Agassiz and Thoreau

Thoreau had a prickly relationship with Harvard, his alma mater, and particularly with the celebrated Louis Agassiz, the Swiss-born professor of geology and zoology at Harvard. I don’t know whether Thoreau was aware of Agassiz’s racial theories, which have been exposed and dissected by Stephen Jay Gould. They would surely have rankled Thoreau, who participated in the Underground Railroad and delivered fiery speeches on the subject of John Brown. At any rate, Thoreau never lost an opportunity to puncture some of Agassiz’s more dubious pronouncements on natural history. Whenever he does this in his Journal, it is in straight-faced New England style, utterly without comment.

May 18, 1856 R.W.E. says that Agassiz tells him he has had turtles six or seven years, which grew so little, compared with others of the same size killed at first, that he thinks they may live four or five hundred years. 

June 2, 1856 Agassiz tells his class that the intestinal worms in the mouse are not developed except in the stomach of the cat. 

July 26, 1856 Agassiz says he has discovered that the haddock, a deep-sea fish, is viviparous. 

March 20, 1857 Dine with Agassiz at R.W.E.’s. He thinks that the suckers die of asphyxia, having very large air-bladders and being in the habit of coming to the surface for air. But then, he is thinking of a different phenomenon from the one I speak of, which last is confined to the very earliest spring or winter.... When I began to tell him of my experiment on a frozen fish, he said that Pallas had shown that fishes were frozen and thawed again, but I affirmed the contrary, and then Agassiz agreed with me. 

May 14, 1858 Picked up, floating, an Emys picta [painted turtle], hatched last year. It is an inch and one twentieth long in the upper shell and agrees with Agassiz’s description at that age. Agassiz says he could never obtain a specimen of the insculpta [wood turtle] only one year old, it is so rarely met with, and young Emydidæ are so aquatic. I have seen them frequently.

Mark Harris

I often think I should write more fan letters to authors who’ve been important to me. In our increasingly nonliterary time, I’m guessing that even fairly well-known writers don’t hear that much from their admirers. So a few days before Christmas in 2006, having recently reread Mark Harris’s book Twentyone Twice, I sent an email to his address at Arizona State University. I didn’t hear anything, which didn’t surprise me, but it was a bit of a shock not long ago when I looked him up and discovered he had died, a few months after my email. Perhaps Mark Harris wasn’t a major writer, but to me he was an intriguing and endearing one. I felt an additional connection because we shared a birthday. The author of several baseball novels, including Bang the Drum Slowly, he had also written two works of nonfiction that I liked even better. Saul Bellow, Drumlin Woodchuck was an attempt at biography, with the eager Harris pursuing his old friend but elusive subject Bellow. (The title is from Robert Frost’s poem about a woodchuck that “dives under the farm” when pursued.) Inevitably, the book becomes as much about Harris and his quest as it is about Bellow, and we experience all the trials and humiliations of the biographer, as he struggles with his attraction to Bellow’s various girlfriends and ex-wives and with the unreliability of his subject and his own memory. (Consulting his notes, he finds that one dinner conversation was either about Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich or the radical writer Ivan Illich, author of Medical Nemesis.) Twentyone Twice was about Harris’s improbable mission to Africa, to check out the performance of some Peace Corps volunteers. (In my email, I had asked Harris to confirm that his fictional country of Kongohno was actually Sierra Leone.) Subtitled “A Journal,” this funny and rambunctious account was apparently a small slice from an enormous personal journal that Harris had been keeping for decades, and mailed out in sections to a small circle of friends. Harris’s papers are now at the University of Delaware, and I hope that more of the journal will someday see the light of day.

Frozen creatures

One of Thoreau’s most endearing habits was his repeated attempt to revive frozen animals that he encountered on his rambles. I’ve found eleven examples in the Journal where he attempted to bring a creature back to life, and three other discussions of attempts by others. The creatures included a striped squirrel (chipmunk), a toad, a tortoise, caterpillars (including the woolly bear caterpillar), dor-bugs (scarab beetles), grasshoppers, pickerel, and snow-fleas. The other day, The Blog of Henry Thoreau featured Thoreau’s unsuccessful attempt to revive a toad that he found frozen on the sidewalk in Cambridge. Here are two more of my favorite examples.

March 15, 1853 There were fewer colder nights last winter than the last. The water in the flower-stand containing my pet tortoise froze solid, — completely enveloping him, though I had a fire in my chamber all the evening, — also that in my pail pretty thick. But the tortoise, having been thawed out on the stove, leaving the impression of his back shell in the ice, was even more lively than ever. His efforts at first had been to get under his chip, as if to go into the mud. Feb. 20, 1860 J. Farmer tells me that his grandfather once, when moving some rocks in the winter, found a striped squirrel frozen stiff. He put him in his pocket, and when he got home laid him on the hearth, and after a while he was surprised to see him running about the room as lively as ever he was.

New York Times photography

It’s obvious from many a feature story that the New York Times is home to a lot of frustrated novelists. But the photographs in the Times, especially since the advent of color in 1997, also show more artistic talent than most daily papers can demonstrate. One photo from the pre-color days made a haunting impact on me at the time, and I recently looked it up again. The photo shows Jimmy Carter on a blasted lot in the South Bronx. He is stepping out confidently enough, with an inquisitive expression on his face, but there is something sinister in the long dark shadows that he and his entourage cast, and the man at the left is twisting around as if checking for snipers in the windows of the gutted buildings.

Albino alligator

No special reason for this post, except that I thought this was a fine photo of an albino alligator. The alligator is named White Diamond, and he grew up in Florida and is now on display in Germany. He (or she?) almost looks as if he’s carved out of ivory. I was reminded of the legend that alligators (perhaps albino) dwell in the sewers of New York City, and of the 1996 film Albino Alligator, which made only $350,000 in the US despite the efforts of Gary Sinise, Matt Dillon, William Fichtner, Viggo Mortensen, Joe Mantegna, and Faye Dunaway.

Change in Zimbabwe, at last

When I first went to Zimbabwe, in 1990, I had spent the previous several years raising funds for political prisoners in South Africa and Namibia. I was an admirer of Robert Mugabe because of his support for the ANC, and because he had overturned the expectations of people who expected him to be a tinpot dictator. He had improved health and education in the rural areas, welcomed foreign investors, and given farms back to white commercial farmers who had fled the country. I was troubled by the massacres a few years earlier in Matabeleland — in retrospect I should have been a lot more troubled — but I thought Zimbabwe could have ended up with a leader much worse than Mugabe. By the end of my six months in the country, I had changed my mind. It was an election year, and thugs belonging to the ruling party’s “youth league” were intimidating and beating up supporters of the opposition. The opposition candidate for vice president was shot, though he survived. Other people who were inconvenient to the government tended to die in car crashes, sometimes in collisions with armored vehicles. Joshua Nkomo, the widely respected leader of the ZAPU party, had been harmlessly neutralized as a minister without portfolio. I saw him at a ceremony for the tenth anniversary of the country’s independence — a huge sad man in a suit, staring at his lap. Meanwhile the ruling ZANU party was finishing construction on a new and brutal-looking tower in Harare. Eighteen long years later, Zimbabwe’s economy is in ruins and its people starving. When I was there, the largest bill in general circulation was a blue note worth twenty Zimbabwean dollars. As I recall, it was worth about ten dollars. In January this year, the government printed new money:

On Jan. 18, Zimbabwe’s reserve bank put a $10 million bill into general circulation, a maroon-tinged piece of paper with a sketch of water gushing through a dam that might well have symbolized the escaping value of the note itself. Worth enough at the time to buy a chicken, it now will barely buy a few eggs, with a value of about 40 cents.

As I write, Mugabe has admitted that ZANU has lost control of Parliament, but he has not yet stepped down. I hope he does so soon, that there is a peaceful transition of power, and that foreign governments and aid agencies provide the country with help that actually promotes development and not debt and dependency.

Books I can’t face

I have a pretty strong stomach as a reader: I’ve read books about the killings in Rwanda and Cambodia, and I have a shelf of books on the Holocaust. But there are some books I feel I should read but just can’t face. Not yet, at least. One of these is Medical Apartheid by Harriet A. Washington. I knew about the Tuskegee experiments, but not about Thomas Jefferson exposing slaves to an experimental smallpox vaccine. And I certainly didn’t know about more recent medical experiments on black people. From the Washington Post:

In 1945, Ebb Cade, an African American trucker being treated for injuries received in an accident in Tennessee, was surreptitiously placed without his consent into a radiation experiment sponsored by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Black Floridians were deliberately exposed to swarms of mosquitoes carrying yellow fever and other diseases in experiments conducted by the Army and the CIA in the early 1950s. Throughout the 1950s and '60s, black inmates at Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison were used as research subjects by a University of Pennsylvania dermatologist testing pharmaceuticals and personal hygiene products; some of these subjects report pain and disfiguration even now. During the 1960s and '70s, black boys were subjected to sometimes paralyzing neurosurgery by a University of Mississippi researcher who believed brain pathology to be the root of the children's supposed hyperactive behavior. In the 1990s, African American youths in New York were injected with Fenfluramine — half of the deadly, discontinued weight loss drug Fen-Phen — by Columbia researchers investigating a hypothesis about the genetic origins of violence.

I’m sure it’s an important book, and I’m sure I’ll read it sometime. Just not now.