How to speak sheep

This strikes me as rather sad — that we can only understand parrots if they're speaking our language about things we've decided are important to us.

Amelia Thomas, What Sheep Think About the Weather

For generations scientists have been trying to teach various kinds of animals to communicate using human speech. But if these scientists are so smart — smarter, one assumes, than those animals — then why not learn to communicate with them using their own forms of communication?

Amelia Thomas is no scientist but just an intelligent woman who loves all animals. In What Sheep Think About the Weather (2025), she tells about her efforts to understand what these animals may be trying to say.

Her amateur studies take her to interview many actual scientists and to examine the communication tools used by whales, dogs, birds, monkeys, horses and many other animals, including sheep. Her book reaches its climax when her beloved but weakening horse, Major, puts his forehead against her own, telling her in his own way that he is ready to die.

Because each of the many species of animals communicates in its own way, and most of them have no interest at all in communicating with humans, it will be a great challenge for Amelia Thomas or anyone else to ever turn into Doctor Doolittle. But Thomas does show us that the true challenge is not teaching chimpanzees or any other species to speak English but rather learning how these animals are speaking to each other, and sometimes to us, in their own way.

Nothing new

I have a view about great art, whether it's stories, music, whatever. None of it tells you anything new; it merely reminds you of something you already knew but forgot you knew. And that's what Larry did, You start reading Lonesome Dove and you feel you already know these people. They're already in you. They've always been in you.

Bill Wittliff writing about Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Larry McMurtry himself disagreed with what Bill Wittliff says above, although his biggest beef seems to have been with Wittliff suggesting that Lonesome Dove is "great art." McMurtry did compare his novel with Gone with the Wind, but then he pointed out that Gone with the Wind is not a great novel either.

But I don't think art has to be great for what Wittliff says to be true. It merely has to be good art.

Art need not tell us anything new. Science does that. Art reminds us of what we know. But it does so indirectly, obliquely even. It may reflect reality, but that reality may be different for different people. Art allows for interpretation. It allows for different opinions. Art so often takes the form of a puzzle.

I was a newspaper book reviewer when Lonesome Dove was published in 1985. I received an advance review copy, and I can recall reading it while on a family vacation that took us to Arkansas, Memphis and Mammoth Cave. If I were asked what book I most enjoyed reading and reviewing, I would say this one. I knew nothing about cowboys and cattle drives other than what I had seen in movies and TV westerns, yet this story moved me as few others have. The characters seemed real to me, as if, as Wittliff suggests, they were already in me.

Behind a masterpiece

I watched Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window again the other night, while I was in the middle of Jennifer O'Callaghan's Rear Window: The Making of a Hitchcock Masterpiece in the Hollywood Golden Age (2025). I must agree. It is a masterpiece.

This 1954 classic entertains audiences even as it convicts them. Jimmy Stewart plays a world-traveling photographer confined by a broken leg to his own apartment. To entertain himself he watches neighbors in a building across the way, sometimes using binoculars. He imagines stories about them. What some may call people watching, others might call voyeurism. Might we under the same circumstances do much the same thing?

Jefferies, the Stewart character, comes to believes a man across from him has murdered his nagging wife. His girlfriend who wants to marry him, played by Grace Kelly; the woman who comes by to give him a daily massage, played by Thelma Ritter; and a police friend, played by Wendell Corey, all think he is letting his imagination get the better of him. But then they become believers, too.

O'Callaghan tells us in detail how this great movie was made, how the elaborate set was built and why it worked so well and how Hitchcock tricked censors into letting him get away with more than they may have imagined.

Yet only about half the book is actually about the making of the film. The rest tells us much about the careers of Stewart and Kelly, especially Kelly, whom O'Callaghan follows from Hollywood to Monaco. She even has a lot to say about Tom Hanks, the modern actor most like Stewart in his common-man appeal. Kelly, however, she regards as one of a kind.

Along the way, she tells readers some fascinating trivia. Who was the highest paid actor in Rear Window? Would you believe Thelma Ritter? And did you know that Ross Bagdasarian, who plays the composer in one of the windows, later became better known as David Seville, the man behind the Chipmunks?

If you enjoy Rear Window — and who doesn't ? — you will have fun with O'Callaghan's lively book.

A nun in Iceland

Icelandic author Olaf Olafsson makes reading his novels a challenge, as in Touch, a book that wowed me a couple of years ago. In The Sacrament (2019), an earlier novel, there is more of the same. Time jumps around, so the reader is never sure what is happening now and what happened way back when. Quotation marks are used sparingly. Much of the narrative is obscure.

Yet Olafsson proves worth the trouble.

Sister Johanna Marie, a French nun, is sent back to Iceland for a second time, two decades after her first visit, to conduct another investigation. Her main qualification as an investigator seems to be that she learned the Icelandic languages from her Icelandic roommate, Halla, when she was in college.

Because Catholic priests and nuns are not allowed to marry, the priesthood sometimes draws homosexual men, partly the reason for the problem the church has had with priests and choir boys. And this is why Johanna is sent as an investigator to Iceland. But does a nun's life also attract lesbians? This is true in Johanna's case, and each time she visits Iceland she has Halla on her mind.

Will she and Halla reunite? That is but one of the novel's mysteries. Also, will misbehaving priests ever face justice? Why did a priest fall to his death from a bell tower during Johanna's first trip to Iceland? And what happened to the boy she rescued from a locked closet?

Olafsson's novels may be puzzles, but they are a joy to solve.

Why not rabbits?

In Version Control, Dexter Palmer wrote one of the most original time-travel novels you are likely to find. In Mary Toft: or, The Rabbit Queen (2019), his creative mind takes off in a very different direction.

Now it is 1726 in a small English village, where a woman seems to be giving birth to dead rabbits. The novel is based on a true story.

Zachary is a village boy who becomes an apprentice to John Howard, the village physician, after he shows interest in a traveling show of human oddities. If this boy has the stomach for this sort of thing, he must have what it takes to be a good doctor, Howard reasons. Mostly the story comes from Zachery's point of view.

But then comes the case of Mary Toft, who gives birth to dead, dissected rabbits every two or three days. At that time it was believed that women who give birth to odd, misshapen children — such as the two-headed woman who shows up late in the novel — must have had something traumatic happen to them during their pregnancy. So why not rabbits?

Soon this oddity attracts surgeons from London, each claiming to represent the king. They take turns delivering dead rabbits and finally take Mary to London to impress the king and others in the big city. Of course, Mary stops giving birth to rabbits once she is in London.

Although this story has comic potential, Palmer mostly plays it straight. He deftly explores the odd human desire to believe the impossible. Whenever we see a magic act, we want to believe the magic tricks are not tricks at all. So again, why not rabbits?

Minor writers

Larry McMurtry

Larry McMurtry, best known for Lonesome Dove, took satisfaction in being regarded as a "minor writer." Relatively few writers ever achieve that distinction, he noted.

Most writers make no splash at all. Minor writers are important in their own generation and perhaps for a few years afterward. Then they disappear. A very few major writers — like Dickens, Austen and Tolstoy — continue to be read a hundred years later and more.

McMurtry placed such respected 20th century writers as Norman Mailer, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow in the "minor" category. He didn't mention John Updike, but it is hard to imagine Updike still being read in the next century. Relatively few people read him now.

The only one of his contemporaries he mentioned as a major writer was Flannery O'Connor. "I think she was a true genius, painful genius," he said.

McMurtry also said, "It's fine if you're minor. I 'm glad I got that high. Not everybody does."

His comments reflect both humility and reality. True greatness in any field is rare, and should be. We think of the word minor as being insignificant or average, if not below average. And if we are thinking only of our own time, such descriptions may be true. McMurtry, however, was a bibliophile perhaps even more than he was a writer. He read great books from many centuries and many writers. He looked at literature on a big screen. In the big picture, the Mailers and the Roths and the Bellows, not to mention the McMurtrys, are truly minor. Even so, they made it to the screen.

McMurtry's life

Writers can come from anywhere, as is proven once again in Tracy Daugherty's fine 2023 biography Larry McMurtry: A Life.

McMurtry was born into a struggling Texas ranch family. Bookish even in a home without books, he was certainly not made to be a cowboy. Yet his experiences growing up in that environment allowed him to create an impressive library of western fiction, both contemporary such as The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment and of the Old West variety, such as Lonesome Dove.

Like his novels, where his characters always seem to be going somewhere, McMurtry lived his life mostly on the road. Archer City, Texas, may have been his home base, where he eventually brought thousands of books in hopes he could turn this nothing town into a literary haven, but mostly he traveled. He owned a bookstore in Washington, D.C. He  went often to Hollywood, where he wrote screenplays (like Brokeback Mountain) and built friendships with the likes of actresses Diane Keaton and Cybill Shepherd. He became pals with author Ken Kesey in California and the Pacific Northwest and eventually married Kesey's widow. He spent a lot of time in Tucson.

McMurtry may not have looked like a ladies' man, but like a sailor he seemed to have a girl in every port. His relationships with women, from Susan Sontag to Diana Ossana, were extremely close, even when they were not sexual. As Daugherty puts it, "He gathered women as he gathered books, and for much the same reason: so as not to feel bereft." And so many of his best characters were women, many of them based on the women in his life.

Daugherty says that "loss was the major theme of his writing." The loss of the Old West, his father's and grandfather's generations, was certainly dominant in his work. But there are other kinds of loss, as well. So many of his main characters die in his books, reminding readers that life is fleeting. 

And now we have lost Larry McMurtry. Yet, at least for the time being, we still have his books.