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Object Lesson
Secrets of the ivory-billed woodpecker
July/August 2006
by Richard O. Prum
Ornithologist Richard O. Prum is the William Robertson Coe Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the curator of vertebrate biology at the Peabody Museum of Natural History.
There are more than 11 million items in the collections of the Peabody Museum of Natural History. Some of the most haunting are found in a metal cabinet marked “Extinct Birds.” The Peabody has examples of about 20 such species. The ivory-billed woodpecker, which apparently vanished in 1944, is the best known.
A year ago, observers in Arkansas made headlines with reports that the bird had been spotted again. However, despite a concerted scientific effort to corroborate the sighting, no additional ivory-bills have been spotted. Some of my colleagues and I have suggested that the bird seen on a celebrated grainy video clip was in fact a fairly common species, the pileated woodpecker.
Scientists never got much of a chance to study the ivory-bill, which was already endangered in the 1890s because of habitat loss when the swampy forests of the Southeast were cut down. It’s a sad fact that with the bird already so rare, scientific collecting also played a role in driving it towards extinction.
The ivory-bill on the left—an adult male with a characteristic red crown—was shot and killed on April 12, 1893, in the vicinity of Mississippi City, Mississippi, by a collector named Charles K. Worthen. The bird on the right, a juvenile, was collected on January 15, 1890, from Kissimmee, Florida. We don’t have the collector’s name, but his unique specimen has provided us with precious insight into the life of a poorly known, and possibly extinct, species.
According to ivory-bill biologist Jerry Jackson of Florida Gulf Coast University, this particular juvenile bird was probably still dependent on its parents even after months out of the nest. Its bill is round at the tip instead of chisel-shaped like an adult's. The chisel shape comes about as a result of hammering on trees to find food. The juvenile bill shape tells us that the newly fledged birds didn’t feed themselves and were dependent on their parents for an extended period.
So this item is a treasure. The open-ended mission of biology is to describe biodiversity. These extinct birds show us branches of the tree of life that we may never be able to know from anything other than these specimens.
The fairer sax
Alejandra O'Leary '04 is is a freelance journalist and rock musician in New York.
For Kit McClure '73, things musical and political have always been intertwined. When she was a teenager, her mother regularly took her on night trains to New York City from their home in Little Falls, New Jersey, to experience a music that was at once avant garde and socially conscious: in dives on the Lower East Side, she heard free-jazz pioneers Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra play at the height of the civil rights movement. “I just felt this music,” she recalls.
Those mother-daughter trips inspired McClure to activism of an unusual kind: she has devoted her career to supporting women in music through an all-woman jazz ensemble. The Kit McClure Band, which will celebrate its 25th anniversary next year, has played with Cab Calloway and Robert Palmer, headlined innumerable international festivals and tours, and played at the first inauguration of sax-playing president Bill Clinton '73JD. They compose, record, tour, and run educational workshops on musical technique, the music business, and the history of women in jazz.
Hundreds of women have played in the band since its founding in 1982, “and there are women in the band now who weren’t born when the band was started,” McClure says. But the pro-woman mission has remained since the start, because “someone has to speak to the young girls, to let them know that it’s okay for women to be in jazz,” McClure says.
McClure’s own career began when she took up the trombone in high school and gigged with garage bands. Even at the small-potatoes level, McClure recalls, sexism flourished. One band “held three months of auditions to try to find a boy who could play as well as me,” she says with a forgiving smile. Her patience and chops eventually won her the slot. After being introduced to the music of Sonny Rollins at age 21, she immediately switched from trombone to saxophone. It’s been her main instrument ever since.
McClure entered Yale in 1969, in the first class of first-year women to be admitted. She wanted to play jazz with other women, so she “converted” two Yalie cello players into jazz bassists and joined an all-woman feminist jazz-rock band in New Haven.
In 1976, McClure got a call to audition for soul legend Barry White, who was about to begin a ten-night stint at Radio City Music Hall with an all-female orchestra. It was during those gigs that McClure first made the connections with other women jazz musicians in New York that led to the formation of her band.
In 2004, the band completed an album celebrating the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, an all-woman jazz band that came out of an African American boarding school in Mississippi in the 1930s and 1940s. McClure’s band researched and transcribed the Sweethearts' vivacious repertoire and recreated them on The Sweethearts Project. The eminent jazz critic Nat Hentoff said of the album, “This recording indeed is both a musical and a historical event. … Whoever gets to hear this recording will find it hard not to get up and dance.”
The band’s just-released CD, Just the Thing, was recorded, designed, and promoted in McClure’s Manhattan apartment and recording studio. “I want to tour this new CD for five years,” McClure says. “This is where my brain is, with the women of this band. It’s where my heart is.”
Love Monkey author’s concrete jungle
Anthony Weiss '02 is a writer in New York City.
I meet Kyle Smith '89, author of the novel Love Monkey and movie critic for the New York Post, at Langan's, a pub in midtown Manhattan frequented by Post writers. Desmond O'Brien, the manager, moves over to greet us. Tall, silver-haired, and immaculately dressed, O'Brien is central casting’s idea of a celebrity author, while Smith—short, pale, tired, dressed in a sweat-stained gray T-shirt, non-designer jeans, and sneakers—could pass for a harried bartender.
Smith hands O'Brien a copy of Love Monkey, with a yellow Post-It note inside marking the first of several appearances by Langan’s in the text. The offering earns Smith and me a Guinness each.
Love Monkey, which was published two years ago and was adapted into a television show for CBS last winter, was pegged by critics as a male response to the literary genre known as “chick lit”—“lad lit,” or, more wittily, “dick lit.” The TV show, before its cancellation, was touted as the male Sex and the City.
The book is a sharp-witted, surprisingly dark novel about a short, insecure, dumpy New York tabloid reporter named Tom Farrell and his frustrations with women. The television show, a glib look at the life of a tall, charming, narcissistic music industry executive named Tom Farrell, bore little resemblance to the book except for the title, names of its characters, New York locale, and frequent, reverent invocations of pop songs. It lasted three episodes on CBS; VH-1 aired the five remaining episodes.
As Post movie critic, Smith now has the same job as the novel’s protagonist—only Farrell had it first. When he wrote Love Monkey, Smith was books and music editor at People. In the book, Smith (as Farrell) writes, “The movie critic is the superstar … the one who sees his name in the newspaper ads an inch high.” The reality has been a little less glamorous—the endless screenings, surrounded by his fellow critics. “You always see all the same hacks there, wearing free T-shirts.” Even so, he says, it is “the best job in the world. The movies are usually pretty bad, but the worse they are, the more I like it. I can write a humor column disguised as a movie review.”
An Army ROTC cadet at Yale, Smith was sent to the Persian Gulf for the first war with Iraq. After leaving the army and a brief stint with the Associated Press, Smith went to work for the Post as a general assignment reporter. But that life didn’t impress him. “Journalism is just asking questions and taking it down. Any semi-intelligent person could do it.”
Smith describes his next novel, which will be released in October, as “a Dickensian satire of the New York magazine industry. Basically, every character in the book is a Dickens character.
“It’s called A Christmas Caroline. Caroline is an accessories editor at a shopping magazine. Every day she opens up packages and they’re full of all the latest gear, the latest shoes, the latest gadgets. So Christmas is the only day of the year when she doesn’t get all these wonderful presents, but everyone else does. That’s why she hates Christmas. It’s the one day of the year where she’s not special.”
Smith wrote the book, as he wrote Love Monkey, at night, on Mondays and Tuesdays, two thousand words a night. “It’s sheer discipline. It’s nothing to do with waiting around for inspiration. Of course, you have to decline a lot of party invitations if you want to get any work done.”
Despite the faint whiff of celebrity that blew his way when Love Monkey ads were plastered on New York’s buses, he says, “I don’t think it changed my life that much. I still go to work every day at the Post, see my bad movies, and try to think of something funny to say about them.”
He shrugs.
“You’re just a writer, at the end of the day.”
Investigating her own near-murder
Ben Yagoda '75 directs the journalism program at the University of Delaware and is author of the forthcoming book If You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better and/or Worse.
In the summer of 1977, Yale junior Terri Jentz and her roommate embarked on a west-to-east bicycle trip across America. Seven days into the journey, while they were sleeping in their pup tent in an Oregon state park, a man in a pickup truck ran over the tent, then attacked them with an axe. Remarkably, both women survived, but the assault left deep scars. Jentz’s roommate suffered permanent vision loss; Jentz herself came to realize, as the years passed, that she was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
That realization was the genesis of her new book, Strange Piece of Paradise (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). In 1992, Jentz—then living in Los Angeles—returned to Oregon for the first time to confront head-on what had happened to her 15 years before. She undertook to find out all she could about the crime, for which no suspect had ever been publicly identified, much less arrested or tried. By the time her investigation was completed, she had identified, to her own satisfaction, the attacker. (The man could not be prosecuted because in 1977, Oregon’s statute of limitations for attempted murder was three years. Largely because of Jentz’s own lobbying efforts, that limit has since been abolished.) More important, she had exorcised her own demons. She chronicles it all in a fascinating book that is part memoir, part true-crime saga, part Nancy Drew-style sleuthing chronicle, part victims-rights tract, and part philosophical meditation.
Y: You started looking into this case in 1992. What took you so long to come out with the book?
J: When I first went back to Oregon, my idea was to make the story into a fictional screenplay. But I very quickly realized this was real, and I needed to track down and talk to everyone with any knowledge of my case or of the person I came to suspect of committing the crime. Over the next five or six years, I accumulated a massive amount of material. I had hundreds of tape-recorded interviews, all of which I had to transcribe myself. I started writing in earnest in late '97, early '98, and the challenge was to organize and shape it into a manuscript I was happy with. I finished the book in 2003 and sold it three years ago this fall. And then the editing process was very, very thorough.
Y: Starting with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, tens of thousands of true-crime books have been published, but yours is distinctive, maybe even unique, because of its personal and meditative quality. Did you have any particular models in mind when you were writing it?
J: To me, Primo Levi’s works were an inspiration, in showing how one can examine oneself in extremity. I found a great resonance in how W. G. Sebald uses an associative model, as opposed to traditional narrative, and a kind of musical structure. So in my book, many themes and motifs repeat themselves, with slight variation. In learning how to tell a story about interior states of mind, a very important model was Knut Hamsen’s Hunger, which is considered the first literary attempt of stream of consciousness.
Y: Among the many interesting ideas in the book, perhaps the most notable is what you say about the presence of evil in the world, and the fact that many people live their lives without thinking about or acknowledging this. Would you agree?
J: Absolutely. I’ve just finished a book tour where I’ve done dozens and dozens of interviews and question-and-answer sessions, and the subject of evil has only come up four times. That notable silence—when the subject of evil is certainly one of the book’s major themes—answers your question. What people always do want to talk about is the perpetrator—the first or second question after my talk ends, someone brings him up. That tells me that although no one will mention the word “evil,” they sure want to talk about the agent of extreme transgression.
Plot, the way it used to be
The Whole World Over
Julia Glass '78
Pantheon, $25.95
Reviewed by novelist and screenwriter John Crowley, who teaches both crafts at Yale.
Julia Glass is the author of Three Junes, which won a National Book Award in 2002 and which the New York Times Book Review said “brilliantly rescues, and then refurbishes, the traditional plot-driven novel.” The meaning of this phrase could be long pondered, but reading Glass’s new novel The Whole World Over is one way of understanding it.
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Julia Glass writes about people in places we recognize, doing things we novel-readers might do ourselves. |
Plot seems to have become a thing that certain classes of fiction have done away with: fiction that involves drastic actions turning on either unlikely violence or unlikely romantic fulfillments. So rescuing plot from the clutches of thrills and wish-fulfillment would mean restoring it to fiction about ordinary people (like its readers) living lives that resemble the readers' own, except more shapely, consequential, and with a better match between doing and feeling, or wanting and having. In all these ways The Whole World Over is enormously accomplished—reflecting the real lives of mostly well-off, mostly well-meaning, thoughtful, and engaging people in places we recognize, doing things we novel-readers might do ourselves. It resembles one of the cakes that the heroine Greenie Duquette makes: gratifying, not too sweet, skillfully concocted, familiar yet with a tang of difference and originality.
Greenie Duquette, as the book opens, is living a good life in New York City with her husband Alan, a therapist, and her wise-for-his-years four-year-old, George. She’s a pastry chef, and devoted to her craft; one of her chief customers is Walter, the gay owner of an upscale but welcoming restaurant, one of those that a few years ago adopted comfort food of a splendid kind as its forte. Walter’s looking for love, as almost everyone in the novel is in a variety of ways, and there are a lot of them: for a while new ones (characters, and ways of looking for love) are introduced in almost every chapter, and it was hard to keep them all straight. To me the most interesting was the least well off: Emily, called Saga, is suffering the consequences of a traumatic brain injury and trying to reestablish not a life of comforts and love but simply a world she can make sense of. All the characters intersect in the pleasing way of novels that are “plot-driven” (doesn’t that phrase sound a little punitive or tyrannical?) and all will eventually be upended in their world-views, and then restored a little differently.
Greenie’s life changes when she accepts an offer from the governor of New Mexico to be his personal chef, which involves moving to Santa Fe, and (temporarily, as she at first believes) away from mopey Alan, who’s losing business even as Greenie flourishes. She’s out to shake him up, and ends by shaking up herself. The governor, as a character, is a mite stagy, unable to open his mouth without something colorful coming out, forceful and roughly wise in the way of such provider characters—in other words, as close to a cliché as this book gets, which is not so close as to make you even think the thought most of the time, though I admit I found myself casting actors from the better night-time dramas in the chief parts as I read.
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Novels, like life, ought to keep on opening up, new things continually evolving, but they can’t. |
Meanwhile Alan has learned that a one-night fling with a childhood object of desire met again at a high school reunion has resulted in a child. He’s never told his wife about any of this, and when he does at last in a rush of guilt and longing for her and his son, his confession collides with Greenie’s own sudden and life-changing encounter out West with her own old high-school crush, which flowers into sudden intense love.
Actually I thought it was going to be the governor who changed her romantic life, but no. In the usual “plot-driven” novel we tend to think about what’s going to happen at the end. In Glass’s novel we wonder what’s going to happen in the next chapter. The effect is less like reading a purposeful story pointed toward an ending than like listening to gratifyingly detailed gossip about people you come to know and like and only sometimes (just often enough) feel superior to, and want to advise.
This effect goes a long way, though not all the way, toward solving that problem that E. M. Forster pointed out about “plot-driven” novels, which in his day were almost the only kind, and certainly predominated in the history of fiction: they tend to die in their final third, as they head toward the inevitable pairings and weddings and disasters. Novels, like life, ought to keep on opening up, new things continually evolving, but they can’t: at some point they have to begin to “wrap up,” and it’s that process that kills them. Characters continue to act like people, they have the same character flaws and virtues, they seem to be making choices, but they have died: the plot is driving. Glass avoids this in how she keeps us guessing, and how she keeps supplying what seem like definitive plot twists that turn out not to be so definitive. Less successful in my opinion is the use of a world-shattering disaster to remix the fates she has kept up in the air: the story climaxes in the summer of 2001, which I realized only as that blue September day actually happens, just 80 pages from the end. (I’m not spoiling anything—at least I assume that Glass was okay with the flap copy that reveals this, which I hadn’t read.)
This is a novel that has to be described as warm. Maybe it’s just all the food: Greenie’s great banquets and cakes for the governor, Walter’s menus, breakfasts and lunches on nearly every page. Forster also said that novels don’t resemble life in that love takes up so much more time in them than eating meals. Julia Glass has the proportions more correct. The only unreality is that some of the love turns bad, but all the food is delicious.
In Print
The Catastrophist
Lawrence Douglas '89JD
Other Press, $24.95
Reviewed by Cathy Shufro
Professor Daniel Ben Wellington knows he should feel happy: married to the handsome R., he teaches at a bucolic Massachusetts college. He and R. are trying for a baby, and he has nearly completed his tenure book, Art and Atrocity. But when R. presents Wellington with a size XXS Yale sweatshirt, he panics. Fear of fatherhood brings on writer’s block, and now Wellington fears he won’t get tenure. He turns to psychotherapy, but there, too, he feels deficient. His therapist’s relatively low fee and bad shoes cause Wellington to similarly devalue the man’s insights. And, indeed, the therapist’s notes on Wellington’s session read: “Milk ½ gal.; Chicken, 8 pc. family pack.”
Characteristically, Wellington faults himself. “I lacked material,” he says. “At times I longed for a distant catastrophe to blame for my present struggles, some un-mastered ur-trauma …”
So Wellington gamely manufactures his own troubles. He falsely claims to be a child of Holocaust survivors, endangering his post on a commission to build a Holocaust memorial. He also fosters hazardous flirtations and whizzes past gas stations with his low-fuel light blazing. Wellington’s colleagues, his research assistant, and even R. seem similarly torn between following paths to maturity and sowing the seeds of self-destruction. The author has a sharp eye for the preoccupations and ironies of the academy, and he creates a character whose ambivalence about growing up proves entertaining and even endearing.
The Men I Didn’t Marry
Janice Kaplan '76 and Lynn Schnurnberger
Ballantine Books, $23.95
Reviewed by Carol Weston '78
No sooner does protagonist Hallie drop off a daughter at Yale and prepare to face a suburban empty nest than her husband announces that he’s not planning on sleeping at home anymore either. Fortunately, lawyer Hallie has money, looks, friends, and a roster of sexy powerful men who remember her fondly from her single days. She decides to track them down, one by one. Before you know it, she’s trysting in Virgin Gorda with her high-school honey turned scuba-diving photographer. “My favorite position,” she muses. “Who needs fancy gymnastics when those missionaries had it right all along?”
As a comp lit major, I could nitpick. The Men I Didn’t Marry is a fairy tale crying out to be a movie—there’s a camera-ready courtroom scene, underwater wedding, even a couple bowling in tux and gown. But hey, it’s also fun: a bag of Gummi bears if not a Michelin meal.
Pick Me Up
Zoe Rice '98
New American Library, $12.95
Reviewed by Debby Applegate '98PhD
The plot of Pick Me Up will be familiar to “chick lit” fans. Narrator Isabela Duncan is, in her own words, “a full-fledged New York gallerista” (translation: she has a good job in a Chelsea art gallery). She survives a series of minor humiliations, including falling for and being dumped by her caddish new boss, only to find her happy ending with a scruffy artist—who is secretly the heir to a large fortune.
OK, the plot is a little hard to swallow, but this youthful fantasy of big-city life is easy to read, and the self-deprecating, humorously naïve voice of the narrator adds definite charm to a story that is equal parts Sex and the City and Bridget Jones’s Diary.
The plucky heroine even has a few things to teach the grownups. After reading this book, I used the word “gallerista” when talking to an art historian at Yale. She'd never heard the term before but found it so apt that she predicted it would soon be common currency in the art world. You heard it here first.
Isolation Ward
Joshua Spanogle '93
Delacorte Press, $22
Reviewed by Ruth Conniff '90
“This is how it all started. At least this is how it came to me over the telephone, 6:30 a.m. from a local health official trying to keep it together, fighting against little sleep and a ballooning fear that this might be The Big One.” So says Dr. Nathaniel McCormick, the narrator of a chilling tale that begins with a mysterious virus killing poor, mentally retarded victims in Baltimore. The story unfolds slowly, but then picks up speed as researchers' ambitions and the promise of giant drug company profits compete with medical ethics.
Spanogle, a first-time novelist, can be distractingly self-conscious at times—interrupting dialogue to compare it derisively to dialogue in a Raymond Chandler story, and stopping a scary scene to note, sarcastically, “I could already see the Hollywood possibilities.”
So could I. But there were also enough twists to keep those pages turning, and I stayed up late to find out what the drug company bad guys were concocting, and who was responsible for a string of murders. Now at work on his second book, Spanogle might become a medical John Grisham.
More Books by Yale Authors
Lori Andrews 1975, 1978JD
Sequence
St. Martin’s Minotaur, $23.95
Debby Applegate 1998PhD
The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher
Doubleday, $27.95
Kevin M. Callahan 1991
The Management Playbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Accelerating the Growth and Profitability of Your Business
Inkwater Press, $24.95
James T. Campbell 1980
Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005
Penguin Press, $27.95
Oscar Chase 1963JD
Law, Culture, and Ritual: Disputing Systems in Cross-Cultural Context
NYU Press, $45
Manual Duran, Professor Emeritus of Spanish and Portuguese, and Fay R. Rogg 1968PhD
Fighting Windmills: Encounters with Don Quixote
Yale University Press, $30
Jonathan S. Feinstein, Professor of Economics
The Nature of Creative Development
Stanford Business Books/Stanford University Press, $34.95
Erwin Fleissner 1957
Vital Harmonies: Molecular Biology and Our Shared Humanity
Columbia University Press, $19
Michael Friedman 1986JD
Martian Dawn
Turtle Point Press, $14.95
Ed Halter 1992
From Sun Tzu to Xbox
Thunder’s Mouth Press, $16.95
Lloyd Kaufman 1968 and Adam Jahnke
The Toxic Avenger: The Novel
Thunder’s Mouth Press, $13.95
Samuel P. King 1969 and Randall W. Roth
Broken Trust: Greed, Mismanagement, and Political Manipulation at America’s Largest Charitable Trust
University of Hawaii Press, $26
Jeananne Kathol Kirwin 1980
Greetings from Cool Breezes: A Family’s Year Abroad
Borealis Press, $14.95
Ralph Lopez 1982
The Elephant in the Room: A Combat Manual for Democrats
Lulu Press, $14.95
William M. Manger, MD, 1944BS
Our Greatest Threats: Live Longer, Live Better
Jones and Bartlett Publishers, $18.95
John Manuel 1972
The Canoeist: A Memoir
Jefferson Press, $19.95
Michele Martin 1970MPhil, Editor and Translator
A Song for the King: Saraha on Mahamudra Meditation
Wisdom Publications, $14.95
Carolyn M. Mazure, Professor of Psychiatry, and Gwendolyn Puryear Keita, Editors
Understanding Depression in Women: Applying Empirical Research to Practice and Policy
American Psychological Association, $49.95
Robert H. Miller 1993
Campus Confidential: The Complete Guide to the Student Experience by Students for Students
Jossey-Bass/Wiley, $16.95
Lynn Miller-Lachmann 1981MA
Dirt Cheap
Curbstone Press, $16.95
Victor Moscoso 1959BFA, Writer and Illustrator
Sex, Rock, and Optical Illusions
Fantagraphics Books, $34.95
Diana Peterfreund 2001
Secret Society Girl: An Ivy League Novel
Bantam Dell, $23
Francesca Polletta 1994PhD
It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politic
University of Chicago Press, $45
James Potts 1943
French Covert Action in the American Revolution
Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, $17.95
Lawrence R. Reno 1955BS
The Life and Times of Nathaniel Hale Pryor: Explorer, Soldier, Frontiersman, and Spokesman for the Osage
Turkey Creek Publishing, $24.95
Kermit Roosevelt 1997JD
In the Shadow of the Law: A Novel
Picador, $14
Jeffrey S. Rosen 1991JD
The Most Democratic Branch: How the Courts Serve America
Oxford University Press, $25
Scott Simpson 1970 and James P. Cramer
The Next Architect: A New Twist on the Future of Design
Greenway Communications/Ostberg, $39.95
Eleanor Jane Sterling 1983, 1993PhD, Martha Maud Hurley, and Le Duc Minh
Vietnam: A Natural History
Yale University Press, $40
George H. Sullivan 1968
Not Built in a Day: Exploring the Architecture of Rome
Carroll and Graf, $19.95
Harlow Giles Unger 1953
The Unexpected George Washington: His Private Life
Wiley, $27.95
Louis S. Warren 1993PhD
Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show
Alfred A. Knopf, $30
David A. Zimmerman
Panic! Markets, Crises, and Crowds in American Fiction
University of North Carolina Press, $59.95
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