Category: News

Hollis Brown’s South Dakota

Hollissmall

When Bob Dylan was 13 years old, one of the century’s worst epidemics of black stem rust struck the upper midwest — particularly North and South Dakota and Minnesota. Up to 75% of the wheat harvest was lost to the disease, which blackens the crop with a powdery, sooty fungus. The economic consequences were severe, and the incident became legendary within the science of plant pathology. There’s no way young Bob Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota wouldn’t have heard about it.

But there were plenty of other diseases to blacken your crops, or kill your animals or you. I’m not an expert in any of them. Ergot can blacken wheat, barley, and other cereals and causes “bad blood” in cattle and humans — convulsions, gangrene, derangement. An invisible fungus in a common grass leads to tall fescue toxicosis, with grotesque symptoms like “fescue foot” and nasty birthing problems. Maybe Bob had heard of such diseases as well.

Dylan’s “Ballad of Hollis Brown” is an exercise in empathy — its power is in the vividness of its vantage point within the head of a desperately bad-luck South Dakota farmer, and in the way the song dares you to turn away. Having lived in Minnesota for almost 20 years, or about as long as Dylan did before he moved to New York, and I can almost see how the young songwriter might have found the empathy to write such a convincing song.

Even in fairly cosmopolitan Minneapolis and St. Paul, farming is always a presence — to this day, grain mills and breweries (or their ruins) are lined up along the Mississippi River. They’re a constant reminder that the cold climate used to limit the viable crops to stuff you could grind or brew, plus animal feed — wheat, barley, oats, alfalfa, sorghum, various kinds of hay. When you fill your gas tank in Minnesota, you have a good chance of being reminded that farmers have more options today, such as President Bush’s switchgrass. Fully 200 of the nation’s 600 ethanol (“E-85”) gas pumps are in Minnesota.

A few years ago, a friend of mine moved from the University of Minnesota to New York — just like Dylan, you might say, only forty years later. On her first day in Manhattan, a shopkeeper mentioned the lack of rain, and my friend, forgetting herself, asked if the farmers upstate were suffering. The shopkeeper gave her a look as if she’d just evidenced a severe case of Tourette’s Syndrome.

But that awareness and empathy, which so animated Dylan’s “Hollis Brown” in 1964, has its limits. In fact, “Hollis Brown” is primarily about those limits. For that reason, it’s convenient for Minnesotans that the song is set next door, in South Dakota.

South Dakota’s leaders have worked to make the state’s economy, and perhaps its conscience, better insulated from the booms and busts of farm life. In 1980, South Dakota was in desperate financial straits and took action by eliminating all laws against usury. Citibank, among other credit card companies, moved operations to the state almost immediately, leading to an explosion of growth in Sioux Falls and, some say, to a lot of South Dakota farmers declaring bankruptcy.

I happened to hear “Hollis Brown” on the same day the South Dakota governor (born the very year of the black stem rust epidemic) signed the bill designed to ban almost all abortions in the state, and ultimately, to overturn Roe v. Wade nationwide. That’s what got me thinking about the song again. It seemed like yet another example of Dylan’s uncanny foresight that he set the song in South Dakota even though, in 1964, Mississippi played the role in folksong that South Dakota now seems eager to play.

Dylan got the melody of Hollis Brown from “Pretty Polly,” as Greil Marcus has pointed out. “Pretty Polly” is about a young man named Willie who murders his girlfriend for reasons which the song leaves completely unaddressed and which therefore seem to take on a menacing profundity. But as Rennie Sparks points out, at least one of Pretty Polly’s 16th-century sources explains the motive simply and without ambiguity: She was pregnant and Willie doesn’t want the birth to take place. At least partly, this is the origin of “Hollis Brown” — a story about the murder of a woman as a de facto abortion.

The best-known version of “Pretty Polly” (the version Rennie Sparks calls “cold as a cockroach”) was recorded by Dock Boggs in 1927. In 1963, Boggs was rediscovered by Mike Seeger who then recorded and traveled extensively with him. In 1993, Bob Dylan made a studio recording of “Hollis Brown” accompanied by Mike Seeger playing banjo in Dock Boggs’ very singular style. Really, the banjo part on the recording is basically just a sped-up version of Boggs’ “Pretty Polly.” The effect of the recording is to return “Hollis Brown” to its family tree, to explicitly situate it within its lineage.

In writing “Hollis Brown,” then, Dylan surely wasn’t looking ahead to 2006. He was looking back to the old Appalachian murder ballads, which the song so convincingly resembles. Marcus seems to claim the song was also inspired by a newspaper report of a mass murder in South Dakota, but I haven’t been able to track that down (Charles Starkweather?). Perhaps the more inspiring history took place at Wounded Knee, South Dakota’s most notorious mass murder and part of the Indian Wars in which Minnesota also played an unfortunate role. Given the history of this South Dakota farm — where the buffalo no longer roam — I wonder if Hollis Brown and his family aren’t merely the most recent seven people to have died there.

It makes little sense to try to enlist “Hollis Brown” in a contemporary political fight. Or anyway, that’s simply not The Celestial Monochord’s schtick. Besides, the song is striking as an early hint of the full-blown poetic strategies Dylan was about to unleash — strategies that revolve around undecided meaning, meaning as an unfinished art for the listener to complete, meaning not as autocratic rule but as democratic process. To claim that “Hollis Brown” is somehow against South Dakota’s new abortion law is to pretty much miss the song entirely.

Still, it’s in the character of Dylan’s art to keep coming around, over and over, asserting itself in new contexts. I think this uncanny relevence comes from reaching as deep into empathy as he can, and from his willingness to share with us the work of meaning. Or, maybe the more you’re able to encounter the world with the past very much alive in you, the more you’re able to anticipate the future. Maybe this is why Dylan continues to mystify, particularly in America where memory is notoriously short and empathy often runs thin.

 

Editor’s Notes: The following is transcribed from the 1993 recording with Mike Seeger. Also, the coyote is the official state animal of South Dakota.

 

THE BALLAD OF HOLLIS BROWN

Hollis Brown, he lived on the outside of town
Hollis Brown, he lived on the outside of town
With his wife and five children and his cabin breaking down

You looked for work and money and you walked a ragged mile
You looked for work and money and you walked a ragged mile
Your children are so hungry, man, that they don’t know how to smile

Your babies’ eyes look crazy there, a-tuggin’ at your sleeve
Your babies’ eyes look crazy there, a-tuggin’ at your sleeve
You walk the floor and wonder why with every breath you breathe

The rats have got your flour, bad blood it got your mare
The rats have got your flour, bad blood it got your mare
Is there anyone that knows, is there anyone that cares?

You prayed to the Lord above, “Oh please send you a friend”
You prayed to the Lord above, “Oh please send you a friend”
Your empty pockets tell you that you ain’t a-got no friend

Your babies are crying louder, it’s pounding on your brain
Your babies are crying louder, it’s pounding on your brain
Your wife’s screams are stabbin’ you like the dirty drivin’ rain

Your grass is turning black, there’s no water in your well
Your grass is turning black, there’s no water in your well
You spent your last lone dollar on seven shotgun shells

Way out in the wilderness a cold coyote calls
Way out in the wilderness a cold coyote calls
Your eyes fix on the shotgun that’s hangin’ on the wall

Your brain is a-bleedin’ and your legs can’t seem to stand
Your brain is a-bleedin’ and your legs can’t seem to stand
Your eyes fix on the shotgun that you’re holdin’ in your hand

There’s seven breezes blowin’ all around your cabin door
Seven breezes blowin’ all around your cabin door
Seven shots ring out like the ocean’s pounding roar

There’s seven people dead on a South Dakota farm
Seven people dead on a South Dakota farm
Somewheres in the distance there’s seven new people born

 

Darwin and Relativism

In a recent NPR segment on religious anti-Darwinism, a young person-of-faith declared that evolution could never be finally, completely proven, whereas Creationism has already been completely proven — “because the Creator,” she explained, “is in my heart.”

Of course, I puzzled over how this could be understood as proof. What if something else — Darwin, maybe, or perhaps The Destroyer — is in MY heart? Or what if her “heart” changes and she loses faith? How then are we supposed to decide how the biological world came to be the way it is? It would seem that proof based on “hearts” leaves us standing on awfully shaky ground.

The religious opponents of evolution frequently accuse evolution of encouraging “relativism,” although I’ve never heard an explanation of just what this means, as if it were self-evident. It’s not self-evident. Science has an awfully firm bedrock foundation for its knowledge — the world, the physical universe, the empirical field. Science changes its mind about things more often than, say, the Vatican because its understanding of the universe deepens and expands, and because it openly corrects its mistakes.

How is science somehow more “relative” than other forms of knowledge, particularly those based on faith (that is, “the heart”)? Although Christianity has The Bible (actually, a wide variety of Bibles) to turn to for continuity, it’s difficult to see that Biblical study has brought great consistency to Christian thought, either between sects or within a given sect over time. To base belief (that is, what one holds to be the case), on what amounts to culture and desire is relativism so extreme as to make me dizzy.

On July 9th, I had to re-read a paragraph on the front page of the New York Times three or four times.

It was in an article about an editorial written by the archbishop of Vienna, a close confidant of Pope Benedict XVI, in which he asserted, in essence, that Darwinian evolution is not true, and belief in it might not be compatible with Catholic faith. This assertion was apparently encouraged by Benedict, in a betrayal of Pope John Paul II’s general friendliness to evolution and science.

What made me stop and re-read, over and over, was the NYTimes article’s seventh paragraph, which reads, in its entirety:

Darwinian evolution is the foundation of modern biology. While researchers may debate details of how the mechanism of evolution plays out, there is no credible scientific challenge to the underlying theory.

What’s so startling is that these facts were printed in an American newspaper as facts. Most news venues would cut this paragraph on the grounds that “sounds” biased. But it only sounds biased because the facts it contains ordinarily go unreported, or are reported only as the assertions of an expert who is, in turn, contradicted by an opposing expert.

So American journalism has its own trouble with relativism in its tendency to “seem” objective while actually measuring that objectivity by its appearance. It would be better to BE objective regardless of appearance — as the New York Times has done in this case — or even to be openly biased. To be both biased and to pretend to offer objective journalism results in a relativism unlike anything Darwin would have tolerated.

Terri Schiavo and Science in the News

At some point during the Terri Schiavo fiasco, I saw a right-wing spokesmodel on CNN say something like, “I was in a coma once and I’m sure glad they didn’t kill ME!” So, the neurologist she was debating pointed out that she didn’t have the same condition that Schiavo had. CNN’s host didn’t bother to get this little confusion sorted out during the segment — not even close. But the science did matter, desperately.

Although the science of neurology was the core of the case, all the thousands of hours of coverage did not add up to America’s education about the brain. That was a lost opportunity. A great thumbnail discussion of the science behind the Schiavo case was on NPR’s Talk of the Nation’s Science Friday, but I’m not sure Americans listen to NPR a heck of a lot …

To my ears, the great unspoken core of the story was the anxiety most people seem to feel around the idea of the brain as the organ of awareness. I find most people dislike the idea that your awareness, wakefulness, personality, emotions, identity, spirituality, consciousness, and soul are all artifacts generated by the meat inside your skull. When the meat goes bad, there’s no more “you.” As neurology advances, I bet we’re going to face increasingly counter-intuitive brain conditions and even more vexing medical and moral decisions. We better get ready, in part by facing the facts.

None of this is to say that the main conflict was between science and religion — after all, Americans of faith were mostly on science’s side on this one. As I watched Shiavo’s parents fight to keep Terry hanging around, I kept hearing the Carter Family sing “Don’t you want to go to heaven? Don’t you want God’s bosom to be your pillow when the world’s on fire?” Perhaps Pete Seeger’s re-writing of a passage from the Book of Ecclesiastes might have been more persuasive, but I didn’t think of it until recently.

Star Pix Wow Space Fans

Hubble Deep Field

The Hubble Deep Field project uses the Hubble Space Telescope to take a kind of “core sample” of the Universe’s development. It always comes to mind when I think of the tempestuous relations between science and journalism.

The project requires the Space Telescope to stare into a tiny part of the sky, chosen for its lack of foreground stars, for something like 10 days and nights — that is, it takes a million-second exposure. The result is a photo that looks, at first glance, like an ordinary field of faint stars, but when you lean in to look at the details, you realize the “stars” are all galaxies.

The Hubble Deep Field images provide random samplings of galaxies as they appeared in successively younger eras of the Universe, stretching back to when it was only about 6% of its current age. There are hundreds of ways to tease information out of such photos, and they’ve been a gold mine for astronomers interested in the evolution of galaxy structure and distribution, dark matter, the big bang, etc., etc., etc.

When the first such image was revealed to reporters in 1996, typical headlines were “NASA Discovers Thousands of Galaxies” or “New Galaxies Discovered, Wowing Astronomers.” It’s true that most of the galaxies in the images had not been seen before, but what happened was no more the discovery of new galaxies than the discovery of new pebbles would be when geologists take a core sample of interesting geological strata. Astronomy is not about increasing the count of known galaxies, but rather, understanding how the Universe works and evolved, so at least some journalists completely missed the most rudimentary facts of the story.

When you read a newspaper article about something you really understand well, it can make you very suspicious of the article next to it, about which you know almost nothing. On the other hand, I understood what had actually happened — what the news stories should have said — because some journalists actually did get it right. You just had to know where to find them.

What You’re Not Interested In

“It’s amazing, the human capacity to not notice things that you’re not interested in,” Bram Gunther said. He’s New York City’s deputy director of forestry and horticulture and recently gave reporter Andy Young a tour of NYC’s urban forest for an article in the May 23 New Yorker.

The city of New York has five million trees, a half million of which are “street trees” not associated with parks or yards. There are fowering cherry, honey locust, silver linden, pin oak, ginkgo, Japanese zelkova and pagoda, London plane, Kentucky coffeetree, dawn redwood — seventy species in all.

Beginning in June, more than 1,000 volunteer “tree stewards” — tree geeks, the article calls them — will take the first census of NYC trees in a decade. Driving along one block, Gunther points out to his reporter some of the reasons the tree population turns over so quickly: “Subway! Grate! Bus stop! Garage! Canopy! Grates! Vaults! Driveway! Awning! Light pole! Again with the canopy!” Along the way, they find injuries due to bikes chained to trunks, dog urine, lovers carving their initials, and Asian long-horned beetles.

Over the last few months, and after more than five years of working for an organization of plant scientists, I’ve finally begun learning to identify trees (so that’s what a maple leaf looks like!). If my eye for the various species ever develops, I know it’ll be one of those experiences that makes the world come alive for me all over again, much like when I learned about atmospheric optics.

I suppose learning about the urban forest has that same character that draws amateur folklorists, conspiracy cranks, poets in American, amateur scientists, certain varieties of bloggers. It’s a way of turning your back on cable news, American Idol, the runaway bride, publicly-funded stadiums, Clear Channel, and inventing your own culture, your own way of seeing the world. (“There are 8 million stories in the naked city …”) It often seems that simply controlling your own attention and finding your own stories to tell is, increasingly, an act of civil disobedience.

Billboards in Space

Advertising in Earth Orbit

The idea of creating very large advertisements and placing them into Earth obit has been very seriously considered. Such “space billboards,” it’s usually estimated, would be about the size and brightness of the full moon and would be visible for hours on end to something like a quarter or half the world’s population at a time. Potentially, no sky on Earth would lack an ad for something.

Current technology is more than enough to do the trick, and actual companies have offered the service (for example, Space Marketing, Inc. of Roswell, Georgia, proposed space advertising for the 1996 Summer Olympics).

It seems that the only obstacles to actual space billboards are:

(1) Public opposition. Any company making use of such advertising would probably (or hopefully) be subject to intense and widespread public criticism. Indeed, I myself can think of few other causes for which I would be willing to go to war.

(2) National laws. At least in the U.S., a law prohibits the deployment of space advertising. Whether, and for how long, the law would stand up to challenges brought to the World Trade Organization, as well as domestic First Amendment challenges, I can’t say. In any case, last week, the FAA asked Congress for the authority to enforce those existing U.S. laws (see CNN.com’s story in their “funny news” section). I believe this is happening now because private space ventures are making rapid progress in the U.S., and the FAA — not NASA — enforces laws relating to private space travel.

Around 1998, I toyed with the idea of writing a screenplay about an underground quasi-terrorist group that sabotage a mission to install some space advertising. They were not the bad guys, either …

Einstein Takes A Test

Bohr Einstein
Niels Bohr and Einstein think about it

In physics, there are often different equations for the same phenomenon, but you can usually do a little algebra and show that the different equations actually come from the same source. This is considered good and normal.

So, it’s a lot more than a bit embarrassing that the two most important ideas in modern physics — quantum mechanics, which are used to describe teeny tiny things, and General Relativity, which is used to describe big-ass things — have no connection at all. They don’t match. To go from one to the other, you have to close one book, put it away, and open another.

For example, Einstein showed that gravity is really just geometry. Mass warps space, and so objects tend to slide down the geometrical warps that other objects create, moving closer together. When we look at this, it looks like gravitational attraction. Unfortunately, quantum mechanics thinks of gravity as an effect generated when masses pass little particles back and forth between them. These ideas are no more compatible to physicists than they are to me or you.

Generally, the conflict can just be ignored, but in certain cases, the two worlds collide. When you want to talk about teeny tiny spaces with HUGE gravitational fields — like black holes, or the Big Bang — you’re in real trouble. You need physics that hasn’t been invented yet — you need “quantum gravity” or a “Grand Unified Theory”. People are working on some interesting ideas (like string theory) in trying to develop this new physics, but it’s not clear whether anyone is on the right track or not.

Check your local bookstore for a good article in the July 2005 Sky and Telescope, describing experiments designed to help break the log jam. In terms of the margin of error, quantum mechanics has been confirmed with a lot more precision than General Relativity has. If Einstein’s work could be confirmed way, way down to the umpteenth digit, and if this work revealed some difficulties with the theory, it might help unravel the curtain separating the physics of the very large and the very small. Astronomy is at the forefront of the effort, hence the article in Sky and Telescope.

The Mount Graham Controversy, 1988

Squir1l

In the 1980s, I studied astronomy (actually, physics and mathematics was all it was) at the University of Arizona in Tucson. I also did a lot of hiking and camping in the mountains and deserts of the southwest, compelled by the same love of nature that brought me to astronomy.

So, I found myself in the company of both astronomers and environmentalists on a daily basis. I thought nothing of it, since so many amateur astronomers prefer to see dark, clean skies than strip malls, and often have to camp in the wilderness to escape light pollution. Similarly, environment-conscious hikers and campers always seem intensely aware of the night (and day) skies they get to experience.

But then came the Mount Graham controversy. In its early stages, the debate mostly revolved around a rare species of red squirrel that some feared would go extinct if a large observatory complex was built on top of the mountain. There was a lot to consider, and I tried hard to consider it. Unfortunately, I found no colleagues willing to help.

The environmentalists I met saw visions of chemical and radioactive spills, noisy research, great tracts of asphalt, and throngs of tourists in a pristine wilderness. I tried to explain that telescopes just bend light with mirrors and today require only electricity, not photochemicals. They also like native plants around them to absorb image-blurring heat, and tourists are only marginally tolerated at a serious research facility. Mount Graham already boasted a road system, a Bible camp, and an artificial lake. Nothing of the sort was in the least bit interesting to the environmentalists I discussed it with — this information was greeted as evidence alright, but only of the fact that my heart was not in the right place. The facts seemed to prove only that I didn’t care.

I will say that they were somewhat more willing to engage than the astronomy students I tried to talk to — at least when those students were in all-male groups. There was no hope of even suggesting that accomodations might be made for the observatory’s impact on animal habitats, or that a better understanding of the ecosystem up there might be interesting, or that mutual education between astronomers and environmentalists might lessen the tensions over the issue. I mostly remember one very brief, bruising conversation in which it was suggested that the group go squirrel hunting.

I eventually stopped paying attention to the Mount Graham debate, mostly because I doubted a real debate was possible. Being somewhat wet behind the ears, I was shocked that my interests could be aligned with people who were so obviously wrong and unwise. It would be many years before I really came to accept that even your ideological brethren can be routinely hostile to the truth and to the common good. I came to accept it as a fact, but I still find it rather unpleasant.

Classifieds: Biosphere 2

Biosphere2

Biosphere 2 was an attempt at creating a sealed-off, self-sustaining ecosystem of the kind astronauts would need for Moon or Mars bases, or for extremely long trips into deep space. The name implies that the Earth itself is Biosphere 1.

The $200 million venture was mostly funded by a Texas oil billionaire. With a lot of TV cameras aimed at them, the first crew was sealed up in 1991, but oxygen levels plummeted, crops failed, the isolated crew grew testy and weak, and no animals survived except abundant ants and cockroaches. It wasn’t long before outside food and fresh oxygen were quietly brought in.

After a flurry of mission changes and lawsuits, the complex just north of Tucson is now up for sale:

“This is not all about the highest bidder,” [general manager of company that owns Biosphere 2] said. “All things being equal, we’d certainly like to see an appropriate reuse of the Biosphere and associated buildings, but ultimately, it comes down to what the market will bear.”

I gather that some good science came out of Biosphere 2, and its certainly better to fail in Southern Arizona than halfway to Alpha Centauri. Still, Biosphere 2 may be best remembered as an especially bizarre example of America’s (and The American West’s) doomed utopianism.

It’s also a dramatic example of something I’ve mentioned before — the intimate and often troubling relationship between American space science and the mass media. I’ll do some exploring of that long history in future entries of the Monochord.

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Classifieds: The Yerkes Observatory

The Yerkes Observatory is for sale. Possibly one of the most beautiful observatories in the world, Yerkes is located on 77 acres of prime lakeside real estate in the charming resort community of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

To those who appreciate the history of astronomy, Yerkes is also one of their best loved shrines. Yerkes was the last observatory to be built during what I think of the first space race — a drive to build larger and larger refracting telescopes (those with a big lense in the front and a little eyepiece in back, like a sailor’s spyglass). Finished in 1897, Yerkes hosted some of the greatest astronomers and telescope builders of its era — E. E. Barnard, Ritchey, George Ellery Hale, Otto Struve, Kuiper, Chandrasekhar, and the young Carl Sagan.

Apparently, the University of Chicago (one of the most richly endowed universities in the world) thinks the most promising buyer at the moment is a New York developer who’d like to (at best) make Yerkes the centerpiece of a gated community of oversized suburban mansions.

If I were a rich man, daidle deedle daidle daidle daidle deedle daidle dum …