Of orphans, the dead, and a house on a street that does not exist
Last weekend the boys and I set off on the last major pre-Italy fact-gathering adventure. Actually it was kinda morbid or, at least, odd for a five- and three-year-old. The goal was to visit my great-grandparents’ residence in Little Italy, the cemetery where they are buried, and the orphanage where my grandfather grew up. Why? Not entirely sure. Not a lot of facts to be gathered at these places frankly. I guess I just had to see.
We started in the massive, mostly-Italian cemetery of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. It is a Roman phonebook written in weathered stone.
We hunted around the graves with a crappy map. It was sweltering. And we were being pummeled by sex-crazed cicadas. But the boys were troopers. Nathan said “So, Dad. Everybody’s dead here?”
“Yes, all dead.”
“Why are they in the ground?”
Didn’t have a great answer for that one.
We got the map in the sprawling mausoleum which really freaked out the boys. Except occasionally for soft strains of angelic choirs coming from somewhere it was supernaturally quite — a situation my children have never experienced. Also the smell. Not quite rancid, but certainly not right. We got outta there quickly.
Back to the grave hunt. Basically Giuseppe Tolva doesn’t have a very elaborate grave, which is why it took us forever to find it. Most graves have upright markers and are visible from the cemetery roads, but his is flat with the ground all the way in the back of the vertical tombstones. I’d love to know who paid to inter him here and even more to know who put the artificial flower on the headstone. Interestingly there is no marker for his mistress nearby as we were led to believe. Just a joint grave for his two daughters.
The heat and bug assault was too much so we had to cut our hunt short for Grace, his wife. We decamped for Maryville Academy, the orphanage my grandfather grew up in when Grace died in childbirth with his brother. Frankly it was more depressing than the graveyard and even harder to grasp for my kids than the corpses in the ground.
“You mean the kids here have no parents? Why not?”
“Well some of them are dead and in the ground.”
The boys’ eyes enlarge to the size of silver dollars.
Actually Maryville isn’t an orphanage anymore. It serves physically, sexually and emotionally abused and neglected children. The old building, the beloved home of my grandfather (he maintained a relationship with the staff there all his life), is in sorry shape. It looks a bit like a dilapidated southern plantation house. The heat and cicadas made it feel all the more so. But still it felt like it could have been a good place for my grandfather. You’d not have been surprised to turn a corner and see this Maryville scene on a park bench. (Photo of my great-grandfather, great-uncle, and great-aunt circa 1920.)
Back into the city with two very tired boys. The heat-spawned rain was starting to fall as we headed into Little Italy. I had recently found Giuseppe’s World War I draft registration card which contained an important (and unknown) reference to his residence at the time: 908 Sholto. It was in his own scrawl so I figured I was reading it wrong. Never heard of such a street in Chicago. So I found a list of all the streets. Nope, no Sholto. Great, doesn’t exist. Or maybe the UIC construction in the 1960’s destroyed it? Turns out, the street had only been renamed. 908 Sholto is actually 908 S. Carpenter.
The kids had fallen asleep in the car by this point. It was pouring rain and I was prowling around the east edge of Little Italy looking a little suspicious. I’m pretty sure the home at 908 S. Carpenter is not the same one Giuseppe and Grazia lived in, but you never know. There are plenty of buildings that have stood that long. I have to believe they were crammed in there with other immigrants.
Yep, I guess I just had to see.
“Gone out of experience”
The New Yorker has a fascinating article on an Amazonian tribe called the Pirahã.
What makes this tribe special is that their language defies a major linguistic theory, championed by Noam Chomsky, that posits a “universal grammar” embedded in the human brain that explains the structural similarity between every language on Earth. In a nutshell, this theory claims that all languages are shaped by a unique biologically-based human ability to create recursive thought structures. What’s that? Well, basically, it is inserting one thought into another. Such as the combination of “A dog is barking” and “The dog has fleas” into “The dog which has fleas is barking.”
The Pirahã don’t do this. Indeed, it appears that they can’t. They simply do not think this way because, in essence, recursion is based on abstraction and the Pirahã do not deal with abstraction.
… the Pirahã perceive reality solely according to what exists within the boundaries of their direct experience — which Everett defined as anything that they can see and hear, or that someone living has seen and heard. “When someone walks around a bend in the river, the Pirahã say that the person has not simply gone away but xibipío — ‘gone out of experience,’” Everett said. “They use the same phrase when a candle flame flickers. The light ‘goes in and out of experience.’”
This has set the linguistic world, much of which subscribes to the Chomskyan belief in an innate, biological basis for the structure of language, on its ear.
I’ve had a passing interest in linguistics since grad school and I bounce around the periphery of ongoing debate, but what really interested me about this piece is how much it reminded me of a comment my son made last year, which I wrote about:
Recently as we passed some strangers on the street he asked “What happens to people when you don’t see them anymore?” He was hovering around asking whether they ceased to exist, though he never actually said so. We explained that they kept on living their own lives and that we’d probably never see them again. This saddened him a bit, though only slightly less that it puzzled him. I think he’s only just realizing that the sum of human experience is a superset of his own.
That got me thinking about the “universal grammar” concept. Maybe abstraction is not biologically-based but learned. But it went further:
… he’s even more obsessed with names. He simply cannot understand how there can be things that do not have names. He constantly asks about how something can exist if it doesn’t have a name. I explain that there are thousands (millions?) of species of animals, mostly small critters, that we suspect exist but have not been discovered and so have not named. Not to mention undiscovered stars, comets, planets and new concepts, future fashion trends, and dance moves…. Like Adam naming stuff in Eden, the power to name is the power to make real for my boy.
So, there it is. One researcher in the Amazon jungle and one little boy in Chicago, both defying the reigning theory on the origin of language. Perhaps my son has Pirahã blood in his veins (though his genography says no).
Wimbledon comes to Second Life (again)
One could argue that it was Wimbledon last year that really jump-started IBM’s involvement in virtual worlds. Before all the hype, before the “but I need a first life!” meme, before IBM committed itself to the space, a small crew of talented developers out of Hursley, England capitalized on IBM’s long relationship with Wimbledon* by creating a rudimentary centre court in Second Life. From there it’s really a blur.
Fast forward a year and the new Wimbledon build on one of the official IBM islands is a good showcase of how far we’ve come. Real-time shot trajectory plotting in 3D, weather plotting, scoreboards, video playback, a shop, and a backdrop for posing your avatar against actual photos from the All England club.
Eightbar has the full scoop, of course.
If you’ve got Second Life, have a visit.
[*] After The Hermitage, the Wimbledon webcasts of 1999 and 2000 were my next projects in IBM. There’s been nothing quite like the adrenalin of those days, coordinating live event coverage with outrageous traffic and no caching. (OK, almost nothing like it.)
Arbëreshë
A leading freedom fight dies in a war between faiths, west and east. Thousands of refugees flee to a neighboring country. Sound familiar?
This is Albania, 15th century. The Ottoman empire has amassed the largest army the world has known and is inching westward into Europe. The town of Krujë is under siege and has repelled two assaults under the command of George Kastrioti, known as Skanderbeg. During a third siege Skanderbeg succumbs to malaria. Krujë falls shortly thereafter and the Ottoman empire expands. Albania’s long resistance has given Vienna time to prepare, but the Turks are on the march.
In the next century nearly 300,000 Albanians fled their homeland, most to southern Italy. Modern Italy retains a link to Albania through the descendants of these refugees who established villages throughout the south. Barile, the birthplace of my great-grandparents, is one of these villages.
These Italians of Albanian descent are known as the Arbëreshë. They speak a language that’s basically unintelligible to modern Albanians (and of course Italians). It is the language of pre-Ottoman Albania, roughly equivalent to someone today speaking 15th century English in conversation. Despite not officially being classified as a protected ethnic minority in Italy, the Arbëreshë have retained customs and rites through to today, including a very peculiar singing style.
When I visited Barile in 1993 all the town signage was in Italian exclusively. In 2003 it was bilingual with Arbërisht underneath. I take this more as a tourist play than any kind of ethnic resurgence. Still, a good thing. As I’ve said before, the diversity of the south of Italy can be quite surprising, permitting glimpses into non-Roman cultures that you don’t find in the hills of Tuscany and alleys of Rome.
Of course, the struggles in Albania and the former Yugoslavia continue today. As does the exodus of refugees to Italy, particularly after the fall of communism. The most recent flight is excellently portrayed in the film Lamerica.
Beyond shuffle
Had a thought.
Been listening to this on my iPod for a while (it is three hours long). There are sections in it that sound like the interference headphones and speakers get from incoming mobile signals. At first I thought it was my phone, but it isn’t. It’s in the recording, sorta like a watermark. Since it is a live recording perhaps it was picked up during the show.
It got me thinking about randomness in music recordings. Artists have been talking about this for decades, trying to approximate the variability of a live performance in a static recording. Basically it isn’t possible, though that which does exist tends towards empowering the listener to muck with the tracks. But what about merely giving the artist the ability to vary the song on a given listen?
You’d not need a new audio format, it seems to me. What about using the comments metadata section in an MP3 (or AAC, whatever) to include an executable chunk of code that could manipulate the actual audio stream? Obviously your player would need a plug-in of some sort to run the code, but that’s easy with the extensibility of most apps these days.
How would it work? Well, the song would play normally. The plug-in would look for comments and would be alerted by some string that announced that the contents were executable. If the plug-in were sophisticated enough it could do anything from simple effects (flanging, phasing, echoing) to actual audio insertions and overlays. You could imagine an online component that would go out and pre-fetch snippets or sounds that could be layered into the pre-recorded track. The key would be variability. It would not happen every time — or rather it would not have to happen every time. If it did, why not pre-record it? The idea is akin to apps today that live a dual existence on one’s machine and also, in part, online. If you didn’t have the plug-in the song would play normally.
It wouldn’t substitute for an artist’s creative freedom during a live show, but it would reinsert variability into the act of playback — something that’s been a part of the musical experience far longer than the era of recorded sound that we live in.
Update: Nick Nice, the artist behind the mix linked above, contacted me. He confirmed that the noise was in fact from his phone being too close to the mixer when an SMS was coming in.
Set trimmers to kill
Buzzed my hair down to the scalp today. Up yours male pattern baldness!
Update: Best comments on new buzz:
“Did you get lice in Russia?”
“Overclocked brains require better heatsinks, right?”
“Your back hair is now officially longer than your head hair.”
Socio
Been thinking a lot about social networks lately. This is mostly because I am part of a team building one. But is just as likely due to Facebook’s amazing proliferation lately.
Figured I’d collect all my nets in one place. Because, you know, I need more friends. (* means you gotta be a part of the network to see the profile.)
Cork’d
del.icio.us
Dopplr* (Closed beta, unfortunately. I have a few invites left if you are interested.)
Facebook*
Flickr
Last.fm
Library Thing
LinkedIn
Twitter (And my car’s Twitter page.)
And let us not forget Isolatr, the anti-social network. Helping you find where other people aren’t.
Better than “Information Superhighway”, I suppose
Spotted at the St. Petersburg airport. I’d like to say this ad is from 1999, when the term cyberspace at least had a degree of currency. Alas, no. It is new. Someone somewhere thought this was a good idea. Cyberspace. Sheesh! The term was awful even when it didn’t sound dated.
Sidenote: St. P’s airport is called Pulkovo II. Like a sequel. Revenge of the Airport.
Mission Elapsed Time: 20:00:21:06:42:40
Recently this blog (and my Flickr account) turned 20 years old, forever in Internet years. I went back through it all, retracing digital footprints made on what feels like a different planet. Here are some highlights.
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly exploration of places in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show.
Subscribe to the podcast or the email newsletter or just read through the archives posted here.
The Ampcamper
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
