the end — 12/21/12

All end titles from the Movie Title Stills Collection by Christian Annyas

Oh no! Its been an entire month since I last posted!
If we make it through today I promise to be more diligent.

Frankenstein and the elements

Frontispiece to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein

Lake Geneva by Corinne Vionnet

waning gibbous moon (from moonmooring).

 A team of astronomers investigated the light and phase of the moon that best matched Mary Shelley's recollections
of her time at Villa Diodati and the creation of Frankenstein

Rhone Glacier by Johann Heinrich Wuest (1741-1821).The Shelley-Byron party made excursions into the Swiss Alps and wrote of feeling overwhelmed by the extremity of the natural setting: the peaks, waterfalls, avalanches, and the unearthly glaciers. One glacier, Byron wrote, was “like a frozen hurricane.” Mary Shelley drew on her impressions to depict the arctic scenes in Frankenstein.

storm over Lake Geneva by Verleihnix

Eruption of Mt Vesuvius by Joseph Wright of Derby (extreme detail)

Giovanni Aldini galvanizing the freshly executed body of a criminal, 1803

The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind the blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day…

— Darkness, George Gordon, Lord Byron

You have exactly one more week only to visit with the Shelleys at the New York Public Library exhibit Shelley's Ghost. However, Percy, Mary and Frankenstein et al. have an afterlife in the new edition of Biblion, a website and free app by the NYPL. Biblion offers thematic features using “documents, images, films, audio, and essays” drawn from and about the Library's collections. The first Biblion was on the 1939 New York World's Fair; the Shelley and Frankenstein issue recently launched. One intriguing essay attempts to pinpoint a definitive date for Mary Shelley's creation of Frankenstein— by the phase of the moon.

A little background: in 1815 Mount Tambora, a volcano in the Dutch East Indies, erupted spectacularly. It was one of the largest volcanic events ever recorded— roughly four times the power of the more familiar Krakatoa explosion. Ash, sulphur dioxide and dust were ejected into the atmosphere by “violent convulsions” which lasted for about three months. Strange weather, lengthy periods of darkness and record-cold temperatures swept across Europe and North America. An extraordinary “red and yellow” snow fell in Terramo, Italy on December 31st. A scientist there predicted that the sun would be extinguished on July 18, 1816.

In June of 1816, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Mary's stepsister Claire, and Byron's physician, John Polidori, on a sojourn in Geneva, Switzerland, were spending their days indoors at the Diodati Villa. They were taking shelter from the cold, hammering rain and mysterious fogs—held captive by weather seemingly inexplicable and apocalyptic. These “atmospheric anomalies” were later identified as having been triggered by the Tambora eruption.

"It proved a wet, ungenial summer", Mary Shelley remembered in the introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, "and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house.” Amusements included reading German ghost stories aloud and nightly conversations which touched upon, among other things, the experiments and theories of the 18th-century philosopher and poet Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles), to galvanism and the feasibility of returning a corpse or body parts to life.

Retiring one evening after midnight, Mary recalled dreaming of "the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out...[and] waking in terror to the very room, the dark parquet, the closed shutters, with the moonlight struggling through.” This was the moon a team of astronomers set out to identify. Read more about Frankenstein's Moon at Bibilion.

Me, Myself, and Irene

 

top: Library of Congress, rest: nypl digital

keep your cool

Snow Cap Burger, Arizona, Carol Highsmith

Iceman at Fulton Fish Market, 1959

ice harvesting in Minnesota, before 1885

Free Ice, New York City, c.1900

Momoyogusa, 1909

snow, December 1949, Eleanor Roosevelt

Licking Ice on a Hot Day, New York City, c.1900

the ghost of subways past

Broadway Local, 1973. Photo from the US National Archives on Flickr.

New York, 1973. Photo from the US National Archives on Flickr.

New York, c. 1980, by Bruce Davidson

New York, c. 1980, by John F Conn

New York, c. 1980, by Bruce Davidson

The other day I took the J train, not something I ordinarily do, and I thought it was a clever, native-New Yorker maneuver on my part. I was at Canal Street and needed to get further downtown and over around the Seaport. The trains I was most familiar with galloped right past the bowels of lower Manhattan whereas this mysterious and foreign (to me) line would swing over to right to where I needed to be. Good.

I found the J in the direction I thought said "Downtown." New York being New York, this didn't mean further down to where I needed to be, it meant "on the way to Brooklyn." That dawned on me as we came to "Bowery", a station apparently not used by anyone who actually paid a fare to be down there. At Essex Street, utterly chagrined I'd taken the train going the wrong way (only tourists did that), I was able to catch the J going the other way. 
The train was oddly screechy, and unpleasant. The car was old with gray bench seating and harsh fluorescent lighting. I swear it seemed like I was stepping back into 1980. Everyone appeared to be hampered, mentally or physically. People with hoods pulled over their heads nodded off in corners. Although the ride was all of about 6 minutes, it was like a train ride back to a New York I'd forgotten.

Looking at these images above, I cant believe I was around for it. This was when New York was "Fun City": garbage strikes, Bernard Goetz and a burned-out South Bronx. (It was when my father would launch into rants about living in "this Great Big Wonderful Town.") I would have been taken on the subway by my parents in the 70s and certainly I must have taken it myself by the early 80s? I don't have a strong negative memory of the graffiti, I kind of remember it neutrally. It was there in the same way the doors were orange and the benches gray. The Bruce Davidson couple at bottom is humorous but unsettling at the same time. The way she's clutching her bag is a distantly remembered feeling I internalized a long time ago. I look at images of New York like this and I think, how did we all not just think the world was ending? // More visions of the Golden Age of New York subway squalor at TwoFour Flinching. //

Someone at the Transit Museum said, "maybe it was one of our Holiday vintage trains?!" Um, no.
Every year at Christmastime and around July 4th several charming vintage subway trains in the collection of the Transit Museum get put into regular service. I would love to be waiting at 34th Street and have this roll up:

Poking around the internets I discovered that the J train has been rated on Yelp—as if one might give it 1 star and complain about service as you would to warn people off the latest beer garden. Here's what Victor C writes: "This train is terrible and dangerous. It's always freezing and filthy on the J. I've been mugged, punched and offered drugs many times on this train. Terrible train. Also, I have seen grown men completely naked on this train. I'd rather walk than take this train, really."

Volcano notes

April 17, 2010. (REUTERS/Ingolfur Juliusson)

April 17 and April 19, 2010. Örvar Atli Þorgeirsson

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

Morn came and went -and came, and brought no day,

....

....

Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,

And their masts fell down piecemeal; as they dropped

They slept on the abyss without a surge—

The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,

The Moon, their mistress, had expired before;

The winds were withered in the stagnant air,

And the clouds perished! Darkness had no need

Of aid from them—She was the Universe!

In July of 1816, Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Mary's stepsister Claire, and Byron's physician, John Polidori, were spending their days indoors at the Diodati Villa, on a sojourn in Geneva, Switzerland. They were taking shelter from the inexplicable cold, "incessant rain" and mysterious fogs. "There was a celebrated dark day," Byron recalled, "on which the fowls went to roost at noon, and the candles were lighted as at midnight." Held captive by the weather, Mary drafted what would become her novel, Frankenstein, Dr. Polidori wrote The Vampyre, and Byron wrote "Darkness" (excerpt above), their creative energies sympathetic with the brooding elements.

Strange weather, lengthy periods of darkness and record-cold temperatures swept across Europe and North America that summer. Prolonged, brilliant sunsets and twilights were frequently seen. On June 6, snow fell in Albany, New York, and Dennysville, Maine. Nearly a foot of snow fell in Quebec City. Lake and river ice were reported as far south as Pennsylvania.The resulting crop failures and livestock loss forced up prices, created panic and produced famine in many parts of the world. Some historians point to the weather conditions in New York and the Northeast of 1816 and '17 as spurring an early westward migration.

1816, The Year Without Summer or the Poverty Year, it was later determined, was the result of a volcano, erupting the previous year, thousands of miles away.

On Wednesday, April 10, 1815, Mount Tambora, a volcano in the Dutch East Indies, thought to have been dormant for 5,000 years, had begun a series of eruptions. On April 15th the final and largest blast spewed sulphur dioxide nearly 27 miles into the stratosphere. The finer ash particles stayed in the atmosphere up to a few years causing global climate changes. The pyroclastic flow killed over 10,000 local people immediately and another 70,000 or more were killed on neighboring islands in the aftermath of tsunamis, ash blanketing and the resulting agricultural devastation. Tambora was the largest volcanic eruption in at least 1,600 years— ten times the size of Mt. Vesuvius. 

Decades later John Ruskin gave a lecture at the London Institute on another meteorological anomaly. In a semi-apocalyptic conflation of atmospheric and psychological disturbance, Ruskin railed about ominous clouds:

For the sky is covered with gray cloud;—not rain-cloud, but a dry black veil, which no ray of sunshine can pierce; partly diffused in mist, feeble mist, enough to make distant objects unintelligible, yet without any substance, or wreathing, or color of its own. And everywhere the leaves of the trees are shaking fitfully, as they do before a thunder-storm; only not violently, but enough to show the passing to and fro of a strange, bitter, blighting wind.... It is a wind of darkness...It is a malignant quality of wind, unconnected with any one quarter of the compass; it blows indifferently from all, attaching its own bitterness and malice to the worst characters of the proper winds of each quarter....

—The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century

This was a year after the famous 1883 Krakatoa eruption. //

Following the August 27th Krakatoa eruption, artist William Ascroft documented eerily brilliant sunsets and other optical phenomena over England, attributed to the volcano's after-effects, until 1886. For a selection of his uncanny sketches, see the Science and Society Picture Library/

Twilight and after glow effects at Chelsea, London, Nov. 26, 1883

some belated thoughts about "You"

For a while now I've been mulling over the hollowness of "You"-- the purported prime mover in the consumer chain. Design your own personal sneaker, Hummer, pizza. Express your personality through the oxymoronic doublespeak of "mass customization." The escalating illusion is that now, with technology at one's fingertips, the power is in your hands. As with niche marketing, innovations with just your slice of demographic in mind, one is told many times over, "you deserve it." You're so busy/ important/overworked/ worthy, you deserve 500 channels of 24-hr HD sports (or whatever), you deserve soup in a go-cup, a good night's sleep with AmbienCR. Here's a fat-free fudge-dipped caramel bite with extra calcium created expressly for your over-40 bones. Coach or L.L. Bean in your Lincoln Navigator? Your choice! This proliferation of specious choice-- the so-called American ethos of individualism ("freedom") distorted through a lens of consumption. All of this disingenuous catering (pandering?) to "you." And then last week Time made "you" the Person of the Year in one of the most oleaginous essays I've read recently:

And we didn't just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software. ...Who has that time and that energy and that passion? The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you.

What about me? Despite both designations having to do with the individual, presumed solipsism, and implied atomization, the "Me" of the Me Generation (I believe it was Tom Wolfe who christened the 70s the Me Decade, with "generation" being an extrapolation from that.) strikes me as a different concept. At its most elementary level, the term is subjective: me, I. And I read the term, at very least, as active --seeking out self-definition, though not necessarily through consumption. This "You" moment conveys an object observed and defined by others: what you buy, what you own, your 'audience.' The you as consumer defined by age/income/race/ demographic...
---
I only just recently saw the Frontline show "The Persuaders" on the web, although the episode is more than 2 years old. It is a disturbing and utterly fascinating overview of the current culture of marketing and advertising and its societal influences. The web site for the episode is dense with interviews, transcripts, commentary--it is a must. Someone there (cant remember which person sums it up) distilled for me what had been ill-defined complaints and ravings: the danger of an atomized populace in a completely immersive, consumer-driven society is that there is no longer a recognition of "the common good," or civic duty; democracy itself comes apart. Media critic Mark Crispin Miller (whom I had not heard of before) delivers some of the most devastating commentary.

Consumers are feeders. All consumers do is consume. ...They're being manipulated to think only about the grass that they're chewing and nothing else, and manipulated into thinking about ways to get more grass. They're not operating on a sufficiently high level to participate in a democracy…

---
So the Burger King "have it your way" campaign of circa 1974 (?) was a brilliant precursor to the mass customization model...

reasons to be cheerful*

Although it hasn't stopped me from planning a trip in February, I've been preoccupied with what I call, somewhat loosely, the end of the world. I find myself scanning news headlines obsessively, salting away tidbits and references in my mental eschatological clipping file: environmental catastrophes, genetically modified foods, religious extremism, obesity, technological singularity (that's a new one for me and, boy, its a doozy), heck, throw in zebo, and the decline of civility. From the absurd to the epic, it's all become a kind of drone that I'm always tuning in to. Perhaps that's why I found Niall Ferguson's piece in Vanity Fair, arguing that the decline of the West is not imminent-- its here, perversely gratifying. It won't win many (other) liberal hearts and minds, making sloppy shorthand of it all in equating NASCAR, illegal immigration, and, yes even tattoos, with signs of The End:

Shame has gone; so has civility. On Friday and Saturday nights, most English city centers become no-go zones where drunken, knife-wielding youths brawl with one another and the police. Another striking symptom of this new primitivism is the extraordinary surge in the popularity of tattoos, once associated with the unruly Picts of the Far North. In this modern decline and fall, it seems, at least some of the barbarians come from within the empire.

But I don't do him justice by merely quoting that, there's much more reasoned content. Somehow I found his cross-referenced kitchen sinkism compelling.

And what about the byzantine and loony mental machinations of Daniel Pinchbeck? I've got a reserve on The Return of Quetzalcoatl at the library! From a piece in LA Weekly:

In 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, his part memoir, part anthropological journey through many things spiritual, metaphysical and just plain eerie, Pinchbeck illuminates not the world’s end but the many ways in which our social structures are disintegrating. “What I’m trying to show is that we’re already in a process of accelerated transformation,” he told me. “And I find that a reason to be hopeful.”

More salient is this comment (from a recent Rolling Stone hatchet job)

"We have to fix this situation right fucking now, or there's going to be nuclear wars and mass death, and it's not going to be very interesting. There's not going to be a United States in five years, OK?"

I think I'm with him on that...
A few months ago I saw a BBC documentary about Isaac Newton, 'outing' him as a religious obsessive, apocalyptic thinker and alchemist. He is said to have calculated AD 2060 as the time when there would be

a dramatic transition to a millennium of peace. In other words: the end of the secular world and the beginning of the Kingdom of God.

2012? 2045? 2060? Whichever date you choose to give credence to, something seems to be coming soonish.

---
Kurt Anderson made an excellent observation in his End Days trend piece in New York magazine

I don’t think our mood is only a consequence of 9/11 (and the grim Middle East), or climate-change science, or Christians’ displaced fear of science and social change. It’s also a function of the baby-boomers’ becoming elderly. For half a century, they have dominated the culture, and now...I think their generational solipsism unconsciously extrapolates approaching personal doom: When I go, everything goes with me, my end will be the end.

The "Me Generation" indeed.

* "Why don't you get back into bed
Why don't you get back into bed
Why don't you get back into bed...
Reasons to be cheerful part 3"

(image from: Morse Library, Beloit College)