botanizing

Holy crap! A Museum Moment

While working last week with DL to plan an exhibit for the Conner Museum, a school group came into the gallery where we sat.   The mass flow of students into the gallery was like the first squirt of water from a garden hose—the stream of students shot forth and one and then another and another separated from the mass, like the spreading flow of water shot from a nozzle.

One of the first to separate from the mass of this junior high class was a young woman, who rushed toward a display case filled by birds.  “Holy crap!” the young woman exclaimed, “I love birds!”  She said, “I know these birds from a bird book I have at home.”  As she stood in front of the display case, she turned her head to look at other cases.  “Do they have all the birds of the United States?” she asked.

Teeth

A few months ago I squeezed some new color on my palette of duties.  In addition to teaching, research, and directing the university’s herbarium, I accepted a position as interim director of the Conner Museum of Natural History.  The Conner, like the Ownbey Herbarium, which I direct, is a university museum, and its mission encompasses support for research and teaching as well as public outreach.  The Conner Museum is devoted primarily to vertebrates, and it consists of a research collection of about 70,000 specimens, a teaching collection used by university classes, and also three rooms of public exhibits. 

The public exhibits are popular and visited by several thousand people each year.  They are fairly traditional mounts of mammals and birds in display cases.  In the past few years, my predecessor worked to make these displays more interesting and more educational.  That’s an effort we need to continue.  I was also intrigued by the idea of mounting special exhibits in which we could bring material from the research collection, which is not normally on public display, into view.

As part of my introduction to the collection several weeks ago, the collection manager showed me examples of the specimens.  In deep storage in a basement of another building, she showed me elephant teeth that a former faculty member had collected.  Each elephant tooth was larger than my large hands.  An idea born was there:  we would have a special exhibit on teeth.

For the past two weeks, we have intensively prepared for the exhibit “The Conner Museum Has Teeth.”  Last weekend, coinciding with the university’s homecoming celebrations, we put our teeth on display.  There were pharyngeal teeth from carp, a shark’s jaw with many rows of sharp-pointed teeth, and skulls ranging from beluga whale to tiger to shrew.  We had a monkey that need orthodontic assistance and bear with shiny incisors and molars (or at least we had their skulls).  And there were the lovely, intriguing elephant teeth.  I spent Friday and Saturday at the exhibit chatting with visitors.

There was one young boy that especially caught my attention.  Let’s call him Thomas.  He was five years old and came in with his mother.  I could see from the start the brilliant intensity of his gaze.  Thomas went slowly from specimen to specimen as his mother read our signs to him and talked to him about the materials.  Thomas was especially interested in the shark jaw.  He would stand by the jaw with his hand lightly touching the teeth.  Thomas would venture from the shark along other tables of the exhibit but after a few minutes he returned repeatedly to the shark jaw. He told me about sharks and his interest in them. Thomas and I also talked about the pharyngeal teeth of the carp and about the Great Horned Owl he had seen in a local park over the weekend.  I had seen an owl in the same park the weekend before.  I could sense a sort of burning inquisitiveness in Thomas that impressed me.  One wanted to put the world on a platter for him to explore and see what thoughts he developed.  One wanted to take him into a laboratory.  Thomas was at the exhibit for an hour and a half, steadily studying and holding the skulls and jaws for several minutes each, unhurried, intensely curious.  He made the planning and preparation of the exhibit worthwhile.  He made me think of my own childhood, when my interest in science coalesced at eight years old.  I then began to read, to synthesize ideas, and to write books on scientific topics.  It was delightful to think about being eight and consumed by the beauty of science.  It was delightful at eight to learn about discovery.  It was delightful last weekend to discover the workings of elephant teeth and to talk about them with Thomas and our other visitors.

A slide show with audio that advertised our exhibit is available here.

 

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Photos:  Coyote skull, tiger teeth, dolphin jaws, and exhibit poster.

Only among biologists . . .

What to do about the French

About 11.30 last night I began rearranging my library.  Actually, it was only the European literature.  Much of the library is arranged geographically by country—as in the author’s place of origin for fiction or the setting of the book for nonfiction.  Exiles and other geographic mongrels have their own section.  Travel writing that is unrooted and placeless also gets its own section.

I’ve been short on shelf space in the library since returning from sabbatical, and this had left an eruption in the middle of Europe.  For the past few months, French writers and literature about France had stood in piles on the floor (in French do books stand or sit?).  Over the weekend, I had added a shelf, and last night, after brushing my teeth, I faced the dilemma of what to do about the French.  This dilemma extends also to the British.  I have a large collection of books by British authors.  British were already stacked in piles on top of other Brits on the shelves.  They needed more space; indeed, they needed some open inches of shelves for anticipated expansion.

The Scandinavians, Russians, and those of the former ‘Eastern Europe’—once again, after the interregnum of the Iron Curtain, better considered as Central Europe—were also part of the problem.  An economy of space had earlier demanded that I box the end of the British with Scandinavians and Russians who were followed by Central Europeans, including the Germans and Swiss.  I began by moving-out the Swiss in order to get all of the British on the shelves.  The Swiss joined the French piles.

With the removal of the Swiss, I began simply to put the French on the new shelf, which geographically had them following the Germans.  The Swiss then went on shelves after the French, which seemed reasonable enough, and I could put the Italians after the Swiss.  It was very pleasing, except that I have several large books of photographs of Switzerland, and in this scheme these big books were in the middle of a shelf, creating a formidable massif that separated much thinner volumes by the French and Italians.  The aesthetics were bad.

I removed the French and the Swiss back to their piles to face again the Scandinavians, Russians, and eastern Central Europeans.  I dawdled with alternatives for the Russians but could come up with nothing satisfying.  The Scandinavians and Russians went back to the end of the British despite the apprehension this gave me.  The Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Bulgarians, and Yugoslavs (whomever they might now be) went to the new shelf.  I left them with some expansion space.  Just below, I brought in the Austrians, Germans, and Swiss.  The big Swiss books again sat near the middle of a shelf, but I was growing tired and decided that they didn’t look as overwhelming placed against the Germans as they did when placed earlier against the Italians. What was to lie beyond the Swiss mountain this time?  The stack of Rousseau.  I had been allowing Jean-Jacques Rousseau a place with the French and suddenly realized that he was the perfect transition.  He could lie back against his Swiss place and look out to France.  The French went on the shelves:  Voltaire, Stendhal, Constant, Zola, Proust, Radiquet, Gide, Genet, Duras, and on.  And next?  The Spanish fit the space so in they went.  Then the Italians, Greeks, and their neighbors the Turks, and I was on to Asia.

*   *   *
The photograph is a statue of Jean-Jacques Rousseau taken on a gray day in the city of light during a December many years ago.  The photograph is a bit of an homage to Laura, who has been posting paintings and sketches of Paris's statues, cafes, bridges, dresses, and miscellany over the past few weeks.

Why wait?

Via Via Negativa the other day, I found a link to an essay at Simply Wait about blog rolls and what it means to link, the compromises, implications, feelings involved, and such.   Why wait?--I thought, and simply linked today to Simply Wait.

Pants for Communion

Debbie sent me to the library today.  We’re working on a review of a book about collecting during the Romantic era, and she wanted to use a quote about the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s jawbone from the book Letters About Shelley.

Debbie has her own copy of the book with her in Chicago, but she explained in her e-mail to me, “I must have tore out [pages 43-45] to use in some other context, and so I don’t have them!”  I cringed as I read the e-mail.  Wait, Debbie, I wanted to holler, what context makes you rip pages from old books?

In her e-mail, Debbie sent the call number for the book as well as the author and title, and I walked up the hill to the main library. The book was shelved on the utter sole of the library, in the bottom basement in compact storage; it’s my favorite place in the library.  The books in compact storage lay beyond fashionable scholarship—it’s the place I troll for old personal narratives, travel, and geography books.  Yesterday, I fetched 120-year old plant descriptions from compact storage.

Letters About Shelley was in one of many compacted aisles of British literature and on one of several shelves of Shelleyana.  Our library copy of Letters About Shelley was published in 1917, but the pages to which Debbie had directed me were uncut. The book had been checked-out several times since 1930, and I was surprised at the uncut pages.  I checked-out the book from the library, and, when back in my office, I used my Swiss Army Knife.  I slit cleanly the margins to separate the pages to make them readable, exposing this quote requested by Debbie:  “Trelawny has a piece of Shelley’s jawbone—charred of course—wh. he showed me.  Oh that it were mine one day!  I wd. imitate ‘the priests of the bloody faith’ and enshrine it.”  I’m looking forward to seeing what Debbie does with this paean to Shelleyana.

While I was in compact storage, I grabbed a couple of other things.  Rather than simply reading letters about Shelley, I wanted also to read some of Shelley’s letters so I took along Letters from Percy Bysshe Shelley to Elizabeth Hitchener. Richard Holmes, in his biography of Shelley, described Hitchener as “a striking figure, tall, black-haired and dark eyed, self-possessed and remarkably articulate.” One would like to have met her.  Shelley was nineteen when he began his correspondence with Hitchener, who was ten years his senior.  The correspondence begins with discussions of books and Shelley’s religious antagonism, it progresses to his relationship with Harriet Grove before and after marrying her, but the correspondence is a long seduction of Elizabeth Hitchener.  Shelley pulls Hitchener toward his ménage.  His letter of 20 November 1811 is impetuous:  “Writing is slow, soulless, incommunicative.  I long to talk with you. My soul is bursting.  Ideas, millions of ideas, are crowding into it:  it pants for communion with you.”

I can’t help envisioning a pair of blue jeans as Shelley’s “pants for communion.”  Shelley’s bursting pants as much as his soul led, I suspect, his desire for communion, which makes me think more about Mary Godwin than Elizabeth Hitchener.

Shelley refers repeatedly to William Godwin in his letters to Elizabeth Hitchener.  Godwin’s writings bewitched Shelley.  He was drawn to meet Godwin, but Shelley’s communion was ultimately with Godwin’s daughters.  Mary Godwin would become Shelley’s second wife. 

Escaping William Godwin’s house with Godwin’s daughters became a Shelley communion goal.  They walked to the cemetery.  Young Mary Godwin was wooed on cemetery grass at her mother Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave.  That’s my favorite story about Shelley, and to imagine the graveyard seduction of Mary Godwin before the daffodils that surround her mother’s headstone is better, I think, than owning a piece of Shelley’s charred jawbone.

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Notes:

The Richard Holmes biography is  Shelley:  The Pursuit; the description of Elizabeth Hitchener  quoted above is from p. 71 of the 1995 Flamingo edition.

The quotation from the Letters from Percy Bysshe Shelley to Elizabeth Hitchener (1908, Bertram Dobell) is from page 91.

Spots of Time

My friend and colleague Debbie, a scholar of the Romantic and writer, has a blog about the moments that become stories at Spots of Time.  Her most recent book is Romantic Liars—stories of women in the Romantic era who were impostors, choosing lives that weren’t theirs. At Spots of Time, Debbie’s most recent post is on collecting, an idea and activity that interest me as a museum director and botanist.  And as a collector, I am a character, which is a little like being an impostor.

New collections

New books arrived this week.  The first to arrive was by Frank Kingdon-Ward, one of the great plant collectors of the 20th century.  Kingdon-Ward collected in the Himalaya for the horticultural trade.  Repeatedly through his adult life, he marched through the high mountains, especially of northern Burma and southern China in search of good, new material for horticulture in the United Kingdom.  He wrote about the traits of the plants in he sought in his book The Romance of Plant Hunting.  The book that arrived in the mail this week was a 1973 reprint of his second book The Land of the Blue Poppy, which was originally published in 1913 and based on his second expedition, the first that he led, in the mountains of China.  Here’s Kingdon-Ward at the beginning of the book:  “.  .  . travel had bitten too deeply into my soul, and I soon began to feel restless again, so that when after four months of civilised life something better turned up, I accepted with alacrity.  This was none other than the chance of plant-collecting on the Tibetan border of Yunnan, and though I had extremely vague ideas about the country, and the method of procedure, I had mentally decided to undertake the mission before I had finished reading the letter in which the offer was set forth.”

Frank Kingdon-Ward about
a year before he left on the
blue poppy expedition.
[from Charles Lyte, 1989. 
Frank Kingdon Ward, the
Last of the Great Plant
Hunters.  John Murray, London]

Joseph Dalton Hooker in the 1860s
when he was the Director of the
Royal Botanic Garden at Kew.
[from http://www.jdhooker.org.uk]

The second new arrival for the week was W. B. Turrill’s 1963 biography of Joseph Dalton Hooker.  Hooker is one of the prominent figures of Victorian science in the U.K.  Along with T. H. Huxley, Hooker promoted science as an institution, sponsored and supported by the state, and pushed for its professionalization. While turning science into a profession for themselves and future generations, Hooker and Huxley are also well known as early advocates of Charles Darwin, one of the ultimate ‘unprofessional’ natural historians. Much of the public face of evolution as it began to transform British science and society after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species had the face not of Darwin or Alfred Russel Wallace, but of Hooker and Huxley. While Joseph Dalton Hooker is fascinating for his various promotions—Darwin and evolutionary biology, rational institutions at the base of society, professional science, the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew, which he directed after his father’s death—I’m now especially curious about Hooker’s experiences as a plant collector and traveller.  He traveled on a voyage of discovery to the Antarctic with James Clark Ross in 1839 to 1843.  After failing to obtain a chair at the University of Edinburgh, he traveled in the Himalaya and India in 1847-1851.  Later in life he continued his botanical travels, making shorter trips to Syria and Palestine in 1860, Morocco in 1871, and North America in 1877.

New Collections

I had earlier been writing about materials purchased for my library, but that thread was dropped last summer when I became distracted by grant proposals. There haven’t been too many books purchased since then—the absence of summer salary and the late summer travels slowed my book buying habit—although I did come away from BookPeople in Austin, Texas, when I was there for the annual botany meetings, with a large bag of new purchases. I’ll pick-up here writing about my new book acquisitions.

I bicycled through Arches National Park today and when finished stopped by the visitor’s center, where I picked-up these two:

    Jack Loeffler’s (2002) Adventures with Ed, a Portrait of Abbey.  Abbey’s writings, especially Desert Solitaire, helped to form my view of the western landscape, and I’ve been rereading things by and about him while I’m in the canyon country for the year.

    Martha Sandweiss’s (2002) Print the Legend:  Photography and the American West.  Both the pleasure of photographs and the role of photography in shaping understanding are captivating.  In this volume on photographs from the 19th century, I’m drawn especially by her chapters on photography during the exploring expeditions to the West and on illustrated books.

Earlier in the week, I received in the mail from the Bear Bookshop in Brattleboro, Vermont, my order of Ruth Hall’s (1977) Passionate Crusader:  the Life of Marie Stopes.  I had read last winter much of our library’s copy, which didn’t have the excellent dust cover with its two photographs of Stopes—one in her academic robes after completing her PhD in Munich and the other of her more diaphanously robed.  Stopes is best know for writing some of the first, sexually frank “marriage manuals” (such as Married Love, which was published in 1918) and for her advocacy of birth control.  Stopes was, however, trained as a botanist and wrote in the early 1900s several important papers and textbooks on fossil plants, and I’m curious about her experiences as a botanist.

The acquisitive urge

I’ve been reading Lord Eccles’s On Collecting (1968, Longman’s, London).  As a museum director (the Ownbey Herbarium at Washington State University) who works to build a collection, the implications of collecting as well as the motivations of collectors interest me.  Eccles’s notions of collecting are filled with the pomp and circumstance of a grander time—you can hear Elgar playing in the background as he talks about his library (actually, I can hear Elgar—I just slipped the “Enigma” Variations into the CD player).  For Eccles, building collections teaches us to cherish genius and “unifies mankind.” Building a collection places the collector in a community—the collection providing, Eccles suggests, a “tenant’s share in a larger existence.”  Neither the substance of that community nor issues of access are explored by Eccles, although he does bemoan tying-up all the good stuff in museums and preventing personal acquisition.  Eccles does not deny the self-indulgence of collecting:  he suggests for collectors, new purchases make “us feel better, more secure, and in some way it enlarges our personality.”  And he sweetly turns the self-indulgence of collecting into a virtue:  collecting can “act as a barrier to more reprehensible expressions of greed and for this reason deserves to be encouraged.”  [Is the analogy here that we should ignore the financial improprieties of congressmen because such activities prevent them from doing worse things?]

Eccles titles his first chapter “The Acquisitive Urge.”  He lays the urge in human instinct.  Are we collectors simply hunter/gatherers writ large?  Are we born to collect beyond the basic need for food and shelter?