The Understanding of Scottiedogs

The understanding of dogs surpasses all understanding -- except (perhaps) the understanding of dogs.

That is to say, they seem to understand us, even if we fail to understand them ... and that is (again, perhaps) the moral of this story.

In our Farmer MacGregor's garden, we are beset by the pestilential presence of long-eared lagomorphs -- those herbivorous mammalians of the snipping teeth and spring-wound hindquarters.

We have owned one live-trap for some time, which has proved helpful in sequestering squirrels, if not rabbits. When I picked up a second live-trap a week or two ago, at a farm auction, I figured I had a better chance of catching a buck-toothed miscreant or two ... for if I had several traps set in various parts of the garden, how could I fail?

The other day I set up the two traps toward the rear of the yard, which adjoins a small overgrown patch belonging to a neighbor. Toward that overgrown patch is where the bunny rabbits, Easter rabbits and Peter rabbits, and all their kin, run to hide once they are spotted by MacGregorian eyes.

Two traps, baited with carrots ... sure to succeed!

Little did I anticipate the strategy of wily rabbithound Scottiedog Lorna, who immediately made it a practice of rushing down the lane between the grape vines, empowered with an humanitarian sense of immediacy, while barking out, "Trap! Trap! Trap!" The traps were no more than live traps, of course -- but when a ferocious little Scottiedog comes zipping along with a jawful of helpful warning, how is a rabbit to know that a somewhat innocuous transplantation to the outskirts of the village was to be the full extent of the dread fate awaiting the entrapped?

Rabbits are all ears, though. Being all ears they have few if any places left in their already tiny heads for brains ... so upon hearing said Scottiedog, they swallowed said Scottiedog Lorna's line, and twitched their noses wisely at one another as they blithely passed by the enticing chunks of carrots.

Martha and I know this to be so: for we have observed that the traps have remained empty.

The other evening, though, Lorna showed the fruits of her strategy: for she came to show us one of the rabbits which had followed her warning (you may recall it: "Trap! Trap! Trap!") -- and which had, as a consequence, steered well clear of those devious wire-and-carrot contraptions.

Admittedly, Lorna showed Martha and me something less than the totality of the wise little rabbit that had evaded the traps.

But that is the way of Scottiedogs. Had Lorna shown us the whole rabbit, it might have seemed boastful, on her part. So she showed us only as much as modesty permitted.

The part she brought to us, when she trotted up the garden path, was the leggiest part of a wise little long-eared and boundingly leggy creature.

This leggy part is, I admit, one of the of the most characteristic parts of the rabbit.

Not the most characteristic part, though. Since bringing us that leggy part and the ears might have seemed a bit obvious, she opted for understatement.

This proves, perhaps (I say, yet again) that Lorna can speak with other animals. (Or is that not what I set out to establish ... I am no longer clear on the matter. I took a shovel and buried the documentation Lorna brought us. I suppose I should have kept it ... scientifific evidence ... etc.)

Cheers ...

Aging Spring Wines

An aspect that may take years for me to gain some handle upon is the effect of aging on different wines. General wisdom calls for aging a wine at least half a year and ideally a year. Beyond that, my impression is that wines have a certain stability, after that first year's aging.

Is this the actually the case with spring wines? Last Thursday, coming home from a day's labors -- literally labors in my case, since I had been doing some concrete work -- I fetched up a Wine 22, a dandelion wine that had seemed quite satisfactory when sipped during the time of dandelion blooming, and in the month or so before that.

On Thursday the flavor seemed to me less than ideal -- making me wonder if these wines should not be enjoyed early in spring, and finished before the arrival of summer. The wine is still changing as the season does, after all.

Does it not seem possible that the wine is at its peak at that point of its first year of age, when its ingredients are again fresh at hand, in yard and field?

Is it not just as possible that the spring-influenced imbiber is at peak receptivity for the product of the season being re-experienced?

Another thought is that basement temperatures may be part of the picture. Those temperatures are now rising from their winter lows. Bringing a wine up from the basement is not the same as it was: for the wine I bring up today, though cool, is warmer than the somewhat chilled wine I brought up in April.

Chilling the wine does seem to restore some of that spring freshness. I remain uncertain, however, about whether the wine tastes quite as good as it did when the yellow brightness of riant dandelion blooms adorned the yard.

Cheers ...

Strawberry Wine, Part III

In our days of rainy picking we had filled a few bowls.

Over the years we have accumulated a stash of stainless-steel containers, mostly bowls, which come in for regular service during the summer. At the beginning of this week we were at the point, in fact, of having bowls of strawberries, fully ripe, on two refrigerator shelves, while other bowls of ripe or ripening berries were taking up space on kitchen table and kitchen window ledge ... prompting Martha to make noises about running out of bowls for gathering greens from the garden and for making the evening salad.

So late Monday I was preparing the five-gallon crock and measuring out ingredients based on a wine we liked from last year's efforts of around this time.

Enlarging the recipe called for enough strawberries to half-fill the rock, before their being chopped and mashed down. I washed and emptied large bowl after large bowl of berries -- not quite depleting our stores, but completely using all but the ones still ripening.

Twelve and a half pounds ...

It astonishes me still -- having such a quantity of such fleeting delicacies ... mashed up and given over to the labors of yeasts.

Cheers ...

Puritan Planet, Part III

In the biography C.M. Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary, I discuss the elements in Kornbluth's stories "The Little Black Bag" and "The Silly Season" that allow them to be read as critiques of his chosen form, which was science fiction. Similarly, elements appear in Carol Emshwiller's "Puritan Planet" that allow it to be read as a critique of science-fiction, as a pulp genre.

A story that is emblematic of the masculine viewpoint in pulp science fiction is the famous Tom Godwin story "The Cold Equations," in which the feminine principle, the anima, the "girl," of the story is jettisoned to die in the vacuum of outer space, putatively because the action is necessary in order to save lives. The definite murder is justified by the indefinite possibility of preserving numbers of others.

Kornbluth's being a fiction of the divided individual, it interests me that this emblematic "hard science fiction" story is also symbolically a piece of fiction of the divided individual, with the anima separated and then rooted out from the masculine soul. (Interesting, too: Rick Bowes' story mentioned here recently, "Pining To Be Human," has a conflicted main character who "sees" his anima in an external manifestation. The word "anima" even appears from the lips of a character who is a woman of insight.)

In "Puritan Planet," the anima plays a redemptive role. The "she," who is called "girl" by Morgan, is a cat who simply by existing resolves the conflict of the story. The cat is named Cat -- which as Cat or Kat can be a shortened form of a woman's name. Cat's presence in the crash-landed ship calls into action Brotherhood's social organization named Animal Welfare. Cat is "a poor dumb animal" -- the defenseless, voiceless anima -- who nevertheless speaks and defends, in resolving the story's crisis; and she does so in a way outside the ability of the male aspect, as represented by Morgan. The soul's coherence, in other words, brings the story to closure. This stands in contrast to the sacrifice of coherence that brings "The Cold Equations" to closure.

It might be too much to call Carol's story brilliant -- the alert reader, for instance, knows from the beginning that Cat will prove a pivotal figure. Yet it rolls out some verbal felicities ("It was still and black and beautiful, and he wanted to stay in the soft, warm, dark forever ... "); and it offers ample reward when regarded from the historical perspective. It also suggests to me that Carol's works are of a piece -- that there is coherence to be found there, scattered across the course of decades.

Cheers ...

Picking in the Rain

A rainy June leads to your having many moments of being down with knees to the damp ground, leaning forward among wet leaves and reaching for ripening berries. Mornings -- the strawberries beneath the row of grapes where the plants grow rampant. Evenings -- same areas again, and then in the fenced-in, protected strawberry beds. So you are getting wet first thing and then again last thing, the way these days have been going.

Yesterday, I opted to leave the house a little early, to walk up the hill and do some Maple Valley work. I left all the picking for the later gray hours of the day. At work we watched the clouds and the rains through large windows. When late afternoon arrived and the three of us -- Martha, Lorna and me -- were home from the job, as we were settling down to enjoy a revivifying nip of whisky, the sun started peering and then staring out from between clouds.

"Picking strawberries in the sun ... why, that is not how it is done," I joked. The irony of the evening, when the sky-change might have made the picking of berries more an idle pleasure and less a sodden task, is that I never got around to picking. We were looking into ideas and possibilities for this and that -- mostly writing-related travel later in the year -- so that suddenly I noticed we had reached the point in the evening when, even with a clear sky above, things were too dim for seeking reddening glimpses among the greenery.

Cheers ...

Puritan Planet, Part II

Carol Emshwiller's "Puritan Planet" is interesting additionally (see previous posting) in that it can be read as a commentary on the masculine hierarchy.

The hero, Morgan, in is a forced-landing situation -- with the landing complicated by the fact that the obviously inhabited world he is landing upon offers him no support for his landing there.

The planet is named Brotherhood.

Morgan reflects on the irony of this name in the face of its uninviting aspect. Later, when in contact with its representatives, he finds himself speaking with individuals who state their concern, first and foremost, for the children of their planet.

Morgan is seen by these inhabitants of Brotherhood as not a "brother" but as a threat to these children. He is seen in this negative light due to his displays of masculine coarseness. Because he is seen as a threat to the children's innocence, he is left to die in the place where he has crash-landed.

The Brotherhood representatives, in other words, give lip service to a maternally nurturing spirit. In their actions, or inaction, however, they demonstrate a brutal, perhaps violent, perhaps masculine character.

Brotherhood is isolationist and exclusionary, rather than open and receptive to outside influences and to possible change.

Cheers ...

Puritan Planet

Reading Carol Emshwiller's "Puritan Planet" has generated several thoughts. One is that Carol's distinctive contribution to the science fiction pulp genre reflects a mindset that echoes well with the current concerns of Wiscon attendees.

The central character of "Puritan Planet" is "a big, square man" whose name is Morgan. However big and square he may be, from the opening paragraph he is displaying elements in his character somewhat at odds with that big squareness. He is deeply and unquestioningly concerned for the welfare of others who cannot care for themselves, to the extent of placing himself at some risk when acting protectively; and in his manner he is freely expressive of his feelings.

In Carol's more recent fiction -- here I am speaking from general memory, not of a particular work --- a sort of character appears who may be described as male but who displays openness, curiosity, sympathetic feelings, and some amount of capricious logic -- none of which are necessarily feminine aspects but which resonate nicely with my understanding and experience of what it is that, at times, makes female personalities valuably different from male personalities.

This stands in contrast to some overtly feminist fiction, in which the female characters are strong, decisive, experience-hardened, and not at all capricious or outwardly emotive. They are emulations of an old masculine model -- one that saw heavy deployment in the pulps, including the science fiction pulps. (In speaking of "some overtly feminist fiction," I am again speaking from general memory, from my reading experiences of perhaps a decade ago -- so these impressions may, of course, be less than perfect.)

What Carol seems to have done from early in her career was to conform to the pulp model of the masculine hero (Morgan is big and square and, importantly to this story's proceedings, one who curses freely) while at the same time housing within this masculine outwardness a richness of character that seems in many ways to be female in its expression.

Her approach might be regarded as subversive, because of this. She was subverting the pulp hero to serve her own non-traditional artistic ends.

Yet this approach may have been a natural expression of Carol's personality, and not a conscious practice intended as subversive. The approach reflected her instinctive way of adapting to the given marketplace situation.

Cheers ...