[email fragment] This morning I finished reading "Swann's Way". I'm not sure how many volumes of Proust you have to've read before you can say things like "well, I've been reading Proust and ..." I'm also halfway through Lauren Bacall's autobiography, which evidently won the National Book Award back in the late 70s. I still can't tell whether that was because it's a good book in its own right, or just a good book considering it was written by a movie star. Still, interesting Bogart tidbits.

Radio Australia/Pacific Beat: "The sea cucumber may seem an unlikely icon to attract tourists, but it has been chosen by the Guam Visitors Bureau to promote the rich marine life of Tumon Bay. The bay is central to Guam tourism, as it is where most hotels are located, but encounters with sea cucumbers, or 'balate', have been keeping tourists away from the water. To change this, the Visitors Bureau has decided to turn the creature into a cartoon character and its latest educational tool."

"The Third Unheard: Connecticut Hip-Hop 1979-1983"

I came up with an interesting a philsophy-of-surgery question the other night while watching the latest horribly, horribly written earthquake-disaster miniseries on NBC. Anyhow, there was a surgery scene and I was struck (though it wasn't really anything new) at just how fully masked everyone in the OR is. I understand why that is, of course, in terms of keeping things sterile and all that, but I wonder what the psychological and sociological effect the masking ritual has on the whole process of surgery. I was reminded of an article I read last year in The Economist, on the child-soldiers of LURD, the Liberian revolutionary group, and their penchant for cross-dressing, putting on makeup or wigs of shower caps before committing their various atrocities -- the point being that it was likely a modernization of traditional W.African usages of mask and costume, the idea being that once you don the mask (even one that doesn't conceal your identity), you become in some sense a different person, and so can't be held responsible for your actions. I suppose the Western traditions of Carnival, Halloween, or, in a different mode, bank robbery, are a long similar lines, though with a bit less emphasis on full possession.

Anyway, given the (often necessarily) ritual nature of surgery, it seems at least metaphorically significant that masks are involved -- perhaps as a way of distancing the surgeons from the patient, or indeed from each other, and I guess of disguising the emotions and keeping things as scientific/mechanistic as possible.

Perhaps just a bunch of psychobabble, but my question's this: if someone invented a perfectly transparent surgical mask, hat, etc. -- that would provide all the antiseptic effects as the current system, and allow for full view of facial expressions in the OR, would surgeons go for it? And how might it change the operating room dynamics, both between members of the surgical team, and, at least in one direction, between surgeon and surgee?

[email fragment] First off, Norfolk Island is not, technically, between Australia and New Zealand, in the sense that one couldn't travel in a straight line and intersect all three. It's a little too far north. But we can accurately say it's between New Zealand and New Caledonia, or between Australia and Fiji.

Secondly [in relation to a discussion of the distinctly un-pine-like Norfolk Island Pine], you really should listen to the Australian-born, Norfolk-Island-Recordin' country singer I emailed you about, Kasey Chambers. If only for her song "These Pines", which takes on oodles of new meaning when you consider where it was recorded:

These pines are not the ones that I'm used to
They won't carry me home when I cry
Am I too far gone to recover
Or can I turn if I try
Should I trade my soul for another
Should I stay and pretend that I'm happy
Like so many times before

Yeah these pines
Are not mine
They don't smell so sweet
like the ones in my mind
And I search the needles
'Til I run out of time
But I don't see you in These Pines.

These past few months I've been doing a lot of searches at iTunes.com for the frequency of specific words in song titles, mostly to see which words of a particular set had the most songs with them in the title. i.e.:

Morning 1481
Afternoon 173
Evening 301
Night 4250

Monday 226
Tuesday 83
Wednesday 31
Thursday 29
Friday 186
Saturday 293
Sunday 549

I also learned that, while iTunes has 564 songs with "mile" in the title, and 68 with "inch", only 9 contain "meter" -- and of those, none of the usages is in the sense of distance.

After that I dredged up an older question, at last near-answerable, about whether (and why) certain names were much more common in song titles than in real life. i.e.:

iTunes Counts for Top 10 Female Names in USA (1990 Census)

1. Mary 685
2. Patricia/Patty 33
3. Linda 134
4. Barbara 66
5. Elizabeth/Beth 111
6. Jennifer/Jenny 161
7. Maria 587
8. Susan/Susie/Sue 577
9. Margaret/Maggie/Meg 200
10. Dorothy 14

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.