The Newsstand Sophisticate

I’ve always found the problems raised by anthropomorphism interesting. When a dog looks at us with a seemingly quizzical expression, are we actually reading the dog’s true state of mind or are we “projecting” our own understanding of human expressions onto the dog? My own unscientific guess is that it’s probably a bit of both. We tend to think of dogs, especially, as such a part of our families that we’re shocked on the occasions they behave like the wolf-cousins they are and snap at strangers. (As Chris Rock said about the tiger that attacked Roy Horn of Siegfried and Roy, “That tiger didn’t go crazy! That tiger went tiger!”)

Nevertheless, the fact that we share, basically, a similar physiological structure with other chordates (four limbs, a dorsal nerve chord, bilateral symmetry, etc.) has always suggested to me that we have a pretty good chance of “reading” animals emotions accurately in many situations. Their brains, though not identical to ours, must work similarly to ours at least some of the time, because their bodies do.

Fortunately for me, there are people who have actually begun to study how animals’ brains work in a more rigorous fashion than me musing on whether my friend’s dog is smiling at me. National Geographic has an article online about some of these scientists’ work. It’s accompanied by a set of animal portraits that bring up the anthropomorphism question beautifully. Can we really read the expressions of these animals, or are we deceiving ourselves?

The portrait of “JB,” a Giant Pacific Octopus, is especially strange and beautiful, and perhaps the most prone to my anthropomorphizing instinct, as it’s so different from us it seems a much greater leap to imagine that we can know what it’s feeling. But maybe it’s not so different after all. It turns out, according to this article on ScientificBlogging, that octopi are among the most intelligent of the invertebrates, but their relatively large brains are structured more simply and have fewer nerve cells than ours, so they are perfect for studying how brains, even our brains, memorize and learn things.

When I first read the introduction to James Thurber’s My Life and Hard Times some fifteen years ago, I laughed out loud at the mixture of menace, melancholy, and absurdity in its concluding sentence: “As F. Hopkinson Smith long ago pointed out, the claw of the sea-puss gets us all in the end.” “The claw of the sea-puss” is pretty unbeatable as a simultaneously ridiculous and terrifying metaphor for the ravages of time and death. I imagined the sea-puss as a cute but murderous deep-sea monster, some fell hybrid of crab and Hello Kitty, perhaps betentacled and squid-beaked as well. I meant to look up “sea-puss,” and F. Hopkinson Smith, of course, at the time, but I was living a careless, profligate existence when I was in my early twenties, and I became distracted by other things (not least by laughing at other things in Thurber’s book, like the “Get Ready Man”) and I simply forgot about them.

I recently reread My Life and Hard Times, however, and I’m happy to say that the World Wide Web has the sea-puss answers I seek. According to Webster’s online dictionary, “sea puss” is an alteration of an Algonquian word for river, and means “a swirling or along shore undertow.” According to a number of sites I could find, F. Hopkinson Smith was for most of his life a marine engineer, and designed the foundations for the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. In short, Smith was a man intimately familiar with the powers of the sea-puss. Smith didn’t begin to write until later in his life, apparently egged on by friends because he was such an engaging “after-dinner raconteur.” I found one of Smith’s novels, The Tides of Barnegat, on Google Books. Chapter XXII is entitled, “The Claw of the Sea-Puss.” The flavor of Smith’s prose, and the terrible destructive power of the sea-puss, can be found in an earlier passage, describing the weather at a beach in the fall:

The cruel north wind now wakes, and with a loud roar joins hands with the savage easter; the startled surf falls upon the beach like a scourge. Under their double lash the outer bar cowers and sinks; the frightened sand flees hither and thither. Soon the frenzied breakers throw themselves headlong, tearing with teeth and claws, burrowing deep into the hidden graves. Now the forgotten wrecks, like long-buried sins, rise and stand naked, showing every scar and stain. This is the work of the sea-puss—the revolving maniac born of close-wed wind and tide; a beast so terrible that in a single night, with its auger-like snout, it bites huge inlets out of farm lands—mouthfuls deep enough for ships to sail where but yesterday the corn grew. 

If that has whetted your appetite, you can read Smith’s entire novel online at its page on Google Books. And may you avoid the sea-puss’s awful claw for as long as you can.

The inimitable Chris Sims has used panels from Archie comics to illustrate Pulp’s magnum opus, “Common People.” 

 Please enjoy “Archie In . . . A Different Class!”

If you like old French postcards (not to be confused with old “French letters”—if that’s your thing you’ve got the wrong Web site), you will enjoy this site. The googly-eyed animal postcards are especially bizarre and amusing. It’s a French site, so naturally some of the postcards are smutty. Those of delicate sensibility beware. 

Here’s a sordid story from the New York Times about Bill Clinton peddling his influence in Kazakhstan for a large donation to his foundation (allegedly, of course). It’s beginning to look as though Clinton is becoming the Billy Carter of his wife’s presidential campaign. 

I don’t know why I’m finding so many stories about old bones lately. (I’m not seeking them out, honestly! They keep popping up in my inbox and RSS feed.) The most recent reminder of mortality delivered to me through the Internet comes from the Austinist’s sister site in San Francisco. The SFist unearths a 1902 San Francisco Chronicle story about some children in my native city using human bones to play baseball. A short excerpt:

Residents of the vicinity of Leavenworth and Broadway going home to dinner were treated to a choice assortment of cold shivers at the sight of the national game being played with the grisly loot from a tomb. Half a dozen boys were making long drives of the ball to center field with resounding thwacks from the long bones, the femur and fibula radius and ulna humerus. Between times two yellow skulls would be tossed to the batters, and the fun characteristic of the reverence of the North American youth, waxed warm until a policeman swooped down upon the players.  

Andrew Winters tells of the trials and tribulations of being Morrissey’s valet. Apparently Morrissey asks all of his employees what the first record they bought was, and there are right and wrong answers. (I believe mine was Randy Newman’s “Little Criminals,” when I was six or seven. Not sure whether that would pass Moz-muster.)

(Via Dr. Frank.)

Sayed Parwiz Kambakhsh, 23, a journalism student and reporter in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, has been sentenced to death by a local court for insulting Muhammad by calling him “a killer and adulterer,” and “downloading a controversial article and adding some of his own words about the ignorance of the Prophet [sic] Muhammad on women’s rights.”

Kambakhsh has the right to appeal his sentence, and I hope the Supreme Court will be more liberal in its views of the right to free speech than the lower court has been.

Index on Censorship has more, and says it’s possible for Kambakhsh to receive a pardon from Afghan President Hamid Karzai, though he has not yet spoken on the case. Still, it is appalling that anybody could be convicted for such a victimless “crime” in the first place.

Daniel Dennett, Colin McGinn, and Massimo Pigliucci have a new blog, Secular Philosophy, which unsurprisingly will cover “all things secular with an emphasis on philosophy.” They’ll also stream a weekly podcast from the Center for Inquiry, “Point of Inquiry,” which will have “live interviews with Nobel Prize-winning scientists, social critics and theorists, as well as renowned artists and entertainers.” Sounds good, though I might have to cut back on my Fark reading time to fit it in.

(Via Norm via Andrew Sullivan.)

Back when I lived in New York, I would often wonder as I walked through Washington Square whether there were still bones beneath my feet from the square’s days as a potter’s field in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Well, I need speculate no more, as city archaeologists doing soil testing found at least three skeletons on the southern edge of the square this morning.

As the article mentions, New York’s current potter’s field is Hart Island, a small island in Long Island Sound, which was also a Nike missile silo site in the 1950s. According to this site, an estimated 750,000 people have been buried there since the Civil War. The site also has pictures of buildings and burial sites on the island.

Update, January 25: In a coincidental e-mail newsletter I received today from my college’s alumni group, I found out that the Hart Island site I linked to above is run by a fellow alumnus of Reed College. (Not someone I know; she graduated before I began). Melinda Hunt is involved in a project to identify over 50,000 anonymously buried people on Hart Island. You can read about it on the New York Times City Room blog here.