June 22, 2005

Goin' Down The Road

My blogging here will continue its typically pokey pace for the foreseeable future, as Lisa and I make the move to Canada. The computer I’m typing on gets packed up today and everything gets packed up tomorrow and I expect I’ll be in offline limbo for a week or two. But I have been blogging up a storm, at least by my own standards, over at my LiveJournal, and I thought I’d offer a link for those who don’t know me from there. I’ve written a series of posts looking back on my ten years in Boston, in particular my first years of grad school, and it’s all very angsty and autobiographical, for those who like that sort of thing. The LiveJournal is here, and the autobiography starts here, with yet another shout-out to Ben Franklin.

Be warned: my LiveJournal is not the work of a mature and erudite scholar but that of a feckless and nerdy grad student. Footnotes are never provided, profanity is not uncommon, and in-jokes that I do not bother to explain are rife. There are no permanent links to my LiveJournal from this page, but I haven’t made any great effort to keep the connection a secret, either. I set up this page while I was on the job market, and it made sense to strictly divide posts about history matters from posts about every other thing in my life. After I make the move, I’d like to renegotiate the divide a little between what I post here and what I post at LiveJournal. Not that I won’t have to maintain some kind of decorum here (in fact, I’ll probably remove links to my LiveJournal, or cull most of the more confessional posts, once I start teaching) but my favorite blogs are the ones that have a central topic and a grown-up tone, yet still let us in to the parts of the author’s life. Like everyone else, I’m still figuring out how to do this blogging thing, and just what authorial voice works best for me. Maybe if I bring a bit more of my own life over here, I’ll also feel like I have more to say about history proper at Cliopatria, since right now my most “serious” history blogging (I use that word advisedly) gets diluted between this site and that one, and I often feel bad about that.

But for now, just more radio silence, as we pull up stakes and bid adieu to the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave. Thank you, America, it’s been a hell of a decade. See you in Canada.

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June 06, 2005

Deep Thoughts

So Mark Felt was Deep Throat. It’s like having a magic trick explained, isn’t it? A mystery is never as fun once the answer’s been revealed...

The Washington Post has confirmed that the great American writer Mark Twain was Deep Neck, the anonymous source who leaked secret information during the Whiskey Ring scandal of the 1870s and helped force the resignation of Republican President Ulysses S. Grant in August 1874. The Whiskey Ring was a conspiracy among politicians, government agents, whiskey distillers, and distributors to siphon off millions of dollars in federal liquor taxes. Deep Neck urged investigators to “follow the whiskey,” and ultimately exposed the rampant corruption in Grant’s administration. A movie adaptation of the story is planned—Hal Holbrook will play the lead role.

The Washington Post has confirmed that Captain Obediah Marsh was Deep One, the monstrous batrachian fish-human hybrid who leaked milt or fish oil or something onto the narrator of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” and helped bring about a secret government raid on the city of Innsmouth in August 1934. “Stupendous and unheard-of splendors await me below, and I shall seek them soon,” Marsh told Vanity Fair. “We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.”

The Washington Post has confirmed that chess prodigy Bobby Fischer was Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer that defeated reigning champion Garry Kasparov in August 1996. Deep Blue is a massively parallel, 32-node RS/6000 SP high-performance computer, which actually means nothing. During the supercomputer’s matches with Kasparov, whirring wheels of tape and a series of randomly blinking lights distracted observers from the secret wooden panel behind which Fischer could be cunningly concealed. Fischer completed the illusion by announcing his moves in a robotic monotone. But the deception unraveled in recent years as Deep Blue became increasingly paranoid and erratic, interrupting numerous matches with misogynist and anti-Semitic outbursts. It is possible that Fischer believed he was acting out the endgame of some eighteenth-century grudge match between Benjamin Franklin and the wooden chess-playing Turk. Fischer told reporters, “you won’t have Poor Richard to kick around any more.”

The Washington Post has confirmed that B-list comedian Murray Langston was the Unknown Comic, the paper-bag wearing Gong Show regular who sounded the show’s eponymous gong and helped force the resignation of Gene Gene the Dancing Machine in August 1976. Langston was a member of the so-called “plumbers,” a special operations unit organized by chief White House counsel Charles “Chuck” Barris. (White House officials leaked Barris’ secret identity as a CIA operative in the 2002 film Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.) In September 1971, Langston organized a burglary of the office of psychiatrist Dr. Joyce Brothers along with confederates Rip Taylor, Phyllis Diller, and Jamie Farr. They could not be reached for comment, but unindicted co-conspirator Arte Johnson declared the revelations “verrrrry interesting.”

I bookmarked a few Watergate links for you in the “Shiny New-ish Links” column to the right. One of them is David Brooks using Deep Throat as a kind of post-Watergate commencement address: In America, any little boy or girl can grow up to bring down a crooked president. Brooks closes by calling Woodward and Bernstein modern Horatio Algers, “two young men who slew the dragon, became rich and famous, and were played by Redford and Hoffman.” Here's where I advertise my immaturity: I liked All The President's Men fine, but Redford's Woodward and Hoffman's Bernstein have been forever eclipsed in my mind by Will Ferrell and Bruce McCullough in the odd little 1999 movie Dick.

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Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Founding Fathers

I’ve been derelict at posting here lately (what else is the new new?) but even worse about keeping up at Cliopatria. Happily, we just had an online symposium over there, about Barry Gewen’s “Forget the Founding Fathers,” an essay on trends in American historiography that appeared in this Sunday’s New York Times. That gave me a nice excuse to get back on the tricycle and try not to look too shallow next to heavyweights like Caleb, Ralph, KC, and Jon.

Gewen’s essay offers a high-speed summary of American historiography over the last fifty years. He then predicts a decline in the current vogue for fat, worshipful biographies of the Founding Fathers, and proposes a more internationalized American history as a goal. Most of us at Cliopatria applaud that sentiment, though some of us want to go even farther than Gewen in getting out from under the nation-state as the sole unit of historical analysis. And none of us, being typical historians, are very convinced that this globalization thing is really all that new.

My thoughts and those of my eminent colleagues await your comments at Cliopatria.

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