Old people and literary types will have heard of Thomas Mann.\u00a0 He was a German author born in 1875.\u00a0 He won the Nobel Prize in literature in the 1920s and he belonged to the Modernist school.\u00a0 Back in the 1970s if you had a high school English teacher who was especially perverse he would assign a book of Mann\u2019s called \u201cDeath in Venice and Other Stories.\u201d\u00a0 Now the title story \u201cDeath in Venice,\u201d is vile.\u00a0 It\u2019s the story of an old German writer who has a premonition of death and goes to Venice to feel young again.\u00a0 He has an infatuation verging on pedophilia for an adolescent boy that mercifully goes unfulfilled and then to the reader\u2019s great relief the protagonist dies.\u00a0 The only legitimate reason to read this story is for law enforcement profilers to gain a better understanding of pedophile motivation.<\/p>\n
One of the other stories in the book is called \u201cA Man and His Dog.\u201d\u00a0 It is autobiographical and describes Mann\u2019s life in a suburban\/rural area of Germany.\u00a0 He chronicles the walks he takes with his approximately German Shorthaired Pointer dog Bashan.\u00a0 We hear about the landscape, the flora and fauna and the farmland occupants of his little world.\u00a0 It is without a doubt, the best thing in the story collection and I\u2019ve always envied his opportunity to share a slice of his world and life in such a congenial narrative.\u00a0 It really is a pleasure to read.<\/p>\n
So, even though I keep German Short Haired Pointers, I can\u2019t do what Mann did.\u00a0 I don\u2019t have his facility for felicitous phrasing.\u00a0 But I\u2019m a lot funnier than he was.\u00a0 So, from time to time, I\u2019ll address things in a post that have very little to do with politics, photography or science fiction.\u00a0 When that happens, I\u2019ll assign them to the category \u201cphotog\u2019s Corner\u201d and that will be a warning sign of irrelevance to the primary foci of this blog.\u00a0 Caveat emptor.<\/p>\n
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