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Daily Mammal Book Club: MFAOA 3

Hi Mammals! Welcome back to the book club! (The previous meetings are here and here.) Today we have a guest club leader, my husband Ted. (By the way, if anyone is interested in kicking off the discussion with a guest post in this or any other possible future book club series, just let me know!) Here's Ted on My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell:

I’m rather behind in my reading of our current Book Club offering, My Family and Other Animals. But I wanted to share a little about the character of Spiro, for I believe I may have once met his grandson.

Spiro seems to have adopted them as his own from the moment they set foot on land, as their loyal manservant -- limo driver, real estate agent, bodyguard and family counselor. Presumably he’s being paid a salary, or tipped well, for his services, though the book doesn’t go into this. The appearance is that Spiro simply latches onto them like a puppy for the sole purpose of helping them in every way. Is this realistic, or is Gerald Durrell offering us an overly rosy, idealized view of things?

I visited Greece for a couple of months about twenty years ago, with Eudokia, a girlfriend at the time who was Greek, and who was living in an apartment in Athens near family. We’d met in Art School, and she decided to move there for about six months to paint and reconnect with Greece; I cam along for a couple of months to stay with her. So though we did a fair share of sightseeing and touristy things, I lived there as a resident, not a tourist.

The Greek people are extremely warm and inviting to strangers, generous with their time and their hospitality, and do indeed seem to form quick loyalties to those they deem as friends. I remember one young man, a friend of a friend, who took on the task of host for us when we went out to a large, late dinner with a group of Eudokia’s friends, as the Greeks often do. I remember that he was an avowed Communist who nevertheless wanted nothing more than high-status American goods -- when he came to visit the States a few months later he spent all his time looking for Timberland shoes and the best VCRs.

Anyway, he was gregarious and energetic, greeted me with a hug and a slap on the back, and from that moment he was my best friend and loyal advocate for the evening. At one point when the group’s conversation had gone back to nearly everyone’s native Greek, he stopped everyone and said, “my friends, we have a guest here! He is from America! We must speak only English tonight!”

His name was Niko, but it might as well have been Spiro. I’ll never forget him.

Rats Three Ways (Neotoma spp.)

The Daily Mammal Book Club is discussing My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell. Join in!

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Here are three rats for you! They're in the wood rat or pack rat genus, Neotoma. Clockwise from the top left, we have N. cinerea (bushy-tailed wood rat), N. floridana (eastern wood rat), and N. lepida (desert wood rat). Wood rats are also sometimes called trade rats. Mammalian Species quotes a 1946 guide to the mammals of Nevada:

"It is supposed that when one of these rats carrying an object of its fancy comes to another more attractive object, it drops the first and continues on its way with the second. If the second object be the watch of a camper, who in the morning finds a piece of old bone where the watch lay when the camper went to sleep the evening before, he will think the name trade rat appropriate."

Just, you know, hypothetically, right?

There are two words related to wood rats that you may not know. Both could prove useful in describing, say, someone's housekeeping. Middens means a pile of bodily waste or a dunghill. Amberat is a deceptively beautiful word meaning crystallized rat urine. (I don't know if it's a portmanteau from amber and rat, but I hope so. I really love this word.) Here, in a book about the Grand Canyon, is a chapter all about amberat, and here is a photograph of it at UtahCaver.com. Apparently, it has a red-gold color and can be built up to several inches thick. It may or may not have a sweet smell.

Amberat helps fossilize wood-rat middens for later examination by interested parties. Archaeologists have found rodent middens that are 50,000 years old. The rats use the same middens for generations, so there's all kinds of intriguing stuff in there. At Mesa Verde, they've found middens that show signs of exposure to smoke, suggesting that the wood rats coexisted with the Anasazi.

Commerson's Dolphin (Cephalorhynchus commersonii)

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This dolphin is also called the piebald dolphin. You know who else is piebald? The horse in National Velvet. That's where I first learned the word. It's a lovely word. It comes from the magpie, which is black and white, and an old definition of bald that meant "streaked with white." The Pied Piper of Hamelin is so called because of his particolored outfit. Another nice word is skewbald, which means brown and white patches.

Oddly (I think it's odd, anyway), there are two subspecies of Commerson's dolphin found in two rather far-apart places, and that's it. One group is around the Falkland Islands and the southern coasts of Chile and Argentina. The other is in the Kerguelen Islands, which are in the Indian Ocean some 3,000 miles southeast of Africa's southern tip.

Daily Mammal Book Club: MFAOA 2

Hi again, mammals! The discussion about My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell is going great so far. We've probably all read a little further into the book by now, but remember, even if you haven't read any of it at all, you can still participate in the club meetings. Here are some things I thought about over the past week:

• In a comment on last week's post, Grace said that she gets impatient with the description in the book, and Clare said that her mother feels the same way. (Grace is my mother, by the way!) Some of the Amazon reviewers said the same thing: they skip the descriptive passages to get to the stories about the family. I often skip long descriptions in books, too, but for some reason, in this book, I don't do that. I think I'm getting into the pace of it. Plus, Durrell's descriptions are just so good! If I were teaching creative writing, I think I would use this book as an example of how to write good description.

• The poor mother! I just love the transition from Part 1 to Part 2. Part 1 ends:

"We are not moving to another villa," said Mother firmly; "I've made up my mind about that."

She straightened her spectacles, gave Larry a defiant glare, and strutted off towards the kitchen, registering determination in every inch.

And then Part 2 begins:

The new villa was enormous…

I suppose it's a fairly easy comic trick to pull, but it cracked me up nevertheless.

• Man, I want to live in the daffodil-yellow villa. The faded walls, the overgrown gardens, the olive groves and orange trees, the bees, the view of the sea…I just love it. It's exactly my vision of how a villa in a Mediterranean country should be.

• I was thinking about how charmingly Durrell anthropomorphizes animals. When Madame Cyclops lays her eggs: "She turned round, lowered her hind end over the hole, and sat there with a rapt look on her face while she absentmindedly laid nine white eggs." The scorpions in the wall: "The scorpion would lie there quite quietly as you examined him, only raising his tail in an almost apologetic gesture of warning if you breathed too hard on him." One of the male birds: "The other male now became terribly harassed and apparently a prey to the dreadful thought that his babies might starve." And Roger after the scorpions escaped at lunch: "Since no one had bothered to explain things to him, Roger was under the mistaken impression that the family were being attacked, and that it was his duty to defend them."

Ordinarily, I'm not a big proponent of anthropomorphization. (Jeez, that's a difficult word to type.) But I love the way Durrell does it. In a pretty straightforward way, it helps to create a clear picture of an animal, making it sympathetic and a subject of interest. I think that in order to care for and respect animals, we have to understand that they do have their own thoughts and lives. I don't know if a turtle can be absentminded, a scorpion apologetic, or a bird harassed and a prey to dreadful thoughts, but being able to relate to them on an emotional level is, I think, ultimately good for both the animals and us. In this case, the accuracy of the thoughts and emotions we ascribe to the animals isn't as important as the fact that we're taking the time to imagine those thoughts and emotions. What do you think?

Coffee Achievers Days: Formosan Rock Macaque (Macaca cyclopis)

The Daily Mammal Book Club discussion of My Family and Other Animals is in full swing!

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Here's one last Coffee Achiever: the Formosan rock macaque, who eats coffee berries and spits out the pits, like you and I would do with cherries. Supposedly, people roast the spit-out coffee beans and sell the coffee for big bucks. I'm just glad to know that someone appreciates having the monkeys around for some reason. Here are some excerpts from news articles about these Taiwanese macaques from the past decade:

Representatives of villagers in Jiayi, Taiwan Province, are negotiating with the local government to let them catch a bunch of mischievous monkeys, which have been causing havoc in five neighboring villages.

The monkeys have bitten newborn piglets to death and chased after frightened children.

The monkeys have even picked fruit and wastefully thrown them everywhere. Villagers have failed in their attempts to scare the monkeys away, and have asked the government to approve a crack monkey-catching team to help them deal with this monkey madness. (China Daily, 2007)

Farmers in southern Taiwan have reported that Formosan macaques, a protected primate species, are becoming so outrageous that they are now milking goats, a local evening newspaper reported yesterday.

The paper quoted Tsai Fu-ching, chief of Tsaishan Li in Kaohsiung City, confirming the reports.

Tsaishan residents said that they have often seen the monkeys milking goats in the past, adding that they tended to appear in the morning and would hang around with the goats in order to steal their food. Not satisfied with this petty larceny, they then grab the goats' teats and milk them.

Tsai said that the goats do not resist and do not seem alarmed by the monkeys, possibly because they are so used to their presence. (Taipei Times, 2001)

The farmers complained that the monkeys take their fruit, ravage farmland, and even sometimes harass women and children. (Taipei Times, 2004)

Daily Mammal Book Club: MFAOA 1

Welcome to the first book club meeting, mammals!

Let's start talking about My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell! To keep it really simple, I thought I'd just throw out a few things and then open up for comments, and we'll see how it works. Also, please don't think that you can't contribute to the discussion if you haven't read the book: you definitely can!

I don't know how far y'all are in your reading, so I'm going to talk about the beginning of the book, y'know, the first few chapters. Some of my thoughts:

• I love the merciless way he pigeonholes his family members into particular characterizations. Margo with her acne, Leslie with his guns, Larry with…oh, Larry. He's the funniest of all. If you didn't know, he's Lawrence Durrell, who became a pretty well known author. I haven't read any of his works, though, but it does make Gerry's descriptions funnier, don't you think, knowing that? And then there's the poor put-upon mother.

• How about the very concise way Durrell passes the family through Europe on their way to Corfu? "France rain-washed and sorrowful, Switzerland like a Christmas cake, Italy exuberant, noisy, and smelly, were passed, leaving only confused memories." Just those few words really do evoke a whole trip, somehow. (Page 6 in my Penguin paperback copy.)

• The very words "The Strawberry-Pink Villa" (the title of chapter 2) create a picture to me. I think Durrell's combined gifts for humor and description are quite remarkable. I love the way he can almost just list things, like fuchsia hedges, creamy green shutters, white cobbled paths, luxurious bougainvillea, etc., and it creates this lush, exotic (to me), redolent world. (Do you know any other writers who do that? It kind of reminds me of Francesca Lia Block's Los Angeles in her Weetzie Bat books: all orange trees and hot dog stands and pink stucco and convertibles.)

• What do you think about the narration being from a child's point of view? It's interesting how a child would necessarily see things differently from his family. I wonder if other members of the family (Larry, perhaps) have written memoirs of this time. It would be interesting to read their different perspectives.

• Speaking of children, what a paradise Gerry has there. It's safe to explore endlessly, accompanied by your loyal dog, nature is lush and vibrant, school is minimal (do you like his school setup?), your family is amusing and indulgent, and strange characters are everywhere. What do you think of Durrell's descriptions of the inhabitants of the island?

That's enough from me for now. Pipe in and share your thoughts!