Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

Visible house

Some friends who live in Harlem tipped me off that the building where Ralph Ellison wrote Invisible Man is for sale. In Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius, Lawrence Jackson writes that Ellison moved into the ground floor apartment of 749 St. Nicholas Ave., in Harlem, in 1946, and that he and his wife kept Scotch terriers in the backyard.

Moon hits Earth; I am published in Persephone Quarterly

I have arrived as a blogger. One of my posts has been reprinted (in deftly edited form) in the Autumn 2006 issue of The Persephone Quarterly the newsletter of Persephone Books, a U.K. publishing house that Peter and I are a little obsessed with. The quarterly isn't, alas, available online, and the blog entry originally appeared at another URL, so I'm going to take the liberty of reposting it. It first appeared under the title "Moon Hits Earth; Poultry Breeder Inconvenienced," in October 2005, when, as you'll see, the news had recently broken that polar bears were doomed.

I am as besotted as the New York Times seems to be by the polar-view map of the melting Arctic that the newspaper reprints every few days. Staring at it does not make any more comprehensible to me the notion that it is melting, and that the polar bears who fail to evolve into dolphins in the next few decades will all drown. Also bewildering is the thought that the Northwest Passage is going to thaw open. I suppose I should have been prepared for this eventuality by the news, a few years ago, that Mount Kilimanjaro will soon be brown, unless someone covers it in white canvas. It's nonetheless hard for me to assimilate. No ice up there. Will the last orts of Sir John Franklin finally surface in the melt-off? Maybe it's time for one last expedition.

Wonderful prospects of cognitive dissonance were opened by the Times article last week detailing the rush by corporations to stake a claim to Arctic shipping routes and oil fields. If you're an energy company shill, and your team's official line is that the world is not warming, how exactly do you explain what you're doing up there, investment-wise? There's great irony in the contrast between the pettiness of profiteering and the world-historical grandeur of the vanishing of what we always, in elementary school, mistook for an eighth continent.

As it happens, I recently stumbled across a literary precedent for such irony. In London a few weeks ago, Peter and I made a pilgrimage to the office of the reprint house Persephone Books, where we admired the 1930s-era railroad posters on the walls and purchased half a dozen titles. I was unable to resist The Hopkins Manuscript, by R. C. Sherriff. As a publishing enterprise, Persphone aims unabashedly at women readers; most of its titles are by women, and those by men often are often concerned with domestic life. The Hopkins Manuscript, written in 1939, was thus a bit of a puzzle, as a Persphone choice. Not only was it written by a man, but it's a work of science fiction. Civilization comes to an end, because the Moon crashes into the Earth.

I can't say how gratifying it is to have a well-written book about the Moon crashing into the Earth printed in the flawless elegance of the Persephone series, with the usual finely chosen endpapers (after a 1932 fabric whose pattern evokes an eclipse, with a touch of the secret emblem from Escape to Witch Mountain), beautiful cream pages, and crisp type. And after reading it, I did see the link to the Persephone vision. The 1930s railroad posters in their office are the key; the Hopkins Manuscript is a portrait of England in that moment, where the end of the world has the function of releasing a camera's shutter. The impending Moon is an allegory of fascism, though less schematically, I think, than the Martians are an allegory for imperialism in Wells's War of the Worlds. The world doesn't end at all suddenly, and there's pathos and, surprisingly, comedy in the decline.

From the Arctic point of view, it's the comedy that's relevant. As an amateur astronomer, Edgar Hopkins learns that the Moon is on a course of collision long before the public does. The secret makes him feel terribly important---much more so than the fellows down at the pub appreciate, to his pain. Of course this is hardly a surprise, because they had earlier failed to appreciate his achievements as a breeder of prize hens. With a reasoning not unlike the modern would-be plunderers of the Arctic, Hopkins decides that since the crash will likely dislodge a lot of crockery, he will sell all his Great Western Railway Stock and buy as much as he can of Wigglesworth & Smirkin, manufacturers of cups, saucers, plates, and dishes. For all his venality and narcissism, one ends up liking Hopkins, as much because of his provincialism as in spite of it. It's hard to resist someone who claims not to be that excited about meeting a post-apocalypse member of Parliament because, as a breeder, he "had met, at different times, almost every famous personality in the Poultry Times."

Mass-Observation on the radio

Jesse Thorn, who hosts the public radio show the Sound of Young America out of Los Angeles, interviewed me yesterday about "Surveillance Society," my New Yorker article on Mass-Observation, and he's running the interview in his latest show. He's an enthusiastic and knowledgeable interviewer, even of a somewhat tongue-tied interviewee. If your local radio station doesn't happen to carry his program, you can download it as an MP3 here.

The anecdote from the Mass-Observation book May the Twelfth that I attempt, without complete success, to recall from memory for Jesse during the interview reads in fact as follows: "7.20 a.m. Get up. Feel rather liverish, with a headache. Put on dressing gown and bedroom slippers---go down to kitchen---put small copper kettle (find myself thinking 'Fancy this still going'---it has leaked slightly for years) on methylated spirit lamp. . . . I go into the kitchen and note some dead black beetles (? or cockroaches---not sure) on the floor---on their backs, my mother having used 'Flit' the night before. I feel slightly revolted..." I don't know why I recalled this detail from May the Twelfth, instead of the dream a young man had of murdering Franco with a garden rake and then being dragged underwater by an octopus, but somehow the dead beetles were within easier reach of my short-term memory than the octopus was.

Worthy causes

This, a somewhat large file, is my new desktop: a boxer, a terrier, a borzoi, a dachsund, and something else (as a lifelong mutt owner, I'm terrible at identifying breeds), seated before a fire hydrant outside the United Nations, in protest of the fatal 1957 launching of Laika into outer space (via the U.S. National Library of Medicine's online exhibit, "Animals as Cold Warriors").

And while on the topic of embracing worthy causes, there's a new magazine with the alarming name Good, which proposes to give a glossy, four-color treatment to the cause of pragmatic benefaction. If you buy a subscription, the entire $20 that you pay will be passed on by them to one of twelve charities (you choose which one). I know, I know, but actually the articles look entertaining. There's a very well written piece by Michael Silverman, for instance, on why no one reads any more; he pins the tail on the wrong donkey, I think, but all praise to him for asking the question.

Mass-Observation in San Francisco

If you live in or around San Francisco, you'll soon have a chance to see Rebecca Baron's 2005 documentary about the Mass-Observation movement, How Little We Know of Our Neighbours, which I mentioned in an earlier post. It's playing on Friday, Sept. 22, at Artists' Television Access, 992 Valencia St. (at 21st) as part of the Madcat Women's International Film Festival.

Meanwhile, a blogger named Didactique has posted photographs of the Crystal Palace in flames and of Edward the Abdicator. And Drunken Volcano has condensed my Mass-Observation article, and all the other articles in the Sept. 11 issue, into a haiku. He seems to perform this poetic function every week; does Emily Gordon know?

Mass-Observation in The New Yorker

My article "Surveillance Society: The Mass-Observation Movement and the Meaning of Everyday Life" is in the 11 September 2006 issue of The New Yorker. Herewith a few acknowledgments and extras (as usual, what follows will make more sense if you read the article first). . . .

My foremost debt is to the book under review, Nick Hubble's Mass-Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, and Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, $85) (table of contents and sample chapter here). I also owe a great deal to two biographies, both of which are great reads: Judith M. Heimann's The Most Offending Soul Alive: Tom Harrisson and His Remarkable Life (University of Hawaii Press, $26.95) and Kevin Jackson's Humphrey Jennings (Picador, £19.80).

Mass-Observation itself is still around, or rather, is around again. As Dorothy Sheridan, Brian Street, and David Bloome explain in Writing Ourselves: Mass-Observation and Literacy Practices, it was revived by the University of Sussex in time to recruit day-surveys for the 1981 wedding of Charles and Diana, and the project is ongoing. You can explore the archive here; they also have a wonderfully comprehensive bibliography. The webpage of the reincarnated Mass-Observation specifies that they are "currently only recruiting male writers aged 16-44 living in all regions of the UK except the South East and South West," but if you meet those criteria, you can enlist here.

The genesis of my article is unusually ancient. When I was in college, I found a copy of May the Twelfth (photographed above) in a used-book store and couldn't figure out what it was. Since it only cost $8.50 and happened to be signed by Margaret Mead (a fact the bookseller helpfully glossed, in case would-be purchasers couldn't read her handwriting), I bought it.

It wasn't until more than a decade later that I read May the Twelfth and looked into who and what Mass-Observation were, and then, when I noticed Hubble's book was coming out, suggested the idea to my editor.

The city of Bolton, which Mass-Observation referred to in print as "Worktown," to give it a modicum of privacy, seems to have embraced the M-O legacy. The Bolton Museums Art Gallery and Aquarium has made scores of Humphrey Spender's documentary photographs available in an online exhibition, Humphrey Spender's 'Worktown.' Here, for example, is the supposed ex-cannibal Tom Harrisson shaving himself, using a dish as a hand-mirror, in the tumbledown M-O office at 85 Davenport Street (the one that stank of fish and chips), and here are a few men drinking in a Bolton pub. It's hard to see the quality of Spender's photos from these online samples; for that, Deborah Frizzell's Humphrey Spender's Humanist Landscapes: Photo-Documents, 1932-1942 is well worth the $45 price tag.

The easiest way for an American to see Humphrey Jennings's films is by purchasing or renting Listen to Britain and Other Films (Image Entertainment, 2002), which is in the NTSC coding compatible with U.S. televisions. Unfortunately, Spare Time, the film I discuss in my article, isn't included and is rather hard to track down. (The Museum of Modern Art's film library arranged a screening for me, for which I'm incredibly grateful.) A few minutes from Spare Time appear in Rebecca Baron's How Little We Know of Our Neighbours (49 min., 2005), a meditative documentary on Mass-Observation and on the nature of surveillance in society today, so try to catch it if screens at a festival near you. Baron's film also features interviews she conducted with Humphrey Spender not long before he died---a real treat. (If you're British---or rather, if your VCR and television are---you could see Spare Time on the British Film Institute's video Britain in the Thirties and Jennings's other films on The Humphrey Jennings Collection (Film First, 2005), both encoded in PAL. (Note: I haven't viewed these last two titles, since my television is confiningly American.) Finally, the Criterion Collection has included Listen to Britain, one of Jennings's wartime documentaries, on its DVD of A Canterbury Tale.

You can hear a Wurlitzer band organ playing an early 1939 performance of "The Lambeth Walk" from a paper roll on Gary Watkins and Matthew Caulfield's online catalog of Wurlitzer music rolls. You can hear the American singer Eddie Cantor's version here. The chorus in Spare Time who sing Handel while they help their pianist take off her coat are singing "Ombra mai fù." I can't seem to find a free 1930s version this morning, though Enrico Caruso does sing it; here, instead, is a cello-and-piano arrangement from 1908, taken from the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project.

Stepping inside a Walker Evans photo

After reading Michael Kimmelman's great New York Times article on "Carbon and Silver," the new Walker Evans exhibit at the UBS Art Gallery here in New York, I had to visit, and we went on Friday afternoon. As the curators, John Hill and Sven Martson, explain, Evans shot most of his famous Depression-era photographs on large-format cameras. Most of his negatives were 8 by 10 inches, so large that he usually made contact prints (i.e., simply laid the negative on a piece of photographic paper of equal size, and exposed it). Each of his photographs is therefore incredibly dense with visual information, a veritable dwarf star of information if compared to an 8 by 10" enlargement of an image recorded on today's standard, a 35mm negative.

In his article, Kimmelman seems concerned to calm purists who might think Hill and Martson are tampering with masterpieces. Although I don't think of myself as a purist, when we started the exhibit, I did feel skeptical at first, perhaps because I was put off by a horizontal striation in some images, which seemed to be an artifact either of a grain in the paper they were using or a quirk of their laser printer. But then I began to notice details I'd never seen in the photos before---an anorexic kitten half hidden behind the leg of a table, a tiny oval of spilt coffee on a wood floor, two women talking on the stoop of a building in the far distance. Hill and Martson blow up some of Evans's photos to gargantuan sizes, and remarkably enough, they hold up. If anything, under the new scrutiny possible, they're even more impressive. In one image, it was now possible to pinpoint where in a tree's branches the wind happened to be blowing.

I couldn't let go. Many of the negatives are held by the Library of Congress, and the images themselves are public property, since Evans shot them for the federal government. The exhibition notes revealed that the Library of Congress also did much of the digitization for this show. When I got home, I checked in the LOC's Prints and Photographs catalog (online), searching for 'Walker Evans' under the 'Creators and Other Associated Names' rubric, and by paging through the several hundred images there, found several scans up to 28 megabytes in size. They're rather large files, so the images are awfully fine-grained. I converted a few into JPEGs, uploaded them into Kodak's online photo printing service, and ordered a print of one at 20 by 30 inches, the largest size that Kodak's online service offers. It hasn't arrived yet, so I can't say how it compares to those in the UBS Art Gallery. I don't expect it to rival them, seeing as how Hill and Martson are expert printmakers who knew Evans and worked with him personally. But I thought I might get something pretty interesting for under $30.

Then, still a little obsessive, I took five images I liked, and uploaded not only them, but also a blow-up of a section of each image at a higher magnification, and blow-ups of two other spots in each image at a still higher one. I put them together in a sequence, which you should be able to view as a slideshow by clicking here. The intention is that you see each image, and then feel as if, in the next three enlargements, you're stepping into it. (My goal was to make a little flip book for myself, using the 'Create a Mini-Book' option, which I did. Again, I can't tell yet how it came out, but if you want one, I think anyone can order it from the slideshow page, if you sign in and fork over to Kodak $10 plus $3 shipping.)

The five images I chose: "Street in Bethlehem, Penna.," Nov. 1935 (LC-USF342- 001166-A). "Washstand in the dog run and kitchen of Floyd Burroughs' cabin, Hale County, Alabama," 1935 or 1936 (LC-USF342- 008133). "Ruins of supposed Spanish mission, tabby construction, St. Marys, Georgia," March 1936 (LC-USZ62-116591). "General store interior, Moundville, Alabama," summer 1936 (LC-USF342- 008164-A). "Negro barber shop, Atlanta, Georgia," March 1936 (LC-USF342- 008100-A).

The image at the head of this post is an enlargement of a detail in "Washstand in the dog run and kitchen of Floyd Burroughs' cabin, Hale County, Alabama."