Babylonia

Ancient Astronomy and Celestial Divination. Edited by N.M. Swerdlow. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1999. 378 pages.

Babylonia: A Very Short Introduction. Trevor Bryce. Oxford University Press, 2016. 142 pages.

I confess that I don’t find the history of Babylonia very interesting. But I think there’s a reason for that. It’s that we don’t know enough about Babylonia to satisfy my historical curiosity, much of which is about imagining what it might have been like to live in that time and place.

What I find most interesting about Babylonia is how scientific they were. They were pretty darn good at mathematics. Their base 60 math, for example, is still with us today, because we divide circles into 360 degrees, and we divide minutes into 60 seconds and hours into 60 minutes. And Babylonian philosophy probably set the stage for Greek philosophy.

Most of what we know about Babylonia has to do with kings, dynasties, and wars with Babylonia’s neighbors. Yawn. Archeology has revealed surprisingly little, partly because one city was built on top of another, and the water table now stands above the level of the oldest ruins. We have some literature, such as the Gilgamesh epic. But I personally find the Gilgamesh story too old and too remote to mean much today.

So, to my lights, the most interesting part of the history of Babylonia is its astronomy. The earliest astronomy though, should really be regarded as astrology. Its chief purpose was divination to guide the decisions of kings. In the last centuries of Babylonia, though (around 500 B.C.) the study of the stars became truly mathematical and scientific. And astrology became more democratic, so that ordinary people, and not just kings, could have their astrological fortunes told.

Most of what we know about Babylonia comes to us in the form of clay tablets, of which there are a great many. Scribes used a wooden stylus to make marks on wet clay tablets. The tablets were baked. The tablets were regarded as valuable, so over the centuries many of them were preserved.

I have not done a search for historical novels set in Babylonia. But, if I did, I think the most interesting characters would be the astronomers. They constantly watched the sky, day and night. They were supported by the kings, so their observatories must have been nice places — towers, I would hope. And because there was a constant dialogue between the astronomers (or astrologers) and the kings, palace intrigue could help drive the plot.

By the way, this is the first book I have read in Oxford’s series of Very Short Introductions. There are hundreds of titles. I’ll be checking out more those titles in the future. As for the MIT book on ancient astronomy, it’s very technical, and most of the astronomy goes way over my head. However, I enjoy reading books that I don’t fully understand, because there is always something to be learned.

The English Game

“The English Game” is the most recent production from Julian Fellowes, who brought us “Downton Abbey.” It was produced by Netflix, premiered last March, and is available for streaming.

The game is football, which we Americans call soccer. The themes, as with “Downton Abbey,” are class conflict, class reconciliation, and social change. The story begins in England in 1879. Football, developed at places such as Eton College, is regarded as a gentleman’s sport, but football also holds a great appeal to the working class. Two professional Scottish footballers are hired by an English mill owner to play for the mill town’s team. In episode 1, the mill town team first encounters a gentleman’s team in a quarter-finals game at Eton. Class-based unfairness starts up the plot.

Some of the situations are a touch melodramatic, and the series certainly doesn’t have the glamour and appeal of “Downton Abbey.” The cast, though, is excellent. The reward for watching it comes not so much from the plot as from the character development. It’s always a good sign when the cast, characters, and dialogue are good enough for the camera to fill the frame with the characters’ faces.

I’m wondering if I’ll ever be able to properly understand Glasgow accents, though. I’m not the only one. There are many funny YouTube videos about understanding Scottish accents. Strangely enough, I do understand the Scottish MP is this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7G4z5uEQnE

The return of sanity and decency

Though it happened only yesterday, volumes already have been written about the violent desecration of the U.S. Capitol. All sane and decent Americans understand what it means, so there is hardly anything that I can add. But I am reminding myself that, in spite of the obscenity of what we witnessed yesterday, and in spite of the rage that we still feel, we have won. Congress went back into session and certified the election. In Georgia, two Democrats were elected to the U.S. Senate. The fascist Republican Party, come Jan. 20, will be out of power.

If any doubt remained about what the Republican Party has become, or what Donald Trump is, yesterday’s events erased that doubt. It will be years before we really understand what has happened. Investigations can now begin, including congressional investigations and criminal investigations. Republicans now have little power to obstruct or corrupt those investigations, or to conduct sham investigations of their own. Many books will be written, both by those who will add to the truth and those who will try to rewrite history with their lies. History will get it right, even if a frighteningly large percentage of the American population, from their self-made hell on the trash heap of history, invent and believe an alternative history in which the very worst of us are great.

One of the immediate difficulties for many of us is figuring out how to deal with the people around us who voted for Trump, those who are unable to recognize what the Republican Party has become, and those who continue to believe in a future in which a repugnant minority of people who have lost all claim to decency can return to dominating, bullying, insulting, and baiting the rest of us as they work to destroy the American democracy and kick down the people they hate. They were unable to complete that work. The institutions of American democracy withstood the attack. The Southern state of Georgia just sent a Jew and a black man to the U.S. Senate. Given four more years, the dismantling of our institutions and the rule of law would have been completed. Some of them won’t give up. Already there is a competition, as Trump goes down, to lead the fascist movement in America. That competition, of all places, is largely in the U.S. Senate.

For now, though, I’m going to try to stop gritting my teeth, savor the fact that a free and fair election has removed the fascists from power, and wait to see what happens as sanity and decency return to American government. What happened yesterday was not really a threat. It was instead a kind of theater, a ghastly public display of infantile bitterness at the fact of their defeat. The world saw what they are in pornographic scenes that will blacken American history forever, scenes that shock the civilized world and that children do not understand. We all knew that Trump would smash furniture on the way out, though we didn’t foresee just how literal that would be.

Those who supported this deserve our ongoing contempt. They deserve to be shunned. They deserve much worse, actually. And yet the everyday activities of life must go on. What next? Your thoughts and comments are welcome.

Life in Squares

I would have to watch this BBC mini-series at least twice to have any hope of following it. Those who have recently read up on the members of the Bloomsbury Group, or who have recently read a biography of Virginia Woolf, might be able to keep up a bit better. Still, it’s great fun to watch, because the performances are so good and the post-Victorian naughtiness is so delicious. This three-part series was produced by the BBC in 2015. It’s available for streaming from Amazon Prime Video.

Back in the mid-1970s, I read Quentin Bell’s biography of Virginia Woolf. That was enough Virginia Woolf to last me a lifetime. I have never been able to finish one of her novels. I find them dull, and I just can’t get the point of them or figure out why they were worth writing. Shortly after I finished reading the Bell biography, a friend asked me what I thought about it. As I recall, I said, “Their lives were much more interesting than their literature.” This BBC mini-series is evidence of that.

In my opinion, for what little it’s worth, of the members of the Bloomsbury Group, I think it was E.M. Forster who matters the most. We must be careful not to give the Bloomsbury Group too much credit, either as writers, rebels, or philosophers. Oscar Wilde was way ahead of them, as were 19th Century heretics such as Charles Fourier or the American writers and theologians who clustered around Harvard University and Concord, Massachusetts.

But the members of the Bloomsbury Group certainly led interesting lives. And I have the greatest respect for them for the progress they made in rebellion against Victorian norms, in the odd ways available only to the upper-crust English who went to Oxford or Cambridge. Today, people such as Stephen Fry have carried this work forward. Fry, I believe, is one of our greatest living intellectuals. I doubt whether any member of the Bloomsbury Group could have claimed such a status in their lifetimes.

According to Wikipedia, the title, “Life in Squares,” comes from a comment made by Dorothy Parker. She said that the members of the Bloomsbury Group “lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles.” And yes, I would argue that Dorothy Parker, in her sassy American way, out-achieved all of them.

Series like this always make me wonder why the United Kingdom, five times smaller than the U.S., produces ten times as many superb actors and actresses. “Life in Squares” shows off quite a few of those actors and actresses. Fans of James Norton in “Grantchester” will want to watch this.

Fire, smoke, food, and drink


Pie from roasted pumpkin, baked in an iron skillet with fire and smoke

Since it was the week before Christmas, I splurged on a Scotch that cost twice as much as what I usually pay. When I first tasted it, I was a bit shocked at how smoky the Scotch was. I usually prefer a less smoky Scotch. But by the third time I got into it (in three evenings, I confess), I found that I liked it, and the smoky flavor no longer seemed to dominate the other tastes of Scotch.

I am by no means a connoisseur of Scotch, though no doubt I’m more experienced with Scotch than most Americans. Having toured the distillery at Oban, I knew about how barley is malted and dried before fermentation. But, after tasting The Balvenie Scotch, I Googled to try to better understand why some Scotches are much smokier than others. I came across this article at Whisky Advocate — Science Can Explain Why You Like Smoky Whisky—Or Not. The article includes this interesting statement:

“… [U]ntil relatively recently in our ancestral timeline—within the last 200 years—all cooked food would have tasted of smoke.”

That got my attention, because it certainly seems to be true. It follows that, particularly for those of us who are interested in what antique cookery — even Iron Age cookery — might have been like, smoke is something that must be kept in mind.

As I looked around the kitchen for a bold experiment with smoke, I settled on one of my little pumpkins. The usual name for the little pumpkins is “Long Island cheese squash.” You can buy seeds from heirloom seed companies such as Baker Creek. A friend gave me my seeds, though, and I have been growing little pumpkins for about five years now, with seeds that I save over to the next year. My first thought was to make pumpkin soup, and I will, later. But I quickly changed my mind to pumpkin pie, because it’s almost Christmas.

One of my dreams is to have an outdoor range and oven, built of brick and fired with wood. For now the best I can do is to use my propane grill, which is on the deck and convenient to the kitchen. I threw in little chips of apple wood to create smoke. (Note to the abbey groundskeeping department: when fruit trees have to be trimmed or cut, save the wood for making smoke.)

One might suppose that a pumpkin pie with so much exposure to smoke and so much brown roastedness might taste like ashes. But that wasn’t true at all. The pumpkin flavor remained dominant, followed by cinnamon (of which I used only half a teaspoon), followed by smoke. It turned out to be an excellent pie, with the smoke acting as a kind of umami. It was no surprise that the pie went well with Scotch.

I hesitate to confess this because it makes me sound like an American bumpkin, but peat smoke to me smells a lot like coal smoke. (In fact, peat would turn into lignite coal if left in the ground.) I’d probably be able to tell the difference in a smoke-smelling test. But the connotations of peat and coal are worlds apart. One speaks of moor and bog, rock and gull, wind, and sea, and water. The other speaks of industry, trains, mines and black dust. I suppose I need to retrain my nose. Lacking access to either peat smoke or coal smoke here in the Appalachian woodlands, I will be obliged to turn to Scotch to train my nose for the scent of peat smoke.

Here in the Appalachian woodlands, we do not lack for smoke. We have many smoke flavors to choose from. If my dream of an outdoor range and oven ever comes true, then I think there ought to be a special woodpile just for flavor — hickory, persimmon, apple, pear, pecan. Even pine might have its uses.

Lapwing: a Glasgow Christmas

The Herald of Scotland has a story today about two schoolteachers whose Christmas song is climbing on the charts. The video is shot in Glasgow.

The Herald writes: “‘It’s really hard for the grandparents,’ said physics teacher Mr. Kwant, who has two young children. ‘Not getting to see their grandkids is a big thing, and I almost sing it from their perspective.'”

Industrial art


Click here for high-resolution version.

From the moment I took these guys out of their boxes, I was eager to shoot their portraits. Justrite has been in business for 115 years. You can buy Justrite oil cans as antiques, including, of course, on eBay. The new cans seem to be even better made than the vintage cans. Even the old ones remain useful, and so they retain their value.

Most gasoline containers sold into the consumer market these days are made of plastic. Having been through two house fires in my life (though they had nothing to do with gasoline), I don’t trust plastic for flammable liquids. My gasoline can is a 5-gallon metal safety can that I’ve had for years, though it wasn’t made by Justrite. I needed new safety cans for lamp oil and for mixed fuel for the chain saw. These Justrite cans are expensive, but I can write that off to safety — and aesthetics.

The design is very steampunk. If there aren’t Justrite oil cans in museums of modern and industrial art, there ought to be. My guess is that, because they’re so expensive, not many homeowners buy them. What keeps Justrite Manufacturing prosperous, I’m sure, is that these cans meet international standards for the safe storage of flammable liquids. They’re mostly sold to industry.

I regret that I have to fill these cans with flammable fluids and send them to the shed. They’d work so well for serving coffee and iced tea.

Amateurs?

I came across this video on Facebook. A friend posted it with the comment, “Give it a listen. You will be surprised.”

These two look like such amateurs — even hicks — that I expected my ears to hurt. But I was surprised.

I am repeatedly astonished at the musical sophistication of which children are capable. What is required, though, is that musically sophisticated adults communicate to children what music (not to mention Italian) should sound like. If children are exposed to that, then they seem to acquire music as readily as they acquire language. And watch out! The language they hear is the language they will acquire.

This girl has the voice of an angel.

Quando sono solo
Sogno all’orizzonte
E mancan le parole
Sì lo so che non c’è luce
In una stanza quando manca il sole
Se non ci sei tu con me, con me
Su le finestre
Mostra a tutti il mio cuore
Che hai acceso
Chiudi dentro me
La luce che
Hai incontrato per strada

Time to say goodbye
Paesi che non ho mai
Veduto e vissuto con te
Adesso si li vivrò
Con te partirò
Su navi per mari
Che, io lo so
No, no, non esistono più
It’s time to say goodbye

I cannot find any good English translations. I’ll keep looking, or have a go at it myself.

Falling Skies, and The Mandalorian

As you can see, it usually takes me a while to get around to watching things. “The Mandalorian” just started its second season. “Falling Skies” premiered in 2011 and ran for five seasons. Some people seem to stay up to date on what’s being released, and they watch things when they’re new. I can’t imagine how they do their research on new releases and where to stream what. If there’s a one-stop source for this information, I’ve never been able to find it. I’m aware of web sites such as The Decider, but 99 percent of it is the sort of thing that I never watch — here-and-now stuff, suburban stuff, brainless sitcoms, zombie stuff, teen romance, and all that.

I knew about “The Mandalorian” when it was new. But I didn’t sign up for Disney+ until recently, partly because it was hard to justify yet another streaming service, and partly because Baby Yoda was so cutesie that I thought the series was aimed at the 12 and under set. But I was wrong about that. I watched the first episode of the first season of “The Mandalorian” last night, and it was a very enjoyable return to the Star Wars world, which I think is the greatest cinematic saga of our lives.

Still, Baby Yoda does seem a bit cutesie. But otherwise it’s a beautifully produced trip back into the Star Wars world. Good writing and good production (including good audio production) does, after all, make a huge difference in watchability and our willingness to suspend disbelief, as the first six or seven seasons of Game of Thrones showed. I’m always grateful for good audio production in which we actually can hear and understand the dialogue. In “The Mandalorian,” a diminuendo in the music often precedes the dialogue. Noisy soundtracks with dialogue submerged in roaring background sounds and dreadful music have stopped me from watching a good many movies and series. After all, it’s the writing that makes a good story, and dialogue is critical. I found “The Expanse” impossible to follow because its soundtrack was deafening and incomprehensible.

“Falling Skies” is an alien invasion post-apocalyptic series. Though I’d probably give it only a B, it’s good enough that I’ve watched the first season. Steven Spielberg was an executive producer. I detect his influence in the series’ emphasis on family, as opposed to the usual same-old same-old emphasis on romance. Much can be done with plots about groups of people banding together and facing extreme threats. I’d give “Battlestar Galactica” an A+ for that. “Falling Skies” is no “Battlestar Galactica,” but it’s comfortably above what I call the threshold of watchability. “Falling Skies” is on HBO Max.

Village-building


Whether we approve or not, Amazon is now important for rural people, just as the Sears catalog was many years ago. We recently put up new signs to help keep the Amazon trucks from getting lost.

I usually think of myself as a hermit, hiding down in the forest, ruled by a bossy, devoted, and needy cat. But when I think back on the eleven years I have lived here in the woods, it’s remarkable how much social work I have done, just because I looked around this little, red, poor, beautiful, unspoiled, undiscovered county in the Appalachian foothills and saw how much social work needed to be done. It also is remarkable how much help, and how many allies, I have had.

Stephen Sondheim:

You move just a finger,
Say the slightest word,
Something’s bound to linger,
Be heard.
No one acts alone.
Careful, no one is alone.

At first it was just me, transplanted (from San Francisco), disoriented, culture-shocked, with an overwhelming amount of work to be done to make a home where there was nothing but woods. I lived in a camping trailer for a year while building the house, and as soon as the trailer had all the hookups necessary to provide for myself and a cat, Lily the cat came to live with me. About a year later, Ken appeared. (I had emailed him after reading his beautiful viral piece in Salon about living in his van while in graduate school at Duke University.) The energy — literary and otherwise — that Ken brought to the project as he lived here on and off for the next 10 years made a huge difference.

For some context and perspective, I recommend the piece that Ken wrote earlier this year for the Wigtown Book Festival, Letter From the Heartland. Also note the satellite photo below, which shows the little village-in-the-woods in which I live, with the abbey’s piece of the woods marked with red.

I first heard Stokes County’s cry for help in 2012. Republicans had taken over the North Carolina legislature, and they naturally thought that sacrificing a couple of rural counties for fracking was a beautiful idea, since fracking had done such wonders in poisoning the people of Pennsylvania. Before my time here, there had been a previous environmental emergency in the county when a chip plant was proposed, the object of which, I assume, was to take our trees and turn them into fuel and building products, polluting in the process and overloading our winding roads with heavy trucks. Some veterans of that fight (which they won), quickly got an organization called No Fracking in Stokes up and running. I am proud to say that I joined that effort early on. Not only have we not been fracked, the organization was so effective that it became quite prominent in the anti-fracking movement.

For better or for worse, I was soon recruited for the executive committee of the Stokes County Democratic Party. Then I was elected county chair. I was in that position for almost six years, until I resigned recently for reasons that aren’t worth going into. The 2020 election was exhausting, and I hope it will be my last election as a local political operative. At the county level, we lost, big (not that we expected anything else). Trump won this county with 78 percent of the vote, so there is a lot of work to be done. In the future I hope to work much closer to home. But there was much to be gained from six years as county chair: I got to know lots of people, and I learned a lot about this county, including things that some people didn’t want me to know.

If I were filthy rich, I’d have the means to do what the filthy rich do to buy seclusion and security. I’d buy hundreds or thousands of acres and put a fence around it. But because I’m not filthy rich, and because my holdings in land are small, I depend on my neighbors for buffer and for security. That’s one reason why village-building is so important (and always has been): Mutual security, and a sharing of skills, tools, and infrastructure.

I can take credit for only a portion of the village-building that is happening here in this neck of the woods. Most of the credit goes to the man whom Ken calls Ron in Ken’s article for Wigtown. Just as Ron doesn’t fully understand why I’m a liberal, I don’t fully understand why a man with his intelligence, social skill, and generosity is a Republican. But we don’t waste time on national wedge issues, because we have plenty of work to do here in the woods.

For example, my tiller had died, and a $90 visit to a small engine shop failed to fix it. Ron suggested that I buy a new carburetor (a mere $14 from Amazon). Yesterday Ron installed the carburetor for me while I handed him tools. Now the tiller runs like new. He has helped with so many projects here that I wouldn’t be able to list them all. I do my best to return the favor with things that I know how to do, such as programming his (and the neighbors’) radios and giving advice on appropriate antennas and how to install them. They heat with wood, so when there’s firewood to be split and stacked, I can help.

Ken has written quite a lot about private property (This Land Is Our Land) and how much he hates no-trespassing signs. There are far too many no-trespassing signs down in these woods. But I’m pleased to say that many of the signs, and much of the purple paint, is fading as a more village-oriented attitude takes root. Ken and I realized long ago that reforming the neighbors’ attitudes on property would be a longterm project to be handled tactfully. I’m pleased to say, though, that the woods are increasingly being treated as a commons, as they ought to be. When a tree goes down in a storm, the question is not whose land it’s on but who needs firewood. And we’ve all become rather proud of our hidden network of trails in the woods, which Ron maintains. When he asked to build a wooden bridge over the stream where the neighbors’ right-of-way crosses abbey property, of course I said yes. My mailbox is half a mile away, and the best walk to the mailbox goes over the bridge and through the woods.

Ron’s organizational skills have turned this little village into a Neighborhood Watch on steroids. Many of the neighbors now have handheld radios, and Ron and I monitor for calls for help. Help has been needed surprisingly often, such as when a 77-year-old neighbor overturned her ATV on a steep hill and was trapped underneath it in the woods, or when another elderly neighbor had symptoms of a heart attack while in the woods hunting turkeys. Everyone has different skills and different kinds of tools. In a village, those skills and tools are available to all. When a culvert washed out a few weeks ago under the road down in the bottom (it’s an unpaved private road, and maintaining it is our responsibility), one of the neighbors brought in his Bobcat and fixed it. That same neighbor now supplies us with eggs. The best I’ve been able to offer him in return so far was enough of my wild persimmons to make a pudding. Everybody has a garden, and everybody shares. Power outages, wind storms, washouts from heavy rain, accidents — there’s always something. One of the biggest shockers to me is that, though most of the neighbors identify as doughty hunters, they rarely shoot anything. Instead they’re on the lookout for poachers that might threaten the local deer, many of whom (including the white deer) have names. Just this week Ron called the game warden because somebody was trying to spotlight our village deer. Ron and someone he knows recently did a census of the local raccoon population, using trained dogs. Six or eight raccoons were treed, but none were harmed. They know where the owls live. They feed the fish down in our little creek, from which irrigation water for gardens is available to any higher-elevation neighbors with tanks and tractors (else Ron will haul it for them). They’ve put out the word that, if anybody is trapping surplus opossums, we could use some more here. If Pete, one of the horses up the hill, breaks out of the pasture, I hear about it, and where Pete pooped, on community radio. As Ken’s article mentions, I’m the “comms” guy, because I have an extra class amateur radio license. And, yes, we all know how to shoot. Ron and his dad set up a shooting range down in the bottom, and it’s available for villagers to go practice. The noise is sometimes annoying, but it’s more a weekly thing than an everyday thing.

Increasingly, what I’m seeing here reminds me of what I remember from the 1950s — the traditional skills and infrastructure that make a high degree of self-sufficiency possible, just because people make their livings at home. Yes, most of us here are retired, but we still work. In a way, Covid-19 has done the world a favor by requiring that we rethink how much of our work can be done from home and how our neighborhoods can expand into local pods. I know that we can’t all live in rural villages. But virtual villages can exist anywhere. I well remember how much Hillary Clinton was ridiculed (by Republicans) for her book It Takes a Village. The ridicule says a lot about the madness of our era, when many people are taught by propaganda to ridicule the very things they most need and are lacking, including an honest politics that serves people’s actual needs. If America is ever great again (whatever that means), surely it will be something that grows bottom-up, instead of being sold as a scam, top down. Until that time comes, I consider it a privilege to have so much space around me, and a level of security that I wish everyone could have.


A neighbor’s wood pile. I helped split the wood.


Pete’s and Buddy’s pasture


The backroad to the mailbox


The road descends past the abbey toward the creek bottom.


Helping the neighbors build their watch tower (no kidding) up on the ridge. That’s Ron’s dad on the right.


The founding members of No Fracking in Stokes. I’m in the back. Winston-Salem Journal photo.


Me as county chair with Deborah Ross, who was running for the U.S. Senate


Ken and me, June 2011


A limousine picks up Ken for one of his many television appearances after Walden on Wheels was published. Yes, that’s the famous van.


She who rules

During the month before the Nov. 3 election, a film crew from Los Angeles and New York was in North Carolina to shoot a documentary called Swing State. They spent several days in Stokes County. I helped show them around and helped them decide whom to interview. Here they are interviewing local candidates for the North Carolina legislature. The documentary should be released next year. I was interviewed, too, and probably will make it into the finished documentary.