Music: Two pieces here. Both straight out of a favorite summer of mine, maybe 1999. First (and last): “Another Sunday” by Tara Jane O’Neil and second, “Every Day a Sunrise, a Summer Every Year” by Telegraph Melts.

Music: Just two tracks this time. A loop from “In the Devil’s Territory” by Sufjan Stevens. Then “You’d be so Nice to Come Home to,” off of Nina Simone’s Live in Newport album. Incidentally, this track is one of my very, very favorite things that exists in the world. Also, it’s the second time i’ve used it in an episode. First time was the first one. A long time ago.

This and future Civil War Stories (their title, super catchy) episode will appear as a standard memory palace episode through standard memory palace channels two weeks after the Slate release, which sounds more complicated than it is. In the meantime, there’ll be other memory palace episodes on other topics sprinkled in. Including a foray or two into personal history. So, update.

Notes: This episode was originally commissioned for the fine, fine design and architecture podcast, 99% Invisible. Hear a shorter version (and discover more about said fine, fine podcast, here). Also note: 99% Invisible is produced by my friend, Roman Mars. Until he was modestly internet-famous, Roman’s image was nearly impossible to Google-image as you’d just get a bunch of Roman statuary.

nate

Now, some of you have been asking what the hold up has been with the new episodes.

A: Thanks for asking.
B: Sorry about that.
C: I’ve been spending most of my time writing much of this book (oddly enough). It is due to come out in October. It is funny. And weirdly memory palace-y in several parts.
D. More episodes soon.

*An earlier version of this post referred to the show as “Shut up and Listen.” It was a mistake. But a much better name.

The Footnotes: I read a bunch about Joice Heth but, it turns out, I really only needed to read one thing: The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s America by a dude named Benjamin Reiss. It’s pretty kick-ass.

The Footnotes: Since this episode was a total bear, I read a lot about and by Sidis while trying to wrestle it into submission. There’s a perfectly readable, proper biography called The Prodigy that’s out of print but probably at your local library. Turns out the Sidis fanatics (and they are legion) think the author is pretty harsh on W.J., but, you know, sure. To dive right into the deep end: run, don’t walk, to Sidis.net, a lovingly curated compendium of most things Sidis. Scans of many of his books and articles. Links to outside articles. It’s not one stop shopping, but it’s like the directory at the mall. Don’t be scared off by the fact that the web-design looks like someone clicked on the “Crazy Conspiracy Theory” template. It’s really well put together.

The Ephemera: If you do read some of his actual writings, Sidis comes off rather well. However singular and odd his interests and, I suppose, obsessions, are he writes clearly (he’s not raving) and he’s often kind of funny in a super-dorky way. “Notes on the Collection of Transfers” is unreadable. But that’s only because no one can care about transfers as much as the author does. I defy you to. But, that said, Sidis comes off like a genial, almost charming tour guide to the world’s most boring museum. It’s hard not to like the guy.

It’s the flip-side to Episode 35(the Walkman one) and, in its way, to Episode 12 (the Marconi one). It’s simple. But lovely.

We’ve only been able to record audio for a hundred years and fifty years or so. It’s only been about a hundred and change that people could actually go out and hear recorded audio or buy a machine to play it in their homes. And so before that, before the phonautograph or the gramophone or the player piano or phonograph or the radio or the 16 gig iPod Nano with Multi-Touch, you only heard a musical performance once. If you fell in love with that song or an aria or a symphony or a chant you heard that one time, that one time might be all you got. You might wait decades to hear it performed again. And who knows how it would sound then? Sung by a different voice? Played by different hands? Who would you be the next time you heard it again? If you ever heard it again.

Anyway, the podcast is still up and running, but has in fact been gummed up a bit by a couple of (paying) projects with looming deadlines. Both of which you will likely enjoy, assuming that you like the podcast, but neither of which I can talk about at the moment. Mysterious.

I will keep you posted and will continue to post here on the blog and poke away on new podcast episodes.

thanks
nate

Anyway, cleaning out some drawers here at The Memory Palace, I came across a CD of a radio documentary I did a few years ago about the history of music programming on the radio that I hadn’t thought about in awhile. It is no exploding pen, but some of you might like it. Link is here.

*Yes. This is my favorite moment in the movie. Even considering the ski chase.

“See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.”
“Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco —”
“That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”
“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.”
“No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.”
“You want to hand over this battle to D. H. Lawrence,” said Abe.
“All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love,” Dick mourned persistently.

A large public works project that I first saw in “someday the city will like look this” illustrations in the Providence Sunday Journal when I was boy, change the course of the Providence river. They dredged the channel. They removed a road that covered it up (and that I’d always been told was, technically, the widest bridge in the world). They gave it a left turn into a basin, around which they put an amphitheater, and in the center of which they put a slightly anemic fountain. It was the kind of Big Public Works Project that is nearly impossible to get done these days without graft and corruption.

Luckily, this was Providence, Rhode Island, a city in whose veins graft and corruption run like coffee milk.

And, truth be told, the river looks great now. Urban renewal through aesthetic revival.

Anyway, one night, between my freshman and sophomore year of college, a high school friend and I were walking around downtown, exploring the construction site. She and I were extremely close back then. We’re not now. No story there. Just the way things go. The next morning, she and I were going drive to my ten year old Chevette across country. It was to be a Great Adventure (and it was). It was to be a friendship cementing experience (and it was, for awhile). But that night when we were walking around we came upon the city’s memorial (1929, granite column, carved stone at the bottom representing the different service branches, female embodiment of Peace on top) to the 612 young Rhode Islanders who’d died fighting World War I.

It used to be in the middle of a roundabout in the middle of the formerly-widest bridge in the world. That night, they were nearly finished moving it to its current location in front of the courthouse. They had dug a trench underneath it into which, I assume, they were about to pour a new cement foundation for the memorial.

So my friend and I took pieces of paper and wrote messages on them to commemorate the night, and that moment in our lives and in our friendship. Words that we wanted to live by. And we threw those messages into the hole beneath the WWI Memorial so they would be sealed underneath forever. So our young selves would be memorialized there too.

And I have absolutely no idea what I wrote.

Check back.

Tell a friend.

Share.

Let me know what you think.

Sincerely,
Nate

A version of this story was originally commissioned for an exhibit at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in 2009. (Note, if you have a museum and want some audio that isn’t super boring, drop me a line).

Meanwhile, if you happen to be in Australia on August 1, A: lucky you, and B: you can hear episode 16, Secret Kitty on ABC’s history show at 2:00 p.m. local

There’s a lot written about Weyman. The most fun things to read are the original newspaper accounts (there’s a fun one from the Milwaukee Sentinal on google books; you can find his obituary on NYtimes.com). But the most comprehensive thing I read was from a New Yorker profile from 1968 (which, incidentally, spends pages on literally psychoanalyzing Weyman).