I'm one of the warm-up acts for Marc Shell this upcoming Wednesday morning. The topic? 'Talking Animals,' which is a chapter in this book, which I just read. Did you know that zebra finches often stutter?

Shell's prolific and deeply learned, but this book needed a more savage editor. Anecdotes too often repeat themselves in what I might as well call an expository form of palilalia, "a speech condition 'characterized by repetition of words, phrases, or sentences'" (48). Form and content merge, but, then, one wonders, what of the tendency in the book as a whole to characterize the stutter as trapped in his (and it's usually he) body, buried alive almost, in an agonizing dissociation of form--the inhuman inability to speak--and content--the thought? ( )