Nellie Bly

So I just finished reading *Around The World In Seventy-Two Days*, by investigative reporter Nellie Bly, in 1890. In case you don't know, she set off to see if Jules Verne's fictional account could not only be duplicated, but bettered. (She popped in to visit the Vernes at their home on her way through France. Jules Verne was utterly delighted by her feat.)

Again, this was an enchanting view into a time and place. I believe she was twenty-five when she set off, with a shocking lack of luggage, even to the minds of free-and-easy modern sorts as ourselves. Even more shocking in her day, she went off alone--meaning she had neither man nor gun with which to protect herself. "...I had such a strong belief in the world's greeting me as I greeted it, that I refused to arm myself. I knew if my conduct was proper I should always find men ready to protect me, let them be American, English, French, German, or anything else." (Wow, how many doctoral dissertations can you find in that statement? Go ahead--in the right crowd it is an evening's entertainment and conversation. Just make sure you have enough snackies and drinks.)

One hundred and twenty years ago, an educated and literate woman could innocently write "I somehow always connected Japan and its people with China and its people, believing the one no improvement on the other. I could not have made a greater mistake." She then proceeds to tell of how her experiences taught her that they were two very different cultures. Some of what she said made me blink, adoptive Angeleno as I am, but she belongs to her time and place as I do to mine, and no doubt back in the day, her stories were revealatory to plenty of Americans.

I had ordered this book at Metropolis Books, down in the historic core, a while back. I t came in and I went to pick it up shortly after the poor girl was found murdered. After finishing the volume, the irony was not lost on me, over the very different fates of these two young women.

Hi, I'm Austen, and I'm a cityhuffer

'Just returned from Nebraska, where I reacquainted myself with Lincoln. Wonderful town. I wandered about the downtown area with Willa Cather short stories in my backpack and drank coffee and had exalted and delirious thoughts about it all. Yup, I love me a city, some bookstores, and coffee....

Finished *Tomorrow's Eve*

...and I don't quite know what to make of it. I imagine that students of Women's Studies and of literature will have fun with it. One could spend a lifetime pleasantly enough just researching any interesting question that crosses the mind. I don't quite know what to make of it at present, and so I just allow it to sit in its own strangeness in my imagination.

I just finished Dashiell Hammett's *The Glass Key,* being the last work of his I had not read. Gracious he was good! "Hammett's San Francisco" would be a fun Moleskine City Notebook to fill out.

Hope for Bird's *Travels*

The nice lady who runs Metropolis Books down on Main (the other direction from the Nickel Diner, if you are standing at the corner of 5th and Main) has very kindly helped me look for a copy of Isabella Bird's *Travels in Persia and Kurdistan* that is complete. She sympathized with my trauma over the previous copy I had that ended with "Volume One." We also found a likely copy of Nellie Bly's account of recreating Verne's *Around the World in Eighty Days*. I believe she did it in something just over seventy. *And* we found some Mary Kingsley, so I am happy. Gawd I just LOVE a brick and mortar shop! As a wise and kind magicianne who works in one of the brick and mortar magic shops I like has observed--"the computer can't point you to what you don't know about; a live person can." So true, so true.

Will we find search engines narrowing our inquiries? What happens when you can't just graze the library bookshelves, or chat with adepts or crazies?

Steampunk right in the midst of the era in question, and another window to be made into the past

Well if you like this sort of thing, and if you have not heard of this yet, let me tell you of it. *Tomorrow's Eve* by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, translated by Robert Martin Adams (1982). University of Illinois Press, first paperback edition, 2002. It was first published as a volume, in French, in 1886. Thomas Edison and a sensitive young English nobleman make a rather Faustian pact to create a female android. Zowie. The translator's introductory notes are engaging, and so far I have read through "Book One" of the novel. The most dedicated pastiche writer could not sustain the evenness of tone that an actual old novel has. Like many old products, plenty of this novel has aged greatly, but plenty is still disturbingly current. It can be perhaps playfully regarded as a superb steampunk novel, all the more so for being written in the period and not intended as such. So far, I've enjoyed the long discourses upon what modern humanity has come to. Anyone who has been a cubicle-denizen will get a shiver reading it. More on that as I finish it.

An idea that hit me a while back--using Moleskine City Notebooks for historical and literary notes on the place. Yum. Has anyone tried that yet?

I finished Bird's *Travels*!

only to discover I only had *Volume One*! Feh! So here I am, left in the middle of territory largely unknown by Europeans in 1890, with Isabella Bird doing quite nicely thank you amid the "fierce savages" who are treating her very kindly as she doles out cough treatments and eye drops, and I DON'T KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT! Apparently Virago Travellers only published this one volume back in the day, and I am beside myself with figuring out what comes next. I putter about on Amazon.com, but what help is that, with the not being able to *handle* the books, and *look* at them? Gah!

Isabella Bird

Talk about someone who walked around and looked at things! Regretfully I near the end of her book, Journeys In Persia And Kurdistan. (Virago Press, 1988.) Like much travel writing, it is an utterly engrossing read about one miserable day after another, punctuated by some relief and some pleasure. As I slowly emerge from such texts, I shake my head over their strange power to absorb my attention and grant such pleasure. With historical texts there is the added spell of the sense of a portal opening up in time and allowing one to look if not enter, in this case, Persia of 1890.

(If you like that sort of thing, I cannot too highly commend to your attention old stereoscope cards. The very dust off the Pyramids stings your lips as you gaze through the shaded lens at the old photos. I'm not quite clear on this, but my beloved gives me to understand that 3-D photography is making a resurgence in astronomy, so run off to your local antiques mall and snatch them up while you still can. Sometimes old Viewmaster reels reprinted old stereoscopic images too.)