Two Fingers

 

Gypsies, now called Roma, pick up the music of wherever they are and inject a flavor in it from further east. That is less obvious with Reinhardt, who fused so many styles that there is no real tracing back. Yet he does sound more Central European than Western European, even late in his career.

I taught a simple song to Roma children in Budureasa,* Transylvania in 1998, a translation of an American song. They were singing along with me by the end of the first line, causing me to conclude some other American must have taught it before. Not so. They just sensed where it was going right away. 

*You can read more of it than you think.

Prehistoric Burials.

 Next up: Prehistoric Burials.  I have to stop taking the bait and stick to my strong suits.

They

I was on the trash-pickup crew for the co-op Wednesday, a job I enjoy. There is a 15-minute break in the garage while the grounds manager drives the truck to the town dump.  When he returns, we cover the park again, picking up the recycling. Television service and classic cars are the two favored topics of conversation. Not mine, but I'll play along easily. Several of the older guys here own a restored Mustang or some such, and all of them have invested money in their TV screens and other equipment. They were grousing about whether it was better to get a dish, or to switch cable providers, and they talked openly about sharing Netflix passwords with their children, jailbreaking firesticks without regard to whether they were watching copyrighted material, and other workarounds to avoid paying for stuff.  I only know the rudiments of what is legal and what's not, as we have not had TV since 1979.

But what struck me was the repeated use of the word "they," especially by one guy. "They always screw us on the cost, I don't mind screwing them back." "They've been overcharging us for stuff for years.  I don't see how they get away with it." The they, when you break it down, seems to be "big companies that charge money to provide equipment or content that I watch on my screen." That these are different companies in different decades, even different industries, is not part of their schema.  It's "they." Note that this cannot fairly be called paranoia, but it has some aspects of paranoid thinking.  I do believe we have a certain baseline level of mood, which floats around a bit because of circumstances. It seems probable that lifetime events could move the propensity for depression or anxiety up or down. Yet I now believe that baseline is much more solid than I used to even ten years ago (certainly twenty). 

Even though if you challenged them that these were not any sort of united group - which they certainly know and could probably describe even better than I could - they would not modify their view much. They're all the same.  They've got you over a barrel and they can charge whatever they want.  It's a good thing to screw them right back.

I used to see this working at the hospital. People would get admitted and refuse to answer questions, saying "You know all this already.  Just look it up and don't bother me." It was hard to convince them that we did not have access to what the police reports were saying about them, or even if they had a criminal record. (We did get notified if someone was a registered sex offender or if they had an outstanding warrant, though we were not told the specifics in either case.) This was even more pronounced when children were admitted. Parents would assume we knew what was happening at the school, in the juvenile justice system, in the community agencies. And they were angry at it all. It was all of us, THEY, who were ruining their child, or at least not "giving him the help that he needs." That not only were all these agencies not in cahoots, but were sometimes quite opposed in their assessments of the situation was foreign to them. We might listen to a description by parents about a first-time admission and say after the conference call "I'd like to hear what the special ed coordinator/JPPO/therapist has to say. She is leaving things out." But we were also very prepared to say "This school district is not doing its job.  They just want to punish the kid." Or"That kid needs a different therapist. Where the f- did they find this clown?"

There is no grand collection of "agencies" that is acting on you or your child. We have to get permission to talk to them, and if you don't give it, we don't know it.*

Often this is merely pitiable, of people who have a terrible illness and just don't understand how systems work, or a kid with frightening behaviors and no one who seems to have any solution. Even if they are angry and unreasonable, you try to put yourself in their shoes and give the best service you can.  Life is hard, and ridiculously hard for some people.  You want to help them negotiate their way through. Yet others do have some understanding of systems.  Our nightmare patients and parents are physicians themselves, or psychologists, or attorneys, or elected officials who understand systems quite well and know what buttons to push. Yet amazingly, many of these also have a "they" mentality. To them it is all connected in spirit somehow.  The World is arrayed against them, has victimised them for decades, refuses to listen to them. Sympathy for such folks is different. One retains the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God pity, speculating on whether we would do any better in their shoes. Yet we also know that these people are dangerous. They ruin their own lives or the lives of their family members. They spread crazy medical and psychological information, dissuading people from getting the treatment they need because they have a Better Idea, usually based these days on "natural" solutions, though alternative medicine and cockamamie treatments can take many forms. The Scientologists are merely the worst of the lot, not the onlies. They poison the well against the only people who have a track record of helping at all, even if THEY (we, me) have the usual percentage of pricks, cranks, bitches, and arrogant bastards. 

Notice again, this is not quite paranoia, though it can be paranoid in its more extreme expressions. It is paranoi-ish, or paranoid-adjacent, as Zoomers might say. But it is mostly just a cynicism out of control. It's that baseline level of paranoia again, just applied to social services. It isn't psychotic. However, it is not just logically weak.  These are not always logic issues or education issues or where-you-get-your-news issues. Some of it is a bit crazy and comes from within.

Longtime readers will have suspected that this has been a setup to this point, and that is fair, because I do that.  It is not my intent to trick you, to suck you in, to build a case and then pull the rug. But it is very much my intent to provide a context of "Oh yeah, I can see how that could be the case in general" before getting to a specific case about something you aren't going to like nearly as well.

This year it happened to conservatives about covid. These are my people, or were. Now, perhaps, I have no home. I keep reading about what they told us about vaccines, or distancing, or projections, or mandates, or school closings, or children, or Europe, or Sweden, and the they might be the CDC, or school boards, or the pharmaceutical industry, or Joe Biden, or any of 50 governors, or Andrew Cuomo, or academic researchers, or the Washington Post, but no, no no, it's all the same thing. They told us. It is often based on some real information, though scant.  Fauci did say mask/don't mask.  And then for eighteen months every skeptical article about covid has led with that in the first paragraph. We were misled about the possibility of it being a lab leak rather than a bat flu - which is important when considering what is going on in government in general and who is protecting whom, but has absolutely noting to do with vaccines, school closings, masks, mandates of any sort, distancing, Karens, or your personal suspicion that THEY-are-always-trying-to-take-our-freedoms. Nothing.  It's not making the right distinctions, it is responding with emotion rather than logic. Various industries have set masking and vaccination requirements. States have had intermittent rules about same.  The federal government proposed sweeping requirements, as they always do, and then...well, not much happened. Even over the things that they do control, like federal employees, it was only some o' this, some o' that.

Hospitals and clinics required people to mask and to get vaccinated, on the basis of very good hard information about contagion. Oh gee, what a horrible infringement on our liberties that was. Maternal outcomes were better, the flu season was low, we even had fewer colds. So the medical people, in their own space, having no authority over anyone else, had it exactly right and proved their point. If it wasn't worth it for the society as a whole about business closings, many of which were voluntary, that is no skin off their nose. When you break the theys down into individual components it all looks different.  How did your specific governor do, and what did s/he do right or wrong?  What did your specific industry, your church, the stores in your town do? There is no they. Don't Karen me about this. She doesn't matter.

Even here, and at the relatively reasonable sites I frequent we get people telling me that it's not a real vaccine, because it's not 100% effective and people still can get the disease. Like that's not true of all vaccines.** Because somehow it is they who are not to be trusted, and they are telling us what to do.  Key point: the friends who are quite careful in their own writing about what is logically supportable and what needs qualifiers still keep linking to crazy people who don't come close. What am I to think? 

Oh look! We found a fact! Let's use that to support every skeptical argument we can unearth.  Like no one has ever done that before.

It's not psychotic.  It's not paranoid.  It's just that cynicism run amok I was talking about.  I have positive acquaintances, people I liked to work with who are emphatically not psychotic who would ask "But don't you think it's odd how few Jews were killed in the Twin Towers?" Or "Reiki helps so many people but you can't get anyone to acknowledge that.  Don't you think the Medical Establishment is trying to downplay how effective it is?" Or the old standards about the Catholic Church not letting you read the Bible or Roosevelt knowing about Pearl Harbor in advance. But let someone go on Tucker Carlson and try to claim that these deaths are not covid, but  really just 25-44 y/o's getting the vaccine,  and no one at any of the entirely reasonable conservative sites I go to seems to be saying "Fuck this! I'm never watching him again and I'm telling my friends not to either.  These people are loons." They think it's good that alternative points of view be available. Well fine.  Let them be available.  Go over to Unz.com.

A humorous comparison. Years ago, there was a charming and attractive woman who went to my church who was skilled at winning over both women and men. She just told men to pick stuff up and move it here or move it there and they would just do it, wondering why later.  Women would quote the funny things she said at women's events. A beloved and truly talented person. Somewhere along the way I picked up that the smiliness was only part of it.  She intuitively invaded your space just a bit, still smiling. Men interpreted it as vaguely flirtatious.  Women felt it as a sisterly intimacy. She was back for that Swede Nelson memorial service I mentioned and frankly, she's still got it.  But I keep my distance now, smiling myself. She had two daughters, very attractive, the same age as my oldest son.  When he was in junior high youth group I noticed at an event once that he looked just a touch wide-eyed, just a touch overwhelmed and frozen. One of those daughters was talking to him, just that little bit too close like her mother, and the poor boy was at sea.  I wanted to shout "Swim clear! You'll be fine if you just get a bit of distance!"

I say that to my conservative friends now: "Swim clear! You'll be fine if you just get a bit of distance.!"

There is no "they." If you find yourself thinking that in any way, swim clear.

*Unless you had me as your social worker, that is, in which case I can read between the lines of what is not being said and drawing conclusions from that. (And I also remember your sister from highschool or had your uncle as a patient 25 years ago and know things I can't say out loud but can use to understand things. New Hampshire is a small state.) More humbly, a lot of us are skilled at noticing what dogs are not barking.

**Rant available. Do I have to pull this car over?

500 Songs

I am listening to Andrew Hickey's "The History of Rock in 500 Songs."  It is the same series that Ann Althouse mentions occasionally, though she has caught up and is listening to episodes as they come out, while I am in the early episodes.

It contains much good information, but perhaps it would be better named "The History of American Racism in 500 Songs." Hickey is a Brit, which would ordinarily be a plus for an Anglophile like me, but in this case it is tiring, that he has the standard-issue, not thought out prejudices about Americans of his tribe in England.  In episode 18 he makes a good point about the Crewcuts making their fortune by taking R&B songs by Black artists and re-recording them without much change. He allows that new versions can sometimes be more valuable than the recordings they are imitating if they have value-added. In the case of the Crewcuts, it would be hard to make the case they added much.  He should have taken this excellent observation to heart and applied it to his own politics. He simply regurgitates what his tribe wants to hear, with no spin or insight of his own.  They are just canned sermons.

It's a pity. I keep trying to hang with him, because he is otherwise pretty good, and it's not as if racism can be legitimately avoided in the discussion of Rock's early roots. But a few episodes have not even been much about the music, just his feelings of outrage.  He doesn't even bother to hide it at times. He mentions that Sam Phillips suffered from depression and explains it by saying it was because he had somewhat different wiring than other people. It allowed him to empathise with the shy Elvis and the depression of some of the Black artists he worked with.  But their depression was caused by oppression. When a Black artist or producer cheated other Blacks, it was because he was just a sonnuvabitch. When a white person did it, it was because of racism.  It's a universal solvent for explanations.

NYC Schools and Discrimination

Glenn Loury had a woman on who is the head of the Chinese-American something-or-other challenging the blatant discrimination against Asians in placement in the seven NYC advanced high schools. At present, 97% of the admissions have been on the basis of a single test, administered yearly. The other 3% are students who were very near the cutoff, but can demonstrate some sort of disadvantage. Asians currently have about 50% of the places, but under pressure to become more demographically similar to New York as a whole, deBlasio wants to move to a different balance, which would have about 25% Asians, and more Blacks in particular.

She is absolutely right, but people just don't like reality. She made an excellent point when Loury, attempting to clarify and summarise, used the words "under-represented" and "over-represented." She countered that these children aren't "representing" anything or anyone but themselves. That is frankly, a very American or even simply Western idea we might be glad that people from the East have figured out and adopted just fine. Yet that is not the prevailing thinking in education, nor in liberal advocacy groups in general at present.

However, I wonder how much it matters.  I don't think schools matter that much in student outcomes. When we look at school district outcomes not in terms of final product, but in terms of difference between kindergarten and graduation testing, they aren't that different, and the differences can usually be tied pretty clearly to demographic changes during those 13 years. Hanover High School likes to think of itself as the best public school in the state on the basis of its highest test scores every year, but its two main industries are Dartmouth College and world-class Dartmouth Hitchcock Hospital distributed over a small population of a few towns.  Those kids come into kindergarten with the best scores in the state as well.

Schools that are not safe matter, though measuring even that has the confounding factors that the surrounding neighborhoods, and the genetics of the people in those neighborhoods is not the same either. Let us grant that there is likely some depression of the education of some kids who might otherwise have succeeded, even though I don't know of studies that demonstrate it. I also admit that most studies of schools are not measuring the effect on the brightest students, but on the population as a whole. There might be some real effect of putting the brightest kids together. I doubt it. The advantages are going to be the same ones that the kid entered with, plus whatever the prestige factor is.

However, the more that colleges don't screen for testing and move toward the much more discriminatory holistic admissions, the more that the selective places will secretly rely on the remaining places that do test, regarding mere admission there as their clue. Graduate programs forced to stop looking at GREs will just look at where you got into college instead. Fewer diamonds in the rough going forward.

Bowling Ball Technology

I don't bowl, and even in my youth never used the big balls that are standard across the country. We had candlepins in New England, and very occasionally at older lanes, duckpins. Scoring is much lower. For kids playing, getting over 100 was a big deal. Local leagues would have top players who averaged 130 or so, I seem to recall. Maybe higher. No one I knew ever broke 150, but I read about some of those in the paper or saw it on TV. It was on television every Saturday on WHDH Boston, with Don Gillis hosting. Mindless TV, even by my very low standards of watching virtually anything that was on the screen. Later the TV games also gave out cash awards. I think duckpin scoring was worse still. 

My friend John "Big Mal" Malyerck who was 6-7 and athletic was very good at this, and when he went to South Carolina to play basketball, bowled for his first time with the large balls. He held the record for many years for best score in an initial game - a 234 or some such. One can see why. After so many years of bowling in a different format it was only technically his first game.

This just showed up in my YouTube feed for some reason, and I have no interest, but somehow it was just fascinating enough to keep watching. I never knew any of this.

3-Yard Punt

 This was fun.

Fall Color

We wondered how things would go this year, with record-setting rains and coolness in July, and no dips into serious cold in August or even September, which is part of triggering the change. The result has been disappointing. The rains caused an increase in black spot on the maples, which are the foundation of foliage color, and the lack of a sharp cold has made the season more gradual.  I suppose that is just a different kind of good, a lengthy rather than dramatic foliage season.

Wren Building Update

In my post "Memory," I mentioned at the end that the Wren Building, shared by Colonial Williamsburg and the College of William and Mary, is not symmetrical.  Looking at the picture again I notice an additional confirmation that it is the portico and doors, not the cupola, that are off. The statue of Lord Botetourt is centered on the cupola.

David Hackett Fischer

James has an alert pickup that there is a new book by the author of Albion's Seed, a book on colonial history that came out in the late 80s has developed a cult following since. African Founders: How Enslaved Peopled Expanded American Freedom. I admit I have grown a bit weary of people trying to shoehorn race into all historical topics, but I very much trust Fischer and am looking forward to this. I don't know what his politics are, though I doubt he is conservative.  He is, however, a straight shooter with the data and is very solid at looking at what it might, and might not, mean. I am betting there is a significance to his use of the word "freedom," instead of "freedoms."

Even before he was a well-known historian he made himself useful by naming the historian's fallacy, which cautions us about retrospective analysis, unconsciously assuming that those in the past were aware of their place in it, and that they must have (somehow) anticipated what came immediately after, because it looks so obvious to us now.  Shakespeare didn't know he was Shakespeare, for example. This is useful especially in studying military history.

He must be over 80 now - I didn't know he is still writing. I just looked it up.  He turns 86 in a few weeks.  This book is likely his last, then. 

Straight to Christmas list. I doubt it's going to ever come out in large print, which I increasingly think I am going too need, so I will have to go to Kindle, which I am able to use but not fond of.

Valuing the Wrong Abilities

In the discussions of meritocracy, abilities, and IQ I have stressed a few themes.  First, that there is more than one way to skin the cat and become successful by some measure. This is reflected in the games that we like, Settlers of Catan being a good example, where multiple resources (out of wool, grain, lumber, brick, and ore) are needed to win. But there are still different ways to go about that, depending on what you've got ready to hand. Having a great deal of grain is a good foundation, but it must be used to acquire other things. We like games like this because they not only have good game play, but because we believe this reflects reality. In open-ended games like AD&D this is even more pronounced. You can design an episode to be played by a party solely of wizards or clerics, but they seem unreal even by fantasy standards.  You need a mix.

Secondly, the real-life abilities we have vary in usefulness depending on what society and situation we are in. In some places resistance to malaria and other diseases is the absolute best thing you can have. In others only courage, nerve, boldness will do, and in still others a capacity for enduring suffering will keep your descendants alive when other abilities fail. Yet there are societies where these good qualities might not be especially valuable. 

As societies get more complicated, IQ becomes more valuable. It feels disproportionately valuable in some eyes for a variety of reasons. It feels as if other abilities are not rewarded as they should be.  Notice the word "should." It figures prominently in what we think of as fair, but has less to do with what actually works.  It leads to some silliness trying to deny its reality, such as the assertion that it only measures one's ability to take a test or that there is no real definition of intelligence. Other than physical characteristics such as height or eye color, it is actually one of the easiest things to define* and measure, much easier than charm, or capacity for hard work, or wisdom. Even athletic ability and musical ability, which people readily see the genetic components of, are harder to define and measure. One might as well complain in Settlers that grain isn't a real thing because you can't wear it or build a house with it. 

Thirdly, and what will be important in the discussion is that it matters how one defines success. 

Fourthly, a whole lot of this is heritable. That is hated by most of the left and much of the right, but there really isn't getting around it. This has been sensed for years - "Of course Fiona sings well. Her father was a Campbell, even if he ran off when she was four, and they are all musical." But the accumulation of data over the last fifty years, especially the last decade, is stunning. 

Notice that points two and four involve a lot of luck. One and three involve some, but much less. Luck is essentially unfair.  Boethius makes much of the turns of the wheel of fortune and thinks that living in both want and plenty, or safety and danger is what the spiritual side of life is about; what turns out to be lucky in the end is also not immediately apparent at first. That is a lot of points one and especially three in that. Yet it is just being cute to not notice that those sorts of responses to life are very much our better selves, emerging only in crisis or in deep reflection. In almost all our everyday responses, the shallow definitions of fame, money, comfort, and praise do figure in what we call success.  We play at the edges by breaking off pieces and saying "I don't care about spectacular wealth...I just don't want to ever be poor again," or being content with the admiration of the few important ones rather than the masses.  We think of those as superior attitudes, but they are rather similar to the successes we disdain. 

Some heritable characteristics, IQ being one noticeable one, are a very big deal in terms of many kinds of American success. This is unfair.  Of course, what environment you get born into is just as unfair, but that doesn't stick in our craw quite so much.** My inclination has been to not deny this or merely deplore it, but to seek to elevate my own estimation and that of society's of deeper virtues, such as kindness, honesty, and piety.

Enter Fredrik deBoer (The Cult of Smart) and Paige Hardin (The Genetic Lottery) called the Hereditarian Left largely because people can't think of another category for them. It bothers them that much of success in life is genetic, and thus a matter of luck. I know less about Hardin so I will leave her aside.  She is a research psychologist at U Texas-Austin, tenured and thus with some protection against the accusations of eugenicist and fascist that are leveled against those academics who teach the realities of heritability. Freddie deBoer sometimes describes himself as socialist, sometimes as communist, and he is quite used to other people of the left excluding him. He has been a college professor and was very aware when teaching intro classes that many of those students drop out in the first year.  The work is too hard for them, they shouldn't be there, they grow discouraged and feel like failures when all that has happened is that they have been wrongly steered to college by adults meeting their own needs. 

He is very clear on the real data in education - that you can predict who will graduate from college by looking at the three-tiered reading group in third grade, or sort who will get a PhD, be granted a patent, or get a book published by giving 13-year-olds the SAT test. Educators do not want this information, and he charges that in Ed schools, it is not merely research into heritability that is rejected, but quantitative research in general. Real research invalidates what they are doing. Not all jobs, and certainly not all types of success are dependent on intelligence. But a lot of well-rewarded jobs are, and even more to the point, the types of success important to educators are dependent on it. But conservatives teach that if you just work hard and delay gratification you can bring these things to yourself, whatever your gifts, and liberals believe that if you follow your dreams you can do anything. Both, he says, are ultimately more cruel to children and young adults than the pain of accepting that they might just not have the talent to follow their dreams and have to find another way to succeed. People do that with athletics, going into coaching, or management, or statistics, or settling on a sport for fun - and similarly with music, if it is something they love but are never going to Julliard. (Well, even Julliard is different now, but you know what I mean.)

Of note, deBoer considers No Child Left Behind to have been extremely destructive, feeding into the idea that anyone can be anything if we just have high expectations and hold the schools accountable.  Testing children over and over is expensive and mostly useless.***  It creates pretend quantitative results that are used to club schools to fix things they can't fix. Educators came to hate the program, but it is based on their own ideas, before and since. "You ordered it, you eat it," a friend used to say years ago. It was gratifying to me to listen to deBoer confirm what I have asserted about the unpopularity of research into heritability and the insistence they have that "everyone acknowledges that genes have something to do with it."  No they don't, he insists.  Some give lip service to the idea but systematically reject anything pointing in that direction. He compares it to the denial that people have that people saying "Defund the Police" are actually talking about defunding, the police, they just want some of the resources to go elsewhere. Then the NY Times publishes editorials by people who say "No, we really do want to abolish the police." So too with Ed schools, says one who has degrees from them, including a PhD from Purdue. 

Freddie thinks it's the whole American Dream that is at fault, which is how he ends up Marxist.  If what we call meritocracy is really just rewarding useful characteristics that are mostly heritable, then that is so deeply unfair that we should be redistributing more. Your genes, the country you were born in, how supportive your parents are - you earned none of this.  Why should some be rewarded more than other?

I would go even further than them, as I believe the supposed non-luck categories such as resilience and hard work are also deeply heritable. From a Christian perspective, all that we have came to us from others without our aid, and we should be nothing but grateful. Pretending we have earned is indeed unhealthy.  Where I would veer away from Hardin, and especially deBoer, is what should be done to fix it. The education bureaucracy now want to get rid of testing because it is racist, but the holistic admissions will be far more unfair, less accurate, and more racist. And those are the people who are going to be in charge of this.  If we say "Nay, nay, this is a society-wide problem and we are going to have to make much deeper changes," then that is going to mean the federal government - and exactly the same sort of people who populate the educational bureaucracy, just more powerful.

I don't see solutions in bemoaning that some people can't get PhDs and patents so we should take everyone's money and give it to some other people, I would rather reorient what confers status in society. I absolutely don't trust governments to do that, even less than I trust them with most things.

*I can do a quick discussion of this if necessary.

** It gets complicated, and worthy of contemplation, why this might be.  We believe we can overcome mean circumstances and disadvantage (for which the simplest explanation is aiyeee! - genetics), so that unfairness hits us differently. Discuss among yourselves.

***It also pisses off parents who are sure their kid's a genius but scores in "only" the 70th percentile.  It must be the school's fault! It also drives those deeply unfair "holistic" admissions, as rich families can much more easily game those systems by putting their kids in expensive prestigious sports like fencing or lacrosse, or pay for music lessons and summers spent building houses for UNICEF in Ecuador.

Brush Up Your Shakespeare

I've mentioned him a few times recently.  It is time to out him to bed for a bit.

Gradually, Then Suddenly

This important principle occurred to me on three separate topics recently.  Though attributed to several writers, the best case can be made for Hemingway using in The Sun Also Rises, about going bankrupt. There was a reference to the idea a few weeks ago about the start of the Industrial Revolution. When we trace retrospectively, whatever element we isolate is likely to trace back much earlier than what we would call the beginning. If we choose the steam engine as the key item, Greeks in classical times sorta kinda had that.

I mentioned just a few days ago in discussing the History of Rock 'n Roll that early artists who came up with something that turned out to be the key ingredient (the backbeat - Western Swing, well, polka music, well...there were 19th C pianists who used it in popular music; electric guitar prominence - Charlie Christian in, gulp, 1939 - is that R&R?) can be said to have influenced other important figures just downstream, who in turn influenced...well everyone.  Yet there are lots of "not quite" attempts, that get most of the elements or mostly get them, that just don't quite get the sound. It all has to come together.  And in the case of Rock, I would push the timeline very late until I said "There.  That's it.  That is indisputable Rock." Irritatingly late, in fact.

Today I heard discussion of the origins of civilisation - which has undergone revision among historians as the 1960s high school model of Sumer...then Babylon and the Assyrians... then the Greeks - has proved unsupportable. Even agriculture, supposedly not occurring until about 12,000 y/a, is being pushed back nearly twice that far in some tellings.  There is evidence of hunter gatherers having gardens.  Maybe for medicinal plants, or for ceremonial plants.  Just not major crops supplying the bulk of calories. Though even those are getting pushed father back, mostly famously by Gobekli Tepe, which increasingly shows as being a continuity from earlier villages and gatherings rather than a new thing. 

When did the Renaissance begin?  Isolate any factor and you will be able to trace it back 300 or even a thousand years before 1500. There are even situations, briefly, in a few places, where all of them seem to be in place, but then it all just dissipates.  No Renaissance for you, Alfredo.

Thee and Thou

Popular opinion regards the use of Thee and Thou as a type of formal speech in English, likely because it is archaic and used to refer to God. As it came up recently around here, I just want to review the facts, and hit hard a bit that is sometimes not quite understood even by those who know that those forms are not formal.

Thou is the intimate form, related to and similar to French Vous Tu and German Du. It is used in reference to God to stress that intimacy.  That is considered more important than even the respect that would be communicated by "you." This is surprising enough that it is worthy of some reflection on its own. But the usage is even more surprising.  Thou was also used with social inferiors. Thus, it could be used to effect with one's spouses, children, and close friends, and Shakespeare does this in several places, where characters will toggle back and forth between the forms depending on the type of persuasion they are engaging in.  The best example is probably the first scene in King Lear (a play that is coming up a lot for some reason), especially the exchange with Cordelia. 

Yet even this, the possibility of disrespect in addressing God, was considered a worthy risk to preserve the I-Thou intimacy. We are a fortunate people.

Vaccine Rejectionism

I draw your attention to the Quillette article currently just up on the sidebar Vaccine Rejectionism and The Left.

Cometary Influence

In my post on Ancient Beer, one of my main sources came over to comment, Merryn and Graham Dinely. Presumably, something pops up when someone links to their site. I should probably have figured that out years ago. Graham suggested that I look into the work of Michael Baillie, a tree-ring expert (dendochronologist, so now you know) whose work indicates terrible conditions 2354-2354 BC, likely resulting in widespread famine. His book is reviewed here at New Scientist. He identifies other dire periods and believes that showers of comets are the most likely explanation. There is no record of volcanoes, and those would not have effects lasting nearly a decade in any event. That particular set of dates is important, as it coincides with Corded Ware and Bell Beaker cultures and the full replacement of Britain's Neolithic farming population with those peoples who are deeply connected with the Yamnaya, the Indo-European nomadic people. Baillie believes that the replacement was not so much the result of invading horsemen with bronze weapons and cattle but of the nine-year famine wiping out the sedentary population across Europe that was crop dependent, while the (relative) newcomers survived better, though likely not entirely well.

It's a highly plausible story, and similar to the new understandings we are developing of disease wiping out a population, or at least weakening it enough that it can be more easily overcome.  The most dramatic example is the discovery of the New World and the massive die-offs of the native populations here, but there's no reason why it could not have happened many other times. I would like to see more evidence before I accept the theory, but I am kindly disposed to it at present. Nine years of famine would certainly be a lot for any population to endure.  I do immediately wonder about those societies that survived by fishing, though.  They would also have a better chance of hanging on, wouldn't they?

Willis Conover

When you attend to highly varied material, there are odd moments when there is crossover of someone you heard about for the first time just the week before. Willis Conover was a young science fiction fan who became friends with HP Lovecraft late in life and was even his literary executor at first.  I ;earned about him last Friday. Conover went on to become a sci-fi publisher.

He was also a recorder and interviewer of jazz greats, which he played on Voice of America, making him famous in Eastern Europe. But he followed the popularity and the money as well, and recorded and encouraged a lot of young rhythm and blues artists in the 1940s and 50s which I learned about today. Strange coincidence.

Moon Mullican

A big influence on hillbilly boogie, rockabilly, and ultimately, guitarists in general who came after, he even had a go at some rock 'n roll in the 50s.  But he was Fais Do-Do in origin and took in whatever he heard and made it sound Louisiana.  This one is just a mix of everything, including both Cajun and English Lyrics.  A bit odd.

Memory

I am reunioned out at this point.  College 46th - bought merch for the first time in over forty years.

 

Then a memorial service for Swede Nelson, a choir member of many decades, which brought back people I had known in the 80s and 90s. Then Manchester High School Central 50th, all in about 10 days time. People commented with some amazement how much I remembered, as they always do.  Last week, I'm not so good at.  But remote memory continues outstanding. I still recall the phone numbers of many, for example. I was touched that a few people remembered things about me as well. Occasionally things I had myself forgotten, but have the ring of truth.

When people have different memories I used to just assume they were wrong. Then I had a son who is as good as I am who sometimes disagreed, and I had to admit he was correct sometimes. So I tried to become more humble with others, knowing that because of the vagaries of memory, and forcing memories into packets according to narratives we want to be true, I should be cautious. Yet I find in practice I was mostly right the first time.  I have anchor points for many of these memories, such as play productions or the year people arrived at school, and fairly often another person present will nod and confirm what I am saying after thinking about it a bit. And when someone has a different memory that is credible, it is usually immediately apparent to me who is correct. It's  not always me, as when one friend said "Are you sure that was Don?  Because I didn't room with Don freshman year, he was across the hall.  I roomed with John for one year." I knew he was right. I had the wrong bit player in the drama.

Mostly I am amazed that people don't remember things. Nostalgia and reminiscence are such staples in my life. I have done enough revisiting of old places, however. There were some that I kept longing to see and eventually did, finishing up about ten years ago. I found I had little interest even at the college, where I had only been twice in the last 25 years. The people I knew are no longer in those buildings and I don't care.

I also got my vindication that the Wren building, despite being Georgian architecture, is not symmetrical.  Look at the photo above and you will see that either the cupola or the doors and portico must be wrong, as they are not in line.  In fact it is the doors that are wrong by about a foot, which I concluded by pacing it off, then confirmed by comparing the doors in the back, which line up with the cupola exactly. How they missed this in the 1920s reconstruction I don't know, but certainly no one is going to be fixing it now.

The Most Reluctant Convert

I will have to drive 30 miles, or 50, to see it but the trailer looks good. I usually don't like this sort of thing, and I doubt it will have anything unfamiliar to me.  But I am terrible at visualisation, so this may serve a strong if indirect purpose. November 3.