the past is another country
Sunday, December 30, 2001
Unsurprisingly, it was a bookish Christmas. Among the many, many books given to me and V. by our friends and relatives was The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (thanks for the recommendation to recommendation; G., who surely deserves a more kindly present than the DVDs of the damned that I saddled him with; however, I needed to make good on a promise), which I finished yesterday. V. received Carter Beats the Devil, a book recommended by Judith, which is being quite good. The two books are about roughly contemporary historical periods, and moving on just a few years brings us to the time of Louis Feuillade's bizarro French serial Les Vampires, a gift from me to V. (I swapped DVDs with my friend Andrew; I gave him The Stunt Man and he gave me Coup de Torchon, a French adaption of pulp auteur Jim Thompson's disturbing little fable, Pop. 1280.) And much more (stationery! Le Creuset! Sweaters galore! Being John Malkovich!) -- it was a good loot year, even if I didn't get Detective Comics #27, an authentic Navy howitzer from 1883 (pointed out to me by Aaaugh!), or Potato Island. Maybe next year.
12:54 am 
Tuesday, December 25, 2001
Do you find the holidays stressful? Does dealing with inlaws get you down? Why not horrify them with an old-fashioned Yuletide tradition, the Christmas ghost story? The most famous, of course, is Dickens' A Christmas Carol, a perennial classic that is also short enough to be read aloud on Christmas Eve, if you have a bit of patience and a durable larynx. If you are looking for something shorter, a little digging will produce many authentic Victorian Christmas ghost stories, for instance "My Cousin, the Ghost, or Something Like a Christmas-Box", by Alfred Paxton, a genuine Victorian original from The Boy's Own Paper, January 6th, 1883. (One presumes if The Boy's Own Paper was a penny dreadful, designed to appeal to the sort of nineteenth century ragamuffin that Scrooge would have gladly caned.) From the turn of the century until after the Great War, M. R. James. James, a medieval scholar at King's College, Cambridge University, made a tradition of writing ghost stories which he read aloud to friends and colleagues at Christmastime. James is considered one of the creators of the modern ghost story; his stories are widely available online, and Ash-Tree Press has collected his entire body of work within and about the ghost story genre into a single volume. Other writers are in the "Jamesian tradition" (Ghosts and Scholars defines this liberally, including such works as Fritz Leiber's marvelous and creepy Our Lady of Darkness). Consider the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies, whose collection of ghost stories written for the University of Toronto Christmas party, High Spirits, features such less-than-terrifying works as "The Ugly Spirit of Sexism", "The Xerox in the Lost Room", and "When Satan Goes Home for Christmas". Davies himself cites Montague Summers, another scholar and ghost story writer; sadly, none of Father Summers' ghost stories appear to be available online, but a well-stocked library will likely have a handful. Next year, settle down by a roaring fire and give your loved ones something even scarier than a stocking full of coal to think about. And I would like to wish my readers a merry Christmas and a joyful holiday season; don't be scared by things that go bump in the night!
1:09 pm
Wednesday, December 19, 2001
In the late eighteenth century, Robert Barker, an Irish portrait and landscape painter living in Edinburgh, had a brilliant idea. He would paint a 360° view of London (making sure to get the perspective right), enclose it in a circular room, and charge an admission fee. Amazingly, the idea worked. Barker had invented (and eventually secured a patent upon) the panorama. The panorama proved to be wildly successful, and variations were created. The moving panorama had rollers, allowing the scene to slowly move past a stationary audience and create the illusion of motion; the diorama, the main source of income for its inventor, Louis Daguerre, early in his career, used tricks of light to dissolve from scene to scene. There was money to be made in the panorama business, and a man named John Banvard was determined to cash in. (more...)
11:15 pm
Sunday, December 16, 2001
Combine cheap wood-pulp paper, prose deemed by noted critics to be "turgid -- even bombastic -- involved, needlessly parenthetical, and superabundant in epithets", and an plot that manages to combine adventure, sentiment, and the forbidden thrill of miscegnation, and what do you get? A best-seller. Ann Stephens was the author of Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter, an 1860 reprint of an 1839 piece written for The Ladies' Companion. Published by Irwin Beadle, it was a massive success, selling upwards of 60,000 copies, a respectable number even today. The price of Malaeska gave birth to a term: Ann Stephens had written the first dime novel. (more...)
8:35 pm
Tuesday, December 11, 2001
Last weekend, I introduced V. to Two-Lane Blacktop, a movie every good as the reputation I wasn't aware of when I first saw it. (One of the great advantages of working at the Fine Arts in Berkeley was that I could rely on Keith and Emily to know about such things.) Warren Oates, dressed in a dazzling array of pullovers, gives the best performance of his lengthy career, and both James Taylor and Dennis Wilson (of the Beach Boys) acquit themselves well. It's pretentious as all hell, with the baffling last shot, the portentious character names (as the poster says, "James Taylor is the Driver. Warren Oates is GTO. Laurie Bird is the Girl. Dennis Wilson is the Mechanic."), the incredibly laconic characters played Taylor and Wilson. The director, Monte Hellman, was a Roger Corman house director. Corman, the frighteningly prolific director, had an eye for talent, and hired Hellman to make two movies with a B-movie actor and screenwriter named Jack Nicholson. Nicholson and Hellman made two Westerns, The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind; when Nicholson became a star with Easy Rider (and, more importantly to American International Pictures, showed that the youth market could be worth a hell of a lot of money to a studio), Corman sent Hellman off to do a road movie of his own. (more...)
1:29 am
Saturday, December 8, 2001
Recently a Slate piece on Monsters, Inc., made reference to today's "golden age of American cartooning":
There was...the stack of cool graphic novels on my desk, which rested on the copy of the New York Review of Books with Anthony Grafton's rapturous essay about Ben Katchor's New York. I wandered over to the kitchen, where I noticed my copy of Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a novel about two loony Jewish immigrant cartoonists that won last year's Pulitzer Prize; I remembered that I had yet to see Ghost World and had missed Wallace and Gromit at the Film Forum.
But that list leaves out another really interesting example: Art Spiegelman's book on Plastic Man. (more...)
10:49 pm
Tuesday, December 4, 2001
Most people don't think about media criticism that often. They might gripe about the left-leaning tendancies of a particular columnist or paper; they might grouse about what they see as blatant lies spewed forth by talk radio hosts; they might occasional catch wind of journalistic scandal, when a Pulitzer winner returns her prize for falsifying a story or a columnist admits to plagiarism. There are occasional flareups of interest, like those generated by Salon columnist David Horowitz's attempt to show that right-wing speech in campus newspapers was being stifled. (Horowitz shopped a vaguely inflammatory ad denouncing slavery reparations around to numerous college papers. He got his wish when thuggish students at several campuses stole newspapers that ran the ad, but when Princeton's newspaper called his bluff and ran both the ad and an accompanying editorial denouncing both the ad and Horowitz, Horowitz decided that the way to encourage free and open depate was to stiff the Princetonian on the thousand dollars he owed them for running the ad.) Since the attacks on New York and Arlington, media criticism has been perhaps more visible than usual, as various people who have the time to worry about such things have been beating each other up in the press about defining legitimate responses to the attacks and the usual debate about the proper relationship between the American press and military breaks out once again. And now there's another possible flareup of attention: the news is in (via MetaFilter) that the editor of Smartertimes.com will be involved with a new New York paper, the New York Sun. I'm a big fan of media criticism, and I wish that I liked Smartertimes more. (more...)
10:30 pm
Saturday, December 1, 2001
Scientists believe that HIV has existed since the early 1950s, if not earlier; a scattering of plasma and tissue samples (from an African, an American, and a Norweigian) shows that it infected at least some people before AIDS became a pandemic. What made the virus so virulent? What changed? Well, HIV is terrifically prone to mutation, so it's possible that the forms that existed before the 1970s were just less easily transmissible. But it seems more like the modern world makes us more vulnerable -- ignoring whether behavioral patterns changed (through increased casual sex or increased use of IV drugs), the formation of a more efficient blood bank system and hugely increased intra- and international travel made it much more easy for the HIV virus to travel. I don't see this trend going away; just as political and economic instability halfway around the globe can now effect the United States virtually immediately, medical crises are not always going to stay regional in a more interconnected world. In 2000, an estimated 2.4 million sub-Saharan Africans died of AIDS; an estimated 780,000 South and Southeast Asians died; an estimated 5 million people were newly infected with HIV this year. I'm fortunate that no one close to me has acquired AIDS, although friends and relatives of friends and relatives have died, and in the United States, we've done a largely masterful job of limiting the transmission of HIV and helping HIV-positive people live longer and more healthy lives; still, I don't think we're going to be able to ignore the spread of AIDS outside our borders forever. (Links via MetaFilter's day of participation in Link and Think, a weblog project for World AIDS Day, and communication with AIDS-researching MeFilistine Sennoma.)
3:06 pm
