Life Magazine, August 7, 1939: "Harvard's Hooten", p.66: an article about an eugenicist anthro professor with a penchant for collecting biometrics on different social classes: "Criminals vary according to their crimes. Robbers are nearly eight years younger than the average of the criminal class. Murderers are older, have broader jaws, narrower, longer, lower heads. Rapists are shortest. Forgers look like pretty much anyone else." I find the final tidbit a particularly pleasing version of the crime fitting the criminal.

Searching these things up at iTunes.com can get a little addictive -- I don't even make albums, just track lists, such as this afternoon's:

The Last Words of Copernicus - Sacred Heart Singers (an Alan Lomax Joint!)
Kepler - Nobukazu Takemura
The Ballad of Sir Isaac Newton - Dr. Chordate
Sigmund Freud's Impersonation of Albert Einstein in America - Randy Newman
Galileo - Indigo Girls
Harvey and the Old Ones - Banco de Gaia
Mendel's Theme - Dr. Chordate
Darwin's Children - Edwin McCain
Faraday - Djilia Phralengo
Descartes in Amsterdam - Dave Nachmanoff
Pascal's Egrets - Charivari
Halley's Waitress - Fountains of Wayne

Interestingly, when you search Google for "great scientists" 9 out of the top 10 listings are pages that append the phrase "who believed in the Bible".

[email fragment] Recently heard a fine (digitized) live performance from a folk/country artist named Kasey Chambers. Shades of Nanci Griffith and other favorites, plus the following fun facts:

a) she's Australian, & grew up as the daughter of an itinerant fox hunter on the wonderfully named Nullarbor Plain in not-quite-so-aptly-named South Australia.

b) most of the songs on her first album ("The Captain") were written in Africa

c) and then recorded in a studio on ... Norfolk Island

d) before being sent off to Nashville for final polishing.

Amazon.

KCRW live

Also if you don't 'lready, you should know about, and listen to, Nellie McKay, whose fusion of cabaret, rap, pop, rant, etc. is utterly winning.

KCRW live

Also, shift gears, what's this I hear about the arrival of Beard Papa?

[email fragment] Thanks for the reading update. I've read a couple by Vargas Llosa -- Feast of the Goat and El Paraíso en la otra esquina ("the paradise in the other corner"), the latter in Spanish and abandoned by me 100 pages in after an "if I'm going to be reading something and not really understanding it, it may as well be Borges and not yet another retelling of Gaugan's Tahitian sexcapades" moment. Gavan Daws' A Dream of Islands: Voyages of Self-Discovery in the South Seas treated it so well and, frankly, told me all I could possibly want to know.

I think I'd heard of the Jivaro and their shrunken heads sometime way-back-when. In fact, during my brief tenure in "Stockade", a church-sponsored boy-scouts-equivalent group, one of the father-son crafts was to make "shrunken heads" out of carved apples. All the skin was pared away, and then we had at it with our pocket knives. The leader took them away to dry over low heat for a week or two, after which the faces were wizened and leathery and ready for a preservative coat of lacquer. I kept mine in my closet for some time afterwards. What this had to do with Christianity, I've no clue.

Anyway, the tsantsa recipe you passed on reminded me of the passage in The Voyage of the Beagle where Darwin tells us how to catch an Andean condor:

Two methods are used; one is to place a carcass on a level piece of ground within an enclosure of sticks with an opening, and when the condors are gorged, to gallop up on horseback to the entrance, and thus enclose them: for when this bird has not space to run, it cannot give its body sufficient momentum to rise from the ground. The second method is to mark the trees in which, frequently to the number of five or six together, they roost, and then at night to climb up and noose them. They are such heavy sleepers, as I have myself witnessed, that this is not a difficult task.

[email fragment] Been a little while since we've swapped reading lists. I just finished W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz, which I'd strongly recommend, and am getting started on Rick Moody's memoir The Black Veil. Also, as a TV-displacement therapy I've started downloading e-books and having my computer's speech synthesizer read them to me. The technology's good enough to where it sounds less like a robot than just a bad phone connection with an Eastern European woman. Which is, I think, what was going through Dickens' head when he wrote The Pickwick Papers anyway.

[email fragment] Also I found a NYC public schools PDF that says when they need to enroll the next flock of Kindergarteners, they put out fliers in ten languages: English, Spanish, Haitian-Creole, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Urdu, Polish, Arabic and Bengali.

Dredged up at a friend's request: a book review about the political efficacy (or lack thereof) of assassination.

[email fragment] I've been reading lots of Latin American stuff recently, much of it in Spanish, which has been fun. I'm currently reading some short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, of which one can subtract 40-60 percent of standard comprehension due to my stumbling language skills, and another 30-50 percent due to Borges' own philosophical loops and labyrinths, meaning that my actual understanding ranges from 30 percent to minus 10 percent -- the latter being a number that doubtless would have especially pleased the author.

[email fragment] In your years in Dhaka did you ever hear anything about the mysterious Second Kumar of Bhawal? He was a member of a zamindar family in Dacca district who died and was cremated under mysterious circumstances in Darjeeling around 1910. A decade later a sannysai appeared in Dacca who claimed to be the Kumar, and was eventually recognized by most of his family and tenants, but not his widow/wife nor the Court of Wards, which was administering the estate and collecting the taxes. Thus began a series of lawsuits and appeals that stretched till the 1940s and supposedly captivated much of Bengal.

Anyway, I just finished a recent account of the whole affair, _A Princely Imposter?_ by the Bengali historian Partha Chatterjee. It's a nice bit of patient legal storytelling, with some enjoyable traipses into the philosophy of identity -- both Western and Indian -- as well as the occasional pleasant postcolonial aside.

[email fragment] Hey, have you heard of Danny Gregory -- he's a sketch/journaling type artist who's written a few books. His web log was linked at one of the design sites I read -- a nice mix of sketches and essay-thought-things, some more interesting than others of course.

[via xblog]

Times of India: From the tie-breaker round of the Miss India beauty pageant: "When the five finalists faced the judges, the anticipation was so thick, you could cut it with a knife. The final question was -- If you had a chance to go back or forward in time and change one thing, what would it be? Ms Lakshmi Pandit won the Pond’s Femina Ms India Earth 2004 for replying, 'I would like to go forward because the past is behind us and better myself and my country with my efforts and sincerity.'

"Ms Sayali Bhagat won the Pond’s Femina Ms India World 2004 for the answer, 'I would go to the past and change the British coming to India and hence the Partition because then India and and Pakistan would be one and we would be a superpower once again.' The winning answer by Ms Tanushree Dutta, who won the Ponds Femina Ms India Universe crown was, 'I would like to go forward in time because a true human mind should be progressive and that is the essence of being a human being.'"

Radio Australia/Pacific Beat: "A family on Buka Island in Papua New Guinea is using copra oil to run their cars. As well as producing coconut oil for vehicles, the company Buka Metal Fabricators Ltd also manufactures pure coconut oil for food, and cosmetic products. Company owner Mathias Horn says this is not the first time coconut oil has been used for vehicles in Bougainville because people in the province were using it to run their trucks during the ten year civil war on the Island." It's times like this you realize Gilligan's Island wasn't totally made-up exoticicist island fantasy drivel.

[email fragment] Reading continues to go well and widely. For the past year or so I've been working on my Spanish, and have lately started reading (if not understanding) lots-o-Latin American novelists in the original. I've also become a regular viewer of Noticio Telemundo, which keeps me up to speed on the latest Central American elections and conjoined-twin-separations.

As for sports: The Argentinian Clausera tournament is heading into its sixth round, with my favorites River Plate resting comfortably in second or third -- all that really matters is that they're ahead of Boca Jrs. England's been less inspiring, with Liverpool (and Michael Owen) still in a slump (though at least it's Arsenal on top instead of Man U or Chelsea). Finally, the real news is in cricket, with India touring Pakistan for the first time in years; they're down 2-1 in the series of one-day matches, with a couple full 5-day test matches to come.

[email fragment] I read An American Pilgrimage [Paul Elie's new quadruple-biography of Dorothy Day, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton and Walker Percy] sometime last year. My dad spotted it on the new books shelf at the library, recognized some of the names, and grabbed it for me. Reading it actually felt a little weird, because the material was so familiar: I'd already read pretty much everything by Walker Percy (when I know I'm in for a stressful week, I'll start rereading one of his novels so I know I'll have something familiar and comforting when the need arises), and 5 or 6 by Merton, plus O'Connor's stories and Day's _Long Loneliness_. Reading Elie inspired me to get O'Connor's collected letters, which I enjoyed mightily.

[email fragment] My Central American history didn't have that much on [19th century privateer/American meddler in politics south of the border William] Walker -- only said that the Nicaraguan Liberals invited him to come help them defeat the ruling Conservatives, which he did, installing a shadow government which was recognized only by the United States -- all which angered the Conservative governments in neighboring states, hence the attack led by the Costa Rican general.

I spent a few minutes trying to dig up a bit more. First, here are some titles of published biographies of Walker:

_William Walker: The Grey-Eyed Man of Destiny_ by Alejandro Bolaños Geyar
_Sad Swashbuckler: The Life of William Walker_ by Noel Bertrom Gerson
_Freebooters Must Die! The Life and Death of William Walker, the Most Notorious Filibuster of the Nineteenth Century_ by Frederic Rosengarten
_Filibusters and Financiers: The World of William Walker and His Associates_ by William O. Scroggs
_The World and William Walker_ by Albert H. Z. Carr

Next, a longish and goodish historical essay on Walker, putting the facts in more or less astounding order.

And, for local color, a Costa Rican take on the subject, including many a majestic malapropism and memorable turn of the phrase.

Oh, there's also a 1987 movie about him, _Walker_, starring Ed Harris.

[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.