The Virtual Stoa

Over here.

I clearly haven’t been following politics closely enough recently, as the news that Labour attacked the Tory candidate in Crewe & Nantwich for living near llamas has only just caught up with me, thanks to popbitch.

This is just weird. It’s not violently grotesque, the way the “make foreigners carry ID cards” leaflet was violently grotesque, but it is very, very strange. Everyone I know is strongly pro-llama. (I think that everyone I don’t know is strongly pro-llama.) And the slow take-over of the English countryside by camelids is very much to be welcomed.

In a genuinely socialist Britain, we would probably all live close to llamas, what with the disappearance of the distinction between the town and the country; and we wouldn’t need lawn-mowers any more. (Charles Fourier probably said something about this.)

Over here. I am proud to share my county with a beaver. It is apparently not the first beaver in Oxfordshire in five hundred years: last summer another beaver escaped from Cirencester and lived in the Cherwell before being recaptured and shipped back across the county line into Gloucestershire.

[It’s also good to see that someone mentions Gerald of Wales in the comments below the article, before it all begins to degenerate.]

Over here [via].

Perhaps they’ve been there for years, but I’ve only just noticed. Anyway, the papers from PECUS: Man and Animal in Antiquity, a conference held at the Istituto Svedese (i.e., Swedish Institute) in Rome in September 2002 are all online over here. I showed up with the rest of the gang from the British School at Rome in order to provide moral support for Michael MacKinnon, who was presenting some of his zooarchaeological work (i.e., ancient animal bones), and it then turned out to be easily the most enjoyable academic conference I’ve ever been to. Though I’m sorry to see the poster presentation (with music!) on bestialities ancient and modern in the rural mezzogiorno didn’t seem to make it through to the publication stage.

Two more specimens came to light this week, and I’m not willing to wait until late October to share them with you. First, the Simone de Beauvoir centenary has led to newspaper articles like this one; second, an erudite colleague has drawn my attention to a passage from Charles Fourier, in which he argues that the dilapidated state of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Frenchwomen gives us just as little insight into what women might be like one day as the torpor of the beaver in captivity gives us any clue to the real nature of the beaver (or something like that, anyway).

Over here.

They say they’ve genetically modified mice to make them unafraid of cats. I’m more concerned by the apparently-genetically-modified cat they’ve got in the vid-clip, who is even less effective at dealing with a mouse than Andromache.

(She can do the stalking, the patiently-lying-in-wait, and even the pouncing. After that, however, she isn’t at all sure what to do next, and when the mouse realises that the death blow isn’t really forthcoming, it’s able to scuttle away to safety. It’s very funny to watch. She’s better with wasps and spiders.)

From the Guardian:

If you are considering dyeing a sheep, first ensure that it is your own sheep and never use household paint or a chemical-based fabric dye such as Dylon. “The dye would need to be a non-toxic vegetable dye,” says the RSPCA, “and applied with a sponge or silent spray.” On one website, a seasoned sheep-dyer recommends food colouring (NB, you’ll need a lot of bottles) and advises that you dye only long-wool breeds, “as they tend to dry faster and not mat up like the finer wools”.

In other sheep-related news, I saw a copy of Henry Moore’s sheep sketchbook in the window of Waterstone’s this morning, which I last spotted at the Moore exhibit in Rotterdam about this time last year. I really should buy a copy. It’s very good.

Readers of this story may see the photograph and reasonably worry about whether I’ve been feeding poison intended for dogs to Enkidu.

I haven’t, and he’s fine.

Traffic has recently gone through the roof at the ironically-named Socialist Unity Blog, as Andy Newman has been giving us all invaluable blow-by-blow coverage of the split in the Respect coalition [now here and here]. And having built up a huge readership for the blog, it can finally turn its attention to the issues that matter — so Tawfiq Chahboune has been brooding on the issue that bugged me here and here, concerning Martin Amis, camels and wheels. Continue over the fold for the relevant portion, or visit the original over here.

(more…)

Over here.

Even a disappointed Collectivist or Communist does not retire into the exclusive society of beavers, because beavers are all communists of the most class-conscious solidarity. He admits the necessity of clinging to his fellow creatures, and begging them to abandon the use of the possessive pronoun; heart-breaking as his efforts must seem to him after a time.

From “The Superstition of Divorce” (1920)

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal concerned itself, among other things, with the promotion of American children’s beaver-consciousness, via the activities of the WPA. Here’s a poster for “Revolt of the Beavers“:

The Federal Theatre Project produced a variety of children’s plays. The great majority were warmly received. The Revolt of the Beavers, however, stirred political passions from the moment it premiered. In the play, two small children are transported to “Beaverland,” where society is run by a cruel beaver chief. “The Chief” forces the other beavers to work endlessly on the “busy wheel,” turning bark into food and clothing, then hoards everything for himself and his friends. With the help of the children, a beaver named Oakleaf organizes his brethren, overthrows The Chief, and establishes a society where everything is shared. The show played to packed houses during its brief New York City run, but its message drew fire. Theater critic Brooks Atkinson labeled it “Marxism à la Mother Goose.”

See here for a stirring image from the play. And there’s more on Revolt of the Beavers, which was revived earlier this year by the Brooklyn Family Theater here. [Thanks!!, PM]

Not so good, I’m afraid. The entry for “Castor” in the Dictionnaire just says, “ancien Auteur. Voiez la Remarque O de l’Article DEJOTARUS”, which is over here.

Go over the fold for the article on beavers from the second volume of the mighty Encyclopédie (pp.750-753) [warning: in French, c.4,000 words] [link]

(more…)

The Stoa has long been interested in universities, Fabians and beavers, so I’m interested to learn that the newspaper of the LSE student union is called The Beaver. But can anybody tell me why?

Regular Stoa-readers will recall that the end of October and the start of November is traditionally the season for a quick bout of beaver-blogging. I’m not sure I’ve got anything beaver-themed to report right now (apart from this, obviously), but with luck we’ll have some beaver stories up here over the next few days. And do please get in touch if there’s any beaver-related item you’d like to see blogged.

Apparently she’s stopped broadcasting.

Until this week I had been completely unaware of the iguana smuggling issue. But first there was the story of the woman who tried to smuggle an iguana into Blackpool in her bra, and now the story of the man who tried to smuggle three iguanas into Fiji in his artificial leg.

(There’s a lot more iguana news than I think I had expected, in fact. Iguanas have also been surprising gardeners in Swansea over the Summer: “Obviously he was surprised to see it and realised it wasn’t a native species of the Mumbles.” And we have at least one iguana here in Oxfordshire.)

Coming out of the monkey-house at the ménagerie in the Jardin des Plantes here in Paris yesterday, we read a notice about the orang-utans, which said, among other things, that

“Sa mère Wattana rejoindra prochainement un groupe de femelles élevant leurs petits à Appeldoorn, en Hollande, afin de compléter l’entraînement qu’elle a suivi à la Ménagerie pour recouvrer un comportement maternel.”

And what was the matter with her comportement maternel, we wondered?

The internet, as ever, comes to the rescue. This page starts with a disussion of La grande erreur de Rousseau, but eventually gets to the ape in question:

“Des observations récentes, en milieu artificiel, suggèrent même que les grands primates sont susceptibles d’apprendre la culture et les comportements d’une espèce voisine, y compris en ce qui concerne des éléments aussi sensibles à la sélection que les comportements sexuels. L’exemple de Watana, célèbre jeune femelle orang-outan de la ménagerie du Jardin des plantes à Paris, qui reçut des éléments de culture sexuelle bonobo au zoo de Stuttgart et se retrouva plus tard rejetée brutalement en milieu orang-outan, est à cet égard particulièrement édifiant!”

Regular readers of Popbitch can probably guess what’s going on here — the giveaway phrase, culture sexuelle bonobo, will be setting off the alarm bells. But there’s also this page which gives a few more details:

“Le second exemple concerne une amie orang- outan, Wattana. Elle appartenait, de naissance, à cette espèce solitaire dont les comportements sexuels, dans la nature, sont rares, pendant le court oestrus des femelles et plutôt calmes. Les hasards de la gestion des parcs zoologiques l’ont fait élever parmi des bonobos, chimpanzés bien connus pour leurs performances sexuelles permanentes et variées, nombreuses et brèves, entre partenaires de toutes combinaisons de sexes. Eduquée par ce groupe, Wattana fût ensuite “mariée” à un orang mâle qui, d’abord, prit si mal ses grimaces provocatrices et propositions sexuelles explicites qu’il fallut les séparer ! Dans un deuxième temps, introduite dans un groupe familial, Wattana fût acceptée par son fiancé, dont elle modifia culture et comportements, ainsi que ceux des autres membres du groupe!”

Grimaces provocatrices! Anyway, this seems to be the deep background to help explain why she’s now off in Holland to recover her comportement maternel. The scientists seem to be interested in the case, as it’s a good example of the extent to which sexual behaviour is learned, rather than innate. (There’s also an academic article out there about Wattana’s talents with knots.)

And for more on the culture sexuelle bonobo, you might start here.

Recently the Google Earth images of Oxford got much, much better. This, for example, is the part of town where you might run into Enkidu on your travels. That’s the canal going down the left-hand-side, where he’s been spotted on a number of occasions now; and there’s St Barnabas Church along the bottom edge, with Jericho’s Albert Street cutting through the top right-hand-corner.

My friend Chris Bertram stayed overnight with us in Oxford last week, and took this picture of Andromache. She’s wrapped in the towel we use for drying off the cats when they get wet.

Obi-Wan Dromaki, perhaps? (Original pic here.)

Here’s a handy chart from The Times showing how tall Hazel Blears is, as compared to (i) hitherto well-documented and in some cases actually-existing varieties of penguin and (ii) the Extinct Giant Tropical Penguin discussed below. [Thanks, David E.]