15976. (Tim­o­thy Find­ley) Famous Last Words
15977. (Richard E. Michod) Evo­lu­tion of the Indi­vid­ual [arti­cle]
(W. H. Wills & Robert D. Leonard) The Ancient South­west­ern Com­mu­ni­ty ― Mod­els and 
. Meth­ods for the Stu­ry of Pre­his­toric Social Organization:
. . . . 15978. (W. H. Wills & Robert D. Leonard) Pref­ace [pref­ace]
. . . . 15979. (Ben A. Nel­son) Approach­es to Ana­lyz­ing Pre­his­toric Com­mu­ni­ty Dynamics
. . . . . . . . [arti­cle]
. . . . 15980. (Eliz­a­beth A. Brandt) Egal­i­tar­i­an­ism, Hier­ar­chy and Cen­tral­iza­tion in the
. . . . . . . . Pueb­los [arti­cle]
. . . . 15981. (Dean J. Sait­ta) Class and Com­mu­ni­ty in the Pre­his­toric South­west [arti­cle]
. . . . 15982. (Kather­ine A. Spiel­man) Clus­tered Con­fed­era­cies: Sociopo­lit­i­cal Organization 
. . . . . . . . in the Pro­to­his­toric Rio Grande [arti­cle]
. . . . 15983. (Bar­bara J. Mills) Com­mu­ni­ty Dynam­ics and Archae­o­log­i­cal Dynam­ics: Some 
. . . . . . . . Con­sid­er­a­tions of Mid­dle-Range The­o­ry [arti­cle] Read more »

Both com­pact and com­pre­hen­sive, this is the first book you should read to enter into the inter­est­ing sci­ence of cog­ni­tive ethol­o­gy. Bekoff sum­ma­rizes the reduc­tion­ist stric­tures that ethol­o­gists had to con­front when the field began to form, and intel­li­gent­ly dis­cuss­es the moral and social impli­ca­tions of the sci­ence. The book, in effect, pro­vides a case study of the cult of “sci­en­tism”, which often infect­ed sci­ence in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. This occurred when fake pos­es of objec­tiv­i­ty, spu­ri­ous quan­tifi­ca­tion, and epis­te­mo­log­i­cal con­fu­sion led to non­sen­si­cal, but irri­tat­ing­ly tena­cious ortho­dox­ies.

Hawthorne’s alle­gor­i­cal short sto­ries were, in some ways, the ances­tors of some of the grim­mer Twi­light Zone episodes. This col­lec­tion includes sto­ries writ­ten between 1832 and 1851, and includes the most famous ones, “Young Good­man Brown” , “Ethan Brand”, “Rap­pac­cini’s Daugh­ter”, and “Dr. Hei­deg­ger’s Exper­i­ment”. All fine sto­ries, but the one that tick­led my fan­cy was the less well known “The May­pole of Mer­ry Mount”. It’s a sort of 1836 ver­sion of The Wick­er Man, except that the Puri­tans, not the Pagans, tri­umph. It is all the more inter­est­ing because Hawthorne seems to have been well aware of things that would not be part of com­mon knowl­edge until James Fraz­er pub­lished The Gold­en Bough. Read more »

This was Tim­o­thy Findley’s fourth nov­el, and it attempts to get into the mor­bid world of the celebri­ties and intel­lec­tu­als who cosied up to the Nazis and the Ital­ian Fas­cists. This was iden­ti­cal, psy­cho­log­i­cally, to the coterie of celebri­ties who cosied up to the Com­mu­nists. It was a loath­some time, in which there were very few voic­es who spoke for any­thing good. Every­one was some kind of sleazy creep. Ezra Pound, the Duke and Duchess of Wind­sor, Har­ry Oakes, Rudolf Hess, and von Ribben­trop appear as char­ac­ters, among oth­ers, all seen through the eyes of a fic­tional Hugh Sel­wyn Mauber­ley (the per­sona of some of Pound’s poems), whose frozen corpse is found in an Alpine hotel, with a tes­ta­ment scrawled in pen­cil on the walls of three rooms. It’s a good and intrigu­ing read, but the absence of any char­ac­ter that one can feel any sym­pa­thy for left me feel­ing worn out by the end. But that has always been my response to the intel­lec­tual world between the two World Wars. Frankly, I don’t care about the fact that peo­ple like Ezra Pound of Bertolt Brecht were tal­ented writ­ers — they were dis­gust­ing lit­tle pieces of shit, and no amount of clev­er­ness or artistry makes them admirable. The Nazi-Com­mu­nist-Fas­cist men­tal­ity was the low­est ebb of the human mind, when genius­es degrad­ed them­selves into moron­ic sav­ages. There is prob­a­bly no way to write about it, or read about it, with­out feel­ing ill. We are still suf­fer­ing the after­ef­fects of that intel­lec­tual holocaust.

15738. (Unto Salo) Ukko, The God of Thun­der of the Ancient Finns and His Indo-European 
. . . . . Family
15739. (Émile Ben­veniste) Les valeurs économiques dans le vocab­u­laire indo-européen
. . . . . [arti­cle]
15740. (Bernard Wailes) The Ori­gins of Set­tled Farm­ing in Tem­per­ate Europe [arti­cle]
15741. (Ber­nice Mor­gan) Cloud of Bone
15742. (Edgar Polomé) Ger­man­ic and Region­al Indo-Euro­pean [arti­cle]
15743. (William F. Wyatt, Jr.) The Indo-Euro­peaniza­tion of Greece [arti­cle]
Read more »

This is an inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion of the psy­cho­log­i­cal real­ity of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics, and why Democ­rats from a pro­fes­sional back­ground don’t con­nect with it. How­ever, it makes unwar­ranted assump­tions about the ratio­nal­ity and “pro­ce­dural savvy” of the social group the author sees him­self as belong­ing to. In my expe­ri­ence, they have demon­strated exact­ly the same degree of sus­cep­ti­bil­ity to super­sti­tion, mag­i­cal think­ing, and irra­tional mum­bo-jum­bo as any of the pro­les that he con­trasts them to. You rarely see this kind of dis­cus­sion in Cana­da. We real­ly do live in dif­fer­ent worlds, now. It is a good arti­cle, mak­ing some good obser­va­tions, despite the patron­iz­ing tone, and the annoy­ing use of the sil­ly neol­o­gism “com­pe­tency” in place of the Eng­lish word “com­pe­tence”. Avail­able at Burke’s blog Eas­ily Dis­tracted, or through Brad DeLong’s site..

The ear­li­est known his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ment is a Sumer­ian king list, of which there are 16 extant copies. It is some­what myth­i­cal in tone (the sec­ond king, Alal­gar, is said to have ruled for 64,800 years. But many of the kings seem to have been real, and some seem to have had hum­ble ori­gins, which the chron­i­cle is care­ful to point out. We are told that “The divine Dumuzi, the shep­herd, ruled for 36,000 years”, that “Etana, the shep­herd, who ascend­ed to heav­en and put all coun­tries in order, became king; he ruled for 1,500 years”, and “The divine Lugal-ban­da, the shep­herd, ruled for 1200 years”. Not only shep­herds aspired to king­ship: “The divine Dumuzi, the fish­er­man, whose city was Ku’ara, ruled for 100.” He was the king just before Gil­gamesh, of epic fame, who is gen­er­al­ly thought to have been a real per­son. Oth­er trades­men in the king list include Kiš, Su-suda, the fuller, Mam­a­gal, the boat­man, Bazi, the leather work­er, and Nan­niya, the stone­cut­ter. Alto­geth­er, even in a long king list, this seems a remark­able num­ber. Per­haps there is, embed­ded in this list, a hint at some mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion in our ideas of the nature of Sumer­ian kingship.

But most remark­able of all was a woman king (appar­ent­ly not a queen who came to pow­er through wid­ow­hood), Kuba­ba. The text reads: “In Kiš, Ku-Baba, the woman tav­ern-keep­er, who made firm the foun­da­tions of Kiš, became king; she ruled for 100 years.” Sure­ly there’s a inter­est­ing tale behind this terse entry. If she is a real his­tor­i­cal fig­ure (and one should­n’t assume so), her reign may have been in c.2400 BC. It’s thought that she over­threw the rule of En-Shakan­sha-Ana of the 2nd Uruk Dynasty to become monarth. The peo­ple of the ancient Near East cer­tain­ly thought her remark­able. Kuba­ba (or Ku-Baba or Kug-Bau) also appears in the text known as the Wei­d­ner Chron­i­cle, in this most remark­able pas­sage: Read more »