Hunza Valley, Pakistan: Our Trip 4

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Featured Image: Lady Finger or Bublimating (6000 metres) and Hunza Peak (6270 m) above Karimabad, Hunza Valley, Pakistan. Ultar Peak (7388 m), Bojahagur Duanasir II (7329 m) are within 5 km. Rakaposhi (7788 m) and Diran Peak (7266 m) although around 27 kilometres away dominate the horizon across the river and the Karakorum Highway, KKH, May 1995.

Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 18 January 2022

The Hunza Valley, Karakorum Highway, Pakistan: Our Trip 4

Introduction

In my first article about the Karakorum Highway I said that I’d been always fascinated by the Hunza and Nagar Kingdoms since I first heard about them in obscure books about South Asia and 19^th century British India many of them out of print.

However, there are still many terrific books available about the Karakorum Highway and associated areas referenced in my articles, which are either still available in print, or historical books available as downloads on the Internet.

This is the fifth article in travelling the Karakorum Highway series. The others are: 1 The Karakorum Highway (KKH), 2 The Lower Karakorum Highway, 3 Besham to Gilgit, the Terrain, 4 Extreme Polo in Gilgit.

I found Hunza a magic place from my reading and had wanted to go there from quite a young age, before I persuaded Denise to make her first trip to Asia in 1995. The actuality of Hunza was not disappointing. It met expectations and fantasises.

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AA Gill British Pubs

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 Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 1 December 2020

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AA Gill & Jeffrey Steingarten

Two wonderful food writers are the late AA Gill, UK and Jeffrey Steingarten, USA. Both have a unique voice and have brought something special to ‘foodie’ writing. Both writers have created a persona, which whilst probably not true adds something immeasurable to their style.

AA Gill seems to be an angry, sardonic working or lower middle class intellectual with a ‘chip on his shoulder’. Although, this is not an adequate description. It is superficial, and certainly not true. He was upper middle class from a happy background.

What is true is that he spent his late teens and the whole of his twenties as a drunk.

Jeffrey Steingarten presents the persona of a New Yorker with obsessive compulsive behaviours. It is also probably not true, but adds an energy to his writing. I’ll cover him in a later article.

Steingarten tends to give you more information than you ever wanted to know, but in a very entertaining way. AA Gill gives you less than you want (fewer column inches).

I’ll concentrate on AA Gill, who wrote a few short articles on the British pub amidst a massive oeuvre of food and travel writing. Although he offended many people constantly, it was an integral part of his style. The quotations below are from Table Talk 2007 a collection of his column articles from the Sunday Times.

E M Foner Union Station Series 1: Overview & KDP

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 Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 1 October 2020

EM Foner Union Station Series & Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)

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Preamble

EM Foner Union Station does not fit my normal Classic SciFi inclination. As you would know from my Classic SciFi series, ten to date, I am a fan of old-fashioned classic science fiction and also would like to remind or introduce people to some of the best books.

My series of Classic SciFi is 1. James Blish A Case of Conscience, 2. Daniel F Galouye Dark Universe, 3. Avram Davidson Rork! 4-7 William Gibson Trilogy 4. Neuromancer, 5. Prophecy, 6. Count Zero, 7. Mona Lisa Overdrive, 8 Ursula K. Le Guin The Word for World Is Forest, 9 Isaac Asimov I, Robot & Killer Robots, 10 Arkady & Boris Strugatsky Roadside Picnic. There are many more to get around to.

In the articles I try to do slightly more than a conventional book review by providing a deeper background and some analysis.

Roy Lewis The Evolution Man is also labelled by Penguin as Science Fiction. I would label it more as humour and not what I call Classic SciFi; though I’d highly recommend it as a must read.

My preferred science fiction and use of the word classic are those books from the 1940s on that try to advance novel ideas and a theme that is plausible and pays lip service to scientific rigour whether from hard science or the social sciences and psychology.

Nevertheless, there are other genres and I have read works from many of them, including the occasional fantasy novel.

My liking of and slight addiction to EM Foner’s Union Station Series does not fit this model. It is unusual for me. Akin perhaps to an otherwise intelligent reader’s attraction to Mills & Boon or Westerns but this does not do justice to EM Foner. The categorisation with Mills & Boon and Westerns is also important. The story or the clothing of each type of writing falls within similar forms of ritualised convention. In EM Foner’s case this is quite clever, if somewhat unusual. The Union Station books are funny and subversively intelligent but quirky.

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Union Station Series

There are 18 Union Station books to date published over the last six years. They are all of similar quality and their ratings average over 4 on Goodreads, which as a reader tends to be my preliminary criterion of excellence these days. When browsing books on secondhand shelves anything over 3.75 tends to be a reliable guide to my giving new authors a go.

I’ll cover the individual books in another article.

What is History 11: World Economic History

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Richard Baldwin The Great Convergence 2016

 Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 4 May 2020

What is History 11: World Economic History to 1990

What is History: Richard Baldwin The Great Convergence 2016

Introduction

I was planning to write the next Jared Diamond Guns, Germs and Steel articles following on from Guns, Germs and Steel: Overview and Polynesia A Natural Experiment of History and I will soon. I accidentally picked up a second hand copy of The Great Convergence by Richard Baldwin 2016 from Canty’s bookshop and decided that it had important information that couldn’t wait.

I usually don’t have much time for macroeconomists and rarely read economics books. But, at least Baldwin is interested in economic history and covers a period from 200,000 years ago to the present, which is extraordinary, certainly a much longer period than most economists ever think about. He has some quite important things to say about the early history of humankind and on the development of world economics up to the modern era.

I had been introduced to Kondratiev cycles (or waves) some time ago by Fred Emery (See Future Predicting and Q Research methods). Fred was interested in the modern modifications of the cycles (see Wikipedia below). He was also interested in the energy implications of the following:

• Industrial Revolution (1771)
• Age of Steam and Railways (1829)
• Age of Steel and Heavy Engineering (1875)
• Age of Oil, Electricity, the Automobile and Mass Production (1908)
• Age of Information and Telecommunications (1971)

(Wikipedia, Kondratiev Wave)

But, Fred thought the new forms of energy or ways of using new technologies were still intricately tied up in the Kondratiev idea of 40-60 year cycles of expansion, stagnation and recession, with their impacts on labour, production and prosperity.

Richard Baldwin is also interested in phases (cycles) in economic history but not wedded to equal time periods. Phase 1 Humanising the globe is from 200,000 years ago to around 12,000 years ago. Phase 2 Agriculture and the first bundling is from 12,000 years ago to around 200 years ago. Phase 3 is from around 1820 to 1990, the industrial revolution, the age of steam and globalisation’s first unbundling. Phase 4 is from 1990 and begins with the ICT revolution (information, communications technology) and is the second unbundling.

What is History 10: Polynesia a Natural Experiment of History

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 Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 23 January 2020

Articles in the What is History? series are 1 Introduction 2 Sleep Patterns, 3 The Medieval Mind, 4 Love,  5  EH Carr Historians & their facts, 6  Religion 7 EH Carr Causation in History, 8 EH Carr History as Progress and 9 Guns, Germs & Steel Overview.

I introduced Jared Diamond and Guns, Germs & Steel in my introductory article on What is History? and again in article 9 with an overview. Diamond is a biologist as I am by training. His foray into history is almost one of frustration. Because as a biologist he understands evolution and is interested how an intelligent naked ape might develop into what we recognise as a human being (Homo sapiens) and how humans might develop agriculture, settled towns, city states, political structures and civilisations.

Yuval Harari (a historian) in Sapiens is attempting something similar from a different perspective.

The development of human history is set in a background of geography, climate, the distribution of plants and animals and other external factors. These sorts of things are quite acceptable as the study of ecology with animals and plants, but suddenly become less acceptable when one deals with human beings and human history.

Diamond’s frustration with history was because mainstream history did not cover the issues of the biological origin of human beings, the development from a hunter gathering background and the influence of such things that can loosely be called environment on human history.

Diamond is frequently labelled as an environmental determinist and dismissed, but that is wilfully misunderstanding what he is trying to do. Part of this is simply an unwillingness to accept a different approach, but Diamond is also at fault for the quirky way he approached his topic.

In article 9, I felt the need to give an overview to the good, the bad and the controversial in Guns, Germs and Steel to get over these issues so that we could begin to look at some of the important findings contained in the book and their implications for human history.

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A unique idea

Of a normal book, if I said that Diamond’s one original idea was… I would be readying myself to belittle the work.

However, we are talking about a generalist work in Guns, Germs and Steel whose aim is to examine the impact of external forces on human history. Generalist integrating works are moderately unusual because they require synthesis of a diverse array of disparate academic disciplines and they rarely contain new ideas other than the generalist overview itself.

In spite of this, there is one very original idea in Guns, Germs and Steel, that Diamond appears to have had, which he outlines in Chapter 2 A Natural Experiment of History.

It is Diamond’s apparently novel idea that is the basis for the remainder of this article.

Richard Evans Schultes and Rubber

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Featured: Wade Davis The Lost Amazon: The Photographic Journey of Richard Evans Schultes, 2004.

 Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 1 September 2019

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Richard Evans Schultes & Rubber

Introduction

I met a young Swiss man about thirty in Pakistan in 1995. I’ll call him Marc. We shared a jeep with he and his girlfriend up the Kaghan Valley through the snow. The first time I saw Marc, though he was lean and wiry, I mistakenly thought that he was not prepared for the rigours of Pakistan. I was wrong.

He’d walked alone the length of Africa a year or so before. Earlier he’d travelled with a friend in the Pacific. The friend adopted his approach of not wearing shoes through the bush and ended up in hospital with blood poisoning.

I imagine that Richard Evans Schultes was of that type. He was a botanist, explorer and admirer of indigenous tribes for their plant knowledge in the Amazon, at a time when that was still possible.

Schultes’ personal hero [from a young age] was Richard Spruce, a British naturalist who spent seventeen years exploring the Amazon rainforest.

Although George Lucas modelled the character of Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark on several famous archaeologists, he could equally have been modelled on Richard Evans Schultes. Like Indiana Jones, at Harvard Schultes dressed as a conservative professor and thought of himself as conservative:

[He was] outfitted in grey flannel slacks, red suspenders, starched white shirt and a white laboratory coat. I was to learn that this was his uniform in Cambridge, as much as his pith helmet, khaki pants, and khaki shirt were his uniform in the Amazon.

He remained continuously in his beloved Amazon Valley [from 1941] until 1953, when a Harvard administrator discovered that he had only taken out a one-year leave of absence, and it was time to return. (Michael J. Balick)

Wolves, Bears, Yellowstone

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Featured Image: Elk, Yellowstone National Park

 Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 11 July 2019

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Some random reading, quotations and thoughts on wolves, bears and wildlife in Yellowstone National Park and the Western USA

Introduction to Yellowstone National Park

We embarked on a tour of Western USA National Parks. Something I had wanted to do for years. We departed from Bozeman, Montana on 9 May 2019 our first stop was Yellowstone National Park, which is mostly in Wyoming with a small northern part in Montana. The park was just opening for the season and in some areas roads were still closed by snow.

Yellowstone is often referred to as the first national park in the world in 1872 (actually there was an earlier one in Mongolia).  As well as the wildlife Yellowstone is situated on a vast caldera with the magma not far below the surface and has wonderful thermal attractions that rival New Zealand’s. The volcanic National Park of Tongariro, Ngauruhoe and Ruapehu, in New Zealand established in 1894, which I wrote about earlier, is now the 6th oldest national park.

One forgets how early conservation efforts in the late 19^th and early twentieth century led to the establishment of a network of wonderful national parks across the USA.

What is History 9: Jared Diamond Guns, Germs & Steel Overview

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   Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 2  December 2018

What is History 9: Guns, Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond, 1997: Overview & Critique

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1 Overview

Preamble

I read Guns, Germs and Steel 1997 within a year of its publication and was strongly influenced. I had been looking for something about human history that was more scientific in its approach and that linked history to the evolution of human kind. It is now twenty years later.

I’ve mentioned before it is important that we start to look at history from a multidisciplinary view and certainly at least link it to our biological heritage. Jared Diamond says much the same thing in his introductory Prologue:

Those disciplines include, above all, genetics, molecular biology, and biogeography as applied to crops and their wild ancestors; the same disciplines plus behavioral ecology, as applied to domestic animals and their wild ancestors; molecular biology of human germs and related germs of animals; epidemiology of human diseases; human genetics; linguistics; archaeological studies on all continents and major islands; and studies of the histories of technology, writing, and political organization.

I would have added more categories at the time. In my 1995 Travel Journal in Pakistan inspired by the Taxila Museum, I wrote:

It is amazing how [our understanding of] history has improved in the past fifty years as the yoke of European ethno-centricity has been thrown off. Scholars knew some of these things before, but outside expert fields the knowledge was remote, and a belief in the superiority of Europeans masked enormous elements of human history. The contributions of science, anthropology, psychology and sociology have been enormous in the twentieth century…

Today I’d add economic history and ‘big data’ to the list.

What is history 8: EH Carr History as Progress

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   Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 1 July 2018

What is History 8 by EH Carr: The next two Lectures or Chapters 5 and 6

History as Progress & The Widening Horizon

Introduction

In What is History: Sleep Patterns we found that what we view as normal wasn’t necessarily the same in other periods. Sleep patterns were quite different before the coming of electric and gas lighting. Similarly the view of history has changed as well.

The two brilliant lectures in EH Carr’s What is History on the historian and his facts and causation were covered in the two previous articles: What is History 5: EH Carr Historians & their Facts and What is History 7: Causation in History covering EH Carr’s earlier lectures 1 to 4 in the book.

The current lecture 5 on History as Progress is perhaps Carr’s most brave and modern chapter in the book. While speculative, it raises issues that we still need to deal with, both in our understanding of history and our current understanding of what civilisation means. As such, the topic needs to be confronted and not marginalised.

The previous What is History? articles have been 1 Introduction, 2 Sleep Patterns 3, The Medieval Mind, 4 Love,  5  EH Carr Historians & their Facts, 6 Religion and 7: EH Carr Causation.

Progress in History

The changing view of History

The ancients were basically unhistorical in Asia, Greece and Rome, that is, basically uninterested in the future or the past. EH Carr says:

Poetic visions of a brighter future took the form of visions of a return to a golden age of the past — a cyclical view which assimilated the processes of history to the processes of nature.

One Sentence

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Featured Image: Keira Knightley, Anna Karenina, UK Film 2012

   Breadtag Sagas ©: Author Tony, 1 June 2018

One Sentence: a story about great sentences and great first sentences

This article on one sentence may veer in an entirely different direction, or not! I don’t always want to be predictable.

Journalists and newspapers often write articles on the first lines or one sentence of novels in holiday periods and the best of them are marvellous. Jane Austen and Tolstoy are always the first cabs off the rank.

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Great opening sentences in fiction

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

— Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, 1813

Comment: This one sentence isn’t a bad summary of the novel. Underlying it is an indictment of late 18th Century inheritance laws and the inability of women to make their own way in the world, of which Jane Austen was painfully aware. She covers this topic in all her books on 18th century county life and manners.

The Story: David Bader’s Haiku barely does a better job than Jane’s sentence.

Single white lass seeks,

landed gent for marriage, whist, 

No parsons, thank you.