elegant variation and the stratemeyer syndicate

Back when most children’s literature was either solely educational or moralising, one publisher and producer saw them for the potential entertainment market they’ve become. In the early 1900s, Edward Stratemeyer got the notion to package or bundle books into serials and employed a winning formula to create many classic mystery and adventure books, appealing to different demographics: The Rover Boys, Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, The Dana Girls, The Bobbsey Twins, etc.
The syndicate, as it became known as Stratemeyer after establishing the characters and the tone only wrote outlines for the continuing perils and a pool of secretaries and editors limned in the plot and the authors with the by-lines were ghost-writers and surrogates of Stratemeyer’s many nom de plume or house-names, produced over thirteen hundred books and sold over the years more than half a billion copies. Despite the consistency and quality-control Statemeyer exercised over his publications, sometimes individual personalities and quirks did shine through for these anonymous copy-writers. One such affectation was the purple-prose of one of the authors of the Tom Swift series. Seemingly unable to allow direct speech to just pass with a “said” and bracketed with quotation marks—he or she developed a penchant to insert colourful adverbs to punctuate and re-enforce the dialogue, often resulting in a pun. “Quick—let’s get out of here!” Tom exclaimed swiftly was probably where these off the garden path sentences originated. Concocting Tom Swifties became a past-time and some turned out quite elaborate—funny or painfully so. “Hurry up and get back to the boat,” Tom ordered sternly. “I forgot to bring flowers,” Tom mourned lackadaisically. “Be careful with that chain-saw,” warned Tom off-handedly. I think we don’t need further examples but would love to hear yours.

suburbia or go to bed old man

With the exception of our feisty Pope and a few others only paraded-out on special occasions with due pomp, I find myself groaning at the appearance of news anchors and their avatars, those manipulative boorish cosmopolitan figures that are the subjects of their reporting who seem more and more shameless about their intent to run us all into the ground.
 Lately, I find it an off-putting challenge to organise my thoughts around anything contemporary without feeling weary and a bit vain over it. The tragedy of the eleventh arrondissement of Paris over a caricature, the near-miss in Oberursel, a suburb of Frankfurt, when police laudably foiled a potential terror-attack, and the latest shooting in a satellite of Dallas, I think however, triangulate tensions with a peculiar and rending precision. The demographic milieux, attitudes and relations could not be more different, contesting a mind-set shared among the perpetrators.
The decision of Garland, Texas to host a draw the Prophet competition is a tacky and misguided memorial at best, which ostensibly provoked retaliation (never justifiable), but looking more closely into the sponsors and the community suggest something far darker and more devious than the tactless message of unwelcome. Fighting the droning fatigue of these daily petitions of terrorism is something to take to task as well.

honest abe

It’s a fact: without the senatorial votes (before the odder system of the electoral college was rigged) of the applicant organised territory of Nevada, who were Republican and staunchly Unionist, Abraham Lincoln would not have secured a second term as president of a divided nation at war.
The fledging state had satisfied all other requirements, except that in order to formalise ascension, Carson City had to send an plenipotentiary to the national capital, a journey that could not be undertaken in time to met statutory deadlines prior to the election. Thus, Orion Clemens, one and only secretary of the territory and brother of one who went by the nom de plume Mark Twain, negotiated what was taken to be an acceptable alternative at the time, though now the use of the auto-pen raises controversy, in the form of the new-fangled telegraph. At considerable effort and expense, the Nevada constitution and articles of confederation was sent painstakingly by Morse code via the wires. One can learn more about this crucial improvisation and other bits of profound and challenging curiosities on the brilliant Futility Closet, which treats all trivia with appropriate and due awe. This seems to me to be quite a story and at the very least would have deserved the treatment of a Star Trek episode or two, like when Mister Data meets Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg) and Mark Twain in old New Orleans and preserves the time-line as we know it. At minimum, it strikes me as one of those epic cross-over episodes with special guest-stars, like the Harlem Globe-Trotters on Gilligan’s Island. Learning of such an unlikely chain of events (plus thinking about how any detail might have been out of place) makes me wonder if there are not some journeymen-embellishers correcting history. Let’s do celebrate this tweaking. What event do you think is too well orchestrated to be left up to contemporary-hands?

futurama

This aesthetic and consumer culture known as populuxe, distinct from Mid-Century Modern, was an exclusively American phenomenon, typified by the look of a retrograde future which brought technology and optimism sharply in focus. To discover more examples, check out the brilliant web-presence of curator James Vaughn (X-Ray Delta One) for an endless gallery of architectural models, industrial landscapes, movie posters, glamourous advertising and other ephemera of the age.

five-by-five

vegetative states: curious and bizarre world of intelligent flora

ensemble cast: famed photographer Annie Lebovitz shoots Star Wars - Pew, pew!

paste-bin: an homage to the wastepaper basket and to the office of yesteryear

shrinks and spooks: an expose of the CIA’s white-elephant specialists

flotsam and jetsam: monumental artist Christo to bridge Lago d’Iseo

toponym or stocklinch ottersay

Thirty years ago, Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams collaborated with linguist and comedian John Lloyd to fill some glaring lexical gaps with their dictionary The Meaning of Liff (produced concurrently with Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life but more than welcomed by the troupe)—liff being defined as a common object or experience for which no word yet exists.

One of my favourite and immediately relevant examples is that of plymouthing—etymology not needed, which is the pang of realisation that one is relating an amusing anecdote back to the source one got it from originally. I think that describes pretty well much of the truck that passes on the internet. A lot of the words are derived from place-names but many are purely inspired. Pulverbatch, for instance, refers to the self-deprecating, humble-brag list of menial, mindless jobs a celebrity held before being discovered, and the stocklinch ottersay above is from the second-edition of spare liffs and refers to the amazement one experiences on encountering a completely new and unknown word twice in one day.  What words would you come up with?

shangri-la or a chicken in every pot

I was listening to a pretty interesting, if not rather sedate but being shrill does not presuppose being impassioned, podcast from BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time segment on the notion of Utopia. Many shun such rarefied discussions as purely academic and formal and human pursuits are not the staid stuff of quiet questioning—just something that we’ve named though cannot agree on the definition, however this panel show was particularly interesting as the episode had originally been broadcast in 1999, on the cusps of the new century and classic thought was indeed buffeted with a lot of future-forward and progressive predictions.
The term utopia is a bit of a puzzle in itself, sounding like έΰ-τοποζ (good-place) but introduced to describe a society that was nowhere (ου)—I don’t think that this was intended as some cynical pun but rather an admonition not to confuse the merely good with the best or the ideal. Even if it did point us to no place, nonpareil, it still gave us visions to aspire to—which were of course constrained by writers’ imaginations and the context that they were writing in. There was much fear and suspicion over perfect societies and technology’s role in creating them—as there is today, thinkers having witnessed the ways regimes can pervert mechanisation and eugenics to forward their own agenda and ideal. In speculative fiction and reality, many of these efforts have backfired in dystopia ways. Having every need and want fulfilled and a surplus leisure seems appealing, but by many past reckons, we are living in an era of great ease and security, the promise of realized of some authors’ reveries—or at least progressing there, yet we seem more and more dissatisfied.  Eventually the talk came around to categorizing futurists into two camps as to how this revelation might be achieved: the husbanders and the technocrats.
Although it was not so long ago and not a retro-future sort of prophesy (which lend us a world far better than what we’ve achieved), it was very interesting how the two groups, geneticists and artificial-intelligence proponents argued their cases. While we do speak in terms of the singularity today, a relinquishing control to a thinking-machine and trust it to keep human welfare as its pet-project and maybe engineer that ideal society, rather than slum around with the details, it is interesting how the panel framed and previsioned their creature-comforts. One side argued that genetic understanding would produce a class of beings where the fittest were not only the most competent but also the kindest and most generous (since the best and most efficient way to promote the individual is not only to fool one’s competition but moreover to fool oneself into being altruistic). The technologists, on the other hand, argued that surrendering day-to-day tasks to a network of computers that monitored our needs and health would greatly increase our efficiency in all things and eventually put us among the stars. Though there are some contemporary persuasive voices urging mankind to become space-faring whom might have become better know, it’s interesting that the proponent that they knew was the physicist Freeman Dyson, who believed that humans should hollow out comets and travel, sheltered, across the Universe like the Little Prince. What do you think? Has AI and our inter-connectedness made utopia and related concepts rather moot points?