Dr. Metablog

Violence in My Life

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my violent nightmares.  And now I shall unclasp a secret book and write about real-life violence in my life -- to be exact, about a murder and an attempted murder.

In the middle-1970s, I exchanged jobs, homes and automobiles with a faculty member of a university in England.  I will call this person by the fabricated name of Maurice Shaper.  Although I certainly profited from teaching in a new setting, and I loved the city in southeastern England in which we lived, Mr. Shaper himself was a disaster.  He missed half of his classes and was cruel to my students when he did present himself.  He fled town early, leaving behind stacks of unread papers, distressed students who had not received grades or credit for the work, and a mess that took me a full year to resolve.  Moreover, Mr. Shaper, who had a friend on the west coast and was commuting 1200 miles bi-weekly, put 60,000 miles on my Dodge station wagon before smashing it into another vehicle on a rainy California road.  Within an hour of our arrival home, we were greeted with a summons and a lawsuit -- as owners of the car we were liable -- from the occupants of the maimed vehicle. It was a lawsuit that took a number of years to run its expensive course.  In short, I must admit that I nursed more than a little antagonism to Mr. Shaper.  Anger, I'd say, but something less than murderous rage. 

Some five years later I returned to England.  The morning after I arrived, I was standing on the steps of the British Museum in Bloomsbury waiting for the building to open when an acquaintance came up to me with a newspaper.  "Have you seen this?" he asked, and showed me an item in The Times. "University Lecturer Murdered."   And sure enough, Mr. Maurice Shaper had been killed in his own home -- the home in which I had lived for a year.  Although it didn't say so in the newspaper, I was later informed that he had been in the habit of picking up young men on the Dover Road and bringing them home.  He must have misjudged his quarry, because he had been slashed in the neck with a broken liquor bottle and had bled to death in his bathroom.  His Peugeot and his camera and a few other items had been stolen and the presumed murderer had disappeared.  What was so odd was that he had been killed just a few hours after I arrived at Heathrow.   

That's the murder;  now the attempted murder.

In my second year at college, I had a roommate (let us call him Peter Dickerman) with whom I was in perpetual conflict.  I'm not generally short-tempered, but once, I was so angry at him that I actually picked up a carving knife and waved it in his direction.  Eventually we came to a truce of sorts;  although we inhabited the same rooms, we didn't speak to each other for the last months of the semester.  Mr. Dickerman then went his way and I went mine.

Thirty years later, I was in Washington DC for a couple of weeks doing some reading at a specialized library when I read in the Washington Post that someone had attempted to murder a northern Virginia psychologist.  The victim, Peter Dickerman, had received a letter-bomb in the mail.  He had opened it, there was an explosion, and he was burned over 60% of his body.  The story was a sensation for a few days but gradually faded from view.  It's my understanding that Dickerman did not die.  (I've now googled him under his real name and I see that he's still practicing psychiatry in Virginia.)

So two times in my life, a person with whom I've been in serious conflict has been violently attacked.  And both times, I've been close at hand.  A little creepy, isn't it?   

The man who murdered Maurice Shaper was arrested and convicted.  The identity of the person who mailed the letter bomb to Peter Dickerman is unknown to me. 

My Favorite Inventions

Life has certainly changed since I was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s.  Here are some of the key inventions that have made life better for me and for all sentient Americans.

1)  the retractable vacuum cleaner cord. Truly one heck of an improvement.  Just step on the little lever, and the cord comes flying back into the machine.  It used to be, I'd waste minutes tying the thing up only to watch it immediately unravel.

2)  fitted sheets.  Just snap them on and have done with it.  Perhaps the greatest improvement in standard of living in my lifetime.  No more folding under and then waking up in the middle of the night sleeping on the mattress tufts.

3)  the bungee cord.  A stroke of true genius.  For packing the top of the car, an unparalleled innovation.  And nowadays, I keep a pair of them strapped to the lawn-tractor cart.  I use the bungee cords to double the load that I can carry in one trip.

4)  luggage wheels.  Pull instead of carrying.  What a concept!!  Luggage, marooned for centuries in the paleolithic, finally discovers the wheel (and just in time to save my shoulders).

5) the mute button. Just a flick of the thumb and the commercial voice disappears.  A godsend.

That's my top five.  Any other suggestions out there in the blogworld will be sincerely appreciated.

November 30.  I'm so chagrined.  I've forgotten the most remarkable invention of the last several decades:  duct tape.  In our household, duct tape holds together more items than gravity. 

November 22

On November 22, 1963, we were living in a small third-floor walkup on Irving Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  It was in the afternoon.  Some high schools students (Cambridge High and Latin was just around the corner) were walking by.  One of them shouted to another, "Kennedy's been shot.  In Dallas."   I immediately thought "this is bad.  That kid shouldn't know that Kennedy's in Dallas."  So we turned on the radio.  And began to grieve.

I don't think that this country's ever regained its balance.  Jack, and then Bobbie and Martin Luther King  -- the heroes of the left taken out, one by one, by assassins.  Without the murders, we'd never have had Nixon and Reagan and Cheney and Bush and Rumsfeld.

If we ever can get the United States on track again, then, only then, can we cease to grieve.   

"A Strange Slavery to Beauty"

On September 6, 1664, Sam Pepys purchased for his young wife a pair of gloves trimmed with yellow ribbon. At 20 shillings, he knew that he overpaid but he was not at all sorry, because Doll, the 'Change woman from whom he made the purchase was "so pretty, that, God forgive me! I could not think it too much -- which is a strange slavery that I stand in to beauty, that I value nothing near it."  Pepys, God forgive him, was not only enthralled by handsome women, but was attentive to beauty in all its manifestations.  He loved plays and performances, paintings and prints and architecture, as well as music, especially songs and ballads.  Pepys's life was ruled by his "strange slavery to beauty."

 

But why should he have described his fascination as "strange?"  If there is a single trait that distinguishes not just Pepys but human beings as a species, it is an irrepressible love of things beautiful.  For every one of their senses, humans have created an appropriate form of art. Hearing?  Music and song.  Sight? drawing and painting and sculpture and film. Taste? elaborate cookery. Motion?  the dance.  Speech and language?  literature from lyric to epic to novel.  Moreover, there's scarcely a substance that human beings have encountered in their time on the planet that they haven't transformed into something harmonious and elegant.  At first, bone and stone and fur; and then wood and metal and cloth and clay.  Occasionally, some anthropologist will emerge from his laboratory with a theory that the fundamental human trait is  -- you name it -- aggressiveness, or territoriality, or the ability to play games, or an interest in the future, or the capacity for bonding into societies.  Such theories have a bit of truth, but they overlook the obvious.  The essence of humanity, in my view, is the drive to create and to appreciate beauty.  Pepys' "strange slavery" is not a bit strange;  it's universal.

 

As for myself, I believe that I can remember the exact day, hour and minute when I was first struck by beauty.  My moment of ascension occurred in a garden.  I must have been twelve or thirteen years old (and therefore not fully human).  One spring day I tagged along with a gang of schoolyard savages to the Zoo to see if we could get ourselves into a little trouble.  So there we were, running about, screaming and hiding and throwing stones at each other and clods of dirt at the respectable zoo patrons. Someone must have called the cops, because the next thing I knew we had all scattered and I was running as fast as I could.  In those days I was small and spry and any fence that I couldn't squeeze through I could certainly clamber over.  And what's a little barbed wire to a frightened urchin?  Separated from my cohort, I became completely lost.  Eventually, I found myself in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden which was then as now adjacent to the zoo.  I climbed over one or two more fences and entered (not by a gate, but surreptitiously) the famous, mature, refined Japanese Garden -- one of the great artistic achievements in all of America.  I was dazzled in all my senses-- it was a true epiphany.  I particularly remember the red cut leaf maples and the wisteria.  Of course I was too ignorant to know that it was wisteria;  I only knew that I was surrounded by magnificent cascades of blue flowers in abundant bloom.

 

Here are some pictures of the garden.  Just take a look, and then try to imagine an uncivilized pre-adolescent, a scared, sweaty, ragtag child, a product of concrete schoolyards and filthy subways stumbling upon such a amenable place.

 

What good fortune it was to have vaulted that one last fence!

 

I think that I've spent the rest of my life trying to get back to that garden -- or, more accurately, I've spent it trying to recreate and to re-live the aesthetic explosion that I experienced at that epiphanic moment.  When I travel. I make it a point to visit the world-famous gardens, and when I'm at home I work on my own landscape.  But it's not just gardens -- the most ephemeral of art forms --to which I stand in strange slavery.  I've found the aesthetic shiver in other places.  Poetry, Shakespeare in particular, is always at hand.  Is there a civilized soul who can read "Do not laugh at me;/ For (as I am a man) I think this lady/ To be my child, Cordelia" without dropping a pleasurable tear.  The Winter's Tale, which is the finest play in the history of this or any other universe, is a fountain of delights, especially Perdita's "I was not much afeard; for once or twice/ I was about to speak and tell him plainly,/ The selfsame sun that shines upon his court/ Hides not his visage from our cottage but/ Looks on alike" -- a sentiment which may be the most genuinely democratic in thirty-eight otherwise monarchist dramas.  Visual arts also are a constant source of pure delight;  in a gallery of Rembrandts at the Metropolitan Museum I was once so ecstatic that my heart began to beat uncontrollably.  And in Helsinki, I had a moment of pure architectural joy at the Church of the Rock -- the most beautiful and holy of buildings.

 

But of all art forms, it's music that is most reliably transcendent.  My tastes have evolved over the years:  Dvorak and Mahler are in the past but Beethoven's great fugue still sets my spine on edge and so does the long harpsichord solo in Bach's Fifth Brandenburg.  Recordings usually (but not always) work better than live performances.  When I'm in the right mood, I play the shivery passages again and again.  Nowadays the single most lovely piece of music is the great chaconne from Bach's second violin partita.  Hilary Hahn's performance is my favorite, but the chaconne is almost as exciting in Celadonio Romero's guitar transcription and in the Brahms piano version (for virtuoso left hand only).  The chaconne does all that music can do, and it does it in fifteen unaccompanied minutes.

 

It's not just classical music.  I'm also strangely enslaved to what is now called "golden era gospel" -- the singing of the "Heavenly Gospel Singers" and the "Harmonizing Four" and Clara Ward and Brother Joe May and Dorothy Love Coates and the "Swan Silvertones" and the "Five Blind Boys of Alabama." A small sample of some of my many, many favorites:  Mahalia Jackson's long live version of "How I Got Over"; the "Roberta Martin Singers"' "Standing on the Promises"; Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Marie Knight singing "Beams of Heaven"; the "Sensational Nightingales" "Brightly Beams";  perhaps the best of the best:  Professor J. Earle Hines, "God Be With You."  In such great music resides the aesthetic ecstasy, that, when we open ourselves to it, makes us most completely human. 

And Speaking of Mosquitoes...

Once upon a time I had a foolproof system for clearing a bedroom of mosquitoes.  Close the door, turn on a light, stick the left arm out of the bedclothes, keep track of the mosquitoes by their whine, and then, as soon as one lands on the exposed skin, smack it with the right hand.  After a few minutes, turn out the light, sleep tight. Used to work wonders.

The system doesn't work any more?  Why?  Because my antiquated ears no longer register high-pitched sounds. I can't hear mosquitoes until one of them pecks on my eardrum.  I'm vulnerable to sneak attack. 

It's bad: all mosquitoes are now stealth mosquitoes. It's good: I'll never again be troubled by that nasty whine. 

Mosquito Sex

Sexnews from the mosquitosphere: "if larvae of Aedes stimulans are raised at 75F, about half become males and half become females. But if they are raised at 84F, only 9F higher, they all become almost complete females."  Almost complete females?  What's the meaning of "almost complete?"  Either they're male, or they're female.  Doesn't the good book say that "male and female created he them?"

Here's the surprising scoop. "Larvae that would have become males lack the big bushy antennae of the normal male and have mouth parts and external genitalia that are indistinguishable from those of a "real" female. Furthermore, "feminized" males have no testicles or other internal male organs of reproduction, but they do have ovaries and other internal female organs of reproduction. Some feminized males have even mated with normal males and been inseminated, but they laid no eggs."

All this mosquito sex science comes from entomologist Gilbert Waldbauer, author of A Walk Around the Pond (Cambridge [Harvard], 2006).

Professor Waldbauer claims to love his insects but he is unmoved by the plight of the 84F feminized males. Can there be sadder words in Aedes households all over the warming earth than "they laid no eggs?"  It's poignant, perhaps even tragic.

How do the mosquitoes themselves feel about attenuated antennae and awkward genitalia?  If Waldbauer had looked with a more compassionate eye, he would have noticed that "normal" males of the 75F variety wave their big bushy antennae and point and laugh at the feeble mini-antennae of the wannabe females. He would also have noticed that wannabe females are stigmatized and often depressed because they are so frequently picked on by "normal" males, who regularly direct loud, scornful, threatening whines at the antennae-impaired.

There's a crisis of values in mosquitoland. Many "normal" males are fundamentally convinced that the wannabes have made a conscious choice to mimic females and that water temperature has absolutely nothing to do with it. Some among the "normal" males -- the more enlightened -- propose that with the right kind of counseling and prayer, the mimics can be reclaimed. But other "normal" males hate, simply hate, the males who consort with the feminized wannabes. They condemn as unnatural all intercourse between the normal and the feminized, and they proclaim the actual act of insemination to be the work of the devil.

I myself wonder why the "normal" males get themselves into such a twist.  I'm tempted to think that they protest too much -- that they themselves secretly lust after the feminized males.

I'll ask the expert, Professor Waldbauer. If he doesn't know, I'll get a second opinion. Perhaps the Rev. Ted Haggard would like to share his insights.   

What We Read in the Fifties: All the King's Men

I've now re-read Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men (1946), a novel that I hadn't looked at since the early 1950s. Once again memory has played its tricks. My fifty-year-old afterimage does not correspond to reality. The book that I thought I remembered focused on Willie Stark (Huey Long) -- his ascent to power, his anti-establishment politics, his ruthlessness, and his assassination.  Willie Stark does in fact appear in the book that I re-read, but he's not the central figure -- not even close. It's a novel about Jack Burden, press-secretary and chief blackmailer for Stark, and about the various spokes of Burden's wheel: his semi-aristocratic mother, his lawyer-turned-religious-fanatic father, the apparently upstanding judge who was his mother's lover, his childhood sweetheart Anne Stanton and her doctor brother, and also Sadie Burke, the Boss's secretary-girlfriend-political guru, and of course about Stark himself.  Perhaps I misremembered because the Willie Stark parts of the novel are so strong, or perhaps my memory was filtered through the 1949 Robert Rossen film. Even half a century later, it's hard to read the book without seeing Broderick Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge in the mind's eye. (The film is now in the Netflix queue, so I'll revisit it shortly.)

It's a good book, well worth the prizes and the accolades. For my money, there could have been more politics and more Louisiana and less young-man-searching-for-his-identity. It's a big, as they say, "sprawling" novel; sometimes the sprawl works, but at other times -- the long flashback in which adolescent Jack woos adolescent Anne, for example -- an editor's scissors would have done the novel a world of good. The prose is mannered and affected and derivative: hunks of Thomas Wolfe, a dollop here and there of Faulkner, along with extra-large helpings of Chandler or Hammett. But it's nevertheless strong writing.       

Melodramatic?  Yes, indeed: murders and suicides, betrayals and reversals, mysteries and exposures. But at the core, a genuine curiosity about America and its southland. All the King's Men persuasively creates a culture in which genuine goodness is mere namby-pamby and in which ruthlessness has become reasonable. To succeed in such a world, Jack Burden and Willie Stark become as corrupt as the world around them. 

The Huey Long material is excellent groundwork for a novel. Warren dresses it up with paragraph after paragraph of murky philosophizing. I confess that I didn't make the effort to absorb the meditations -- they seemed to be the usual southern stuff about religion and about the weight of history. I think that readers are supposed to learn that "if you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without the one there cannot be the other, and ... if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future."  But if such a platitude is the best that Warren can do, it's best to skip the tepid philosophy and stick with the rich and abundant storytelling.  

Flying the Flag

Yesterday, we dug out our grand old American flag and flew it from the holder that I had improvised after 9/11. We flew it to celebrate two great changes: a) the Democratic triumph in Tuesday's election, which restored a bit of our faith in representative government, and b) the end of the arrogant reign of Donald Rumsfeld, the principal mover (except for the cowboy-in-chief himself) of this foolish, disastrous adventurism in the Middle East. We're hoping for a return to common sense in America, but we're not entirely optimistic  -- the guy who's in charge doesn't read, can't admit he's ever made a mistake, and takes his marching orders from a) Rove, b) his gut, and c) his narrow, parochial version of the great signifier in the sky  -- in what order of priority no one knows. 

Rumsfeld should have been out on his ass years ago. He had lost the respect of the soldiers, certainly of the generals, the congress, and, as we now know from the election results, of ordinary Americans everywhere. However, until yesterday he could still patronize and mystify the journalists, and he could still issue instructions to those beneath him in the chain of command.  And generals obey even when they despise the person issuing the orders.

In 1606, Shakespeare described the psychological relations between the generals and their civilian commander. Of Macbeth, Angus says that "Those he commands move only in command,/ Nothing in love." That is, they do what they're told, but they hate doing it. Here's the full transcript of Angus's remarks: "Now does [Macbeth] feel/ His secret murders sticking on his hands;/ Now minutely revolts upbraid his faith-breach;/ Those he commands move only in command,/ Nothing in love: Now does he feel his title/ Hang loose upon him, like a giant's robe/ Upon a dwarfish thief."

It's hopeless to expect that Rumsfeld would recognize that the mantle of Secretary of Defense hung upon him as Angus describes Macbeth's (or, as does, a fortiori, the presidential mantle upon its own wearer) -- there's not sufficient insight or perspective or self-knowledge around the White House these days. But we know exactly what Angus meant, and we know that some of our so-called leaders are nothing more than dwarfish thiefs.     

("Minutely" means "every minute";  "Now minutely revolts upbraid his faith-breach" means "every minute a revolt [by one of his former followers] pays Macbeth back for his own breach of faith, i.e. assassinating Duncan.)

What We Heard in the Fifties

Regular readers (and even stray internet pilgrims) know that Dr. M. has composed a series of entries called What We Read in the Fifties, in which he's revisited books that were noteworthy or notorious during the days of his youth. It's been a rewarding exercise, at least for him. Some of the books have been canonical novels that were required reading in English class at Erasmus Hall High School, some have been pop best-sellers which his more earnest teachers would have scorned, and some have been cheap sensational paperbacks passed under the desk from hand to grimy pubescent hand.

In the years that have passed since I first read these books, rivers have changed course, glaciers have melted, and American society has altered almost beyond recognition -- and yet the books have remained exactly the same. Reading them has been an exercise in nostalgia and a test of memory, and also an unwelcome insight into the incalculable callowness of adolescence. And yet, Dr. Metablog has found readers -- or, at least, he thinks he has, for in May and in December, when high school students all over America, yea, even across the waters, write their assigned term papers on Lord of the Flies or The Catcher in the Rye, blague-traffic spikes, and the dissenting views offered in these essaylets are plagiarized and offered to a new generation of English teachers, who reward them with grades of D or F. 

I fear, however, that my readers might have gathered an erroneous impression of 1950s Flatbushian youth -- that they might have been literate or intellectual. Let me clear my conscience and confess that for every hour that I spent reading books that had actual bindings, I spent ten hours reading comic books and an equal measure with my ear to the radio. It was the comics that taught me how to read; I was well along in years before I came to realize that there were such things as lower-case letters and that there could be sentences that didn't end with exclamation points! In my neighborhood, super-heroes (Batman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman) were as common as squirrels or starlings. But radio -- radio serials-- affected us even more than the comics. Radio stimulated the imagination, took us to worlds far way, presented us with alternative realities. Members of my age-cohort will not forget the glories of radio:Jack Armstrong, the All-American boy, who trotted the globe in support of native ideals and Wheaties; Bobbie Benson, the youth who inherited the B-Bar-B ranch in the Big Bend country, and who, along with Tex, Windy, and Harka, triumphed daily over snakes, droughts, famines and outlaws; the Shadow, who had the power to "cloud men's minds so they cannot see him," and who taught us, every day, that "the weed of crime bears bitter fruit"; Sergeant Preston of the Northwest Mounted, who fought crime and bad guys in the Yukon with horse and dog ("Well, King, this case is closed"); and the Lone Ranger, who with the aid of Tonto and the "thundering hoof beats of the great horse Silver" and with the marvelous voices of exotic Detroit's Fred Foy and Brace Beemer, created an enduring mythology of a spacious but vague and unlocatable west. 

Radio gave scope to the listener's imagination. When television came along, and these programs were translated into a visual form, they were all inevitably diminished. It's no wonder that the great epics (Gilgamesh, the Odyssey and Iliad, Beowulf, the Icelandic sagas) are oral creations. The spoken word can cast spells that are beyond the capacity of visual forms. When it comes to heroes, a single word is worth a thousand pictures.

Radio prepared me for Shakespeare. It's a fact that when Londoners crossed the Thames to attend the Globe, they did not go to "see" a play; they went to "hear" a play. There's a world of difference between seeing and hearing. When we "see" a movie, 90% of the information comes to us through the eye. In a Shakespeare play, it's exactly the opposite -- 90%, or more, of the information comes to us by way of the ear -- which is why recordings of Shakespeare's plays can be so entirely successful and so true to the original intent. And because the plays are primarily oral, with their big speeches and complicated rhetorical patterning and brilliant displays of verbal acuity, they can also be larger-than-life -- and they can be heroic. Shakespeare's plays are closer to radio than they are to any other modern literary form. Those of us who grew up with radio bring to Shakespeare an intuitive understanding of oral forms that precede television, film, and even precede the theater itself  -- especially decadent modern theater with its compulsive and distracting visual distortions.   

Shakespeare and Dogs

In a recent post, I casually mentioned that William Shakespeare was not fond of dogs and I offered as evidence the fact that the two villainous sisters in King Lear are called "dog-hearted daughters." Not convincing, says one of my readers. Is that so? Well, let me offer further evidence of dog-heartedness. Shakespeare's first true villain, Richard of Gloucester, is metaphorically speaking, a dog. According to the legend, which the character himself embraces and flaunts, Richard was born with a full set of teeth "which plainly signified/ That I should snarl and bite and play the dog." Not a tractable or ingratiating dog either, but one who is both treacherous and poisonous: "when he fawns, he bites; and when he bites,/ His venom tooth will rankle to the death." At the end of Richard III, when Richard is killed at the climactic battle of Bosworth Field, his heroic Tudor successor Henry Richmond proclaims victory in these words: "God and your arms be praised, victorious friends,/ The day is ours, the bloody dog is dead."  So here's a pretty pack of hounds: Goneril, Regan, and Richard of Gloucester. And yet one more villain -- Iago in Othello: "O damn'd Iago. O inhuman dog." 

In the Shakespearian universe, villains are regularly described as dogs, but dogs are never, ever, characterized as loyal, or affectionate, or helpful. They're anything but our newspaper-fetching friends.  On the contrary, dogs are "base," "unmanner'd," "thievish," "mangy," "hellish," "whoreson," "coward," "rascal," and "bloody." Shakespeare often uses the dysphemism "cur" for dog. Curs are "mongrel," "cruel-hearted," "o'erweening," "whoreson indistinguishable," and "venom-mouth'd." Hounds, highly regarded by some for their hunting ability, are "false" or "fell and cruel." Both Richard of Gloucester and Macbeth are "hell-hounds." Shakespeare's dogs are regularly associated with disorder, violence and evil;  everyone knows Mark Anthony's "Cry 'havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war."

Shakespeare draws upon dogs when he wants to describe an uncivilized and wild world. Henry IV fears what England will become when his undisciplined son succeeds him: "For the fifth Harry from curb'd license plucks/ The muzzle of restraint, and the wild dog/ Shall flesh his tooth on every innocent." Dogs are untrustworthy, because they are "easily won to fawn on any man." "They turn... As dogs upon their masters." When the conspirators murdered Caesar, they "fawn'd like hounds,/  And bowed like bondsmen, kissing Caesar's feet;/ Whilst damned Casca, like a cur, behind/ Struck Caesar on the neck." Dogs are not only disloyal, they're disgusting as well. In The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth, Archbishop Scroop complains that the common people are no more loyal to Henry than they were to his predecessor Richard II. "So, thou (i.e. the people) common dog, did'st thou disgorge/ Thy glutton bosom of the royal Richard./ And thou would'st eat thy dead vomit up,/ And howl'st to find it." 

Shakespeare knew his dogs and had their names at his finger tips. Macbeth runs through a catalog:  "hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs/ Shoughs, water-rugs and demi-wolves, are clept/ All by the name of dogs." Mad Edgar, in Lear, makes a similar list: "Be thy mouth or black or white,/ Tooth that poisons if it bite;/ Mastiff, greyhound, mongrel grim./ Hound or spaniel, brach or lym,/ Bobtail tyke or trundle tail." Shakespeare had a particular and peculiar dislike of fawning dogs, whom (as was first noticed by Walter Whiter in 1794) he lumps together with (strange as it seems) candy or sweets, and images of melting. When Hotspur thinks back to an early encounter with the future King Henry IV, he remembers "Why, what a candy deal of courtesy, this fawning greyhound then did proffer me." In Anthony and Cleopatra, Anthony realizes that his followers are abandoning him; he laments that "the hearts/ That spaniel'd me at heels, to whom I gave/ Their wishes, do discandy, Melt their sweets/ On blossoming Caesar; and this pine is bark'd/ That overtopp'd them all." Flattering dogs and sweets are bound so closely in Shakespeare's subconscious that sometimes the dog is implicit rather than explicit. Hamlet to Horatio: "Why should the poor be flattered./ No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp,/ And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee,/ Where thrift  [i.e. advantage] may follow fawning." A reader who is familiar with Shakespeare's imagination can detect the ghost of a fawning spaniel behind that "candied tongue." The ghost of a ghost is there also in King Lear, where Lear, in his madness, imagines that he surrounded by a pack of hounds: "The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanch, and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me." 

Did Shakespeare suffer some traumatic childhood event involving dogs and candy? It has been so suspected?  Whether yea nor nay, it's more than clear that Shakespeare's loathing of dogs was not of the surface; it was a deep and elemental revulsion.