Kirth Gersen goes shopping

From Jack Vance's sf novel The Book of Dreams.

...Gersen sauntered along Corrib Place, looking into shops, which here affected a special eclat and offered only goods of eclat and distinction and elegance...Gersen paused ten minutes to watch a pair of puppets at a game of chess. Thhe puppets were Maholibus and Cascadine, characters from the Comic Masque. Each had captured several pieces; each in turn, after deliberation, made his move. When one captured a piece the other made gestures of rage and agitation. Maholibus made a move and spoke in a creaking voice:"Checkmate!" Cascadine cried out in anguish.He struck himself on the forehead and toppled backward off his chair. A moment later he picked himself up; the two arranged the pieces and started a new game....

Mexico: The advantages of having a woman as president

Politico covers https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/mexico-president-sheinbaum-presses-charges-after-street-groping-incident/ar-AA1PTFmC?ocid=BingNewsSerphe reaction to the groping of Mexican president Claudia Scheinbaum in the street.

IMAGE: President Sheinbaum at a press conference. She doesn't look like someone you'd want to cross.https://th.bing.com/th?q=Mexico.+Claudia+Sheinbaum&w=120&h=120&c=1&rs=1&qlt=70&o=7&cb=1&pid=InlineBlock&rm=3&mkt=en-CA&cc=CA&setlang=en&adlt=moderate&t=1&mw=247

Some wise words from Umair Haque

Months, nay years ago now, I used to post material from Umair Haque pretty regularly on this blog. He struck me as one of the few commentators who understood how bad the political situation was in the US and had a coherent analysis of the way fascicm worked and was working in America. His insistance on using the word "fascism" probably made him seem a nut. But I found him convincing, as prediction after prediction came true.

I stopped posting his material because I figured that those of my readers who cared what I thought about the issues he covered had got the messaage: read Umair Haque, he'll give you a dose of reality.

The November elections in the US seem to have changed the political landscape. Or have they? Maybe it's time for another dose of reality from Umair. Especially if you haven't read him before.

The organization of Early Medieval (Carolingian and Ottonian) armies

Medievalists.net has published an article by a distinguished historian, David Bachrach. He has written extensively on how Charlemagne and his German successors won their many campaigns by organizing logistics and mastering siege warfare. Nicely illustrated by images from the famous Utrecht Psalter.

AI generates a podcast reviewing my article " Heroic Kings and Unruly Generals: The "Copenhagen" Continuation of Prosper Reconsidered. Florilegium, 6 (1984) , 50–70.

Yesterday an unexpected item showed up in my mailbox: a podcast, based on my 1984 article analyzing an Italian chronicle which preserves unique material from the 5th, 6th, and 7th centuries. (The chromicle's connection to Denmark is only the fact that the Danes own it.)

I don't quite know what to think of this. The first notification I got told me that "Our AI generated a professional podcast of your paper."I'm not sure what that means. Certainly a human being working for Academia.edu was involved -- his discussion was quite good. Today I got a comic interpretation of the material and a slide show. These seem to me less useful.

On one hand it's a compliment that a rather old paper of mine should be picked for this treatment, though it is a very useful paper in my not so humble opinion. But Academia.edu seems to expect me to pay and sign up. For what exactly?

Comments welcome.

The 20th Century is a long time ago

This morning I was reading a lecture by Alan Lupack The 2016 Loomis Lecture: Moral Chivalry and the Arthurian Revival. It started out rather slow, describing material I was quite familiar with, but became increasingly fascunating to me as it got into later times, especially late 19th century and early z 0th century Arhuryan revivals. (The title of the lecture is deceptive; Lupack himself shows that there is always an Arthurian revival, often more than one at the same time.

It struck me reading the section on 20th century material, seeing the 20th century asas referring to a time when my grandmothers were young, that the 20th century was a long time ago!

Jack (the real) Vance -- as I see him

Jack Vance -- the sf and fantasy writer, not the guy who is US VP-- was a wonderful writer. He hhad a unique talent. His vast vocabulary, the place names, some of his proper placenanes whuch were wonderful,made his prose unmistakeable. Most of his characters, too.

One of his more obvious traits was the use of detail: One is seldom in any doubt what a character is wearing, especially what the colors of their costume. Consider this brief passage from The Star King. The action takes place at Smade's Tavern on Smade's Planet, which is entirely inhabited by Smade and his family.

"Will you drink?"

Without waiting for assent he signaled one of Smade's daughters, a girl of nine or ten, wearing a modest white bouse and a long black skirt. "I'll use whiskey, lass, and serve this gentleman whatever he decides for himself".

[two pages later]

Gersen signaled, and young Araminta Smade brought whiskey on a white jade tray, upon which she herself had painted a red and blue floral border.

And that's all we hear about young Araminta Smade! Nothing happens to her, good or bad. She's just part of the background --thoughI don't think of her as just... She is part of Vance's effort to make his universe real

You should see what he does with landscapes! More on Vance. Yes, Araminta is a real if rare name.

Tambora and the Year without Summer

Link to Substack pictures to come. Here's some striking paintings of the Year Without Summer . Thanks to xtracurriculars for this link.<

Cobalt, Ontario 1931 by Yvonne McKague Housser

Deir el-Medina and The Golden City -- looking at artisan life in Egypt

Material now at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge gives us a look at daily life comparable to Pompeii according to experts. This post from ArtNet gives an amazing discussion and some great pics.

Timothy Burke summarizes one aspect of Graeber and Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything"

Timothy Burke writes an extensive thought piece on Substack on how Trumpism is possible (Thanks to Brad DeLong for alerting me to this). Burke covers a lot of territory with reference to Graeber and Wendrow's The Dawn of Everything. I'm quoting what Burke has to say about this provocative book in hopes some of my readers will be inspired top read it (or Ibn Khaldun for that matter).

I think we’ve gone beyond reductionist paradigms that saw all such interactions as conquest, imitation, or appropriation, or that were alwaylot s defined by the unequal relationship between cores and peripheries. I like the synthesis proposed recently by David Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything where they argue that societies within some kind of contact zone sometimes reshape themselves as an answer to another society they’ve encountered, that they amplify or rework their systems and practices as a kind of commentary upon and contrast to a neighbor. For example, in the book, they argue that indigenous societies in Eastern North America intensified their own ideas about economic behavior, political freedom, and social cohesion as a response to their encounter with Western Europeans and their dislike of some aspects of Western European institutions and behavior.

It’s an approach that has some problems. It seems to put us back in the space of a “Tylorian” idea of relatively fixed and separable cultures that are a single coherent text that can be read for a few core ideas that shape everything else (or the Geertzian revision of that concept in looking for ‘thick descriptions’ that read into those opaque underlying cores), rather than think of cultures as having fuzzy boundaries, internal pluralism and contradiction, and considerable dynamism over time. But Graeber and Wengrow do point out that as societies reshape themselves as commentaries upon contrasting neighbors, they push some of their members who don’t care for the redefinition into those fuzzy boundaries and provoke forms of internal pluralism and dissent against such reshaping. There’s also the challenge of how to “read” the text of past societies, especially ones we know so little about: I love the idea of seeing practices, movements, material signs as embodied, experienced forms of political and social philosophy that are as sophisticated or complex as the written texts we normally fall back on, but there’s an inescapable hubris involved in doing that reading from the perspective of our present moment and the ways we read towards a kind of simplistic universalism.

What worries me in the context of thinking about Trump through Graeber and Wengrow’s perspective, however, is that they have a strong tendency to read away from domination, tyranny, violence and empire. That is, they want to restore contingency and variety to premodern human history, and to unshackle it from any form of teleology whatsoever. I’m with them on that goal: centralized states, agriculture, empires and a whole host of other political, economic and social forms have not been one-way inventions that automatically remake societies forever once they first appear. There’s a tremendous amount of evidence that societies switch in and out of sedentary agriculture, foraging, and pastoralism, between urbanism that is not controlled by a central state, centralized administrative states that are not empires or kingdoms, highly hierarchical societies that have no single head or ruler, and so on—that these are not fixed or linear sorts of choices. They also point out that none of these systems are necessarily applicable to whole “societies”—that there are communities where one part of the population lives within one kind of system and the other lives a different way, that are distinct while still living right alongside one another. But Graeber and Wengrow consequently take little interest in past societies which have developed highly regimented agriculture, brutal forms of labor servility, economies and social systems predicated on raiding and conquest, or are ruled by kings and emperors. They are so driven to show that none of this is inevitable or as common as many established perceptions might have it that they don’t really say much about the cases where it absolutely does happen. centralized monarchy next door or disdain the harsh servility of people forced to grow crops, there might also be societies (or at least some portion of societies) that dislike what they take to be the disorder, openness or pluralism of their neighbors and shape themselves to communicate that antipathy.

And here’s where I find myself on the edge of a thought that is a bit outside the comfort zone of a lot of contemporary history and anthropology. It’s pretty common in premodern world history to find that people living in one region who see themselves as the enemies—and victims—of some neighboring society tend to develop exaggeratedly negative caricatures of their antagonists, to see them as the opposite of everything that is good and right. The difference between that and modern forms of alterity is about power and totalization—the people If there are societies that decide that they really don’t like the who have been made into Europe’s “others” have been forced in various ways to live with that remaking. Whereas in a premodern context, it didn’t matter very much to the Scythians if the Greeks imagined them to be barbarians: the Greeks had no power to force that on the Scythians in their home territories and neither group let it get in the way of the practical business they wanted to conduct in the northern Black Sea.

So far, so good. The thought that is outside the comfort zone is that if we follow Graeber and Wengrow into thinking that some societies embed a critique of their neighbors within their own embodied institutions and practices, in an almost-dialectical kind of relationship, then perhaps sometimes some societies embrace and incorporate the negative “othering” of their neighbors to become more fearful enemies.

Contemporary historians are usually dedicated to rescuing past societies that have been depicted in negative ways by sedentary, literate neighbors from the stereotypes contained in the texts that the 19th Century imperial scholars of Western universities read as they learned more languages and developed a more universal perspective on global history. So historians look again at Scandinavian societies in the era of “Viking” raids, at waves of pastoralists moving out of central and east-central Asia up to and beyond the Mongols, at histories characterized as episodes of conquest and imperialism like the formation of the Zulu state under Shaka, and they’ve tried to shake them loose from a lot of preconceptions, to detail the complexity and heterogeneity of those societies and to offer more nuanced explanations of their raids, their conquests, their movements.

But I do wonder whether in some of those histories, there are also episodes of groups—not whole societies, sometimes just military units or raiding bands—who acquired a fairly sophisticated understanding of what their targets and enemies thought about them and decided to play it up to the hilt, to become the goblins and ghouls of a neighboring imaginary. And this maybe goes in more ways than the Western histories of the 19th Century often wrote it—say, various Crusades sacking Jerusalem, Constantinople, Zadar, Ma’aara and Nicaea with grotesque brutality, or more potently, in the savagery of European imperial conquest at precisely that moment. (Clifton Crais’ forthcoming The Killing Age I think will put that front and center of its account.)

So not so much “negative dialectics” in any sense but “negative emulation”, a decision to become the monsters that others believe you to be, to get the better of them.

I’m sure you see where I’m going with this thought when I loop back to Trump. If it’s correct to imagine that at times, some groups or societies in conflict with others elect to embody the worst ways they are imagined, the question is whether that’s a short-term or limited performance or whether it gets incorporated into the deepest reservoirs of personhood and consciousness, whether it suffuses everything. That is often what we see as the violence of alterity, that the people who are forcibly made “other” find they can never get away from what the dominant group or people think of them. But if my outside-the-conventional thought has anything to it, and it’s true that sometimes groups and societies agentively “otherize” themselves, choose to inhabit some aspect of their enemies’ negative vision, what happens if that choice becomes so fully inhabited that it is no longer remembered as a positional gambit or situational performance?

I think there are two basic answers. One I’d take from the Muslim scholar and philosopher ibn Khaldun, who described a historical cycle in which pastoralists raid strong sedentary societies and as those societies fall pray to indolence, corruption and internal conflicts, the raiders overwhelm them and become their new ruling elite. At which point they begin to transform towards the institutional and cultural world that they defeated and the cycle starts over. It doesn’t do to take the most simplistic version of this vision at face value but there’s certainly a number of examples in premodern world history that have some resemblance to this dynamic. And in some of those cases, you could also say that the new rulers imported some of their own ideas and culture into the societies they now ruled—but the important thing is that inasmuch as they had internalized ideas of themselves as the fearsome enemy prowling in the wilderness, those ideas melted away once they came in from the cold.

The other answer is that negative emulation, if it exists at all as I’ve described it here, is a disfiguring trap, that it chains the aspiring monsters to a cycle of outrages and violations that don’t even come from them in the first place, that it makes the emulator into nothing more than that imaginative space that’s been reserved for them by enemies, hopelessly inauthentic and perpetually reactive. The monsters might even exterminate their enemies but they’ll be forced to resurrect them over and over again because they’re nothing except the nightmare of another culture, another society, another group now. I think a little about what the journalist George Anastasia has written about the decline of Italian organized crime, the “Mafia”, in part because as the oldest generation of mobsters went to jail, the younger Mafia members found themselves increasingly imitating the characters they saw up on screen in The Godfather, Goodfellas and The Sopranos. Many younger mobsters weren’t anything any more but “The Mafia” and as such, they had no autonomy or authenticity, no direction but to live into that representation, and were for that reason increasingly easy for law enforcement to deal with.

If Trump and Trumpism are negative emulators in this sense, people who’ve elected to become the terrors of people they have hated, I suspect their future is going to be more consistent with the latter of these two scenarios. Which means, unfortunately, we will be stuck in here with our monsters, who no longer have any sense of who they were or what they wanted before they chose to be what we most feared, until they exhaust themselves in some fashion. I hope if so that that the air can just go out of their bubble rather than the monsters chasing the full horror of their persona to its most nightmarish ends.

Words of Wisdom from Frank Zappa and Steve Vai

I was idly paging through YouTube shorts when I ran across this piece of an interview with the musician Steve Vai (who I don't know from Adam). Vai reports on something he learned from Frank Zappa.

It ends with a very hard-hitting observation.

See for yourself!

I recently spent two weeks in Patrick County, Virginia.

The county is at the heart of Appalachia and part of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Appalachia means to me a very poor region, one of the areas LBJ wanted to fix with his Great Society policy. There has been progress since. The roads are in good shape and most people have internet connectivity. But most people, I hear, are still are poor.

Patrick County has interesting features. There are very few straight roads; most of the roads snake around between cliffs that rise up on one side and fall away on the other. Not too many fields, and few domesticated animals living in them.

Not too many houses!

The county, besides being isolated by topography, looks like a social island. There is perhaps one and only one fast-food outlet. Not that you will go hungry.There are what you might call mom and pop restaurants, But no McDonald’s, no Tim Horton's, no Wendy’s. There is good food in some of them. And some of the venues host music time and again.

What made the greatest impression on me was the Blue Ridge Mountains. On the way back to the North I was fascinated by the mountains to the point that I dreamed about them all night long.

IMAGE: one view of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Some good stuff from the earlier days of this blog -- and other people's blogs

I spent much of a recent morning looking at earlier parts of this blog and I found myself surprised at the quality of the material. I don't say this to brag, but simply because I found lots of stuff that I had forgotten.

Good stuff.

Two instances:

I quoted George Orwell who argued in 1940 that people who wondered how Hitler had become so popular in Germany should contemplate the sacrifices Hitler demanded or offered his followers. This was, said Orwell, made Fascisim more attractive than Socialism or Capitalism which merely promised an easier life. I thought of current Fascism and wondered and how applicable this analysis might be.

Here's a little more detail (it's from Greaeme Wood in the Atlantic in early 2015):

In reviewing Mein Kampf in March 1940, George Orwell confessed that he had “never been able to dislike Hitler”; something about the man projected an underdog quality, even when his goals were cowardly or loathsome. “If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon.” The Islamic State’s partisans have much the same allure. They believe that they are personally involved in struggles beyond their own lives, and that merely to be swept up in the drama, on the side of righteousness, is a privilege and a pleasure—especially when it is also a burden.

Fascism, Orwell continued, is psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life … Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them, “I offer you struggle, danger, and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet … We ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.

Second, I rediscovered my old friend Will McLean. Will died all too young but not before making a significant contribution to the re-enactment of the Middle Ages. Will was a member of the SCA but not a typical one. He was more like a pioneer than the usual person who joins the SCA today, who learns the about the "Middle Ages as they should have been" as they become part of it. Will was always one to go back to the source material rather than follow some contemporary who had done a pretty good job. I reprinted a number of his more interesting posts from his blog A Commonplace Book in mine.

That's just two of the things you might stumble across looking at my blog. And that doesn't count original material by me -- for instance some of the insights I acquired while teaching Crusade and Jihad at Nipissing University. I had to think very intensely about what was important about these phenomena, and what my students could be expected to learn.

This process, familiar to all sorts of teachers taught me a lot.

For instance:

There were plenty of religious rivalries before 1096, and a great many were Christian v Christian and Muslim v Muslim. Like Syria or Iraq today.

Or

Crusader motivation

In a famous eyewitness account of the taking of Jerusalem in 1099, the crusading chaplain Raymond of Aguilers described a bloodbath at the Temple Mount (drawing, as has often been pointed out, on the Book of Revelations):

It was necessary to pick one's way over the bodies of men and horses. These are small matters compared to what happened at the Temple of Solomon, a place where religious services are ordinarily chanted. What happened there? If I tell the truth, it will exceed your powers of belief. So let it suffice to say this much, at least, that in the Temple and porch of Solomon, men rode in blood up to the knees and bridle reins.. Indeed it was a just and splendid judgment of God that in this place should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers, since it suffered so long from their blasphemies. The city was filled with corpses and blood.... Now that the city was taken, it was well worth all of our previous labors and hardships to see the devotion of the pilgrims at the holy sepulcher. How they rejoiced and exulted and sang a new song to the Lord! For their hearts offered prayers of praise to God, victorious and triumphant, which cannot be told in words. A new day, new joy, me and perpetual gladness, the consummation of our labor and devotion, drew forth from all new words and new songs. This day, I say, will be famous in all future ages, for it turned our labors and sorrows into joy and exultation; this day, I say, marks the justification of all Christianity, the humiliation of paganism, and the renewal of our faith. "This is the day which the Lord hath made, let us rejoice and be glad in it," for on this day the Lord revealed himself to his people and blessed them.

This passage relates to two questions that often come up in studying history, but particularly the history of the Crusades (or for that matter, jihad). The first might be the question of sincerity. Did so-and-so undertake this project, or conquer this country, or start this war because he sincerely believed in his stated ideals? I find this as a historical question somewhat uninteresting. Every observer has his or her views as to how human nature works in general and in particular cases, say for instance, how kings and emperors act. It is hard to convince people to change their mind on this issue. So arguments about sincerity don't go very far unless you clearly define what you are talking about -- and people generally don't. Part of the problem is terminology, especially the use of the word "religion." Often when people talk about "religion" they are talking about a creed or set of beliefs that someone else really (or doesn't really) believes in. Or they may mean a set of rules that members of a given religion are supposed to follow. But both beliefs and rules are usually discussed in terms of formal definitions laid down by higher authorities in well-defined religious organizations. If you look in detail about what individuals say they believe or how they actually act, you may well find that these individual "believers" or "followers" not to have the same "religion" as the great authorities. If a theologian says that Christianity believes thus, or a scholar says that Islam demands thus, it is trivially easy to find Christians or Muslims who do not believe or do those things. In any big-name religion, the greatest and most respected authorities only speak for one stream of a very diverse tradition. And if ordinary people attached to that tradition claim to be obedient followers, the outside observer may often find that they don't realize how far they are from literal adherence to proclamations of their leaders; or do realize, and have good reasons of their own for their particular interpretation of what the religion means.

Which brings us to the second question, which might be put this way: "Were the Crusades really about religion? What does holy war have to do with the teachings of Jesus?" My answer to these questions is, yes they were about religion (if you just want a war that were plenty closer to hand in 11th- century Europe) -- but what was that religion like? What was its actual content? Christianity in most varieties is a lot more than the teachings of Jesus. Put aside for the moment the vast diversity of the Bible, which makes it possible to find justification for almost anything in it, especially if you use sophisticated symbolic interpretation. More important, I think, is that even Christians with little or no firsthand knowledge of the Bible have strong opinions about what Christianity is. When we are talking about the motivations of Crusaders it is probably more useful to think about the individuals who trekked across the Balkans and Anatolia and how they acted, rather than what Pope Urban II said at Clermont (important as that might be in other contexts). When we are talking about the religion that led men to Jerusalem and helped produce the slaughter there, Raymond of Aguilers’s version of Christianity is as important as that of any Pope, or of Augustine of Hippo, if not more so.

So yes, this blog has hidden treasures. And some of those treasures are links to other blogs. Note that the most recent post in Will's Commonplace Book is ten years old, but there is plenty to learn from it, today or whatever day you are reading this.

Brad deLong on AI and H.P. Lovecraft

I am very impressed by Brad DeLong's essay Shoggoths among us. I've been going through my inbox, and except for all the great astrophysics material, this discussion of the horror writer H.P. Lovecraft and the Singularity was by far the best. When I was in university (ca 1970), I like my fannish friends read H.P. Lovecraft. We all read as much SF and fantasy as we could get our hands on. Young readers today probably can't imagine how little of such material there was. I was not impressed by Lovecraft (except for At the Mountains of Madness .) Too creepy.

But Brad got more out of it. One result is this sensible (!) essay on AI, modernity, democracy, autocracy, and industrial revolutions.,

/p And monsters.

Highly recommended.

Good books

Brad deLong loves Peter S. Beagle's Folk of the AirFolk, which he called, back in 2021, "a fantasy novel of Berkeley and of the Society for Creative Anachronism."

Charlie Angus reflects on what he learned at a Juno Beach Commemoration some years ago

Here's what he said. This in particularly touched me:

At a beautiful ceremony in the vast Canadian cemetery at Bretteville-sur-Laize, young schoolchildren read out a poem in French to Canada's dead: "We are the children you never had. We are your children — the children of liberty." There wasn't a dry eye in the crowd as they read.

And here's the music. https://youtu.be/ii79Yoxf3Uw