24324. (Juliet Clutton Brock) Animals as Domesticate ― A World View through History
24325. (Andrew Garrard, et al) Prehistoric Environment and Settlemen in the Azraq Basin:
. . . . . Interim Report on the 1987 and 1988 Excavation [report]
24326. (Adam Grydehøj, Ilan Kelman & Ping Su) Island Geographies of Separation and
. . . . . Cohesion: The Coronavirus Pandemic and the Geopolitics of Kalaallit Nunaat [article]
24327. (Chris Fox & Paul Wiegert) Exomoon Candidates from Transit Triming Variations ― Six
. . . . . Kepler Systems with TTVs Explainable by Photometrically Unseen Exomoons [article]
24328. (Alun M. Anderson) After the Ice ― Life, Death, and Geopolitics in the New Arctic
24329. (Robert Carter) Pearl Fishing, Migration, and Globalization in the Persian Gulf,
. . . . . Eighteenth to Twentieth Centures [article]
24330. (LIGO Scientific Collaboration & Virgo Collaboration) GW190814: Gravitational Waves
. . . . . from the Coalescence of a 23 M⊙ Black Hole with a 2.6 M⊙ Compact Object [article]
24331. (Thomas R. Alexander) The Evolution of the Ancient City: Urban Theory and the
. . . . . Archaeology of the Fertile Crescent
24332. (Elena Liarskaya) Women and the Tundra: Is There a Gender Shift in Yamal? [article]
24333. (Kewin Pèche-Quilichini, Aurélien Tafani & Annette Palmade) Un réseau de sites
. . . . . fortifiés du Bronze moyen autour du golve de Lava, Corse occidentale [article]
24334. (W. N. Robertson) Cycling [1894]
24335. (Larry Beasley) Vancouverism
24336. (Fanny Ekblom Johansson, et al) Lake Sediments Reveal Large Variations in Flood
. . . . . Frequency Over the Last 6,500 Years in South-Western Norway [article]
24337. (Pierre Zalloua, et al) Ancient DNA of Phoenician Remains Indicates Discontinuity in
. . . . . the Settlement History of Ibiza [article]
24338. (Bruce Pascoe) Dark Emu ― Aboriginal Australi and the Birth of Agriculture
24339. (Syed Imran Haider & Sarfraz Khan) Geo-Politics of Syrian Conflict: Role of Regional,
. . . . . Extra-Regional and Non-State Actors in the Situation [article]
Category Archives: B — READING
READING — JULY 2020
READING — JUNE 2020
24306. (K. Langlois, et al) Vitamin D Status of Canadians as Measured in the 2007 to 2009
. . . . . Canadian Health Measurs Survey [article]
24307. (S. J. Whiting, et all) The Vitamin D Status of Canadians Relative to the 2011 Dietary
. . . . . Reference Intakes: An Examination in Children and Adults with and without
. . . . . Supplement Use [article]
24308. (Matthias Wacker & Michael F. Holick) Sunlight and Vitamin D ― A Global Perspective
. . . . . for Health [report]
24309. (Siddharth Chandra & Eva Kassens-Noor) The Evolution of Pandemic Influenza;
. . . . . Evidence from India, 1918–19 [article]
Read more »
READING — MAY 2020
24295. (John Graunt) Natural and Political Observations Mentioned in a Following Index, and
. . . . . Made upon the Bills of Mortality [1662]
24296. (Thomas Piketty) Capital and Ideology
24297. (Noel B. Salazar) Anthropology and Anthropologists in Time of Crisis [article]
24298. (Joyce Marcus) The Inca Conquest of Cerro Azul [article]
24299. (Tobias Richter, et al) Interaction before Agriculture: Exchanging Material and Sharing
. . . . . Knowledge in the Final Pleistocene Levant [article]
Read more »
READING — APRIL 2020
24281. (William Shakespeare) Sonnet #1 “From fairest creatures we desire increase”
24282. (Katherine Stewart) The Power Worshippers
24283. (Marc Lipsitch; David L. Swerdlow & Lyn Finelli) Defining the Epidemiology of
. . . . . Covid-19 [article]
24284. (Jorrit M. Kelder) A Thousand Black Ships: Maritime Trade, Diplomatic Relations, and
. . . . . the Rise of Mycenae [article]
24285. (Peter Hagoort) The Neurobiology of Language Beyond Single-Word Processing
. . . . . [article]
Read more »
Wednesday, April 29, 2020 — Fletcher Pratt’s The Well of the Unicorn
Afficionados of fantasy fiction are usually familiar with the collaborative works of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt collectively known as the “Harold Shea stories,” written in the 1940s. Both these men were hard-nosed rationalists who enjoyed writing fantasy, with de Camp particularly keen on building worlds out of the logical implications of magical premises, and equally keen on the humour that ensues from such logic. De Camp lived until 2000, dying at the age of 92, writing during most of that time. He published a science book on primatology in 1995 and an autobiography in 1996. He remained well known and well loved in the Science Fiction / Fantasy community for all that time. Pratt, however, was born in 1897 and died in 1956, shortly after the publication of these famous collaborations. Without de Camp, he wrote four science fiction and two fantasy novels, as well as sixteen books on naval history and many others on a broad range of subject. He was also a pioneer “gamer,” creating a complex mathematics-based strategic naval war game in 1933 that is considered one of the best ever conceived. After the publication of the revised version of the game in 1940, he wrote that “wives and girlfriends of male participants dropped their roles of observers and soon became fearsome tacticians.” He was, like de Camp, a man of broad interests. He wrote mysteries, Civil War histories, culinary histories and cookbooks, and a considerable amount of well-regarded poetry. While looking for a photo to illustrate this post, I found one of him at his New Jersey home gamboling on its lawn with the poet John Ciardi and rocket scientist Willy Ley.
Fletcher Pratt
Of the two fantasy novels, I’ve just read The Well of the Unicorn, first published in 1948. Three things are striking about the book.
One is the style, which combines the clean and crisp sentence structure and imagery you would have found in the era’s Saturday Night or New Yorker with some of the purple conventions of pulp fantasy novelists, and a dash of Lord Dunsany. He delighted in inserting antique and anagogic words into this slick matrix, but unlike most of the pulp writers, he actually knew what they meant.
Another thing that struck me is the social, psychological, and political realism. The society depicted is actually plausible, resembling very closely what you would find reading the Twelfth Century Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus. The interplay of local kings and feudatories with pirate raiders and independent jarls on the fringes of a world previously dominated by an urban empire is pretty much what you would have found in early medieval Jutland. Unlike most fantasy novels, Pratt’s imaginary world is one where people have to eat and make a living, and people get hurt when they fight. The politics is realistic. Much of the text is concerned with the hero Airar struggling with competing ideologies, forced into unpleasant compromises, and finding no social arrangement that doesn’t create some injustice. By the end of the book, he comes across something like Duke Louis II de Bourbon.*
There is, of course, magic in Pratt’s world, but there is an underlying message: magic sucks. It doesn’t work very well, doesn’t produce the desired results, and at its best is rather lame. This is what allows the book to maintain its realistic feeling, and also cures the most irritating problem of fantasy fiction. Since at any second someone might pull out a spell or summon some power that makes whatever happen that the writer wants to happen, the magical element of fantasy fiction essentially inflates the currency. The reader just trudges through the set-pieces and battles, waiting for the magic ring or the cosmic woo-be-doo to do its stuff. Pratt could see this peril, and instead used magic more as a source of irritation and irony than a driving force in the narrative. The only other fantasy writer that I know of taking this approach is R. A. MacAvoy.
This is an enjoyable old fantasy, if you know the conventions of pre-WWII pulp fiction established by Robert E. Howard, and even more if you’ve read a bit of Dunsany or A. Merritt. A modern reader might not quite “get it” or see its charm.
—–
* whose life story has recently been translated by my friend Steven Muhlburger (primarily) and myself (assisting). [Chronicle of the Good Duke by Jean Cabaret d’Orville (fl. 1429), translated by Steven Muhlberger and Phil Paine]
READING — MARCH 2020
24342. (Steven Muhlberger & Will McLean) Murder, Rape, & Treason ― Judicial Combats in
. . . . . the Late Middle Ages
24343. (Rebecca M. McLennan) The Wild Life of Law: Domesticating Nature in the Bering Sea,
. . . . . c. 1893 [article]
24344. (Daniel Fisher) Spun Dry: Mobility and Jurisdiction in Northern Australia [article]
24345. (Sarah Song) After Obergefell: On Marriage and Belonging in Carson McCuller’s Member
. . . . . of the Wedding [article]
24346. (Peggy Brock) The Many Voyages of Arthur Wellington Clah
Read more »
Wednesday, March 18, 2020 — “I see day like smoke.”
While the response of Canadian authorities to Covid-19 has not been ideal, it at least makes a better-than-average grade, and the initial sluggish response is quickly giving way to a science-based one. Testing levels are still woefully inadequate. I have to admit that even Ontario’s notoriously slimy Conservative administration is showing competence, and Premier Doug Ford, a congenital fathead, has been on his best behaviour. The Prime Minister is in isolation because of his wife’s positive test, and gives press conferences alone. Ninety percent of government business is now being conducted by skype or other virtual platforms. Here in Ontario, public gatherings are suspended, restaurants are closed except for take-out, and delivery carriers wear face-masks. Only supermarkets and pharmacies remain open. The border is now closed with the United States, with various economic and medical-based exceptions. There was considerable “panic buying” over the weekend, and you can’t find either eggs or toilet paper for the moment, but even at the height of this panic buying people remained polite and well-behaved. Supermarkets are assuring that they will be restocked quickly, and prices will remain the same. As of this writing, eight Canadians have died. The superiority of a single-payer public health insurance system in such an emergency is self-evident beyond the slightest doubt.
In the U.S., various state governments have been taking up the slack of a pathetically inept and corrupt White House, and America must place it’s hopes in local infrastructures. Notable is Washington State, which has been hard hit and requires drastic measures. Washington has about twice as many cases as all of Canada and has had 52 fatalities. Washington’s Public Health authorities are facing a fierce foe. But to demonstrate that state’s creative spirit, the best online website for consolidating current world Covid-19 statistics was built as early as last December — by Avi Schiffman, a seventeen-year-old high school student in a Seattle suburb.
American State-level authorities have been responding admirably, but to show you the difference between the two Federal administrations, I submit the following image from a White House press conference taken a few hours ago:
The most basic protocols in an epidemic are being visibly violated by the President, Vice President and his staff. This is idiocy, incompetence and corruption in a nutshell.
By contrast, this is a press conference, for identical reasons, conducted at the same time by Finance Minister Bill Morneau and Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz following the Prime Minister’s solo address:
They are maintaining the proper six-foot distance, the few journalists present are as well, and the bulk of questions are being asked through the internet. This is following protocol.
Canadians have had little experience with epidemics since the polio outbreaks of the 1950s and the global flu pandemic of 1918. The most serious recent issue was the SARS event of 2003, which killed 44 Canadians and was largely confined to Toronto. I was working in a medical laboratory at that time, handling potentially infectious materials, so I was kept abreast of the issue and had to follow very tight protocols. To this day, I keep my own home well stocked with disposable gloves, swabs, cleaning agents and large quantities of hydrogen peroxide — so I didn’t have to run out and buy any of these items. For that matter, I am also stocked with enough household supplies (such as bins of rice, dried beans and peas, flour, couscous, millet, as well as canned goods) to stay at home for months, if necessary. Toronto hospitals were caught with their pants down during SARS, and I’m told that standards are considerably better now.
But if you go back in history, you can learn what having to deal with the real horrors of epidemic disease is like. I’m presently reading an amazing book called The Many Voyages of Arthur Wellington Clah, by Peggy Brock.
Arthur Wellington Clah was a Tsimshian man born in 1831 in a village in the Nass River valley of coastal British Columbia. At the age of 26, Clah [his hereditary name was Sgała’axł Xsgiigł] was taught to speak and write English by William Duncan, an Anglican missionary, and adopted a personal version of a Christian religious faith, giving no allegiance to either the Anglican or Methodist sects that he was exposed to. During his long life, he worked at a wide variety of jobs, was often an ambitious entrepreneur, and travelled widely in B.C., Alaska, the Yukon, and Washington State.
Within months of learning to write, he began to keep a diary, and he maintained this diary for the next fifty years. Over this half century, he produced over 650,000 words of hand-written entries, the equivalent of Tolkien’s combined Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, and Silmarillion. By 1890 it had evolved into a repository of his personal philosophical musings and an ambitious attempt to write a history of his people. Clah was proud of his work and wanted to see it published for posterity, but the manuscript languished for a century in the stacks of the Wellcome Library in London. It presents many difficulties to researchers because Clah’s English was very crude in the beginning, and was never the language he thought in. It contains little punctuation, and because of its idiomatic specificity can only be puzzled out by someone very familiar with the complexities of the Tsimshian, Nisga’a, Haida, Heiltsuk, Kwakwaka’wakw, and Tlingit cultures of the region. Peggy Brock’s book draws on the diary and explains its context in order to produce a balanced biography of Clah. This is admirable and quite difficult scholarly work, so I will not diminish it with any kibitzing.
When Clah began this diary, there were but a handful of Europeans in British Columbia, and the aboriginal population counted hundreds of thousands. The Tsimshian and other coastal people lived in substantial towns of large wooden buildings decorated with art that still dazzles and amazes the world to this day. By the end of it, the European and Asian populations far outnumbered them, and most of the 20 or so aboriginal nations, who spoke disparate languages and pursued widely varying lifestyles, had been massively disrupted and diminished by the effects of dealing with gold-rushes, incoming settlers, the imposition of Colonial and then Canadian government, religious conversions, the rise of forestry and fish canning, urbanism, the suppression of the Potlatch, and most of all, infectious disease. When he made his last entries as a somewhat lonely and embittered man with failing eyesight, he described the streets of his native village:
I walk up Gitlaxdansk village. The place half empty, use[d] to be big place. [F]irst time I take my wife in that tribe [,] good many people [:] strong tribe and rich people to all tribes on [N]ass river [.] [N]ow tribe very poor. [P]eople very near all out. [G]o easy places the young people.
While the various cultural and political shocks that aboriginal societies in the Pacific Northwest (on both sides of the Canadian/American border) experienced were serious, nothing was as overwhelmingly destructive as infectious disease, particularly smallpox. This began appearing as early as the 1790’s either introduced by the Spanish ships that explored the coast, or more likely travelling up through the Basin & Range regions from the Spanish settlements in New Mexico, carried by the complex trade networks of the Mandan. But the real devastation began in the 1820s, as American settlers along the Oregon Trail brought smallpox and measles. From then on, the death rate often exceeded 80% of the aboriginal population in a single season, and wave after wave of such pandemic slaughter drifted northward into Clah’s homeland. Clah’s village experienced a disastrous smallpox epidemic when he was five years old.
Arthur Wellington Clah [Sgała’axł Xsgiigł]
Clah remembered the smallpox epidemic of 1836 and the many who died from the disease. His account of the epidemic of 1862 is much more detailed. In that year, smallpox, which had been introduced to Victoria via a ship from San Francisco, quickly spread through the Tsimshian Reserve at Rocky Bay and then to other camps. Tsimshian expelled from Victoria took the disease north. Frightened people were given a day’s warning to vacate the reserve. They burned their houses and blankets before leaving, and a gunboat in the bay ensured their departure. Although doctors started vaccinating people in Victoria, three hundred Tsimshian had contracted smallpox and twenty had died by late April. Doctors also went up the Coast to vaccinate the Aboriginal population, as did Duncan, who was concerned the vaccinations were not taking. It is impossible from the data available to determine their effectiveness. The epidemic ran its course by December, when Clah wrote to Duncan that there had been 301 deaths and 2,069 survivors among the Fort Simpson tribes. Presumably, Clah had been vaccinated, for he did not get the disease, even though he nursed relatives with smallpox. The Tsimshian also tried treating themselves with remedies such as “woomash” plant, which Clah went up the Nass River to collect in July.
This catastrophe ruptured the spiritual cosmos and social fabric of Tsimshian society. Drinking and violence were two symptoms; burning religious paraphernalia and making sacrifices for absolution were others. Clah believed the Tsimshian had angered the Christian God by lying, stealing, committing murder, and engaging in drunken fighting. He prayed for God to forgive them and take away the sickness. This crisis no doubt pushed others towards Christianity. Duncan’s mission certainly benefited.
Epidemic disease was one of the chief moulders of Clah’s life and worldview. Of his dozen children only three survived to adulthood. Two sons lived only to the ages of twelve and thirteen, both killed by measles. Two daughters died in their mid-teens. His last son made it to the age of 23. Far from any fatalistic Stoicism, the diaries are filled with accounts of the emotional trauma caused by these deaths. But Clah’s resolute devotion to telling his story is best shown in an entry made as his sight began to fail: “My eyes half blind. I see day like smoke. But I don’t stop writing.”
READING — FEBRUARY 2020
24331. (Robert Silverberg) Recalled to Life
24332. (Hans-Dieter Bader) Archaeological Geomagnetic Report Owhiti Bay, Waiheke,
. . . . . Auckland [article]
24333. (Guðvarður Már Gunnlaugsson) Árni Magnússon’s Initial Collection [article]
24334. (Gwich’in Elders) Nành’ Kak Geenjit Gwich’in Ginjik
24335. (Francesca Balossi Restelli) Yumuktepe Early Ceramic Production: Dark Versus Light
. . . . . Coloured Wares and the Construction of Social Identity [article]
24336. (Somdeep Sen) Writing the “Refugee Crisis” ― Proposals for Activist Research [article]
24337. (Bill Gammage) The Biggest Estate on Earth ― How Aborigines Made Australia
24338. (Christoph Schwall & Barbara Horejs) Western Anatolian Impact on Aegean Figurines
. . . . . and Religion? [article]
24339. (Jeffrey D. Stilwell, et al) Dinosaur Sanctuary on the Chatham Islands, Southwest Pacific:
. . . . . First Record of Therapods from the K-T Boundary Takatika Grit [article]
24340. (Dorothée G. Drucker) Collagen Stable Isotopes Provide Insights into the End of the
. . . . . Mammoth Steppe in the Central East European Plains during the Epigravettian
. . . . . [article]
24341. (Corinne Sanchez, Véronique Mathieu & Yvan Maligorne) Architecture monumentale et
. . . . . domestique à Narbonne à l’époque tardo-républicaine: réexamen de données
. . . . . anciennes et apport des fouilles récentes [article]
READING — JANUARY 2020
24316. (Matthew Gardner, Lorena Roque & Steve Wamhoff) Corporate Tax Avoidance in the
. . . . . First Year of the Trump Tax Law [report]
24317. (Hector A. Garcia) Alpha God ― The Psychology of Religious Violence and Oppression
24318. (Sing C. Chew) From the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean and Beyond ― The Maritime
. . . . . “Silk” Roads of the Eurasian World Economy 200BC-AD500 [article]
24319. (Jessica E. Libby-Roberts, et al) The Featureless Transmission of Spectra of Two Super-
. . . . . Puff Planets [article]
Read more »
READING — DECEMBER 2019
24267. (Donald Hoffman) The Case Against Reality ― Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our
. . . . . Eyes
24268. [2] (Mary Stofflet) Dr. Seuss From Then to Now
(Nicholson Baker) The Way the World Works ― Essays:
. . . . 24269. (Nicholson Baker) Foreward [preface]
. . . . 24270. (Nicholson Baker) String [article]
. . . . 24271. (Nicholson Baker) Coins [article]
. . . . 24272. (Nicholson Baker) How I Met My Wife [article]
. . . . 24273. (Nicholson Baker) La Mer [article]
Read more »