SCALES #38: "wormwood, harvested rye and buckwheat"
Hello!
So as threatened, I brushed up on my Turgenev, namely the Richard Freeborn translation of Sketches from a Hunter’s Album. To rehash some learning entirely indebted to Tom Newlin and his course linking American and Russian nature writing: The name of the short story collection is a bit of a headfake, as the point is mostly to get the narrator out into the Russian countryside and let loose his powers of observation and description. Turgenev can definitely be read as Thoreau’s Russian contemporary: literary naturalism, with an interest in precise description that can read as somewhere in the neighborhood of scientific. (One notable difference is that, in broadest strokes, though both writers also care deeply about the ethics of the society situated within the natural landscape, from Thoreau you get a depiction of society as filtered through his individual character whereas Turgenev frames his narrative persona as more of an impersonal observer of the broader social landscape: the serfs, peasants, the occassional minor rural nobility.)
One story I revisited, pointed to by Knausgaard, was “Bezhin Lea”. The sketch starts with a striking extended description of the sky on a sunny July day, and I was struck by the atmospheric science at play. A more sensitive depiction of how a day in the sky progresses than what I get out of a lot of scientific papers about field campaigns! The writing reflects a deep understanding of typical patterns in weather and atmospheric conditions for a specific place. The impression is of hard-won knowledge that results from living in a landscape for an extended period of time, rather than jetting in for a few weeks:
“It was a beautiful July day, one of those days which occur only when the weather has been unchanged for a long time.” The sun first rises over “a long, thin cloud” but around noon “a mass of high round clouds appear, golden-grey, with soft white edges.” After tracking the colors and clouds of the sky through sunset, Turgenev goes on to observe, “On such days the heat is sometimes very strong and occassionally even ‘simmers’ along the slopes of the fields. But the wind drives away and disperses the accumulated heat, and whirling dust storms—a sure sign of settled weather—travel in tall white columns along roads through the ploughland. The dry pure air is scented with wormwood, harvested rye and buckwheat. Even an hour before nightfall you can feel no dampness.”
After a night spent listening to ghost stories told around a campfire by peasant boys, the narrator observes overnight “the air was not so strongly scented, and once again it seemed to be permeated with a raw dampness.” And then setting off at sunrise, he observes the river bank was first “shrouded with smoky mist” but soon, “over the glistening blood-red bushes and across the river which now shone a modest blue under the thinning mist—flowed torrents of young, hot sunlight, crimson at first and later brilliantly red, brilliantly golden. Everything began quivering into life, awakening, singing, resounding, chattering. Everywhere, large drops of dew began to glow like radiant diamonds.”
To risk ruining fine prose writing by translating into science-speak: Turgenev is recording characteristic patterns of local meteorology, clouds and aerosols, diurnal cycles of volatile organic compound concentrations (those scents of “wormwood, harvested rye and buckwheat”, which weaken overnight)—all topics scientists think about today. Despite the quantitative nature of today’s science, the goals is often to use nanogram per cubic meter- or parts per trillion-level measurements, and complicated modeling frameworks, ultimately as tools to arrive at conceptually correct qualitative descriptions akin to what I think Turgenev is reaching for. Of course the superhuman abilities of contemporary scientific instrumentation provide new insights, but I like seeing in Turgenev how much can be learned from careful attention to our human senses.
Also remarkable to me is how descriptions such as these, just like the holdings of natural history museums, or historic paintings, or written records by those such as Thoreau, can hold value beyond their artistic worth as records of historic climate, a critical part of our understanding of our planet’s future climate.
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So I was listening to this podcast…
Switched On Pop looks at Janelle Monáe’s new song, “Make Me Feel”, with the impossibly charismatic Lizzo as guest. One thing I like about the podcast is how despite the hosts’ default music theory-bro approach they gracefully welcome in other voices and perspectives—unlike at least one other high-profile music podcast I have conflicted opinions about.
Still Processing encounters first-hand the new Obama portraits in the National Portrait Gallery.
On Gravy, a history of Civil Rights-era work, using “War on Poverty” federal funding, to address public health and particularly malnutrition in Bolivar County, in the Mississippi Delta, including a food prescription program and a cooperative farm.
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Reading list
Lili Loofbourow’s piece, “The Male Glance”, doesn’t just lay out a useful framework for understanding a culture’s often subconscious belittling of woman-authored creative works (which I struggle with as much as anyone): it does so with expertly deployed rhetorical tools.
“Nominally a book that covers the rough century between the invention of the telegraph in the 1840s and that of computing in the 1950s, The Chinese Typewriter is secretly a history of translation and empire, written language and modernity, misguided struggle and brutal intellectual defeat.”
From the Instapaper back catalog: (1) “All Sales Final: The Closing of Chicago’s Clark & Barlow Hardware”; (2) “A Walmart hoping to look better-attended than it really is, for example, could spoof the satellites with a parking lot full of fake cars, or a new residential building could be playfully designed so that its roofscape looks like a neighborhood park, throwing off the watchful eyes of Terrapattern.”
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Science!
“The Beverly Clock … is still running despite never having been manually wound since its construction in 1864 by Arthur Beverly. … The clock’s mechanism is driven by variations in atmospheric pressure, and by daily temperature variations.”
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Grateful for the notes I cribbed in the front matter of the Turgenev.
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—Adam