the greycat blog

The February 2008 issue of All The Rage is out, and the theme this month is ‘time’. I ramble on about the relative nature of time, the thought of Henri Bergson, and the cluelessness of post-modernist historians:

No past event is intrinsically in the past. It is only a past event in relation to other events that are in the present and the future. This does not mean, as some post-modernists like to tell us, that the relationship between past and future is consequently meaningless. Time passes and change occurs: did the trendy post-modernist historian write any of his vacuous articles before he was born? No, and nor will he write a single word once he is dead.

The highlight of the issue, however, is editor Leila Johnston’s mind-opening piece on ‘time and the future of writing’:

You could, if you wanted, read the great art of the past century as a laborious delivery of 21st century individualism. Maybe it was a kind of battle to own the unknowable years ahead. Whatever lay in front would still be beyond reference, but pehaps naming it as such meant it could be deliberately uncontrolled in ways the present and past could not. Unlike the past, which was vulnerable to subjective reading and revision, the future represented a lack of context, an absence of meaning. We can view this effort to represent chaos as rather quaint - so obviously idealistic, so clearly doomed to fail.

You can find the February issue of All The Rage here (PDF): go and read the lot, and look at the pictures.

The theme of the January 2008 issue of All The Rage is ‘forbidden knowledge’. Highlights include an interview with Greg Stekelman, better known as themanwhofellasleep, some borrowed opinions from Oliver Holtaway, and typically classy ramblings from Sylvia Bellini. And there’s something from me:

Modern technology, the googleization of the world, has made more knowledge available more easily than ever before, and has led to the concept of ‘forbidden knowledge’ itself becoming devalued. Every conspiracy theorist now has a website, repositories of convoluted nonsense that feed off each other and off the internet itself. Whether it’s 9/11, UFOs, the New World Order or the satanic nature of bar codes, the Truth is but a click away - ‘google it, people!’

‘Forbidden knowledge in the internet age’ can be found on pages 3-4 of the new issue (PDF file) of All The Rage.

Picture: Detail of photograph depicting Eve in the Garden of Eden by Jean Agélou (1878-1921). [Source]

The December 2007 issue of All The Rage is published today, and has various items related (in broad terms) to Christmas, including my article on ‘Christmas presents through time’ which looks at some of the things that have been inflicted upon children at this time of year in the name of seasonal goodwill. Other great stuff in this issue includes letters to Santa, an Advent calendar, and the various ways in which Christmas combines hope and disappointment.

Find the new issue of All The Rage here (PDF file), and the main All The Rage site is here.

Picture: ‘Santa Claus in Iceland’: advertisement for Gamage’s Great Christmas Bazaar, 1922 (detail).

The latest (November 2007) issue of All The Rage is out, and the theme this month is ‘puzzles and mysteries’. Particularly recommended: Rob Jones’s artful Mystery on the District Railway and Tim Warriner’s guide to the best way to remember playing cards (’requires a good understanding of hexadecimal and binary and the ability to convert from one to the other quickly’). But, of course, it’s all good. My contribution is an article exploring that classic mystery of the sea, the case of the brig Mary Celeste:

The tale of the Mary Celeste is one of the sea’s most enduring mysteries, a puzzle with no apparent solution: a vessel found drifting on the open sea, dry and in perfect condition, sails set, boats intact, no sign of storm or violence, food served out on the table, cargo in perfect order, and no living soul aboard … Many solutions have been suggested over the years: mutiny, insurance fraud, alien abduction, mass religious frenzy, and an attack by sharks during an impromptu swiming competition; but the enigma remains. Yet the Mary Celeste of this enduring mystery is quite different from the real Mary Celeste …

… as you will discover if you read ‘The Mary Celeste: fact, fiction and mystery’ in the new issue of All The Rage. Here is a direct link to that very issue (PDF).

Picture: Engraving of the Mary Celeste as found in December 1872. [Source]

In the current (October 2007) issue of the online magazine All The Rage you will find, among other fascinating things, an article of mine about Victorian and Edwardian science fiction: ‘Steam sci-fi: how the Victorians invented the future’. An enticing excerpt that will leave you breathless with excitement and saying I simply must read on follows.

The French had a particular genius for these imaginative but uncanny visions of futurity. In his Le Vingtième Siècle of 1882, Albert Robida (1848-1926) depicted the people of 1952 watching the news on television, catching flights from the central airship station built upon the towers of Notre Dame, having husband-and-wife arguments over the téléphonoscope, and taking pleasure cruises in submarines. In a nicely Gallic touch, he observes that if twentieth-century women are to ride upon flying machines their dresses will have to be shorter than those of their nineteenth-century predecessors.

I simply must read on, you say? Then here is a direct link to the issue containing the article (PDF).

Picture: Illustration from Albert Robida, Le Vingtième Siècle (1882). Author’s collection.