Clippings 01
Country mail carriers, hunting tips from herons, and other stories
Buzzcut is always better in your browser
You’re reading Buzzcut, a newsletter of close-cropped commentary on travel, style, history, and nature by writer and strategist Zander Abranowicz.
Knowledge is to this newsletter what fireflies are to mason jars. Our new franchise, titled “Clippings,” gathers a few glowing specimens of knowledge in a single format, designed for gentle Sunday reading. Thank you, as ever, for your enthusiasm.
You can always read our library of reports, reviews, and recommendations here.
Rural Free Delivery
The historian Shelby Foote famously observed: “Before the [Civil] War, it was said ‘the United States are’ — grammatically it was spoken that way and thought of as a collection of independent states. And after the war it was always ‘the United States is,’ as we say today without being self-conscious at all. And that sums up what the war accomplished. It made us an is.” Well said, if simplistic: post-Appomattox America still had a long way to union, not only of north and south and black and white, but of rural and urban. This divide defined life down to everyday matters like mail. Until well after the war, remote farming communities were commonly excluded from federal postal routes. Championed by Southern populists and Midwestern merchants — and opposed, in classic Gilded Age fashion, by a quartet of wealthy express companies — Rural Free Delivery was permanently established in 1902 to link isolated and often impoverished communities to national arteries of information and commerce. To welcome the “great army of rural carriers” who operated this rugged new network in their own vehicles (from mules to carriages and later automobiles), farmers initially constructed mailboxes from lard pails, syrup cans, cigar boxes, and other materials on-hand. Rural delivery remains the United States Post Office Department’s most expensive endeavor of all time, as of 2022 employing some 133,000 carriers serving 80,000 routes coursing through our heartlands.
Country Home by Frederic Malle
$135 is a lot for a candle, but a lot less expensive than buying a house in the country. ‘Country Home,’ by French fragrance maven Frederic Malle, is a super-special-occasion-kind-of-gift that brings, when lighted, the warm patina of landed life to even the most industrial spaces. I can attest to this: right now it sits flickering on my desk, transforming my Spartan, echoey new office into a game warden’s cottage on the Outer Hebrides, someplace where the muddy Wellies and ash walking sticks are always at-the-ready by the door. Soot, pine, fir, leather, and styrax — I Googled it, it’s a small tropical tree — are tucked into a 220-gram column of pale wax, cupped by a white ceramic vessel that would seem invisible if not for the red interior, like a flourish by Le Corbusier. I’m weird about candles. There are few gifts I’m more excited to receive, but I never want to light them for fear of letting a good thing go too soon. With Country Home, I’ve made a deal with myself to only burn it while writing this newsletter: a little olfactory reward for putting words on the page. Strike a match, put it to the wick, and you can almost hear the sighing of the lurcher lazing by the fireplace.
Shadowfishing
Family Areidae, which includes herons and egrets, produces some of the most elegant features of aquatic scenery. Somehow, the ubiquity of these species along the rivers and shorelines near my home doesn’t diminish their aesthetic value, and spiritual intensity. I’m always awed by their grace in flight, their poise in stillness. Recently, I came across footage that added a new layer of wonder to these creatures. In it, a black heron, leggy denizen of Sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar, practices an ingenious form of hunting known as “canopy feeding.” Using the loose plumage of its dark wings to cast shadow over the surface of the water, the bird inches forward with balletic control before snatching up its prey. Why is this method so effective? For one thing, the darkness seems to attract small fish seeking shelter and safety. Another theory posits that the shadow makes it easier for the predator to see prey beneath the water, akin to a fisherman wearing polarized lenses. In the canon of intelligent animal behaviors, I put this up there with chimpanzees using sticks to catch termites, and octopuses arranging stones of a particular color to camouflage their dens.
Rent Parties of the Harlem Renaissance
Facing high housing prices and low wages in the 1920s, black residents of Harlem and Chicago’s South Side devised a brilliant solution to make rent: charging small entry fees (between 25 and 50 cents) to attend raucous parties in their apartments. They would advertise these affairs with small letterpressed cards hawked block-to-block by printers, often featuring whimsical rhymes like “Hop Mr. Bunny, Skip Mr. Bear, If you don’t dig this party you ain’t no where!” Between 1925 and 1960, the poet Langston Hughes collected these ephemeral invites, now held amongst his papers in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. With his keen ear for the lyricism in everyday language, Hughes integrated verse sourced from these cards into his “Simple stories,” and recalled in his 1940 autobiography The Big Sea: “Almost every Saturday night when I was in Harlem I went to a house-rent party. I wrote lots of poems about house-rent parties, and ate many a fried fish and pig’s foot — with liquid refreshments on the side. I met ladies’ maids and truck drivers, laundry workers and shoe shine boys, seamstresses and porters. I can still hear their laughter in my ears, hear the soft slow music, and feel the floor shaking as the dancers danced.”
Something You Should Know
A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver
Albert Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel on November 17, 1952, following the death of Israel's first President, Chaim Weizman
Well this was pleasant.