Boria Sax's Blog: Told Me by a Butterfly, page 9

Books were their Ghosts

When I was a kid, the rule was that one should only whisper in libraries. They were places of solitude, modeled on temples, which pillars outside and high ceilings, often decorated with murals, within. Loud talk was deemed disrespectful to the dead, and authors, it was assumed, were usually dead. The books were their ghosts.

Well, if one has to die - as, of course, we all do - being a dead poet is not so bad, especially if one gets to haunt an old library.

Mice as Avatars

Anthrozoology is an area of study that emerged in the 1980s and centers upon human-animal relations, most especially on all of the complex, contradictory, funny, and tragic ways in which we, as human beings, try to differentiate ourselves from other creatures. This concern is already present in the Biblical account, where the elaborate set up prohibitions laid out in the Book of Leviticus seem intended in large part to distinguish human beings, especially the Hebrews, from other creatures. Human beings are omnivores, but the Bible lays out in great detail what we are permitted to eat, or even to touch, and how meat must be prepared. In the Book of Genesis, people are created separately, and on a different day, than animals. According to much Judeo-Christian and Islamic tradition, animals before the Flood spoke like human beings and accepted human dominion. Their original condition, in other words, was closer to what we call "domestic" than to what we call "wild," and this only changed when God made the New Covenant between Noah and his people.

The Bible, in summary, sets up very sharp boundaries between animals and humankind, but these lines are now becoming blurred in all sorts of unpredictable ways. As dogs, for example, are brought ever more into the human realm, and given their own television shows, psychiatrists, personal trainers, designer clothes, four-star hotels, jewelry, hospices, gourmet foods, prescription drugs, and so on, one wonders if their biology is enough to distinguish them from people. Pigs are now injected with human genetic material, so they can produce valves and organs suitable for transplantation into human bodies, and their altered biology brings them closer to human status. The changes are now coming so quickly that academics, including anthrozoologists, can no longer do a very good job of keeping up with them.

I had begun to think that no new development could startle me any more, but today (Sept. 26, 2012), on the front Page of the New York Times is an article entitled "Seeking Cures, Patients Enlist Mice Stand-Ins." To see what treatment is right for an individual patient, doctors now use mice as avatars, simulating the patient's condition as closely as possible in a mouse. In one case, for example, bacteria from a human patient's stomach was transplanted into a mice, so doctors could experiment with different treatments.

You might either dismiss this as "yucky" or celebrate it as progress. Myself, I am not sure just what to think. The practice can greatly extend the scope of animal experimentation, and perhaps it already has. At the same time, it individualizes and personalizes the experimentation. Sometimes at least, it must create a feeling of intimacy between a patient and his/her avatar.

Well, this is one more thing to ponder as we read texts like Gilgamesh and the Bible. As we learn where human-animal relations come from, we might think about where they are going as well.

The Queen & the Raven: the UK's Special Relationship With a Very Smart Animal

Legends and fairy tales are set in a world where relations between animals and human beings are egalitarian and reciprocal. This places human dominance in question, and many societies try constantly to distance themselves from that message. Already, in ancient Greece and Rome, the fables attributed to the half-legendary Aesop were set in an indefinite period of the past "when animals talked like human beings".....

Continued at: http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jun/...

Video for City of Ravens

For a brief video about my book City of Ravens and how it came to be written, go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_AAMl...

The Tower Ravens: Invented Tradition, Fakelore, or Modern Myth?

Routledge is providing free access to "The Tower Ravens: Invented Tradition, Fakelore, or Modern Myth?," as one of their most cited and downloaded articles in their journal Storytelling, Self, and Society. This article is adapted from a chapter in a draft of City of Ravens: London, its Tower, and its Famous Birds. The article may be downloaded at:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10...

Witch's Review of City of Ravens

http://www.badwitch.co.uk/2011/10/rev...

"Strange History" Review of City of Ravens

http://www.strangehistory.net/2011/10...

Online Writing Course

Over the summer, I will be teaching a course entitled "Planning a Book, from the Conception to the Final Proposal" online for the State University of Illinois at Springfield. For information, or to sign up, please go to: https://uisapp-s.uis.edu/ows/continui...

Animals in Literature Course

The online graduate English course "Animals in Literature" that I will be teaching at Mercy College will run in the summer 2011 semester and is now open to registration. https://www.mercy.edu/academics/schoo...

Poem from my book The Raven and the Sun

SNOWMAN

The snowman, azure
At the height of day,
Then tinted crimson
By an evening cloud,
Takes on the blue or red
Of winter coats,
The black of branches, emerald of pines,
And all the many tones of human skin.

Suddenly in March, his flesh
Collapses to reveal
His soul made of water,
Streaked by sun.