unnaming Kroeber

Having removed the names of a couple genuine racists and Confederate sympathizers of their time from buildings, UC Berkeley has now added the removal of its former professor Alfred Kroeber's name from the anthropology building. One of these removals does not belong with the others. Perhaps, as we're being told, Kroeber's actions don't measure up to today's standards and thus he doesn't deserve a memorial, but to classify him with the racists is to do an injustice to a man who did his best to support the native cultures of California that he studied with care, and who befriended and was friended by his informants from those peoples, on a personal as well as professional level. (See his daughter Ursula's essay "Indian Uncles" for her relationships with some of these.)

Most grievous to see, the statements proposing the unnaming perpetrate grotesquely misleading and easily correctable misstatements about Kroeber. If he's genuinely culpable in some things, it shouldn't be necessary to perpetrate libel on him regarding others.

First we have this.

Kroeber collected or authorized the collection of the remains of Native American ancestors from grave sites and curated a repository of these human remains for research study. This practice, labeled “Salvage Anthropology” by some scholars, is now illegal.

He may have authorized this; I know of no evidence that he personally practiced it, because he was a social anthropologist and not a field archaeologist. Yes, it's distasteful. What I'm objecting to is defining it as "Salvage Anthropology." Though salvage anthropology may include such activities, salvage anthropology as Kroeber practiced it - and what is meant by the term in books about him (he didn't use the term himself) - is the recording of cultural information from informants, preserving - with their full cooperation - information about cultures that will disappear when they die. Language, customs, traditions, spiritual beliefs. And also physical artifacts: their tools and other objects, not their bones. If Kroeber is culpable in this area, it's in believing that some cultures were dying out that still had life to them. But what concerns me here is that this statement will lead people to see the phrase "salvage anthropology" applied to Kroeber and think it means only and exclusively grave-robbing. It does not.

More disturbing because more comprehensively misleading is this:

In 1911, Kroeber also took custody of a Native American man, a genocide survivor he named Ishi, and allowed him to live at the UC’s anthropology museum, where the proposal states that he ‘”performed’ as a living exhibit for museum visitors,” making Native crafts, such a stone tools. After dying of tuberculosis in 1916, his body was autopsied, against the wishes he’d expressed to Kroeber for cremation and burial without autopsy.

This is a studied case in giving the maximum possible negative spin on what is actually a positive and sympathetic story. The man called Ishi -

Well, first off, Kroeber proposed calling him "Ishi", which was his culture's word for "man", because in his culture names are kept private, and there was nothing else to address him as. It was intended as a polite way to avoid forcing him to reveal his private name. The name wasn't arbitrarily chosen or imposed against his will, as the phrasing implies.

Same with "took custody." Makes it sound as if Kroeber arrested him and took him away against his will. The man called Ishi had been living alone in the wilderness after the rest of his people were killed, lost, or died (the genocide referred to had been massacres in the 1860s, when this man was a boy), and it was no longer practical. Eventually he gave up, and came down out of the hills to the white folk's town of Oroville. The sheriff put him in the jail as a place to keep him - he was not arrested - and when the UC anthropologists heard about it, Kroeber sent his linguistic specialist colleague up by the next train, who was able to work out communication with the man. Since he was putting himself in the white man's hands, Kroeber and his colleagues offered him a place to live and a job to do. "Custody" was not arresting him, it was taking him under Kroeber's wing. The man needed the help: ours was an alien culture to him.

The statement says he lived in the museum, and "performed" as a "living exhibit." That makes it sound as if he were placed inside a diorama, in his native clothing, forced to act out his behavior from his earlier life. That is not what happened, not at all. He lived in a custodian's apartment in the museum building. He did custodial work, and I believe he was paid for it. He normally wore white men's clothes, and he traveled about freely. He did make stone tools while visitors watched, but it was not as a stage performance or in an exhibit. It was more like what we would now call a docent lecture.

Lastly, his autopsy. Kroeber was away when Ishi died. He protested against the autopsy but was unable to prevent it. He did not ignore Ishi's wishes as the phrasing suggests. When he returned, he and the other anthropologists arranged for Ishi's burial in the best approximation of his people's customs that they could come up with. (Except for his brain, which Kroeber sent off to a museum, and we can give him a big minus for that one.)

Kroeber was in many ways an honorable and admirable person, and most of his treatment of Ishi exemplifies this. If his flaws outweigh his virtues, let us balance them honestly, and not smear him in a mischievous and dishonest fashion.

musical and theatrical news

1. I've attended a couple more online concerts for reviewing purposes. Kohl Mansion is a local venue which has announced the rest of its online season, so I wrote an article which combined that news with a review of their final previously-announced concert, Beethoven's Op. 130 quartet which I was desirous of hearing anyway, and with an announcement of the release of the CD of their Violins of Hope concert which I had reviewed live. I was told I'd get a download of the album for review, but it turned out to consist only of one minute of each track. I'm not reviewing an album that way, and neither should you. So an announcement based on the copious press releases, and not a review, it was.

2. And Menlo's Gershwin-and-Ravel violin-&-piano recital, which was kind of goofy and which I'm saving up for review so that I can combine it with their next online event in a couple weeks.

3. The SF Conservatory of Music has given up on pre-registration for their inhouse concerts and are just streaming them. So I'm sampling a lot. Most interesting was one of those events where the resident professional string quartet plays student compositions. When the first piece started, I couldn't at first tell if it was the music or the players tuning up, which is the kind of problem you get with events like this. But some of the pieces were better than that. A French student channeled Debussy, but of course.

4. Some recommendations for online listening by people not me.

5. Bought a ticket to the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey's production called Shaw! Shaw! Shaw!, three one-act plays by GBS, on the basis of a rave review. Didn't deserve it. Shaw didn't think his own (very obscure) plays were very good, and he was an astute critic. The actors could be seen trying desperately to enact these bizarre and wooden characters. Nor, though these were all reportedly actual pre-pandemic stage productions, were they before live audiences, so no reaction to anything that might have been a laugh line.

6. Latest attempts at soothing late hours with aging thriller movies: Skyfall, only the second James Bond movie I've ever seen, was pretty good if hackneyed (Javier Bardem, then recently out of No Country for Old Men, plays the absurdly-haired villain, but of course) and mostly consisting of Bond (Daniel Craig) suffering through spectacular stunts and muttering "I'm getting too old for this crap." Breach, real-life story about the capture of Russian-spy-mole-in-the-FBI Robert Hanssen, despite good reviews did not work. Hanssen is written as a cranky old geezer and is consequently played by Chris Cooper, but of course. The movie's problem is that the feds already have the goods on Hanssen, they just need more evidence that will hold up in court. So they assign Ryan Philippe as Hanssen's bonehead assistant, his job being to make boneheaded mistakes (some deliberate and some not) to waste Hanssen's time so the feds can swoop in while he's out of the office and rifle through his stuff. So Hanssen goes to have his official photo taken, or across town to a meeting that gets cancelled. As a premise for a thriller, this is desperately dull.

gaming in academe

The U of Glasgow's new Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic had an online lecture today, a short one (the Q&A afterwards was longer), on fantasy literature and Dungeons and Dragons: how each influenced the other. It was given by John D. Rateliff, a good choice as he's both a noted fantasy scholar and a (retired) editor of fantasy role-playing games.

John said yes, D&D clearly drew a lot from fantasy authors like Tolkien, Leiber, Howard, and Vance. From Tolkien in particular came the idea of a company of disparate heroes traveling together and working in mutual support, and a large number of the species of monsters and critters populating the invented-world template. Gary Gygax, developer of D&D, later denied that Tolkien had anything to do with it, but the evidence is clearly there in the first edition, and John speculated that Gygax changed his tune after getting some trademark cease-and-desist orders from the company that owned the marketing rights to Tolkien's characters, after which a lot of species names were changed ("hobbits" to "halflings").

John's talk was preceded by a brief introduction to the game from Grace Worm, a Glasgow grad student. This was admirably concrete, unlike many descriptions of D&D which are frustratingly vague about what players actually do during the game. I was relieved to see that, other than a vast increase in the complexity of character sheets, and the possibility of electronic substitutes for dice-rolling, little has changed since my own brief period of D&D playing about 1978.

D&D is immensely popular and addicting, and I seem to be one of the few, or at least one of the few recorded, who tried it and soon dropped out. A group of my college friends had decided to start a campaign, as a series of game sessions is called, in the then fairly new game, and I was asked to join in. Why not; we were all fantasy readers with overlapping tastes, and it might be fun.

It wasn't. I was thunderously bored, and soon quit. D&D players to whom I've told this have declared there must have been something deficient about how our campaign was built. I doubt it. The rest of the players went on; one of them told me over a decade later that they were still playing the same campaign with the same characters.

No, it was me, and what I use literature for. The appeal of D&D is often said to be that it's do-it-yourself storytelling, in which the players collectively invent the story, instead of passively absorbing it. I'm not interested in that. My primary needs from a story are an absorbing plot and captivating language, and I'm going to get a lot better story from a talented writer in control of his or her own material than from making one up myself on the fly. I'm not an inventive fiction-writer. Nor is D&D a recipe for the prose of Dunsany or Le Guin.

In D&D, I rolled up a character who, though he was but first-level, needed to know a lot more about how to operate in a world of swords and sorcery than I did, so I didn't know what to do with him. Our party set off in a random direction on the invented world's map in search of adventure. That's not the kind of premise that makes for my idea of an exciting story. And nothing much exciting happened. Oh, we were attacked by six balrogs and a witch. We had stopped in a village to which our DM had added a witch flying around on a broomstick. That was supposed to be a portent. Then he rolled to see if we were attacked while we were there. We were. Attacked by what? Roll again. A balrog. How many balrogs? Roll again. Six. That just seemed kind of silly to me.

After several sessions I started taking a book to the game to read to pass the time more agreeably, and then I found the other players were making my rolls rather than disturb me. So why was I there at all? But I'm glad I had the experience, because it means that, when I see references to this ubiquitous game, I know what's being talked about.

English suites and others no. 34

Have another Malipiero retelling, this one his Vivaldiana. Although it doesn't always sound much more like Vivaldi than Fritz Kreisler's pseudo-Vivaldi violin concerto - in fact the opening bars sound rather like Henry Cowell - it's fun, especially the lively last movement (10.59).



I'm setting an informal limit in this series of two items per composer, but I wouldn't leave you without a link to Malipiero's third and grandest resetting of old music, Gabrieliana.

transgressive books

Maria Dahvana Headley, Beowulf: A New Translation (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
B. has been trying to get this from the library for months, but they keep denying it exists and giving her The Mere Wife instead. I simply went online and ordered a copy.
This is supposed to be the feminist translation of Beowulf, but there isn't room for much feminism in Beowulf. What this one does is clearly reveal, scrubbed of all the formal and archaic language that traditionally surrounds the poem, how intensely masculine a story it is. Told in blunt modern language that retains the terseness of the original ("The Geat was ready to rumble, pissed now.") and festooned with exclamations of "Bro" and "Dude", it's a story of warrior jocks, with no room for the pale sorts you'd imagine studying Anglo-Saxon in a classroom.
One major feminist point by omission: Headley makes clear that descriptions of Grendel's mother as a monster are artifacts of past translations, not of the original poem. So she omits them. Though the remaining descriptions of Grendel's mother are alarming enough.
Tolkien is mentioned once, in the introduction, for Headley to disagree with his statement that "if you wish to translate, not re-write, Beowulf, your language must be literary and traditional." I'm sure that Tolkien would have responded that Headley's translation is a re-writing, but then Tolkien thought the only need for a Modern English translation was as a crib: he didn't think Anglo-Saxon was a difficult language for a Modern English speaker to learn.

Derf Backderf, Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio (Abrams Comicarts)
I'd seen praise of this graphic-novel retelling of the 1970 tragedy, so I ordered it too. As a recounting it turned out to be excellent, covering the complex events of four days of protest with clarity which the visual format makes an essential contribution to. It's meticulously researched, as well, with 26 pages of source notes. This is, obviously, a backloaded story, mostly intended to explain how it got to the point where the shootings, which begin on p. 218 of a 280-page book, happened. There's a lot on the background and personal lives of the four victims, something which the story-telling format is well-equipped to fill in, but it also gives perspectives of other students, the National Guard soldiers, and the authorities; and for this, a lot of expository text on the outside agitators that the authorities feared is given: necessary for context, though mostly irrelevant to the Kent State protests.
The re-creation of the physical setting is meticulous, but the art style is extremely ugly and the drawings of faces grotesque and clotted. A guardsman, for instance, is stated to be a 22-year-old student, but with glasses and in his helmet, he looks like Phil Silvers. And most of the people have what looks like a drop of snot dripping down from their nostrils. I'm sure that's not what it's intended to be, but I can't figure out what it is intended to be, and that's what it looks like.

English suites and others no. 33

Respighi wasn't the only Italian composer of his generation to retell older music. So did Gian Francesco Malipiero, who compiled several suites out of the music of earlier Italian composers. His first, and the liveliest and goofiest of the bunch, was La Cimarosiana, based on keyboard pieces of the 18C Domenico Cimarosa, better-known for his operas.

notes

It was dry when I went out to pick up our weekly grocery order, but otherwise today it rained a lot, first heavy rain of the season. This followed a couple days of blustery winds, which knocked another slat out of the fence around our front porch. I tucked it back into place, where it will probably stay until the next high wind.

Still working on a large bag of lemons we were given as a casual gift. (And what's the next post on the neighborhood association list? Someone giving away free lemons!) Having had success with a lemon-butter sauce on chicken, this time I tried a lemon-cream sauce on the same chicken. I very much like the way of cooking chicken, by the way: slice a breast fillet into two thin pieces, season and coat lightly with flour, and pan fry on medium in an even mixture of butter and olive oil for 4 minutes a side. Take the chicken out, leave the drippings in, and cook the sauce in the same pan. It also works with winglets.

I am vastly amused by the distress of the QAnon people who were utterly convinced that DT was going to stage a military coup at 12 noon on Wednesday, that being the last possible moment he could have done it. Why do they think he would have waited so long? I guess only because he never did it earlier, when it would have made more sense if any of the conspiracies had been true. When asked about it, DT would indicate that he was aware that QAnon considered him their savior, but he seemed vague about what they expected him to do about it. Possibly they thought he was mounting the ultimate stealth operation, or maybe they just ignored what he said, which anybody considering him either sane or competent would have to do.

A few orders of books have come in:

Dan Ackerman, The Tetris Effect: The Game That Hypnotized the World
Not a gaming book, but a business book, because the process of marketing this thing and sorting out the rights was far more complicated than anything about inventing it, let alone playing it. Though I did like the story about showing the game to one software marketing CEO and having to pry him away from the computer six hours later.

Roger Angell, This Old Man
I like Roger Angell's writing, even when too much of it is about baseball. He is a worthy successor to his stepfather, E.B. White.

Christopher Fifield, The German Symphony between Beethoven and Brahms
Will tell you all about composers you've never heard of, like Woldemar Bargiel (Clara Schumann's brother, bet you didn't know that) and Felix Draeseke, and even some composers I'd never heard of, like Franz Xaver Schnyder von Wartensee (what a moniker) or Julius Otto Grimm.

Gary Krist, The Mirage Factory
The making of Los Angeles, 1900-1930, by which date it was well on its way to being a great metropolis, and also by which date the careers of all three of the book's protagonists - William Mulholland, D.W. Griffith, and Aimee Semple McPherson - had crashed and burned.

J.R.R. Tolkien, Letters from Father Christmas
A new "deluxe edition," more physically readable than the 1999 edition with the text overprinted on the illustrations, but they still haven't managed to accurately transcribe the letters, even the ones actually shown in the illustrations. This is vexing.

Anthony Tommasini, The Indispensable Composers: A Personal Guide
Never mind that I consider half of the 17 composers covered in this book to be eminently dispensable, though I am distressed by Tommasini's extremely traditional modernist limitation of what constitutes 20th century greatness. "Personal" means a lot of reminiscences of what particular compositions meant to him, especially piano works from his early career as a budding pianist. The book was redeemed by its Epilogue, which stoutly says yes, the serialist hegemony was a real thing, and more of a blight for its awful rhetoric than its music, which modernist Tommasini finds valuable.

and two movies:

Soul
Even though I don't care for jazz, certainly not this guy's jazz, I was beginning to get caught up in this story of a man who's trying to make it as a musician and escape from the drudgery of teaching high school band, when all of a sudden the plot made a left turn and became a remake of Defending Your Life, a movie I disliked and not just because it starred Albert Brooks.

The Vast of Night
Demonstration that you can't make an effective movie out of people talking nonstop, or at least these people can't. Hushed accounts of mysterious happenings and conspiracies don't cut the mustard. I'd just say "uh-huh" and back slowly away.

The Senate: it's done

The Senate was called to order, VP Harris announced the submission of two electoral certificates from Georgia and an appointment to replace for her own resignation from California (which she added was a weird thing to say) and swore in the incumbents. Then they formally elected the most senior Democratic senator (Patrick Leahy) as president pro tem to replace the most senior Republican senator, and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) took the floor as majority leader, and began by welcoming his three new colleagues: Senators Warnock, Ossoff, and Padilla.

"Well, that's it," I said. "Our long national nightmare is over."

Of course I was watching the inauguration. Klobuchar as MC was enthused. Amanda Gorman, the national poet, gave her own version of an inaugural address. It felt securing to have such determination and aspiration from a young person. Biden's speech was also aspirational, but it specifically brought up all the major problems we face, including racial issues: so it felt clear-eyed and also determined. Justice Sotomayor, didn't anyone tell you how to pronounce "Kamala"?

Three ex-presidents and their wives were there, huddled together. Everyone wanted to talk to Barack Obama. Were I to greet him today, I'd say, "We miss you. I liked your book." The Carters had to decline attendance due to age, I guess, but Biden mentioned them. He didn't mention the one who was missing.

Mike Pence, thank you for being there, sir, to represent the transition, as also for having carried out your duty in presiding over the electoral vote count. Now you can go home to Indiana and may we never have to think about you again. And take the fly with you.

Of course I was interested in the music. Lady Gaga was a little creative with the tune to "The Star-Spangled Banner," and dressed as if to remind everyone that the Duchess of Windsor was American. Jennifer Lopez was extremely creative with her tunes. I don't think I'd heard her sing before; is she always like that? Garth Brooks had to refrain from being creative with "Amazing Grace" if he wanted everyone to sing along, which we did; and he walked as if he were trying simultaneously to ride a horse.

Aerial shot of the scene. Look, Donald, a smaller crowd than yours!

Now the next exciting news is the Senate. When does it turn to Democratic control? Maybe this afternoon - they meet at 4:30 EST - but not yet. As of this writing the new senators have still not taken office, as the list of senators on the official website doesn't include them and still has Loeffler (who as an appointee stays in office until her successor formally takes over). She gave a farewell speech yesterday, in which she went so far as to denounce "cancel culture," pretty ironic since she supported the biggest cancel-culture warrior of them all. It's not until both of VP Harris taking the chair and all three new senators, including Harris's successor, take office that the Democrats can take control. You need all those things, not just some of them.

Anyway, we got through that OK, though I nearly froze in terror at a momentary break in the tv feed during President Biden's speech. "President Biden": that feels good, and especially "Vice President Harris" - wow, that's amazing. Well, on to the next step.

English suites and others no. 32

Ottorino Respighi produced another suite of ancient airs and dances besides the three that bear that name. My favorite of his works is the suite Gli uccelli "The Birds", which orchestrates five avian depictions from early keyboard or lute pieces.

The five are, with time stamps for this recording, 0.00 Prelude (Bernardo Pasquini), 3.07 The Dove (Jacques de Gallot), 7.30 The Hen (Jean-Philippe Rameau), 10.26 The Nightingale (Jacob van Eyck), 14.08 The Cuckoo (Pasquini again).

But you have to be careful in selecting a recording of this suite. Too often it's played mechanically, and becomes tick-tock and dull. It needs life and breath, and, for that, no conductor is more reliable than good old Eugene Ormandy.