This reference to the impact of volcanic activity on the birth of Frankenstein got me to do some digging on the "Year Without a Summer," 1816, leading to this fascinating paper, which argues: "The weather in 1816 may even be the single most determining influence upon the novel's creation."
In 1816 everyone talked about the weather. And with justification. The summer never came. The spring was unexceptional, and until mid-June the agricultural cycle proceeded normally. Then came the rains which, a few clear days excepted, lasted the summer ...In the spring, astronomers had sighted mysterious sunspots in their telescopes. During May and June these blemishes became large enough to be visible with the naked eye. People squinted at them through smoked glasses. Superstitious folk, even some less so, concluded that the sun was dying; others thought a chunk of the sun would break off and destroy the world ...On the 17th, hawkers in Paris sold a pamphlet entitled Détails sur la fin du monde. The end was to occur the next day. 'The 18th of July has passed', the Gazette de Lausanne reported laconically on the 23rd, 'and that day, which was supposed to be marked by the most frightening cataclysm, offered no other miracle than the return of good weather.' Unfortunately, the return was short lived. The sun lasted four days before again disappearing.
Assuming we bring upon ourselves the interesting weather described by President Gore in his recent documentary, what sorts of wonderful literature might it inspire in the future? We may not enjoy the same superstitions today, but we certainly have plenty of our own ...
But I also just love the idea of a partially undiscovered world. As the Clubbe article continues:
We easily forget that Frankenstein appeared in a world still very imperfectly charted. In 1816 almost none of the earth's high peaks had been scaled; less than fifty years before, Captain Cook had claimed for England the hardly-known continent of Australia. The arctic regions remained terra incognita and, as Captain Walton's letters remind us, the subject of intense speculation ... Mary Wollstonecraft described primitive customs in Norway, and Byron was among the first Englishmen of the day to have set foot in what is now Albania. Huge tracts of Africa, the American continents, and Asia were unknown to Europeans. Numerous islands remained undiscovered. Contemporary maps indicate the known world surrounded by large uncharted areas where angels blew trumpets and sea-serpents rose out of the waves.
The world of Frankenstein, we remember, lies closer in time to that of Gulliver's Travels than to our own ... In 1816 the eerie creations imagined by Mary Shelley, both creature and novel, seemed all too possible. It needed only the thunder and 'pitchy blackness' of a 'tempest-toss'd' summer to launch them into life.
This excerpt from an upcoming (in the UK, at least) Christopher Hitchens book about Thomas Paine's Rights of Man is worth a look, if only for the great scene of Paine valiantly fending off pushy Bible salesmen on his deathbed:
Dying in ulcerated agony, he was imposed upon by two Presbyterian ministers who pushed past his housekeeper and urged him to avoid damnation by accepting Jesus Christ. "Let me have none of your Popish stuff," Paine responded. "Get away with you, good morning, good morning." The same demand was made of him as his eyes were closing. "Do you wish to believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God?" He answered quite distinctly: "I have no wish to believe on that subject." Thus he expired with his reason, and his rights, both still staunchly defended until the very last.
I'll leave the raised intellectual eyebrows about just why the smokin' turncoat has decided to associate himself with Paine these days* to those with, um, more intellectual brows. Really, I only bring this up as an excuse to recommend one of the more satisfying books I've picked up this year, Paul Collins' The Trouble With Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine.
I'm not sure I can do this book the justice it deserves here -- for a much more thoughtful take, see this February 2006 Bookslut essay.** Collins brings you to Paine's deathbed and then beyond, as he follows the exceedingly strange overseas journey made by the thinker's remains after they've been collected from the ground and passed along through a motley group of fans and countrymen in a culture that boasted a flourishing trade in the bones and other remains of storied personalities. "[O]nce dead, we no longer belong to ourselves," Collins observes. "It is the final loss of control."
As Collins follows the trail of the remains, we get a quirky travelogue, visiting contemporary locations including an Asian restaurant on Manhattan's Curry Hill (former office of 19th century medical theorist E.B. Foote) and a boarded-up Lloyd's Bank "grimly rotting at the end of the Jubilee tube line" (site of a long-departed herb shop whose proprietor in the 1880s owned a dessicated, "hardened chunk" of Paine's brain "the size of an india-rubber eraser" before said chunk went missing again, turning up in ... oh, you'll just have to read it).
Along the way, we're treated to portraits of long-forgotten geniuses, crackpots and other characters on page after page. This reader, at any rate, was introduced to the fascinating Moncure Conway, a 19th-century southern gentleman-turned abolitionist-turned pal of some of the brightest luminaries of his day. This guy befriended Emerson, Whitman and Twain, crossed paths with Poe and Darwin, you name it. I can't think of anyone in our time who comes close in terms of hobnobbing with (and in some cases advancing the careers of) Big Names of His Day, not even Ahmet Ertegun. If that's not enough, you'll find a wealth of fun facts about phrenology, Victorian toilets, 18th century gin vending machines, and the wonderfully named Muggletonians, a long-lasting yet obscure British religious sect Collins deems "the world's laziest cult." Oh, and some delightfully complicated game involving the London tube system, too.
One caveat: Collins' writing style in this book ... well, um, it can be a little distracting, like listening to This American Life on a really staticky NPR station. Or, OK, like reading certain blogs, perhaps even this one.*** I only bring this up because I suspect that those who aren't true Believers might dismiss the book's authorial voice, with its italicized asides, pregnant pauses, and two-word paragraphs, as precious, while those who consider themselves hard-core historians might be put off by its non-linear approach. But get past all that and the narrative is truly captivating. It transcends any kind of genre, particularly when Collins goes off on one of his from-the-heart tangents that reveal the passion behind his project:
We forget all the time. We forget very nearly every single impression that passes through our minds. What we ate for lunch: who our roommate was ten years ago: what we paid for a soda in 1982: what we just came from the living room to the kitchen for. It is constant and vital, and we only notice it if everyday useful things go missing. Every moment gets thrown out like so much garbage -- which, in a sense, is what the past is. Memory is a toxin, and its overretention -- the constant replaying of the past -- is the hallmark of stress disorders and clinical depression. The elimination of memory is a bodily function, like the elimination of urine. Stop urinating and you have renal failure: stop forgetting and you go mad. And so it is that the details of nearly every single day that we have lived, nearly every single moment of each day, nearly every person that we have met and spoken to, the exact wording of the paragraph that you have just read ...Gone.
Oh, and yes, you do learn, along the way, about why Thomas Paine should be remembered, too -- not a bad deal if your primary school education was as terrible as mine.
*To wit: Amazon UK's review refers to Hitch as Paine's "natural heir."
**Allow me to digress long enough to register a small complaint: I can't get enough of the entertaining, informative Bookslut. That is, I can't get enough because its racy URL is frowned upon by my workplace Web servers. I dream of a nonsexy mirror -- Bookwife? Bookpal? Bookdomesticpartner? -- that would allow me to delve into this site at my leisure, my Web-reading leisure time mainly being that which takes place during "work" hours. Am I the only one with this problem?
***Oddly enough, though, not Collins' own blog, which is quite straightforward in style and way cool, and full of links to his great reviews and articles like this must-read on Sponsie, the Victorian sex-ed monkey.
Goofy talking Tom borrowed from the Clinton Avenue School's very educational 4th grade American History pages (caution: gratuitous patriotic music!).
The National Museum of Ireland said fragments of what appeared to be an ancient Psalter or Book of Psalms, written around AD 800, were uncovered by a bulldozer in a bog in the south Midlands.
"In discovery terms this Irish equivalent to the Dead Sea Scrolls is being hailed by the Museum's experts as the greatest find ever from a European bog," the museum said in a statement.
Aside from those nattily groomed young bog men they found a few years ago, that is ...
Since moving to New York, I haven't been itching to travel as much as I used to; I spend most of my weekends in Polish-occupied Greenpoint and most of my weekdays in equally alien sectors of Manhattan, and all this has satisfied much of my wanderlust for the time being. For the past few years my most exotic travel fantasy has involved a visit to a suburban Target with aisles as wide as my living room, overflowing with dustless, neatly shelved merchandise.
But I am getting restless again, probably thanks in part to a budget that could barely get me to Staten Island these days. It doesn't help that I'm surrounded by jetsetters. One of my best friends is currently traveling Taiwan, and another is off to Marrakesh in the morning. Oh, and did my mother tell you she's moving to Mexico next month? There, now you're the last person on the planet to know. And here I sit in an undisclosed location high above Wall Street or thereabouts, as I do most days of the week, idly surfing.
Of course you can learn a lot about the difference between what you think you might enjoy and what you actually would enjoy by letting other people suffer the experience. People with courage, expense accounts, and newspaper assignments, such as Sarah Lyall, whose trip to the top of Mount Snowdon has reminded me that I have a horror of heights and thus can cross this particular Welsh travel fantasy off my list.
And thanks to the wonders of the Internet, you also can learn about places and things in which you never thought you had an interest. I've long been a fan of the travel dispatches of Roy Kesey, an American married to a Peruvian diplomat living in China, which are well worth your perusal on McSweeney's if you haven't read them yet. I never thought I wanted to live in China or marry a Peruvian diplomat before reading them; now I just have to figure out whether it's more advisable to go to Peru first to find the spouse, or just pack for Beijing and hope for the best. This week, The Elegant Variation features a fun interview with Kesey, coinciding with the publication of his new novella, set in Croatia (of course). In honor of "Kesey Week," TEV just wrapped up a contest in which commenters write in with tales of travel tedium and terror, describing how and which books saved them from said misery. Good stories here, though reading some of them only reminded me that I'm super-jealous of anyone who can read in a moving vehicle without becoming hyperemetic.
Anyway, this blog, Idle Words, gets my vote for some of the most consistently entertaining, finely observed travel writing around. The photos are great, too. Check out the entries from a trip from Argentina to Chile to see the glaciers:
A little Zodiac takes you out to the boat, which then heads up the lake. As we manoeuver past an imposing cliff, the captain taps the "Release Condor" button on the main panel and an enormous bird dutifully takes off from his nest a hundred feet above the water.
The entire boat ride feels this scripted. As we near the glacier, clouds roll in and start dropping rain and sleet on the boat. The ice is half-visible and ghostly through the mist. Then, as we pull within twenty meters of the glacier face (the retreating glacier doesn't pose the kind of threat from calving ice as the Perito Moreno), the clouds open and a lone sunbeam strikes the ice from the side. I turn around to look at a brilliant double rainbow to the south of the boat, and just then I hear a tinkling sound of ice on glass and a soft voice behind me, speaking the four most beautiful words in the Spanish language:
"Whisky o pisco sour?"
Our pilot has climbed up the metal ladder in horizontal rain to bring up a tray of cocktails. At this point I would not be surprised to see a pink-hooved pegasus flying in, bringing sandwiches.
In my many moves over the past few years, I've sometimes noted how retro the Post Office's change-of-address procedure seems -- the last few times I've done it, I've simply picked up a card at the PO, written my new address on a few cramped lines, and dropped the card in the mail. A few weeks later, presto! Mail starts showing up at my new address. Abuse of this system seems too easy, as in this example from the other day:
A man was charged with using scores of change-of-address forms to divert mail from all over the nation to his address in Beaver County.
Federal prosecutors this week charged Fred Hill of Aliquippa with wire fraud, accusing him of diverting mail from people both living and dead.
Postal inspectors said in court records that when they entered an Aliquippa home where Mr. Hill had stayed, they found "a significant volume" of abandoned mail along with lists of Social Security numbers and names of people in California, Georgia and Arkansas.
Of course, this scam could be used for purposes less nefarious than ID fraud -- anyone could anonymously drop an address change on someone they want to mess with -- or simply have their mail held for an annoying period of time, using the PO's handy online or paper forms.
Of course I'm not advocating this -- it is my duty as a blogger to state the obvious. (In fact, I'm usually so dim when it comes to clever schemes like this that on the off chance one does occur to me, I figure most everyone from Nigeria to New York has thought of it long before. If there's a catch to all this, I obviously have overlooked it, so feel free to correct me ...)
Anyway, in the article, the PO says they have "systems in place to prevent this type of occurrence," but doesn't elaborate on exactly what these are. Now I'm going to have a new flavor of paranoia to contend with when my New Yorkers are delayed ...
From a NYT article on a new series of Sesame Street DVDs, "Sesame Beginnings," aimed at the new hot (or is it hot new?) 0-3 demographic:
Miniature versions of Elmo, Prairie Dawn, Cookie Monster and Big Bird were all introduced, together with their caregivers. The eclectic caregivers — one mother, one father, one aunt and one grandmother — included Elmo's charming handlebar-mustachioed dad, whose dingy Villagey apartment had cheap bars on its windows*, and Prairie Dawn's equally appealing sunburned mother, who wore turquoise jewelry and lavender eye shadow, talked like Ethel Merman and favored Miami décor.
I'd watch that just for more insight into Elmo's world, which suddenly seems more interesting than I'd previously supposed.
But I'm dismayed at the series' apparent lack of baby Yip-Yip Martians. Even as a card-carrying member of the Yahoo Yip-Yip Fan Club (which "holds claim to being the Internet's largest club or group, strictly themed to Sesame Street"), I had never stopped to wonder about their home life.
*on second read: "cheap bars" on the windows? I guess the Times would notice such a thing ...
Dear Across-the-Hall Neighbor, With Whom I Share a Wall that
Runs the Length of My Apartment, Along With the Same Cheap, Creaky Wooden
Floors:
Jumpy City Mouse
