Available:*
Format | Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Book | Searching... Main Library | 814.6 Pas | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... South Regional Library | 814.6 Pas | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Beginning with Yuka, a 39,000 year old mummified woolly mammoth recently found in the Siberian permafrost, each of the 16 essays in Animals Strike Curious Poses investigates a different famous animal named and immortalized by humans. Modeled loosely after a medieval bestiary, these witty, playful, whipsmart essays traverse history, myth, science, and more, bringing each beast vibrantly to life.
Elena Passarello is an actor, a writer, and recipient of a 2015 Whiting Fellowship in nonfiction. Her first collection with Sarabande Books, Let Me Clear My Throat , won the gold medal for nonfiction at the 2013 Independent Publisher Awards. She lives in Corvallis, Oregon.
Author Notes
Elena Passarello is an actor, a writer, and recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award. Her first collection with Sarabande Books, Let Me Clear My Throat , won the gold medal for nonfiction at the 2013 Independent Publisher Awards and was a finalist for the 2014 Oregon Book Award. Her essays on performance, pop culture, and the natural world have been published in Oxford American, Slate, Creative Nonfiction, and The Iowa Review , among other publications, as well as in the 2015 anthologies Cat is Art Spelled Wrong and After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essay . Passarello lives in Corvallis, Oregon and teaches at Oregon State University.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Passarello (Let Me Clear My Throat) traces stories of famous animals and how they reshape our thinking about humanity in this stunning collection of 17 brief essays. Some read as traditional essays, such as her mediations on the need for new language in an age of mass extinction, the way that artist Albrecht Dürer's wildly inaccurate rhinoceros prints influenced popular imagination in 16th century Europe, and the author's personal encounter with a deformed goat who was billed as "Lancelot, the Living Unicorn" by Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in 1985. Others are more genre-blending: Passarello inhabits the mind of Charles Darwin's pet tortoise and imagines Koko the signing gorilla retelling the infamous "Aristocrats" joke in her limited vocabulary. Passarello's keen wit is on display throughout as she raises questions about the uniqueness of humans. Perhaps the most stunning work is her bricolage timeline of murderous elephants in America, which aligns their crimes and executions with the rise of electricity and capital punishment. The entire collection satisfies through a feast of surprising juxtapositions and gorgeous prose. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
The meanings of Dürers rhino, Mozarts starling, Darwins tortoise and others explored with wild imagination and pyrotechnic prose Elena Passarello starts this extraordinary book with the image of Yuka, a woolly mammoth chiselled from the softening permafrost by Siberian tusk hunters in 2010. First a rounded hoof comes into view, then a hollowed-out eye and finally the flank still bearing evidence of the gash that must have done for young Yuka she was no more than 10 years old when she died nearly 40 millennia ago. Most surprising of all, though, is the burning smoulder of her pelt, which has kept to its unconvincing ginger-red despite the passing centuries. Whoever knew that woolly mammoths shared their hair colour with dime-store dolls? As Yuka is flopped on to the snowmobile it is not her odd dislocations most of her spine is gone although her legs remain rigid that qualify as one of the curious poses of the books title (taken incidentally from a line in When Doves Cry by Prince). It is what happens next, Passarello suggests, that stretches and shrinks Yuka into something truly strange. First she becomes the object of hard financial bargaining as the tusk hunters hide her carcass in a frozen cave and wait for the highest bidder. Then, when the scientists finally get their hands on her, she morphs into the poster child for a rewilding initiative that aims to make extinct breeds live again by splicing their ancient DNA into the embryo of their nearest living relatives. Each of the 17 short pieces in this book catches a famous historical animal just at the moment it dangles precariously between nature and culture. We meet a bear made to fight dogs in the stews of Elizabethan Southwark, and Clever Hans, a horse doing complicated fractions at a time when many working people still struggled with basic numeracy. Pressing on into the 20th century, theres Mike the headless chicken from postwar Oregon who struts and preens around the farmyard for 18 months apparently unaware that he has been decapitated in readiness for dinner. And Arabella, the common cross spider who was sent into space with the Skylab 3 mission of 1973 and spent 59 days industriously spinning webs so that the boffins could observe the effect of zero gravity on her intricate craft. Most famous of all, though, is the approximate rhinoceros that Albrecht Dürer created in 1515 which became lodged in Europes imaginary menagerie for the next two centuries. Nuremberg-based Dürer never got to see Ganda, the real-life rhino that was briefly on show in Lisbon, but that didnt stop him working up a woodcut from someone elses eye-witness scribble. The result was a beast that skewed towards the heraldic, with an elaborate armour of riveted panels topped by an extra horn between the shoulders and a disarmingly swishy My Little Pony tail. Thanks to the ubiquity of Dürers woodcut, this tooled-up rhino now seeded itself in the most unlikely places, cropping up in Flemish tapestries, Sicilian fountains, not forgetting a Medici family crest and countless onyx chess sets. In a typically deft counter-intuitive swerve, Passarello refuses to castigate Dürer for his high-handed makeover of the natural world. Instead, she argues that his riff on the rhino was actually more compelling than the anatomically accurate studies that started appearing in the mid-18th century, when live Sumatran specimens toured Europe. These paper rhinos had proper pink mottling, scaly tails and no extra shoulder horn, yet they somehow read as dead on the page. Dürer, by contrast, with 1,200 miles between him and Ganda, had to force himself inside the animals skin and the result was not the facts of a rhinoceros, but something altogether more real, a two-horned body twisted by the facts of human anxiety and awe. Although these animal case histories lodge under the label of essay, Passarello tests and stretches the form in thrilling ways. Particularly brilliant but, honestly, they are all brilliant is an extended fantasy written from the point of view of Harriet, the Galápagos tortoise who Darwin reportedly brought back on the Beagle. Harriet initially sexed as Harry is heartsick for her captor whom she is convinced has saved her for love. Most of the other Galápagos tortoises have been stowed on board as ambient larders, but Harriet tells herself: Youre not dinner, youre different. Back home on dry land, though, Charlie turns out to be a heartless beast and hopeless lover. He marries his nervous, pious cousin and pimps Harriet out to various naturalists with clammy hands, before finally sending her to a museum in Whitehall so chilly that she is obliged to go into perpetual hibernation. Passarello moves between musicology, biography and the golden throat of a bird brain with virtuosic ease All this might come off as charming but essentially whimsical were it not for the fact that Passarello underpins her wild imagination and pyrotechnic prose with rigorous research. She doesnt do footnotes, but an extensive bibliography of 255 sources bears witness to the huge accumulation of reading that has gone into her book. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the chapter on Mozart and his starling. Buying the bird in a pet shop in 1784, Mozart was tickled when the little beast listened intently to the first bit of his recent Piano Concerto in G and then spat it back, scrambled but improved. The feathered maestro replaced his masters tentative grace notes with bold crotchets, sharpened a couple of lacklustre Gs and added a dramatic fermata at the end of the first full measure. The result, an enchanted Mozart had to admit, was schön and the changes stayed. The way that Passarello moves seamlessly between musicology, biography and the golden throat of a bird brain suggests that she is something of a virtuoso herself. Crucially, though, she is smart enough not to show off about it. For there is always a danger with this kind of creative non-fiction that the first-person narrator will take over, blaring out her truths in every sentence, talking over everyone else and absorbing the world into her greedy I. Instead she keeps a decorous distance from her material, so that when she does detour into memoir towards the end of the book, it really means something. In her chapter Lancelot she recounts how as a child in the 1980s she became obsessed with a circus unicorn that was, in fact, a deformed goat with a bad perm. But instead of making this into an occasion for mourning the way in which fake animal presence, to use John Berger s disapproving term, robbed her of an authentic experience of animal-alterity, Passarello boldly maintains that it has always been like this. There never was a time when animal forms werent already enmeshed (or mucked up according to Berger) in fantasy versions of themselves. You only have to look at the Paleolithic paintings on the cave walls at Chauvet, a bestiary of cows and lions and, yes, mammoths, to know that, long before Beatrix Potter put puddleducks in bonnets or Pixar turned rats into chefs, mankind was doing a kind of ontological violence to animals. For Passarello this realisation is not so much dismaying as ruefully chastening. For it is only, she suggests, by coming clean about how we have always used animals to make sense of our own lives that we can begin to work out how we might set about repairing theirs. - Kathryn Hughes.
Kirkus Review
An essayist populates a bestiary of an ark with famous animals from history, all celebrated by humans even as we harnessed and exploited them.Passarello (English/Oregon State Univ.; Let Me Clear My Throat: Essays, 2012) welds eccentric stylistics, which can feel rather too fanciful or ethereal, to more grounded and less "poetic" deliberations on varied well-known species while revealing that we do not know as much about them as we thought. The former do not read as essays so much as peculiar little anthropomorphic meditations, some of which presuppose areas of knowledge on the reader's part while providing meager enlightenment of their own. They tend toward the allegorical, peppered with all manner of similes and labored metaphors, which work only occasionally. What are we to make of such lines as, "the stews downriver had less fornication," or the curious amalgam of elephant and electricity in "Jumbo II"? Doubtless these installments are matters of taste, though some readers may wonder at the point of it all. Thankfully, the majority of the book is more concrete, definitely more engaging, and decidedly more edifying. Despite Passarello's tendency to ramble, there is an agile intelligence at work in the best pieces, as she makes connections among disparate elements and wields keen perceptions on the creatures she encounters. There are some real dazzlers. Particularly impressive are "Vogel Staar," a meld of Mozart and starling, "Four Horsemen," an anatomical evaluation of our equine friends and the partnership we share, and "Celia," an elegy for the disturbing pace of extinctions, past and present. Another fine piece, "Lancelot," uses autobiographical elements to prime a salvo on the commercialization of animals and the hollowness of zoos. Even Beatrix Potter takes her lumps. Passarello manages to chronicle humanity's cavalier exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals without getting preachy in the processno mean feat. If only the entirety of the book reflected the gifts the author demonstrates at her best. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* This phenomenal collection of essays documents the lives of particular animals from a wide range of species, following a structure similar to Passarello's previous Let Me Clear My Throat (2012), which explores the human voice through individual recording artists. This contemporary bestiary reaches back to Yuka, a mammoth frozen in ice for nearly 40,000 years, and up to the infamous case of Cecil the lion, murdered by an American dentist. Passarello treats her subjects with dexterous care, weaving narratives together in a way that investigates, honors, and complicates her subjects. One essay chronicles the life of Harriet, a 176-year-old tortoise, purportedly collected by Charles Darwin himself and celebrated at her final home in Australia by excitable naturalist Steve Irwin. Another traces the peculiar influence of Albrecht Dürer's fanciful woodcut of the then little-known rhinoceros, which circulated widely at a time when half the world was built on hearsay. An especially harrowing entry on Jumbo II catalogs the long tradition of pachyderm exploitation and abuse in American circuses. A lighter entry consists of a joke composed entirely of words used by Koko the gorilla, who understands sign language. Passarello has created a consistently original, thoroughly researched, altogether fascinating compendium.--Báez, Diego Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE FIRST TIME I visited the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, I wandered entranced through galleries packed with curiosities to open a door onto an uncanny re-creation of a Central Asian courtyard, a rooftop columbarium of fountains and ferns, statuary and stillness. And there I found myself face to face with a live Barbary dove on her nest, her small dark eyes inwardly focused on nothing more than the need to sit, the feathers on her crossed wings lifting in a dusty breeze curling up from the streets below. This dove was a prop on a set designed purely for the play of human imagination, and yet there she sat, knowing nothing of this purpose, concerned only with the eggs beneath her. Looking at her made my eyes spill with tears. So did this book, whose title is, aptly, a line from Prince's "When Doves Cry." I've spent decades reading books on the roles animals play in human cultures, but none have ever made me think, and feel, as much as this one. It's a devastating meditation on our relationship to the natural world. It might be the best book on animals I've ever read. It's also the only one that's made me laugh out loud. Passarello is a Whiting Award-winning essayist and former actor whose previous collection, "Let Me Clear My Throat" (2012), tackled the subject of the human voice in a series of essays that ranged from the Wilhelm scream to the apostrophized voice of a sentient ventriloquists' dummy. Now, in "Animals Strike Curious Poses," she has written biographies of famous animals from Yuka the mummified mammoth (37,000 B.C.) to Cecil the Lion (2015), taking in on the way a menagerie as various as Albrecht Dürer's rhinoceros; Elizabethan fighting bears; Mr. Ed; a space-station spider; and the tortoise reputedly kidnapped by Darwin. The formal exuberance of this modern bestiary is exhilarating. In one extraordinary piece, Passarello pleats together the timeline of the history of electricity in America with that of the history of elephants in America, weaving light and darkness, electrocution and executions into a scorching meditation on the violence at the heart of modernity. In others she recreates the missing half of Christopher Smart's poetic paean to his Cat Jeoffry, and supplies us with a deadpan transcription of Koko the gorilla signing a famously obscene theatrical joke. It's a lazy move to use an author's background as a key to unlocking her work. But in its playful, performative, dramatic and fearless inhabiting of diverse voices and selves, this is an actor's book. Despite her intellectual brilliance, Passarello rejects the dry style of the anthropologist or cultural critic: "In Berger's thinking, little space exists for children," she acutely observes in an essay on the animals of her own childhood. And this has political, as well as creative, import. For "Animals Strike Curious Poses" speaks of and for the voiceless hordes with whom we share the earth, shows us how we make sense of them and, crucially, how they make sense for us. "Up from the mummy on that icecave slab comes a linked chain of animals, all of them pointing backward," she writes of the frozen mammoth. That's what she is doing here, forging a chain of essays with themes that link and snap together, so that upon reading one essay, the others are carried up and along with it, the clear analytic coherence running through its wildly disparate essay forms being perhaps this book's fiercest grace. No matter how long-dead its animal subjects, this is a book with burning current relevance, and not just because we are living through the sixth great extinction. The essay on Dürer's rhinoceros reflects on the lives of iconic images and their peculiar relation to truth, and makes early-modern Europe akin to our state today: "It was as if anything in your head could be confirmed by some far-flung report. Your wildest anxieties, your most God-forsaken imaginings - they could all be pulled out of the sky and made manifest in a woodcut of a nightmare beast, a fresh pox, or a folk tale." The retelling of the story of St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio is an examination both of the nature of wolves and also of faith and belief in authority, and it fearlessly tackles the deepest questions of identity. Is a wolf still a wolf if it comes to your door to be fed? How is an animal a moral? How is a person a person? At times, reading this book, so obviously in the presence of a master of the essay form, I felt like the starling Passarello describes in one of the collection's most beautiful pieces, "Vogel Staar (1784)": "At the moment it locks in on your Mozartean whistle, the little bird will only blink, aiming its entire soundless self toward the music coming from you." Ostensibly about Mozart's beloved pet bird, this essay is a collision of musicology, psychology and scientific ornithology. We learn of the parallels between a late-18th-century obsession with a classical four-part sonata form and the innate four-part schema of starling song upon which the bird builds its messy beauty from the broken scraps of what it's heard around it - and we learn, too, how Mozart and starling collaborated in a rare blossoming of interspecies creativity, each mimicking the other, both breaking the rules. This is not just the story of Mozart and his starling, but a love letter to vulgarity, messiness, caprice and the beauty of things that don't fit, don't go where they are supposed to. "Think of it," she writes of the starling and Mozart's collaboration; "he'd whistled a tune steeped in Vienna's golden algebra to a thing with feathers, and then the animal bobbed its little head and whistled back to him a glorious, deviant, Mozartean wink. This wasn't just schön ; it was game recognizing game! " "Animals Strike Curious Poses" is as much about our human frailties as it is about animals. It's full of darkness, of course. How could it not be? Violence and incomprehension have marked our relationship with animals since before we made the distinction between them and us and started using them to think with. But of all the essays in the book, I love this one in particular for setting a single bright star against that darkness: that the voice of a starling, elaborating on the tune of a man, could be written in staves and bars, and then pressed into wax, then vinyl, then digitized, so that one wrong note might be heard and loved forever. It gives one hope that we humans might not be so lonely after all. HELEN MACDONALD is the author of "H Is for Hawk."