Sign of Error

A month ago (back when we had sun) I was walking by the old church associated with the Newman Center near the university and noticed a paperback book stuffed into the empty bulletin board box in front. The book was Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie.

I have not read this book, though I’d like to. It is a classic work of French history about the lives of the inhabitants of a small village in the Pyrenees at the beginning of the 14th century in the wake of the suppression of the Cathars. The history is based on a set of records set down by the Inquisition (the Fournier Register) between 1318 and 1325. Historiographically the book was a famous study from the Annales school of historians and was an important example of writing microhistory. I do not know if the person who placed the copy in the display case was making a commentary on the inquisitorial legacy of the Church.

Sapiens En Español

I’ve been reading Yuval Noah Harari’s bestselling book Sapiens in Spanish translation for language practice. This was inspired by Andres, one of the guides on Dreaming Spanish, doing videos on the book chapter-by-chapter. He is up through chapter 7 now as am I. Sapiens was originally published in Hebrew so if I were to read it in English it would still be in translation.

This is the largest book I’ve tried reading in Spanish to date. So far it’s going well — I don’t understand every word and don’t try to look them all up but I’m certainly getting the gist of his arguments. So far it is a very good popularization of an extremely wide sweep of human history but I don’t think it’s nearly as groundbreaking as a couple of books I’ve read in recent years with a similar theme: David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, and James C. Scott’s Against The Grain.

Most of the books I read are history books so it makes sense for me to look for some in Spanish to read too. I’m thinking Eduardo Galeano might be next?

Transcribing Catalan With My New Workstation

Thanks to the Easy Languages folks, I learned the power of target language subtitling of video content in language learning, and this has been a big part of my Catalan studies. The Easy Languages approach is to do double subtitling e.g. for Catalan this is subtitles in both Catalan and English. But it is also very helpful to watch videos that are singly subtitled in the target language, e.g. Catalan subtitles for Catalan video, and I have watching these where I can find them. The YouTube channel Català al Natural does this specifically for language learning, and as I’ve described earlier I have watched many episodes of the TV series El Foraster this way.

But most of the Catalan content on YouTube has no subtitling available, which limits its utility to a beginner in the language. What to do? I came up with a plan for adding automated subtitling to the video content, and tried this out yesterday with much success. The workflow is as follows: a) download the YouTube video to my workstation b) run speech-to-text software over the audio channel of the downloaded video and c) add the transcribed text as subtitles as one watches the video stored locally.

This approach came together very easily using my new workstation. The details are as follows. First, I used the program yt-dlp to download the video from YouTube. The next step is the speech-to-text conversion. I used Whisper here, which I believe is the best open source speech-to-text converter, at least that is what I gathered from working with the AI institute a year-and-a-half ago. This is software from the belly of the AI beast, coming from the company OpenAI. It is multilingual, and Catalan is one of the better performing languages in the software. The output from this program consists of transcribed text with timestamps. Finally, I watched the video in the program Celluloid, which turns out to be smart enough to take the text-with-timestamps and overlay the text on the video as subtitles at the right times.

It greatly helps the accuracy of the transcription not to have to do it in real time, as the software can take advantage of looking at the language context around the current timepoint to produce a better transcription. My new workstation is very helpful here, having a graphics card with 12 GB of VRAM memory. It still takes a while: it was transcribing at a rate of about 4x real speed (that is, a 12 minute video was taking about 3 minutes to transcribe). The output seems very good, though as a beginner in the language I am not the best one to judge.

I tested this system today with a couple of recent videos from VilaWeb, and was pleased with how it helped. I might try experimenting with double subtitling a la Easy Languages, since I think that is supported by the video playback software after some fiddling.

Loving Handwriting (Again)

Calligrapher Tom Gourdie wrote in Improve Your Handwriting that any handwriting that deteriorates at speed is useless. I remember working through his book when I was at university in the UK — basically he was advocating for a monoline italic, where some letters are joined but others aren’t, depending on where they sit in the word — the aim always being efficiency/speed without sacrificing legibility. (This is different than the cursive children are/were taught in the U.S., where every single letter is supposed to be joined up, a legacy of Spencerian/copperplate and modified and developed into the Palmer method, now largely discarded as students, if they write by hand at all, mostly print.) My own handwriting was transformed under Gourdie’s gentle prodding and I still write like this; in fact seeing handwriting from when I was at school is jarring to me now.

There is nothing like the tactile pleasure of writing with a good (not necessarily expensive) fountain pen on good, smooth paper. I am a fast typist. I am also (undiagnosed) ADHD, and could type out complicated philosophical ponderings while thinking about my shopping list. Writing by hand slows down my monkey brain and demands sequential thought. (When word processors came into common use in the late 1980s, the average length of book manuscripts went up by a third, at least those submitted to the Harvard University Press where I used to work; when cutting and pasting is easy, people do it instead of thinking through their ideas beforehand.)

Various studies have shown that there is different cognitive process between writing and typing, and that writing wins the cognitive battle, as described in this recent paper:

Handwriting activates a broader network of brain regions involved in motor, sensory, and cognitive processing. Typing engages fewer neural circuits, resulting in more passive cognitive engagement. Despite the advantages of typing in terms of speed and convenience, handwriting remains an important tool for learning and memory retention, particularly in educational contexts.
bq. —Marano et al., “The Neuroscience Behind Handwriting: Handwriting vs. Typing — Who Wins the Battle?” (Life (Basel), February 2025).

There’s more, of course. I recently realized that most of the jobs I’ve done in my life can already, or will soon, be done by artificial intelligence, a sobering thought. I have already disengaged from popular social media outlets because my drawings, such as they were, were being used without my permission to train AI. I am in no doubt whatsoever that every key stroke I make is somehow being monitored, studied, and spat out into an algorithm for something. So far, they haven’t figured out a way to track what I’m writing by fountain pen, though there are certainly pens available that can convert handwriting to typewritten text as you go.

Zettelkastening Away

I am almost a month into my project of writing into a Zettelkasten and am quite pleased with how it is going. When I initiated it I didn’t know where to start so I just began with an article near the top of my Vivaldi browser reading list and took notes on it. I think this first article was an excellent piece in The Guardian by Shaul Magid entitled The Zionist consensus among US Jews has collapsed. From there the following themes have emerged in my Zettelkasten note-taking:

• American Jewry following the Gaza war
• The rise and fall of the nation-state
• Post-growth economics
• Neolithic history.

So how do I get to taking notes about Neolithic history? Thinking about Zionism leads me into pondering the nation-state — I need to revisit what Hannah Arendt has to say about nation-states in The Origins of Totalitarianism — and in turn I discover a piece from 2018 by Rana Dasgupta also in The Guardian entitled The Demise of the Nation-State. Dasgupta will have a book coming out next year on the same theme, and he put together a related reading list for the upcoming book.

The first book on Dasgupta’s list is Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, by the political scientist James C. Scott. He makes the argument that when agricultural grains emerged in the Neolithic as a major food source, they proved easy to tax and this led to the first states being coercive rather than voluntary assemblies. Anyway, I read Scott’s book in the middle of October, put it aside, and last week I decided I had better take notes on it for the Zettelkasten before I return it to the library.

It is a much bigger project to take notes on a book than an article and I need to work out the best methods for doing so. It will depend on the book of course: for Against the Grain I am proceeding chapter-by-chapter. But I am astonished with how much more I am retaining when I write down notes rather than just reading the book and moving on. And the ideas from books can lead in so many directions.

When Pica went to Berkeley last week my stepmother suggested that Pica write a book as a memoir. And she thought that I should write a book as well. I am a long way from knowing what such a book would be about, but I can now confidently say that Zettelkastening is the way to get there.

The Traitor of Arnhem

One of the great pleasures of heading to the library is picking up an unexpected book of interest, often on the new books shelf. Recently I found there a new book entitled The Traitor of Arnhem, by Robert Verkaik. I have been interested in the battle of Arnhem ever since seeing the movie “A Bridge Too Far” back in 1977, and this book threads a spy story into the narrative of the battle. Actually, it presents two spy stories, one of which was briefly discussed in the Cornelius Ryan history of the same title that the movie was based upon. This first story was that of the double or triple agent Christiaan Lindemans, who was a Dutch resistance fighter who visited a German HQ in Holland two days before the battle started and evidently leaked information about British armor positions as they prepared to move north towards Eindhoven.

The second story involved an intelligence source that was almost completely forgotten until Verkaik started researching his book. Three days before the battle started (i.e. on 14 September 1944) a German spymaster in Stockholm received information via a diplomatic pouch about an upcoming airborne operation in Holland involving the British 1st Airborne and the U.S. 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions. The following day the spymaster received more detailed information about the plans in a set of microdot photos, and this information was communicated to the German field commanders by 17 September, when the battle started. The source for the intelligence was a shadowy figure somewhere in the heart of the British state who was going by the name of Agent Josephine.

A mole in British intelligence. This is starting to sound like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy territory. This isn’t entirely coincidental. John le Carré, who wrote Tinker and many other fine spy stories, worked in British intelligence from the late 1950s until the early 1960s, the period when the Cambridge Five spy scandal came to light. Before reading Verkaik’s book, I didn’t realize that the Cambridge Five spies were actively passing information onto the Soviet Union during World War II, prior to the Cold War.

Who was Agent Josephine? Verkaik presents a lot of circumstantial evidence that this was one of the Cambridge Five spies, namely Anthony Blunt. Of the Cambridge Five spies, Blunt’s reputation fared the best, and he kept his career as an art historian going well into the 1980s. But perhaps he was as dastardly as the others.

One wonders what le Carré would have thought of Verkaik’s book. At any rate, this just got me to reread Tinker and rewatch bits of the 1979 TV series starring Alec Guinness, always a fun thing.

Stammtisch

Last night I rewatched Downfall (Der Untergang in German), which chronicles Hitler’s final few days in his Berlin bunker. A tour de force by actor Bruno Ganz, the film draws heavily on material from survivors, especially Traudl Junge, who was one of Hitler’s secretaries. The spectacle of not just Hitler’s, but of many minds unravelling as the Soviet army advanced on the German capital, is something I find particularly interesting in light of where we are in the world.

The term “malignant narcissism” was coined by social psychologist (and Holocaust survivor) Erich Fromm to describe the type of grandiose sadistic paranoid pathology displayed by Hitler. It is a term that has also been leveled at various dictators or would-be dictators such as Putin, Orban, Erdogan, Kim Jong Un, and Trump, and whether or not the armchair diagnosis is an actual pathological condition, there are certainly traits in common to all of them. “Becoming unhinged” is a fate most of them will face.

I have been very remiss in my German study since before Mum died but wanted to do some preparation for today’s Stammtisch, a monthly gathering for my German conversation group where we get together and speak German for an hour or two. Given that we often end up talking about politics, this seemed a good entry point. I am not sure about the usefulness of the “No Kings” rallying cry since most kings nowadays have little more than a ceremonial role and exert little to no power, unlike the characters mentioned above, but it does have resonance in the American context and certainly brought people out in their millions last week.

Convivencia

Having recently gotten interested in the world of the Catalan medieval rabbi Nachmanides (aka Moses ben Nachman aka Ramban aka Bonastruc ça Porta), I just read the 2002 book The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, by María Rosa Menocal. I was initially deterred from reading it by some disappointing reviews, but I dived in anyway and quite liked it. It is not a scholarly history nor was Menocal a historian: she was a scholar of medieval Iberian literature, and the book is at its best tracing the world of translators and connections between Arabic, Hebrew, and Romance poetry and poetic forms. There is a 2019 PBS documentary based on the book; I will watch it one of these days.

I looked at some of the reaction to this book and came across a Wikipedia entry for a book entitled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Andalusian_Paradise by Dario Fernández-Morera. But reading to the bottom of the entry led me to one of the most scathing academic reviews I have run into, entitled The Myth of the Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: The Extreme Right and the American Revision of the History and Historiography of Medieval Spain, by S.J. Pearce, who is a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. Thus I stumbled into a war between liberal and far-right historiography, between convivencia and reconquista. Here are some choice quotes from S.J. Pearce:

By cherry-picking evidence, relying on outdated and explicitly partisan scholarship, adopting a messianic and omniscient authorial voice, and misrepresenting his opponents in order to argue against straw men he can vanquish rather than flesh-and-blood ones he cannot, Fernández-Morera uses the case of medieval Spain to further an explicitly extreme right-wing political and conservative Christian political and cultural agenda as it bears upon debates about politics, the establishment of religion, and the very place of the academy in civic life.

and

In addition to criticizing liberal ideas and values, Fernández-Morera situates his historiographical approach on the political new right through his explicit aim of vindicating Spain’s Catholic past in a way that closely mirrors and brings to an Anglophone audience the historiographical jiu-jitsu of Francisco Franco’s nationalist dictatorship, which is articulated clearly in the preamble to the Law of November 24, 1939 Creating the Spanish National Research Council. This law, signed into effect by Franco himself, establishes the council in order to defend Spanish history against Enlightenment thought and the diversity of opinion.

I feel vindicated in reading Menocal, and will follow up with some of her suggested readings.

A Notebook Accounting

We watched today’s keynote for the Wild Wonder Conference on nature journaling that is currently taking place. The keynote presentation was given by Roland Allen who recently wrote the book The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, and was billed as an incomplete history of nature notebooks. Allen traces the history of notebooks in Europe back to the introduction of paper manufacturing in Xàtiva in Islamic Spain. This technology gave people cheap and durable surfaces upon which to write, and in Florence the paper was bound into notebooks for common use. Accountants were some of the first ones to take advantage of the technology, inventing double-entry bookkeeping via ledgers. Paper was also a much more satisfying material to draw on than parchment, and this led to the first realistic nature illustrations by individuals such as Conrad Gessner.

Allen is a great advocate of the notebook as a cognitive tool, and he shared some of the different notebooks he keeps. Both Pica and I keep many notebooks as well, and here is a perhaps incomplete list of the ones I have:

1. My bullet journal. A list of daily, weekly, and monthly tasks and events, together with notes on various projects. This is a Moleskine gridded notebook.
2. My daily journal, entitled “A Journal of The Unraveling”. I complete one page a day in this, and always end the page with a quick sketch of a cat.
3. My daily sketchbook, currently in vertical format with the subjects being plant bits.
4. A work notebook, which I mostly used for taking notes on conference calls.
5. A nature journal. Unlike most of the attendees at the conference, I rarely make entries in it.
6. A notebook of astronomy observations.
7. A notebook for my Catalan studies. I don’t seem to have a notebook for Spanish, and instead use a card file to record interesting words.
8. A notebook of Hebrew vocabulary from the Duolingo course which I got through in spring of 2022.
9. A notebook of astronomy observations.
10. Two notebooks from the days when I was actively doing radio. First, a logbook of my ham radio contacts on HF.
11. Second, a notebook of interesting shortwave radio loggings.
12. And a miscellany of other sketchbooks.

The Spanish Spoken in Chile: A Dialect or a Language?

I’ve long been a fan of La Linguriosa (Elena Herraiz), a Spanish linguist with a “superinteresante” YouTube channel. In the video released today, she’s talking about Chilean Spanish. It’s true that when spoken quickly by people whose education deprived them of learning standard Spanish, Chilean Spanish can be difficult to understand. I remember working in an office in Madrid in the early 1980s, when one of the secretaries (a refugee from Pinochet’s excesses?) introduced me to certain Chilean phonemes (especially “ch” for “tr,” as in nosochos instead of nosotros).

Language is a source of constant interest and joy for me. I’ve started playing Lingule daily along with Wordle, Geoguesser and bridge (massively fail on Australian indigenous and African languages, but I’m learning).