The Shallows

“Silent Spring for the literary mind.” –Michael Agger, in Slate


Subtitled What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, this is an emphatic book – not quite strident, but assertively thought-provoking. It insists that computers and the Internet undermine the human mind’s ability – hard won ever since the advent of the printing press and wide-spread literacy – to pay deep and reflective attention. Nicholas Carr's thesis may be overstated, especially in attributing deep, sustained, and reflective attention primarily to reading. After all, native peoples with oral traditions, craftsmen, and ascetics have always practiced intense attention.

But I think Carr is right when he says that computers and especially Web surfing have a destructive effect on attention. He laments the “permanent state of distractedness that defines the online life.” He’s right about that! He accuses the Net of being a nexus of ‘interruption technologies’.” I can’t quibble with that assessment. I’ve watched myself flit around the Net and respond to e-mails that interrupt excursions on the Net that have interrupted something I should be concentrating on…. Carr’s provocative book has me re-examining my Net habits. Fortunately, I’ve never fallen into the habit of Net-surfing while writing, and I’m not going to let that camel get its nose in the tent of my vocation.

Carr isn’t sanguine about e-books either. I hope he’s wrong, but this what he asserts:

“When Amazon’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, introduced the Kindle, he sounded a self-congratulatory note: ‘It’s so ambitious to take something as highly evolved as a book and improve on it. And maybe even change the way people read.’ There’s no ‘maybe’ about it. The way people read – and write – has already been changed by the Net, and the changes will continue as, slowly but surely, the words of books are extracted from the printed page and embedded in the computer’s ‘ecology of interruption technologies’.”

Sci-Fi excursion to College Station

On Monday, a small crew of Austin writers made the two-hour drive out to College Station to visit the science fiction archives at Texas A&M Cushing Library. In attendance, Nicky Drayden (a Space Squid contributor who supplied some of these photos), some random awesome guy (a Space Squid co-editor), Elle Van Hensbergen (Space Squid Assistant editor), and myself.

Last month my zine, Space Squid, spawned a modestly viral meme when we published an issue on a clay tablet. Since then I've been trying to find an archive that would take it, because in theory it can survive forever, and I'm just self-centered enough to stash it somewhere where it might. Two podunk archives in Austin turned me down flat. A third archivist said she could slip it into the back stacks, but she couldn't catalog it or tell any of her co-workers about it.

On a tip from the inestimable Lawrence Person, I asked Catherine Coker, the new curator of the Cushing Library's Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Collection. Not only was she interested in the clay tablet and the Space Squid back issues, but she also offered a behind the scenes tour of the archive.

Does it make me a nerd that I really enjoyed looking behind the scenes of an archive?

The archive itself is behind a locked door that has cold, dust-free air whistling through the cracks. The archive's environment system is similar to the ones used in nuclear submarines, Ms. Coker tells us.

To maximize space, the shelves slide on motorized tracks. It's the sort of library that Katsuhiro Ôtomo would have designed.

First we see the periodicals, a category that contains virtually complete runs of all the major pulps running back to the 1920s. It's here that Coker shows us a sight even more chilling than the Navy-grade AC vents. The floor is covered with tiny scraps of paper. It's the rotting detritus of low-grade paper, dissolving in its own chemical stew. Irreplaceable magazines from the classic age of Science Fiction flake off to the ground to be vacuumed up every couple of months.

Coker takes us deeper into the motorized stacks to see the rare books, early copies of Dracula, a signed first-edition of Fahrenheit 451 (the European edition is called Celsius 233).

The personal manuscripts and papers of notable authors fill several aisles. George R.R. Martin, Michael Moorcock, and Joe Lansdale making up the bulk of the space. At random we pulled down a box of Michael Moorcock's old things. It was a fascinating selection of effects that will no doubt be relevant to coming centuries of historians. There were multiple drafts of his fiction work and an anti-Klan pamphlet.

I didn't touch Joe Lansdale's stuff because I figured he would kick my ass if he found out.

Upstairs there's a temporary exhibit dedicated to Science Fiction titled "One Hundred Years Hence."


It's only open until next January, so you will want to hurry out there to catch it. There's an early edition of Frankenstein with an illustration of the monster (he looks brooding, muscular, and slightly American Indian). Hand-written letters by J.R.R. Tolkien are standouts. I liked the timeline posters, which were as thorough and concise a record of the genre as anything I've seen. The fan art figurines were also particularly inciteful.

Catherine Coker anticipated my desire to see the library's clay tablets (not part of the science fiction collection, technically speaking). They were much smaller than I had imagined. One of them was apparently a receipt for a sheep carcass, and it was just about the right size for a receipt. I can imagine some Mesopotamian putting the lozenge-sized clay receipt in his pocket and accidentally leaving it in his tunic as he beat his laundry on some creek stones.

And if that weren't enough, we got to see a working replica of an early printing press.

At the end of the extensive and informative tour, we experienced the height of College Station graciousness when Catherine Coker posed for the official handover of the Space Squid clay tablet. During the tour I found out that once a state agency accepts a gift, it is illegal to dispose of it.

Oh. Whoops.

There's more photos at Nicky Drayden's blog and at my other blog, Zombie Lapdance.

Jews and Boxing Before the War

L.P. Hartley had it right, of course: the past is another country. Things really are done differently there. But this is true both of the distant past and the more recent. The more you read about cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries--places no longer in living memory of anyone, but places which we can learn a great deal about with minimal effort--the more you realize how alien they were in so many ways. When we read about them and look at photos and watch films shot in those cities, the rough outlines are familiar, but the details are often not, and might as well have come from fiction. (Which is why I've long claimed that one of the best secondary worlds (in the Tolkienian sense) ever created is the film M, from 1931).

So Stephen Norwood's "`American Jewish Muscle'; Forging a New Masculinity in the Streets and in the Ring, 1890-1940" (Modern Judaism v29n2, May 2009) feels in many ways like a bunch of outtakes from the best novel never written, while also having poignant overtones because of the tragedy which was to come.

In Norwood's words, the article is about how Jewish boxers "helped undermine hoary stereotypes of Jewish males' physical incapacity, cowardice, and effeminacy that dated almost from the beginning of the Second Diaspora. These stereotypes were so pernicious that many gentiles in Europe and America believed Jews were unqualified for military service."

Some highlights:

- Following the Kishinev pogrom, Jews across Eastern Europe and the Pale of Settlement established armed self-defense groups. "Less than two months after Kishinev the Atlanta Constitution reported that in Odessa, which contained one of the largest Jewish populations of any Russian city, "Every Hebrew carries a gun." Jews there developed a communications system that enabled units of armed men from across their community to quickly converge on a particular section that came under attack."

 

Not that Odessa Jews were soft or unarmed before Kishinev. Many of them were hardcore chatta. Daniel Panzac wrote, in "International and Domestic Maritime Trade in the Ottoman Empire during the 18th Century" (International Journal of Middle East Studies, v24n2, May 1992): 
 

...brokers, always of local origin, were essential mediators between the European merchants, on the one hand, and the buyers and suppliers, on the other. They spoke Turkish or Arabic, perhaps both, as well as one or many European languages, and had wide commercial experience on both sides. They were always drawn from minority groups--Armenians, Greeks, or Jews. The last had a monopoly on dealings with French merchants. They organized the sales and shipments of European merchandise with local Muslim or minority buyers. They harassed debtors and even supplied European merchants confined with the plague.

This Jewish readiness resulted in attempted pogroms turning into actual battles. The pogromists at Gomel in 1906 were, according to a Jewish Morning Journal reporter, "met by Jews armed with revolvers, knives, and iron bars" who after "fierce combat...succeeded in beating back the attacking multitude." Many Jews died--it was a pogrom--but so did many pogromists.

- Americans have no call to feel superior to Russians about this. From the 1890s through the 1920s, "Jew-hunting" was a pastime for Christian youths in the big cities. They'd rampage through Jewish neighborhoods, assaulting and even mutilating the residents. Beatings were common, rapes less so but not unheard of. Boys were forced to display their circumcision, girls had their clothes torn off, and orthodox Jews had their beards pulled. Synagogues were desecrated, merchandise was stolen from Jewish shops, and the police were either indifferent to the Jew-hunters or aided them. Jewish peddlers in Chicago in 1901 even said that "Jews in Russia...were safer from assault and insult in that country than they are on the streets of Chicago."

 

However, a number of the Jewish boys who suffered through this took up boxing, and used their skills in self-defense. One such was Meyer Lansky--yes, that Meyer Lansky. Another was Mickey Cohen, the Mickster so memorably portrayed in James Ellroy's novels. In 1938 eight Irish-American thugs invaded Cohen's neighborhood:

The marauders had already "snatched a yeshiva boy's glasses from his face and spun them into the street," seized a Jewish newsboy's papers and thrown them into the gutter, and pulled an old man's beard when they attacked Cohen. But with "swift and terrible precision" the Jewish boxer struck down each one of his assailants, leaving them groaning in pain, "all broken up...on the sidewalk." When one of the two who had remained conscious cried out, "in a child's voice," that Cohen had hurt his testicles, the Jewish fighter, "kicking him...into his companion's vomit," replied, "Save you money if I have. Kids cost an arm and a leg these days."

- I knew about the Jewish boxers of England in the late 18th and early 19th century, of course--introduced scientific boxing, introduced the uppercut, helped make the sport more than Irish stand-down, etc. But I didn't know that Daniel Mendoza, the "Light of Israel," was on a ship, sailing to Ireland in 1791, when it was attacked by pirates. Mendoza personally beat two of the pirates into unconsciousness, causing the rest to flee back to their ship.

- It was Jews who desegregated boxing. Most prominent white prizefighters, including John L. Sullivan and Gentleman Jim Corbett, refused to box blacks. Jews did. The great Jack Johnson was knocked out in a fight in Galveston, Texas, in 1901 by "Chrysanthemum Joe" Choynski, but Texas Rangers arrested both Johnson and Choynski for violating an anti-prizefighting law. Choynski and Johnson shared a cell for four weeks, and Choynski taught Johnson as much as he could about how to box.

- Most of us know--I would hope--about Jesse Owens clowning the Nazis at the '38 Olympics, and about Joe Louis beating Max Schmeling in 1938, and about the symbolic importance of those victories. But I didn't know about Max Baer's fight with Schmeling in June 1933.

Norwood disagrees with Wikipedia on one point (I'll side with Norwood, of course--if Wikipedia said the sun rose this morning I'd run to the window to make sure): that Schmeling was a friend to the Nazis. (Wife was a "strong Nazi sympathizer," Schmeling gave the Nazi salute to Mussolini in Oct. 1933, and Schmeling praised Hitler to the press).

In June, 1933, Max Baer--who at this point was publicly identifying himself as a Jew--took on Schmeling. Before the fight Schmeling, "the Black Uhlan of the Rhine," declared his support for Hitler and claimed that (per Norwood) "Germany had never been more peaceful than under Nazism, and that he had seen 'no cruelties against Jews.'" Baer responded by announcing that he would wear the Star of David on his trunks during the match and for every match following, which he did. During the match, Baer "taunted Schmeling by placing his hands on the portion of his trunks with the Star of David, and fluttering the symbol of Jewish pride at him." In "the dirtiest heavyweight brawl since bare knuckle days" Baer won on a TKO in the tenth round.
 
There's a lot more in the article, of course. Norwood talks about how closely tied the Jewish boxers were to their individual neighborhoods, about their efforts to provide good role models for other Jews and to be flawless in the press, and about what happened with these boxers after WW2 (short version: a lot of them joined the George Washington Legion and the Irgun). If you're at all interested in this subject, the article is well worth searching out.

Camille Flammarion, Mad Scientist, and the expedition into the Hollow Earth.

Camille Flammarion (1842-1925) was a French astronomer, science popularizer, and author of science fiction. (Wikipedia entry here). He's not well-known in the U.S., but in Europe he has a certain reputation as a Victorian poor man's Carl Sagan. (Hmm. Costermonger's Carl Sagan? Or would that be too obscure?)

Flammarion was also, ahem, a bit of a nut job. The Wiki entry touches on his views on "spiritism," and the at-the-time notorious Flammarion Woodcut (that's the Woodcut there on the right) hint at Flammarion's tendency to let his enthusiasm get the better of him, at the expense of strict truthfulness. (I certainly understand and sympathise with him in this regard. I guess we can just think of this as the 19th century French sf version of truthiness).

But the following, taken from a Times of London piece in 1888 (I think), is new to me:

A most remarkable bill has been introduced in the American Congress. It appropriates 100,000dol to be expended in boring into the earth's crust, and the duty of spending the money has been relegated to the Engineer Corps of the United States Army. This boring is to be done "with a view of extending and enlarging our knowledge of the features and peculiarities of its formation and structure." The provision for making a report requires "that the Secretary of War shall make a report to the Fiftieth Congress showing the progress of the boring up to the date of the report, together with the views of the board as to the depth to which, with mechanical instruments and appliances at their command, it can be carried ; and that the estimates submitted by the War department for the ensuing year shall include an estimate of the amount necessary to prosecute the work during the fiscal year ending June 30,1889." In choosing land for the purpose preference is required to be given to that of little value, and the title shall be secured to land four miles in every direction from the bore-hole. Curiously akin to this scheme is one propounded almost coincidently by M. Flammarion, the eminent French astronomer, who has been dubbed for his pains "a mad scientist." M. Flammarion's mind is exercised by the spectacle presented in Europe at the present time, where 5,000,000 men stand armed for mutual destruction. In the interests of humanity and science, he wises to utilise the services of these men to some profitable and peaceful task. This is no less than to dig an enormous hole into the globe for the purpose of once for all finding out what is inside. With the armies of Europe for workmen, he would by their means solve the perplexing problems and mysteries which surround the vast regions hid from mortal eye in the body of this sphere. A London paper says :--Of the interior of our earth below the depth of one mile nothing whatever is known, and not even a guess can be made of the 8000 miles which separate us in a direct line from our kinsfolk in Australia and New Zealand. M. Flammarion's weird idea leads to some interesting and amusing reflections. The hole would have to have a diagonal direction, for no hauling gear miles long could be contrived for pulling up and letting down men vertically, as miners do. Cornish miners even work stripped to the skin on account of the heat, and M. Flammarion's soldiers would have to stand a temperature no salamander could endure. Imagine, too, if his hole reached a depth of many miles, the excited work there would be in, perhaps, tunneling through stratas of solid gold, and of finding precious stones as big as boulders. But anything is better than war, and if M. Flammarion, by his wild project, can only divert men from slaughtering each other, the world would be a gainer, and he would be hailed to all time as a benefactor to the human race.

Out here in real life, the idea of all those countries setting aside their enmities and coming together for one big mining project is silly. Never happen. And if it did, we know what would be found: the crust and upper mantle, the lithosphere. If such an expedition had taken place, the only thing of significance that would have taken place is a possible adoption of or at least consideration of the theory of continental drift.

(Not that such an expedition would have stopped loons like Neal Adams, but never mind).

But in fiction or an rpg...now there is where this might-have-been has potential. A Steampunk The Core, for example. (The Core was great! YES IT WAS SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP). Or...well, imagine the scene: thousands of Prussian and French and British soldiers, covertly casting hostile glances at each other as they use their picks and shovels, crack an opening into an enormous cavern. Some of the soldiers fall into the cavern, others scramble away from the hole. Then...

...well, what's in the cavern? The Mole Man's moloids? Dinosaurs? Some Lovecraftian monster? (Can't recall offhand if HPL had any monster lurking in the depths of the earth). Whatever it is, it retaliates, and suddenly we've got a new version of War of the Worlds, but with the invaders coming from below.

And that's just one of the possible scenarios.

Having just given the preceding a moment's thought, I realize I'm refitting the plot of La Guerre Infernale for a Subterraneans Invade scenario. La Guerre Infernale was a French pulp, created by Pierre Giffard and Albert Robida, which ran for thirty issues in 1908. La Guerre Infernale was about the world war of 1937, which began between Germany and Great Britain and France, dragged in the United States, and then took a right turn when the Japanese, dastardly Yellow Perils that they are, take advantage of the war in Europe to attack. They conquer Europe and attack and conquer most of the United States. This forces the British, Germans, Russians, and Americans to unite into the "White Wall" and attack the Japanese.

I wouldn't want to do a Yellow Peril scenario, but if you swap out the Subterraneans for the Japanese...oh, sod, this is what Harry Harrison did in his Worldwar series, didn't he?

Never mind.

The atemporality of 21st century urban warfare

Viewing this morning's front page picture of the world today, one can't help but be struck by the atemporal medievalism of it all, from riot-armored Israeli knights on horseback to the Gandalfian cathode ray necromancers in their remote mountain lairs to the English warrior princes.



How very Blackwater Prince Harry it all is.



Still waiting for the Web to produce a fragmented Shakespeare suited to articulate this strange Zeitgeist.

Another early robot.

This one from 1909/1910/1911. The article is from the American Examiner sometime in 1911 (should have written down the exact date, but didn't.

A CLOCKWORK MAN THAT TALKS AND SINGS

 

H. Whitman, a Berlin inventor, has, after many years, succeeded in making a mechanical man that can walk, and make other human movements, and can speak, sing, whistle and laugh. This mechanical masterpiece is so human that at a distance of a yard it cannot be told from a living being.

The figure is a mass of intricate cogs and machinery. In the chest a number of phonographs are arranged, but how the machinery is controlled is a secret of the inventor. It has been said that wireless electric waves are at the bottom of the mechanical miracle. Each part of the figure is controlled by a little electric motor.

The inventor carries about with him a disk upon which is a little needle. This is attached to an electric coil of his own invention, which is in harmony with the little motors inside the figure. By moving the needle from one point to another, he starts by wireless waves the parts that he wants to move. And the principle is owrked out in endless combinations.

The invention seems in fact to duplicate Bulwer Lytton's mechanical servants in his famous story "The Coming Race," and at a latter date H. G. Wells's conception of the same solution of the servant problem.

Writers of fiction, in all countries and ages, have found inspiration in the idea of duplicating the complicated works of nature with mechanical constructions. To describe such imaginary mechanisms is much easier than actually to construct them.

Clockmakers, owing to their familiarity with the means of producing all sorts of movements in the transmission of power, have always been the most ingenious artificers on these lines--but they have usually constructed their moving human figures with the main purpose of their contrivances--to tell the time of day and the progress of the seasons.

To construct a mechanical man is merely to triumph over mechanical difficulties--the man being of no use, but merely a curiosity when created--which appears to be the case with Mr. Whitman.

 

I found this article, with the (admittedly murky) picture on the left, back in June, during my hiatus. While looking for some accompanying information on this "H. Whitman," I found the Cybernetic Zoo (a site I hadn't known about) and its page on this robot, which was apparently named "Occultus" or "Barbarossa." I took the (much clearer) photo on the right, from that page, and I trust the owner(s) of the Cybernetic Zoo will forgive me borrowing the image from their site.

Victorian Women: Industrial Espionage And You!

The use of women as spies was certainly common enough in the 19th century. But a lot of the spying was not quite what you'd think. From a Straits Times of Singapore article, 21 October 1907:

During at least a century in Russia, ladies who have enjoyed the ear of the Court have been known to use their social opportunities for the purpose of obtaining State secrets for their various allies. In other Imperial Courts in Europe favoured courtiers have been long credited with the practice of eliciting political information for the benefit of their patrons. It is, however, comparatively of late years that the system of female espionage has been introduced into Great Britain and America with the object of elucidating matters of the first importance to financiers, promoters of trusts, and concessionnaires [sic] of all kinds.

The enormous profits which can be made by those who promote combines, railway amalgamations, mineral or other State concessions make it worth the while of capitalists to scatter some thousands of pounds amongst well-dressed and well-educated ladies and gentlemen of leisure who will exert themselves to obtain accurate information from authentic sources as to coming events of financial significance. For instance, the knowledge that some Oriental State was about to make a new issue or to convert an old one on certain lines has, in the past, enabled diplomatic capitalists to anticipate Stock Exchange fluctuations and secure a considerable profit.

In a more limited way, information as to the racing stables of celebrated owners is often gathered in the drawing-room or billiard-room of a country house far more effectually than by loafers about the training quarters. Lady detectives are sometimes employed by fortune-hunters to investigate the position and prospects of Amreican and other heiresses, and to report upon their movements and pastimes.
 

As far as I know industrial espionage hasn't been used at all in fiction about the 19th century, and I certainly haven't heard of a story or novel in which a Victorian woman was an industrial spy, but it's logical and even obvious once you think about it, and as the preceding shows, it was certainly a reality.