Just north of the Alps, on the border between Germany and Switzerland, lies beautiful Lake Constance. And on the northwest shore of the lake is the lovely small city of Constance, Germany.

Constance is well worth a visit. A lot of German cities have rather bland or unattractive centers, thanks to the American and British air forces. But Constance escaped these attentions entirely, because the Allies didn’t want to risk any bombs landing in neutral Switzerland. So Constance has an unusually intact Old Town with lots of interesting old buildings, some going right back to medieval times.

Constance also has this:



A nine meter tall, 18 ton statue of a medieval sex worker.  She’s down at the harbor, on the lake.  She rotates once every four minutes.  Her name is Imperia.

You may reasonably ask, what?  And part of the answer is, she’s memorializing the Council of Constance, the great political-religious council that happened here 600-some years ago, from 1414 to 1417.  And you may ask again, what?

I’ll try to explain.  

Constance

Lake Constance gets its modern name from the city of Constance.  And the city of Constance is named after Constantius, a fourth century Roman emperor.


[probably this guy, though it might have been his grandson.  it was the 4th century, stuff got confused.]

Back in the first century AD, the Romans pushed up through the Alps into what’s now southern Germany. They brought peace to the region via their traditional mix of mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and forced Romanization.  They seem to have built a bridge at Constance — the lake tapers down to a narrow neck there.  And credit where it’s due: the Romans loved nothing better than building transport infrastructure.  Bridge going north, good Roman roads going south, inevitably a town sprang up.  Later, in the 4th century when the Empire was turtling up against the ever more aggressive barbarians, the trading town built walls.  It became a border fortress, and got a new Imperial name.

(You have to work a bit to find corners of Europe that haven’t been touched by someone’s empire.  Roman, Frankish, Byzantine, Holy Roman, Ottoman, Spanish, French, Russian, British, German… ruins and roads, castles and place names, borders and battlefields.  The continent is pock-marked with them like acne scars.)

The Romans eventually departed, but the bridge and the town seem to have survived.  Certainly both were still there a thousand years later, when the Catholic Church convened a General Council there in 1414.

So is Imperia about the Roman Empire, then? 

No, not at all.  Well… not directly.

Three Popes, One Council

“And if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: for so did the papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power.”   — Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

For a while, back in the 14th century, there were two rival Popes.  Each had his own Papal court and hierarchy, each was doing all sorts of Papal things — collecting religious dues, appointing Bishops and Cardinals, excommunicating heretics — and each was recognized by about half of Europe.  This was generally agreed to be a bad situation!  So there were several attempts to fix this problem.  They all failed, and one went so spectacularly wrong that it produced a third Pope, recognized by another couple of European countries.

At this point pretty much everyone agreed that something drastic had to be done.  So a General Council of the Church was called, with implicit power to sit in judgment on all three rival Popes.  Italy was problematic for a bunch of reasons, France was in the middle of the Hundred Years War — 


[Branagh or Olivier?  discuss.]

— so after some discussion it was decided to convene the Council in the small neutral city of Constance, which if nothing else was centrally located.

In Conference Decided

“A conference is a gathering of people who singly can do nothing but together can decide that nothing can be done.”  — Fred Allen

The Council of Constance is just so darn interesting.  

I’ll try not to chase too many rabbits, but here’s a thought.  In the early 15th century Europe was, in terms of global civilization, a backwater.   The Chinese were more technologically advanced, India was richer.  Asia was full of cities that were larger, cleaner, safer, and better designed than Europe’s grubby little burgs.  Heck, the contemporary Aztecs had a capital at Tenochtitlan that was bigger and nicer than anything in Europe,  and those guys were barely out of the Stone Age. 

Europe had nothing that the rest of the world particularly wanted  to buy, which meant that Europe had been running a trade deficit for literally centuries.  (This would lead to a serious economic crisis later in the century, as the continent nearly ran out of  gold and silver.)  Militarily, Europeans had been losing battles and wars to non-Europeans for a while, and this would continue for some time.  In particular, the Ottomans had just embarked on a long career of kicking Europe’s ass. Within a century, a huge chunk of the continent would be Ottoman provinces or tributaries. 

And yet.  Somewhere along the line, Europe went from “D-tier also-ran kind of lame civilization” to “planetary apex predator”. 

Why?  Why Europe? 

Some of the world’s smartest people have spent lifetimes of scholarship trying to answer that question.  Not for a moment will I imagine I can add anything useful to that great debate.  But here’s an offhand thought: there’s a short list of things that are, historically, unique or nearly unique to Europe.  One of those things? International conferences.  


[it doesn’t get much more European than this.]

This is probably because international conferences started as a particularly Christian thing.  The early Church was spread broadly but thinly across a politically united Roman Empire that had, for a premodern state, unusually excellent transport links.  (See earlier comment re: Romans and transport infrastructure.)  So it made sense to periodically come together: to keep doctrine and practice consistent, to resolve leadership disputes, and just generally to settle questions that couldn’t be worked out locally.  The great-grandfather of them all was the Council of Nicaea, back in 325 AD, which gave us the Nicene Creed.


[BEGOTTEN NOT MADE HERETIC iykyk]

And there were lots more Councils, all through late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Chalcedon, Constantinople, Lateran, Lyons.

But there’s a second line of mostly secular conferences called by Europeans to resolve international disputes: most typically to end a war, but often with a sidebar of “and let’s try to set up some sort of international order”.  And you can argue with a straight face that the Council of Constance is the takeoff point for this second line. 

Because Constance was a Church council, yes.  But it was also political in a way that previous medieval Councils hadn’t been.  It was attended by kings and dukes and counts, lawyers and professors and representatives of Imperial Free Cities — in fact, the lay attendees may have outnumbered the clerics.  It relied on the Emperor Sigismund to provide security and enforcement.  Its decisions required buy-in from the secular authorities.  Voting at the council was done by “nations” — groups of Churchmen, but sorted geographically by region within Europe.  And while Church reform and heresy were on the agenda, the overriding imperative was straight-up power politics: to resolve the Papal schism and settle the Church’s internal government.

So on one hand, Constance was just another in that long line of Church councils from Nicaea to Vatican II (1962-65).  But at the same time, it was arguably the first great multilateral peace conference.  Lodi, Westphalia, Vienna, Versailles, Yalta: Europeans have been holding these conferences for a long time.  There’s a direct line from Constance to the G-20.

— No, I’m not claiming that international conferences are what made Europe special.  I’m just noting that these secular peace-and-international-order councils really get going in the 15th century, right around the time that Europe begins its slow ascent out of mediocrity.   Almost certainly a coincidence!  Still: interesting.

Deliverables

So the Council of Constance had three declared goals, plus one goal that was undeclared but universally recognized. 

The declared goals were:

1)  Fix the whole three Popes thing.
2) Deal with heresy.  Specifically, deal with Jan Hus, who was the beta version of Martin Luther, and his followers.  The Hussites had basically taken over one European country already, and were threatening to spread.
3)  Reform the Church, which everyone agreed was spectacularly corrupt, and doing a pretty terrible job of providing spiritual guidance and moral leadership to Catholic Europe.  (This was cross-wired with (2) because the Hussites were claiming to be, not heretics, but reformers.)

The undeclared goal was

4) By asserting the superiority of a Church Council over Popes, convert the Catholic Church from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy. 

Nobody was publicly saying this was the plan, but this was totally the plan.  There had been a bunch of bad Popes already.  It was clear that giving that much power to anyone was a dubious idea to begin with, and that this was made worse by a selection process that favored ruthless conniving corrupt SOBs. 

Getting rid of the Papacy was unthinkable, of course.  But regular Church Councils to keep the Popes in check?  That seemed entirely doable.

Key Performance Indicators

They succeeded at (1) and failed at the other three. 

They did burn poor Jan Hus.  It’s a sad story and I won’t go into the details.  TLDR, they burned him, but the Hussites took over Bohemia anyway — the modern Czech Republic, more or less — and stayed in power there for over a century.  The secular rulers around them did manage to contain the Hussite heresy and keep it from spreading, but that wasn’t because of anything the Council did.

But the really consequential failures were that they utterly failed to reform the Church and they didn’t curb the powers of the Papacy.  The Church would remain horrifically corrupt, and the Popes would remain autocratic — and all too often greedy, cruel, and completely uninterested in providing spiritual or moral leadership.

It would take nearly another century for these particular chickens to come home.  But the eventual, inevitable result was the Protestant Reformation.


[hammer time]

By failing to fix the system, the attendees of the Council guaranteed that the system would eventually explode. 

But, really, how could they do otherwise?  Cardinals and bishops and abbots, counts and dukes and kings, priests and professors… they were all products of the system, and they were all benefiting from it.  

Somewhere, Imperia is smiling.  We’ll get back to Imperia.

One fled, one dead, one sleeping in a golden bed

So what happened to those three Popes, anyway?

Well: John, the Neapolitan Pope, was a pretty sketchy character even by the low standards of late medieval Popes.  Among other things — many, many other things — he was plausibly suspected of having poisoned his predecessor.  So the Council offered him a deal: resign, and we won’t open an investigation into these accusations.  Since an investigation would lead to a trial, and a trial would lead to a conviction, Pope John agreed and stepped down.  

But then!  John slipped out of Constance — disguised as a postman, some say.  He fled to the castle of a friendly noble, un-resigned, and declared the Council dissolved.

The Council wasn’t having it.  The Holy Roman (German) Emperor summoned an army to besiege the castle. John fled again, but the Emperor’s forces followed.  Eventually he was caught and dragged back to Constance, where they did put him on trial, and convicted him too.  He spent several years in comfortable but secure confinement.  He was allowed out once it was clear that he would behave himself, i.e. not try to be Pope any more.  

Now, one of John’s few accomplishments as Pope was choosing the Medici of Florence as his bankers.  Did you ever wonder why the Medici were such a big deal?  It’s because they were the bankers for the Papacy for almost a century.  Immense sums of money flowed into Rome from all over Europe.  All of it passed through Medici hands at some point, and of course the bankers took their cut. 

And, credit to the Medici, they used at least some of that money to become some of the greatest patrons of art that the world has ever known.  Michelangelo, Botticelli, the Duomo, Donatello, the Sistine Chapel… all that happened because of bad Pope John.


[“Award of a Sole Source Contract for Financial Services”, fresco, c. 1509]

When the disgraced ex-Pope eventually died, the reigning Pope didn’t want to give him a burial in Rome.  So the grateful Medici whisked John’s body off to Florence, where they gave him a nine-day funeral.  Then they built him a nice little tomb.  It was eight meters tall, marble and gilt, with Corinthian columns and a bronze effigy — you know, the usual — designed by Medici client artists Donatello and Michelozzo.   It’s still there in Florence today.


[phrases rarely found together: “Medici” and “tasteful understatement”]

Gregory, the Venetian Pope?  He cut a deal.  He agreed to resign if (1) the Council subsequently acknowledged that he had been the One True Pope all along, so that his rivals were declared schismatic antipopes, and also (2) he got a unique one-time title of “Second Most Important And Holy Guy In The Church, After The Pope”.  The Council decided this was cheap at the price, and agreed. 

So Gregory is still counted by the Catholic Church as an official Pope.  (Which means he was the last official Pope to resign the office until Benedict XVI’s abdication in 2013, five hundred and ninety-seven years later.)


[he even got to keep the hat]

Benedict, the Spanish Pope?  He refused to resign.  But the Council went to work on the remaining countries and monarchs who were supporting him, and talked them around.  So Benedict ended up abandoned by most of his supporters.  He died a few years later, mule-stubborn to the end, isolated and mostly ignored.

That time they elected the Pope in a shopping mall

Once the Council had eliminated or sidelined the three Popes, they needed to choose a new one.  For this, they used a unique, one-time-only system of voting. Council attendees gathered into geographic “Nations”, each nation picked six guys to represent them, those six guys cast one vote.  This was an attempt to put a new, Council-based system of Pope selection in place, since the existing College of Cardinals process kept throwing up Popes who were scheming evil bastards.  

It didn’t take.  The next Papal election took place when there was no Council, so they went right back to the College of Cardinals.


[and they’ve kept it ever since]

But they also had the problem of where to hold the election.  Because traditionally, Papal electors are isolated, cut off from outside influences until they decide.  So they needed a building that was large, but that could be sealed off, but also handed over to the electors for some indefinite period of time. As it turned out, medieval Constance had exactly one building that fit the requirements:  the town Kaufhaus.

Today the word “Kaufhaus” gets translated as “department store”.  But the Constance Kaufhaus was a combination warehouse and retail center.  Foreign merchants kept and sold premium goods there.  It was a big building full of little shops selling luxury items.  Literally, a high-end shopping mall.

Still, needs must.  And credit to the electors: they managed to reach a consensus and elect a Pope who was, if not brilliant, at least not an incompetent, a criminal, or a monster.  Pope Martin V would rule for 13 years and while he wouldn’t do much that was memorable, neither would he poison his enemies, appoint a bunch of nephews and bastard sons to high office, run the Church into bankruptcy, or otherwise disgrace the office.  

Of course, this goes to a deep structural problem.  The Council chose a kindly mediocrity because they were afraid that a strong Pope would claw power back from Councils.  (Which is exactly what happened, a Pope or two later.)  But the Church desperately needed reform, which a kindly mediocrity couldn’t possibly deliver.  

Also, the College of Cardinals absolutely hated the idea of anyone else being involved in electing the Pope. Partly this was a status issue.  Partly it was about ambition — most Popes came out of the College, after all.  (Still true.)  But most of all, it was about cold hard cash.  Would-be Popes were often willing to pay immense bribes in order to buy votes.  Kings and Dukes would throw in more bribes to support or oppose a particular candidate.  Banks and wealthy families would coolly lend money to finance these bribes, since backing a winning Pope could mean an instant flow of massive wealth. 

This is, of course, how the Medici became the Papal bankers.  It was they who funded the election of bad Pope John in the first place.  



[Allegory of a Papal Election, c. 1480.  the winged figures represent the Medici, scattering flowers (money) as they blow the candidate to the shores of success.  the handmaiden (the Church) is about to clothe her in a robe decorated with flowers (even more money).  the candidate gazes into the middle distance, seemingly unaware.]

So reforming the electoral process would not only have been a hit to the Cardinals’ status, it would also have drastically curtailed their future income.  It’s no surprise that they weren’t enthusiastic about the new system, and abandoned it as soon as they could.

Somewhere, Imperia is still smiling.  We’ll get back to Imperia.

Everybody goes home

The Council wrapped up in 1418.  Joan of Arc would have been in first grade, if medieval French peasant girls went to first grade, which they didn’t.  She was about 10 years away from starting her brief incredible career as the savior of France.  Johannes Gutenberg was a freshman at the University of Erfurt.  He was about twenty years away from inventing the printing press. Over in England, a handsome young Welshman named Owen Tudor was hanging around the court of King Henry V.  In a few years, King Henry would die of dysentery.  His widowed Queen would marry handsome Owen.  Their grandson would be the first Tudor king of England, and their descendants are sitting on the British throne today. 

Jan van Eyck was in his twenties, just getting started on his career as a painter.


[weird mirrors were already a thing]

And down in Portugal — a kingdom small and obscure even by medieval European standards, out on the far edge of the continent — Prince Henry the Navigator was forming an ambitious plan.  Portugal, like the rest of Europe, was running out of gold.  But there was gold down in Africa… somewhere.  It came north regularly, after all, in caravans across the Sahara.  The trade was controlled by Islamic middlemen, who took a hefty cut. 

But what if Portuguese ships could work their way down along the African coast?  They might find the source of the gold… and who knows what else?


[just getting started]

And that’s the story of the Council of Constance.

But wait, you ask.   What about Imperia?

Yes, well… this post got a little out of hand.  But Imperia is not forgotten!  Modern Constance has a nine meter, 18 ton concrete statue of a medieval sex worker that rotates every four minutes, and there’s a reason for that.  We’ll get to her story shortly.

Because she is most certainly still smiling.

I. Miles

Punk would have been his first choice
But most days, he settled for jazz fusion
Mind you, it wouldn't be your smooth easy listening
No, the incarnation he favored was electric Miles
Live-Evil era Miles to be precise
Pip squeaks of funk, a bitches' brew of sonic chaos
Untethered dissonance that destabilized the unwary listener
Barely a minute after they'd entered the library
Check the startled looks of the patrons - priceless

It was not what you'd expect, distorted, unsettling
Very far from what you'd expect given the setting
But this was what you got when it was his shift
On duty at the front desk, he controlled the playlist
Not your garden variety background inoffensive music,
No, at its most friendly, the riffs would place you On The Corner
Or a journey into free rhythmic abstraction, taken to Pangea
Unmoored, with little recognizable features, frankly disconcerting
Pugilistic in intent, the music, it demanded active listening
At such times, you were apt to be left completely disoriented
Wishing for the relative aural safety of A Tribute to Jack Johnson

Electric Miles then, and only occasionally Electronic Miles
No Kind of Blue modalities, no stately Sketches of Spain
No First Quintet bop stylings, no Second Quintet excursions
The library's soundscape became full of challenges
You'd wonder why you kept re-reading that page of the article
Strangely uneasy, enervated and somehow provoked by the music
And as for the microfiche, you'd inevitably lose concentration

The middle schoolers mostly gave up on doing their homework
Best just to decompress or browse the aisles during those hours
The other librarians would exchange looks of concern
The mantle of reverence had been punctured if not shredded
Nervous energy, the wall of sound evoked the shape of dread
Missing, the customary hushed tones of the library
It hearkened to Sly Stone, There's a Riot Goin' On

But we are creatures that avoid conflict, striving simians
So no one confronted him or made any demands for silence
Discreetly and strategically placed, a box of ear plugs was often to be found
Near the display of staff recommendations at the entrance
Passive aggressive too, posters and vinyl, The Birth of the Cool
Sorcerer, Someday My Prince Will Come - Frances on the cover smiling at you
Ascenseur Pour L'échafaud, the iconic Miles projects, Miles Ahead too.
And it became institutionalized and part of the practice
Buyer beware, know what you're getting into
The loud librarian ruled on Tuesday afternoons

II. Method

If organized chaos was his soundtrack
Manufactured serendipity was his methodology
Walking the aisles searching for opportunity
Where a blanket of serenity would normally greet you as you entered
The diffident and deferential queries you expected:
"Is there anything I could help you with?"
No, the loud librarian would approach you head on
"Have you seen this? Over here we have a new exhibit"

And, well, you would often forget what you had been looking for,
The reason you'd come to the library in the first place
He had sized you up as you entered and unerringly tailored the offbeat material
He always gave you something that you didn't know that you needed
Redirecting you, changing the perspective, oblique viewpoints
The connective tissue he saw was inspired direction

So, despite the inevitable naysayers at his aural eccentricity
Despite the chatter and slanted anecdotes he imparted
After a few encounters he garnered a following
Aficionados would leave the library synapses firing

Many a research project would be revitalized
Science fair projects became baroque surprises
No mundane experiments with baking soda
Newton's experiments in alchemy became prime subject matter
The histories of the maroons in Suriname and Guyana
Speculation on elements of continuity within the Akan diaspora
Suddenly Fabian Socialists entered classroom discussion
At the dinner table, parents would now face new contentions
Their curious offspring now questioning state legitimacy
Back from the bibliothèque devotees of oral histories

III. Billie

Come the winter solstice, the soundtrack changed
Tuesday heartbreak became troubled Thursday
A shift change, the director rearranged the schedule
And Thursdays were known to feature a tough crew
Gathered as they were in dueling conference rooms
The first group considered stamps, the Philatelic Society
Altogether conventional, they researched political histories
But the seeds of conflict were sown by the Psychedelic Society
He couldn't help it - simply couldn't contain his curiosity
About what strange things could be going on in their meetings
A fractious lot, not responding to any of his queries
From what he could make out after examining their marginalia,
Their focus was ostensibly on matters mind-altering and minor arcana
They were reluctant to reveal the substance of their "happenings"
But he was not at all impressed with their take on bioprospecting
Their single minded focus on ancient herbal remedies
Commerce instead of the application of indigenous knowledge

And so we all started to listen to Billie Holiday
The Lady in Satin album mostly, autumnal Lady Day
Pathos in the voice, wracked by too much living
Thoroughly wrought with experience, witness the mannered phrasing
Off kilter, her way with a ballad, the lush strings backing
And loud, crucially you could hear every bent note
Trace the curvature of her deliberate voicing
As if caressing the microphone, the breath control, halting
The immediacy in the lyrics was striking, but it tended to take a toll
By the time Glad to be Unhappy came on, you'd be thoroughly wrecked

After a few months, he decided to quit, it was time to move on
Another town across the country would require his intervention
He planned out the soundtrack of his last Thursday afternoon
He played The End of a Love Affair it seemed on repeat
Careful observers would realize that it was all seven takes
Variations on a theme, as ever, she preempted the beat
The strings mournful, her voice increasingly emotional
The psychedelics were in distress as they walked out the door
The blues of wist and melancholy, no one could stand it anymore.
Billie. You're killing us, this is too much to bear
How many times can we hear The End of a Love Affair?
Finally smiling, for the encore, he switched to Portishead
He hummed along to Sour Times during his exit interview

The Loud Librarian, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• Inamorata by Miles Davis
• The End of a Love Affair by Billie Holiday
• Sour Times by Portishead

File under: culture, observation, perception, life, music, obsession, whimsy, Small Things, poetry, toli

Writing log: November 24, 2022

I woke up hearing your brain buzzing,
   It sounded like a lawnmower
Or perhaps it was like a landscape crew
   Deploying their leaf blowers
Disturbing tranquility in the neighborhood,
   I could hear all your thoughts
Clearly, you were lining something up
   Troubling and mischievous

Oh, I hear you say, it must have been a dream,
   You were still sleeping
But lying next to you,
   I could tell from the way you were breathing
The gears were starting to shift,
   As if you were deciphering a puzzle
Leaving me to wonder
   What a girl has to do these days to get a cuddle

What is it this time? Another poem? Really!
     Or is it that godforsaken novel?
That you seduced me with all those years ago.
     I always knew that you were trouble
Now I see you, lost in thought, contemplating,
     Long before the crack of dawn
With sleep in your eye, yet acting
     As if you want to catch the morning sun

You're having an affair with the muse.
     That's right, I know your shady ways
Don't smile at me. I'm the other woman,
     Who's lost her man to constant wordplay
You'd best shape up, you know
     If you want to keep me in the marital home
Don't laugh now, how dare you. What's that?

"The early bird catches the poem"

Early Bird, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• Body and Mind by Heavy D

  Your body's here with me
  But your mind is on the other side of town

• Early in the Morning The Gap Band
• You Can't Turn Me Away by Sylvia Striplin
• In the Morning by Omar
• Earn my Affection by Amel Larrieux

  Put your back into it

• The Other Part of Town by Horace Parlan & Grant Green
• Soul Inspiration by Anita Baker
• Good Morning by Gregory Isaacs
• Conception by Black Thought
• Love from a Distance by Beres Hammond

Or alternatively Close to You by Maxi Priest

In my defense, it was the excitement of the winter solstice that stirred the mind that morning but it seems I was misconstrued.

See previously in a similar vein: Quality of Life and The Stereotype

File under: humour, life, culture, observation, perception, Creative Process, language, whimsy, marriage, poetry, toli

Writing log: December 21, 2022

“There ought to be some mechanical way of doing this job, something on the principle of the Jacquard loom, whereby holes in a card regulate the pattern to be woven.” — Dr. John Shaw Billings [1]

The Jacquard loom, invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard in the early nineteenth century, was one of the first machines to be controlled by something resembling a stored program, namely a sequence of punched cards [2]. It wasn't a computer in the modern sense, but it demonstrated that a machine could perform complex work by following an external set of instructions, an idea that would echo through the history of computing. Jacquard's punch-card mechanism influenced Charles Babbage, who proposed using cards to control his Analytical Engine [3]. Later, Herman Hollerith used punched cards to encode census data for tabulating machines, technology that eventually fed into IBM and twentieth-century information processing [4].

Jacquard's invention was driven by a problem: weaving elaborate patterns in silk was slow, expensive, and difficult to scale. Simple repeating designs, such as stripes, checks, and other geometric regularities, had proven amenable to mechanical improvements. But figurative or non-linear patterns, the kind that signaled luxury and status, remained dependent on highly skilled labor.

Before Jacquard, producing complex woven designs required a drawloom. These were large looms operated by two people: the weaver, and an assistant often called a drawboy. The weaver controlled the shuttle and the rhythm of the loom. The drawboy's job was to lift selected warp threads, sometimes in large groups, at exactly the right moment so the weft thread could pass through and lock in the pattern [5]. This was slow work with daily progress measured in inches rather than feet and yards. It was also physically punishing. Drawloom assistants were often young and small because the job required agility in a cramped space above the loom, where bundles of warp threads had to be lifted repeatedly for hours. The labor was highly specialized, and in the wrong hands it could ruin expensive material.

Jacquard had worked in the silk trade and was familiar with this system. Whether or not he actually served as a drawboy as has been claimed isn't clear—he was born into the Lyon silk trade, and his father was a master weaver, but it isn't definitive. But he understood firsthand the limitations of pattern weaving being the physical coordination with the drawboy and their punitive work.

His breakthrough was to replace that second person with a mechanism. In 1801, Jacquard exhibited an early version of his loom at an industrial exhibition in Paris, where it attracted serious attention. The invention was impressive enough that it led to further scrutiny and development. In 1803, Jacquard was summoned to Paris for evaluation and refinement of the mechanism. By 1805, the French state backed the invention declaring it public property, and Jacquard received government support in the form of a pension and royalty-style payments tied to adoption. By 1812 there were 11,000 Jacquard looms in use in France.

The loom itself used a set of hooks connected to harness cords, each harness controlling specific warp threads. A punched card would be pressed against a row of needles. Where the card had a hole, the needle could pass through. Where the card had no hole, the needle was blocked. This determined which hooks were engaged and lifted on that cycle of the loom [6]. In that sense, the card didn't contain the pattern as an image, it contained the instructions for a single row of weaving. One card corresponded to one 'step'. A chain of cards corresponded to a complete design.

A Jacquard pattern could thus be 'programmed' by creating a set of cards with holes punched in specific positions. Once you had that card chain, you could reproduce it, share it, or run it on multiple looms. The design became portable and scalable. It was software, of a sort, in a primitive physical form with the loom acting as a runtime. The skill and physical effort of the drawboy moved into the abstraction of the punch-card. This had two notable consequences. First, it dramatically increased productivity. A single weaver could now produce complex patterns with far less assistance, and the loom could reproduce intricate designs reliably and at scale. Patterned cloth that once required elite labor and time could now be manufactured more efficiently. Second, it introduced an information concept that would become central to computing: a machine could be controlled by a sequence of discrete symbolic instructions.

The Jacquard system is often described as 'binary'. Now, that's not wrong in a loose sense. Each possible position on the card is either punched or unpunched. There's a hole that allows the needle to pass through or no hole that blocks it [7]. It's not a computer in a formal sense, but it is a demonstration of a fundamental idea in computing: a complex output can be produced by a sequence of simple yes/no decisions. That punched-card approach survived for an astonishingly long time, well over 150 years. Variations of card-driven control appeared throughout industrial machinery, and punched cards remained a data medium in business computing well into the twentieth century, not completely phased out until the 1970s.

Jacquard's loom itself did not remain completely unchanged, but the essential architecture of hooks, harness cords, and punched-card control, proved durable. Later improvements added speed, reliability, and power. Steam power and later electric motors removed the need for human muscle entirely. Looms became faster and more automated, and industrial weaving evolved into a specialised branch of engineering [9].

The next leaps in weaving was not merely better programming but entirely new mechanical approaches. Shuttleless looms—rapier looms, projectile looms, and air-jet looms—dramatically increased weaving speed by replacing the old back-and-forth shuttle mechanism. It wasn’t just volume and scale. The looms by the end of the 18th century could produce weaves of incredible detail, matching and arguably surpassing anything a master weaver could. A prayer book, woven in silk, called the Livre de Prières. Tissé d'après les enluminures des manuscrits du XIVe au XVIe siècle is a remarkable example. Its 58 pages are woven silk, made with a Jacquard machine using black and gray thread, at 160 threads per cm. The pages have elaborate borders with text and pictures of saints. It’s estimated up to 500,000 punchcards were used to encode the pages [10].

Eventually the cards themselves began to disappear. Instead of encoding a pattern physically by punching holes, the pattern could be stored digitally and fed into a loom electronically. Modern Jacquard looms are computer-controlled and can operate with thousands of independently controlled hooks, producing designs of extraordinary complexity at industrial speed [9]. Today, modern looms can insert weft threads hundreds or even thousands of times per minute, producing vast quantities of fabric with minimal human intervention. But at heart, the archetype remains: row by row, instruction by instruction, the machine being instructed which warp threads rise and which remain down.

Jacquard’s invention reorganized labor. If you no longer needed a drawboy to lift threads and were no longer gated to inches per day, you still needed someone to create the pattern instructions. The pattern itself became separable from the act of weaving. This gave rise to a new kind of specialist: the designer and pattern-maker, whose work in the form of pattern books could be translated into a card chain and reproduced at scale. As patterned cloth became cheaper and more widely available, demand expanded. More people could afford decorative textiles; at the same time ability to produce outstripped basic demand. And as the Industrial Revolution repeatedly demonstrated when you can manufacture large volumes, you need reasons for people to buy them. It's difficult for example to imagine modern fashion without this underpinning. Styles began to change faster. Designs cycled. Novelty became a market force, for example in the form of seasonal changes.

And what of the drawboys whose back breaking labour Jacquard's invention helped eliminate?

The Jacquard loom was not universally welcomed. In Lyon, silk workers resisted its adoption, and early Jacquard mechanisms were attacked and smashed and rioted against. Jacquard himself was threatened. The status of Jacquard in Lyon erected in 1840 on the site where one of his loom was destroyed. To the workers whose livelihoods depended on the old system of child labour, the loom wasn't a deemed a benefit. The drawboy as a job vanished, and master weavers shrank drastically as value moved into automation and pattern design.

Notes

This was first written in 2006. Dusted off twenty years later as an allegory in the age of AI and also to correct some facts.

[1] U.S. Census Bureau, History: Dr. John Shaw Billings and Hollerith's Tabulating Machine.

[2] Encyclopaedia Britannica, Jacquard loom / Jacquard mechanism. Wikipedia, Jacquard Machine

[3] UK Science Museum, Charles Babbage and the Analytical Engine

[4] Encyclopaedia Britannica, Herman Hollerith. Wikipedia, Herman Hollerith

[5] Encyclopaedia Britannica, Drawloom. Wikipedia, Drawloom

[6] Manchester Science and Industry Museum, Jacquard loom and punched cards

[7] Encyclopaedia Britannica, Punched card . Wikipedia, Punched card

[8] Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), Jacquard weaving and history

[9] Smithsonian Museum of American History, Jacquard-related textile technology collections.

[10] Boston MFA, Livre de prières tissé d’après les enluminures des manuscrits du XIVe au XVIe siècle

I must say it was quite gracious
The reception to my latest mistake
Indulgent and polite, they were, my family gave me a break
Tolerant, that time, in the face of yet another faux pas

For that morning, I noticed that the oats weren't at all popular
Huh? Was it another case of the princess and the brown sugar?
I wondered quizzically what the subtle difference was in the flavor
Worried, perhaps, that my taste buds had been afflicted by the Corona

But it was a more mundane class of category error
A substitution - for the spice bottles looked so similar
Oops, instead of cinnamon I had picked up the paprika
Aha, that explained those curious flecks of red powder

...

A class of category error that I should really avoid
Stems from keeping my bottle of eye drops
And hand sanitizer in the same bag

When you're tired and your eyes are watery,
You reach for the small bottle, and you apply the drops and...
Well, you get the picture

...

A kettle is not an iron
- size, shape and steam to the contrary,
It is unwise to mistake the one for the other

#ModernProverbs

...

Error is a poor friend but an excellent teacher

Category Errors, a playlist

Call it poetic licence that I branded a garden variety mistake as a category mistake in one of the examples above, truth be told there is a full spectrum of mistakes. In any case, a soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• Mistake - Gregory Isaacs
• Full Attention - Beres Hammond
• Distracted - Al Jarreau
• Mistake - Fela Kuti
• Uh Oh, I made a mistake - Pennye Ford
• Faites Attention - Pompon Kuleta
• Mr Magoo - Bunny Lee Allstars
• Mister Magoo - Rich Willey & Boptism Funk Band
• Mr. Magoo - Tana

File under: life, error, humour, failure, culture, observation, perception, experience, best practices, Small Things, poetry, toli

Writing log. October 26, 2022

Seeing friends in the East Coast digging out from their winter storm put me in mind of the Nor'easter of 1995 when I did an 18 hour stint DJing on WHRB in the basement of Memorial Hall. A duty of care, I didn't want to shut the radio station down.

It all started so innocently, I was set to do the Street Beat hip hop show from 4 to 6 pm on Saturday. I showed up 90 minutes early, having paid no attention to the weather forecast. Albeit I did notice a few flakes of snow as I exited the shuttle bus with my crate of records. Who knew?

Almost immediately, I got the sense that something was up. As I poked my head in the studio, the DJ who was on air signaled to me and pointedly asked me if I wanted to go on early. I didn't know any better and so said "Sure, why not" and ran to pick out a few more records from our stacks.

The Street Beat credo, if there was one, was simply that we didn't play commercial stuff. If you did play a club banger, it had to be a rare white label remix. The founders of The Source magazine were Street Beat alums. We had standards. We did vinyl. We mixed. We were underground.

I had my work cut out because I hadn't been keeping up with the latest releases so I was half expecting some irate caller from Roxbury complaining about the lack of Ed O.G. & Da Bulldogs. Anyway, I started my set off with Dip Dip Divin' by Justin Warfield and got more esoteric from there.

At 5 pm, I got a call that the next DJ wasn't going to be able to make it for the 6 pm show. Hey, I thought, more airtime and, well, I wanted to play some soul. The Boston hip hop audience is unusually demanding whereas the soul crew are far more forgiving. I threw on Rainbow by Shinehead.

Anyway 6 pm came and I switched to spinning club classics. Grooving really, everything was beat-matched; not a bad mix. I was feeling it and getting lots of requests. Callers did mention that the snow was really coming down but my music was giving them soul comfort.

I suddenly realized that I was getting hungry. Ah right, I'd missed dinner. But, well, I could pass by the Hong Kong at 8 pm and grab something. The red leather furniture of the restaurant, the ambiance of disrepute and the strangely comforting food. Salivating. Bruce Lee would approve

Of course, I'd forgotten Francis Bacon's adage:

Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.

7:45 pm came and the next DJ hadn't shown up. I went to the front door and saw a pile of snow. It was coming down hard. Blizzard conditions really. I checked the schedule but didn't see a phone number or who to call for backup. Ooooh trouble.

I decided to not just put on a cd, it's a point of pride to always be mixing vinyl. So I dug more records from the vault and I mixed, blended and matched beats.

8 pm came.

For You To Love was our quiet storm show. DJ Zik had heavy boots to fill but I thought I'd be up to the task for the next two hours. Where his signature was the titular Luther Vandross song, I went with Crying Overtime by Alexander O'Neal, the king of ad libs.

10 pm came. I now had to read a Public Service Announcement, something about a storm advisory, how you should avoid leaving home if at all possible. As I read the script, the penny dropped. Stay off the roads. No wonder no one was coming to give me relief.

Midnight came. No replacement. I continued with a set of torch songs. Again it would have been easy to throw on an Isaac Hayes half hour lament but that would feel too much like cheating. I dug deep: Luther Ingram, The O'Jays, Eddie Kendricks etc.

2 am. Despair set in.

Burning Spear came to my rescue (Mi gi dem was the joint). I turned to roots reggae. Then decided to explore the falsetto singers in reggae. The phone calls to the studio blew up at this point. I must have struck a nerve.

Also: scavenging around the studios, I managed to find a Twix bar. I didn't query its vintage, I just ate it up. Where there's a snack gap...

4 am. This was getting ridiculous. UK soul then - I put on Loose Ends, Omar, Mica Paris and some acid jazz, Young Disciples, Galliano, Jamiroquai. Also I started to think of drastic measures...

When you comped, you had to learn how to turn the station on and off. FCC regulations or something. But no one really paid attention to that part of the training. I certainly couldn't remember how to turn the station on if I came in cold in the morning. Whoever heard of shutting it down?

I grew up in newsrooms and the BBC World Service formed the backdrop of my teenage years. Dead air was anathema to me. I wasn't going to be the one to let the side down. So I kept spinning, running back and forth to pull more records. Mixing on the turntable decks always, I refused to play cds.

At 6 am the woman who normally did the Sunday gospel show called apologetically to say that she couldn't make it, commiserating about the snow drifts, danger and all that jazz. Sigh...

I threw on some divas. Aretha, Brenda, Mavis, Chaka and Rachelle Ferrell. Know what I mean?

8 am came, and it seemed as if relief beckoned. Some poor soul called and said that he hoped to be there soon to do the folk show. The storm had abated somewhat. I started playing songs that mentioned Heaven. Bebe and CeCe Winans, Miles Jaye and so forth.

9 am and the guy hadn't showed up. I was tempted to Shut 'em down c/o Public Enemy - the Pete Rock Remix of course (still the best remix of all time).

I cheated and decided to throw on Freedom Suite by The Young Disciples. A good 15 minutes of respite. Isaac Hayes's By the time I get to Phoenix was another option considered (18:45 minutes for those in the know) but I couldn't find Hot Buttered Soul in the stacks.

10:15 am. He arrived. Another human being in the flesh. He said it was rough outside. Of course he needed some time to pull some records together for his set but by this stage I didn't care anymore, blending and beat matching almost like an automaton.

I couldn't find Keep the Beat by Eric B & Rakim so I closed my set out with And the beat goes on by The Whispers. I committed to the task.

The studio was an almighty mess when I handed over and I started reshelving the hundreds of records I'd pulled and deliberated over. 18 hours worth. It was tough going.

I walked back to the dorm through the 14 inches of snow with my crate of records. No shuttle bus obviously. I didn't have boots on, no gloves and, well, I wasn't appropriately dressed. It was a long, treacherous walk but, at length, I made it to the Quad. The Cabot House dining room was just opening for brunch.

...

There's no moral to the story, just the abiding memory of holding down the fort in that basement, at one with the music and the radio audience.

DJs may be a strange breed but we have a keen sense of duty.

A DJ's Duty, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note. Some of what I played that weekend (spotify version)

• The Basement by Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth
• Dip Dip Divin' by Justin Warfield
• Rainbow by Shinehead
• Got To Keep On by The Cookie Crew
• Last Night a DJ saved my Life by Indeep
• Mi gi dem by Burning Spear
• Burrup by Nardo Ranks
• Shut em down (Pete Rock mix) by Public Enemy
• Can't Stop a Man by Beres Hammond
• Crying overtime by Alexander O'Neal
• I get the job done by Big Daddy Kane
• And the beat goes on by The Whispers

Bonus beats: a tape of a Club Classics set I did circa 1993 that I digitized when I found time during the early covidious lockdowns


File under: music, obsession, memory, humour, life, youth, culture, observation, perception, WHRB, whimsy, Social Living, toli

Writing log: January 5, 2022