Month: August 2013

It’s not as if I have any excuse (you warned me plenty of times) but I’m shocked by how wrecked I am right now. Patrick, Chris and Jessie, thank God, have been holding down the fort on the Dish, because otherwise I’m not sure I could think about much else right now. How can the emotions be this strong? She was a dog, after all, not a spouse or a parent.

And yet, today, as I found myself coming undone again and again, I realized that living with another being in the same room for 15 and a half years – even if she was just a mischievous, noisy, disobedient, charming, food-obsessed beagle – adds up to a lot of life together. I will never have a child, and she was the closest I’ll likely get. And she was well into her teens when she died.

She was with me before the Dish; before my last boyfriend, Andy; before I met Aaron. She came from the same breeder as the beagle my friend Patrick got as he faced down AIDS at the end of his life. I guess she was one way to keep him in my life, so it was fitting that his ex-boyfriend drove me to the farm in Maryland to get her. I was going to get a boy and call him Orwell (poseur alert) but there were only girls left by the time we got there. I didn’t know what I was doing but this tiny little brown-faced creature ambled over to me and licked the bottom of my pants. She chose me. On the ride home, I realized I hadn’t thought for a second what to call a girl dog, and then Dusty Springfield came on the radio.

My friends couldn’t believe I’d get a dog or, frankly, be able to look after one. I was such a bachelor, a loner, a workaholic writer and gay-marriage activist with relationships that ended almost as quickly as they had begun. I thought getting a dog would help me become less self-centered. And of course it did. It has to. Suddenly you are responsible for another being that needs feeding and medicine and walking twice a day. That had to budge even me out of my narcissism and work-mania.

But I also got her as the first positive step in my life after the depression I sank into after my viral load went to zero in 1997. I know it sounds completely strange, but the knowledge of my likely survival sent me into the pit of despair. I understand now it was some kind of survivor guilt, and, after so much loss, I had to go through it. I wrote my way out of the bleakness in the end – as usual. But this irrepressible little dog also pulled me feistily out.

She was entirely herself – and gleefully untrainable. I spent a large part of our first years together chasing her around bushes and trees and under wharfs, trying to grab something out of her mouth. She’d find a disgusting rotten fish way underneath a rotting pier, wedge herself in there, eat as much as she felt like and then roll around in ecstasy as I, red-faced, bellowed from the closest vantage point I could get. There was the year that giant tuna carcass washed up on the sand and I lost her for a split second and nearly lost my mind looking for her until I realized she was inside the carcass, rendering herself so stinky it was worse than when she got skunked. But the smile on her face as she trotted right out was unforgettable. It was the same, proud, beaming face that appeared from under a bush in Meridian Hill Park covered in human diarrhea, left by a homeless person. Score!

Good times: the countless occasions she peed in the apartment, always under my blogging chair, driving me to distraction; her one giant chocolate orgasm, when she devoured two boxes of Godiva chocolates left on the floor by a visiting friend, ate every one while we were out at dinner, and then forced me to chase her around the apartment when I got home, as she puked viscous chocolate goo over everything, until I slipped in it too. Yes, she survived. The rug? Not so much.

She was also, it has to be said, always emitting noise. She had a classic howl, and when the two of us lived in a tiny box at the end of a wharf, she would bay instinctively at every person and every dog she saw come near. It’s cute at first. But after a while, she drove most of my neighbors completely potty. I tried the citronella collar, but she found a way to howl that stayed just below the volume that triggered the spray. Howling was what she did. There was no way on earth I was going to stop it.

But there was one exception to this rule. In my bachelor days, I’d stay out late in Ptown, trying to get laid, and often getting to sleep only in the early hours. I installed some floor-to-ceiling window blinds to block out the blinding sun over the water – so I could sleep late (this was before the blog). Dusty – usually so loud and restless – would wait patiently for me to wake up, and wedge herself between the bottom of the fabric of the blind and the glass in the window. That way, she kept an eye on all the various threats, while basking in the heat and light of the morning. And until the minute I stirred, despite all the coming and going around her, she uttered not a peep. In her entire life, she never woke me up. This is the deal, she seemed to tell me. You feed and walk me and house me on a beach all summer long, and I’ll let you sleep in.

It was a deal. She never broke her part of it; and I just finished mine.

(Photo montage by Aaron Tone.)

Mark Cocker contemplates the cultural cachet of birds:

The central symbolic value that birds play in language, literature, art, thought and religion is that of transformation from one state to another. The idea is ancient, visceral and undeniable. Mesolithic infants have been found buried with their heads resting on swans’ wings. The symbol for the Holy Spirit in the Christian faith is a dove. In south-east Asia cranes carried the souls of the dead to heaven. At weddings throughout the western world people release white doves as a symbol of the couple’s love. In Europe white storks bring the spring. Muslims built hospitals to house injured storks and made it an offence to harm them. Traditionally the symbol of homecoming for sailors was the swallow tattooed on their arms.

The examples are innumerable. Central to them all is the idea that birds often express our most cherished ideas and our most exalted values. Look at the spectrum of national flags and other state insignia. Birds, particularly birds of prey, are everywhere – few other creatures feature. It is surely this association with transcendence, or some tiny fragment of it, that is at work in all our encounters with birds. And it is for this reason that they are so crucial to our relationship with all nature.

Jim Crace shares his experience of swifts, “a bird neither friendly nor unfriendly”:

Here, this evening, in Grasse in the Alpes Maritimes of southern France, the noise trapped in the dilapidated, medieval, traffic-free alleyways and courtyards is deafening and eerie. At least a thousand screaming swifts have condescended to spend an hour close to me. I could almost catch one with a butterfly net if I stretched high enough and if they weren’t such whizz-kids of the wing, celebrating every duck and dive and every taken bug with their falsetto palaver. In the final shadows of the evening, these alpine swifts are closer to my head than either starlings or bats would ever dare to come. They are as close as gnats. I’m standing in the eye of the swarm. But still I cannot claim any intimacy with them. Despite this tumultuous proximity, they are not sharing any of their world with me. There is no interface, no common ground. They’re still aloof. My love for them is vain. All they know about is bugs and air, feeding, flying, moving on. They leave me gaping at an empty sky.

Previous Dish on our feathered friends here and here.

(Photo of flying swifts by Robert T. Britt)

Sarah Stillman spotlights the abuse of civil asset forfeiture laws:

The rise of civil forfeiture has, in some areas, proved of great value. It allows the government to extract swift penalties from white-collar criminals and offer restitution to victims of fraud; since 2012, the Department of Justice has turned over more than $1.5 billion in forfeited assets to four hundred thousand crime victims, often in cases of corporate criminality. Federal agents have also used forfeiture to go after ruthless migrant smugglers, organized-crime tycoons, and endangered-species poachers, stripping them of their illicit gains. Global Witness, the anti-corruption group, recently cheered the Justice Department’s civil-forfeiture action targeting the son of Equatorial Guinea’s dictator, which sought his Malibu mansion, Gulfstream jet, and some two million dollars’ worth of Michael Jackson memorabilia, including a bejewelled white glove.

Yet only a small portion of state and local forfeiture cases target powerful entities.

“There’s this myth that they’re cracking down on drug cartels and kingpins,” Lee McGrath, of the Institute for Justice, who recently co-wrote a paper on Georgia’s aggressive use of forfeiture, says. “In reality, it’s small amounts, where people aren’t entitled to a public defender, and can’t afford a lawyer, and the only rational response is to walk away from your property, because of the infeasibility of getting your money back.” In 2011, he reports, fifty-eight local, county, and statewide police forces in Georgia brought in $2.76 million in forfeitures; more than half the items taken were worth less than six hundred and fifty dollars. With minimal oversight, police can then spend nearly all those proceeds, often without reporting where the money has gone.

Ilya Somin believes that the “best solution is to abolish civil asset forfeiture completely”:

As a practical matter, most of the people victimized by asset forfeiture abuse are poor, lacking in political influence, and unable to bear the expense of prolonged litigation. For these reasons, there is little political pressure to prevent the sorts of abuses documented in Stillman’s article and elsewhere. And there is similarly little incentive for higher officials to monitor police and prosecutors’ use of asset forfeiture to curb this kind of behavior. A categorical ban on civil asset forfeiture would be easier to administer than piecemeal reforms, and therefore more likely to succeed.

In 1970, Dylan released Self Portrait, a notoriously awful album that has confounded many of his fans for decades. When Greil Marcus reviewed it in Rolling Stone, he famously began with the question, “What is this shit?” Now, as part of their “Bootleg Series” that uncovers rarities, outtakes, and unreleased tracks from Dylan’s recording sessions, Columbia Records is releasing Another Self Portrait, offering a fuller picture of what the songwriter was up to at the time. Kevin Courrier thinks we have reason to be optimistic about the album, believing it will show “a man tracing the roots of both his musical path and interests”:

Self Portrait suffers from the sense that Dylan is playing the songs to himself rather than to the listener.

But the samples I’ve heard on Another Self Portrait, from Eric Anderson’s “Thirsty Boots” and Tom Paxton’s “Annie’s Gonna Sing Her Song,” actually reach out to an audience. You hear the threads of what not only came to define the musical territory Dylan had already been mining to that point, but also what would later become the Bob Dylan Theme Time Radio Hour on satellite radio. On that program Dylan, as the host, took us on musical journeys through the history of American music – blues, jazz, show-tunes, rock and folk – using a theme like ‘the weather’ as the clothes line on which he hung the songs. On Another Self Portrait, he also extends to his listeners the country sound he was immersed in with his previous album, Nashville Skyline, by reminding us (as he had on the infamous The Basement Tapes) that his music was not narrowed by the social protests of the topical song. In his mind, the American songbook is an evolving and expanding catalogue tracing a map of the nation’s struggles and triumphs.

Another Self Portrait could very well be the album that Self Portrait wasn’t. It may compare to how Good As I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993) set Dylan up for his series of records (Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft) that brought his voice back to its authentic sound. In those two early Nineties records, Dylan revisited the songs of his youth, earlier versions of the America that would help him come to terms with the country he was living in now. He then set forth to mine his own path with those tracks (“World Gone Wrong,” “Black Jack Davey”) as skeleton keys for his own (“Not Dark Yet,” “High Water (for Charley Patton)”). But we already know that the history that followed those sessions led into the eventual aimlessness that Good As I Been to You got him out of. The only authentic thing about Self Portrait was its portrait of an artist in hiding. What Another Self Portrait might just reveal is more of what Dylan was actually hiding from.

Jen Doll pens a love letter to the books that filled her childhood summers:

There are a great many excellent summer reads, but to me, some of the most moving books of summer are the ones we read way back when we were kids on summer vacation. These stories may be five or 10 or 20 years old, or more, yet they still manage to take us right back to that childhood sense of summer, and wonder, when the days stretched out long and full of possibility, when the sun didn’t go down until 9 p.m. and we could roam free in our neighborhoods, ruling our small worlds, until then. Anything could happen by day, but by night, I’d be tucked in bed with a good book, which I could read with impunity into the wee hours because there was no school the next day. I’m a big believer in re-reading, particularly books we experienced at some long-ago time in our lives, because the power of those stories is not just in their words. They are transportive, letting us remember, re-live, and compare who we were then with who we are now.

Along the same lines, Judith Hertog recently revisited Ivan Turgenev’s classic novel of social change in Russia, Fathers and Sons, and came away surprised by how her response to the work had changed:

On rereading, I had expected to recognize the scenes and characters that moved me years ago. But I could not even guess which passages I had underlined and annotated as a seventeen-year-old. I vaguely remembered being impressed with Bazarov – it was probably one of his speeches that I recommended to my friends – but as an adult, I found Bazarov childishly pompous and recognized him as an insecure young man who holds on to the reassurance of big ideas to avoid having to make emotional connections. He was, in fact, I now realized, the boyfriend with whom I had just broken up when I was seventeen and whom I continued to love obsessively.

On second reading, I found that my sympathy now lies with the older characters, whom Bazarov ridicules. I felt pity for Bazarov’s parents as they try to understand and please their disdainful son. I identified with Arkady’s tenderhearted father, whom Bazarov dismisses as a sentimental fool. I even found myself siding with Arkady’s conservative uncle, Pavel. When, in one of their many quarrels, Bazarov declares that he questions anything that has not been proven, Pavel replies: “We are old-fashioned people; we imagine that without principles… taken as you say on faith, there’s no taking a step, no breathing…” Now that I’m an adult, I’m inclined to agree with Pavel that there is indeed a limit to the power of rational thought. In the twenty-five years between my readings of Fathers and Sons, the elements that originally did not speak to me seem to have germinated and become a part of myself.