Two more Lapham collections: Epidemics and Comedy

 Lapham’s Quarterly XIII-3: Epidemic. (2020) The current issue, with timely reminders that all our current protective measures against covid-19 have been used as far back as we have records. The ancients didn’t know about viruses, but they did know that staying close to infected people somehow transmitted the contagion. Lock downs, quarantines, masking, miscellaneous nostrums, and reliance on the protection of the gods are as old as epidemics. So are the hostile reactions to these measures, including distrust of whatever authorities imposed or prescribed them.

     The collection also shows that the school histories that everybody knows ignore the impact of plagues. We hear a lot about the great squabblers and their bloody wars, of the merchants and their wide-ranging travels, and the inventors and their ingenious devices for improving both war and wandering. The story of the plagues visited by Yahweh on the Egyptians is one of very few instances that gives illness its proper historical weight. But in the school accounts of the 30- and 100-Year wars which marked the transition from medieval to Renaissance Europe, the fact that plague killed somewhere between one-third and one-half the population is glossed over. Like many other crucial facts, I did not learn it until university.
    Another excellent collection. ****    

Lapham’s Quarterly VII-1: Comedy (2014) Enjoyable, as always. Someone has claimed that humans are the only animal that laughs, and the only animal that needs to. Recent careful observation of animals shows that some other animals display what looks very like the laughter of pleasure, the only kind exhibited by human babies, which suggests that all laughter expresses some kind of pleasure. The questions are what kinds, and why.
     In their answers, several of the writers quoted here distinguish between wit and humour, and several others claim that true humour transcends cultural specifics. I’d say that wit requires that the creator and audience share the same range of knowledge and insight, while humour relies on the most basic prompters to laughter, which are mostly the (usually less than lethal) mishaps of other people. Another constant is the sad and sometimes dangerous fact that authoritarians have no sense of humour whatsoever. Nor do the moralists who believe they have the duty to impose their moral purities on the rest of us. ****

 

Upun my word: a book of puns.

 Himie Koshevoy Treasure Jest of Best Puns (1969) The puns are usually laboured and often lame, displaying more ingenuity than wit. Which means for full effect they need the delivery of a stand-up comic who has mastered the inflection and timing of long jokes. No one-liners here. The collection also shows that wit depends on common cultural references, and since the 1960s many of these no longer apply, and some are now in poor taste. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the book well enough, thus proving I’m an old fogey. I’ve read it twice or thrice over the years (I’ve forgotten). It is a well made book, printed on excellent paper, with at least tangentially relevant old-timey engravings facing each joke. But not a keeper.  **½

Sample (edited): The exploits of Alexander the Great are wondrous and many, but few realise he was an inventor who might well rank with Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. It was he who discovered that timing mattered in battle. He needed a device to ensure his troops would arrive on the scene all at the same time, or thereabouts. Alexander took to his tent to think it over, and when he emerged he had the forerunner of the modern chronometer Every soldier had to wrap a chemically treated rag around his wrist. As the day wore on, the cloth changed colour, thus marking the passing of time. It was Alexander’s rag time band.

Food and Human Behaviour

 

  Lapham’s Quarterly IV-3: Food (2011) All human societies have devised rules, customs, conventions, and moral judgements about food. There some constants: One must compliment the host on their generosity in sharing food, and their skill in its preparation. One must demonstrate that one knows the best table manners. One must show appropriate restraint in eating. One is permitted or required to display good taste in the table settings. One must be on one’s best behaviour either as host or as guest.
    Just how these requirements defined and met in different times and places makes for entertaining and instructive reading. There also some recipes. Here and there, the selections hint at what underlies our species-specific elaboration of food-related behaviours: we’re an omnivorous social species, who would fight over our food without these restraints on our behaviour. ****

The Sea

  Lapham’s Quarterly VI-3: The Sea (2013) Lapham’s family operated a shipping company in California. One of his earliest memories is of watching one of the family-owned ships breaking up on the rocky California coast. Most of the people in it survived, but Lapham was duly impressed by what he saw. His introductory essay-cum-memoir to this collection is alone worth the price of the magazine. The rest reminds us that we humans have at best merely survived on the seas, which we know we have never subdued as we believe we have subdued the land.
     The collection tells a great deal of first hand experience. Recommended for any landlubber who wants to know why they don’t want to sail the seas, and for any seafarer who wants to relive the exhilaration and terrors of sailing. ****

Money: its invention and history

 

 Lapham’s Quarterly I-2: About Money (2008) Compiled just before the financial collapse of 2008, this collection nevertheless covers all the main points, both as theoretical discussion and as evidence for the theories. Herewith a few stray thoughts prompted by this collection.
     Money is said to be a means of exchange, a measure of value, a standard of deferred payment, and a store of value. Historically, the means of exchange came first, approximately 6000 years ago in Mesopotamia. But a means of exchange is possible only if there is also an agreed measure of value, so those two aspects of money are fundamentally the same. The transition of material specie to abstract money happened via letters of credit and bank notes. Both of these were written promises to pay specie “on presentation” of the letter or note.
     In short, the value of money is what we (more or less unanimously) agree it is. That value is basically what we can buy with it. Unfortunately, money has also been treated as a commodity. In fact, a web search on “money” tosses up several sites that state that money is a commodity.
     The “labour theory of value” claims that money  measures the amount of labour needed to provide some good or service. The problem with that notion is that the price of some types of labour may be well below their value as measured in comparison with other types of labour. What’s more, pretty well everybody believes they are underpaid compared to what many, perhaps most, other people are paid for their labour.
     None of the common definitions of money get to the heart of the matter: Money is a system of universally accepted IOUs. A $10 bill shows that you provided $10 worth of goods or services, and hence are owed $10 worth of goods and services in exchange.
     There is fundamental confusion around the notions of value, cost, and price, terms which are often used interchangeably, and (worse) any one of which is often used to express different meanings in the same discussion. If economists could agree on fixed definitions of these terms, economics might actually become the science it aspires to be. As it is, much economic theory consists of ad hoc formulas used to “prove” that some political notion or other is an objective truth. Thus the claim that prices rise and fall according to “market forces”, while in fact some people ask for more money, and other people agree or refuse to pay more. The Law of Supply and Demand is supposed to explain how this works, but in fact the rise and fall in prices has to do with the psychology of the buyer and seller, which includes many more factors than the awareness of scarcity and abundance. It also has to do with market dominance, a polite phrase for monopoly. It is a commonly overlooked irony of “free market competition” that its aim is to eliminate competitors.
     My working definitions are:
Cost: the sum of materials, energy, and human labour required to produce some good or provide some service.
Price: The amount of money the vendor is willing to sell for.
Value: The amount of money the buyer is willing to pay.
     Cost is objective: it can be measured. Price and value are subjective: they exist only in the minds of seller and buyer. The so-called law of supply and demand begins there.
     One of the first of Lapham’s collections, but already excellent. ****

Mixed media on paper 2021-12

 

 

 Mixed media on paper [© W. Kirchmeir] Water colour and collage over laser print.

Why art?

 

 Why Art?

I came across this quote of Jack Chambers after I’d written everything following it. I think Chambers is right: the desire to share one’s delight in the world is fundamental. I think that we make art for the same reason we do science: We want to make sense of the world. We want to perceive meaning. With both science and art we attempt to organise our experience into shapes that feel orderly and significant, which is a pompous way of saying we want to account for the unaccountable fact that we perceive beauty and truth. Keats equates beauty with truth. That’s also what mathematicians claim. Anyone who makes or performs any kind of art knows that it’s true. All art on this page made by me.

“The artist may hope to redeem man’s reality by showing him the world as it looks when it is loved.” (Jack Chambers, ca. 1978)

Why art? Many years ago, I took a course in the philosophy of art, and that was one of many questions that it didn’t answer. Psychology and anthropology note that the making of art is species-specific, and that it figures in everything from attracting a mate to shaping religious ritual to asserting social status. Does that mean that art has only such utilitarian functions, or is there something more to it?

Another question was the value of expertise. Does it or does it not increase one’s pleasure? Is there such a thing as educated taste? After all, how do you differentiate the pleasure derived from educated taste from that of untutored delight? As the man-in-the-street is supposed to have said, “I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like.” And why should the taste of the person knowledgeable in the history of some art determine what’s worth looking at or reading or listening to? Isn’t educated taste just someone else’s taste that for some reason one deems superior to one’s own? Besides, educated taste looks suspiciously like the taste of people who can pay more for art than you can afford. What do rarity and price have to do with the value of art? Isn’t a lot of great art simply that which the privileged classes patronise?

What’s a classic? Isn’t it just some old work that has found admirers many years or centuries after its first audience has died off? Or maybe it’s just what the sons and daughters of privileged families have read during their expensive university education, and which now functions as a signal of belonging to that class of people.

Besides, aren’t popular literature, painting, theatre and music popular precisely because most people haven’t benefitted from the training in taste and insight their social betters have received?

As you can see, these questions all implicitly assume some answer to the question, Why art?

2021-12-13