The Devil Wagon and a Bet Between Gentlemen – History (and the US) in the Making

Wow, I’ve always told folks they should buckle up in cabs, and voila! history provides me with a lovely tale for the wary. It turns out that the first automobile fatality in the United States was caused (no surprise) by a New York City cab:

The public’s perception of this newfangled conveyance took a deep public relations dive on Sept. 13, 1899, when Henry H. Bliss stepped off a streetcar in Manhattan and was flattened by an electric-powered taxicab, becoming the first automobile fatality in the country.

Poor Bliss.  This freaked people out. The “devil wagon” was much maligned and feared, to the extent that the state of Vermont made it mandatory for drivers to have someone go ahead of the car and wave a red flag wherever they went.

In the early 1900s in the US the car was still considered a novelty with no practical value.  It cost oodles and put to the test:

The first effort to cross the country in 1899 ended inauspiciously for the car. The trip had to be called off after a one-armed bicyclist made up a 10- day head start from New York and passed the hapless car before it reached Syracuse.

These quotes come from a hilarious, fascinating and also I daresay, awesome article about the first San Francisco to New York journey by car.  Until then, people thought the US had been “done”–that the frontier was closed. Now people started thinking about highways.  Long distance drives at speeds hurtling up to 30 miles an hour became possible.  Incredible!

The first trip took only 63 days, and was made after a bet between gentlemen.  Our first driver:  Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson, apparently also known as The Mad Doctor.  What a way to go down in history!

Later in his life, Horatio would be stopped by the police for violating the speed limit in town.  The speed limit was 6 miles an hour.  (You read that right. Six.)  In the first decade of the century in the US, there were only 10 miles of paved road in the country. But times, they were a’changin’!  By the 1920s, the US had 387,000 miles of paved road, and the California-New York drive took only 13 days–and of course car accidents were causing more and more deaths.

Enjoy the San Fran Chronicle article! And buckle up!  :)

Horatio Jackson Nelson in his Winton

New York City yellow cab by Rockefeller Center

Incredible Moments in History – The Horseless Carriage Gets on the Road

In 1888, a woman took her two children and without even notifying her husband set out with them on the first long-distance drive of the first automobile in the world.  Her name was Bertha Benz, and she was the 39 year old wife of Karl Benz–yes, of future Mercedes-Benz fame.

Bertha zoomed along the roads at 10 miles an hour, driving 60 miles from Mannheim to Pforzheim in this new-fangled horseless carriage.

Her trip made headlines; nothing of its like had ever been seen. In making this voyage, she catapaulted the automobile from the bog of doubt and neglect that had greeted its invention.  Her spunk raised public attention and was just the marketing her husband needed to get his invention sold–and to get people to believe that cars without horses could actually work.

But Bertha didn’t just dare to drive, she also proved a self-sufficient improviser and mechanic during this trip, cleaning the carburetor using her hat pin and insulating a wire with her garter. (I, who own neither a hat pin nor a garter, feel ill-prepared for a drive now!)  She also replaced the brake lining on the drive, and upon her return home advised her husband on improvements he should make to the vehicle–including adding a gear for climbing hills.

Karl Benz was a believer, pioneer and inventor, and his wife’s contributions–financial, moral and finally mechanical–were crucial in getting his dream off the ground.

If you’re in the mood to relive history, you can join or witness the caravan of antique automobiles which follows this historic trip every two years.

Now two little nuggets of history to enjoy.

First off, if you’re imagining that Bertha traveled in the kind of secure car we use today, think again.   This is from the following link from Wikipedia–and it’s her model.  Imagine driving this with two kids for 60 miles.  Egad!

Incredible invention

And secondly, this is from years later, but check the BOUNCE in this vehicle!  That’s a ride that’s gotta hurt.  (I have no idea what make of car this is.)  And yet look how excited everyone is about it.  Divine.  History.  :)  So alive!

And the Prize for “Most Creative Use of the Word Brief” Goes to…

I’m online, and as per my wont, I’m reading history. Why use modern technology for anything else?

And I come across something I think will be interesting.  It’s called A Brief History of France.  Which is quite perfect, really, because I don’t intend to spend much time learning more about France. Not before supper.

So I read on, to the next line, which is a subtitle.  And I kid you not–I kid you not–this is what it says:

Prehistoric France

I blink, and check the webpage name again. Yes, I’m still in the Brief History. A little smile, and I peak into the next line.

During the last ice age humans called Cro-Magnons lived in France.

Ah. This of course sets me to thinking (which takes an odiously long amount of time, particularly as it involves chortling and then blogging)–at any rate, I find myself wondering, What, pray tell, would the LONG history of France include?

Ah, France.

I know you doubt me, you, so here’s the link. :)  Make sure you put aside a minute or two.  Because it’s brief.

The d00d who started it all (in a Cloisters doorway)

More on the doorway above (and a photo of the entire thing) from the Met site.

Oh, and lest you read the site and find yourself wanting to note that it IS brief considering the length of time covered, allow me to note in advance that a loyal brief overview would have kept the post 1780s sections as brief as the 16th century or 17th century sections. But no, come the Revolution, the site forgets all in its glorification, and suddenly the Cro-Magnons are feeling abandoned and miniscule.  Which is not a fun feeling. Let us not to the Cro-Magnons admit impediment.

Chasing Down My Setting

I have reached that point where I accept that I have somehow taken the exit ramp from the highway of hip, from the tracks of technological savviness.  Nowadays if I can’t do something, I no longer assume that it can’t be done.  I assume someone born after the Berlin Wall fell will be able to do it.

So I called one of these young people into the office.

“Are you intelligent?” I asked her.

“Yes.”

I studied her.  “Hold on a second. I’m going to want confirmation.” 

But the person I was calling wasn’t in.  Meanwhile the young woman in question has thrown herself on one of my chairs and is laughing her ass off at me.

“If you’re sure you’re gifted, I’m going to need your help.” 

She walks toward the Computer of Doom.  She too cannot figure out how to resolve the problem.  I realize it cannot be fixed by an Earthly Soul, and I move on with my life.

But first she asks me, “Why do you need to print that?”

I look at the article title.  Scapegoats in Greek and Roman Ritual.  “Why not?” I ask her.

She picks at a fraying thread and frowns at me, but says nothing.  Then she shakes her head and informs me that she has a life, and she skips out to enjoy it.

Ah, youth.

But I could hardly say the truth, could I?  She already knows that I love reading history and learning funky things in general (of a non-technological nature).  But the truth of this particular matter–that since starting to write my book I have begun scavenging through history to find places where my magical premise can be woven in seamlessly, well…

This week I have exciting plans.  I shall be heading to my secret location right here in the city where my novel currently features its “inciting incident”–that event which launches the book’s action into being.  Very exciting.  I shall try to look like a tourist, although I expect I shall come off as wholly suspicious.  Most people come to this place to enjoy the architecture and whatnot, gazing about themselves in pleasure and tranquility, and meanwhile I shall most decidedly be looking for “the right spot,” constantly checking “would they be seen from here,” “where could X be found?” and “would security see them here?”  Not the least suspicious questions to be testing…

Yes, perhaps it is no coincidence, the subject of my last blog.

Should I be removed bodily from yet another location this week, I may just blog about it.  On the other hand, I may dust myself off and try get someone to help me explore by revealing that I’m writing a book and require the ability to investigate the area.  That said, that may just be the ticket to complete denial. 

No, no… They shall be happy to have me ask these odd questions.  I am quite resolved that I shall go there and seek out what Anne Shirley (of Anne of Green Gables) would call a bosom soul, and I shall tell this bosom soul what my purpose is, honestly, and he or she shall help me, much in the manner of, um, a fairy godmother.  Oh dear.  There are no fairy godmothers.

I may not need a ticket to denial.  I may be there already.    But I shall try!

Anyone got any story research tales to share?    Or things they haven’t done but wished they had?

Historic Home near Tbilisi's Turtle Lake (if memory serves)

One Night in the Midwest

It was a beautiful night, swelling with stars and cricket songs, and I was on the front porch with a glass of red wine. B and I listened to the sounds of the party inside; the raucous music, the jumbled laughter.

That’s what I heard, anyway. He heard the lyrics of the song. When he broke the silence, it was my life plan that shattered.

“I remember the first time I held one,” he murmured.

I looked at him, confused, and then the song’s refrain came through the curtains, a chant of “Kalashnikov, Kalashnikov.”

B, hold a Kalashnikov? Dread stiffened me. B was urbane, intelligent, witty, unmilitary—not that a military person couldn’t be all those things too. He was just so obviously not military.

But what B was, was Bosnian.

I had spent years studying his region; it was my passion. I was studying his language. I hoped to travel to his fractured country one day and work. It was one of my life goals. And now he was on the verge of cracking my rose colored glasses.

I wanted to know and I didn’t—what his path to the US had been. Who he was. What it had been like, surrounded by the tanks and rifles of the Serbs.

I wanted to know and I didn’t; and he who always kept his silence, he who never, ever was inclined to talk, was cradling his glass of wine and being brought back into the memories by the music, and he was telling what I wanted to know and didn’t.

He told me then about getting the rifle. It was common lore already that the Serbs had guns but not enough men, and the Bosnian Muslims had men enough but not enough guns. It couldn’t have been easy to get a gun, then, in that city under siege.

But he got one, a Kalashnikov. And he crept to No Man’s Land. And through it. And he made it out, with men shooting at him from both sides.

His family was long since saved—he’d arranged it the moment he saw tanks in the streets of Sarajevo when the war was theoretically only being fought against Slovenia. That’s when he knew, the war was coming home.

He made it to Pale, the town known to me only as the base for Serbian military action in Bosnia. The place that in my mind was actually called “Beyond-the-Pale.” He made it there, and then, over time, he made it out.

My heart pounded the whole way through his few words. He spoke briefly, sketching only vaguely what must have been terrifying and unknown.

I was young then, and I tried to encourage him to have faith in the future. “Go back and rebuild,” basically.

He laughed silently and humorlessly. “My grandmother’s home was destroyed three times, and by whom? Not by the Germans. Not by the Russians. By our neighbors. No, I’m not going back.”

He sipped wine and returned to the Indiana summer, and I stood in the breeze, and I never returned back to the same moment I’d left when B opened his mouth and said, “I remember the first time I held one.” I’d learnt what I always wanted to know and didn’t.

I’ve learnt more since then—more that I’ve always wanted to know and didn’t. Funny how you never go back when you learn. Painful knowledge doesn’t destroy as much as push; at the end of the day, who are you, the person pushing back? That’s what you learn.

Well, that’s what I learn. For every lesson that my nature seems to seek, I leave carrying a glimpse, a shadow of the pains of other people’s lives, and that pain makes love and beauty and strength and hope all the more radiant, even if they’re all ultimately equally true, equally human.

Tbilisi Winter, 2008

Stone Cold

My new thing is stonemasons.  I read a great book a while back by a master stonemason (Thomas Maude), and ever since then, I can’t get enough.  From stonemasonry to architecture to sculpture, I’m swimming in delicious books, hooked onto the glimpses of that other world, that other our world, lurking beneath the surfaces of our everyday lives.  Literally.

One thing that’s fascinating me is the way in which we fixate on inanimate things in order to prove our strength.  Remember the Taliban in Afghanistan?  The Soviets did the same thing in Kaliningrad—only instead of blowing up statues in effigy, they decapitated them.

Apparently this was all the fashion in the Paris of the Reign of Terror (1793-94).  When Louis XVI was decapitated, it wasn’t quite enough of a statement—the funerary statue of Carolingian King Lothair (954-86) was decapitated too. 

Throughout Paris, images of kings were torn down and destroyed.  Decapitated-destroyed.  Statues of unknown provenance, if possibly regal statement, were also thusly tossed down.  If stone could think, it would scratch its head.  Which would of course be lying on the ground several feet away from its body.

The Notre Dame, when its medieval sculptures were forced from their pedestals along the walls, offered the discerning anti-royal citizen quite the heaping mass of rubble.  According to records, the very doors of this grand cathedral were obstructed and obscured by defiled stonework, featuring the illustriously decapitated statues of French royalty—be they holy or secular.  For three years they sat there in disarray, gathering the dirt and detritus of abandonment.

A contemporary painter suggested they put the rocks together to form a huge sculpture, but France had enough problems at the moment without directing all their horses and wagons to the site, and of course trains had yet to be invented.  So to minimize costs, they offered the misshapen rocks as quarry for sale.  Genius.  And so it was that these historical statues, saints mistaken for kings, were transported to various reaches of that great land.

Almost two centuries later, in 1977, the French were living their normal lives, sans revolutions and butchered statues or royalty.  Very novel.  And what should happen when some dear French dudes start excavating at 20 rue de la Chaussee-d’Antin to build a prison?  You guessed it.

Wait, you didn’t.  I shall have to furnish the answer myself.  No worries, dear reader.  I came prepared.

What should they find–but a mass grave.  A mass grave of statue heads, all buried facedown.  Twenty-one heads, buried together and cushioned by plaster.  No records exist to tell us today who buried these heads.

So now we have not only the fact that we sculpt ourselves from stone and venerate it.  We also destroy these images to show our power.  And we also bury them, again in veneration.  We bury them, or of course we walk slowly around resurrected statues like Venus de Milo, and marvel at its beauty, at its survival, and at its makers.

Stone…not so cold, after all.

my word for the day (if I can limit myself)

LACONIC

Read its etymology recently?  Originally it refered to people from Lakonia, an area around Sparta, whose inhabitants were famously terse.  Better than terse.

The story goes that when Philip of Macedon threatened them, “If I enter Lakonia, I will raze Sparta to the ground,” the Spartans retorted simply: “If.”

I need to work on my laconic delivery.  Excuse me while I go practice.

What does fiction owe reality, or what ought it adhere to, if anything?

A friend was asking me how many pages of my book my seemingly endless research will take up.  It won’t take up too much.  Maybe ten to fifteen pages total.  But I need them to be accurate.  I have a bone with BS in books.  I get we’re working with fiction here, but there’s no reason to insult reality or the reader while we’re at it.

I just read a fun book set in medieval England.  The author clearly knew the period rather well.  My quibbles with details were less about the facts, than about the choices. 

A)  The author chose to paint the Church with a wide, unforgiving brush.  No room was given at all to honest clerics–to their very possibility.  None.

B)  The author chose to depict a Jew burnt at the stake in punishment for bringing about the plague–a terrible and terrifying reality for entire communities of Jews in medieval Europe, despite their innocence–but then made the oddest decision about how to depict the victim.  The Jew was depicted as–get this–a Christian.

WTF?  This Jew was basically a Jew for Jesus, without the title.  Why?  I can’t think why.  Or rather, I can’t think that it’s accurate to the Jews of this period.  So the author made another choice.  Who knows what the reason was. 

Does the author doubt the reader will sympathize with a Jew, an “other”?  Did the author simply struggle for a way to include a subplot featuring a Jew as well as a subplot allowing her to reveal that reading (Christian) scripture was forbidden to layfolk during this period, and so she meshed both stories into one?  If the former, it’s an insult to readership and diminishes the value of the historical accuracy the book otherwise edges toward.  If the latter, uh, that’s just wrong.  It’s two separate issues affecting different peoples.

Add to this bundle the fact that the heroine is also an accomplished markswoman, rider and swimmer, and the story veers just off the set, stumbling off stage as I reel, making up my mind whether the pages are turning fast enough for me to stick with the ride.  That’s not what one wants:  disrupting internal credibility such that the reader breaks to make a conscious choice–not to believe, but to enjoy despite not believing at all.  To enjoy while seeing tricks played before their eyes.

I did choose to ride on, as it happened.  But the set had crumbled.  Maybe that’s the issue.  The center did not hold.  Things fell apart as the centripetal force crumbled.  Credibility was lost in the malaise.

There’s fiction, and then there’s license.  The twain are not the same.  A book ought not to purport history to be its set when it’s only its gloss.

Used to be, I avoided all historical fiction.  I didn’t want to absorb a sense of a time, how things went down, etc, from a novel, and then in my ignorance, assume it accurate.  Now I try read quality fiction almost regardless of genre, and only read historical fiction when it’s fearlessly self-described as fantasy.  Sometimes I wonder at myself, choosing to write a book which touches on history, when I have that strong bias.

Fiction is one thing, but glaring misdirection or toying with facts–nope.  Toy with mysteries, with the unknown.  Ponder the significance of known and unknown occurences–sure.  Make up stories that could fit, or alternate realities that you call by their honest names–yes.  But to place a novel in a period or in a location and then to violate its truths– that’s just not cool.   It’s a lazy choice, even if the book is still an enjoyable read.

What are your thoughts about the same, in books you’ve read or even are writing?

Ishakpasha Palace, overlooking eastern Turkey

Strange how this poem never made it onto the syllabus…

See, this Lord Byron poem below did NOT, somehow, make it to my reading list.  It was written on the death of Castlereagh, the former foreign secretary. 

Now, although I myself know nothing about Castlereagh, my finely-tuned artistic sensibilities allow me to discern, through the shades and nuances of this fine poetry, Byron’s opinion of the man.

Posterity will ne’er survey
A nobler grave that this.
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop, traveler, and piss.

*wipes a tear from her eye*

Ah, Byron.  You did have a way with words.

At Long Last…

I don’t even know where to start.

It’s hard being an early-riser sometimes.  The past week in particular has been really tough.  On Friday, I had the fortune to wake up bright and happy at 4:30am.  Deliciousness–a crisp morning of writing awaited me.  And indeed, I was fruitful and the pages did multiply, and all the problems of weeks past were chased away.  Brilliance.  Only something else also happened EACH DAY.

Namely, before it was decent, whilst windows across the street were still dark with slumber, time and again, I would come upon in my research an amazing, absolutely gut-bustingly fantastic little-known fact that I HAD TO SHARE.

But with whom?  With whom?, I cry!  (Yes, worthy even of mid-sentence sentence-ending punctuation.)

I know, I know.   Thou thinkest I exaggerate.  No.  Not I.  I never use hyperbole. 

Sample Gut-Busting Fact:  In 1545 (see, already your blood begins to rush with excitement), a little town in France had its vineyard destroyed by flies.

What, you say, suddenly wondering if these early mornings (or perhaps the unfiltered coffee I favor) has made me bonkers.

But I’m not done.  WAIT FOR IT, folks:

What did the townsfolk do, seeing their crops thusly destroyed?  That’s right.  They sued the insects. 

There, I thought you needed a moment.  [Waits patiently for the jaws to hover above the floor once more.]  Yep, they sued them.  So, the flies were assigned representation by a distinguished canon lawyer.  He must have been good, because the insects were acquitted.  His case was strong.  He cited God’s will, you see, that the flies “be fruitful and multiply.”  Thus in eating the crops, they were fulfilling God’s will, and could not be judged as wrong-doers.

The court agreed.  But what to do about the crops?  Finally they came upon a genius solution.  GENIUS.  (Wait for it.)  They assigned another field for the flies to eat of.  Yep.  That’s right.  Want to read that line again?  They assigned another field for the flies to eat of.

Did this gentle compromise work?  Apparently we may never know.  You see, the reports of success have not made it to our century.  They were, it is said, destroyed by insects.

[You can thank me later for this tidbit, which I KNOW you're dying to share now, as I was these past few mornings, along with other similar fascinating facts.]

And on this painfully delicious information was I forced to sit and not share.  On this bounty did I bounce impatiently waiting for the time to tell the world.

Consider yourself, World, told. 

Ah, and in case you were wondering if in between the gathering of salacious facts I actually got any writing done:  YEAH, BABE!  The story is zooming.  ZOOMING.

Love it. 

Subway Station in Brooklyn