A Big Wow

It has been very cold in Maine lately, as this report in the Boston Globe attests:

The coldest temperature ever recorded in Maine, a frigid 50 degrees below zero, was reached when a blast of Arctic air hit New England last month. The record is tied with a thermometer reading from 1933 in Bloomfield, Vermont for the coldest recorded temperature in New England history.

“It’s a big wow,” said Tony Sturey, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Caribou, Maine. “It’s an incredible number, an insanely cold number.”

In January 1971, the country's lowest temperature ever recorded, 80 degrees below zero, was reached in Alaska. The lowest temperature on record in the continental US is 70 degrees below zero, measured in January 1954 in Montana. Maine's previous record of 48 degrees below was measured in 1925, also in mid-January.

January was a colder month than usual in many parts of Maine and New England. The record-breaking temperature was recorded the morning of January 16, after a mass of Arctic air plunged into Alaska and northern Canada, and traveled eastward into New England.

From Walden:

Once, in the winter, many years ago, when I had been cutting holes through the ice in order to catch pickerel, as I stepped ashore I tossed my axe back on to the ice, but, as if some evil genius had directed it, it slid four or five rods directly into one of the holes, where the water was twenty-five feet deep. Out of curiosity, I lay down on the ice and looked through the hole, until I saw the axe a little on one side, standing on its head, with its helve erect and gently swaying to and fro with the pulse of the pond; and there it might have stood erect and swaying till in the course of time the handle rotted off, if I had not disturbed it. Making another hole directly over it with an ice chisel which I had, and cutting down the longest birch which I could find in the neighborhood with my knife, I made a slip-noose, which I attached to its end, and, letting it down carefully, passed it over the knob of the handle, and drew it by a line along the birch, and so pulled the axe out again.

Photo Library of Congress--Fred Waters in Auto-Sleigh, between 1910 and 1915.

88 Keys Below W 4th

This is what we at The Thoreau You Don't Know are talking about, and it comes via Flicker as first spotted on Gothamist.

Like Conan O'Brien, Thoreau Went to Harvard

Like Conan O'Brien, Thoreau went to Harvard. In the New York Times Book Review this weekend, Jennifer Schuessler writes of Flannery O'Connor, who is the subject of a great book review by Joy Williams:

O’Connor never made the best-seller list, but she did catch the eye of the budding literary critics Tommy Lee Jones and Conan O’Brien, both of whom wrote Harvard undergraduate theses on her work. In his Class Day speech at Harvard in 2000, O’Brien described the awesome, kryptonite-like powers of his analysis: “I wrote a thesis: ‘Literary Progeria in the Works of Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner.’ Let’s just say that, during my discussions with Pauly Shore, it doesn’t come up much. For three years after graduation I kept my thesis in the glove compartment of my car so I could show it to a policeman in case I was pulled over. License, registration, cultural exploration of the Man Child in ‘The Sound and the Fury.’ . . .” Jones, according to The Boston Globe, received cum laude honors for his opus. O’Brien’s thesis grade has apparently not been disclosed.

Also like Conan O'Brien, Thoreau was big on getting laughs out of his lecture audience, though today have lost their sense of humor when it comes to (a) Thoreau and (b) nature, among other things.
(Photo NYPL Digital archives here--New York's first known comedian.)

Talking Transportation With the Times

A member of the Thoreau You Don't Know team talks about shutting down the Times Square area to cars and, thus, opening it to people here.

Railroading

People think Thoreau was against the train. Personally, we at the Thoreau You Don't Know don;t get that feeling. He took the train to hike in the hills. He took the train to lecture. He used to hang out by the train tracks to check out the nature--kind of like looking at plants on a highway median, in terms of today. One of our favorite reporters is Sarah Goodyear at Streetsblog.org, and she recently had this to say about trains and the United States and today--she is following the people following high speed rail as it relates to the stimulus bill.

In Common Parlance

According to the New York Times Book Review's blog, Paper Cuts, the discussion between Lawrence Lessig and the artist Shepard Fairey. (Jennifer Schuessler wrote the post, "Steal This Blog.") Here's the moderator's Twitter feed. All I want to say is they talked about the commons. Thoreau talked a lot about commons, pitching himself as what he called an extra vagrant, a phrase that, if you think about it, gets better and better. Here's this about the idea of commons:

Speaking of Unemployment

A lot of people think that Walden is a paean to nature. And it is pro-nature. On the other hand, it is an economic analysis--or an analysis of the culture that thinks only economically. The goal, of course, is to mend the rift between thinking economically and thinking nature--"healing the false binary" is a phrase the the staff at The Thoreau You Don't Know have seen in academic papers. It seems relevant to point out that times were not good when Thoreau was setting out as a writer, as this brief excerpt from The Thoreau You Don't Know indicates:

Violent class warfare was more of a possibility than the typically genteel study of the Transcendentalists’ time would indicate, or marketers who invoke Thoreau’s namenowadays might imagine. Union membership had taken hold on a mass scale—in 1834, New York City’s General Trades Union created a National Trades Union, and had a march a mile and a half long—but the layoff s zapped their power. In the winter of 1837, as theaters were deserted and markets empty, renters were planning a mass action in New York City; landlords collectively held back on their attempts to collect. For the first time in U.S. history a president, Andrew Jackson, used federal troops in a labor dispute—against the immigrant Irish workers on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal who had attacked scab workers. The Workingman’s Party was agitating in Boston, while women working in the mills in Lowell went on strike, what they then called a “turn out,” singing, “Oh! isn’t it a pity, such a pretty girl as I/ Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die?” Philip Hone, the former New York City mayor and diarist, wondered how a workingman fed his family, given that Hone’s upper- class friends were in dire straits. “What is to become of the working classes?” he wrote. That spring, Emerson wrote in his journal: “Cold April; hard times; men breaking who ought not to break; banks bullied into the bolstering of desperate speculators; all the newspapers a chorus of owls. . . . Loud cracks in the social edifice.—Sixty thousand laborers, say rumor, to be presently thrown out of work, and these make a formidable mob to break open banks and rob the rich and brave the domestic government.”

In other words, there was a great recession, a depression, in fact-—that's what Thoreau was thinking about. And it should also be noted that Thoreau survived. It was a lot of work, but he and his contemporaries figured out ways to get by.
(Library of Congress photo of Big Bill Heywood leading strikers in Lawrence, MA.)

A Nineteenth Century Moment!

Is it just us here at the Thoreau You Don't Know or does it feel as if we are having a Nineteenth Century Moment? Thoreau, by the way, was critiquing farming methods when he wrote Walden. At the time, farms were growing less for local customers and more for people out of town, which he thought was a bad idea. (On the other hand, he exported pencils, until German competitors caused him to shift to graphite.) Anyway, look here:



Above is the photo from a recent Times report, below a photo seen on your number one Victorian clothing web site.

But wait--why stop?

Wildlife Patterns

From the Journal Human Nature, via Eric Etheridge's wordblog, The Thoreau You Don't Know notes this wildlife research:

This study investigated the use of mobile telephones by males and females in a public bar frequented by professional people. We found that, unlike women, men who possess mobile telephones more often publicly display them, and that these displays were related to the number of men in a social group, but not the number of women. This result was not due simply to a greater number of males who have telephones: we found an increase with male social group size in the proportion of available telephones that were on display. Similarly, there was a positive relationship between the number of visible telephones and the ratio of males to females. Our results further show that the increased display of telephones in groups with more males is not due to the ostensive function of these devices (i.e., the making and receiving of calls), although single males tended to use their phones more. We interpret these results within the framework of male-male competition, with males in larger group sizes functioning in an increasingly competitive environment. This competitive environment is suggested to be akin to a lek mating system in which males aggregate and actively display their qualities to females who assess males on a number of dimensions. We suggest that mobile telephones might be used by males as an indicator of their status and wealth (sensu �cultural ornaments�).

Photo Library of Congress

Bottlenecks

Click here for a bottle neck story that includes this line: "Researchers say there was a thirty percent drop in traffic congestion last year, the likely result of higher gas prices and higher unemployment." The story is about bottlenecks, not bottleneck slide guitar playing, seen below:

Walking

In the Times today, the mayor's plan to cut out traffic from Times Square is leaked, as is this from Thoreau's Journal, 1857:

... in the distant woods or fields, in unpretending sprout-lands or pastures tracked by rabbits, even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day, like this, when a villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine. I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent to what others get by churchgoing and prayer. I come home to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful. I have told many that I walk every day about half the daylight, but I think they do not believe it.

Go feet (Photo NYPL.)

The Ecology of an Intersection

We at the Thoreau You Don't Know never tire of watching this, which reminds us of watching herds of animals on the Great Plains, or fish in a stream and so on:

Scramble from Sam Javanrouh on Vimeo.

Seeing the Wind

As readers of The Thoreau You Don't Know know, the staff of the The Thoreau You Don't Know is very interested in wind and windstorms, especially in the city--which is why we were elated to receive the following e-mail from an alert reader, in particular alert novelist Matthew Sharpe (Stories from the Tube, Nothing Is Terrible, The Sleeping Father, Jamestown), who came across this wind description from Charles Dickens, in Our Mutual Friend:

The grating wind sawed rather than blew; and as it sawed, the sawdust whirled about the sawpit. Every street was a sawpit, and there were no top-sawyers; every passenger was an under-sawyer, with the sawdust blinding him and choking him.

That mysterious paper currency which circulates in London when the wind blows gyrated here and there and everywhere. Whence can it come, whither can it go? It hangs on every bush, flutters in every tree, is caught flying by the electric wires, haunts every enclosure, drinks at every pump, cowers at every grating, shudders upon every plot of grass, seeks rest in vain behind the legions of iron rails.

Nice wind quote. (We put it in italics, because italics look windblown.) When the BBC did "Our Mutual Friend," they also ran a scholarly article archive, which can be found here. As far as Dickens and Thoreau goes: we are reminded of Dickens tour of The Five Points, the notorious so-called slum of New York City. (Photo NY Public Library Digital Collection.)

We am reminded that he liked to go slumming. We are reminded that the Five Points was exploding due to the sudden influx of immigrants, running from famine. We are reminded that Dickens did not have a lot of nice things to say about the Five Points residents, comparing them to the pigs.

Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays. Many of those pigs live here. Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright in lieu of going on all-fours? and why they talk instead of grunting?

We recall that Thoreau came to New York City the following year, living in Staten Island, and had some not nice things to say about the very same immigrants. Then he returned to Concord, MA, where there were also a lot of immigrants all of the sudden. In fact, Thoreau lived with some of the immigrants at Walden Pond, using party of a Irishman's shanty to build his house. Sometime after living at Walden, Thoreau's attitude changed. He began to have nice things to say about the immigrants--about their work habits, their fence building skills, their kids. In other words, Thoreau stayed loose; he was flexible. Kind of like Matthew Sharpe, seen here on the Today Show:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

In closing, note that one of the BBC's scholarly articles--Choi, Tina Young. "Completing the Circle: The Victorian Sanitary Movement, Our Mutual Friend, and Narrative Closure." A paper originally delivered at the Dickens Project Winter Conference, UC Davis, February 19-21, 1999--refers to the great English sanitarian Edwin Chadwick and says this:

Dickens's massive novels about urban life, such as Great Expectations and Bleak House, elaborate upon a similar conception of nationhood, where both narrative and nation, in spite of seeming novelistic excess with respect to characters and pages, actually exemplify remarkable economy. But his last complete novel, Our Mutual Friend, might provide the most fitting example of this emergent sense of nationhood, if only because here, Dickens overlays an almost Chadwickean vision of narrative and national closure with a pervading narrative thematic of sanitation, waste, and recovery.

Reception

The staff at the Thoreau You Don't Know wrote a piece in last week's New Yorker and then forgot to post it. It's about the signal, and your reception, and it raises either no questions at all or questions such as, Are you in a position to see and hear? Are you receiving the signal or any signal at all? Here is the Talk of the Town piece mentioned, and here is an excerpt:

The handoff of the White House seemed like a piece of cake next to America’s transition from analog to digital TV signal. With the White House, you switch residents but get a lot of the same stuff: podiums, helicopters, tour groups. With the switch that is officially taking place in television transmitters around the country starting this week, you could wind up with frame skipping, frozen screens, or, worse, nothing (as in snow). Bill Beam, the engineer in charge of the signal that WABC-TV sends off the Empire State Building, said recently, “We don’t know how it’s all going to wind up.” In the months leading up to the switchover, the city’s anxious cable- and dish-less citizens have been turning for answers to the Antenna King.

Lately, the Antenna King himself—a.k.a. Henry Langan—has not been in residence at the Antenna King headquarters, in the shadow of the Gowanus Expressway. Once, he ruled the rooftops of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx, places where today there are still a few hundred thousand people using old-style antennas to watch “Dancing with the Stars.” (The relatively wide-open vistas of the outer boroughs make them antenna-friendly; Manhattan, by comparison, is practically terra incognita to the Antenna King, save for a few satellite dishes.) Steven Langan, Henry’s son, is in charge now. “I’m the Prince,” Steven said the other day, at the Antenna King showroom.

Here is an excellent report on the neighborhood in which the Antenna King resides, Brooklyn's Leif Ericson Corridor, as it is referred to at this most excellent site, Forgotten New York.

A Simple Meal

This comes, no pun intended, via the Daily Dish, and reminds me of how Thoreau used to say that if you cut your own wood (and he got this from a neighbor) then you would warm yourself three times: once when you cut it, again when you lugged it home, and finally when you burned it. If you were to ask the staff at The Thoreau You Don't Know what they thought of this video, then they would tell you that they think it is kind of beautiful.

Under the Streets

The other day, people were coming out from under the street, as they sometimes do, on Atlantic Avenue, in Brooklyn.

It reminded me of that old, old Superman film, the first Superman film, "Superman and the Mole Men."

The film was in black and white.

Here it is:

A good synopsis is here
What people were doing under Atlantic is here
And this is where they had been:

If Thoreau Live Blogged the Oscars, 14

From everyone on the Thoreau You Don't Know staff: Good night everybody!

(Illustration, NY Public Library Digital Archives, here.)

If Thoreau Live Blogged the Oscars, 13

If Thoreau were live blogging the Oscars, he might take a moment to note that an (excellent) film about the first openly gay elected official in California winning the best actor award for Sean Penn reminds him (Thoreau) that people are often wondering whether or not he (Thoreau) was gay. Thoreau is the kind of guy who always turns a question around. For Thoreau, the question might not be, Am I (Thoreau) gay? The question might be, What's up with 21st Century America that they are so concerned with who is gay? With how close your relationships are with those of the same sex? In Thoreau's day, there were intense male to male relationships that would now be labeled gay and maybe were and maybe weren't gay, a kind of moot point, given that they were good relationships. I am reminded of the fact that Lincoln, as a young legislator, answered an add for a roommate and shared a bed with the guy in Springfield for a while, no big deal. I guess the question is, Gay, not gay? What do you care? The question really is, Are you relating?

If Thoreau Live Blogged the Oscars, 12

I don't know what the Reader is about even; I have not seen it. The people I am watching the Oscars/Live blogging the Oscars pretending to be the Thoreau You Don't Know tell me it's about a woman and a boy and post-WWII Germany and him reading to her, or something along those lines. All I know is that Thoreau says this, in the opening section, entitled "Reading," in Walden:

WITH A LITTLE more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike. In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident. The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed. That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present, nor future.

If Thoreau Live Blogged the Oscars, 11

If you are the Thoreau You Don't Know then you don't know if they will name Frost/Nixon for any awards this evening, but you feel compelled to mention, after seeing Paul Newman's picture in the pictures of actors who passed away this year, that Newman was on Nixon's enemies list. Newman was what Thoreau, in Civil Disobedience, described as a friction, that thing necessary for the proper functioning of a machine, in this case the machine of government. Just for fun, read to his name on this list, which can be found here and is below:

The original list of 20 names of White House "enemies" submitted with comments submitted with comments to Dean by the of office of Charles W. Colson.*

Boldface type indicates a correction in erroneous White House identification of its political enemies. Material in brackets is additional information supplied by the editor.

Having studied the attached material and evaluated the recommendations for the discussed action, I believe you will find my list worthwhile for status. It is in priority order.

1. Arnold M. Picker, United Artists Corp., N.Y. Top Muskie fund raiser. Success here could be both debilitating and very embarrassing to the Muskie machine. If effort looks promising, both Ruth and David Picker should be programmed and then a follow through with United Artists.

2. Alexander E. Barkan, national director of A F.L.-C.I.O.'s committee on Political Education, Washington D.C.: Without a doubt the most powerful political force programmed against us in 1968 ($10 million, 4.6 million votes, 115 million pamphlets, 176,000 workers--all programmed by Barkan's C.O.P.E.--so says Teddy White in "The Making of the President 1968"). We can expect the same effort this time. [See p. 468E3]

3. Ed Guthman, managing editor, Los Angeles Times [national editor]: Guthman, former Kennedy aide, was a highly sophisticated hatchetman against us in '68. It is obvious he is the prime mover behind the current Key Biscayne effort. It is time to give him the message.

4. Maxwell Dane, Doyle, Dane and Bernbach, N.Y.: The top Democratic advertising firm--they destroyed Goldwater in '64. They should be hit hard starting with Dane.

5. Charles Dyson, Dyson-Kissner Corp., N.Y.: Dyson and Larry O'Brien were close business associates after '68. Dyson has huge business holdings and is presently deeply involved in the Businessmen's Educational Fund which bankrolls a national radio network of five-minute programs--anti-Nixon in character.

6. Howard Stein, Dreyfus Corp., N.Y.: Heaviest contributor to McCarthy in '68. If McCarthy goes, will do the same in '72. If not, Lindsay or McGovern will receive the funds.

7. Allard Lowenstein, Long Island, N.Y.: Guiding force behind the 18-year-old "Dump Nixon" vote campaign.

8. Morton Halperin, leading executive at Common Cause: A scandal would be most helpful here. (A consultant for Common Cause in February-March 1971)[On staff of Brookings Institution]

9. Leonard Woodcock, UAW, Detroit, Mich.: No comments necessary.

10. S. Sterling Munro Jr., Sen. [Henry M.] Jackson's aide, Silver Spring, Md.: We should give him a try. Positive results would stick a pin in Jackson's white hat.

11. Bernard T. Feld, president, Council for a Livable World: Heavy far left funding. They will program an "all court press" against us in'72.

12. Sidney Davidoff, New York City, [New York City Mayor John V.] Lindsay's top personal aide: a first class S.O.B., wheeler-dealer and suspected bagman. Positive results would really shake the Lindsay camp and Lindsay's plans to capture youth vote. Davidoff in charge.

13. John Conyers, congressman, Detroit: Coming on fast. Emerging as a leading black anti-Nixon spokesman. Has known weakness for white females.

14. Samuel M. Lambert, president, National Education Association: Has taken us on vis-a-vis federal aid to parochial schools--a '72 issue.

15. Stewart Rawlings Mott, Mott Associates, N.Y.: Nothing but big money for radic-lib candidates.

16. Ronald Dellums, congressman, Calif.: Had extensive [Edward M. Kennedy] EMK-Tunney support in his election bid. Success might help in California next year.

17. Daniel Schorr, Columbia Broadcasting System, Washington: A real media enemy.

18. S. Harrison Dogole, Philadelphia, Pa.: President of Globe Security Systems--fourth largest private detective agency in U.S. Heavy Humphrey contributor. Could program his agency against us.

19. Paul Newman, Calif.: Radic-lib causes. Heavy McCarthy involvement '68. Used effectively in nation wide T.V. commercials.'72 involvement certain.