Notes, Photos, Likes, Listens

Short content: a microblog of status updates or short notes
Posts with an embedded image/photo as the primary focus
Compliments to the original post/poster of external content
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
I’m curious if anyone has tried building a digital public zettelkasten on WordPress in general or using using the Slippy plugin in particular?

I’m thinking it may be an interesting experiment, particularly using it in combination with the Webmention plugin to get replies/responses for crosslinking with others’ ideas on the web. This could allow one not only to communicate with other their own slip box, but slip boxes to communicate with each other.

Listened to How Indigenous elders read the stars by Sarah Kanowski from Conversations (ABC)
Working over many years with several Indigenous Elders, Duane has published The First Astronomers, a complete overview of traditional First Nations star knowledge.

A great introduction to the book The First Astronomers.
Listened to Historian Uncovers The Racist Roots Of The 2nd Amendment by Dave Davies from Fresh Air | NPR

In her new book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, Anderson traces racial distinctions in Americans’ treatment of gun ownership back to the founding of the country and the Second Amendment, which states:

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

The language of the amendment, Anderson says, was crafted to ensure that slave owners could quickly crush any rebellion or resistance from those whom they’d enslaved. And she says the right to bear arms, presumably guaranteed to all citizens, has been repeatedly denied to Black people.

This is the sort of history that should be more commonplace in our schools. Why was I not taught this? What an excellent little interview. Going to buy Carol Anderson’s book in triplicate. 
Listened to Grain and transport As wheat travelled, it created the modern world by Jeremy Cherfas from eatthispodcast.com

Cereals provide their offspring with a long-lived supply of energy to power the first growth spurt of the seed. Thousands of years ago, people discovered that they could steal some of the seeds to power their own growth, taking advantage of the storability of seeds to move the food from where it grew to where it might be eaten. Wheat, the pre-eminent cereal, moved along routes that were ancient before the Greek empire, carried, probably, by ox-drawn carts and guided along these black paths by people remembered in Ukraine today as chumaki.

In this episode, Scott Nelson, author of Oceans of Grain, tells me about the various ways in which the ability to move wheat more efficiently changed world history, geography and economics, for starters.

Notes

  1. Scott Reynolds Nelson’s book Oceans of Grain is published by Basic Books.
  2. Listen to Persephone’s Secret, if you haven’t already, and I promise no vengeful gods will render you dumb.
  3. Banner photo of a grain elevator and train in Wichita Falls, Texas by Carol M. Highsmith. Image of a 19th century Chumak by Jan Nepomucen Lewicki; Public Domain.
  4. Transcript coming soon.

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In the trailer for this short series, I presumed some context about the relationship of the topic to the Ukraine, but missed the true mark with the additional context provided here.

Even better, I suspect that some of the history here is right up my alley in relation to work I’ve been doing on oral cultures. Some of it “sounds” like early oral Ukrainian culture is eerily reminiscent to Milman Parry’s work on orality among the guslars of Yugoslavia and reading I’ve been doing on Indigenous astronomy! What a great find. I’ve immediately ordered a copy of the book.

I wouldn’t expect these sorts of information and insight in a typical podcast about food, but Jeremy Cherfas always delivers the goods.

Listened to Persephone’s secret: The Eleusinian Mysteries and the making of the modern economy by Jeremy Cherfas from eatthispodcast.com

Many people take the myth of Demeter — Ceres in Latin — and her daughter Persephone to be just a metaphor for the annual cycle of planting and harvesting. It is, but there may be more to it than that. Why else would it be worth scaring participants in the Eleusinian Mysteries into saying absolutely nothing about what went on during these initiation rites into the cult of Demeter and Persephone?

Maybe the story hides a secret so valuable that it was worth protecting.

Elucidating the Eleusinian Mysteries is one small element in Scott Reynolds Nelson’s new book, Oceans of Grain. It looks at the many, many ways in which wheat and human history intertwine, which he’s been working on for years. It was finally published on 22 February this year.

Two days later, Russia invaded Ukraine.

Today, what the story of Persephone is really about. And over the next three weeks, Scott Nelson and I will be talking about how wheat has influenced human affairs, as it is still doing today.

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Support this podcast: on Patreon

I’ve fallen way behind on making my listen posts public and hope to remedy the issue, particularly for the better podcasts I listen to. What better way to start than a new short series in Jeremy Cherfas’ excellent Eat This Podcast?
There aren’t many published copies of annotated books out there, but you can get a limited edition replica of Francis Ford Coppola’s prompt book The Godfather Notebook for the movie’s 50th anniversary. It includes Coppola’s handwritten annotations on Mario Puzo’s novel.

Hello Donald McKenzie! 👋🏼

For quite a while I regularly see Donald McKenzie pop up in the “likes” on my website. Usually WordPress notifications for this sort of activity encourage you to visit the sites of those who do this and they have a link to some sort of identity or blog of the person who left the like. But alas, I suspect Donald only has a reader account and doesn’t blog themself. 

This makes me wonder, who is Donald McKenzie?! If you’re reading this, do take a moment to say hello in the comments. And thanks for being such a loyal reader all these years! 😍 

To prevent problems of context collapse and cultural interface (p67), I’m curious if “women’s business” in Indigenous Australian contexts carries the same type of Western cultural gendered baggage that such a phrase might suggest in the United States? My current understanding of it is solely one of knowledge domains between people in a defined group. Are there other subtleties here?  Are there other differentiations that split up knowledge besides the obvious young/old which has a clear differentiation due to the amount of time living and learning?