October 31, 2005

Clio's Nightmares

Tags: All Hallow's Eve, the Hite Channel, “if this is anybody but Avram Davidson, you're stealing my bit!”

First of all, boo! Happy Halloween, America. Second, something is way wonky with my weblog templates. Every page on this site but the one you're looking at takes you to my out-of-date CV, shouting my anemic grad school publication rate to the world. Now that's really scary.

I wish I had a good Halloween post for all of you today. A rollicking spooky-creepy alternate history. I actually do have an alternate history idea I’ve been hoping to write up, but it’s not at all scary, so it will have to wait. What I really wish I could do in honor of All Hallow’s Eve is just link directly to Ken Hite’s Suppressed Transmission and introduce the gentle readers of Cliopatria to Clio’s Nightmares.

Ken Hite is well-known (it would stretch the truth only a little to say worshipped) by a tiny community of tabletop role-playing gamers, yet essentially unknown outside that little world. For several years now, Ken’s been writing a brilliant column called “Suppressed Transmission” for the online gaming magazine Pyramid. Alas, Pyramid is accessible to paid subscribers only. Ken’s column is a crazy grab-bag of historical mysteries, occult synchronicities in myth and literature, and gonzo alternate histories. While ostensibly written to provide fodder for role-playing scenarios, Suppressed Transmission is really just fine reading for anyone interested in the weirder side of history.

A typical column might recount the history of Red Mercury, the Big Rock Candy Mountain, or the desert of Takla Makan. (Those links just go to Wikipedia, which is pretty great, but not as fun as Ken.) Another column might imagine an alternate mystical-gnostic Christianity splitting off under Pope Valentinus in 141 A.D., or a world in which the wildest dreams of the Italian futurists came true. Hite’s readers knew all about the Chicago Murder Castle of H.H. Holmes five years before The Devil in the White City. Would-be Erik Larsons, Tom Standages, etc. could do much worse than mining Ken Hite's column for topics for future historical best-sellers. Better yet, Ken should write his own.

Every Halloween, Ken really cuts loose with a column called “Clio’s Nightmares” that offers three or four truly twisted takes on history. This year he retold the Star Wars saga using real-life historical figures from the 10th century Holy Roman Empire, mashed up the Napoleonic Wars with a dark Golden Bough-spin on Peter Pan (Admiral Nelson is Hook, snicker), and—ah, but it doesn’t work if I just give away all the premises like that. This is the sort of thing that either delights you or doesn’t, and you really have to read it first hand to find out.

“Alternate history” isn’t really the right word for what Hite does. (He’s not the only one doing it, I should note, but he is one of the masters.) These aren’t the sort of counterfactual histories where you posit one pivotal change and then try to construct the most plausible outcome. They’re more like remixes or mashups. “You can’t make this stuff up,” Ken always says, and indeed he does begin with historical facts. They’re like the raw material, the samples he loops to lay down a beat. Then he layers other histories on top of them, like bass and melody, riffing on synchronicities and similarities. What does it mean, for instance, that Vlad “Dracula” Tepes, King Arthur Pendragon, and the Cherokee leader Dragging Canoe all have surnames or nicknames meaning “son of the dragon”? If you answered, “nothing, really,” you're absolutely right—but you're not getting into the spirit of things.

The goal of the game is not historical accuracy but historical audacity, not plausibility but performance. As in the musical mixing done by DJs and mashup artists, there is a set of regular referents and even clichés. Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco, is an ur-text for this kind of play. “You can tell [a lunatic],” Eco wrote, “by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.” Sure enough, for this kind of historical play the Templars are the well-worn equivalent of James Brown saying “Good Gawd!”

I can’t, as I said, link you to this year's Clio’s Nightmares. Or I can, but you'll only be able to read the first few lines. I can link to the full text of one of Ken’s early columns—“Six Flags Over Roswell,” which relocates the mythical Roswell UFO crash into six different eras of U.S. history. It's a fun read, and I've even done my own Canadian Content version of it, but I don't actually think that one column does justice to Ken's full cleverness or ambition. In his later columns, you're as likely to find a close reading of Christopher Marlowe or an investigation of Islamic mysticism as you are alien-controlled conquistadors. I can point you instead to Matt Rossi's “Encyclopedia of Heresies.” Matt plays in the same sandbox as Ken, and is second to noone in deranged erudition. But if Ken is like Fatboy Slim, hitting you with a slick radio-friendly three-minute single, Matt is more like Paul Oakenfold, spinning out a six-hour set of slow-building trance. And not everybody is up for 20,000+ words on the Cathar heresy. The first few years of Ken’s columns have been collected into two fine books. (Matt Rossi also has a book of columns that I really need to pick up.) I wish there was a better name and a bigger market for what these guys do.
They look a little like gaming publications, but they’re really not. They’re a crazy genre all their own.

I'm always curious what other historians will make of this scene, where people muck around in history for purposes so different than our own. The party line is that professional historians don’t approve of this kind of tomfoolery. I understand why, and why we need to draw clear lines between what we do in our day jobs and this kind of historical play. Ken himself is very thoughtful and tries to be responsible with history. Still, his work does demonstrate that with a library card, a good search engine, and the right kind of mind, one can wreak all kind of mischief on and with historical “facts.”

Professional academic history is only a tiny fraction of what people do with history in their lives. To those of us inside the guild, that’s both a blessing and a curse. Some people watch the Hitler Channel or read giant biographies of the Founding Fathers. Some people dress up like Civil War soldiers and spend their weekends in muddy ditches playing dead. Some people twist the facts of history for pernicious, hateful purposes. But some people do it just for fun.

Happy Halloween.

[Crossposted at Cliopatria.]

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October 20, 2005

Metaphysical Graffiti

Tags: gilded age memetics, intellectual history as improv jazz, the secret of the sphinx revealed.

I’m a little stunned by how many nights back in September I stayed awake to the small hours reading Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club. You might not expect the intellectual biography of four Gilded Age pragmatists to be a compulsive page turner, but for me it really was.

The four heavyweights at the center of the book are Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey, but in telling his tale Menand folds the four men into a wide-ranging, even meandering, intellectual history of late nineteenth-century America. Menand writes beautifully, and the book is just about as accessible as I think a 500-page tome on such a topic could possibly be.

Even though I study this period and I already knew all those names, a lot of the actual philosophy in this book was embarrassingly new to me. (Top down intellectual history was not exactly du jour while I was in college or grad school.) What really delighted me was how very modern Menand’s four subjects still sound. Not only in the sense that their ideas undergirded much of 20th-century American thought, but also in the ways they anticipated, and in some cases rendered redundant, a lot of things I’d describe as 21st-century thought—ideas and issues that are up-to-the-minute to the point of faddishness.

Old is the new new? You better believe it. Holmes is seminal for all of today’s intellectual property debates. Dewey (along with an eccentric partner named Franklin Ford) had the idea for the internet decades before Vannevar Bush or Al Gore. Charles Peirce’s ideas on design and chance, what he called his “guess at the secret of the sphinx,” sound an awful lot to me like chaos theory without the math.

William James’ application of Charles Darwin to the world of ideas not only prefigured memetics, it implies a kind of super meta-memetics. Check this out: James says the reason human beings possess the idea of causation, say, is not because causation exists. Which is not to say that it doesn’t exist. We don’t know if it does, and James for one doesn’t care. But the reason we believe in causation is that experience shows it pays to believe in causation. So our intellectual evolution effectively selects for that belief. That’s all truth is for William James. “All our thoughts are instrumental, and mental modes of adaptation to reality,” he wrote, “rather than revelations or Gnostic answers to some divinely instituted world-enigma.”

Is that too hand-wavey and po-mo for you? Well, in another part of the story, Charles Peirce offered an answer to postmodern “we can never really know anything” subjectivity that is more sensible and satisfying and optimistic than anything I ever heard in all the campus culture wars of the 1990s. I know I’m not going to do Peirce, or Menand, justice, but I read Peirce’s argument as follows: the mistake of 19th century nominalism (or 20th century postmodern subjectivism, whatever you want to call it) is the definition of belief or knowledge as individual belief or knowledge. Sure, yes, the beliefs and knowledge of individuals are subjective and flawed. No one person is capable of transcending their observer’s bias and attaining an accurate and objective knowledge of reality. But the aggregate beliefs of many individuals are another matter entirely. Riffing on the astronomers’ method of least squares, Peirce defines objective truth as the mean value we approach as our number of observations rises to infinity. There is such a thing as truth and knowledge, but it is inescapably social. We will never get there on our own; we can only approach it, together.

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October 16, 2005

Not Getting Things Done

Tags: lactose intolerance, robots, "belly up!", GTD.

As I was saying to a friend of mine this week, it is practically a law of nature: “what ye mock, shall ye become.” In her case, this had to do specifically with lactose intolerance and the whole organic food NPR yoga industrial complex that lies in wait on the far side of hipness for so many women of Generation X. In my case, well, there are about a million ways in which that law is true, but one among many is my trip down the rabbit hole of GTD.

One of my first posts on this weblog, almost a year ago exactly, snorted with mild derision at what I called “organization porn”—in particular the work of productivity-guru David Allen, author of Getting Things Done. Fast forward a year and what do you know? I've joined Allen's disciples, I've swallowed the GTD Kool-Aid. I've got a tickler file and a hipster PDA and I'll talk up GTD and 43 Folders to anybody who asks. I know, I know, I am such a sheep. But at least I'm not alone.

There's a long article in today's NYT magazine on the “life hacking” scene that does a good job of explaining the appeal:

At the core of Allen's system is the very concept of memory that Mark and Czerwinski hit upon: unless the task you're doing is visible right in front of you, you will half-forget about it when you get distracted, and it will nag at you from your subconscious … “David Allen essentially offers a program that you can run like software in your head and follow automatically,” O'Brien explains. “If this happens, then do this. You behave like a robot, which of course really appeals to geeks.”

Ahem. The article is also good on the value of a big clean desk and a big computer monitor with a big clean Desktop:

On the bigger screen, people completed tasks at least 10 percent more quickly - and some as much as 44 percent more quickly. They were also more likely to remember numbers, which showed that the multitasking was clearly less taxing on their brains. In two decades of research, Czerwinski had never seen a single tweak to a computer system so significantly improve a user's productivity. The clearer your screen, she found, the calmer your mind.

So am I any more productive now that I've adopted GTD? Um, not really. But I stress about my To Do lists much less. A little less. In a different way, at least. I'm a long way from being a zen productivity master. The real virtues of GTD and the associated hacks and tricks, at least as they've been working for me, are about focus and stress control. I'm learning to outsource a lot of the worry work I used to do with my own mind onto index cards or computer software. It's a process, and I'm not where I want to be yet, but I'm definitely on board.

My GTD post from last year describes finding another book in the Harvard Libraries on personal productivity, also called Getting Things Done, also abbreviated GTD. Only this one was written back in 1938. It was a hoot. I always meant to post a big table comparing the highlights of the Golden Age GTD (good posture featured prominently) with David Allen's. But I never did get around to getting it done.

That seems like proof of something.

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October 15, 2005

Curse of Bigness

As for me, my bed is made. I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water. … The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, underdogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on the top.
—William James, June 7 1899

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October 10, 2005

Eventually Let Me Go

Somewhere on the hard drive of my old laptop is an unfinished blog post praising the Kazuo Ishiguro novel The Remains of the Day, which I read over Canadian Thanksgiving or maybe Christmas two or three years ago. It was brilliant and heartbreaking. I never actually posted about it, though.

Somewhere in one of my old notebooks is a page or so of scribbled thoughts about Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans, which I read over American Thanksgiving or maybe Christmas last year. When We Were Orphans hit me even harder than Remains of the Day, which is saying something. I powered through the book in two flights and a layover, then walked around in a daze for most of the next week. But I never did get around to typing those scribbles into my computer.

So this year I’m going to get this down before I forget to do it: We went up to my parents for Thanksgiving this weekend, and in between the big dinner and the hike up Foley Mountain and the all-camp Cranium championship, I was lost to the world in Ishiguro’s latest novel, Never Let Me Go. There must be something about his tragically deluded narrators and slow sickening reveals that goes with turkey dinner like cranberry and stuffing. Which is not to say that the big reveal to the reader is the point—in all three books, it’s the moment when the narrator figures everything out that kills you. And what’s worse is the subsequent realization that they’ve probably always known.

There are lots of other things I could be posting about on this Thanksgiving Monday. Lots of bigger things to be thankful for. But my little shoutout to Ishiguro’s sparse little masterpieces of delusion and grief has been postponed long enough.

Edit: How topical am I? The Booker Prize for 2005 was announced today, and Never Let Me Go was on the shortlist. OK, it didn't win, but Ishiguro already has a Booker—and my little blog post will no doubt mean just as much to him as Britain's most influential literary award.

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October 05, 2005

Math and Unicorns

On the day before school started this September, I got a haircut, something I’ve probably done on or around the day before school started for the last thirty years. But as I’ve just moved to a new city, I didn’t have a regular place to go. It is no doubt a sign of my advancing years, and my imminent ejection from the coveted “white males aged 18-34” demographic, that this year I sacrificed hipness for familiarity by going to a national hair-cutting chain.

The woman cutting my hair asked me what I do for a living. I told her I was about to start a brand new job as a history professor. I still grin every time I say that. No doubt the thrill wears off in time, but after mumble-mumble years of grad school and three consecutive bouts with the job market, I gotta tell you, it feels great to be a professor. OK, assistant professor, whatever. It’s faculty, baby, and that’s fine by me.

“Wow,” the hairdresser said. “A history professor. You must be really good at math!”

That threw me. “Math? Why do you say that?”

“Oh, because of all the numbers you must have to remember.”

I don’t mean to make fun of her. The haircut I got was pretty good. And my comments about cutting hair probably sounded just as off base to her. But that conversation reminded me that what we do as historians is not what most people probably imagine we do.

I’ve been thinking about that again as I read Sam Wineburg’s terrific Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts...

I’m digging this book almost as much as I’m digging the phrase “Professor MacDougall.” Maybe I’m coming to the party late on Wineburg. Maybe everybody already knows about his work and the emerging study of historical cognition. But I can’t believe I haven’t heard more historians talking about it already—if only to tell me why it isn't as nifty as it seems to me on first blush. (Like many good things in my life, I learned of the new literature on historical cognition through my wife, a high school history teacher who is beginning a PhD in education.)

Edit: L reminds me that we both heard about Wineburg's book simultaneously, and it was from a historian—our good friend Brad Austin, who uses it in an AHA award-winning “Methods in Teaching History” course at Salem State College. Sorry, Brad!

Wineburg is an educational psychiatrist, and his subject is the things that people—students and teachers, mostly—do with history in their minds. How do we think about history? What are we doing in our heads, what cognitive moves are we making, when we think historically? What do students get out of learning about history, and what does the teaching of history contribute to our society? Once you read some of this literature, you can’t help but realize how sterile the existing debates over history standards and curricula and “what history is for” usually are.

Just one of Wineburg’s insights is the way historical thinking “cultivates puzzlement.” His first chapter, available as an online pdf, describes a high school student reading primary sources from the American Revolution, an elementary school principal discussing Laurel Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale, and a professional historian encountering documents from outside his area of expertise. (Other good sections include Primo Levi’s encounter with the student who swore that if sent to Auschwitz, he could have escaped, and a chapter about drawings that schoolchildren made of pilgrims and hippies.) One order of historical thinking, that first chapter argues, is the rationing of facts. A more prized kind of historical thinking is the ability to empathize with the past—to put yourself in the minds of historical actors. But what marks the most mature historical thinkers is their understanding that they cannot fully empathize with the past. No matter how many facts we marshal, we cannot know what it was to live in those times.

And that is what historians wrestle with: What is it that we do not know that prevents us from fully entering Lincoln’s or Charlemagne’s or Martha Ballard’s world? “A historian’s thought process is full of hunches and reverses, constant self-questionings and I-don't-knows,” Wineburg says. What distinguishes the most advanced historical thinkers from the intermediate learners is humility—“humility in the face of our limited ability to know, and awe in the face of the expanse of human history.” Elsewhere, Wineburg writes: “History teaches a way to make choices, to balance opinions, to tell stories, and to become uneasy—when necessary—about the stories we tell.” That unease is one of history’s great gifts.

Wineburg closes his first chapter with a nice story about Marco Polo. On his journey from China to India, Marco Polo ventured into Sumatra, where he came upon a species he had never seen: the rhinoceros. But Polo’s diary says nothing about the rhinoceros. Instead, he described his surprise at the poor quality of Sumatran unicorns. “They are very ugly brutes to look at,” Polo wrote. “Not at all such as we describe them when they let themselves be captured by virgins.” “History presents us with a choice,” Wineburg concludes: “to learn about rhinoceroses or to learn about unicorns. We naturally incline toward unicorns—they are prettier and more tame. But it is the rhinoceros that can teach us far more.”

[Crossposted, with some comments, at Cliopatria.]

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