Archive for February 2024
“As you sow, so shall you reap”*…
The circle of life, via Nothing Here (@nothinghere_but).
* Galatians 6:7
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As we watch what goes around come around, we might send very carefully-crafted birthday greetings to Jacques de Vaucanson; he was born on this date in 1709. A mechanical genius, de Vaucanson invented a number of machine tools still in use (e.g., the slide rest lathe) and created the first automated loom (the inspiration for Jacquard). But he is better remembered as the creator of extraordinary automata. Among his most famous creations: The Flute Player (with hands gloved in skin) and The Tambourine Player, life-sized mechanical figures that played their instruments impressively. But his masterpiece was The Digesting Duck; remarkably complex (it had 400 moving parts in each wing alone), it could flap its wings, drink water, eat grain– and defecate.
Sans…le canard de Vaucanson vous n’auriez rien qui fit ressouvenir de la gloire de la France. (Without…the duck of Vaucanson, you will have nothing to remind you of the glory of France)
– Voltaire
“I think that the audience intuitively understands the idea of sampling and remixing stories”*…
Comedy songs and musical parodies have been around for ages. But the novelty song– a performance rooted in a gimmick– dates from the 1920s. Dickie Goodman was a master of that arcane form, one whose gimmick presaged the popular music era in which we live…
On November 6th, 1989, a guy named Dickie Goodman died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Ironically, this sad act marked the end for the creator of a specific kind of novelty record known as the “break-in.” Seen nowadays as a (dubious) precursor to sampling [see here], a “break-in” record is created by using clips of other songs to tell a story or perform a skit, usually with narration of some sort.
The written word cannot even begin to do the art form justice — and yes, it is an art form — so here’s an audio example by the king himself, Dickie Goodman. “Mr. Jaws” was a satire of the movie blockbuster Jaws, and was a Top 10 hit in the latter part of 1975.
… Jump back to 1956. Rock ‘n’ roll music is starting to really break through to the masses. The charts are full of records by Elvis, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, and countless others. In the middle of 1956, two struggling songwriters named Bill Buchanan and Dickie Goodman created something that would finally put them on the map… but not as songwriters.
They decided to create a novelty record by writing a fake newscast about an alien invasion from outer space, but while they would ask the questions, the answers would be provided by musical snippets from popular records of the day. After a lot of shopping around and rejections, they finally created their own label and released “The Flying Saucer.”
Surprisingly, the record was a big hit, making it all the way to #3 on the Billboard chart and hitting the top of the charts in some local markets. Unsurprisingly, there were numerous lawsuits once the record became a hit. Most of the record labels that had a sample on “The Flying Saucer” sued Buchanan and Goodman for copyright infringement. The whole legal morass that followed is too much to detail here, but in the end it was decided that the record was a new work in the form of satire and wasn’t infringing on anyone’s copyright. It was one of those rare cases where the little guy actually won…
Goodman continued a balancing act over the next couple of decades between trying to be a legitimate songwriter and record producer, and creating more “break-in” records. He rubbed shoulders with the charts from time to time, but never had another big breakthrough until “Mr. Jaws” in 1975. Once that record came and went, he kept making novelty records periodically until his untimely end in 1989.
What’s really beautiful about Goodman’s novelty records — and this is a serious statement — is they’re excellent time capsules of different eras. Pick up any of his records and you’ll get an idea as to what was being played on the radio at the time. Wanna know what was big in 1969? Check out “On Campus.”…
Ol’ Dickie also left behind a nice sampling (no pun intended) of what was on the public’s mind as well. Communism, the flying saucer craze, the moon landing, campus unrest, Watergate, and the energy crisis were just a few topics covered by both the evening news and Goodman’s records. He also satirized television shows like Ben Casey, The Untouchables, Bonanza, Batman, and Happy Days among others, and various movies including Superfly, Shaft, King Kong, Star Wars, and E.T.
Keep in mind that these may look easy to do, but they’re not. Granted, anybody can throw one together (and many others have over the years), but to make one that’s actually funny is no simple task…
Honoring a pioneer: “Dickie Goodman and the Art of the ‘Break-In’ Record,” from @rebeatmag.
* DJ Spooky
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As we eulogize our elders, we might recall that the #1 song in the U.S, on this date in 2002 was “Always on Time,” by Ja Rule featuring Ashanti. It has been sampled (at least) 9 times since.
“I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath”*…
E.O. Wilson once observed that “Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.” John Whitfield explores the way in which, over the past four centuries, quadrillions of ants have created a strange and turbulent global society that shadows our own…
It is a familiar story: a small group of animals living in a wooded grassland begin, against all odds, to populate Earth. At first, they occupy a specific ecological place in the landscape, kept in check by other species. Then something changes. The animals find a way to travel to new places. They learn to cope with unpredictability. They adapt to new kinds of food and shelter. They are clever. And they are aggressive.
In the new places, the old limits are missing. As their population grows and their reach expands, the animals lay claim to more territories, reshaping the relationships in each new landscape by eliminating some species and nurturing others. Over time, they create the largest animal societies, in terms of numbers of individuals, that the planet has ever known. And at the borders of those societies, they fight the most destructive within-species conflicts, in terms of individual fatalities, that the planet has ever known.
This might sound like our story: the story of a hominin species, living in tropical Africa a few million years ago, becoming global. Instead, it is the story of a group of ant species, living in Central and South America a few hundred years ago, who spread across the planet by weaving themselves into European networks of exploration, trade, colonisation and war – some even stowed away on the 16th-century Spanish galleons that carried silver across the Pacific from Acapulco to Manila. During the past four centuries, these animals have globalised their societies alongside our own.
It is tempting to look for parallels with human empires. Perhaps it is impossible not to see rhymes between the natural and human worlds, and as a science journalist I’ve contributed more than my share. But just because words rhyme, it doesn’t mean their definitions align. Global ant societies are not simply echoes of human struggles for power. They are something new in the world, existing at a scale we can measure but struggle to grasp: there are roughly 200,000 times more ants on our planet than the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way…
…
The more I learn, the more I am struck by the ants’ strangeness rather than their similarities with human society. There is another way to be a globalised society – one that is utterly unlike our own. I am not even sure we have the language to convey, for example, a colony’s ability to take bits of information from thousands of tiny brains and turn it into a distributed, constantly updated picture of their world. Even ‘smell’ seems a feeble word to describe the ability of ants’ antennae to read chemicals on the air and on each other. How can we imagine a life where sight goes almost unused and scent forms the primary channel of information, where chemical signals show the way to food, or mobilise a response to threats, or distinguish queens from workers and the living from the dead?
As our world turns alien, trying to think like an alien will be a better route to finding the imagination and humility needed to keep up with the changes than looking for ways in which other species are like us. But trying to think like an ant, rather than thinking about how ants are like us, is not to say that I welcome our unicolonial insect underlords. Calamities follow in the wake of globalised ant societies. Most troubling among these is the way that unicolonial species can overwhelmingly alter ecological diversity when they arrive somewhere new. Unicolonial ants can turn a patchwork of colonies created by different ant species into a landscape dominated by a single group. As a result, textured and complex ecological communities become simpler, less diverse and, crucially, less different to each other. This is not just a process; it is an era. The current period in which a relatively small number of super-spreading animals and plants expands across Earth is sometimes called the Homogecene. It’s not a cheering word, presaging an environment that favours the most pestilential animals, plants and microbes. Unicolonial ants contribute to a more homogenous future, but they also speak to life’s ability to escape our grasp, regardless of how we might try to order and exploit the world. And there’s something hopeful about that, for the planet, if not for us.
The scale and spread of ant societies is a reminder that humans should not confuse impact with control. We may be able to change our environment, but we’re almost powerless when it comes to manipulating our world exactly how we want. The global society of ants reminds us that we cannot know how other species will respond to our reshaping of the world, only that they will…
Bracing: “Ant geopolitics,” from @gentraso in @aeonmag.
* David Lynch
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As we investigate insects, we might spare a thought for Sara Josephine Baker; she died on this date in 1945. A physician, she was a pioneer in public health and child welfare in the United States in her roles as assistant to the Commissioner for Public Health of New York City, and later, head of the city’s Department of Health in “Hell’s Kitchen” for 25 years. Convinced of the value of well-baby care and the prevention of disease, in 1908 she founded the Bureau of Child Hygiene– and decreased the death rate by 1200 from the previous year. Her work made the New York City infant mortality rate the lowest in the USA or Europe at the time. She set up free milk clinics, licensed midwives, and taught the use of silver nitrate to prevent blindness in newborns.
Baker is also remembered as the public health official who (twice) tracked down “Typhoid Mary.”
“A translator’s primary work isn’t knowing what it means (that’s a prerequisite, not the work itself). Translation is working out how to say it, how to write it. Translating is writing.”*
Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post: the estimable Damion Searls argues for a literary approach to translating rigorous philosophical texts…
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s [here] Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a book with an aura. His name, let’s admit it, is already a vibe; the title sets an extremely highbrow tone; the paragraphs are all numbered, promising a very impressive logical rigor, even if questions linger. (Is 6.2322 really exactly one level more primary than 5.47321? What does “3.001” mean since there’s no 3.0 or 3.00?) And then the text itself has a kind of cryptic grandeur, awe-inspiring opacity, Olympian disregard for normal human understanding that gives us what we expect, what we want, from such an iconic philosopher. It’s an exciting challenge. A lot of the reason why the book has been so widely read in the century since its English publication in 1922, by philosophers and philosophy students and nonphilosophers alike, is how it makes its readers feel.
Several similarly forbidding-yet-thereby-thrilling books were published in English that same year—T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; James Joyce’s Ulysses—but unlike those, the Tractatus was a translation, and the question arises how much of its style was a byproduct of bringing it into English. The book’s title did not come from Wittgenstein: it was an esoteric pun on Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus from 1670, suggested by G. E. Moore, the Cambridge philosopher who was the fourth most important figure in getting the book into English, after the credited translator C. K. Ogden, the actual translator Frank Ramsey [here], and Bertrand Russell [here]. Wittgenstein’s own German title was the far more humble and straightforward Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, something like Essay on Logic and Philosophy. Russell’s introduction, included in the first edition and every subsequent one until this one, firmly placed the book in the context of technical academic philosophy. And the book’s language in English was simply not at all like Wittgenstein’s forceful, earnest, fluid, subtle German.
Yet the book in English is what it is; should it just stay that way? This same debate came up around the retranslation of yet another iconic book from 1922: C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way. He too completely changed the title (from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time to the Shakespeare quote Remembrance of Things Past); he too created an English-language voice, lush and purple, that wasn’t the original’s. And yet his writing was what generations of English-language Proust readers knew and loved; his translation was modified slightly over the years but largely preserved; when Lydia Davis came along with a new translation faithful to other aspects of the original, such as Proust’s analytical rigor, many readers didn’t care whether or not her version was more like the real Proust—Scott Moncrieff’s Proust was the real thing as far as they were concerned.
The situation with the Tractatus is clearer and less debatable, for two reasons. First, the earlier translations are more deeply flawed than Scott Moncrieff’s Proust ever was. Second and perhaps more important, Wittgenstein’s book is explicitly about the relationships between language and thought, between language and the world, making it imperative to get these relationships right in translation. And so I have retranslated the book, paying special attention to where the assumptions of typical academic philosophy translation would lead us away from expressing Wittgenstein’s thought in English. Implicitly, I am making the case for a certain kind of approach that is generally called “literary”—attentive to emotional nuances, subtle connotations, and expressive power—even when translating rigorous philosophical texts…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Translating Philosophy: The Case of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” in @wwborders.
* The equally estimable Emily Wilson, paraphrasing Searls
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As we emphasize essence, we might spare a thought for the creator of the inspiration of the title of Wittgenstein’s work, Baruch Spinoza; he died on this date in 1677. One of the foremost thinkers of the Age of Reason, he was a philosopher who contributed to nearly every area of philosophical discourse, including metaphysics, epistemology, political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. His rationalism and determinism put him in opposition to Descartes and helped lay the foundation for The Enlightenment; his pantheistic views led to his excommunication from the Jewish community in Amsterdam.
As men’s habits of mind differ, so that some more readily embrace one form of faith, some another, for what moves one to pray may move another to scoff, I conclude … that everyone should be free to choose for himself the foundations of his creed, and that faith should be judged only by its fruits; each would then obey God freely with his whole heart, while nothing would be publicly honored save justice and charity.
– Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, 1670
“The evolution of language is widely judged to be the culminating event in the emergence of humanity as we know it today”*…
Linguists and archaeologists have argued for decades about where, and when, the first Indo-European languages were spoken, and what kind of lives those first speakers led. As Kurt Kleiner reports, a controversial new analytic technique offers a fresh answer…
Almost half of all people in the world today speak an Indo-European language, one whose origins go back thousands of years to a single mother tongue. Languages as different as English, Russian, Hindustani, Latin and Sanskrit can all be traced back to this ancestral language.
Over the last couple of hundred years, linguists have figured out a lot about that first Indo-European language, including many of the words it used and some of the grammatical rules that governed it. Along the way, they’ve come up with theories about who its original speakers were, where and how they lived, and how their language spread so widely.
Most linguists think that those speakers were nomadic herders who lived on the steppes of Ukraine and western Russia about 6,000 years ago. Yet a minority put the origin 2,000 to 3,000 years before that, with a community of farmers in Anatolia, in the area of modern-day Turkey. Now a new analysis, using techniques borrowed from evolutionary biology, has come down in favor of the latter, albeit with an important later role for the steppes.
The computational technique used in the new analysis is hotly disputed among linguists. But its proponents say it promises to bring more quantitative rigor to the field, and could possibly push key dates further into the past, much as radiocarbon dating did in the field of archaeology…
Fascinating– both for what it suggests about our linguistic roots and for the epistemological questions it raises: “A new look at our linguistic roots,” from @kgkleiner in @KnowableMag.
Apposite: “Flow of time: reality or illusion?” (on language and our experience of time)
* Richard Leakey
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As we untangle tongues, we might spare a thought for Leonard Woolley; he died on this date in 1960. An archaeologist, he is best known for his excavations at Ur in Mesopotamia— for which he is recognized as one of the first “modern” archaeologists, who excavated in a methodical way, keeping careful records, and using them to reconstruct ancient life and history.
His work greatly advanced knowledge of ancient Mesopotamian civilization, enabling scholars to trace the history of the city from its final days during the 4th century BC back to its prehistoric beginnings (c. 4000 BC). His finds revealed much about everyday life, art, architecture, government, religion– and relevantly to the piece above, language and literature– in this “cradle of civilization.”
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