Jack Vance, fantasist extraordinaire, is dead.

 Will McLean sends me sad but not unexpected news: One of my favorite writers, Jack Vance, is dead. He was nearly 100 years old. Here's an article that talks about his work.

My own take on Vance: when I was a kid and read his stuff, I thought it was intriguing exotic. And indeed many people will say even today that he was great at creating exotic situations and characters. But as I got older and more well-read in history, I came to the conclusion that Vance's characters in particular were much more realistic than I supposed.

 Vance's characters often had seemingly irrational beliefs and practices; these were generally observed by commonsensical characters, sometimes from Earth, and one could easily identify with the observer and feel superior to the others, the exotics. I remember well the day when my own exoticism rose up and took control of me and I realized I could never feel superior to a Jack Vance character again. In other words, Vance's work was reportage more than it was invention. He just had a keen eye and a talent for recording what he saw.

Update: a much more substantial appreciation of Jack Vance.

Frederik Pohl goes to war

Frederik Pohl, best known as a science fiction author and editor, wanted to do his part in World War II. He was trained as a weatherman and sent off to support the US air fleet. And then:

The rumbling and grumbling roar of B-24 motors was coming from every one of those takeoff strips that sprawled over what had once been Italian farm fields and olive groves. We weathermen just arriving from the States had got there in such a hurry that I had already pulled my first shift in the weather station by the time I dumped my baggage in the four-man tent, one of whose cots would be my home for the foreseeable future. At last! I was in the war! The proof of that was right overhead, where some three hundred or so lubberly B-24s were fighting every attempt of their pilots to gain altitude so they could form up for the long pull across the Mediterranean to where their war would start — No! Had started already! Once I was outside, I could see in the last glimmer of daylight those chubby B-24s nuzzling into their formations, a few of them all formed up already and already starting to line out across the Mediterranean Sea toward southern France. That’s what it was, the invasion of Southern France, begun at last! And every American and British bomber and fighter in Italy or North Africa was joining in the fight. The sky was full dark now, stars beginning to appear, along with the little running lights of all those planes — no! It wasn’t dark! Two great blossoms of red and yellow fire swelled overhead, followed at once by the great ker-BANG blast of two B-24s that had cut their turns too fine and exploded in the air as they turned into a collision … and then, suddenly, another immense ker-BANG from a little farther away, as two more B-24s collided … and then a single, smaller blast as a plane flying by itself caught a chunk of wreckage from one of the collisions and itself blew up. That was five heavy bombers afire at once in the sky over the 456th Bomb Group. Ten men in each crew. Fifty human beings dying before my eyes. And the next morning at daybreak, every last cook, clerk or MP in the 456th Bomb Group was rousted out of his bed at dawn and set to join one of the wobbly lines of searchers that trudged across the earth under where the explosions had been, looking for a head, a thumb, an ear, a boot with something that once had contained a living human’s foot, to turn over to the graves registration squadrons to try their luck at identification. That’s what I saw that first night with the 456th. There were ten men, from pilot to tailgunner, in each of those five blown-up bombers, but there were no parachutes and no survivors. Oh, I was in the war all right. I just wasn’t allowed to do any fighting.

Freelance Academy Press and La Belle Companie demos at Kalamazoo, May 2013

Freelance Academy Press, which publishes the Deeds of Arms series that I edit, sponsored two sessions on Western medieval martial arts and historical combat at Kalamazoo's Congress of medieval studies earlier this month. One of them, a reenactment of a judicial duel in the Italian tradition was videoed and can be seen here. Likewise, La Belle Companie, which re-creates a late medieval retinue, presented a show and tell on how 14th and 15th century English men at arms armed themselves – or rather, were armed by other people. It too is here. I mentioned the prominent place that high-quality reenactment had at this year's conference, and now you can see what I meant.

The Battle Hymn of the First Crusade

People often have a hard time seeing how the ethos of the Crusades can be justified in the light of certain seemingly pacifistic statements attributed to Jesus Christ in the Gospels.

Why not think about this in a different way by looking at a religiously inspired song of a more recent time?

Comments welcome. Do you find this strange, exotic, and if so why? Is this part of your personal cultural heritage? If you thought it was before you read all of the stanzas, what do you think now?

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:

His truth is marching on.

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,

They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;

I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:

His day is marching on.

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

His day is marching on.

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:

"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;

Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,

Since God is marching on.

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Since God is marching on.

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;

He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:

Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!

Our God is marching on.

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Our God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,

With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.

As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,

While God is marching on.

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

While God is marching on.

He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,

He is Wisdom to the mighty, He is Succour to the brave,

So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of Time His slave,

Our God is marching on.

(Chorus)

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Our God is marching on.

What does it mean that the soul of time will be His slave?

Beautiful place names in the northern seas

I was away from home for a while, and restricted to using mobile devices. I find it rather aggravating to write a blog post of any substantial nature using the mobiles. Back at home again, I can now conveniently share with you a great entry in a blog goes back to my early days of reading blogs, Strange Maps. 

The maps show the very peculiar place names of the two island groups north of Scotland, Shetland and Orkney. Frank Jacobs, the maintainer and compiler of Strange Maps, says much of what anyone might say about these wonderful names, but he does not address something that I would like to know. How is it that all of these names seem to be English, even if it's a rather peculiar kind of English? When exactly did people in these islands stop speaking some Norse dialect and not only take up English but Anglicize the whole landscape? Of course you could say that the language language of the map is Scots, but then the same question applies with a very minor change in terminology. At what point in Shetland history did somebody look at that rather centrally located site and decide that it was now going to be called Pund of Grutin? If that doesn't mean a pound of something or other, it does a good job of faking it. And what, oh what, was it called before?

Kalamazoo Medieval Congress, 2013

I really enjoyed myself.

What was most remarkable was the number of sessions based on re-enactment or experimental archaeology.

Activities  on site included:

Smelting

Drinking ale and mead brewed with historic methods

Dressing a person in armor starting with the underwear

A late medieval armor  fashion show

This doesn't include discussions of activities off site.

Peak moment: watching a re-enacted trial by combat while in the next room a pick-up choir learned plainchant -- and sang it very well indeed.

Italy!

What's wrong with Niall Ferguson

I have had a low opinion of Niall Ferguson ever since 2003, when he was academic hitman for the pro-Iraqi invasion interests. Following his most recent creepy outburst, Juan Cole has explained just what's wrong with the man better than I could:

Harvard historian Niall Ferguson apologized Saturday for having said that economist John Maynard Keyes did not care about future generations because he was gay and had no children.
The question I want to raise here is the over-all logic of Ferguson’s underlying reasoning. What makes him continually make embarrassing and simple errors of fact, as with his attack on Obama last summer, which Newsweek did not bother to fact-check before publication.
I would argue that the reason that conservatives like Ferguson hate Keynes is that Keynes demonstrated conclusively that when the economy goes into a deep recession or depression, the only way to get back out of it is for the government to increase spending. ... Paul Krugman once wondered, after the 2008 meltdown, why so many academic and professional economists are so anti-Keynesian, given the impressive record of correct prediction attendant on the Keynsian enterprise. I am more cynical. I don’t have to guess. I think some, or many, are corrupted by the big money that flows from upholding the independent role of capital and from belittling government efforts.
Ferguson’s outrageous polemic is an example of the ad hominem fallacy. Instead of demonstrating that Keynes’s theory is faulty (which no one has yet done), Ferguson attempted to smear Keynes and deprive him of standing in intellectual debate by calling him a deviant...
Why does conservatism even have the implicit category of the deviant lurking in the back of its collective mind?
Contemporary Conservatism erects a social hierarchy, with wealthy heterosexual Westerners (and their compradors) at the top, and other groups queuing behind them from below. The wealthy Western heterosexuals are autonomous wealth-creators, constantly dragged down by the foolish impulse to regulate inherent in the government, which in any case represents the unwashed hoi polloi.
Ferguson’s remarks come on top of another conservative Harvard scandal, as a 2010 paper by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff , which argued that deficit spending by governments hurt growth. ...
Ferguson is so tied to the demonstrably false Reinhart-Rogoff paper that he continues to defend it even after its own authors are backpedaling furiously, and continues to attack Paul Krugman, whose papers won him a Nobel prize; they noticeably lack glaring excel spreadsheet errors. (Excel? Seriously?)
The hierarchies are not only economic or rooted in style of life. Ferguson’s Western triumphalism is well-known. I was at a conference where his comments about the (perfectly nice) Oxford Islamic Center was brought up, and he shouted, “They’re in Oxford!” Ferguson thinks it was a good thing for Oxford graduates to run, and loot, Muslim countries at gunpoint during the past two centuries, but is appalled that Muslim intellectuals might turn up for peaceful academic discussions in the old college town. [emphasis SM] He was all for the Iraq War and only carped that it couldn’t be successful unless the US committed to run Iraq for decades. Presumably this is because Iraqis (Muslims after all) are juveniles that need the firm adult Western hand. The Conservative fascination with reviving a long dead and impracticable Empire is just one more manifestation of a desire for social hierarchy. The imperial masters are on top.
The creation of social hierarchies, with people with ‘good’ attributes on top and others seen as somehow incomplete or deformed, is central to contemporary conservative social thought. Christians (or, in some versions, Christians and/or secularists)? Good. Heterosexuals? Good. Muslims and gays? distinctly inferior. Moreover, the government is the mechanism whereby the second-class citizens can engineer changes in regulations that rein in the alleged money-makers, and so it is intrinsically problematic and should be crippled as much as possible.

Ferguson is a smart guy and may have done some good work along the line. But he can't be trusted.

Shiraz Timelapse

Over at Juan Cole's Informed Comment, this portrait of Shiraz in Iran. What gorgeous gardens and monumental buildings!

This was segregation, 2

One of the great racist lies that has distorted North American politics since 1865 is that African-Americans, once they got there formal freedom from exploitation by the masters, suddenly turned into welfare bums, exploiting in their turn the story of past injustices to get handouts from the government. But it would be a brave person who could honestly say that the injustices have even stopped yet. Who got talked into subprime mortgages and then got punished for the crimes of the people who lent them the money? (Before you object read story of contract buying below.) Ta-Nehisi Coates spells out the systematic economic exploitation of the black population by both official and unofficial white actors, in areas where segregation was the law of the land, and areas where it was not on the books. It's one more part of a continuous story reaching back to the first slave sales in Jamestown Virginia.
Coates:

I spent the last week interviewing men and women, and the children of men and women, who bought their homes on contract in Chicago during the 1950s. Contract buying sprang up in Chicago after the federal government effectively refused to insure mortgages for the vast majority of black homeowners, even as it was insuring the mortgages of white homeowners, and encouraged banks to redline black and integrated neighborhoods. The import of mid-20th century housing policy -- along with private actions (riots, block-busting, contract lending, covenants) -- has been devastating for African Americans. 
Buying on contract meant that you made a down-payment to a speculator. The speculator kept the deed and only turned it over to you after you'd paid the full value of the house -- a value determined by the speculator. In the meantime, you were responsible for monthly payments, keeping the house up, and taking care of any problems springing from inspection. If you missed one payment, the speculator could move to evict you and keep all the payments you'd made. Building up equity was impossible, unless -- through some Herculean effort -- you managed to pay off the entire contract. Very few people did this. The system was set up to keep them from doing it, and allow speculators to get rich through a cycle of evicting and flipping.
I spent some time talking to a 90-year-old man who'd come up from Mississippi. His family had been reduced to sharecropping after the county government took their land. "In Mississippi, there was no law," he told me. There was no law in Chicago either. The gentleman purchased his home for $26,000. He later found out that the deed-holder had purchased the same home -- only weeks before -- for $9,000.
...
Jim Crow -- Northern or Southern -- is usually rendered to us as an archaic system in which people irrationally decide to separate from each other just based on skin color. There's a reason that so many of us remember Martin Luther King's line about little white boys and little black boys holding hands. It's comforting to us. Less comforting is that fact that Jim Crow amounted to the legal pilfering of resources from the black communities to advantage white people across generations. In Mississippi, it meant the right to reduce someone to sharecropping, or to benefit politically from their census numbers while not giving them any representation, or to tax them for services they did not enjoy equal access to. In Chicago, it meant the legalized theft of black wealth by white agents.
It is very hard to accept this -- the wealth gap is not a mistake. It is the logical outcome of policy and democratic will. From the streets of Cicero on up, the point was to imprison black people in the black belt and then exploit them. The goal was pursued through public policy, private action, and open terrorism. The goal was accomplished.
If you want to know more, see the reading list here, specifically Beryl Satter's Family Properties.

In Canada, we have a similar situation in regard to native peoples, who are treated as outsiders (sovereign nations) only insofar as it benefits everybody else. The vast benefits that we immigrants have gotten in our dealings with native communities are undeniable; benefits for the natives are generally inadequate and hedged around with exceptions and limitations that leave northern communities swimming in sewage. I can American treatment of African-Americans, the impoverishment of native communities is no accident.

The mysterious slash

Anne Curzan in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Two weeks ago, one student brought up the word slash as an example of new slang, and it quickly became clear to me that many students are using slash in ways unfamiliar to me. In the classes since then, I have come to the students with follow-up questions about the new use of slash. Finally, a student asked, “Why are you so interested in this?” I answered, “Slang creates a lot of new nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. It isn’t that often that slang creates a new conjunction.”
Let me explain. Lots of us use the slash (/) in writing to capture two or more descriptions of the same thing, with a meaning something like “or,” “and,” or “and/or”—e.g., “my sister/best friend” or “request/require.” The slash typically separates two things that are the same part of speech or parallel grammatically; and we can say that slash out loud if needed: “my sister slash best friend.”
Now I wouldn’t write that phrase down that way, with the slash spelled out, but students tell me they now often do. A student kindly sent me some real examples from her Facebook chat (shared with her permission):
1. Does anyone care if my cousin comes and visits slash stays with us Friday night?
2. I have been asking everyone I know in the Chicago area if they’re going slash if they’d willing [sic] to let me tag along slash show me around because frankly I’d have no idea how to get around Chicago on my own....
If the story of slash ended there, with a perfectly logical semantic extension of slash from its more conventional use, I wouldn’t be writing about it here on Lingua Franca. But for at least a good number of students, the conjunctive use of slash has extended to link a second related thought or clause to the first with a meaning that is often not quite “and” or “and/or” or “as well as.” It means something more like “following up.” Here are some real examples from students:
7. I really love that hot dog place on Liberty Street. Slash can we go there tomorrow?
8. Has anyone seen my moccasins anywhere? Slash were they given to someone to wear home ever?
9. I’ll let you know though. Slash I don’t know when I’m going to be home tonight
10. so what’ve you been up to? slash should we be skyping?
11. finishing them right now. slash if i don’t finish them now they’ll be done in first hour tomorrow
The student who searched her Facebook chat records found instances of this use of slash as far back as 2010....

 The innovative uses of slash don’t stop there either: some students are also using slash to introduce an afterthought that is also a topic shift, captured in this sample text from a student:

12. JUST SAW ALEX! Slash I just chubbed on oatmeal raisin cookies at north quad and i miss you
This innovative conjunction (or conjunctive adverb, depending on how you want to interpret it) occurs, students tell me, even more commonly in speech than in writing. And in writing, it is often getting written out as slash, even in electronically mediated communication, where one might expect the quicker punctuation mark (/) rather than the five-letter word slash.
Slash is clearly a word to watch. Slash I do mean word, not punctuation mark. The emergence of a new conjunction/conjunctive adverb (let alone one stemming from a punctuation mark) is like a rare-bird sighting in the world of linguistics: an innovation in the slang of young people embedding itself as a function word in the language. This use of slash is so commonplace for students in my class that they almost forgot to mention it as a new slang word this term. That young people have integrated innovative slash into their language while barely noticing its presence is all the more reason that conjunctive slash might have staying power.

Green paint and other good things

Here in the Near North April and even early May can be pretty dry.The huge overlay of winter snow melts off, but that is not enough to start things growing. For that you need rain, and we often don't get rain for weeks at a time. April showers, forsooth! "April showers bring May flowers" is like a cruel joke imported from a different climactic zone.

Eventually, the rain does come, and in dramatic fashion the first really good rain turns things green *immediately.*   It is like green paint is falling from the sky.

Today, May 1, the green paint has fallen.

Yesterday, I had another pleasant experience, a surprise. You should know that North Bay does not have a Starbucks. The coffee market is absolutely dominated by Tim Horton's, a coffee/donut/sandwich chain that makes reasonable but hardly inspiring coffee. We do, however, have a good coffee shop called Twiggs. I discovered yesterday that I had missed the opening of the second Twiggs near the University. My wife and I sat around there and it was very pleasant. For one thing, there were young people, maybe even university students, not just old-timers like us. (North Bay has a rather elderly population these days.) And they were not dressed like they were just back from hockey practice. In other words, it looked like we were in a university town. Which in fact North Bay is.

I should be fair and mentioned that the wearing of hockey arena clothing that is so common in North Bay is not just a matter of a deficient fashion sense. Given what the weather is like here during most of the school year, hockey arena clothing is a sensible choice. But it's nice to see something else when the good weather finally rolls in. See my remarks on green paint.