Highlights from this month's Believer (issue 39, November 06)
Suggestions for reading to kill the hour when you realize 2:30pm Saturday is the “start of coverage” of the Ohio St. v. Michigan game and not the actual 3:30pm kickoff:
Rediscovering the eccentric St. Louis newspaperman Ben Thomas:
The Evening Whirl had a singular design—mug shots, both profile and obverse, were wainscoted two deep below the headlines. Pictures of the perps, Ben Thomas knew, sold newspapers. The faces were almost always black. Eight columns of triple-decker tombstones declaimed the week’s crimes and scandals, usually involving a killing, a cutting, a robbery, a rape, or some piece of local gossip. The lead story of nearly every edition was annexed with verse, built of four-line stanzas rhymed a-b-a-b.
The meter of the lines approached the iambic. Headlines and pictures were sometimes cockeyed. Captions and advertisements were occasionally handwritten. With its shabby appearance and neighborhood scuttlebutt and atmosphere of danger, the Evening Whirl had the look and feel of an old, dark corner-saloon metamorphosed into a newspaper.
—Scott Eden, from “Whirl”
And you thought Irish immigrants made for tough cops; try eastern Ukraine:
The young men slowly get to their feet and put on their snappy black leather coats. Maybe they will begin with the TV-booster ring; the dope dealer will be sleeping until noon. Logistics are everything on this job; the paramount concern is to save gas. Plainclothes cops in Dneprodzerzhinsk must pay for their cars, their gas, ballpoint pens, and office paper—even their own handguns.
“All you get is a chair when you join up,” says Vanya. “A wooden chair, that’s it. The rest you must supply yourself.”
—Larry Frolich and David Weber, from “Inside the Third Reich”
Selling the Ars Memoriae:
It took dedicated monks years to master the Art, but those who did reported astonishing mnemonic feats. One fellow claimed to have memorized more than one hundred thousand rooms, enabling him to recall the entire canon law, two hundred complete speeches by Cicero, three hundred philosophical sayings, twenty thousand legal points, and more. Another practitioner devised a system that would allow the student to learn every known fact of theology, metaphysics, law, astronomy, geometry, arithmetic, music, logic, rhetoric, and grammar. Over the centuries, the practice yielded increasingly elaborate exercises that often devolved into a kind of exponential crossword puzzle: an endless source of diversion for the solitary monk whiling away long days in his cell.
—Alex Wright, from “The Theater of Memory: A Cheap Factotum of an Old Monastic Trick”
DJ Shadow should just be a professional namer-of-things:
DJ Shadow: No. I always have a title at the beginning, but it never ends up being the title.
Jeff Chang: What was the original title for this one [The Outsider]?
DJS: Skull Fuckery.
JC: Huh?
DJS: Skull Fuckery.
JC: Skull Fuckery?
DJS: And it was intended to be really political—when I started the record in 2004, I thought it was going to be really political, but then what I realized is that I’m only political about 5 percent of the day, and I didn’t want an album that was disproportionately political—and after the 2004 elections I just felt like I couldn’t even dwell in this world anymore. So the album started to become more about human beings create contructs—for people, for situations, for everything—to help them understand and compartmentalize things.
—From “DJ Shadow (DJ) in Conversation with Jeff Chang (Writer)”
