The era whose stories I enjoy the most is America from roughly 1890 through 1950. It's the era of my grandfather's first decades and perhaps the era where your average fifty years of life saw the most change. The earliest stories include ice blocks keeping your root cellar chilled and the latest have you driving your air conditioned car to Dairy Queen for soft serve ice cream. The book from last week's essay chronicled the rural west from 1905 through the 30s. Its opening saw the closing expansionist west of the pioneers; its ending was somewhat metropolitan, although our heroes still drove cheap cars, they no longer had doubts of gas stations along the way.
All the anachronisms of these stories are a wonder. How many of their plots would've been solved with a phone? How many of their characters would've been flattened by the omni-culture? More seriously, how many of their lives were snuffed out by pandemics, wars, and poverty long before their time? That relatively recent years were so different is a wonder; on the other hand, for all the distance we've come since then, we're little different.
It's like Cheever's great line, "their gods were as ancient as yours or mine." Despite how far we think we've come, we're still the same people. We still fall for scams, we still think we can make a quick buck. We think we're more sophisticated than everyone else, that what we try to hide will stay hidden. We still look at people ruining their lives and wonder what makes them different from us.
We still boo the opposing team, especially when they're great.
This week's reading: the latest in stories that could've been written a hundred years ago.
The Package King of Miami
Matthew Bergwall was a gifted coder who could have gotten a job at any tech company. He decided to go in another direction.
The Russian Spies Next Door
Posing as Argentine immigrants in Slovenia, the quiet married couple were in fact part of Putin’s aggressive effort to seed the West with ‘illegal’ intelligence operatives, say authorities