the past is another country
Monday, April 28, 2003
The idea had been stirring in the brains of inventors and mad scientists throughout the end of the nineteenth century: use radio to transmit voices through the ether. Marconi's sparks showed that radio waves could reach from England to the Americas. Reginald Fessenden (link via MeFi) harnessed the power of wireless for speech and music as early as 1906. Everyone knew that radio was revolutionary, a gold mine. But at the beginning of the twentieth century, people were beginning to ask exactly what people could do with it.
11:40 pm 
Sunday, April 27, 2003
On my birthday two years ago, I launched my Literary Year project. A year ago, I wrapped it up. Other people have been doing booklogs, in many cases better than mine. On the other hand, Diana of Field Notes, no slouch of a reader herself, said she was fond of Literary Year. I won't flatter myself that I'm any great shakes as a critic -- A. of Waggish is one of many far better sources for thought-provoking reaction to books -- so I will ascribe Diana's kind words to my catholic tastes. I'm starting a reviews log back up; unlike Literary Year, I will not even attempt to record everything I've read. Even aside from my inability to review everything, I read in bulk; this year, I reread almost the entirety of Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos books, a handful of of books by Raymond Chandler, three late Horatio Hornblower novels, and every book I own by Edward Eager. I love Eager, but it's more difficult to write something interesting about the sixth treasured children's book in a row than about, say, The Third Policeman upon first discovery. Nonetheless, I'll give it a try every now and then, lest Diana think ill of me. Seven Things Lately will also contain more than just book reviews; it'll be a consumption journal. In Providence and in Berkeley, I watched a hell of a lot of movies; now that the Silver Theatre has opened, I hope to resume the practice. Food and drink and comics and music and suchlike will all be fair game, as will websites I don't think I can wedge into a proper Snarkout entry. (I have my own elaborate rules about what constitutes such a thing.) I've installed Moveable Type and will be engaging in some shuffling over the next week or two; please forgive any broken links or hideous stylesheet foulups you encounter. In the interests of keeping this sort of tedious housecleaning update away from essays about con artists, decadent Frenchmen, the origin of nachos, and anti-Stratfordians, I've also added an announcement page that will be of little interest to anyone. Thank you, readers, for indulging me; your continuing interest is always something of a surprise to me, and remains a wonderful gift.
11:41 pm
Tuesday, April 22, 2003
Katie Roiphe is worried that people are reading What I Loved all wrong. She cites a New York Observer writer who carefully explicated all the similarities between the life of the author, Siri Hustvedt, and her protagonist. Roiphe seems to think that, mere coincidences like dates and biographies aside, it is an act of "sordid literary sleuthing" to feel that a novel about an academic (married to an artist) whose stepson is involved in a drug-related murder bears any relationship to the real life of a poet and novelist (married to a novelist) whose stepson was involved in a drug-related murder. Roiphe goes on to complain about the reception of her own family's novels and notes that "in the mid-'50s, when Mary McCarthy wrote her novel A Charmed Life, reviewers took her to task for myriad weaknesses, but not for the mere fact of writing about her ex-husband, Edmund Wilson." This is rather amazing. I know from The Morning After, Roiphe's feminist-slamming book about date rape, that she earned a graduate degree in English at Princeton; it is a mystery why Roiphe, possessed of a Ph.D. in literature, refuses to mention the roman à clef. (more...)
11:19 pm
Tuesday, April 15, 2003
Ben Franklin, the "first American", once declared that nothing in life was certain but death and taxes. Brother, if he only knew. In colonial and post-revolutionary America, the government funded itself using taxes, levied against certain goods made in America, and tarriffs, levied against imports. The occasional armed revolt broke out. Shay's Rebellion in 1787 was at least partially about taxes although largely about more general economic hardship faced by Massachusetts. The Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 was explicitly a response to a tax on whiskey dreamed up by Alexander Hamilton; the hard-drinking frontiersmen of western Pennsylvania didn't take kindly to the idea, and rose up to fight until the rebellion was quashed by a militia under the personal command of President George Washington. In wartime, however, sin taxes and tarriffs didn't suffice. Income taxes were first levied during the war of 1812, and again during the Civil War. In 1894, a tarriff-reduction measure brought with it the first peacetime income tax; the Supreme Court promptly struck it down as unconstitutional in 1895's Pollock v. Farmer's Loan. In 1909, the Sixteenth Amendment, legalizing the federal income tax, was proposed. To the joy of editorial cartoonists nationwide, it was ratified; decades later, cartoonists were still making a living off mocking the taxman (link via Kieran Healy). If one feels that income tax is bad or that progressive taxes are bad, one will find a great deal of company. The argument that income taxes are unconstitutional, however, would seem to be on shakier ground -- there are all those laws and editorial cartoons as evidence! But people say it, and a whole microindustry has sprung up around providing escape mechanisms for tax protestors (link via Making Light). One might think that the idea that Nebraska was not a state or that the flag in a courtroom annulled judicial authority or that a hidden Thirteenth Amendment made Congress obsolete would be harder to swallow than the idea that not paying one's taxes is a crime, but apparently not. Just last week, a federal judge contemplated banning Irwin Schiff's The Federal Mafia: How It Illegally Imposes and Unlawfully Collects Income Taxes in front of "a courtroom filled with vociferous tax opponents." I'm pulling for Mr. Schiff; banning books, even if they're tax fraud manuals designed to sucker the unwary, creeps me out. I wonder, however, if Schiff is charging sales tax on those things.
11:40 pm
Monday, April 14, 2003
The aftermath of the war in Iraq has begun; the images of Iraqis looting hospitals and museums have begun to filter back to the United States where they've been inevitably spun. It's been an amazingly bloodless campaign for the Americans, slightly less so for the Iraqis (but still much better than I had feared). The American military isn't a police force, and thankfully it knows it's not a police force; even if it were, it's not at all clear that they had enough people to control a city of five million people. Like Teresa, I'm appalled by the almost overnight dismantling of Mesopotamia's history. (more...)
11:10 pm
Thursday, April 10, 2003
The baseball season is in it's second week, and my fantasy team is already struggling to stay out of the cellar. My inability to draft decent starting pitchers is part of the problem, but the shoulder injury Derek Jeter suffered in the season opener didn't help. I'm no fan of today's Mr. Yankees, who I think is overpraised, but the hit he took looked ugly, and I'm happy that he won't require surgery. Baseball is a non-contact sport. The death from heat stroke of Steve Bechler was shocking in part because serious injury on the diamond is so thankfully rare. There are only a handful of people (mostly players, a few umpires) who have been killed as a direct result of the national pastime, most famously Ray Chapman, a standout catcher for the Cleveland Indians who was struck in the head by a Carl Mays pitch in 1920. Today, beanballs are much less common and when people get hurt, but it's usually relatively minor -- Ken Griffey's hamstring, Juan Gonzalez's thumb -- or a result of the fantastic stress of heaving a ball at 95 miles per hour. Pitching is strenuous enough that it's somewhat surpring how long-lived some pitchers can be. Nolan Ryan's career lasted 27 years after its inauspicious start; Nolan was 6-10 over his first two seasons in the majors before going on to win 324 games. Jesse Orosco isn't nearly the pitcher that Ryan was, but if he continues to be used as sparingly as he is (a recent save was his third in the past five seasons), there's no reason he can't hold up for another few years. But it seems likely that no one will ever replicate the longevity of Hall of Famer Satchel Paige. (more...)
11:33 pm
Monday, April 7, 2003
Today is the birthday of a very special little boy. In 1951, Osamu Tezuka, the "father of manga", created a character known "Mighty Atom" in a Japanese comics magazine. "Mighty Atom", better known in America as Astro Boy, was a robot with the futuristic birthdate of April 7, 2003. Today celebrations are taking place in Japan and at scattered locations in the U.S. (link via Boing Boing). Astro Boy, along with Tezuka's Kimba, the White Lion, became the basis for the Japanese animation industry, today one of Japan's major export industries. But April 7 has arrived, and despite the arrival of breakdancing robots, the market for robot superheroes with a heart of gold is, as yet, not fully developed. That's the danger of putting an expiration date on the future; the University of Illinois computer science department had to have HAL's birthday party without HAL. As Bruce Sterling has noted, even when science fiction got things largely right, it missed on the particulars. And Sterling's examples of getting things largely right weren't so much the product of visionary futurism as a reading of history; Orwell's 1984 was two parts Stalist Russia and one part BBC bureaucracy, and Heinlein's theocracy in Revolt in 2300 was Huey Long crossed with Father Divine. But Heinlein's heroes sound suspiciously like Heinlein characters rather than residents of the 24th century, and Orwell didn't predict the control devices of today. With a few exceptions -- "Deadline", a short story that described the atom bomb, is one famous example -- predictions generally fall flat. Perhaps that's for the best; a writer in 1951 might have been able to guess that the Soviet Union would fall or that we'd have access to battery-powered toothbrushes by April 7, 2003, but would he or she have predicted improvements on dental hygine or loosening of political repression under Kruschev? Could the facts of Braun's product development cycle or the Velvet Revolution have the same narrative appeal of something that a talented writer just made up? Truth is stranger than fiction, but truth can't provide a robot boy with seven different powers and a strong sense of justice. Thank you, Osamu Tezuka, and thank you, Dr. Elephun. Happy birthday, Astro Boy!
8:04 pm
