Tonight, though, I have three short pieces.
Two of them are about seven minutes long, and one of them--
we'll see how we feel, it's a little raucous and weird,
I tried to get the temperature of the room from Caleb,
we're not sure if it's going to work, but we'll see--
is about a 2 minute read.
And Caleb's right, this new book of mine
is a bestiary of animal celebrity.
So every animal in the book has been named, in some way,
and recorded into some semblance of the historical record,
starting with a mammoth that was on the walls of Chauvet Cave--
I don't know if the mammoth that I talk about
is the exact mammoth but I fudged that a little bit--
and moving all the way to these animals that
are the last of their species, that we are naming,
and harvesting, and keeping in frozen labs,
hoping-- frozen zoos, hoping that one day we
can bring them back.
And maybe in the Q and A I'll tell you about a couple
of interesting changes that have happened
to some of the named animals in my book since publication.
Some of them are pretty sad, but one of them
is kind of exciting.
I'll start with the third essay-- or the fourth essay--
in the book.
The book is chronologically arranged,
and this one takes place in Elizabethan England.
It's the first essay that I wrote
that made me think that maybe I could
write a collection of essays on animal celebrity.
I just was so obsessed with this fact
that I stumbled upon, that Shakespeare
had a lot of rivals.
He was fighting for-- he wasn't the only game in town,
back in the late 1500s, early 1600s.
And there was the Globe Theater on the Thames--
the South bank of the Thames--
and then there was another octagonal structure,
almost identical from the outside, that
was a bear garden, where various animals would sort of fight
each other, often to the death.
And that was one of the many things that were taking
ticket sales away from Hamlet.
And he was a competitive guy, and so he
has these bitchy references to all these competitors
in his place.
Like the children's company, people really loved--
it was like that movie with Scott Baio, and Jodie Foster,
Bugsy Malone-- people loved watching kids do shows.
And they were sort of robbing him from butts in seats.
He has a little reference to Christopher Marlowe
in As You Like It, but he never says their names.
They're just these sort of veiled, quiet jabs.
But there is one rival that he name checks,
and it's this bear.
It's this super-famous, killer bear named Sackerson,
and he references him in the Merry Wives of Windsor.
And there was just something about the fact
that Shakespeare picked up his quill
and just wrote down the name of this bear,
as this kind of cultural reference in this play that's
probably being done in your theater right now, right?
That just really got me.
So here is the essay on this famous bear, Sackerson.
"The London garden, brackish and packed-in,
was hazy with a dozen kinds of flesh.
The bulls, cocks, mastiffs, men, and chimpanzees in air
so rickety it lowered the roof.
So dark, the line 'tween crowd and beasts was marred.
And there, in that black, Sir Raleigh
took his Frenchmen and other men of duty met their spies.
The reason for the famous fireworks?
Just so the folks who'd wagered bets could see.
A rose of flames pitched high above the crowd, fired smoke
into the muck that hung about.
It spun, it spat red bits around the seats.
They'd rigged it to toss pears as it rotated.
The fruit-mad crowd would then jump up
and chase the rolling pears out to the Bankside streets.
Or yardboys, eager in their dirty gloves,
would toss hot bread upon the patrons' laps, which
made them clutch and scurry toward the exit.
Outside, they'd find some other Sunday sport--
a archery butt, a woman, or a play.
The stews downriver had less fucking in them.
And St Bartholomew's floors less wet with blood.
The bloody muzzle or the mastiff's blood.
The blood of fisticuffs up in the stands.
The blood of offal, floated down the Thames to Bankside
from the abattoirs of town.
And by the time the century turned around,
it seemed the blood most often spilled was his.
But do not think that London's garden crowd imagined him
some broken, bashed-in thing.
Believe me, this is tricky.
I might see the lives of baited bears
as nothing but a broken chord of muzzle, chain, and stake.
Of blunted teeth, barrages of dog jaws,
of living-out a mongrel just to have another thrown
upon the slathered flesh.
For that rink's the only place that he could run,
a hard-won constitutional-- running
laps and dodging bulls in that dank polygon.
That garden, broken even in its flowers--
the rosettes they affixed to his brow
were bullseyes for the mastiffs when they jumped.
And jumped they did, mouths tearing
at the flesh that leered at them from each side of the bloom.
They bit so hard that London citizens grew up
thinking a bear's eyes to be pink.
Few years of that, he was too blind to fight.
The bearward had to get creative then.
Chained center, hunkered, lashed by volunteers
until the blood ran rivers down his spine.
Sometimes he'd raise his matted arms and gnash about the lash
until it broke in half.
And once, he stooped low to the lazy knot, untied himself
with effort from the stake, then nosed
about the rink in backward loops to hear the ladies scream,
the bearwards scramble.
They dragged him offstage to his pit in cheers.
For even then, near-lame and sightless,
he could still throw nine-stone mastiffs to the crowds.
Up to the boxes, to the ladies' laps, bypassing pumpkin hose,
straight to the skirts.
Like he could sniff a woman's quivering thigh
and hurl the big dog, head o'er tail, right to her.
A twitch, a snort to shudder the dog spit, a fling, a lady's lap
a-going oof!
And then they'd add another dog, then two--
till six or seven mastiffs lined the rink,
the sound more deafening since his sight was gone.
Goddamnit if he wasn't still around.
They could have put his picture on the money.
Elizabeth, who never said hullo, loved
him enough to ban all Thursday sport.
Upon the mildest Thursdays, he'd parade out
past the playhouse, down to London Bridge.
He'd smell the rag men, actors, punks
in stews who yelled for him in ripe cacophony.
The Bulls, in ribboned horns, all marched behind.
The cocks-in-boxes and the dogs behind.
The Only Bear That Ever Led the Dogs.
And even on his nights off, he appeared-- in name-checks
at the Hope, the Rose, the Globe.
A dactyl in the mouths of water poets.
The only rival Shakespeare called by name.
In Jonson.
In Act five at Dunsinane.
At Middle Temple Hall on Candlemas,
when Chamber's fairest boy-in-fake-dugs crooned--
have you not set my honor at the stake
and baited it with all the unmuzzled thoughts
that tyrannous heart can think?
So.
It'd be wrong to match that bear with breaking--
they built him up.
They called him out by name because they
saw in him a secret code both terrifying and recognizable.
They saw it in his low-slung hips and gut.
The way his pupils, round and beady,
lived inside a circle of expressive white.
They saw it in his stance--
up on two legs, the forepaws spread, the 10 claws digital.
And milliseconds prior to the bite,
they saw it-- as he bowed his head and sighed.
What did they see?
They saw themselves, of course.
A taller man, more leaden and hirsute, with thick skin
better suited for a beating, but still their
bear-- this massive chestnut frame, dwarfed tiny
by a darkened ring of foes.
A smaller ratio of the rink itself,
dwarfed by the river flowing to its north-- that lurid,
pestilent Thames.
Six city plagues-- the pox, the new ague, the curious sweats--
all floated past the beargarden in leagues.
A river of unprecedented sick.
In '92 things got so royally poxed,
the playhouses were forced to shutter up.
A quarter of their population down each decade,
give or take a hundred score.
And a blighted age can make a garden blind.
Each ticket holder turns left, right, behind,
and wonders which part of their dark quartet
will suffer an unnatural upset next.
For when our clans explode up into towns,
the back-bite comes from nature, and it smarts.
The devil holds back nature by its ears,
takes aim, makes wager, then releases it.
We toss it off and it regenerates--
six natural mouths leap forth before we're primed.
And parades of sickness cannot be explained by any learnéd
clansmen-- physics, priests.
The inexplicable can send us toward an unclanned occupation
with the self.
And selves, like famous bears, are singular.
"We are" soon switches places with "I am."
And then clans bewitched by "I ams" become
crowds, which are an altogether different thing.
He heard those "I ams" in the gardens roar.
I am this bear stuck in this blighted rink, beset
upon by nature's ticking clock.
I am not hunkered down in numbered packs,
instead I am awaiting death alone.
I am afraid of time's encroaching
power, for each new year, I am more bluntly struck.
I feel pain, feel it doubling, than I am it.
I am always in wait of time's new teeth.
And though befuddled, drunk on sick,
I am unfit to tear my eyes away from him.
The growl of him, his mighty swipe, his blood,
the way he foams both in and out of hours.
My chain of foes would weigh less, I am sure,
if I could toss off minutes, break pain's spine,
or send plague squealing to a bitch's lap.
For even if I knew more time, more sick, was at the go,
it'd be a righteous salve to fight
whatever hour's on me now.
To discard the sick dog of what is now.
To throw it-- a contaminated rag stained
with the gusto of my intellect.
Yes.
I am jealous of his natural acts.
And so I'll hit his nature with a stick."
And that's Sackerson.
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks.
It's cheerful a little story about bear torture,
for your Thursday night.
Yeah.
[LAUGHS]