Adam's Notes for August 19, 2023
Hello and welcome to Adam's Notes. I'm Adam.
Recently I came across a line about prehistoric giant sloths so evocatively stunning that it made me want to drop what I was reading in favour of a book on prehistoric mammals:
Made in close succession more than 11,000 years ago, the larger (footprints) belonged to a sloth; the smaller belonged, unmistakably, to a human. More overlapping tracks suggested that a group of adults and children had deliberately stepped into the sloth prints and followed the animal until it turned to face them, dragging its knuckles along the ground as it reared up to its full eight-foot height. In another part of the lake bed, the research team documented a set of similarly aged human prints left by a teenager or young adult who carried a child on one hip while hurrying through territory crisscrossed by sloths and mammoths.
[Source: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/08/17/the-nature-trade-wild-new-world-market-in-birds/]
But I remembered that I already had a book about prehistoric mammals on my kindle, and decided to read that instead of the Dan Flores book from the review. The book I read was called the Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us, by paleontologist Stephen Brusatte.
If nothing else, the book is a good argument for Aristotle’s maxim about starting stories in media res, because I really couldn’t make myself care about all those squirrelish little proto-rodents that the author writes about in a way that only a dentist could love. Or maybe a geologist, considering the incessant teeth talk borrows a lot of vocabulary from geology (and apparently cartography techniques, to map molars). Learning that dimetrodons weren’t actually dinosaurs but “stem mammals” was cool, but aside from that and a paragraph on the moschops, there’s nothing interesting happening until the dinosaurs are wiped out at the book’s halfway point.
It’s also full of terrible “pop sci” writing, there’s nothing about the paleotunnels dug by giant sloths, and my beloved chalicotheres get only two brief mentions.
But I think part of my problem is that I’ve hit my limit for this kind of nature writing. Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk was great, if a little weepy, and it brought me to T.H. White’s The Goshawk and J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine. A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meiburg was another good bird book, and it did a better job than Brusatte with the basic formula for these things, juggling the (usually pretty wild Victorian) history of a discipline with more recent science as conducted by the author and his or her colleagues, all rounded out with a few memoir-type pieces of the author's experience with the animal or environment in question. The problem for me, I think, is that these things generally refuse to be speculative and thus inevitably have trouble helping us get inside the mind of an animal.
The writing I really like on animals brings uses fiction to bring us inside alien minds in a way that nonfiction just can't. I loved the Animorphs books when I was a kid, and I still think they’re great at evoking the feeling of what it must be like to be an animal. John Dolan’s essay A Holy Book on mammal solidarity is something that’ll stick with me forever. I remember reading it and his other mammal writings in my early twenties and almost instantly waking out of a cynical phase, no longer ashamed to think that such interests were only for children. His bit about the near extinction of the musk ox in his novel Pleasant Hell is its own little tragicomedy that plays on that exact dichotomy, he feels their plight so profoundly but he can’t get anyone to care. And then there’s Ted Hughes’ Hawk Roosting, which in a few lines so perfectly puts you the experience of being a hawk in a way nothing else can.
I’ll end here this section with a link sure to annoy any paleontologist: the Diplodocus album Slow and Heavy takes its inspiration from the antiquated portrayal of dinosaurs as, well, slow and heavy. It always cracks me up whenever I remember this band exists, there’s just something absurdly beautiful about how people actually took the time to envision this and make it real. They absolutely nailed it, too. Slow and Heavy sounds exactly like the soundtrack for a dinosaur movie from an alternate 1956.
Pepys Show
I was really disappointed when the Pepys bot stopped updating on twitter. Still, I follow Pepysdiary.com pretty closely and I think it’ll be fun to do a recurring section where I check in on what he’s up to. I also have a Pepys-related project tentatively set to debut at the end of the year that I’m really excited to share with you guys.
As it happens, OTD in 1660 Samuel Pepys went with his friend/rival John Creed to the Cockpitt theatre. It’s the first play he’s seen since returning to London (he’d gone with his patron Edward Montagu (soon to be the Earl of Sandwich) to fetch Charles II from Holland). The play starred Edward Kynaston, who you might remember as the last of the “boy players” (boy actors who played female roles) and the main guy from Stage Beauty. Pepys says that Kynaston “made the loveliest lady that ever I saw in my life, only her voice not very good.” After the show Pepys and Creed went for a drink and were joined by Kynaston and another actor. What a treat!
Link roundup
Canadian Food Inspection Agency: fellow energy drink connoisseurs might want to avoid Mind Blow brand energy drinks, which are being recalled for containing a non-permitted ingredient used in Parkinson’s medication.
LitHub: I got a kick out of this piece from 2020 about the time Hans Christen Andersen overstayed his welcome as Charles Dickens’ houseguest. “Hans Christian Andersen may perhaps be with us, but you won’t mind him—especially as he speaks no language but his own Danish, and is suspected of not even knowing that.”
CBC: Kelowna, BC, is burning and Yellowknife and a lot of smaller NWT towns have been evacuated. It’s been an unprecedented year for wildfires, not just in western Canada but seemingly everywhere, and yet it’s hard to get people to care or even to make the connection to the climate crisis. My own town got evacuated a few years ago, and it feels crazy to me that life just went back to normal and that our governments are choosing to treat each fire as an anomaly rather than the systemic crisis it is. I dunno. Sorry to end on a downer.
Well, that’s all for now. Thanks for reading. I went on a bit longer than I intended to. I think I’m going to aim for posts about half this long and send them out once every two weeks. But I’m also experimenting, and once in a while might try something different to see what works. Thanks again, especially if you’ve made it this far. This has been Adam’s Notes for August 19, 2023. My name is Adam, and you can find me on Twitter, Bluesky, and Goodreads.