Hey, who moved my Ferris Wheel? -- Garbo
Last week my spouse and I were watching a documentary about the 1904 St. Louis Fair, and I said, "Oh no!" about halfway through the film.
I'd just had an awful realization about a short story I'd written a few years ago. I'd done my research in the pre-Google version of the internet and unfortunately I'd done flawed research. In my bit of historical fiction, what should have been the Ferris Wheel from the 1904 had accidentally been swapped out for the Ferris Wheel from the 1893 Columbian Exposition (known informally as the Chicago World's Fair). Here's the 1904 wheel.
And here's the 1893 wheel.
The two look a lot alike, don't they? That's because they are in fact the same wheel. When the Chicago fair concluded, the Ferris Wheel was taken apart and set up somewhere else for a while, then disassembled again and sent off in pieces by rail. It traveled three hundred miles to the site of the St. Louis Fair.
In terms of my short story it wasn't so terrible that I was eleven years off. But the three hundred mile wrong-city situation had to be remedied. When I realized my error, I decided to simply move the location to the other fairground.
I found that making all the corrections would ruin the story, or my joy in it anyway. The title went from "If Sousa Had Been Syncopated at the Columbian Exposition" to "If Sousa Had Been Syncopated at the World's Fair." Accurate, but it had lost the rhythmic language I'd liked so well. And the more I looked, the more necessary edits and corrections I saw. I had to change the location of a scene from Jackson Park in Chicago to Forest Park in St. Louis. I changed the Illinois Central Railroad to the New York Central Railroad, and felt uneasy I wasn't a hundred percent sure that I had the right rail line.
And then I got to the part where I mentioned the Peristyle at the Chicago Fair, and realized I'd just have to take it out, and I thought "No, no, no! I can't lose the Peristyle!!"
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| The Peristyle at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago |
At that point I went back and returned the tale to its Chicago setting. To address the inaccuracy issue, I added a note at the beginning so readers knew we were dealing with a "what if" situation and not true history.
Ah, I find the phrase "true history" brings up what's been on my mind all week: The role of writers as preservers of history. I've been a poor example, as you can see from the recent uncovering of my long-ago blunder. But I am more diligent these days, have better-organized notes, and now there's Google and Wikipedia.
In thisTrumpian Age of glorified ignorance and willful hate, it seems important to me, while blogging about writers and history, to note that we've just had Holocaust Remebrance Day on January 27. If there was ever a need for writers to preserve history, it is right now.
I do understand that no written word can change the minds of dedicated conspiracy theorists. But I hope that we can keep a few young people or other struggling, desperate people looking for easy, evil answers to global conflict. I'm advocating for writers to continue helping our oldest citizens to preserve their narratives of wartime. Holocaust-deniers can buy into all the online stupidity they want about why the absence of one camp structure on a particular map means there was no Shoah, but it's really hard for anyone who's held onto a scarp of sanity to believe that all the camp survivors are puppets or fakes or liars. The narratives are simply too real. Take for instance this guy.
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| French painter Jean Helion |
He wrote this memoir in 1943.
Here's a bit from Goodreads about They Shall Not Have Me:
Civilians living their lives outside barbed-wire saw a lot of what went on during wartime as well. Some were already writers or journalists. Some became citizen journalists and war correspondents because the world needed them to do that work. Let's take Janet Flanner for example.
I hadn't thought about Janet Flanner for a long time, though I do love history and like Flanner, I grew up in Indianapolis. Then a month ago I began reading The Bright Lights. In this theatre memoir, Broadway actress and writer Marian Seldes writes about a potential role portraying Janet Flanner. Flanner was most famous as the American-born French Correspondent to The New Yorker. She wrote the ongoing reportage series "Letter from Paris" for the magazine. ( On its website, The New Yorker has put up several of Flanner's Letters from Paris along with other contributions.)
As Seldes was working on "becoming" Flanner during stage rehearsals, someone who knew Janet Flanner well worked with Seldes to get the portrayal right. In particular, Seldes was urged to do a full, free laugh in one scene because "Janet had a wonderful laugh."
And this moment in Seldes' memoir really grabbed me because some writers are able to offer direct observation of what will be become history as it's happening, add keen insights, yet do these two things with enough creative detachment to remain separate from the events. And within this group of writers is the subgroup of authors and journalists who can still laugh, even while living daily in an occupied city with no way of knowing how long it will take for the occupation will end, or whether it ever will end.
Along with a selection of Flanner's Letters from Paris, the New Yorker site also has an excepts from other writing. But it's the Letters which made, and make, the biggest impact on Flanner's readeership. In this book
Finally, to end today's post, this link goes to the short story I mentioned at the start of this post, the one about Sousa, Joplin, and the Chicago World's Fair. It's on my Blogger site "Dot Matrix Archives." I hope you enjoy it.
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| Garbo |
In high school, probably my Junior year, the vice principal of the school, Fred Clark, got to teach a history course of his own devising, from the colonial period forward to the early 20th century. His duties had largely lifted him away from teaching years before, so his teaching any class was an exception. I still have no idea if this was him exercising a whim, or if there was some credential-linked requirement that he log so many teaching hours every so often. Whatever the reason, it was one of the relatively few times during my primary school years where I got to see a teacher obviously indulging himself in a subject of great personal interest.
ReplyDeleteHis primary approach was to go for first person accounts, and even when he wasn't directly sourcing them as such, he made a point of wherever possible keeping the perspective of those who were directly involved. It made a world of difference in bringing it alive and making it relevant, whether it was one man's account of negotiating for the lives of several people who had been taken captive by a tribe (and what was done to the one, poor soul whose freedom he wasn't able to wrangle), or the psychological impact of Germany's "Big Bertha" artillery on primarily French forces in WWI.
In that same spirit a decade later, circa 1987, I latched onto the then newly-published EYEWITNESS TO HISTORY, edited by John Carey, which was a collection of such first-person accounts throughout recorded history, starting with an account by Thucydides of a plague in Athens from 430 BC, a dinner with Attila the Hun c. AD 450, accounts of the Black Death in 1348, factory conditions c. 1815, all the way up to the fall of the Marcos regime in 1986 Manila. I was very much taken with the book, which can be randomly dipped into, and for the following year I recall making a gift of copies to several people. My copy of it is either still packed away somewhere, or is among the books ultimately lost to me as a consequence of moving and leaving things behind at my mom's place.