What happened down there?

So NEVER MIND why I was typing these words into Google's ngram tool. But now I'm fascinated. What happened "down there" that peaked in 1881 and dropped off to a low in the late 1920s?

1881: trouble below

Vague theories:

1. Something to do with syphilis, with treatments getting better and better until WHAM penicillin!

2. Lots of medical journals starting around then, and Google Books still dating every issue of some of periodicals to their starting year.

Don't forget!

Holy...

The New Mother.　You should just read it. It is perfect and evil. When you read it, imagine reading it when you were a child.

(What reminded me of it was this post on Kindertrauma.)

I bet it's something dirty

"Unworthy of being repeated." This looks promising!



(Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature Science and the Arts, v. 50, 1873)

Encountered while looking for information on the "Haxley Hood," a rustic new year's entertainment in the village of Haxley where locals compete kick to a piece of leather down the street towards one or more bars.

UPDATE: Not dirty and not that interesting.

Apparently there's a pinheaded local legend that she was an atheist who said "If there's a God let seven ash trees grow from my grave." If you're going to make up a legend about a local tree, long-dead-old-time-legend-maker-upper, please make up something better than that. Honestly. Not worth posting images of the text, but you can read a description and an refutation in Notes and Queries or William Chambers' A week at Welwyn. Googling her name, it turns out the same stupid little legend is still being passed around today.

There's also a nice picture of the grave today here at Barking Tig's Flickr page, along with a lot of really nice pictures of old churches and stained glass.

I'm disappointed, I was totally expecting it would be something soooper crazy and unspeakable.

Vos têtes! Quel dommage.

One of the pleasures of studying a "classical" language--here, "classical" just means "nobody talks it anymore"--is the example sentences in the textbooks. You study French, it's all Monique and Jean-Claude and Jean-Pierre and Jean-Luc deciding whether to meet at la bibliotheque or la piscine. My first Japanese textbook (excellent, but from the 1960s) was mostly Tanaka-san and Yamamoto-san and White-san and Black-san asking each other how many city blocks to the bank (which was on the left, next to the library, it turned out). Sometimes Brown-san would show up and ask how much a chair cost. More recent Japanese textbooks are enlivened by part-time jobs at restaurants and bringing back souvenirs from Osaka.

Study a dead language, though, you're in different territory. Start high school Latin and you'll probably be talking about spears and slaves and Gauls and wild animals in the forest on Day 1. The only thing I remember from classical Greek is απολολα: "I am ruined, utterly." (I'm not sure I actually remember the word, but I remember the translation.) Anglo-Saxon, you're awash in blood and endless sorrow and alliteration before you've finished writing your name in the front of the book. (I'm assuming.)

Anyway, in Classical Japanese: A Grammar by Haruo Shirane, just 30 pages in we find this:

頭　蹴わられ、腰践みおられて、おめけ叫ぶ物おほかりけり。Kashira KE-wara-re, koshi fumi-ora-re-te, omeki-sakebu mono ookari-keri.

There were many (ookari-keri) who had their heads (kashira) kicked and split open (ke-wara-re-te), whose hips (koshi) were stomped on and broken (fumi-ora-re-te), and who screamed (omeki-sakebu). (Heike, vol. 5, Fujikawa, NKBT 32:374.) (Ke-wara-re is the ren'yokai of keru, the mizenkei of waru, "to split open," creating a compound verb, and the ren'yokei of the passive auxiliary verb ru.)

And it's not like some big reading lesson, either, it's just to illustrate a verb conjugation. You study French, it's like three semesters before you learn how to talk about heads getting kicked open. IF THEN.

COLOR TELEVISION

Middle of the frame, MAGNAVOX COLOR TV. A store in Santa Monica I'd never noticed before. I can't remember the last time I've seen COLOR TV on a sign outside an appliance store. COLOR TV. A phrase you mostly encounter these days on faded signs outside old and very crummy motels, and when they play "Money For Nothing" on the radio.

I'm the CRUISER. You're the LOSER.

Pete Shelly's "Homosapien."  I think I spent about 2 years in the mid-90s with this song on endless repeat.  Very likely the best song ever.  Almost certainly not the best video ever.  I'm guessing the spinning wheel and the Commodore PET were quite a contrast at the time, but now they seem like pretty similar kinds of objects.

Why, daddy? {Updated]

[UPDATED 6/7/10:

Sometime in the past couple of weeks this book went from Full View to Snippet View on Google Books, which is why the pictures no longer make sense. Lesson for me: save the images next time so they can't change out from under me.

So anyway, this post no longer makes sense. Sorry!]

When I was a kid I had a library discard copy of this 1945 joke book:



Later in life I would encounter Bennett Cerf every now and then in the form of an anthology or an introduction. Little by little his anthologies, long out of print, are vanishing from libraries. I remember without pleasure his oddly condescending introduction to the old Portable Dorothy Parker--presumably he didn't realize when he wrote it which of them would be better remembered. He's far from forgotten, but he's certainly fading out at a reasonable clip--how many more years before he's familiar only to scholars, erased from the world of ordinary reading? Since I encountered this book so young, though, he'll always seem a little bit exciting to me, sophisticated and faraway.

Anyway, here's my favorite joke, not just in this book, but in the world:



Outstanding.

There were a few jokes I didn't understand. As the years wore on every now and then it would suddenly dawn on me what another one meant. When I came across it today and started reading through, most of them were obvious (generally mild sex jokes that were beyond me when I was eight). Some weren't so easy. This one I found absolutely baffling as a child, and finally understand (though it took me a couple of minutes even now):



Maybe you're cleverer than me and you're already laughing, but if not....


SPOILER


SPOILER


SPOILER


She thinks he's the iceman. In the days of iceboxes, the iceman was the guy who brought you the ice that kept everything cold--he was also the guy you slept with, the way in later years you would sleep with the milkman, and today you would sleep with, I don't know, the pool guy.


This next one, though, I still don't understand. I just have no clue. I don't even know how to start investigating.





Am I missing something obvious?

It's kind of nice. Childhood mysteries generally evaporate--sweet for a few of them to remain baffling.

Motorcarese as She Is Spoken

From today's Daily Mirror, what looks like an English As She Is Spoke reference (Google Books, new edition with valuable additional information, the real original):

If "* as she is spoke[n]" was used the way I think it was, I would assume that what she's saying doesn't make sense, but I'm completely unable to tell whether it does or not.

You might want to skip this one.

You really might, it's ugly.  George Samuel Parsons' Nelsonian Reminiscences is a dull and often squalid little clump of nautical memoirs.  It almost sputters to life here and there, but only really catches fire in this Mishimaesque anecdote:





When I was a child I was always stumbling across things like this in the library.  (Maybe it didn't happen all that often, but often enough, and it left an impression.)  I would stand there in the aisle, reading the passage over and over in a hot fog of fascination and horror and shame, blushing and sweating, slamming the book shut if anyone walked past the aisle.  Maybe furtively return to it on the next trip to the library. Not this particular book, of course, but there are many, many like it--Fox's Book of Martyrs, that kind of thing.  The narrator's weirdly innocent mix of horror and amazement reminds me of that feeling.

The bits about his manly courage and resignation, the contrast between his handsome form before the impalement and his bugeyed agony after, are strangely guileless.  We're used to that kind of thing written by someone like Mishima, someone knowing--someone whose fascination is cultivated and conscious and maybe a little bit showy, a little bit faked--here the same fascination seems nascent, ignorant, innocent. It's never occurred to this person to be fascinated by such a thing; he seems like he doesn't quite realize that he is.

I came across this on a side excursion from some endless vitriolic 1870 debates over whether what a pair of British travelers saw impaled on a hillside in Bosnia was a person or a sack of beans.  A Google Books search on liddon maccoll impalement will show you the way into the fray; you may find your own way out.  I learned one thing that illuminated a puzzling passage above, the bit about the stake being "driven by the executioner into his back-bone." It seemed to me (and I think I'm right) that if a stake were really driven into your spine, you would  be unlikely to survive the hour, let alone the night--but apparently the actual practice was to drive the stake between the backbone and the skin.

Brought you something

From the October 1888 issue of the Heathen Woman's Friend. It looks like the kind of magazine Mrs. Jellyby would read.



I have a weakness for ghouls and giant heads, but the picture is really the best thing about this article. A couple of the characters on the banners are identifiable but most of them look pretty messed up.

Breeding pearls

This notion of "breeding pearls" turns out to be charming. I'm only linking an image for the first page, but you should really click through and read the whole article.



And speaking of Paul Collins (two posts back), I was excited to see a Frank Buckland reference towards the end:



A selection from Frank Buckland's works being one of the ornaments of the Collins Library.

Is this notion of "breeding pearls" still current anywhere?

Almost there but not quite. With special guest the carnivorous cockatoo.

As promised, the little article I read about beri-beri.




Leaving in the note that follows just because how could I not.

Beri-beri is actually caused by a vitamin deficiency. It really is connected with rice, just not in the way the author of this piece thinks: a diet of polished and unfortified white rice doesn't supply enough vitamin B1.  Presumably the disappearance of beri-beri among the medical students is explained by the change in diet when they began boarding with others instead of dining on the communal rice.

You see similar situations over and over in discussions of beri-beri from this era.  The facts, meticulously described (more in other accounts than in this one), and clearly explainable once you know the actual cause of the disease, but at the time attributed very plausibly to some kind of taint or parasite in the white rice itself.  I wouldn't have imagined how closely a deficiency in a staple food can resemble a contamination.

Still need to figure out what this "breeding pearls" business is all about.

Dreadful news

From Paul Collins's blog:

http://weekendstubble.blogspot.com/2010/02/free-dreadfuls.html

Much as I love Google Books it tends to be weak on this kind of literature, so this is great news.  (Varney the Vampire is close to unreadable, though.)

Dust and bones by now, but at that time hardly grown cold

You can say all kinds of different things to say about Notes and Queries. (Right now I'm only thinking about "the" Notes and Queries, but anything called "Notes and Queries" from before about 1915 is full of treasure. Just read an interesting piece about beri-beri in the Notes and Queries of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society that I'll talk about another time.)

All kinds of things to say, but here's what I'm thinking about Notes and Queries right this minute. It records a present that's very distant from our present--that's a given. But it also records a past that's removed from our own past. Things that are part of our distant, historical past are in Notes and Queries part of the recent past, or at the edge of living memory. For example, the black rat is long since extinct in England, replaced by the Norway rat, but in Notes and Queries we can read a memory of a particular London slum's demolishing, and how it was found to be infested with the older black rats, though the Norway rat was by then already firmly established. Other things have more of an M.R. James/Wicker Man feel--peculiar local festival customs that one or two elderly people still remember fondly from childhood, statues that a few people still remember seeing in a particular church, but no one knows when they were removed or what happened to them.

The overall feeling this gives me is a familiar one, and maybe doesn't lead anywhere in particular. One of those rotary-phone type emotions, pushed back a century: someday you will die, and the things you remember from your early life will be gone not just from the world but from the personal memory of the living. But it's good to keep being reminded that one time and another time are not islands surrounded by mist and inaccessible from one another, they're always joined by the long fading out of things. It's easy to think only of the periods when things were firmly what they were, not of the complicated and strandy and indeterminate times in between.

"Poultryman's Damp," they called it

Nestled in the lower left corner of a back page of a 1905 issue of the American Poultry Advocate.

On the same page:



"These poultrymen are a wet bunch, Clem."

The first time they blew up Blossom Rock

Report upon the removal of Blossom Rock in San Francisco Harbor, California, 1870. Blossom Rock was an underwater hazard in San Francisco Bay, named after the first ship that hit it. They dug a series of caves in the interior, filled it with explosives, and blew it up. I picture these guys in the dark in these passages under the bay, chipping away. What did it sound like when they stopped working and just sat there?

Ships kept getting bigger, so they've had to blow it up twice since to increase the depth.

Spelling for beginners: whose tomb is this?

Learning to spell would have been fun with more doomed love and tools shoved through hands. Spelling for Beginners, a Method of Teaching Spelling and Reading at the Same Time, 1870, from "Dr. Cornwell's Educational Series."