Alice McDermott, 2013
the fifty-first book in the visitor recommendation series;
suggested by Lewis Gentry
Even though it’s only 232 pages long, this book took me over a month to get through—long enough that multiple people out in public saw me reading it and asked what it was about. And I told them all the same thing: the cover pretty much sums it up. It is about someone. It’s the life story of some rando. Not totally uneventful—a broken engagement, a brother who gives up the priesthood and later has a psychotic break, some deaths—but, yeah, neither more nor less eventful than the life story of someone you arbitrarily picked off the street, and I found no indication of why I should spend 232 pages following this life rather than one of those others. I dunno. Not everything has to be for everyone. I imagine that there were probably plenty of readers who found that this protagonist’s life resonated with them. I happen not to be one of those readers. Reading this book was like being set up on a blind date that quickly sputters out into strained small talk and awkward silence. Like, hey. You seem fine. But we just don’t seem to have anything to say to one another.
Irene Pepperberg, 2008
(This wasn’t on any of my lists—I needed something to read on the plane ride down from Portland and saw this on Ellie’s shelf.)
I first heard of Alex the parrot in the late 1990s from Liza Daly, founder of ifMUD, the chat room where I hung out in those days. Irene Pepperberg, who at that point had already been working with Alex for over twenty years, had recently arrived at MIT’s Media Lab, with which Liza had an affiliation which, a quarter of a century later, I no longer remember. In any case, ifMUDders quickly became a bit obsessed with this parrot who could not only read a bit and answer surprisingly complex questions—shown a board full of letter magnets of various sizes and colors, you could ask him which letters were green, or what color the largest letters were, and he would answer correctly—but who could devise novel appellations for things by combining words from his inventory: he knew what a nut was, and he knew what a cork was, so when he first encountered an almond, he termed it a “cork nut”. We liked these Alex stories enough that when Dan Shiovitz created an ifMUD bot to intercept and answer frequently repeated questions, he named it after Alex and gave it some mannerisms based on stories we’d heard or read about the real Alex. Anyone who typed the word “almond”, for instance, would be interrupted by Alex chiming in, “Awk! Want cork nut!”. The MUD’s Alex bot became one of the top hits for searches on Alex the parrot, and when Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake came out in the early 2000s, with its references to the real Alex, a handful of fans showed up on the MUD expecting that we must be a like-minded community of Atwood enthusiasts. It was weird that other people knew about our little in-joke.
But of course Alex wasn’t actually an in-joke—sure, most of us had heard about him from Liza, but he’d been on TV and had been featured in major newspapers and magazines. When he died unexpectedly in 2007, Alex and the transformative effect Irene Pepperberg’s research on him had had on the scientific world’s view of animal cognition received a surprising amount of media coverage, which in turn generated enough demand for this book to see print. This is not a deep look at thirty years’ worth of research; that book, apparently, is The Alex Studies, published six years earlier. This goes into the scientific work at about the same level as the magazine articles and PBS specials; I was already familiar with those, so to me this read like a “greatest hits” compilation. What was new to me were the passages about Irene Pepperberg’s life: her unhappy childhood, her unhappy marriage, her largely unhappy academic career (struggling for funding and for a position with some security, hired for a tenure-track position at last over the objections of half the department, and stuck in tiny, roach-infested offices with the sort of furniture you’d find in a dumpster). Like, to me, Irene Pepperberg is a huge celebrity. I blithely assumed that she’d been on easy street since Alex hit the big time. But as recently as the 2000s, while Alex was appearing in Oryx and Crake, Irene Pepperberg was filing for unemployment, and Alex himself was being looked after by friends because she had no place of her own where he could stay. I mean, gyah, here’s someone who really changed the conversation about the capabilities of the minds, and even about the existence of the minds, of creatures very different from us. I hope that this book, slight though it is, helped give her some financial stability commensurate with those landmark contributions.
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Tumblr |
this site |
Calendar page |
|||