LOCKE ON LIGHT & FAIRYLAND TENNIS

From today's perspective John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding beats an entire team of dead and decaying horses, regaling the reader ad nauseam about relatively simple empirical concepts. Witness my relief when I am greeted with the following:

Those who tell us that light is a great number of little globules, striking briskly on the bottom of the eye, speak more intelligibly than the Schools: but yet these words never so well understood would make the idea the word light stands for no more known to a man that understands it not before, than if one should tell him that light was nothing but a company of little tennis-balls, which fairies all day long struck with rackets against some men's foreheads, whilst they passed by others.

Locke was no Richard Feynman, but I'll take my bizarre physical metaphors where I can find them.

HALF-CRAZED FRUIT DROPS & THE POLISH EDISON

In chapter 12 of A Companion to Russian Cinema (Wiley Blackwell) essayist Phil Cavendish quotes Victor Shklovskii as characterizing color film as "half-crazed fruit drops [vzbesivshiisia landrin]."* 

The first full Soviet feature in color:
The Nightingale

Schklovskii was deriding a popular push among Soviet ideologues to develop a Soviet answer to Disney's color process. But this failed to prevent Fedor Provorov (inter alia) from developing a two-color subtractive process, which was used for the 1936 film The Nightingale (i.e. Solovei-Solovushko = Соловей-Соловушко, but it's also known by the name of its protagonist Grunia Kornakova)).

Other exciting tidbits can be gleaned from Cavendish's essay, e.g. just the existence of Polish inventor extraordinaire "Jan Szczepanik, 'the Polish Edison'", who apparently developed a color film process, among a multitude of other things. According to Wikipedia, Mark Twain met and wrote an article about him entitled The Austrian Edison Keeping School Again.

*A note explains that landrin derives from popular confectionery founder Fedor Landrin, but that the quote was repeated so extensively by Soviet writers that its provenance is uncertain.

SHEEP AND SACKPIPES

Leaping headfirst into the macabre picaresque maelstrom that is Simplicius Simplicissimus, I am immediately rewarded with a raucous evocation of herdsman-royale King David, and how his example solaces Teutonic everyman Melchoir Sternfels as he protects his father's flock of sheep from wolves with the aid of his trusty Sackpfeiffe (i.e. bagpipes). 

In his words,

damal gleichete ich wol dem David auſſer daß jener an ſtatt der Sackpfeiffe nur eine Harpffe hatte welches kein ſchlimmer Anfang ſondern ein gut Omen fuͤr mich war

Englished:

"So I was much like David -- though in place of a bagpipe he only had a harp -- which was no bad start but a good omen for me..."

Dann von Anbegin der Welt feynd jeweils hohe Pesonen Hirten gewesen wie wir dann vom Abel, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, seinen Sohnen und Moyse selbst in H. Schrifft lesen welcher zuvor seines Schwehers Schaf huten muste ehe er Heerfuhrer und Legislator uber 600000 Mann in Israel ward.

 "Since from the beginning of the world high persons have been shepherds, as we read in Holy Scripture of Abel, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and his sons, and of Moses himself, who tended his in-law's sheep before becoming the leader and lawgiver of 600,000 men in Israel."

The novel, written by the fantastically named Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, recounts the miseries and misadventures of the aforementioned Teutonic everyman during the Thirty Years War -- an unimaginably destructive catastrophe that was basically WWII and WWI rolled together.

From vague references throughout the years I've gathered that it's something like a cross between Eine Frau in Berlin and a Huckleberry Finn. Whether this impression has any basis in reality remains to be seen. 

p.s. I'm reading the excellently produced online edition on the DTA Deutsches Text Archiv website, which features facing pages from the original, a facsimile and the normalized orthography.

HE'S BACH, AND THIS TIME, HE'S BAD

New Year's Resolution 2017 Edition: Listen to all of Bach's cantatas according to their original performance dates (i.e., today features BWV 190, BWV 41 and BWV 16 from the first, second and third Leipzig cycles respectively, as well as BWVs 171 (pr. 1729), 143, 248/4 and 134a.)

Bach's cantatas follow the Lutheran calendar (obviously, in their capacity as liturgical pieces) and the seasonal flow of the year permeates their texts, so they lend themselves to a chronological listen-through.

I'm using John Eliot Gardiner's glorious Music in the Castle of Heaven (Gardiner's 2000 "Bach Pilgrimage" gave me the idea in the first place), the excellent Bach Cantata Website and whatever other internet goodies I can locate as sources.

We kick off with BWV 190, Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied, performed Jan. 1, 1724 in Leipzig. I prefer the punchier Gardiner performance to Koopman's Low Country mellow, as it seems more fitting for a New Years celebration where every second word is loben ("to praise").

The final line of the fifteen-ish minute piece is the most interesting. After rousing, jubilant music and psalmic ebullience, the choral concludes with "Die Heuchler mach zuschanden / Hier und an allem Ort" ("confound/ruin the hypocrite, here and in every place"). Oddly out of place, to a modern ear, for a piece entirely dedicated to ringing in the new year, but I suppose 18th century churchgoers were used to sterner admonitions.

Anyway, we'll see where this leads.

TYMPANIC TANTRUM

Bzzzzap

So I'm reading The Insects: An Outline of Entomology, and its authors (P.J. Gullan and P.S. Cranston) have introduced me to a brilliant little parasitoid of auditory interest.

Meet ormia ochracea, at left, a nocturnal fly who locates prospective hosts (male crickets and katydids), via sound, and then rather coyly uses them as larva hatcheries.

Interesting thing is, according to Penny G. and Peter C., the hearing mechanism in these flies is too small (1.5 mm) for them to determine sound direction via the traditional time-lag-between-ears method à la humans. Uniquely, they only have one auditory chamber containing two bulbae acusticae (basically one ear, two ear drums). These tympana are so close together that the timelag between sounds is only <1-2 microseconds.

To compensate, these flies boast a "cuticular structure" which functions as a sort of leaver between their "ears," magnifying the time and intensity differential between sounds by dampening the vibration from one tympanic membrane to another. So, they get two ears in one, and with hyper-accurate directional hearing. 

I thought this was awesome, and Google makes it look like a lot of other people do too (NPR apparently ran a piece on it in '99). Of course, Wikipedia mentions it, as well as £430,000 grant received by Uni. Strathclyde and MRC/CSO Institute for Hearing Research to develop a hearing aid based on it.

And here's the original (1994) article Penny'n'Pete refer to on the subject, if you happen to have an account at $pringerLink.

MACHIAVELLI IN HELL

Just finished Sebastian de Grazia's in/famous work of intellectual biography: Machiavelli in Hell. It's as idiosyncratic as it is compelling: Rife with amusing Italianisms, scatalogical digressions and pretty Renaissance paintings, it takes a brilliantly odd approach to Machiavelli, the world's most misquoted philosopher after Nietsche and Hobbes. 

This is a work which manages to evoke an intimate portrait of Machiavelli while quoting Mark Twain ("heaven for the climate, hell for the company.") 

Basically, de Grazia presents old man Niccolo as an off-the-wall, off-color and slightly goofy theologian hell-bent on restoring the old Roman notion of virtus, specifically in the person of a principe nuovo who would restore order among the Florentine civitates who left Machiavelli without a job. Fortunately, de Grazia doesn't try to round off the contradictory edges in Machiavelli's writings either. Dense, scattered, the whole thing reads like your favorite professor rambling from behind his desk about his favorite subject and you're not entirely sure he remembers you're there. The editing is appalling, but it's almost the better for it. I will read it again at some point.

But the most important thing I learned about Machiavelli is this: he wrote a novella entitled Belfagor arcidiavolo, which follows the exploits of a devil (Belfagor) sent to earth to investigate the allegations of recent male entrants into hell that they arrived there because of their wives. Belfagor's travails at the hands of one Onesta Donati, whom he marries in the pursuit of the truth, eventually sends him packing, gratefully, back to hell.

BARON GREENPICKLE

German as a language specializes in absurdly comical names. Some Romance names may provoke a grin, but Italian over-flamboyance and Spanish goofiness are nothing compared to the German monopoly on the denominatively ludicrous.

Take, zum Beispiel, a glorious reference buried on page 134 of Princeton's Drawings from the Holy Roman Empire 1540-1680, to a certain Baron Ferdinand Hoffman von Grünpichl und Strechau. Besides providing sorely needed respite from a succession of unimaginatively named artists, the good baron provides a good laugh by virtue of his apparent place of origin: Grünpichl. I don't know about you, but that immediately puts me in mind of Greenpickle and, well, that's good enough for me. 

Of course I'm still working on the actual etymology of Grünpichl. Duden.de defines picheln as "(in kleiner Runde) über längere Zeit Alkohol trinken," which I find amusing. Of course a pre-16th century place name probably has a very different origin.