February 21, 2007
The New Old is the New New?
I am no longer updating this version of Old is the New New. Please visit the NEW Old is the New New at www.robmacdougall.org. Also, if you’re reading this in some kind of RSS reader, please update my feed. The new RSS feed for this site is: http://www.robmacdougall.org/index.php/feed/.
Aieee! What’s become of Old is the New New? Where’s the brown on beige color scheme that looks sickly yellow on certain browsers? Where are the long bloviating triennial posts in a skinny center column that makes them seem even longer? Where are the inside jokes and references nobody can understand? Where’s that globey-planety thing I always scroll down and ignore?*
Have no fear. I am migrating have migrated over from Movable Type to WordPress, and I’ll be hacking the layout for a while yet, but while the new Old is the New New is under renovation, you can always find the old Old is the New New, plus its loyal sideblog The New New, at www.robmacdougall.org/old.
If you’re reading this in some kind of RSS reader, please update my feed. The new RSS feed for this site will be: http://www.robmacdougall.org/index.php/feed/.
*It’s called an orrery.
January 03, 2007
Aha
Tags: The best four days in history?
The annual wargame, roleplaying game, and dressing up like an elf convention GenCon (to which I have never been, by the way) bills itself as “the best four days in gaming.” Will the American Historical Association’s annual convention, which starts tomorrow in Atlanta, be the best four days in history? I’ll let you know—I’ll be there. If you’re going to be there too, let’s meet up: drop me a line using the AHA’s weirdly archaic message system, email me (electromail chez robmacdougall dot org, not com), or just look for the guy in the totally bitchin’ elf costume.
December 28, 2006
Dr. Hodgman, I Presume
Tags: ARFFF 2006.5, Hodgman vs. Livingston, Metaphysicians of Tlon, the primal scene of American historiography, The Muppet Movie, how history judges a dream-thief.
We’re still visiting family in (y)our nation’s capital and I’m finding it hard to write the second half of my books of 2006 post without more of the books in front of me. In its stead, I thought I’d excerpt two remarkable books I did bring with me on this trip. The books are John Hodgman’s crypto-pseudo-almanac The Areas of My Expertise, and James Livingston’s philsophical critique of American intellectual history, Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy. 
The two books have nothing in common except that: I brought them both on vacation, they both impressed me, and they look almost identical. OK, maybe not identical identical, but they’re trade paperbacks of similar size and their covers have nearly identical color schemes. All week I was picking up Livingston and expecting it to be Hodgman or Hodgman and expecting it to be Livingston. You think you’re so clever, you tell me which is which!
Keep reading "Dr. Hodgman, I Presume"
December 23, 2006
ARFFF '06
Tags: All reading for fun at Fessenden, our quirky electronic childhoods, the great American elevator inspector novel, I don’t know Dick.
It’s year in review time, Loyal Dozens, that magical time of year when we review the year that went by since the last time it was time to review the year between the times when it’s time to review it. I’ll dispense with such fripperies as the year in movies, music, or current events, but I read a lot of books and every year I like to take some time to record a few that stayed with me, both for their own merits and for vaguely autobiographical purposes. (I try to associate the subjects of books with the places and times where I read them. Even though you can find a copy anywhere, for instance, it’s cool to me that I bought Colson Whitehead’s old weird NYC novel The Intuitionist, along with Ann Douglas’ Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, at the awesome Strand bookstore in Greenwich Village. Or that I read Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon while actually en route from Paris to the moon.) This is made easier this year by the LibraryThing account I started last December. Most people use LibraryThing to catalog the books they own, but I use the library so prodigiously that my the set of books I possess bears only a passing resemblance to the set of books that have passed under my eyeballs. Instead, I used LibraryThing to catalog books as I read them, regardless of their provenance. You can, if you care, see all the books I read in 2006 here. But here are some highlights, starting with fiction first.
5. HOW TO BE BAD, by David Bowker. Read April 24-25, 2006, in the maternity ward of Victoria Hospital. This book makes the list in spite of the fact that I have no memory of it—or, to be precise, I remember vividly the night I read it, but I have almost no memory of its contents. I believe it’s an unobjectionable “bookish author stand-in meets sexy bad girl and is drawn into a thrilling demimonde of crime” story, spiced up with a bunch of metatextual references and allusions to the novels of Nick Hornby. (It hadn’t occured to me before reading this how large Hornby’s shadow must loom over Gen-X British authors hoping to break into the lad lit game.) But I can’t remember the name of the main character, or what sort of crimes he gets drawn into, or which combination of he, the sexy bad girl, and/or Nick Hornby live happily ever after. Because I read this book while sitting next to L in the hospital waiting for the Ukelele to be born. Maybe I never got to the end. Maybe I was just a few pages from the thrilling conclusion when the delivery kicked into high gear (the nurse, a laconic Native woman reminiscent of Fleischman’s secretary Marilyn on Northern Exposure, shrugged around midnight and told L, “oh, you could probably start pushing now if you like”) and my life was forever bifurcated into Before and After. The book I had in my hand that night was at once instantly forgotten, and something I’ll remember for the rest of my life.
4. A BUNCH OF BOOKS, by Philip K. Dick. Read in the feverish post-baby summer, often with crying newborn in arms. Armed with Jonathan Lethem’s essay parsing the good Philip K. Dick novels from the stinkers, I read a lot of Dick in May, June, July, and August: reading Martian Time-Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich, and A Scanner Darkly for the first time, and rediscovering Ubik, Radio Free Albemuth, and The Man in the High Castle, which I’d read as a teenager but resented for not being more like Blade Runner. I now have a bunch of ideas for a super keen PKD role-playing game, but the specific mechanics continue to taunt and vex me. The novels made entirely appropriate reading for a summer of sleep deprivation, a crumbling grasp on reality, and the dawning realization that my free will had been broken and my life taken over by an invading alien in diapers and jammies from Baby Gap.
3. THE INTUITIONIST, by Colson Whitehead. Read ostentatiously in a succession of East Village hipster coffee shops because yes, I am (or was before the baby) That Guy. Donât even bother trying to write the great American elevator inspector novel, folks, because It. Has. Been. Done. Again I defer to Jonathan Lethem: “This splendid novel reads as though a stray line in Pynchon or Millhauser had been meticulously unfolded to reveal an entire world, one of spooky, stylish alternate-Americana, as rich and haunted as our own.” Man, true. Colson Whitehead’s mysterious urban gothic milieu—the city is unnamed, but can only be an alternate New York—is the old weird Harlem to Ben Katchor’s never-quite-was Lower East Side. And the elevator shafts plunging through the heart of this novel offer the richest, strangest metaphor for race in America since Moby Dick. Oh, OK, smarty, and Ellison’s Invisible Man.
2. ABSURDISTAN, by Gary Shteyngart. Read November 3-5, 2006 on flight to and from Charlottesville, VA. Well, I ought to put one book on this list that was actually published in 2006. It’s made a couple of best of lists; in fact it tops the NYT’s (alphabetically-ordered) 100 Notable Books for 2006. “Why praise it first? Just quote from it at random,” said the Times. “Like a victorious wrestler, this novel is so immodestly vigorous, so burstingly sure of its barbaric excellence, that simply by breathing, sweating and standing upright it exalts itself.” I loved Shteyngart’s debut novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook. I gushed about it, and also tossed in an anecdote about Peter the Great’s “Cabinet of Monsters,” around this time two years ago. Absurdistan covers similar ground—in fact, Shteyngart’s first novel makes an appearance in his second, as the hack work of a poseur named “Jerry Shteynfarb,” who trades on his foreignness to mack on chicks—but the second novel is altogether bigger, sloppier, and richer. It’s the story of Misha Vainberg, bon vivant son of a murdered Russian mobster, whose heart is in New York but whose visa-less body is marooned in a crumbling ex-Soviet republic. Misha thinks and talks in hilarious, off-color stereotypes, and nobody really escapes getting skewered. I have no idea how accurate is Shteyngart’s portrayal of post-Soviet Russia and post-Soviet Russians, but I give him the benefit of the doubt; whenever he turns his gaze on subjects I do know, like American post-college slackers, he is funny, incisive, and a little cruel:
Life for young American college graduates is a festive affair. Free of having to support their families, they mostly have gay parties on rooftops where they reflect at length upon their quirky electronic childhoods and sometimes kiss each other on the lips and neck. … At Accidental College, we were taught that our dreams and our beliefs were all that mattered, that the world would eventually sway to our will, fall in step with our goodness, swoon right into our delicious white arms. All those Introduction to Striptease classes (apparently each of our ridiculous bodies had been made perfect in its own way), all those Advanced Memoir seminars, all those symposiums on Overcoming Shyness and Facilitating Self-Expression. And it wasn’t just Accidental College. All over America, the membrane between adulthood and childhood had been eroding, the fantastic and the personal melding into one, adult worries receding into a pink childhood haze. I’ve been to parties in Brooklyn where men and women in their mid-thirties would passionately discuss the fine points of The Little Mermaid or the travails of their favorite superhero. Deep inside, we all wished to have communion with that tiny red-haired underwater bitch.
That sounds about right.
1. MOBY DICK, by Herman Melville. Read, mostly in bed, a few pages at a time, from August through November. This is a funny thing to say about one of the reigning classics of the American canon, but why didn’t anyone tell me Moby Dick was so great? The back cover of my copy, a British paperback edition, studiously undersells it: “Ignored for many years after its first publication … Moby Dick can be read as … a sociological critique of American class and racial prejudices, a philosophical inquiry into the structure of good and evil, and a repository of information about whaling.” Mmm, hard to see why that took a few years to catch fire. But here’s what they don’t tell you: it’s fantastic! First of all, and this was complete news to me, it’s hilarious. Melville leavens everything with these droll, dry asides, ranging from ridicule of racial chauvinism (way ahead of its time for a white American author) to dark laughter at humanity’s folly to fart jokes, plain and simple. Second, it’s filled with buckets of blood and gore. People complain about all the whaling trivia, but as it turns out, nineteenth-century whaling was insanely cool. There were about a hundred hideous ways to get drowned or crushed or maimed on a whaling voyage, and Ishmael catalogs every one with happy pedantry. Like the part where two severed whale heads are lashed to either side of the Pequod’s hull (like Locke and Kant, Ishmael jokes) and then one of the harpooners—Tashtego?—is scraping spermaceti out of one of the skull cavities, and he falls into the huge head, and gets stuck! Inside the head! And then the head falls off the side of the ship, and sinks with him in it! And Queequeg has to dive in after the head and swim down underwater and hack his way through the whale’s skull with a machete to rescue his buddy… That is so hardcore ridiculous awesome. Why isn’t that on the cover? I read this book slowly, a chapter or two in bed most nights between August and November, and still I was bereft when it ended, too soon. Talk about your old, weird America: Melville is the uncut mother lode.
Next Time: Non.
December 14, 2006
Wichita Mind Control
Tags: Old weird America; Ratched, Wormer, and Hogg; the banality of anti-Americanism; your cheating humu humu nuku nuku a’pua’a.
“One measures a circle beginning anywhere,” said Charles Fort. Our expedition to the old, weird America will begin in Kansas: home of Dorothy, Bob Dole, Clark Kent, Brown v. Board, and the world’s largest ball of twine (disputed). This may seem an odd place to begin. Isn’t Kansas the anti-weird? The bluest of blue states, the pancake-flat heartland? Well, yes and no. Frank Baum knew what he was doing when he put the gateway to Oz there. But before we hit the road, a little discussion of what the old, weird America is good for, and why we might value it at this particular point in time.
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December 06, 2006
The Old, Weird America
Tags: Harry Smith, $60 t-shirts, Hoover’s hobo-fighting robots, regrets.
My colleague Alan stopped me in the hall the other day and said, “I don’t want to start this conversation by saying ‘hey, Rob, you’re into weird stuff, aren’t you?’ but, um, you are into weird stuff, aren’t you?” It’s a fair cop. He wasn’t inviting me to his swingers club or anything like that. The local news had called looking for someone to do fifteen seconds of talking head on the history of Halloween. Which I ended up doing.
I don’t know if anyone has noticed the change to my sidebar, which no longer mentions robots. (I still like robots, I just rarely post about them. Though to be fair, I never promised I’d post about robots, I just said I liked them. Which I still do.) Now the sidebar promises dowsing for “the old, weird America.” That mellifluous phrase comes from Greil Marcus; it’s the title of his book about Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes and his name for that semi-buried world of often eerie Americana that Dylan and the Band tapped into by way of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. The old, weird America is a land of juke joints and revival preachers, medicine shows and haunted battlefields. It’s the music of Harmonica Frank, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Cannon’s Jug Stompers, and the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers. It’s the home of Tom Joad and John Henry, Mike Fink and Stagger Lee. Where preachers speak in tongues and tricksters make deals at crossroads, where grifters run long cons and hoboes lure young lads with songs of candy, where eggheads make breathless, pointless lists of rustic exotica, the old, weird America is near.
Keep reading "The Old, Weird America"
November 23, 2006
Bon Appetit
Tags: Miserable careers of eccentric characters (present company excluded), Regency-era overuse of exclamation marks, kittens, kugel, French cuisine.
All we want to do is eat your brains
We’re not unreasonable
I mean, no one’s gonna eat your eyes
Happy Thanksgiving to all my American readers and friends. I’d meant to post this morbid little slice of historical polyphagy on Halloween, but it seems no less appropriate to serve it up now with your Yanksgiving yams and kugels. I quote the following verbatim from an essential little book entitled Biographical Sketches of Eccentric Characters, published in 1832. Harvard’s Widener Library has not one but two copies of this handy volume, on the stacks in open circulation—there’s a lot to love about Widener—which I used to peruse occasionally when procrastinating there. And now Google Book Search has the whole thing online, in a slightly unwieldy format—there’s a lot to love about Google, too. I’ll probably dip into the sketches again next time I’m feeling a little Kirchnerian. For now, I give you: The Miserable Career of Tarrare!
This manâs voracity would stagger all belief, were not the truth of the circumstances guarantied by the most unquestionable testimonies, among which it is only necessary to mention professor Baron Percy. At 17 years of age, Tarrare weighed only one hundred pounds, and yet he could devour, in the space of twenty-four hours, a quarter of beef as heavy as his body!
At the commencement of the revolutionary war, he entered the [French] army; but here he was so scantily supplied with food, that he soon fell ill, and was conducted to the military hospital at Soultz. On the day of his entrance, he got four rations, which, only serving to whet his appetite, he devoured every kind of refuse victuals in the ward, then searched the kitchen, dispensary, &c., devouring everything, even the poultices, that came in his way! In the presence of the chief physician of the army, Doctor Lorence, he ate a live cat in a few seconds, leaving nothing but the larger bones! In a few minutes, he devoured a dinner prepared for fifteen German laborers, and composed of various substantial dishes. After this tiffin, his belly appeared like a small balloon!
As the French in those days turned every thing to account, the commander-in-chief had him brought before him, and, after treating him with thirty pounds of liver and lights he caused him to swallow a small wooden case, in which was enclosed a letter to a French officer, then in the hands of the enemy. Tarrare set off, was taken prisoner, beaten and confined. He passed by stool the case with the letter, before he could see the officer, but immediately swallowed it again [Eds: Eeew.], to prevent its falling into the hands of the enemy. In another hospital where he was confined, the nurses frequently detected him drinking the blood which had been drawn from the sick; and when all other sources failed, he repaired to the dead-house, and satisfied his frightful appetite on human flesh!
At length, a child of fourteen months old disappeared all at once, and suspicions falling on Tarrare, he also disappeared for four years, when he was recognized again in the civil hospital of Paris, where he ended his miserable career.
For more on Tarrare from an unimpeachable source, see this Fortean Times article on eighteenth-century cat eaters.
October 23, 2006
Leaving Las Vegas
Tags: The UWO-GMU axis of digital evil, a virulent meme.
I was and still am hoping to blog about the SHOT conference in Las Vegas a week ago, but this week finds me a bit overmatched, so what happened in Vegas will have to stay in Vegas a little longer yet. I can tell you that I met Josh Greenberg, one of the clever elves at CHNM and a fellow plot point on the “UWO-GMU axis of digital evil,” along with many other excellent people who inexplicably do not have weblogs. I can also tell you that I was in Las Vegas for about 72 hours, and probably heard or made one “what happens in Vegas…” reference per hour. Apparently my wife actually went to college with the guy who originally came up with that “…stays in Vegas” ad campaign. I hope his boss let him take the rest of that afternoon off.
October 12, 2006
Superman III
Tags: Kicking ass for justice.
I can’t believe I left this out of the History Carnival: I got an email last month from a guy named Jake Lowen, who saw my post about Superman vs. the Klan and did a video podcast about it. Jake is a community organizer in Kansas, Superman’s adopted home. He trains disenfranchised people, including kids, to fight for self-determination and political change. “I have the greatest job in the world,” Jake says on his site. “I fight evil for a living.” He keeps a video blog describing his adventures “kicking ass for justice,” and it’s pretty inspiring stuff. He gives me too much credit for digging up the Superman / Stetson Kennedy / KKK story, which was in Freakonomics after all, but I’m chuffed that somebody who is actually out in the world fighting for “truth, justice, and all that stuff” found something relevant or useful in my scribblings.
In other news, I’m leaving right this instant for the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) annual conference in Vegas, baby. I’m commentator for a panel on “The Rhetoric of Telecommunication Policy,” comparing the political and rhetorical construction of telecom networks in the U.S., Canada, and Sweden. We have scored the less-than-coveted Sunday morning slot, but it’s a good trio of papers, and I’m looking forward to the panel. And there’s lots of great stuff on the program this year, plus apparently this Las Vegas is something of a tourist town. So if you happen to find yourself on the Vegas strip early Sunday morning, in the vicinity of the Imperial Palace, fresh out of chips and looking for something to do… We’ll even waive the usual two drink minimum. Seriously, though, if anyone reading this is on their way to the conference, hit me with an email and we’ll get together.
In the hopper: What happens in Vegas, biographical sketches of eccentric characters, what I’m not reading.
October 01, 2006
History Carnival XL
Tags: “The links simply multiply like maggots in a cheese.”
About a month ago, Dave Davisson posted something called the Patahistory Manifesto at his blog, Patahistory, and ever since I’ve been wondering how best to respond. The Patahistory Manifesto starts like so:
Patahistory: A Positive Manifesto for Time Travel, Immersive History, and Synchronic Societies
Patahistory is the beginning of history. Today’s historical works are written for contemporary consumers. Patahistorical works are created for future Patahistorians. The Patahistorian expects his or her work to be changed, to be altered, reworked, and revised. The Patahistorian expects an open and democratic editing of raw history. Patahistory celebrates open-source archives and creative commons works.
And it goes from there. Like all the best manifestoes, the Patahistory Manifesto is a fertile mix of genius and manure, so well tilled that I am not sure where one substance ends and the other begins. It’s also kind of a Rorschach blot, in that it reflects the interests of its readers back to them: as I planned to write a response, all month I was bookmarking interesting things I read in the history blogosphere that seemed to illustrate or illuminate Dave’s Manifesto. This became a bit tedious, as I was also bookmarking interesting things I read in the history blogosphere for this iteration of the History Carnival. The solution came to me in a blaze of patahistorical imagination: the Patahistory Carnival.
So, with insincere apologies to Dave, here at last is History Carnival XL. My thanks to those who submitted entries, and my apologies, sincere this time, for the many fine entries I did not use. There was too much good stuff to cover, even in a frightening barrage of links like this, and I freely admit to being fickle, erratic, and unsystematic in my selections. If there is a larger point to all this (a big if), it is that Dave spake better than he knew: Patahistory is already here.
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