Statistics, Demographics, Music, Art

Last night, I went to Vienna Teng's concert at the Highline Ballroom with Brett, who was in town this week. Vienna's touring her new album, Aims. Her sound in this record is rather different from her earlier work -- it's louder, more electronic, more contemporary. But it's still the Vienna we all know and love, and it's not the first time she's tried something new (see "Grandmother Song" and "Radio" from her previous album, Inland Territory).

One of the aspects of Vienna the songwriter that I admire is how she incorporates a wonderfully diverse array of experiences, abstract concepts, and places into her work. One never forgets that she's a true renaissance woman -- she just finished up a dual degree in business and environmental science (one of her passions is environmental sustainability), and she was a computer scientist out of Stanford undergrad. Aims's album artwork, for example, is quite inspired -- it's a population density map of Detroit:

http://viennateng.com/album/aims

It makes the demographics/stats/sociology nerd in me really happy. I've always loved maps -- centuries-old ship's maps, star charts, subway maps, hilariously inaccurate classical and medieval maps (like those inspired by Herodotus, for example), Tolkien's maps... (The maps room is probably the coolest underrated exhibit in the Vatican Museums compound.) Maps that convey information beyond mere geography, like this one, are even better.

On the subject of demographics... I can't wait until The Signal and the Noise comes out in paperback! It's another case of excellent concept meets brilliant cover design (the art department at Penguin has turned out some really thoughtful covers these few years; Moonwalking with Einstein and The Painted Boy come to mind):

http://www.us.penguingroup.com/static/pages/features/the_signal_and_the_noise

I get the sense that Vienna must have read some Nate Silver, and not just because she's an intelligent, multi-talented person with a mathematical brain and two advanced degrees. This occurred to me while listening to two particular songs on the Aims album, "In the 99" and "The Hymn of Acxiom." The former includes the phrase "said the signal to the noise" -- while the phrase (or a variation thereof) didn't originate with Nate Silver, Vienna does use the line in a song about social (im)mobility and economic stratification. "The Hymn of Acxiom" was, more obviously, inspired by Acxiom, a marketing/advertising company that compiles databases of personal information. It's actually rather creepy how much it knows about us -- Vienna even said as much when she was introducing the song. (Just a year and a half ago, she'd said in an interview that she was trying to figure out how to merge the worlds of music and sustainability -- I suppose she found it!) Even in her Inland Territory days, one could sense from her music that she was highly aware of, and engaged with, the social context in which she was writing (see "Stray Italian Greyhound," inspired by the 2008 presidential election, and "No Gringo," a commentary on the illegal immigration issue). 

The first step to addressing any issue is understanding it -- which is especially difficult with broad, longterm problems like climate change, food security, infectious diseases, &c. I particularly admire people like Vienna Teng and Nate Silver because they're not necessarily on the front lines, not really within the system or calling the shots, but they've nonetheless found ways to achieve great things in fields that they love and simultaneously contribute to our understanding of how our world works and how we might face the challenges of living in it. (Vienna's taken the approach of having two mostly separate careers, music and sustainability, that inform each other; Nate Silver has found an innovative way to apply his expertise, quantitative analysis, to a largely unrelated field.) Interestingly -- and I'm sure it's no coincidence -- all of these areas deal with multitudes, the masses, the People.

One of the great advantages of civilization, which elevates homo sapiens above non-sentient species, is our ability to consider and attempt to solve problems which affect humanity as a whole, as opposed to merely dealing with issues that affect our genetic kin and the small populations we interact with regularly. We're capable of viewing our species (and indeed, our world) as collectively valuable -- even the pieces we can't see -- and of thinking in the big picture, in the long-term, in lightyears rather than miles and millennia rather than mere decades. We acknowledge that which is greater than the individual, the genetic, even the human, and embrace the possibility that comes with it. (I am one, but I am of the many, and my words, actions, ideas may one day sway the multitudes, whether they know it or not.)

The Rise of Agriculture: the Worst Mistake in Human History?

I recently found this article by Jared Diamond, a scholar and writer I admire (famously the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel):
http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html

It's an excellent piece, and not too long, so you should read it for yourself! The gist of it is: structured, populous (agrarian) societies naturally develop lopsided hierarchies, putting a portion of the population at significant disadvantage (compared to the unstructured, sparsely populated communities of hunter-gatherers). The quality of life of the average hunter-gatherer was actually better than that of the average farmer, despite the relative sophistication of the latter's society; the reason for the prevalence of agriculture and husbandry over hunting and gathering is that "quality over quantity" doesn't apply when one population can overwhelm another by sheer numbers. (I bet Leonidas of Sparta would have something to say about that!)

Another interesting point Diamond raises is that gender dynamics tend to be more equal in hunter-gatherer societies -- partially because such conditions are less conducive to hierarchy in general (see above), and also because the practical day-to-day circumstances of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle cannot support any house-bound, "idle" population, be they women or an aristocracy. Women who had to be on their feet all the time simply couldn't bear as many children in quick succession -- especially since the children had to be as mobile/portable as everyone else. The patriarchy couldn't simply turn them into brood mares, because the women contributed valuable labor and the children had to be spaced at large enough intervals that their mothers only ever had to carry (whether in utero or on her back) one child at a time. (Methinks twins wouldn't have fared as well in these societies.)

This is actually quite relevant to our own times. Notice how, as women have become increasingly educated (on par with men, especially if we consider university completion rates) and increasingly productive in the work force (issues of equal pay aside), they tend to have fewer children, and said children are born later in the mother's life. Unchecked childbearing, it appears, has always been a way for the patriarchy to turn women into second-class citizens. (Anti-abortion/birth control Republicans, I'm looking at you!)

What Would You Do with a Time Machine?

I've been asked the above question quite a few times (I think it happens to history majors fairly frequently), and my answer tends to vary depending on the classes I happen(ed) to be taking, the books in my bag, the day of the week, &c. By now, I do have a list of responses that I cycle through and explain in depth at parties (which, for me, are of the variety that includes social dancing, board games, home cooking, or karaoke).

This is an answer I've given before, because I think it's one of the great tragedies of the classical world:

I imagine the "Dark Ages" would have turned out quite differently had the libraries of Egypt, Rome, and all the other great ancient cities not burned. So much knowledge -- especially in the sciences -- was lost, setting human progress in the West back several centuries. If I had a time machine... I would definitely go back to save the second volume of Aristotle's Poetics, and Aristarchus's text on astronomy, and Ovid's Medea, and Euripides's lost plays...

In short, I would be both the best and worst Doctor's Companion ever.

io9: Let's Bring Back the Greek Gods!

Because they were so much more interesting than the all-powerful monotheist deities people worship now!

http://io9.com/5974126/can-we-bring-the-greek-gods-back-please

Granted, religion isn't meant to be entertaining so much as to provide followers with a roadmap to a pleasant afterlife and an explanation for all questions not yet answered by science. But the Greeks had both those (well, perhaps not always the nicest afterlife) as well as extremely colourful and often interactive mythology. I don't fancy getting abducted by a Greek god, but going to an oracle sounds like quite the experience. (Then again, the oracle of Delphi was supposed to be on psychotropic fumes emitted by the volcanic vents in the area.)

In any case, it sure beats Calvinism!

Hipster Ipsum

A funny, ironic (of course) article I found on Boing Boing:

http://boingboing.net/2011/08/15/hipster-ipsum-filler-text-for-your-next-design-project.html

Lorem ipsum is itself derived from Cicero (and I use "derived from" very loosely in this context, considering how mangled it actually is), so I suppose further adulteration isn't too far from the spirit of the thing.

Oh, and see the illustration, of course. :-)

NYTimes: The City

An ode to my hometown, or rather, an analysis of its continued prominence in the collective consciousness:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/08/opinion/08judt.html?src=me&ref=general

I've always known that I wanted to come back to New York -- that wherever I went, for school or work or pleasure, I would never find a place that quite compared. Where else would you find world-class museums, a fantastic theatre scene, an equally fantastic classical music scene, Broadway, and just about every major culture and language on earth (and some not-so-major ones too) -- not to mention that it's the hub of so many different industries, one of which is the publishing industry. It's a bittersweet fate, I must admit -- I have made some fast friends here at Stanford, and I'm not looking forward to the day I graduate and leave them all. (Most of them are computer scientists, and likely to remain in Silicon Valley.) And yet, it's a homecoming.

The magic of the City, methinks, is that it's secure in its brilliant, often-conflicting identity. New York has never sought to prove anything, never tried to claim any dubious superlatives, never really defined itself, or attempted to. The best analogy I can think of would be classical Rome -- the center of the world in its day, comfortable subsuming other cultures, or coexisting with them, or ignoring them, as was expedient. It required assimilation, but only to a point. So long as Roman subjects accepted its legal and political jurisdiction, so long as they also adopted aspects of Roman identity, they were allowed to retain their own languages, customs, and beliefs. They were, within a generation or two, accorded the rights of a citizen of Rome. Rome did not fear its immigrants, did not shun the unusual or the foreign, but kept them all until they became no longer quite so strange. And this is how Rome endured for centuries as the foremost city in the (known) world. And so, too, does New York.

The Original Snuggies

This is, of course, Raphael's "The School of Athens". I have a photograph of the original in its entirety in an earlier post. The speakers depicted are Plato and Aristotle, which makes it even better.

The Onion: Historians Admit to Inventing Ancient Greeks

My thanks to Lewis for sending this to me; The Onion is great!

http://www.theonion.com/articles/historians-admit-to-inventing-ancient-greeks,18209/?utm_source=recentnews

I'm a huge fan of classical history, so I find this especially funny. I can't imagine the actual undertaking of creating this sort of cultural richness; it would be like Tolkien x 100!

I wouldn't be surprised if some people got it in their heads to actually believe all this was fabricated though, like the people who think that dinosaur fossils were planted by God or something.

Italy Travelogue, Part 3: Vatican City

If you're ever in Rome, the Vatican is definitely worth seeing. It'll take a day, at least, but do go. It's chock-full of centuries of artwork and architecture, and not all of it is Catholic; some of the most famous classical sculptures are there. The pièce de résistance, of course, is the Sistine Chapel; disappointingly, but understandably, we were not allowed to photograph it. We did take pictures of lots of other things...

The Vatican Museums are home to some of the greatest artistic treasures in the world. Exhibit A -- Here's the marble of Laocoön and sons being strangled by Athena's sea serpents, the one that Pliny the Elder wrote about (Yes, I took Latin in high school, why do you ask?), one of the most celebrated statues from antiquity:


The story goes, Laocoön was a Trojan priest of Poseidon, who was in Poseidon's bad books because he took a wife and sired children (this is relevant only because his terrible luck and grisly death is sometimes attributed to the god's displeasure). Anyhow, he was one of the few Trojans who suspected that the Trojan horse was a ruse, and proposed that they set it on fire. Athena summoned a pair of giant snakes to strangle him and his sons. The Trojans then assumed that the horse was sacred (and that anyone who dared to harm it would meet a similarly nasty end), and so they brought the horse into Troy. I'm not sure who had it worse, Laocoön or Cassandra.

We also saw Raphael's even more famous The School of Athens:


This is often considered to be not only Raphael's finest piece, but also the very spirit of the Renaissance in painted form. The term itself, "Renaissance", means "rebirth", and the great artists and thinkers of the Renaissance felt a deep intellectual kinship with their Greco-Roman peers. It is only fitting that the spirit of the era is captured as Greek institution.

I had fun squinting up at it and trying to identify all the people in the painting, but I didn't get very far. The two figures in the middle (under the central arch) are Plato and Aristotle, in the red and blue mantles, respectively. Plato is supposed to be modeled on Leonardo da Vinci (and with that beard, I can see the resemblance). Michelangelo is in the middle on the bottom step (purple shirt and red pants, with his elbow on a box, looking bored), as a Greek painter (what else) of some importance. Raphael painted himself in, too, though I didn't find him until we got home. He's in the upper right, where the bottom of the arch meets the top of the pillar, next to the old man in the green cloak (he's wearing red and purple, too).

Fast-forwarding several centuries in art history, we come to Canova's Perseus, who is depicted in the style of the classical hero (read: naked), holding up the head of his slain foe (Medusa). Here he is:


I thought he looked rather familiar, and that's because he is. Canova made another Perseus, which is almost identical, and that one resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so I've seen it before.

Canova's Perseus is one of the few post-Renaissance marbles to be exhibited so prominently in the Vatican Museums, and rightly so. He sculpted Perseus in the tail end of the Baroque era, when everything was excessively embellished (to the point of seeming nauseatingly garish), and manages to capture the hero triumphant, simple and clothed in little besides his own achievement.

The Vatican Museums also house a collection of artifacts of non-European antiquity. They have an excellent Egyptian wing, and also one with Near Eastern art. My sister and I were much amused to find, in the Assyrian section, this piece:


It's Birdman! (My sister is a better bird(wo)man than I am, I know; I have a terrible poker face.)

It's one of many long-standing points of reference for us. She currently attends the same middle school I did, and one of our favorite teachers is the inimitable Ms. Springer, archaeologist and historian extraordinare, who taught us sixth grade history. (She did a wonderful job of it, too; I was immensely surprised to find, in my Ancient Empires course reader, a passage from "Wen-Amon Goes to Phoenicia", which we read in sixth grade.)

Birdman was one of the most memorable characters from our Assyria unit. I still remember taking a field trip to the Met to see him; I thought he was enormous, back then. I spotted him in the Vatican all these years later, and we couldn't resist.

Of course, no trip to the Vatican is complete without a visit to St. Peter's Basilica. The lines were not as terrible as we'd feared (thank goodness!), and the inside was every bit as spectacularly grand as we'd imagined. I made a beeline for Michelangelo's most famous Pietà:


You'll have to click on it to get a closer view, and even then, it's still quite small; I was pressed up against the plexiglas wall, but I was still about a dozen feet away from it. Apparently, some crazy person tried to attack it with a hammer, and ended up chipping off Mary's nose, and so they won't let anyone get anywhere near it anymore. (Something similar happened to the David (who lost a few toes), and so there's a plexiglas shield around him, too.)

One of the first things anyone notices about the work is that Mary looks incredibly young. There's some debate about why this is; we know that Michelangelo made her deliberately so. Some say that it's an indication of her purity and favor with God; others say that she's actually supposed to be a young mother, and that she's holding her baby and having a premonition of her son's fate.

On the subject of Pietàs, I edited the Florence part to include some pictures from the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo that I oddly couldn't find the first time around, so scroll down if you're interested in one of Michelangelo's other Pietàs.

Well, that's Italy. It was a lot of fun (and a historian/erstwhile Latin student's dream). There was plenty we didn't get to see this time around, so I'd definitely want to go back sometime in the future!

Bartleby

Bartleby is an online database of poetry, prose (fictional and otherwise), reference works, quotations, &c. It's tremendously useful, and I thought others might benefit from knowing about it.

http://bartleby.com

El Cid, Cicero, and Napoleon...

... walk into a bar... I'm kidding. Actually, what the three have in common (other than being dead) is that they were all exiled from their homelands, for various (political) reasons.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

~Aeschylus, Agamemnon

There is something about the concept of homeland, la patrie, the people and language and culture and physical earth of the places we love, that drives people to live, to love, and to die. To be exiled, for some, is the finest form of agony. That notion, that singular spark, seems to have been lost, or twisted beyond recognition, in this day and age. I am a student of history, and The Song of Roland moves me still -- as does, of course, The Oresteia -- though I have read them both many times.

The line is also much more broadly applicable; hope is, after all, the last thing that can be taken from a person, short of his life.

Project Gutenberg

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

Free books! (All of them are past copyright protection, of course, and many of them are currently out of print.) Project Gutenberg is wonderful!

The Classics Rock! (article)

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/02/the_classics_rock

The classics do rock! I definitely get the sense that too many people automatically assume that Latin and Ancient Greek, being "dead languages", are automatically less valuable than say, modern Romance languages, or just modern languages in general. While I don't deny that modern languages are, on the whole, more practically applicable than purely written languages, this doesn't mean that the classical tongues are any less worth study. That's the equivalent of an assertion that pre-modern history is less valuable than recent history, because it was much further past. For all that has changed, human nature remains much as it was a millennium or two ago.

The Classics rock!