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305

Don’t Scoff–Serious Science on What Motivates Dogs As They Decide Where to Poop

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Editor at Raw Story David Ferguson, known as @TRexstasy on Twitter, has a fascinating post up covering a new study of animal behavior by scientists in the Czech Republic and Germany demonstrating that dogs–when off-leash and left to their own devices–show a decided preference for finding a position to defecate so that they’re in line with the Earth’s magnetic field, along a North-South axis, and actually avoid doing their business on an East-West axis. Ferguson summarizes the findings of the research, published in the journal Frontiers in Zoology:

“The study examined the daily habits of 70 dogs during 1,893 defecations and 5,582 urinations over the course of two years. Consistently, during times of calm electromagnetic ‘weather,’ the dogs chose to eliminate while facing north or south. Dogs are not the only animals that are sensitive to the Earth’s magnetism. When it comes time for them to mate, salmon use their sense of the Earth’s magnetism to find their way back to the spawning grounds where they were born. Birds, similarly, migrate along magnetic lines. Even ants have been proven to have a sense of the Earth’s alignment and to distinguish between north, south, east and west. As to why the dogs prefer to poop facing north or south rather than east or west, that’s still a mystery. ‘It is still enigmatic why the dogs do align at all, whether they do it ‘consciously’ (i.e., whether the magnetic field is sensorial perceived (the dogs ‘see,’ ‘hear’ or ‘smell’ the compass direction or perceive it as a haptic stimulus) or whether its reception is controlled on the vegetative level (they ‘feel better/more comfortable or worse/less comfortable’ in a certain direction),’ wrote researchers, ‘Our analysis of the raw data…indicates that dogs not only prefer N-S direction, but at the same time they also avoid E-W direction.’”

This helps me understand why my old black Lab Noah–who was very obedient and with whom I often walked leash-less in the wilds of Franconia, New Hampshire, and suburban Cleveland–may have been so choosy about where he wanted to poop, and even once he had found his spot, sometimes moved around quickly in a narrowing circle, until stopping at what was evidently always just the right spot for him. I got Noah on a cross-country road trip with my brother Joel. We rescued him from a dog pound in Deadwood, South Dakota, in the summer of 1970, a day or two before his three-week stay there was going to end with him being put down. We enjoyed his companionship until 1982. I tell Noah’s story in greater detail at a post on this blog called How I Came to Have as a Companion a Black Lab Named Noah.Noah and PTNoah with Philip Turner

306

A Basket Full of Holiday #FridayReads

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PT #FridayReads photoDelighted to have so much free time this week for this terrific collection of great recreational and work-related reading. Here’s a quick rundown on each book with the tweets I put out about them tonight.
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My fave books by suspense writer Michael Connelly are his Harry Bosch novels, but the ones involving defense attorney Mickey Haller are enjoyable too.


Dave Bidini, longtime member of The Rheostatics, is a triple threat–stellar musician, compelling writer, and all-around good guy. I love oral histories like this one: the memorable voices of many musicians are soldered together in to an alternately hilarious and heartbreaking narrative of stalwarts traveling and playing music across one of the largest countries on the planet.


I admire CUNY Graduate Center Professor William Helmreich’s civic enterprise–he walked on nearly street in the five boroughs, meeting and speaking with hundreds of New Yorkers to weave together a fascinating portrait of the 21st century city enriched by new immigrant groups.


I’m hopeful that Chicago writer Haas’s suspense novels will merit rediscovery and publication. I was delighted to be asked to look at them by Shirley Haas and old Chicago friend Kevin Riordan.

307

A Freelance Writing Assignment to Grow On

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Bonnie Clyde from History® websiteBack in September, thanks to a referral by publishing friend David Wilk, I was hired to write a 1200-word article for the November/December issue of H Magazine, the publication of the cable channel known as History® (formerly History Channel®). On a rush basis, they asked me to do a piece about what would be History®’s December 8-9 broadcast of a new 4-hour miniseries on Bonnie & Clyde, airing simultaneously on History® and sister networks Lifetime® and A&E®. Materials I could review–for a sense of the production–were scant. Before accepting the job, I submitted a brief opener to what I might write, a kind of imagined interior monologue of Clyde Barrow sitting behind the wheel of a car waiting for Bonnie Parker. When I heard back that they liked that bit, I knew I had a path to successful completion of the article. When I handed it in five days later the editors liked it, and so it runs below pretty much as I turned it in, with them adding their own title (I had called it “A Bonnie & Clyde for Our Times,) pictures, captions, and their own headlines and sub-heads. 

A few days after the mini-series aired last Sunday and Monday, I got some print copies of the magazine in the mail. I’ve scanned the relevant parts of the issue and am sharing them all below. I later found it’s also online [link since taken down], but I think it’s more interesting to read the actual glossy pages, so here they are. You may read them in full by pausing the blog’s slide show at the top right corner. As readers of my blogs will know, I write a lot of personal, reportorial, expository, and essay-type prose, which made it a special treat to channel my imagination in to the fictional exercise that makes up the first half of the article. This is a sort of writing I have not done for a long time, and I’m glad I had the chance to do it here. Hoping to do more like it in 2014. Thank you David Wilk, History® and the editors of H Magazine.

308

William Morris’s Historic Printing Press Gets a New Home in Rochester, NY

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Albion No. 6551On December 5 New York Times reporter David Dunlap published a fascinating article about the forthcoming sale at Christie’s auction house of the illustrious printing press that under William Morris’s cultivated hand and eye printed the Kelmscott Chaucer, with illustrations by pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones. Completed between 1894-96, it is among the most important modern fine press books ever printed and published. I’ve always enjoyed Dunlap’s reporting, in which he usually covers architecture. He brought the right sensibility to this article, which I loved for it being stuffed with factual nuggets like these:

“The instrument on which this artwork  [the Kelmscott Chaucer] was composed was the Improved Albion Press No. 6551, a hand press almost seven feet high, weighing 2,000 to 3,000 pounds, that was made in 1891 by Hopkinson & Cope in England. It is to be auctioned on Friday by Christie’s [in New York]. The estimate is $100,000 to $150,000.”

I’ve been waiting to blog about Dunlap’s article, because I wanted to report the auction result, if I could. And from a report I just found today, I’ve got that now, and also great detail on the provenance of the press. For instance, I’d been wondering: 

How did the Albion Press No. 6551 even get to North America?

Turns out, in 1924, noted type designer Frederick Goudy shipped the Albion across the Atlantic to his print shop in Marlborough, NY. I’m glad it wasn’t wartime, when the ship could’ve been the target of a U-Boat crew. In a real sense, the precious Albion carried the legacy of Morris’s elevated enterprise, so devoted–all-in, as we say now– to cultivating the art of the book. In 1960 the press was acquired by J. Ben and Elizabeth Lieberman of White Plains, NY. Under their ownership it was moved on three occasions, the last time when they moved house to Ardsley, NY. Though the family had long been active in fine printing circles, they came to find day-to-day operation and maintenance of the press beyond their capacities. Current owners, Jethro K. Lieberman and his wife Jo Shiffrin, told Dunlap, “It’s time for someone who will put it back into service.”

Dunlap reports that over two years in the last decade of the 19th century, 438 copies of the Kelmscott Chaucer were printed by Morris and his pressmen on the Albion, and that every copy is accounted for, whether in institutions, libraries or private hands. He writes,

“Four belong to the Morgan Library & Museum. John Bidwell, its curator of printed books and bindings, permitted this reporter to examine a volume bound in white pigskin.The sheer amount of ink on paper is breathtaking. The decorated pages are blacker than they are white. Yet the printing is so exact that there is not so much as a stray smudge in this jungle of leaves, vines, berries and flowers.”

The report on the auction, running at What They Think, a site devoted to news of the commercial printing industry, reports that the Albion N. 6551 will now be housed at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in upstate NY in the Cary Graphic Arts Collection. It was bought for RIT by the “Brooks Bower family. Bower, a 1974 graduate of the School of Print Media, is an RIT trustee and chairman and chief executive officer of Papercone Corp., an envelope-manufacturing firm in Louisville, KY.”  The auction price was $233,000, well above the estimate. It will be put in to regular use by RIT students. I was pleased to read this thorough provenance of the press, which includes a lovely bit of history provided in part by Steven Galbraith, curator of the Cary Collection:

“’From 1932 to 1941, Albion No. 6551 was owned by the Cary Collection’s namesake, Melbert B. Cary Jr., director of Continental Type Founders Association and proprietor of the private Press of the Woolly Whale. . . .Cary bequeathed the press to his pressman George Van Vechten, and in 1960, J. Ben and Elizabeth Lieberman acquired Albion No. 6551 for their Herity Press. They topped the press with a Liberty Bell, a reminder of the vital role that private presses play in the freedom of the press.’ Albion No. 6551 will join the Cary Collection’s Arthur M Lowenthal Memorial Pressroom, a working collection of 15 historical printing presses and more than 1,500 fonts of metal and wood type. Supporting study of the press is a collection of Kelmscott Press publications and archives of material related to Frederic Goudy and Cary’s Press of the Woolly Whale. The Cary Graphic Arts Collection is located on the second floor of The Wallace Center at RIT. Hours are from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. For information, call 585-475-3961 or go http://cary.rit.edu.”

It’s been a good week for the art of the book, as last Friday I saw gorgeous printed materials at the Center for Book Arts’ holiday open house, and now this news about the outcome of the Christie’s auction. I hope to see the Cary Collection and the Albion No. 6551 someday. The photo at the top of this informational post and those borrowed below for it I happily credit to Eddie Hausner and Marilynn K. Yee, photographers of The New York Times, and thank them for this fair use.Kelmscott ChaucerJPKELMSCOTT1-articleLarge-v2

309

Celebrating Books & the Season at the Center for Book Arts

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Center for Book ArtsHad a great time at the Center for Book Arts holiday open house and sale last night. My wife Kyle, a visual artist, used to teach a course on printmaking at the Center and it was fun for both of us to revisit the big loft space in Chelsea on W. 27th Street and see the place full of people. We found the work of many, many talented book artists and paper artists on display, Kafana Mundial, a musical trio (clarinet, accordion, and percussion) playing Balkan music, and lots of nice food & drink. Everywhere my eye landed I saw printing presses, drawers of old metal type fonts, bookbinding materials, and beautiful examples of paper craft and book art. We enjoyed speaking with Alex Campos, director of the Center; Barbara Henry, master of letter press printing who’s done a stunning Walt Whitman book under her Harsimus Press; Roni Gross, book artist and publisher of Z’roah Press; and Esther K. Smith, artist, author and co-publisher of Purgatory Pie Press. Here are the best pictures Kyle and I took last night. Please click here to see all of them  

310

Netanyahu’s Deplorable Choice

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I deplore Israeli PM Netanyahu’s refusal to travel to South Africa for celebrations and observances of Nelson Mandela’s life. As a counter to that decision. I’m going share a celebratory photo of then-President Nelson Mandela taken with South African Jews. His decision shamed and dishonored the noble legacy of many Jews typified here, of Jewish people–in South Africa and abroad, the latter category of which I am one–who all worked to end apartheid in our lifetimes. Photo credit to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency who also published a comprehensive timeline chronicling the relationship between Mandela and the Jewish community.

One of the best commentaries I’ve read on this issue was by columnist Bradley Burston in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Nixing Mandela Funeral as too Costly, Bibi Shows World What He’s Truly Made OfMandela-and-the-Jews JTA. Here’s how it ends:

“Never has Netanyahu sent a message quite this infuriating, with so much apparent success. He is betting, apparently, that the moderate majority has expectations so low, its resources of outrage so overtaxed and depleted, its capacity for response so beaten flat, that it will do little more than shrug and trudge on. And this bet may well be the smart money. What we are stuck with, in the end, is the message that Netanyahu is sending to the world. The world that Netanyahu’s Israel is determined not to be a part of. “The whole world is coming to South Africa,” foreign ministry spokesman Clayson Monyela said at the weekend. The world, yes. Israel, maybe not.”

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Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Abandons Renovation of Metro Theater in NYC

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Despite earlier reports from Austin, Texas-based Alamo Drafthouse NYC that they would be renovating the Metro Theater on Manhattan’s Upper West Side on Broadway at 100th Street, word came today that actually the movie chain has abandoned those plans. This is a big disappointment for all denizens of my neighborhood who lament the lingering blight of recession upon our neighborhood, and had hoped that this new establishment would bring renewed life to this part of town. More’s the pity, since my wife, artist Kyle Gallup, had some years ago created a visual homage to the theater’s facade, which we hoped to see back up in lights sometime in 2014. Alas, it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. Below you can see images of the banner on the Metro marquee that will presumably come down soon, a photo of the facade, and Kyle’s painting. Alamo MetroMetro Theater facadeMetro Theater marquee Kyle Gallup

312

In a Moment of Difficulty for a Friend, Thinking of Lt. General Roméo Dallaire

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December 15 Update: Just after publishing the post below, the fine radio program CBC Sunday Edition carried a lengthy interview with Roméo Dallaire which I linked to on the sister blog to this one, Honourary Canadian. It was a very moving conversation.
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Shake Hands with the DevilIn 2005 when I was an editorial executive with Carroll & Graf Publishers of the Avalon Publishing Group I brought out the U.S. edition of a Canadian bestseller, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. Its author was Lt. General Roméo Dallaire, a career officer in the Canadian forces, a national military that more than most in the modern world has cultivated a strong tradition of serving as peacekeepers helping to end conflicts in lands distant from their own. In 1993 Dallaire was commander of the United Nations peacekeeping force in Rwanda when that country was swept in to genocide and ethnic cleansing by Hutu militants. The member nations of the world body refused to resource Dallaire’s mission adequately, even after he presented them with a military plan weeks before the genocide that would likely have blocked the carnage before it ever began. Horror ensued. Dallaire and fewer than 500 soldiers (he’d asked for 4,500 more troops) sheltered and saved approximately 25,000 people, yet 800,000 Rwandans died. Dallaire returned home to Canada from the Rwandan mission a nearly broken man, suicidal and afflicted with severe PTSD.

In Canada, where the tragic failure of the mission under Dallaire’s command was well known, the book from Random House Canada struck a huge chord and it had already sold over 100,000 copies when I acquired the rights. Many US publishers, including Random House in New York, had declined to publish the book here. I knew why they had–in the States, Dallaire was hardly known at all. As an acquiring editor at publishing houses for more than twenty-five years, I had never minded a situation like that. I welcomed the challenge, and loved working to promote an author, who on the merits of his/her book and their compelling personal story, deserved to be widely read and better known, thus allowing the book, with a solid foundation, to be built up in to a big success. Going in, I knew I needed to help the book find as large an audience as possible in the US, or better yet, bring as big an audience as possible to the book. I commissioned an original Introduction by Samantha Power, who’d recently published the Pulitzer Prize winner, A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide. We also caught a break when publication coincided with release of the movie, “Hotel Rwanda,” in which Nick Nolte played a Hollywood version of the general. The movie portrayal, though very inaccurate, did elevate Dallaire’s notoriety, and enabled us to generate major reviews and book him on shows like Charlie Rose, and many NPR programs.

Samantha Power of course is now serving as US Ambassador to the UN. Ironically, when Shake Hands  was published, the Washington Post asked former US Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright to review it. I considered this a very interesting, even a daring assignment by the Post book editors. After all, the Clinton administration’s failure in Rwanda along with other countries was still fresh in mind, raw and painful. To her credit, in her review Albright gave Dallaire and his book their due. While conceding she’d been a part of many failures in Rwanda, she also pointed to flaws in the world system that leads to failures like Rwanda. Almost a decade later, failures like this still occur–look at the current civil wars in Syria and the Central African Republic. These recurrences are the sort of thing that torture Roméo; they can tip him in to a new flare-up of post-traumatic stress.

Despite the severe illness, Dallaire has rebuilt his life and psyche and gone on to do very important work in conflict resolution. I accompanied him to several of his NYC interviews, sitting in the back of taxicabs and in green rooms with him. We became friends, and I found him a dear person. Despite everything Roméo had endured–and the treatment and therapy he’s still engaged with regularly–he has a good sense of humor with an almost merry glint in his eyes. I mentioned this to him and he said, “I’ve always tried to be like that. A commander without a sense of humor will not be respected by his troops.” He’s a soldier-humanitarian, kind and sensitive, Gandhi-like in his way. From the position he holds now as a Canadian Senator–where a major scandal has been coincidentally been raging the past few months–he has moved on in his life to advocate for the end of the practice of armies conscripting child soldiers. The Carroll & Graf edition of Shake Hands  sold well over 60,000 copies the first year after I published it, and it’s still selling well today.

With the 20th anniversary of the genocide approaching next year, and four recent suicides of Canadian veterans of the Afghan War, Dallaire had a traffic accident this week due to severe insomnia and sleeplessness he’s been enduring as these events prey on him. He was uninjured but shaken by the crash. The same day he made a statement of apology to his colleagues in the Canadian Senate, ironic since so few others there have been anywhere near as forthright in admitting their own missteps. I shared my concern for Roméo in a few tweets earlier this week.