Old is the New New

The Believer on the Kcymaerxthaere:

The Kcymaerxthaere is a vast alternate universe created by Eames Demetrios, a California-based artist and filmmaker who began installing the plaques in 2003. The premise of the project is that the Kcymaerxthaere exists as its own parallel world, but its remnants are often visible in our own, “linear” world—intersections that Demetrios endeavors to commemorate by physically marking their presence.He has already installed over sixty of these faux historical markers, and hopes to increase that number to seventy by the year’s end. Most are in the United States (that is, Kymaerica), while others dot the globe, materializing in Singapore, Spain, Dubai, and Australia. This August, Demetrios even lowered a plaque onto the ocean floor, under forty-five feet of water in the Garvellach Islands of Scotland. In addition to the plaques, there are lectures, websites, travel guides (including Discover Kymaerica), and bus tours. … Demetrios calls the project “three-dimensional storytelling,” and says that he hopes to mark some two thousand sites before he is through.

It helps to know a few key features of the Kcymaerxthaere: The world there is divided into gwomes, cultural groups that bear some resemblance to nation-states, though they are much smaller. (There are more than 5,000 gwomes in Kymaerica alone.) The great cultures of the Kcymaerxthaere were made up of road builders, and Kcymaerxthaere history is marked by several massive migrations—across both land and sea. Central figures recur throughout the story, such as the Nobunagas, a father-son legacy of warriors whose saga extends from Korea to Texas (or “pTejas”). There has been warfare, including the enigmatic but crucial Battle of Some Times, and the less significant if more colorful Battle of Devil’s Marbles, where thousands of warriors fought astride giant, vicious war-kangaroos.

At times, it can be difficult to follow.

Jeremy Kalgreen’s Science! t-shirts are, obviously, awesome. It’s a sign of how much I’ve changed since the 1990s that I have not already ordered a closet of them. If another sign were needed, that is, besides kids, minivan, hair in places where there was no hair before… The key is the Magnus Pyke exclamation mark. Science (no exclamation mark) is a painstaking process consisting mainly of grant applications, faculty meetings, and washing out test tubes. But Science! is giant guitar-shredding robots, cloned T-rex burgers, and tri-breasted alien honeys. You see the difference?

I want a line of History! t-shirts.

But what would History! designs depict? Shirley Temple decking Hitler? Voltaire and Ben Franklin playing electric guitar? Vikings, just being themselves? All worthy subjects, but not iconic enough to immediately read as a t-shirt design. What are history’s goofy, “hell yeah!” equivalents to Kalgreen’s jubilant mad scientists? I suppose some of his equally swell Teach The Controversy t-shirts, like UFOs building the pyramids or the Illuminati ruling the world, could work as History! designs. As could much of Kate Beaton’s stuff. But I welcome alternate suggestions.

I’ve been trying to come up with a mission statement for this blog: to figure out if and why I want to keep writing it, to boil what it’s all about down to one or two sentences. I haven’t gotten there yet, but one thing I’ve always known is this: History ought to be awesome.

John Ralston Saul’s A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada is a beautiful book, and it makes an appealing argument which I would really like to be true. Canada, Saul argues, is not a British nation or a French nation but a Métis nation, profoundly if unconsciously shaped by Aboriginal ideas. Almost everything that is distinctive or admirable about Canadian society–modesty, pragmatism, respect for diversity, negotiation and compromise, a comfort with constant tension between individuals and groups–comes, he says, from Aboriginal roots.

Some raised their eyebrows at this argument. Some did considerably more than that. Not long after A Fair Country came out, I was at a fancy sort of dinner where I mentioned the book to a gravelly-voiced veteran reporter from one of Canada’s major newspapers. He was totally excellent–gruff, profane, and hilarious, my Platonic ideal of a gravelly-voiced veteran reporter. I said, “I don’t know that Saul proves his thesis, but it’s a really appealing argument.” He said, “If you can find six other Canadians that believe it, I’ll [eat my hat].” Except he didn’t say “eat”, “my”, or “hat”, and I did a laughing spit take that sprayed daikon sprouts and golden beet soup all over the assembled dignitaries.

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(I don’t know about you, but I’d say this gives that Gary Coleman and Michael Hasselhoff picture a run for its money.)  Happy New Year, friends and readers. All the best for 2010.

Kenneth Burke described literature as “equipment for living”: “A work like Madame Bovary,” he wrote, “is the strategic naming of a situation. It singles out a pattern of experience that is sufficiently representative of our social structure, that recurs sufficiently often mutis mutandis, for people to ‘need a word for it’ and to adopt an attitude toward it.  Each work of art is the addition of a word to an informal dictionary.”

My mother once said she felt bad about not giving my siblings and me a religious upbringing–not because she feared for our souls, but because she worried we’d miss out on all the biblical references and allusions woven through Western culture.

You needn’t have worried, Mom. There’s my equipment for living, there’s my vast Talmudic dictionary of allusions and parables for apprehending and articulating the world. The first episode of The Simpsons aired twenty years ago today.

(*) Just to reiterate: The worst fate Mom could imagine for her heathen kids was not hellfire and damnation, but not getting all the references. I am my mother’s son.

Dr. Johnson to Boswell: “Do not fancy that an intermission of writing is a decay of kindness. No man is always in a disposition to write; nor has any man at all times something to say.”

(Yoinked from The Wreck of the Henry Clay, the tremendous paper and ink version of Caleb Crain’s Steamboats Are Ruining Everything.)

Searching for something else, I just came upon a comment I’d clipped and saved by Timothy Burke at Scott Kaufman’s Acephalous. The post is a few years old; SEK was talking about how “Social Darwinism” never really existed, at least not in the simple, coherent form handed down to us by Richard Hofstadter. Tim says:

There are a very substantial number of tropes, terms, events and so on which are taken as historical truths which, when you take the trouble to trace them back, rest on very slender … scholarly foundations. You could spend your life as a historian just doing skeptical investigation of many commonly reproduced ideas about the past… Eugenics is an interesting example that’s closely linked to “Social Darwinism”: it differed very substantially from nation to nation, but in England and the United States, it actually had very little to say about people of color, contra the commonly received view (which I often see in humanistic writing). It certainly had a powerful racial referent, but a lot of that was implicit, and almost always directed at white people, at a notion that the hierarchical place of whites was threatened by their ebbing biological strength due to their over-civilization. In other words, it was a lot weirder than the commonsensical invocation of it often looks.

But this is also of course where a truly intricate sense of intellectual history can enter the picture: you could ask why the idea of “social darwinism” as a past construction which we imagine ourselves to have overcome (but which can be invoked in the present to criticize some opponent) became so appealing. In other words, excavating the historiography of “Social Darwinism” can turn into a backdoor intellectual history of the time at which Hofstader published his work. You could observe that perhaps the term was so appealing at the time because it was a useful mythography for New Dealers trying to sum up how their form of capitalism was a moral triumph over the capitalism of the robber barons. Or perhaps it was also a comforting term for mid-century biologists and social scientists, stressing the evolution of proper formal boundaries and precision between disciplines. … “Social Darwinism” almost invariably gets used as a way to stress the moral and intellectual distance between late 19th Century America and now, that we are both better scientifically and morally.

When a guy’s comments–not his blog posts, his comments on someone else’s blog–are this smart and useful, maybe the rest of us should just pack it in?

(See more silent film / video game mashups at GamePlayGag.)

Richard Lewontin, on his friend Carl Sagan and how to think about pseudoscience, from a 1997 review of Sagan’s Demon Haunted World:

[Carl] Sagan and I drew different conclusions from our experience [debating creationists]. For me the confrontation between creationism and the science of evolution was an example of historical, regional, and class differences in culture that could only be understood in the context of American social history. For Carl it was a struggle between ignorance and knowledge.

Conscientious and wholly admirable popularizers of science like Carl Sagan use both rhetoric and expertise to form the mind of masses because they believe, like the Evangelist John, that the truth shall make you free. But they are wrong. It is not the truth that makes you free. It is your possession of the power to discover the truth. Our dilemma is that we do not know how to provide that power.

I am (finally) starting to think about my cranks book again.

Another blast from my blogging past, this one from a long time ago in a Livejournal far, far away: Alec Guinness on Star Wars, The Simpsons, syphilis, and Marlene Dietrich’s alien lover.

[Edited to add: Hey, Carrie Fisher has a blog!]

Guinness is Good for You

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