newyorkette

^{This week’s TNY fiction is available online. (image: carolita johnson)}

Stacy Schiff’s “Know it all,” is everything you ever wanted to know about Wikipedia, but were afraid to ask Wikipedia themselves about because you weren’t really sure how far you could trust them. I have been known, when needing a reference to point to, to use Wikipedia in order to avoid using other more commercial sources, but have often wondered if I did well. Schiff brings Wikipedia’s birth amongst the dusty encyclopedias and encyclopedists under scrutiny, with points of view from Encyclopedia Brittanica (who Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales would consider a competitor, “except that I think they will be crushed out of existence within five years.” The article also affords a revealing glimpse into the origin of the first European encyclopedias, which I’ve heard had some very strife-filled moments no less earnest than today’s struggles.

For good measure, read Wikipedia’s history of the encyclopedia up to Wikipedia’s times here.
UPDATE as of 8/4/06: just heard from Ken Berard at The Atlantic, who kindly sent me this link for your further enrichment on the subject , while assuring me that “the article is supplemented with several interesting sidebars and Wikipedia links.” And indeed it is. Enjoy! For Wikimania, see this, via Emdashes and her great pun: Oh, Wiki, you’re so fine.

In Shouts & Murmurs: Paul Simms’ Ambien Cookbook for you hungry somnambulists, features the Licorice Surprise, among others. Here’s my favorite part of the recipe which calls only for a couple of ambien and a plugged-in black extension cord:

Roll out of bed, wake up on floor.
See extension cord, think, What a big delicious licorice rope that is!
Chew on essentially flavorless cord until you get to the metallic center, where the surprise is.

Alec Wilkinson’s fish story, The Lobsterman, about a fisherman who turned “oral history into science,” isn’t online, but an interview with Wilkinson by Blake Eskin is available in the Online Only section of TNY in “Q & A: At Sea.” If you read it, you will want to read the article it spins off from. It’s not Pirates of the Caribbean, but it’s salty. (And I’m sorry, but it did make me want a nice piece of fried cod and chips.)

Alberto Mendez’s “First Defeat” (1939), translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, is an exercise in surrender, and not the good, Harlequin Romance kind. If you know any Spanish, you’ll know from the start that the main character, a Franco soldier who surrenders to the Popular Front as soon as he hears that their surrender to Franco is imminent, is named after Joy, or Happiness. It is the story of the whittling down of the act of war, particularly civil war (but if you think about it, all wars on the Earth are civil wars between earthlings), to the one sad fact that wars begin with an ideal and end with only one objective, which is to kill the enemy. Here is a scene from Alegría’s courtmartialling:

“When asked what our objective was, if not to win the Glorious Crusade, the accused replied, ‘To kill them.’ ”

I’ve always thought that if instead of celebrating wartime victories , we’d mourn all those who died in order that we might win (including the enemy’s dead, because we did regrettably have to kill them, didn’t we?), we might be less inclined to go to war and work things out in more peaceful ways. As Alegría says,

“All wars cost human lives, of course, but this war has become a form of usury. We will have to choose between winning the war and conquering a cemetery.”

Posted Saturday, July 29th, 2006 at 6:00 am under TNY weekend reader. Feel free to trackback from your own site. All images on newyorkette.com are the intellectual property of Carolita Johnson, and you must ask (and receive) express permission to use them or reproduce them in any way whatsoever.