Owl's Cabinet of Wonders

News, Newsreels, and Uncle News

2011-08-07T08:39:00.000-07:00

For no particular reason, other than the fact that I'd been going through old photographs yesterday, it occurred to me to do a bit of research on an old family friend, Newsreel Wong.

Wong made a name for himself in the late '30s for a photograph he took (and possibly staged to some extent) of a baby on a Shanghai train platform.

What I didn't know was that he had been in New York City on July 28, 1945, when a disoriented pilot flew his Boeing B-25 Mitchell Bomber into the Empire State Building. Visiting the Hearst Metrotone offices early that morning, Newsreel Wong had been the only one in an office when the phone rang, and he answered it. He ended up commandeering a camera and headed to the site, where he was able not only to shoot the exterior of the building but got in to get film of the offices that were affected. The only other person who managed to gain access was Max Markman, who posed as a doctor, and shot the footage of the event included in this British Pathé newsreel.

A less dramatic version of the coverage can also be found on YouTube, but I thought this highly edited bit was interesting for its embellishments. Since I'll be teaching the Visual Anthropology course in the Fall, this could provide some talking points about the role of the observer in the interpretation of events, and the impact editing has on the reception of information.

I don't know what happened to Wong's footage (although I suspect that if it exists it's accessible through UCLA's archives), but locating this particular event during an innocent search for a character from my past (he was known to my brother and me as "Uncle News" and lived near us on Yang Ming Shan outside of Taipei) amounts to a bit of the kind of synchronicity we've been talking about in the Myth class. As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 nears, this incident resonates eerily with more recent events.

One of the best blogs about media history I've ever found on the web is Amanda Emily's Feeding the News Beast: A Century of Tales from Behind the Lens. Her post on this event is the source of much of my information, and one on Wong himself explains how he got his nickname. Digital Video and Photography students ought to bookmark her site, because it's an endlessly informative record of visual news coverage.

Note: I'm posting this entry on both the Cabinet and The Owls' Parliament, due to its potential interest for a variety of audiences.

The Green Life

2011-07-01T07:15:00.000-07:00

Every now and then, out of vanity, curiosity, or fear (I'm not sure which), I Google myself to find out if anyone is using my name in vain.

Usually what comes up are posts from the Farm or here--as well as the ubiquitous "rate your professor" sites (my hotness factor is, alas, still zero). Once in a while, however, somebody will quote me and refer to one of the posts. I'm usually happy for the exposure, and occasionally join the conversation. It's rare, however, that I happen upon something truly wonderful.

I pinched the above image from an internal visual journal, Vita Viridis (Green Life), published by some clearly like-minded folk who work at one or more of the Harvard University Herbaria. There are only a few available online--volume 1 number 5 (from whence I obtained the page that includes a letter I wrote to the editors of Orion magazine some time ago), volume 1 issue 2, and issue 3, in living color and .pdf format so they can be enjoyed in all their visual splendor.

I love this idea so much that I'm going to try something similar with my myth class this spring--a sort of in-class journal of stuff they write and create (the great thing about teaching in an art school is that you can actually ask students to do this and they will), and things they find that they think apply in one way or another. It'll be a one-off venture, but we can scan and share among ourselves--and perhaps with readers of the Cabinet.

Anyway, the real treasure here is not the "me" part, but the discovery of the Herbaria pages themselves. As an inveterate plant lover, erstwhile amateur naturalist (who can still identify every one of the eighteen "official" trees on her half acre, as well as all the volunteers that now occupy various corners of the Carbon Sink), Old China Hand, and certified museum junkie, this site offers nearly everything.

For example, check out the Digital Collections of such wonders as the SHIP initiative (images of seeds in the collection of the Arnold Arboretum) and links to the expedition collections of Joseph F. C. Rock, who explored the "Hengduan Mountains Hotspot" in western Sichuan and eastern Xizang (Tibet), China. I especially love the Arnold Arboretum Image Collection, which contains historical photos taken in the "Hotspot" region during the early twentieth century.

The website offers a mere glimpse into the richness of Harvard's collections, but since I didn't have any idea of their extent (and only vaguely knew of the herbaria at all), this amounts to a truly serendipitous find.

Good Stuff

2011-06-11T06:33:00.000-07:00

This spin-off from the Farm has been sadly neglected, in part because it takes so much effort for my aging brain to curate the ephemeral events and objects I run across. Other blog-wunderkammern (like those on the blog roll) are much better about this than I am, and continue to inspire me, but my writing-energy is almost wholly devoted the mother blog, at least until I can get myself better organized. Nevertheless, I occasionally run across things that group themselves into curatorial categories--even as nebulous as "good stuff"--so I'll keep posting them as they collect.

My ambivalence about technology, frequently commented upon on the Farm, doesn't usually come into play here. But I do appreciate some of the mod cons that make it possible to enjoy the cultural benefits of living in a place like New York, even though I'm unlikely to get there any time soon.

In my weekly newsletter from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I was reminded of the new(ish) Cloisters blog, The Medieval Garden Enclosed, about which I posted back when it started up back in 2008. Like many of my favorite web places, it slips my mind frequently, but it's such a welcome and informative place to spend time that I thought I'd bring it up again. The blog itself is full of useful information on Medieval life in general, and plants in particular. The photographs are also lovely, offering a virtual visit to the Cloisters that almost makes up for not being there.

Anyone with an iPhone might be interested in two terrific apps. The new promotional freebie related to the J. J. Abrams film, Super 8, is almost more fun than you can have legally. I got it for my iPhone 4--newly acquired when the old Silverback version just got too clunky for my digital needs--but apparently also works with a 3GS and iPad2. In essence, the designers have given us our own miniature Super 8 camera from which we can shoot grainy movies that work like a time machine to take geezers like me back to "the day" when home movies were made like this. Similar, though not as sophisticated, apps are widely available for still photography as well, such as Old Photo Pro (free), which allows you to convert your iPhone photos into Daguerreotypes, cyanotypes, infrared images, and the like.

The second bit of technological wizardry I've come to admire is the New York Public Library's new app for the iPad, Biblion, an interactive multimedia tour of the 1939 Worlds Fair. I find this especially cool because this particular fair introduced all manner of forward-thinking ideas (not all of which transpired), including a decidedly Art Deco view of art and design. "The World of Tomorrow" was the source of many a science-fiction fan's dreams of the future: robots, cars (not flying ones, though), and utopia. There are quite a few shots from the Fair featured in Robert Hughes's episode "Streamlines and Breadlines" from his rather epic treatment of the history of American art, American Visions.

The Beloved Spouse has just begun to grind up wood-droppings into mulch for the garden, so I'd better go help. Our own garden should benefit immeasurably from this effort, and will perhaps spark another post before too long.

Image notes: I couldn't resist a doctored "flying saucer" sighting constructed in PhotoShop Elements, which came with my new scanner. I may alter it even more when I have some time, to make it look more like something I could get from Old Photo Pro.

Early Spring Miscellany

2011-03-04T07:50:00.000-08:00

It seemed prudent to abandon the Farm this week, because I've got too much to stew about and not enough time to think it out on "paper." So this week's Skywatch contribution comes from Owl's Cabinet, still (on occasion) my repository for the fleeting, ephemeral, odd, or idiosyncratic moments and objects that show up in my life. All of the photos were taken with my cell phone.

The sky photo is actually another of my iPhone moments, taken out the west-facing windows in our school library. I've done this before, but this one has more than the "alien spaceships" (reflections of the banks of ceiling lights behind me); I saw a wondrous cloud formation around the setting sun and decided to shoot it. My antique iPhone (I have a "silverback"--first-generation version) has only a 2-megapixil camera, so the effect is pretty low-grade. But I rather like its weirdness.

On Tuesday night the utopia class wandered the shopping/dining/living complex that surrounds the school, talking about new urbanism and utopian city-planning. The shot at left is of one of the lights that flank the elevators on the main "street." My ever-inventive students thoroughly enjoyed playing with the marbles by rolling their hands back and forth over the surface.

And finally, a contribution to Phenology 101: some of the first signs of spring to show up in my garden (the others include budding pears and peaches, flowering quince that sticks through my fence from next door, and a few herbs poking up through the detritus left over from winter). We could still get a freezer or two, and according to the weather guy, it's snowed in March three out of the last four years. The daffodils, however, are up in force, and I thought they looked rather nice in the window.

I hope everyone has a lovely weekend.

For the Love of Print

2010-11-15T09:46:00.000-08:00

Just when I had decided to severely limit the number of print magazines I subscribe to, I ran across mention (can't remember where now) of a new effort called Anthology (subtitled "Living with substance & style"). The initial attraction was the inaugural issue's theme "The Slow Life: Relax and Enjoy the Things That Really Matter." I'm a sucker for slow anything, so I succumbed.

My first issue arrived last week, and it turns out to be far more evocative and interesting than any shelter/design magazine I've encountered in years (with the possible exception of Selvedge)--and I'm both familiar with most of them and very choosy about the ones I pay attention to. Most of these I can read in the school library, like American Bungalow, Style 1900, Old House Journal, and Natural Home. I still occasionally pick up a copy of the British edition of Country Living, but have weaned myself completely from Martha Stewart Living, figuring that after fifteen years she didn't have that much more to offer me. Gone, too, are the subscriptions to Eating Wel l, La Cucina Italiana, and Cooking Light.

If I find myself going back to these old friends more than once in a while, I'll look for digital subscriptions. But since I don't toss 'em when I've finished with them (I usually recycle after I've excised interesting material), they had become a burden. It was clear that I was never really going to do anything with all of those articles anyway, even 99% of the recipes, so out they went. Some of them, like American Bungalow, were just too nice to pitch, so they've been shelved for future use and enjoyment.

I had pretty much vowed to subscribe online from now on whenever possible, but when I saw Anthology, and started reading the blog, the whole "print is not dead" notion began to resonate. After all, I am a great magazine sniffer from way back (see the comments on Esopus from a couple of years ago) and this one smells great. It's also full of quirky craftsmanship, eclectic design, and really interesting-sounding people. Check out the video introducing the first issue, with some cardboard sculpture I found particularly amusing:

Print Is Not Dead from Anthology Magazine on Vimeo.

For more cardboard sculpture, see the blog entry about Chris Gilmour.

I guess one reason I like this publication so much is that it combines craft with design; it marries two of my major concerns and it seems to welcome off-center ideas and views of what makes life beautiful. The fact that the creative director, Meg Mateo Ilasco, has also written a book called Crafting a Meaningful Home indicates that there's a real connection to some of the notions I deal with in my blogs, both here and on the Farm.

The admixture of esoteric aesthetics and nostalgia--as well as trendy stuff that's not as attractive to me, but will be to my daughter the designer, makes perusing the magazine itself and its digital augments a pleasure. I'll be looking forward to each issue, and have added the blog to the Cabinet's sidebar.

A New Poet Laureate

2010-07-01T07:58:00.000-07:00

I don't encounter many poets any more, except for Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder--whose prose works are among my "usual reads." When I was younger, I read a great deal of Wallace Stevens and Wilfred Owen, and I was introduced to W. S. Merwin by Rainer Schulte at UT Dallas when I was a grad student. We read him in several classes, and studied his translations of others' works--which made them available to those of us who lacked anything but ancient or obscure languages.

I loved the clarity of Merwin's work, and its lack of sentimentality; his poems are personal, but also universal, so I don't feel like I'm reading autobiography. He writes about living in nature as an act of being--not just of observing.

As usual these days, I was surprised to learn that Merwin was still alive (he's 82) when a little pop-up box from the New York Times announced that he had been named the nation's newest poet laureate yesterday.

This news drew me back to his work, and reminded me of my former attachment to his poems. I was disappointed to discover that none of it rests on the copious bookshelves in this house, so to celebrate I'll start remedying that situation. A trip to Half Price Books should turn up a few of the earlier works, at least, and then perhaps I'll treat myself to one of the newer books.

In the meantime, here are some links to pages about him, some with further links to poems. Do try them if you don't already know him; he's well worth reading, especially when he focuses on nature and our life in the natural world. His poetry should resonate with anyone who reads any of the owl blogs.

Modern American Poetry

Dwight Garner, Finding Home and Inspiration in the World of Nature

Patricia Cohen, W. S. Merwin to Be Named Poet Laureate

Poets.org

Random House page on Merwin, with links to works (including poems)

The Mole, a poem that appears on the National Resources Defense Council's OnEarth page devoted to award-winning journalism.

I keep forgetting that the Cabinet is the perfect spot for little gems of information like this. I spend so much time grousing about the human condition on the Farm and the sorry state of education on the Owl of Athena that I neglect the enjoyment of serendipity and gallimaufry--so I'll try to pay more attention.

Image credit: lacking a legitimate source (Wikimedia Commons has failed me!), I've stolen this photo from the Natural Resources Defense Council's blurb on Merwin. I'll take it off if they ask me, but maybe the link to their pages will count for something.

Culinary Meditations, One: Slow Oatmeal

2010-02-03T13:15:00.000-08:00

I have always been interested in good, basic peasant food, so as I work harder to prevent further health-related crises, I've been thinking long and hard about more deliberate eating.

People seem more and more inclined to either obsess about food or to simply eat what's cheap or handy. Neither extreme requires thinking through what we eat, or considering what it all means. But since food is one of the few real basic needs (along with clothing and shelter), it's a significant part of what I go on and on about on Owl's Farm: the education of desire.

Seeking to educate my taste buds, I've embarked on a small program to spend time each week cooking and thinking. This morning I wanted something warm and filling to eat, so I decided to make some oatmeal. Sometime last year I found out that instant oatmeal is next to useless as a source of soluble fiber--the kind that helps regulate blood sugar, lower cholesterol, and provide other good things to one's body. After that I bought steel-cut Irish oats, cooked them up in fairly large quantities, and kept them in the fridge to nuke for breakfast. But not long ago, in one of my more nostalgic moods, I picked up some organically grown rolled oats, and these are what I retrieved from the pantry this morning.

In an effort to keep the weevils at bay, I had removed the oats from their package and put them in an air-tight container, but forgot to put the cooking instructions in with them. Since I don't have much of a memory for quantities and proportions, I went to my old copy of The Joy of Cooking to look up oatmeal and found that Rombauer had left oatmeal out of her instructions for cereal grains. But I used her quantities for course grains as a starting point, and began with four cups of water and a cup and a half of oats.

I got the water boiling while I poured a cup of coffee, and added a few grinds of sea salt (probably no more than a quarter teaspoon). When the water hit a rolling boil, I started slowly pouring in the oats, and watched them perform their acrobatic roll around the pot. I held the last half cup back for a few moments, thinking that perhaps these would be a little less "done" in the end, and add some crunch.

Once you get the oats all boiling together, you have to keep stirring them so they don't stick and/or boil over--but you also have to lower the heat a bit.

I kept stirring for about ten more minutes, turned off the heat, and left the gruel to sit. It was still a bit watery, but I was pretty sure that the remaining moisture would be absorbed if I left it alone long enough to read the funnies and enjoy the rest of my coffee.

The living room, where I read the paper in my comfy chair, is three rooms away from the kitchen, but the aroma of warm oats reached me within a couple of minutes, mingling with the coffee and sending me back to my home town, and winter mornings around my grandmother's kitchen table.

When I returned to the pot, the oats were ready to eat, so I ladled some into a bowl, put a dollop of olive oil/butter spread in the center, drizzled it all with about a teaspoon full of ginger syrup, and added a handful of blueberries.

I sat down and stirred the melting butter into the oats with the ginger and blueberries. I'm pretty sure I've never tasted oatmeal quite as good as this. Whether the brand of oats was particularly well-milled, or whether my method made them better, or whether just paying attention made the difference, they were quite simply the best I've ever had. The flavor was subtly oaty, there was indeed a bit of crunch, and the tiny bit of salt was all it needed to round out the flavor. I got a serving of fruit from the blueberries, and a smidgen of fat from the teaspoon of butter.

At a time in my life when my senses seem to be either dwindling or getting lazy, it was an enormous pleasure to enjoy something so simple so much.

I look forward to the next experiment, in hopes that this marks a way to invigorate my experience of the world. It's far too easy to get lost in the rigors of teaching, grading, and administrating, especially in winter when it's difficult to occupy oneself in the garden. Small pleasures seem to reap large rewards when approached thoughtfully--something that seems far too easy to forget, even when one has teetered on the brink of existence all too recently.

Left Behind

2009-12-25T10:03:00.000-08:00

Those of us who are enamored of Wunderkammern often seem to find ourselves drifting--either physically or virtually--into ghost towns and other abandoned spaces. I think my own interest must stem from the archaeologist in me, because I'm equally drawn to unearthed remains from past civilizations--particularly three-dimensional sites like Chaco Canyon, the Labyrinth at Knossos, and the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

I began musing on this topic late last year,* when I picked up a book on sale at the Dallas Museum of Art. It was in Japanese, with very little information in English, so I ended up doing an internet search on Gunkanjima Island, an artificial construction on a small reef off the coast of Japan. Gunkanjima, or Battleship Island (because that's what it looks like from a distance) had arisen in the coal-mining heydey of the nineteenth century, was built up over the next century and a half, and then finally abandoned in 1974.

The book first attracted me because it's about a place in Japan I'd never seen--nor had I (at least consciously) ever heard about it--but it had the mysterious aura of a ghost town, or a place devastated by some Chernobyl-like event (something that's haunted me since talk of a neutron bomb). The photographs are stark and beautiful, in black and white, and seem almost like museum reconstructions of an apocalypse. Here is visual proof of what goes on after we're gone--as recently portrayed in Alan Weisman's The World Without Us.

The web search led me to BLDGBLOG, and the post I found turns out to have been Geoff Manaugh's first on his more-or-less-focused-on-architecture pages. He's since gone on to myriad other fascinating places, and it'll take me a good while to plumb them all. That is, if I don't get lost looking at all the interesting stuff he sends one off to, including BLDGBLOG's sister site, Edible Geography, now linked on the Cabinet's "Wunderkammern: Food" section.

The General Web Directory Journal's pages on Abandoned Places In the World list articles on Gunkanjima and other spots, including one in Taiwan that was built and abandoned after I left. It's not a proper blog, and its home site is more of a clearing house for web information, but I was happy to find it nonetheless.

Of the many web places that deal with San Zhi, the "UFO pod village" originally designed to serve as a tourist trap in a relatively neglected area of Taiwan, Carrie Kellenberger's post on her My Several Worlds blog has the best pictures. She's a Canadian ex-pat living in Taiwan (much like my mother did for most of her life), and manages to transport us to the site through her photos. The place was built while my mother was living in Taipei, so I guess I could expect to find pictures of it among the thousands she left behind for me to sort through. One of these days. At any rate, mystery endures because construction was abandoned due to fatal accidents (or not) and rumors have hinted at nefarious deeds, resulting in another Asian take on the ghost town idea.

In my more recent travels I discovered a plan to tear it down, which seems to have come to fruition according to this story in the Taipei Times and more recent photos. Demolition apparently began shortly after I started writing about it. (Hear the Twilight Zone theme now, please.)

My fascination with places like these actually began in Taiwan, even though I left a decade before the San Zhi pods were built. Above one of the many houses we occupied in the five or so years I lived there sat a small abandoned house that my brother and I managed to sneak into a couple of times. The place was tiny--only three rooms that I can remember--and may have been a remnant of the Japanese occupation, like many of the homes we rented (all five had at least some Japanese features). My curiosity wasn't confined to Taiwan, however. Whenever I visited my grandparents in the Owens Valley, I would peek into the windows of the empty Department of Water and Power bungalows, since they were seldom occupied when I was there. Empty spaces leave room for growing imaginations.

The latest issue of Orion Magazine plays into all this with an article on Deyrolle, a Parisian taxidermy store that caught fire in 2008. Martin D'Orgeval's story ("Touched By Fire") and photos evoke the same, almost mythic quality that inhabits old, stuffy museums and ghost towns. It's not online yet, but may be later (Orion tends to parcel out its web access between issues). Two of the pictures are, however, available on Jessica Palmer's Bioephemera blog post, Beautiful Decay: Three Collections. The store, which has since reopened, has its own website (in French). The New York Times ran an article, Rescuing Deyrolle, a beloved Parisian Shop, not long after the fire. This is another of those places I most certainly would have visited, had I known about it--even in the diminished state of youth some forty years ago, the last time I saw Paris.

The web is chockablock with blog entries and photo collections of lost places and fascinating collections of odd things. Not at all a bad way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

*While this post was begun last Christmas, it was abandoned, then taken up again and completed on 23 January, 2010. I think there's a metaphor here.

Image credits: The opening photo was taken by a Japanese user and posted to Wikimedia Commons. He/she also has a page of photos of the island. Unfortunately, I don't read Japanese, so I can't name the photographer. The shots of San Zhi (Sanjhih) are from Cypherone's Flickr photostream.

Grandma Clarice's Recipes: Dinner Rolls

2009-11-30T08:03:00.000-08:00

I made these, as I usually do, for Thanksgiving, which was otherwise catered by daughter at her loft in downtown Dallas. She did herself proud, with traditional fare like stuffing, sweet potatoes, mashed red spuds, and Dead Baby Chickens (well, traditional for us). Beloved Spouse and I joined three of her friends, and her moose/dog Homer, for a lovely meal and great company.

Which is what Grandma Clarice's Dinner Rolls are all about. They were a staple in our lives while I was growing up, and a perennial request from the children and grandchildren on all sides of the family. If there ever were a holiday celebration without them, I don't remember it.

The exact equivalent is probably not attainable, even with her hand-written recipe in front of me, because she made them without reference to anything written down. I did ask her to record the recipe for all our sakes, but until Thursday I hadn't even come close. I think I've finally nailed it down, needing only to try this version with cake yeast and bread flour to see if that gets me even closer.

If any of my cousins want to try it, resist the temptation to skip any steps. For the sake of authenticity and nostalgia, stick with the white flour and all the beating. Especially the beating.

The verbatim recipe (transcribed from the little notebook in which Gram collected recipes from family and friends):

My Rolls
1 c scalded milk with 1/2 c sugar & 1 tsp salt
Dissolve 1 cake yeast in [1/2 c] hot water--add to cooled milk mixtures
Add 1 beaten egg--beat
Add 1/3 cup oil--beat
Then add short 5 c flour & knead well.
Let rise then make into rolls & let rise again

Gram and I often discussed the changing character of flour. She used plain-old all-purpose, but the gluten content seemed to change over the years. Now flour made especially for bread-baking is commonplace, so I'd suggest using that.

Over time I've tended to mess with the recipe, feeling guilty as I do whenever I don't use whole grains. So it's possible to make them with about 1/3 whole wheat flour, and even honey in place of sugar. Gram insisted on using cake yeast, but when I can't get that I use organic packaged dry yeast.

This year I stayed as close as I could to the original, and took out my whole wheat angst on the pistachio rolls I also made for the meal. These were adapted from a James Beard recipe (from Beard on Bread) and turned out nicely--but everybody ate Grandma Clarice's rolls instead.

Since Gram didn't write out instructions about how hot the oven should be, or how long the rolls should bake, I've had to improvise. In my electric oven set to 375F, I bake them from 15-18 minutes, but 16 is probably exactly right. For oil I used a canola/light olive oil blend, but plain canola is probably better (she undoubtedly used Crisco or corn oil--or whatever was on sale that week at Joseph's Buy-Rite market).

Butter muffin tins and put three one-inch balls of dough in each space for clover-leaf shaped rolls. I brushed them with melted butter before and after baking, but that's not necessary if you're keeping fat content down. We also used to make these as crescent rolls (triangles rolled up from large end to small) and occasionally cut rounds out of rolled-out dough. I like the clover-leaf shape because it's easy and they pull apart like monkey bread. The recipe makes exactly two dozen in this shape.

These rolls are rather sweet, but go really well with holiday foods. I love them the next day, warmed over with unsalted butter and good home-made jam. Their aroma while baking is a sure-fire way to nip back into my childhood for a few, sweet minutes.

Happy Birthday, Origin of Species

2009-11-24T07:29:00.000-08:00

This has been a banner year for Charles Darwin: the 200th anniversary of his birth, and today the 150th anniversary of the book that changed the world.

I've been posting about Darwin and his work all year, but couldn't let the day go by without saluting (and later raising a glass to) the best literary/scientific book I've ever read.

Thanks, Mr. Darwin. And may the fruits of your labor continue to inspire scientists and lay folk alike.

Photo credit: HMS Beagle in the seaways of Tierra del Fuego, painted by Conrad Martens during the voyage of the Beagle (1831-1836), via Wikimedia Commons. I've already posted pictures of the book itself, and I love this painting, so thought it would be a fitting image for a birthday greeting.

Art and Evolution: More Darwiniana

2009-10-26T12:05:00.000-07:00

Beloved Spouse was on his way to work today, listening to XM radio (my gift to him when he bought his "Galapagos Green" Element a few years back), when he heard Margaret Wertheim's TED lecture on hyperbolic geometry and her Crocheted Coral Reef project. He sent me the link, and I spent the next few minutes getting inspired to pick up my crochet hooks again.

The project itself is fantastic, and since she mentioned Darwin's bicentennial, I decided that the Cabinet needed a post on some of the art Darwin has inspired over the years, either directly or indirectly. The opening illustration is from Wertheim's photostream on Flickr, and I hope it's okay to use it. I posted here on Darwin back in February, in honor of his birthday, but I keep happening on things related to him and thought it time for another visit with Darwin in Cyberspace--so Wertheim's amazing project offered an excuse to return to the topic.

Another notable, if not nearly so ambitious, project is Jessica Polka's wonderful Voyage of the Beagle finger puppets. She also crochets natural objects, and when I saw the TED video on the Coral Reef effort, I immediately thought of her blog, and her recent contribution to the world of Darwiniana.

Last spring I started reading Robert Charles Wilson's 1998 novel, Darwinia, but had to stop because it was a bit too intense for someone on the threshold of heart surgery. I finally finished it this summer (and went on to read The Harvest and Mysterium) and recommend it enthusiastically. It combines some of my favorite elements of speculative fiction: true alienness and good science. His stories frequently involve dei ex machina that spark the fictional equivalent of punctuated equilibrium, forcing characters to adapt precipitously to new situations.

While I was looking for a link to Wilson's book, I came across a game by the same name, which might be interesting if you're a video gamer. This one looks mildly entertaining (at least as much fun as shooting down snaking lines of scarabs, which is what I do in my off moments), although only marginally involved with Darwinian processes; it does, however, seem to resemble Wilson's scenarios in the sense of requiring a kind of evolve-on-a-dime-or-die situation.

Yet another contribution to the cabinet of Darwinian curiosities, combining media arts, science, and literature, is the amazing new addition to English Heritage's website devoted to Down House, Darwin's home: "Explore the manuscripts" includes entire virtual copies of four of Darwin's field notebooks, plus highlights from the Beagle voyage notes. I posted about the software that makes this possible yesterday on the Owl of Athena, but wanted to mention the site here, because the ability to view these notebooks in as much detail as the "Turning the Pages" application allows is just priceless for Darwin devotees.

If I haven't already mentioned this, I'm remiss--but the Darwin Online site provides the texts of everything he published, plus a list of supplementary works that include Emma Darwin's Recipe Book (with the recipe for boiling rice in her husband's hand). The technology isn't as sexy as Turning the Pages, but it still makes it possible to read exactly what Darwin wrote.

Finally, I'd like to mention a treat I bought myself when I had a 40% off one item coupon at Borders: The Beagle Letters, edited by Frederick Burkhardt--a marvellous volume illustrated with watercolor sketches and pencil drawings by Conrad Martens, who was for a time Darwin's fellow passenger. The book's publication is a product of the Darwin Correspondence Project, another noteworthy effort to get Darwin's works online--this one focusing on the full texts of more than 5000 letters.

Although I'm not a great fan of biographies, I love to read other people's mail, at least when the correspondence is as lively and as interesting as Darwin's. One gets a better sense of the person in a letter, and since nobody much writes them anymore, epistolary insights into the characters of great writers and scientists may be fewer in the future.

Before the year is out I expect I'll come across more to add to this list, but I do have to get back to work. As the rain drips off of every surface outside my window, though, sifting through the web for things Darwinian provides a nice respite from gloom and chill.

Image credit: Hyperbolic crochet corals and anemones with sea slug by Marianne Midelburg. Photo © The Institute For Figuring (by Alyssa Gorelick). Downloaded from Margaret Wertheim's Photostream on Flickr.

Grandma Clarice's Applesauce Cake Revisited

2009-10-18T10:47:00.000-07:00

I didn't realize, when I split The Farm into three pieces, that it would be so hard to post regularly on all of them. The Cabinet, thus, suffers from chronic neglect. I'm hoping to rectify the situation as I get myself more organized, and this is my initial attempt.

Last weekend, when it was cold and damp and I was cranky and homesick, I did what I usually do in such situations: I baked Gram's applesauce cake. But because the applesauce I had on hand was Santa Cruz Organic Apple Cherry Sauce, I used that instead of the usual plain, unsweetened, natural variety. I also decided to make some flax meal (by grinding flax seed in a coffee grinder) because I'm trying to increase my Omega 3 fatty acid intake, and part whole wheat flour to lower the impact on my glucose levels. And I used butter (organic sweet cream, unsalted), mainly because I didn't have any canola oil, but also because Gram sometimes did and it always tasted a bit richer than usual (her fat of choice was margarine). For grins (and because of the apple cherry sauce) I used dried, unsweetened sour cherries instead of raisins.

The original recipe's on my Grandma Clarice's Recipes, Part 1 post from June 2008. The modified one goes like this:

1 cup organic cane sugar
1/2 cup butter
1 cup unsweetened applesauce (or apple cherry sauce)
1 3/4 cup flour (1/4 c. flax meal; 1/2 cup whole wheat flour; the rest unbleached all-purpose)
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
dried sour cherries
1 tablespoon (or so) cocoa powder
1 teaspon baking soda dissolved in 1 tablespoon boiling water

Cream butter and sugar, add applesauce, spices, cherries, and dissolved soda. Then add flour. Bake in moderate oven (300F) until top springs back.

I frequently double the recipe, as Gram did. If you do so, bake it at 350F for about 45 minutes. It can be baked in a loaf or shallow rectangular pan--or an 8x8 inch glass pyrex dish-- if you're making a single batch. The doubled recipe needs a 13x9 inch pan or pyrex dish.

The cake came out a little denser than usual because of the flax meal. It would be moister and more nutritionally valuable if canola oil were substituted for the butter; or, I might try the new 50/50 blend of Smart Balance and butter next time. It's salted, though, and this is normally a good cake for folks on a low-sodium diet. I'm not sure that the tiny bit of salt in the butter would be bad for the cake itself, however.

When it was warm from the oven, I had a slice with a bit of Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia ice cream for extra mood enhancement, and it was luscious. Just what I needed to make it through one more rainy day.

Image note: Beloved Spouse has the camera in Alabama for a tennis tournament this weekend, so the fuzzy shot is the fault of my iPhone.

Looking Back at the Moon

2009-07-22T09:21:00.000-07:00

For old astronomy buffs, there's been a lot to celebrate this week. Most of us can remember where we were on July 20,1969--and I'm no exception: baseball game, watching the Angels at what was then called Anaheim Stadium. The Angels were playing the Oakland Athletics, who won 9-6. The old stadium didn't have much in the way of cool graphics capabilities, but they did show a rough version of the lunar module slowly descending to the "surface" of the moon. When it stopped, the crowd erupted and the poor guy at bat, who was behind in the count, couldn't figure out what the hell was going on. Then he looked up at the scoreboard, threw down his hat, and started jumping up and down. I can't remember who it was, but I think it was one of the guys who pitched--and since this was in the days before designated hitters, I could actually be right. Anyway, when something great happens, like a moon landing, it's rather fun to be with a big crowd.

Then, yesterday, if you were living in the right place (mainly China and India), you got to see the longest solar eclipse of the century. In honor of all this I though it would be a good idea to revisit my favorite repositories of web-available images for an historical look at moon pictures.

My first stop was, as usual, Wikimedia Commons, which produced a page of Galileo drawings of moon phases, a Japanese print of a wolf in front of a full moon, and a detailed map of the moon.

Galileo, Phases of the Moon (1616)

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi Full moon in Mushasi, 1890

I can't do the Map of the Moon justice here; you'll have to go to the link and enlarge the image, but it's rather wonderful. It was created for the Andrees Allgemeiner Handatlas, 1st Edition, published in Leipzig in 1881 and scanned by "Grombo" for the Commons.

I then found a composite photo of the earth and the moon, which originally came from GRIN (Great Images in NASA):

The Earth and Moon, created from two separate images taken by the Galileo spacecraft in 1992. See the GRIN page on the image for the full description. And here's another great shot from the same website, taken from the Apollo 16 Command and Service Module on April 23, 1972. The Lunar Module carrying John Young and Charles Duke were on their way up to "Casper" after three days of exploration.

I also revisted the New York Public Library's Digital Gallery for another drawing by E. L. Trouvelot (who was featured in an earlier Cabinet post on astronomy), this time one showing a partial lunar eclipse.

The event was observed on October 24, 1874 and published c. 1881-1882.

Back at Wikimedia Commons I found the image that says it all for me, and which opens the post: "Earthrise." This may well be the most evocative photograph to come out of the space program, and was taken On Christmas Eve, 1968, by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders in orbit around the moon. The information on the link notes that

this phenomenon is only visible to an observer in motion relative to the lunar surface. Because of the Moon's synchronous rotation relative to the Earth (i.e., the same side of the Moon is always facing Earth), the Earth appears to be stationary (measured in anything less than a geological timescale) in the lunar 'sky'. In order to observe the effect of Earth rising or setting over the Moon's horizon, an observer must travel towards or away from the point on the lunar surface where the Earth is most directly overhead (centred in the sky).

I was, alas, too busy to properly mark the 40th anniversary of the first actual landing, but I did want to wax sentimental about it as soon as I could. At my age, celebrating things that happened that long ago is part of what's good about getting old. We were there, we saw it happen, and it was amazing. That Walter Cronkite died almost on the anniversary itself is almost poetic; after all, he was part of the experience.

As I type, I'm watching and listening to astronauts Dave Wolf and Chris Cassidy doing some battery work and preparing for a payload transfer to the Japanese module, Kibo, on the International Space Station. I never get tired of listening to these guys as they work, and will be forever grateful for the NASA TV gadget that shares space with the moon phase gadget on my desktop.

My hope for the future is that today's young folk have a chance to experience the wonder and the sense of human accomplishment generated by spectacular achievements in the various space programs currently in progress. And I hope I live long enough to see somebody (I don't really care who) go to Mars and come back. Maybe they could retrieve Spirit and Opportunity so we can put 'em in the Smithsonian for subsequent generations to enjoy, like my kids enjoyed seeing artifacts from the Apollo missions, moon rocks, and Neil Armstrong's space suit.

Garden Oddities

2009-07-07T10:41:00.000-07:00

It's been eons since I've posted here, but I'm hoping to make up for it by aiming for a couple of posts a month at least. I'm not sure why I ever thought it was a good idea to break the original Farm into three bits, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

My so-called holiday is almost over, and I've spent the entire morning updating the slide list for my first lecture on Monday. But before I head out to the garden for some R&R (despite the fact that workers are tearing down the back of one neighbor's garage immediately adjacent to the potager, and major repairs are being inflicted on the house across the alley), I thought I'd post the pictures I took last week. Later I'm going to saw off the legs of an old wooden dining table to make a perch for feet and food (not necessarily together) and place my grandmother's old metal lawn chairs around it--so this is part one of a two-part effort on the cranky things we're doing in our garden these days.

I had got the idea for the bottle fence pictured above from the traditional bottle trees that show up all over goofy back yards in the south. But it's also connected to a Sherri S. Tepper novel called The Visitor, in which bits of DNA were "bottled" and put into a wall for reasons I won't go into here. When I was looking for ways to keep the Terrifying Space Monkeys out of the kitchen garden, I put the following equation together: saved blue glass bottles + all the rebar we inherited from the previous owners = bottle fence. At last my packrattishness bears fruit.

Beloved Spouse kindly nipped bars of iron into more-or-less random lengths (some are a bit too uniform and will have to be modified later), and impaled them in the ground at intervals too small to let largish dogs in. We then upended the bottles on the bars, and voila!

We also dumped about five big bags of cedar mulch in amongst the herbs in an effort to cut down water loss and maybe keep the mozzie population down. Then we moved the copper/tree-trunk bird bath off the sidewalk and onto the dirt to help close up where the dogs get in. It's not 100% yet, but I've figured out a way to put a gate in that we can lift up easily, so now I just have to tie together some twigs (as artfully as possible, I suppose) to make that and we should have a dog free garden.
But not toad-free, I hope. There are now two places for toads to hide, although one is probably a bit too open for them. The one above is an up-ended broken clay pot that got smashed up a bit during the big storm I wrote about on the Farm. The ceramic pipe shown below doesn't work as well, but it has the advantage of being next to a shallow dish of water. So far the robins love the water dish and occasionally perch on top of the pipe. But no toads in either place yet.

The final shot is of the newly moved bird bath. There was just enough space between the concrete and the Salvia, and room next to it for a pot of basil (the grille behind it is from the Smith & Hawken copper firepit that got smashed when our neighbor's tree fell on it; we replaced the firepit, but then had an extra grille, which last year supported a pot of Stevia).

The weather has been so lovely the last couple of days that I've gotten spoiled. No air conditioning, a spot of rain, Sunday morning on the front porch with coffee, newspaper, and no bugs. Most of the baby birds are fully fledged (although there was a baby blue jay tragedy yesterday when the little Manx that occasionally hangs out under my car caught herself a nice little morsel, much to the very loud consternation of its parents), so the mums and dads are getting a rest and occasionally lounging in the bird baths. By tomorrow the temp will be back up in the high 90s and all this cool peacefulness will evaporate. Still, it's reasonably nice most mornings, so the summer isn't a complete bother yet.

Hope everyone hasn't given up on me--I really will try to post more frequently and get back to looking at all the blogs I get such a kick out of, including a couple of new additions.

The World Digital Library

2009-04-21T09:37:00.000-07:00

Just when I'm the most irritated with our local rag because of its skimpy, highly-localized news reportage, they do me proud by including an article (albeit from the Washington Post) on the newly-available educational marvel, the World Digital Library, which aims to make "available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world."

The site is beautifully designed, highly accessible, and a true marvel of modern digital technology. The opening page consists of a world map divided into nine regions: North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, Central and South Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Oceania and the Pacific, Europe, Middle East and North Africa, and Africa. Linked to each section (illustrated by a thumbnail of a representative work) is a list of the number of items currently available.

Even at this early stage, the offerings are marvellous: maps, journals, books, photographs, etc. Click on the link and a further list of offerings by country, by period, by topic, by medium, and by institution appears, with further thumbnails of the available works. Click on these and enter a world of enough zoomable images to keep any would-scholar or lover of curiosities busy for years. And the collection will keep growing.

Altogether I've offered six images that I think will provide a peek into what's available, and will not strain international copyright law (this post, after all, amounts to news coverage, and a review of a new online presence). If anyone finds me in error, please let me know. Quoted material is from the description accompanying each image.

"Sketch Map of Africa with a Comparative Overview of the Journeys of Dr. Barth and Dr. Livingstone." This thumbnail does very little to indicate the intriguing nature of this map, which "compares the voyages of the British explorer David Livingstone (1813-73), who traveled down the Zambezi River in 1851-56, and the German Heinrich Barth (1821-65) who, between 1850 and 1855, explored much of western Africa and the Sahara." It was created by August Petermann, and printed by C. Hellfarth in 1857.

A photograph of Victoral Falls, from around 1890-1925. From the Frank and Frances Carpenter Collection at the Library of Congress.

A map of Peking, from 1914. "This detailed map of Beijing by the Cartographic Division of the Royal Prussian Ordnance Society is based on surveys carried out by the Expeditionary Corps in 1900-01," and was a product of the German East-Asian Expedtionary Corps 1900 attempt to put down the Boxer Rebellion.

A page from Dharma Wonder Boy, author unknown, "an early 18th-century example of Nara-ehon, the illustrated manuscripts or hand-printed scrolls and books produced in Japan from the Muromachi (1333-1573) through the mid-Edo (1615-1868) periods. The Hōmyō dōji is originally an East Indian story with roots in Buddhism. Like many such stories, it begins with the characteristic phrase, 'Once upon a time in the land of the Buddha...'"

Map of the Three Arabias by French royal geographer Nicolas Sanson d'Abbeville, 17th century. Engraved by Jan Somer, 1654. " . . . based on the medieaval work of the 12th-century Arab cartographer Al Idrisi (1099-1164), whose work Geographia Nubiensis was first translated into French only in 1619.

The pièce de résistance (the image that opens the post), is from the Description of Egypt: Antiquities, Volume One (Plates): Or, Collection of Observations and Research Conducted in Egypt During the Expedition of the French Army. Second Edition (1920). When Napoleon was still planning to conquer the world, he sent his artists and engineers forth in Egypt to observe and record everything they saw. The result was one of the most remarkable works ever assembled, and the edition featured here is from the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

The educational possibilities of this single website are enough to reassure me that not everything about the internet is going to the birds. My students in art and design history, in myth, and in visual anthropology can all find myriad uses for the materials contained herein. It warms the cockles of my little Borg heart to know that this incredibly powerful technology is being used, at least in this case, for the enrichment and betterment of human kind. Now, if you don't mind, I'll get back to fooling around in it.

'Possum Saga

2009-04-06T06:43:00.000-07:00

I've been neglecting the Cabinet in favor of the Farm lately, but thought that I'd get one last post in before I take a forced hiatus (see the Farm for that particular saga). The topic is actually related, tangentially, to my reasons for taking time off, but I digress.

Last week my dogs uncovered a nest of baby opossums in our woodpile. I always know there's something naughty afoot (and some't nasty in the woodpile) when Woody doesn't come running the minute I step out the back door. He was lounging out back in the Accidental Garden, intrigued by something, so I went back to investigate.

There he sat, pleased as punch, licking what turned out to be a joey, as they're called, according to my source on the 'possum kingdom (that's sort of a pun; there's a lake by that name south of here). I thought the poor little guy was dead, so confiscated him and got ready to bury him when I noticed that he was still moving. I took him into the house and cleaned him up, and he got a lot more active. Then I noticed that Woody was still back at the woodpile, so I looked again, and there was another one snuggled down into a nest, of sorts, so I replaced the cleaned-up baby back with his/her brother/sister and took the dogs in. Later, I went back and tried to dog-proof the nest enough to give mom a chance to come back and get her kids, and when I let the dogs out again, Woody found another one, making its way through the tall grass that's now filling the open space in that part of the yard.

I picked that one up and put him/her back in the nest, and kept the dogs in for the rest of the day. By bedtime, though, it was clear that the nest had been abandoned, so I went out to get the nestlings and keep them warm for the night. The day had been chilly, though, and one was now cold and stiff--not playing 'possum at all. So I buried him and put the other two in a basket of old tennis socks and put that in the bathtub to keep the house critters away. I gave them some fluids through an eyedropper, but didn't feed them anything, and everybody hit the sack.

The next morning I began to search for 'possum rehab folks on the internet and was directed to the Texas Parks and Wildlife department, where a nice man gave me the number of a woman here in town, but the number was out of service, so I called back--and bingo: The Living Materials Center run by Jim Dunlap for the Plano schools. Why didn't I think of that? Years ago, I lived practically across the street from the facility, and used to lead little kids through the Outdoor Learning Center portion of the property. They were happy to take them, so I made a detour on my way down to work and deposited the little critters and their tennis socks with people who will take care of them.

On the way back to the highway, however, I had a bit of an angina attack (related to the cardiac procedure I'm having done tomorrow) and briefly stopped paying attention to the speedometer. Of course, that one lapse had some consequences: my first ever, in forty years of driving, speeding ticket. The officer was apparently not at all impressed with my 'possum sob story, and because I'm undoubtedly going to be in the hospital when my court date arrives, I won't even be able to plead my case before a judge. So, little miss animal-rescue person who drives below the speed limit on highways and still does everything the nuns told her to do will now have a blot on her otherwise stainless record.

Still, little brother and sister opossum will have a better life, and I'll get over my self pity. They're really interesting animals, and one of the few marsupials native to this area--so they make a nice subject for a Cabinet entry. I founds some lovely photos through Wikimedia Commons, and have a shot of my little pair, so if you've ever wanted to know something about a creature most folks in this part of the world associate with stew, now you have it.

Here are some resources in case you run into a nest: The National Opossum Association (with their very helpful page on orphans), the NatureWorks page on Virginia Opossums (the brand we have around here), and the very complete page from Wikipedia.

Image credits: The post-opener is a lovely winter photo of a 'possum by Wikimedia user Cody.Pope. The closing image is a drawing of Virginia oposums, Didelphis virginiana, from the "small" edition (1927) of Brehms Tierleben (Life of Animals) by by Alfred Edmund Brehm. It was uploaded by a fan of the book, "Petwoe," to Wikimedia Commons. The other photo is mine of the babies in their little basket hotel.

Tipsy Braised Pork Loin

2009-03-09T14:35:00.000-07:00

The ineffable Geoff Isaac on It Came From the Kitchen has been ranting about cilantro (and who can blame him?), but like me he does enjoy the lovely little seeds of the coriander plant.

I was first introduced to coriander as a spice (rather than an herb) when I was working at Penn and a graduate student from Nepal periodically brought me a gift of rice pudding, called Khir. It was rich and creamy and redolent of both cardamom and coriander. I thought I'd post a recipe here to help Geoff out, even though it's far too rich for the current condition of my own arteries. Alas, however, the closest recipe I could find online (from Zen in Practise; it originally came from Asiarecipe.com) doesn't mention coriander seeds, but I suppose one could add them. My hunt also located a luscious variation that does include coriander, Chilled Vanilla Rice Pudding with Figs--even better because there's a red wine sauce to go with it and it'll give me something to do with my figs when they come in. The recipe comes from Big Oven, from whence I've derived several inspirational meals.

None of this has anything at all to do with the topic of the post. But I thought Geoff would be interested in tonight's main course, and so might other folk, because it requires beer. I've made it before, but not recently, and as I was searching for Himalayan rice pudding recipes I remembered that I had a pork roast in need of attending, and it was coming up on 3 pm, thanks to the arrival of Central Daylight Time on Sunday. So first I typed "pork loin roast" into Google, but didn't really want to deal with the oven. I was on my way to the cookbook shelves to leaf through my slow cooking bibles when it hit me: Tipsy Braised Pork Loin, as I used to call it when I made it for friends during my halcyon days in Philadelphia, before I got religion.

It just so happens that I have on hand some pink lady apples, onions, and plenty of garlic. There's always beer, so any time I want to souse a chunk of meat I'm well prepared. I'm less eager to give up a bottle of wine, but Beloved Spouse will forgive my pinching a bottle of his Sam Adams for a good cause. And I no longer have religion, so that's not a problem, either.

So here goes:

1 two-pound loin of some poor dead pig (preferably one that lived well before it became dead)
An onion, sliced
An apple, also sliced (not peeled; don't ever peel anything unless you have to)
A bottle of beer (real beer, like Sam Adams Boston Lager or, even better, Guinness Stout or Samuel Smith's Oatmeal stout; use 12 oz. of that one and drink the rest)
about 4 cloves of garlic, chopped
freshly ground peppercorns
freshly ground sea salt
two sprigs of rosemary, from the kitchen garden
a bit of good Greek or other tasty olive oil

Pour the olive oil (probably about two tablespoons) into a heavy Dutch oven big enough to fit the roast and heat; place the pork roast in the hot oil, turning it periodically to brown it. Then remove it to a plate, while you saute the onion and apple briefly in the oil. Add the garlic and stir it up, being careful not to burn the garlic.

Add the roast back in, and pour the bottle of beer over meat and veg. Do this slowly so as not to foam the beer over the top of the pot. Bring to a boil, add the rosemary sprigs, grind pepper and salt on top, cover, and lower the heat. Let it cook on low, peeking about every twenty minutes or so and giving it a stir, for about two and a half hours. When done, it should practically fall off the fork you test it with.

Serve it with basmati or some other aromatic rice, either steamed or cooked as a pilaf (with some pignolis and raisins if you like). I'm going to add a fig and onion chutney I made a while back, and maybe some naan.

And, of course, don't forget your favorite tipple.

PS: The image at top is what it looks like when it gets going. Here's a shot of what it looks like plated up for eating. I did serve it with brown basmati rice pilaf, but since I didn't have any raisins, I used dried cherries, and they were terrific. Good thing, however, that I'm a better cook than a food stylist. It needs some green, so I'm thinking of picking up some slender French green beans for the second round. The whole things goes well with a good stout beer or a glass of something dry and rich with berry flavors, like Bogle's "Phantom."

A Celebration of Darwiniana

2009-02-12T06:56:00.000-08:00

Charles Darwin was a kind of human glacier, moving slowly through human scientific life, raising lateral moraines alongside the flow, scooping up ideas along the way and pushing them ahead, leaving the occasional drumlin. I could go on with this silly metaphor (if you don't know what I'm talking about, see this page on glacial terminology), but I'm a fan of Pleistocene geology and once had to memorize all this stuff. It is kind of apt, though, even though it's not biological.

In the accumulation zone, the cirque, lies Darwin's birth in Shropshire, England, on 12 February 1809. It includes the Beagle and Edinburgh University and Cambridge and Down House, where Darwin did most of his work. The glacier itself, flowing forth over the intellectual landscape, incorporating some ideas, grinding others down, consists of everything that's happened since. It includes all the controversies, the affirmations, and the ancillary work by more-or-less contemporaries like Gregor Mendel and Ernst Haeckel, and modern biologists like E. O. Wilson, Ernst Mayr, and Stephen Jay Gould. He influenced more theologically oriented thinkers like the philosopher Henri Bergson and priest-paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, and has remained a controversial figure among other religious folks less capable of reconciling doctrine with scientific evidence.

What's really astonishing about Darwin is how well his original ideas hold up, despite the fact that there was, at the time, no inkling of biology to come: RNA, DNA, the double helix, gene transfer, punctuated equilibrium. Everything that gets done in modern biology starts in Darwin's cirque and flows outward. The beauty of science is that it changes, builds--evolves--and grows as people explore ideas. Theory is about good answers based on good evidence: the best picture we can draw from what we know at the moment. But the power of Darwin's model, even though challenged over and over again, has stood its ground and provided us with a basis on which to enlarge our picture of the world. Even recent news about the shape of Darwin's tree isn't a negation; it's an affirmation that the guy had it fundamentally right, two hundred years ago.

This post, to celebrate this momentous birthday, is a wunderkammer of cool stuff related to Darwin and available on the web. I only have a couple of hours to work on this today, so I can't pore through the vast amount of information that exists. But here are some good links to blogs and websites to begin your celebration, followed by my choices of favorite images of Darwiniana:

Scientific American's Darwin Day Special podcast

David Leff's all-encompassing Darwin information page

Larry Moran's blog, Sandwalk: Strolling with a Skeptical Biochemist. Moran is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto.

The Biologista's tribute to Darwin

Pharyngula's Happy Darwin Day post. P.Z. Myers is a biologist and an Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris

Darwin's Canopy: Art Inspired by Evolution, from the New Scientist online. The site also has a feature on Darwin's impact: Darwin 200. The site's blog, Short Sharp Science, even includes a post by Australasian Editor, Rachel Nowak, called Eating my way through four billion years of evolution.

And now for some pictures:

Darwin's Thinking Path, also known as the Sand Walk--where he would walk and muse; would that we all had such a place to do our thinking.

Darwin's first "tree of life." It's a testament to scientific uncertainty (and its lack of belief in religious terms) that he writes "I think" at the top. That's just it: scientists think.

Ernst Haeckel's "Pedigree of Man" based on Darwin's description in The Origin of Species. The Opening pages of the 1859 first edition of Origin appear below (the link above is to the 6th edition, which corrects mistakes from earlier ones):

Darwin's finches, discovered on various of the Galapagos Islands, each with beaks and other anatomical features adapted to its peculiar circumstances, helped his ideas coalesce into coherent theory:

Here's a plan and cross-section of the ship, HMS Beagle, on which Darwin sailed into history:

There are more pictures where these came from, and myriad editions of the book. Read it if you haven't already; there's even an illustrated version with nice pictures--and the readability of the text still amazes me. The good thing about not having a huge pre-existing vocabulary from which to draw is that Darwin had to write in language everyone could understand. We no longer commonly have as many words in our everyday vocabulary--but at least you won't need a scientific dictionary.

Happy birthday, Mr. Darwin. And thanks for all the fish.

Image credits: all images on the page are from the Wikipedia article on Darwin, the Beagle, on Darwin's Tree of Life, or from Wikimedia Commons.

Celebratin' Rabbie Burns

2009-01-25T09:01:00.000-08:00

Everyone with a wee dram of Scots blood in 'em should be throwing a party today--a Burns Supper--to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the most celebrated figure in Scottish history. I mean celebrated in the more literal sense--rather than simply in the "celebrity" sense. Probably Mary, Queen of Scots, or even Gordon Brown (or for that matter Sean Connery) are more written about and discussed these days. But every year, all over the world, proud fans of the poet celebrate his birth with single malt and toddy and haggis* and a great deal of pompous recitation of his works, ending with a rousing chorus of Auld Lang Syne.

Well, mostly. I, for one, leave out the haggis*--although I have been known to make oatmeal (thanks to the Slow Cook blog for the article) for breakfast to mark the day. And to be honest, I've only actually ever attended a few Burns Suppers in my life (primarily in my years at Penn, where such traditions were held dear amongst my friends). But this year's special, so I thought I'd mark it, in honor of the attachment of one man to one place, and the enjoyment anyone with a connection to that place feels on such an occasion.

Although many folk of Scottish descent claim relation to Burns, probably the only way I could would be if he'd had children with his great love, Highland Mary (Campbell), since I've got both Campbell and MacDonald blood flowin' in my very veins. I have mentioned, have I not, that my great grandfather's name was Angus Campbell McDonald? But, alas, there was apparently no issue from this union--however consecrated, or not, it might have been. And my relation to Burns is thus merely that of a devotee.

One of the best sources of cool stuff related to Burns (or Burruns, as my Glaswegian friend Victor pronounces it) is the online Future Museum that provides access to collections from south-west Scotland museums. Their Burns artifacts are all absolutely fascinating, from the ordinary to the sublime. I urge a visit to peruse everything from pipes to manuscripts to whiskey bottles, like the one at left, which was produced in 1896 to commemorate the centenary of Burns's death.

Seldom have I had as much fun noodling around a virtual space. Thanks to the staff for providing such a valuable and entertaining resource.

And so, in parting, a bit of my favorite poem of all, untranslated and with its wit intact, "To A Mouse" (the link is to a study guide):

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty
Wi bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murdering pattle.

I think of this poem every time a member of my menagerie goes after a cotton rat.

Should one feel the need for further celebration, here are some Burnsian links:

The Robert Burns World Federation

Scottish Gemini's Worldwide Toast To Robert Burns site, where you can donate a pound to help preserve the Burns birthplace in Alloway. The page has a history of Burns Night, complete with a picture (which is as close as I want to get) of a haggis.*

The self-proclaimed official Robert Burns website, Burns Country, with a page of instructions on how to throw your own Burns Supper (there's still time!). I'd do one my own self sometime, if I could just get past the haggis.*

*Haggis: Traditional Scottish dish consisting of a sheep's stomach stuffed with oatmeal and all manner of other ingredients. It's actually admirable in that it represents the consummate example of not wasting anything, and may account for the reputation of Scots as "thrifty."

Google video results for "haggis" (some videos not for the squeamish) including one of a recitation of Burns's poem, "To A Haggis."

Haggis Recipes from (of all places) the Gumbo Pages (stands to reason, though; Gumbo's an example of food frugality as well--and Lord knows New Orlean's has been through some tough times of late).

Here's hoping that folk will still be raising glasses and eating haggis in Burns's honor 250 years from now.

Image source: the portrait (by whom they don't say) is from the Wikipedia article on Burns.

A Brief History of the Heart: In Pictures

2008-12-28T10:32:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned over on the Farm, I've been looking up images of the heart in conjunction with my current preoccupation with impending surgery (not until March, I hope). For someone interested in the visual arts in general, and design in particular, the history of ways in which human beings have imagined the heart visually offers a fascinating journey into imagination and understanding.

Metaphor-makers that we are, human beings have to understand new concepts in terms of what they already know. I remember a history of science professor once telling us that the real breakthrough in modern understanding of heart function didn't occur until the hydraulic pump was invented, because until then we had no way to envision what was going on. I'm not entirely convinced that this is the case, since William Harvey's understanding of the pumping action of the heart was in place by the early seventeenth century, and the hydraulic ram is an eighteenth-century invention; ideas about pumping in general had also been around since the Middle Ages. But the popular understanding of the relationship between the heart and the pulse must certainly been made clearer to the general public after sophisticated pumping devices became more commonplace.

There are several terrific websites available on the heart and the history of what we know about it (one of the best is the PBS program, The Mysterious Human Heart; see also the Franklin Institute's online exhibit, The Human Heart). But most histories start with Harvey, and the more intriguing ideas are those that preceded our modern notions.

Take, for example, this illuminated drawing of the circulatory system from a thirteenth-century medical miscellany (Oxford). I show this to my art and design history students as an example of Medieval secular manuscripts, and they hoot over the goofiness of it. But if that little circle in the middle of the chest is supposed to be the heart, it's clear that the illustrator had some notion of the relationship between heart and veins. If it simply acknowledges the connections between vessels and the heart, without really understanding how it all worked, it's still interesting that folks were poking around in bodies trying to figure out what exactly was going on.

Or consider this Persian image, from The Medicine of Akbar (via the National Library of Medicine's Historical Anatomies site), which suggests a similar view of the heart and the veins.
The "anatomical squat" as I like to call it is a common pose in early medical documents. Sometimes annotations and rubrications can be entertaining, because they describe (in languages I don't read) what's going on in the drawings, at both ends of the digestive system, and are frequently placed in amusing contexts. What's clear, though, is that the image of the heart with which we're familiar today isn't intuitively obvious.

As printing and graphic arts burgeoned beginning in the sixteenth century, lovely illustrations appeared in anatomical treatises, such as this woodcut from Anatomiae, by Johann Drylander, published in 1537 (from the University of Toronto's Anatomia, an exhibit of prints from the Thomas Fisher Library). The catalogue description indicates that even if functions weren't completely fathomable, the artist could still depict what he saw.
Anatomy of the heart, pericardium reflected and heart ventricles incised. Aorta, superior vena cava, pulmonary vessels and diaphragm shown. Structures shown in isolation. Anterior view.

As much as I admire what earlier illustrators accomplished, I can't help but think that living in this particular technological moment has its rewards. For one, digital imaging machines and programs of all varieties are making it possible not only to explore the physiology of the heart in ways that the early theorists couldn't imagine, but to use these technologies to fix what ails us. Some of what's produced is quite beautiful:

This particular image (as well as the one used to open this post), by medical illustrator Patrick Lynch (available from Wikimedia Commons; his medical illustration portfolio is on his website) shows just how lovely instructional media can be thanks to the new technological tools available to talented artists. And as much as I appreciate the efforts of the early physicians, I'm thankful to live in a time when the visual arts, married to advances in medicine, can provide us with the technology and expertise to repair hearts that don't work.

Orientalist Switchplates

2008-12-04T09:36:00.000-08:00

Once in a great while I wax creative with stuff I've collected over the years: odd images, bits of paper, stamps, and other ephemera. As an unabashed fan of the pioneers of collage and papier collé (Picasso and Braque) as well as of their heirs (Joseph Cornell, Nick Bantock, and others), I occasionally dabble in the practice of sticking things onto other things.

Some of the best imaginable "canvases" for such an endeavor are the cheesy blank plastic plates generally used to surround light switches and power outlets in our homes. Since I can't really throw anything away without a damned good reason, and am appalled by the prices some sources ask for more artful examples, I took it upon myself a couple of years ago to decorate my own. The first couple were usable, but not exactly awe-inspiring. I finally perfected the technique to my own satisfaction, however: first paint the plate with flat acrylic, and when it's dry begin to apply the desired bits with decoupage gel and a paintbrush. After that's dry, add metallic paint or leaf, or a stamped image or two, and then coat with another layer of gel. They turn out nicely and are pretty indestructible once coated.

All of mine so far are created from origami papers, kimono wrapping paper, washi, postage stamps from Asia, newspaper, fabric, photos, images from Dover design books and other bits of Japonisme or Chinoiserie I've come across over the years--even my mother's signature "chop." I grew up in Japan and Taiwan, and (because I hoard material evidence of my past experiences--it's a genetic defect and probably also has something to do with my archaeological training) have collected myriad boxes of things that can be used for collages on small surfaces.

I once made a couple of Impressionist examples for a mother-in-law as a Christmas gift by simply applying note cards cut out to fit blank wooden plates, and used gold paint on the edges. They looked like a million bucks--but also like something you'd buy in a hobby store. The collage versions are much more personal, and offer me a connection with my past every time I turn on a light or plug in the toaster.

As we've been working on the house and making rooms more habitable, I've been adding the plates as a finishing touch. It's just plain fun to do, and a nice way to work of tensions that can't be eased by gardening this time of year. The materials are ready-to-hand, cheap to acquire, and simple to use, providing the perfect sort of art therapy one might need around the holidays. They make nice gifts, too, especially if you spring for the wooden versions. Nick Bantock I ain't, but I have nice switchplates nonetheless. The iPhone images don't exactly do them justice--but provide a general idea of the results.

Channelling Frank Gehry

2008-11-19T11:11:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago I showed a film on Frank Gehry in my Art & Design Since 1945 class, and then gave them this assignment:

Using Gehry's process, design and build a model of a building for a specific use. The model must be completed by the end of the class (3 hours from when the film ended), and must fit the footprint of a letter-sized manila folder. Include the names of the team members and design sketches in the folder.

They picked buildings out of a hat (more or less), and these are some of the results (I apologize for the meager information provided by the photos--I took them with my iPhone):

A performance space with indoor and outdoor venues.

A brewery, with a tasting room and a bistro.

A high-school science lab.

The science lab was the clear winner, but I really appreciated the ingenuity and spirit all of these guys put into the project. I'd mention their names, but I can't find the list. I'll edit this post to add them when I locate it.

The class is now busily working on group seminar projects like "The Artist's Book in the Twenty-first Century" and "Public Art and Architecture in the DFW Area." The results are almost always interesting, and this particular class shows more promise than usual. Can't wait to see what happens.

Days of the Dead

2008-10-28T13:02:00.000-07:00

Before I moved to Texas, my end-of-October celebratory experience was limited to Halloween, which lost its fascination quickly after I started getting serious about health and environmental issues, and after my kids had outgrown (I thought) dressing up like Han Solo and fairy princesses. I am, of course, completely wrong about that, since I'm pretty sure they both gleefully dress up as video game characters or Sex in the City types on a regular basis. But I've gone a bit bah-humbug on the candy-giving/costuming mania over the past few years. We've handed out treats only once since we moved to this neighborhood; mostly we keep the porch light off and hunker down to watch a movie with the curtains drawn.

I still do like the idea of celebrating the dead, but I'm not sure that scoring pounds of candy is the most poetic way of doing it. The last time I "dressed up" I wore a white Victorian nightgown and pasty white makeup and drifted about the trails of the Heard Museum, a nearby nature center, to frighten paying guests. But that was over twenty years ago. More recently, I've grown fond of local Day of the Dead festivities, and of the lovely sugar skulls and crepe-paper colors, and the music that floats down the street when folks from our local barrio drive by on their way to the highway.

My grandmother was a great one for remembering those who'd gone before, but her ceremonies (which included gathering up every stray flower in the yard into a couple of buckets of water) focused on the family plot in Big Pine, on Memorial Day. Once or twice we drove up on Veterans Day to put flowers on my grandfather's grave, but Day of the Dead wasn't in our vocabulary then, despite the fact that the Valley was home to a fairly large population of second- and third- (and probably more than a few fourth-) generation Mexican immigrants.

Outside my hometown lies an old, mostly-forgotten graveyard with only a few headstones left, some engraved in Spanish, some in Russian. I've never pursued the sources of the graves, but maybe this would be a good time to do so. Sometimes we'd visit the site when I took the kids to see Grandma, and we'd go out and walk among the graves on a hot summer evening. The setting sun always made the scene a bit eerie, and once (about twenty five years ago) I took the picture here--of my daughter in her nightie next to one of the headstones that had fallen over (or had been pushed) and then cracked.

An aside: Following my own instructions (issued to my students only yesterday) to follow any question that arises with research, I conducted a quick search on Owens Valley graves and found this through Google Books (it refers to the very gravestone beside which my daughter is standing in the photo):

Josefa de Alday's tombstone reads, 'Your children wish to remember the proof of the great love they had for you.' In 1880, Josefa was 40 years old and living in Inyo County wth two children. The D. E. P. at the bottom of her stone means 'rest in peace.'

From Cemeteries of the Eastern Sierra, p. 119
by Gena Philibert-Ortega

Now, in exile far from familiar graves and family bones, I've taken to enjoying what goes on locally. This year, at least one of my Visual Anthropology group projects will involve Día de los Muertos celebrations in town. The last time I taught the class was during the fall quarter a year ago, and one team visited a street party in Fort Worth to record Cowtown's version of the Day of the Dead. Because it involves community and tradition, it's a natural subject for anthropology in the first place, and an especially good topic if the focus is on recording it on film. These two guys took lovely pictures of the festivities and exhibits. This picture that opens this post is from those taken for the project.

Holidays like All Saints' and All Souls' days have roots in far more ancient traditions than the Christian beliefs that finally embraced them. Celebrating Los Días de los Muertos is itself a hybrid of Aztec and Christian views of the dead and of the afterlife, just as Halloween marries Christian and pagan rituals. I'm not sure why I now enjoy the Day of the Dead idea so much more than Halloween, except that the focus on remembrance (rather than on greed?) reassures me that when my remains have been scattered in the Sierras, or buried under a tree in an eco-cemetery somewhere, somebody might build a little altar in my honor, with pictures of things I loved and a little sugar skull. At least I'll know that nobody will be posing their daughter next to my tombstone!

Photo credit: Thanks to Alex Antonio and Drew Simon for the great picture and for inspiring the direction of the post.

The Peter Patter Book

2008-10-03T11:58:00.000-07:00

When I was little, we spent a great deal of time overseas, first in Bermuda, then Japan, then Taiwan. Between every posting (my father was career Air Force), we'd go home to my grandparents little bungalow next to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power intake and power station at Cottonwood, in the Owens River Valley in California.

The first thing my brother and I would do upon arriving, after we had been greeted by grandparents with hugs and cookies, was to grab a timeworn copy of The Peter Patter Book of Nursery Rhymes (by Leroy F. Jackson, illustrated exquisitely by Blanche Fisher Wright) and curl up on Grandma's lap to hear the poems read aloud:

Peter lives upon a mountain
Pretty near the sun,
Knows the bears and birds and rabbits
Nearly every one;
Has a home among the alders,
Bed of cedar bark,
Walks alone beneath the pine trees
Even when it’s dark.

Squirrels tell him everything
That happens in the trees,
Cricket in the gander-grass
Sings of all he sees;
Rimes from bats and butterflies,
Crabs and waterfowl;
But the best of all he gets
From his Uncle Owl.

Sometimes when its day-time,
But mostly in the night,
They sit beneath an oak tree
And hug each other tight,
And tell their rimes and riddles
Where the catty creatures prowl—
Funny little Peter Patter
And his Uncle Owl.

The telling of exploits involving one or more of our uncles was part of the total experience of hearing these poems. Since my father's two younger brothers were over ten years his junior, and close to one another in age, they had developed a friendly but spirited sibling rivalry that revealed itself upon hearing a particular favorite, "Jelly Jake and Butter Bill."

Jelly Jake and Butter Bill
One dark night when all was still
Pattered down the long, dark stair,
And no one saw the guilty pair;
Pushed aside the pantry-door
And there found everything galore,—
Honey, raisins, orange-peel,
Cold chicken aplenty for a meal,
Gingerbread enough to fill
Two such boys as Jake and Bill.
Well, they ate and ate and ate,
Gobbled at an awful rate
Till I’m sure they soon weighed more
Than double what they did before.
And then, it’s awful, still it’s true,
The floor gave way and they went thru.
Filled so full they couldn’t fight.
Slowly they sank out of sight.
Father, Mother, Cousin Ann,
Cook and nurse and furnace man
Fished in forty-dozen ways
After them, for twenty days;
But not a soul has chanced to get
A glimpse or glimmer of them yet.
And I’m afraid we never will—
Poor Jelly Jake and Butter Bill.

After she'd read (or rather recited, since she knew many of them by heart) about Jake and Bill, she proceed to tell us the story of how, when her boys were little, my Uncle Art would exclaim upon hearing the line "And no one saw the guilty pair," "Well I saw 'em too!" This was brought on by the fact that Art's older brother was named Owen, which sounded all too much like "no one"--so if Owen could see them, so could Art.

Of course, my brother and I always thought this was hilarious (Art was also known to claim, whenever anyone referred to Owen's Lake, the then-dry lake bed that dominated the landscape, "It's my lake too!"). We never got tired of hearing these stories, nor of hearing my grandmother tell them.

At some point after I'd gone off to college, married, and had children, I realized that I wanted to share those poems with my own kids. But by that time the book had disappeared from Gram's house, absconded with by some cousin or another. So one might be able to imagine my joy when several years later she acquired a copy through a book search service and presented to me and the children around the time of their birthdays in 1980, when my daughter turned one and my son four.

Lately I've been rearranging rooms and getting ready for an onslaught of visitors this coming December (my daughter will be graduating from college, at long last, after several years of working full time and going to school), and things keep reappearing after long years of being tucked away in odd corners. One of the books resurrected from a spider-webby corner of a closet was none other than the Peter Patter book. I thought of scanning some of the images to talk about here in the Cabinet, but a quick Google search led me to a Project Gutenburg edition, complete with illustrations.

Several years ago I saw a few reprints for sale in Barnes and Noble, but they had been "cleaned up" in order to meet to the present-day guidelines for political correctness to which publishers must adhere (with good reason, for the most part). But since I managed not to associate the "big black Bugoo" in my favorite rhyme, "Polly Picklenose" (which I can still recite from memory) with African Americans or become a racist as a result of reading this book (any more than I became a racist or a sexist from reading Enid Blyton as a child), I wonder about how much risk is actually involved. Gutenberg has, alas, used the revised version. A few unsavory stereotypes have been removed, but the bulk of the book is just as I remembered it, Wright's beautiful pictures, and Jackson's silly, funny, still-entertaining rhymes.

Also available through Project Gutenberg are Wright's illustrations in The Goody-Naughty Book written by Sarah Cory Rippey, and (perhaps her best known) The Real Mother Goose.

Images: The cover drawing, and "Jelly Jake and Butter Bill." The image just above is for "Hippity Hop to Bed."

A Surfeit of Pears

2008-09-09T08:48:00.001-07:00

One of the lovlier aspects of my old, cranky house, is that its big property is home to a number of fruits and nuts--and that doesn't include the owners. Ahem.

This year there have been tons of pears, probably because of the relatively abundant rain. I just leave them be, so I didn't prune them or pinch buds, or perform any of the steps required for large, well-groomed fruit. As a result, the branches drape down to the grown, overburdened with their bumper crop. And now I've got to figure out what to do with them, because they're not the most photogenic of varieties, and are rock-hard, but quite good even when not quite ripe. If you'd like to plant pears hardy to North Texas, Willis Orchard Company seems to be a good source.

My two trees don't seem to be quite the same, but are probably Kieffer/Orient varieties, both pioneer favorites in Texas. They're highly resistant to fire blight (the Plague of Pears), and store well. The nifty thing about pears is that they ripen best off the tree. I've had a couple recently, still hard as granite, sliced and eaten with good cheese--crisp, like apples. Ugly as sin, though.

I had to harvest the lot last weekend, because the neighborhood urchins swarmed across the front lawn with glee when one of them noticed my over-laden trees placed invitingly next to an alley. After scolding them gruffly ("It would be decent of you to at least ask," I lectured. "Take some, but do leave some for me; it's my yard, after all!"). And then they all but cleaned me out.

The basket I filled with what remained was given me by one of my former mothers-in-law. Mind you, I've had five, thanks to the vagaries of modern marital patterns, but one of them was really good at finding unusual gifts. Since I had the reputation of being the family "earth mother," I got the reproduction Appalachian apple picking basket from the fancy mail-order catalogue one year. This is the first time I've used it for anything resembling its original purpose, and it does hold a good number of pears.

At any rate, now I've got to do something with them, since the weather's cooling off (thanks in part to the hurricanes now ravaging the Caribbean), and it's not too hot to work in the kitchen. I want to be able to give preserves or confits for Yule gifts, and to have something nice to marry with cashew or almond butter in sandwiches. Actually, the idea of sliced hard pear and cashew butter sounds great for a good midday nosh.

The first place I looked for a recipe was Mrs. Rudkin's cookbook about which I waxed enthusiastically a while ago. Once again, her antique recipes section had the answer, from 1658, and she modified it enticingly for the modern kitchen:

Weigh as many pears as you want to preserve and then weigh out half their weight in sugar. Core and stem but do not peel the pears. Put alternate layers of pears and sugar in an earthenware jar or crock. Add brandy to cover the fruit. Cover the jar closely and keep in the refrigerator or in a cool place for at least 2 weeks. For 8 quarts pears, 1 quart brandy will suffice.

I can see us all now come December, sitting around the fireplace getting tipsy on brandied pears. I'll still look for jam and conserve ideas, but this is my kind of recipe. For others, I recommend the page full of ideas from Alcestis (Cooky) Oberg, Galveston County Master Gardner--especially the one for "exotic pear pickles." I never thought of gulf-coast Texas as pear-growing country, but she's had success with varieties like mine. I just hope that the wave of hurricanes doesn't damage her crop.

Photos: Pears on one of the trees, ugly pears on a tablecloth, pears in an apple-picking basket with my neighbor's much-lovelier-than-mine yard in the background.

Fiddling Away the Summer

2008-08-25T14:56:00.001-07:00

On the same day that I purchased the aforementioned cookbook, I picked up a copy of Neil Gaiman's wonderful kid's book, The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, illustrated by Dave McKean. There's something charming about these post-David Carson illustrated books, with their grungy disregard for the former proprieties of children's illustrations. We can lay some blame for this--if that's what's required--at the feet of Georges Braque, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg, and others who taught us that collage is a legitimate art form, and on David Carson and April Greiman, among others, who taught us that we didn't have to take type at face value. We can, in fact, mess with it.

As much as I love all the artful tomfoolery that gave us Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpiller (or, as my children used to call it, The Vey Hungey D-r-r-r-r), I still remember fondly Walter Crane and his many imitators, and their engaging drawings in books I inherited from my mother, and even my grandmothers. So when, in the process of sorting through decades worth of accumulated miscellanea (as part of the guest-room conversion project), I came upon some of these books, I decided to share them here.

The first is The Story of Silky, by Jasmine Stone van Dresser, with pictures by Clarence Biers and Joan Harman (originally published by Rand McNally in 1924; mine is the 1938 edition, so I don't know who it originally belonged to). The story is a bit silly, but both "Silky" and another story, "The Kitty With the Black Nose," contain lessons about diversity, of all things. The pictures are derivative, as are most from the '20s, of Aubrey Beardsley and Walter Crane, but are not without their own charm.

The second, in what looks from the cover background to be from the same series of Rand McNally books as "Silky," is called Loraine and the Little People of Summer, by Elizabeth Gordon and illustrated by James McCracken (originally published in 1920, but reprinted in 1936). It's inscribed to my mother from her mother (Mummy would have been about 10). I was especially fond of fairy stories when I was little, so I can see why this would have been one of my favorites. Again, the pictures owe a great deal to the Art Nouveau sensibilities still making the rounds. Gordon, according to my research, wrote another Loraine book, involving the Little People of the Ocean.

Finally, my favorite of all: John Rae's Grasshopper Green and the Meadow-Mice, published by P. F. Volland Company whose wonderful logo can just be seen on the back cover, in 1922 (mine is the 16th edition). The front cover appears at the beginning of this post. The story is a marvelous riff on the Aesop fable about the grasshopper who fiddled away the summer and was then turned away by industrious ants. "Now you've probably wondered, just as I used to, whatever finally became of that Grasshopper," says Rae. And off he goes. It turns out to be a story of redemption and friendship--and once again about diversity. Who'd have thought? To top it all off, the whole book, complete with illustrations, is available through the link, thanks to Project Gutenberg.

I was apparently still reading the book when I was in high school, because I recorded my grades in the back. That tells me two things. First, I was rather careless about where I wrote things (it's really an odd place to be writing down Freshman grades), and second, that it might well have belonged to my Uncle Art, since it would have been at Grandma Clarice's that I first read it.

The archaeology of childhood can be extremely revealing. I associate all of these books with places--the first two in Oregon, the last in the Owens Valley--which surprises me little. But they also reflect something about where my values come from: concepts of community, experiences of friendship, and even my aesthetic sensibilities.

I don't have any grandchildren on the horizon. But I do have friends with young children, and when they come to visit, I'll make sure that Grasshopper Green and the Meadow Mice is every bit as accessible as The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish.

Mrs. Rudkin's Cookbook

2008-08-16T11:50:00.000-07:00

One of the problems with having multiple blogs, even when they're focused on different topics, is that sometimes I'm not sure where to post something. This conundrum arose yesterday when I came across a wonderful book about which I wanted to make note--but couldn't choose the proper venue. This morning I decided to post it on both. This sounds a bit lazy, but since it's the product of a serendipitous occurrence and about the idea of home and place, maybe the idea isn't as silly as it seems even as I write.

The book in question is The Margaret Rudkin Pepperidge Farm Cookbook, illustrated by Erik Blegvad, and published by Atheneum in 1963. I found it in the "nostalgia" section of Half Price Books yesterday, where I'd gone to drown my sorrows after hearing about the resignation of a friend and colleague--the second in as many months--which left me feeling more than a little bereft. Beloved Spouse and I were on our way out when I noticed the rather Edward Gorey-ish spine of a book which, on first glance seemed to be another corporate promotional endeavor (some of which, like the Spice Islands Cookbook, also published in 1963, can be quite good)--but with amusing and well-crafted pictures scattered throughout. The dust jacket was missing, so what attracted me were the un-augmented images on the front (above) and back (below) covers.

Now, I'm as big a sucker for good illustration as I am for good cookbooks, so I said to myself, "What the hell; it's only ten bucks" and added it to my small pile of goodies.

When I got home, I started leafing through the book and discovered a treasure: a compendium of healthful recipes developed by the woman who had founded Pepperidge Farm (named for her own family's farm in Connecticut) and ended up serving on the board of Campbell Soup after she sold her company to them in 1961. In 2007, Fortune Magazine named her one of the century's fifty most powerful women. (Copies of the cookbook can be had from online used-book outlets like alibris for less than what I paid, but some may be the 1992 edition).

Margaret Fogarty Rudkin was born the same year as my Grandma Clarice, 1897, in New York. In 1937, when her son developed allergies that his doctor said could be addressed by feeding him bread made from whole grains, she began a journey that eventually led to the cookbook. 1963, when Rudkin published it, was the year after I returned from Taiwan and during which I lived with my grandmother, so the coincidence adds to my delight in finding the book when I did.

The illustrator, Erik Blegvad, is actually no stranger to my family. One of my children's favorite books growing up was Judith Viorst's The Tenth Good Thing About Barney (which I highly recommend to families for helping them deal with the death of a pet)--illustrated by none other than Mr. Blegvad.

During my recently aborted attempt to improve my typographic skills (I had to drop the class because midterm madness caught up with me), I had run across another book by Blegvad that's probably worth looking for: Types Best Remembered/Types Best Forgotten, published by Parsimony Press in 1994. But the cheapest edition I could find through alibris is $69. Guess I'll wait on that one.

At any rate, owning Rudkin's cookbook is really like having several books in one, because each chapter focuses on an entirely different topic: Childhood, Country Life, Pepperidge Farm, Cooking from Antique Cookbooks, and Ireland. Each features a chatty and informative introduction, and the "antique cookbooks" chapter offers modern versions of such goodies as a fifteenth-century pumpkin pie, although the original carries this warning: "Cassius, who was bothered by colic and stones, did not eat this. It is difficult to digest and nourishes badly." Rudkin's version is much more palatable (perhaps because she doesn't put in a half pound of sow's belly), and simple to make:

Preheat oven to 450.

Ingredients: (Plain pastry for a 9 inch single-crust pie.) 1.5 cups canned pumpkin, 2/3 cup brown sugar, 1 tsp. cinnamon, 1/2 tsp. ginger, 1/2 tsp. salt, 2 eggs, 1 c. milk, 1 c. cream.

Method: Line a 9-inch pie pan with pastry, making a high edge. Brush the pastry all over with egg white. Place in the refrigerator while preparing the filling. Mix together the pumpkin and the spices. Sift the brown sugar into the pumpkin and mix well. Beat the eggs and add them. The add the milk and cream and mix well. Pull out the shelf of the oven, set the prepared pie pan on the shelf and carefully pour the filling into the crust. Don't pour all onto one spot., but take a cupful at a time and spread the filling around to avoid breaking the crust. Filling the crust this way avoids spilling.

Bake at 450 F for 10 minutes, then reduce heat to 350 and bake 45 minutes more until the custard is set.

The idea of simple food, lovingly prepared is always welcome, but I think we can especially appreciate it in times when folks no longer eat together all that often, and when grandmothers and their grandchildren can be separated by continents. My memories of times in my grandmother's kitchen come flooding back when I find a book like this, grounded in a similar view of the world and a similar notion of nurturing. My fondest wish is that more people come back to the practice of spending time cooking together as gas gets more expensive and makes folks less likely to run out to the Olive Garden for a family meal. There is absolutely nothing like a home-made pumpkin pie to make us feel secure and comfy--and nothing like a well-illustrated, well-written cookbook to help us recall the relationship between food and home.

Heavenly Visions

2008-08-08T16:43:00.000-07:00

While I was preparing an augment for this week's History of Art & Design II lecture on the Fin de siècle, I spent some rather enjoyable hours looking through various sites that offer images of natural history illustration in the late nineteenth century. I'd already been inspired by the Haeckel book mentioned on my last post, and in addition to the various pages devoted to his work, I also happened on the New York Public Library's Digital Image Library and its collection of drawings by the French astronomer Étienne Léopold Trouvelot (1827-1895). The images are of chromolithographs produced from drawings Trouvelot made while observing such heavenly bodies as the moon and Mars.

The drawing of the moon is quite fanciful and suggestive of the Art Nouveau designs that would shortly follow in France, England, Austria, and other parts of the Continent:

A crater on the moon was later named after Trouvelot:

Compare Trouvelot's almost floral interpretation with Galileo's drawing of what he saw, alongside a photo of the spot:
Trouvelot's image of Mars almost suggests an embryo, but it's quite simple to understand how he came to his conclusions about what his telescope showed him, because I get an image close to this when I look through my very basic backyard model:

The drawing records his observation at a precise moment: September 3, 1877, at 11 hrs. 55 min. P. M.

My favorite image Wunderkammer, Wikimedia Commons, produced some interesting and varied finds under the general rubric of science illustration. You really need to search using "science" as your keyword, because the illustrations show up under general topics such as "biology" (which would eventually lead you to Haeckel) or "astronomy." Looking through the Commons catalogue under "armillary sphere" in "history of astronomy" (under "astronomy"), for example, produced a lovely scan of Utagawa Kinuyoshi's Chinese Astronomer 1685. When it ran as Wikimedia's "Picture of the Day" it proved to be so popular that it was nominated for "Picture of the Year" for 2006.

There are also numerous diagrams from periods throughout history. These are often simple, elegant, and accurate--especially considering the lack of all the technological bells and whistles we have access to today. One of these is a 10th century CE Greek copy of calculations made by Aristachus of Samos (in the second century BCE) of the relative sizes of the sun, moon, and Earth:

Another drawing, by the Arab astronomer Nasir Al-Din Tusi, illustrates what's now known as a Tusi-couple, used to depict an aspect of planetary motion that Ptolemy described in his convoluted equant theory. Together with its clarity, and the elegance of the Arabic script, it combines calligraphic elements that exemplify good solid graphic design principles still in place.

I should probably end with what was one of my favorite discoveries of all--Tito Lessi's painting of Galileo and Viviani from 1892.

It's a wonderful emblem of the interest in science evident in nineteenth-century Europe that had a huge impact on the development of art and design, especially in terms of subject matter. I only hope that by introducing my students to the existence of this fascination they can play around with some of these sources and makes some discoveries of their own.

Photo credit: in addition to the images I've already credited, the first one I include is Universum, a montage by Camille Flammaron for the 1880 edition of his work, Popular Astronomy.

The Encyclopedia of Life

2008-07-21T12:50:00.000-07:00

My interests are pretty wide-ranging, and they include the natural world in general, and the interactions between geology and biology in particular. In fact, I was once enrolled in a graduate program to acquire credentials to teach earth and life sciences to middle schoolers. Anyway, by an odd progression of chances while I was checking out web sources on conceptual typography (!), I ended up reading the Chronicle of Higher Education's article about The Encyclopedia of Life. This ambitious project to catalogue all of earth's species (disappearing at an alarming rate as we speak), is described on the home page as "an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about all life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world." Right up my little collectivist alley.

I was drawn to the article in the first place by the fact that it was illustrated in the print edition of the Chronicle (I subscribe on the web, but often read the print copy in the library) by one of Ernst Haeckel's drawings--the very same Haeckel I'd blogged about a couple of weeks ago. This image, of Aulacantha scolymantha, from his 1862 monograph on radiolaria, was obtained by the Encyclopedia from a truly wonderful web page called Micro*scope: yet another discovery to make a frustrated bio-geologist's day. This site represents another collaborative effort and provides information and images on all manner of microbial life; it's also collaborative, and partnered with the EoL. If you register, you can get access to terrific (I think, anyway) screensavers, and a massive number of images like this one of a colonial radiolarian (say that three times quickly), by Dave Caron of the University of Southern California:

Now, I'm no marine biologist, but I love this stuff! I can't help but think that studying the incredible variety of forms available in nature would be useful and instructive to artists and designers everywhere.

The Encyclopedia of Life and its partners promise to bring together a Wunderkammer of information and images about the species on this planet. And if you want an idea of how bloody lucky we are to be here in the first place, take a gander at the National Geographic Channel's series, Earth: The Biography. Host Iain Stewart (terrific Scots accent), with the help of magnificent NatGeo footage, not only shows us where we come from, but how many chancy factors are involved. If more people understood these things, and knew more about what's at risk if we screw it all up now, perhaps our grandchildren would have a chance to enjoy it, too.

Addendum, 22 July: It occurs to me that I neglected to mention one important point. The perpetrator of the Encyclopedia of Life project is none other than E. O. Wilson, biologist extraordinaire and my favorite ant guy. He invented the field of sociobiology, out of which came one of my favorite books: Biophilia. He's gone a bit cranky in his old age, hankering as he is now for the Enlightenment, but his newer book, Consilience, is still a good read--especially for those of us somewhat sympathetic to his views. More summer reading, for the biodiversity-inclined.

Joss Whedon's At It Again

2008-07-19T13:48:00.000-07:00

This just in (and only available until Sunday night): Joss Whedon's latest effort. Those of us who worship at the feet of the master are having enormous fun with this little curiosity, so do take the opportunity to check it out. Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog is an online musical miniseries starring Nathan (Mal Reynolds) Fillion and Neil Patrick (Doogie Howser) Harris, along with Felicia Day as the love interest. Nicely produced by Mutant Enemy (you know, the "Grrr. Argh" guys who brought us Firefly) and just plain fun, it's well worth several minutes of your time. And it's why I'm not posting any more today, because I need to get the whole thing watched.

It'll be back (see the Master Plan), but this is apparently it for now.

Angles of Repose

2008-07-14T08:07:00.000-07:00

One thing always seems to lead to another, and its this serendipity factor that I enjoy most about living in the rarefied aether of the blogosphere.

Today, for example, I had no intention of posting here in the Cabinet. But I wanted to touch base with some of the blogs I frequent (I don't have automatic feeds to any of them, because there's already too much stuff to attend to in the various e-mail accounts), and went first to Serenity Now, another web Wunderkammer that originates not all that far north of me. Christie has been talking about fireflies and what to do with roosters, and after I'd posted comments I did what I often do: glanced at other commenter's blogs.

There I discovered Sweet Repose, where "lives" a retired Iowa antiques dealer who had recently posted on chamber pots. After leaving a small reminiscence there, I started musing on the blog's title, and this old gal's mind wandered to--Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Angle of Repose, which I read last summer, not long after having re-read the late Ellen Meloy's The Anthropology of Turquoise. Meloy was a long-time Stegner fan, and all three of us share California connections--although mine involves a different side of the Sierras than either of theirs do. Meloy died young, but not before writing several really evocative books about western wilderness. Stegner, during his stint as the director of Stanford's creative writing program, influenced the likes of Wendell Berry, Edward Abbey, Ken Kesey, and Larry McMurtry. For more of my take on related topics, see my Owl's Farm post from last year, "Writing the Desert."

I should mention that I'm not reading much fiction these days (except for good hard science fiction), but I became so absorbed in Stegner's book that I ended up doing a bit of research on the inspiration for the novel: the life and work of Mary Hallock Foote. There's a nice profile of Stegner on the California Association of Teachers of English site, and it succinctly describes the controversy that arose over Stegner's use (with the permission of her granddaughter) of Foote's letters as the basis for his novel. Although fiction, the accounts of Susan Burlington Ward's experiences as a turn-of-the-century eastern Quaker in the American west (grounded as they are in Foote's actual life) resonate with what my grandmother described about living in California's Owens River Valley in the early twentieth century. At any rate, what emerges from the confluence of the novel and what I learned about Foote is further confirmation that other people's lives overlap in unexpected ways to enrich our own when we're paying attention.

Were my grandmother and my father still alive, the books I list below would have been taken home during my then-annual pilgrimages back to the valley and offered up enthusiastically on the family literary altar for reading and later conversation.

In their memory, my Summer Reading Recommendations, for anyone interested in topics like desert ecology and life, the history of mining in the West, the history of California, Victorian women in the west, and some damned good writing, are as follows:

Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose.
Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise
Rodman W. Paul, A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West: The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote (Huntington Library, 2003)

Online resources:

Mary Hallock Foote
Ellen Meloy
Wallace Stegner and the text of his Wilderness Letter

I hope you've got a good hammock in your back yard, and a large supply of cold-brewed iced tea.

Photo: A Hammock, by Dennis Mojado. Wikimedia Commons

The Medieval Garden Enclosed

2008-07-11T07:54:00.000-07:00

I remarked to a colleague during a meeting this week that the only people who read blogs are those who write them--or who are related to the bloggers. But occasionally I come across a blog that needs to be shared because it has worth beyond the blogosphere, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new effort, The Medieval Garden Enclosed is one of these.

The Cloisters Museum and Gardens at the Met are among its most popular exhibits, in part because medievalism enjoys frequent revivals in popular culture, but mostly because of the Unicorn Tapestries and the gardens. The exhibit itself is an exercise in virtual reality, with its reconstructed Romanesque enclosures, and the variety of works that transport us back to the Middle Ages. I've spent a good deal of my adult life studying the effects of medievalism on the development of modern art, and the Cloisters is always my first stop whenever I get to New York. Since I don't get there much any more, this blog will provide a nice touchstone.

The most recent posts are on lavender, an herb that grows beautifully here in Texas (even though I don't have much success with it), and is the best sleep-inducer of all time.

I look forward to reading the blog regularly, not only for its inside view of the Cloisters exhibit itself, but for the practical advice on medieval herbs and plants--a topic many of us just can't get enough of.

Photo: the Cuxa Cloister Garth Garden, nicked from the blog.

Old Timey Information Technologies

2008-07-06T08:55:00.001-07:00

Even before I learned the word "steampunk" I was fascinated by older technologies that feature interesting designs or gizmos that make them cool-looking, even today. The early typewriters are a good example: those big clunky Underwood models with the keyboards whose style of letters have become ubiquitous among the scrap-booking crowd (you can buy alphabets that look like the keys at any hobby shop), and the various manifestations of the letter forms themselves. My favorite among these is P22's version, "Typewriter," which I use on some of my web pages. It's got a slightly worn aspect that reminds me of what typed letters looked like when I was a kid.

But the particular technologies I've been thinking of lately are the immediate ancestors of the web itself--what we used before we could simply Google something, or browse a library's catalogue online. I was reminded of microfilm and microfiche when I finally picked up the second volume of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series, The Subtle Knife. In it, Will (one of the kid heroes) goes into a library and looks up news reports of his father on microfilm. Today, many libraries will have digital copies of these stories, but during most of my graduate career, microfilm was where we had to go, and microfiche was how we got there.

The immediate predecessor of microfiche catalogues was, of course, the handy dandy card catalogue (a term which librarians I know still use without thinking sometimes--"Go look it up on the card catalogue"). At UC Riverside, where I started out, the catalogue was several drawers high and gazillions of drawers long--on two sides of an aisle. When I got to Penn, there were several, one in each specialty library, but I don't remember if there was one grand central catalogue--although surely there must have been one. I still possess a six-drawer unit salvaged from the basement of Bennett Hall, where I worked, and where the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences was located at the time. The box had been painted an abysmal pink, which, when removed, revealed the same quarter-sawn oak I now have underfoot in my house.

My Bennett Hall office (I administered fellowships and scholarships for the Grad school) also housed a couple of IBM Selectric typewriters--cutting-edge technology in the early seventies. When one was stolen, however, the replacement was bolted onto a rolling typewriter stand made to hold an old non-electric model. The stand, which I also still have, features a side shelf that sits up about two inches from the bottom of where the typewriter would rest, to make it easier to copy handwritten text.

My all-time favorite typewriter, however, is a little portable Olivetti Lettera 22. It was given me by my mother's Italian boyfriend, an Olivetti salesman, when I left Taiwan, and I have it still. Its script type was extremely difficult to read, but it was what I had (before I discovered typing labs in college), so I actually wrote my first college papers on it. This practice came to an end rather abruptly when an archaeology professor--even though he thought the paper was so good he glued five round paper hole-reinforcers (do they still make these?) on it and colored them yellow with a highlighter because he "didn't have any gold stars"--told me that my typewriter "could drive a man to drink." Despite the A+ on my assessment of the Linear B decipherment controversy, I never used that machine for a paper again.

Nowadays, of course, few of us give even a passing thought to these old, obsolete or at least obsolescent ways of locating information and transcribing it. The computer does it all. Nonetheless, our technologies have a way of affecting what we write and how we write it, so it seems prudent to remember where we've been in order to assess where we're ending up.

The first computer in our family was a Commodore 64, with an eight-page file memory in the first version of Word Perfect I ever owned. So I wrote papers that were multiples of eight pages, and became adept at producing 32-page graduate essays that I printed out on a dot-matrix printer (which some professors were reluctant to accept). Our family trudged into the digital age with a succession of IBM clones (one a Clone brand), and at one point I even served as the token humanities teaching assistant in the microcomputer lab at UT Dallas. In recent years, even though I think of myself as a slow-adopter, I've entered the twenty-first century at full tilt, with a hot-shot laptop computer and an iPhone. But I still miss the old clunky typewriters that required strong wrists and clear minds--because there was no "undo" function.

Too bad I'd never be able to find ribbons for that old Olivetti, or I'd dust it off and type something to my Uncle Art--who's probably the only person around who might get a kick out of it.

Photo credits: Typist, image from an old French postcard, contributed by Knyf; Olivetti Lettera 22 (first model) typewriter by LjL; The obsolete card catalog files at Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, by Ragesoss. All from Wikimedia Commons.

Wikimedia Wunderkammer

2008-06-27T09:27:00.000-07:00

Not that I need anything to occupy my time, since there seems to be so little of it these days, but I've been meaning to sing the praises of Wikimedia Commons ever since I started using it on a regular basis. Today's post will, I hope, be the first on the many wonders I've encountered there, and perhaps encourage my small coterie of readers to see what the Commons has to offer.

I have to admit that I was a reluctant convert to Wikipedia, because my students insist on using it as their first (and often last) source when conducting research. It's not that I have anything against Wikipedia itself, but it's an encyclopedia--a terrific instrument for school-age kids, but limited in actual content (my rule is: use primary sources first, whenever possible). But Wikipedia also lists multitudes of auxiliary sources, both in print and online, that can lead a student in productive directions, so although I still won't let them include it in a bibliography, I don't mind their consulting it for further information.

Yesterday, while engaging in one of my seemingly random web searches--this one on the nineteenth-century evolutionary biologist and artist, Ernst Haeckel--I discovered that the Commons contains the plates from the 1904 edition of his Kunstformen der Natur (Artforms of nature). The Wikipedia article on Haeckel had linked this collection, as well as some other really interesting web pages devoted to his work. Beloved Spouse was busy using a drum sander in our soon-to-be study, so I had time on my hands and went exploring.

In addition to an animated film about Haeckel's work, called Proteus, which I'll be ordering for our college library, the Wikipedia "external links" list included one to some gorgeous alpha channel transparencies of images from Kunstformen, by media artist Scott Draves, who links an online copy of the book, in German, with an index to all of the plates and a large-format .pdf version.

Inspired by what happened yesterday, today I went to the Commons home page and clicked on "Nature: Animalia" and then on "Mollusca: Gastropoda" and then on "Fossil Gastropods." Since I'm interested in natural forms and human design motifs, I figured that this would be a good place to look for spiral forms in nature for use in a new lecture in History of Art and Design I. Sure enough, there were scads of lovely photos--all available as public domain images or contributed under sharing licenses by a variety of good-hearted folk who, like me, might think that "intellectual" and "property" are mutually problematic ideas. I love the idea of the Creative Commons licenses, under one of which I published More News From Nowhere; I figure that anybody who might be even remotely interested in it shouldn't have to pay for it, especially given the novel's philosophical focus. Not that I don't think people should be paid for their work, but when ideas are floating around all over the place it seems absurd to start copyrighting and patenting stuff that's been out there for eons.

At any rate, I recommend meandering through the Wikimedia Commons at your leisure. I have found lovely photos to use on my blogs, such as those featured in today's post, and am happy to attribute them whenever possible. I'll probably start uploading some of my stuff, rather than trying to make a buck out of a lucky shot by putting it up on a stock photo sharing company site (even though it's the next best thing to the Commons, and one of my favorite former students works for one such outfit--so here's a plug, Lesa: istockphoto.com).

But now I have to get back to rehabbing our old house, and the business of sanding corners on my hands and knees. It's a lot more fun to go messing about among quaint and/or interesting topics and pictures, though, so I'll undoubtedly be doing so again soon.

Addendum, 24 July 2008: While making my weekly pilgrimage to the "new" section of the Kelley Library yesterday, I noticed--prominently displayed among the "check this out" selections--an absolutely gorgeous volume of Haeckel's work: Visions of Nature: The Art and Science of Ernst Haeckel (Munich: Prestel, 2006). This is a terrific addition to our collection, and one that (once they can get their hands on it) should inspire a whole new generation of students. But I'm not giving it up until after the weekend, when I'll have a chance to drool over the magnificent photos of Haeckel's study and his own private collection of interesting oddities--as well as the wealth of beautifully reproduced prints. Oh, and there's actual information included in here, too!

Photo credits: Ernst Haeckel, Ammonitida (Ammonite), Wikimedia Commons. Thalamophora, from Kunstformen der Natur by Ernst Haeckel, .png file by Scott Draves. Viviparus glacialis; Borehole Rosmalen, Netherlands; Pleistocene: Late Tiglian, taken by Tom Meijer (PaleoMal), Wikimedia Commons.

Grandma Clarice's Recipes, Part 1

2008-06-17T12:33:00.000-07:00

In some ways, this post (and the ones that follow on this topic) should be called "Great-Grandma Esther's Recipes" because my grandmother attributed most of what she made that we loved to her own mother. But the little notebook of recipes I have the privilege of owning is written in Grandma Clarice's almost-illegible handwriting, or pecked out on one of her series of old-timey typewriters. A couple of the recipes are written out in my pre-adult hand, probably while I was living with her during my Freshman year in high school.

Not included in the book, however, are instructions for favorite foods such as applesauce cake and "home-made noodles." The only reason I have these is because she dictated them to me so I could add them to my little recipe box. As she cooked, I wrote down what she was doing, and so my archival inclinations came in handy. Some day when I've got more time, I mean to scan the scribbled notes she made about food she'd had at friends' pinochle parties, and make a book of them (with translations, since I'm one of the few people alive who can actually read her handwriting), along with the family favorites, for my cousins and their children. But in the meantime, at the risk of taking my Uncle Art on yet another teary-eyed journey, here is her recipe for Applesauce Cake (as dictated to me):

1 cup sugar
1/2 cup butter
1 cup unsweetened applesauce
1 3/4 cup flour
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
raisins
1 tablespoon (or so) cocoa powder
1 teaspon baking soda dissolved in 1 tablespoon boiling water

Cream butter and sugar, add applesauce, spices, and dissolved soda. Then add flour. Bake in moderate oven (300F) until top springs back.

Now, the real essence of this cake--Gram's abilty to throw it all together and add whatever she wanted to (raisins, for example--and often walnuts) in whatever amounts she wanted to--is missing from my version. It's not that I'm any more precise, but I haven't been able to use white flour in quite a while, and I have to cut some of the saturated fat down by using half butter and half canola oil. So my interpretation tends to be heavier.

She also used to double her recipe (which fits into an 8 x 8 inch pan) and bake it in a 9 x 13 pan to feed a crowd. I still double it, but put it into two smaller pans, and am going to start freezing one every time I bake it. As I mentioned in today's Farm blog, it's one of my strategies to help fight homesickness and avoid pie cravings. My sweet tooth is decidedly smaller than it once was.

For folks who are concerned with fat content and/or glycemic indices, here's my modified version. It's still pretty good, but it's not Gram's:

1/2 c. sugar
1/2 c. honey
4 Tablespoons butter
1/2 c. canola oil
(cream these together)

Add to creamed mixture:
1 c. unsweetened natural applesauce
Stir in:
1 3/4 c. whole wheat flour (I use white whole wheat; another alternative is to mix unbleached and whole wheat half and half)
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. cloves or allspice (or both)
about 1 cup raisins
about 1 cup toasted pecans or walnuts
1/4 to 1/2 c. Dutch-process cocoa powder
1 tsp. soda dissolved in 1 Tablespoon boiling water.

Bake at 300F for about 50 minutes (set timer for 40 and test with a finger).

This is a pretty forgiving cake. It's potentially vegan (if you leave out the butter), and there's no salt in the recipe. If you add a little (half a teaspoon) you'll get a lighter result.

This cake is best warm, soon out of the oven. A little butter makes it a luxurious treat. It's also great for breakfast or with an afternoon cuppa.

Now, if you'll excuse me, my cakes are ready to come out of the oven, and I'm off to indulge in a bit of nostalgic munching.

In Praise of Figs

2008-06-09T14:14:00.000-07:00

Before I moved into this house eight summers ago, I didn't particularly care for figs. I must have retained some odd childhood association with them or something, but aside from the occasional fig newton, I seldom had contact with them at all. But my grandmother, not a notable hedonist, would positively salivate over a plate of fresh figs, so I should have suspected that there was something more to them.

The spring after we moved in, the two fig trees on our property had bumper crops--one in late April, and another later in the summer. They were quite simply ambrosial. I made fig chutney, fig jam, and (best of all) fig confit (or konfyt, as my South African sources would have it)--a laborious but rewarding effort. I wish I had a photo of the jar of confitted figs I made to give to one of the chefs at school, because it looked like a container of liquid green jewels.

More often than not, however, I'd just eat as many of them straight off the tree as I could, because the mockingbirds do their best to beat me to the ripe ones. 8 oz. of figs provides a whopping 30% of one's daily fiber requirement, plus numerous other nutrients--and fig leaves help mitigate diabetes.

I have also learned that our fig trees are probably San Pedro (or at least some kind of Adriatic variety), and that the current crop (on last season's growth) is parthenogenic, whilst later fruits will have required pollination. A video on the interaction of figs and fig wasps (contributers to said pollination) can be found on Figweb. It's won awards, and is most certainly worth watching (if you're 21-minutes worth of interested).

Two years ago, the figs died back because of the drought, and I really missed the summer crop. Last year, they miraculously sprang back to life, but so much of their effort was put into rebirth that I got no figs. This year, the little nubbins started early--and for the first time, I saw them growing up the stalk, like Brussels sprouts. They're finally beginning to ripen (the cool spring seems to have held them back a bit), and today I said Shehecheyanu upon eating my first fig of the season. Although I'm one of little faith, certain traditions adhere--especially when they mark occasions like first fruits; I am, in fact, happy to have reached this point. Or, as my daughter would (less poetically) put it, I'm glad I'm not dead yet.

Figs are, in fact, ancient fruit. They're mentioned in the Bible, loaded with symbolic import, and included in early cookbooks. Apicius boils ham with figs and bay leaves, according to The Roman Cookery Book: A Critical Translation of The Art of Cooking by Apicius, for use in the study and the kitchen, by Barbara Flower and Elisabeth Rosenbaum (George G. Harrap, 1958). A newer interpretation by John Edwards (Hartley & Marks, 1984) includes a modern recipe, but--if you'll forgive me--it pretty much boils down to the same thing. Several other out-of-print translations are available through alibris. Ilaria Gozzini Gicosa's book, A Taste of Ancient Rome (University of Chicago Press, 1992; translated by Anna Herklotz) is still available (and Google Books has a preview). She notes how the Romans dried figs, and how they stuffed them (and dates).

Andrew Dalby and Sally Grainger more recently wrote The Classical Cookbook (Getty Museum, 1996), and it's making the rounds with various Roman art exhibits (including In Stabiano at the Dallas Museum of Art last year, where I got it). They suggest wrapping fish in fig leaves (terrific idea I can't wait to try). Still not much on figs--but they seem to have been a staple, both in sweet and savory cooking.

If you're interested in trying the Green Fig Konfyt that wowed my chef friend, it can be found here, with a link to a printable version (the page works badly on Firefox). Its origins are Medieval, but it seems to be a favorite in South Africa, where this one comes from.

And finally, a word about fig leaves. In the interest of misapplied modesty, leaves often used to cover the genitalia of ancient and Renaissance statues. The Greeks and Romans thought nudity to be natural, but the pre-Renaissance Church couldn't handle intimate body parts and so typically covered them with leaves. Durer's Fall of Man uses strategically placed branches and leaves, for example, but not figs. Tullio's Adam is easily distinguishable from its Greek predecessors not by a fig leaf, but a grape leaf (he's currently under restoration; I wonder if it's to remove his leaf . . .). The best example of real fig leaves can be seen on the Adam and Eve figures on the Ghent Altarpiece--if anyone's interested. I'm just trying to clear up a common misconception, in the interest of ridding the fig of its bad rap.

I was really disappointed to find that the God Hates Figs web page, which promises to prove "that figs are the source of all the world's evil. Includes propaganda, resources and FAQ" appears no longer to be available on the web. It was a parody website in the tradition of The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which would undoubtedly offend some who read this blog, so it's probably just as well. One never does know exactly where Google will lead one in the quest for blogfodder.

I think I'll go have a fig.

Magnolia, Dying

2008-06-03T07:25:00.001-07:00

Alas. The Romantics would love this: from dewy bloom to the throes of death and rebirth (via a seed pod). The embodiment of the Sublime.

Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water.
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a cluster of fruit, every day, between my hands.

---Pablo Neruda, translated by W. S. Merwin

This is how the flower ends, from bud to bloom to pod. I'm not sure it'll actually form a seed pod, since neither bloom is still attached to the tree, but I'll keep them long enough to find out--or until they start getting smelly.

Magnolia, Blooming

2008-06-02T09:13:00.000-07:00

I'm stumped for a clever title; I had intended to post a little item on random chunks of granite, but that will have to wait, because I walked into the breakfast room a few minutes ago, and was greeted by an Event.

Yesterday, my husband trimmed a pecan tree that was interfering with the growth of our neighbor's big southern magnolia tree. It's about 50 feet tall, and quite majestic, but the pecan was encroaching on its territory (as well as over the property line), so the request to trim it back was certainly reasonable. When he was finished, the neighbor presented him with two large magnolia blossoms, each the size of a luncheon plate.

At first I had them in a green glass vase, and they were nicely framed by the glossy green leaves that surrounded each of the blooms. They scented the air all yesterday afternoon. But the cats knocked them out, and I finally split them up into separate containers, and this morning put one in the breakfast room and one in the dining room. When I did so, they were both closed up into cup-like formations, and I left them to their own devices.

When I went to make a late breakfast after a morning of working on The Farm, I was delighted to see what had happened in the ensuing hours. They had not only opened, but dropped their stamens. Obviously, I have little experience with magnolias, and so this phenomenon was truly wonderful for me to behold. I only wish I had been there to experience the whole process.

While I was looking around on the web to find out more about what was going on, I found a nifty site called Evolution of a Magnolia Blossom, which does a nice job of showing the steps. If you're not fond of the theme song to "A Summer Place," however, you might want to turn your sound off. It's rather apt, though, from what I remember of the film.

One rather amusing coincidence: the green book with the Japanese writing on the cover is about Ikebana, the art of flower arranging. I found it at Half Price Books a couple of months ago, and bought it because it was beautiful and reminded me of my early childhood, when my brain got steeped in Japanese aesthetics, never (thankfully) to recover.

At any rate, I thought it interesting that one of the blossoms deposited its stamens on the sideboard, while the other held onto them, holding them in one of its petals--as if not wishing to damage a book on arranging flowers . . .

Here are two more pictures: one is a slightly closer view of the pile of stamens, and the other shows remnants of pollen on one of the petals.

And they both still smell heady and redolent of summer, only about three weeks early.

Coffee, Tea, Madeleines, and Memory

2008-05-26T08:40:00.000-07:00

Every morning of my life, my first cup of coffee reminds me of my grandmother, and the year I spent with her after I returned from five years in Taiwan, and while I waited for my father to return from his posting in England.

Gram always got up before me, even on school days, and made coffee. None of the fancy stuff--Maxwell House out of a can--and no fancy brewing technique--just a Farberware percolator. The results were strong and aromatic: coffee smell. I'd almost invariably wake up then, and join her for a cup liberally doused with milk and (then) laced with sugar; it was probably more like "coffee milk" with which my other grandmother treated me almost from infancy, with a bit of doughnut for dunking. I gradually weaned myself from the sugar (Gram drank hers black), but never could do without the milk.

I'm always amused, too, when I go to Starbucks these days for my usual nonfat latte and occasionally grab a pack of madeleines for the trip to school. This combination almost always leads to my turning off the radio and letting my mind go wherever it wants to, instead of listening to NPR for news on the latest catastrophic event.

So Proust's tea-and-madeleine experience is essentially universal, although most people are not eloquent enough to write huge tomes about memories that engage readers for nearly a century. He died the year after my father was born, and the year my house was built (I'm great at finding connections that mean absolutely nothing).

This morning, the combination of fresh coffee (freshly-ground Ruta Maya organic, filtered through a Cuisinart into a carafe that keeps it hot but doesn't over-cook it; still, my tastes have changed very little) and the memory of my grandmother carried me further: to her Memorial Day tradition of gathering flowers and taking them from her house to the family plot in the Big Pine cemetery, thirty miles north. Gram didn't care for cut flowers in the house, claiming that they were better off and would last longer in the garden where they belonged, but on Memorial Day she'd pick everything then blooming: sweet peas, honeysuckle, trumpet vine, and put them in a huge bucket with enough water to keep them from wilting during the trip.

I can still remember the ride north, with the windows open in the Chevy ('57, I think; she later got herself a souped up Chevy Nova). In the high desert, mornings are cool and crisp no matter how hot it gets later in the day. By the time we left the cemetery, it was already warming up, and we were tempted to stay there under the trees. But there were always things to get done, so after a couple of hours of stories about folks buried there, we headed home and the ride back was a little quieter than the ride up. Although I didn't live with her after that year, except during summer vacations, I made the Memorial Day trip several other times during my life, and I'm pretty sure we took my children once--even though they were probably too young then to remember. They've been back, of course, when we buried her ashes and later those of my father. And my one true regret in life now is that I don't live close enough to go up there every year with flowers for her.

On this memorial day, I wanted to note my family's "collection" of veterans in that cemetery. Thanks to Ancestry.com, I've now got access to various military records that help fill in some gaps, and I recommend that folks take advantage of this treasure trove if they've got vets of their own.

My father's father, Ira Uhlmeyer, fought in World War I, and his participation in that particular war made possible my enrollment at the University of California, Riverside. I received a La Verne Noyes Scholarship, available only to direct descendants of veterans of WWI. Were it not for that scholarship, I doubt if I'd been able to spend the summer working in my home town (for less than minimum wage at a local frosty shop), and would have had to find better-paying work nearer the college. As it was, I got by with the summer gig in Lone Pine, and a work-study job on campus. At any rate, here's my grandfather's draft card (click for a larger view):

My father, Thomas William Uhlmeyer, served in the Army Air Corps during the second World War, and later joined the newly formed U. S. Air Force and served during both the Korean and Viet Nam "conflicts." He retired after 23 years as a Senior Master Sergeant, never having had the ambition to become an officer because he loved what he did and going to officer candidate school would require changing jobs. Always the raconteur, Daddy wrote down his Pacific theater experiences in WWII, and as soon as I get my scanner working, I'll start publishing them here--complete with pictures.

My cousin Eddie Uhlmeyer (eldest son of grandfather's brother Charles) joined the Army during Viet Nam, but was stationed in Germany for most of his enlistment. He died in an auto accident not long after his discharge, and is also buried in the Big Pine cemetery. Eddie and I got to know one another the summer before I started college, and I still miss him. Like most Uhlmeyer men, he had a terrific sense of humor and was fun to be around.

And so today, as I linger over my coffee, I'm remembering these three men in particular, as well as Ralph Hoard (mentioned previously). I may be a pacifist under the skin, but even those of us who think there are better ways to solve problems than by killing one another appreciate the job our soldiers have done on our behalf. Many of my current students are Iraq and Afghanistan vets. I'm glad they made it back, and I worry every day about the ones who are still "over there." Another of my students recently lost her brother in Iraq, and I can only begin to imagine what today must be like for her family. But as long as people haven't managed to figure out how to keep political conflicts from erupting into war, and as long as we remain mortal, remembering our dead one day a year is the least we can do.

I hope somebody's remembering Proust today, too.

Photos: My grandfather's draft card, courtesy Ancestry.com; Proust's grave in the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, taken by Paul Louis, from Wikimedia Commons.

Requiem for Rauschenberg

2008-05-18T06:48:00.000-07:00

Robert Rauschenberg died last week, at 82--which isn't even as old as my father was when he died of multiple ravages. Rauschenberg had a puckish smile that reminded me of my father's, and the same silver haircut. The cause was announced as "heart failure," and when I heard the news, I wept.

Mind you, I don't usually get particularly verklempt when artists, especially well-known ones, die, but Rauschenberg is among my small coterie of favorites, which also includes Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, and Joseph Cornell. These four men took Cubism's basic idea of collage--originally compositions that included pasted paper, paint, and drawings--and opened up an entirely new mode of creative expression. As innovative as Braque's idea was (for it was, in fact, Georges Braque and not Picasso who came up with it), neither he nor Picasso, nor any of their original followers managed to marry two- and three-dimensional art in the way that "my four" did.

There's a natural affinity between what these men created and the idea of a Wunderkammer. Collage can become a locus of memory: collecting bits and pieces of life, sticking them to a canvas, and recording an idea, a moment, an observation about the human condition. It can also interpret the artist's experience of the world, and help us all make sense of history--as Rauschenberg's large screen-printed canvases did after John Kennedy's death, the subject of Skyway (1964), owned by the Dallas Museum of Art, and pictured here (rather awkwardly, because it's in the Atrium Cafe and I had to shoot it with my iPhone from the stairs). The DMA's image, plus three others from the collection can be found here. Although this isn't really a collage in the formal sense (it has more in common with Picasso's late synthetic Cubist efforts that looked like collages but were actually created entirely in oils), it's an example of one of the possible directions Rauschenberg and others explored: collage as a collection of images, married in improbable ways, but which can produce an almost jarring connection with the objects pictured.

These works have clearly touched a monumental nerve in the American psyche, because their impact includes twenty-first century book arts, and has even reached into the mundane aisles of the hobby merchants, fostering (indirectly) the current craze in "scrap-booking."

Little I could say could even begin to describe Rauschenberg's impact on modern art, and so I'll end by including a list of links to biographies, articles, and obituaries. 82 may not seem particularly young to many people, but I'll miss the works he'll never create, and I hope he left a huge cache of unrevealed works for us to enjoy.

New York Times obituary, by Michael Kimmelmann (includes a slide show of significant works)

Rauschenberg Got a Lot From the City and Left a Lot Behind, by Roberta Smith in the New York Times. It links the same slide show, but also lists New York museums in which Rauschenberg's works can be viewed.

PBS's American Masters episode, with a video about Monogram and the other "combines."

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibition featuring the combines (2005/2006) with an introduction and images.

"The Wild And Crazy Guy," Time Magazine's obituary, by Richard Lacayo.

As always, a list of online sources of Rauchenberg's work can be found on the Artcyclopedia.

Photo credit: Canyon, 1959 (Wikimedia Commons photo, taken at the National Gallery of Art in Washington). My shot of the Atrium Cafe at the Dallas Museum of Art was taken on May 15, 2008.

Letters From the Front: 1919

2008-05-11T09:20:00.000-07:00

One of the truly fortunate aspects of being bred from a variety of the species Neotoma cinerea (Bushy-tailed Woodrat, better known as "packrat") is that I've inherited hoards of letters. Or, more aptly put, letters of Hoards.

My maternal grandfather, Ralph Disbrow Hoard, married my grandmother, Dorothy Minneola Crumley, shortly before he shipped out to France during World War I. Apparently because his eyesight was too poor for battle purposes, he spent the war as a medic; the experience is probably what prompted him to become an osteopath, because by the 1920 census he's listed as a medical student. I found a biography online from Merced County, California, that notes his marriage on November 29, 1917, and the fact that he spent a year in France. Even though they were married before the war, however, they seem not to have lived together until after he finished medical school--judging from their separate entries in the census taken in Pasadena.

My newest project is to sort, arrange, and read through a box of letters he wrote to my grandmother during his enlistment, many of them from France toward the end and after the war. A brief sortie into the stack and a half-hearted attempt to put them in chronological order prompted me to read through a couple of them--only to find out that my sarcastic streak is probably genetic:

March 23 1919

Dearest Dottums. Oh yay, how my arm aches. Merle and I got our shot in the arm today. They are using the new lipovaccine. It has an oil medium and, oh boy, the kick we're getting out of it.

The vaccination was probably for pneumonia. He says later (April 8), after thanking "Dottums" (I knew her as "Gramie Dottie") for some pictures she had sent of the family cottage at Balboa,

I do believe you're better looking now than when I left. If such is the case, I guess I had better stay over here, not (the "not" is underlined three times).

I thought this locution was specific to twenty-first century teenagers, but obviously it's made the rounds before. He goes on to mention a motorbike trip (he had been a mechanic, so one of his war jobs was apparently with the motor pool) to some of the central sites of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 [click on the map for a larger version], and talks about visiting the museum at Gravelotte--which is quite near Mars la Tour (site of one of the major battles of the war), where he was billeted:

. . . I went through the military museum and it certainly was wonderful. All kinds of uniforms, guns, swords, shrapnel, shells, bayonets, breastplates, helmets, etc., of both German and French. Then there are a great many paintings of that war. Oh, I tell you it was great and I wouldn't trade that trip for a trip through Field's museum.

I'm assuming he's talking about the Field Museum in Chicago, which he probably visited en route to the East Coast for transport to the front. See? Even the museum bug is in the blood.

It seems fitting on Mother's Day to spend a bit of time getting to know my forebears better. I remember both my grandfather and my grandmother as remarkable people, and their early devotion to one another (although they later divorced) is quite poignant. She clearly wrote to him regularly throughout his stint, and he was equally faithful in his replies. I only wish I had the other half of the correspondence.

Photos: Part of the stack of war letters; Map of the Franco-Prussian War 1870, from the Cambridge Modern History Atlas of 1912 (Wikipedia commons)

Edited to add links on 13 May 2008.

Esopus, the Magazine

2008-05-07T18:32:00.000-07:00

This morning I received an e-mail from a former student, announcing that her first issue of Esopus had arrived, and that she was "smelling it right now." I had introduced my Art and Design Since 1945 class to it last quarter, and they all responded enthusiastically-- and a couple of them subscribed.

It's difficult to describe Esopus, which is published by a non-profit foundation and comes out only twice a year. It's an amazing bargain (well below its actual cost) at $10 US a pop on the newsstand (if you can find it), or $9 each by subscription. The production quality is superb, and the variety of topics covered and materials used provide a visual and tactile experience unlike any other print medium I can think of. On top of that, they commission a music CD based on a particular theme, and some of the tunes are so witty and intelligent that even a cranky old classical and jazz purist like I am can enjoy them.

The "smelling" part comes from the fact that the papers and inks used for the art works and articles evoke an almost pheromonic response from lovers of paper. I wouldn't exactly call the experience erotic, but it's certainly enticing.

This issue contains a couple of things that have stirred the little section of my brain devoted to wonder: a segment called "Drawing Comparisons," which includes facsimiles of sketches by former MoMA director, René D'Harnoncourt, comparing art works from various island cultures in Melanesia. The drawings are part of regular file-folder feature drawn from the museum's archives; in the past these have included the evolution of a flow-chart describing the influence of Cubism, and sketches by Lewis Mumford of an exhibit that was never mounted. Both Cubism and Mumford are among my abiding interests.

Some of what's included is surprisingly intimate, like the notes to his children by Robert Guest, an exhibition designer. Guest has written lunch-box notes to his kids for many years, and his wife has retrieved thousands of them (an artful arrangement of these notes graces the issue's cover). A few of them are included as "Daily Reminders." One feels privileged to be allowed to read them, even though they're fairly simple: "Take time to relax and think about life." They're illustrated with sweet drawings, and make me wish I'd done this with my children.

The most amazing section this time is well within the realm of the traditional Wunderkammer: Doug McNamara's "Biodiversions," a series (mostly on vellum) of scientific illustrations of organisms that don't actually exist. The drawings are astonishing, amusing, delicate, beautiful, fanciful, and poetic all at the same time. And the paper makes you want to fondle it. I'm not kidding.

The CD will accompany me down the road to work tomorrow. This one's called "Good News," and was inspired by a quotation from Confucius: "The more man meditates upon good thoughts, the better will be his world and the world at large." One of the songs celebrates the tax rebate--which hasn't shown up in my bank account yet, but a part of it will go to support the Esopus Foundation because I get such sheer pleasure from what it brings me--even if it is only twice a year.

Now I'll be looking forward to the newest issue of the quarterly Cabinet Magazine, named after cabinets of wonder, and usually filled with provocative and beautifully written and illustrated stuff on a particular theme (bones, mountains, insects, electricity). It's due any day now.

Photo credit: since this post is almost an ad for the magazine, I hope it's ok to use the cover photo. I know I should ask, but I'm shy.

Family Archaeology

2008-05-06T08:26:00.001-07:00

One problem with being old, and being the child of a family of packrats, is that one not only accumulates a large amount of stuff, but the stuff is not only one's own--it's often the legacy of others.

And then there's the problem of having an overactive imagination, one that's constantly coming up with ideas about what can be done with this or that bit of stuff. So that stuff gets collected. And so do things that can be recycled into other things.

Ultimately it all ends up in one or two places in my house. Visits to IKEA have produced a few strong cardboard boxes in nice colors to hold some of it. Those items sit attractively on shelves in bookcases. The rest ends up in closets--specifically one in the study, and in another we've dubbed The Museum of Unfinished Projects. This latter spot is a wonderful space, designed almost like a pantry, with room for a dresser or storage unit under shelves that start about halfway up the wall on two sides. I've got a small bookcase on one wall, which holds an almost complete collection of Martha Stewart Living, several years' worth of Old House Journal, and a more random stack of This Old House. Martha will no longer arrive at my house when my subscription runs out next year, but I find it difficult to toss what I've got.

In the back of the closet, under the deep shelves, I've got two rolling wire carts that hold hanging files. One of these belonged to my husband during his bachelor days, and another was a gift from him and my children on the first Mother's Day we were together. Now they hold tearsheets from magazines--one for articles on food and recipes, another for "ideas"--home repair, craft instructions, inspiration, etc.

Boxes on the shelves contain memorabilia (mostly from my children's growing-up years) and fabric for quilts long since abandoned. Other unfinished efforts include a stuffed pteradactyl, some paper dragons I was going to hang in my son's room after I'd painted them, bereft baskets of embroidery, tins of buttons, bags of pillow stuffing, and boxes of reparable items of too much sentimental value to be discarded.

The closet in the study holds boxes of old photographs and letters, most of these from my mother's family, but a large bag of photos was added about five years ago, when my father sat down with me and went through stacks of family pictures before he died. Since I wasn't ready to admit that he was actually dying at the time, I neglected to ask as many questions as I should have done.

One of the things I've noticed about blogging is that it helps to focus one's energies on tasks at hand. Because the Museum of Unfinished Projects houses a number of collections, it will probably provide blog fodder for at least a few months, and if nothing else, blogging about hunting and gathering should encourage me to sort and consider its contents. If this in fact occurs, I may accomplish something even more important: ensuring that my children aren't left with the task after I've shuffled off.

On the other hand, the very act of sorting through the family midden is an exercise in connection, context, and history. Old photographs, memorabilia from experiences not our own, correspondence, well-loved objects--all of these generate memory, stir the imagination, and provide hints about where we are and how we got here.

In his novel, Howard's End, E. M. Forster utters the memorable injunction, "Only connect"--connect the prose with the passon, connect the fragments, create wholeness. This is in part what we do when we look back at the material remains of our pasts and the pasts of our ancestors. It's probably what makes archaeology a necessary profession in a world otherwise consumed with modernity. It may also explain interest in museums and Wunderkammern: images and objects that connect the very distant past (both on a human and a geological scale) with the present. Excavation and classificaton are acts of history, memory, and connection.

Let the dig begin.

Photo: The Museum of Unfinished Projects

Constructing the Cabinet

2008-05-03T08:03:00.000-07:00

The idea for this blog actually came to me in a dream. I was contemplating the fact that many of the topics I wanted to consider on the Farm had nothing really to do with utopia or William Morris--as much as both occupy my intellectual life. I realized that it might be a good idea to find somewhere else to build a sort of salon: a place to explore and discuss ideas, events, or objects not necessarily related to anything else, or even to one another.

I'm fond of telling my students that I've never been bored in my life. But the reason I've never been bored is that I've been introduced to so many different ideas, places, ways of life, and things worth paying attention to that I've never had time to be bored. There's almost always something interesting going on, and by far the largest repository of wonder is the natural world.

Hence this new blog. I've had so much fun on the Farm, that another, supplementary venue seems only natural. Here there be dragons: and museums and collections and assemblages and all manner of gatherings. It took me a while to come up with a title, because all my initial choices were already in use (I guess I'm not quite as original a thinker as I fancy myself to be). But this is a Wunderkammer of sorts, and so I thought it fitting that I join the ranks of my favorite bloggers with my own contributions to the genre, stamping it with my own "name."

My father discovered many years ago, and much to the family's amusement, that our surname had once been spelled "Ohlemeyer," which, in German, means "Owl Farmer." I immediately adopted it for an avatar, and have gleefully used it ever since for my course pages, and now the two blogs. The fact that owls catch and digest small critters and then spit them out in the form of fuzzy pellets filled with tiny bones is strangely apt. Feel free to think of this blog as being a series of fuzzy pellets filled with tiny gems of interesting (I hope) materials.

North Texas, where I live, is home to large numbers of raptors, including owls. In fact, a murder of barred owls (I know, crows come in "murders," but I couldn't resist) lives in our neighborhood, and during the spring we are regaled most nights by the hoots and screeches of sex-crazed males vying for territory. At times, one can walk out the back door at dusk and be swooped over by large, heavy birds who've been roosting on the house-eaves. One evening earlier this year, we listened as our dog Arlo, a basset-border collie mix, accomplished an astoundingly accurate imitation of the barred owl who sat twenty feet above him, hooting away in a pecan tree.

So it does seem appropriate to use this blog as a way of focusing on the idea of collection, of hunting and gathering (for which we are clearly genetically programmed, although not always in a productive way), and the human tendency to conduct archaeological explorations of everything from lost civilizations to ideas. The possibilities at this point seem endless.

Photo credit: A Barred Owl Rescued after an Accident, T. J. Peterson, Wikimedia Commons.