Notes on Animal Stories
I was recently in conversation with Kate Zambreno about her wonderful book Animal Stories. The night before I reread the book and took notes of my thoughts and questions that I wanted to ask her. We had a lovely conversation and time ran out before I could ask everything, so instead, I will post the notes that I had written down while reading the book again. I might also make this a new series for all the notes that I take of the books that I read and movies that I watch.
1. The first line places the zoo next to the sight / transportation of horror. There’s an undercurrent of human terror running through the book and our relationship with animals — captivity, killing, discarding them, and the spectacle.
2. The terror becomes more pronounced when we start recognizing ourselves in them, or become aware of their capacity to suffer (consider the lobster)
3. What do we want from animals? Everything.
4. JM / Coetzee / Elizabeth Costello’s tracing of the chimp Sultan: Where is home, and how do I get there?
5. The boredom of apes and human beings, page 21
6. The bloody baboon war in London Zoo / patriarchal
7. How did animals experience the pandemic — when their only entertainment tends to be human beings coming to them for entertainment?
8. Going to the zoo was a form of escaping human boredom / horror
9. So much about seeing, looking, staring back, photography
10. More humane habitats to appease the discomfort of humans (page 37)
11. “One sees the animals through the curious faces of one’s children.” Relates to Berger writing “Adults take children to the zoo to show them the originals of their reproductions and also in the hope of refunding some of the innocence of that reproduced animal world that they remember from their childhood.”
12. Parents are also looking at their children as mirrors, projecting or looking for themselves in the kids.
13. Peacocks
14. The blue heron, the birds, the freedom that they have (page 39)
15. Modern life is organized to bore and trap you (find quote)
16. “What I mean by this is simple: when we think of the way our days are structured, the kinds of activities most readily on offer, the mode of relating to the world we are encouraged to adopt, etc.—in each case we are more likely to find ourselves spent rather than sustained. The default set of experiences on offer to us are more likely to leave us feeling drained and depleted rather than satisfied and renewed. In our consumption, we are consumed.” - L.m. Sacasas
17. Kate’s mother died at 56 / close to the same age she is now, and close to the age of the monkey Nenette, who was called an old lady.
18. “For Szarlowski, the zoo used to offer a happy fairytale stroll for him and his wife, before he saw in Winogrand’s project a lack of recognition and bad feelings, between the human and the animal.” The camera as an exterior gaze that reveals how dissimilar we are to animals or how similar in the sense that they have their own feelings towards us. But also as Janet Malcolm writes, “Winogrand shows the Central Park Zoo for the dirty prison it was, the dispirited, ugly animals, the dumb (for thinking they are enjoying themselves), ugly people, and the grubbiness and meanness, conveying an atmosphere of nakedness and brown-soap harshness like that found in the paintings of Francis Bacon.” We don’t like to see ourselves.
19. We also don’t like to see the reality over fantasy — what the camera does is capture the real: “it’s the photographs that have now made him see this paralyzed condition in which the animals are forced to live, and he almost wishes not to have this new sight.”
20. “Winogrand depicted in the 1960s are far more dressed up than the current shorts-wearing horde, whose shabbiness is still in the eye of the critic perceiving them.” Page 49 — how mean she can be.
21. Also judges herself “a jerk with a notebook” and wearing shorts.
22. Winogrand’s photo of the interracial couple holding the monkeys, read by Hilton Als as “we see a white woman and a black man, apparently a couple, holding the product of their most unholy of unions: monkeys. In projecting what we will into this image —about miscegenation, our horror of difference, the forbidden nature of Black men with white women—we see the beast that lies in us all.” But Winogrand says, “what is the subject of a photograph but a photograph?”
23. “To make a metaphor of the animal is also to ignore the animal…”
24. The first Jumbo’s mother was killed and then the calf was captured and imported to Jardin des Plantes, then London Zoo. Eventually transferred to the circus because of fits of grief and rage. “Jumbo broke his tusks by ramming against the walls of his cage at night, and when they regrew, he would grind them against the stone enclosure, in despair.” A form of self-mutilation. A personal version of his mom’s tusks being hacked off by poachers.
25. Nabokov was inspired to write Lolita by the ape in the Jardin des Plantes who picks up a piece of charcoal to execute the bars of his cage.
26. Animals are not only replaceable but essentially products that are used to entertain when alive and dead, being taxidermied to ease the loss of tourism and ticket sales. PT Barnaum saying that if he can’t have Jumbo alive, he’ll have Jumbo dead because the animal is worth a lot in fame.
27. Page 74: She brings back the terror of zoos and the specter of death with Austerlitz through Sebald listing the nocturnal animals of Antwerp Zoo, which killed all their large animals during both world wars.
28. “The history of the zoo is now also footnoted with its relationship to natural and manmade disaster.”
29. Kafka’s portrait — the projected melancholy and the fact that it’s cropped. Hansi and the dog are taken out. The photo is “unreal”.
30. The furunculosis — his disabilities. “I feel no better than someone who falls and breaks both legs in the middle of the traffic of the Place de L’Opera” as his metaphor for writer’s block. There’s also an obsession with self-mutilation.
31. His own father’s illness — maybe the father hated the weakness reflected back to him by his son. His irritation at his son’s breakfast: yogurt, chestnuts, dates, figs, grapes, almonds, raisins, berries, whole grain bread, and oranges. It’s no surprise that the father withered after the son’s death since there’s no double to draw strength from through opposition.
32. Exercise as a form of conquering the body, ownership over one’s life and destiny. Restoring agency. “He spent much time swimming, mostly at the Civilian Swimming Pool in Prague, and in doing so has conquered something of his despair and disgust over his frailty. Finally, he stopped being ashamed of his body in the swimming pools in Prague, Königssaal, and Czernowitz.
33. He also has the tastes of a child — iced and fizzy drinks. And no attraction to the prostitutes. He’s interested in parts of the women and their gestures but not them.
34. Kafka makes so many lists. Umberto Eco in an interview with Der Spiegel said that making lists was a way to face infinity, to make infinity comprehensible. “We like lists because we don’t want to die.”
35. The dogs in the paintings that are listed by Kafka are used to convey meaning. They are not just dogs but also status.
36. Imprecision in describing the insect — Kafka — because it’s about the feeling and being of the thing, not its literary quality. The poem that says “Jessica has a forehead scar from the deep end of a pool. I ask Jessica what drowning feels like and she says not everything feels like something else.” Also thinking of the doctors’ offices where they ask you to describe your pain and the charts about pain levels — sometimes you can’t describe it by any other way than the intensity.
37. She’s writing about Metamorphosis but it’s really The Trial — the life of a guest lecturer and the bureaucracy and obscure answers and reasons that trap you in a kind of limbo of existence.
38. “I learned I was not supposed to have a body, and for them, I tried not to have one.”
39. What is sold as freedom actually leads to erosion between private and working life, so instead of an app like zoom freeing one from the waste of time that is the process of commuting and leaving from work, it actually allows work to invade the home space and time outside of normal work hours, or would be if one was sick or on vacation. You can work anywhere and anytime becomes you will work anywhere and anytime.
40. Elizabeth Costello focuses her traveling lectures on the horror of the lives of animals, including connecting factory farming to the Holocaust — sheep to the slaughter, Nazi butchers. Page 147
41. “But perhaps it’s actually, like other of Kafka’s stories, about his identification with the nonhuman, reinforced by his vegetarianism. Don’t call them parables, he told Martin Buber. If anything, call them animal stories.”
42. A sense of terror from devouring animal, and peace only when he stopped eating them.
43. Human zoos. No longer a metaphor or something to be projected on. But real people.
44. Kafka was an investigator for the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute. Kate calls them animal stories but also zoo investigations. Reports.