The Dangerous World of Butterflies

I read Peter Laufer’s book The Dangerous World of Butterflies after seeing the author interviewed on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Perhaps because he wrote the book as a break from his books on warfare, prisons, and other light topics, Laufer uncovers a surprising amount of conflict, criminal behavior, and creepiness—including a painting by Damien Hirst (of dead shark fame) incorporating the bodies of butterflies who emerge from their chrysalises only to be trapped in the artist’s fresh paint.

Laufer presents other intriguing (and less creepy) facts.

For instance, it is apparently a myth that one cannot hold a butterfly by its wings without permanently damaging its ability to fly.

The color in the wings of some butterflies, including the showy Blue Morpho, comes entirely from reflection and refraction: the actual color of a Blue Morpho, visible when it gets wet, is brown.

And the transformation from caterpillar to butterfly, as remarkable as it is, is even more remarkable when you learn that the creature doesn’t just change shape in its chrysalis—it actually turns to liquid. Laufer talks to Rachel Diaz-Bastin, a biologist at the butterfly house in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park:

Inside the hard chrysalis the transformation is in progress. “All of their body parts, every cell, liquefies.” It is, as she has said before, science fiction. “This is weird stuff. All of their cells differentiate and begin forming the adult butterfly. It’s basically this big butterfly soup inside.”

Were you cut the chrysalis at this stage, you would find nothing resembling a caterpillar and nothing resembling a butterfly: only liquid.

The red sash of the sumac

Having moved to Brooklyn from Cambridge, Massachusetts, ten years ago, one of the things I miss is the brilliant autumn foliage—the subject of Thoreau’s essay “Autumnal Tints,” and of many passages in his Journal.

The fall colors in New York are mostly yellow, russet, and brown, but there are a few sugar maples that turn scarlet and orange, and it’s possible to find a few other plants that add a touch of intense color. This week at the High Line park the leaves of the sumac were turning red, the birch leaves were yellow, and honeybees and bumblebees were gathering nectar from dense beds of purple asters.

The sumacs were also glowing red near the lake in Prospect Park, reminding me of a passage that Damion Searls has included in his new edition of Thoreau’s Journal.

The clear bright-scarlet leaves of the smooth sumach in many places are curled and drooping, hanging straight down, so as to make a funereal impression, reminding me of a red sash and a soldier’s funeral. They impress me quite as black crape similarly arranged, the bloody plants.

Becoming Americans

My review of Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing, edited by Ilan Stavans, is out now in the Christian Science Monitor. Here’s an excerpt:

Many of the selections describe the obstacles, and sometimes opportunities, of learning to use American English. To be an exiled writer, says Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel Prize–winning poet, “is like being a dog or a man hurtled into outer space in a capsule (more like a dog, of course, than a man, because they will never retrieve you). And your capsule is your language.”

Of course, the contributors to this book have more to worry about than just language. Some are indentured servants. Some are slaves. Others struggle with lack of money, poorly paid and degrading work, and lack of support from compatriots who have come before. The fact that these authors survived and wrote well about their experiences makes them among the most successful immigrants. But whatever successes they may have had in the Old World, and whatever successes may come in the New, the memory of being scared and vulnerable and out of their element lends their work a refreshing humility.

The Pattern in the Carpet

My review of The Pattern in the Carpet by Margaret Drabble is out in the Christian Science Monitor. Here’s an excerpt:

Margaret Drabble’s new book, The Pattern in the Carpet, as she explains on the first page, is a cross between a memoir and a history of the jigsaw puzzle. It looks at first like a cozy book, full of idyllic reminiscences of a slower and more rural way of life. And in fact, it describes how Drabble’s Auntie Phyl “taught us to peg rugs, and to sew, and to do French knitting, and to make lavender bags, and to thread bead necklaces, and to bake rock cakes and coconut fingers, and to play patience.”

Fans of jigsaw puzzles will learn where they appear in the work of Jane Austen and how they developed from the “dissected maps” once mounted on mahogany to teach children geography.

But take care before you send this book to your own kindly aunt. Under the comforting surface is something much more disquieting.

I’ve also reviewed Drabble’s novels The Radiant Way and The Witch of Exmoor, and I’ve discussed her a few times in my blog.

Thoreau’s Garden

Thoreau’s Garden by Peter Loewer is an engaging book, but it takes a little while to figure out what the author is intending with it. Chapters are devoted to various plants discussed by Thoreau—most but not all of them flowers—and are generously peppered with quotations from the Journal and expert discussion by the author (an experienced botanist and gardening author) and illustrated with the author’s own pen and ink drawings.

Beginning with the serviceberry, Thoreau’s Garden also covers the bog rosemary, bearberry, swamp pink, jack-in-the-pulpit, milkweed, aster, barberry, cardoon, jimsonweed, horsetail, joe-pye weed, rose hibiscus, desmodium, false foxglove, turtlehead, dyer’s greenweed, wild geranium, bluet, water lily, puffball, earthstar, and more.

Yet this is a far from exhaustive list of the plants Thoreau wrote about. The shrub oak, for instance, is missing, though Thoreau had warmer feelings toward it than probably any other plant. ("I love and could embrace the shrub oak with its scanty garment of leaves rising above the snow, lowly whispering to me...")

The scarlet oak is also missing, as well as the maple and all the other trees that supplied the material for his essay on Autumnal Tints—as well as the apple tree, which was the subject of its own essay. But Loewer has not deliberately left out the trees, since the hemlock has a chapter.

On page 70, Loewer reveals at least some of what he’s about. After commenting on how he (and Thoreau) like the barberry despite its disagreeable smell, he goes on:

That’s why it’s good that Thoreau’s Garden is a garden of the mind. The small pool is kept full by a waterfall that ripples along, fed by a hidden spring, glistening as it turns and tumbles over rocks. Perfect ferns arch over the pool and everything is shaded by a towering three-hundred-year-old tulip tree. And there’s a comfortable rush chair that is impervious to the elements, a chair for dreaming and thinking, a chair for idleness. Surrounding this garden is an impermeable hedge of common barberry, protecting me from the world, just as in ages past hedges ringed farms to keep out the wild.

This, then, is a book created to realize the author’s vision of an ideal Thoreauvian garden. He has included what he wants and excluded what he doesn’t care to write about (including that tulip tree). He has made room for well-chosen quotations from Thoreau on sexual relations, water and water bugs, the tourist sights of New York City, and many other matters. Not everything is here, or meant to be here, but what’s here is presented with charm and affection.