Dinesh's photos with the keyword: George Levin

. . . Jonathan Smith has pointed out, in Darwin’s books about botany, there is something about Darwin’s preoccupation with the ordinary that extends beyond realism. Darwin’s preoccupation with the aberrant and the unique and the grotesque (as traces of indicators of large movements and significances) extends in the botany books to the study of plants that are truly, as Smith put it, “macabre,” plants that trapped, killed and ate insects;. . . bizarrely ornamented, gaudy colored, fantastically structured flowers that lured insects into unwittingly effecting cross-fertilization: and. . . species with various sexual forms and multiple reproductive possibilities. While these works also embodied a realistic spirit, the literature of the day that most looked like Darwin’s botany was not the realistic novel of Trollope and Eliot, but the “sensation fiction” that flourished in those same decades, the thrilling novels full of shocking crimes and illicit sexuality by Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon, and others. ~ Page 127

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitcher_plant . . . Jonathan Smith has pointed out, in Darwin’s books about botany, there is something about Darwin’s preoccupation with the ordinary that extends beyond realism. Darwin’s preoccupation with the aberrant and the unique and the grotesque (as traces of indicators of large movements and significances) extends in the botany books to the study of plants that are truly, as Smith put it, “macabre,” plants that trapped, killed and ate insects;. . . bizarrely ornamented, gaudy colored, fantastically structured flowers that lured insects into unwittingly effecting cross-fertilization: and. . . species with various sexual forms and multiple reproductive possibilities. While these works also embodied a realistic spirit, the literature of the day that most looked like Darwin’s botany was not the realistic novel of Trollope and Eliot, but the “sensation fiction” that flourished in those same decades, the thrilling novels full of shocking crimes and illicit sexuality by Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon, and others. ~ Page 127

. . . The happy bird lives, probably unhappily, through periods of dearth and cold; the happy bird is subject to predation. Thus readers have to be reminded to ‘see’ what is not immediately visible but what they in fact know, to consider the two different conditions, and then to draw necessary inferences from the connection, and then to draw necessary inferences from the connection. The counter-intuitive fact emerges from two common facts, both incapable and disturbing to the lyric expectations the idly singing birds evoke. "Darwin The Writer" ~ George Levin - Author