http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/05/five-hundred-fairytales-discovered-germany How remarkable to think that we’re still finding forgotten lore!

Why is it that priordial origin stories are so similar across times and places? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-trace-society-rsquo-s-myths-to-primordial-origins/

Union Soldiers' Memorial - Riverside Park, Manhattan I believe that all symbols supporting the Confederacy should be removed from public lands / parks etc. While I recognize that decent but ignorant or miseducated individuals might have argued for these symbols’ preservation in the past, a clear-eyed look at the Confederacy’s foundation, purpose, and legacy presents more than sufficient evidence that these symbols should be retired to museums where they can be contextualized as symbols of an oppressive and murderous regime better relegated to the ash-heap of history. The Purpose of the Confederacy Do you know The Cornerstone Speech? Above I used the word “miseducated.

One of the real perks of living in NYC is the longevity and vitality of some of the city’s pubic institutions: The Met, the MOMA, the parks, and (sometimes) even the subway.

But hail hail the New York Public Library who is always innovating!

Where their considerable collection and desire to share it intersects is their blog where I found this gem from librarian Meredith Mann.

“Despotic Characters: Researching Shorthand at the New York Public Library”

Mann gives a history of fast-writing disciplines, highlights their use in the library’s Gütenbeg Bible, shows the reference documentation for Gregg and Pitman’s systems, and shows how shorthand for musical notation once existed.

How blissfully Umberto Eco!

Out on a sparsely populated prairie, there once was a girl called herself “Maud Fenstermaker.” The daughter of Germanic immigrants, she grew up in Basil, Ohio, a village that no longer exists. As a girl, she studied grammar from Reed & Kellogg’s Graded Lessons in English Grammar. One day, perhaps idly passing a dull school-day, she recalled a bit of a verse from a poem from an annual reader for children called “Chatterbox.” In pencil, she wrote down a couplet, misremembered as a quatrain, onto the flyleaf of her grammar book. On another Fall day, she wrote out her name and the date in confident Copperplate strokes, recording her name and the date: October Copperplate strokes, recording her name and the date: October 14^th 1891. On another day, with another ink, she seems to have revisited her signature and made a few delicate adjustments.

One hundred-and-twenty-five years later, I bought her grammar book and began pulling at the thread of this life that ended before my own began. I’d like to share what I know about Maud(e) or Mathilda thanks to the internet. In her story I found a story of America and Americanness.

Note: Storytelling based on genealogy is a series of likely guesses. Is it possible the writing was done by Maud’s mother, sibling, or teacher? Possibly. Was it possible her name was Maude versus Maud? Possible as well. Spellings, especially in immigrant communities, were famously changeable as literacy and Americanization worked their effects. Accept this as a work of speculative historical fiction.

This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience for ourselves. We must rely upon the words of others. — Yaa Gyasi

As I’ve mentioned before, I grew up exposed to lurid horrors of American Southern Gothic folklore in school. Even now, I can remember snatches of songs like this from a version of the circa-1650 ballad “The Twa Sisters:”

He made a bridge of her bone-ridge.
Oh! the dreadful wind and rain

This ballad finds its source in Northumbrian folk tradition. As the English departed England for homes in Appalachia, these ballads traveled with them. As the colonists staked their new homes, they stitched into the American folk songbook these songs of dismembered, disemboweled, drowned, or imprisoned women (usually with a fiddle and mandolin accompaniment).

Recently, a friend from my childhood neighborhood recalled on Facebook seeing David Holt spin his ghastly yarns (that I recounted before) with an incredulous “Does anyone else remember this?” I think there was also some implicit “Couldn’t do that today.” Her post was a prompt to review my post on this material.

With those thoughts refreshed, the tradition of the murder ballad was discussed in an episode of the podcast “Dolly Parton’s America” (a podcast series that I heartily recommend). I’d like to connect my baptism to that tradition here. I also wanted to make a note of the vibrancy of this tradition by noting its influence in the Anglo-Scots folk tradition of Australia, courtesy of Nick Cave.

The Murder Ballad in the Australian Folk Tradition: Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue

This video reawoke my Gothic gene from a decade of slumber:

I hadn’t thought of murder ballads much in the ten or so years since my baptism into the Southern Gothic until one fine day when the music of two Australians found me on the cobblestone streets of Holland.

She follows the contours of the Latin syntax with remarkable commitment, even at the risk of obscuring the sense in English.

January to October 2020 have been the most historically significant years of my life and seem likely to stay there. In 2001, it seemed certain that the terror attacks of September 11^th would be the most world-historical moments in my lifetime, as Kennedy’s assassination was for my mother.

But 2020 saw multiple memory-searing events:

• The bungled coronavirus response of the Trump administration (80 September 11^th death tolls and counting; nearly a quarter of a million Americans dead)
• The near-contemporaneous killings of Black Americans (George Floyd, Breonna Taylor) while interacting with police and associated protest
• Trump’s cosseting of domestic terrorism, white nationalism, and conspiracy theory movements
• Trump’s refusal to publicly wear a mask; his subsequent infection with coronavirus; his reversion to haughtily patronizing rhetoric that he was somehow of superior immunological stock despite the fact that he had received the best care money could buy — more accurately care that money could not even buy as a fast-tracked remedy was given to him before entering general approval
• A looming election in which Trump himself has telegraphed that he expects the election to be illegitimate if he loses

Amidst all that, both Lauren and I felt the touch of history. This Spring we fell ill with a respiratory illness that felt like hot fiberglass threads being threaded through our lungs. We wheezed and burned with fever (thankfully, briefly) and emerged alive. In those sweaty, scary nights when emergency service sirens were the only sounds in the canyons of the buildings in Manhattan, we wondered whether ambulances would still service us if we needed them. We wondered whether a hospital bed or a ventilator would be available if we could make it to care.

Given the scale and gravity of these events, I’ve wanted to put down some thoughts. Yet, since March, the incessant chaos, denial, and misinformation blared by the Trump administration has kept me off-balance. On top of the misery of the facts, their campaign of public distraction and enervation has raged so loudly, so irrationally, and so incessantly that I’ve not known where to start. So let me try to start this chronicle with this beginning:

In 2020, a pandemic began in China and slowly, but surely spread across the world. The disease stopped commerce. It changed how humans worldwide appeared in public. It eventually, it seems, came to my household. While the citizenry wrestled with how to live in such times, we did so alone. The US government, under the Trump administration, failed to marshal resources, provide leadership, or offer comfort. In many cases it, and President Trump personally, fought data-backed scientific best practice. This was done in a cynical bit of theatre designed to support the president’s favorability ratings in a craven, politically-rotten bit of responsibility-shirking theatre. And while Trump himself and his administration continued to play games, to distract and deflect, America’s competitors organized and prepared to seize markets and influence as the Trump cancer eats away at the prestige of the American ideal.

To be continued…

One of my favorite TV shows of the aughts was Mad Men. From its profoundly flawed heroes, to its careful capture of the aesthetic of the 60’s and 70’s Manhattan, to its genius writing and carefully plotted (across seasons!) callbacks to characterization, it was a wonderfully-crafted show.

In Season 2, episode 4, Don, our enigmatic lead protagonist, describes a special candy favored by his (abusive, alcoholic) father:

And this candy.
It tasted like violets.
Had a beautiful purple and silver package.

I was curious about this vintage hard candy, and I went about trying to find out where I could try violet-flavored candy. I found it, tried it, and here’s the story.

I frequently (too-frequently) kill time on Reddit and I came across someone posting a few scans from a discovered copy of the first edition of Time magazine.

I’m a bit of a weird bird in that I like to look at the ads from the nostalgic scans: Were they still giving heroin to cure toothaches? Had newfangled devices like the “ice-box” entered common commercial spheres? So I was struck by the serious looking, “Lothrop Stoddard” and his book “The Rising Tide of Color:”

White world supremacy is in danger. The world-wide ascendancy of the white race, apparently so unshakable, is in reality threatened by the colored races.

So here there we were, in 1923, pushing the “Great Replacement Theory” hokum that today Tucker Carlson pushes on his FoxNews show in the pages of what was to become one of the most important periodicals in American letters. Also note that Stoddard’s work wasn’t published by “Crank’s Press Unlimited: An Anti-Zionist Press,” but rather this was published at Scribner’s, again, one of the most storied brands in American publishing.