With the wheels a-singing ``Westward Ho''

[austin_dern]

One might suspect that I have a wee bit of a problem in keeping myself from buying every book that looks even slightly interesting. And maybe also that I find nearly every book at least slightly interesting. Well, I do. I like having a widening circle of interests and hobbies and I love coming across some intersection of topics that I hadn't thought about before. So I was wandering amidst the Book Garden, which recently reconfigured some of its shelves so that there's a specific Astronomy/Space section, not to mention a section devoted just to Old West books. I'm not so interested in the Old West --- bear in mind I've never lived in North America west of 81 degrees west longitude --- but it doesn't take much of a twist to get my eye.

So when I saw a hardcover titled Badminton of the West I thought, ``How can this possibly be a book?'' and therefore, ``I've got to see the book made of that subject.'' Well, wouldn't you want to know how that could possibly be more than a short essay?

Unfortunately it turns out I'd read the title wrong, and it was really Badmen of the West. Hardly worth raising an eyebrow for.

I also ran across, in the rather heftier History section, a book titled Famous Americans You Never Knew Existed, by Bruce Felton and Mark Fowler, which promises to be a compendium of curious people with a handful of quirky instances. But my confidence in the book was shattered by going into David Rice Atchison, The Real 12th President Of The United States. I could forgive a book cover for making that claim --- its need, of course, is to draw interest from the reader and serve as a trap to enrage the pedantic --- but the entry itself would need to explain why you could make the claim that he was president for a day but you really have to hold your fingers crossed to insist on it. The actual entry doesn't discuss those reasons, and even claims Atchison made some whimsical cabinet appointments, an assertion I haven't seen elsewhere.

So, with the book's reliability fatally compromised (a lack of references and no index, and this for a book with persons listed out of alphabetical order, too) it went back to the shelf to I imagine someday allow a future twelve-year-old know-it-all to learn that just because a book claims to be revealing secret trivia doesn't mean that trivia actually has anything to do with reality.

Trivia: The first broadcast of what became the Columbia Broadcasting System, on 18 September 1927, was a symphony orchestra concert. Source: On The Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio, John Dunning. (Oh, and by the by the 25th, Columbia Phonographic --- which had rescued the original plans for what had been the United Independent Broadcasting company --- sold the network to William S Paley. Apparently the adverising market in 1927 for radio symphony orchestras was not so robust as might havebeen hoped.)

Currently Reading: Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe, Thomas Cahill.

Comments

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

hehe... lack of biblio-willpower... I can think of worse things... just roll with it and enjoy ^V^

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I don't mind rolling with it, but I am sorry that I haven't got the number of bus rides for commuting and getting to things and whatnot that served as an extra hour or more of reading time every day. I can --- and do --- listen to books on tape (or CD) when I'm driving places, but that's not quite the same, despite its pleasures.

[orv.livejournal.com]

When radio first started to get popular, it was assumed that one of its big uses would be to broadcast classical music into people's homes. At the time, the only way to listen to music at home was on 78 rpm records, which required chopping up long pieces into 3 minute 30 second chunks.

It seems like people always assume technologies will be used for higher purposes than they actually are. Philo T. Farnsworth was always bitter that TV didn't end up being used primarily for education, as he'd envisioned.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Classical music didn't do too badly on radio as it worked out anyway: Dunning's book lists about sixty major concert-series programs spanning a season or more (not counting ones that were just regular specials) for the four networks through the Golden Age, which when you consider that era lasted only about thirty years and featured some extremely long-running programs like the Boston Symphony Orchestra (1926 - 1956 on NBC) or the NBC Symphony Orchestra (1937 - 1954) and doesn't count local broadcasts makes for a pretty robust set of music available.

While new technologies don't tend to be exclusively used for the high principles inventors may have hoped for, they do have their higher and culturally-uplifting effects anyway: an enormous number of people listened to Toscanini who otherwise wouldn't have known of his existence, for example, and a good number of performers came to realize that their music should be available to the masses and presented for people to enjoy, surely benefits in both directions.

Farnsworth would probably be very annoyed by many of the things on television today, but on the other hand, you can't say that a system with two history channels, a military channel, a science channel, a couple of health channels, an animal sciences channels, a biography channel, and several general-interest nonfiction channels isn't providing an educational service. The shows on them may not live up to their ideals, but, they are there and that's surely better than not having it available.