The Machine Stops

The Machine Stops was written in 1909 by E.M. Forster, who you may recognize from A Room with a View, Howard's End, and suchlike. It's a short story about a future society in which space has been abolished. People live in small, hive-like cells and have everything brought to them through the function of a world-spanning device called the machine. They spend their days communicating with friends, consuming culture, and rehashing ideas without ever leaving their rooms. There is no physical contact and no direct experience of the world.

It's a bit terrifying to see how, a century later, much of the story's predictions are increasingly true in spirit.

Pretty Words

Erin McKean recently wrote an article for the Boston Globe about the new Pictorial Webster's, which features over 12,000 engravings set and printed by hand from the 1859 edition of the Merriam-Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language. Its a lovely book. If the cheapest edition weren't $2600, I'd want one for myself. Incidentally, Ms. McKean gave a delightfully geeky TED lecture about lexicography last year.

I'm tossing this entry into the Vickies and Eddies filter, since it may be of interest to steampunk enthusiasts.

The Cost

One of the saddest things about the Iraq war is that the destruction of an ancient culture isn't even tabulated in the cost. An article in today's New York Times, A Fabled Iraqi Instrument Thrives in Exile, discusses the suppression of secular oud music in Baghdad. There are other places where Arabic music continues to survive, but Baghdad was once the center of a particular sound that may now fade into obscurity. This is the long term cost of political instability. There are millenia-old pieces from the National Museum of Iraq that may never resurface, and an intellectual tradition as old as the Abbasid Caliphate is slowly being rubbed away.

The same thing has happened in Afghanistan in the instability following the Soviet invasion in 1979. In 2001, the Taliban destroyed the giant Buddhas at Bamyan, and things didn't get much better after allied forces took over. In The Places in Between, Rory Stewart documented the 2002 looting of the lost city of Turquoise Mountain, former capital of the Ghorid empire. The empire was utterly destroyed by the Mongols, so an organized excavation of the site may have been our last opportunity to learn about this vanished culture.

This is worse than killing a group of people; it's erasing any sign that they ever existed.

On a more positive note, if you're not familiar with the oud, check out this video on YouTube or visit the website of Issa Boulos, a Palestinian player in Chicago, for some free recordings. If you want to listen to the Baghdad style, search YouTube with the phrase "Iraqi maqam."

As an interesting tangent, check out the middle of this video from the Turkish film Crossing the Bridge to hear the oud's influence on flamenco. The entire film is well worth watching and is narrated by Alexander Hacke of Einstuerzende Neubauten.

Confidential to Jonathan Coulton fans: mark the date.