[email fragment] First, a nice omnibus Pitcairn site, including shopping.

And in answer to the resettlement question, the Pitcairn Island gov't website.

[email fragment] Robert Hughes' history of Australian settlement, The Fatal Shore, has a couple of chapters on Norfolk Island, from which I remember the following:

1. At the outset, Norfolk Island was considered to be of way more importance and value than Australia -- due to the eponymous pine tree and a native form of flax. With a good supply of replacement masts and linen for sails, England could operate much more easily in the Pacific, and thus rule even more of the world. Problem was, neither the trees nor the flax turned out to be much good for those uses, so the whole scheme foundered.

2. The CIA Factbook info sort of glosses over why N.I. failed as a penal colony -- that it was way way way more brutal than even the worst Australia and Van Dieman's Land had to offer. I'm a little foggy on the details, but I think word finally leaked out about how bad the prisoners were being treated, and scandal shut the place down. So the island was empty and forgotten till some (but not all) of the Pitcairn Islanders were resettled there.

Radio Australia/Pacific Beat: "Fiji's taxi drivers have reacted strongly towards a levy imposed on them for listening to the radio in their vehicles. The move is an attempt by the country's Performing Rights Association to clamp down on copyright infringement, but is not limited to cab drivers. Bus operators will not be spared either."

[email fragment] Finished [Woody Guthrie's autobiographical novel] Seeds of Man this afternoon. Thanks (again) so much for sending me the book. I don't know how much you got a chance to look at it along the way ...

Anyway, what thoughts? I guess the thing that struck me (not too surprisingly) is the overwhelming (though in places patchy) exuberance of the writing. Nobody strings together 14 or more adjectives like my man Woody. And of course the willingness to write pretty much as his interests lay, which means that sentences or paragraphs that start out being about one thing wind up being about another -- sort of like the song on "Mermaid Avenue" where he starts out about the ten hundred books he could write you about her, but by the end of the verse he's talking about union-organizing, and at the end of the song about the thousand-years-distant final blurring of all creeds kinds and colors. Of course exuberance, particularly without the benefit of much editing or selection, has its downsides -- in this particular case unevenness and pretty much no discretion when it comes to writing about sex (let's just say there were lengthy sections made "Walt Whitman's Niece" sound like Mr. Rogers).

Still all told a rollicking, dusty, rocky, paint-brushery, thistle-daggery, skattlerakery, catamountery, gila-monstery, burnt-rubbery, sour-whiskery good time.

One thing I've been trying to figure out is which languages lend themselves to rap, which don't -- this presumably would have a lot to do both with grammatical flexibility and with the sounds the language contains. For instance, pretty much all Portuguese rap I've heard sounds (to my ear) just awful. I think that's because so many words end on complex vowel sounds and swallowed consonents (-ao, -io, etc.) -- which is ironic, because I think it's that very feature that can make sung Portuguese so beautiful and versatile.

French and Spanish and, to a slightly lesser degree, Kiswahili, are all capable of producing (again to my ear) "cool-sounding" rap, but all the cool songs tend to sound kind of alike -- they fall into a certain patter, a vocal rhythm.

German and Swedish and (at least with Deux) Korean fare worse -- they've got the patter, but so often it gets too bouncy to be taken seriously.

English, of course, lands top of the heap. Is that just because I'm best positioned to appreciate the nuances? I'm not sure, though I suspect that the fact that, despite roots in African music, the genre was created and first defined mainly by native English speakers, so of course as style developed it was tailored to the strengths English offered.

[email fragment] The Astonishing Elephant has a nice chapter on the elephant in history. Evidently the first elephants in Europe were four brought back from India by Alexander the Great as a gift for his old teacher Aristotle, who wrote about them in his "History of Animals":

The elephant is said by some to live for about two hundred years; by others, for three hundred. (Book VII, Part 9)

Astonishing Elephant also says that Roman sources include descriptions of both African and Indian elephants (I think the differentiating feature being the number of nose-fingers). Also, it says that neither African nor Asian elephants can be truly tamed -- every few years even the Asian ones are supposed to need to head off into the forest for a while before coming back to their mahouts. Otherwise they go crazy and squash people. Speaking of which, have you been out to Coney Island to see the memorial they just put up in honor of the first elephant to be executed by electrocution?

Did you read the Johnny Cash obit that ran in First Things magazine? I liked it quite a bit...

Have you heard about Komar & Melamid's "People's Choice Music" project? Similar to what they did with the paintings, only they produced pop songs from the survey results.

Public radio's "This American Life" did a story on it -- with tasty audioclips -- a few years back. One who wanted to could search it out at thislife.org.