to a grudging admiration for the sheer professionalism, the smoothly oiled Bonnie-and-Clyde teamwork of these academic parent-child hit squads. I too had insanely pushy parents, but in retrospect they seem like pikers. Yes, my Danzig-born mom wrote all my sister's school papers (which my sister then dutifully copied and presented as her own). However, the result was not Ivy League entry but instead, as my sister will joke, 'my strange German syntax, to shake, I have never been able.' When I was a senior at Caltech, my Shanghai-born scientist dad kept calling my dorm room to shout, over the thumping ZZ Top, 'Sandra! Apply to any grad school in any engineering major!' Sadly, thanks to the freedom of the EZ student loan the great cheapskate himself had helped me secure, I was already off dating a rock-bagpipe player and spectacularly bombing my physics GRE. (Out of a possible 99, my percentile was 7 - that's right, one digit - a number so low it inspires almost Talmudic awe in those who hear it uttered).

Hee.

The oddest thing in the issue was Virginia Postrel's piece on Superhero movies called "Superhero Worship" which, despite those two facts, seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with superheroes or superhero movies. Great topic idea, though...

Over in Esquire (the same issue in which Brad Pitt says he and Angelina Jolie will get married once everyone in the country can legally marry), there's a brief interview with a 21-year-old creature named "David Lehre" (apperently, he's a filmmaker who's 'exploding' ... but there's a picture, and he doesn't look old enough to NOCTURNALLY explode, if you catch my meaning) who at one point affirms that he, like all other right-thinking individuals, is a fan of "High School Musical."

There's also a page-long pan of Cesar Milan, the so-called "Dog Whisperer" during which several ACTUAL dog-experts speak up about what a fraud the guy is. I've read his book, but far more importantly I've now seen his show, and I can tell you one thing beyond any doubt: most of the dogs he 'fixes' are only badly surprised, not rethinking their lives.

Domesticated dogs aren't exactly the smartest species in the world, but they know perfectly well that a human isn't a dog. Milan's whole approach - establishing himself as 'alpha dog' and then claiming he gets results when a 'pack' structure then forms with him at the top - well, it just isn't happening on his show. Instead, time after time, you see a dog go blank-eyed and immobile when confronted with this human acting so weird.

Almost all domestic dogs WANT to please humans - they've been genetically engineered over thousands of years to do so. Importing this pack-leader crap is literally turning back the clock 8,000 years.

So if you're having problems with your dog, kindly DON'T bare your teeth and kneel on their chest. Patient conversation will do just fine (except in your case, Beepy ... sorry about that).

Elsewhere in the issue, Tom Junod writes a book review of the Koran that's just a few good sentences shy of being utterly imbecilic. If any of you should happen to read it (i.e. if any of you can teach me how to link directly to it), please disregard it entirely. Even a 'Dummies' book will give you a better introduction to what is, beyond doubt, the most important book in the world today.

But by far the weirdest thing in this issue was Chuck Klosterman's article on 'Survivor' and 'Lost.' Heck, not even the whole article, just one sentence:

" 'Lost' is probably the best network drama in the history of television (The only other candidate might be 'Twin Peaks')."

Even in this day and age of 24-hour inane commentary, that's got to be the single DUMBEST fucking sentence I've read in the month of September.

So we'll close out this edition of In the Penny Press on that note and hope for better sense next time.

'Lost' the best network drama in the history of television? Jesus Christ on a fucking cross.

Books! Breaking faith

When I read the advance notices for Jon Katz' new dog book, A Good Dog, one phrase struck me: a "lifetime dog."

Katz' book is about Orson, an unruly border collie who came into his life and, the book's summaries maintained, changed him and renewed him. Katz uses the term "lifetime dog" to describe that one dog who touches you more than any other - often for reasons that make no sense at all, often despite everything. I automatically started nodding at this concept.

Dog people - that odd, quirky subset of dog-owners who've had many dogs, who almost always have more than one dog at the same time - will tell you this is a true concept. Every once in a while, a dog will come along who touches you deeper and more truly than the others, through no fault of their own.

You love all your dogs, of course. But when one of those special dogs comes along, something deeper inside you is involved, something involuntary and far more coercive than love. It isn't anything you decide, and you can't ever predict it, but if you're lucky, you'll experience it. And Katz is right: it changes you.

Some of you will know that I myself have had a "lifetime dog." Some of you may have met him. Katz is a bit melodramatic about the moment he bonds with Orson: he talks about a 'covenant.'

"I will keep faith with you. I will stay committed to you. We will not quit on each other. We will not give up on each other."

A little hammy, but again, it had me nodding - we make that vow with all our dogs, but in virtually all cases, the promises only go one way. I promise to look after you, to stay with you, to shield you from harm. And in return, well, you'll be you - sometimes wonderful, sometimes frustrating, sometimes funny.

With this special kind of dog, though, the promise goes both ways. They look out for you, indulge in your weaknesses. They, unlike all their brethren, are not only your friends but your ALLIES.

When my 'lifetime dog' was with me, no heartbreak was unsalved, no joy was unechoed, and no trial was unsupported. I was never lonely, and I was never privately lost.

So naturally I was interested in any book that explored this particular slice of dog-life. Katz is a fairly good writer on dogs, so I was happy to get an advance copy of the book.

Imagine my surprise when I read the thing and realized that all the hype-work was entirely wrong. And that Katz was foisting a big fat fraud on the dog-book-buying public, probably unintentionally.

Orson, it turns out, is not a 'lifetime dog.' It's abundantly clear at the book's end that Katz is currently living with his 'lifetime dog,' and it's not Orson.

Orson is a very different kind of dog: the problem dog.

The two are never the same. Problem dogs don't have the clarity or strength to do the work of 'lifetime' dogs. But problem dogs also touch you in a unique way, and it's clear that's what Orson was.

He bites people. He bolts into the street in an attempt to herd cars. He never calms down, no matter how Katz yells at him.

Some of you will know that I myself recently had a problem dog. His name was Dooley, and he was not a good dog. He was haunted - nervous, high-strung, mostly too tense to be happy. Sometimes he was suspicious even of me, and sometimes he would bare his teeth at others.

I lived with it. I schooled myself in patience. I had to, because I'd already made all the promises Katz portrays himself making to Orson. To protect him. To help him. Not to quit on him.

Eventually, Dooley got sick. Even then, I stuck with him as long as he wanted. As long as he needed. He was never anything but a source of anxiety and annoyance to my friends and loved ones (to say nothing of my other dogs), but I stuck by him, because that's what you do with your dogs. Problem dogs moreso than most, because they need it so much more.

I stuck by Dooley, and he died, and I won't lie and say his death didn't have as many elements of relief as grief to it.

Which is why, if Jon Katz walked into this room right now, I'd punch him in the face.

Because two-thirds of the way through A Good Dog, exasperated by Orson's misbehavings, he packs him into the car, drives him to the vet, and has him executed.

Orson springs into the car that brings him to his death. He looks up with deep curiosity into Katz' face as the drugs are administered, no doubt wondering why his human friend was so obviously upset. And then the light goes out in him, and Katz stands up, wipes his eyes, and goes home to write his book about his 'lifetime' dog.

Some of you may know how far I go back with dogs. They aren't a trivial subject with me.

And I say Joh Katz is a traitor. A weakling. A hypocrite. And worst of all, a plain and simple coward.

Orson was being difficult. He was making Katz' life difficult. His dogs were always regular and obedient, good and steady farm dogs like the ones I grew up with, happy little boys and girls who'd no sooner displease their humans than fly unaided through the air. Orson was different - he needed a huge amount of help, inconvenient, time-consuming, and probably expensive help (although the expense would have been considerably lessened if Katz had ever bothered with any kind of systematic attempt to TEACH Orson anything at all)

Almost every dog-person has experienced this at least once. The ones who are no fun. The ones you always need to THINK about, whenever you're going to a friend's house (or a friend is coming to yours), whenever you take them to a dog-park or onto a subway. The ones you need to WORRY about, because they do mad, crazed things.

They can't help it, problem dogs. Dooley couldn't help it. Orson couldn't help it. The only difference is, I didn't have Dooley executed the first (or even the tenth) time he BARKED at me when I tried to leash him up for his nighttime potty break.

Katz can cloak his cowardice all he likes in shamanism and mystical mumbo-jumbo. 'I feel he's out there somewhere' ... well, he sure as Hell isn't HERE - he's gone from the only existence he'll ever have because Katz betrayed the covenant he made. He quit when the going got rough.

Orson was a handful, but Katz was the master: it was his job to take whatever chance sent his way. My friends Andre and his beautiful wife just lost their good old girl, certainly no Miss Manners, a borderline problem dog herself, and my friend Beepy has a problem dog right now as we speak, a dog who's reduced her to tears on any number of occasions.

And I had Dooley.

None of us KILLED our problem child, much less killed them and then maundered on about their MEANING.

Orson is dead today because Katz wasn't up to the task of dealing with him as he was. I've been there, in exactly that position: having a problem dog and wanting more than anything else to FIX them.

You don't fix them by killing them. That's easy and conveniently sentimental, but it's awful. I read the book and came away with one overwhelming (albeit retroactive) urge: give ME Orson! You're not providing him with anything more than confusion: your instructions are inconsistent, your considerations are haphazard. Let me take over. Let me take him off your hands.

A Good Dog is obviously being marketed to the same readers who bought Marley & Me in such huge numbers. But the two books aren't anything alike: Marley is also a problem dog (from the two books' descriptions, a whole lot more of a problem dog than Orson was), but his owners keep faith with him nonetheless, and he lives a long and happy life because they didn't just quit when things got tough.

Here's hoping Katz' craven rationalizings don't make it onto the bestseller list.