aw, shucks; & pets

Thanks Diarmuid. I do try to be sweet.

“My interview with the philosopher Graham Harman was published in Mute magazine. I’ve called him ‘a prolific, iconoclastic thinker of objects whose work proffers an alluring antidote to the linguistic turn and the recent anarcho-deleuzian contagion’ – I didn’t mention that he also loves cats, is militantly vegetarian and that he’s a very sweet guy… You can find it here.'”

Actually, Diarmuid and I had a great discussion on tape in London just minutes before I left for Oxford in early May, and that was the foundation of the interview that appeared in Mute.

I love dogs, too. Cairo just isn’t a very easy city in which to have one. Not much grass, not many parks to run around in, so it would be a housebound existence for dogs here with occasional walks on pavement, at least in Zamalek. If I moved back to El Rehab I could have a dog, but I can barely find cat babysitters when I travel, let alone babysitters for more complicated dog stayovers.

We always had dogs when I was growing up. First was Juniper, a mutt with a bit of airedale in her; my parents rescued her from a shelter near Chicago when I was about 2.

Then we had a sheepdog named Xantha, but couldn’t keep her for long. I don’t remember why not. Xantha was a purebred sheepdog, so just for fun my dad (who was a total hippie longhair at the time) registered her with the Kennel Club. You had to give a first and second choice for name in case the first choice was already taken, so my dad tried to ensure that Xantha was accepted by listing “Susie Puntwater Fishfin” as the second choice. They gave us “Xantha” in the end.

Juniper died in 1982. In 1983 my youngest brother demanded duck chicks for his 10th birthday. It seemed like a bad idea to me, but it worked out brilliantly. Ducks are extremely good pets, as long as you have enough space. At the time we were renting an old farmhouse (though not farming ourselves). There were mulberry bushes on the property, and the ducks loved the berries. They also eat a lot of mosquitoes. Finally, they’re more emotionally accessible than you might think, though the white one was more aggressive than the brown one, who had a bit more emotional subtlety. During the freezing Iowa winters we would put the ducks in our dirt-floor basement.

The duck period lasted several years. The white duck sadly died after some animal dug into their pen one night and fought him; probably a fox. The brown one simply vanished a couple of years later, and was possibly eliminated by a jerk neighbor we had who didn’t want “that damn duck” crossing into his stupid manicured yard.

We were never cat people, but in 1987 my youngest brother found some kittens abandoned inside one of the old farm sheds where we were living. Some of the cats died prematurely from various causes, while the survivors served as magnets for additional new cats that emerged from nowhere, and all told my parents were stuck in the cat business for nearly 20 years.

In 1994, my other brother used to play with a cute fox terrier puppy in his apartment complex. The puppy was called “Cobain,” and was badly neglected by the irresponsible undergraduates who owned him. One day my parents drove over to visit my brother, “Cobain” jumped in their car, and they insisted on keeping him. The undergrads agreed they could have him. Renamed “Woody,” he turned out to be a very smart and likable dog. Like most of his breed, he could even understand sentences. Once someone said: “Woody, go upstairs to your toybox and get the rope.” He cocked his head sideways while thinking, the command was repeated a few times, and finally he went upstairs to get the rope. Woody also loved fortune cookies, and would often bury them in the yard in their plastic wrappings for later retrieval.

In 2004 or so, a black dog was on the road near my parents’ house, and they took him. He was named Cairo, perhaps in my honor. (My grandfather was quite old by then and could never master the name Cairo; it was always “Romeo” or “Cicero” instead.)

Otherwise, my Toronto brother (not the youngest) had a few pet red-eared turtles when he was somewhat younger.

Ah yes, we also once saved a baby rabbit in our yard whose mother had been killed. We called him “Ears,” and released him into the wild one day once he had grown enough. That was an unusual experience. We let Ears out of his cage, and he didn’t run away immediately. He just sort of grazed on the grass, slowly moved his way while grazing into the weeds, and then simply never came back.

I think there may have been a fish tank at some very early point as well, but I have only feeble memories of it.

It’s not exactly Lingisian pet exoticism (I’ve never owned an electric eel, parrots, toucans, Himalayan pheasants, an octopus, bees, stonefish, or sharks as Al Lingis has at various times), but these were all great animals.