In the ear­ly 1940’s, Robert Hein­lein wrote two charm­ing nov­el­ettes, which have most of the ele­ments of his mature style, but with a lighter, more imp­ish tone. The two nov­el­ettes have been in print togeth­er under the title Wal­do & Mag­ic, Inc. for the last 58 years.

Wal­do (pub­lished in Astound­ing in 1942) is set in a future (appar­ently around our present, now) where Niko­la Tesla’s radi­ant pow­er forms the back­bone of the tech­no­log­i­cal infra­struc­ture. The prob­lem is, the tech­nol­ogy is mys­te­ri­ously fail­ing, and there is the pos­si­bil­ity radi­ant pow­er is cre­at­ing an eco­log­i­cal dis­as­ter. It may be sap­ping everyone’s vital­ity, turn­ing human­ity into help­less couch pota­toes. Nobody is bet­ter qual­i­fied to solve this prob­lem than Wal­do, the obnox­iously brat­ty super-genius who lives in orbit above the earth, and is afflict­ed with myas­the­nia gravis, a degen­er­a­tive mus­cu­lar dis­ease that makes him help­less. To com­pen­sate, he has invent­ed var­i­ous forms of remote con­trol devices, known as wal­dos, which Hein­lein describes in detail. But he needs the help of a Penn­syl­va­nia hex doc­tor to solve the prob­lem. Hein­lein con­ceived of the remote con­trol devices long before they were actu­ally built, and it is said that the sto­ry led direct­ly to their inven­tion. Read more »

This is an inter­est­ing, well-writ­ten nov­el by an accom­plished New­found­land writer. It com­bines three sto­ries. One is set in dur­ing World War II, and focus­es on a desert­er from the navy, who is on the run in back­woods New­found­land. Anoth­er sto­ry cen­ters on, Nan­cy Shanawhdit, the last known native Beothuk, who died of tuber­cu­lo­sis in 1829. The third focus­es on a foren­sic pathol­o­gist at Cam­bridge, U.K., whose life is strange­ly altered by the first two sto­ries, and by her expe­ri­ences dur­ing the geno­cide in Rwan­da. It’s an odd com­bi­na­tion, but Ber­nice Mor­gan makes them work togeth­er with a decep­tive ease.

One detail that struck me. The sailors and sol­diers in wartime New­found­land includ­ed New­found­lan­ders, Cana­di­ans, and Amer­i­cans. New­found­land had not joined Cana­da, and for most of the his­tory that pre­ceded that union (in 1948), lit­tle love was lost between the two coun­tries. In Cloud of Bone, the New­found­lan­ders have reg­u­lar, and rel­a­tively good-natured fist­fights and brawls with the Amer­i­cans, usu­ally over access to dance-hall girls, but the fights with Cana­di­ans are far more vio­lent, and far from good-natured. It reminds me of the old New­found­land folk songs, “Come Near At Your Per­il, Cana­dian Wolf”, and “Thank God We’re Sur­rounded By Water”.

15593. (Christo­pher Allen) French Paint­ing in the Gold­en Age
15594. (Dana Priest) Sol­dier Sui­cides at Record Lev­el [arti­cle]
15595. (Ken­neth A. Schmidt & Richard S. Ost­feld) Bio­di­ver­si­ty and the Dilu­tion Effect in 
. . . . . Dis­ease Ecol­o­gy [arti­cle]
15596. (Jacob Baak-Teshu­va) Rothko
15597. (Rod­ney Cas­tle­den) Britain 3000 BC Read more »

This was the most pop­u­lar play in Eliz­a­bethan Eng­land before the arrival of Shake­speare (it was appar­ently first per­formed around 1582). Shake­speare was clear­ly influ­enced by it in some ways. It’s a bru­tally vio­lent and lurid study of revenge. I couldn’t find any audio or video per­for­mance of it. The poet­ry doesn’t exact­ly call up any admi­ra­tion, though Kyd gets some amus­ing effects when he has char­ac­ters alter­nate sin­gle lines in a kind of rapid-fire pat­ter. We don’t know much about Kyd, and not much of his work has sur­vived. He is reput­ed to have writ­ten the “Ur-Ham­let”, the treat­ment of the Dan­ish sto­ry that Ham­let is said to have either revamped or sup­planted, but which has not sur­vived. He was not as skill­ful at elud­ing the cen­sors as Shake­speare. For var­i­ous impi­eties, he was impris­oned and tor­tured. His career ruined, he died at the age of 35. He had been Marlowe’s room mate for awhile. Mar­lowe was either assas­si­nated for polit­i­cal rea­sons, or in ran­dom brawl, depend­ing on the biographer’s incli­na­tion. Being a play­wright was a rough game, in those days.

A read­er sent in the paper in the cur­rent issue of Acta Archae­o­log­ica, because it seems to con­firm some of the points I made in the blog entries for Feb­ru­ary 18 and 20. It does con­firm that many oth­er sites may have been inter­preted as dom­i­nated by hunt­ing big game when they were pri­mar­ily fish­ing vil­lages. How­ever, it isn’t an exam­ple of a fish­ing vil­lage act­ing as a syn­er­getic fac­tor in neoloth­ic agri­cul­ture. I’m look­ing for­ward, opti­misti­cally, to some­thing along those lines.

I looked for­ward to read­ing this book, which had been rec­om­mended to me. But it proved a dis­ap­point­ment. Occa­sion­ally, it laps­es into com­mon sense for a page or two, but for the most part it’s an exer­cise in regur­gi­tat­ing the tedious ortho­dox­ies of our time. Plen­ty of Fou­cault. Plen­ty of neb­u­lous and de-human­ized pas­sages like “Polit­i­cal vio­lence may have lacked sys­tem­atic­ity because juris­dic­tions con­flicted, but it retained an over­all coher­ence through its tech­niques. These tech­niques involved the inscrip­tion of signs, and it is there­fore not sur­pris­ing that the vio­lence about penal rit­u­als involved the mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of signs….The brig­and in this instance used pun­ish­ments as a tech­nique or rep­re­sen­ta­tion. He did not oblit­er­ate the sys­tem of rep­re­sen­ta­tions; he mere­ly play­fully changed what the signs meant.” That is how the author choos­es to describe some­body hav­ing nails ham­mered into his feet. We learn that “the encar­cer­ated become sub­ject to a hermeneu­tics of sus­pi­cion”, and so on. Read more »

I strong­ly rec­om­mend this book to any­one who is begin­ning to look at the Neolith­ic peri­od in Eng­land, or to any­one who is intrigued by Stone­henge, Ave­bury, or the mar­velous Orkney sites. Cas­tle­don does a fine job of pulling togeth­er the cur­rent evi­dence and weav­ing it into a com­pre­hen­sive pic­ture of life in the U.K. in 3000 BC. Much of this involves inter­pre­ta­tion, guess­es, and imag­i­na­tive recon­struc­tion, but the author usu­ally makes it clear when he is doing this, and care­fully dis­tin­guishes between what the archae­o­log­i­cal evi­dence can prove or not prove, and when analo­gies from anthro­pol­ogy are appro­pri­ate. Occa­sion­ally the text drifts into fash­ion­able pat­ter about the psy­chol­ogy of spaces and the rela­tion of mind to land­scape, but not enough to be annoy­ing. There is only one embar­rass­ing pas­sage, where he talks about the “emer­gence” in the fourth mil­le­nium BC, of “lit­er­ally self-con­scious peo­ple, peo­ple like us, self-con­tained and self-aware”. The notion that human beings in some peri­od or cul­ture were not self-con­scious or self-aware, and sud­denly became so because of some sud­den trans­for­ma­tion, is, as far as I can tell, non­sense. Yet it con­stantly pops up in his­tor­i­cal and anthro­po­log­i­cal writ­ing, based on the flim­si­est rea­son­ing. One might as well claim that peo­ple became “self-aware” in 1950, because then they began to make indi­vid­ual pur­chases with cred­it cards. But this is only one blem­ish in an oth­er­wise excel­lent and use­ful work. The book abounds in well-cho­sen maps, illus­tra­tions and pho­tographs, the mate­r­ial is pre­sented in an order­ly fash­ion, and the prose style is pleasant.

15469. [2] (Philip Pull­man) The Gold­en Com­pass [His Dark Mate­ri­als, Book 1] 
15470. (Philip Pull­man) The Sub­tle Knife [His Dark Mate­ri­als, Book 2] 
15471. (Philip Pull­man) The Amber Spy­glass [His Dark Mate­ri­als, Book 3]
15472. (Christo­pher Boehm) Seg­men­tary “War­fare” and the Man­age­ment of Conflict: 
. . . . . Com­par­i­son of East African Chim­panzees and Patri­lin­eal-Patrilo­cal Humans [arti­cle]
15473. (Jacob M. Rab­bie) The Effects of Intra­group Coop­er­a­tion and Inter­group Competition 
. . . . . on In-group Cohe­sion and Out-group Hos­til­i­ty [arti­cle] Read more »

Rotat­ing cred­it asso­ci­a­tions are pro­foundly impor­tant insti­tu­tions. They illus­trate the abil­ity of peo­ple to orga­nize them­selves demo­c­ra­t­i­cally on a grass-roots lev­el, and show that this impulse is cross-cul­tur­al. This is the clear­est and most detailed descrip­tion of how rotat­ing cred­it asso­ci­a­tions work. The author’s best knowl­edge is of Indone­sia, but he draws on well-researched com­par­isons with oth­er regions, espe­cially Africa. The analy­sis of struc­ture, motives, and effects is very sharp. Basic read­ing in this area.

This cogent­ly argued book deals with the prob­lem of how peo­ple man­age com­monly held prop­erty where dis­crete sub­di­vi­sion into indi­vid­ual own­er­ship or man­age­ment is not prac­ti­cal, or not desired. Exam­ples of such sit­u­a­tions are fish­ing grounds, joint pas­turage, rota­tional usufruct, and pro­duc­tive forests, but there are numer­ous oth­ers. Much non­sense has been writ­ten on this sub­ject, and Ostrom clears the air with a dis­ci­plined analy­sis. Unlike most of the peo­ple who have pon­tif­i­cated on the top­ic, she has stud­ied spe­cific, real-life instances in great detail. She begins by describ­ing how var­i­ous dubi­ous and unproven notions, such as Gar­rett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Com­mons” [see above], have been used to advance a vari­ety of ide­o­log­i­cal agen­das, almost always end­ing up jus­ti­fy­ing mas­sive inter­fer­ence and expro­pri­a­tion by the big and pow­er­ful. For exam­ple, the “Tragedy of the Com­mons” gim­mick was used by bureau­cratic cen­tral­ists to jus­tify state con­trol of all resources, and by Neo­con­ser­v­a­tives to jus­tify “pri­va­ti­za­tion” (the seizure and hand­ing over of local­ly owned resources to vast, baro­nial cor­po­rate bod­ies). I live in a coun­try that was pop­u­lated, in great num­bers, by immi­grant Scot­tish high­landers who had been dri­ven off their own lands by Enclo­sure, an ear­ly incar­na­tion of this kind of clap­trap, so it’s easy for me to appre­ci­ate her insights. Ostrom points out that there is no evi­dence that there is any nec­es­sary “tragedy of the com­mons”, that the world abounds with exam­ples of effec­tive col­lab­o­ra­tive con­trol of resources on the local lev­el, and that the argu­ments pre­sented have lit­tle basis in expe­ri­ence, are full of self-con­tra­dic­tion and over­look fun­da­men­tal eco­nomic facts. The book is an impor­tant intel­lec­tual resource for all of us involved in the bat­tle against Big Power.