Arcane Gazebo

Independence Day

I've seen this on a couple blogs already, but it's so good I want to repost it. Frederick Douglass in 1852:

What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy--a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the every-day practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival....

Fellow-citizens, I will not enlarge further on your national inconsistencies. The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense, and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad; it corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing and a byword to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your union. It fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement; the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds insolence; it promotes vice....

Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country.... While drawing encouragement from the "Declaration of Independence," the great principles it contains and the genius of American Institutions, my spirit is also cheered by the obvious tendencies of the age. Nations do not now stand in the same relation to each other that they did ages ago. No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference.... A change has now come over the affairs of mankind. Walled cities and empires have become unfashionable. The arm of commerce has borne away the gates of the strong city. Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe.... Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively annihilated. Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic are distinctly heard on the other.... No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light.

BSL, a blogge most scholarlye and literarye!

I can't believe I haven't linked Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog yet. This is definitely the funniest Middle English blog out there. In a recent post, he rewrites the opening of The Da Vinci Code in the style of the Canterbury Tales. An excerpt:

So Sauyniere lyk Sinon storye tolde
False as the devil, and seyde yt forth ful bolde
For he hadde yt rehersd many a yeer
(Ye notice, o myn gentil rederes deere,
Ich telle yow nat of what thys ‘thyng’ might be-
Yt ys a tricke poetic vsid by me
To kepe yow yn confusioun most plesynge
Thurgh alle thys vague and nonspecific tesyng).

It's quite an improvement over Dan Brown's writing. For further reading, the best post ever on that blog is the one where he writes a rough outline for the Canterbury Tales. (Those of you who read Making Light have already seen all this.)

Attack of the Great American Novel

By popular demand, Tyler Cowen has been blogging about the Great American Novel. I've long been convinced that the answer is Moby Dick, so I was pleased to see that Cowen chose an appropriate set of criteria:

So what qualities must The Great American Novel have?...

1. It must reward successive rereadings and get better each time.

2. It must be canonical and grip the imagination.

3. It must be linked to American history and letters in some essential way.

4. It must span the intellectual, the emotional, the religious, and the metaphysical.

5. It must be fun. You must be sad when the book is over, and wish it had been longer than it was.

6. It must be about a large white whale and have numerous Biblical allusions.

He then chooses an interesting excerpt that was almost certainly left out of the abridged version we were assigned in high school. I decided I liked the book enough to be a badass and read the unabridged version instead, a huge tactical error since the 30-page nightly assignments ballooned to 80 pages this way. It would be interesting to go back and read it again, now that I'm ten years older and can afford a more relaxed pace.

Cowen also suggests some runners-up and dark horse picks. I can see the argument for Huckleberry Finn, but even though I love Mark Twain I wasn't wild about that particular novel. Of Faulkner I have only read short stories, a gap I should remedy at some point.

My favorite piece of American literature from high school was Catch-22, but I can't argue for this as the Great American Novel. The much-loved Catcher in the Rye didn't do much for me; I suppose my teen angst was of a different character than Holden Caulfield's.

So what are your picks for the Great American Novel? What's your favorite "canonical" American novel? What did you read in high school that was the biggest waste of time? (My pick for the last question: The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver; not especially canonical, but nevertheless assigned by my hippie American Lit teacher.)

363rd Newton's Birthday [Open Thread]

It's time once again for us to celebrate Newton's Birthday (which has a Wikipedia entry!). Some physics carols may be found here. Also check out that issue of Physics Today for physics songs. (Was it August '05? I don't have my collection here.)

Enjoy the holidays! Here's an open thread.

But did he write Shakespeare's plays?

Wow, apparently Bach didn't write the Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor:

Scholars now think the Toccata was originally a violin piece Bach transcribed.

"If you know the piece you can just see it was written for the violin," says Don Franklin, a Pitt musicologist specializing in the composer. "It has idiomatic figuration for the violin [and] the initial statement of the fugue subject can easily be played on the D string, crossing over to touch the G string."

The opening of the Toccata, too, is violin-like, offering "the solo violin an opportunity to drop down through its four strings," writes Williams. And there are other nuances that add up to an organ piece covering up its origins.

This hypothesis fits. "Bach did a lot of transcription," says Franklin, also past president of the American Bach Society. Perhaps this Toccata simply lends itself to transcription. After all, Leopold Stokowski's orchestral version worked out pretty well in "Fantasia" and in concerts.

The evidence all points to the fact that Toccata does not match organ music of the time, especially Bach's. It does fit the period's string music, however.

Via Marginal Revolution.

Mankind's Greatest Mistake: Agriculture?

Something else I meant to post on Friday: Brad DeLong recommends a fascinating article by Jared Diamond (the Guns, Germs, and Steel guy) arguing that many of mankind's historical woes—famine, war, tyranny—stem from a catastrophic event: the invention of agriculture.

Apparently there's a lot of evidence that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is quite a bit healthier than that of the typical peasant-famer, but agricultural societies were able to dominate since they can support a larger population, albeit at a lower level of nutrition. (Sort of like McDonald's, I guess.)

The article is originally from 1987, so it's not so new, but I hadn't seen it before, and I found it really interesting. Here's an excerpt:

There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition. (today just three high-carbohydrate plants–wheat, rice, and corn–provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some archaeologists think it was the crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn’t take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearnce of large cities.

Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter-gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing élite set itself above the disease-ridden masses. Skeletons from Greek tombs at Mycenae c. 1500 B. C. suggest that royals enjoyed a better diet than commoners, since the royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and had better teeth (on the average, one instead of six cavities or missing teeth). Among Chilean mummies from c. A. D. 1000, the élite were distinguished not only by ornaments and gold hair clips but also by a fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease.

Seems like this thesis was also proposed by Tyler Durden, although in a less scholarly manner.