Thanks for sharing. Also very impressed that this is a <1 hour job ("timed post").
32 karma · joined April 15, 2022
The Beowulf manuscript dates from around 975 CE and is written in what might be better termed Anglo-Saxon. How much can you understand from this random sentence: "þa me þæt gelærdon leode mine, þa selestan, snotere ceorlas"? ("So my vassals advised me well…) I personally can't understand a single word or even relate it in any way to the English I know.
On the other hand, the Sequence of Saint Eulalia was composed in "Old French" in 880 BCE and seems rather intelligible to me. I also just took a random sentence from the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100 BC) and can understand all of it: "Seignurs, vos en ireiz. Branches d’olive en voz mains portereiz, Si me direz a Carlemagne le rei Pur le soen Deu qu’il ait mercit de mei." I'd even go so far as to say that's closer to modern French than Shakespearean English despite being written in Anglo-Norman … Which also means it should probably count as being English literature if Beowulf qualifies…
I guess the lesson here is simply to remember that reality is always a lot more granular than we first expect and that any sweeping judgements on languages, countries, etc. over the span of millennia make very little sense. By that criteria, the linked article was pure clickbait to begin with.
In Italian, corporativismo has a distinct meaning that is unrelated to the concept of commercial corporations. It refers to a system of collaboration between social groups, represented through joint associations of employers and workers. Essentially, it is a state-aligned alternative to independent trade unions, a "national syndicalism" of sorts.
The quote itself doesn’t appear to be a mistranslation—it just doesn’t seem to exist. (https://politicalresearch.org/2005/01/12/mussolini-corporate...)
Muskotrumpia may excel in performance-based state capture, but fascism it is not. The anti-state culture of the U.S. clashes with the "everything for the state" ethos that defines fascism. We're simply entering textbook Caesarism territory.
That being said, terroir is something more that just "land" and includes the idea of common rules or ways of doing things, and of course genetics.
When a type of cheese can only use the highly creamy milk from a specific breed of cow, the result is highly specific and tasty, yet it doesn't express anything that's really related to the land itself at that stage. Camembert is widely understood as a typical terroir-expressing product, yet it would be pretty much the same if it were produced elsewhere than in Normandy with the same production methods, breeds, yeasts, and same access to pasture for cows for instance. It's the common approach that lends terroir to it. (Well, theoretically, because the an unpasteurized Camembert fermier will actually be more similar to a creamy, soft-ripened farmer's Brie than a pasteurized industrial Camembert, the slight difference is butterfat content notwithstanding).
The fetishizing actually transformed the way local products are perceived and grown, by lending importance to the idea that instead of going for something generic, we should be aiming to express something more, the way some grape varietal can express the underlying mineral bedbrock (as with Chardonnay in Burgundy's Chablis area, which is geologically a region of Kimmeridgian limestone). It's posh to some extent. I remember meeting a old wine producer from the Loire region at a wine tasting a few years back who was befuddled by some of the audience's questions and that basically asked us to keep the complex questions for his son because he had only been trained to make wine that was nice to drink in the same way his forefathers did and just had no idea in what way his soil and grapes were special because those were the only ones he knew.
A lot of it is fake/commercial gatekeeping and poring over details of DOC regulations can be quite disturbing at times. For instance, DOC foie gras produced from Barbary ducks, which cannot naturally deliver fat liver like geese and that were never used before being hyperselected by the French agricultural research institute INRA in the postwar era. Meat products or cheese that use generic methods that could be applied anywhere seem to be the worst offenders. DOC cheese with clonal lines of moulds, give me a break… DOC wine in Italy seems to be similarly impacted if I'm to believe Jonathan Nossiter of 'Mondovino''s fame. Interestingly, one of the Italian winemakers in his follow-up documentary 'Natural Resistance' actually says something along the lines of "there's no concept of terroir in Italian"" and basically everyone in that documentary use the French word. I really do think it's an interesting, elusive concept, but one that intuitively clicks with people throughout the globe that don't necessarily have as mature a word for the same ideas and that most French people don't necessarily understand either because of how commercialized it is and how prevalent the paradigm of uniformization has become. Everyone wants terroir, but Camembert uses albino moulds because everyone wants them perfectly white, cider comes with labels mentioning how the liquid might be cloudy but it remains perfectly safe to drink, etc.
Also laser printers draw a lot of power constantly, you may be confused here. The toner needs to be kept warm.
Returning to the Afar, the story about tourists being gunned down was told to me by an embassy source, but it may have been unrelated, older than stated, or even plain false (the seeds of doubt are now sown in my mind!). The whole thing being at least in part a mafia protection racket was something I was told by the folk who set it up for us, however, and something that felt realistic at the time given that we were targeted for random things like trying to cross a government bridge without also paying for the barge that it replaced. I actually tend to believe that there would be more attacks if insecurity were the cause. Clearly, few travellers would go up to Dallol and then cheap out by refusing to pay 50 or 100 bucks for protection, especially seeing all those weapons around them.