the past is another country
Monday, July 30, 2001
If you have been reading my book reviews, you may have noticed that I haven't been keeping up. It's not that I haven't been reading (Spenser books are like popcorn, and I went on something of a spree); it's that I've been working on a project for Greg, who is on his way to Reno, Nevada. Reno is the home of marriages a-plenty, the National Bowling Stadium, the Mackay School of Mines, and, in at least one bad movie, Clint Eastwood. Soon it will be the home of Greg and the 6 Car. Best of luck, Greg!
9:00 pm 
Friday, July 27, 2001
I live right outside a major tourist destination, but like most people who live near major tourist destinations, I rarely do tourist things -- except when tourists are in town. My college roommate has been contemplating a move to DC, and he's making an exploratory visit, which meant yesterday was spent wandering around the Mall and being reminded of just how nice tourist interactions can be. A man in a Sikh's turban managed to communicate to me that he wanted me to use his camera to take a picture him using hand gestures and about three words of English. In the National Gallery, an older man with a heavy Italian accent stopped me. "Excuse me, what does it mean, this word?" he asked, pointing to the "American Naive Art" sign. "It means, well, untrained," I responded. He turned to look at one of the paintings. "Oh, yes! That baby," he said, pointing at a particularly unrealistic depiction of an infant, "he is 30 years old!" Then he broke out into a big grin, and I did too -- two tourists enjoying a joke.
8:35 pm
Tuesday, July 24, 2001
Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, one of the cornerstones of Objectivism, would by most any standards be considered a book of science fiction. Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is, among other things, a case study of a libertarian society. Jerry Pournelle claims credit, along with frequent collaborator Larry Niven, for much of the initial push for Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. So is science fiction a literature of the political right? (more...)
2:24 am
Thursday, July 19, 2001
Things have been pretty hectic at work, and V. has been running around like a crazy woman trying to get ready for the big academic conference she'll be at next week. But the big reason that I haven't posted is that I already have most of a hefty post written. It happened to 19th C. authors Thomas Love Peacock and Charles Dickens. (Dickens famously died before revealing who did kill Edwin Drood, sparking a hundred years of debate and leaving Edgar Allen Poe the title of inventor of the modern mystery story.) It happened to Schubert. Skyscrapers stand unfinished on the Pacific Rim, waiting for the next economic boom; the Cathedral of St. John stands unfinished in New York, waiting for something else. Often it seems like artistic performance anxiety prevents one from finishing the deed -- see, for instance, Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth, a gargantuan manuscript lost once to fire and entirely reassembled, added to in dribs and drabs for thirty years and never, ever handed off by Ellison. I feel for the editor who had to make something of that manuscript, and I feel for Ellison. My upcoming post won't be that long, never fear -- it's not even as long as my brief history of comics -- but it's just not right. While you're waiting, why not sit down, crack open a beer, and read a short story? I'll be done any minute now.
12:37 am
Sunday, July 15, 2001
When I lived in Berkeley, there were at least five revival houses in the Bay Area. I went to a lot of movies -- probably an average of two a week by the end. Part of that is because I was a volunteer at the Fine Arts, and usually managed to slip in to see at least one movie during my popcorn-counter shift there. But part of it is that I had a number of friends whose opinions I could rely upon -- I knew where their tastes overlapped with mine, and I knew when I could trust them when they told me that I had to, had to, see a movie. Which is good, because most newspaper film critics suck. One who doesn't, I'm pleased to discover, is Jonathan Rosenbaum. (more...)
1:36 am
Wednesday, July 11, 2001
My senior year of college, I worked at the library. Specifically, I worked for the acquisitions department. I helped them catalog (and cart to the sub-basement) their special collections; I sifted through boxes of donations that hadn't seen the light of day in twenty years; I leafed through the collection of the late Austin Warren looking for marginalia and spent a lunch break walking through the hundreds of joke books a pair of brothers had donated (before sitting down to read The Wit and Wisdom of Spiro Agnew). My boss was a charming woman who had begun her career at the library working in the bindery. She told me that when workplace stress got to be too much, she still liked to pull out a book and start sewing on a new cover. (more...)
2:10 am
Sunday, July 8, 2001
Those with no monetary need to reign in their flights of fancy do all kinds of entertaining things. Round-the-world ballooning has practically been done to death by moguls. 19th century rifle heiress Sarah Winchester built her house into a 160-room maze, the better to protect her from ghosts. The Cone Sisters collected art in the Teens and Twenties, just like British adman and Thatcher confidante Charles Saatchi does today. (Determining the relative merits of their collections is left as an exercise for the reader.) Museum-building has long been popular, and philanthropy is a perennial winner, from the Ford and Carnegie Foundations to today's Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or Soros Foundations. But more Quixotic efforts are ever so much more interesting! Martin Gardner's Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science cites the case of financier Roger Babson, who devoted some of his fortune to the Gravity Research Foundation, dedicated to inventing an anti-gravity device. On a more earthbound note, the Clay Mathematics Institute was founded by money manager Landon Clay; "dedicated to increasing and disseminating mathematic knowledge," it offers million-dollar prizes for solutions to some of mathematics' most important unsolved problems, including a final answer to the question of whether P = NP and a proof or disproof of the Riemann Hypothesis. And then there is the strange case of Marc Sanders, an amateur philosopher who has spent thousands of dollars to have experts on metaphysics review his manuscript. Godspeed, Mr. Sanders -- debating the necessity of the divine is a hell of a lot more interesting than taking a balloon ride.
7:06 pm
Friday night we went to see Will Oldham play at an art gallery in Baltimore. It was sold out, sadly, so we hung around outside the door to listen to a song or two while Amy practiced her cigarette-rolling skills. Oldham lives in Baltimore now, so I should get another chance to see him. From everything I've heard (and the one show I've seen, opening for Quebocois art-school favorites Godspeed You Black Emperor!), Oldham's not much of a live performer, cultivating a chilly distance from the crowd, but there's always the lure of hearing a new song (or one from his extensive back catalog that I'm not familiar with). (more...)
6:04 pm
Monday, July 2, 2001
Carrie Nation stood six feet tall and weighed 180 pounds. She was not a woman in whose way you wished to stand as she brandished her hatchet and tore up a bar. The divinely-inspired Nation and other temperance workers -- most famously the Women's Christian Temperance Union -- were a powerful political force in turn-of-the-century America. The WCTU was associated with the Progressives, the coalition of good-government reformers, trust-busters, Christian reformers, and suffragettes that made huge strides in the Midwest and Northeast and produced such notable polticians as Teddy Roosevelt and Battlin' Bob LaFollette. The WCTU's agitation for a dry America led to the 18th Amendment, which in turn led to the growth of organized crime and ethnic machine politics in America's large cities. The temperance movement was an example in the law of unintended consequences, but I suspect that even Carrie Nation wouldn't disagree with me when I say this: demon rum and keyboards do not mix. I beg your indulgence, dear reader; I'll be picking up a new keyboard at the Apple Store and be regularly posting again Real Soon Now.
10:29 pm
