Sherry Chandler

A correspondent writes:

Have been reading Larry McMurtry’s book on frontier slaughters. Wounded Knee massacre stemmed from white’s fears of the Ghost Dance–a religious cultural movement of the native Americans not dissimilar to other 19th Century Millenial belief systems such as the 7th day adventists. Cultural thuggery &n ignorance seem to be on the move again in a big way now whether in Iraq or with these British louts who steal their cultural heritage to sell for scrap.

The thefts the writer refers to are explained here in The Guardian:

A huge, modernist sculpture has disappeared from a university campus in west London, heightening fears that monumental bronzes are being targeted by thieves cashing in on booming scrap metal prices. One of The Three Watchers, a set of figures created by Lynn Chadwick in 1960 and estimated to be worth £300,000, was stolen from the grounds of Roehampton University after being snapped off at the feet.

The theft occurred less than a month after a gigantic Henry Moore figure was driven away from a sculpture park in Hertfordshire. Both statues were taken at night.

The Metropolitan police’s art and antiques unit said yesterday that as many as 20 similar thefts of bronze artworks had been reported in and around the capital within the past year. The officer leading the investigation urged sculpture owners to protect them or move them indoors last night.

Soaring scrap prices have opened up an opportunity for gangs to pocket a quick profit. The Henry Moore sculpture, taken in mid-December, was believed to be worth around £5,000 if melted down; the Chadwick may fetch as little as £1,000.

A couple of articles from The Guardian about the destruction of the world’s cultural heritage in Iraq. Mostly this stuff makes me too sad to be able to make much of a comment.

from Tomb Raiders

Even more serious, perhaps, has been the damage to Iraq’s archaeology. In this cradle of civilisation, more than 10,000 sites of interest have been identified, of which only 1,500 have been researched. These sites are currently undefended from looters. Willy Deridder, the head of Interpol, has said that these sites - particularly those in the south, such as the 4,000-year-old ziggurat at Ur - are almost impossible to protect.

Babylon and Ur were requisitioned by the coalition and have had military camps constructed within their ancient sites. At Babylon the US forces flattened 300,000 sq metres and covered the area with compacted gravel in order to create parking lots for military vehicles next to a Greek theatre built for Alexander of Macedon. A dozen trenches, each up to 170m long, have been cut through archeological workings, destroying the evidence that they might have yielded.

A helipad was constructed in the heart of ancient Babylon. For this, ground had to be bulldozed and thousands of Hesco sandbags (made by the US-owned Handling Equipment Speciality Company) filled with earth to provide fortifications. The soil in these bags, dug up from the site, contains archaeological material now ripped out of its context, deracinated for all time. Worse, when more Hesco containers had to be filled, soil was brought in from other sites. The Hesco containers are biodegradable and are already beginning to collapse, leaving a stew of archaeological material that will eventually have to be sifted at vast expense if it is to be of value.

The military have now moved on, but while the helipad was in use the daily flights shook the foundations of Babylon’s ancient walls so severely that the wall of the Temple of Nabu and the roof of the 6th-century-BC Temple of Ninmah collapsed.

In the south, the remains of the ancient city of Ur, excavated by Leonard Woolley in the 1920s, is still a military camp, while the sites of neighbouring Sumerian city-states (Lagash, Uruk and Larsa) have been so badly damaged by looters that observers have described them as resembling devastated lunar landscapes, with craters 5m deep. These craters have been dug by Iraqis who, now that the sites are not guarded, are “farming” them at night for portable antiquities that can be sold.

and a response: The US could have saved Iraq’s cultural heritage

In the preparations for the first Gulf war under Dick Cheney, then defence secretary, the Pentagon brought together detailed advice on the cultural heritage of Iraq and Kuwait from around 80 international experts and institutions. Several hundred specific sites, archaeological zones and monuments, and important historic buildings - including the National Museum in Baghdad and the Babylon and Ur archaeological zones - were identified for protection from direct acts of war such as air and ground attack, and from any postwar situation,

The protected sites were then identified on military maps used for both aerial targeting and the ground campaign. The system worked extremely well, with only one or two apparently genuine mishaps due to missiles going off target. A postwar evaluation of these measures was reported to Congress by the department of defence in January 1993, in response to a Congressional inquiry into the war’s environmental and heritage impact. In the concluding section of the report, the Pentagon gave an assurance that “similar steps will be taken by the United States in future conflicts”.

…

It is simply inconceivable that, during the planning of military action in 2002-3, the Pentagon did not turn up the detailed heritage-protection rules and maps applied so relatively successfully in the first Gulf war. Almost the first move of military planners in preparing for a possible conflict is to dust down records and maps, perhaps many decades old, and build on these. In this case, many of those responsible for developing and implementing the Desert Storm policy were still in the Pentagon. Someone or some group must have taken a positive decision to scrap the US’s established protection policies and ignore the January 1993 assurance to Congress given by the defence department, still under Dick Cheney at the time.

Who made that fatal decision? Who back in Washington refused to allow the Baghdad commander to move a tank 200 yards to protect the National Museum from looting - despite pleading by the museum and international experts - and who authorised the building of a gigantic military base in the middle of Babylon’s archaeological zone and allocated an adjacent area of the site to the Kellogg, Brown, Root subsidiary of Halliburton, Vice-President Cheney’s old firm?

Juan Cole has the link and a comment.

And so does Gilgamesh, our earliest epic hero:

What can I find (to serve) as a marker(?) for me!
I will turn back (from the journey by sea) and leave the boat by the shore!”
At twenty leagues they broke for some food,
at thirty leagues they stopped for the night.
They arrived in Uruk-Haven.
Gilgamesh said to Urshanabi, the ferryman:
“Go up, Urshanabi, onto the wall of Uruk and walk around.
Examine its foundation, inspect its brickwork thoroughly–
is not (even the core of) the brick structure of kiln-fired brick,
and did not the Seven Sages themselves lay out its plan!

Here’s a link I picked up from Meredith Sue Willis’s Books for Readers newsletter.

It’s the LuLu Titlescorer that lets you pit the title of your novel against those of best-sellers and gives you a score.

I tried my Dance the Black-Eyed Girl – admittedly not a novel but I’ve always thought it was a pretty neat title. Not so, says LuLu. Only a 44.2% chance of becoming a best-seller. The goal is a score over 83%.

Here’s (sort of) how it works:

The Lulu Titlescorer has been developed exclusively for Lulu by statisticians who studied the titles of 50 years’ worth of top bestsellers and identified which title attributes separated the bestsellers from the rest.

We commissioned a research team to analyse the title of every novel to have topped the hardback fiction section of the New York Times Bestseller List during the half-century from 1955 to 2004 and then compare them with the titles of a control group of less successful novels by the same authors.

The team, lead by British statistician Dr. Atai Winkler, then used the data gathered from a total of some 700 titles to create this “Lulu Titlescorer” a program able to predict the chances that any given title would produce a New York Times No. 1 bestseller.

The fruit of this work is presented here, in the form of the Lulu Titlescorer: a program that you can use to gauge the chances that your own title will deliver you a New York Times No. 1 bestseller.

So now I know why all those copies are still sitting in the warehouse (metaphorically speaking).

On the other hand, Cujo only had a score of 45.6%.