Jackson and Anya had been doing the duet singing thing for a little while before they got picked up by the folks from the Crooked Road, Southwest Virginia's juggernaut of cultural tourism. Carter Fold, the Floyd Country Store, Olen Gardner's workshop, and a bucketload of string bands intended to showcase the authentic sound of the Virginia Appalachian mountains. This caused at least some anguish for Jackson: the thing is, he's not from the Appalachians. He's from Portland, Oregon. Like me, he cut his teeth as a punk musician, and has the tattoos and the piercing scars to prove it. For him, old-time and bluegrass music was a redemption, not a birthright. So it made him uneasy to be showcased as an example of the sound of the mountains.

I can sympathize with that. I have no idea how often I've been photographed, recorded, or videotaped by tourists in pursuit of some glimpse of a "folk culture" that largely doesn't exist. Once money gets involved, it becomes more about entertainment than preservation. The Crooked Road is a fine example of it. When money came into the Floyd Country Store, it got bright lights, a professional sound system, and retail galore: brand new barrels of candy, a restored antique soda fountain, and a Carhart shop so the cultural tourists can buy authentic country overalls. None of that is necessarily a bad thing, but it is a manufactured thing. When you bring in the antique soda fountain with state grant money, you're restoring the place to something it never was, but to what the cultural tourists want and expect it to be. And the irony is that it keeps things alive, but changed. The store can pay the bands now, which it never did before. The music hasn't changed significantly since the money showed up. Our CD sales are up. How can you really complain? But I share Jackson's discomfort. I'm an Dutch-Irish descended, California-born, Pennsylvania-raised punk turned old-time musician. I don't make any claims to the contrary, but I'm sure it's not what the throngs of tourists are thinking when they photograph me on stage. They think they're getting Appalachian culture. And, in a sense, they are.

But about the CD: when it's good, it's very, very good. The duet singing on the slower songs is sublime. "Wild Bill Jones" will never again be the same tune for me. The bluegrass tunes impress me much less. Bluegrass is, by definition, kind of busy, and the vocal harmonies do best with more space around them. So of the 14 tracks on the CD, there are about four that I listen to, and usually skip the rest. But those few tracks are worth the price of admission. When you hear Anya and Jackson do "Moonshiner" a cappella, you won't worry about where they're from or whether the sound is authentic enough. You'll be absorbed by great singing and a great melody, and that's as much as any music lover can ask.

Donc, j'ai emprunté Les fleurs du Coran d'une amie qui étudie le français. Je ne savais rien du livre, donc j'étais sans prévision. Et ce me plaît à dire que je l'ai aimé. C'est une histoire un peu fantastique -- pas fantastique comme Marquez ou Calvino, mais une histoire d'un enfant ordinaire qui fait des choses extraordinaires, à cause de l'assistance d'un épicière musulman. Monsieur Ibrahim est sufi sans famille, et Momo est enfant abandonné par la sienne. Le vieux est mentor et père adopté pour le jeune, et le deux appris beaucoup de l'un à l'autre.

Malheureusement, je crois que je suis arrêté apprendre plus de français maintenant. C'est impossible d'apprendre une langue tout seul. Si je ne suivrais pas d'autre cours ni habite dans un pays francophone, je ne sais pas si je peut avancer. En lisant et en écrivant tout seul, je peut espérer de ne laisser pas ce que j'aie maintenant, mais c'est tout.

Peut-être c'est l'heure d'apprendre un peu d'espagnol...

One example: Levitin observes that most of us don't mind not being expert at our hobbies. When we go out to play a game of basketball with our friends, we aren't bothered that we aren't NBA superstars. We shoot some hoops, maybe we're competitive or maybe we aren't, and we go home. But most of us are embarrassed to make music or sing in public, because we think we aren't good at it. Not being good at basketball doesn't embarrass us; singing badly does. Levitin makes the observation, which I think is astute in itself. He offers what seems on the surface to be a plausibly social explanation -- we're encultured into it. Levitin claims that particularly in pre-technological cultures, music and dance aren't something reserved for experts; they are things in which everyone participates.

It does sound plausible, but it also undermines much of what he's doing in the rest of the book, which is to show the biological and neurological basis for music creation and appreciation. If that's his line, I'd like to have seen him follow through on it. I can see a couple of openings:

1. Levitin makes the case that music has an evolutionary origin. Birds sing to communicate, to establish territory, or to find a mate. Male birds with a wider vocabulary of songs are more successful at mating than those with a smaller vocabulary. Clearly consistency has to be a factor: a mating song has to sound like a mating song every time. If it were mixed up with a song to warn of predators, it would be counter-productive. As such, we could convincingly argue that singing with accuracy, reproducibility, and consistency confers a reproductive and survival advantage, and that having a good ear for hearing the songs does likewise, at least for birds. If human music is analogous to bird song (and it's not at all obvious to me that it would be, but Levitin makes the case for it), then it would follow that we are genetically and biologically predisposed to want to sing well, and to shun those who sing badly. Which is to say that our embarrassment is not strictly or even primarily cultural, but has a strong selection component. Of course, I don't actually believe that, but it would be more consistent with the rest of Levitin's argument than the somewhat weaker "It's cultural" claim.
2. The other possible line that I see (and the one that I find more plausible, despite not really being mutually exclusive with the evolutionary explanation) is more developmental. An observation: almost no children are concerned about the quality of their public singing or dancing, unless seriously pressured by an adult. It's not until pre-adolescence that we become mortified to sing in public. Certainly that's partly just cultural, but more importantly, it's when we cross the developmental threshold out of childhood that we become truly self-aware. Embarrassment requires self-awareness; it requires that we realize that we've done something different, that there's a norm and that we're outside of it. So what of those pre-technological cultures where there seems to be no taboo about singing? It's not that they're childlike; it's that their music-making is (if I may generalize) tribal. It's not about individuals, but about subsuming the individual to the collective. Church singing does exactly the same. Most of the congregation enjoy singing in unison, but most would abhor being a soloist. If we can bring the tribal element of music back into everyday life, we can resurrect the the group serotonin high that lets us overcome our individualistic embarrassment.

You're welcome.

I think we've all felt like the elf who just can't quite get his pants on. Time for spring, I say!

People like categories. We like to know who's a Christian, a Muslim, an atheist, a Buddhist, a Republican or Democrat. It lets us make quick judgments about people, based on our predispositions about what those things mean. And most of us like to fit into categories, because it's expedient. Once I call myself a Pentecostal or a Libertarian, I don't have sort out every thorny issue of doctrine or politics myself -- I can just ask my Pentecostal pastor or Ron Paul what's good. And most of us adopt our religion or politics from our family. It's rare for Baptists to have a Muslim child, and vice versa. As the twig is bent, so grows the tree. But if we feel uneasy about our category later in life, we go fishing. The Information Age makes the fishing more interesting. An American Civil War soul-searcher wouldn't have much opportunity to become a Taoist; where would he find out about it? These days, we have toys like the Belief-O-Matic and the Political Compass Test to tell us our orientation. (I'm apparently a Socialist and a Universalist, if you want the handy categories.)

The problem is that the categories hide at least as much as they reveal. The standard opening questions to religious discussions is "Do You Believe in God?", and as soon as it's spoken, it's already a bad question. The Buddhist and the Baptist both say "yes", but of course they aren't talking about the same thing at all. My standard answer is "You tell me what 'god' means, and I'll tell you whether I believe in it." Because if you really need a category, I'm basically an atheist. But only basically. I find it crazy to think that there's some super-human intelligent being out in space somewhere that controls human lives but nonetheless has human characteristics like a will, desires, and rationality. I understand why people want to believe it -- it's nice to think of a divine being that's just like us, but more perfect -- but that doesn't make it an accurate picture of the world. So basically, atheist. But for most people, that category also implies some unwavering faith in human reason, human science, and naturalistic explanations of the unexplainable. And here is where I depart from the label, and nuance enters.

I don't think human rationality is a sufficient tool to explain the world. And I don't think any possible human science can understand it, either. I find that idea nearly as arrogant and crazy as the idea of a giant bearded Caucasian pulling the cosmic strings from heaven. We humans have about three pounds of goo in our heads, connected to another few ounces of sense organs. The whole enchilada took on its modern form barely a half million years ago; the universe, by contrast is somewhere in the neighborhood of 13 billion years old. So our little head full of modern neurons has existed for about .004% of the history of the universe. That ain't much. We've had anything like "science" for about 500 years of that; maybe more if we're generous to the Greeks. Do I think that our little bucket of monkey brains is capable of perceiving much of the universe, let alone explaining it with this new-fangled "science" thing? Please. It's more likely that I could explain calculus to my cat.

So I'm very willing to accept that our experience of the universe is a minute portion of what's actually going on -- .004% seems as reasonable a guess as any. I'm willing to accept that we may observe phenomena that are fundamentally unexplainable, because we're experiencing a tiny sliver of something much, much bigger. And I'm willing to accept that if we stick around long enough to give our brains a couple million more years to evolve, we'll be able to perceive and understand a whole lot more. Not merely because scientific understanding has advanced, but because our sensory and cognitive capacities will have advanced. In the mean time, we're operating with a scarcity of information and very imperfect models, and we muddle along with those as well as we're able. If somebody wants to take that vast sea of what we can't perceive and couldn't possibly understand with our little monkey brains and call it "god", I don't have a problem with that. But don't pretend for a second that you know what's in that sea, and certainly don't tell me that it looks just like us, but more perfect, and that it "loves" or "wants" or "gets jealous" or any of those other petty things that our monkey brains do. I think Wittgenstein nailed this one in the Tractatus -- "What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence."

So science and religion are both just imperfect models, and one is just as good as the other, right? Not so fast, cowboy. They definitely address different domains, and solve different sets of human problems. You can't run your car on prayer or transcendental meditation, and you probably can't learn to love your fellow man by drinking gasoline. I'm not personally very interested in the question of truth-seeking in either science or spirituality, because I don't think that our bucket of monkey brains can get very far in that direction. I am, however, very interested in improving the human condition and solving problems in the realms of perception to which we do have access. Scientific pursuit has done a pretty good job of that. I'm willing to say that since the days of Sir Francis Bacon, both quantity and quality of life have improved. Sure, we've also made atomic weapons and designer plagues, but on the whole, we've done pretty well. I find the case for religion quite a bit shakier. Certainly it has improved the lives of some, but it's also been a primary justification for a majority of the armed conflicts and genocides in the last three thousand years. It's hard for me to imagine a much-improved version of the world that doesn't include some form of scientific curiosity (I don't know what would take its place), but it's not so hard for me to imagine a better world without religion, in which basic human respect and decency took the place of the existing mythology. I'm constantly amazed when we pit recent scientific information against two-thousand year old mythology in our schools, and the mythology wins. It probably has something to do with community-building: the two-thousand year old myths and rituals give people something with which to bond. The genius myth of twentieth-century science fails in that regard. As long as we cling to the myth of the solitary scientific genius toling in his laboratory, of course people are going to be turned off by it. We evolved as social animals. If the genius myth and ritual of modern science can't provide for that, people will look for it elsewhere. Folks do so love those Sunday afternoon Baptist church dinners. And why shouldn't they?

As for Hume's "Dissertation on the Natural History of Religion", I was disappointed. He catalogs the religious beliefs of "less enlightened" (i.e., "not Scottish") people, and shows how preposterous they are, but why people believe in them, anyway. And then he always add something to the effect of "But of course our Christianity is nothing like that (wink, wink)" which is supposed to be a transparent veneer that shows that our Christianity is of course exactly like that. And he's not wrong, and I understand the social context in which he couldn't just come out and say that Christianity is as much bunk as every other primitive myth, but there's really no philosophical argument in it. It lacks the argumentative precision of the Treatise on Human Nature, and it's that precision that makes Hume such a joy to read. The Dissertations are a pretty lackluster effort overall, and it's no surprise that they've been barely a footnote to Hume's philosophical legacy.

Fortunately, there are a few gems in the collection. “St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” by Karen Russell is pure fancy, creative, whimsical, unlike anything I've ever read. “Wake” by Beverly Jensen is equal parts William Faulkner and Ray Bradbury, and a fun (if unimportant) read. And Alice Munro's “Dimension” is a completely fascinating take on violent crime, in which the victim finds that the murderer of her children is the only one who can really understand the gravity of her experience.

In the only-slightly-ironic forward, guest editor Stephen King laments the decline of the American short story. (I don't doubt that there are those who would argue that he has helped to hasten its decline, but I digress.) But I wonder how true it is. Has the short story really been in decline, or are the good old days never really as good as we think they were? It might be true that fewer people are buying short stories; it might even be true that printed literary magazines are on the decline. They're small runs, expensive to produce, and so bear a high cover price that most of us won't pay. But anybody with twenty dollars and an Internet connection can start their own online literary magazine, dedicated to whatever they like. Star Trek fan fiction? More than you can shake a tribble at. Snuff erotica? No problem. First person stories about being sad and lonely? Welcome to the blogosphere.

The short story is in decline? Hardly. It's just no longer the exclusive domain of rich New Englanders with MFAs. They've been writing stories for each other for decades. Now the Trekkies are doing the same. The medium morphs, and you can pine all you like for the good old days of The Cathedral, but we now live in the age of The Bazaar. Or The Bizarre, as the first-person Star Trek snuff erotica goes.

So I figured that rather than recommending a book about which I no longer knew anything, I should maybe read it again. Too bad for its intended recipient. But good for me. I am pleased to report that it is still a pretty good (and very fast) read. Steinbeck. His dog. Good times.

Of course, I should know better than to read travel literature. Because it makes me want to go, forever and always. Not on a road trip -- staring at interstate highway is without romance for me -- but on foot, into the world, out the front door with a pack and home again two months later. I've been home barely two months, and I could go again tomorrow given the chance. It's a curse, a blessing, a lebensform. I'm no Steinbeck, but here's to the restless everywhere. Long may we roam the earth.

I've also started doing my homework and sifting through old records stored in the archive at the Virginia Tech library. It's not a huge collection of material, but a few records, mostly put out by Smithsonian Folkways during the 1950s. Some of it is, to be honest, wretched stuff. It's not hard to understand why so many of the old-timers have complained about the folk revival over the years. Some of the records of "shanty singing" that I've pulled from the library are actually records of revivalists finding shanties, and then performing them Kingston-Trio-style on acoustic guitar and/or banjo, with rhythms nothing like the original work songs. It sucks the life out of the very thing that makes the shanties great, which is big beats and unison singing. The folk-trio revival versions have about as much authenticity as minstrels in blackface singing slave songs with a rousing chorus of "doo-dah, doo-dah". It's not so much performing the source material as robbing it for fun and profit.

Paul Clayton and the Foc'sle Singers straddle the line uncomfortably. For some of the songs, they made the bewildering decision to include banjo accompaniment. What the hell? Why did the revivalists have to put banjo on absolutely everything? (Example: the Rainbow Quest videos, in which Pete Seeger can't resist playing his banjo on f*cking everything, whether it makes any sense or not.) Banjo on eighteenth century sea songs? Check! Never mind that the banjo wasn't actually invented yet when the damn things were written -- it's FOLK MUSIC! But there are some gems on the album, and those gems tend to be the a cappella tunes with minimal harmonies, like the outstanding rendition of "Haul Away Joe". There are also a few diamonds in the rough, those tunes that actually have good material buried beneath the rather silly renditions.

I sound like a curmudgeon, and I probably am. Certainly I don't have the standing to be much of a purist on anything, much less sea shanties. I've never been anything but a landlubber and a hack. But I do know what rings true for me and what sounds like hollow facsimile, and most of this sounds like facsimile trying to pass as authenticity. No doubt the same can be said about most of the music that I make, but nobody is offering me a Smithsonian Folkways grant to do it :) It may be that some of this material would have vanished if the revivalists hadn't preserved it under straight teeth and cardigan sweaters. Whether it's better off dead or shrink-wrapped and packaged, I don't claim to know.

This year, the clan came to my place, which meant no matching napkin holders and a tree made out of spare parts, but nobody seemed to miss all of that too much. The primary attraction, of course, was The Larvae, aka "Sharkypants". For a guy who poops his pants multiple times per day, he's pretty all right. We got along fine, anyway. Give him a few years, and I'm confident that his uncles will have him drinking and cursing like a champ, if he hasn't been quarantined from us by then.

After dinner, we did a bit of token gift-swapping, but mostly just played games and hung out. Looks like we really are past the buying-lots-of-crap thing, at least until The Larvae becomes interested in things that don't secrete milk. I'm going to start socking money away for his first drum kit. Merry Christmas, Mom!

In all, 'twas a fine holiday season. A shame we only do it once a year. Anyway, the full photo spread lives here.

Would it be weird to say that I enjoyed this book? It seems like one ought to find a Chomsky-Foucault debate provocative, perhaps interesting, but enjoyable? Nonetheless, there it is -- I enjoyed reading this. After my claim that I was going to read something lighter than a French novel about a WWII internment camp, I picked this. And liked it. Something is wrong with me.

I'm not sure that I find the title so apt. For one thing, the debate is fundamentally not really a debate at all. Set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, both thinkers wholeheartedly agree that colonial policy is a losing game. Where they disagree is really only in how to talk about it. Secondly, the book is only about human nature to a limited extent. There is some disagreement as to whether linguistic structures are innate to the human brain vs. contingent on human culture, but the conversation doesn't dwell there long. It quickly moves into more interesting territory -- the power and nature of the state. Chomsky's perspective is more easily pigeonholed: he's an anarcho-syndicalist, and believes in working toward a real liberation in which those worst off no longer serve as cannon fodder for the powerful. Chomsky is also straightforward in disconnecting his philosophy of language from his politics; for him, the two are separable, and while the former pays the bills, the latter is ultimately more important.

Foucault, as we might expect, is much more embedded. He's interested in how power structures constrain human relations and human communication, in which the state is not merely a bureaucracy but a cultural network that steers the very way that we can think about the world.

Here again, Chomsky doesn't really disagree; he just chooses to focus his work at a different layer. And while I'm sympathetic to Chomsky's politics and find it the more direct approach, I also find Foucault's approach gets more to the fundamentals of living. The problem with pitting The People vs. The State is that it places the individual or the citizenry outside the state, which is a bit dangerous. Here in the U.S., we really don't have anything like a democracy anymore. We ostensibly have a government for the people, but I don't think we can convincingly argue that we have a government by the people. Geography aside, there is no way to cut up Congress demographically to represent anything like America. It's still rich white guys, with a handful of rich white girls.

So if government by the people doesn't exist (and maybe it can't in modern America), the best we can do is to assure government for the people. But then we get the separation of governors vs. governed, state vs. populace, and Chomsky can't be happy with that. Foucault seems uncommitted to any particular government structure, and would mostly reject that State vs. Populace is the useful divide to recognize. He's more interested in revealing the dynamics of institutions -- families, churches, government, schools -- to lay bare who is controlling whom, and through what means, and toward what ends. For Foucault, we can't ever be free from power relationships, but we can unveil them and scrutinize them, as to rearrange or dismantle those we find harmful.

And so the debate is really a non-debate, but mostly an exploration of common issues from different perspectives. With a new presidency, we have the opportunity to undo the closed style of paranoid government ushered in by the Nixon era that has become the status quo. One thing the Obama campaign showed us is how to dissolve the divide between the governor and the governed -- the "we" in his "yes we can" was what won the election. Whether he can leverage that "we" to participate in the actual governance or whether it will become more cannon fodder for the powerful is up to us to decide.

J'ai acheté ce roman à Cassis, après j'ai fini De La Terre À La Lune, avec aucune idée d'histoire ni l'auteur. J'étais à la plage, j'avais besoin d'un livre, et celui a gagné quelques prix en France. Donc, je l'ai acheté. Malgré la qualité du roman, l'histoire de l'holocauste n'est pas si bon pour la plage, ni pour voyager. Un peu lourde pour ma situation. Néanmoins, c'est un bon livre, et la méthode de raconter m'intéressait. Mais pour mon livre prochain, peut être quelque chose plus leger...

Aujourd'hui, il n'y a plus de respecte pour les machines de guerre américains, non plus pour les américains eux-mêmes. Les nouvelles en France sont pleine de la crise économique aux États-Unis, parce qu'elle touche tous le monde. Cette crise n'est pas entièrement la faute des guerres américains, mais elles on joué leur rôle -- certainement dans le prix d'huile, ce qui fait des effets sûr pour l'économie.

Peut-être avec le nouveau président Obama, les États-Unis peuvent retrouver un peu de leur respecte encore: la respecte du monde, mais aussi la respecte des eux-mêmes. J'espère que nous pouvons devenir le pays décrit par Jules Verne. Un pays intelligent, aventureux, et avec la respecte pour le monde et avec la respecte du monde.

Near sunset, I met with Ilan by the Seine to play old-time music. It was definitely peculiar playing traditional Appalachian music in the shadow of Notre Dame de Paris as tourist boats shined their floodlights on us so people could take pictures. (I wonder how many vacation photos I'm in by now. I wonder if any of them realized that they were tourists taking photos of another tourist.) After a couple of hours, Max from the hostel in Aix tracked us down, along with his friend Ellen, and we hopped a bus to Belleville to see Savoy Cajun music at a punk club. It was a crazy mix of people -- the bar regulars were heavily tatooed Parisian punks, and the people there to actually hear the Cajun band were largely Americans. I dragged a bunch of them onto the dance floor for the two steps and waltzes. The band was terrific, and really a great musical segue for me. In addition to Cajun, they do some honky-tonk, but translated into Cajun French. So I got to two-step to George Jones's "N'Arretes Pas La Musique". Weird.

After the show, we met up with Steven, the bass player from the old-time band I crashed the previous night, and went to a late bar to get drunk and argue politics until 4am. Steven is British-born and a staunch royalist. He holds that the monarchy is the primary reason that Britain has had a stable government for hundreds of years. Ilan is a self-described Libertarian, and I found myself arguing in favor of Social Democracy, if only to take a contrary position. Many whiskeys later, I bid adieu to tous la monde and ambled back to the Hotel to get four hours of sleep before my flight. (Thank you, Benjamin Franklin, for the extra hour.)

I'm now over the mild hangover, back on U.S. soil, and awaiting my escape pod back to Appalachia. Weird to think that I'll sleep in my house tonight, and tomorrow night, and the night after that, into the foreseeable future. Weird to think that I'll wake up tomorrow to spend the day at a desk. Weird to think that I'll need to buy groceries, feed the cat, pay the water bill. I'm sure I'll be OK, but for now it just seems so foreign. I keep listening hard to the airport announcements to translate them, but they're already in English.