On world-making and Muppet origins.

children, cultivation and creation, cultural worlds, puppets, television

Nate

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Bonnie Erickson designed and built the inimitable Miss Piggy in 1974 for an early “Muppets” television special, produced by Jim Henson.  Puppets, props and storyboards from Henson’s prolific career are featured in the traveling exhibit ”Jim Henson’s Fantastic World.”  Anika Gupta spoke with Erickson.

You’ve been designing muppets and mascots for years. What attracts you to them?
The creation of worlds—the whole process of designing characters, putting together a back story, giving the characters an environment in which they can thrive and casting performers who can bring them to life.

Why do puppets appeal to adults as well as children?
They’ve been a tradition across the world for thousands of years as a form of storytelling. But, until recently, they have’t been appreciated in the United States. Now, however, puppetry is finding a niche in the arts—dance, theater and even opera. I think people appreciate the performers’ skill as well as the artistry of the puppets themselves. We owe a lot of that to [Muppets creator] Jim Henson’s vision.

Who inspired the character of Miss Piggy?
My mother used to live in North Dakota where Peggy Lee sang on the local radio station before she became a famous jazz singer. When I first created Miss Piggy I called her Miss Piggy Lee—as both a joke and an homage. Peggy Lee was a very independent woman, and Piggy certainly is the same. But as Piggy’s fame began to grow, nobody wanted to upset Peggy Lee, especially because we admired her work. So, the Muppet’s name was shortened to Miss Piggy.

When it comes to travel writing, it's out with the old, exotic cliches, in with the ... new, exotic cliches? I fear so, alas. Though in a weird way the example about the schoolgirls (with its circumvention of the old old center-to-margins model of cultural spread) gives me the most hope.

cliches, cultural worlds, exoticism, globalization, travel

Nate

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Of course, the motifs and assumptions of well-told travel stories do change over the years. Twenty years ago, for example, books like Pico Iyer’s Video Night in Kathmandu showed how travel writers had a new duty to deal with the charms and challenges and complexities of globalization. By the time I started writing for a living in the late 1990s, it had come to the point where it was nearly impossible to write a travel story without acknowledging globalization in some way. It’s difficult, after all, to project the old exotic clichés onto foreign lands when you keep meeting Burmese Shan refugees who can quote West Coast hip-hop, or Spanish Catholic girls who have crushes on Chinese movie stars, or Jordanian teenagers who idolize Bill Gates.

A sort of high-end storefront secular church emerges in London.

education, england, horizons of the possible, literature

Nate

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London’s new School of Life, based in a Merchant Street storefront, offers courses on “the five central themes of our lives—work, play, family, politics and love.” The school’s courses treat the classics (like Shakespeare’s sonnets or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina) as works with practical, not just academic, value. It’s a refreshing approach. “Real” college literature and philosophy courses are often too distracted with their cerebral exercises (”deconstructing the narrative,” or whatever) to consider whether these works of genius might have actual applications in everyday life.

An alternative to Andy's 3–12–120 plotting of optimal sizes for culture-making (and -disseminating) groups. I don't know if starting with "the seven" totally matches with Andy's idea of an "absolutely small" creative group—seven is more minivan than Mini Cooper.

3 12 120, community, crime, groups, numbers

Nate

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150—“The Exclusive Dunbar Number”. Robin Dunbar got much of the discussion of group thresholds started with his article, “Co-Evolution Of Neocortex Size, Group Size And Language In Humans.” However, as I’ve written previously, and as I’ve described in this article, Dunbar’s group threshold of 150 applies more to groups that are highly incentivized and relatively exclusive and whose goal is survival.

Dunbar makes this obvious by the statement that such a grouping “would require as much as 42% of the total time budget to be devoted to social grooming.”

The result of the grooming requirement is that communities bounded by the Exclusive Dunbar Number are relatively few. You will find hunter/gatherer and other subsistence societies where this is a natural tribe size. You’ll also find these groups sizes in terrorist and mafia organizations.

I just learned recently that Kellogg's Rice Krispies cereal is sold in Australia under the name Rice Bubbles—which reminded me of this description I'd read a while ago of a traditional Bangladeshi technique for making puffed rice.

breakfast, cooking, food and drink, parallels

Nate

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Joygun Nessa’s life revolves around rice: she eats it; her family raises it on their farm; and it supplies her with a livelihood: making muri (puffed rice).

Rice and salt and sand—as a medium for puffing the rice—are all she needs. Ms. Nessa, however, does not use just any old rice. She recommends IR8 developed by IRRI or BR11 for the best results.

To prepare her specialty, she uses a clay stove in which the fire is underground. It uses one-third less fuel than other stoves, which is important in a country suffering from fuel shortage. She has been using the stove for about 7 years.

Squatting by the stove, she stokes the fire by throwing fistfuls of wheat straw down the stove’s holes. Sometimes she uses balls of cow dung, rice hull, and sticks for fuel. The heat produced is intense.
Over one of the holes, she heats up a large clay pot with sand in it. Rice in salted water is warmed in a small pot over a different hole. She stirs the rice with a naruni, a utensil made of palm-midribs bunched together.

When the right temperature is reached, she skillfully pours the rice into the big pot with the sand and swirls it for 30 seconds. Suddenly, the rice becomes alive in a burst of steam and fills the pot.

Ms. Nessa knows exactly when the rice is done puffing. If she hesitates a moment too long, the rice will burn. With the precision of a master chef, she dumps the contents into a clay strainer and shakes out the sand.

The muri is warm and mildly salty, with a nutty taste. She makes it every day so that it’s fresh for her customers and family.

She markets the muri in bulk and in small plastic bags at the family’s grocery store. From 40 kilograms of rough rice, she gets about 26 kilograms of muri.

Like many popular-press articles about psychological studies (fuzziness squared!), these conclusions about regional culture are fascinating but probably worth taking with a grain of salt. The interactive graphics that go with the article are definitely worth a click.

cultural worlds, personality, psychology, social sciences, usa

Nate

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Even after controlling for variables such as race, income and education levels, a state’s dominant personality turns out to be strongly linked to certain outcomes. Amiable states, like Minnesota, tend to be lower in crime. Dutiful states—an eclectic bunch that includes New Mexico, North Carolina and Utah—produce a disproportionate share of mathematicians. States that rank high in openness to new ideas are quite creative, as measured by per-capita patent production. But they’re also high-crime and a bit aloof. Apparently, Californians don’t much like socializing, the research suggests.

An example of a deep cultural practice that seems to be—like many deep cultural practices, actually—able to make a rich and creative rebound from rejection and critique.

cleansing, cultural worlds, jewish, least of nations, tradition, water, women

Nate

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In the late ’60s and early ’70s, Jewish feminists claimed that the mikveh and other laws dealing with niddah, or menstruation, deemed women’s natural cycles unclean. (Under rabbinical law, married couples are forbidden to have sexual relations during the woman’s menstrual period and for seven days after menstruation has ceased. Some couples even sleep in separate beds during that time.) Objecting to what they saw as the patriarchal concept of ‘family purity,’ many feminists rejected the mikveh and the rituals that surround it. Mikveh continued, of course, but mostly among Conservative and Orthodox Jews.

‘Early feminists were very negative about the mikveh, seeing it as a denigration of women, a focus on ‘cleanliness’ and ‘impurity’ that seemed to be a way of keeping women from tainting men,’ says Shuly Rubin Schwartz, assistant professor of American Jewish history at Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. ‘Now women are saying, ‘Wait a minute. This is a tradition that was an important part of Judaism for our foremothers. Let’s look at the deeper meaning.’’