Piezoelectric headbanging

This site is amazing.  I have always particularly loved the word stridulation....

Bombardiers

Natalie Angier has a really nice piece in the Science Times about Thomas Eisner, who died last month:

Ian Baldwin, a professor of molecular ecology at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Germany, who studied with Dr. Eisner in the 1980s, said of his mentor: “He articulated the value of natural history discovery in a time of natural history myopia. We train biologists today who can’t identify more than four species, who only know how to do digital biology, but the world of analog biology is the world we live in. Tom was a visionary for nonmodel systems. He created narratives around everything he did.”

The book of Eisner's that I think should be in every person's library is the dazzling volume For Love of Insects....

Also: Alexis Madrigal's new book sounds great.

Earwig heaven

In the New York Times Book Review, Philip Hoare reviews Hugh Raffles' Insectopedia:

Raffles’s approach is almost perversely eclectic. His alphabetical entries range in subject matter from the personal disgust he feels when he discovers a cockroach sharing the shower in his Manhattan apartment to epic journeys into Asia and Africa and observing cricket-betting in Shanghai and locust-eating in Niger. His essays may take up 20 pages or a mere two paragraphs. But the most satisfying ones illuminate his subject via potted biographies of men and women who are passionate about insects.

In “Chernobyl,” for instance, Raffles offers a cameo of Cornelia Hesse-­Honegger, a contemporary artist dedicated to creating near-perfect watercolors of insects deformed by nuclear fallout. This is sci-fi stuff: flies with legs growing out of their eyes, the kind of mutations that in any other animal would elicit our horrified response, yet which, because they occur in such small creatures, seem almost excusable because almost invisible. In the act of depicting them so exactingly, Hesse-Honegger, whose own child, we are told in an upsetting aside, was born with a club foot, “discovers that the insect is deformed in ways she hadn’t noticed before.”

There is an extraordinary set of pictures of Chernobyl at the Independent this week, by the way, commemorating the 24th anniversary of the catastrophe.

Miniature, giant

Two old pieces I'm still pleased with: my review of Toni Schlesinger's Five Flights Up (assigned to me by Ed Park, who also suggested the format as an homage to Toni's long-running Shelter column); and the longer spin-off essay in the Believer.

Thinking about this because I'm doing another interview soon, the first for a long time, of a writer I particularly admire: details to follow at a more appropriate juncture...

(Toni was another one of Tino's "interpreters" at the Guggenheim show, though I mostly only caught a glimpse of her as we crossed paths in the stairwell. And a nice bit in the Times this week on another person I know through Tino's gigs: Hugh Raffles, whose book Insectopedia sounds very much the kind of thing I delight in!)

Intuition and Pest Control

A Journey Round My Skull presents books from an imagined academic history concerned with the study of invertebrates and other animals as they relate to architecture and psychology, invented and designed by Julian Montague.