Floppy Ears Research Articles

Resolving the Family Tree of Placental Mammals

Natural selection was particularly inventive in the appendage and accessory department during the evolution of placentals—an expansive category of mammals that bear live, fully developed offspring. A placental might sport webbed wings, a prehensile tail, flippers, fangs, tusks, cloven hooves, paws, claws, floppy ears, horns, or any number of other specialized structures. While such morphological characteristics shed light on evolutionary relationships, they can also confound classifications because animals might independently acquire the same traits without sharing a common ancestor.

The Act of Seeing

The Act of Seeing Ciaran Berry (bio) The optometrist tapes a patch over my left eye and asks me to read off the rows of capitals he projects onto the white wall opposite. I can make out only blurred bellies and dismembered stems, fragments that represent nothing except themselves or the first crude letters a child might scrawl between parallel lines as he negotiates the alphabet. Between slides, there's an empty square of light onto which I could throw shapes with my fingers, long-necked giraffe, a dog with floppy ears, or one of those rabbits my brother and I found on that stretch of no-man's-land above the beach, where two hundred of them scurried to and fro, unable to find the way back to their holes. For months now, I've been joining dots round everything that's more than a few feet away, adding eyes and ears to blank faces, letters to subtitles and street signs, redrawing the lines that fall short of my retinas and seeing mostly what was never there, like those creatures beyond the beach that seemed so unlikely, so out of place, even before we captured one and held it up into the light and stared at the thick layer of white that obscured its opened eyes, silenced and only then realizing that all of the rabbits were blind and terrified, that winter would see the beach littered with bones. And maybe there as well we saw, just a smidgen, into the world to come, saw something of what Samuel Johnson knew, almost sightless, and muttering violently under his breath [End Page 90] as he added a third definition of pain to his lexicon, writing sensation of uneasiness from Bacon, then putting aside his empty quill until the spasms subsided, the shaking quelled. It takes the doctor only five minutes to confirm I need glasses and have needed them for at least ten years. Now he adjusts the chair and lays me down and drops a thick yellow liquid onto the surface of my eyes, dilating my pupils to five times their normal size, so that my irises almost disappear, leaving just these two black holes into which he stares, through a lens the length of a shot glass, to read what's written on my retinas. How strange and intimate to be seen into like this, the back of my eye flashing onto his as he scans its mother-of-pearl surface for any sign of change, the act of seeing reduced to its viscous minutiae: conjunctiva, cornea, and lens, the same layers thirty of us cut through in the soft, bloody bulls' eyes our teacher brought back from the abattoir so we could see, for ourselves, the bright clusters of rods and cones, and the severed optic nerve that had, just a few hours ago, borne images of grain, grass, mate, and water trough into the damp whorls of the creature's brain. That day we learned that sight was not a miracle, but a funneling of light into the flesh through the same portals now pried open in me that allow another man to see inside until, satisfied that everything's in place, he sends me out into an afternoon that's become distant, smudged, a blur of gray buildings and passing cars through which I carry just this crumpled note— instructions for the lens crafter who'll shape metal and glass, set a neat frame round all that's before me. Ciaran Berry Ciaran Berry received his MFA from New York University, where he was awarded a New York Times fellowship. His work has appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, AGNI, the Three-penny Review, Green Mountains Review and the Southern Review. He currently teaches at the Expository Writing Program at NYU. Copyright © 2005 The Curators of the University of Missouri

Etude, and: Tender Beans

Etude Nobody loves us the way the gods did. Crazy with it they'd meet at the corners of order and chaos arriving just before dawn without the aid of ropes or pulleys. They left teeth marks. It was all petty larceny to them. And here we stand. Pachyderms on a narrow mountain ledge unable to get out of the way beep beep go the fast cars. If we've got a few more lifetimes up these trunks let's crouch over there in the foliage, watch the hair rising on our floppy ears till the traffic thins. Friend, we're not ordering a suit of clothes here. We're doing something difficult what with the liftings and the fallings and the awkward hand positions. [End Page 59] Tender Beans I like the way the bean plant first announces itself as a petite volcano then presses the back of its neck through the soil and lifts its pod head which splits open, its leaves emerging like two thoughts. This one is growing in a coffee can in a small Montana town where, if you wanted, you could write Bonjour Cowboys in the grease on the wall behind the stove of the Cowboy Bar and Grille. I like how you can buy pickled eggs and vitamin B-12 along with your fishing license, how the electrical tape on the cracked vinyl booths and stools holds up under all those cowboy butts. And I like the miniature Las Vegas game board that lightens pockets beneath the electric beer sign, its waterfall cascading cascading even after the place has closed and the streets are dark. But most of all, I like the back of the bean plant's neck - just before its head lifts, [End Page 60] just before the thoughts spill out. A great heart once said his favorite pillowcase was the color of sky after rain. One thought can make you tender. Two could pry a heart beneath a sky this big. What starts as a volcano grows into a soft neck. I really like that. And the waterfall. And the pale blue pillowcase.

A Conspiracy of Dunces? Walker Percy's Humor and the Chance of a Last Laugh

For the first time in my life I have met the system face to face, fully determined to function within its context as an observer and critic in disguise, so to speak.--Ignatius Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces, p. 86 I've read the excerpt from A Confederacy of Dunces and am most intrigued. The writing is unique but at the same time reminiscent of several contemporaries I've admired. You allude to Heller; I think too of Pynchon and Barth. I'll refrain from mentioning Percy.--Les Phillabaum, publisher of A Confederacy of Dunces, in note to Walker Percy dated March 1, 1978 When Walker Percy was buried on May 12, 1990, at St. Joseph's Abbey in Covington, Louisiana, sounds of life intruded on the occasion of his death. Writer Doffs Betts reflected on the scene: As the procession moved to the burial spot, its line was crossed by some group of Louisiana revelers, parade really, almost mini-carnival. How Walker Percy would have enjoyed that celebration! I can't help hoping the moment was one of those signs Will Barrett was always looking for, that maybe Walker Percy made his wager like Pascal and won it, and had the chance to send back from eternity this fleeting, ambiguous merry clue. Percy had genial soft spot for Louisiana's freewheeling unpredictability. As writer who loved good joke--particularly cosmic one--he would no doubt have relished the scene. It is hard not to hear some of Percy's voice carrying through in this excerpt from his novel Lancelot: In New Orleans I have noticed that people are happiest when they are going to funerals, making money, taking care of the dead, or putting on masks at Mardi Gras so nobody knows who they are. (1) By most accounts, Percy was hard one to figure. His mercurial temperament--at times as easy-going as Carolina frat-boy, at other times an incurably moody doctor--left contradictory legacy for his biographers. It is the lighthearted side of the that I'd like to sketch briefly. On sophomoric level, some of Percy's bumptious high jinks with fellow wayfarer Shelby Foote are well documented. As undergrads at the University of North Carolina, while on Chapel Hill boys'-night-out that terminated in Durham dive, Percy took punch intended for Foote--from an outraged woman, no less--and had the good grace to earmark the scene for fictional purposes in The Last Gentleman. After being socked by woman, Will Barrett gnashes his teeth with Job-ish complaint: hideous exploding goddamnable nose pain, the thump-thud of woe itself. Oh, ye bastards all together. (2) The Walker Percy archives, housed in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina, abound with evidence of Percy's humor, from the self-deprecating to the satiric to the just plain silly. The archives house many of Percy's scribblings (anyone who has seen his handwriting will conclude that this is the right word); one folder is full of scraps from pocket notepad where Percy jotted down jokes. This one is representative: Joke. What do you get when you cross an onion with jackass? Either an onion with floppy ears or piece of ass so good it makes tears come to your eyes. This is dinner club fare, not exactly side-splitter. But what I like about the jokes is how they humanize the historical man. To borrow Percy's phrase, the archives illuminate the qua man against the august shrouding of literary commentaries that portray him as an endlessly soul-searching, high-powered intellectual jack-of-all-trades. Of course, he was those things, but he was also joker. After all, he once described novelists as a devious lot to begin with, disinclined to say anything straight out, especially about themselves, and their stock-in-trade is indirection. I have always been tantalized by the possibility that Percy tweaked us with joke and left deliberate paper trail. …

Syndrome of gingival hypertrophy, hirsutism, mental retardation and brachymetacarpia in two sisters: Specific entity or variant of a described condition?

Two sisters born to consanguineous Lebanese parents had mental retardation and epilepsy, brachymetacarpalia, hirsutism, bulbous soft nose, thick floppy ears with abnormal configuration and gingival hypertrophy. One girl presented additionally with tetralogy of Fallot and the other with congenital hypothyroidism and bilateral ureteral stenosis. These manifestations resemble the syndrome of hypertrichosis-gingival fibromatosis-mental retardation and seizures of Anavi et al. [1989: Dev Med Child Neurol 31:538-542] but our two girls additionally have brachymetacarpia. The inheritance seems to be autosomal recessive. These two sisters may represent a hitherto undescribed syndrome. We discuss the findings in our patients in relation to the literature.

Magic mouse

Microprocessor-run fauna have gained another species – micromice, complete with floppy ears and grey fibreglass body (figure 1). What makes this mouse so amazing is its 'skill' in a sizeable maze.

The Rabbit Man: The Art of Harrison Cady

A minor-key tragedy of American artists, it seems to me, is that which visits, at times, the most proteanly dexterous, the most joyously volatile—those who find themselves somehow diverted, or discouraged, or lulled into some particular cove or inlet of their art, with which their audiences often identify them, exclusively, forevermore. Such becalming, I think, befell one of American art's trimmest and most adroitly navigated vessels: the talent of Harrison Cady, who, for close to five decades, until his death on December 10, 1970, was crowned by generations of readers with the floppy ears and pink-nosed countenance—beaming or winsomely staring—of Peter Rabbit; who, to triply seal the charm, was the transatlantic conversion, sea-changed but recognizable, of Beatrix Potter's cabbage-pillaging picaro—a suburban cousin of the more footloose and dreamily sententious Peter of Thornton W. Burgess' Mother Nature volumes. This third Peter, Cady's whimsical avatar, was, of course, the Peter Rabbit of the New York Tribune's (later, the Herald Tribune's) Sunday comic pages, from August 15, 1920, until July 25, 1948: a tenure that seemed, indeed, to harden even as the initial comic brio and adventurous friskiness drained way into the kind of inane, half-desultory mechanics which can nevertheless delight small children (as shrewdly economical as sparrows in finding their pleasures) but which, for Cady admirers, was the rather saddening sunset streak lingering from his early career's lusty radiance. It was a career, not of the most copiously imaginative, the most originally perceptive or charm-laden of artists, but that of a richly articulate and jovially inventive artist, the kind who, as he needs the oxygen he breathes, needs to circulate and traffic in the widest of worlds possible because his converse with such a world, the tapestry of his daily notations, is the content of his art, and its savour.

Lethal tricuspid and mitral regurgitation in Marfan's syndrome ∗

A 4 3 4 month old white male infant with Marfan's syndrome had presenting clinical signs and symptoms of progressive congestive heart failure due to severe mitral and tricuspid insufficiency which resulted in death. The classic features of Marfan's syndrome that the patient exhibited included arachnodactyly, high-arched palate, floppy ears, iridodonesis and subluxated lenses. Cardiac catheterization and selective angiography documented the diagnosis of severe bilateral regurgitation from the atrioventricular valve. At autopsy, the cystic medial changes seen in Marfan's syndrome were observed in the pulmonary artery and aorta. Myxomatous transformation involving the mitral and tricuspid valves, with similar changes within the annulus, and fibrosis of each valve led to the hemodynamic alterations and demise. In all infants and children with otherwise unexplained valvular regurgitation, occult or overt Marfan's syndrome should be considered in the differential diagnosis. Furthermore, in infants and children with any of the clinical features of Marfan's syndrome careful cardiovascular evaluations should be made to detect valvular insufficiency due to fibromyxomatous abiotrophy.