1.7 Assembling the Evidence

The history of the potato’s popularity, however, is of a truly international collaboration. The potato was originally cultivated in the Andes Mountains of Peru. The Spanish Conquistadores brought it back with them to Spain, and as early as 1573 in Seville it was used medicinally against scurvy. The Quechua Indians called the plant papas, from which the Spanish derived their word patata. It is likely that the potato was also brought to Ireland by the Spanish, given their active trading relationship, and thence to England. Traditionally Sir Francis Drake is given credit for introducing what he named Batata Virginiana, named for the Virginia colony at Roanoke. Descriptions of his tuber-forming plants, however, bear no resemblance to the round white potato. Nevertheless, when English herbalist John Gerard authored the first published description with an illustration in 1597, he compounded the confusion of names by using Drake’s Batata Virginian.

A dirt road is different every day. Winter makes every corner and hill an event. In the spring, underground frost cells thaw, spots the size of soup plates turn to sandy porridge. In my county, entire roads, even schools, are closed because of mud. On warm spring days, I can hear my road hissing as streams of tiny bubbles rise and break in the thin film of water on the crown of the road....In summer, the road hardens and dries to the color of putty, but even then a single downpour changes its topography. By early October, the first few leaves have fallen into the ruts and ditches that in two weeks will be full of crisp fragments slowly losing their vivid color, softening and turning to mulch.

Shortly afterwards, the first terrible dust storm arrived boiling out of the central Australian desert. One sweltering late afternoon in March, I walked out to collect wood for the stove. Glancing toward the west, I saw a terrifying sight. A vast boiling cloud was mounting in the sky, black and sulfurous yellow at the heart, varying shades of ocher red at the edges. Where I stood, the air was utterly still, but the writhing cloud was approaching silently and with great speed. Suddenly I noticed that there were no birds to be seen or heard. All had taken shelter. I called my mother. We watched helplessly. Always one for action, she turned swiftly, went indoors, and began to close windows. Outside, I collected the buckets, rakes, shovels, and other implements that could blow away or smash a window if hurled against one by the wind. Within the hour, my father arrived home. He and my mother sat on the back step, not in their usual restful contemplation, but silenced instead by dread.

Ram’s Head, White Hollyhock—Hills is highly stylized, juxtaposing discrete images (mountains, clouds, skull, flower, horns) to emphasize the transitory effects of nature. We see an elemental mountain landscape at the base of the composition. Just above the mountains are level and swirling gray clouds. A ram’s head is centered in the painting and depicted larger than life, larger than the mountains and shrubs below. Blended earth-tone colors outline the form of the skull, remains of a once vivacious ram. A white flower, with its yellow center, adjacent to the left eye socket of the skull, is in full bloom and at the height of its life. The ram’s horns extend to the upper edges of the canvas, echoing the colors of the mountains below.

Graffiti is considered vandalism under the law, but do the people who enforce the law listen to the messages of graffiti? Graffiti often represents social issues within the inner city, such as prejudice and discrimination. A common theme of graffiti is hostility aimed at the police, mainly because many urban artists feel that they are threatened and typecast by officers of the law. Graffiti is treated as an illegitimate art form, but it might be seen as the creative outlet and the voice of a suppressed group of people.

The jumping positions of Richard Nixon and Audrey Hepburn illustrate the extreme poles in Halsman’s theory of “jumpology.” Nixon jumps with his legs together and his arms held out to the sides in a somewhat lax second position. His toes are pointed to the ground. He gazes calmly ahead, a faint closed smile on his lips. He looks poised, as if this picture were just another press photograph; even his suit jacket and pants are barely ruffled. His manner of jumping is restrained, perhaps self-conscious. Hepburn, on the other hand, strikes a very different pose. In a light dress with a full skirt, her body is turned slightly to the left. Her legs are spread eagle and she is barefooted; her sandals are pictured on the ground beneath her. She throws her arms behind her body while giving the photographer a large, open-mouthed smile. Her skirt flows out elegantly at each side. She looks to be laughing, perhaps surprised to find just how exciting a jump can be.

Humphrey Bogart is memorable in his role as Philip Marlowe, but it is Dick Powell who captures the characteristics of Chandler’s Marlowe. Bogart seems to create a new character, one inspired by the novel, but shaped by Bogart’s icon status, confidence, and interaction with women. Powell, on the other hand, rarely strays from Chandler’s depiction of the character, portraying his many ambiguities and nuances. Bogart’s confident composure allows the audience to feel safe in the dangerous realms of society that Marlowe inhabits. Powell brings to Marlowe all the loneliness, cynicism, and battered idealism of Chandler’s famous antihero.

Neat people are especially vicious with mail. They never go through their mail unless they are standing directly over a trash can. If the trash can is beside the mailbox, even better. All ads, catalogs, pleas for charitable contributions, church bulletins and money-saving coupons go straight into the trash can without being opened. All letters from home, postcards from Europe, bills and paychecks are opened, immediately responded to, then dropped in the trash can. Neat people keep their receipts only for tax purposes. That’s it. No sentimental salvaging of birthday cards or the last letter a dying relative ever wrote. Into the trash it goes.

Social problems are much more complex than are technological problems. It is much harder to identify a social problem than a technological problem: how do we know when our cities need renewing, or when our population is too big, or when our modes of transportation have broken down? The problems are, in a way, harder to identify just because their solutions are never clear-cut: how do we know when our cities are renewed, or our air clean enough, or our transportation convenient enough? By contrast, the availability of a crisp and beautiful technological solution often helps focus on the problem to which the new technology is the solution. I doubt that we would have been nearly as concerned with an eventual shortage of energy as we now are if we had not had a neat solution—nuclear energy—available to eliminate the shortage.

On a bus trip to London from Oxford University where I was earning some graduate credits one summer, a young man, obviously fresh from a pub, spotted me and as if struck by inspiration went down on his knees in the aisle. With both hands over his heart he broke into an Irish tenor’s rendition of “María” from West Side Story. My politely amused fellow passengers gave his lovely voice the round of gentle applause it deserved. Though I was not quite as amused, I managed my version of an English smile: no show of teeth, no extreme contortions of the facial muscles—I was at this time of my life practicing reserve and cool. Oh, that British control, how I coveted it. But María had followed me to London, reminding me of a prime fact of my life: you can leave the Island, master the English language, and travel as far as you can, but if you are a Latina, especially one like me who so obviously belongs to Rita Moreno’s gene pool, the Island travels with you.

Scene designers need a variety of skills, many of them pertinent to other arts, especially architecture, painting, interior design, and acting. Like architects, scene designers conceive and build structures for human beings to use. Although scene designers do not design entire buildings, as architects do, they sculpt space and, like architects, must be concerned with its function, size, organization, construction and visual appearance. Also, like architects, they must be able to communicate their ideas through sketches, scale models, and construction drawings that indicate how each element is built and how it will look when completed.

Scene designers, in some aspects of their work, use skills similar to painters’. For example, one of the designer’s primary ways of communicating with the director and other designers is through sketches and drawings. During preliminary discussions of a production, designers usually make numerous sketches to demonstrate possible solutions to design problems; before these designs are given final approval, they usually are rendered in perspective and in color. In addition to making sketches showing entire settings, designers also make painters’ elevations—scale drawings of each piece of scenery showing how it is to be painted and the painting techniques to be used. Designers sometimes must paint (or supervise others who paint) the scenery they have designed.