Christian Zavisca

Sorry, Balloon Boy: This hoax was much better

I'm loving the revival of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Balloon-Hoax."

The Guardian reports:

On 13 April 1844, the New York Sun published a breathless account of a great step for mankind: "The air, as well as the earth and the ocean, has been subdued by science, and will become a common and convenient highway for mankind . . . The Atlantic has been actually crossed in a balloon . . . and in the inconceivably brief period of 75 hours from shore to shore!"

In a precursor of the reality shows to which the Heenes apparently aspired, the Sun ran excerpts from the faked diary of the Victoria's navigators, which ended just after their "sighting" off the coast of South Carolina. (In reality, the Atlantic would not be crossed by a balloon until 75 years later, when the rather less romantically named British dirigible R-34 landed in New York City after an 108-hour flight.)

The account was cooked up by Edgar Allan Poe, a hoax-lover in an age of hoax-lovers; he perpetrated five others. Poe seems to have rather enjoyed the fuss: "On the morning (Saturday) of its announcement," he later wrote in the Columbia Spy, "the whole square surrounding the Sun building was literally besieged, blocked up from a period soon after sunrise until about two o'clock PM . . . I never witnessed more intense excitement to get possession of a newspaper. . . I tried, in vain, during the whole day, to get possession of a copy."

"The Balloon-Hoax" isn't even the best Poe hoax, in my estimation. That prize goes to "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall," an apparent precursor to Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon." The Hans Pfaall story is about a man who uses (what else) a balloon to travel to the moon. This hoax was upstaged by yet another in the New York Sun, The Great Moon Hoax, if Wikipedia has it right.

It really was a golden age for hoaxes.

Mad magazine's zany history

Reading this biography of Alan Moore got me to thinking about Mad magazine as he discussed buying early issues of Mad while growing up in Northampton, England.

"I didn't understand any of it; it was all making jokes of American things whch I've got no knowledge of. But that didn't stop me repeating it to my parents in the hope that they'd find it funny. So I was telling them jokes about Jimmy Hoffa and Caroline Kennedy and Adalai Stevenson. I didn't know who those people were, my parents didn't know who those people were — but it was the beginnings. I was starting to piece together just from Mad satires and other references in comics — I was starting to piece together a picture of the world. It was probably quite sophisticated, given my environment and my age, you know?"

Before The Onion, before "The Daily Show," there was Mad. I loved Mad magazine growing up, too. One of my favorite jokes on "The Simpsons" made fun of Mad:

Bart: My God! The Mad Magazine Special Edition. They only put out seventeen of these a year.
Milhouse: Boy! They're really sockin' it to that Spiro Agnew guy again. He must work there or something.

And of course hilarity ensues when on a later episode, Bart visits Mad's offices.

Mad's "untold history" can be found here.

Suttree

What am I reading? Thanks for asking. Besides the obligatory football preview magazines, I've been working on Cormac McCarthy's "Suttree."

According to Publisher's Weekly:

Set in Knoxville, Tenn., in the 1950s, this novel tells the story of a man who has repudiated his well-to-do parents, deserted his wife and is now a river fisherman who consorts with robbers, ragmen and other outcasts. McCarthy captures these people's lives and speech with a tough, lyric grace.

It's great so far, and as a Knoxville resident, it's fun to follow the lay of the land through the wanderings of the protagonist, Suttree.

Books and their uses

A great post by Lifehacker explores any number of things you can do with books:

• Suggestions on finding new stuff to read, powered by LibraryThing's brilliant UnSuggester, Whichbook and others.
• Sources of free books, such as Project Gutenberg.
• Ideas on building things out of books, like a bookshelf (figures), or even a bar.