Art Everywhere

 Here in Ann Arbor

A very pretty old bridge in a park: the boardwalk uses the access under the railroad tracks.

From Elaine in Indiana and Evelyn in Montreal

blog post © 2024 mae sander

Beaver Dreams

 

The beaver dam in the Botanical Gardens was rebuilt this spring after winter flooding washed it away.
There have been only a few trailcam sightings of the actual beavers. I always enjoy walking past this site.

As a child, I was nervous about beavers. I thought they were lurking under my bed, and would grab my feet if I got up. I dreamed about them fearfully. Much later, my father mentioned a children’s book that probably inspired my worries. Thinking about the beaver dam that I saw recently made me remember about this book, so I looked online. 

Now I think I know what book it was. It was titled The Secret of the Ancient Oak and was published in 1942. In this children’s book (which isn’t all that suitable for children) a beaver terrorizes the other animals who live in a forest, especially those who inhabit a very ancient oak tree. Realizing his evil ways, they band together and drive him out. The author intended to write a story that was not just a for children, but was also an early allegory of the rise of Hitler. My father had evidently admired this secondary message, but regretted having read it to me: it was too effective in portraying a threatening dictator. 

I have no memory of actually seeing the book, as I believe it was disposed of when I was very young (but I guess that was too late for my fears). I learned a little about the book from my web search. The author went by the name WOLO, pseudonym for a German writer Wolf Erhardt Anton George Trutzschuler von Falkenstein (1902–1989). Copies are now rare and expensive, but I found several images of the book’s pages on websites that deal in collectibles. Here are some of the images.

I’m still afraid of the evil beaver who wanted to destroy the oak tree and take over the forest.

Review by mae sander © 2024.

Shared with Sunday Salon at https://readerbuzz.blogspot.com/.

Good Fiction

 Elif Shafak

There are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak relates a tale of several rivers and the people who are fascinated by these rivers. Throughout the novel, one metaphor comes up over and over: that a drop of water has a memory that can connect these disparate individuals just as their personal fascination with rivers connects them. We hear a lot about their experiences with the rivers of London in the 19th and 20th centuries; the rivers of ancient and modern Mesopotamia; and also a bit about the rivers of Paris and the bodies of water around Istanbul. Metaphorically their experiences are reflected in a single drop of water that lasts through the ages. 

I was especially interested in the author’s use of the water-drop metaphor, because it’s based on a completely discredited scientific theory, specifically that of  “the French immunologist Jacques Benveniste, who developed the theory of ‘water memory’ at the cost of his career and professional reputation.” (p. 475)  What fascinates me is that a scientific disaster like this one can make a good literary device! Other novelists,  poets, dancers, musicians, and narrative writers, have also used this bad science as a good artistic metaphor.

The Lamassus

Each of the characters in the novel has a relationship with the ancient mythical hybrid creatures called Lamassus. 

The author explains:

“Lamassus are protective spirits. Hewn from a single slab of limestone, such sculptures have the head of a man, the wings of an eagle and the hulking body of a bull or a lion. Endowed with the best qualities of each of their three species, they represent anthropoid intelligence, avian insight, and taurine or leonine strength. They are the guardians of gateways that open on to other realms.” (p. 7) 

 

Ancient Times: King Ashurbanipal 

Ashurbanipal was the king of the Assyrians in the seventh century BCE. He collected clay and stone tablets on which were written both mundane records of crops and accountancy and also tablets with verses from the epic poem Gilgamesh. Eventually, archaeologists were fascinated with finding these tablets and reconstructing this ancient poem. Here is an image from that era showing Ashurbanipal and his wife:

“Ashurbanipal and his wife are drinking wine and enjoying a picnic in an idyllic garden, whilst from the boughs of a tree nearby, amidst ripe fruits, dangles the decapitated head of their enemy, the Elamite king Teumman.” (p. 7)

 

Born in 1840: “King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums” — From the Thames to the Tigris River

Brought up in the most desperate poverty, the fancifully named “King Arthur of the Sewers and Slums” was a young man with some very unusual gifts of memory and recognition of patterns. Although without formal education, he grasps the meaning of the writing on the clay tablets — once owned by Ashurbanipal, now in the British museum — and becomes a scholar, eventually traveling to the site beside the Tigris River where he hopes to find some of the missing verses of Gilgamesh. Here are his thoughts as he approaches the site where he hopes to search for the clay tablets:

“If he closes his eyes he can imagine an utterly different view from thousands of years back and see his surroundings as if looking through cut glass: gardens lush as paradise, palms and grape vines, edible and ornamental plants; pine, olive, juniper, cypress, pomegranate and fig trees all around. Parrots gliding about among the branches, while tame lions roam below. Fruit of all kinds, luxurious orchards and, spreading far out into the distance, grain fields on four sides. All of it possible because thousands of slaves, their bodies tattooed with the identification marks of their owners, labored with pickaxes carving channels to bring water into this barren landscape, diverting the river from the mountains all the way into Nineveh. They were here, the kings and the canal builders. It all happened here—the ambitious dream of King Sennacherib, continued and expanded by his grandson King Ashurbanipal.” (p. 312)

 

Born in 2005: Narin in Turkey and Iraq

Member of a long-persecuted Christian minority in Turkey and Iraq, the child Narin seemed doomed throughout the chapters that described her life. The events she experienced took place in 2014, both in Turkey and later in the same area where King Ashurbanipal once reigned and where Arthur conducted his search for the missing verses of Gilgamesh. At age nine, she wants to know why her people are reviled, but her grandmother instead offers her food:

“Sensing her disappointment, Grandma opens another bag. Inside, wrapped in a cloth to keep them warm, are flatbreads—each spread with sheep’s milk butter and filled with herbed cheese. The old woman makes these every morning at the crack of dawn, settled on a stool in the courtyard. She pats the dough into round pieces, slaps them against the tandoor and bakes them until they are crisp and puffy. She knows how much the girl loves them.” (p. 42)

Born in the 1980s: Zaleekhah in London

Zaleekhah Clarke is a scientist who studies rivers. In 2018 her life is in flux as she has just moved out of  the apartment she shares with her husband, and moved to a houseboat docked in the Thames, another significant river. Her relationship with her uncle, who comes from an unspecified part of “The Levant” includes her views of many rivers in both London and the Middle East. Here is just one example of the water drop that remembers — a tear that she sheds as she first sees her new home, the houseboat:

“A tear falls on the back of her hand. Lacrimal fluid, composed of intricate patterns of crystallized salt invisible to the eye. This drop, water from her own body, containing a trace of her DNA, was a snowflake once upon a time or a wisp of steam, perhaps here or many kilometers away, repeatedly mutating from liquid to solid to vapor and back again, yet retaining its molecular essence. It remained hidden under the fossil-filled earth for tens if not thousands of years, climbed up to the skies and returned to earth in mist, fog, monsoon or hailstorm, perpetually displaced and relocated. Water is the consummate immigrant, trapped in transit, never able to settle.” (p. 77)

 

So Many Interesting Stories

My introductions to these major characters are very brief and I haven’t really showed you how interesting they are, maybe just that they are quite intriguing. It’s difficult to capture what really appeals to me in this novel, which is so different from the others I’ve read by Elif Shafak.

I’ll end my very selective and digressive review by quoting the passage about the water drop from the beginning of the novel:

“Dangling from the edge of the storm cloud is a single drop of rain—no bigger than a bean and lighter than a chickpea. For a while it quivers precariously—small, spherical and scared. How frightening it is to observe the earth below opening like a lonely lotus flower. Not that this will be the first time: it has made the journey before—ascending to the sky, descending to terra firma and rising heavenwards again—and yet it still finds the fall terrifying. 

“Remember that drop, inconsequential though it may be compared with the magnitude of the universe. Inside its miniature orb, it holds the secret of infinity, a story uniquely its own. When it finally musters the courage, it leaps into the ether. It is falling now—fast, faster. Gravity always helps. From a height of 3,080 feet it races down. Only three minutes until it reaches the ground.” (p. 4)

Review  © 2024 mae sander for maefood.blogspot.com

Insects that Spin

A spider made her web in the doorway to our deck. (Two commenters have mentioned that spiders
are not insects, just similar to them.)

The life cycle of monarch butterflies is given a lot of attention, as they fly away to Mexico in the fall.

The Silkworm and Other Creatures

A very poor treatment of a potentially interesting topic.

In a meandering and undisciplined book titled Silk (published 2023) author Aarathi Prasad presents the story of several insects and a few sea creatures that spin silken fibers. Best known is Bombyx Mori the scientific name for the silkworm, a domesticated insect that can live only in the environment provided by its human owners. For millennia, silk thread has been collected from generations of captive Bombyx and woven into cloth. The life and times of the insect are described in detail, but alas, the book is strikingly free of vivid images of the uses of silk fabrics. The book’s few illustrations mainly show portraits of men who studied the science of silk or the natural history of silkworms and other silk producing creatures.

Prasad covers a huge number of topics about silkworms, including a history of their cultivation in a number of places; the use of mulberry trees for their food; the types of cloth made from spun silk; the insects’ anatomy; the names and accomplishments of scientists who studied their anatomy; military uses for silk in such devices as bullet-proof clothing; medical uses for silk fiber and special-purpose fabric; experimental uses for silk, and much more. Further, the author describes several closely-related wild insects and how people managed to capture their silk for various purposes. Historic efforts to use the silk-like fibers produced by sessile sea animals, which use these fibers to cement themselves in place on the sea bed, is another long topic. The level of detail about the sea creatures is frustrating to read, as these efforts on the whole never succeeded in a practical way, so it’s more of a digression than a relevant topic for the book.

Prasad finds that almost any subject is worthy of a digression. Did a scientist who later worked on silk come from an interesting historic city? You’ll read a long description of the city which in fact had no relevance to silk at all. Did the silk from one of the sea creatures appear in a Roman grave or in a Medieval archaeology site? You’ll find out a whole lot of stuff about that. Why do we need a full paragraph describing all the features of a house in Pompeii where a silk item was found? Silk was used in one of the earliest examples of knitted fabric — does this mean we need to go back and hear about a completely irrelevant city where ANOTHER early knit item made of some other fabric was found? The indisciplined digressions are mostly maddening to read. 

Only one topic is missing that might seem quite relevant: there’s virtually no discussion of how silk textiles look or how they were used in fashion through the ages. There’s very little description of how the threads were spun, processed, dyed, or crafted into fashion items like clothing, upholstery or other uses like for tents or blankets; for example, I would like to have heard about just what textiles were displayed in the numerous silk stalls at the famous Crystal Palace Exposition that the author mentioned.

I did enjoy the one and only description of a popular wild silk fabric from a not-domesticated silkworm in the 19th century, which was shown at the famous Paris Exposition. I wish there had been more about such fabrics — I loved the fact that the wild silk fabric could be dyed fourteen “gem colors” that were “wonderfully named sapphire, emerald, topaz, pink topaz, spinel-ruby, beryl, jacinth, chrysoprase, amethyst, coral, gold-quartz, turquoise, ruby, and peridot, all laid out like jewels in a glass case in the great exhibition hall in the heart of Paris.” (p. 129)

The book is so silent about fashion that I didn’t even find out, from reading it, the functions that silk fabrics played in the fashions of various historic eras, other than generically for clothing. The only memorable description of a garment was of a dress worn by Queen Anne, wife of James I of England, which was embroidered with images of silkworms on the sleeves. The book didn’t include an illustration of this intriguing dress, but I found it online and here it is:

As you can tell, I think you should avoid reading this book. Review © 2024 mae sander.

NOTE ADDED Sept. 10: A review of this book by Jenny Uglow titled “Worms’ Work” summarizes all the interesting parts and leaves out all the irrelevant parts. It’s behind a paywall, but if you can get to it here’s the link:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/09/19/worms-work-silk-aarathi-prasad/

Around Ann Arbor

A Few Graffiti We Have Seen

Dexter, Michigan: a cute tiny mural by famous Ann Arbor artist David Zinn.
Unlike his usual chalk drawings, this one is durable and has been in place for over a year.

Near the railroad tracks on North Main, Ann Arbor. Various graffiti on RR boxes.
I know nothing whatsoever about what these mean, I hope they aren’t offensive!

The Wrecking Ball is Coming

Everyone recognizes the unique dome on this old house quite near the UofM campus.
Like many older houses that have long been student rentals, it will soon be demolished and replaced by a high-rise apartment building, also catering to students. Ironically, after years of neglect this house seems to have recently been very nicely repainted.

Another view of the construction site showing the beautiful old stone porch that will soon be rubble.
Does this mean our town is losing its character and its connections to its history? Maybe it means that.
In case you are wondering about the shoes: after graduating, students throw their shoes over the utility wires.

On Our Walks

A view of Argo Dam from the far side of the river. An expanded park is being constructed here.

Not far from the Huron River: a tree has begun to turn red and the vegetation is looking very much like autumn.

 All photos © mae sander 2024

Shared with Sami’s Monday Murals.

Recent Reading

Burma Sahib by Paul Theroux (published in February, 2024) is a novel based on the true experiences of a man named Eric Blair in Burma approximately 100 years ago. The story begins when Blair is 19 years old, recently graduated from the famed prep school Eton, where he was not at all happy. He has gone to Burma to become a policeman and an officer of the British Empire. This is in stark contrast to most of the other Eton graduates who would have enrolled at Oxford or gone on to something else very upper class, but Blair wasn’t upper class. His father had been a rather lowly civil servant in charge of a minor aspect of the British-state-run opium business in a nearby part of the empire. 

Theroux selects wonderful detail about life in colonial Burma. For example, I really enjoyed his descriptions of the occasional native meals that Blair tried, as well as very British food that the Indian cooks prepared: food that they wouldn’t eat themselves because they were vegetarians. For example, a lunch of “boiled fowl, mashed potatoes, and a slimy vegetable no one could name.” (p. 33).

Food often contrasts to the political environment in which Blair exists; consider this:

“And the other memory was of an occurrence at the end of the meal (veal chop, mash, brown gravy, bottled peas). The boat that had brought the arresting officers had also brought provisions: crates of wine, potted meat, packets of water biscuits, tins of salmon, and a chest of cheeses.   

 

“Wearing gloves, the khidmatgar placed a cheese board on the dining table next to Oliphant. Grasping a cheese knife, Oliphant tapped it on a large wedge of Stilton, lowering his head so that his slicked-down hair gleamed in the lamplight, scrutinizing the Stilton. All the cheeses on the board were sweating slightly, a moist double Gloucester, a damp cheddar, a softening brie…. 

 

“There were more shouts, a yelping from one person, a woman’s shrieks, and Oliphant paused. … And that was the moment Blair heard the ruckus—yells from the precincts of the pagoda, the frantic jangling of bells, hoarse shouted orders from the arresting officers. Oliphant did not look up but instead studied the cheese.” (p. 144) 

Basically, being a policeman does not suit Blair at all; he finds that he doesn’t fit in at all with the colonial society and its repressive racist greed. He also doesn’t fit in with any of the various Asian people he gets to know, though unlike most of his fellow policemen, he learns the local language and has a lot of sympathy for the people. In fact, he is stymied by the rampant prejudices, the cruelty, and the pettiness that he finds all around him. 

Blair wants to write poetry, but is never satisfied with his efforts, and begins to write stories about his experiences. I loved reading about this five-year period in Blair’s life. His growing awareness of people and relationships, as well as his many frustrations and humiliations, are portrayed in a very fascinating and effectively dramatic way — much of this due to the imagination and inventiveness of the novelist. As you may know, Eric Blair was a very real person who did in fact become a writer. His nom de plume was George Orwell.

The Soul of an Octopus (published 2016) is the third book by Sy Montgomery that I have read. The others were about turtles and dolphins. But in fact all of them are really about Sy Montgomery. In The Soul of an Octopus, of course, you can learn a lot about the lives of octopuses that the author encountered — especially a few of them that live in a large aquarium in Boston. You can learn a bit about natural history, about scuba diving to see more of these creatures, about the dedicated caretakers who work in the aquarium, and about scientists who study the sea. But most of all, you learn about the author. I wasn’t as conscious of this in the earlier books of hers that I read but in retrospect I think it was the same. Not that it’s bad, that’s just the way it is.

I expected to enjoy The Seventh Veil of Salome by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (published August, 2024). I was very disappointed. It’s a soppy story about Hollywood. Unlike Moreno-Garcia’s other novels that I’ve read and liked, this one didn’t have any magical realism at all. Not recommended!

I’m also rereading Moby-Dick, in the aftermath of my trip to the Galapagos.

Reviews © 2024 mae sander

Shared with Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz.

 

The Unique History of the Galapagos Islands

The Recent Origin of the Islands

Cone-shaped mountain peaks are evidence of the recent volcanic origin of the islands. A geological hot-spot in the Pacific Ocean produced the chain of islands. The oldest islands are around 5 million years old; eruptions continue to the present.

Signs of recent volcanic activity appear on many islands. Here, you can see a lava tube with both of the major types of lava: a’a and pahoehoe.

A crevasse in the ground: another sign of recent volcanic activity.

We enjoyed all these beautiful volcanic landscapes during our voyage from August 17-24.

Life Begins on the Isolated Island

Five million years is very brief in geological time! The new islands, being very far from the South American continent, had no life forms at first. Slowly, birds landed on the island, some blown by storms, many by flying there on their own. Plants and small creatures arrived from the mainland on large floating tangles of branches and roots; birds also can carry seeds or insects on their feet or feathers. In time, these new residents adapted in ways that haven’t really been observed in other places. 

During the last 300 years, humans have been frequent visitors, and a small number of people eventually settled in the Galapagos. The current population is around 32,000. With human activity, some native species have become extinct, and other species have been introduced such as goats and rats. Recently, the fascinating variety of birds, iguanas, giant tortoises, plants, and so on have become a major attraction for tourists. 

From our own photos, here are a few images of the very numerous endemic species in the Galapagos taken during  our two trips to the islands in 2010 and 2024.

Flightless cormorants, unique to the Galapagos (2010)

Endemic Lava Gulls, rarest gulls in the world.

Around 18 species of finches are found only on the Galapagos Islands. Here’s one example.

The Galapagos Penguin is also unique to the islands. (2010)

A giant tortoise at the Darwin Research Station

At the Darwin Research Station many of the endangered tortoises are being bred to avoid the extinction of yet more species. Before human disruption of the island’s fauna, at least one unique tortoise species lived on every major island. Unfortunately tortoises made perfect food for the whalers and other sailors who stopped at the islands in the 18th and 19th centuries, and populations were wiped out.

Galapagos Sea Lions, another endemic species that we have seen on many islands.

Marine Iguanas — perhaps the strangest of the endemics in the Galapagos. Darwin called them “Imps of Darkness.”

Sallylightfoot Crabs are everywhere on the rocky shore; they are also found in many other locations.

I don’t know anything about plants, but this is one of the evolved plants that is unique to the Galapagos.

Charles Darwin and the Study of Natural Selection

Len and Darwin at the Darwin Research Station.

In 1835, Charles Darwin spent several weeks visiting some of the islands in the Galapagos, which were at that time uninhabited by humans. He was traveling as a naturalist and companion to the captain of the ship H.M.S. Beagle, whose purpose was to make nautical charts and collect native species of plants and animals. His work was eventually published under the long title:

On the Origin of Species

BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION, OR THE

PRESERVATION OF FAVOURED RACES IN THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE.

You are probably aware of the history of Darwin’s careful observations and life-long effort to understand how the emergence of the unique plants and animals of the Galapagos as well as the species found in many other places he visited. You probably also know of the controversies about his theories and their eventual acceptance by scientists and natural historians. Many ensuing research projects in the scientific fields that Darwin invented have and vindicated Darwin’s accomplishments.

One evening we cruised past the island of Daphne Major while hearing a talk about an important project done there.

Daphne Major was the site of some very important research to understand natural selection in action. From 1973 until 1989 two evolutionary biologists, Peter and Rosemary Grant, lived there and intensively studied the various species of finches on the island. They and their students discovered many new details about natural selection and speciation in the birds they observed. Their work was the subject of an award-winning book titled The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner. 

I read Weiner’s book some time ago, and I was very interested in seeing the actual island that was involved, though from the deck of the ship one can’t actually see the flat volcanic mountain top where the birds and researchers lived. While we were traveling on the ship I borrowed the somewhat dog-eared copy of the book from the ship’s library and began reading it again. (Having a carefully selected library of natural history, geography, and biology books is a key amenity of Natural Geographic voyages!)

Virtually the entire territory of the Galapagos Islands belongs to the Ecuadorian Galapagos National Park. On Santa Cruz Island we visited the park headquarters and the center for preserving threatened species, especially the giant tortoises. The park has a very well-organized and seriously enforced program to protect these unique resources. The naturalists and staff of the ship take these rules very seriously.

More about the Island’s History

For a brief history of the islands and of Darwin’s visit see this summary from the Galapagos Conservancy. 

The human history of the islands is very brief: in the 1960s there were only 2000 residents, and today there are only 32,000. A few settlements date from the early 20th century, and the airport on Baltra Island was built as an American base during World War II.

The inhabitants today mainly work in the tourist industry, with a very small amount of agriculture and fishing. Needless to say, many volumes of history, scientific research, and accounts of natural history chronicle the fascinating story of the islands.

Where we were.

Blog post and photos © 2010, 2024 mae sander

Mercado Artesanal La Mariscal in Quito

On the last day of our visit to Ecuador, we had plenty of time because our plane didn’t leave until 11:30 PM.
We spent the day mostly at our hotel, but we did take a taxi to the Artisan Market around a mile from the hotel.

Market stalls sell hats, trinkets, sweaters, wood carvings, embroidered dresses, and much more

In the courtyard of the market. Food vendors sell ice cream, hot dogs, and everything
else you would expect.

Almost the first shop we saw was selling very attractive carved wood masks. 

After walking around for a wile, we realized that we liked them the best. We returned and bought one!

Our newest mask. 

The finest hand-woven Panama hats are made by artisans in Ecuador. 
They were incorrectly named Panama hats because they were shipped through Panama in the 19th century.

On the Market Buildings: A Series of Murals

And then we went home…

After our visit to the market, we returned to the hotel, where we had arranged for a very late check-out.
We had a pleasant lunch in the hotel cafe called the Quito Deli. They also sell sweets, coffee beans, and bottles of wine.

A lovely ending to a delightful trip.

Blog post and photos © 2024 mae sander

Shared with Sami’s Monday Murals

and Elizabeth’s Blog Tea Party.