Letter no. 76: [insect taxonomy for the vertebrate-minded]
Good morning, everyone. Please enjoy the rapidly decaying American empire, which has choked so thoroughly on its own poison that the very tentacles it plunged Iwo Jima-style into the flesh of the twentieth-century world, have begun, twitchingly and painfully, to retract.
And since we’re in an altered frame of mind, let’s start with something unexpected, shall we?
Today’s Organism [PSYCH!]
Today’s featured organism is no organism at all but, thanks to a reader suggestion, a key. An unwritten cipher, to decode the mute squiggles of any insect in the dust and uncover the chitinous secrets of its ancestry and taxonomy. So how do you figure out which bugs are what?
Well, first of all, everyone has bugs all around them pretty much at all times. Even in a shitty ornamental bush in a parking lot or by your apartment, if you poke around and look under all the leaves and everything you will probably see a bug sooner or later. Or even inside your house. Identifying bugs like any other animal takes a certain amount of attentive artist-like looking, to see what it truly looks like and not just what you assume it to be categorically. You probably already know a lot about insects (does it look like a butterfly/moth/beetle/ant/spider? it probably is), but a few tips can help you narrow in what it actually is. Take the two images below:
They look very similar. But note the "wasp waist" on No. 1, many, many times more narrow than the thorax or abdomen width, versus the fat waist on No. 2—No. 2 is a moth mimicking a wasp! "Wasp waist" is a diagnostic for most wasps, bees, and ants, compared to other stuff that mimics wasps. Plus, check out those antennae on No. 2. Each segment is so thick and short and velvety compared to the wasp antennae, and there are far more segments per antenna; and the wasp antennae have a strong elbow where the moth antennae have a more gentle curve with no elbow. Plus, that shape of long with the little tipped-over-end is another sorta-kinda clue it’s a butterfly or moth. (Don’t rely on it, though… it’s one of those “concatenation of clues” things rather than a dead giveaway.)
So then, you could do an internet search on "wasp mimic moths nebraska" or whatever your state is. Try flipping back and forth between the two photos and try to find more differences—don't get fixated on color patterns, those can vary a lot within closely related groups—look for structural features instead. Where are the eyes and other facial features positioned on the head? How about the spurs on the legs? Veins of the wings? Body hair texture—is it bristly, silvery, fluffy, sparse, thick, arranged in bands? Shape and texture of antennae? Something as simple as body size? Is it covered with a hard shell all over (beetle), what shape are the mouthparts (like pinchy ant jaws or like a weird poky needle?), does it have #thickthighssavelives (maybe a coreid true bug or a chalcidid wasp, you’re welcome)?
Well, that’s all well and good, you may say, but how do I know that damn thing is a moth in the first place to do the web search? I thought it was a wasp. A really no-brainer method to get to know what's around is to surf the World Wide Web to iNaturalist, search for "Insecta" and set the location as your county, then click on "[number] Species" just to the right of "[number] Observations" to get a list of species rather than individual observations. It's sorted from most to least common. Anything you see out and about (has a higher chance of being eyecatching, colorful, larger-bodied, common and widespread) has a good chance to be in those first few rows!
Okay, so let’s say you went to all those websites and studied all that shit and now you’re out on the trail or digging in the pantry for silverfish. What is actually this thing in front of me? One tip that often alarms the greenhorn: having the critter in hand is helpful. When I lived a more entomologically oriented life, I would carry around little clear screw-top vials with me, in order to check out the situation at closer range. (Actually, I think I still have a stash in my backpack, but I always forget about them.) Failing this, some crisp, hi-res photos from various angles — top and side at a minimum — and an attentive artist’s eye will go a long way when looking it up afterward or describing it to a professional. Or uploading it to BugGuide… Do yourself a favor and cruise there NOW. Other suggested searches once you have your crisp, hi-res images in hand: “[broad group] of [your county]” (especially for charismatic groups like butterflies, it is highly likely that some rando made a website for them) or “[broad group] wings blue spots orange body [your state].” Seriously.
Look at what it really looks like, not what you imagine it looks like or what your mental-verbal vocabulary tells you it looks like. Focus more on body parts—number, size, shape, orientation—and behavior—crawling on the ground, visiting a flower, hovering in one spot, on leaves, on dead twigs—than color and pattern. (But color and pattern are important too.) Use the thousands of experts on iNat, BugGuide, and elsewhere who are itching and foaming to help you ID your crisp, hi-res, geolocated photos. Finally, remember that nature has a thousand variations and it doesn’t always look like the book… You could find a color variant, a deformity, an injury, or even a gynandromorph (a single organism vertically bifurcated into male and female), and then you’d be the happiest person in the world.
A Recipe I Made and Liked
Oh, I guess I forgot to do this one last time. I haven’t really been very food-oriented lately. Uhh…
Buy these noodles (I got mine from my local HMart as sacrificial unflavored noodles and accidentally discovered the broth sachet is excellent). They have a really wonderful anise-y aspect that makes me think of a dark, ruddy phở bò broth enriched with chili crisp, even though the brand is apparently Chinese. Cook them with some cabbage. Poach an egg in the broth. Eat it.
(P.S. on the insect ID: Most often it does look like the book, and if you’re getting lost in a description or matching photos and confused because nothing fits exactly right, go back, you probably messed up. When it’s right, you’ll usually know and it’ll feel like a bull’s-eye.)
We’re bangin’ with links this time because I simply have a lot of them. Don’t you want to have a lot of little tabs open and close them one by one as you read and finish the articles? Wouldn’t a sense of peace just wash over you as you X each out, like a rich woman gradually giving away each of her possessions?
'Her rooms were becoming airier and airier. She sent off one parcel after the other, and the fewer possessions she had left, the lighter she felt. Finally, she was walking about in empty rooms, feeling rather like a balloon, a happy balloon ready to fly away...'
from “Cedric,” in Tales from Moominvalley (Tove Jansson, 1962) [Ed.: a book you should read as soon as possible, if not sooner]
By my homegirl Ada Palmer, the politically-minded violence of Renaissance art:
[Sculptor Benvenuto] Cellini lived in the rocky decades when (after the death of the famous Lorenzo de Medici) the Medici family had been kicked out and strove to return and seize control of the city by force. Duke Cosimo I took over in the 1530s, and commissioned the Perseus in the 1540s right after a bloody revolt. Perseus’s face deliberately resembled the then-teenaged duke, and Florence had long displayed corpses of traitors that square, often hung from battlements, sometimes as heads on pikes. When the statue was unveiled Medusa’s head in the duke’s hand represented very real & recent rebel heads!
Peruse more of Palmer’s fabulous blog here.
A link I snagged from my colleague, reporting from the trenches of middle-school education in her phenomenal and intelligent Substack: Katherine Rundell asks in the LRB, why children’s books?
[… I]f you are Tolstoy, [children] were to be extravagantly harrowed. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, Tolstoy wrote stories for the children who lived on his family estate; they went on to become popular throughout Russia and summon up the same feelings of delight and warmth that you find in Anna Karenina’s suicide scene. There is a lion who tears apart a puppy, a tree cut down ‘screaming in unbearable pain’, a dead bird, a dead hare, another dead bird. There is a disputation on ‘why there is evil’, in which a hermit tells us that ‘from our bodies comes all the evil in the world.’ [Ed.: LOL] They work, like many English children’s books of the time, on the assumption that children are not to be trusted with the freedom of pleasure: they might break something with it.
Over the decades, however, children’s literature slowly uncoupled itself from strident moralising and nostril anxiety. […] As grown-ups came to recognise the childhood imagination as something unique to itself, something wild and immense, so the books, in turn, became wild and immense offerings. From being engines of control, they began offering visions of how various good and evil might be. They work to disprove the Anna Karenina principle that happy families are all alike: they offer a multiplicity of models for what delight might look like.
More here. If you get paywalled, open it on Firefox and click the little “Toggle reader view” page-looking doohickey on the right of the URL bar, then hit Ctrl-Shift-R to hard refresh. Oh, and subscribe to my friend’s education Substack.
Eric K. Ward on how antisemitism animates white nationalism:
As a kid in Southern California and as a young adult in Oregon, deep in a West Coast punk scene that in some ways looked a lot like the U.S. in 2017, [White nationalists] were literally [my neighbors]. Because I grew up Black in a city and a scene where people of color were under attack by White nationalists, the immediacy of the movement’s threat and its hatred of dark-skinned people like my family and friends is something I have always known. I thought I understood what motivated them, and I thought their motivation always looked like me. What I learned when I got to Oregon, as I began to log untold hours trying to understand White nationalists and their ideas, was that antisemitism was the lynchpin of the White nationalist belief system. That within this ideological matrix, Jews—despite and indeed because of the fact that they often read as White—are a different, unassimilable, enemy race that must be exposed, defeated, and ultimately eliminated. Antisemitism, I discovered, is a particular and potent form of racism so central to White supremacy that Black people would not win our freedom without tearing it down.
Long Beach, California is planted on the line that locals call the Orange Curtain, the border between the working-class and immigrant neighborhoods of southern Los Angeles County and the White conservative suburbs of Orange County. By the time my mom and I moved down from L.A. in 1976, when I was in sixth grade, this endless sprawl of White flight was increasingly interrupted by people of color looking for affordable housing in safe neighborhoods. The civil rights and radical social movements of the 1960s and early Seventies had already been smashed by the state or self-destructed. White nationalism, on the other hand, was part of the scenery.
More. The author was an original member of the band that became Sublime, BTW.
In The Nation, Elaine Blair reviews an Alison Light book about Virginia Woolf and her servants:
Woolf’s diaries and letters are sprinkled with careless snobbish comments about servants, and her and Vanessa’s dislike of having servants shades easily into disdain for the servants themselves. They make everything “pompous and heavy-footed,” Virginia writes to her sister, who in another letter complains that her “brains are becoming soft… by constant contact with the lower classes” during a vacation when her family and their servants were living in close quarters. “I am sick of the timid spiteful servant mind,” Virginia wrote about Boxall. The sisters often grumble about the “necessity” of having any help at all. They want a simpler life and resent the responsibilities that go with having employees when staying in the country or traveling abroad. “The more I think of it,” Vanessa wrote to Virginia, “the more it seems to me absurd that we should have, as we soon shall, 5 servants to look after a young & able-bodied couple & a baby.” (Vanessa took on a larger staff after having children, but Virginia continued to live with just a cook and a maid for much of her adult life.) Virginia especially, who during her nervous breakdowns was looked after by servants and nurses supervising her eating and rest times as if she were a child, chafed at having bodily needs taken care of by another person. Servants may have been especially vexing figures for Woolf because they gave the lie to the idea of “the fully self-directed, autonomous” life that she aspired to.
Leonard Peltier’s old website from 2003, with some excerpts from his prison-authored memoir Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance:
The time has come for me to set forth in words my personal testament--not because I'm planning to die, but because I'm planning to live.
This is the twenty-third year of my imprisonment for a crime I didn't commit. I'm now fifty-four years old. I've been in here since I was thirty-one. I've been told I have to live out two lifetime sentences plus seven years before I get out of prison in the year Two Thousand and Forty One. By then I'll be ninety-seven. I don't think I'll make it. My life is an extended agony. I feel like I've lived a hundred lifetimes in prison already. But I'm prepared to live thousands more on behalf of my people. If my imprisonment does nothing more than educate an unknowing and uncaring public about the terrible conditions Indian people continue to endure, then my suffering has had--and continues to have--a purpose. My people's struggle to survive inspires my own struggle to survive. Each of us must be a survivor.
I acknowledge my inadequacies as a spokesman, my many imperfections as a human being. And yet, as the Elders taught me, speaking out is my first duty, my first obligation to myself and to my people. To speak your mind and heart is Indian Way. In Indian Way, the political and the spiritual are one and the same. You can't believe one thing and do another. What you believe and what you do are the same thing. In Indian Way, if you see your people suffering, helping them is an absolute necessity. It's not a social act of charity or welfare assistance; it's a spiritual act, a holy deed. I know who and what I am. I am an Indian--an Indian who dared to stand up to defend his people. I am an innocent man who never murdered anyone nor wanted to. And, yes, I am a Sun Dancer. That, too, is my identity. If I am to suffer as a symbol of my people, then I suffer proudly. I will never yield.
[…] I swear to you, I am guilty only of being an Indian. That's why I'm here.
Being who I am, being who you are--that's Aboriginal Sin.
Leonard Peltier’s sentence was commuted to in-home confinement in the last hours of Joe Biden’s presidency, after almost 50 years of staunch advocacy by the Lakota People’s Law Project, the NDN Collective, Amnesty International, and many more (surely not exhaustive). He corresponded with Subcomandante Marcos, Rigoberta Menchú, Nelson Mandela, and many more (surely not exhaustive). He can go home now, at least.
That’s it for this time. May we walk the path.
xo,
ck