Author Archives: Phil

Well, I’m doomed.

Seriously, it looks like the 33 1/3 people have their work cut out for them. They got 421 book proposals, which testifies to peoples’ enthusiasm for this series, and to the fact that there really are a lot of people out there who’d like to read thoughtful writing about popular music. That’s never a bad thing.

Random thoughts on the list:

1. Three Mekons proposals! (Two for Rock’n'Roll, and one for the album immediately preceding that one, 1988′s So Good it Hurts.)

2. This is not an editorial choice that would benefit me at all, but I’m glad to see what seems (at a glance) like a larger-than-usual number of proposals for albums by non-white artists, and I hope the series takes the opportunity to ethnically diversify itself a bit. This would be good business, good aesthetics, and good politics all at once. On sheer musical grounds, I’d immediately buy any book on whichever self-titled Caetano Veloso album was proposed. I’d probably buy any book on Prince’s Dirty Mind (1981), Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way (1969), Isaac Hayes’s Hot Buttered Soul (1969), Fela’s Zombie (1977), Smokey’s Going to a Go-Go (1966), P-Funk’s Mothership Connection (1975), De La Soul is Dead (1991), Heart of the Congos (1977), or Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) (1994). Lauryn Hill’s Miseducation (1998) has always struck me as a somewhat chilly, self-righteous piece of work, but a very different opinion is held by nearly every person on earth, and the story behind (and in front of) it is book-worthy by any criterion. Likewise, I personally can’t enjoy even quite good examples of macho/gangsta/capitalist rap (it feels too much like there’s a drunken rhyming sociopathic hedge fund manager at the next barstool, and he’s trying to pick me up), but Jay-Z and Kanye West are deeply talented people and any competent writer could make an interesting and marketable book of The Blueprint (2001) or My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010). So: more books by and about black and brown people, please.

3. Personal favorites: I wish good luck to the people who proposed Go-Betweens books and to the brave soul who wants to write about Tears For Fears’s The Hurting (1983). Really?! That album almost got me beat up in junior high. I would read the hell out of that book, especially if it included an exegesis of the following dance.

I mean, what is Roland doing? At the beginning it kind of looks like a soon-abandoned CIA hand-signaling system. “Chased by a swarm of bees” is another popular fan theory.

The longlist is supposed to come out in early June. I’ll be visiting my in-laws in Texas, whom I like. So the blow will be cushioned a little if I don’t make it.

A couple of centuries before Micea Eliade: here’s the Encyclopedie on why there can’t be a real “science” of mythology:

Thus “mythology” is not a whole whose parts correspond to each other. It is a shapeless, disorganized mass, yet pleasing in its particulars. It is a confused mixture of the fancies of the imagination, the dreams of philosophy, and the debris of earliest history. Its analysis is impossible. At least it will never be possible to arrive at a sufficiently scientific unraveling of the whole to permit us to discern the origin of every myth, and even less of all the details which make up each myth. The theogony of Hesiod and Homer provided the material with which all the theologians of paganism have worked, whether they were poets, priests, or philosophers. However, by dint of continually adding to this material and distorting it even by their embellishments, these theologians have rendered it unrecognizable. For lack of documents we cannot determine precisely what myth owes to such and such a poet, or what belongs to a particular people or a particular age. We can judge from this how many mistakes have been made by our best writers when they tried to explain every myth and to reconcile it with the ancient history of the various nations of the world. One writer, obsessed by his Phoenicians, finds them everywhere and seeks in the frequent ambiguities of their language the solution to all myths. Another writer, bewitched by the long history of his Egyptians, considers them the sole fathers of Greek theology and religion and believes that he can find the explanation of the Greek myths in arbitrary interpretations of a few obscure hieroglyphs. Others again, who discern in the Bible some vestiges of ancient hero worship, derive the origins of the myths from the poets’ alleged misuse of the Books of Moses, which were unknown to them, and take the least resemblance as an excuse to draw parallels between the heroes of the myths and the heroes of the Holy Scriptures.

I feel like you can still more or less find all those books, injudiciously updated, on the shelves of your local Barnes and Noble.

Economics barely existed, as a discipline, when Diderot, et. al, created the Encyclopedie, and just as today in any good reference work you’d find Keynesians and corporate-mercantilists and free-racketeers (I mean free-marketers) waging warfare by definition, here already, at the dawn of a discipline, you find quite a diversity of opinion on economic questions. As one of the Encylclopedie‘s translators notes:

[T]he neomercantilist Forbonnais and the physiocrat Quesnay differ sharply on the function of commerce in the state, Saint-Lambert defends luxury and finds it beneficial to the commonweal, while Jaucourt and other contributors condemn it for its harmful effects, and differences of opinion characterize the discussions on tax policy and other economic subjects.

OK. So. The physiocrats, apparently, were the guys who thought that a country’s land was essentially its only wealth. The neomercantilists believed in a strong central government, lots of exports, as few imports as you can manage: basically, get a big stackful of another country’s money and keep it in a central bank. What’s really at stake in this debate was whose wealth economics would be concerned with. Is a country rich because the king is? Or because it has abundant natural resources? The mercantilists favored one explanation, and the physiocrats the other.

A mercantilist named Forbonnais managed to wangle himself a shot at writing the entry for Commerce, and this is the result:

Infinite Providence, the creator of nature, intended to make men dependent on each other through the diversity of this nature. The Supreme Being forged the bonds of commerce  in order to incline the peoples of the earth to keep peace with each other and to love each other, and in order to gather to himself the tribute of their praise; and He revealed His love and His greatness by giving them knowledge of the marvels with which He had filled the universe. Thus human intentions and passions enter into the unalterable order of eternal decrees.

Not exactly the bareknuckle competition that modern economics assumes. And given that neomercantilism, from the summaries I’ve read, seems like little more than a form of intellectual sucking-up to the king (Oh, your Majesty, we’re only wealthy if you are!), Forbonnais’s assumptions about early economic history are also kind of unexpected:

In the earliest times trade took the form of barter. This means that a certain quantity of one commodity was held to be the equivalent of a certain quantity of another. All men were equal and each one produced by his work the equivalent of the help he expected from others. During those years of innocence and peace men thought less about fixing the value of the goods of exchange, than about helping each other.

That’s a downright Occupational anthropology right there.

Unfortunately, men waxed great upon the earth, like Nimrod:

Before and after the Flood exchange must have increased together with the population. Then the abundance or scarcity of certain products, whether produced by art or by nature, increased or reduced the equivalent needed for them. Barter thus became difficult. … Because of the unequal distribution of property by division among children, as well as differences in terrain, in strength, and in industriousness, some men found themselves with a greater surplus than others. Those who needed this surplus had to pay for it either by means of work or by inventing new commodities. Yet the use of this surplus remained limited as long as men were content with the simple things in life.

I’m not sure if I’ve correctly implied the connection between this paragraph and the next. If I understand Forbonnais correctly, surpluses (which arise from differences in natural resources, ability, etc.) start to break up the primal anarchy, but only a little. Then he writes, “From injustice arose the need for legislators. Trust created judges, respect made them stand out above others, and soon fear separated them from their fellow men. Pomp and circumstance formed one of the prerogatives of these powerful men; whatever was scarce was reserved for their use and luxury appeared.” I assume this “injustice” arose from the existence of surplus (if I have lots of figs, I can monopolize), but it sounds like for him the existence of mechanisms to check this injustice led to further injustice. After which, “[t]hose who were inferior made luxury the object of their ambition, for men like to outshine each other. Greed stimulated industry; men traveled far and wide or used their powers of invention in order to obtain a few unnecessary goods. Thus, extreme inequality among men extended even to their needs.”

He then gives a potted economic history: the luxurious Asians; the invention of carry-trade by the sailin’ Phoenicians who also established colonies in Greece, Spain, and even Thule (“which is generally believed to be Iceland”); Babylon, which sacked the Phoenicians’ greatest city and forced them to move all the good stuff to Carthage; the Greeks, who got rich through guts and elbow grease.

Rome got rich the same way the Godfather did:

“But the mistress of the world scorned to gain riches in any other way except by the tributes she exacted from the conquered nations. She was satisfied to foster the commerce of those nations that engaged in it under her protection.”

Protection. Uh-huh.

After the fall of the Empire, sailing plays an important point in reviving commerce: the Phoenicians had had a good idea. “Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Florence vied for dominion of the seas and for supremacy in manufacture. For a long time they competed in carrying on trade with Morea, the Levant, the Black Sea, and, by way of Alexandria, with India and Arabia.” This in turn enriches Flanders, which becomes the place where Italian sailors store their shit during long, multi-part journeys (because otherwise PIRATES!). But then poor political decisionmaking drives the manufacturers out of Flanders in the fourteenth century, whereupon a lot of them jump to Great Britain, which is why that tiny little nation became this huge manufacturing power and also, not incidentally, the birthplace of many of the major eighteenth- and nineteenth-century economists (most of whom were snobs, jerks, and grinders of the faces of the poor).

There’s lots of other stuff in that section about the Dutch and whatnot, but my attention is officially flagging. The fifth great age of commerce, in Forbonnais’s reckoning of things, starts with colonialism, which he describes as a nice, chaste little enterprise where you enrich the mother country by getting natural resources from elsewhere while guaranteeing a captive marketplace for the mo. country’s wares. Nothing about extirpation of natives at all, though lots about the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, etc. extirpating each other from India, America, and other places that weren’t theirs. Forbonnais berates his countrymen for missing out on the scramble for colonies: “Yet France, divided against herself by religious wars, remained insensible to any other feeling than that of its own suffering.”

After this, Forbonnais wraps it up with some bullet points:

The history of commerce presents us with three important reflections:

1. We have seen nations make up through industry for the lack of agricultural products and thus possess more conventional wealth than those with natural wealth. However, this has always been achieved by distributing to every country the natural wealth it lacked. On the other hand, no nation has been able without industry to possess an abundance of gold and silver, which constitute conventional wealth. 

In other words, industry is more important than agriculture. Suck it, Physiocrats!

2. A nation that does not engage in commerce to its full capacity faces a gradual commercial decline. Every branch of commerce supposes the existence of a need, whether real or conventional; profit from such commerce provides the means for engaging in a new enterprise; and nothing is as dangerous as to force other nations to provide for their needs themselves, or to find a substitute for these needs. …

In other words, the balance of trade should be on your side, not theirs.

3. A large population follows inseparably upon an extensive commerce, since its transactions are always characterized by great wealth. It is well known that the comforts of life are the most powerful lure for men. If we imagine a trading nation surrounded by nations that do not engage in commerce, we shall find that the former will soon have attracted all the foreigners for whom its commerce can provide work and wages.

He continues: “Thus, there is a useful and a useless type of commerce. We shall see the truth of this if we distinguish the merchant’s gain from the gain of the state. If a merchant imports foreign merchandise that reduces the consumption of domestically manufactured goods, he himself will profit from the sale of this merchandise, but the state will lose: (1) the cost of the purchase abroad; (2) the wages that the use of domestically manufactured goods would have provided for various workmen; (3) the value the raw material would have yielded if grown on the land of the nation or its colonies; (4) the benefit from the circulation of all these sums, that is to say, the prosperity in which other subjects would have shared; (5) the income the prince has a right to expect from the prosperity of his subjects. … On the other hand, it can happen that the merchant loses while the state gains. If a trader rashly sends merchandise from his country into another where it does not command a ready market, he may lose on the sale. The state, however, will still gain the sum paid by the foreign buyer, as well as the money paid to the landowner for the raw materials, the wages of the workers who manufactured the merchandise, the cost of shipping if the export took place by sea, the benefit of having money circulate, and the tax that public affluence owes to the nation. The profit the merchant makes on his dealings with the other subjects is of no concern to the state since it does not share in it. On the other hand, such profit does concern the state if it increases the indebtedness of foreigners and furthers other enterprises from which the nation stands to gain.”

So, clearly, after what feels like a pretty neutral beginning, this entry does start to grind its ideological axe. Interestingly, though his economic ideology is implicitly nationalist (France’s wealth is only the French sovereign’s wealth), he talks about how the English are the world’s best economic theorists. Similar to how Voltaire considers both Pascal and Newton’s metaphysics and clearly prefers the latter.

I love, love, love Open Letters Monthly, so it’s an honor to have my review of Andrew Brown’s A Brief History of Encyclopedias: From Pliny the Elder to Wikipedia appear there.

What OLM has in common with encyclopedias, and with most of my favorite writers, and some would say with me, is that it takes eclecticism to an absurd degree.

Two weeks ago, I turned in a book proposal to these awesome folks. My (projected) book would be a critical examination of the Mekons‘ classic 1989 album The Mekons’ Rock’n'Roll. I got really excited while working on the proposal and am now hoping to God to have a chance to write the book that I dreamed up.

Today’s the final deadline for other proposals in the same series. So, any readers of this blog who consider themselves partisans of mine might hazard a discreet crossing of the fingers on my behalf today. I should know sometime in the summer.

(The reference is to a song from Blondie’s second album.)

Not much of the nonfiction I’ve read in the last few weeks has really caught me. There was a book about the history of museums that spent way too much time summarizing Foucault, an interesting book about the Rand Corporation that really should have been a long article but our society no longer supports in-depth journalism, and many, many scholarly works of intellectual history that were just too specific for an essentially magpie reader like myself. (How many editions of the Argonautika were printed at Strasbourg in the 1550s: that kind of thing.) I like to know such books exist, in the same way that it delights me to know that Jacques Rivette once made a 12-hour-long movie; but I don’t really want to experience them for myself.

I think it’s the time of year. I’d rather be outside, running. Who needs books anyway? Pish. Also: Tish. Also, I’ve been working hard on my novel, so that eventually it’ll be done and then Christian Bell will stop being mad at me.

Irregular posting will continue for the next few weeks, and regular posting will hopefully resume in early May.

As the tab above indicates, I serve as a freelance editor and writing coach for academics. I think I do a good job.

Academic Coach Taylor does not, so far as I can tell, actually exist (he seems to be the result of a collaboration between a very honest, funny Ph.D student and Photoshop), but if he did, he’d be tough competition. In fact, one conversation with him would probably make me quit in a fit of self-loathing. I mean, how do you say it any more pithily than this?:

That about covers it! Via.

PS: Oh, just one more.

That means you, MURAP students!

What most surprises a reader, or this reader, of the Encyclopedie is the conventionality of many of the entries. Given the book’s reputation as one of the cornerstones of European freethought (that term is a misnomer, but we’ll save that for later), you expect, on looking up Louis de Jaucort‘s entry for absolute monarchy, to find a sulfurous venting of rage against that institution. Instead you read this:

The same thing happens when you read the entry for adultery. I mean, this book is the work of French Deists. It’s like a law of the universe that these guys all had mistresses. (Diderot even wrote a porn novel as a young man.) So you expect the entry to say something like

Adultery. Noun. An arrangement about which it behooves men of the world to be discreet. Mais oui!

followed by a nasal, insinuating laugh. 

Actually, it’s very conservative, a full-throated condemnation of cheating. Adulterers break the social contract and litter society with bastards, and you know how bastards are, etc. etc. And then it ends with this wonderful, poetic bit:

Some astronomers call eclipses of the sun and the moon adultery , because they come in an unusual manner, and they are found to be irregular; such are the horizontal eclipses: because although the sun and the moon are at the time diametrically opposed, they give the appearance of being together above the horizon. This word is no longer in common usage.

The long entry on “Art” was so important in conceptualizing Diderot’s and D’Alembert’s whole project that they originally published it separately, as a sort of teaser to get people psyched about the Encyclopedie.  (Even at this stage, in 1751, with over twenty years of work to go, the Encyclopedists were already mired in controversy; bundled along with the standalone version of this entry was an open letter to some Jesuit who’d gotten pissed off by their Prospectus. I wish I could get people that riled by describing books I’m gonna someday write if I get around to it.)

It’s important because it discusses D&A’s intention to cover the so-called “useful” arts: the trades, in other words. This was a big deal, and it remains controversial even now. In their time they were criticized for devoting resources to such earthly arts as printing and glassblowing (rather than to theology and to the personal awesomeness of the royal line); more recent scholars have interpreted D&A’s interest as a sort of middlebrow power grab, one designed to reduce the control that professional guilds had enjoyed over trade secrets. (This critique chaps my ass for all kinds of reasons, starting with the fact that being Denis Diderot probably wasn’t exactly an exercise in what we’d now think of as bourgeois comfort, what with the three months in a dungeon and all.)

At any rate, Diderot spends several pages arguing, with much help from Francis Bacon, that the trades are awfully nice things to have around. He’s especially grateful to the person “who wrested from the English the secret of the machine for producing hosiery, from the Genoese their velvet, from the Venetians their mirrors,” which turns out to be a fellow he calls Colbert, and with whom Diderot seems to be in love.

Us liberals just can’t shut up about him, can we?

Well, actually, the Colbert involved here seems to be this one, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who served as France’s Minister of Finance from 1665 to 1683, and … um, did all that stuff I just talked about.

So. In the eternal debate between the Breakfast Club characters of Anthony Michael Hall and Judd Nelson, it would seem the Encyclopedists side squarely with the latter. “Bender, did you know without trigonometry there’d be no engineering?” “Without lamps, there’d be no light.”

Do you hear this? Or do I have to turn it up?

What I noticed, however, was the ingenious way Diderot solves a big practical problem for anyone who would write about how the trades came to exist: their origins are lost to history. We don’t actually know, or at least he didn’t, how it happened that the first guy blew the first glass. (Wikipedia says it was the Phoenicians.) So he defends, in essence, speculative reconstruction—what we might call “making shit up”—as a sort of standin for this lost knowledge.

Often we do not know the origin of a mechanical art or have only vague information on its progress. That is the natural consequence of the scorn in which those who engage in these arts have been held at all times and in every learned or warlike nation. In such a situation we must have recourse to philosophic suppositions, begin from some probable hypothesis, from some first fortuitous event, and proceed from there until we reach the point to which the art has advanced. I shall explain this by an example, and I prefer to take it from the mechanical arts, which are not so well known, rather than from the liberal arts which have been described in a thousand different ways. If the origin and progress of glassmaking or papermaking were unknown, what would a philosopher do if he intended to write the history of these arts? He would suppose that a piece of cloth had accidentally fallen into a container filled with water and had remained in it long enough to dissolve, so that when the container was emptied it was found to have in it, instead of a piece of cloth, only a kind of sediment. It would have been difficult to determine the nature of that sediment, had it not been for a few remaining filaments which indicated that the original matter of the sediment had been cloth. As far as glassmaking is concerned, he would suppose that the first solid dwellings built by men were made of baked clay or brick. Now it is impossible to burn brick in a strong fire without some part of it vitrifying, and it is in this form that glass first occurred. But how far removed this dirty greenish shard is from the pure, transparent matter used in windows, etc.! Yet this or a similar fortuitous happening is the starting point from which the philosopher will proceed to the present state of glassmaking. … By this procedure the progress of an art would be presented in a clearer and more instructive manner than by its true history, if that were known. The difficulties that had to be overcome to improve the art would occur in an entirely natural order, the synthetic explanation of its successive steps would render it comprehensible even for very average minds, and this would divert artists onto the path leading to perfection.

It’s interesting that he not only defends the usefulness of what are in effect just-so stories (technically, the ad hoc fallacy), but he considers them more worth having than the actual facts would be. This nags at me for some reason: it seems important, though I’m not sure why. It’s a position I can’t quite imagine a modern writer of an equivalent work—an author writing for children about the origins of the universe, or a pop-prehistorian—being quite so comfortable with the unavoidability of this kind of speculation. When we do it now, we’re certainly not so open about it. It embarrasses us to admit that even hard science involves a certain degree of storytelling, a little core of unfalsifiable guesswork.

Because of course I’m not reading the whole thing. (You can, if you want, over here.)

I have been fascinated with this book since the semester in grad school when I took a course on research methods and a course on eighteenth century Britlit, both with Dr. Stephen Karian, a nice guy and a smart man. (I believe there’s a saying that describes people like that.) The Encyclopedie came up in both classes. By any criterion—size, comprehensiveness, social reach, use of alphabetic rather than importance-of-the-subject order, treatment of theology as something less than the queen of the sciences, the fact that it didn’t achieve “completeness” simply by absorbing libraries whole in the manner of Chinese encyclopedias—it was the first modern encyclopedia.

And the story behind it is full enough of crazy anecdotes to gladden the heart of Laurence Sterne. (If not my hero Samuel Johnson, who probably hated the thing.) So, first of all, it wasn’t supposed to be some major publishing project at all. It was supposed to be a simple French translation of Chambers’ Cyclopedia, which was one of the biggest works of the kind available in Europe. It was in two volumes. To us, that’s an almanac or something, maybe. Or a Princeton Companion. Not a bloody encyclopedia.

So. Some guy named Mills got hired to translate this thing into French. He “worked on it” for two years, in the way some of us “work on” our dissertations and theses. They didn’t have YouTube back then, so I’m going to guess he was just straight-up drunk. The translation went on sale in 1745, which was kind of a problem because it did not exist. Mills didn’t even have a copy of the book.

The printer hit him with a cane, got sued by Mills, and won, because the Court felt like Mills had acted like such a moron that he deserved to get hit by a cane. The controversy between Franzen and whomever-it-is-this-week just seems so boring when you hear stories like this.

Anyway, Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D’Alembert, among others, were hired to just go ahead and make a whole new book in place of this silly thing. Diderot’s claim to fame, at that point, was a novel about talking vaginas.

The story just gets awesomer after that. The work itself, if it so far has failed to offer much in the way of chatty orifices, is still a good deal saltier than the average reference work, and one of the most enjoyable books of any kind I’ve read in several months. To give an example of its pleasures, I here include the entry for Aguaxima, written by Diderot, who already here seems to foresee some of the problems raised by the genre he created:

Aguaxima, a plant growing in Brazil and on the islands of South America. This is all that we are told about it; and I would like to know for whom such descriptions are made. It cannot be for the natives of the countries concerned, who are likely to know more about the aguaxima than is contained in this description, and who do not need to learn that the aguaxima grows in their country. It is as if you said to a Frenchman that the pear tree is a tree that grows in France, in Germany, etc . It is not meant for us either, for what do we care that there is a tree in Brazil named aguaxima , if all we know about it is its name? What is the point of giving the name? It leaves the ignorant just as they were and teaches the rest of us nothing. If all the same I mention this plant here, along with several others that are described just as poorly, then it is out of consideration for certain readers who prefer to find nothing in a dictionary article or even to find something stupid than to find no article at all.