nextian | Entries tagged with dork: historical

(

homestuck1000: it still exists. It hasn't stopped existing or anything.)

In my continuing Escape From Thesis Island, I'm reading Mark Twain's autobiography. I can neither recall if I've mentioned this before, nor care to go back and find out. I am constantly amused by the fact that when I'm looking up a quote from it -- usually to copy-paste into Facebook so I don't have to type it up myself -- I encounter blog post after blog post about the exact same section I would like to discuss. Today it's "the Morris incident," and you can read a great little summary of it here. Essentially, Roosevelt's secretary, Barnes, literally had a woman thrown out of the White House and dragged through the streets to the police station, where he then cheerfully had her charged with insanity.

( blogging and teddy roosevelt )

I'm not sure this is the actual purpose of International Women's Day, but considering I started it out with reblogging a Rugrats/Gold Digger/99 Problems mashup, I think I will take this baby step. XD

Name a female character I have ever written (or one I haven't and you think I can!) and I will attempt a drabble about her.

If you give me a keyword, lyric, or picture I will use it if it sparks something for me.

Also, Today In Research: Henry B. Hawes, you're a nice guy and all, but in 1933, you probably should not have told the Philippines that "no it's totally cool Japan will have its hands full for generations with Manchuria."

I just emailed in a paper that I hate more than any other paper I've turned in. This is not because it's rhetoric-heavy and done in a rush -- I have done papers under worse conditions, and for reasons less solid than "grief combined with actual responsibilities" -- but because the book I'm writing on is historically bankrupt. It's by Richard Pipes, and it's called The Degaev Affair. It's extremely well-written, it makes an interesting point about the origins of terrorism, and every fucking word of it is source hash.

( ONE HOUR OF SLEEP RAGE )

(This entire post was won by

cmattg in the

help_pakistan auction. His prompt is spoilery for the Doctor Who finale so it's under the following spoiler text: 1800+ years, Rory must have inspired at least one artist, yes? I would therefore like THE BALLAD OF THE LONE CENTURION in your best faux-folk style. It can be slightly tongue-in-cheek but mostly serious, please. My post itself is probably only spoilery if you've seen episode twelve and not thirteen, but caveat lector.)

So as a lot of you know, I am a history major suffering through the first throes of thesis work, and last year I was very nearly pulled into a vortex of medievalism by a teacher who was really into the Ottoman Empire. He's teaching at Haverford now and he put up his booklist for the classes he's doing this fall, and on a whim I JSTORed the articles, and it kind of turns out that folk music is hilarious as a historical document because it comes from all over the place and all over the time.

For some reason I got really enamored of this one, even though it doesn't sound like anything really from the Childe ballads and is probably a contemporary invention. It might be because it baffles the crap out of the musicologists.

( follow the cut for music )

Just got back from Boston. Sorry for all those who I didn't meet up with (that would be everyone); I spent three days happily marinating in

anekdot's city hijinks, walking my legs off, watching a truly surprising amount of Rurouni Kenshin, discovering I like tuna rolls, and looping Optimist vs. The Silent Alarm in my head.

I know at least

littledust and

roga will be in Boston over the course of the next few days, and so to them, and also to anyone else, but most especially to anyone not born in this fine institution of a country, can I highly recommend the "Immigrant Experience" or whatever it's called movie-thing at the top of the Prudential Tower? Because there is just nothing like that video to explain Yankee society. It featured the actual quote "Unfortunately, Boston in its early days was subject to dangerous outside influences ... like slavery." It also featured a hilarious jump cut from the Sacco and Vanzetti trial to the future where everything is fine now. Neither of which were a patch on the Irish immigrants, represented by the Kennedy family, featuring the, again, completely actual dialogue:

BRIDGET KENNEDY: Patrick, it seems like a day hasn't passed since ye came to this country that hasn't been spent in sweat and toil.
PATRICK KENNEDY: Bridget, seems that way because 'tis.

They called him Patrick Kennedy Cooper. A very lazy googling has indicated to me that his name might have been just, you know ... Patrick Kennedy, comma, a cooper.

The other thing I'd highly recommend was the Mapparium in the Christian Science center. To give full credit to the Christian Science center, that was more quotations about social justice than I've heard in one place since my confirmation. But the general gist of the Mapparium tour thing is that they light up the various countries on their glass globe while talking about the magical things that have changed. Apparently one of the things that has changed is that the world is now 75% democratic. Countries that lit up for this: China. Countries that did not light up for this: France.

I also bought this book "Bohemian Brigade: Civil War Newsmen in Action". Sares made me promise that I would send it back to her with markings on all the pages I wanted her to read. So far the book is about 90% little scraps of my receipt, 10% pages I felt guilty about not putting a little scrap of receipt on. Aside from the actual interesting historical insights and the hilarious fights with Sherman, I am now playing a game with this book called "guess how charming and funny Lincoln will be before he shows up next." I always lose.

Hmm I can't find original sources for my post about tin dildoes and it's against my religion to make a history post without going to the original text. The gist, however: There was this dude named William Chaloner. For his full biography, you should read Newton and the Counterfeiter, by Thomas Levenson, but basically his first job was hawking "Tin Watches, with D-does &c in 'em." Because, apparently, during the 1600s, there was just a lot of adventurous sex going on. Levenson quotes a story in which a dude goes into a brothel and, overwhelmed, orders "some of your plain fucking, if you please." So if you want to learn how to make fake coins, you start with fake penises. I find this inexpressibly delightful.

The whole book is great -- my favorite part, predictably enough, is the Newgate discussion. England's criminal system pre-Robert-Peel but post-Oliver-Cromwell was vicious and unsystematic. You bribed the guards to get basic courtesies in prison; there was no police system or real method of reporting crime, so felons wandered in and out of prison whenever someone wanted to grab them to testify or whenever they could pay enough to get out; torture was de rigeur and confessions were perfectly admissible; it is a prison system that is actually worse than California's now. I could cry from pleasure that we haven't hit bottom yet. Newton in particular is just -- imagine if Gene Hunt from Life on Mars was also one of the greatest physicists to ever live and you'd basically have a sense of his method of policing! There's a long section where Levenson, who is conscientious, tries to explain why Newton would have done and enjoyed quite as much torturing as he seems to have, and it's a marvel of mental gymnastics.

I also (FINALLY) read Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel, which is the first book by Mantel I've ever finished, which is completely criminal. Ji has full license to hate me. Anyway, it's a sympathetic portrayal of [Thomas] Cromwell and it's just wonderful, on every level. She's writing a sequel, apparently, and I look forward to it. It's funny because her prose style is totally different from Guy Gavriel Kay, but he's the only other person I know who writes historical fiction with this constant sense of elegy.

I didn't like Cromwell before reading it, and now I don't like More. It's a tricky proposition to like both of them at the same time -- cf Man of All Seasons -- and I'd like to read a book that tries it. Curiously I have never read a book in which Henry VIII is portrayed any differently than he is in this, in Shakespeare's Henry VIII, in Man for All Seasons, in the freaking Tudors, all of it. He's always a capricious, savvy, emotional manchild with a talent for lying who the author is kind of like "you are a magnificient something, but I'm not sure you're cool enough to be a bastard." I'm not calling for a revisionist history of Henry VIII here but I do think it's interesting. Maybe there's a different treatment in The Other Boleyn Girl or something, I will never know.

Thanks to everyone who looked this over. I have the best flist.

naraht linked to this post by

xtricks, called "The thing no one talks about..." It's about romanticizing the military, and the current culture of dehumanization in training of American soldiers and how that interacts with our [whose?] consumption of violent media that heroizes the violent.

This critique has already been made (by

hradzka and

msilverstar among others), but I want to make it again. I apologize in advance if this sounds like I'm attacking

xtricks, because I'm not intending to, I think she has a good point and she's addressed this in comments a couple places, but I think this is worth drawing out.

( heroism and war, probably triggery )

I'll drop a source list for a few of these in comments, but mostly these are just the wars I've taken history classes on. Please let me know if you have specific questions about claims you'd like me to moderate or source.

(What does this have to say for my love of and interest in violent stories about violent people? Um ... not a lot. For that, I refer you back to

xtricks and

monstrous_regiment. And like every philosophicoliterary conversation since someone wrote down the Iliad.)

I love my flist. ♥

Here are some other things I love:

*

sotto_voice wrote me fic for her Fake TV Show Extra Credit, and it is Akane/Riley, and I want it bound in pink. Something jiggled and then clicked in the general vicinity of the lock, and then the door swung open and Riley tumbled out across Akane's knees. "I'm generally a level-headed person," Riley said without skipping a beat, sprawled half across the floor and half across her smaller roommate. "I'm not all grr, arg on the inside. You, like," she wagged a helpless hand, "Hulk-ify me."

* Where-no-woman is having a minificathon! 300 words sometime in March, based on some schweet prompts.

* As you should know, I love Drunk History (and things in a similar vein: Mitchell & Webb: Are We The Baddies?, Mitchell & Webb: Explorers, Lazy Thomas Jefferson, and of course

newredshoes's Delicious.) Is -- is it wrong that this preview of the next Drunk History does more to convince me that Don Cheadle can totes play Rhodey than anything else? That's wrong, right?

This is exactly how I feel about cooking. In related news, yesterday morning I lost a life because I forgot to double-jump and my bathrobe caught fire. You can make up your own mind what parts of that story I made up.

And then

bookelfe prompted me to write a revolution, so I spent hours doing research about al-Andalus! Reconquista: What If Andalusia Said "Fuck You" To Isabella and Ferdinand? And Mika Played An Emo Muslim Sultan? And Cote de Pablo Had To Speak Hebrew Again? (or an even more accurate subtitle, Reconquista: Emma Works Out Her Issues With Los Reyes Catolicos.)

I know with advertising like that it is hard to resist!

Today started off terribly, when at first I couldn't get myself out of bed and shaven and clean for my grandmother's headstone placement, and then I got to the airport and drove around for half an hour, increasingly worried about my mother who wasn't picking up, and then ... I called home and heard her voice. Turns out the placement is tomorrow, and I continue to be perhaps not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

But then I drove home and ate my homemade ice cream, and spent hours on this blog Letters of Note. It's what it says on the tin; guy compiles letters that are notable because interesting, or sad, or funny, or famous, or scary. It made me want to start leaving documentary evidence again. I'd only read, I think, three before -- the Jack the Ripper letter, the Disney-to-women-illustrators letter, and this letter from Groucho Marx to T. S. Eliot. The rest of the correspondence is similarly charming, trust me, and you can find it in The Essential Groucho. "So, when I call you Tom, this means you are a mixture of a heavyweight prizefighter, a male alley cat and the third President of the United States."

Then there are letters like the one where a kid sends some helpful advice to the Woomera Rocket Range, or the several in which young women complain about how the government is keeping Elvis and the Beatles down (they all end with "if you don't do [x] I will just die." A lot of people write back. Kennedy is apparently hilarious. Stephen Fry is shockingly wonderful even for Stephen Fry. Dr. Seuss encourages a kid to keep drawing ... and the kid becomes a comics artist. Isaac Asimov is a gentleman. Mark Twain rips a patent medicine peddler a new one; Mark Twain disses the telephone.

And then there's this one.

( that photomosaic meme under the cut )

From Facebook:

nextian has just found a reformation-era How Come? book. "Wherefore is it, that old folkes sneeze with more pain then young?" "How comes it that Eunuches are so extreamly moyst?" "Wherefore is it, that a dog of all other Animals, remaines lynde or fastned within to the female after coupling, without being able easily to unloose, and undoe?"

It's true, you guys. I HAVE. It is the greatest thing I have ever seen. The best part is not the (AMAZING) questions I have posted above, but the questions that I remember from my first How Come book:

Q. FRom whence comes it that pictures to the life seeme to regard us, upon what side soever wee goe?
A. This same proceeds from our mooving, in as much as wee take no regard to that, but only to the picture; neverthelesse perceiving that there is a mooving in one action; wee attribute through errour of the sences, to the aspect of the picture, neither more nor lesse, then doe those which are sayling within a boate, they thinke it is not the boat which goes and remooves, but the shore of the water, the houses, and the trees, which they looke upon.

PS the answers to the first three questions are:

1. Because they have the conduits of their nose more shut, and more straight, and as it were taken and clos'd together.
2. In that their seed which they cannot thrust out, or consume by naturall heat, so well as perfect men, spreads through all their
bodies, and are moyst excessively, by which they have their cheeks blowne up, and their Paps great even as women.
3. Alexander Aphrodeisea saith, the cause is, that the bitch in her native waies is very strait, and the verge of the dog,
being swolne within, by the Ebullition of the spirits, he is hardly able to withdraw it after the coupling.

I seriously have to share this with the world. I'm dropping the enormous index in a comment. Pick a card!

I've been doing my China/Japan homework (yes you totally read that right, only it's the 1800s so it's a fairly abusive relationship; I keep being tempted to rec this in the CoC meme for "best friends who have been torn apart by their changing needs") and I keep being reminded how much I love history, specifically world history, specifically culturally comparative history, because you get amazingness like this:

( image-heavy under the cut )

So one of you has read a book about Dowager Empress Cixi, I am sure! Who is it and who can recommend it to me?

I am having the disconcerting reaction of watching QI and having to bite my lip to stop myself from shouting out all the answers, because they did an episode that starts with the Civil War. Stephen Fry's just asked "what does the S stand for?"

pushingmetaphor, HE'S TALKING TO YOU THROUGH THE TELEVISION SCREEN. He also told the wonderful story about the Union general whose last words were "What are you dodging for? They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist--"

This weekend's been very fun; our big CD release concert was on Friday (now is the time to mention for the first but I promise not the last time that if you want to buy an a cappella CD that is the shiz-nit, send me an email, they're only twelve dollars and we're very very poor) and yesterday I wandered from party to party all day, with a brief break to see Michael Clayton. ( Spoilers and long thoughts under the cut. )

Now back to a distinct lack of doing my work.

Spring break was pretty epic, even if it didn't include hundreds of girls with neither shirts nor inhibitions, or in fact much sunlight. I toured the East Coast -- 'toured' here being my own delicate euphemism for 'pathetically wandered, going from dorm floor to dorm floor like an orphan, begging parents for scraps of food and their triple-A numbers for discounts' -- to see

pushingmetaphor,

sandanzuki,

ariastar,

polaris_starz,

evil_overlords. This would be their chronological order and not the order of their importance, of course, although Sares gets the Congressional Medal of Putting Up With My Shit, I think, because Sares was the only one who had to pick me up from Newark. Or, in fact, pick me up at all.

Anyway, as much as I'd love to discourse on New Jersey, Northampton, and MIT, I don't think y'all came here for an architectural discussion, nor are you likely to be particularly interested in my rising allergy to even the mention of the word suburb. (Seriously, who invented those things? The fifties are over. Move away.) So I'll keep this ~~more or less brief~~ so, so long, do I have verbal diarrhea or something?, and limited to things of pressing importance, primarily ( GETTYSBURG THE MOVIE. )

So that was Sares' house. From there I went over to Smith to see Aria, who also wins little prizes for hosting me even though she spent the vast majority of the time on a dead sprint to the bathroom with the stomach bug that wouldn't die. Massachusetts, while beautiful in its own right, is mostly fun for me because I am a very bad dilettante baseball fan but I do get enthusiasm about the Sport and America's Pasttime and all that jazz, and apparently being in MA in the spring is kind of like being inside the opening chords of the 1812 overture. (No, there were no cannons as I left.)

But, seriously, poor Aria. I attacked her with so many vids by the author of the fantastic Origin Stories,

giandujakiss. Her James Bond vid "Der Kommissar" is pretty much the only thing that could have made watching Licence to Kill any better -- which is my segue into the next section: did you know that Simon Pegg & Edgar Wright call Timothy Dalton "the Daltinator?" No? Then you ought to watch the ( Hot Fuzz Director's Commentary. )

And because there's no good place in this post for this, I'm just going to put this out there: funniest thing in my life right now. I met the Scottish girl and she is a lovely person who usually you can, in fact, understand.

There are so many other things I wanted to talk about but that's all I can fit into the text box, so. Thank you to all of my wonderful hosts, and to

newredshoes, whose DVD is totally on its way back to Chicago right now in the mail I'm so sorry don't kill me.

Current Mood: amused

[slightly edited to make it more polite. i am not so good with the saying what i mean in a nonterrifying fashion.]

For my Yuletide writer, whoever you may be, you poor, sad bastard.

What turns me on: Love. The second person done right. Banter. Metaphors that have never been used before in the human language because they are horrible, but totally spot on for the narrator in question. Real dialogue. (See: David Mamet.) Monologues. Pauses. The em-dash (--). The Oxford comma. La futile de vie. Bank robberies. A sense of personal history. The present tense. Existentialism with a sense of humor.

What turns me off: Honestly, as long as you spell tihngs rite, punctuate! correctly, and get a beta, I will love you no matter what. There are only two things that specifically gross me out, and they are (white-texted because they are SO GROSS) leeches or maggots, and I assume that you are too cool to make jokes about them in your Civil War fic/going "why would there be [redacted] in Jekyll fics anyway?"/going "I don't remember any bugs in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang."

If you only have one thing, make it: The aforementioned sense of humor.

Spoilers for EVERYTHING under the cuts. The only one of these that actually has any sort of bindingosity to it is the Civil War one, in which, if you're going to write Grant and Sherman like they crawled out of an Emma Darcy book, I will cry. The rest are just very long, very rambly guidelines.

( The March )

( Kiss Kiss Bang Bang )

( Grant/Sherman, Grant&Sherman, Grant!!!!Sherman )

( Jekyll )

Thank you everso for doing this, and of course obviously I will be thrilled with whatever you write. Yuletide looks terrifying and hard and long and I hope I've made it slightly easier, or at least not psychopathically harder, to start writing.

Current Mood: five lines of this essay exist
Current Music: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang theme

Some thoughts that came before my Calculus homework started driving me into the sodding ground. This may qualify as an essay, if you like your essays fitting certain qualifications, such as "they suck." (Also, I am not a mathematician in any way, even though I would like to be; take that as your caveat.)

( on mathematics as art )

Current Mood: awake

Oscar Wilde's tomb is covered in lipstick kisses in a variety of colors and hastily scrawled notes. Despite the message to please, please refrain from defacing this national historic monument, people continue to add their note of thanks and slobber all over it. I sat by it for a few minutes, enjoying the ambience and the puppy-dog expressions on the faces of the gay men visiting it, and then I added my kiss and scrawl to the rest and left feeling touched by genius.

The poor bastard. It isn't even a little aesthetic.

Current Mood: happy
Current Location: in an internet cafe outside pere lachaise

Because I read Beth's cryptic classics notes (even if I never comment, as I never comment anywhere): The following is a blend of cryptic annotations left in my Moleskine today and my observations about the University of Chicago classes that I sat in on. If you are wondering why I am totally going to the school where fun goes to die, unless I suddenly change my mind and go to Bryn Mawr, click the cut! If not, that is also okay.

( our rifles blaze away )

In sum: I understand linear algebra, but I am not sane enough to understand morality. Also, I love this school, even if everyone here is serious and intent, and I am so not serious and intent. Er. But. I can pretend, right?

More from the archival footage. This is from a history test. In eighth grade. Weirdly enough, the teacher did not mark me down for it.

... Even the Intolerable Acts were deplorable but understandable. After all, Britain's colony -- its NICE, SHINY COLONY -- was being 'corrupted' from within. Britain got possessive. No patriot was going to take its precious colony away! Britain would show America who was boss! Britain did this again and again, and curiously it didn't work very well, but it certainly was an expected act in retrospect. Indeed, both Britain and America acted according to national needs and character. The war became unavoidable as soon as British debt appeared.

..."it certainly was an expected act in retrospect"?!

What the hell does that mean?

Current Music: the sound of my facepalming

From

thistlerose: This is how it works: Comment on this entry and I will give you a letter. Write ten words beginning with that letter in your journal, including an explanation what the word means to you and why, and than pass out letters to those who want to play along.

( P is for ... )

Current Mood: pernicious
Current Music: Picaresque!

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a++ would smuggle into space again

the gallery of paisley and regret

Entries tagged with dork: historical

can anybody find me

to catch my own damn fish

here i am, baby

a sorry box and a hillside

it's never been so clear it's the end of our career

yeah yeah, i think i heard you

look at all we've won with the saber and the gun

what kind of hat? a captain's hat

the king and the queen of light rule with unbendable might

i will be close behind

than those which have all their peeces

if they croon it too right-wing we'll make them cry

you should've somehow realized what we've got to do

away down south in the land of traitors

if you take a life, do you know what you'll give?

mandelbrot set! you're a rorschach test on fire.

religion? the fashionable substitute for belief.

(no subject)

omgz aren't i witteh

p is for ... uh ... pastry.

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September 2012

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