If this has a unifying theme I'm not sure I want to figure out what it is.
Most of the stuff I want to talk about recently involves Things I Have Been Reading, so here, Things I Have Been Reading:
1. I put down Ian Hodder's Reading the Past, borrowed from![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
stellar_dust, in order to finish The Leopard's Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Çatalhöyük by Ian Hodder, which I started at her place and then checked out on interlibrary loan. I started it in hopes that my inherent fascination with the late Paleolithic and the Copper Age, and the fact that he's actually writing about something other than pure theory, would help me get past NO U IAN HODDER.
I'm now willing to concede that some of what he says may actually be clever, if I could read the actual scientific papers behind it. I also had the sudden revelation that part of the reason I am so frustrated with his stuff (and let's face it, most of the archeology theory I have been masochistically inflicting on myself) is that I am far, far more interested in the what and the how than in the why or in trying to figure out what it says about Deep Psychological Concepts. Or, to put it in Anthro 101 vocabulary, I think we need to figure out the emic reality of a culture before we put too much effort into the etic. I want to know how the people lived and thought in their city, not what a Cambridge-educated elderly white man thinks is strange about them.
It is not like we are anywhere near the limit of finding out new whats and hows and we have to resort to the complicated stuff.
Especially with a site like Catal Hoyuk, where it seems to be traditional to focus all your intellectual effort on the significance of things that are missing from the city, which just makes me want to scream, "You have excavated well under 15% of the site! You have no freaking clue what isn't there! Maybe you should concentrate on what you have actually found, instead!"
This is frankly sort of amusing, because Hodder structured the book around the 'mystery' of why there is so much leopard imagery on the site but they hadn't found a single leopard bone, and all the very deep things this says about their concepts of space and community and individuality and whatever, Hodder. And then there's an epilogue that basically goes "oops, while this book was in edits they found a leopard bone BUT MY THEORIES ARE STILL TOTALLY VALID."
Let's talk about the leopard thing some more, actually, as an example of why I found this book so frustrating. His basic thrust of the argument is that nearly all the depictions of humans found on the site are shown wearing polka-dotted garments that are usually interpreted as leopard skins, but the small foot bones that are generally associated with the presences of skins are absent, and therefore leopards must have had some special significance to the people, probably involving a taboo, and taboos in this period are interesting because etc, etc, blah blah embodiment materiality communalism etc. PS: we also found all of these mysterious patterned clay stamps that look like they were designed to put polka dots on cloth or something, I wonder what they were for?
Possibly the most annoying thing about Hodder is that he does mention in passing the possibility that they were wearing 'faux-leopard skins' in the paintings, so you can't just complain that he ignores the possibility, but he then proceeds to keep building his theory as if it's completely irrelevant. When frankly I find the possibility that they may have been making printed cloth or printed furs at that period way, way more interesting, in terms of what it says about society, art, and economy, than the presence or absence of leopard toe bones.
AAAGH. The other main evidence for the mysterious significance of leopards is frequent wall-reliefs of roughly modeled long-tailed quadrupeds, which could be leopards. The evidence that they're leopards is that every so often, they would be painted with geometric patterns - different every time, and none particularly close to leopard spots - which would be painted over with white again soon thereafter. They could be leopard. They could also be, oh, sheep, based on the evidence he presents. There is no acknowledgement of the possibility that seems most likely to me, that if you went up to somebody who lived there and asked them why, they would shrug and say "polka-dots are pretty".
Of course he also quotes a paper, and then works it into his fancy theory, that seems to basically consist of a much lengthened version of the statement, though translated into longer and far less comprehensible words, 'people like pretty things because they are pretty. especially if they are also shiny'. NO DUH IAN HODDER.
That is another things that annoys me about this approach: it seems to concentrate on exoticizing the archaeological cultures under study. I don't know if they're doing this on purpose - emphasizing the differences between cultures as an ideological point, or if it's just a side effect of the theoretical approach that has to put everything in the most alienating terminology possible. But either way the effect is that discoveries like 'prehistoric people liked shiny things' become a way of defining how they are so very different from modern people, so very different that we can hardly comprehend the way their minds worked.
????
This is really a basic ideological conflict: I tend to believe, as a core foundation for all my cross-cultural learnings, that when it comes down to it, people are people no matter when and where they live, and once you understand the cultural and ecological constraints they operate under (which are no stranger than the ones you operate under, looked at with an open mind) they will make perfect sense to you. Requiring only an open mind and a fair amount of experience with humanity, not a Master's degree in cultural theory.
I accept the possibility that this is wrong, and possibly that it is also a reflection of privilege somehow, but it is also a) a fundamental and required postulate of the Western/liberal belief system of diversity, equality, and community that my culture is trying to rebuild its morality on, possibly best summed up by the phrase 'it's a small world after all'; and b) also the required postulate of the novelist or storyteller.
(I keep bouncing back to the story Jo Graham told in a talk I went to once, about how difficult it was to convince her publisher to let her put Indian takeout in a novel set in Alexandrian Egypt, even after she showed her primary documentary evidence that they had Indian takeout places in Alexandrian Egypt. Part of the way humans are all alike is to want to believe that we were the first people ever to understand the benefits of Indian takeout, when really, it's not all that complicated an invention once you have the infrastructure and population density to support it. Anyway, off topic.)
At any rate: I actually think the theory is very useful for one thing, and that is applying it to the culture we already have all possible evidence for, that is, ours, in order to figure out where the 'open mind' thing fails and we're just projecting our culture's weirdnesses onto theirs, and also, you know, to maybe start to understand why we, the living humans, do the things we do. But you have to've learned to look at your own culture that way first (and I am constantly disappointed by the number of academics who never have, really.)
Here's another example from the book: Hodder makes a big deal about the fact that the people of Catal Hoyuk decorated their houses with images and trophies from wild animals they hunted, rather than the domestic animals most of their food depended on. Hodder wants to make this very meaningful in terms of things like the invention of history and of personal property and of the creation of stratified societies.
I, on the other hand, assume they brought home and displayed hunting trophies for more or less the same reasons that the people who shoot deer in the woods by my house bring home and display hunting trophies, and it makes me think about the chapter in the Brunvand book of urban legends that I just read about modern myths involving incompetent or deceived hunters who kill domestic animals instead of wild and are humiliated for it, and also about that Tom Lehrer song. It makes me wish I still had academic library access so I can see if there are any good sociology or anthropology papers about why hunters say they bring home trophies and how the emic and etic meanings of them differ between societies. It makes me go, oh, it's interesting to have evidence that this behavior goes back at least as far as the beginning of domestication, not particularly surprising though, people are like that.
It does not make me go 'Wow, the Catal Hoyuk people were so ~mysterious~ and ~different~ from us, I must come up with a whole new vocabulary for talking about the fact that physical objects exist and people do things with them.'
...all that aside, and also leaving aside what I suspect is a basic personality conflict + issues with his writing style (readable enough, at least when aimed at a popular audience, but not terribly well structured): still far less frustrating than all pre-Hodder analysis of Catal Hoyuk I've ever read. So there's that.
Maybe I will actually make it through Reading the Past before I seestellar_dust again, and I will decide that actually Hodder's approach is great and all of the above was just me being the hubristic outsider who's read too much Charles Fort which I always fear is the case when I publicly critique academic work I don't have all the background for. Which is why I wanted to borrow Reading the Past in the first place ...
Also? They've found female figurines with detachable/articulated heads at both Catal Hoyuk and Hoyucek (c.9000 years ago), which pushes back the earliest attestable date I had by several thousand years, and means articulated heads on dolls go back about as far as the history of dolls. Yet more evidence that the Venus of Hohle Fels could have had a head and people need to stop assuming that prehistoric artists were as obsessed with fetishizing dismembered women as they are. :P
2. I am also reading, in a free downloaded ebook, Medieval English Nunneries, by Eileen Power, 1922.
This seems to be the only English language book in existence that talks about what life was actually like for the nuns in medieval English nunneries, as opposed to a) what the nuns were supposed to be doing according to the written Rules, or b) how English nunneries fit into some sort of theory of gender or power or class or religion.
Anyway I went looking for this a) because of a Time Team episode where someone pretended to be a nun for a day, and I was like 'yes, she's following the Rule of the Order, but no contemporary writing I have encountered portrays the average nun as strictly following the rule, surely they would know this' and b) because I still think that if I ever actually joined the SCA and seriously worked on a persona I would have to be a sister.
I'm only about 75 pages in, and I'm not sure how much it'll end up having about what I was really interested in (Lay sisters. Anything at all about lay sisters,) but so far what has really boggled me is the numbers. I'd always visualized a nunnery as being a healthy, fairly bustling community - a few dozen sisters in a small chapter, a few hundred or so in a large one. But she did the numbers, and at least in medieval England, I was way off - the largest nunnery had around 50 sisters, and at the time she did her numbers, 63 out of 111 total houses had fewer than 10 nuns in them - the total number of choir sisters in all of England was generally somewhat less than 2000.
Every so often I'm doing historical research and I hit something that makes me realize just how much smaller communities were, even in what seems like comparatively recent history. Like when I was writing a paper on a somewhat-obscure Maryland family in the revolutionary war period, and I suddenly realized that as recently as my four-great-grandparents ago - not all that long ago if you think of it in terms of storytelling generations - the population was small enough that all the White landowners along the Potomac River and tributaries not only knew each other, but were fairly closely related, and were also related to most of the Blacks (and could trace the bloodlines)...
(and then I get to thinking about just how incestuous British Politics RPF, and for that matter the U.S. Congress, are, and remember that, hey, when you get down to it, people are people and the past isn't that strange a place.)
Still! Less than 2000 nuns in all England. Plus an unknown number of noblewomen boarders, students, novices, lay sisters, occasionally lay brothers, and servants from the local community, but still. There were that many people in my high school class. And a nunnery with six nuns in it makes a very different sort of a community than one with even 24...
3. Also, just because I can, I am also slowly reading through an online copy of Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine. So far my main takeaway from that is: Assbabies!
Yes, Gould & Pyle, in their meticulous combing of pre-1896 medical literature, found three reasonably credible accounts of women who were born with imperforate vaginal openings and vaginal canals that had somehow diverted to the rectum, with the result that they menstruated, copulated, conceived, and delivered through the anus without ever realizing they were abnormal, until the midwife/attending physician started acting confused.
Apparently in at least these three cases, rectal delivery involved no more trauma to the mother or medical intervention than the average vaginal delivery of the time, and mothers and babies all did fine. There were several more cases listed where the child was presumably conceived by way of the vagina, but obstruction or pathology of the vagina at the time of birth, or an extrauterine pregnancy, meant that it ended up pushing through the walls between the vagina and the rectum and coming out through the anus anyway, with severe but not fatal trauma to the vagina and rectum and full recovery. (There were also quite a few more gruesome and tragic stories, but of course, many of these accounts being pre-antisepsis, most of the birth stories in there end tragically.)
I was mostly just wondering why fandom had never seen fit to inform me that this was, in fact, medically possible, so I went to Google Books to see if I could find any corroborative evidence (what is Google Books for if not looking up obscure things in outdated medical journals?) and, yes, this does seem to be a real thing that can actually happen, with the last paper on the topic that I could find full-text dating from the 1950s. Like a lot of the more terrible obstetrics-related things in Anomalies and Curiosities, this is not likely to happen anyplace with modern medicine because it wouldn't be allowed to get that far, so that may be as good of evidence as we'll ever have, but yep, assbabies = possible in RL.
I wonder if there's been any good Jack Harkness mpreg posted since the last time I checked?
...I will do you a favor and not share any of the other things I learn from that book.
...You know, half my excuse for reading all this semi-random nonfiction is that I need to know this stuff for worldbuilding. Maybe I should just post some of the Theory of Worldbuilding stuff that's been accumulating on my hard drive over years.
Or finish organizing/clearing out/actually reading the, um several thousand books I do own on paper. Unlike what I seem to read these days.
1. I put down Ian Hodder's Reading the Past, borrowed from
stellar_dust, in order to finish The Leopard's Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Çatalhöyük by Ian Hodder, which I started at her place and then checked out on interlibrary loan. I started it in hopes that my inherent fascination with the late Paleolithic and the Copper Age, and the fact that he's actually writing about something other than pure theory, would help me get past NO U IAN HODDER.I'm now willing to concede that some of what he says may actually be clever, if I could read the actual scientific papers behind it. I also had the sudden revelation that part of the reason I am so frustrated with his stuff (and let's face it, most of the archeology theory I have been masochistically inflicting on myself) is that I am far, far more interested in the what and the how than in the why or in trying to figure out what it says about Deep Psychological Concepts. Or, to put it in Anthro 101 vocabulary, I think we need to figure out the emic reality of a culture before we put too much effort into the etic. I want to know how the people lived and thought in their city, not what a Cambridge-educated elderly white man thinks is strange about them.
It is not like we are anywhere near the limit of finding out new whats and hows and we have to resort to the complicated stuff.
Especially with a site like Catal Hoyuk, where it seems to be traditional to focus all your intellectual effort on the significance of things that are missing from the city, which just makes me want to scream, "You have excavated well under 15% of the site! You have no freaking clue what isn't there! Maybe you should concentrate on what you have actually found, instead!"
This is frankly sort of amusing, because Hodder structured the book around the 'mystery' of why there is so much leopard imagery on the site but they hadn't found a single leopard bone, and all the very deep things this says about their concepts of space and community and individuality and whatever, Hodder. And then there's an epilogue that basically goes "oops, while this book was in edits they found a leopard bone BUT MY THEORIES ARE STILL TOTALLY VALID."
Let's talk about the leopard thing some more, actually, as an example of why I found this book so frustrating. His basic thrust of the argument is that nearly all the depictions of humans found on the site are shown wearing polka-dotted garments that are usually interpreted as leopard skins, but the small foot bones that are generally associated with the presences of skins are absent, and therefore leopards must have had some special significance to the people, probably involving a taboo, and taboos in this period are interesting because etc, etc, blah blah embodiment materiality communalism etc. PS: we also found all of these mysterious patterned clay stamps that look like they were designed to put polka dots on cloth or something, I wonder what they were for?
Possibly the most annoying thing about Hodder is that he does mention in passing the possibility that they were wearing 'faux-leopard skins' in the paintings, so you can't just complain that he ignores the possibility, but he then proceeds to keep building his theory as if it's completely irrelevant. When frankly I find the possibility that they may have been making printed cloth or printed furs at that period way, way more interesting, in terms of what it says about society, art, and economy, than the presence or absence of leopard toe bones.
AAAGH. The other main evidence for the mysterious significance of leopards is frequent wall-reliefs of roughly modeled long-tailed quadrupeds, which could be leopards. The evidence that they're leopards is that every so often, they would be painted with geometric patterns - different every time, and none particularly close to leopard spots - which would be painted over with white again soon thereafter. They could be leopard. They could also be, oh, sheep, based on the evidence he presents. There is no acknowledgement of the possibility that seems most likely to me, that if you went up to somebody who lived there and asked them why, they would shrug and say "polka-dots are pretty".
Of course he also quotes a paper, and then works it into his fancy theory, that seems to basically consist of a much lengthened version of the statement, though translated into longer and far less comprehensible words, 'people like pretty things because they are pretty. especially if they are also shiny'. NO DUH IAN HODDER.
That is another things that annoys me about this approach: it seems to concentrate on exoticizing the archaeological cultures under study. I don't know if they're doing this on purpose - emphasizing the differences between cultures as an ideological point, or if it's just a side effect of the theoretical approach that has to put everything in the most alienating terminology possible. But either way the effect is that discoveries like 'prehistoric people liked shiny things' become a way of defining how they are so very different from modern people, so very different that we can hardly comprehend the way their minds worked.
????
This is really a basic ideological conflict: I tend to believe, as a core foundation for all my cross-cultural learnings, that when it comes down to it, people are people no matter when and where they live, and once you understand the cultural and ecological constraints they operate under (which are no stranger than the ones you operate under, looked at with an open mind) they will make perfect sense to you. Requiring only an open mind and a fair amount of experience with humanity, not a Master's degree in cultural theory.
I accept the possibility that this is wrong, and possibly that it is also a reflection of privilege somehow, but it is also a) a fundamental and required postulate of the Western/liberal belief system of diversity, equality, and community that my culture is trying to rebuild its morality on, possibly best summed up by the phrase 'it's a small world after all'; and b) also the required postulate of the novelist or storyteller.
(I keep bouncing back to the story Jo Graham told in a talk I went to once, about how difficult it was to convince her publisher to let her put Indian takeout in a novel set in Alexandrian Egypt, even after she showed her primary documentary evidence that they had Indian takeout places in Alexandrian Egypt. Part of the way humans are all alike is to want to believe that we were the first people ever to understand the benefits of Indian takeout, when really, it's not all that complicated an invention once you have the infrastructure and population density to support it. Anyway, off topic.)
At any rate: I actually think the theory is very useful for one thing, and that is applying it to the culture we already have all possible evidence for, that is, ours, in order to figure out where the 'open mind' thing fails and we're just projecting our culture's weirdnesses onto theirs, and also, you know, to maybe start to understand why we, the living humans, do the things we do. But you have to've learned to look at your own culture that way first (and I am constantly disappointed by the number of academics who never have, really.)
Here's another example from the book: Hodder makes a big deal about the fact that the people of Catal Hoyuk decorated their houses with images and trophies from wild animals they hunted, rather than the domestic animals most of their food depended on. Hodder wants to make this very meaningful in terms of things like the invention of history and of personal property and of the creation of stratified societies.
I, on the other hand, assume they brought home and displayed hunting trophies for more or less the same reasons that the people who shoot deer in the woods by my house bring home and display hunting trophies, and it makes me think about the chapter in the Brunvand book of urban legends that I just read about modern myths involving incompetent or deceived hunters who kill domestic animals instead of wild and are humiliated for it, and also about that Tom Lehrer song. It makes me wish I still had academic library access so I can see if there are any good sociology or anthropology papers about why hunters say they bring home trophies and how the emic and etic meanings of them differ between societies. It makes me go, oh, it's interesting to have evidence that this behavior goes back at least as far as the beginning of domestication, not particularly surprising though, people are like that.
It does not make me go 'Wow, the Catal Hoyuk people were so ~mysterious~ and ~different~ from us, I must come up with a whole new vocabulary for talking about the fact that physical objects exist and people do things with them.'
...all that aside, and also leaving aside what I suspect is a basic personality conflict + issues with his writing style (readable enough, at least when aimed at a popular audience, but not terribly well structured): still far less frustrating than all pre-Hodder analysis of Catal Hoyuk I've ever read. So there's that.
Maybe I will actually make it through Reading the Past before I see
stellar_dust again, and I will decide that actually Hodder's approach is great and all of the above was just me being the hubristic outsider who's read too much Charles Fort which I always fear is the case when I publicly critique academic work I don't have all the background for. Which is why I wanted to borrow Reading the Past in the first place ...Also? They've found female figurines with detachable/articulated heads at both Catal Hoyuk and Hoyucek (c.9000 years ago), which pushes back the earliest attestable date I had by several thousand years, and means articulated heads on dolls go back about as far as the history of dolls. Yet more evidence that the Venus of Hohle Fels could have had a head and people need to stop assuming that prehistoric artists were as obsessed with fetishizing dismembered women as they are. :P
2. I am also reading, in a free downloaded ebook, Medieval English Nunneries, by Eileen Power, 1922.
This seems to be the only English language book in existence that talks about what life was actually like for the nuns in medieval English nunneries, as opposed to a) what the nuns were supposed to be doing according to the written Rules, or b) how English nunneries fit into some sort of theory of gender or power or class or religion.
Anyway I went looking for this a) because of a Time Team episode where someone pretended to be a nun for a day, and I was like 'yes, she's following the Rule of the Order, but no contemporary writing I have encountered portrays the average nun as strictly following the rule, surely they would know this' and b) because I still think that if I ever actually joined the SCA and seriously worked on a persona I would have to be a sister.
I'm only about 75 pages in, and I'm not sure how much it'll end up having about what I was really interested in (Lay sisters. Anything at all about lay sisters,) but so far what has really boggled me is the numbers. I'd always visualized a nunnery as being a healthy, fairly bustling community - a few dozen sisters in a small chapter, a few hundred or so in a large one. But she did the numbers, and at least in medieval England, I was way off - the largest nunnery had around 50 sisters, and at the time she did her numbers, 63 out of 111 total houses had fewer than 10 nuns in them - the total number of choir sisters in all of England was generally somewhat less than 2000.
Every so often I'm doing historical research and I hit something that makes me realize just how much smaller communities were, even in what seems like comparatively recent history. Like when I was writing a paper on a somewhat-obscure Maryland family in the revolutionary war period, and I suddenly realized that as recently as my four-great-grandparents ago - not all that long ago if you think of it in terms of storytelling generations - the population was small enough that all the White landowners along the Potomac River and tributaries not only knew each other, but were fairly closely related, and were also related to most of the Blacks (and could trace the bloodlines)...
(and then I get to thinking about just how incestuous British Politics RPF, and for that matter the U.S. Congress, are, and remember that, hey, when you get down to it, people are people and the past isn't that strange a place.)
Still! Less than 2000 nuns in all England. Plus an unknown number of noblewomen boarders, students, novices, lay sisters, occasionally lay brothers, and servants from the local community, but still. There were that many people in my high school class. And a nunnery with six nuns in it makes a very different sort of a community than one with even 24...
3. Also, just because I can, I am also slowly reading through an online copy of Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine. So far my main takeaway from that is: Assbabies!
Yes, Gould & Pyle, in their meticulous combing of pre-1896 medical literature, found three reasonably credible accounts of women who were born with imperforate vaginal openings and vaginal canals that had somehow diverted to the rectum, with the result that they menstruated, copulated, conceived, and delivered through the anus without ever realizing they were abnormal, until the midwife/attending physician started acting confused.
Apparently in at least these three cases, rectal delivery involved no more trauma to the mother or medical intervention than the average vaginal delivery of the time, and mothers and babies all did fine. There were several more cases listed where the child was presumably conceived by way of the vagina, but obstruction or pathology of the vagina at the time of birth, or an extrauterine pregnancy, meant that it ended up pushing through the walls between the vagina and the rectum and coming out through the anus anyway, with severe but not fatal trauma to the vagina and rectum and full recovery. (There were also quite a few more gruesome and tragic stories, but of course, many of these accounts being pre-antisepsis, most of the birth stories in there end tragically.)
I was mostly just wondering why fandom had never seen fit to inform me that this was, in fact, medically possible, so I went to Google Books to see if I could find any corroborative evidence (what is Google Books for if not looking up obscure things in outdated medical journals?) and, yes, this does seem to be a real thing that can actually happen, with the last paper on the topic that I could find full-text dating from the 1950s. Like a lot of the more terrible obstetrics-related things in Anomalies and Curiosities, this is not likely to happen anyplace with modern medicine because it wouldn't be allowed to get that far, so that may be as good of evidence as we'll ever have, but yep, assbabies = possible in RL.
I wonder if there's been any good Jack Harkness mpreg posted since the last time I checked?
...I will do you a favor and not share any of the other things I learn from that book.
...You know, half my excuse for reading all this semi-random nonfiction is that I need to know this stuff for worldbuilding. Maybe I should just post some of the Theory of Worldbuilding stuff that's been accumulating on my hard drive over years.
Or finish organizing/clearing out/actually reading the, um several thousand books I do own on paper. Unlike what I seem to read these days.
no subject
THIIIIIIIIIIS. My issues with Cave of Forgotten Dreams, let me show u them.
Also, do you know which Jo Graham book that is?
#3: AUGH.
I thoroughly enjoyed #1 and #2, but I think I would like to forget #3.
Theory of Worldbuilding: read ALL the things?
no subject
Cave of Forgotten Dreams: so many issues. Still kind of want to see it in IMAX, but only if I can turn the sound off. (I would love for you to show me your issues with it, since I think I am not going to get around to writing up mine.)
Read ALL the things is the best theory of worldbuilding but I am slowly coming to understand that I will never be able to read all the things so these days it is more sort of 'ways to cheat' + 'collections of interesting facts' + 'general rules that will probably keep you from totally screwing up'.
no subject
It was gorgeous, but yeah, I wish I could have turned the sound off. And fast-forwarded through everything that didn't involve the actual paintings. Also ALBINO ALLIGATORS AT THE END WTFFFFFFFF?!
(I am STILL super skeptical about the "partial female figure" hybridized with a bull. It did not look all that clearly like a human leg to me.)
Read ALL the things is the best theory of worldbuilding but I am slowly coming to understand that I will never be able to read all the things so these days it is more sort of 'ways to cheat' + 'collections of interesting facts' + 'general rules that will probably keep you from totally screwing up'.
I would read this!
no subject
...I agree with every single thing you said in that post about the movie! In fact I think you made the post I would have made! (Plus extra whining about gendering, and dismembered women and the Venus of Hohle Fels. And the cinematographic choices.) Now, to figure out why I didn't notice that post when it came through my friends list.
no subject
(Also, the human footprint is dated, and I bet the wolf's is as well, so perhaps the question is already answered, if they were sufficiently far apart.)
I gather Herzog has a huge fan following for his artistic existentialist films, but if this is typical, I will be an uncultured plebe and pass.
(Plus extra whining about gendering, and dismembered women and the Venus of Hohle Fels. And the cinematographic choices.)
Oh, but I want to read all this!
Now, to figure out why I didn't notice that post when it came through my friends list.
Because I apparently hadn't granted you access, oops. Um. Sorry, now you will see all my whining about work, too.
no subject
I was trying to be forgiving of Herzog because he doesn't usually do documentaries, except that actually he has done a bunch of documentaries before, so NOT SO MUCH. (One of the things that annoyed me was that he was going on about how the restrictions of the cave meant that he and the camera crew couldn't be invisible, and we would just have to bear with this new kind of documentary making. As if every low-budget BBC and History Channel documentary series haven't been using exactly the same methods for decades. And doing them better.)
Oh! Good, that explains that. (I'm always paranoid that I'm absently skimming past posts I actually want to read, or that my reading list is dropping posts, and people will think I'm filtering them our or something. I didn't mean to nag you into giving me access, but I am sure I will enjoy work whining!)
no subject
As if every low-budget BBC and History Channel documentary series haven't been using exactly the same methods for decades. And doing them better.
Yeaaaaaah. I was not impressed with the cinematography at all. Or the "moment of silence" that turned into a heartbeat, because a) I don't think you can convey that cave experience without actually being in a cave, and b) it's not a moment of silence if there's a HEARTBEAT and EVOCATIVE MUSIC (actually I didn't like the soundtrack, either).
I JUST WANT PRETTY CAVE PAINTINGS IS THAT SO MUCH TO ASK?
*g* No worries; I don't know why I hadn't given you access before. If the whining annoys you but you still want to read the public posts, let me know. :-) I feel very boring lately.
no subject
And the whole silent cave thing was just so ... smirky. If he wanted some silent footage is there any reason he didn't wait to do that until the scientists were gone, except to be obnoxious?
I liked the former-circus guy too, and that one junior female archaeologist who tried to point out the gendering issue was okay, but mostly I wanted more cave paintings, more context on the cave paintings (would it have killed them to show us a map that marked where in the cave the various paintings were?) less random pretentiousness. I kept comparing it to the special-access tour of Meadowcroft Rockshelter I took a few years back, and despite being accompanied by several dozen community college kids and having only one rainy afternoon to do it in, they somehow managed to convey both more wonder and more information than Herzog managed with weeks of filming, dozens of scientists to access, and a filming and effects budget.
I enjoy whining! Anyway I am sure you will not be more boring than I am being lately.
no subject
This is an awesome sentence.
And the whole silent cave thing was just so ... smirky. If he wanted some silent footage is there any reason he didn't wait to do that until the scientists were gone, except to be obnoxious?
IDEK! And I fundamentally don't think it would work, because a silent movie theatre is nothing like a cave. It's just boring. I understand wanting to try to convey the feeling, but I think it's impossible.
would it have killed them to show us a map that marked where in the cave the various paintings were?
APPARENTLY.
I agree with your comment.
no subject
I keep bouncing back to the story Jo Graham told in a talk I went to once, about how difficult it was to convince her publisher to let her put Indian takeout in a novel set in Alexandrian Egypt, even after she showed her primary documentary evidence that they had Indian takeout places in Alexandrian Egypt.
When I was at Viable Paradise a few years ago, Debra Doyle described this as The Tiffany Problem: The given name Tiffany is attested, as a diminutive of Theophania, as far back as the 14th century IIRC. But no editor in the world will let you name your Renaissance teenager Tiffany. Just because it's true doesn't mean it's believable.
no subject
"Just because it's true doesn't mean it's believable" is a useful thing to remember for all sorts of fiction writing, though.
...I now want to see if anyone has managed to officially get "Tiffany" as an SCA name. :D
no subject
That said, if I could find something more solid than genealogy websites to back up the assertion, it would be easy to register in the SCA in combination with an English surname; the SCA has no problem with "modern-looking" documentable names, which is why there's a FitzBubba in Oklahoma, among other oddities.
There are no registered Theophanias, which is a shame, because it's an awesome name.
(I, on the other hand, wish the SCA wouldn't register diminutives at all, but that's a different matter.)
I would like to read a Renaissance novel where the protagonists eat pasta in a delicious cheese and butter sauce, following it up with a deep-fried cake, perhaps poured from a funnel into the oil.
no subject
I still amuse myself by the fact that the greatest hero in Irish myth was essentially named MacCool (and the occasional reteller even spells it that way.)
(I am confused by diminutives, because looking through name lists of the period, it seems fairly common for the only recorded name for a person to be a 'diminutive'. Much as today. Of course this is mostly commoners which makes the whole idea of an in-period 'official' name rather unlikely.)
Macaroni and cheese - the universal! I could swear I've read something recently where a modern person made mac'n'cheese for somebody from the past/a fantasy land, and was shocked when they said it was a long-time favorite, but now I can't recall if it was printed or fanfic or anything..
I have an early 18th century US colonial recipe for "cheefe bifcuits", designed to be made in quite large batches, that have exactly the taste and texture, and depending on how you cut them, very similar looks, to Cheez-Its. I wish it was attested just a little bit father back so I could claim in for SCA stuff; as is my sister and I have both amused ourselves taking them to more general historical pot lucks. (I also have a somewhat later recipe for not-very-sweet crispy chocolate cookies, which you serve by pressing a white lard-and-sugar icing between two of them, which I occasionally disturb people with.)
One of the things I am sort of quietly researching as I stumble upon facts is the history of mayonnaise - so many simple, and disturbingly modern, dishes would be perfectly plausible if only I could prove they had mayonnaise then!
no subject
I know! If I didn't already have name registered that I am perfectly happy with.....
I still amuse myself by the fact that the greatest hero in Irish myth was essentially named MacCool (and the occasional reteller even spells it that way.)
Heh, this came up recently. Apparently now there is a whole lot of "well, do we know that anyone other than him ever had that name?!" which I do not think is the question: the question is whether we know if anyone other than Finn's dad was named Cumhal, and if so, it's a perfectly fine patronymic. But I don't get into the Celtic stuff.
(I am confused by diminutives, because looking through name lists of the period, it seems fairly common for the only recorded name for a person to be a 'diminutive'. Much as today. Of course this is mostly commoners which makes the whole idea of an in-period 'official' name rather unlikely.)
Oh, absolutely! My reasons for objecting to registration of diminutives have nothing to do with authenticity, because the whole concept of registering names (and not being permitted to have names that are "too similar" to other people's names) is not historical. I'm not sure I can articulate them, though. (Perhaps ironically, my mother's name in real life is a diminutive, on her birth certificate.)
no subject
(I am also trying to figure out if I could get away with 'Sabrina' in an English SCA name, but this is all very silly considering I haven't even officially joined the club or anything.)
no subject
no subject
no subject
Let me check Reaney & Wilson when I get home!
no subject
A Roman British cognomen does have possibilities though, hmmm.
no subject
The closest R&W has as a surname is
filius Sabeline (1182-3)
Sabelina (1197)
Sabelyn (1297)
But I would have to look through to see if an argument could be made for a locative byname based on a Latinized river name.
no subject
Sabina, presumably, is derived from the Roman gens, and Sabeline from the color/fur, both of which mean entirely different things, which is the problem with going for meaning rather than sound.
I wonder if I could try looking for evidence of Hafren as a period Welsh given name that I could independently Latinize to Sabrina. Or try to derive the locative from the Welsh cantrev Rhwng Gwy a Hafren / my actual town of Severn rather than the river .. and oh look, I just stumbled on "Sabrina" on a list of inappropriate names on the heraldry.sca.org website. I guess it's back to Allys the Cat Lady then. :P
no subject
Sabina, presumably, is derived from the Roman gens, and Sabeline from the color/fur, both of which mean entirely different things, which is the problem with going for meaning rather than sound.
Yep.
Seuarne and Severne are both attested bynames from the river (14th century). I'd have to look at Welsh for Hafren, but I'm sure it was used in bynames. The trick with Latin documentary forms is that usually it means something like Maria de Severne or Mary de Severne for Mary Severne. I do still think Sabriniana as a cognomen is potentially plausible; there are definitely examples of cognomina that look locative.
Anyway, the list o' inappropriate names is a) only pending documentation to the contrary, and b) only bars it as a given name, not as a locative byname. I dunno. It would be tricky stunt documentation, if it were doable.
no subject
1. The things you say make a great deal more sense to me than the things you report Hodder as saying...
2. OH MY GOODNESS I NEED TO READ THIS BOOK
3. OMGWTFBBQ. I am -- wordless. What. This is FASCINATING.
no subject
2. It is full of fascinating stuff, all from primary sources! Unfortunaly the copy I downloaded screwed up the page/footnote formatting, so reading it is a bit confusing, but thus it goes.
3. :D I am glad somebody appreciates knowledge!
no subject
2. Gonna see if I can find me a non-screwed up version, then. *adds to reading list*
3. I ALWAYS appreciate knowledge, if it is weird and interesting!
no subject
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/
no subject
no subject
no subject
(I have to admit that my immediate reaction to 'multimedia work' is 'completely lacking in content' so I haven't looked much at the web sites.
...also I'm still annoyed by Hodder's discussion of the Catalhoyuk web projects in the Stonehenge book.)
no subject
(Which isn't to say that academics don't know more about their subjects than a layperson, because OF COURSE they do. Just, that knowledge may not translate directly into their publishing.)
(Also, don't get me wrong, we lawyers are the same way. Tons of contract language, for instance, is needlessly labyrinthine--and it's because if we make it too simple, we're shutting ourselves out of the extremely lucrative market of figuring and fighting it out later.)
/rampant cynicism
no subject
I sometimes think that graduate school is basically an elaborate and sophisticated brainwashing strategy to make you forget that it is possible to write about or think about things in simple and straightforward terms, and that this is sometimes useful. (In fact I had a professor who outright told us that if we wanted to be writers, never go to graduate school, because he still hadn't re-learned how to express himself clearly and he'd had his doctorate ten years. He had his doctorate in journalism. Although I have heard rumors that blogging all the way through the process can help, as a sort of inoculant.)
no subject
Pretty much. We all seem to have an 18 hour awake/8 hour sleep cycle, etc. There are some things you can't escape by dint of having evolved on this particular planet and no other.
no subject
no subject
no subject
Are you familiar with the monkeysphere theory?
One of the problems with modern life, especially urban modern life, is that we're so *swamped* with other people, so busy dealing with so many strangers on a regular basis, that we hit empathy burnout. We can't care about our friends, families, kids' teachers, guy who fixes our car--and 12 people at the local bank, and the endless faceless parade of teens that flip burgers at the local McFoodies, and the 7000 people driving the freeway during commute hours with us.
I dunno if I buy the M'sphere's limit of 150-or-so. I do know that trying to hold onto a sense of "community" in the midst of a web of connections with thousands of people is frustrating and somewhat scary.
And, on another topic... I should spend some more time sorting out historical ebooks that don't have decent Gutenberg editions. There's a lot at archive.org and googlebooks that has no corrected-OCR version.
no subject
My feeling is that 150 is a pretty good limit for a single network, that sense of community -- a village, a faith group, a mailing list, whatever - in which each member needs to be able to keep track of all the relationships between all the people in the network. Somewhere around 150 active personal accounts seems to be where my journal reading lists settle before I start getting lost, for example. But you can keep adding mostly-separate 150-person networks pretty much indefinitely: reading list, mailing list, school people, church people, RL friends, work people, extended family, hobby people, etc etc. Adding one new person to a 150-person network creates about as many new relationships to track as adding another, entirely new 150-person network. If 150 was a hard limit I'd be pretty much maxed out just by the time I got to my first-cousins-once-removed.
I suspect we can keep caring about individuals in isolation - networks of one - pretty much indefinitely, but individuals-in-isolation do not a community make.
I don't actually remember if the screwy copy of the Nunneries book I downloaded is from Archive.org or not - there are a couple university/professor's websites that I think have it too - but I suspect it is the Archive version. I keep finding really cool books there, and wondering why people don't go there instead of Gutenberg, and then trying to read the really cool book and remembering why Gutenberg is better.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
*
deserved eviceration ofreaction to Hodder'sfoolishnesswriting, but all the books you've described here sound fascinating and informativeif only as a bad example, in Hodder's case. Thank you for this post!