Via Negativa

May 12, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Incoming

White crab spider on Dutchman’s breeches, clearly trying to disguise itself as just another blossom in order to net an unsuspecting pollinator. See here for an even better photo of a white crab spider, on a different kind of white flower, with a bee actually in its grip.

At last, comment spammers who don’t insult my intelligence!

Those of you who don’t blog may be surprised to learn that such a thing as comment spam exists. Can it really be worthwhile to leave comments at obscure, low-traffic blogs like this one, just on the off-chance that a few readers might click on the link to the website? It wouldn’t be worth it if real, live people were leaving the comments, but it’s all done automatically, by spam bots.

There are various ways to screen out spam bots. Haloscan – the independent outfit that provided the commenting service I used when Via Negativa was at Blogspot – seemed practically immune. So when I moved to the present location, I was taken aback by the volume of spam that began to pour in, following the incoming links. So far, it’s not been much trouble to screen it out by requiring all comments by first-time commenters to go wait for approval.

I saw this species of spider in a number of different places this spring – enough to persuade me that the web here, on the inflorescence of a smooth rock cress, is merely fortuitious.

But the thing that really annoyed me about the spam that began flooding in was the language it employed – a mixture of crude flattery and awkward English. How could anyone clever enough to unleash an army of spam bots not have the sense to at least comb through the English-language blogosphere and plagiarize some real comments? Instead, they employed lines such as “Your site is very cognitive. Thanks for author!” and “Best site I see! I make link, come back often, continue like that.” I’ve seen hundreds of variations on these, and worse.

The pink lady’s slipper orchid depends on bumblebees for pollination, but gives them nothing but frustration in return. The bees are lured in by the delicious aroma, but find no nectar. The shape of the flower forces them to exit through the top, preventing self-pollination.

So imagine my surprise this morning when I find 17 posts waiting for moderation that actually force me to pause and study whether they were made by human or robot-with-typewriter. The giveaway was that they all originated from the same website, despite having all different (presumably fictional) email addresses. But the messages were, well, cute. “William Safire has just been picked on by a blog with a name that keeps changing. Not too harshly, though. The comment is William Safire, you annoy me.” First out of the block, a meta-comment! “Frivolous bastardisation of our punctuation is one of the key witnesses to the current decline of our wonderful nation,” writes another. And that nation would be Great Britain, I’m guessing.

“God save the Sex Pistols
One means it, subjects
We love our boys
God bless”
A punk poem, employing irony! Nice to see some recently graduated English major gainfully employed, isn’t it? In my favorite non sequitor from the overnight crop, “EBONY” asks, “I wonder what the society for the advancement of formal structures would make of this site about natural language parsing?” This was a comment to my May Day post.

Oak apple gall on a red oak. Worldwide, over 700 different species of insects – most of them small wasps, as with the apple gall – have learned how to manipulate oaks into growing them a brood chamber from their own tissues.

In this morning’s email, someone who has just linked to Via Negativa had what I thought was a slightly unusual request: not for a direct reciprocal link on my Reciprocal Links page, but for a link to another, related site. “In this way we both get a one-way link which is better than a reciprocal link as far as search engine ratings go,” he wrote. Since both sites were non-commercial (and seemed to reflect quite lofty idealism), I was happy enough to comply. But in my response, I did include a brief and (I hope) friendly rant about the quest for search engine rankings.

Personally (I wrote), I’m not too concerned about search engine rankings, since I feel that traffic volume is not a real guarantee of attentive readers. The site statistics for my old blog seemed to bear this out. A couple hundred unique page views a day courtesy of the search engines had no perceptible impact on the 40 or so people (not counting subscribers to the feed) who stopped in every day or two for five minutes or more. In my view, the best way to find and retain the sort of readers I’m looking for is by leaving comments on other blogs, or by reading their comments and following the links back to their own blogs. Not that that’s my primary motivation in leaving a comment, though. When I read something that moves me, it’s wonderful to be able to respond and know that the author and other readers will see it, and can respond in turn if they so choose. It’s this kind of inter-linking – the building of real human relationships – that interests me.

Woolsower gall on scrub oak. Who is fleecing whom?

On re-reading my reply, though, I’m afraid it makes it sound as if my motives are more altruistic than they are. For me, it’s still all about the writing – though amateur photography has turned out to be a fun and complementary avocation. Read SB’s post about how and why she writes poetry (linked also from the Smorgasblog) if you want to know my own feelings about writing, too. “A poem is my way of discovering (dis-covering) what I feel; sometimes, what I think.” Precisely. And sometimes it’s galling what the world makes of us, what strange winged creatures ultimately emerge.

May 11, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Medicine

The LPN believes in being firm. Her daughter is five, and she doesn’t allow her to meet her gaze; she always stares back until the daughter looks away. Give ’em an inch and they’ll take a mile, she likes to say.

The woman in the next bed
moans all night: Help me, help me,
somebody, nurse.
The nurse steals in on stockinged feet.

When her four-year-old son was an infant, she would sit on him, straddling his tiny torso while her husband changed the diaper. They’re never too young to learn to lie still, she said.

In the woods behind the hospital,
trilliums bob in the sun, a white mirage.
The moss cracks open from lack of rain.

The 88-year-old great-grandmother looks on with an aching heart. Her mild suggestions carry little weight with her daughter or son-in-law, with her grandson or his wife the nurse. “They all talk to me like a child,” she tells us. “You’re the first people I’ve had an adult conversation with in months.”

Those clouds could be anything:
dogwood, hawthorn,
some wild cherry wrapped in caterpillar webs.

Expected to look after her great-grandchildren half the week, she tries to make them understand that love need not be accompanied by threats or a smothering embrace. When the four-year-old kicks her, much to his outraged surprise, she hits back.

On the abandoned farm, a lawn chair
still sits out under the apple tree.
Petals drift down between the slats.

Back in Pennsylvania for a rare visit, she apologizes for not doing a better job of staying in touch. “I’ve been so exhausted. I can’t remember the last time I got a good night’s sleep.”

Toothwort,
spleenwort,
bleeding-heart,
hepatica:
we might fall forever if not
for that net of roots.

May 10, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Dogwood

Though flowering dogwood (Cornus florida) is a New World tree, a widespread Appalachian legend links it with the crucifixion. The dogwood was once as tall as the oak, they say, but its wood was used to make the cross that Jesus was crucified on, and forever after it has grown small and crooked, and each of the four, white bracts surrounding the flower is stained with a drop of blood. Farther south, its blooming usually coincides with Easter.

The wood is uncommonly hard, and is still harvested to make spindles for weaving. In the past, it was favored for bearings and wagon wheels, and some people with the time to make things right still like to fashion tool handles from dogwood. One can see how the crucifixion legend got started: nothing but the best for our Lord and Savior! It didn’t hurt that the “flowers” were white and cross-shaped, and that the cluster of true flowers vaguely resembles a crown of thorns.

According to the new (and excellent) Trees of Pennsylvania: A Complete Reference Guide, by Ann Fowler Rhoads and Timothy A. Black (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), flowering dogwood

was used by Native Americans to treat children for worms and diarrhea, to counteract poisons, and as an antiseptic and astringent. The roots were also used as a tonic and the twigs were chewed as a sort of early toothbrush. The bark of dogwood roots was sold in apothecary shops in Philadelphia in the mid-1700s as a substitute for quinine for treating ague (malaria). […] Native Americans are reported to have relied on the appearance of the flowers of dogwood to signal the time to plant corn.

I think I like that last piece of folklore much better than crucifixion legend – for one thing, it’s much more likely to be true. Blooming times of native trees and wildflowers are excellent indicators of when to plant.

Besides, dogwood anthracnose is the real curse afflicting this species. I hear that flowering dogwoods have been virtually eliminated from many more southern forests as a result of this disease, which first appeared in North America in the early 1970s. Its origins are unknown, but chances are good that humans–not a vengeful deity–were responsible for its introduction.

Dogwood berries are sought out by many species of birds and mammals, which inadvertently spread the seeds throughout the woods. Rhoads and Black say that spring azure and red-spotted purple butterflies use dogwood as a source of nectar, but those are just two of many species one can fine on the flowers. But when I took my camera for a walk the other day, I found various species of bees, several small flower scarabs, and some kind of hemipteran (true bug), a pale-green creature that I never would have noticed if I hadn’t been intent on photographing the bower of joined bracts surrounding it.

This has been the best year for dogwood blossoms in many years. Someday, if and when the anthracnose has reduced our population to a few, widely scattered individuals as botanists predict, I’ll try and remember the spring of 2006, when clouds of dogwood blossoms dotted the hillsides, and each blossom was a revelation, distinct and irreducible.

May 9, 2006September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

New Enterprise Stone & Lime

The Tyrone Forge quarry, owned by New Enterprise Stone & Lime, Inc., supplies blacktop, concrete, lime and crushed stone. For us, the quarry is a bit of mixed blessing. Since it’s only a little over a mile away from our houses as the crow flies, we get noise and light pollution from it – though nothing like the folks living right next to it in the villages of Nealmont, Ironville and Tyrone Forge.

But it’s damned convenient having a source of 2RC gravel so close to the bottom of our lane. “Lane” perhaps fails to convey the reality of a mile-and-a-half-long, one-lane road up a northeast-facing, steep mountain ravine. Road maintenance has been a constant preoccupation for us in the 35 years we’ve lived here. There are always trees to be cleared, rocks to be pitched off, ditches to be dug out, cross-grates to be cleaned (picture half-culvert pipes topped with narrow versions of cattle guards), ruts to be raked out, and potholes to be filled. So they know us pretty well at the quarry. It’s a fairly friendly place, and the state Department of Economic and Community Development has listed New Enterprise as one of the 50 best companies of its size class to work for.

Up through the 1970s, the quarry was a small, family-owned operation. But when it was bought up by New Enterprise, it began to expand almost overnight, gobbling up hundreds of acres of valuable farmland. Though limestone quarries don’t produce anywhere near the kind of pollution that other forms of mining do, they can still produce a lot of silt runoff, which can have a devastating effect on aquatic life. And the Tyrone Forge quarry sits right on the banks of the Little Juniata River, a high-quality trout stream. According to FlyFishingConnection.com,

Little Juniata River, located in the Southern region of Central Pennsylvania, is a river that’s making a comeback with help from the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission and environmental awareness. Throughout the 1960s, raw sewage and pollutants from local mills ran into the Little Juniata from towns above. Cleanup started in the early ’70s and today, the Little Juniata is a large river with large deep pools, moderate water, and prolific hatches supporting the thousands of fingerlings stocked by the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission each year. This river is one of the finest in the State of Pennsylvania, running through two counties (Blair and Huntington).

In March, New Enterprise applied for a permit to expand further–

to deepen the quarry, add additional mining and support area, add an additional sediment pond, add a NPDES discharge point, and change the postmining land use on New Enterprise Stone & Lime Company’s property from forest and cropland to unmanaged natural habitat (251.4 acres) and permanent water impoundment (137.4 acres).

So if this is approved, they will become stewards of a small lake and over 250 acres of “natural” habitat.

Meanwhile, the parent company continues its active involvement in the permanent destruction and fragmentation of habitat through highway construction. In 2000, New Enterprise was the successful bidder for the construction of a ten-mile stretch of the newly christened Interstate 99 just north of here. Thus, it became the official executioner of a once-beautiful section of Bald Eagle Mountain – the very same ridge we live on – tearing a gash out of its wooded flank that in some places reaches all the way to the ridge crest. The quarry roars through the night to supply the stone and concrete for former Congressman Elmer Greinert “Bud” Shuster’s “Highway to Nowhere.” By sheer coincidence, New Enterprise was always a heavy contributor to Shuster’s campaign chest. (It has continued that pattern with Bud’s son and dynastic successor, Bill Shuster. In the current election cycle, Son of Bud is the second-largest recipient of campaign donations from the building materials industry in the U.S. Congress.)

Bud Shuster was no stranger to such amazing coincidences during his tenure in power. His highway-building zeal found its fullest expression in his chairmanship of the powerful Congressional Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, during which time he aided and abetted the most expensive road construction boondoggle in U.S. history, Boston’s Big Dig. If you live in Boston and have learned to appreciate the convenience and fine workmanship of this engineering marvel, you can thank his stalwart supporters at New Enterprise Stone & Lime – and you can thank us, the residents of Plummer’s Hollow, for helping to keep them in business. Have a nice day.

May 8, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Band of gypsies

Eu amava o amor, essa lepra.
I was in love with love, that leprosy.
–Eugénio de Andrade, Matéria Solar

Thanks to your lightfoot genius
no Eighth Route Army
kept its lines more fluid,
traveled with less baggage,
so nibbled the advantage.
Even with your small bad heart
you made a dance of departures.

–Stanley Kunitz, “After the Last Dynasty”

The gypsy musician tells the interviewer that his favorite album growing up was by Jimi Hendrix, Band of Gypsies. He had a cassette copy that he listened to thousands of times. He liked it because it was so different from the traditional music his father played. He didn’t speak a word of English then, and had no idea what the title meant.

I don’t have a car. Lately, in my dreams, I have been running across train stations in the oddest places, all lit up and waiting for the railroads to come back. Some people are already buying tickets at the window. Homeless people are already moving in.

There were lilacs in the above photo, but I cropped them out. If you can’t smell them, what good does it do to see their image? The white in the background is the side of my parents’ house. If it weren’t out-of-focus, you’d see clapboard: about six inches wide near the ground, tapering to less than five near the roof – a trompe l’oiel effect designed to make the house look taller than it is.

You are all homeless – says the one god – with me. The thin whisper of a voice is lost in traffic.

May 6, 2006 by Dave Bonta

A brief inquiry into the manners and customs of fools

I have been thinking about the fools, those anti-heroes of proverb and byword. A whole fool is half a prophet, they say, and A fool is his own informer. Which half of the future does he see – the half without hope, or the half without informers?

The fool is prolific: he grows without rain, they say. He takes liberties. He puts on airs. The fool’s world is a paradise, but better hell with a wise man than the heaven of fools. Don’t they sound jealous, these anonymous pimps for wisdom?

The fool tries patience, proves the rule. You can tell an ass by his long ears, a fool by his long tongue. His laughter resembles the crackling of thorns under a pot, they say: a loud and useless fuel, soon spent. And they say there’s no fool like an old fool, so it seems the elderly must be held in high esteem in the fools’ country. A dead man is mourned for seven days, a fool for a lifetime. What a wise custom, to mourn people while they are alive, so they may appreciate the tributes! For seventy years we learn wisdom – and die fools.

The language of fools – Folly – must be among the hardest to master, because it so easily masquerades as ordinary speech. Answer not a fool according to his folly, says the Book of Proverbs, lest you become like him. But Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he become wise in his own conceit. No foolish consistency at work there!

Clearly, not all proverbs are creations of the wise, though it’s hard to tell which are which. For example: In the country of the fools, a proverb walks with a limp. So what? Balance is where you find it. And why shouldn’t a dog return to his vomit? It’s the only way to discover what really happened! Everyone agrees that God looks after fools, so why should we shun their company?

Proverbs are prickly things, full of acid and the taste of deja vu. Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child, but the rod of correction shall drive it from him, says the Book of Proverbs. What dangerous folly! But aren’t proverbs in general a little like fools? For a fool cannot be questioned or explained, as the Yiddish proverb has it.

If we can’t trust proverbs, what do we really know about these strange people, the fools? Like most tribes, their own name for themselves is doubtless much less derogatory – in fact, it probably means something like “the people.” But given the difficulty of finding reliable informants, this is sheer conjecture. That fools are fond of sweets is an invention of the wise.

One hears about holy fools, though not of late. Fools used to have their own pope, too, chosen by popular acclaim – and vox populi, vox dei, as they say. I don’t think the Pope of Fools did much beyond carrying around a shepherd’s crook with no sheep in sight and issuing bull. But when the festival was over, he went wisely home to his wife.

Some say the fools have a tortoise for a king; we know all about his contest with the too-clever hare. The Yoruba call him Ijapa, and quote his proverbs for laughs – the only safe way to wax proverbial, I suspect. One morsel for the mouth, one morsel for the pocket – the word of Ijapa. What the world calls corruption the corrupt call being prudent. If you’re going to question authority, be sure to ask permission first – the word of Ijapa. Aren’t the best revolutionaries always like the good soldier Schweik?

I think I have identified one authentic saying of fools in the Bible: It rains on the just and the unjust alike. Who but a fool would believe such seditious nonsense? As Ijapa arrived at his in-laws’ house he exposed his penis, saying, “Nobody knows who might like to have a look.”
__________

Sources: Yiddish Proverbs, edited and translated by Hanan J. Ayalti (Schocken, 1949); Holy Bible; A Treasury of African Folklore, by Harold Courlander (Marlowe, 1996).

May 5, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Becoming animal

chipmunk among Canada mayflower leaves

The other evening, my fifteen-month-old niece Elanor gave utterance to her first distinct, undeniable series of English words. They were animal sounds.

I had already gone down to my own house, worn out from a day of visiting, so what follows is based on my parents’ account. Elanor loves books – all books, even the ones without pictures – and as the adults talked, it seemed nothing out of the ordinary for her to sit on the couch with one of her favorite books on her lap, slowly turning the pages. It was a picture book for small children called Animal Sounds, which has foldout, cardboard pages, and for novelty’s sake, apparently, she was looking at it upside-down. Her grandpa was the first to notice that Elanor was imitating his pronunciations of the onomatopoeia in a low voice. “Ribbet! Ribbet!” she said as she looked at the upside-down frog. Then she turned the page to the lion cub. “GrrrrrrOWL!”

Dad signaled Mom and Steve to shut up and watch. It was no fluke. “Squawk! Squawk!” said the parrot. Another turn and unfolding of the complicated pages, and the baby elephant was clearly saying “Baroooo!”

tent caterpillars on a wild sweet cherry

And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of each kind, cattle and crawling things and wild beasts of each kind.” And so it was. And God made wild beasts of each kind and cattle of each kind and all crawling things on the ground of each kind, and God saw that it was good. And God said, “Let us make a human in our image, by our likeness, to hold sway over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the heavens and the cattle and the wild beasts and all the crawling things that crawl upon the earth.”

And God created the human in his image,
in the image of God he created him,
male and female he created them.

(Robert Alter, trans.)

This is the notorious passage in Genesis leading up to God’s first commands: be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and conquer it, hold sway (radah). About this last verb, Alter notes that it is “not the normal Hebrew word for ‘rule’ […] and in most of the contexts in which it occurs it seems to suggest an absolute or even fierce exercise of mastery.”

Could we ask for a more explicit expression of the kind of anthropocentrism that has fueled our current environmental malaise? And yet the passage is not without redeeming qualities. Notice, for example, that wild animals and creepy-crawlies are given equal standing with livestock. This is consistent with other parts of the Bible, such as the 104th Psalm and the last chapters of Job, which explicitly recognize the claims of untrammeled nature. One can also see some irony in the account of humanity’s separate creation. While all other earthly inhabitants were brought into being through the utterance of spells – or prayers, if you like – the human is fashioned by reference to an image, as idols are made. This is brought home by the parallel Creation myth that begins a few verses later, in which God literally fashions the man out of clay, and simultaneously gives birth to the world’s first bad pun (“‘adam, ‘human,’ from the soil, ‘adamah,” as Alter puts it).

yellow mandarin

These thoughts were sparked by an entry in a new (to me) blog called everydayandeverynight.com, by Rabbi Shai Gluskin. According to Rabbi Gluskin’s post Shade Under Sun, the word tzelim, “image” or “idol,” derives from the word for shade or shadow, tzel.

We are idols made of flesh and bone, mere shadows of God. Certainly we shouldn’t be worshiped. Though not the real thing, we do share some of God’s qualities.

Taking refuge in the shade, safe from God’s blinding light we can look up and see the canopy illuminated. This illumination is akin to our inspiration.

We can, however, forget to look up. We may, like Adam, delude ourselves into thinking we can hide from God. The shadow then is no longer a protector from God’s blinding light, but a vice to run away [into].

I like the way Rabbi Gluskin grounds his interpretation in the arboreal imagery of spring. Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, trees are explicitly recognized as a potential focus of idolatry, reflecting the historical competition of the Yahwist cult with the cult of the Asherim. In fact, in the second chapter of Genesis, the humans’ first openly idolatrous behavior is toward a tree.

a Baltimore oriole harvesting insects from young black walnut leaves

Let’s step back a few verses, though. In the first Creation account, as I mentioned, non-human animals are not shaped, but merely spoken into being. Given the primacy accorded to mindful prayer in Jewish tradition, wouldn’t this actually threaten to raise their ontological status above that of humans? Perhaps the original compilers of the Bible thought so, too, because in the second story, we see the order of (male) human and animal creation reversed – and this time, God fashions all creatures from the soil, and subcontracts out to Adam the job of giving them names.

But were these creatures, too, fashioned after pre-existing prototypes – are they “made in the image of God”? If God works the way a sculptor does, shouldn’t we expect him to project some element of his own identity into his work, like any artist?

gaywings, or fringed polygala

Of course, it would be absurd to accuse God Himself of idolatry. But he does seem to be actively encouraging Adam’s own tendencies in that direction, fashioning the animals one by one not only “to see what he would call it,” but also to see if any of them would appeal to him as a “sustainer.” When none seem to fit the bill, the female human is created while the male sleeps, almost like a sexual fantasy given flesh. The stage is set for idolatry, loss of innocence, fear and exile. Alter says,

The Hebrew ‘ezer kenegdo (King James Version “help meet”) is notoriously difficult to translate. The second term means “alongside him,” “a counterpart to him.” “Help” is too weak because it suggests a merely auxiliary function, whereas ‘ezer elsewhere connotes active intervention on behalf of someone, especially in military contexts, as often in Psalms.

But the Psalms are directed toward God, are they not? Did the authors of this myth mean to suggest that in his yearning for a flesh-and-bone sustainer, Adam was already drawing away from God? His first recorded utterance is no psalm, but an impassioned poem to the woman – a naming-poem, a spell.

The language used for Eve’s creation, says Alter, is architectural rather than sculptural: the verb means “to build” rather than “to shape,” and “the Hebrew for ‘rib,’ tsela’, is also used elsewhere to designate an architectural element.” (This imagery helps set the stage for the Tower of Babel story, perhaps. Or at least suggests that we should see the Tower as anthropomorphic, if not theomorphic.) The idolatrous impulse here is quickly realized with the entrance of the first non-human animal a few verses later. No sooner have we been told that the man and woman “become one flesh” and that “the two of them were naked … and they were not ashamed,” then the serpent appears to set them against each other. And the main descriptor used for the serpent, ‘arum, “cunning,” is a play on ‘arumim, “naked.”

Thus, guided by the active intervention of one of the animals Adam named, Eve “saw that the tree was good for eating and that it was lust to the eyes and the tree was lovely to look at, and she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave to her man, and he ate.” The word translated as “lust” will appear often in the exhortations of the prophets, for whom lust and idolatry seem to have been closely linked.

blue-gray gnatcatcher on scarlet oak sapling

Eve’s first act is to look for her own ‘ezer kenegdo, it seems. Forget for a moment the millennia of moralistic and sexist interpretations based on the premise that the rightful place for righteous humans is back in some otherworldly version of that paradise. Forget the quintessentially priestly assumption that ignorance – unthinking obedience – is bliss. What the Genesis Creation stories really suggest is that rebellion is somehow intrinsic to created beings. A thing is no sooner named, fashioned, or dreamed up – a child is no sooner birthed – than it acquires its own personality, as every artist or parent knows. Self becomes Other, and Other then returns to open the eyes of the Self. The pivotal importance of the serpent in the Genesis story (the devil is nowhere in sight) almost bridges the gap between this and other tribal Creation myths, where animal tricksters also play central roles. By the time we get to Abraham and Sarah – let alone Jacob, Job and the Prophets – we find human beings capable of telling God a thing or two.

What could we possibly know that an omniscient God does not? Humility: the dawning recognition that we are not, in fact, the center of the universe. A sense of wonder. Without some measure of selflessness, is true empathy possible? The infant, godlike in her egotism, can hardly begin to imagine herself as another being; her squawks and chirps and cries are solely her own. Only with the growth of other-consciousness can she become capable of the imagination necessary for anthropomorphizing empathy. If – as eco-philosopher Paul Shepard asserted – it is the animals that made us human, could we not also say without any impiety that it is humans who taught a violent and amoral god how to be Good?

Photo from last year’s trip to the reptile zoo. See here and here.

__________

UPDATE: Steve tells me that Elanor had actually been saying “Woof, woof!” now and then for a month or so, and that the evening before her “reading” of the animal sounds book, she had added a second element to her vocabulary: “Tickle, tickle!” Make of that what you will.

May 4, 2006 by Dave Bonta

&

Dave,

I’d like to use your poem Grace in the upcoming issue of _____. It’s a beautiful piece, but I would much prefer to spell out the word “and” throughout rather than using the “&.” How do you feel about this? We’re going to run it in either case, and we will, of course, respect your decision.
[…]

C.,

[…]
Ampersands: I love ’em! I know that poems with ampersands are looked down on by the mainstream poetry establishment these days, and some readers may find them off-putting. But I like “&” because it is an ideograph, one of the few permitted in our otherwise alphabetic language, and so connects us more viscerally to the world of signs and tracks and omens.

In addition, “and” is one of my favorite words, because of the way it can bring disparate things together and lead the mind off in new directions, so I don’t mind calling attention to it.

That said, however, I’m very curious about your reasons for wanting to spell out all the “and”s in this poem. I’m not completely inflexible on this point.
[…]

Dave

Dave,

[…]
As for ampersands, I guess I’m just one of those people that are put off by them in formal text. I find that they interrupt my concentration–and that I end up paying attention to the &, rather than focusing on the word it represents.

That said, your argument for using them was very nicely stated. And in the end, I’ll be fine with whatever decision you make.
[…]

What do you think? Is anyone else out there put off by ampersands in poems, or other text?

I find them curvy and sensuous – little women, almost. “&” could be a pictograph of a woman holding a child – not an inappropriate image, considering the fecundity of the word it represents, often replaced by a mere pause, a catch in the breath represented by a spermatozoal comma. To me, ampersands make a printed poem a bit more tactile, subconsciously recalling the link with calligraphy – and with my childhood, when I taught myself poetry and calligraphy together. I don’t remember when and I why I picked up the habit of using the ampersand for every “and” in my poems except at the beginnings of sentences, but it has become deeply engrained.

And being suspicious of any and all habits, I’m grateful to C. for making me question it. Does it really make sense to risk distracting the reader with this anachronism?

Some time ago, the redoubtable Languagehat gave his imprimatur to a page from Adobe that traces the history of the ampersand. I had known it came from a ligature for the Latin et (“and”). But I hadn’t realized that it still serves as a sort of touchstone for modern type designers, the one character where they can really let their imaginations roam.

There are many interesting variations of the ampersand, such as those created by the talented Ludovico degli Arrighi, the Renaissance writing master (fig. 8 ), and Robert Granjon, the gifted 16th century French type designer (fig. 9). The new Poetica typeface family, which was designed by Robert Slimbach of Adobe and based on Cancelleresca, the commercial writing hand used during the Italian Renaissance, offers a rich collection of 58 different ampersand characters (fig. 12).

Ampersand usage varies from language to language. In English and French text, the ampersand may be substituted for the words and and et, and both versions may be used in the same text. The German rule is to use the ampersand within formal or corporate titles made up of two separate names; according to present German composition rules, the ampersand may not be used in running text. In any language, the ampersand’s calligraphic qualities make it a compelling design element that can add visual appeal and personality to any page.

Some version of the ampersand appears in most languages that use a Roman script, so it gives any text that employs it a sort of window into the wider, polylingual universe. It is also an important element in many computer languages. Character entity references in HTML all begin with an ampersand, which further reinforces – in my mind at least – the connection between ampersands and the dream of a common language.

__________

Ampersand image of “Humanist minuscule, 1453 A.D.” borrowed from the above-linked Adobe page.

May 3, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Stalking the horned fungus beast

Last Thursday, after I re-found the blister beetles for my brother Steve, we walked back through the flowering oak woods. It was a sunny day, and the woods were filled with butterflies.

Juvenal’s duskywing (Erynnis juvenalis) – not to be confused with the very similar Horace’s duskywing, which emerges later on in the summer – almost disappears when it lands on the forest floor. It’s strongly associated with dry, upland oak habitat, emerging from the chrysalis just as the oaks are bursting their buds. We were probably seeing males patrolling for females; each seemed to circle a fairly small area.

After mating, the female duskywing will lay her eggs singly on scattered oak leaves. The caterpillar will munch away on its oak leaf in splendid isolation – unlike, say, tent caterpillars – and will roll the leaf around itself like a sleeping bag whenever it rests. To each his own method of camping out, I guess. The adults feed on nectar from a number of species, including blueberry, which is the main ground cover here. They are said to sleep “with wings folded rooflike over the back, in the manner of a moth.”

A brilliant green six-spotted tiger beetle lands on the trail in front of me, and I go into the photographer’s crouch (see the photo in Friday’s post). This is quite possibly the most-photographed beetle species in the world, Steve says. He adds that when he was a kid, he used to have to go to the Scotia Barrens near State College to find any tiger beetles, but thirty years later, Cicindela sexguttata has become a common resident here on the mountain. I wonder if that might not be due to an increase in available prey. As a forest matures, it becomes structurally more diverse, with more forest openings and fallen woody debris, and insect numbers and diversity increase correspondingly.

Tiger beetles are famous for their ferocity, but there’s more to them than that. After six-spotted tiger beetles mate, the male rides around on the female’s back for a while to make sure nobody else gets a chance at her. Or at least, that’s how the scientists explain it. I suppose it might just be a prolonged afterglow.

We pass a fallen scarlet oak log, and Steve gets his knife out. “Oak logs like this are a gold mine – you never know what you’re going to find,” he says happily as he begins ripping off pieces of bark. Grubs and spiders go scurrying.

Daylight crashes rudely in on a scarab beetle larva, which squirms and burrows deeper into the rot as I snap its picture. It somehow manages to be both beautiful and repulsive at the same time.

A brilliant green halictid bee pauses in front of a slug. Perhaps we’ve just interrupted something important; we’ll never know. “Halictid” means “salt-loving,” Steve informs me. “There are a huge number of species, including those little sweat bees that like to sting after they’re finished drinking your sweat. But most of them are harmless, like this one.”

We spot two tiny snails, barely a millimeter across. Snails were one of the earliest animals to colonize land, and they’ve been doing quite well in the 350 million years since. By some estimates, one acre of moist temperate woods might harbor 1.5 million snails; a montane forest in Panama was estimated to hold 7.5 million snails. I guess if you know what you’re doing, you’d never have to go hungry. But one can only eat so much escargot.

Our most spectacular find was an orange-red larva of an elaterid, or click beetle. Some click beetle larvae – smaller than this one – are known as wireworms, and arouse fear and loathing in many gardeners. But adult click beetles are every kid’s favorite insect, especially the huge eyed elators with false eye spots on the back of the thorax. Click beetles are so called because of their unique, two-step defensive strategy. First, they roll over on their backs and play possum, without the grin. If that doesn’t work and the predator – or a finger – actually makes contact, they flex the head and thorax backward, then suddenly straighten out with an audible click that fires their bodies several inches into the air.

“Not too much is known about beetle larvae in general – they’ve hardly been studied at all,” Steve notes. Most of what we think we know is based on what we can most easily see, so even for relatively charismatic insect species like tiger beetles and click beetles, we have few notions about their behavior during the 90-some percent of their lives spent in the juvenile form.

The limitations of our current method of investigation – rapid roof removal – for learning anything about insect behavior are obvious. In one crevasse, we surprise a pair of cave crickets, side by side but not mating. They sweep their amazingly long and sensitive antennae back and forth like a blind person feeling for the curb. I can’t resist quoting from a Japanese website:

Many of cave crickets have the round back, it has the form of having been the thickset, and there is no wing. Hind legs and an antenna are very long and detect existence of a surrounding situation and a foreign enemy in darkness by shaking and moving this antenna from back to a front. In the color of the body, it is brown, an eye degenerates, and, as for gray or the thing which was adapted for the cave, the body is soft. It lives by preference under the damp places in a cave etc., and a stone and the fallen tree.

Cave crickets are omnivorous, and can go for a long time without food. To stave off starvation, they will eat their own legs, one by one.

“Oak logs are the best,” Steve says as we make our way down to the stream. “You won’t find anywhere near the same level of biodiversity under the bark of a pine log, for example.” I feel another piece of the ecological puzzle snapping into place. I knew that oaks were keystone species in the Appalachian forest, but I had always thought in terms of acorns and den trees – the scale I’m familiar with. From what Steve is saying, it sounds as if, prior to the death of an oak, its contribution to the food web has barely begun. And doubtless a wood so prized by invertebrates must furnish more than its fair share of nutrients for soil microorganisms, as well.

We pass a beech log, and Steve pulls back a strip of bark to show me a smooth, unpopulated surface. But then he spots an old bracket fungus, A.K.A. artist’s conk. “This is where you find stuff on a beech log,” he says. He pulls it off and shows me the underside, which is pocked with small craters.

“These are the exit holes of Bolitotherus cornutus, whose name translates as ‘horned fungus beast’! Here, let’s find one so you can get a picture of it.” He starts digging into the rotten conk with his fingers. “A-ha!”

“That’s an insect?”

“Yup. I’ll put it on my hand so you can get a better look.”

“It’s a type of tenebrionid, or darkling beetle,” Steve explains. Most tenebrionids are desert dwellers, but this species has adapted to life inside rotten shelf fungi. It isn’t so much camouflaged as thoroughly imbued with its environment, which is caked between the ridges of blunt, tuber-shaped projections on its back. A much better picture of a clean female fungus beast can be seen here. The accompanying photo of a male shows the horns for which it was named. It looks like nothing so much as a miniature Triceratops.

According an abstract of a paper I found online, B. cornutus has well-developed wings, but has never been observed to actually use them, preferring, apparently, to walk. In a mark-and-recapture study, a few individuals were found at distances greater than those predicted from observations of its regular style of locomotion. Perhaps they did short sprints when no one was watching.

May 2, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Epithalamium, with images from the Brothers Grimm

The French woman who received the world’s first partial face transplant has complete feeling in the new tissue five months after the operation, she told a Sunday newspaper.

Isabelle Dinoire, 38, also told the newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche that the hardest part of her recovery appears to be getting to know herself again. When asked if she has accepted her new face, she responded: “It’s too difficult to explain.”
AP

1. Prince Charming
A bad week. She swallowed
pills, eight
little erasers

& while she lay on
the floor with her mind
elsewhere, the golden Lab

brought his famished
tongue across her face.
Unclipped toe-

nails click
on the cold linoleum
as the dog goes

to his bed, comes back
for another lick, & finally begins
to nibble.

He starts with the lips,
like any faithful lover.
That faint half-smile.

2. Mirror, mirror
The only mirror she kept
in her apartment
lies face-down when not in use.

Every day she checks
a small flag of skin that
the doctors implanted

right above her navel: white
or gray would signal
surrender. Every day

when she pulls up
her blouse, she feels
something turn over inside,

some phantom embryo
forming without nose
or chin, the mouth

a permanent wound
no lips can ever hope
to zipper shut.

3. Cinderella story
The organ
donor’s face comes
slowly back to life.

Too young
to have had laugh lines
or crows’ feet,

it was smooth
& as firm at first
as a glass slipper.

Now, after
the delicate diplomacy
of scalpel and suture,

the awkward wedding over,
it slowly fills
once again with feeling,

softens
in the heat
of an unfamiliar dance.
__________

An epithalamium is a wedding poem. For a brief history of the form, see here.

Incidentally, submissions are still open for the current qarrtsiluni theme, “an opening in the body.”