It's August 12th, again. Three years ago this evening, I returned to my house, an empty house, my family having left the day before for a long-planned trip to the other side of the continent, and it was evening, and I was very, very tired. I had stopped at the store, and I made myself some hamburger, mushroom soup, and rice--an old family comfort food--but it tasted strange, bad, almost stale, as if the past itself could offer no consolations. Maybe it couldn't. I had been nowhere near any danger that day, not at least consciously, nor had I been at any moment of momentousness. All I had done was hang around, when I could, and see if I could be of some use. As is the case with most people in such situations, I bet, I found I could be of very little use at all, and whatever use that was, was mostly indirect.
Inevitably in later days I found myself grieving at injuries not my own, and equally inevitably, perhaps, also feeling guilty for not having done more, for not having been at the right place at the right time, for wandering about, meandering through the day, almost deliberately missing every moment of consequence, every instant where my agency might have meant something, or at least that's what my amour-propre told me. Truth be told, however, there was little I could have done, and probably little I would have done, unless I had been surprised by some gratuitous heroism in myself; but people in their late fourties are not normally heroic, not at least unless those they immediately love are involved, are endangered. So I did what I could, or so I told myself, but it was obviously too little, and I was stuck there, too often standing about, trying to be encouraging to others, a little contribution of jocosity, attempting to dislodge people from their stupor of I cannot believe this is happening. I am still not sure, not only if it was effective, but even if it was useful. I still something like a tourist of one of the few historical events in which I had the chance--the fate?--of participating.
Oh, well. Heroism is not my line. Learning, and thinking, are. So here are some links, as ever, for both of those:
Just like each and every language in the world, monkey lip-smacks have previously shown a rhythm of about 5 cycles/second (i.e. 5Hz). This exact rhythm had been identified in other primate species, including gibbon song and orangutan consonant-like and vowel-like calls.
Now this has been shown to be the case with chimpanzees as well, arguing (as one of the researchers put it) that “spoken language was pulled together within our ancestral lineage using "ingredients" that were already available and in use by other primates and hominids. This dispels much of the scientific enigma that language evolution has represented so far. We can also be reassured that our ignorance has been partly a consequence of our huge underestimation of the vocal and cognitive capacities of our great ape cousins.
We found pronounced differences in rhythm between chimpanzee populations, suggesting that these are not the automatic and stereotypical signals so often attributed to our ape cousins. Instead, just like in humans, we should start seriously considering that individual differences, social conventions and environmental factors may play a role in how chimpanzees engage "in conversation" with one another.
Useful book review about a new “intellectual biography” of John Maynard Keynes. I’m sure it’s good, but if you have to call your book an "intellectual biography,” I worry about how “intellectual” it actually is. I’m still a big fan of the three-volume Skidelsky biography of Keynes, one of my absolute favorites. (I read them out of order, the second volume first, that one mostly on an overnight train ride from Chicago to Washington DC, in grad school.) Still, I’ll read this, I’m sure, if only because the last third of the book is actually about Keynesianism after Keynes’s death, in 1946.
Great piece about Spike Lee.
We’ve always believed in the promise of what this country could be; we’re very patriotic,” he said. “But I think that patriotism is when you speak truth to power. It’s patriotic to speak out about the injustices in this country. That is being an American patriot.
I expected to find this less useful than I did. Behind a paywall, but hopefully you can read it anyway. Some people don’t follow the instructions, but a number of them do, and some of the books are genuinely contenders. (Both Bayly and Belish are terrific, btw. So is Oesterhammell. And when I found it, I didn't know about Ngai's OUR AESTHETIC CATEGORIES, but I'm checking it out. Among others.) Judging from this, crucial categories of widespread interest and substantial interrogation include: sex, gender, world history, race, and environmentalism. Religion in the guise of Islam is here. But what is missing? Is affect missing? Or is that sort-of included here via aesthetics? Politics as an explicit issue seems mostly not visible, except via Srinivasan, but she's quite remarkable. What about attention to the nature of human agency? Is that distinct from affect? What do you think is worth noting about this list, what appears on it and what do you think is missing?
Wargaming in a pandemic at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College; turns out it makes things more realistic, which is interesting.
How did Bach’s music sound to Bach, in the St Thomaskirche in Leipzig? This article suggests how it would have sounded crisp and clear, for starters.
Be well. I hope one day it will be, again, an undebated good, that citizens should stand up to white supremacists and neo-Nazis, when they march in your town.