Quammen's The Boilerplate Rhino
Here's another title from recent weeks' reading: The Boilerplate Rhino, by David Quammen (New York : Simon & Schuster, 2000). It's one of his collections of essays, all of which were published originally in his monthly column for Outdoor magazine between 1988 and 1996. Like most collections it has uneven spots, but I enjoyed reading it. (More at the book note.)
In the usual way these are a few miscellaneous passages that I marked for one reason or another.
First, from the essay "Either or Neither", about slime molds and Alan Turing, a provocative pairing to say the least. As he explains, he also gives us a short and poignant portrait of Turing.
This is also an essay about Alan Turing. Who was Alan Turing? Not, as you might suppose, a biologist who studied the slime molds. Turing was a brilliant English mathematician, a pioneer of computer theory, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and one of the chief cryptanalysts responsible for breaking the German naval code during World War II. Enigmatic himself, he helped solve Hitler's fancy machine-based cipher system, known as Enigma. He was a gentle nerd who buried his money in the woods instead of entrusting it to a bank, collected wildflowers and fir cones to study their anatomical patterns, took up long-distance running in his thirties, turned his hand to mathematical biology, made some trailblazing efforts in th field now known as artificial intelligence, and dreamed of building an electronic machine that could play chess. He was also a quiet but stubborn rebel against authority, an unsecretive homosexual at a time when homosexuality was illegal in Britain, and eventually a convicted perpetrator of forbidden acts, a victim of quackish "organotherapy" in the form of court-mandated hormone treatments, and a suicide. He died of cyanide poisoning in 1954. [p. 140]
Next, from "The Great Stinking Clue", about an unusual fruit called "Durian". Durian, it seems, is as much reviled as it is revered; this essay asks the question (non-musical): would Durian without the stink still taste as sweet? I saved this bit because I liked the idea that fruit is a tree's means of locomotion.
Fruit is the means that trees have invented for traveling from one place to another. But not every fruit travels as well, or as far, as others. Some kinds are adventurous. Some are more laggard. Some hit the ground unswallowed and don't even roll. So to get to the core of the matter, you'll need to do a little traveling yourself. My advice is: Start with a flight to the island of Bali. Then follow your nose upwind toward a species of tree called Durio zibethinus.
The fruit of that tree is a yellow-green ovoid, big as a rugby ball, heavy as fate, upholstered all over with thorns. It goes by the name durian, from the Malaysian word duri, for thorn. It's a hard capsule that hangs from a stout stem and God help you if you're beneath when it falls. It looks about as succulent as a stuffed porcupine, but it splits open along suture lines to reveal its amazing innards. Each inner chamber contains several large gobbets of ivory-white pulp. That's the edible stuff. Inside each gobbet, a seed. The seed itself is as big as a chestnut. Durian is renowned throughout Asia for its luxuriant flavor, its peculiar anatomy, and its indecent stench. [p. 93]
Finally, as visitors to Björnslottet will know, I'm not a big fan of the traditional, suburban lawn. For historic reasons ours is mostly low-growing weeds (selective pressures from mowing encourage the short forms) that slowly get taken up as I replace the lawn with garden.
Anyway, this excerpt from "Rethinking the Lawn: Turf Warfare in the American Suburbs" struck a chord.
There was a time, back in the late Fifties and early Sixties, when I was inclined to view the American lawn as part of a Communist plot. Thousands of square miles of valuable landscape, from Bangor to San Diego, were covered with useless swards of turf. Millions of man-hours (and, more pointedly, boy-hours) were squandered each year on its upkeep. Did that extravagant commitment of resources serve the national interest? Clearly not. Like the helpless GI in The Manchurian Candidate, so it seemed, the entire class of American suburbanites had all somehow been brainwashed to execute certain dronish tasks. Mow. Rake. Trim. Fertilize. Kill off the broadleaf invaders with poison. Mow again. It was ruinously stupid. Khruschev, I figured, had to be chortling up his fat little sleeve.
I conceived and nurtured this theory during my own long boy-hours spent at the exhaust end of a mower–hours that, I believed, would have been far better devoted to more meaningful pursuits (such as baseball, or throwing cherry bombs at hornets' nests, or breaking my nose on the handlebars of a bicycle), if only the cabalists in the Kremlin hadn't managed to perpetrate this wholesale diversion of democracy's young talent into the soulless drudgery of lawn care. Sputnik and then Uri Gagarin had gone into space, after all, while America remained earthbound and I stained my Keds green with grass clippings. I was the only son among three children, and therefore the designated mowist. We lived on a half-acre. Formerly farmland, and before that deciduous forest, amid the rolling hills and the humid breezes of southwestern Ohio, it was relentlessly verdurous. [pp. 171–172]
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on Saturday, 21 April 2007 at 23.25
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Quammen, and maybe you, might enjoy Las Vegas. Many a home there has a pebblescape instead of a lawn. As for me, I'm OK with grass.