Comments on: Angels and Octopodes

By: Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Teresa Nielsen Hayden — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 21:12:04 +0000

I love your weblog.

By: Rob

Rob — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 13:54:25 +0000

Cosma: Absolutely, Tarbell deserves to be one of the Real Trustbusters, but for my conceit of trying to match the names of the movie ghostbusters to historical figures.

By: Cosma

Cosma — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 03:47:58 +0000

I love this post, but surely one of the three Trustbusters should be Ida M. Tarbell?

By: Rob

Rob — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 22:43:08 +0000

Alex: Excellent.

Teresa and Nancy: I’m hip to Tim Powers and Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness, but will have to check out Smoke Ghosts and The Big Time. Thanks!

By: Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Teresa Nielsen Hayden — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 17:57:07 +0000

You need to read Fritz Leiber, if you haven’t already. Look for a short story called “Smoke Ghosts,” and a novel called The Big Time.

By: Alex

Alex — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 16:49:14 +0000

There’s the Moholy-Nagy designed London Underground poster as well – POWER – NERVE CENTRE OF THE UNDERGROUND!

1) Nerves/tentacles/networks!
2) Electricity!
3) Subterranean!
4) Futurism!

By: Nancy Lebovitz

Nancy Lebovitz — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 13:22:11 +0000

Thanks– fascinating essay.

A couple of things you might like: Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness– the inimical magical forces built up by the combination of the weight of stuff and the geometrical patterns in cities and Powers’ Declare– the occult powers behind the Cold War.

By: The octopodes among us « sans everything

The octopodes among us « sans everything — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 20:26:59 +0000

[...] December 21, 2009 by Ian Garrick Mason It is not normally my practice to blog from work (see “mortgage payments”), but having discovered historian Rob MacDougall’s Old is the New New via his own link to Jeet’s own post on Homer Simpson and Irish stereotypes, I was immediately entranced by both his buoyant writing style and his remarkably eclectic range of historico-cultural interests — so I felt compelled to drop what I was doing and tell you about it. Go check out his site, and for your first mind-expanding sally, read his post Angels and Octopodes. [...]

By: William Turkel

William Turkel — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 21:14:14 +0000

Rob, if you don’t come back from Utah soon, I’m going to send a robotic octopus after you. See if I don’t.

By: Lizzzi

Lizzzi — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 01:34:51 +0000

Thanks!

All networks resemble epidemiological ones because the underlying statistics are the same.
Explosive growth outside of individual human control is unnerving, especially when human agency is involved (cities, transportation, communications are all drivers of epidemics–e.g. AIDS, the 1918 ‘flu.)

I will seek out Ghost Map asap.

You in turn should read Rene Dubos The White Plague (not the Herbert SF novel).

The most unforgettable scene he evokes (1839) is the mute, dying Paganini (syphilis and TB) playing his violin in the Nice Opera House for an audience of “corpse-like consumptives…lavishly jeweled but so pale beneath their curls that their faces seemed to be powdered with ‘scrapings of bones’…as if cemeteries were not closed at night and allowed the dead to escape.”

Now that’s a Romantic horrorshow, and the real irony of Pride and Prejudice with Zombies–the TB zombies WERE coming in the 1800s.