Ooh, I envy you. Do you like Dr Emily Wilson's new translation? I loved it. Wyman's substack and podcast has a bunch about the excavations to "find Troy" and they are fascinating. Check out his podcasts with Erik H. Cline!
As always I have so much to say in response to all your thoughts -- and I’m falling asleep as I say it -- so let me just pick one: I only heard about the DC fossil thing recently, through this NPR story: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/17/1117165931/dinosaur-fossil-hunting.
I particularly like the idea that there’s an official DC Dino, the Capitalsaurus. Also that some folks view the marble and limestone landscape of DC as an unofficial fossil exhibit. I sometimes try to think of it that way too -- no, these aren’t endless brutalist buildings meant to intimidate, they’re scrolling murals of our ancestors.
"Living fossil" is a good way to think about our ancestor-worshipping form of government. The founders, the framers, I couldn't care less about deciding our lives on what they would have thought.
I'm about halfway through Tyson Yunkaporta's book, Sand Talk, and what it is most solidifying for me is that any ideas that white historians/archaeologists/anthropologists have to say about ancient/Indigenous/paleolithic people must be taken with a heaping grain of salt because there's just no way to know and many of them are blinded by their own preconceived notions of what the world was like before all of this "glorious civilization." It's good fuel at least for my own prodigious biases and I am quite content to live so.
I think often of a paper by a white anthropologist who studied a NW tribe, the Tlingit as I recall. The visitor went out in an ocean boat trip with a large group of men who would paddle like hell, then take a break & during the break one of the older guys would tell a story about this or that time they stopped at the same place & such & such a thing happened. Which all seems normal, right? But the anthropologist wrote about this behavior as if such a deep, commu ity connection to a place was a remarkable feature of "primitive" life & used lots of fancy terms to describe it. Which was so telling in showing how deracinated (sp?) the writer was from any sense of place or community himself, how isolated he was & completely unaware that he was the anomaly, a member of an ethnicity defined by reductive behavior--"white," not Irish or English or Dutch, etc.--but also part of a socioeconomic class for whom constant movement & disconnection is normal. And these are largely the people makibg the rules & writing the dedault definitions of us all.
Yes, I am loathe to read anything written before the last ten years, because disrespect and even mockery of indigenous people and oral history has been rampant. Part of what I like about Patrick Wyman is that he’s not an expert, and has no problem saying “we just don’t know.” And he also refuses to buy into the “behavioral modernity” discussion, which states that Homo sapiens sapiens is the only living human because the others were somehow deficient in “modern behavior,” when there is zero evidence to support this. Everything genetic points to us mingling and meeting over and over again, not a narrative of competition and conquest. But you know, the conquerors like to justify conquest as “the way things are.”
Thanks for the introduction to Patrick’s podcast. As someone who attempts to teach The Odyssey every year, the background information will be awesome.
Ooh, I envy you. Do you like Dr Emily Wilson's new translation? I loved it. Wyman's substack and podcast has a bunch about the excavations to "find Troy" and they are fascinating. Check out his podcasts with Erik H. Cline!
Truly sorry about your dad. Thank you as always especially for the NJ recommendations.
Thanks, it was many years ago, but not something you forget.
As always I have so much to say in response to all your thoughts -- and I’m falling asleep as I say it -- so let me just pick one: I only heard about the DC fossil thing recently, through this NPR story: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/17/1117165931/dinosaur-fossil-hunting.
I particularly like the idea that there’s an official DC Dino, the Capitalsaurus. Also that some folks view the marble and limestone landscape of DC as an unofficial fossil exhibit. I sometimes try to think of it that way too -- no, these aren’t endless brutalist buildings meant to intimidate, they’re scrolling murals of our ancestors.
"Living fossil" is a good way to think about our ancestor-worshipping form of government. The founders, the framers, I couldn't care less about deciding our lives on what they would have thought.
Sometimes, the metaphors, they write themselves.
I'm about halfway through Tyson Yunkaporta's book, Sand Talk, and what it is most solidifying for me is that any ideas that white historians/archaeologists/anthropologists have to say about ancient/Indigenous/paleolithic people must be taken with a heaping grain of salt because there's just no way to know and many of them are blinded by their own preconceived notions of what the world was like before all of this "glorious civilization." It's good fuel at least for my own prodigious biases and I am quite content to live so.
I think often of a paper by a white anthropologist who studied a NW tribe, the Tlingit as I recall. The visitor went out in an ocean boat trip with a large group of men who would paddle like hell, then take a break & during the break one of the older guys would tell a story about this or that time they stopped at the same place & such & such a thing happened. Which all seems normal, right? But the anthropologist wrote about this behavior as if such a deep, commu ity connection to a place was a remarkable feature of "primitive" life & used lots of fancy terms to describe it. Which was so telling in showing how deracinated (sp?) the writer was from any sense of place or community himself, how isolated he was & completely unaware that he was the anomaly, a member of an ethnicity defined by reductive behavior--"white," not Irish or English or Dutch, etc.--but also part of a socioeconomic class for whom constant movement & disconnection is normal. And these are largely the people makibg the rules & writing the dedault definitions of us all.
If only European culture had these kind of folkways. 😂
Yes, I am loathe to read anything written before the last ten years, because disrespect and even mockery of indigenous people and oral history has been rampant. Part of what I like about Patrick Wyman is that he’s not an expert, and has no problem saying “we just don’t know.” And he also refuses to buy into the “behavioral modernity” discussion, which states that Homo sapiens sapiens is the only living human because the others were somehow deficient in “modern behavior,” when there is zero evidence to support this. Everything genetic points to us mingling and meeting over and over again, not a narrative of competition and conquest. But you know, the conquerors like to justify conquest as “the way things are.”
If Rinso won't rinse and Duz won't do
Fug it. Fug detergent.
I never even knew what Rinso was, but I knew that joke. 😁