#history
Not now
For the past few months the days have been long and dark. Somewhere in the middle there it snowed and it stuck for a couple of weeks, slowly hardening into sheet ice. We're through most of it now. Last week, in the courtyard behind the apartment the trees started to bud, and now there's sun enough to catch the green rippling along all their branches. Spring, maybe. In the dark months I kept my head down and worked. Ugly, stupid work. Pointless work. Now just as spring comes I'm sick. The other day I was in the office and I...
Notes from Granta 165 (Deutschland)
The Granta office in Berlin is located in the district of Friedenau. It’s a neighborhood of shuttered vinyl record shops and thriving funeral parlors that few visit, and fewer seem to leave. In the 1970s and 1980s, Friedenau became home to a concentration of West German writers, several of whom would make significant contributions to Granta: Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Günter Grass, Herta Müller. Today, on Niedstraße, in Enzensberger’s old building, piano lessons are offered on the ground floor; in Grass’s stout brick house next door, his widow runs an Airbnb (€145 a night). The residue of the Cold War is thick on the ground.
It's enough to make you crazy
The world is enough to make you crazy. The city is enough to make you crazy. The building is enough to make you crazy. The way lint builds up on the desk right in front of you, given enough of everything else, is enough to make you crazy. I've deliberately contracted in the past couple of years. I've tried to become less of a jangly ball of reactive nerve endings. I think I used to be a gaping maw that inhaled current affairs from near and far and exhaled analysis and anxiety. I try to do less of that. Touch...
Wartime reading
It feels like there's a lot of war going on. Whenever that happens I really feel my ignorance; it seems like if thousands of people are dying about something, I should understand what that something is. So here's what I've been reading lately about war. I didn't start reading Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte because of the present wars but because it was recommended to me by a friend. However, it's been instructive. Malaparte was a fascist, which gave him access to all kinds of people during WW2 who I haven't really seen close up before. Kaputt is a brilliant book...
Links, November 2023
Right now I am in England. It's the first time I've been back since we moved away to Germany and being here has immersed me back in some old themes... like the British class obsession. A little while ago I read Bright Young People, about a certain set of upper class enfants terribles who were the first of a kind of person that is now splashed all over Hello magazine. One of that set was Evelyn Waugh, who wrote a send up of the whole gang that I've just finished reading: Vile Bodies. The book is full of social climbers,...
Links, June 2023
I think I've given up on systems that organise the world, even the world right around me. Even so, it's nice to dream about a way of living where everything is fast, smooth, organised... easy. That's why I still look at consumer electronic products and software even though I have long accepted none of them will make me happy in an enduring way. Picture then, a world where everything (everything) I have is organised into numerical folder trees. Johnny Decimal, everybody. A fellow foe of the Grand Narratives that organise our collective consciousness is Roland Barthes, who as it turns...
Lucian, Ann, Fred
So Popbitch (a very catty UK media gossip newsletter) reports that Fred Again's people have been trying to keep the fact that he is minor gentry out of his Wikipedia article. Fair enough. I understood his story to go as follows: young South London guy makes poppy dance songs during the pandemic, goes viral, becomes instant stadium-packing act once the restrictions lift, and boy he just can't believe his luck. Shucks! No doubt this narrative has been carefully shaped by him and his people, and the truth does endear me to him less. His daddy is a Baron and a...
Links, February 2023
Well, we moved to Germany (we know!), so I've been correcting some of my gaps in recent German history by reading the lengthy Wikipedia page on German reunification. In terms of online life, that's the only real giveaway that I've moved in the real world. The rest of the anglophone media roar rolls along as before with two notable edits. I've completely cut out the very high volume Westminster insider newsletter I used to read first thing every morning (why?) and I've generally reduced my intake of UK news to a minimum. In other non-English news, AI has been used...
Links, October 2022
First off, here's a DJ set I liked. Right now a lot of people are talking about leaving Twitter (here's mine). Many of those that go ahead with it and turning up in Mastodon (here's mine) and talking a big game about how the collapse of Twitter will beget a golden age for the decentralised internet. That's nice. I don't believe it's really going to be that simple, though. On the topic of decentralised internet things: the FBI seized the Z-lib ebook archive! That's a big pity given how hard it is to get ebooks without giving Amazon money. The...
Links, September 2022
First I have a whole collection of maps. There's a map to show where in the world Wikipedia edits are coming from. There's a map that shows all the different kinds of planning boundaries that overlap the in Britain. There's an incredibly detailed weather map. Finally, here's a whole series of maps that examine how much various governments fudged their COVID-19 infection, hospitalisation, and mortality rates. There are a couple of websites about making websites to share. First is this fun tool to make scrappy, zine-like websites for party invitations and so on. On the more technical side is a...
Links, August 2022
First I have this amazing oral history of the production of certain aspects of the video game Red Alert 3. Specifically the story is about how this incredible cut scene, starring Tim Curry as a high camp Soviet general blasting off into space, came to be. It's astonishingly detailed and manages to go far beyond "pretty funny clip". It talks about how casting and producing these little fragments of video for video games works. It answers the question of how in on the joke various parties are. Finally, it's a tribute to how much Tim Curry threw himself into the...
Pellatt Road
In East Dulwich there is a Pellatt Road. I still don’t know how to pronounce it; a simple “pellet” seems most statesmanly. I’ve wondered where that name came from. It struck me as a person’s name, probably. I started looking, and found an MP for Southwark who died a little before a plot called Friern Farm near the village of Dulwich in Surrey was bought up and replaced with a tidy horseshoe of early Victorian streets, one of which was named Pellatt Road. Taking that as good enough, I sank into a rabbit hole finding out about what life he...
Grapefruits are weird
— Grapefruit Is One of the Weirdest Fruits on the Planet, Dan Nosowitz in Atlas Obscura
History of the Bible
I read The History of the Bible this weekend and enjoyed it a lot. I have a little collection of books about theology now, not because of any interest in faith but because I think it's an interesting vein of history and culture. The bible is so often quoted, wittingly or unwittingly, in popular culture and everyday speech. Here are some good excerpts from the book. The first I've included because I like the readings of the Old Testament that give God a personality. In this case it's a taunting condescention. I also just think the language here is amazing....
Historical Cookbook Database
— A Database of 5,000 Historical Cookbooks Is Now Online, and You Can Help Improve It, Reina Gattuso in Atlas Obscura
You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument
— You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument, Caroline Randall Williams in The New York Times
British Slave Businesses
— There are British businesses built on slavery. This is how we make amends, Catherine Hall in The Guardian
Off-Road Land Trains
— The Incredible Story of the US Army's Earth-Shaking, Off-Road Land Trains, by Peter Holderith
All the history I learned in my youth came from the American Girl doll books
— All the history I learned in my youth came from the American Girl doll books, Jessie Gaynor in LitHub
When Manhattan Was Mannahatta: A Stroll Through the Centuries
— When Manhattan Was Mannahatta: A Stroll Through the Centuries, Michael Kimmelman in The New York Times
When Oil Derricks Ruled the L.A. Landscape
— When Oil Derricks Ruled the L.A. Landscape, Nathan Masters in Lost L.A.
How a French Midwife Solved a Public Health Crisis
— How a French Midwife Solved a Public Health Crisis
Emma Willard's Maps of Time
— Emma Willard&'s Maps of Time, Susan Schulten in The Public Domain Review
The mystery of the lost Roman herb
— The mystery of the lost Roman herb, Zaria Gorvett in BBC Future
This Is Not the Senate the Framers Imagined
— This Is Not the Senate the Framers Imagined, Jane Chong in The Atlantic
Eugenics & Statistics
There were lots of interesting and terrible things in Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini but here's something that stood out. Eugenics was a widely respected field of study around the time of the turn of the 20th century, well before the rash of state-sponsored genocide programs we now associate with Nazis etc. University College London established a Eugenics Record Office, that aimed to study races of man and conct the best ways to hone the (presumably white) superior race to perfection. Of the many people who were both active in the field then, and still respected...
Madame Tussaud's Tall Tale
I started reading Little by Edward Carey without knowing what it was about. Soon it emerged that it's a fictionalisation of the life of Madame Tussaud based on her memoirs. It is typical of a revolutionary French narrative in that it involves a exploited child orphan, the beautiful disarray of Paris at the time, and finally: no shortage of chance encounters with significant historical figures that begin to stretch the reader's credulity. I haven't finished the book yet but the young orphan has already had personal interactions with: I'm sure that Madame Tussaud had a fascinating life that brushed up...
