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Alex Washoe

What we talk about when we talk about turtles

When I was young, I loved the library.  I would check out as many books as I could find and bring them home.  I would read just about anything -- history, biography, science, mysteries, fantasy, science fiction -- but what I loved most was books about writing.  I soon learned that the 808 section of the Dewey Decimal System was my home -- and especially 808.3.  I would check out everything I could find.  I had the old Writer's Handbook volumes published by The Writer Magazine, with their articles by famous writers.  I had Dean Koontz’s book Writing Popular Fiction long before he was famous.  Every month I got Writer's Digest, and for my birthday each year my parents would buy me the new Writer's Market.  I could spend hours on my bed just leafing through that book, marveling at all the different kinds of publications and imagining what I might write for them.

 

(It may just be the rosy glasses of hindsight, but I remember WD as a very different magazine back then than it is today.  Lawrence Block wrote a monthly column on fiction and Judson Jerome wrote about poetry.  Those columns seemed almost inexhaustible to me.  Nowadays, when I break down out of nostalgia or boredom and buy an issue, it just seems shallow and commercial -- filled with ads for their seminars and editing services -- and recycling the same advice I read as a kid, in much less entertaining fashion.  I'd like to think that, for someone coming to the magazine fresh today, it's as exciting and valuable as it was for me.  But somehow, I don't believe it.)

One year -- I must have been in the sixth of seventh grade, what would be called a tween today -- my family spent a week at a lake house that belonged to a friend of my mother.  This isn't the place to get into my mother's "special friendships" and the weirdness that entailed for a young boy.  It's enough to say the house belonged to someone she knew from the tiny private airport where she worked.  She worked there to pay for her flying lessons.  My mother was a pilot.  In the mid-seventies in South Carolina my divorced mother was a college student (in philosophy) and a pilot.  I remember that we flew out to the lake in a small seaplane.  It could seat six people I think, but there was only my mother, her boss from the airport, and my brother and me.  We came in low over the lake, and when the pontoons hit there was a jolt, then a hop, another jolt, and we were gliding smoothly across the surface of the water.

(The seaplane reminds me of my father, who was not with us, because my father was a water skier -- pontoons look like big skis -- and when he was young he could start off sitting at the dock and ski all around the lake until he finally let go of the rope and glided easily into shore -- never once going into the water.  That was on a different lake.)

That summer I had a lot of books with me.  I had Forester's Aspects of the Novel and a big Writer's Handbook filled with articles by writers who, even then, were mostly a decade in the past.  I sat out on the deck of the house and read watched the lake.  I read about point of view and characterization and plot.  And every couple of pages I would lay the book down -- or just hold it with one finger marking my place -- and daydream stories in my head. 

That summer, for some reason, I was thinking of sea turtles.  Aquatic turtles that lived underwater.  In addition to my writing books, I almost certainly had books with me about wildlife and books about dinosaurs.  Those were my other obsessions.  I was imagining a novel about turtles. It didn't seem at all odd to me that you could write great literature -- serious literature -- and it could be about animals. I loved Watership Down.  I don't remember what the turtles in my imagined story were doing, but I have images of them swimming deep down beneath the water -- beneath blue green water, and on the sandy bottom there were old bottles, sunken boats (the lake wasn't big enough for ships), and the ruins of collapsed piers.

When I was even younger, my parents and I were walking on a pier one day -- I think this might have been at Myrtle Beach -- and it collapsed underneath us.  It's one of those events that I don't so much remember as I remember others remembering it.  But I think the sense of it stayed in my bones, because I dreamt once of swimming underneath a low pier, being trapped underneath it, and finding that I could miraculously breathe through the water.  I've never been really comfortable in deep water.

To this day, books about writing are my favorite books.  Last year I kept John Gardner's The Art of Fiction by my bed and read a couple of pages every night before I went to sleep.  I know Gardner's book almost by heart, but I found it very comforting, as if an old friend was talking to me as I fall asleep.  Fiction, he says, should be like a vivid, unbroken dream -- first in the writer's mind, and then in the mind of the reader.  Like a seaplane, I imagine, coming in for a landing on a large, still lake on a summer evening, racing to catch up with its reflection, and merging with it. Like a turtle paddling down to the sandy bottom.  Like discovering you can breathe underwater.

5 Perspectives on Point-of-View

1.      There are infinite shades of POV

“Basically, there are three choices for POV – first person, third person limited, and third person omniscient.” 

If you read a lot of advice on writing – in books, magazines or blogs – you’ve probably heard something similar to that a thousand times.  Often, the advice giver will go on to admit – grudgingly – that there are a few other variations.  (Like second person, if you’re feeling really pretentious and affected.)  And they will tell you that omniscient viewpoint is “old fashioned”, out of date – and anyway, too fraught with peril for any beginning writer to consider.  So pretty, much, your choices are first person and third person limited.  In fact, third person limited with multiple viewpoint characters – with the POV shifts scrupulously divided by chapters, or possibly scene breaks (but never ever ever happening within a scene!) is pretty much the default for big suspense novels, epic fantasies and the like.  

This is a lot like telling a painter there are only three colors:  red, blue and yellow.  In a way, that’s true.  And you could produce some interesting paintings (or at least comic books) using that idea.  But you would be severely limited.  There’s an entire world of things you couldn’t render realistically – and you’d have a hell of a time representing perspective or depth.

POV is sort of the same way.  We could think of third person (limited and omniscient and all the “in-between”), first person, and second person as primary POV’s.  They’re at the corner of the of the color triangle.  Between them, though, are all the shades of the spectrum – as Mr. Spock used to say, “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.”

A lot of people who should know better – editors, agents and even other writers – will make it sound like there are rules for POV.  As with anything in writing – or art (or business or love or life) – there is really only one rule:  YOU HAVE TO MAKE IT WORK.

In Moby Dick, which is arguably the greatest of all American novels, Herman Melville starts in first person (“Call me Ishmael.”  An opening that is not quite as clear cut as it seems – notice he doesn’t say, “My name is Ishmael”, does he?)  Then, about a third of the way into the book, once the voyage of the Pequod is underway, Ishmael’s first person voice pretty much disappears, and we find ourselves in something that looks a lot like old school omniscient – complete with long essay-like passages about whaling, whale anatomy, metaphysics, and other topics – then at the end of the book Ishmael’s voice returns to wrap up the story.  No explanation, no apologies.  Just try getting that past your writing group.

William Faulkner, in the story “A Rose for Emily” uses the voice of the town – a sort of collective “we” – to narrate the events.  More recently, Stephen King, in Salem’s Lot has passages in which the town itself is the POV, and we jump rapidly through different locations and characters to see what is going on.  Peter Straub picked this technique up from King and expanded it brilliantly in Ghost Story, where the town sections gives us a grisly overview of what is going on everywhere – something none of the characters could know. Ghost Story, like most of Straub's work, is a wonderful example of the range and power of effects that can be achieved by experimenting with unusual POVs.)

2.      A Memoir by Any Other Name is Still Not a Novel

You could write a long essay – or a book or a PhD thesis – on how it is that third person limited came to be the default POV in American fiction in the twentieth century.  To be brief, I don’t think it’s an accident that this kind of fiction coincides with the rise of memoirs as a major literary form.  The twentieth century, in America and the Western World, at least, was a time when a lot of people who had never had a voice – never been able to tell their stories – finally got the chance.  There was an incredible release of political and social energy there.  And it re-shaped the arts.  We became convinced that writing was about “telling your story”, and that the most important element of art was “self-expression”.  I am skeptical about that, to say the least.  I understand the importance of telling certain stories, and of speaking things which have long been forbidden or repressed.  But we lost something along the way.

I don’t think it’s an accident that the novel as a form corresponds historically to the rise of liberal democracies and multi-cultural societies.  As Jane Smiley (Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel) has pointed out, one of the most powerful effects of the novel is that it allows us to experience other lives, other times, and other points of view.  It expands our sense of what it means to be human.  The novel – as opposed to older forms like poetry and romance – was frequently about the part of society that had been left out and forgotten.  It was about women, common people, even slaves.  The power of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the bestselling novel of the nineteenth century in America, which Lincoln only half-facetiously credited with starting the civil war, was not that it was another polemic against slavery – it was that for the first time in popular culture it presented slaves as whole people with complex inner lives.  Once readers have made that leap – once they had glimpsed that possibility – it was damnably hard to go back.

The great eighteenth and nineteenth century novelists had a kind of ambition to encompass the entire world – or at least the whole of a certain society – within their work.  Think of Tolstoy sweeping across Europe in War and Peace or of Dickens scandalizing London by showing the hidden connections between all the social classes.  That’s how the novel works.  The defining characteristic of the greatest novels is not “self-expression” – its empathic imagination.  

To be fair, I should admit that I’m not really fond of memoirs as a form.  I seldom read one that doesn’t contain a dog or a scientist.  The difference between a great memoir and a great novel is the difference a good home movie and the Sistine Chapel. 

3.      Third Person Limited is Just First Person in Drag

Henry James once remarked that, for any work longer than a short story, the First Person point of view was “barbaric”.  That might be (as John Gardner has suggested) going a bit far – but there’s point to be made.  First person is tailored to certain kinds of stories – Raymond Chandler and his descendents for instance made it the standard for private eye fiction – and most mysteries still use it.  This kind of fiction depends heavily on voice.  There are mystery series that I read not because I care that much about the plots, or who-dunnit, but because I like the main characters, appreciate her (these days it often seem to be “her”) voice, and like spending time in that world.    

Outside of mysteries, Huckleberry Finn is the classic example.  It is, ultimately, Huck’s voice that we remember, his peculiar take on the world.  The same could be said of contemporary writers like Robert B. Parker.  I’m not sure I could remember the storyline of any given Spenser novel all the way through, or could separate the scenes in my mind by what book they came from.  But who cares? I can pick up any one of his books, read the first paragraph, and I’m hooked.  I’m seduced by the voice.  That is the power of first person at its best.

The drawbacks though are serious.  First person makes it very hard to achieve any kind of real scale.  The first person narrative is limited in scope.

Third person limited (note that adjective) has the same drawbacks – and lacks both the immediacy and the voice of first.  Its strength is that it can take us deeper inside a character than any other viewpoint (except that omniscient can do that too, and still have the greater scope at its disposal).  Seeing through the character’s eyes gives the writer the opportunity to explore perception, to color the world by the character’s thoughts and feelings.  This can be very effective – and this kind of subjectivity has been the obsession of twentieth century literature.  The problem with it – I believe – is that it traps us in a world where nothing is ever true – just “perceived”.  And where our viewpoint – the writer’s, the character’s, human being’s – is all there is.

This is probably the place to say that I’m really tired of the whole “unreliable narrator” shtick.  We get it.  People don’t always tell the truth – even to themselves.  How you see much of the world depends on where you stand.  It’s possible that we’re all crazy.  Yep, we get it.  It’s been done.  Like photo-realism in painting, it’s an interesting experiment – once or twice.  Then …

4.      You don’t need God to be Omniscient

Many critics believe that omniscient viewpoint in fiction lost favor in part because of the breakdown in our religious world view – the onslaught of science, philosophy and skepticism broke down the old certainties, and it was no longer possible to be quite so confident that there was an over-riding truth, or even an objective reality.  Maybe POV is all there is.  This was a revolutionary idea in the nineteenth and early twentieth century (and apparently still is, at least in Hollywood, which explains why Phillip K. Dick is the only science fiction writer a lot of people can name).  It is an idea, I think, that has pretty much run its course.

Science shows us that, while it may never be possible to find absolute certainty about the world, it is possible to grope our way to better and better approximations of it.  Some things are true independent of belief.  (If you step off a twenty story building, you’re going to fall – no matter what your deeply held personal convictions are.)  

I don’t see why fiction can’t reflect this.  What if our omniscient viewpoint was not God, but evolution?  Or Deep Time? Or just the ecological web of life itself?

Step out in your yard for a second.  Close your eyes.  Listen past the traffic noises and the neighbor kids playing.  What do you hear?  Find the sounds of life going on around you.  What are the concerns of the songbirds in the trees?  The rats tunneling under the fence?  The opossum sleeping in the back of your garage with her babies in a pouch?  Where are they in our fiction?

When we limit our ideas of POV, we don’t just limit our style.  We limit the kinds of stories we can tell.  We limit whose stories we can tell.

As an everyday person, I’m small.  Selfish, impatient, opinionated.  But as a writer, as a Novelist, I should be more. I should contain multitudes.

5.      Don’t Use POV to cheat your reader

I said above that first person was the most common POV for mysteries – where-as large scale suspense novels are often written in some form of third person – usually with multiple viewpoint characters.  There’s a reason for that.  And it has to do with the difference between mystery and suspense.

Imagine a group of characters standing around a table.  On the table is a box.  If none of the characters – or the reader – know what’s in the box, it’s a mystery.  Mystery is basically an intellectual effect.  We wonder and think about what could be in the box.  First person, or very close third person, works beautifully for mysteries because the reader doesn’t know any more than the narrator and can learn everything as the narrator does.  

Suspense, however, is an emotional reaction – it’s akin to tension, anxiety and fear.  Whereas mystery comes from what we don’t know – suspense comes very often from what we do know.

Back to the box on the table.  If none of the characters knows what’s in it – but the reader knows it’s a bomb and it’s going to go off in two minutes – that’s suspense.  

It’s also called “dramatic irony”.  The literary term for when the reader knows something the characters don’t.  And it can be extremely powerful.  Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to achieve in first person or close third person.

Historical novelists can use this to great effect.  You can show us, Abraham Lincoln, for instance talking to his advisors about his plans for the future, on the day before he goes to the play at Ford’s Theater.  If this is done well, it can be incredibly poignant.  A young wife is planning a romantic dinner for her husband’s homecoming, but we already know the husband is dead.  Or a character who is stressed and freaking out about his small problems, while we’ve been shown a larger perspective and can see just how shallow his concerns really are.

I’m a big fan of dramatic irony.  I tend to think that in any plot that isn’t specifically built around “who killed Roger Rabbit” – a mystery in other words – that withholding information from the reader is cheating, and the suspense you create by doing it is cheap and unfair.  (Even in the mystery, there is a sense that the writer should “play fair” – that the information to solve the problem should be there, if the reader can only discern what’s important.)

The worst examples of this kind of thing are often found in those big suspense novels we mentioned earlier, with their third person, multiple-character viewpoints.  I’ve read too many novels where the writer actually puts us into the head of the villain early on in the story and “cleverly” – by misdirection or outright deceit – hides the person’s true identity from us.  (Are you listening Dan Brown?)  As soon as I realize this, I lose all faith in the writer and in his story.  He cheated.  How much more effective would it have been to simply reveal the villain to me – while hiding it from the protagonist – and generate real suspense out of that knowledge?

POV is one of the most important – and infinitely flexible – tools in the writer’s arsenal.  The ways in which can be told, the voices and perspectives and combinations that can be used, are as rich and varied as the rainbow.  I’m not suggesting that you don’t use the primary colors.  I’m just telling you that there’s a whole spectrum to paint with.  And the only way to learn that spectrum is to read – as widely as possible – and start experimenting with mixing the colors yourself. 

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Readers of Birds and Beasts might also enjoy our sister blog Birdland West, which covers birds and wildlife, mostly in the Seattle Area. 

Rin Tin Tin and the Mystery of the Missing Oscar

Rin Tin Tin

Way back in 1929, when the Academy of Motion Picture Artsand Sciences was brand new, they organized the first Oscar presentations.  The members of the Academy voted on the (then short) list of awards, including best actor and actress.  When the votes were counted, the winner for best actor was Rin Tin Tin.

It really wasn't surprising.  Though it's hard to imagine today, Rin Tin Tin was the biggest star of his era.  Rinty, as he was known, helped to turn Warner Bros. from a small, struggling studio into the huge industry leader it became.  He was so famous -- and so beloved -- that when he died in 1932 radio broadcasts all over America were interrupted with the news.  In 1929 there really was no other clear choice for Best Actor.  There was Rin Tin Tin, and there was everyone else.

But (according to Susan Orlean, in her book Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend) the Academy was worried that if they gave the first ever Best Actor award to a dog, no one would take their new organization seriously.  And so, they gave it to the runner up, a German silent film actor named Emil Jannings.

Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich in "The Blue Angel" (1930)

(Who?  Emil Jannings was a German actor, well known to silent film audiences.  He starred opposite Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel.  Jannings had a thick German accent, which effectively ended his career in Hollywood once talkies came in.  During World War II he starred in Nazi Propaganda films and was reportedly close with Joseph Goebbels.  If you've seen Quentin Tarantino film Inglorious Basterds, Jannings is portrayed as one of the German actors in the climactic theater scene. You can find his Wikipedia page here -- and in the spirit of full disclosure, it was me who added the information about Rin Tin Tin to his biography.)

Taking into account the times, and the youth of Hollywood, the decision is understandable.  But over the years, the Oscars have become an institution, one that is devoted to celebrating and preserving the history of Motion Pictures.  And now, it seems only fitting that one of the greatest movie stars of all time -- Rin Tin Tin -- should finally get his due.

The folks over at The Dog Files (a great blog -- if you're not familiar with it, check it out) have started a petition to do just that.  They are calling on the Academy to include in the live Oscar ceremony a montage honoring animals in film, and then award (re-award) a posthumous Best Actor Oscar to Rin Tin Tin.

As my friends could tell you, I can go a little overboard on the subject of pop culture injustices (Why aren't the Monkees in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?)  But this, I really believe, is a cause whose time has come.  So I would like to call upon all my readers to sign the petition -- and if the spirit moves you, maybe write directly to the Academy of Motion PictureArts and Sciences.   

Let's get Rinty back his Oscar.

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Readers of Birds and Beasts might also enjoy our sister blog Birdland West, which covers birds and wildlife, mostly in the Seattle Area.  Currently at Birdland West, CSI: Pigeon Town, an avian murder mystery. 

 

Best Of 2011

Photo Courtesy of Animal Planet

This time of year everyone is coming up with their "Best Of" Lists, so not to be outdone, here at Books and Beasts we're offering our choices too.  If you follow the blog, you know that I've reviewed a lot of books and a few movies -- I'm pretty selective in what I include, so everything that I covered is there because I thought it was worth checking out -- even the books I had problems with.  However, even among the best, a few stand out.  So here are my choices for the best animal related offerings of the past year.

1.      Best Fiction -- Again, I've reviewed a lot of great novels and short story collections and all of them are worth your time.  However, there is one novel that stands out this past year among all the rest.  Possum Summer, by Jen K. Bloom is a wonderful children's book that will speak to child in the heart of every reader.  It's the kind of book I loved when I was a kid, and still do.  You can read my review of it here, but you might as well save yourself the time and just rush out and get it.  Not to be missed.

2.      Best Nonfiction -- Same caveat, all the books I've reviewed are important, useful and entertaining (in different combinations, depending on what they were).  But if I have to pick one that most affected me this year, it would be Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend by Susan Orlean.  Wonderful portrait of the dog so famous that when he died they broke into radio broadcasts around the country to announce it.  You can read my review here, but please, get this book, and pass it on to all your dog loving friends.

3.      Best Movie --  This one's easy.  (I haven't seen War Horse yet, but as soon as I do it'll show up here on the blog).  The best animal movie of the year -- and one of the best I've seen in a very long time -- is Rise of the Planet of the Apes.  Yes, it's true, I love it in part because I'm a geek, and there are scenes of Apes running wild through the city and attacking helicopters.  But this is much more intelligent, thoughtful and accurate movie than I ever expected.  The writers obviously did extensive research on chimps raised in captivity, and Caesar -- played by Andy Serkis in a performance that would be nominated for an Oscar if there was any justice in the world -- is the most realistic chimpanzee character ever captured on film.  (Sorry, Cheetah.)  Emotionally, technically, and intellectually the best movie of the year.

The Worst -- I don't usually include a section on "worst" in my blog -- I prefer to use time and space pointing out what's best, and what's important.  But one blog post I wrote this year Tears for Elephants has drawn more hits than anything else I've written.  It's about the sad fate of elephants in Hollywood, including the ones who starred in Water for Elephants.  I gave that book an enthusiastic review, because I think it's great -- but I boycotted the movie, sadly, because I think it could have been great too.  There have been a number of movies this year -- including Hangover 2, Zookeeper, and the new We Bought a Zoo, that made the unfortunate choice of using exotic, wild animals -- a practice that contributes to the abuse, over hunting, and endangerment of these creatures.  You can see my thoughts about it in earlier reviews, but it only makes my Best Movie choice even more notable.  The totally CGI apes in "Rise" are wonderful creations.

4.      Best TV Show -- I haven't reviewed this one yet in the blog, but it's too good not to include.  There are lots of great nature and animal shows on TV, but this one is the best if you're an animal lover -- especially if you're a dog lover -- absolutely if you're a Pit Bull lover. It also happens to be hands down the best reality show going: Pit Bulls and Parolees on Animal Planet. (This is the new favorite show of my canine housemate Lulubelle Dawg, who was also a big fan of Meercat Manner back in the day.) In this day and age, just the idea was audacious.  Let's take two of the most stigmatized groups we can think of, and then let's make an honest, sympathetic, non-sensationalized show about them.  If you've never seen it, the show follows Tia, the woman who runs Villalobos ranch, a rescue facility for pit bulls.  She is helped by her daughters -- who have had difficult lives in their own ways -- and by the parolees she takes on as volunteers.  I don't know of another show on television that deals with second chances, heartbreak, triumph and joy more often.  Oh yeah, and there are Pit Bulls!  What more could you want? 

Well, those are my choices for 2011.  I'd love to hear your thoughts or picks, whether you agree with me or not.  And I look forward to continuing to bring you reviews and information about the wide world of "Books and Beasts".

Readers of Birds and Beasts might also enjoy our sister blog Birdland West, which covers birds and wildlife, mostly in the Seattle Area.

The Hummingbird at the Center

I've been doing NaNoWriMo this month (if you don't know what that is, check it out -- it's like the literary equivalent of a marathon, held all over the world every November) and it's been taking up a lot of my time.  But it has also forced me to confront the problems inherent in novel writing -- and in writing my novel in particular -- that you only see when you are into the work itself.  

Anyone who has looked through the reviews on this site probably has some idea of what those problems are.  Non-human characters, point-of-view, how far we can extend fiction (and more importantly, our empathic imagination) out from the human center of consciousness and still tell something recognizable as a story, something that human readers will be interested in.

In October I tried a little experiment over at our sister blog, Birdland West -- I published a short piece of fiction, more of a sketch than a story, that attempted to do some of the things that attempt to do some of things that I'm interested in.  In a very small way.  Let me share just a piece to show you what I mean:

"The hummingbird hung motionless, except for its furious wings, above the feeder.  The red plastic -- a human would have called it red -- glowed like a beacon in the bird's vision, reflecting parts of the spectrum no mammal could see.  Light glinted off the bird's feathers which broke it apart like millions of tiny prisms, throwing flashes of green and red.  (Again, green and red as humans would see them -- with their primate color vision, recently recovered in evolutionary time, and so limited as compared to the bird's).  The hummingbird poised above the feeder.

"Almost no one noticed.  The writer -- who lived in the house attached to the yard where the feeder hung -- was uncommonly aware of the sounds of the bird's presence -- the high pitched, fast sound, like a telegraph key -- but the weather was growing cold and the doors and windows of his house were shut.  Besides, he was preoccupied with work (or with the distractions that kept him from working).  And he was thinking about a young woman he had recently become interested in and what seemed like the impossibility that she could be interested in (old, fat, unsuccessful) him.  He didn't hear the hummingbird's approach or sense it hovering over the feeder in the bush at the front of the yard."

[See the whole piece here]

Now, not focusing on quality for a second, but just on what it attempts, the idea of this piece was just to capture a moment in a neighborhood, with the hummingbird as the focal point.  It clearly has an omniscient viewpoint, it's totally outside the consciousness of all the characters, but it has access to all of them.  It also tries, at least I intended to try, to put the "non-human" world on equal footing with the "human" -- or even better to erase some of the artificial boundary we draw between the two.  The humming bird and (if you read the whole piece) the dogs and birds and squirrel are not treated, I hope, as background for the humans, who as usual are preoccupied with their own lives and barely see.  That's the problem with being in the third person limited -- the "inside" pov -- it traps us in human perspective, in human concerns -- and unless we write about characters who are uncommonly aware of the natural world, of the greater context, much of it is lost.  And even if our characters are hyper-aware (try talking to me sometime in a yard full of birds) we're still getting the human pov -- the hummingbird as seen by a person, not as a thing into itself, a center of action and awareness no less important than the human.  That's the same as colonial writers -- say Joseph Conrad -- who despite their great talent and insight into human begins, could never quite get out the white European perspective, and who therefore couldn't represent Africans or other colonized people as subjects in their own right.  Even when they are viewed sympathetically, they are viewed as objects of someone else's consciousness.  The truly revolutionary power of novels like Uncle Tom's Cabin (despite the fact that it has been a flashpoint in arguments about representation almost since it was published) was not it's overt polemic against slavery, but that for the first time African American slaves were presented as real, feeling characters with interior lives -- as subjects of their own experience.  It was that radical shift that made it impossible for many white American to ignore, and changed forever the way they thought about slavery.  

I'm not saying that my little hummingbird has the world-shifting power of Stowe's characters.  I haven't accomplished that yet.  But this is one of my deepest goals as a writer.  To de-center fiction, perhaps just slightly, from the fixed human pov.  To shift the focus even for moments away from our human concerns. To set them in broader contexts -- ecological, evolutionary, cosmological.

As the poet Mary Oliver says, "Meanwhile, the world goes on."

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Readers of Birds and Beasts might also enjoy our sister blog Birdland West, which covers birds and wildlife, mostly in the Seattle Area.

Remembering a Legend

Rin Tin Tin: The Life and Legend

We're all familiar with celebrity tragedy stories these days.  Brandon Lee dies during the filming of "The Crow" -- Heath Ledger on "The Dark Knight" -- and the stories become not just front page news and fodder for tabloids, but eventually the stuff of legend.  We might think this is a new phenomenon, fueled by our modern media.  But it is really as old as Hollywood itself (and maybe even older -- look at public furor created by Conan Doyle trying to kill Sherlock Holmes).

In 1932 another Hollywood legend died.  He was as big in his day as any movie star has ever been; the news of his passing broke into radio programs across the country.  The United Press bulletin read:

"Rin Tin Tin, greatest of animal motion-picture actors, pursued a ghostly villain in a canine happy-hunting ground today."

As Susan Orlean recounts in her wonderful new book Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend:

The story was soon floated on the great raft of legend.  It was rumored that Rin Tin Tin had died at night; that he had died on the set of Pride of the Legion during a rehearsal; that he had died while leaping into the arms of Jean Harlow ... that he had collapsed on Lee's front lawn and Harlow had raced over to comfort him, where she "cradled the great furry head in her lap, and there he died."

She goes on to recount how, following his death an hour-long tribute was broadcast on radios stations around the country  " Last night a whole radio network and thousands of radio fans paid homage to a great dog ... a gentleman, a scholar, a hero, a cinema star -- in fact, a dog which was virtually everything we could wish to be."

That's the way legends are remembered.

In his day Rin Tin Tin, who was found as a puppy by an American soldier, Lee Duncan, in the ruins of a burned out kennel, starred in twenty-three "blockbuster" silent films, was credited with saving Warner Brothers from bankruptcy, and won the heart of a nation.  His career suffered a set-back with the advent of talkies but he went on to star in serials as well.  He was without a doubt one of the greatest stars of his era.  Over the decades to come his descendents would star on radio and TV -- twenty years later his grandson rescued both his owner, Duncan, and the family name from the edge or ruin when he starred in the The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin (a show I remember from re-runs as a child) which climbed the ratings faster than any other show in the history of television. 

Rin Tin Tin:  The Life and the Legend is one of those wonderful books of popular history that captures not just an individual but an entire era of American life -- in this case, several years, from the great age of silent films to the golden age of television.  And Rin Tin Tin, in one of his incarnations, was a star in all of them. 

Lee Duncan was a man with a troubled family history, who spent part of his life in an orphanage, and struggled with human relationships all his life.  But he believed in Rin Tin Tin with an unfailing faith, and the world came to believe too.  As the years went on, others would take up the legacy, inspired by devotion to the symbol of courage and friendship and unfaltering love.  Orlean captures that feeling powerfully in her book -- those of us with memories of Rin Tin Tin from our childhood will find them flooding back, and those who don't remember will discover him all over again. 

More than anything, this book made me long for Rin Tin Tin's return.  Our world could use a hero like Rinny again -- if only to remind us of all the things we might wish to be. (I can see Rinny as a Search and Rescue dog working at today's disaster sites, as a police dog finding bad guys on a TV cop show, or even as a canine astronaut exploring space -- the possibilities are endless.)

Perhaps nothing sums up what Rinny meant to generations of movie, radio and TV fans better than a poem that Lee Duncan wrote after the star's death -- something all dog lovers will understand:

A real selfless love like yours old pal

Is something I shall never know again

And I must always be a better man

Because you loved me greatly, Rin Tin Tin.

The world is better for the enduring legacy of Rinny, and for Susan Orlean's wonderful book that keeps it alive.

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Readers interested in books about dogs might also like to check out my earlier reviews: "Born to Bark", "A Brace of Dog Memoirs" "Goodbye Alpha Dog", "Two Dogs in Search of a Master", "A Nose for Justice", "Whatever Happened to America's Dog?" and "Scent of the Missing".

You can also enjoy my recent article "Crazy Flickers" over at 10,000 Birds.  They have a great site, well worth checking out even if I wasn't included.  And "Change of Seasons" at the Seattle Mariners Baseball Blog SoDo Mojo.  

Readers of Birds and Beasts might also enjoy our sister blog Birdland West, which covers birds and wildlife, mostly in the Seattle Area.