the greycat blog

Very occasionally the World Wide Web throws up a jewel of a site; even more rarely, a jewel of a blog. I came upon one such today, the genuine sparkling precious article: JSBlog, ‘The weblog of Joel Segal Books - on varied topics inspired by working in a secondhand bookshop’.

The secondhand bookshop concerned is Joel Segal Books in Topsham, Devon, and it looks to be a wonderful place (I speak as someone for whom an hour in a good secondhand bookshop is nothing less than an anticipation of paradise). What drew me to JSBlog was a fascinating article on ‘Trains in literature’ which discusses an extraordinary range of rail-related topics from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries including my old favourite, ‘Railway Spine’. Everything’s fully referenced and linked to aid further exploration - start following the links from this article, or any other on this blog, and you’ll be engrossed for hours.

There’s much, much more at JSBlog: to list just a few articles which caught my eye, ‘Further beyond the woodshed’ (on Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm), ‘Encyclopaedic thoughts’ (very good on Wikipedia), ‘Predictions’ (on c19th views of the future, and has interesting things to say about Anthony Burgess’s 1985), and ‘Bizarre historical affectations’ (from the Alexandra Limp to the Bush/Blair Power Walk).

Blog Of The Year.

Two new essays are published at greycat.org today (well, the model railway essay is a revised version of a draft that has been around for some time, but the revisions are so extensive that it counts as new).

‘Miniature railways and cultural microcosms: railway modelling in Britain, c.1900-c.1950′ - a study of the sociocultural history of railway modelling in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century, examining issues from philosophical and historical questions of the nature of leisure to the presence of modernism and nostalgia in model railways.

‘Killdozer: on the tracks of a monstrous machine’ - in June 2004 Marvin Heemeyer used an armoured bulldozer to stage a destructive assault on the town of Granby, Colorado. Taking this incident as a starting point, ‘Killdozer: on the tracks of a monstrous machine’ explores the significance of the bulldozer as a weapon, ‘simultaneously tank and tractor, tool and weapon, creator and destroyer’.

Theodore Sturgeon’s short story about a killer bulldozer, published in 1944, is the origin of the term ‘killdozer’. The story was turned into a film in 1974. This flash game is much more exciting than the film. Make sure you have your sound on.

‘Most-read’ may not be strictly accurate; ‘most-visited’ is perhaps closer to the mark. The statistics for greycat.org show that ‘Representing the Victorian railway: the aesthetics of ambivalence’ has received far more visitors than any other essay over the last week, almost all of them over the last 24 hours. This essay always receives a good number of visitors but the recent surge is solely down to the fact that the page has just been ’stumbled’ - i.e. recommended and shared within the StumbleUpon community.

StumbleUpon brings in a lot of visitors, but, at least for a site like this, most of them aren’t worth having. It’s like a hose that soaks your site in visitors, most of whom rapidly drain away. In the case of this page, only 12% of Stumblers stayed for more than 30 seconds, and 41% stayed less than 5 seconds. Lots of traffic, not much real interest. Still, every visitor is welcome and if even one person who comes here via StumbleUpon takes the time to read the essay and finds it interesting and/or useful then it’s worthwhile.

‘Representing the Victorian railway’ is derived from my doctoral research and was originally written for an academic conference in 1998. It has been much updated and revised since.

The railways constituted one of the most significant technological phenomena of the nineteenth century and, contrary to what some historians have argued, it took many years for the emotions they stirred up to become submerged in a general indifference; as Jack Simmons has noted, expressions of fear and alarm did not come to an end in the 1840s, but continued to be felt far into the Victorian age. As a presence in the nineteenth-century landscape, the railway was a source of a highly significant collective experience of technology, and of a powerful, liberating and disturbing vision of what technology could symbolize, offer, and threaten. Railways could be seen as a symbol of progress, promising economic and social betterment, freedom from old restrictions, democracy, energy, all the benefits and opportunities of modern mechanized civilization. Yet they were also associated with pollution, destruction, disaster and danger, bringing about the destabilization and corruption of social order, the vulgarization of culture, the defilement of natural beauty.

The essay uses two case studies to illuminate the ambiguities of nineteenth-century attitudes to the railway: J. M. W. Turner’s painting Rain Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway (1843-4) and Michael Reynolds’s book Engine Driving Life: Stirring Adventures and Incidents in the Lives of Locomotive Engine-Drivers (1889). To read more, visit ‘Representing the Victorian railway: the aesthetics of ambivalence’.

Picture: Great Western Railway locomotive, c.1880 [Source]