Diary of a Mad Natural Historian

My friendly neighborhood spidey-librarian got me a copy of Six Legs Better - a book I’ve been interested in reading since Pluvialis pointed me at Charlotte Sleigh in a comment she made. I’m only 60 or so pages into it, but so far it’s really interesting - an examination of how the study of ants has linked back to larger topics in science and society. A nice middle ground between faux-Kuhnian relativism and ivory tower idealized science (Pluvi - what’s the right word for the latter?):

The scientists and naturalists discussed in this book studied ants for their own sake, and often did so with remarkable passion. They did not merely adopt ants instrumentally as vehicles for social and political agendas. Yet neither could they step outside the cultural frames within which they operated. In each case there was a two-way traffic between science and broader culture, with the culture shaping the questions posed by scientists and the scientific answers in turn directing cultural views, reinforcing or slowly altering conceptions of the natural and its significance for the human condition. *

To go along with the reading, I moved The Naked Jungle to the top of my Netflix queue. I gotta admit - all I remembered of the movie (from a Saturday morning creature feature long ago) were the !attack of the marabunta! scenes - turns out the movie is mostly about Christopher Leiningen’s psycho-sexual confusion regarding his mail-order bride. I can’t decide what the right frame is to put around Chuck Heston’s scenery-chewing - 50’s? Turn of the century? 1954’s idea of 1901? Or how it looks from where I sit right now? I couldn’t for the life of me move out of my right-here-right-now reaction to Leiningen’s problem - in a phrase, what a douchebag. Leiningen freaks when he finds out that his talented, pleasant and very attractive new wife is a widow - yes kids, another man has already had carnival knowledge of her. This is an especially serious issue because Leiningen is a virgin. I guess he has some 1st time performance concerns. Pinhead. I’ve been listening to a lot of Elvis Costello recently - Mystery Dance fits, but I really like these two bits from Two Little Hitlers:

You call selective dating
For some effective mating

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You say you’ll never know him
He’s an unnatural man
He doesn’t want your pleasure
He wants as no one can
He wants to know the names of
All those he’s better than

But, of course, the ants (standing in for the rainforest/Ma Nature) are held off, and Joanna Leiningen’s bravery wins her husbands heart. Yay!

Went off to the Manchvegas herp show on Saturday to pick up various and sundry food items. Andy the phasmid guy was there and had some young Macleay’s Spectres (Extatosoma tiaratum) - I couldn’t resist. I’ll post some pix when she’s a little bigger. In reading up on their natural history, I was semi-surprised to find a commensal relationship with - you got it - ants:

The outside material of E. tiaratum eggs consists of lipids and other organic compounds that ants identify as food. They carry these eggs to their colony, consume the edible outer portion, and dump the intact eggs into their waste piles.

Newly-hatched E. tiaratum nymphs are ant mimics and resemble the insects in whose nest they are born. Their aposematic pattern — orange head, white collar, the rest black — mimics the ant genus Leptomyrmex and makes them appear toxic. Although most adult stick insects are notoriously slow, these nymphs are speedy, active, and quickly make their way to the trees.*

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Last, but not least, this post over at BLDGBLOG caused me to immediately order Ant Farm: Living Archive 7(yes, I know I’m pushing it, connection-wise). It came in on Saturday - I haven’t had a chance to do more than leaf through it, but chapter/section/part III looks esp good - “Projects for a New Mobility”. Ferrocement! Inflatable structures! Media/culture jamming! Info on a current Ant Farm project here.

The Comics Reporter spins off a variation on a meme:

Leave Plain = Things I don’t have
Make Bold = Things I do have
Italics = I have some but probably not enough (optional)
Underline = I don’t agree I need this (optional)

1. Something From The ACME Novelty Library
2. A Complete Run Of Arcade
3. Any Number Of Mini-Comics
4. At Least One Pogo Book From The 1950s
5. A Barnaby Collection
6. Binky Brown and the Holy Virgin Mary
7. As Many Issues of RAW as You Can Place Your Hands On
8. A Little Stack of Archie Comics
9. A Suite of Modern Literary Graphic Novels
10. Several Tintin Albums
11. A Smattering Of Treasury Editions Or Similarly Oversized Books
12. Several Significant Runs of Alternative Comic Book Series
13. A Few Early Comic Strip Collections To Your Taste
14. Several “Indy Comics” From Their Heyday
15. At Least One Comic Book From When You First Started Reading Comic Books
16. At Least One Comic That Failed to Finish The Way It Planned To
17. Some Osamu Tezuka
18. The Entire Run Of At Least One Manga Series
19. One Or Two 1970s Doonesbury Collections
20. At Least One Saul Steinberg Hardcover
21. One Run of A Comic Strip That You Yourself Have Clipped
22. A Selection of Comics That Interest You That You Can’t Explain To Anyone Else
23. At Least One Woodcut Novel
24. As Much Peanuts As You Can Stand
25. Maus
26. A Significant Sample of R. Crumb’s Sketchbooks
27. The original edition of Sick, Sick, Sick.
28. The Smithsonian Collection Of Newspaper Comics
29. Several copies of MAD
30. A stack of Jack Kirby 1970s Comic Books
31. More than a few Stan Lee/Jack Kirby 1960s Marvel Comic Books
32. A You’re-Too-High-To-Tell Amount of Underground Comix
33. Some Calvin and Hobbes
34. Some Love and Rockets
35. The Marvel Benefit Issue Of Coober Skeber
36. A Few Comics Not In Your Native Tongue
37. A Nice Stack of Jack Chick Comics
38. A Stack of Comics You Can Hand To Anybody’s Kid
39. At Least A Few Alan Moore Comics
40. A Comic You Made Yourself
41. A Few Comics About Comics
42. A Run Of Yummy Fur
43. Some Frank Miller Comics
44. Several Lee/Ditko/Romita Amazing Spider-Man Comic Books
45. A Few Great Comics Short Stories
46. A Tijuana Bible
47. Some Weirdo
48. An Array Of Comics In Various Non-Superhero Genres
49. An Editorial Cartoonist’s Collection or Two
50. A Few Collections From New Yorker Cartoonists

Guess I just never recovered from my first encounter with Cooch Cooty…

I just updated the Booklist section of the roll with the current queued stack. There may be an addition tomorrow - keep your fingers crossed for me. S - the Hyperion books were a blast - thanks.

“One should not talk to a skilled hunter about what is forbidden by the Buddha” -Hsiang-yen

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A gray fox, female, nine pounds three ounces.
39 5/8″ long with tail.
Peeling skin back (Kai
reminded us to chant the Shingyo first)
cold pelt. crinkle; and musky smell
mixed with dead-body odor starting.

Stomach content: a whole ground squirrel well chewed
plus one lizard foot
and somewhere from inside the ground squirrel a bit of aluminum foil.

The secret.
and the secret hidden deep in that.

- Gary Snyder

Signor Poletti puts up a kaiju Fickrset. Worth a look or two or three (also - check out COOP’s vinyls in comments).

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Bookride runs down prices on one of my top ‘want it, but can’t afford it’ books - Ricky Jay’s Cards as Weapons. Sigh.

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Peacay, at the always excellent BibliOdyssey, posts one that’s right up my alley:

The book’s [Topographische und naturwissenschaftliche Reisen durch Java] author was an enigmatic character by the name of Franz Junghuhn (1809-1864). He overcame depression and a suicide attempt as a medical student, a prison sentence following a pistol duel (he escaped), and a stint in the French Foreign Legion on his path to becoming one of the foremost naturalists in 19th century Indonesia.

This  plate reminds me a bit of a much later artist - O’Keefe:

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Click over and read - beautiful illustrations and a fascinating character.

A bookstore down the road a ways gets a notice in Bookride:

A bookseller on Route 1 in Porstmouth NH recently got in the papers yet again - he makes Bernard look like John Inman (’Are you Being Served?’)–he charges a $5 browsing fee and has been known to knock out customers who venture in his shop without permission. I had heard of him over the years as an example of a dealer who had seriously lost the plot and have always been amazed that he stays in business.

Go and RTWT - the man is nuts. I was warned away from there 15 years ago by a friend who told me about the browsing fee and the generally threatening (”Why should I sell you my books, you POS?”) vibe. Portsmouth Herald article here.

• Via Bruce Sterling, a great series of summer reading lists.Lots of interesting books - two that I’m going to put in my queue: The Resurrectionist and Dark Mission. Feral House, publishers of Dark Mission, print some wild stuff - this looks to be no exception.

This weird yet well-researched book by a former science advisor to Walter Cronkite argues that NASA is an occult control system, created by Nazi SS officers and high-ranking U.S. Free Masons, that discovered alien technological artifacts on the moon. Hoagland believes the “secret government” has been reverse-engineering alien technology for decades.

• One of the folks tapped for summer reading materials in the link above is Paul D. Miller, DJ Spooky :: That Subliminal Kid. I heard an interview with him a few days ago - I especially like his notion of “artist as search engine”. I think there’s a sense where this has always been true - part of the artist’s job is pattern recognition - pulling something (at best, something unexpected) out of the ground. An MP3 of the interview is here and you can click here to get to Miller’s Hail the Jewel in the Blue Lotus mix (Buddhist  hip hop).
• Another dispatch from the digital edge - The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete. Not sure how I feel about tossing theory over the side…  Update - an example of scientific petabyte computing - the Large Hadron Collider - 2Gb of data every 10 seconds.

Apropos of absolutely nothing, a picture of Barbie finials on a miniature trebuchet.

I’m going to take up Kevin Kelly’s challenge and list some things I read that changed my life. The list is short - my feeling is that if the book does not immediately come to mind, it’s probably disqualified (I do reserve the right to add, though - “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of petty minds” and all).

• My Side of the Mountain - I read this when I was 10 or so - I already loved the outdoors; this book gave me a hunter-gatherer ideal to aspire to.
• Stranger in a Strange Land/The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - I’m cheating and combining two of Heinlein’s best into one entry.  I know there’s a lot to argue about in these books, but at thirteen they were a pretty heady mix of libertarianism, sex, and confirmation of suspicions that everything you know is wrong. Got me ready for the anti-authoritarian streak (persists to this day) reinforced by:
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest - I read it in high school - a time when questioning authority needs to happen. It did - never wore off. It also gave me a taste for signs, symbols and layers; thank you, Noni Randolph (HS English teacher). Ms. Randolph asked me once to count the number of fishermen that go with McMurphy on the party boat trip, smiled, and walked off. Obviously, I still remember the moment, and the moments afterward.
• The Whole Earth Catalogs - you are not alone - in fact, there are a ton of people way ahead of you.
• A Rage for Falcons - relit the fire that My Side of the Mountain kindled. “This [falconry] is do-able - it’s something you [I] can pursue!”

I’m starting to get ready for a weekend trip the Designer and I are taking to the North American Amphibian Conference. As if to spur me on, peakay posted plates from the ‘Metamorphosibus Insectorum Surinamensium’.

Here’s a detail (the canonical birdeater) from a handcolored plate in an edition he links to - click to see the whole thing.

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I’m going to try a little moblogging from the road, but having fun at the conference is the first priority, so it may be Sunday or Monday before things start to appear here or on my Flickrsteam.

It’s here!

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Chabon! Stevenson! Di Filippo! Moorcock! This is going to be fun.