Feel the love.

And y'all thought I was exaggerating! Anyway.

A link for Noel. It's the Andrews Sisters, from 1944, and yes, they're singing what you think they're singing in the chorus. Frankly, I don't think you can find that in Vegas anymore.

Some notes about the song: during a USO tour, Morey Amsterdam sleazed off the song from the great Trinidad bandleader Lionel Belasco -- named like a London boxer in the days of Pierce Egan, and for much the same reason: Belasco's father was Sephardic -- who in turn had adapted it from a folk song from Martinique. There was a complicated lawsuit. The music business in the 1940s was very strange. Today most people know Belasco through Terry Zwigoff, the movie director from Appleton (Wisconsin), who adapted Daniel Clowes's graphic novel Ghost World in such a way to highlight Belasco's music.

Since I have to do everything bass-ackwards, I first came across Belasco while researching the Venezuelan waltz. Oh, hell. Some things should not fall down the memory hole.

Did I ever thank Colin Alberts for recommending Leo Katz's books to me? I should do that here. (Also, I just realized: William Ian Miller is from my neck of the woods, isn't he? Like, Shawano or something.) Also, if David Tenner is around, Robert Murray's The 103rd Ballot has been inspirational in recent months.

And two book recommedations for Will Baird on Ukraine and Russia. The first, Anthony's recent The Horse, The Wheel, and Language. It's a strong synthesis of late Soviet and post-Soviet archaeological findings on the Indo-Europeans, as well as his recent results on horse domestication. Anthony has something of the North Americanist's perspective, where long-distance migrations and vast social changes due to new domesticates are amply documented. (Incidentally, there's a long post on the Siberian Ket, Alaskan Eyak, Pacific Northwest Tlingit, and Canadian Athabaskan -- including American Southwest Navajo and Apache -- linguistic connection that I'm not going to write. I am a tease, aren't I.) There's an interesting bit of the sociology of anthropology here: many Europeanists believe in the extremely local development of prehistoric European cultures -- little migration, and that caused by the achingly slow spread of agriculture -- which multiple lines of evidence show is flawed, but academic inertia keeps in play.

They ate a lot of fish.

The other book is Andrei Sinyavsky's Russian Folk Belief, a phrase he uses in contrast to Russian ecclesiastical belief. Sinyavsky is perhaps better known in the West under his pseudonym of Abram Tertz, which would be as if an American writer in exile wrote under the name Benny Siegel or Al Capone, or possibly Nat Turner. I picked the book up for its folklore, but there's also a large section on non-Orthodox Russian religious movements, including a section of Protestantism in Russia. It should tell you something about his baseline that Sinyavsky considers Seventh-Day Adventism a rationalist faith; and also, that he has nothing but admiration for the diverse sectarians he met in the camps. I'd quote some, but I'd have to quote the whole chapter.

One more to go.

Comments

[Marcia Of The Boonies]

>Anthony has something of the North Americanist's perspective, where long-distance migrations and vast social changes due to new domesticates are amply documented. (Incidentally, there's a long post on the Siberian Ket, Alaskan Eyak, Pacific Northwest Tlingit, and Canadian Athabaskan -- including American Southwest Navajo and Apache -- linguistic connection..)

Damn, I wish I lived closer to academia. Time to look into interlibrary loan.

[Carlos]

That's actually from a seminar held in Alaska about two months ago. Here's a link:

http://www.uaf.edu/anlc/dy2008.html

All the conference papers and readings are accessible through there.

[Will Baird]

spasebo bolshoi, Carlos.

The, uh, Europeanists are very hard to take seriously. No, that's not right. It's hard to read what they say without either giggling or shaking my head in disgust with saltings of eye rolling.

Ukrainian and Russian history suffers from this big time. Even mentioning the Riuirikids (sp) causes near fights at times with some. *sighs*

[Colin Alberts]

Bill Miller always cited growing up in Green Bay's small Jewish community in his lectures, but the student body dynamics of the public high school he attended there he made clear was absolutely the most significant factor in what he made his life's work: first Icelandic bloodfeuds, then the more general concepts of disgust, courage and shame.

I just wish I could have enticed him onto SHWI when David Friedman was making his appearances there a few years ago.

[Marcia]

Thanks for the link, Carlos.

[Jussi Jalonen]

Friedman presented his comments on the said topic on SHWI _eight_ and _six_ years ago. Generally an amusing discussion to watch, and I'm not talking of just Friedman. Actually participating in the latter exchange turned out to be an exercise in futility, though.

But I take it that the interaction must have left a deep, deep impression on you, given that you still can't get over it? Considering that, perhaps you should really speed up your departure already.

Incidentally, I hadn't heard of the possibility of William Miller projecting his own past, personal experiences on his work. Then again, self-reflection haunts everyone.

Cheers,

J. J.

[Carlos]

Colin, he missed the wave of -- well, they weren't called skinheads yet -- when the militias moved into the area. They kept their hair at the time. Nothing like going to school and finding a swastika carved on your locker, and if that's all that happened to you, it was a good day.

There's still a remnant, but the state has been very good about treating them in the appropriate manner, although dragging them behind a snowmobile through a barbed wire fence is still illegal.

They once tried recruiting my cousin Aaron, which is hilarious in so many different ways. (Hey, Aaron sometimes reads this blog! Hi Aaron!) Wisconsin teaches us all different things.

Anyway. I'd think that Miller would mop the floor with Friedman, who frankly isn't very bright. I have to wonder what Milton and Rose really thought about their rumpled, dumpy, Society for Creative Anachronism jackass son. Dude couldn't even get noticed during the Freakonomics bandwagon.

[Carlos]

JJ, you're being an idiot. Miller was one of Colin's University of Michigan professors that he and I discussed at a non-Internet party in northern Virginia a few years ago.

It's not all about you, or even the Internet, and thank God for that.

[Tony Zbaraschuk]

Speaking as a Seventh-day Adventist, there is a lot of truth to the idea that we're a rationalist strain of Protestantism. (This is not the full story by any means, of course, but we are often frighteningly rationalist given certain additional axioms...)

[Noel Maurer]

Jussi, why the rudeness? You show it a lot.

[David Weman]

I didn't know Carlos was quitting. Carlos is great.