Meetings with Remarkable Sheep

By longstanding custom, the origins of which are murky, part of every New Year's Eve is devoted to paying social calls on local livestock. A brief proclamation is read, a few hasty carols sung, and the sheep tolerate the proceedings with benign indifference.

Blegvadiana

For a guy who has been making records for something like forty-five years and has a long and complicated discography, Peter Blegvad manages to maintain a fairly low profile. His new CD, Go Figure, has been released by ReR in anticipation of a full bells-and-whistles Blegvad retrospective boxed set promised for early 2018. By my count a little shy of half of the 17 tracks on Go Figure are new songs, the others being new versions of tunes that originally appeared on earlier Blegvad or Slapp Happy records or that were premiered on the Radio Free Song Club. The band is made up of usual Blegvad confederates Chris Cutler, John Greaves, Bob Drake, and Karen Mantler, the CD package features various Blegvad doodles, and the whole thing was produced and engineered by Drake in the south of France, though not on the Côte d'Azur, a locale that prompts these typically frivolous Blegvadesque lines:

We're so rich
we're out of reach.
We're at the top of the heap
at the bottom of which
people sleep on the beach.

The new version of "God Detector" doesn't seem like an evident improvement on the one included on Choices under Pressure, and nothing here strikes me as on a par with Blegvad compositions like "King Strut," "Hangman's Hill," or "How Beautiful You Are," but it's all tuneful and fun and it might grow on you. In the meantime there's that boxed set to look forward to.

Update (March 2018): After living with Go Figure for a few months, I think my favorites here are "Had To Be Bad," "Simon at the Stone" (a tribute to Blegvad's late friend, the photographer Simon Marsden), and the cheeky "Way To Play The Blues." The boxed set is still in the offing.

News

Thomas Pynchon:

Rachel and Roony sat on a bench in Sheridan Square, talking about Mafia and Paola. It was one in the morning, a wind had risen and something curious too had happened; as if everyone in the city, simultaneously, had become sick of news of any kind; for thousands of newspaper pages blew through the small park on the way crosstown, blundered like pale bats against the trees, tangled themselves around the feet of Roony and Rachel, and of a bum sleeping across the way. Millions of unread and useless words had come to a kind of life in Sheridan Square; while the two on the bench wove cross-talk of their own, oblivious, among them.

V.

World of Wonders

I read this book by the late Stephen Jay Gould shortly after it was published in 1989, and more or less randomly grabbed it off the shelf and re-read it recently. I'm not a scientist, let alone an invertebrate paleontologist, so the impressions that follow are strictly those of a layperson.

To be as brief as possible (and with no pretense of doing justice to a rich and intricately argued book), Gould's immediate subject was the rare assemblage of soft-bodied fauna discovered, a century ago, by Charles Doolittle Walcott in the geological formation known as the Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rockies. Walcott, a geologist who was the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution at the time, classified (Gould's word is "shoehorned") his new discoveries into existing taxa (mostly of arthropods), but subsequent work by Harry Whittington, Simon Conway Morris, Derek Briggs, and others revealed that many of the creatures properly belonged in previously unknown classes or even phylla that later become extinct. These Cambrian fossils, Gould reasoned, provided evidence that in the aftermath of the Cambrian explosion that produced the ancestors of the metazoan animals with which we are familiar (e.g. crustaceans, molluscs, vertebrates — and of course us) there was a wide diversity or disparity of body plans, many of which ultimately proved to be evolutionary dead ends. Instead of a steady progress of expanding diversity from a small number of original phylla, the analysis of the Burgess Shale fauna suggested a winnowing over time of possible avenues for evolutionary development. There may be more species now, but the roster of higher-level taxa was greater during the Cambrian than now. (Or so it seemed.)

Gould's broader argument, which he used the Burgess Shale reclassification to support, centered on the importance of contingency to the evolutionary history of life on earth. The lineages that became extinct were not necessarily essentially inferior to the lineages that survived; they perished because of circumstances that were equivalent, at least in part, to a roll of the dice. Climates changed, continents moved around, asteroids impacted the earth, etc. The fact that these lineages no longer exist (while others do) proves, in a certain sense, that they were less fitted to the challenges that followed, but since the challenges themselves were contingent and not predictable we can't say that a different roll of the dice might not have produced an entirely different outcome. A minor shift might well have led to the premature extinction of the chordates and hence precluded our own existence. (Gould's title alludes explicitly to Frank Capra's film It's a Wonderful Life, in which one small change holds the possibility of triggering a cascade of altered consequences.)

In the past thirty years continuing analysis of the Burgess fauna has, inevitably, complicated the picture considerably. It's no longer as clear as it seemed in 1989 that all of the re-classified species are true "weird wonders" that can't be contained within the familiar major phyla and classes. That process is highly technical and well beyond my ken, but although Gould, had he lived, might have been disappointed by the implications of more recent developments for his thesis, he was well aware of (and specifically notes) the fact that science proceeds by a grinding process of error and rectification. ("One cannot hope to do anything significant or original in science unless one accepts the inevitability of substantial error along the way.") His larger point, reading the role of contingency, remains open.

Ironically, one of Gould's main sources (fully credited and repeatedly praised in the book), Simon Conway Morris, has been one of Wonderful Life's most vigorous detractors. For Conway Morris, who has made a particular study of convergent evolution, the logic of evolution imposes such constraints that certain outcomes can be said to be predictable or even inevitable; one of them, in his opinion, is higher intelligence of the kind that we possess. Even if the chain of contingent events had been modified, for instance, so as to extinguish the primate lineage, "humanoid" intelligence would have been highly likely to evolve (or would eventually evolve) in another. Underlying Conway Morris's argument are his Christian beliefs and his philosophical antimaterialism (although criticism of Gould's book is not limited to those who hold such beliefs).

Though both scientists — Gould and Conway Morris — have used specific paleontological evidence to buttress their positions, the broader logical and philosophical arguments are fairly resistant to easy resolution by mere fact, and one suspects that if and when the classification of the Burgess fauna is finally settled, the debate will simply be continued in another venue. Regardless, Wonderful Life seems to me to hold up as a landmark of intelligent science writing for a general audience.

Chicoutimi

One year when I was a kid we took a family camping trip to Quebec. I don't remember much about the trip except that we stayed at least a night or two in both Montreal and Quebec City; by now whatever specific memories of those cities I obtained at the time have long since merged with those of earlier trips and a later one I made as an adult. But I know that we headed north out of Quebec City, probably traveling through the Parc national de la Jacques-Cartier, stopping at campgrounds that I remember as being sparsely occupied, and here and there fishing meandering streams and ponds with cobbled shores. The road snaked through swamps and forests, and there were probably beaver lodges and maybe a moose or two. It was a Francophone area, and one morning when I was dispatched to fetch water from the campground's well a boy a year or so younger than me (he was the son of the couple who ran the campground) ran ahead of me, took my bucket, and worked the well-pump for me. When he was done I said merci — probably the only French word I knew — and he responded merci beaucoup, distinctly emphasizing the second word. Was he correcting my manners, or simply acknowledging that I had respected his assigned domain? For a long time I puzzled over the significance of this trivial exchange.

We continued north, heading for a small city that is today simply a borough of the larger city of Sanguenay, which stands on the river of the same name. I don't know why we had chosen that destination — possibly it was just mere curiosity — but as we entered the city we could see the river ahead of us, or at least that's how I remember it now. As we passed through an intersection a car ran a red light and collided with the front bumper of our truck. No one was hurt. When the police arrived they spoke to the young woman who was at the wheel of the car. Permis?, they asked. She didn't have one. She was barely older than I was, and had taken her parent's car without their knowledge.

Calls were made to insurance companies and, language barriers having been overcome, a local body shop was found. We probably spent a night in Chicoutimi, but if so I remember nothing about it. As soon as the damage was set to rights we headed south for home.

Fallen leaves

Above, and following: headstones in a burial ground on a former estate, now a public park.

Below: the deceased are not sent into the other world unprovided for.