Alternate Entries

Alternate Entries

Friday, June 20, 2003

Tonight (well, technically tomorrow) Harry Potter. Sunday Sex and the City. Ah, the solstice.

posted by jeev | 8:54 PM |

Tuesday, June 17, 2003

I'm reading Oakland, The Story of a City by Beth Bagwell. It's appealing on a lot of levels, but almost none of them are the ones I usually associate with history. It's actually based on a set of articles Ms. Bagwell wrote for a small local paper, The Montclarion, and it has that feel - and here's some other interesting stuff you don't know about the town you live in.

There are wonderful graphics: a photograph of 10 year-old Jack London with his class at Cole School; a map showing the block in Oakland where the University of California began, before the move to Berkeley; an engraving of the Oakland Brewery, one of the city's earliest growth industries. And there are the details that you just don't think about in regular life: take the Transcontinental Railroad, it of the Golden Spike. When you emerged from the train after your unimaginably speedy for the time seven day trip across the country, you were in Oakland, either at the station, at 7th and Broadway, or at the wharf at the foot of Broadway, where you could catch a ferry to San Francisco. Who knew?

I'm not sure it's history exactly; it's more like the raw material out of which history might be fashioned. There's an enormous amount of really fascinating information, (the archival work alone must have been staggering) but it doesn't seem to be in the service of anything other than a need to acquire as many sets of facts as possible and present them in more or less chronological order. I think history has to be more than just "and then this happened". Still, living here, there's a real pleasure in knowing these bare facts. It's like hearing your great-uncle's stories about your grandmother when she was teenager: the surprise of suddenly realizing there was a world right here that sort of, but not quite, lines up with the world you had, until that moment, lived in without giving it a second thought.

posted by jeev | 10:00 PM |

Monday, June 16, 2003

What happens when a bomb explodes in a French bakery?

Napoleon blown apart.

(Thanks, Katie)

posted by jeev | 1:19 PM |

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