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Donald's Blog
June 11, 2013 A good book
Joe Gioia is an editor and a writer on the subject of photography; his new book, The Guitar and the New World: A Fugitive History, is a departure. He is studying the guitar, ten years after having bought his first instrument, but his book is not very much about the guitar at all, but a memoir, sparked by his discovery that his uncle, Carmelo Gugini, had been a maker of guitars in Buffalo, New York.
The evidence is overwhelming that early observers found the whoops, hollers and passionate falsettos not only in African Pygmy music and in blues, but that the sheer strangeness to European ears of early blues was very similar to that of the music of the Indigenes. Some Indian tribes had black slaves; some treated their slaves better than others; runaway slaves had nowhere to go except deep into the woods, where the Indians were. When the Indians were cruelly cleared out of the South by Andrew Jackson, there were impenetrable swamps and forests useless for growing cotton where thousands of Indians remained. As far back as the 1840s, the government of Virginia was petitioned to seize the property of a local Indian tribe because they had effectively become black (the petition was denied). And very late in the 19th century, or very early in the 20th, when note was first taken of what we now call blues, its antecedants were already lost in the unrecorded mist. Or almost lost. In 1835, when 23,000 Creek Indians and hundreds of their slaves were being driven from Georgia to Oklahoma, a witness wrote,
In later chapters, Gioia writes about Harry Smith's famous Anthology of American Folk Music, a collection of old 78s on six Folkways LPs that inspired a generation of American musicians, describing the unheard-of strangeness of Dock Boggs, whose 1927 recordings "opened a window on a closed-off world" (Colin Escott). And so along with Gioia's beautiful affection about his ancestors and about American history, we are reminded that the invisible republic, the strange, old America that Greil Marcus and others have described was not about My Baby Left Me or My Car's Been Repossessed, but about being kidnapped by Indians who've killed your parents, or about being an Indian murdered by the United States Army, or about being a Mexican gunned down by a Texas Ranger for the crime of possessing a cow. In short, our cultural history must include the hardship, the heartbreak and the terror of winning a new continent. June 11, 2013 I read the news today oboy I read in the paper today (the Wall Street Journal, not some tabloid) that some people, if they quit drinking coffee, suffer withdrawal symptoms including headaches that can last for days. And as if Lime disease wasn't bad enough, I also read today that there is another deer tick that can make you allergic to red meat. Months after you get bit and after you eat a hamburger, in the middle of the night you wake up with cramps, hives, breathing problems, maybe even death. In which case you don't wake up, I suppose. I may decide to quit reading. June 11, 2013 In the Universe In a recent issue of the Time Literary Supplement I read a review of Thomas Nagel's Mind And Cosmos: Why the Materialist neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly Wrong. The review was written by Gideon Rosen and is the second or third review I have read of this book, and I can only wonder why the Oxford University Press published it. Nagel is not arguing for creationism, or for the concept of God. Rosen writes:
Nagel thinks that physics, which explains how things work, must make room for the inevitability of our consciousness. He apparently thinks that the behaviour of each molecule in the Universe is as it is because minds like ours will eventually emerge. And he is wrong, simply and foolishly and pathetically wrong. The fact that, unlike dogs or cats, he can write a book and I can argue with him about it is... Wonderful! As amazing as anything we will ever encounter! A miracle leading to Beethoven string quartets and the poetry in the King James Bible and the riotous humor of Fats Waller! I would use the word "awesome" if it had not been stolen from us by children who think that a hot dog is awesome. But our brains are containers of electrical impulses and chemical exchanges which have evolved a little further than those of orangutans. There is every reason to be grateful for our consciousnesses, but no reason whatever to conclude that the Universe did this on purpose, or that any far corner of the Universe, where (I presume) stars are still being born, gives a damn how smart we are.
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