April 27, 2004
Three different names
William Shakespeare (who, as we all know, was a prosperous grain merchant from Stratford-upon-Avon and certainly not a cultured and brilliant playwright) was born around April 23, 1564. No one knows exactly when, however; all we have to go on is the day that Shakespeare was christened, and any number of factors could have affected the date. It could have been three days before St. George's Day, or it could have been more than a week before. We'll never know; for most Elizabethans, there wasn't any point in recording the day a baby was born. Instead, they recorded the day he or she was christened. Baptism is a Catholic sacrament, but christening serves a purpose other than baptism, other than allowing a child's godparents to reject Satan and all his works; it's traditionally where children were given their names. "Christian" names, as distinct from family names (given at birth) or confirmation names (given on reaching adulthood in the eyes of the church). There's a reason Clark Kent became "Superman": names are powerful things. From Nigeria to Lithuania, naming ceremonies mark beginnings. The tradition is at least as old as Abraham (born "Abram" and taking his new name before becoming a father of nations) and is at least as current as Russel Jones becoming Ol' Dirty Bastard (and then Osiris, then Big Baby Jesus, and now Dirt McGirt). Names are a way of marking the dawn of something new. And what happens when we build a ship? We christen it: have a ceremony, give it a name, hit it with a bottle of champagne. That's what I call a birthday party.
April 21, 2004
Described by Rabelais, Flaubert, and Finney
Charles Finney was a newspaperman in Tucson, Arizona for thirty years. On the side, he wrote fiction, but either it wasn't much of a concern or he worked slowly; after two efforts in the 1930s, he stopped for twenty years. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he published a bare handful of short fiction in such magazines as Harper's and the Paris Review. In 1968, he wrote a novella. And, assuming he was a good reporter, that was it for his career as a writer of fictions. His reputation rests entirely on the slim volume that was his first published work, a odd little tale about a circus. The circus is The Circus of Dr. Lao, and it brings some curious characters along to a dusty little town in the desert:
Who is Dr. Lao? Curator, pulp fiction "Chinaman," or the last of the gods? The relentlessly laconic author doesn't seem to care about these questions one way or another, beyond framing them.
His Circus features the original Apollonius (b/w Golden Ass), Satan, a satyr, Medusa and the Great God Yottle. The people of Abalone, Arizona, where The Circus has landed, are impatient, by and large, with these apparitions -- they only want a sideshow.
The book was made into a movie that people seem to have generally disliked, despite Tony Randall's performance in seven different roles. The Circus of Dr. Lao is back in print, thanks to the University of Nebraska, so you can judge for yourself whether the movie missed the point. "Relentlessly laconic" is a nice way of putting it; the characters are as nonplussed by weirdness as the characters in the works of the great R. A. Lafferty. Lafferty deals with the sort of people who, when confronted with gigantic flying islands tend to get shirty about zoning regulations; Finney's characters are much the same. Unlike the ever so slightly gonzo Lafferty, however, Finney seems to share his characters' sense that Medusa turning a patron to stone is no more or less interesting than college kids kicking up a ruckus at the peepshow unless you're the patron's husband, and maybe not even then. The citizens of Abalone just want a circus.
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April 19, 2004
Musique mechanique
In New York, the musician's union is gearing up for a battle against a new technology, the Sinfonia (links via Girlhacker). The issue is whether the Sinfonia, a souped-up keyboard that has enabled the producers of a new Off-Broadway musical, The Joy of Sex, to to run its orchestra pit with only three musicians is an instrument or a "virtual orchestra machine". If it's simply a new and powerful electronic instrument, the musician's union will be forced to stand down, but union representatives say that the Sinfonia is no ordinary synthesizer. Ever since Elisha Gray hooked keyboards to oscillated metal reeds and Thaddeus Cahill realized that electric signals could generate musical tones, the sawtooth sounds of electronic music have been improving. (The improvements didn't come in time for Cahill; he and his family managed to build his seven-ton masterpiece, the Telharmonium, but a lack of electronic amplifiers was crippling; after a brief flurry of interest, the project began losing money hand over fist, and today not a scrap of the several models of Teleharmonium -- one weighing two hundred tons and occupying two floors -- remains.) There were various oddities along the way, such as theremins and the bowed Choralcello, but generally electronic instruments stuck to keyboards and progressed in a rigorously linear fashion, with electronic music improving all the while. The Pianorad, developed by science fiction and radio pioneer Hugo Gernback, gave way to machines with well-known names made by people like clockmaker Laurens Hammond and engineer Robert Moog. Even if the Russian models looked like they could withstand a direct artillery strike, they were still clearly a single musical instrument. Not so the Sinfonia.
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April 16, 2004
The locusts sang such a sweet melody
Brood X is about to invade the nation's capital. Brood X is not, alas, something dreamed up by Grant Morrison (or a cheap Alien knockoff by Chris Claremont). Brood X is the largest population of periodical cicadas to hit the eastern seaboard; the cicadas are entirely harmless and vulnerable to predators, so they've developed a unique strategy for ensuring that they survive to make the next generation of baby periodical cicadas. They spend the vast majority of their lives underground, and when they surface en masse they do so in such quantity, often in densities of over a million per acre, that predators simply get overwhelmed. There are twelve seventeen-year broods, each locked to a different cycle, and Brood X, the tenth, is the largest, which means people will be sweeping vast quantities of discarded cicada exoskeletons off their stoops and dogs will be eating themselves sick. (Some people may eat themselves sick, too, although I doubt the comparison to soft-shelled crabs will convince the general public.) And they'll be loud, too; Bob Dylan may have enjoyed their song when he experienced it two cycles ago in 1970, but he didn't have to sleep with ten thousand cicadas outside his window. If the 1987 brood is anything to judge by, it will be maddening. But it's hard to begrudge them their moment; they hide underground for years, drinking from plant roots, only to emerge upon a hidden signal when the time is right. If they were called Barbarossa bugs and were released when the nation was in danger, maybe they and their brethren would get a little respect. But then again, their name alone may do that; not dead which eternal lie, and fear for your sanity when Brood X wakes.
April 12, 2004
Print the myth
Every now and again, a survey comes out designed to show how stupid Americans (and particularly American schoolchildren) are compared to the rest of the world. Americans don't know where Mexico and Canada are! They can't identify what language the Dutch speak! They think The Flintstones is solid anthropological fact! This tradition seems to have moved on to England, where a recent poll seems designed to make the British feel as bad as Americans. It seems that Britons are confused about whether the Battle of Hastings or the Battle of Helm's Deep was real, and so forth. Some of it seems calculated to confuse; the Battle of Endor, featuring those irritating (yet beloved among a certain segment of the population) Ewoks sounds real. If the Witch of Endor could serve as the basis for
sixteenth century Dutch painters and designers of Bible-themed collectable card games, couldn't there have been some sort of fight for Endor in the past? It certainly sounds more plausible than the War of Jenkin's Ear. The problem is that there's no resonance to the Battle of Hastings itself; everyone knows the date, but the Bayeux Tapestry leaves something to be desired in these highly mediated times. If people are confused about whether William Wallace was real, it shows that Robert Burns has been letting down the side. More movies on the order of Gibson's manly Scottish Western won't do the trick; the secret is to build into myth. Believing in a historical Arthur or even a historical Robin Hood doesn't seem entirely half-baked, but surely Arthur and Robin seem more real than, say, William Pitt the Elder. Pollsters can phrase questions to make people sound stupid, but nobody makes people believe truth or lies. We do that for ourselves, because some things sound right. Put the penny dreadful back in history. People will respond when the Duke of Marlborough and Admiral Nelson seem as real as Robin in the forest, Lord Edmund Blackadder, the Battle of the Bulge, the last desperate stand of the 300.
April 05, 2004
Not fade away
The world heard that today is the tenth anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death. The world at large never heard of Wesley Willis. Cobain was blond, beautiful, brooding, the face of a new sound of rock and roll whose band sold millions of copies. Willis was a three-hundred-pound black man, a singer and schizophrenic from Chicago who wrote songs like "Spank Wagon" and "I Wupped Batman's Ass" ("Batman beat the hell outta me and knocked me to the floor / I got back up and knocked him to the floor / He was being such a jackoff"). Record critics and music industry types tended to love him. Wesley Willis was 40 years old when he died from internal hemorrhaging. Kurt Cobain was twenty-seven years old when, addicted to heroin and still struggling with his success. Cobain might have lived if he had had a little more Wesley Willis in him.
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April 04, 2004
The puzzle palace
A hundred years ago, a craze swept through Europe and America. In the offices of America, it was banned as a distraction that kept workers from their desks; in the cafés of Paris, it was handed from person to person; statesmen and politicans sat down with it in the halls of the Reichstag. It was a puzzle, the "Fifteen Puzzle", the masterwork of the American puzzle king, Sam Loyd. The Fifteen Puzzle was unquestionable Loyd's most popular work; it sold tens of thousands of copies, spurred on by Loyd's offer of $1000 to the first person who was able to provide the solution to the puzzle. This sort of offer isn't terribly unusual; the lure of prizes drives armchair treasure hunts (as opposed to the more active kind, which seems to be mainly driven by prestige). Celebrity magician David Blaine commissioned an armchair treasure hunt from game and puzzle designer Cliff Johnson; Blaine's puzzle was recently solved, bringing the winner a hundred thousand dollar prize. Unlike David Blaine, Sam Loyd didn't have to worry about paying up; the Fifteen Puzzle has no solution.
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April 02, 2004
Wars without end
In 1911, Ivor Gurney won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music. In 1914, he volunteered to join the British army. In 1915, he was accepted. In 1917, he was gassed at Passchendale. In 1922, he was certified insane and institutionalized, and he never got well. The story that "Batty Gurney" was eternally reliving the horrors of Passchendale are apparently a myth; he continued to write poetry about the war, but Gurney was not suffering from "deferred shell shock" and he knew it. Gurney freely admitted that he had invented the symptoms of shell-shock in order to get improved medical benefits. Although there is some debate about what his condition actually was, he was genuinely ill; one doesn't spend a decade and a half in a mental institution on a lark. Still, he could have had it worse. The idea of Gurney, the lost (and last) war poet, reliving and responding to the events that shattered him is a romantic one, but twenty years of life during imagined wartime would have served only (as one of Gurney's poems put it) God's purpose of pain.
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