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Tagged: history Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

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  hardie karges 7:47 pm on December 5, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: history, names   

  Last names can tell a tale of betrayal and collusion. 

  
  A culture diametrically opposed to the one conquering it might nonetheless borrow the language and adopt the names of the conqueror. Interestingly, even when the reign of the conqueror is long past and the language is but some stains on the bed that just won’t come out, still the surnames live on proudly defining the bloodlines and the entire nation as collaborators and sleepers with the enemy. Not unsurprisingly, the best examples of this are to be found in Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines, where little else remains of three hundred years of Spanish colonialism except peoples’ names. Certainly most Spanish Americans adopted the names of the Spanish conquerors, but there Spanish is without question the predominant language today. The strongly indigenous country of Guatemala is a notable exception, where the majority of Maya-related natives have retained their native names, even when they adopt the Spanish culture and move to the cities. Interestingly, Mayan women, and to a lesser extent, men, have largely retained native dress in the same circumstances, while others in Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia have not.

   

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  hardie karges 10:17 am on December 4, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: currency ( 2 ), history   

  Beyond language, sausages, architecture, and textiles, 

  lies the DNA of currency, or the name of the unit of currency at least, usually based on weight at its origin, silver or gold, once cattle became too cumbersome. Thus the Spanish word for weight, ‘peso’, yields modern-day Philippine pesos and the same with much of Latin America except where they adopted names with nationalistic overtones, such as sucres, bolivianos, colones, and cordobas, etc. Meanwhile Spain itself kept the concept in a diminutive form with pesetas, perhaps to distinguish itself from those same banana republics. The British are still using pounds, as do a handful of other countries under that influence in Africa and the Middle East. This is just like a Roman pound, libra, then the Italian lira and Romanian leu. Like banana republics, the French needed a franc to prop up their egos, bolstered especially when Belgians and Swiss and half of Africa followed suit, all of dubious worth now, with Europeans united by currency itself, not just the name. After the demise of the franc, the widest name of currency in modern use derives from the tiny Bohemian silver-mining town of Joachimstaler, living on in the dollars of the US and most of the English-speaking world and such pretenders as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Brunei, and Singapore. Joachimstaler was also formerly famous for its radioactive thermal baths. Yep. That business has slowed down a bit these days. Stranger than fiction and in true DNA quantum-leap mutation fashion, the lowly pre-Islamic Roman denarius, now as dinar, and its cousins dirham and riyal live on as the currency of a dozen countries in North Africa and the Mideast. This is not to mention the reales of the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking world, nor el dinero itself. Scandinavians also pay tribute to their royalty with crowns as currency as Portuguese do with their escudo. Rupees and rupiah cross borders and oceans in India and Indonesia, even more so if you hypothesize a connection in rubles. Germans left their mark and Greeks their drachma. If there’s no better way to put a value on the world and its many and varied things, then let it be money, regardless of the language.
   
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  hardie karges 8:42 am on December 1, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: architecture, history   

  Beyond the DNA of languages and the DNA of sausages is the DNA of architecture, 

  the landscape of cities and culture, sky-lines crossing borders and leaving traces where people themselves feared to tread. The red tile roofs of Rome live on not only in Italy, Romania, and Spain, but in a whole continent of bastard South American children. Likewise the columns and the arches that still stand in tribute to Rome and Greece. Medieval churches taking orders from Germans and cues from Arabs still set the tone for the religions of antiquity worldwide. The same principle operates on the village level, the best example in mind being the pueblo architecture of the American southwest and parts of Mexico. This is almost the spitting image of the African desert architecture of Morocco and Mali, just enough water to hold the mud together in bricks and the buildings together in recognizable shapes of temples, mosques, and churches. Is this coincidence, or is it more? The only historical connection between the two cultures is via a third, the Spain of the Spanish and previously by code-sharing agreement, with the North African Moors, mostly Moroccan, that era coincidentally brought to an end precisely the same year that Columbus first set sail for India and found America. That sounds like some hippies I know. To be sure, there are enough similar buildings, at the Spanish village level, possibly of Moorish inspiration, to postulate a tentative connection, regardless of the fact that Spanish cities continue heavily in the Roman architectural tradition. Though there are pueblos that pre-date Spanish arrival in the Americas, certainly the classic cliff-dwelling pueblos were long discontinued and the Arizona pueblos use much stone, like Mexican ruins, rather than adobe. The New Mexican style is much closer in time and style to the Spanish, and some southwest ‘pueblos’ are in fact purely Spanish in origin. Given the fact that the word ‘adobe’ itself is of Spanish-Moorish origins, via Arabic and Egyptian Coptic, and the fact that Pueblo Indians themselves are of diverse groups and languages united more by desert lifestyle than common culture, the line of transmission across continents is probably legitimate.

   
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  hardie karges 4:54 pm on November 30, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: history, sausage   

  The heartland of Europe is the story of sausage, 

  
  a well-documented story of evolution and geography, history and drama. There’s something for everyone when people decide to stuff meat by-products into the very plumbing that watered and fertilized it in its formative years. So it reads like the map of Europe: Frankfurt and Hamburg, Bologna and Vienna, and Poland in general, a tortured medieval past converted into the fast food future of the world. Sometimes tasting good is more important than good taste. Ask Charlie the tuna.

   
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  hardie karges 10:40 am on November 22, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: culture ( 21 ), food ( 8 ), history   

  The Hong Kong Café in Flagstaff was my cook and kitchen 

  
  when I had nothing better. The customers were mostly Navajos and Hopis and a few intergalactic stragglers like myself, looking for succor in a plate of chop suey and a cup of hot tea. Those days are over now. Flagstaff has only one chop suey joint left out of the three I knew twenty years ago, and it’s looking more ‘fusion’ every day. Places like this are so ‘out’ that they might actually be back ‘in’ if they can hold on long enough and sell themselves as kitsch, without having to go the way of diners first. You don’t go to places like this for good Chinese food. You go there for atmosphere, a taste of the old days when people were fleeing the Midwest dust bowl, when people were fleeing the Caste wars, when people were fleeing their own personal demons. You go there for the blue-plate special under $5, with a piece of pie afterward for a buck and change. Little by little, Thai or more-modern Chinese eateries open their doors to the more sophisticated clientele that moves in when cowboy-and-Indian towns have been sufficiently sanitized for mass consumption. The same happens with Mexican places when the Mariachi décor gets traded for a more tropical look and hopefully the food gets a makeover also.

   
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  hardie karges 11:25 am on November 3, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: history, language ( 145 )   

  Psycholinguistics vs. socio-linguistics, ultimately rests on one question: 

  could people think without language? Unfortunately there’s no way to test the proposition, because, even if you could locate people who’ve never had language, how would you document their thought processes without language? Okay, so the logic is circular and forms a tautology, so more importantly, without begging the question of ‘thought’ itself: Is intelligence a function of language? Certainly you can’t penalize bears for improper vocal chords anymore than you can punish dolphins for lack of an opposable thumb, so you look for behavior that might indicate abstract thought regardless of any symbols that might suggest language. A ‘mental’ language should require no symbols; it is pure code. I see much behavior that promotes survival, but not much more than that. Furthermore, back to the original question, any animal capable of sound is capable of language, whether it be clicks or whistles, giggles or gurgles; the more complex, the better. I don’t see it, any more than I see primitive tribes building cities. Furthermore, there seems to be a clear correlation between complexity of language and complexity of civilization. Bird’s songs and bees’ dances aren’t language. Traveling long distances does not count as intelligence. All animals do that, for whatever reason, most likely to get to the other side. If there is no better measure of intelligence, then let it be complexity, in behavior and symbolism. Still other questions arise from the issue: Would it occur to people to invent language if they hadn’t already been taught it? Why do children learn language so easily and so fast, which is the psycholinguist’s ace in the hole? Answer: They don’t. I have a better question: Why do most adults learn so slowly?

   
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  hardie karges 1:57 pm on November 2, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: history, language ( 145 ), love ( 49 )   

  We view the past with a microscope from the present, 

  city fuckers viewing the ‘primitives’ with disdain, as though our fat bellies and haute coiffures were the essence of civilization. Even worse would be to glorify the primmies, of course, as though their stargazing was somehow superior to Hubble’s simply on principle. At one point, it wasn’t even clear that the ‘Indians’ were real people, and that chimpanzees weren’t. Things that just seem so patently obvious now weren’t necessarily obvious at all in the past. It wasn’t even obvious that men should seek sexual pleasure in the arms of their wives until the Greeks experimented long and hard, and played both sides of the fence. Of course then the Romans cultivated the art. They’re so romantic. The subject-verb-object word order of modern English and all analytic, isolating languages is a system that is found to work, not something innate or obvious. In a mysterious world of supernatural events, things are acted upon without clear antecedents, yielding an O-V-S order with no apologies. If the S-V-O word order was obvious to the Chinese, then that may be as much to their credit as, and ultimately related to, movable print, paper, and sweet-and-sour pork. They never had a zero, of course, nor positional notation, until they got it from the Hindus via the Arabs just like the rest of us, all except for the Mayas, that is. The Mayas apparently even had something else that very few great civilizations ever had: an appreciation of great ceremonial centers as places to congregate and corresponding disdain for large cities as places to live. Apparently it doesn’t occur to most modern historians that mega-cities are not only not the archetype of civilization, but are downright unhealthy.

   
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  hardie karges 6:51 am on October 31, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: history, MUSIC ( 8 )   

  Of course in every thing is the seed of the ‘other’, 

  
  like thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, or more like fashion du jour, and the 60’s and 70’s were no different. No sooner had psychedelic band-oriented rock captured the airwaves, than it was trumped by an expanded singer-songwriter acoustic-folk style that it itself had replaced only a few years before and an improved blues-rock format dominated by jazz-inspired technical virtuosity. This in turn was couped by gender-bending glam-and-glitter rock turning to disco when left to rise and baked. Enter a revitalized cosmic-cowboy style of country music and the re-discovery of bluegrass and some feel-good laid-back island-rock from Jamaica and you’ve just about covered all the easily accessible options for adaptation to album-oriented rock. Of course commercial singles-oriented rock just kept jingling along mindlessly in the background all along. Despite the soundings from apparently different corners, all this happened relatively simultaneously and the net result was money, Big Business, which, when combined with the corporate takeover of the film industry, re-defined the entertainment industry. Hollywood suddenly went global, with ramifications still felt to this day and probably far into the future. When Thais think of American music, they still think of it as they first received it, with the Eagles, John Denver, and the BeeGees listlessly ruling the charts, and Bob Marley still poster-boy number one for the disaffected. Still, the system worked, and antithesis saved the day from utter boredom. The punks and new wavers came along and of course said, “Fuck all this,” and started banging out kick-ass rock-and-roll once again, with a nod to the Beat poets thrown in for good measure, as if that were the one hand left to be played. There is a God.

   
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  hardie karges 9:25 am on October 8, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: history, machismo, violence ( 7 )   

  Violence play in the background 

  of every encounter between people without pigment, only one step removed from the jungle from which we escaped on to the broad open plains of the future, complete with battle-axes, beer, and long cold nights with heifers. Sounds like home. Violence is abstracted into games and contests, competition and capitalism. For the people of color who stayed back in the ‘hood’, the violence is open, not merely alluded to. The jungle lives on and life is nasty, mean, brutish, and short. Humans maintain their close relations with their close relatives and the price of bush meat is cheap. The Middle East lightens up a little, but not much. Religion takes over where instinct leaves off, and women bear the brunt of the burden, propping up the overweight egos of hunters who can no longer hunt, and caravan raiders with no more caravans. Asia prefers the hierarchy of suppression. You kiss up and you beat down. Everybody knows their place whether they like it or not. Elaborate rituals back-fill the logic of repression, but the end-result is the same: you gotta’ serve somebody.

   
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  hardie karges 10:36 am on September 26, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: history, love ( 49 ), sex ( 39 )   

  Beyond all the silly songs, beyond all the eye contact, 

  the late nights and jockeying for underwear rights, there’s just something unassuming yet overwhelming that drives the entire history of the universe, and the history of organic life especially, and the history of humans particularly. The modern age needs it most acutely, the cuter the better. It’s love, simple and pure, the original entertainment, something to hold you between acts, someone to hold you, on the coldest of nights, in the twilight of life. Old men need it special. It can expand you to unlimited horizons or reduce you to statistics. Sometimes you’ve got to second-guess yourself. What you want is not always what you need. What you want is not always even what you think it is. Just because I need someone there doesn’t mean that I always need her here. I just need the warm wet feeling in the back of my mind.

  Beyond all the bsilly/b songs, beyond all the eye contact, is discussing. Toggle Comments