Alphonse Mucha, Posters

Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) was one of the creators of what we call Art Nouveau, and one of the leading European artists of the era around 1900. He straddled the boundary between art and commercial design, and while he did a lot of oil painting he is best remembered for his posters.

In the 1880s, new printing technologies made the production of colored posters affordable, and advertisers leaped to take advantage. They were willing to pay top dollar for designs by skilled artists, and a whole profession grew up to fill the need. Mucha, who moved to Paris from Bohemia in 1887, became this new profession's top practitioner.

His most famous posters are those he did for actress Sarah Bernhardt, a fusion of the era's top celebrity actress with its top celebrity designer.

Mucha designed everything: posters, wine labels, biscuit tins, sausage wrappings, cigarette papers, stamps, currency, wallpaper, menus, and more.

He also worked in three dimensions, designing jewelry, bathroom fixtures, storefronts, display counters for jewelry stores (above), theatrical sets, a whole world of objects. He was the perfect artist for the new world of mass production and surging wealth.

Although he throve in the commercial world of Gilded Age Paris, he also had a somewhat alarming array of political and spiritual beliefs. Reading about him reminded me of the poet Yeats, because both of them espoused a trunkful of different belief systems, not seeming to care that they contradicted each other. He was a Czech patriot, a devotee of pan-Slavism, and rose high in the ranks of French Freemasonry, devoted to reason and the international brotherhood of man. He was a Catholic who also followed Anthroposophy and various occult movements. His art was strikingly sensual, but he was personally something of a prude. (My post on his Slavic Epic is here.)

But his work is so lovely that I forgive him everything.

Whose Jobs are Safe from Foreign Digital Competition?

If we're all going to work from home, why should American companies prefer to work with people who live in the US? If the people who want to keep working from home are right, and physical location is irrelevant, then why not hire cheaper workers in India or Jamaica?

Tyler Cowen says the safest jobs will be the ones that require local cultural knowledge:

If you have had a relatively comfortable job during the pandemic, it might now be time to worry.

The more culturally specific your knowledge and skills, however, the more protected you will be. Doing math and writing code are universal skills. But if you are a wedding consultant, even an online wedding consultant, you’re probably not going to lose business to a competitor from Zimbabwe, no matter how sharp. On the whole, more people will end up in jobs that feel very “American,” for lack of a better word. Legally protected sectors — law, medicine and other professions requiring occupational licenses — will also get more crowded.

Since my job requires knowledge of North American archaeology and history, as well as the US regulations surrounding environmental review and historic preservation, as well as the way those regulations are implemented in several states, I feel like I am pretty safe here.

Links 5 November 2021

Joan Miro, Jumping Cat

To avoid that unwanted social engagement, just say you're quarantining after exposure to Covid. (NY Times)

German folk art in Virginia graveyards.

Interesting look at how one California Indian tribe is using archaeology to connect with their past. Their claim that they continued some traditional ways of life into the 19th century seems plausible, but the dating would have to be very precise to nail that down, and it usually isn't good enough.

For many politicians, style is part of the message; consider that the most intelligent political piece I have read in the NY Times this week is called "Why We Should Talk about what Kyrsten Sinema is Wearing." The argument is that she is flaunting her independence from the Democratic leadership in clothes that have gone rogue. It's hard to write about what female politicians wear without coming across as trivializing, but this writer shows how to do it.

Enormous floor mosaic dating to the 7th century AD revealed in Jericho.

Revisiting the Obama presidency through the writings of W.E.B. DuBois; after all the two men's biographies have many similarities.

Among intellectuals, there are two kinds of climate change skeptics: right-wing cranks, and hard-nosed physical scientists used to equating science with precision. Because there is no precision in climate science, just probabilities. Many of these hard cases are also put off by tricks like polls of what scientists believe: "Science is not something a scientist believes, but rather finds persuasive." Anyway here is a review of a book by hard-nosed physicist Lawrence Krauss about how he came to shrug aside those doubts and accept the need for radical action to reduce CO2 emissions.

What would happen to dogs if people disappeared? Interesting to learn that only about 20 percent of the world's dogs are household pets; many more are free ranging, either with an owner or without.

Former shoeshine man and scrap dealer Kermit Washington flew from New Orleans to Ohio with his $28,000 life savings to buy a truck, but the Feds decided it was drug money and seized it. It took Washington a year to get his money back. Civil Asset Forfeiture is an abuse of power we need to end.

The unspeakable awfulness of Albanian communism.

Noah Feldman thinks Abraham Lincoln destroyed the original American Constitution, which was founded on compromise among the states, and replaced it with a new one based on an uncompromising moral vision. (NY Times) I believe that something like this is true; I think Madison and Hamilton very much wanted the Constitution not to be a moral document, and that has certainly changed for many Americans. But I would put less emphasis on Lincoln personally and more on the Abolition movement, the Second Great Awakening, and the experience of civil war.

How crazy was René Magritte?

Converting soccer games to animations to investigate race and gender bias in how people evaluate players. E.g., people watching a clip of Senegal vs. Poland said the African players were more "quick and athletic," but with the players' identities hidden they said the reverse. Interesting, but everybody knows that 90% of what fans say about games is nonsense anyway, so probably not as important as these researchers seem to think. Other studies have shown that people think athletes in black socks are slower, and those in red uniforms are stronger. The pros are using fancy tracking software and analytics to analyze players, so they know who is really quicker, and they're the ones setting salaries etc. 

US military deploying microwave weapons against drones.

In Norway, the supreme court ruled that wind farms violate the cultural rights of Sami reindeer herders. Opposition from native communities, which has also happened in the US, is yet another problem with our finding enough space for wind and solar power.

The US military has long made use of Norway's artificial seafront caves to preposition material in the event of Arctic fighting, and they just announced they are setting up a 150-bed hospital in one of these caves.

Pretty Loud is a hip-hop band made up of young Roma women from Serbia who rap about empowerment for Roma women – delaying marriage, getting education, having choices. Interesting that they were actually created by an NGO set up to promote Roma education, GRUBB - Gypsy Roma Urban Balkan Beats, and also that they "draw on the thriving culture of Balkan hip hop". Wikipedia, NY Times, mash-up of their work on YouTube. 

An Indian graduate student on his first impressions of America.

This week's music is Mark Knopfler: Privateering, Haul Away, Brothers in Arms, a live version of Telegraph Road with a long guitar solo, and one with Emylou Harris, If this is Goodbye.

David Campbell

I discovered British artist David Campbell in a picture book about beautiful English town houses; one of those featured was his house and studio in York. I liked the house but my favorite part was the paintings on the walls, all his. The one above is either one of the ones in the book or a close cousin. (Eringium, 2016)

According to his web site, Campbell divides his time between York and a primitive house in a remote part of southern Greece. (Anemone Nemorosa, 2009)

Agitrea, Our Lady Who Shows Us the Way (2018)

Instead of an artist's "statement" he has this:

Past work has been concerned with botanical forms, the flora and geology of a particular valley in the Yorkshire Dales and is now primarily inspired by the area around his home in Greece. Here, the iconography in medieval church paintings, the flora, the geological strata and the detritus of more recent history, have provided the inspiration for his work in recent years

Jasminium, 2008

Olea Europaea II, 2017

Martagon, 2017

Calyx I, 2015

St. Elmo, 2014

Jill Lepore Tries to School Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos on the History of Science Fiction

Jill Lepore has an interesting essay in the NY Times about billionaires, space travel, and Elon Musk's fantasies. But I think she misunderstands what people, or at least men of my generation, found exciting about science fiction. Like this:

Weirdly, Muskism, an extravagant form of capitalism, is inspired by stories that indict … capitalism. At Amazon Studios, Mr. Bezos tried to make a TV adaptation of the Culture space opera series, by the Scottish writer Iain Banks (“a huge personal favorite”); Mr. Zuckerberg put a volume of it on a list of books he thinks everyone should read; and Mr. Musk once tweeted, “If you must know, I am a utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks.”

But Banks was an avowed socialist. And, in an interview in 2010, three years before his death, he described the protagonists of the Culture series as “hippy commies with hyper-weapons and a deep distrust of both Marketolatry and Greedism.” He also expressed astonishment that anyone could read his books as promoting free-market libertarianism, asking, “Which bit of not having private property and the absence of money in the Culture novels have these people missed?”

I think that what Musk and millions of others find appealing about science fiction is not the details of the social arrangements, but the absence of limits. From what I remember of the Culture series, the characters do pretty much whatever they want. That is the fantasy, not the absence of stock markets. I would say the same about avowedly libertarian sci-fi like Neal Stephenson's; the characters are too smart to be controlled by bureaucrats and the police, so they find ways to do whatever they want despite the evils of statism. 

The economics of the Star Trek universe are not very well worked out, but I always thought that one of the main points was that money simply didn't matter. If you want something, you ask the replicator to make it for you. The main obstacle seems to be finding something interesting to do with your life.

The fantasy is the freedom. The dream is that science and cleverness will one day make us truly free. The nightmare is that science and cleverness will one day make us utter slaves.

Lepore finds ten different ways to point out that these libertarian capitalist dudebros were inspired by socialist books, but so what? None of the books she cites is remotely realistic about communism; the closest thing in a famous sci-fi book is probably Le Guin's Dispossessed, which I thought was awful preachy nonsense –although even she realized that many of the residents of her communist utopia would be pining to escape to the roaring capitalist planet nearby.

And how, do you suppose, could a resident of our world best approximate the total freedom of sci-fi heroes? Why, by getting obscenely rich. By heading a giant company that will respond to their wishes. By building their own rockets and flying themselves to Mars.

It makes perfect sense to me.

Virginia's Election and American Politics

I am deluged every day by ads asking me to demand more from Joe Biden and Congress: more money for caregivers, more money for transit, more money for preschool, more citizenship for undocumented immigrants, more attention to climate change. 

I keep seeing essays by people who obsess about Obama's first two years in office and insist that he had a chance to do something much more radical, if only he had pushed harder for it.

But the lesson of the Virginia governor's race is that America is not a progressive country, and every time progressives push too hard, the voters will rebel. We are going to see an epic wipeout of Democrats in 2022, and in all likelihood a Republican president in 2025.

The lesson of the vote in Minneapolis is that even in one of America's most liberal cities, the voters worry about crime and will not support abolishing the police no matter how many people they kill.

The only way to make this country better is one small step at a time. Loudly pushing for radical action never helps anyone but conservative politicians, especially when it is accompanied by denunciation of everyone who disagrees.

Villa Aurora is Up for Sale, One Caravaggio Included

The Villa Aurora in Rome is up for sale, asking price $547 million. This intrigued me, because I can't remember ever hearing of the Villa Aurora before, besides which, how many people with $547 million to spare want a house in Rome? 

What is now known as the Villa Aurora was once a small part of an estate established in the 16th century by Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte (1549–1627). The Cardinal was a diplomat, intellectual, connoisseur, and collector, patron of (among others) Galileo Galilei and Caravaggio. The surviving house was once the "casino" of this great estate, that is, a sort of lodge where gatherings and parties were held. The point was that moving away from the main house allowed greater license in behavior, even though events there were not really any more private; sort of like putting on a mask that did not really conceal your identity.

In 1631 the property was sold to Ludovico Ludovisi, newphew of Pope Gregory XV. That's him above. It has remained in the Ludovisi family ever since. They later married into the Bomcompagni family and acquired the title Princes of Piombino, so you often see those names in association with the house. In recent years tours of the property were led by the American-born wife of the 12th prince, Rita Boncompagni-Ludovisi.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the estate was regularly opened to the public, and the gardens were much admired by aesthetes like Stendhal and Henry James. But in the 1880s the Ludovisi clan fell on hard times and had to sell off both their main house and most of their property, which became a populous neighborhood. They were forced to move into the casino and renovate it into a residence. And now they have run into more trouble over the estate of that 12th prince, who died in 2018, and it seems the family will have to sell everything.

The great draw of the house, and the reason for its crazy asking price, is the art. Its name come from a painting on the ceiling of the main hall by Guercino (above) showing Aurora bringing in the dawn.

But the really famous piece is by Caravaggio, Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto, the only ceiling he is known to have done. This was unknown for centuries because somebody painted over it, perhaps because the divine testicles were too disturbing. It was rediscovered in 1968 and restored to this state. I have not found any sign of controversy over either the discovery or the restoration, so I suppose it is respected.

So that's what you could get for $547 million: a house where various Baroque grandees partied and debated Galileo's discoveries, a remarkable array of 16th-century art, and a large, unique painting by one of the most famous artists of all.

I'm have no idea who would find it worth the price, but it beats buying NFTs.

From Ai Weiwei's Memoirs

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has written a memoir in which, reviewers say, he connects his politics with his family life. His father Ai Qing was a rebel in his own way, a supporter of the communists who tried to write poetry that would resonate with the masses:

Ai’s story begins with his childhood, years of which were spent living with his father in the remote hinterlands of China, where Ai Qing was exiled in 1967 to do reform labor during Mao’s murderous purge of intellectuals. While his father was cleaning latrines, scraping feces that had frozen “into icy pillars,” 10-year-old Ai built the stove, fetched water from the well and endured a life that resembled “an open-ended course in wilderness survival training, if we were lucky enough to survive.” During countless “denunciation meetings” of which Ai Qing was a primary target, the author bore intimate witness to his father’s ritualized humiliation. “The estrangement and hostility that we encountered from the people around us instilled in me a clear awareness of who I was,” Ai writes, “and it shaped my judgment about how social positions are defined” — and the necessity of enemies in the rhetoric of revolution.

You can hardly read a single paragraph about Chinese politics without running into the horror of the Cultural Revolution. That catastrophe blighted the lives of many, many people, but especially intellectuals and artists. Eventually Ai Weiwei was jailed on charges eerily similar to those for which his father went to prison in the 1930s and was then exiled in the 1960s: essentially, making art that upsets the authorities. For Ai Weiwei, the struggle must go on: 

In the final pages of the book, Ai writes that “advocacy of freedom is inseparable from an effort to attain it, for freedom is not a goal but a direction, and it comes into being through the very act of resistance.” Remembering, too, is a form of resistance. In documenting the past, he is also repudiating the country’s generations of imposed amnesia. “After all the convulsions that China had experienced, genuine emotions and personal memory were reduced to tiny scraps and easily replaced by the discourse of struggle and continuous revolution,” Ai writes. In “1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows,” Ai does not allow his own scraps to remain buried. To unearth them is an act of unburdening, an open letter to progeny, a suturing of past and present. It is the refusal to be a pawn — and the most potent assertion of a self.

From the NY Times.

Scenes from the Life of Bunny Mellon

Rachel Lowe Lambert Lloyd Mellon (1910 – 2014), generally known as Bunny, was the second wife of Paul Mellon, hence one of the richest people in America. Her passion was gardening, which she did well enough to win professional design awards. I recently checked a lovely book out of the local library, The Gardens of Bunny Mellon, and have spent a pleasant hour perusing it. It is both beautiful and appalling. The beauty is shown in these pictures, mostly of the Mellons' Oak Spring house in Upperville, Virginia. 

As for the other, well, here is her father describing Bunny at about 12:

Bunny began to show a talent that she has developed ever since. She designed and had built a small playhouse in the woods near out house in Princeton. She stood over the workmen every minute, directing them. It was of concrete block with a thatched roof of straw. It had a Dutch door that opened in two sections and was painted blue. There was a square walled garden in front with tiny boxwood bushes forming intricate patterns, and rare shrubs and vines. Inside it was completely furnished, everything done to the scale of the house.

The White House Rose Garden before recent changes

The Mellons were good friends of the Kennedys, and John F. Kennedy tapped Bunny to redesign the White House Rose Garden. 

A few months later, while vacationing on Cape Cod, President Kennedy sailed with his family to the Mellons' beachfront home in Osterville on Nantucket Sound for an afternoon picnic. (The menu most likely included Mellon family favorites: corn on the cob, fried chicken, vegetable salad, blueberry pie, and vanilla ice cream.) . . . The President got right to the point, telling her that the White House had no garden equal in quality or attractiveness to the gardens he had seen and in which he been entertained in Europe.

I thought this was an interesting insight into the mind of a true politician:

As the president had requested, the steps leading from his office portico into the garden were redesigned to his specifications. He wanted the central step to be larger and wider than the others so that it could serve as a platform for presentations and speeches. And he wanted the three steps above it to be where honorees would stand, so that he would not be positioned above them.

Nerds like me worry about stuff like tax policy, but politicians obsess about how everything looks.

Although the President had put Bunny in charge of the garden design, the work had to be executed by the National Park Service, and they had their own ideas about how it should be done. Bunny and her assistant, Irvin Williams, outmaneuvered them and ended up getting their way in everything, by one means or another.

As the work began, Mrs. Mellon recalled, "Mr. Williams and I realized the garden needed to be wider than the plan called for; the proportion wasn't quite right. Se we asked the G men to move the measuring string on the south boundary over another eighteen inches. Without any discussion or even a moment of thought, they said 'No,' turned away and went back to work. Well, Mr. Williams and I decided we'd wait. As soon as they left for lunch, Mr. Williams quietly went over, measured the additional eighteen inches, and moved the string!  When the crew returned from lunch, they didn't notice a thing, or if they did, they said not a word but went straight to work. We got our way."

JFK's Grave Site at Arlington National Cemetery

As an adult Bunny had a maxim about her gardens which can stand as a rule for WASP life: "nothing should be noticed." After she and an architect had designed JFK's grave site at Arlington National Cemetery, Winston Churchill died.

This "descendant of Dukes and modern day hero who had rescued democracy," as Mrs. Mellon described him, was buried in his family's country churchyard in a simple grave, with only his name and birth and death dates etched in stone. According to Painter, "Jacqueline Kennedy began to wonder if our design was too formal and architectural after hearing of the simplicity of Winston Churchill's grave."

I mean, we don't want to be different from the other best people.

But this is the best one, from a chapter on Bunny's work in France:

On a memorable day in 1968, Bunny Mellon's longtime couturier, Cristobal Balenciaga, announced to her that he was retiring, and walked her across Avenue George V to the atelier of his protégé Hubert de Givenchy. That introduction marked the beginning not only of a new designer-client relationship but also of a deep and abiding friendship. Sharing a profound admiration for the horticultural traditions of the past, in time they collaborated on the redesign and restoration of several historic French gardens. In the early days of her association with Givenchy, Bunny placed an order for one hundred dresses. "I called her office to ask if this was correct. It was," Givenchy recalled. And when he found out that she had ordered the same dress in multiple colors for different houses, it made perfect sense to him. He was impressed with her efficiency.

How can any woman get by without dresses to match each of her houses?

Also, if you're Bunny Mellon, you can get what may be the most famous work of trompe l'oeil painting from the whole twentieth century to decorate the shed attached to your greenhouse.

But, hey, the garden at Oak Springs is still there, managed by the Oak Spring Garden Foundation. I hope I'll get to see it some day. 

Fall Flowers

Links 29 October 2021

Innu Coat, collected in Labrador, 19th Century

A reminder that while Thomas Jefferson is on the outs because of his hypocrisy about slavery, he remains a hero of religious liberty; the statue just removed from New York's City Hall was paid for by Jewish naval officer Uriah P. Levy, because it was Jefferson who made it possible for Jews to serve in the Navy and to attend his creation, the University of Virginia. (NY Times)

Short history of Yanga, a community of self-liberated African slaves in eastern Mexico.

Mention here of a study that found 90% of people rated their own objectivity as above average. (NY Times) It is important to remember that while you feel your opinions are justified by the facts, because you are rational and objective, everybody else feels the same way.

A bit of Aztec cruelty: the Festival of the Flayed God. Just like the Aztecs to celebrate the new plant growth of spring with torture and human sacrifice.

Trying to map all the connections in the brain of a fruit fly: 25,000 neurons and 20 million synapses mapped so far, a lot more still to do. (NY Times, ungated articles here and here.)

Scott Siskind goes meta with QAnon: "My point is we're all engaged in this kind of desperate project of trying to feel like we're having new important insights, in a world full of people who are much smarter than we are." I think this is very broadly applicable, especially to academia but also to bloggers like me.

Long, somewhat strange article by David Graeber and David Wengrow about the remote human past, focusing on how flexible and diverse our political and social arrangements used to be, concluding by asking why they are so rigid now. I feel like population density and economic complexity are such obvious answers to that question that after displaying real learning and intelligence they end up making themselves look obtuse.

Electric mini-helicopters, or one-person eVTOL aircraft, are here, giving you the "land speeder experience." Top speed 63 mph, range 20 minutes. Article, promotional video.

Archiving America's prison newspapers.

It's an old story in the US, low-grade wars between white settlers and Indians, with the Indian attacks remembered as crimes or "massacres" and the white attacks as law enforcement operations or justified revenge. But really it was just a slow-motion war of conquest. The post-Gold Rush California version is back in the news now because it turns out the man who founded the University of California law school hired a militia to kill Indians around his ranches. (NY Times)

Chaos in Haiti, where the country is running out of fuel because gangs are blockading the ports, the police lack the firepower or the will to take on the gangs, and gang leaders hold press conferences demanding the resignation of the Prime Minister, who probably colluded in the murder of the President, etc. Where should one start with such a place? (Reuters, NY Times)

Is this really a "take this job and shove it" moment"?

Gold mask from Peru, daring to around 1000 AD, was painted with human blood. But was it the artist's, or from a sacrifice? Both strike me as possible.

How Jacobite politics troubled the marriages and ghosts of 18th-century England.

Ethno-religious politics in Bulgaria, where Muslim citizens are still sometimes called "Ottomans."

The history of the Jackfruit, which has lately been touted as a meat substitute but was first grown outside south Asia by British planters as a cheap food for slaves.

Today in Republican drama, Marjorie Taylor Greene calls Liz Cheney a "Karen." Getting rough out there.

This week's music is Miles Davis and friends, Kind of Blue. As my eldest son put it, this is the jazz album that even people who hate jazz like.

Obsessing about that 7 Percent

At the Washington Post, a white woman discovers that her mother was "passing" and she is 7 to 9 percent African, then decides this is the most important thing about her:

For the majority of my life, I’d never been asked my race. Everyone, including me, assumed I was what I appeared to be — a White woman. I never considered that once my mother’s story went public, people would question my racial identity. . . .

Is that really who I am — a White woman with Black heritage?

The worst part is the article's title, "I thought I was White until I learned my mother’s secret."

Let's go over this: genetically, race does not exist. Does not. West African ancestry exists, but it is a completely different thing from East African ancestry, and it is only tangentially related to "race" as various laws and societies have defined it. Nor is there any genetic way to decide the race of people with mixed West African and European genes.

What exists, is culture. So if you grow up in white culture and think of yourself as white and everybody else thinks you are white, then you are white in the only sense that I think has any meaning. Your genes are irrelevant. You may find it interesting that your genetic profile includes a few percent of non-European genes, but there is no special reason anyone else should care. This writer ends up deciding that she is "mixed race," which I think is a farce. Not that it's any of my business. But I hate, with an abiding passion, the notion that anything about your ancestry defines who you are. How you grow up, sure, that's something you can't escape. But who your great-grandparents were? Who cares?

This why I hate royalty, and I mean really hate it. If other countries want kings and queens, fine, that's their business. But if somebody tried to introduce one here I would become a violent revolutionary and fight monarchy to the death.

"Passing for white" is an archaic bit of American lore we should toss in the same bin as all the other strange arcana about our past, like bear baiting and ducking witches.

And while I'm ranting, let me ask this: why is your race "who you are?" There is nothing – repeat, nothing – in this piece about a single other component of the author's identity other than race. Nothing about her being a woman. Nothing about her being a writer and a speaker. Nothing about being kind or cruel, generous or stingy, truthful or dishonest, shy or bold. Nothing about being her mother's daughter in any way other than the race angle. Nothing at all but the bald fact of her 7-9 vs. 93-91 percent.

I suppose she might say, in her defense, that this is what everybody else asks her about and wants to talk about. Which might be true. But because the rest of America is obsessed with race is no reason to feed the fire.

Russell Hoban, "Riddley Walker"

Russell Hoban's 1980 novel has never gone out of print and retains a far-flung readership of people who like really weird books. It is the sort of book that people have written whole books to explain, the explanations longer than the original text. I found Riddley Walker to be hard to read but somehow remarkable, and as I sit here thinking it over I can't make up my mind if the struggle through it was worth it or not.

Riddley Walker is a 12-year-old boy who lives about 2,000 years after the nuclear apocalypse that destroyed our civilization. His world is sort of an Iron Age, except that rather than making iron from ore people dig it out of destroyed cities. The book is a struggle because of the language, an invented notion of English as it has decayed among people who have lost most of their learning but somehow retained words for things that no longer exist. For example a plan is called a "program," "inputs" refers to things people learn, and "outputs" to what they make out of the inputs. People figure things out by "Spare the mending and tryl narrer." The book starts like this:

On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben one for a long before him nor I aint looking to see none agen.

Most of the language is like this, not that much changed, but in other places it requires an effort to decipher.

The action in the book revolves around puppet shows. Without books, this is how people preserve whatever they remember from the past. The leaders of what passes for their government spend much of their time traveling around the land – which is Kent, in England – staging puppet shows in which they both teach the old lore and provide new interpretations in keeping with their current policy. The main puppet show concerns Eusa, their folk anti-hero. It was Eusa who, because he had too much cleverness, pulled the little shining man named Addom apart, unleashing the Bad Time. In punishment for this crime Eusa has to spend the rest of his life wandering from place to place, driven away with beatings from every town, until he ceases to be just a villain and assumes the part of a long-suffering everyman, passing on nuggets of hard-won wisdom.

The Eusa show describes the pre-apocalypse world like this:

Counting counting they wer all the time. They had iron then and big fire they had towns of parpety. They had machines et numbers up. They fed them numbers and they fraction out the Power of things. They had the Nos. of the rain bow and the Power of the air all workit out with counting which is how they got boats in the air and picters on the wind. Counting clevverness is what it wer.

There is a plot, but this is where the mystery comes in. On the surface the story seems to concern Riddley's discovery that a bunch of old rhymes about Eusa actually encode the formula for gunpowder. This formula is extracted by certain bad people, who start using it to kill each other. They call this the 1 Little 1, as opposed to the 1Big 1 that was the nuclear apocalypse. There is also a lot of petty village politics and various attempts to gain knowledge by shamanistic methods.

But I finished the book convinced that this was just a shell of some kind over a deeper meaning. Which, as I said, others have tried to elucidate in book-length treatises. On the other hand, maybe I am just overrating Russell Hoban, and the plot about gunpowder was deep enough for him. Looking back, I can't decide.

One thing I will say about the book is that the invented language sometimes gives rather conventional sentiments a striking force. Riddley is a young moralist who worries a lot about how he should act and how he should understand the world, and written in Riddley-speak these musings are very fine.

I cud feal it in the guts and barrils of me. You try to make your self 1 with some thing or some body but try as you wil the 2ness of ever thing is working agenst you all the way. You try to take holt of the 1ness and it comes in 2 in your hans.

I'm not sure if I recommend this book or not, but if you're in the mood for something different you might give it a try. It certainly has thousands of rabid fans.

The Thought Gap after Conversation

Here's an interesting article abstract, Cooney, Boothby, & Lee, in the Journal of Experimental Psychology:

After conversations, people continue to think about their conversation partners. They remember their stories, revisit their advice, and replay their criticisms. But do people realize that their conversation partners are doing the same? In eight studies, we explored the possibility that people would systematically underestimate how much their conversation partners think about them following interactions. We found evidence for this thought gap in a variety of contexts, including field conversations in a dining hall (Study 1), “getting acquainted” conversations in the lab (Study 2), intimate conversations among friends (Study 3), and arguments between romantic partners (Study 4). Several additional studies investigated a possible explanation for the thought gap: the asymmetric availability of one’s own thoughts compared with others' thoughts. Accordingly, the thought gap increased when conversations became more salient (Study 4) and as people’s thoughts had more time to accumulate after a conversation (Study 6); conversely, the thought gap decreased when people were prompted to reflect on their conversation partners’ thoughts (Study 5). Consistent with our proposed mechanism, we also found that the thought gap was moderated by trait rumination, or the extent to which people’s thoughts come easily and repetitively to mind (Study 7). In a final study, we explored the consequences of the thought gap by comparing the effects of thought frequency to thought valence on the likelihood of reconciliation after an argument (Study 8). Collectively, these studies demonstrate that people remain on their conversation partners’ minds more than they know. 

This is something I learned rather late in life. With some people (notably my wife and children, and certain of my colleagues) it is not necessary for me to repeat things that I feel haven't sunk in, because they will sink in later when people brood on them. For some of the people who have worked under me, the slightest criticism reverberates for days. Understanding this puts an obligation on us, as I see it, to choose our words carefully; they don't just pass through the air and disappear, but may linger for decades.

Via Marginal Revolution

Roman Glass Vessel from Autun, France

Last year French archaeologists were excavating in a Christian necropolis near Autun in central France when they made an amazing discovery.  In one of the stone sarcophagi, dating to the 4th century, they found a complete glass vessel.

One of the sarcophagi at the site.

Shroud pins made of amber and jet.

The vessel has now been reassembled by German experts and it looks like this. The reassembly took five months. This style of glassware is called "reticulated," and only ten complete specimens are known. The raised letters spell out VIVAS FELICITER, live in happiness. This kind of glass was a new development of the late empire, unknown before around 300 AD.

The vessel measures 4.7 inches high and 6.3 inches in diameter (11.9 x 16 cm). You can see the remarkable clarity of the glass, something Roman glassmakers had learned to do during the flowering of glass manufacture that took place in that period.

Almost as interesting as the vessel itself was what chemical analysis showed about its contents. It seemed to be a perfume or balm that contained plant oils, flower extracts, and ambergris. Ambergris is an extremely valuable substance that whales vomit up from time to time, and that even more rarely washes up on the shore. It was known to the ancient Egyptians and to their satellites in Judah and Israel, used in an expensive perfume called Spikenard. Spikenard appears several times in the Bible, but it was hardly mentioned at all by the Greeks and Romans of the classical period. The first European scholar who wrote about ambergris is believed to be Byzantine Greek physician Aëtius of Amida, some time in the late 5th or early 6th century AD. Spikenard is what Mary, sister of Lazarus, poured on Jesus' feet, so it really was an extravagant gesture and maybe Judas wasn't off base to question the cost.

Anyway from being completely unknown in the classical period ambergris came to be a much more widely mentioned luxury under the Byzantine and Carolingian Empires, which is an interesting historical footnote on the influence of Christianity.

French original at INRAP, English at The History Blog.