Word: humanity
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...book, Juliet, Naked (Riverhead; 416 pages), is an example of what you might call iPod lit--Arthur Phillips' The Song Is You would be another--novels that meditate on the paradoxical mixture of intimacy and estrangement that arises from listening to digitally recorded music, or really from any human interaction mediated by the Internet. In the case of Juliet, Naked, the music is by Tucker Crowe, a legendary (fictional) singer-songwriter who was last heard from in 1986 but who still has rabid online followers who endlessly dissect his recordings on message boards. Sort of like Elliott Smith...
...fetching what a human points at is standard dog behavior: master and dog. The cat, however, takes the lead in the cognition contest because she points her paw at what she wants, and the human fetches it for her: cat and slave...
...Mind" [Sept. 21]. I have nothing against your accolades for canines. But in their ability to follow a pointed finger's intent, dogs are not so unusual among animals, as your piece asserts. Did you know that ravens and other birds have shown the ability to follow a human's gaze...
Novelists love twins--evil twins, vanishing twins, incestuous twins, conjoined twins, spooky dead-little-girl twins. We make handy symbols for any writer who feels inclined to muse on the nature of human identity, which is basically every writer ever. But twins aren't symbols; they're people. There are not, to my knowledge, any great identical-twin novelists (though I think John Barth has a twin sister), and I have never yet read a fictional account of twinness that I found convincing, with one exception: Darin Strauss's excellent Chang and Eng, about Barnum & Bailey's famous Siamese twins...
...This is not a humanitarian camp. It's a base for human traffickers...