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Done Snarking

I posted the last four chapters of Jack London’s Cruise of the Snark today. I will be very pleased if I have introduced someone to this delightful book by posting it here.Jack_London's_Snark_on_Alameda_CA_Estuary

A friend of mine has been exploring the possibilities of writing non-fiction narrative prose. I pointed him toward Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, which was published as fiction but is frequently cited as autobiographical, and the Philadelphia Inquirer’s “Blackhawk Down”, forgetting that I was in the process of posting the Cruise of the Snark. That was an egregious lapse. Jack London is occasionally described as a pioneer of twentieth century journalism, and I think the Cruise is a wonderful example of his contribution. The scenes of the Cruise are as carefully plotted as those of any novel and London always finds an element of drama to highlight.

I often judge a book by its atmosphere. Some are closed in and stuffy, like business and technical literature that piles cliche on cliche apparently trying to avoid a hint of an original thought. Others, like my old standby, Anatomy of Melancholy, are richer than an over-priced slice of chocolate cake at a pretentious lunch counter.  The Cruise is open, wide open, looking past the horizon, beyond the next port of call, without regrets, without illusions. What an idiot! What a fantasy! What a way to live!

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Why Call This Site the Vine Maple Studio?

Long ago, before I struggled all the way out of my teens, Herrlee Creel, Edward Kracke and the other sinologists of Hyde Park on the south side of Chicago shanghaied me from a normal life into the cult of the traditional Chinese scholar, my neglected true calling. The scholar in my dream spends his life working for the the lao bai xing, the people of the land, as a virtuous imperial official, then retires; forced by his stubborn refusal to compromise his lofty Confucian ideals, he retreats to a rustic setting, to study and write disinterestedly on topics that strike his fancy. There are several Chinese phrases for the scholar’s writing room, but they are all conventionally translated “studio.” The old farmhouse that we inherited from my parents is my studio, and the vine maple groves are on every side.

The furnishing of a scholar’s studio evolved into an art form in China. Mundane objects, such as rat whisker pokers used to prod pet crickets to sing on command became elegant objects of art.Water containers, brush racks, and paper weights all became respected symbols of scholarly virtue. Scholars kept their pet crickets in gourds meticulously grown in molds to assure perfect lines and in the summer, they brought out intricately carved ivory open work cages. Scholars also liked rocks and by the T’ang dynasty (7th C.) precise technical terms had already appeared for describing the thinness, wrinkling, holes and other characteristics of the rocks piled on a scholar’s desk.

The “four treasures of the scholar’s studio”wenfang-si-bao (wenfang si bao), – writing brush, ink stick, ink stone, and paper – occupy the heart of the scholar’s studio. Chinese characters were written traditionally with brushes that resemble western artists paint brushes. Chinese ink sticks are pieces of hardened natural resin mixed with lamp black. Often, ink sticks are molded into artistic shapes with interesting inscriptions. The ink stick is ground on a fine abrasive ink stone with water to form ink. Most ink stones have a little well where the prepared ink accumulates. The more ink that is ground into the water, the darker the ink. Before a Chinese scholar writes, he must grind ink. The fourth treasure of the studio is paper. The Chinese invented paper and the traditional scholar had many varieties to choose from, but in a remote studio, he made do with what he could get, or even made his own.

The Vine Maple Studio is my scholar’s studio. I don’t keep crickets, but I have a few rocks on my desk, and I have a few Chinese writing brushes, an ink stone, and a stick of ink, but I have never practiced writing with a brush for more than a few minutes. I do occasionally write a few Chinese characters, but I use whatever I happen to have– pencil, ballpoint or fountain pen, or crayon, and I have a hard enough time starting writing without grinding ink. Still, I call it it my studio.

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Changes: People, Slugs, and Hawks

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This afternoon, I was out wandering and I started thinking about what has changed and what has stayed the same during the fifty odd years that I have stumbled over the fields and woods of the farm.

The people have changed the most. I grew up surrounded by my great grandmother, grandparents, parents, uncle, aunt, cousins, and my sister. It was a large and close family spread over four houses. I would have been as likely to knock on our own door as I would have been to knock before walking in on my cousins or my grandparents. Now, my sister, parents, uncle, aunt, grandparents, and great grandmother are all dead and my cousins have all moved away. I am unnerved that I don’t even know the names of the people who now live in those houses that I used to walk into freely.

At another outpost on the evolutionary spectrum, the slugs have changed also. The totals in the slug census have not changed, but the species have. When I was small, there were two kinds of slugs: spotted and striped. The spotted variety was most common. Both varieties were smooth skinned.  They were so common in the woods that when I was about ten, my cousins and I would engage in what we thought of as trans-species eugenics and stage slug hunts in which we counted the number of slugs we could disembowel with sticks. The only slightly exaggerated kill tallies on those hunts were often over a hundred each for a half dozen hunters. The victims of this ichorous carnage were almost all spotted.

It’s been dry, so the slugs are in hiding, but I saw a few in the woods this afternoon. They were all of the dark and wrinkled variety that were unknown in the Darwinian salad days of the slug hunt. The wrinkled slugs only began to show up thirty or forty years ago. The spotted variety is now hard to find. Striped slugs are a little more common now than spotted, but the wrinkled species has taken over. This year slugs in general are not especially numerous, but the slug population is cyclic, or dependent on the weather. A couple years ago, the wrinkled slugs were as numerous as the smooth slugs of the slug hunts.

The number of raptors that patrol the skies above the farm has increased for the last thirty years. I remember  hawks circling above the fields when I was in elementary school and at that time, eerie owl hoots and the dark figure of owls sweeping over the fields were commonplace in the summer twilight. Then for the next fifteen or so years into the seventies, I don’t believe I saw a single hawk and the hoots were few. My dad, who was out in fields all the time and most likely to spot a hawk, might mention seeing one a year during that time. In the late seventies, the hawks and owls began to reappear and we began to see eagles occasionally, which dad remembered from his youth. Now scarcely a day goes by that we don’t see several birds of prey, circling, swooping, and diving for mice and the occasional rabbit.

The return of the raptors could be related to the ban on DDT. Among my dad’s friends, some thought banning DDT was nothing but government meddling; others, like my dad, thought that DDT might be useful in other places, but they couldn’t see that DDT really did that much good here and we were probably better off without it. One of the reasons cited for banning DDT was that it was killing off the birds of prey. DDT was banned in 1972 and the hawks had begun to come back by the late seventies. It may be a coincidence, but I am inclined to think that DDT caused the hawks to die off and the ban brought them back.

People change, slugs change, and hawks return.