Herbal with treatises on food, poisons and remedies, and the properties of stones

The things you can find online (via Twitter). From the 16th century comes the manuscript of  'Giovanni Cadamosto, Herbal with treatises on food, poisons and remedies, and the properties of stones (Peutingerorum Liber Botanicus) (Harley MS 3736)'. As the pictures show the draftsmanship is tremendous but it is also interesting for its position somewhere between the stylization ans conventions of earlier ages with the drive towards naturalism (to draw form nature rather than copy from the ancients).

Gary Snyder & Julia Martin: Nobody Home [review]

This is proving to be a good year for us fans of Snyderiana. Earlier this year the correspondence between Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder (my review here) appeared and now there is 'Nobody Home Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places'. It is a beautiful slim volume that fits perfectly in the side-pocket of your backpack, the perfect format for all books. It collects three interviews with Gary Snyder and the correspondence (1983-2011) with the interviewer Julia Martian, a South-African academic and Buddhist. The interviews are nice but hardly surprising, Snyder as a writer and thinker has a one-track-mind that amtraks towards the next station at his pace and without room for deviation. A near 100% of his output sits on a continues line of what he wants to say and for his steadfast reader these letters allow you to get a ever closer look on the minutiae of his intellectual development. Compared to earlier volumes you do get a little closer to Snyder as a man of teaching and travel, and there is also slightly more shown of the emotional events in his life. The real star of this book for me is Martin. I never heard of her before but we get to know her in her students years writing long overbearingly intellectual letters from the isolation of South Africa to her self-chosen teacher. As the years go by you follow the way she matures and comes into her own. At the background are the great events of her countries recent history: the fall of apartheid, the presidency of Mandela, the normalcy of violence, the presence of deep history and nature. A better title for this book would have been: "Growing up with Gary Snyder".

At the end of the book letters turn into email and this changes the entire tone of the correspondence, less formal, more kindhearted and also quicker, shorter and more pragmatic.

Not once does the word beat or beatnik fall. 

I like seeing Snyder with one of those 1980's pen holders. I always wanted one when I was a child but the only thing I could do was try to make one with toilet paper rolls. And he had one: lucky bastard.

Weeds and Aliens

 
Weeds and Aliens (1961) by Edward Salisbury (the man had more honorary titles than I have teeth) is the absolute classic book that pioneered the modern study and appreciation of wild plants in a globalized, man-made environment. I have not completely read it but you only need to read 10 pages to understand that this book is fundamental to a way of looking at plants (and the world) that is still edgy. Everything Richard Mabey has ever written is a mere footnote to this book. Peter del Tredici, Emma Marris and the entire novel ecosystems/anthropocene line of thinking should cite Salisbury's book out of habit.

Weeds and Aliens was published as part the same New Naturalist series that included the Fitter book on the Natural History of London. Where biology has now moved into the ivory tower of DNA-sequencing this is still old school and everything Salisbury did every plant spotter or gardener can do. It is experimental science with everyday materials. He collects data on seeds, soil and distribution but Salisbury does it with an intelligence and memory that few people can match. It is a tough book to read, its scope is encyclopedic but not with a desire to collect all the knowledge of the world but out of desire to share with his readers the excitement of the versatility of plants and the geographic narrative of a industrializing world they tell. It is old fashioned and refreshing at the same time to meet a writer who does assume his readers to be idiots and expect them to want to know everything to the last detail. How else can he excite if the facts themselves are left out? 

Weeds and Aliens is a book for nerds. Maps, lists, raw data. drown in it and be happy.

Distant Neighbors, the letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder.

Of all books that I have read last decade Gary Snyder's 'Practice of the Wild' has made the most impact on me. The selected letters of Allen Ginsberg and Snyder came out in 2009 (edited by beat pinata Bill Morgan) and it failed to impress on every level: the letters were short, contained barely any new info, did not make up for it with slylish panache. If you did not know who Ginsberg and Snyder were the letters would have never given you the idea that they were friends, more poet-celebs maintaining a beneficial node in their social network. That book was just another piece of worthless beat nostalgia to rip off the fans. When I saw Distant Neighbors advertised, the selected letters of Snyder and Wendell Berry (edited by Chad Wriglesworth), however I knew that I would get something much better. 

Both Wendell Berry (that eloquent secular-Amish farmer-intellectual whose stodgy perspectives on (agri)culture and nature always seem realistic, conservative and radical at the same time) and Gary Snyder (that zen-mountaineer-poet with a surprisingly small oeuvre) are never going to be Horace Walpole's but then Walpole was not homesteader.
If you think about picking up this book to learn more about the beats then you do not need to bother.

My main problem with Snyder is that never seems to put himself in a position of being under serious scrutiny. His published interviews all have the interviewer assuming the position of humble acolyte listening in awe while the Master sits and teaches with timeless abandon. In that Snyder has with grace reinvented the Confucian (no: Kungian) form for the age of Aquarius. I don't mind it but for an intellectual he has engaged himself in surprisingly little discussion and polemics. His position on overpopulation for instance he has made for at least 40 years but no one has ever made him elaborate on how the population decline he so much desires could be enforced without draconian measures. He takes the position, declares it central, but fails to substantiate it and nobody ever seems to have challenge him about it. But in Distant Neighbors we find Berry critiquing him for it and asking him to clarify his position. I was anticipating a polite but fierce discussion but what does Snyder do? In a next letter he merely shrugs. It confirms the hunch I have about Snyder: he takes critique very badly.

The book begins with a letter from 1973 and ends with a letter from 2013. From a distance we see the man float through life: working the land, traveling to and from public ado's, discussing the seasons and the weather, suggesting books and sharing poems and essays, sometimes they tease. For instance when Snyder in response to Berry's essay on why he will never use a computer sends him a love poem about text processing.

In the background the extended families act as background radiation: children and grandchildren, disease and death. Who would have though that Snyder would so gently break the news to Berry about him swapping wifes with real concern for Berry's more conservative antics on such matters.  Berry takes it well and seems to have taken more to the new partner than he ever did to the old. But that is conjuncture, these are man from  I you think about picking up this book to learn more about beat-matters than don't. Mars, silent on emotions.

So what do we have here: 40 years of correspondence, that show two distant friends keeping in touch. Sometimes they argue, sometimes they ask for advice, often they are planning how and when they are going to meet. I would not call this great letter writing but you see something of the pace of life of both authors and you get a sense of what life was like for them as they were writing their books. I learned something new about how The Practice of the Wild was written. That alone is enough for me.
   

The origin and evolution of herbals (Agnes Arber)

It is hard to escape the image of the modern day wild plant watcher as a bearded teacher of the old stamp who would wear a dear stalker on his floral huntings if only his wife would let him. It has not always been like that as Agnes Arber's 'Herbals, their origin and evolution' (1912/1938, reprinted 1986) shows. Arber takes us through the history of herbals between 1470 and 1670, roughly the years spanning the discovery of printing and the emergence of botany as a science in its modern form. There is a great deal to be learned, but what strikes me most is that many of the botanical advances reported share a close proximity to the intellectual spheres as so eloquently described by Frances Yates: the world of Elizabethan Rosicrucians and radical (hermetic) philosophy. Many herbalists were radical protestants, often on the move to avoid prosecution, operating in the intellectual and power hubs of the Renaissance world. We witness the change from medical herbalism to botany, we see how novelties emerge and how stubbornly certain traditions are maintained. We get a glimpse of how the plants of the new world were integrated, and how hard it was to see them for what they were. The earliest herbals in print were often reissues of manuscripts, creating a timeline of at least a millennium for certain texts. 

What makes this book even more wonderful is the liberal use of images. Nothing can beat a good woodcut.
 

Through sympathetic magic Arber's book also gave me new respect for the Heukels', the most complete lay flora for the Netherlands. Not only does it contain information to the point of singularity it has now also acquired for me the patina of history. If you look of the drawings you can see how little has changed.

   

Food pairing / gastronomy with a telescope

The theory of food pairing inspires little faith (see earlier) but when moving away from culinary applications perhaps it can be used to differentiate cuisines and cooking styles. How Chinese is Jamie Oliver? How similar are Mexican and Indian cuisines? How do French and Indian cooking differ? How unique is Rene Redzepi? 

The aim is to find a way to reveal the inner structure and logic of a cuisine, if such a thing exists, by comparing the way a cuisine or a cook combines ingredients with other cuisines and cooks. The first step is turn a collection recipes (a cookbook) into ingredient pairs, here is what a fragment of a looks like:

potato,pork,2
chicken,cucumber,1
chicken,grapeseed,15
chicken,milk,6
chicken,onion,9
chicken,pork,3
cucumber,grapeseed,3
cucumber,onion,2
cucumber,pork,2
grapeseed,milk,10
grapeseed,onion,11
grapeseed,pork,4
milk,onion,2
milk,pork,1

Two recipes use both potato and pork, one recipe combine chicken and cucumber, 15 recipes combine chicken with grapeseed oil and so on down the list. In a graph the pairs look like this:

The problem is in the data more than in the code. To get to lists of ingredients as recipes that are easy to process I am using Eat Your Books, a website that catalogs recipes and cookbooks. The ingredient lists are not complete (what exactly are 'cupboard ingredients'? a reference to the mock turtles of the soup) but they will do for my purpose.

Here is the graph of 'An Invitation to Indian Cooking' by Madhur Jaffrey (1975). It is pretty much what you would expect, a chaotic self-referential hairball with the core ingredients in the center with the rarer or less staple ingredients pushed to the edge. All graphs can be enlarged, the real information however is in the shape of the graph, not in the name of ingredients.

A different projection shows the connections differently, clearer on the eyes but not necessarily better: 

If you were creating something that would generate options for chefs you could take a book like "French Home Cooking: An Introduction to Classic French Cooking" by Paul Bocuse (1989) to generate diagrams like the following that shows what Indian (blue) and French (red) cuisines combine with potato and carrots.
It is of course bad practise to use one cookbook as representing an entire cuisine, but we are here in illustrative mode. Indian and French cuisine are national cuisines; how do they compare with someone like Rene Redzepi. With what ingredients does he (in green) combine the humble potato and carrot in his book "Noma: Time and  Place in Nordic Cuisine" (2010)? I a French manner.

But from the perspective of dry cooking this is still puny and close to home. The next image compares French and Chinese cuisines. The French is the Bucase book (blue), the Chinese (red) is Ken Hom's "A Taste of China" (1990). Again we are not actually comparing cuisines but cookbooks representing a certain regional form of cooking to a Western audience but the differences are real. Chinese and French cooking are worlds apart and only share some basics like vinegar, onion and pork. Chinese cooking comes across as much more homogenous and compact.

Now add Jamie Oliver's "The Naked Chef" (2000) to this French/Chinese data and see what happens: Jamie Oliver's cuisine is like a giant flesh eating amoeba devouring both cuisines whole and it still remains hungry. For now it is seems more French then Chinese.

Here is what happens when comparing Rene Redzepi (red) and Jamie Oliver. Even though the two appear to be opposites (the wild vs the supermarket, the avant-garde vs the popular) this graph does not really show it as you can see by the overlap. Both are Western chefs cooking Western food even when many ingredients are not shared.

The next image returns to the observation that Indian and Mexican food are historic twins. Would food pairing confirm this? Comparing Jaffrey (blue) with "Rosa's New Mexican Table" by Roberto Santibañez (2010) resulted in the following. The two cuisines are structured as separate spheres with a few heavily contested ingredients. Ingredients do not a cuisine make, as Rachel Laudan would possibly say as this graph seems to say.

 

In conclusion, to show that two similar bodies of recipes will overlap, I have compared Jaffrey with "50 Great Curries of India: Tenth Anniversary Edition" by Camellia Panjabi (2006). Both writers are of course using different ingredients but this image, in combination with the images above, do suggest a metric of displacement and uniformity: similar recipes will generate similar and overlapping hairballs.

 

 

The tragic case of distant reading

 

Franco Moretti teaches literary at Stanford and I feel conned in spending 15 Euro on his 2005 book 'Graphs, Maps, Trees, Abstract models for literary history.' Moretti is also a Marxist of some kind and as a working man I feel doubly ripped of: at my minimum wages that represents 2 hours of work.

For some reason in literature, in academia, scholars are expected to write with the convolution of the Mississippi river and the jargon of a turbine-engineer. It is good because it will always prefer to make you read the original rather than its interpretations. Mr Moretti is no exception: his prose is 'magical' in the personal and extrapsychological spectrum, or spectra, (the model is not the map and the network is an inverted social doxa of personalized metastatis vis a vis Hegel [in his early period]). Like, obscure, self-referencing and self-aggrandizing.

The outset of Mr Moretti project I can completely follow and admire: millions of book have been published, it is impossible to read them all, perhaps, from a distance, using text mining and statistics, something of value can be learned.

What happens next however is of a quality that I find staggering. The absolute bottom is reached on page 25 where a geograph shows 'US film comedies as a percentage of top five box office hits 86-95'. In some places, Central Europe and Israel, this can be as high as 30%, elsewhere, Serbia and Taiwan, it is 0%. Why there is the need to suddenly mention film I do not know BUT if an academic in the humanities can do no better than explain why comedies "are hard to export" with the observation that "contemporary comedies make large use of jokes, which are often lost in translation" I can only petition any serious body giving to man a forum to discontinue all their connections with him. Not only is it bad science: the statement needs proof with linguistic analysis (would Hungarian really be better suited to translate US jokes than Serbo-Croatian?). It is incomprehensible that a professor in literature can't come to the idea that humor is, at least in part, culturally defined.

The book continues without ever picking up steam, some graphs are nice, most seem pointless, most visualizations fail to convince me. There is much talk about form and genre and evolutionary metaphors but it is all cliquish more about reference than real understanding. If you want to do quantitative science, provide the data and the software, tell the world exactly how you came to your results, make it falsifiable. Mr Moretti begins with the right idea and then manages to ruin it completely with his own continuing presence, he seems concerned more with staking his claim than with doing a proper job.

I refrain from using the world charlatan but I am not sure why.