I'm not sure if any of you have run into this "genre" before, but as for myself, it's a first. Here is a review from the NYT Sunday Review of an eco-mystery, entitled "Where the Wild Things are Victims." (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/books/review/Pogue-t.html?ref=books). Is the writer capitalizing on the current trendiness of environmentalism or is there more to it?
Where the Wild Things Are Victims
By DAVID POGUE
Published: February 13, 2009
Not many authors are equally successful at writing books for adults and children, but Carl Hiaasen seems to have made an effortless transition. His first and second books for young readers, “Hoot” (2002) and “Flush” (2005),won awards and legions of fans. His latest, “Scat,” won’t disappoint Hiaasenphiles of any age.
What’s truly amazing is how much mileage Hiaasen gets here from mining the same narrow niche. Every novel is an eco-mystery set in Florida. Every plot features a greedy businessman (with a dumb-as-bricks henchman) bent on getting rich at the expense of Florida wildlife. Each plot is energized by improbable and hilarious action sequences.
In “Hoot,” “Flush” and “Scat,” the hero is a middle-school boy with a feisty female sidekick. Secondary characters include a delinquent bully and a mysterious, benevolent stranger. (In “Scat,” the stranger has wandered in from another Hiaasen novel: he was the protagonist in “Sick Puppy.”)
Yet despite the similarities, the novels don’t feel repetitive — especially not “Scat,” which stirs some new, more ambitious elements into the formula.
This time, the mystery involves Mrs. Starch, an unpopular biology teacher who disappears during a disastrous field trip to an Everglades swamp. At first, it’s hard for Nick, our hero, and his friend Marta to care. After all, Mrs. Starch is a nearly six-foot-tall tyrant who wears “her dyed blond hair piled to one side of her head, like a beach dune.”
But before long, Nick is up to his neck in secondary mysteries. What was the tan-colored, fast-moving blur on the video he took in the swamp? Who or what caused the swamp wildfire that day? Why has Smoke, the class arsonist/slacker, suddenly cleaned up his act? Why is Mrs. Starch’s home filled with stuffed animals (of the taxidermy sort)? And if Mrs. Starch is missing, then who’s driving around town in her blue Prius?
“Scat” is by far the plottiest of Hiaasen’s young-people books. The story lines — involving Nick, Marta, Smoke, their parents, Mrs. Starch, local fire and police investigators, the mysterious stranger and the two hilarious bumblers who run the Red Diamond Energy Corporation’s illegal drilling operation — are intertwined in ways that must have required a spreadsheet to track. Not surprisingly, all of these strands are neatly and satisfyingly resolved at the end of the story.
This is also the most contemporary Hiaasen book, dropping names like Facebook, “Harry Potter,” the TV show “COPS,” CNN’s Anderson Cooper — and the war in Iraq.
And here’s the most startling deviation from the Hiaasen formula. Just when the fun is hitting its stride, we learn that Nick’s father has been wounded in Iraq; his right arm is blown off by a roadside explosive. The story returns periodically to monitor the stages of his recovery: his bandages, his infections, his attempts to work with his remaining hand, and so on.
This is all handled unsentimentally and with a positive spirit; Nick conceals his grief, calls his dad Lefty and tapes down his own right arm in solidarity. But this subplot introduces some new, grimmer notes to the series, and not every young fan will know what to make of it.
Still, the ingenious plotting makes “Scat” more engrossing than either of its predecessors. The characters are richer — two of them turn out to be not at all the caricatures they seemed at first. And even the title is a clever pun, referring both to the good guys’ message to the bad guys, and to the panther droppings that hold a key to the mystery. In short, Hiaasen’s novels for younger readers seem to be maturing right along with them.
David Pogue writes about technology for The Times. His first children’s novel will be published next year.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Vergil's Eclogues I and IX; Georgics IV
Due to either the sudden heatwave or my own vast technological ignorance, the photocopier jammed up on Tuesday and I was unable to bring in copies of the Vergil poems. And so, to save paper for those not interested while simultaneously hoarding my precious, precious photocopy quota, I thought I'd post some links instead.
Both the eclogue (a short, pastoral poem) and the georgic (a "how-to" farming guide translated into verse) are classical genres that Vergil is adapting to his own time. I picked out Eclogue I and IX for their political content, more specifically how the rural landscape is threatened by the repossession and civil war from the city. Georgic IV, which concerns bee-keeping, is interesting in that political allegory is read onto the landscape (the two warring kings). These translations are by J.W. MacKail. To see the poems in the original language, click the "Latin" tab at the top of the page.
Eclogue I:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/virgil/ecl/ecl01.htm
Eclogue IX:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/virgil/ecl/ecl09.htm
Georgic IV (pp. 339-40):
http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/virgil/geo/geo04.htm
Both the eclogue (a short, pastoral poem) and the georgic (a "how-to" farming guide translated into verse) are classical genres that Vergil is adapting to his own time. I picked out Eclogue I and IX for their political content, more specifically how the rural landscape is threatened by the repossession and civil war from the city. Georgic IV, which concerns bee-keeping, is interesting in that political allegory is read onto the landscape (the two warring kings). These translations are by J.W. MacKail. To see the poems in the original language, click the "Latin" tab at the top of the page.
Eclogue I:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/virgil/ecl/ecl01.htm
Eclogue IX:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/virgil/ecl/ecl09.htm
Georgic IV (pp. 339-40):
http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/virgil/geo/geo04.htm
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Pyxidanthera, Rudbeckia, Sclerolepis, Escholtzia
I found Cooper’s tirade on the naming of flowers (82-87) wonderful, partially because I can’t help wanting to agree with her, in feeling if not in linguistic reason; partially because she works up some interesting ideas about the relationship between language, the world, and the experience of the world; partially just because it’s pretty hilarious when, in a moment of unusually fiery indignation, she starts re-writing Shakespeare and Chaucer with clunky scientific Latin to make her point.
This is a case where an excess of culture (or a certain kind of culture) has clearly had a negative impact, but not on nature qua nature so much as the natural world as humans are able to experience or describe it. It disturbs Cooper first that children who pick wildflowers can’t identify them, then that adults often can’t identify the plants around them either, and then that the plants are getting named all wrong anyway. She celebrates the “pretty, natural names” given to flowers in the nostalgic time when there was “some simplicity left in the world (84) and bemoans that “it is really a crying shame to misname them” (87) This “wrongness” suggests that there is some preferable “rightness” in the attaching of names to things; that things have “right names” which inherently belong to them. It’s a concern that dates from Adam (who, according to the Vulgate, named things nominibus suis, by their own names – but were those names their own even before Adam named them?), to Plato (In the Cratylus, the eponymous character remains convinced that the names for things are “natural” – they inhere in the nature of the thing itself – and not “conventional”), to present day prescriptivism in language(usually deeply occupied with the “problem” of language changing and words changing meaning).
Cooper certainly advocates a portion of this linguistic inherency, but not to the rigid degree of Cratylus; her concerns seem to be largely about transparency, aesthetics, and culture. The Latin names are “long [and] clumsy” where the common names are “homely and rustic” and show “quaint humor” or are “imaginative or fanciful” (84); names such as Schoberia and Brugmannsia are simply too ugly for flowers, better suited for “crocodiles, and rattlesnakes, and scorpions” (85); meanwhile, the daisy (or French marguerite) gets top honors as the flower (and flower-word) of romance, especially medieval. The “natural” names of flowers are parsable; they mean something to people who aren’t enrolled in botany classes and don’t know Latin. Cooper’s catalogue of flower-names with occasional explanations or [folk] etymologies reminds us that lady’s-smock is named for its color and bindweed for its habit of “winding about shrubs and bushes” (84). These names are relatively transparent, their meaning and relationship to the flower they denote evident to anyone who knows to connect word and object. Cooper’s concern is, at the last, that people simply won’t understand flowers if they’re named wrong. They’ll miss out on the “natural, unaffected pleasure” that the flowers, by their “right” names, offer (87).
(On the other hand, her note on gilliflowers, “a corruption of July-flowers, from the month in which they blossomed” (ibid) shows us two things: one, that even good “natural” English words change and become less-transparent; two, that since here Cooper’s etymological note is wrong (“July-flower” is actually a folk etymology of “gilliflower,” the “gilli” of which comes, via Latin, from a Greek compound meaning “nut-leaf,” according to the OED), meaning is only as transparent as we construct it to be.)
There is a struggle going on between registers at least, and languages at most, here. For Cooper, the Latin scientific terms are an “evil spreading over all the woods and meadows” which “perverts our common speech” (83); Latin will intimidate the timid and disgust the poets. And I think there’s also a struggle between disciplines, the humanities and the sciences. Cooper doesn’t exactly come at this issue as a wide-eyed ingénue; she’s full of cultural background, erudite quotations, and etymological speculation. However, all of Cooper’s encyclopaedic information seems to enhance her experience of the flowers, anyway – I think she genuinely likes the daisy better for knowing that Chaucer called it the “eye of the day” (which is, I can’t resist pointing out, in this case, its actual etymology), that the German word means “goose-blossom,” that French word is “marguerite,” and that French peasant girls are in the habit of pulling the petals off to figure out their love lives. The scientific name, on the other hand, compromises one’s ability to enjoy the phenomenon, and any amount of scientific knowledge about daisies would presumably only exaggerate that effect.
This is a case where an excess of culture (or a certain kind of culture) has clearly had a negative impact, but not on nature qua nature so much as the natural world as humans are able to experience or describe it. It disturbs Cooper first that children who pick wildflowers can’t identify them, then that adults often can’t identify the plants around them either, and then that the plants are getting named all wrong anyway. She celebrates the “pretty, natural names” given to flowers in the nostalgic time when there was “some simplicity left in the world (84) and bemoans that “it is really a crying shame to misname them” (87) This “wrongness” suggests that there is some preferable “rightness” in the attaching of names to things; that things have “right names” which inherently belong to them. It’s a concern that dates from Adam (who, according to the Vulgate, named things nominibus suis, by their own names – but were those names their own even before Adam named them?), to Plato (In the Cratylus, the eponymous character remains convinced that the names for things are “natural” – they inhere in the nature of the thing itself – and not “conventional”), to present day prescriptivism in language(usually deeply occupied with the “problem” of language changing and words changing meaning).
Cooper certainly advocates a portion of this linguistic inherency, but not to the rigid degree of Cratylus; her concerns seem to be largely about transparency, aesthetics, and culture. The Latin names are “long [and] clumsy” where the common names are “homely and rustic” and show “quaint humor” or are “imaginative or fanciful” (84); names such as Schoberia and Brugmannsia are simply too ugly for flowers, better suited for “crocodiles, and rattlesnakes, and scorpions” (85); meanwhile, the daisy (or French marguerite) gets top honors as the flower (and flower-word) of romance, especially medieval. The “natural” names of flowers are parsable; they mean something to people who aren’t enrolled in botany classes and don’t know Latin. Cooper’s catalogue of flower-names with occasional explanations or [folk] etymologies reminds us that lady’s-smock is named for its color and bindweed for its habit of “winding about shrubs and bushes” (84). These names are relatively transparent, their meaning and relationship to the flower they denote evident to anyone who knows to connect word and object. Cooper’s concern is, at the last, that people simply won’t understand flowers if they’re named wrong. They’ll miss out on the “natural, unaffected pleasure” that the flowers, by their “right” names, offer (87).
(On the other hand, her note on gilliflowers, “a corruption of July-flowers, from the month in which they blossomed” (ibid) shows us two things: one, that even good “natural” English words change and become less-transparent; two, that since here Cooper’s etymological note is wrong (“July-flower” is actually a folk etymology of “gilliflower,” the “gilli” of which comes, via Latin, from a Greek compound meaning “nut-leaf,” according to the OED), meaning is only as transparent as we construct it to be.)
There is a struggle going on between registers at least, and languages at most, here. For Cooper, the Latin scientific terms are an “evil spreading over all the woods and meadows” which “perverts our common speech” (83); Latin will intimidate the timid and disgust the poets. And I think there’s also a struggle between disciplines, the humanities and the sciences. Cooper doesn’t exactly come at this issue as a wide-eyed ingénue; she’s full of cultural background, erudite quotations, and etymological speculation. However, all of Cooper’s encyclopaedic information seems to enhance her experience of the flowers, anyway – I think she genuinely likes the daisy better for knowing that Chaucer called it the “eye of the day” (which is, I can’t resist pointing out, in this case, its actual etymology), that the German word means “goose-blossom,” that French word is “marguerite,” and that French peasant girls are in the habit of pulling the petals off to figure out their love lives. The scientific name, on the other hand, compromises one’s ability to enjoy the phenomenon, and any amount of scientific knowledge about daisies would presumably only exaggerate that effect.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Cooper's joys and pleasures
What comes across for me in Cooper first and foremost is the intense joy and pleasure that her outdoor escapades seem to give her. She seems to be willing to expose herself to the elements and immerse herself in the experience of “nature” even when it might cause her a lot of physical discomfort (i.e. “the teeth of a sharp wind” etc. on March 4th). For all the discomfort, what is gained is a “virtuous glow which is not to be picked up by cowering over the fireside” (ibid). Being in nature is an incredibly joyous pastime for her, and a sensuous one at that. In her descriptions of her experiences she engages all of our senses – it’s not only the obvious impressions like the colors of the flowers or even the songs of the birds or frogs that are worth noting for her, it’s also the temperature of the air, the fragrance of tiny buds, the taste of maple sugar etc…The joys and pleasures are sensuous. The word “pleasant” is her word of choice for describing desirable sensations, and it seems that often she evaluates “nature” depending on whether or not it’s a source of desirable sensations. On May 19th, for example, in her discussion of the European species’ encroachment on American native plants, the only explicit reason she gives for why the situation is not desirable is the fact that the native plants are “prettier” (ergo more pleasant) than the native ones. (This is only one passage though, and I’m not sure whether this is a general trend or not).
But there’s more to Cooper’s experience of nature than just sensation. She seems to be preoccupied with the question of language and the naming – proper naming that is - of “nature.” Sensations need proper labels. It seems that to Cooper a rose by any other name would not smell as sweet. She is concerned with decorum – simple yet beautiful flowers demand simple yet beautiful names. In other words, flowers need “pretty” and “natural” names, not scientific, dead terms (June 23). While recognizing the need for naming and classifying, typically scientific pursuits, Cooper warns us about our tendency to “overflo[w] with science” (June 23). I get the sense that she is sensitive not only to the beauty of “nature” but to the beauty of language as well - just as immersion in nature should give us pleasure, so should the (poetic) names of flowers. She wants them both (names and flowers) sweet and pretty. “Botany” corrupts our ability to enjoy “nature:” it destroys our “natural, unaffected pleasure in flowers” (June 23). What is interesting about Cooper’s critique of science as a corrupting and alienating force is her notion that the corruption and alienation occurs through (scientific and dead) language. Language is the medium through which we experience nature, and if we lack proper language, the experience will be ruined.
But there’s more to Cooper’s experience of nature than just sensation. She seems to be preoccupied with the question of language and the naming – proper naming that is - of “nature.” Sensations need proper labels. It seems that to Cooper a rose by any other name would not smell as sweet. She is concerned with decorum – simple yet beautiful flowers demand simple yet beautiful names. In other words, flowers need “pretty” and “natural” names, not scientific, dead terms (June 23). While recognizing the need for naming and classifying, typically scientific pursuits, Cooper warns us about our tendency to “overflo[w] with science” (June 23). I get the sense that she is sensitive not only to the beauty of “nature” but to the beauty of language as well - just as immersion in nature should give us pleasure, so should the (poetic) names of flowers. She wants them both (names and flowers) sweet and pretty. “Botany” corrupts our ability to enjoy “nature:” it destroys our “natural, unaffected pleasure in flowers” (June 23). What is interesting about Cooper’s critique of science as a corrupting and alienating force is her notion that the corruption and alienation occurs through (scientific and dead) language. Language is the medium through which we experience nature, and if we lack proper language, the experience will be ruined.
Audubon's Personalities / Turkey and Gender
After reading about the hunters in the Passenger Pigeon, one cannot help but see how the vulture resembles its human counterpart. Vultures are least desirable birds and are compared in many ways to humans, given their excessive—even gluttonous—eating habits, and the way in which they prey unrelentingly on things. Also, Audubon finds that they are not, in fact, distinguished by a keen sense of smell. Instead, they are visual creatures like humans, and he says they also rely on memory. The turkey nests so as to hide eggs from the sight of the vulture, and the main determinants of where to nest for turkey hens are hunters and vultures/crows (200).
Audubon has a very diplomatic way of presenting his observations, developing the birds’ traits in a succession, using patterns of repetition, in order to move toward the classifications he makes, while still seeming to rest on scientific evidence. Yet, the birds are made into characters, with character flaws and predictably repetitive patterns of behavior, which all serve to bolster their personality types. The turkey is the least graceful of the birds we’ve read about. At first sight, it is also the least intuitive and thoughtful, and is, instead, very reactive, bewildered even by its own reactions, awkward, cacophonous, erratic. However, Audubon distinguishes gender differences within species with such detail, and this serves to complicate his caricatures.
Looking at the Passenger Pigeon image at the Lilly, we discussed briefly the curious relationship portrayed between male and female. The female is placed above the male, so it seems she is feeding—moreover, providing for him. It is also interesting how the female Turkey is characterized separately from the male. “The young cocks…gobble and strut, while the young hens pur and leap” (202). The males are given to “ceremony” and their behaviors reflect their baser desires and impulsiveness, whereas the females are portrayed as more intuitive and conscious of her surroundings—particularly with regard to her young. The female, guarding her nest, knows the difference between a human who is careless and unaware of her, and one who intends to approach and/or harm her, the same way she knows when to pursue or abandon the male turkey. Once Audubon “returns to the females” (200), which occurs after a much shorter time spent describing the males, the portrait of the turkey becomes more complex. There is a great deal of “instinct” and intuition among the female turkey and her young. While the female is clearly the smarter, more complex of the two, and switching back and forth between the sexes presents two very different species of Turkey, the female description seems to color all succeeding description of the turkey, giving a greater sense of purpose to the male behavior.
I don’t know why yet, but I am especially struck by this dichotomous way of understanding species of birds—that by understanding how each is broken down into gender roles, and how the male and female correspond to and supplement each other, a more holistic view is gained of the bird as it exists and acts in its natural environment….
Audubon has a very diplomatic way of presenting his observations, developing the birds’ traits in a succession, using patterns of repetition, in order to move toward the classifications he makes, while still seeming to rest on scientific evidence. Yet, the birds are made into characters, with character flaws and predictably repetitive patterns of behavior, which all serve to bolster their personality types. The turkey is the least graceful of the birds we’ve read about. At first sight, it is also the least intuitive and thoughtful, and is, instead, very reactive, bewildered even by its own reactions, awkward, cacophonous, erratic. However, Audubon distinguishes gender differences within species with such detail, and this serves to complicate his caricatures.
Looking at the Passenger Pigeon image at the Lilly, we discussed briefly the curious relationship portrayed between male and female. The female is placed above the male, so it seems she is feeding—moreover, providing for him. It is also interesting how the female Turkey is characterized separately from the male. “The young cocks…gobble and strut, while the young hens pur and leap” (202). The males are given to “ceremony” and their behaviors reflect their baser desires and impulsiveness, whereas the females are portrayed as more intuitive and conscious of her surroundings—particularly with regard to her young. The female, guarding her nest, knows the difference between a human who is careless and unaware of her, and one who intends to approach and/or harm her, the same way she knows when to pursue or abandon the male turkey. Once Audubon “returns to the females” (200), which occurs after a much shorter time spent describing the males, the portrait of the turkey becomes more complex. There is a great deal of “instinct” and intuition among the female turkey and her young. While the female is clearly the smarter, more complex of the two, and switching back and forth between the sexes presents two very different species of Turkey, the female description seems to color all succeeding description of the turkey, giving a greater sense of purpose to the male behavior.
I don’t know why yet, but I am especially struck by this dichotomous way of understanding species of birds—that by understanding how each is broken down into gender roles, and how the male and female correspond to and supplement each other, a more holistic view is gained of the bird as it exists and acts in its natural environment….
A bit more on Cooper's "ruins"
It seems as though Cooper's attitudes towards history and natural history may be indirectly related to colonial attitudes towards Indians....
While, as Andrew has pointed out, Cooper doesn't get too bent out of shape about the lack of picturesque "mouldering" artifacts, when she does find them, they are not meant to give pause or evoke sublime wonder on the past (as they might in Romantic poetry, say) but to illustrate the birth of history in the New World. After discussing the only tradition the Indians have left in the "neighborhood" leaving no other "mark her, on hill or dale, lake or stream," she moves to
"something more positive; from the dark ages we come to the dawn of history. On the bank of the river are found the ruins of a bridge, the first made at this point by the white man. Among the mountain streams of the Old World are many high, narrow, arches of stone, built more than a thousand years since, still standing to-day in different stages of picturesque decay. Our ruins are more rude than those" (114).
Even if a bit self-conscious about America's lack of picturesque ruins comparable to the Old World's, Cooper doesn't hesitate to suggest that Indians are without history--the bridge, though rude, is remarkable in the sense that it is the first sign of "real" history.
In the section in which Cooper reflects on the "ruins" of the forest [125-35] it seems as though she is not endowing them with history, as she conceives of it above (though her reflections on the "slow" deep-time sort of growth of trees is probably indebted both to the discourses of natural history and Romanticism). Rather her emphases on "unnumbered seasons" and "unrecorded time" (127) produce a sublime that works dialectically with her own prosaic method of recording her neighborhoods history down to the daily temp, and, more importantly, with her collapsing of the distance between the natural and the cultural "other". Here's an example:
"These hills, and the valleys at their feet, lay for untold centuries one vast forest; unumbered seasons, ages of unrecorded time passed away while they made part of the boundless wilderness of woods....The whole land lay slumbering in the twilight of the forest. Wild dreams made up its half-conscious existence. The hungry cry of the beast of prey, or the fierce deed of savage man, whoop and dance, triumph and torture, broke in fitful bursts upon the deep silence, and then died away, leaving the breath of life to rise and fall with the passing winds" (127).
Cooper's forest, frequently (seemingly) anthropomorphized as a "tribe" is not the sort that, in itself, has the consciousness necessary for history proper. And while the forest in its "strangely slow" growth and decay is imagined as existing in a slumber, it surpasses the growth of the "savage man" whose actions become a "dream" reduced to a "deep silence," in a passage that seems to mystify the disappearance of Native American tribes as part of a speechless, sublime, natural process. While the reverence Cooper has towards the unconscious but boundless forest informs her attitudes towards a more responsible land stewardship, the same reverence seems bound up in an unconscious cultural violence.
While, as Andrew has pointed out, Cooper doesn't get too bent out of shape about the lack of picturesque "mouldering" artifacts, when she does find them, they are not meant to give pause or evoke sublime wonder on the past (as they might in Romantic poetry, say) but to illustrate the birth of history in the New World. After discussing the only tradition the Indians have left in the "neighborhood" leaving no other "mark her, on hill or dale, lake or stream," she moves to
"something more positive; from the dark ages we come to the dawn of history. On the bank of the river are found the ruins of a bridge, the first made at this point by the white man. Among the mountain streams of the Old World are many high, narrow, arches of stone, built more than a thousand years since, still standing to-day in different stages of picturesque decay. Our ruins are more rude than those" (114).
Even if a bit self-conscious about America's lack of picturesque ruins comparable to the Old World's, Cooper doesn't hesitate to suggest that Indians are without history--the bridge, though rude, is remarkable in the sense that it is the first sign of "real" history.
In the section in which Cooper reflects on the "ruins" of the forest [125-35] it seems as though she is not endowing them with history, as she conceives of it above (though her reflections on the "slow" deep-time sort of growth of trees is probably indebted both to the discourses of natural history and Romanticism). Rather her emphases on "unnumbered seasons" and "unrecorded time" (127) produce a sublime that works dialectically with her own prosaic method of recording her neighborhoods history down to the daily temp, and, more importantly, with her collapsing of the distance between the natural and the cultural "other". Here's an example:
"These hills, and the valleys at their feet, lay for untold centuries one vast forest; unumbered seasons, ages of unrecorded time passed away while they made part of the boundless wilderness of woods....The whole land lay slumbering in the twilight of the forest. Wild dreams made up its half-conscious existence. The hungry cry of the beast of prey, or the fierce deed of savage man, whoop and dance, triumph and torture, broke in fitful bursts upon the deep silence, and then died away, leaving the breath of life to rise and fall with the passing winds" (127).
Cooper's forest, frequently (seemingly) anthropomorphized as a "tribe" is not the sort that, in itself, has the consciousness necessary for history proper. And while the forest in its "strangely slow" growth and decay is imagined as existing in a slumber, it surpasses the growth of the "savage man" whose actions become a "dream" reduced to a "deep silence," in a passage that seems to mystify the disappearance of Native American tribes as part of a speechless, sublime, natural process. While the reverence Cooper has towards the unconscious but boundless forest informs her attitudes towards a more responsible land stewardship, the same reverence seems bound up in an unconscious cultural violence.
Scattered Thoughts and Reflections on Cooper
Like Arwen, I was surprised at how Audobon portrayed the Ruby-Throated Hummingbird as a poetic image of domesticity and then "joltingly" described in detail how one might be able to kill it. All content aside, the seeming lack of a grammatical transition between these sections and the abrupt change in tone were enough to disorient this modern reader.
With that in mind, I'm interested in how Cooper also seems to jump between the vices and virtues of nature (all from a human perspective of course) without any real transition. This particular passage caught my eye: "An instance is on record, quoted by Dr. De Kay, in which three men, who went upon Tongue Mountain, on Lake George, for the purpose of hunting rattlesnakes, destroyed in two days eleven hundred and four of these venomous creatures! They are taken for their fat, which is sold at a good price" (54). The next paragraph changes focus and tone almost immediately: "We found this afternoon a very pretty butterfly, pink and yellow; it seemed to be quite young, and scarcely in full possession of its powers yet; we thought it a pity to interfere with its happy career, but just begun, and left it unharmed as we found it" (54). Cooper then concludes her daily entry with a truncated sonnet about the butterfly. Can we attribute this strange transition as a feature of the genre? Or is there some kind of guilt Cooper feels at vast destruction of wildlife and its subsequent monetary gain that she must end this entry with an image of beauty and rebirth? In any event, there appears to be a tension in Cooper between the "use" and cultivation of the land and the fear of its diminishing.
It's also interesting to note the morality that Cooper superimposes upon nature: flowers are praised for shunning "vanity" and spiders are scolded for being "plotting" and "creeping" (61). But Cooper seems to be anthropomorphizing the landscape knowingly: "for it is a natural impulse of the human heart to prefer that which is open and confiding to that which is wily and suspicious, even in the brute creation" (62). And thus the unity that Cooper emphasizes in nature prevents us from viewing the world through a good vs. evil lens (snake vs. butterfly, spider vs. fly): "No doubt these insects must have their merits and their uses, since none of God's creatures are made in vain" (61). Cooper seems to be saying here that what we read as evil in nature is just as essential as what we read as virtuous; we just need to learn to read the Book of the World to extract the proper lessons. I wonder if this religious faith in unity and providence accounts for these "jolts" between beauty and violence and virtue and vice in Cooper's work. I also wonder how different religions may affect writing about the natural world. For instance, has the idea of dominion in Genesis complicated the West's relationship with the natural world?
With that in mind, I'm interested in how Cooper also seems to jump between the vices and virtues of nature (all from a human perspective of course) without any real transition. This particular passage caught my eye: "An instance is on record, quoted by Dr. De Kay, in which three men, who went upon Tongue Mountain, on Lake George, for the purpose of hunting rattlesnakes, destroyed in two days eleven hundred and four of these venomous creatures! They are taken for their fat, which is sold at a good price" (54). The next paragraph changes focus and tone almost immediately: "We found this afternoon a very pretty butterfly, pink and yellow; it seemed to be quite young, and scarcely in full possession of its powers yet; we thought it a pity to interfere with its happy career, but just begun, and left it unharmed as we found it" (54). Cooper then concludes her daily entry with a truncated sonnet about the butterfly. Can we attribute this strange transition as a feature of the genre? Or is there some kind of guilt Cooper feels at vast destruction of wildlife and its subsequent monetary gain that she must end this entry with an image of beauty and rebirth? In any event, there appears to be a tension in Cooper between the "use" and cultivation of the land and the fear of its diminishing.
It's also interesting to note the morality that Cooper superimposes upon nature: flowers are praised for shunning "vanity" and spiders are scolded for being "plotting" and "creeping" (61). But Cooper seems to be anthropomorphizing the landscape knowingly: "for it is a natural impulse of the human heart to prefer that which is open and confiding to that which is wily and suspicious, even in the brute creation" (62). And thus the unity that Cooper emphasizes in nature prevents us from viewing the world through a good vs. evil lens (snake vs. butterfly, spider vs. fly): "No doubt these insects must have their merits and their uses, since none of God's creatures are made in vain" (61). Cooper seems to be saying here that what we read as evil in nature is just as essential as what we read as virtuous; we just need to learn to read the Book of the World to extract the proper lessons. I wonder if this religious faith in unity and providence accounts for these "jolts" between beauty and violence and virtue and vice in Cooper's work. I also wonder how different religions may affect writing about the natural world. For instance, has the idea of dominion in Genesis complicated the West's relationship with the natural world?
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