OP.1: Prior mention here (with approving commentary by neb).
This is all just really here so we can argue about the merits of borrowed versus rented birds, right?
Speaking of birds, this picture is something. Unlike the genre of things on capybaras, the weasel is trying to kill the bird.
Damn the link in 2. I was about to start discussing my own really absurd level of affection for Thurber, and now I feel all neb-pwned and shy about it.
I always feel kind of guilty about regulars who I don't have a distinct personal sense of. There's some kind of tipping point, beyond which I become aware of a regular as an individual person I know, but there have been people like One of Many, and plenty of others, who never mentioned enough biographical details or had distinctive enough rhetorical quirks that they popped out of the background for me -- familiar pseuds, but not individuals to me.
Ah, thought it might have been a hat for a hat.
I bought H is for Hawk on the iPad before I finished the NYer review quoted in the O.P., but I'd like to add a word for The Goshawk: it is really beautiful and, I think, warmer in complexion than the review's pity-the-benighted-British-non-heterosexual-between-the-wars refrain allows.
Let me also credit Flippy for bringing the review to my attention.
[Finger guns, exaggerated '80s movie freeze-frame wink.]
12: Thank you for saying that, because something about the way she wrote about his presumed desires, sort of smirkingly, was driving me up the wall. Sounds like it's time for me to read a lot of books about hawks, though.
15: I've read something similar about T.H. White in the past (that he was a tragically frustrated gay sadist), and, while I can't remember the exact context of the other account, it had the same "What's your basis for this?" issue -- that is, that it was the sort of insight into someone's emotional difficulties that you'd really want to be referring to something they wrote to back up. Did he write very personally revealing letters, or a memoir, or what's the deal?
I mean, I'm quite interested in frustrated gay sadists, or some of them at least. This particular gloss just annoyed me a lot.
I assumed it was in his letters, owing to this:
White did believe he was horrible. "I had a friend who was a sadistic homosexual, now happily married with children," he once wrote to L. J. Potts, his former Cambridge tutor, in a minor classic of the genre of Asking for a Friend.
Maybe it's more explicitly stated in other letters.
Right, I'm complaining about the "perhaps that's why he liked leather and knots, eh??" stuff more than that, but all of it just struck me as tone-deaf and glib while pretending to be deep and sensitive to his pain. Possibly I'm a monster.
White did believe he was horrible. "I had a friend who was a sadistic homosexual, now happily married with children," he once wrote to L. J. Potts, his former Cambridge tutor, in a minor classic of the genre of Asking for a Friend. White was himself a sadistic homosexual, and, in those pre-Stonewall, pre-"Fifty Shades" days, his desires were a misery to him. They were also, as far as anyone can tell, unfulfilled. White had no known male lovers, and he was, if anything, gentler than the standards of his time.
I'd take that paragraph, in the absence of any reference to anything more specific, to say that it wasn't in his letters, at least not in so many words.
These are not about birds. They are about people who think they are thinking about birds.
Oh, wait, duh. I completely misread "the genre of Asking For A Friend" -- I was reading it as "a letter in which White, lonely, was seeking friendship" rather than "a letter in which White was purportedly asking for advice about a friend, but was really talking about himself" (bad reading on my part, the paragraph isn't that unclear). That makes the paragraph make much more sense, although it also makes sound as if a not-terribly compelling interpretation of this one letter is what the whole thing rests on.
19 and 20 both seem reasonable and non-monstrous. The comment about leather and knots seemed more lurid than anything else.
22: At first I thought it meant that White's correspondence had been collected under the title Asking for a Friend! But still, one wishes to know why the author is so certain that White was really "asking for a friend". I mean probably that's just omitted for length's sake.
24.1 was my first take, too. But why should we assume Fifty Shades would have made White happier and more self-assured or whatever? And why would he not have sadistic homosexuals as friends if he were one himself and perhaps envy one who'd cloaked or seemingly overcome those tendencies? etc.
Shorter me: people tend to assume because they know one thing about someone else's sexuality that they know everything, but I doubt that.
Googling around, it seems to go back to the Sylvia Townsend-Warner biography of White.
Ok, everyone post your real name, your annual income, your SAT scores, the length and girth of the penis nearest you, and one thing about your sexuality.
There's a kind of mid-20th C Freudianism that I find fascinating -- repressed secrets leading to neurosis that would be instantly cured if only the secret were brought to light. This kind of sounds as if STW was thinking along those lines -- the dreadful, frustrated secret explains everything about White's personality.
28: I was thinking about foxes and hedgehogs. The hedgehog knows one thing about its own sexuality (that it is to be engaged in very very carefully)...
Whereas the fox knows many little things (namely the thrill of the hedgehog's spines).
(Am I the only one who assumed that the one big thing and many little things were interrelated like that? The hedgehog knows one big thing, his own defense mechanism? The fox knows many small things, also the hedgehog's defense mechanism, but in a different way?)
I was thinking about foxes and hedgehogs.
It all ultimately comes back to depilatory choices, doesn't it?
I think I took it that the fox knows many things of varying importance, not necessarily all minor in themselves but with an implication of shallowness w/r/t the fox's knowledge thereof.
My particular complaint, I guess, is that leather as a part of sadism seems culturally constructed and not like it would necessarily apply to White's particular interest unless he'd given some evidence that it did. Possibly I should have paid more attention to the thesis on the vegan ethics of leather culture that nice young woman was writing many years ago instead of falling prey to non-sadistic homosexual tendencies instead. Anyway, off to read about falconry AND T.H. White's sexuality, but not immediately because it's about to be bedtime for small folks.
I'm really happy I'm not the only one who makes fox/hedgehog sex jokes, too!
35.1 is certainly right. Venus was in furs, after all.
If hawking in White's day, you needed leather. I don't know if Kevlar would be a suitable substitute even now.
Perhaps this wasn't the context of the original reference, but there's plenty of choices that derived from practical physical constraints before moderns interpreted them as just symbology.
Finally read the goshawk thing last evening so now I know what y'all were going on about. I will repost a semi-relevant bit from Barry Lopez's .
A former German military officer, F. W. Remmler, hunted wolves with eagles in Finland in the 1930s and later in Europe before moving to Canada. He trained his eagles first by turning them loose on children. The children were dressed in leather armor and covered with a wolf skin, and raw meat was strapped to their backs. When the eagles were used to knocking down the children for the meat, Remmler put them in an enclosure into which he loosed wolves bought from European zoos.
There's footage on youtube of Khazaks doing that. Hunting wolves with eagles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iiTY4RIZ0Q
There's an entire sub-genre of eagles looking pretty bad-ass.
That the current active threads are about cats and birds is delightsome, though it reminds me of this, and of my first sighting of a Ruby-crowned Kinglet, when one of my stupid cats (pbut) deposited it dead at my front door.
From this terrific piece on the nature lexicon (alternate title: Funes the Memorious' Northern Ramble) is this little gem:
A dialect name for the kestrel - alongside such felicities as windhover and bell-hawk—is wind-fucker.
Perhaps this wasn't the context of the original reference
It wasn't.
40: The best thing about the Mongolian eagle hunters is that, after taming the haggards and hunting with them a few years, they are expected to re-release them so they can breed and, generally, eagle. Amazing sacrifice of investment.
43: How do we know this? I'm seeing a lot of interpretations by people who, afaict, don't do anything non-literary, which, ime, is not a sufficient foundation for interpreting references to the rest of the world.
I assumed by "original reference" you meant the reference to leather and knots in the linked essay. We can pretty easily see what the context was, in that case.
Last spring, my sister and her family found a tiny baby pigeon on the sidewalk, still alive. They brought it home and put it under her broody chicken. (She has other non-broody chickens.) They fed the baby pigeon (mostly baby bird food, but also Korean food since they found it outside the Korean restaurant) and named it Ernie. Since my sister doesn't actually like pigeons, she always referred to it as the new chicken.
It grew big and one day it left.
That reminds me of the guy who helps the birds in "The White Snake", except with nobody having been granted the power of understanding animals and nobody being used a prize in their father's sick game.
Slap me sideways with a fish, I completely missed the New Yorker article. Which is so good! Not least because it's about someone who both writes and not-writes.
when a species is endangered it suffers not only numeric but also semantic decline. "The rarer they get, the fewer meanings animals can have," she observes. "Eventually rarity is all they are made of."
This is a much-debated problem in conservation, but I've never seen it so well put.
AND YET: the NY article *still* doesn't have any actual evidence that White liked leather in any circumstance other than hawking, which required it. (What do they think fly-fishing enthusiasts do in bed?) We assume BDSM-Folsom-leather, so it's easy for us to jump from White's emotional torment with the hawk to his assigned costume, but why would White have? Even picnic baskets in the 1930s were also made with leather and knots. It's semantic decline of the material.
More about birds: Corvus. Stone house, house crows, kung fu fighting.
AND YET: the NY article *still* doesn't have any actual evidence that White liked leather in any circumstance other than hawking, which required it.
Yes, uh, precisely, as has been observed already.
|| Digby's always worth it, but this one on the Clinton emails is especially good. |>
It's been a couple of years since I read STW's bio of THW, but my recollection is she had more to go on than just a few references in letters, also perhaps some empathetic insights owing to STW's own much less closeted romantic life. The overall impression I got from the bio was pretty unrelieved desolateness - which, fair enough. I somehow recall that in STW's own letters she wrote the bio project ended up much more depressing than she had thought it would. For pure enjoyment, I'd skip the bio and go straight to Mistress Masham's Repose and The Corner That Held Them (one of my favorite novels of ever ever ever so tremendously good).
Martin Windrow's book about his owl is on my list for the library, partly because I know that reading extracts of it aloud will reliably cause my very neatnik better half to quiver in horror. Evil anticipatory cackle!
Wasn't misremembering:
"
His suitcases were at the foot of the stairs, as though he had just come back.[...] His clothes were on hangers. His sewing basket with an unfinished hawk-hood; his litter of fishing-flies, his books, [...] his vulgar toys bought at Cherbourg Fairs, his neat row of books about flagellation - everything was there, defenceless as a corpse. [...] I went back to the hotel and drank a brandy and told Michael I expected I'd do the book. (Element, 22 July 1967)"
From http://townsendwarner.com/data/2014_the-cat-in-the-hamper.php
But anyone could be interested in flagella.
I was only pointing out that there is more than the "asking for a friend" letter to go on in fleshing out THW's sexuality. Seems you've got some other point in mind I'm missing.
I'm not contesting his sexuality; I - not alone - find the NY author's interjection that THW liked hawking because it involved leather ill-founded.
Hawking and flyfishing don't have to be psychologically significant because leather, for instance; solitude is as significant and less semiotic.
I am now curious about what Cherbourg meant to the English.
Neb was pursuing that line of questioning for a friend.
I am now curious about what Cherbourg meant to the English.
Yet another place where the wogs started.
Was former times Englishman closetedly gay and/or into whipping describes what maybe 10000 distinct books and 50,000 distinct articles by now, no? Fuck it Mongolians have fucking eagles killing wolves and I've learned that from this thread.
59: Despite Halford posting double-digit comments in the thread linked in 39 which has a number of eagle hunting mentions?
Have the eagle hunting fans posted a link yet to any of Sardar Afkhami's work?
||
So Ira Glass and Philip Glass are cousins?
|>
60 -- you may have noticed that I don't pay close attention, in general.
In that case, let me be the first to tell you that Ira Glass and Philip Klass are cousins.
Not to mention their other cousins: Looking, Gorilla and Hand-blown.