MINI-MAILBAG: LONDON, HISTORY, TIME TRAVEL, SHARK-JUMPING: I know there are emails buried in my inbox that I have neither time nor energy to dig out. (That’s also why I haven’t posted contest results–so if you still feel like being funny about Elvis Costello and/or the 2004 election, feel free….) So these are the emails that are easy to find and deal with.

Comments on my London post, from Lee Schwartz: “The houses were almost all white, with some dark houses; bright color was rare. Perhaps this is different in immigrant neighborhoods? It was strikingly non-U.S.-like.”

Very interesting observation on your part. [It was actually The Rat’s observation–ed.] In late February my wife and I made our first-ever visit to London. In my mind’s eye I still see London rendered in the black and white of an old film from the 40’s, even though Piccadilly Circus was fully as garish as Times Square. Your commentary is bang dead on.

“Londoners have walled-off or hedged-off gardens instead of big green “My lawn is my manhood!!!” King of the Hill-style lawns. The gardens are much prettier and more individual than lawns, but also much more standoffish. The contrast was almost too easy.”

I believe this to be a more the English have carried with them to other countries. About four years ago my wife and I visited Australia and new Zealand, We stayed for awhile in a private home in Kew, a small suburb outside Melbourne. The train station into the city was about a 15 minute walk through some very nice old neighborhoods where almost every house had the fenced-in front garden, including some with miniature fruit trees. Similar gardens could be found in Auckland and Rotorua New Zealand.

Interestingly, there weren’t many of these gardens in Sydney. The explanation I was given by a Melbourne resident who went to school in the States went something like this: “Melbourne is Boston. Sydney is New York City.”

From Nigel Harris: “memorials to historic local vileness” — I think most Londoners are amused, not depressed. Historic vileness is apparently what tourists want to see, and the tourist industry has responded accordingly. The Clink and The London Dungeon are recent innovations, heavily marketed to tourists and unvisited by locals. Madame Tussaud’s has been around for longer, but has also always been a pure tourist attraction. The Tower of London is the only one with real historical significance – built as a powerful symbol of subjugation of the city by William “The Conqueror” in 1077, using alien white stone from Caen in Normandy and the site of a great deal of genuine historic vileness in later years. But I dare say most Londoners’ mental map of their own city has “here be tourists” written on the uncharted territory within the castle walls. And that’s fine by us, if it keeps the main tourist crowds away from the true gems of the city — some of which, like the IWM and V&A;, you were wise enough to seek out.

“white houses” — You won’t find many bright colored houses anywhere in England, immigrant neighbourhoods included. In parts of Suffolk the houses are traditionally painted pink, but it’s a very subtle shade of pink!

“astonishingly ugly” Tate Modern — this building was originally a coal-burning electricity plant.

Good points from Lise Legault: The most effective and inclusive way to study history–and widely accepted and taught among historians (though not in high school, perhaps, where it might count the most) is through the study of cultural history–and not just “high” culture but culture in its totality. The definition of cultural history is worthy of an essay in itself, and I don’t have time to go into it here. But worthy practitioners are Natalie Davis, Carolyn Bynum, Peter Brown, Peter Burke, Paul Johnson, Simon Schama, even (as a literary historian in works like The Discarded Image) C.S. Lewis–and hundreds, perhaps thousands of others.

To focus on great men without understanding the kind of society from which they came will make you short-change their achievements and misunderstand their connection with their own society. It leads inevitably to the “take him down” mentality, as students begin to read widely enough to see that Abraham Lincoln, for example, said some foolish as well as some inspiring things. To know why he was great you have to know what he came from. (Also, not everyone who was great in his/her own time remains well-known today–but such people are often worth studying if you can.)

On the other hand, the kind of “social history” that was fashionable in the 1970s-80s–with its endless quest for new archival materials of piddling worth, its statistical charts, its yearning for “scientific” objectivity, and its ruthless refusal to take individual experience

seriously–encourages a numblingly materialistic understanding of human experience.

Cultural history–in the broad sense of the term culture–is the way to go.

From Avram Grumer: In my eyes, the best time travel stories ever are Poul Anderson’s Time Patrol stories. I think the collection — called just The Time Patrol— is still in print, and includes every story but for the novel The Shield of Time, which isn’t as good as the shorts anyway. I especially like “Delenda Est” and “The Sorrow of Odin the Goth”.

I’m also very fond of John Kessel’s Corrupting Dr. Nice, a time travel comedy with interesting political metaphors. One of the protagonists is the apostle Simon, from an alternate timeline in which Jesus was taken into the future by time travellers (possibly to become a talk show host).

Similarly from Jendi Reiter: Your comments on “The Man Who Folded Himself” made me think you might enjoy “Changing the Past” by Thomas Berger. Without giving away the ending, it’s about a guy who is magically given several chances to erase his past and start over, each time with a different gift — good looks, brains, talent etc. But each time, he ends up a lonely, unlikable person. Why? You will like the answer, I think.

Another reader informed me that “sci-fi” is considered derogatory–I had no idea. Always heard it called that. Of course, I always said I was a Trekkie, too, and apparently people who get het up about such things say it should be “Trekker.” Ah well. I really like science fiction, so rest assured, I wasn’t dissing the genre.

From Jim Christiansen: Your question: “why romanticism but not Enlightenment rationalism a la Voltaire? Is it just because

nationalism is being considered one of the core constitutive elements of modernity in this reading, and nationalism is more romantic than rationalism?”

Well, since you asked, and at the risk of seeming to take this diversion far too seriously, here’s one answer: the most satisfactory sneer I can make in retaliation for the Enlightenment’s sneers at the Middle Ages is to assert that the Enlightenment is in fact merely the decadence of the Middle Ages. Strip away its self-congratulation and Enlightenment rationalism is not much more than a continuation of trends you can find back at least as far as the thirteenth century, and arguably the eleventh. The continuities tend to be obscured by the century of the religious wars, but they’re there. Even anti-clericalism has antecedents in the Middle Ages;

Voltaire is not a lot more anticlerical than Boccaccio, who’s as medieval as they come.

In a lot of ways, Voltaire is just the last, least chaste, and most complacent in the line of monastic reformers going back through Erasmus and St. Bernard to Peter Damian. Yes, he’s doctrinally more fluid than his predecessors, but he’s recognizably of the same type. But with Rousseau and Goethe and the German idealists the mind of Europe seems to change. They’re after something entirely different; they are creators, not reformers, and it never occurs to them to sneer at abuses, since they have no ideal order in mind. They mark the sharpest break since the mid-eleventh century. One feels that Peter Abelard or John of Salisbury could have understood Voltaire far better than Voltaire could have understood Feuerbach or Coleridge.

Of course, ask me again tomorrow and I’ll give you a completely different answer.

And from someone who may be named Dylan: Would Oscar Wilde’s decision to counter-sue the Marquess of Queensberry

(for slander, I think) be considered a shark-jump?



Yes.–ed.