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INSECTOPEDIA
By Hugh Raffles
Illustrated. 465 pages. Pantheon. $29.95.
Creepy-Crawly, Letter by Letter
By JANET MASLIN
Hugh Raffles was taking a shower in his Manhattan apartment when a three-inch-long water bug dropped from the ceiling and landed at his feet. His first reaction was one that might be expected. “I admit it: I screamed,” he writes in “Insectopedia,” his new compendium of thoughts about the creepy-crawly. “Wouldn’t you?”
Then Mr. Raffles did something more unusual. He took this anecdote about the shower, labeled it “The Unseen” and made it the “U” chapter in his fluky, perversely appealing encyclopedia-style volume. There is one entry per letter of the alphabet, but why does this scream/shower/big-horrible-bug story become the “U” entry? As with all of “Insectopedia,” there’s no particular reason for what goes where. Arbitrariness is part of this book’s extremely peculiar charm.
At “N” (for “Nepal”), Mr. Raffles describes taking a trip with his friend Dan and smoking drugs with Dan all day long. “We lived in a state of sensuous, if not analytic, clarity,” he recalls. That’s more or less the mind-set of “Insectopedia,” which is not to say that Mr. Raffles isn’t lucid and full of interesting information. It’s just that a creature like the cricket can pop up anywhere in this book without warning.
Many crickets are here, even Jiminy Cricket. But not even he is anywhere near the “C” chapter. Jiminy shows up in “Il Parco delle Cascine on Ascension Sunday.” (What’s that? It’s the “P” chapter, for “Parco.”) Mr. Raffles tells the reader that he wishes he could quote the lyrics sung by Jiminy in “When You Wish Upon a Star,” from Disney’s “Pinocchio,” because this is “one of Hollywood’s most enduringly democratic lyrics, a lyric that brilliantly captures the emptiness, naïveté and consolations of the American dream.” But “the copyright holder wanted way too much money.” Most of “Insectopedia” is even buggier than that. Its “G” chapter, “Generosity (The Happy Times),” delves deeply into the weird world of Shanghai’s illicit cricket fights. This involves high-stakes gambling, issues of biosecurity, criteria for cricket excellence, special equipment like the cricket couple’s “marriage box” and Jia Sidao’s “Book of Crickets.” This last is a 13th-century book identified as “the unquestioned urtext of the cricket community.”
So what if this oddball foray into insecto-tourism coughs up occasionally empty passages? (“What is a cricket in these circumstances without its existence in culture? What is this culture without the existence of crickets?”) Mr. Raffles’s adventure succeeded in landing him in The Shanghai Evening Post as a visiting “Anthropologist Studying Human-Insect Relations, U.S. Professor Wants to Publish a Book on Crickets.” And he has learned that a male cricket will fight much better if pregame sex is part of his training regimen.
Mr. Raffles refers to sex-related insect lore as often as he can. Of course he does: he has to. Less attention would be paid to “Insectopedia” if its “S” chapter were not literal-minded enough to be called “Sex,” and if the brand of sex to which it refers were not so extra-special. Here is an opportunity to learn about the fetish that has prompted films like “Squish,” “Smush,” “Toad Trampler” and “Clogs and Frogs”: pornographic films in which small creatures (not all of them insects, but who’s counting?) are stepped on, films made for men who are excited by the thought of being messily crushed.
“What did it feel like?” the big-footed female star of one such film is asked. “It felt artistic,” she answers.
“Insectopedia” includes a close-up of a squashed critter on the sole of a shoe. This book’s photos are not in color.
So much for obvious sensationalism. Mr. Raffles, who is more philosopher than provocateur, reserves his most incendiary ideas for weightier subjects. The “J” chapter is simply called “Jews.” It describes and analyzes the virulent strain of anti-Semitic propaganda that invoked images of pernicious lice. (Mr. Raffles does not mince Heinrich Himmler’s words when he quotes Nazi invective.) The “C” is short for Chernobyl and introduces Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, whose paintings of deformed insects were published by one Swiss newspaper under the headline “When Flies and Bugs Don’t Look the Way They Should.” “M” is for “My Nightmares.” Name a slithering, burrowing, swarming thought about insect life and it has probably enlivened one of Mr. Raffles’s dreams. “D” is for “Death,” which prompts him to wonder what it would be like if all the insect specimens in a museum were suddenly able to come back to life. Answer: it would be like an out-take from the “My Nightmares” chapter.
There are also some lovely thoughts here, like the “B” chapter called “Beauty.” But even the supposedly sweet visions here have their unappetizing side, especially in the “O” chapter, which can lay claim to the most far-fetched title in the book. “On January 8, Abdou Mahamane was Driving through Niamey...” is set in Niger and describes that country’s great influxes of crickets and locusts. What are they, plagues or nutrition? Mr. Raffles cites the popular local idea that they fry up nicely and have a peanutlike flavor.
“Insectopedia” itself qualifies as food for thought. Though it sometimes threatens to come unstrung, this is a collection of imaginative forays into what, for most readers, will be terra incognita. (Mr. Raffles incidentally loves to invoke Latin whenever he can.) Its ideas are unified by the author’s genuine fascination with his material and his eagerness to follow it wherever it leads, even when it goes half-mad. “The insects are all around me now,” he writes on the book’s last page. “They know we’re at the end. They’re saying, ‘Don’t leave us out! Don’t forget about us!’ ” No problem. Whether you’re wide awake or fast asleep, they aren’t easy to forget.
INSECTOPEDIA
By Hugh Raffles
Illustrated. 465 pages. Pantheon. $29.95.
Creepy-Crawly, Letter by Letter
By JANET MASLIN
Hugh Raffles was taking a shower in his Manhattan apartment when a three-inch-long water bug dropped from the ceiling and landed at his feet. His first reaction was one that might be expected. “I admit it: I screamed,” he writes in “Insectopedia,” his new compendium of thoughts about the creepy-crawly. “Wouldn’t you?”
Then Mr. Raffles did something more unusual. He took this anecdote about the shower, labeled it “The Unseen” and made it the “U” chapter in his fluky, perversely appealing encyclopedia-style volume. There is one entry per letter of the alphabet, but why does this scream/shower/big-horrible-bug story become the “U” entry? As with all of “Insectopedia,” there’s no particular reason for what goes where. Arbitrariness is part of this book’s extremely peculiar charm.
At “N” (for “Nepal”), Mr. Raffles describes taking a trip with his friend Dan and smoking drugs with Dan all day long. “We lived in a state of sensuous, if not analytic, clarity,” he recalls. That’s more or less the mind-set of “Insectopedia,” which is not to say that Mr. Raffles isn’t lucid and full of interesting information. It’s just that a creature like the cricket can pop up anywhere in this book without warning.
Many crickets are here, even Jiminy Cricket. But not even he is anywhere near the “C” chapter. Jiminy shows up in “Il Parco delle Cascine on Ascension Sunday.” (What’s that? It’s the “P” chapter, for “Parco.”) Mr. Raffles tells the reader that he wishes he could quote the lyrics sung by Jiminy in “When You Wish Upon a Star,” from Disney’s “Pinocchio,” because this is “one of Hollywood’s most enduringly democratic lyrics, a lyric that brilliantly captures the emptiness, naïveté and consolations of the American dream.” But “the copyright holder wanted way too much money.” Most of “Insectopedia” is even buggier than that. Its “G” chapter, “Generosity (The Happy Times),” delves deeply into the weird world of Shanghai’s illicit cricket fights. This involves high-stakes gambling, issues of biosecurity, criteria for cricket excellence, special equipment like the cricket couple’s “marriage box” and Jia Sidao’s “Book of Crickets.” This last is a 13th-century book identified as “the unquestioned urtext of the cricket community.”
So what if this oddball foray into insecto-tourism coughs up occasionally empty passages? (“What is a cricket in these circumstances without its existence in culture? What is this culture without the existence of crickets?”) Mr. Raffles’s adventure succeeded in landing him in The Shanghai Evening Post as a visiting “Anthropologist Studying Human-Insect Relations, U.S. Professor Wants to Publish a Book on Crickets.” And he has learned that a male cricket will fight much better if pregame sex is part of his training regimen.
Mr. Raffles refers to sex-related insect lore as often as he can. Of course he does: he has to. Less attention would be paid to “Insectopedia” if its “S” chapter were not literal-minded enough to be called “Sex,” and if the brand of sex to which it refers were not so extra-special. Here is an opportunity to learn about the fetish that has prompted films like “Squish,” “Smush,” “Toad Trampler” and “Clogs and Frogs”: pornographic films in which small creatures (not all of them insects, but who’s counting?) are stepped on, films made for men who are excited by the thought of being messily crushed.
“What did it feel like?” the big-footed female star of one such film is asked. “It felt artistic,” she answers.
“Insectopedia” includes a close-up of a squashed critter on the sole of a shoe. This book’s photos are not in color.
So much for obvious sensationalism. Mr. Raffles, who is more philosopher than provocateur, reserves his most incendiary ideas for weightier subjects. The “J” chapter is simply called “Jews.” It describes and analyzes the virulent strain of anti-Semitic propaganda that invoked images of pernicious lice. (Mr. Raffles does not mince Heinrich Himmler’s words when he quotes Nazi invective.) The “C” is short for Chernobyl and introduces Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, whose paintings of deformed insects were published by one Swiss newspaper under the headline “When Flies and Bugs Don’t Look the Way They Should.” “M” is for “My Nightmares.” Name a slithering, burrowing, swarming thought about insect life and it has probably enlivened one of Mr. Raffles’s dreams. “D” is for “Death,” which prompts him to wonder what it would be like if all the insect specimens in a museum were suddenly able to come back to life. Answer: it would be like an out-take from the “My Nightmares” chapter.
There are also some lovely thoughts here, like the “B” chapter called “Beauty.” But even the supposedly sweet visions here have their unappetizing side, especially in the “O” chapter, which can lay claim to the most far-fetched title in the book. “On January 8, Abdou Mahamane was Driving through Niamey...” is set in Niger and describes that country’s great influxes of crickets and locusts. What are they, plagues or nutrition? Mr. Raffles cites the popular local idea that they fry up nicely and have a peanutlike flavor.
“Insectopedia” itself qualifies as food for thought. Though it sometimes threatens to come unstrung, this is a collection of imaginative forays into what, for most readers, will be terra incognita. (Mr. Raffles incidentally loves to invoke Latin whenever he can.) Its ideas are unified by the author’s genuine fascination with his material and his eagerness to follow it wherever it leads, even when it goes half-mad. “The insects are all around me now,” he writes on the book’s last page. “They know we’re at the end. They’re saying, ‘Don’t leave us out! Don’t forget about us!’ ” No problem. Whether you’re wide awake or fast asleep, they aren’t easy to forget.
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