Fresh

Fresh stuff in Anna Tambour and Others this month, many surprises, from this quote in the section "I hate quotations" (Ralph Waldo Emerson's most quotable words):

"Maudeen was special in many ways. Her song began with a low-pitched creeeeak like a rusty iron cemetery gate being forced open."

- Sue Weaver, The Donkey Companion: Selecting, Training, Breeding, Enjoying & Caring for Donkeys

— toThe
virtuous medlar circle
thoroughly bletted featured fiction, "The Secret Origin of Spin-man" by Andrew Drilon (reprinted from the recently released Philippine Speculative Fiction IV edited by Dean Francis Alfar and Nikki Alfar).

See also

More Irresistibles
Amongst them,
Frogs: the Amphibian World Revealed by Thomas Marent will take you to frogs you wouldn't have thought possible in anyone's imagination. Glass frogs, anyone?

J. Freedan's "Over-analyzing fiction writing structure and why it is silly" with its glorious "Silly lists that are also meaningless" would be my tattoo of choice to cover the bodies of millions of lecturers—by law.

There's lots more, from my favourite picture of torture to the search for Brazilian beer that doesn't taste like Bud Light.

And the picture for this month of winter is a paparazzo snap of bletting medlars. They couldn't run, they couldn't hide. No botox for them. Delicious!

Decoding scripts old and new

Recommended reading:
Decoding Antiquity: Eight scripts that can't be read by Andrew Robinson and the 75+ comments in New Scientist.

My first reaction on reading the title was Where's a pharmacist when you need one? but that's a cheap quip. I thought that now that prescriptions are computer-generated (in more ways than one, but that's another subject) we must be losing people who can read illegible handwriting, but that's hardly a loss anyone misses. I was wrong.

Doctors' bad handwriting. It's time to talk about it, pleads pharmacist Jim Plagakis. "Handwriting is a huge huge problem," he writes. "It is the turd in the punchbowl that everyone sees and no one talks about."

It sure causes problems for pharmacists when they can't decipher and guess wrong. How Safe is Your Prescription? Wrong drugs, incorrect dosages are more common than you think," by David Woods at consumer.com comes down hard on pharmacists, not the scrawlers who might as well throw entrails, they are so up to date. Why as a patient, would you put up with slop on paper when your health's on the stake?

How much handwriting is there any more anyway? How is your handwriting these days? Do you need a pharmacist to read your notes?

For other adventures in decoding, see my Onuspedia entry for James Godolphin.

Bark undersides

The underside (inner side?) of bark is often more interesting than the outside. While still on the tree but not quite attached, it attracts many spiders such as the huntsman (one of whom appeared on this blog a few days ago, in a space that should have been devoted to beetles) to attach egg sacs. The small space between bark and wood makes a perfect nursery, and prized shelter for many. But even as forest detritus, bark undersides are worth prizing.

This piece (5 cm x 2 cm) has been shed by a coastal banksia, a genus of 76 species and innumerable surprises. Banksias have spectacular bark all the way through, no matter which species. The woods are quite unusual, too. Some, such as that of B. integrifolia, if the bark is shed, look as if they are covered with fine netting. The heartwood is pulpy and could remind you of a cycad.

Every banksia tree and bush is a character, especially the "old man banksias". These gnarled trees have enormous flower heads that invite imagination, to say the least. They don't feel as if they could be made of anything but 1960s plastic. But the "fruits" could give you dreams. They make the trees look inhabited by hairy many-eyed creatures with heavy eyelids and no shyness – they stare. They always look friendly to me, but "big bad Banksia men" star in some of the most beloved stories and illustrations by May Gibbs.

Inspiration

Case moths feelings and feltings

Their faces are incapable of registering disgust that we can recognise, but this case moth caterpillar has picked up house to move from the top of a balcony railing to the underside. It measures less than 5 mm (3/16 inch) to the top of its tower.

from one of my favourite books,
Life Stories of Australian Insects by Mabel N. Brewster, Agnes A. Brewster, and Naomi Crouch, Dymock's Book Arcade, Sydney, 1946:

FAMILY PSYCHIDAE (Case Moths) These are moths whose larvae live within silken causes, covered either with pieces of stick or leaves, attached or just more or less smooth. In walking, the caterpillar has only the head and three pairs of horny legs without the case, and this part of the body is consequently hardened, and is much darker in colour than the rest of the body which is protected by the case. It drags the case along as it walks. The method of constructing the case is worth observing. We reared some larvae of the large case moth from the egg. At first they resembled tiny black threads, but when they moved we saw that each had a slender web attached to itself. The spinning commenced at once, till a tiny bag was made. This increased in size, but the larva worked along the upper edge, much as one proceeds in knitting a sock. The growth of the case keeps pace with the growth of the larva. The upper edge is always loose, so that it can be attached to any object. To strengthen the case, pieces of sticks, leaves, pine needles, etc., may be woven in.

Everyone has noticed these case moths and the wonderful arrangement of the 'sticks' or leaves. The inside of the case is smooth and silky. If the caterpillar be placed in a box with a glass lid, one will soon see regular transverse lines of short silken threads, not unlike railway sleepers, all over the surface of the glass. These are the 'foot-holds' of the caterpillar to enable it to move over the smooth surface of the glass. It does it so quickly that one can hardly see the placing of these threads. The larva pupates within the case, and then a beautiful, soft, white, silky 'blanket' is made to protect the pupa. The female never leaves the case—she is wingless and lays the eggs within it. The male emerges from the end of the case, the pupal shell being pushed right out, and hangs from the tip of the case. The male moth is winged and is not very conspicuous. The tiny larvae let themselves down from the case by long silken threads.

Oeceticus elongata, the largest case moth, the larva of which forms a very large case, with pieces of stick sewn in, is of orange-brown and black colour. There is the faggot case, leaf case, and the beautiful little ribbed case. The 'moths' are popularly named from the type of case woven by the larvae. Interesting experiments can be made to show the weaving powers of the larvae. We cut the case of the Oeceticus from end to end. Almost instantly the larva drew it together at the upper end; then wove the edges so neatly and so closely that it was hard to detect where the incision had been made. It is curious, too, to find that there are careless individuals who just cobble their cases together; we came across this three or four times. Another time we made a case of flannel in the form of the Oeceticus case. We removed the larva from its own case and left it overnight. In the morning we found it was comfortably within the flannel case. Then we placed its own case back again. It vacated the flannel one and went back to its own case. We split open the flannel case and found it was lined with a layer of silky threads . . . The Oecticus elongata has a very long existence as a caterpillar—a year, and they can live without food supply for months.

The occupants of these cases were gone when I found them. They are a faggot case and an Oeceticus elongata.
It's no wonder that its own case would be far preferred to anything we could construct. As a feltmaker, for years I've made what to our touch, is a very soft fabric from fine Merino wool.

Imagine the silken luxury inside. Even the most pea-under-a-dozen-mattress-sensitive princess is a lout with skin as thin as cork bark compared to the demands of these rather common caterpillars. And every one of these larvae spin and weave finer than the most enchanted princess.

Australia moves to North Pole position

A new world order?

A dung beetle's performance art

Dung beetles often fly into water troughs in the wee hours, and come day, are still treading water. They, like this * fiddler beetle nectar-eater who was almost fatally charmed by a water gauge,have strong legs, thank beauty!Though they might not have the egos they should have in the modern world, these Australian fiddler beetles could brag about the time they won "Bug of the Month" ("the first Bug of the Month not found in the U.S.") on the splendid What's That Bug site produced by "Lisa Anne and Daniel". LA and D have great taste, for they say: "The truth is, the site is an art project."

Art lovers everywhere, unite!












* This common name must have changed from "fiddle" to "fiddler", though why we should support the change is a mystery to me. I agree with the Chews of Brisbane who call it the "fiddle beetle", as they also know the pipe from the one who plays the tune. What the Eupoecila australasiae isn't is the rose chafer (a sloppy name for quite a few beetles, it seems, including Cetonia aurata, C. floricola and also Macrodactylus subspinosus), though some call this beetle a rose chafer too. "Fiddle" is a most accurate descriptive name, until such time that evolution changes its looks to resemble a fiddler. Or say, a gardener who rubs roses.

What should a fiddle crab look like, and a fiddler beetle? Then there is the infrequently seen Welsh rarebit beetle vs. that common introduced pest to Australia, the Welsh rabbit beetle.

Burma doesn't have to be an example of "the more things change..."

"It was sad, was the general opinion, but what can one do!"

"Diplomats set to meet with Suu Kyi"
"Burma had allowed diplomats from all 30 foreign embassies to observe the trial on Wednesday but the move was for one day only, the diplomat said." - RTE News

"I discovered with horror that the people who where gathered here to build a better, nobler, more beautiful (and so on) world, stank of the old and rotten one. They were the same statesmen and diplomats who had forced the world into its present lethargy, pompous representatives of sovereign states. The same old methods. The same holy traditions and noble intrigues. The same beautiful, sanctimonious speeches."

It's been years since this.

"I beg of you, how could the mighty nations of the world who have inscribed on their banners the rights of man, democracy and other rights and freedoms, intervene in the sovereign internal affairs of another country?"

Sovereignty, of the people, or the scum on top?

"They did not want to realise that our world had become one and indivisible."

You can do something about Burma.

NOTE: All the italicized quotations are by B.N. Jubal, from The Smile of Herschale Handle, Currawong Publishing Co., Sydney, 1947. Jubal was a new Australian, having escaped from Austria.

Giles Watson's poetry–"little celebrations of the secret"

Carrion beetles Ptomaphila perlata
hunting maggots on a dead rat

These pictures have been posted here as inspiration for Giles Watson and others, not excluding the world auto industry (Imagine an all-terrain war/disaster transporter with this armour and cab-chassis independence).

"All of these reactions of the recently initiated are, of course, so much better than the indifference of the many, who for the most part are unaware that the mysteries even exist. These poems have been written not in an attempt to decipher the code or unravel the mystery, for this is largely impossible. They are merely little celebrations of the secret."
— Giles Watson

Giles Watson's subjects and his poems are very much alike—wonders too little known. Some of his poems (plus "source material" commentaries as intriguing as his mind) are on his site:
Cryptogams Poems—The Secret Lives of Spore-Bearing Plants.
Some accompany his stunning pictures here on Flickr.

He writes not only of what he sees, feels, and has often tasted—

I remember them so well, still sizzling in their buttered bath,
In a white dish, and the way their pink-white flesh slithered through my lips,
A paroxysm of sense. The melting in the mouth of my first initiation.

but of the soil that clings to these things—soil composed of tales about them, dense, ancient and complex as peat; history that surrounds them, be they small as a spore or large and unmapped as the insides of a certain tree; reputation fearsome, musty, and beloved. Always, and unusually for one who writes, he stands away from the centre of attention, even when he says:

There is more flesh
here, than in many louder tongues.

I asked Giles to write a poem for my recent post,
Bryophytes and grandmothers and many other things
and his response is too good for this blog. One day I hope to own a book by him—a type of book that as a class, is more viewed with horror (the look away or flight reflex) by most people than any scene of carrion beetles feasting: that most overrated, undersold "slim volume" (when written by a manufactured poet).

A book of poems by Giles Watson, however, would be as surprisingly beautiful as a carrion beetle, as irresistible as something glittering in a hole. A collection by him would remind me of another of my favourite books-to-save-if-I-could-only-save-a-bagful—Alan L. Mackay's A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (Institute of Physics Publishing, Bristol and Philadelphia, 1991)—not to mention another small and powerful volume that influenced Mackay.

A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations is a unique, idiosyncratic collection that includes many great, witty poems that I've never seen anywhere else. From the Preface to the First Edition:

". . . after work in industry, I was able to join Bernal's crystallographic laboratory at Birkbeck College, London. The years in which Bernal was active were immensely stimulating. Besides the revolution in biology all kinds of social, scientific and political movements had their base there and the decrepit buildings which housed the laboratory were an important international and intercultural crossroads . . . Bernal's example of the excitement and wholeness of life remains an inspiration. However, it is to my father, whom a book of poetry helped to carry through the Great War, from September 1916 to the end, that I would wish to dedicate this selection."
- Alan L Mackay, Department of Crystallography, Birkbeck College, London

Are all your favourite poems, too, written by people obsessed by the curiouser—mathematicians, accountants, physicists, school teachers, trash collectors . . . ? Anyone but a certifiable poet?

At the moment, we cannot pack a volume of Giles Watson's poetry, and must settle for the web. Since he also left some "little celebrations" in the comments section of another of my posts, I'm reprinting them here so you might notice them:

Three poems by Giles Watson

I'm glad you have written an ode to the dung beetle. Life would be a lot poorer without them. I hope you don't mind me posting three poems at once, but here are three more insects whose reputations have, I am sure, been unjustly maligned:


YELLOW DUNG FLY

It doubled as our larder,
This horse turd where we grew;
One day we pupated
And another day we flew.

We have hairy legs,
Dung-coloured are our bristles,
We fly and look for fresh new piles
Among the grass and thistles.

When you walk by we’ll gad about,
A merry cloud of yellow
Where the dung is steaming
Or where it has grown mellow.

When we were grubs, we gobbled dung
Like all the other flies,
But now we’re homing in on them
Fixed in our compound eyes,

And all the scatophagic flies
We’ll gobble where they sit,
For now that we are fully grown
We’re sick of eating shit.


Source material: Despite its scientific name, the adult dung-fly Scathophaga stercoraria does not eat dung, but preys on other species of fly feeding on it. The larvae develop in the dung. The males, yellow in colour, are the most commonly observed; the females are rarer and greyer. This song was inspired by observation of their habits on Port Meadow in Oxford, where there is a ready supply of horse dung. They are equally partial to flies which feed on cow-pats.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

BED BUG

I am of fine lineage; my forebears
Skulked in the crevices of London
In 1670. Aristophanes knew them too.

To prevent our coming is impossible;
A greatcoat holds enough of us,
In its hems, to stock a house.

We keep to the cracks by day.
Or secrete ourselves in old socks;
By night we suck your blood.

You can stop every nail hole with putty,
Every crack with plaster of Paris,
Smother the ceiling with white lime,

Dip the bedstead, disassembled
In turpentine or corrosive sublimate,
And sprinkle the sheets also, to no avail.

Though your house reeks and drips with spirits,
I’ll crawl the crack between your legs;
You’ll be scratching by the morning.


Source material: Curtis’s British Entomology, 569.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

LOUSE

Sylla the dictator fell to our host
As Pliny’s discourse will tell you -
He scratched and he groaned
And he gave up the ghost -
And if that’s not enough to repel you:
We have lobster claws
We have bloodsucking jaws
For tapping our guts to your pulses,
And our dinner’s apparent,
For our bellies transparent
Make it easy to watch peristalsis.


Source material: Pliny records that Pherecydes Sirius and Sylla the dictator both died phthiriasis, a disease caused by louse infestation, and Quintus Serenus adds: “Great Sylla too the fatal scourge hath known;/ Slain by a host far mightier than his own.” See G. Shaw and F.P. Nodder, The Naturalist’s Miscellany, 1789-1813.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Thank you, Giles Watson.

Find more of his marvelous poetry here.

NOTE: All poems and commentary by Giles Watson are copyright © Giles Watson and are not to be reprinted without his permission.

Well

The weakness of her flesh starts it. Forget passion. This is bones, ligaments, nerves, viscera, screaming in anarchy. Sickness--funny word to sum up complete subjugation. Pain, that overwhelming force, the only exercise her brain experiences--finally subsides, leaving a preoccupation with its existence as real as the damp of a tidal flat. She walks an empty beach of self-absorption.

Thunder clouds appear, and turn into a season of storms, perpetually pounding the beach to pocks. She writes letters. Not belles lettres, but hell's letters. Anger gives her a sense of impending doom, a prescience of wrongness of the ways of progress. She sees this wrongness everywhere, as the grains of sand.

She flings her thunderbolts everywhere. Her beach looks like a mined field, but her bolts are piercing as red jelly frogs.

One day between storms, she labels her state: Crisis of irrelevancy.

Letters become more strident, take on a full, old-fashioned clarion tone. She is a suffragette chained to the Hyde Park gate with no policemen to carry her off, no photographers and the only onlookers: pigeons. No martyrdom possible when the campaign is a private one, and the non-engagement of others as easy as dropping a piece of paper.

Then there are the faces of those she visits after not seeing them for a year. In the phone calls that she doesn't know how to end, she next labels her state Totally Confirmed when she hears the nails pounding the coffin lid down on an Interesting Person. Evelyn taps on her keyboard hm'ing to the handset on her desk, Chris slurps spaghetti, the dwindling others just wait for a decent time to say they are late for the same appointments she always enlisted at certain times.

The metamorphosis is complete. The result is panic, an old horror of hers: being trapped by a bore.

She begins to explore the types of bores, and writes:

1. Drug bores. Nasty when refused companionship/audience. Foodies included.
2. Sick bores, whose physical or mental pain makes sickness the abiding interest in pre-death life, a length of time which is always interminable.
3. Religious bores. Fanaticland, from evangelists to tennis and film verbal replay machines.
4. Has-been bores. Historical achievers, whose achievement is history.
5. Bore holes. Those who never had a substance of their own, so suck it from any popular source. The quicksand of boreland.
6. . . .

This defining of bores becomes engrossing. She identifies The Twelve Major Types. She elaborates on the myriad of variations. She draws charts and devises quizzes to track the Stages of an Interesting Person to Ten-Point Bore.

So involved does she become in observation and research, and writing, that she becomes too busy to communicate with anyone else until she finishes, when her work has become a Book; and she finds publishers.

In the USA, the book is launched as The Poison Personality: How to Stop Being a Bore in 7 Days.

The Poison Personality reaches the New York Times Bestseller list in less than thirty days and then sits in number 3 position as if the list is stuck, until a challenge is made that three points of the Ten-Point Bore and all of the trademarked behavior modification Plan are in essence, translations from G. J. Taylor's 1984 paper in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, "Psychotherapy with the boring patient". See for instance, a few sentences from Taylor's abstract, and the brilliance of the little book that tops the charts will be clear:

Boredom is an unpleasant affective state which may be evoked by monotonous sensory input and reduction of an individual's internal instinctual and fantasy activity. Certain difficult patients have the capacity to evoke boredom in their psychotherapists and unless technical modifications are used, therapy quickly reaches an impasse and may be terminated on the grounds that the patient is 'not psychologically-minded.' Chronically boring patients have an impaired capacity for symbolization and can be identified by their non-symbolic communicative style. This reflects an inner struggle with primitive mental states due to fixation at, or regression to, the paranoid-schizoid developmental position.

The week after the Taylor controversy, the New York Post quotes "an unsubstantiated source" to reveal that the author of The Poison Personality was the ghost writer of the EZYreed Uplift Bible™, and sales rise to Number 1.

"A triumph of insight .... Exposes a raw nerve string of insecurity in everyone." - The New York Times

"Updike should read this." - The Village Voice

"A threat to all people of sincere faith who have a duty to spread the word." - The Watchtower

"If only it worked." - Rowan Pelling, The Independent on Sunday

Though there were a few scathing reviews, they must have only spurred sales. The book has now been translated into 125 languages and is sold in 132 titles. In Australia it is titled: The Bore Well. In Canada, a committee is still deciding the title, but the book is widely available upon request in certain chemist shops. In the UK, it was first sold thirteen months ago as The Well of Boringness. There the launch was picketed by a new group, Sufferers from VUPS (Very Uninteresting Person Syndrome). They call anything with "bore" in the title, "pre-enlightened" and want it banned; and they used the launch opportunity to issue a press release calling for NHS funding and an end to job discrimination, especially where they say "prejudice is most deeply entrenched: in the arts", a point hotly disputed in a subsequent op-ed piece in The Times that caused incalculable offense to many.

Perhaps because of that incident, Bore Identification (B-ID) has now become an international "sport".

For her, life is now a blur of book signings, interviews, talk shows, so much time in planes that she longs for a quiet day to collect her thoughts again, because there are so many projects she's involved in now. Her publishers are pushing her to finish the next book, Decorating for Joy. And then there's the ghosted cookbook, Recipes for a Relevant Life—and of course, the autobiography that made Publishers Weekly for the size of the advance: Coming out Famous.

Her old friends are universally worried. She hasn't rung them in years. Each one now knows why. She wrote the book about me.