The Only 2008 Award That Matters...

... is the honorary Harry Stephen Keeler character of the Year.

And the prize goes to: Death-Ray Matthews.

HE WORKED on a killer beam aimed at knocking out aircraft engines and killing all on board. The eccentric inventor also claimed the deadly ray could shrivel plants, electrocute mice and ignite lamps up to four miles away. Now a new book about Welshman Harry Grindell Matthews has been published, and could be turned into a film.

The scientist established a lab surrounded by barbed wire and searchlights in the lower Swansea Valley during the early 1930s. People travelled for miles to peek at the bungalow where the inventor said he was working on the beam, which used high intensity radio waves. Dubbed “Death Ray Matthews”, he also worked on the development of sound in film and a string of other innovations, including a device to cast images onto clouds...

(from the Western Mail of Wales)

And yes, so help me, here is his actual photo:

Victorian Roller Derby!

An 1895 issue of The Strand magazine includes this (unbuilt) design for city buildings to have ramp access (!) -- not for wheelchairs, mind you, but to keep up with the Victorian craze for roller skates:


As the writer notes: "Pedestrians could... just stand erect at the top of the slope, and allow themselves to travel down without further effort -- unless it be to maintain equilibrium or to avoid violent contact with fellow-skaters."

Really, I think violent contact between top-hatted and hoop-skirted skaters would be the point of building this.

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime Novel?

Over at The Stranger, under-$5 Gift Books for the New Depression include Jack Chick pamphlets, cheapo little cookbooks from the supermarket checkout line, Archie comics, and -- of course -- old paperbacks:

They literally don't make them like this anymore. There's real joy to be found in these sprawling novels of the 1970s; other long-out-of-print paperbacks like The Boys from the Mail Room, The Man Who Killed Mick Jagger, and Little America are sitting, battered, on used-bookstore discount shelves for a dollar or two, just waiting to be snapped up and given to an ardent lover of fiction.

Kids These Days

From 1883, it's...


From his Preface:

I have for a certain number of years concluded that out present age has become vastly too swift for that which, by a contradictory metaphor, may be called "safe running"... [the] previous time was very greatly superior to the hasty and conceited period in which we live.

Chapter titles include "The Generally False, Affected and Pretentious Literature of the Present Day" and "Modern Advertising -- Its Emptiness -- Its Falseness -- Its Probable Collapse on the Future."

I'm glad to hear that we'll have worked that out by now.

Tommy Wallach on iTunes

Tommy Wallach (one of the earliest McSweeney's contributors) has his new Decca EP out! To find it on iTunes, as he emails -- "Click on Pop, then scroll over one page. That's me, between Christina Aguilera and The Pussycat Dolls."

Here, as an encore from posts past, is the home-brew video he made last year for "Elodie," now the first track on his EP:

Gameband

Curiouser and Curiouser

Just in time for the Christmas -- it's the newest Collins Library book!

This time around I'm reprinting the essays of eccentric Victorian naturalist and surgeon Frank Buckland -- that's him, administering medicine to a sick porpoise -- and a snippet from my preface will give you a sense of the fellow:

Whenever a mysterious oddity arrived in Victorian London, readers knew there was one man they could rely on being at scene: Frank Buckland. A barrel-chested surgeon chomping an ever-present cigar, Buckland was one of the most outsized eccentrics of his time—a naturalist who seriously proposed kangaroo and yak ranching in England, and a raconteur whose London home was filled with a freakish array of stuffed animals and grinning skulls, and an all-too-alive menagerie of bickering meerkats, otters, scorpions, and a gang of monkeys who snatched food off visitors' dinner plates.

Not that his guests were too sorry to miss dinner, since Buckland was also famous as a man who'd eat anything—except earwigs. ("Horribly bitter," he explained.) Fried rotten porpoise, he found, tasted "like a broiled lamp wick." His odd palate was only matched by that of his father, an equally eccentric geologist and respected theologian. When the elder Buckland was shown a miraculous cathedral where "martyr's blood" accumulated on the stones, the old man dipped his finger in the puddle and tasted it. "I can tell you what it is," he announced to the horrified faithful—"It is bat urine."

Much of his work has been out of print for a century, so I've culled and abridged thousand of pages of his published essays into a brief collection titled Curious Men.

McSweeney's now has Buckland's essay on mummies up, including this anecdote about Liverpool sailors trying to hoodwink a showman into buying the mummies they'd smuggled into the country:

To make him more desirous of obtaining the curiosities, my friends found out where his show was situated, and for two or three evenings remained smoking their cigars about the show, and paid boys and idle people they found about the place a small fee to go to the door of the show and ask to "see the wonderful mummies which had just arrived."

"We have not got them yet, sir" was the showman's answer.

"What? Not got the mummies! Never heard such a thing. No mummies! Can't possibly go into the show," said the visitors.

The fact of so many people coming, night after night, so quickened the showman's appetite that he made a higher bid of several hundred pounds, which offer, foolishly, not being accepted, the owners brought the mummies up to London.

The last thing I heard of them was from my friend, who told me that he had left his mummies at his lodgings while he went on another voyage; when he returned, he found his landlord had got into trouble, and had pawned the mummies for £10 at some pawnbroker's by the Docks. Reader, if you are very anxious to have them, there may still be a chance of getting the mummies cheap.

Incidentally: for those who have pondered joining the McSweeney's Book Release Club, memberships currently kick off with this book, and upcoming releases include an Art Spiegelman collection and the latest Dave and Toph Eggers book of absolutely accurate science from Dr. and Mr. Doris Haggis-on-Whey.

How can you go wrong? You cannot go wrong.

A Little Background Reading

Best title-catch since Nicholson Baker took a magnifying glass to Pottery Barn catalogues:

Tom at Omnivoracious has done a little detective work to figure out what those books behind Obama in his presidential addresses are: He's pretty sure they're a collection titled Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1961, 1962 and 1963. Now the question is: Are they a gift? Is Obama really reading them? Are they subliminal advertising? I can't believe I care so much about what a president-elect is reading.

(Via Paul Constant at Slog)

The Man Who Knew Too Much

I'm in the NY Times Book Review with an essay on sporting goods retailer and inimitable advice author George Leonard Herter:

His enchantingly bombastic catalogs included listings for more than a dozen of his self-published works, bound in metallic silver and gold covers, and bearing titles like “How to Get Out of the Rat Race and Live on $10 a Month” — which apparently involves moving to Alaska and zapping up fresh fish by running two car batteries into a stream’s shallows. (If you don’t have batteries, “drop 10 pounds of quicklime” upstream.) George often listed his wife, Berthe, as a co-author, though she’s notably absent from his marriage guide, “How to Live With a Bitch.” This, perhaps, accounts for the revised edition’s chastened advice to “under no circumstances call your wife a bitch.”

Herter catalogs are an extraordinary slice of eccentric Americana, not least because Herter's inventiveness extended to creating many of the goods that he sold. There's piles of patents in his name; one of my favorites is his notion for a Fish Calling Device:

The Flaneur

After hints in the press earlier this year about mysterious vans cruising the city, this morning I noticed that, rather quietly, Google has unveiled their street-view of Paris.

I happened to be looking for a map of Avenue du Maine in Montparnasse, when... I saw it!


View Larger Map

Book Release of the Damned

A fascinating recent piece on publishing trends from a newspaper in.... the United Arab Emirates.

S'true:

Karl Marx, according to his German publisher, is enjoying a new-found popularity. Sales of Das Kapital are surging as the global financial crisis inspires people to reassess the capitalist system.... Borders and Barnes and Noble bookstores have repositioned their personal finance sections to the front of the stores, and books such as George Soros’ The New Paradigm for Financial Markets are doing a brisk trade.

...At the other end of the timing spectrum is Amit Chatwani’s Damn, It Feels Good to be a Banker, which was published in August. “I’m hoping that people will look at it as a sort of historical document, a parody of a world that existed until basically a moment after it came out,” Chatwani says.

You sort of have to feel for that guy.

Stump the Reader

Here's something that I heard about before visiting the University of Padua this summer, and that has fascinated me ever since -- antique wooden books.





Instead of pages, they contain botanical samples of different trees -- for which the covers serve as cross-sections...

Post-It Not

I'm in Slate this week with a piece on the rare but curious phenomenon postmen who hoard mail:

The hoarding and abandonment of mail is a phenomenon that extends at least back to 1874, when Providence, R.I., postman Benjamin Salisbury was caught throwing mail into the ocean "to avoid the trouble of delivery." In 2006, the last year the U.S. Postal Service released figures, there were 515 arrests and 466 convictions for "internal theft"... They've been caught by meter readers, by housesitters feeding a rabbit for a vacationing postman, and by state troopers making traffic stops. "Dead-letter cars"—old clunkers filled up like a junk-mail piñatas—have been discovered by mechanics and used-car dealers. And a number of cases are broken after the stashed mail catches fire: In 1974, back-to-back cases a week apart yielded 1,200 sacks of mail in a Louisville, Ky., attic and another tractor-trailer load in a burning attic in suburban Connecticut.

Inevitably, there's a literary angle: William Styron's mail went missing in one case.

Indeed I Will

Long-promised and finally on the way... The Book of William: How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World is now up for pre-orders on Amazon!

The End

During the crash of Wall Street, I've kept wondering: what does Michael Lewis make of this? Well, now we know: he's just put an absolutely brilliant piece up at Portfolio.

A passage on the short-sellers who saw the crash coming years ago:

“All hell was breaking loose in a way I had never seen in my career,” Moses says. FrontPoint was net short the market, so this total collapse should have given Moses pleasure.... [But] “I spent my morning trying to control all this energy and all this information,” he says, “and I lost control. I looked at the screens. I was staring into the abyss. The end. I felt this shooting pain in my head. I don’t get headaches. At first, I thought I was having an aneurysm.”

Moses stood up, wobbled, then turned to Daniel and said, “I gotta leave. Get out of here. Now.” Daniel thought about calling an ambulance but instead took Moses out for a walk.

Outside it was gorgeous, the blue sky reaching down through the tall buildings and warming the soul. Eisman was at a Goldman Sachs conference for hedge fund managers, raising capital. Moses and Daniel got him on the phone, and he left the conference and met them on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. “We just sat there,” Moses says. “Watching the people pass.”

This was what they had been waiting for: total collapse. “The investment-banking industry is fucked,” Eisman had told me a few weeks earlier. “These guys are only beginning to understand how fucked they are. It’s like being a Scholastic, prior to Newton. Newton comes along, and one morning you wake up: ‘Holy shit, I’m wrong!’ ” Now Lehman Brothers had vanished, Merrill had surrendered, and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were just a week away from ceasing to be investment banks. The investment banks were not just fucked; they were extinct.

Not so for hedge fund managers who had seen it coming. “As we sat there, we were weirdly calm,” Moses says. “We felt insulated from the whole market reality. It was an out-of-body experience. We just sat and watched the people pass and talked about what might happen next. How many of these people were going to lose their jobs. Who was going to rent these buildings after all the Wall Street firms collapsed.”

Tea for Tenniel

Via Fine Books, a lovely compilation of book sculptures at the Dark Roasted Blend blog.

This one in particular looks like an anxiety dream I'd have while in the middle of research:

Bike Kwan Do

Is anything more entertaining than Edwardian martial arts? I think not.

Which brings me to a great Neal Stephenson quote over in The Telegraph:

But for now he's instructing me, over a pint, about longsword-fighting, walking-stick self-defence and an Edwardian martial art that used a bicycle as a weapon.... "Yeah. There's a whole curriculum over fighting with bicycles. Pictures of an Edwardian lady in a floor-length dress and a huge hat with flowers, riding primly down a country lane, and when a ruffian comes out she uses some trick with the bicycle to flatten him and rides off. It's great stuff. The bicycles we're not sure how to approach, but we've created a little assembly line to make rattan canes, with a knob on the end. But there's, you know, how to use a bicycle pump as a weapon. How to defend yourself with a parasol. Crazy."

Searching on "bicycle pump" and "weapon" turns up this utterly wonderful article from 1900 on escaped big game in England in Fores's Sporting Notes:

Although 1898 was so devoid of interest from the elephant shikaris point of view, it was undoubtedly the best season the hunter of the British bear has yet seen. On Lady Day of that year the first bear hunt on bicycles was instituted quite involuntarily by some Shoreditch cyclists, who rode as only Shoreditch cyclists can, at full speed into a herd in the neighbourhood of Leighton Buzzard. One of the riders, during this exciting encounter, was thrown from his saddle, but alighted upon the back of one of the bears — a truly Rougemontal feat — and two others were thrown, but not without rolling over a couple of the ursi.

During the second week in August bear-hunting was very popular in the outlying villages of Colchester, but shopping and walks abroad were decidedly at a discount. The bear in question escaped from its den near Walton-on-the-Naze, and for over a week roamed at large, though any able-bodied man with a gun in his hand thought himself at liberty to indulge in a little stalking.... A cyclist, armed with a bicycle pump only, was more fortunate, and came into camp, evidently greatly alarmed, with the news that he had met the monster on the high road....

Since 1896, in which year there was a splendid hunt at Bedford, the ostrich has not afforded the British sportsman much excitement, but the pursuit of the Bedford ostrich through the streets of that town by a highly talented body of circus employes mounted on horseback... has only once been rivalled, namely at Croydon a couple of years ago, when a boxing kangaroo ran amok through the busiest thoroughfares.

Joe the Oxford Don

Since plumbers don't seem to be working out so well, the McCain camp has turned to... uh...

Dr Peter Millican, a philosophy don at Hertford College, Oxford, has devised a computer software program that can detect when works are by the same author by comparing favourite words and phrases.

He was contacted last weekend and offered $10,000 (£6,200) to assess alleged similarities between Obama’s best-seller, Dreams from My Father, and Fugitive Days, a memoir by William Ayers.

Ayers, now a university professor in Chicago, co-founded the Weathermen, a radical 1960s underground group that bombed government buildings in Washington and New York. The Republicans accuse Obama of “palling around” with him.

The offer to Millican to prove that Ayers wrote Obama’s book was made by Robert Fox, a California businessman and brother-in-law of Chris Cannon, a Republican congressman from Utah. He hoped to corroborate a theory advanced by Jack Cashill, an American writer...

Millican took a preliminary look and found the charges “laughably unsubstantiated”. A deal was agreed for more detailed research but when Millican said the results had to be made public, even if no link to Ayers was proved, interest waned.

(from the Times of London)

If you need philosophy profs to save your presidential campaign, you may be beyond saving.

The Election According to Google Books

John McCain: Working the polls for Democrats.

Sarah Palin: Tangled up with haberdashers.

George Bush: "One of the most profound scholars of his day."

Dick Cheney: Prosecuted for illegal lobbying.

Joe the Plumber: Dodging his taxes.

Jeremiah Wright: Busted for taking advantage of the Civil War.

Bill Ayers: A fine kettle of fish he's gotten you into.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden: have no precedent.

Muffins, My Friends

Great catch by Paul Constant over at The Stranger:

McCain talked about other books he admires, contradicting his own, oft-recorded preference for Hemingway: "War and Remembrance and Winds of War are my two absolute favorite books... War and Remembrance for me, it's the whole thing." Goldberg asks, "Not a big Philip Roth fan?" And McCain curtly responds, "No, I'm not. Leon Uris I enjoyed."

...There's one particularly relevant Leon Uris book: his twelfth novel, titled A God in Ruins. Published in 1999, just as McCain's presidential ambitions were made public for the first time, Ruins tells the story of a presidential race in 2008. The hero is Quinn Patrick O'Connell, an ex-military man from Colorado who is running for president but has discovered a shameful secret: He is actually Jewish. Like all speculative fiction that's reached the date it imagines, the idea of a candidate's Jewishness being a problem is almost laughable now, but even without the central engine of the plot to concern us, there's still much to learn.

Certainly Uris's writing—"She smiled, and her eyes were big brown muffins"—can't compare to Hemingway's lean introspection....

The Man Who Pawned the World

I ascend my J-Rock soapbox once again for Yura Yura Teikoku, who clearly raided every pawn shop in Tokyo for a video that sounds like a lost track from The Man Who Sold The World. The song takes a while to really warm up, but it's worth it:

Too Bad They Can't Censor Irony

Word from Britain in today's Times of London that their Ministry of Defence censorship board has decided to censor... itself.

There is a long tradition of the military suppressing news that it considers detrimental to national security by slapping a D-notice on it. But when the D-notice committee decided that the time was ripe to publish its own official history, nobody imagined that it would fall victim to its own system. The history of the D-notice committee has, in effect, had a D-notice slapped on it by the D-notice committee.

London Commute

Don't feel like going to work? Then let someone else go for you:



(A nice touch: music that roughly synchs with the constant bobbling of the camera.)

A Book Town, Eh?

From today's Daily Gleaner of New Brunswick, word of a Canadian book town:

SIDNEY, B.C. - Stroll down Beacon Street, Sidney's main drag, and it won't take long to realize this quaint Vancouver Island town is chock-a-block with bookstores - 11 within a five-block area, with number 12 due to open next month....

"It wasn't our idea," says the U.K.-born Clive [Tanner], 74, a one-time B.C. Liberal provincial politician.

He says it was his Canadian-born wife's fondness for visiting Britain that resulted in their discovery of the original "Booktown" in Hay-on-Wye, a tiny village that straddles the border between Wales and England. An eccentric by the name of Richard Booth, often called the "King of Hay," turned the once-sleepy backwater of 1,100 people into a home to roughly 40 bookshops and the largest annual literary festival in the English-speaking world.

The Tanners have met Booth on several occasions.

"He's as nutty as a fruit cake, quite honestly," says Clive, who some might consider a wee bit "out-of-round" himself.

"But the idea he had was that more bookstores invite more people. We thought it was a hell of a good idea."

It's worth pointing out that Sidney may avoid the the problems that I pegged as dooming Archer City and other would-be book towns.

From that Stubble post in 2005:

If I were to guess, I'd say that that if a Hay-scale book town (I know, I know, Nevada City is trying) ever arises in the US, it will be in a neglected old mill town -- you need some good old 19th-century brick commercial buildings sitting about -- with a densely built walkable downtown. It will be within a hour's drive from a city with an airport... preferably a city served by Jet Blue or Southwest, since bookworms like me are cheapskates... oh, and within reach of one of the rail or bus corridors, since a lot of us are crap drivers. And it wouldn't hurt to have some bucolic rural landscape outside of town.

Sidney's a harbor town -- so it probably has a charming and walkable center with good storage space -- and it's just a half-hour from Victoria.

Sounds like it might do quite nicely.

Everything Sounds Better in French

Though judging by the cover, I've apparently written a Victorian detective novel.

Price Slashed! Motivated Seller!

I'm in New Scientist this week with a favorite obsession of mine -- Orson Fowler and his Victorian fad for octagonal houses. Many old octagons are still around -- check out this strangely engrossing website that exhaustively catalogues them -- but the Fowler's own home in Fishkill NY isn't among them. The massive 60-room octagon that came to be known as "Fowler's Folly" had, shall we say, a checkered history.

Although it had been vaguely known that a Cuban and a falsely identified "murderess" occupied the home in its later years, digging around in archives for this article turned up new details of just how weird things got:

After the typhoid outbreak, the home ran through a succession of colourful owners. Cuban revolutionary Andrés Cassard used it in the 1860s to house a "Cuban Institute and Military Academy." Later, one Emma Cunningham ran it as a boarding house, until she was misidentified as an infamous jilted lover of the same name who had stabbed her dentist beau to death with his own instruments. Her boarders fled and the house went up for sale again.

Last year the Times covered Cunningham's case in all its jawdropping detail when new headstones marked "the most hideous, dysfunctional, psychopathic couplings between man and woman that I’ve ever read."

Dr. What?

How do you goose explication along in a script? Allow Dr. Who to demonstrate....

(via Onion AV Club)

Strategery!

Over at Slate, Kitty Burns Florey heroically attempts to diagram Sarah Palin's sentences:

I had to give up. This sentence is not for diagramming lightweights. If there's anyone out there who can kick this sucker into line, I'd be delighted to hear from you. To me, it's not English—it's a collection of words strung together to elicit a reaction, floating ands and prepositional phrases ("with that vote of the American people") be damned. It requires not a diagram but a selection of push buttons.

It just so happens that someone has come up with that exact schematic. Via Andrew Sullivan, it's the...

McSweeney's Takes You To the Cleaners

I'll be reading this Wednesday night in Portland at The Cleaners -- yep, the space adjoining the Ace Hotel is a former dry cleaners -- with Deb Olin Unferth, Eli Horowitz, John Brandon, and with music by Two Beers.

No cover, though starch will cost you extra.

The Housing Bubble Explained

(Via Dan Savage at The Stranger...)

Past Times

The Times of London has a brand-new blog up -- just two weeks old, and you can count the postings on one hand -- but it's an absolutely brilliant idea. The Times Archive Blog digs through their two centuries of digitized issues for whatever strikes their fancy, and the postings link directly into the original newspaper pages.

Their first post is particularly fascinating, on how Times classifieds were used by German (and then Austrian) Jews wanting to escape to Britain:

For much of 1938 and 1939, the columns were full of applications from mainland Europe for jobs as cooks, governesses, housekeepers, nannies, gardeners, chauffeurs and men of all work. Clearly, very many of the applicants were well-educated and over-qualified for these positions. Most say that they are Jewish, although some refer to themselves as "non-Aryan". Some even specify that they have one Christian parent.

European Jews who wished to escape persecution by emigrating were subject to restrictions on their eligibility to enter Britain. To protect the home labour market, Jewish immigrants had to prove that they would not be a liability on the state, either because they were bringing their own business with them, or by producing a letter from a prospective employer confirming that they were coming to work as domestic staff.

I hope the Times continues to push the development of this blog -- it really could become an extraordinary site, as well as a model for what other newspapers can do online with their archives.

Meanwhile...

Paul Constant notes some Joseph Mitchell reissues over at The Stranger.

And -- an awesome (translated!) catch by Ed Park from the BBC Mundo interview with the widow of Jorge Luis Borges:

[Maria Kodama:] [Borges liked] fun things such as The Beatles, the
Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd.

[BBC:] Pink Floyd?

[MK:] Yes, he loved it. So much so that his birthday anthem was not
"Happy Birthday To You" but "The Wall."

[BBC:] How did he discover it?

[MK:] I don't know. The movie of "The Wall" is awful and we watched it
infinite times. At some point I think he knew the dialogue by heart.
He liked that kind of music because he said it was a thing of enormous
force, yet vital.

[BBC:] And the Rolling Stones?

[MK:] He loved them, he also said they had an incredible strength. One
day we were at the Palace hotel in Madrid, waiting to go out for
dinner, and I see Mick Jagger coming. He kneels, grabs Borges' hand
and tells him: "Maestro, I admire you."

Borges, a little astonished, couldn't see him well, and says, 'And who
are you, sir?' and he answers "I am Mick Jagger." Borges says, 'Ah,
one of the Rolling Stones.' Mick Jagger almost faints.

Bubblenomics

...Oh? Sorry, I was busy stuffing money into my mattress.

Pull up a chair!

Back in February, Harper's ran a piece by Eric Janszen (full text is up) that remains the most astute and useful analysis I've seen of this year's meltdown. It must have actually been written a year ago -- Harper's editing is not exactly swift of foot -- and that puts Janszen far, far ahead of the talking heads this last week. (Robert Reich's blog today is, at least, a voice of reason regarding the bum's rush around the bailout proposal.) Not only did Janszen call what's happening now, he's also the only person to make what strikes me as a good guess about what happens next.

Here's the crux of Janszen's piece, tucked in near the end.

The U.S. mortgage crisis has been labeled a “subprime mortgage crisis,” but subprime mortgages were only a sideshow that appeared late, as the housing-bubble credit machine ran out of creditworthy borrowers. The main event was the hyperinflation of home prices. Risks are embedded in price and lurk as defaults. Even after the faith that supported a bubble recedes, false beliefs continue to obscure cause and effect as the crisis unfolds....

As more and more risk pollution rises to the surface, credit will continue to contract, and the FIRE [Finance, Insurance, Real Estate] economy—which depends on the free flow of credit—will experience its first near-death experience since the sector rose to power in the early 1980s. Because all asset hyperinflations revert to the mean, we can expect housing prices to decline roughly 38 percent from their peak as they return to something closer to the historical rate of monetary inflation. If the rate of decline stabilizes at between 6 and 7 percent each year, the correction has about six years to go before things stabilize, leaving the FIRE economy in need of $12 trillion. Where will that money be found?...

There is one industry that fits the bill: alternative energy ... Supporting this alternative-energy bubble will be a boom in infrastructure—transportation and communications systems, water, and power.... Of course, alternative energy and the improvement of our infrastructure are both necessary for our national well-being; and therein lies the danger.

The good news, at least: we'll finally catch up to nineteenth century energy technology.

A Man on the Moon

In 1989 I was in the MFA fiction program at U Arizona for about 5 minutes. I was 20 years old, sort of making me the Doogie Howser of the program -- which was cute until I discovered that being underaged in an MFA program is like getting locked out of the best classroom on campus. I soon left.

But while I was in Tucson, there were two names always spoken with reverence. The first was that of Edward Abbey, the program director who'd died just days before my first visit to the campus; the second was a guy named Dave Wallace. He'd come brilliantly alive: he'd finished the program recently, after publishing his first book while still in the program, and just that week had published his second collection. Understand that to MFA students, this achievement was like landing on the moon. We were in awe. Somewhere in the department office there was a display with a new copy of The Girl With Curious Hair, and when I'd walk past, it was like looking at a photo of Neil Armstrong.

Wow, I'd think. That man has walked on the moon.

And the thing is, he kept walking. When his Harper's nonfiction pieces ran in 1994 and 1996, you could see a genre being reborn. By then I was living in San Francisco, struggling hopelessly with a novel that a publisher was hemming and hawing over, and the moment I read those pieces it was like... Good god, you can do that with nonfiction? John Hodgman just put a lovely appreciation of Wallace and his cruise ship piece up on his blog, and I think he best expresses what many of us felt back then. Writers remember those Harper's issues the same way another generation recalls seeing Tom Wolfe in Esquire for the first time.

I still think you can date a literary era from those Harper's pieces. And while I won't claim that Wallace laid all the track for the amazingly inventive nonfiction of the last decade, I know this much: when we laid those articles side by side and put our ears to the rails, we could hear the train coming.

David Foster Wallace

The news, if you haven't heard.

This is so terribly sad that I simply don't know what to say.

(Update: Please see the recollections of DFW up at McSweeney's.)

There Can Be Only One!

From the Guardian: the world's oddest title has been decided upon.

The people have spoken and the oddest book title of the past 30 years has been selected: Greek Rural Postmen and their Cancellation Numbers. The impenetrable-sounding book, a comprehensive record of Greece's postal routes, is published by the Greek Hellenic Philatelic Society of Great Britain, which "exists to encourage the collection of Greek stamps and to promote their study".

MF'ers

Early this week in Slate I plumbed a rhetorical mystery: why does John McCain say "my friends" so much in his speeches?

"My friends," John McCain recently informed a crowd, "we spent $3 million of your money to study the DNA of bears in Montana."

McCain's meeting with parishioners at Rick Warren's Saddleback presidential forum certainly was a friendly one: He referred to "my friends" another 11 times. In the week leading up to Saddleback, the senator also friended, among others, a crowd in York, Pa., ("Two years ago, I traveled to South Ossetia, my friends"); workers at a locomotive factory in Erie, Pa., ("… my friends, look at the events that are transpiring in Georgia"); and Iowa state fairgoers ("My friends, I'm all in favor of inflating our tires, don't get me wrong ...").

John McCain's insistent recourse to "my friends" is easily the most mystifying verbal tic of any politician since Bob Dole's out-of-body presidential campaign of 1996, which featured Dole's not entirely reassuring promise that "Bob Dole is not some sort of fringe candidate." Like Dole's use of the dissociative third person—or illeism, a propensity also shared by Elmo and the Incredible Hulk—this year's obsessive invocations to friendship invite scrutiny.

My conclusion: blame William Jennings Bryan.

The Washington Post took up the story a few days later, noting that "McCain achieved what may have been a personal best at a town hall gathering in Lima, Ohio, using the phrase or some variation exactly 30 times."

Curiously, it only came up once in the transcript of his convention acceptance speech, though I think I caught one more slipped into the actual performance, which drops him down to the paltry level of a 1960 Nixon RNC speech. Pshaw!

To make up for this lapse, I now bring you the greatest MF'er in literary history: the Rev. Mr. Chadband, the religious hypocrite in Bleak House who preaches to the poor while helping himself to the larder:

"Can we fly, my friends? We cannot. Why can we not fly, my friends?.... Is it because we are calculated to walk? It is. Could we walk, my friends, without strength? We could not. What should we do without strength, my friends? Our legs would refuse to bear us, our knees would double up, our ankles would turn over, and we should come to the ground. Then from whence, my friends, in a human point of view, do we derive the strength that is necessary to our limbs? Is it,” says Chadband, glancing over the table, “from bread in various forms, from butter which is churned from the milk which is yielded unto us by the cow, from the eggs which are laid by the fowl, from ham, from tongue, from sausage, and from such like? It is. Then let us partake of the good things which are set before us!”

Buzzkilling Your Weekend

I'm on NPR Weekend Edition to talk with Scott Simon about my article in the new issue of The Believer -- Buzzkill: Picketing the 80th Annual Scripps National Spelling Bee. (The full text is online.)

My fascination with the long history of spelling reform grew out of covering a picket line at last year's National Spelling Bee. (That's me with the press pass, reacting to a spelling pun.) For a historian interested in reform movements, it's like discovering The Lost World. The groups picketing -- including the Spelling Society and the American Literacy Council -- are the direct descendants of groups founded by such Victorian progressives as H.G. Wells and Melville Dewey . Though they only have perhaps a hundred active dues-paying members left, thanks to wise investments and bequests from those days of old, these groups still have the coffers to mount serious campaigns.

Imagine, say, if the Anti-Corset League had been so well funded that it still could organize protests.

It's a deeply idealistic cause -- many are retired educators frustrated at the difficulties English poses for immigrants and the learning disabled -- and it has survived essentially unchanged for over a century. My favorite discovery while researching it was a series of wartime letters to the Times of London by spelling enthusiast George Bernard Shaw:

Spelling-efficiency enthusiast George Bernard Shaw wrote to the Times of London in 1941 claiming that “by shortening a single common word instead of lengthening it we could save the cost of destroyers enough to make an impregnably guarded avenue for our trade with America.” Only a writer, I suppose, would believe the silent e was propping up Hitler’s regime. After the war, Shaw claimed instead that Shakespeare could have written more plays with a better alphabet.

One tidbit that didn't make it in: when Shaw died, he left potentially millions in royalties to the spelling movement. (Ironically, this was due in no small part to the screen success of My Fair Lady.) His executors challenged the will in court, and -- incredibly -- the judge agreed, despite Shaw's clear intentions, and cut the bequest down to a few thousand pounds. The mind boggles at the kind of protest you'd have seen mounted outside the Spelling Bee if they'd followed Shaw's will.

Another journalist with me, David Wolman, also has an account of the picket in his splendid upcoming book Righting the Mother Tongue -- a travelogue that also includes him tracking down and interviewing the inventor of Spellcheck!

The Man From Planet X-Rated

The catch of the day from Keith Phipps over at Onion AV Club -- the writer behind the hilariously awful soft-porn The Man From Planet X: The She Beast (the excerpts must be seen to be believed) also wrote... Tom Swift and The Visitor From Planet X.

Bumbershoot!

I'll be reading -- with Starlee Kine, Arthur Bradford, Arthur Jones, Jonathan Goldtein and Judd Greenstein -- in a Post-It Note Reading Series event at next weekend's Bumbershoot in Seattle.

Eggscellent!

I'm in Slate this week with the creepy joy of cooking with Vincent Price:

For those who know Price from classic 1950s horror films like The Fly and The House of Wax—or who were imprinted with his Batman cameos and Saturday-morning commercials for Stay Alive and Hangman—it's odd to discover that he and his wife, Mary, were also gourmets. Thanks to tutorial LPs from the 1970s, you can still find clips of Vincent discoursing upon Viennese stuffed eggs floating about online; and the inevitable Youtube mashup assures that you'll never hear the words chunky peanut butter the same way again. But the Prices' culinary fame rests primarily upon their 1965 collection, A Treasury of Great Recipes, which culled recipes and reproduced menus from top restaurants around the world. Everyone who owns this volume swears by it for one reason above all others: The Treasury is a shockingly (terrifyingly?) good example of 1960s cuisine...

One of my favorite finds -- though it wound up on the cutting room floor -- was digging up a TV listing from 1971 in the Times of London archive, for a series of his called Cooking Pricewise:



It's curious, looking over the listings, to recall just how few channels there were back then. (And that they didn't run for 24 hours.) There must have been untold millions of Britons watching Vincent Price in his kitchen, whipping up American Icebox Cake and Turkish Yogurt Fluff.

The Elkin Scale

The Stranger continues to have some of the most inventive book coverage in the country, and actually appears to be growing, even as book sections get cut back at other newspapers. (The LA Times is the latest casualty.)

Here's a great bit by Paul Constant in this week's Stranger:

Here's the supersecret method I use to determine if a bookstore is any good: Find the fiction section, locate the Es, and look for Stanley Elkin. If a bookstore carries Elkin's novels, it's a sign of all-around quality. Elkin, who died in 1995, was a masterful writer with a playful love of language that few authors this side of Nabokov could match—it's a good bet that almost every literary author you admire has read and loved Stanley Elkin's fiction.

But many bookstores don't carry Elkin's novels because they're obscure and they don't sell—you'd be lucky to have one stolen every other year, compared to perennial sellers like Kerouac. Granted, any bookstore can order Elkin's books—the nonprofit Dalkey Archive Press keeps them all in print, supposedly forever—but so can I, from my laptop, on my couch. A bookstore that carries Stanley Elkin has more than good taste; it has a commitment to its stock and a willingness to shelve excellent books that don't pay for their own real estate.

Hey, Genius!

I'm in New Scientist this week with an early attempt by Thomas Edison at short-answer testing for prospective employees:

EARLY in 1921, New Yorkers who answered an anonymous job ad in the New York Times received a curious reply: they were to go Newark, New Jersey, take an early morning bus on the West Orange line to Thomas A. Edison Industries, and ask at the front desk for a Mr Stevenson. No letter of introduction or resumé was required. Applicants who followed the mysterious instructions found themselves ushered inside a laboratory and subjected to a barrage of 163 seemingly random questions: Is Australia larger in area than Greenland? Of what wood are kerosene barrels made? What is copra?....

Edison pointed to his results as proof that he had isolated a specific mental ability: of 718 men who took the test, only 32 scored more than 90 per cent, and only 57 scored above 70 per cent. Those tested appeared split between "A-men" who could answer the questions, and "XYZs" who believed Bengal was the capital of Maine, that tides caused the phases of the moon, and the “candidate [who] reasoned that if the active principle of coffee is caffeine, that of tea ought in all fairness to be taffeine.”

For a time in 1921, a favorite journalist gotcha was springing the "Edison Test" on the unsuspecting. Edison's own son failed it, as did NYC's Superintendent of Schools. And, of course, there came this immortal headline in the Times:

EINSTEIN SEES BOSTON, FAILS ON EDISON TEST.
Asked to Tell Speed of Sound, He Refers Questioner to Text Books.

"Baboons Are Simply Too Small For Leopard Bait"

I'm in Slate this week with the 10 Oddest Travel Guides Ever.

For instance:

1. The Truth About Hunting in Today's Africa, and How To Go on Safari for $690.00, by George Leonard Herter (1963)
Equal parts Hemingway and Cliff Clavin, mail-order hunting goods retailer George Herter was one of America's great oddball writers. His self-published guide—bound in leopard-print cloth—is a malarial fever of anecdotes, family safari photos, and horrifying advice: "Baboons are simply too small for leopard bait. ... A live dog is one of the best leopard baits." Hunting with a phonograph of distressed goat calls is encouraged; so is the importation of animals: "Leopard farming would be far more profitable than mink farming," he proposes. As the corpses of rhinos, lions, elephants—and one of their guides—pile up for more than 300 pages, Herter never misses a chance to sell his sporting goods with such photo captions as: "A Masai warrior admires a pair of Hudson Bay two point shoes."

Space kept me from delving into all the insane goodness of Herter in my article, but here's a few more Herter quotes for your edification:

• "Buy five pounds of hard mint candies for every 30 days of your safari."

• "Africans know nothing about pancakes or pancake syrup."

• "Cheetahs are large cats that look like a cross between a cat and a dog. They are easily tamed and make good household pets. The only trouble with them is that they will attack dogs."

Rutabagas From Hell

I just love that somebody actually wrote a book on this: The Biggest Beetroot in the World: Giant Vegetables and the People Who Grow Them.

From today's Times of London review:

Leapman guides us through this strange world by shadowing a group of its key players through a season as they prepare for the 2007 shows. While displaying the total commitment of all top athletes, the stars of the Big Veg league each have their own individual techniques....

Clive Bevan raises his long cucumbers inside women's tights. Apparently this allows them to expand in all directions. When raised in the more traditional sock they're liable to touch the end, lose heart and stop growing.

Ian Neale - a nursery owner who once grew the world's biggest beetroot at 51lb 9oz (there is no metric system in the world of giant veg) - gets his monsters off to a good start by feeding them rock dust, essence of pig slurry and a material called “dinosaur fertiliser”, from a “big pile on the top of a moor in Yorkshire”.

Digging a little into the subject led me to this absolutely bonkers headline in the New York Times for November 3, 1924:

GROWS GIANT PLANTS WITH ELECTRO MAGNET
Obscure Scientist Revealed by Jealous Peasant's False Charge in Murder Case

Known as "Satan's servant" by 586 fellow inhabitants of the little Norman hamlet of Qubue des Yvelines, but heretofore unheard of elsewhere in France, Justin Christofleau asserts that he is not unknown in America and other countries owing to his research work in connection with electric fertilizing....

Sigh. They just don't make mad scientist stories like they used to, do they?

Play With Your Food

My nine year-old's discovery of what you get when you search "musical instruments" and "vegetables" on Youtube:



And: a family concert!

Portland Flips You Off

This week's Willamette Week on local outfit Fliptography:

Animated flip books – those old-timey, handheld series of photos or drawings that vary ever so slightly from page to page – have been working our thumbs since the late 1800s. But it took a 26-year-old queer dude from Texas, “fliptographer” Jason Miers, to figure out how to make it brand new for this century. Miers, a former med student who now lives in Portland, created the technology that allows him to make fliptography books lickety-split, whether it be at bar mitzvahs or gay bars. Miers’ happy-time machine records seven seconds of video of a moving object–say, a cute guy stripping his shirt off–which is then captured by a computer and spit out as a book.

Speaking of which, check out this weirdly haunting mechanized flipbook art installation by Diane Landry, using an old dictionary for the pages.

Noted Without Comment

New from University Press of Kentucky, it's...

Fiend Folio

Interesting further developments in the Shakespeare folio theft that I covered in Slate last week. Scott Brown over at Fine Books points out:

Paul goes on to note: "Thanks to a careful inventory of Durham folio pages performed in 1905, a number of its identifying marks are already well-known. There's a patched hole in the colophon, for instance; there's a broken clasp on the outside of the book; there's a specific annotation regarding Troilus and Cressida...The Durham thief faces a particularly nasty bit of bad luck, though. Although reports indicate that a potentially telltale marked-up endpaper is now missing in this copy, it's highly unlikely that a thief would have sliced out the title page, with its iconic portrait of Shakespeare."

Now here I'm proceding on speculation, based on the reports about the theft in the Washington Post. Here's how the Post described the scene at the Folger when the alleged thief walked in with the book:

Out of his bag, he pulled an old book. Flimsy, no binding, big pages. Said he wanted the Folger book detectives to check it out. Could it be a genuine 400-year-old Shakespeare? he wondered.... A few of the opening pages of the version presented to the Folger had been removed.

So much for using the broken clasp as an identifier.

[Weekend Stubble shakes its fist.]

Damn you, thieves! Have you no sense of fair play?

He notes a thief might indeed still turn a profit by breaking a folio up into individual plays -- a notorious practice with medieval works -- but I think the fact that this one wasn't broken up is telling. Namely, to sell a complete Folio involves one shady transaction for which one has no good provenance to present to a buyer. Selling it in parts involves dozens of risky transactions. And that might explain why a stripped but unbroken Folio was, apparently, dumped off onto the (perhaps unwitting) Raymond Scott for a mere deposit of £5000.

Weirdly enough, a run through Google News and Lexis-Nexis shows that the one newspaper to continue reporting on this story was last Sunday's Daily Mail of London -- a publication not exactly known for lit coverage. It's as if we had the National Enquirer covering a political story. (Oh... right.)

The Mail actually tracked down the alleged Cuban source of the Folio, one "former Castro bodyguard Odeiny 'Danny' Perez." A Castro bodyguard... ah, priceless! Though either Perez or the Daily Mail seem to have their facts mixed up...

Mr Perez, shown a photograph of the cover of the rare Shakespeare manuscript, shook his head and said: 'That is not the book I gave to Raymond.

'I have never seen it before. My book was called Tempest and had the front and back covers missing. Some of the pages were also missing.'

He said the book he gave the Briton was printed on paper. The First Folio, a collection of 36 Shakespeare plays printed seven years after the Bard's death, is printed on goatskin.

Um, guys? It wasn't printed on goatskin.

And there's also a simple explanation for why Perez might think his book was called The Tempest. First, it sounds like the Folio's title page may have been sliced off. And second, the first play in the Folio -- whose title you then might well mistake for being that of the whole book -- turns out to be....

The Tempest.

Finally, an Organization for Me!

There is a Folly Fellowship in Great Britain. Because, by god, somebody needs to celebrate a horse made out of horseshoes:

The Gang That Couldn't Steal Stright

I'm in Slate this week with helpful advice for book thieves:

When Raymond Scott—the colorfully eccentric 51-year-old book dealer, champagne connoisseur, and shiny-suited wooer of nightclub dancers—walked into the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., recently to get a 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare appraised, he didn't realize, he says, he'd be accused of possessing a folio stolen from the Durham University library in England. His folio, he claims, was simply a friend's lucky find in Cuba. As Scott proclaims in a Washington Post profile today, at the time of the 1998 robbery at Durham University, "I wouldn't have known the difference between a First Folio Shakespeare and a paperback Jackie Collins." The Folger's expert verification of the stolen Folio's identity, he contends, is just plain wrong.

Just how much Scott knows about rare first editions, only time—or perhaps a plea bargain—will tell. But what he clearly doesn't know is what any folio scholar could tell him: that aside from a face-melting Ark of the Covenant, a Shakespeare First Folio is the lousiest loot in the world to steal.

Individual folios have been so obsessively analyzed that they might as well be Lojacked at this point. My favorite anecdote of the whole thing was the last hapless attempt to swipe a Folio:

It's because of obstacles like these that the last theft of a First Folio—from the Williams College library in 1940—also ended disastrously. Four months after gaining entry with the forged papers of a fictitious "Professor Sinclair E. Gillingham" of Middlebury College, the thief turned himself in and fingered three fellow conspirators. The reason? The folio they'd stolen was hot enough to roast marshmallows over. It was unsalable. This didn't exactly end their criminal careers, as folio historian Harold Otness has noted: "The sentencing judge received a letter asking for leniency for the aircraft worker [of the gang] because he was designing a special military plane. That letter was a forgery."

I love that story so much that I may just have to adopt Sinclair G. Gillingham as a pen name. One detail that I left on the cutting-room floor: none of the four conspirators had ever graduated high school. "Professor Gillingham" was, in fact, a shoe salesman.

Dizzyheads, take note: before hitting Williams, the Folio stash that the gang first went to scope out was at... the former University of Buffalo.

The Window Into the American Mind

A unexpected find from In These Times from earlier this year -- an account of a Vonnegut fan club in China:

Guizhou University sits on the outskirts of Guiyang City, the sleepy capital of China’s poorest province. Undergraduate tuition is the equivalent of $250 per term, books and housing included. A meal of pulled noodles, hot pot or sweet and sour pork runs about $1, while the soup-and-rice special in the dining hall costs a dime. The two most popular courses at the school are Mao Tse Dung Economic Thought and an early morning Kung Fu class that meets on the soccer field.

Life at Gui Da, as the school is locally known, is economically, socially, culturally and politically removed from life in America. Despite this, the school is home to an informal — and unlikely — group: a Kurt Vonnegut Fan Club.

“We don’t understand all of what Vonnegut wrote,” the club’s president, Isabel Yuan, told me, “But we think reading him helps us understand America.” Isabel and I spoke over a steaming pot of bitter pu’ er tea in a restaurant not far from the Gui Da campus. She sat upright, her black eyes focused on the porcelain cup in her hand. “Vonnegut,” she continued, “is our window into the American mind.”...

"Bite Me"

No, really -- it's my piece in the new Believer music issue:

The auditory capacities of teeth may be demonstrated through a simple test. First, find a quiet room to sit in. If you are wearing an analog watch, remove it from your wrist. Open your mouth wide and suspend the timepiece inside your mouth without actually touching your teeth. You will hear a quiet ticking. But close your teeth upon the watch, and you will hear a loud ticking.

This is because you are hearing with your teeth....

I've been meaning for ages to do an article on the weird world of bone conduction and osteophones. I blame my fascination with the subject on exposure at an early age to a Bone Fone ad in the November 1980 issue of Modern Mechanics.

Some links to the peculiar stuff mentioned in the article:

• A heartwarming scene of people biting on rubber "sound catching" audiphone fans to hear music.

• This amazing close-up illustration from 1882 of an audiphone in action.

• Electric dentures! ... Electric dentures! ... Need I say more?

• I think the 1959 patent filing on this one speaks for itself:

The present invention relates generally to a smoking pipe hearing aid and more particularly to an acoustic smoking pipe apparatus wherein a single unit functions as a tobacco pipe and also as a self-contained hearing aid utilizing osseous or bone conduction, i.e., conversion of sound waves to mechanical vibrations which are transmitted through the teeth and bone structure of the head to the auditory organs.

"Of course I'm listening to you, honey... I'm smoking my pipe."