Submarine Skink

Underwater Adventure, Willard Price (1955)

Looking back on my childhood, I’m hit by one big regret: I watched too much TV. Any TV is too much TV, of course, but I watched hours almost every evening. It was what my family did, though, and it was natural to go along. Still, it’s a regret. I wasted all those hours watching a TV screen when I could have been reading.

Fortunately, I managed to read a lot too. And the reading stayed with me. The TV didn’t. For me, reading was always more intimate, more powerful and much more enjoyable. Two of the authors I enjoyed most were Enid Blyton (1897-1968) and Willard Price (1887-1983). I had all of Blyton’s Famous Five series and all-but-two of Price’s Adventure series (Tiger Adventure and Arctic Adventure were the missing ones). And I re-read all the books at the time as I’ve always done if I enjoy a book.

But you can’t step in the same river twice, as Heraclitus said, and you can’t enjoy a book as an adult in the way that you did as a kid. Sometimes you can’t enjoy a book at all. I’ve tried the Famous Five books again and found them bland and uninspired. Blyton wrote down to her readers, using simple words and syntax and situations. It worked and she became the most successful children’s author of all time. But maybe she could have been both simple and subtle, or even simple, subtle and surreal, like J.P. Martin in his excellent Uncle series. I can re-read the Uncle books as an adult and enjoy them as much as I did as a kid. Or maybe even more, because I understand better now how good Martin was as a writer.

Like Martin, unlike Blyton, Willard Price is still enjoyable to read as an adult. He isn’t surreal or subtle, but his books are full of incident and information as they relate the adventures of the young naturalists Hal Hunt, who’s in his “late teens”, and Roger Hunt, who’s in his “early teens”. They’ve been given a year off school by their famous animal-collector father. And they cram a lot into that year as they collect animals and battle villains in exotic settings around the world, from the Amazon jungle to the Arctic wastes.

And maybe there is some surrealism in the books too: I haven’t re-read Elephant Adventure (1964) since I was a kid, but I can still remember things like the giant earthworms at the Mountains of the Moon and the pygmy crawling through the chambers of a slaughtered elephant’s heart. I didn’t remember this book, Underwater Adventure, like that. Except for one incident that I won’t reveal, because that would spoil the plot. One thing that won’t spoil the plot is the news that Hal and Roger beat the villains in the end, despite overwhelming odds and a hurricane.

This time they’ve gone to the Pacific to help a marine biologist collect specimens for his Oceanographic Institute. They meet one of Hal’s old classmates, S.K. Inkham or Skink, as he’s nicknamed. Inkham is young like the Hunt brothers; unlike them he’s lazy, greedy, cunning and cowardly. His villainy is one half of the plot. The other half, as always in the Adventure books, is the animals and the setting. Hal and Roger battle sharks, collect a rare and beautiful monster from the deep, learn about sea-anemones and clownfish, and explore a sunken ship. There’s treasure aboard, but that brings the plot back to Inkham and his villainy. At the beginning he was trying to cripple or kill the Hunt brothers with scorpions or stonefish or sabotaged diving-equipment; later on he’s trying to steal the treasure too.

He fails in both endeavours and the Hunt brothers are where they always are at the end of their books: ready for their next adventure. This time it will be Volcano Adventure (1956). I haven’t re-read that since I was a kid, but I can still remember incidents there. And the book was my introduction to the fascinating world of vulcanology. Willard Price didn’t create great literature, but his books are enjoyable, informative and worth reading at any age.

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Twice Has Thrice the Vice

Pisces, Peter Sotos, with an introduction by Dr Miriam B. Stimbers (TransVisceral Books 2017)

March 2016. Anglo-American academic Miriam Stimbers leaves her apartment in St Louis to attend an ’80s nostalgia concert at a local rock-arena. Behind her, she leaves transgressive author Peter Sotos to fish-sit her prized tank of tropical fish. Four hours later, Stimbers returns to her apartment to discover the tank empty and Sotos lying unconscious on the floor.

When he revives, Sotos describes how, minutes after Stimbers’ departure, the apartment was invaded by a masked gang.

He remembers trying to fight them off.

Then it all went black…

Pisces is a detailed examination of that fateful March day and its continuing repercussions. It is a true-crime book like no other, written from the inside by a no-holds-barred author who has been at the heart of events right from the beginning. As Dr Stimbers writes in her introduction:

Peter was a rock throughout the preliminary bewilderment-and-grieving process. It was truly a great comfort when he told me that, despite the brief time he knew my fish, he felt that he and the eighty-six of them had forged a genuine and permanent bond. Furthermore, despite the brutal assault to which he was subjected and the stress-induced hiccups he suffered for two days after the fish-napping, Peter barely left my side for the rest of the month, helping me to process my initial shock and horror and trying to assist the police investigation in any way he could. He also came up with the most plausible theory as to the gang’s identity. No trace of any break-in could be discovered, nor, despite detailed examination of multiple CCTV-feeds, was it possible to identify any strangers entering or leaving the apartment-block during the relevant time-period. But, while the gang was in the apartment, they re-arranged my bookshelves and anonymously purchased me a gift-subscription to the Journal of Forensic Entomology.

Peter’s suggestion?

“They must have been ninja librarians, Miri,” he said.

I concur. It’s the only explanation that fits all the facts. (Introduction, pg. ix)

But why would ninja librarians fish-nap a set of tropical fish? Where have they taken their piscine prizes? When will they issue a ransom demand? These questions continue to haunt all those involved in this unique tragedy. Pisces examines each aspect of the case from every conceivable angle and will only serve to trans-toxify Sotos’s rebarbative renown as an edgily incendiary archaeologist of the most photophobic furlongs of the counter-cultural complexus.

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Previously pre-posted on Papyrocentric Performativity:

• K-9 Konundrum — review of Dog by Peter Sotos
• Toxic Twosome — review of Doll by Peter Sotos and James Havoc

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Forthcoming Fetidity from TransVisceral Books…

• Stiff for Stiffs: Kandid Konfessions of a Korpse-Kopulator, דוד קרקשׁ
• Slime-Sniffer: The Norman Nekrophile Story, Nicolae Feralescu
• Pay to Slay: The Toxic True Tale of the Mersey Murder-Machine, Dr Samuel P. Salatta

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Fresh Flesh

The Complete Illustrated Guide to Freshwater Fish & River Creatures, Daniel Gilpin and Dr Jenny Schmid-Araya (Hermes House 2011)

Fresh-water fish are special in part because fresh water seemingly isn’t. It’s the transparent stuff that human beings drink and bathe in. It’s an everyday thing that, in most parts of the world, falls regularly from the sky. And yet very strange creatures live in it: fish, which breathe water and drown in air. That inversion of normality doesn’t seem so remarkable in the sea: the saltiness of the water doesn’t seem to contradict the strangeness of the citizens, as it were. Instead, saltiness and citizens go together.

The difficulty of keeping a marine aquarium seems appropriate too. What else should you expect? But a freshwater aquarium seems special in part because it’s so simple. Even if the water has to be heated, it still seems everyday, like bathwater. But it’s bathwater with aliens in it.

In truth, of course, it’s human beings who are the aliens. Water is where life began. Fish are still there, breathing in the natural way, not the unnatural one. The ocean is the womb of life and when life left the ocean, it had to find ways to re-create it. Blood is a portable ocean and human beings have gills for a time when they’re embryos. We were fish once. Fish still are. But they’ve continued to evolve and to find new habitats. As the introduction to this book points out, moving from the sea to fresh water is like moving from a continent to an island. The world shrinks and fresh-water fish don’t generally have such big ranges as marine ones. Some species are confined to single rivers or single lakes or even single pools, which makes them vulnerable to pollution and desiccation.

But some fish can survive desiccation:

West African lungfish, Protopterus annectens

This fish inhabits temporary swamps and floodplains. When these habitats start to dry, the fish buries itself in the mud and secretes a thin layer of slime around its body. This dries to form a fragile cocoon which helps to maintain moisture. By slowing its body metabolism, it can survive within this cocoon for a year or more, although it normally re-emerges within a few months, when the rains return. … Once the water within its burrow has [evaporated] it relies entirely on its primitive lung to obtain oxygen. (“Africa: Knifefish, Elephantfish, Bichir and Lungfish”, pg. 157)

So lungfish are a step towards life on land. Elsewhere, other fish step in other directions. Electrophorus electricus, the electric eel of South America, isn’t truly an eel but is truly alien. It uses electricity both as a weapon and as a sense, because it lives where vision isn’t always useful: in the “calm, turbid waters” of streams, rivers and swamps (“South America: Sharks, Rays, Sawfish and Electric Eel”, pg. 127). Some cave-dwelling fish have lost their eyes entirely, like Typhlichthys subterraneus, the southern cavefish of Tennessee and Kentucky (pg. 111).

But Toxotes chatareus, the archerfish of Asia and northern Australia, has excellent eyesight, because it can squirt jets of water and “shoot insects” from overhanging branches up to five feet away: “Once it has knocked its target into the water it darts across to snap it up” (“Asia and Oceania: Other Perch-Like Fish”, pg. 231).

This makes it popular with some aquarists. Other fish are popular for their appearance, not their behaviour. Fresh-water fish can’t match the range of colour and patterns found in salt-water fish, but a shoal of neon or cardinal tetras, Paracheirodon innesi and P. axelrodi, is like a cloud of swimming jewels. Surprisingly for such a well-known aquarium fish, the neon tetra is restricted “in the wild to the tributary streams of the Solimões River, which flows into the Amazon” (“South America: Tetras”, pg. 140).

The paintings here capture the beauty of both species: one of the good things about the natural history series to which this encyclopaedia belongs is that it uses paintings to illustrate the main text, not photography. Capturing the shine, shape and colour of fish is a challenge to artists, so when they meet the challenge their art rewards the observer. The amphibians, reptiles and mammals also covered here are less challenging, so less rewarding, but they’re few in number and fish dominate the book. I like that dominance and I like the maps that open each geographic section. Rivers and lakes are prominently marked, from the Amazon to the Mississippi, from the Nile to the Euphrates, from Lake Victoria to the Caspian Sea. There’s lots of interesting information here and lots of attractive art.

Fish are strange creatures and that strangeness seems to strengthen in that everyday liquid we call fresh water. But water is strange too, wherever you find it and whatever it tastes like. It’s still being studied, still throwing up surprises, despite the simplicity of its composition: two atoms of hydrogen to one atom of oxygen. We should remember that as we read books like this.

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Latest Reviews (6/viii/2014)

• Colouring the Chameleon – Olivier, Philip Ziegler (MacLehose Press 2013)

• Paper-Deep – Treasure Island (1883) and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885), Robert Louis Stevenson

• Fins and Fangs – The Fresh and Salt Water Fishes of the World, Edward C. Migdalski and George S. Fichter, illustrated by Norman Weaver (1977) (posted @ Overlord of the Über-Feral)

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Or Read a Review at Random: RaRaR

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The Aesthetics of Animals

Life: Extraordinary Animals, Extreme Behaviour, Martha Holmes and Michael Gunton (BBC Books 2009)

Probably the best BBC book I’ve seen: the beautiful photographs and the enlightening text complement each other perfectly. It’s not advanced biology, with equations and game theory, and it doesn’t give scientific names. But it does include some recent discoveries, like the rehabilitation of the Komodo dragon. If that’s the word:

The tissue damage from the bite is not enough to kill. Until recently, it was thought that bacteria in the dragon’s saliva poisoned its prey. But it has been shown now that the dragon, like some snakes, has venom, making it the world’s largest venomous animal. (ch. 5, “Frogs, Serpents and Dragons”, pg. 134)

The Komodo dragon has become more frightening. And also more interesting. But the book isn’t only about big and frightening: it’s also about strange and beautiful, like:

A tall Gersemia soft coral bending over to sweep tiny animals from the sediment. It does this when there isn’t enough food in the water for its polyps to trap. Once it has consumed everyting in a circle around itself, it will detach from whatever it is holding onto and crawl to a new spot. (ch. 1, “Extraordinary Sea Creatures”, pg. 39)

That’s in very cold water under “the ice in McMurdo Sound, in Antarctica’s Ross Sea”, as part of an “ancient, isolated and utterly unique community” of marine life: there are also sponges, starfish, proboscis worms and sea-urchins. The Gersemia looks both beautiful and graceful, bowing to the sediment like a jewelled and mobile tree, but those are human terms for an organism that probably isn’t even conscious. And all of those organisms that are conscious, like the mammals in the final three chapters, aren’t aware of how they look to us. Natural beauty – and its absence – aren’t designed for us, but the aesthetics of animals is an interesting topic.

Television wants powerful images and this book reproduces them from the series, like the “lioness charging across a river in the Okavango” on page 228. But I think the static image must be more powerful than the mobile one: the photograph freezes the chaos of splashing water and the pale gold perfection of the lioness herself. She wears a look of immense concentration and purpose and I’ve rarely seen a better example of the power and beauty of the big cats. On page 219, there’s an image of one of the big cats’ greatest enemies. It’s also powerful, but in a different way: “a yawning spotted hyena revealing a perfect set of teeth, specialized for cutting, tearing and grinding.” Hyenas are interesting but not attractive. Big cats are both, from the charging lioness to the cheetahs on pages 231-5 and the alert lynx on page 237.

So why is the cat-family, big and small, generally much more attractive than the dog-family? And why are bats often so grotesque? The bulldog bat sweeping up a fish on pages 242-3 has a flat snarling face, ginger fur, taut, veined wings, hook-like hind claws and what looks like a small dangling penis. Birds are often very attractive. Why not bats? Their hairiness and leathery wings are part of it, as are their faces, which are adapted for sonar and eating, not for appealing to human beings.

And then we come to the primates in the final chapter. Now we’re getting closer to home. The faces of each species has a distinct effect on humans, from the endearing spectral tarsier to the choleric red uakari and the melancholy macaque. And chimpanzees look more intelligent than gorillas. Their faces haven’t evolved for our eyes, but they trigger mechanisms in our minds all the same.

So do the insects, birds and fish earlier in the book. And the plants in the single chapter devoted to them, like the bamboo and the dragon’s-blood tree. Colour and line: beautiful and ugly, attractive and repulsive. But all of this bio-aesthetics is interesting and all of it’s governed by natural and sexual selection. And behind it all is Mathematica Magistra Mundi, Mathematics Mistress of the World, from the circle swept by a soft coral on the floor of an icy ocean to the pattern of veins in a bat’s wing and the stripes in a tiger’s pelt.

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