Logophily: 13 Ways of Not Looking at a Blackbird

I spent a good hour [1] the other day [2] firmly establishing [3] that I have no idea what a crow looks like.

I can pick a crow out of a lineup [4]. I’ve written about corvids. I’ve sculpted them. But I tried to draw one (in advance of sculpting another one), and I didn’t have a reference on hand. I could not draw something that I could recognize as a crow. An owl, sure. A turkey vulture [5], even. But my sketches of those birds relied on shorthand and gimmickry. A crow requires finesse and savoir-faire and esprit d’escalier [6].

More important than the time spent drawing and writing about crows was the time I’ve spent watching crows. It was largely unmemorable time, but I spent around an hour one morning watching a bunch of them harass a parent [7] hawk while said parent hawk watched an adolescent hawk try to hunt squirrels [8]. (I was supposed to be at work, lifting heavy objects.)

(Above: there was a lot of cussing scrawled on the bottom of the page, for reasons that should be clear.)

 

I can tell crows from grackles, is what I’m saying. I can tell them from ravens, which doesn’t sound like much, but around here, the crows get huge, and the ravens stay relatively puny. But I can’t draw them.

I’ve read several times about a similar exercise[9]: drawing a bicycle without looking at a bicycle. It sounds easy, but a lot of people screw it up in fairly spectacular and exciting ways. We all know what a bike is, but if we don’t work on one, it’s easy to get the parts confused. Give it a shot. I don’t care if you can’t draw. I can’t either. Proof is posted above.

Alternately, pick something you know well, something you use every day [10], and try to draw it. Better still, try to describe it fully.

Some time ago, when I taught creative writing [11], the only really good advice I gave the students was as follows: include concrete details in everything. To illustrate the importance of observation, I did the following: I told the students to write a short passage describing a big yellow cat. When they’d done that, I brought in my cat, who at the time weighed around 20 lbs[12], and whose eyes and fur were the light khaki color of a mid-90s carpet, with pale underbelly fur, and very faint stripes.

On the other hand, I also told them not to write about their pets. I can’t be trusted.

 

Footnotes:

1. It was kind of a shitty hour, now that I think about it.

2. It was the other day now, but I’m not sure if it’s still the other day when you read this. Maybe it’s later. Maybe your now is my later. Maybe I’m dead. If so, I hope it was from something fun.

3. The phrasing here is not correct. I’m letting the infelicity stay, since it’s less awkward than a more correct construction, and so that I can point to it later on, when I finally get around to telling people to stop being pedants and assholes about language, which is what I signed on to the PANK blog team to do (or I think that’s what it was, anyway). And the title of the column, “Logophily,” doesn’t really work, this time around.  There’s no etymology in this one.  I’ll stick some in this footnote, just to feel a little better about things: a mix of carrots, celery, and onions, diced and ready to be sweated in a pan, is known is mirepoix. It’s the base for a lot of French and Italian foods, and shows up (in sometimes modified form) a lot of other cuisines, too.  The word looks as though it’d have a really fecund etymology. . . mire– looks like the look-word (admirable, mirror, the Spanish mirar), and –poix looks as though it might be a variant of pois, which is to say, peas.  But the mix turns out to be named for a Monsieur Mirepoix, so the speculation falls apart.

4. It’s an underutilized skill.

5. New World vultures have senses of smell, but Old World vultures don’t. Science.

6. Note that a crow would never suffer from esprit d’escalier. A crow always has a cussword at the ready.

7. I can’t sex hawks. YOU HEARD ME.

8. A woman stopped by and said, “Look! An owl!” I said, “I think that’s a hawk, ma’am,” because it was obviously a hawk, and therefore obviously not an owl, so maybe I’m underrating the overall usefulness of my bird-lineup skills.

9. I can’t remember where I first saw this exercise, but there’s a neat writeup on a small study here:
http://www.liv.ac.uk/~rlawson/cycleweb.html

And there’s a Tumblr blog devoted to drawings that come from the exercise:
http://bikedrawings.tumblr.com/

10. I can draw the stove, but not an Evan Williams label, which probably says something about how I interact with each of those things. You might try an xBox 360 controller, your lover’s nipples, or the blender, depending on your proclivities. Or you could try to draw those things.

11. As a grad student and then as a lowest-tier monkey-work adjunct, mind you.

12. His fighting weight was around 17.5 lbs, and his feet were the size of soup spoons. He was a large beast.