history

Terms of art, 1847

Footnotes in advance:

1. “Now exhibiting” means “now being exhibited.” It’s a progressive passive construction that now survives only in a few expressions such as “Now showing” (= “Now being shown”) and “What’s cooking?” (= “What’s being cooked?”).

2. The epigraph from Hamlet’s “Speak the speech, I pray you” had extra force in 1847, when its readers would have known that a daguerreotype’s surface is reflective, like a mirror.

3. “Fleeting and happy expressions” means “fleeting and lucky expressions.”

4. “Saloon” means “studio,” “likely” means “capable,” and “sold for no fault” means “money-back guarantee.”

On the other hand, “Seamstresses for sale” has kept on meaning “Seamstresses for sale,” not only as of 1847 but at present as well. The Civil War dismantled the text machines that had fabricated the phrase, and so “Seamstresses for sale” is no longer a tissue of truths. But its bared minimum, “We have for sale GIRLS,” remains on the loom. It still means what it says.

Richmond [Virginia] Times-Dispatch, Tuesday, March 23, 1847, page 3

History in an era before irony. Art in an era before color.

After the World Series of 1913, the New York Giants and the Chicago White Sox boarded the first of many trains and headed west for a series of exhibition games. After they arrived in California, they kept right on rounding bases through Asia, Australia, and then Europe. In England they played a game before King George V, then boarded one last steamer for their return to the United States. It arrived in New York on the morning of March 6, 1914.

It docked two hours late, and the weather over the harbor was rainy and snowy. Nevertheless, a riverboat brought hundreds of people alongside, cheering. A photographer from the Bain News Service recorded their approach, and after that somebody scratched three words of explanation into the silent negative that survived the event. Using a photo-editing program, I’ve erased them from this print. Trying to read them on their own single term is pointless now, because “now” is the period of time extending almost all the way back to the instant of shutter release. To read the word “now” requires a supplementary history archived far from the site of anything instant.

The words that no longer mean are “Ship with fans.” Other attempts at inscribing meaning might have been made, of course: words such as “prow,” “angular,” and perhaps “geometric” or “abstract.” Two more would have to have been “white” and “black.” Think of a Mondrian shape without color. As of March 6, 1914, however, the time for such a thing hadn’t yet arrived.

But one more incision scratched into the negative cut all the way through to the time beyond 1914. Referring across a few more inches of silver halide emulsion to the word “ship,” it gave it a name bearing the colors of a future. In 1914 “ship” in plain black and white was all it needed to be. For the purposes of a news service’s lexicon in 1914, the ship was only a mode of baseball delivery. The second scratching gave “Ship” a proper name, but as of 1914 that amounted only to journalism’s who-what-where practice at its automated busywork. The name itself remained insignificant.

But in 1915 it suddenly began signifying on its own. Suddenly the ship sank below the visible surface of things; suddenly the letters on its bow and stern became unreadable; suddenly, then, they were transformed from a string of morphemes painted on metal to a meaning capable of existing anywhere. Now that they are gone into history, the metal letters are history.  Their historiography took only a few minutes to accomplish, and in its final form it is only one synecdochic word long.

Say the synecdoche. In memory, as memory, say Lusitania. Like Guernica, it will be one of the words in which some artists of the twentieth century defined a mortal passage out of time.

Sources:

Tom Clavin, “The Inside Story of Baseball’s Grand World Tour of 1914.” Smithsonian Magazine, March 21, 2014. 

“Giants Get Rousing Welcome Home.” New York Times, March 7, 1914, page 12.

[“LUSITANIA, 1907-1914 . . .”] George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002721377/

Twinning and special

In 1925 the two big volumes of Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy were published nineteen years after the occurrence of the one little non-fiction on which they were based: a small-town murder, followed by the murderer’s apprehension, trial, and execution. Bit by bit during the nineteen years, Dreiser laboriously traced the historiographic relationship between himself and those data. For the 1948 World Publishing Company edition of his final transcript, H. L. Mencken explained:


“It really happened”: italicizing Dreiser’s words as if they were foreign, Mencken distanced them from his own. He seemed to assume that he himself wrote under the control of a literary norm, whereas Dreiser’s discipline was something like an autobiographical sociology.

But the source of the language that immersed Dreiser wasn’t entirely under Menckenian genre control. Look below, for instance, at this twinned pair of stories from the Detroit Free Press for Sunday, July 15, 1906. Together they were printed on the front page.


There below the fold they appear side by side: first an early text of the upstate New York drama of Chester Gillette; then, with no space whatever between, the text of a drama closer to Detroit. The Detroit text and only the Detroit text is tagged “(Special).” It also comes to us marked with a time term, “Eight years ago,” which points to the little did she know genre of dramatic irony. A mere six years after Chester’s boat capsized, the Titanic went down.

On a page, such a pairing of texts becomes one more text. Think of the infinitesimal between the liftoff of Ignatz’s brick (Zip) and its touchdown on Krazy’s head (Pow). Think of Ignatz and Krazy’s George Herriman as a geometer writing an equation that reveals that curve through time as one more thing: uniting the mouse, the brick, and the cat, their integrating idea.

Think of Herriman’s no longer read older contemporary Theodore Dreiser as almost another such artist, but this one the one who wrote thousands of slow words about a trajectory through time without being able to name it. Little did he know: its name was the infinitesimal Zip.

Cloud and rippling water nineteen six

That summer evening, women in white gowns went to a boat under a sky that didn’t seem to concern them. For the five years of my life since I first saw their image in that act, I haven’t understood. I’ve been trying to make the sky around them concern me, but I haven’t succeeded.

The women are present to us now only as a blemished, poorly processed image in an archive:

“Going to the night boat, Petoskey, Mich.,” 1906. Detroit Publishing Company Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016800038/.

Petoskey, their place of being in the image, is a tourist town near the northern end of Lake Michigan, and there exist plenty of other archives that can easily define the women’s tour term “night boat” by placing it in historical context — for example, in detail that can be increased almost as much as you’d like,
(1)
St. Joseph (Michigan) Daily Press, Monday, August 27, 1906, page 1

(2)
Grand Haven (Michigan) Tribune, Wednesday, June 27, 1906, page 4

(3)
Detail from “R. R. Station and Park, Petoskey, Mich.,” 1908. Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016814610/

But somehow the gowned women were also all of a piece with a cloud and a sun and some rippling water, and that plenum isn’t present except as an image.
Left behind with me in the visible, the first traces of the image seem no longer to be apparent. They are no longer detectable in the present tense that once was written “going.” Perhaps they never were detectable, and perhaps that’s why the gowned women seem not to have noticed, there under the setting sun, what they were undergoing. At any rate, it seems apparent to you now that some time ago the women in white and their particular sun were erased to dark.

Paleontology of the warm-blooded

A horse on a bridge. Men and women under the bridge. Telegraph wires weighed down by birds. A locomotive, steaming.

Their date is 1910. They all are warm to the touch — still and forever.

“[Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, Locomotive CBQ 2867],” 1910. Louis A. Marre Rail Transportation Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2024643247/. Edited for format and clarity.

Civilization considered as a huge machine

A moral is this aria from Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus:

How vain is man, who boasts in fight
The valor of gigantic might,
And dreams not that a hand unseen
Directs and guides this huge machine!

But the libretto directs that the aria’s performer be a coloratura tenor, not a man in coveralls with a dented oilcan and lungs full of coal smoke. The unseen hand and its score are a musical machinery, but the mustached body once was warm and tangible.

—

From “Group of Lackawanna freight engines,” between 1890 and 1901, Detroit Publishing Company Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016801376/. In 2020 I posted to this blog an earlier edit of the image (no longer shown) under the title “Man in City.” The city is Scranton, Pennsylvania, which between 1851 and 1960 was the headquarters of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad.

History of World War II: two data for the record

Between 1964 and 1969 at the Greenfield, Indiana, laboratories of Eli Lilly & Co., I worked with a man named Donald Richbourg who claimed to have been a member of the guard detail at the Nürnberg war crime trials. His reminiscences about his clients, as I recall, included these two items.

1. Ernst Kaltenbrunner was a big sumbitch.

2. And Julius Streicher used to wash his face in the toilet.

Power events on an island

Five months ago I published online a little Issuu book about what happened to the history of power in one place, Honolulu, and two times: the 1830s and the nineteen-teens. The first series of events displays Herman Melville plagiarizing the indignation of a German botanist about the tyrannical control of Hawaii’s New England missionaries. The second culminates in an almost successful attempt by German forces during World War I to blow up Honolulu harbor, followed by a near-lynching on a King Street trolleycar.

Force repeats itself. If you’d like a second chance to read how that worked out in Honolulu, your link is