The Victor Mourning Blog

An unknown work by Arthur Rimbaud has been discovered, written during the Franco-Prussian War.

“Bismarck’s dream”, a prose text running to around 50 lines, was published on November 25, 1870 in the local newspaper Le Progres des Ardennes, under the name Jean Baudry.

Rimbaud and his era was a fascination of mine about 20 years ago, about the time that Barnaby Conrad’s coffee table book on absinthe was published. The Franco-Prussian War has been another minor fascination lately. I recently found several small portraits of Prussian soldiers from this era and framed them. They now hang above my DVD shelf. I also recently discovered the probability that one branch of my family (my paternal great great grandmother) immigrated to the US from Prussia just before the war.

-Stephen Lee Canner

When I lived in Bloomington around 1984-85 I lived downtown in a large (now locally famous) apartment building called the Allen Building. Given the extremely cheap rent (bathroom down the hall, $135 a month) the vast majority of my neighbors were musicians, artists or just scenesters. But there were a couple of pensioners that I would occasionally see in the hall. I knew their names and would nod hello to them on the stairs, but nothing much more than that. One of these folks was Carl Moenkhaus, a thin balding man who never said much. I knew that there was a dorm building on the Indiana University campus called Moenkhaus but that was as far as the familiarity went.

Recently on the Indiana MFT site a discussion of Hoagy Carmichael’s early days in Bloomington came up. In the 1920s Carmichael famously hung out in the Book Nook, a soda shop/bookstore directly across the street from the gates to the university. By the time I lived in Bloomington the Book Nook was just a place to stop in and grab a Coke on the go, more a convenience store than a hangout. If memory serves they did still sell a few Cliff Notes and other minor books, though. In Hoagy’s day the Book Nook was evidently the hip place for the jazz kids to get together. One of these kids was William “Monk” Moenkhaus. Monk was great pals with Hoagy and evidently something of a Hoosier Dadaist. One source says that he was actually going to school in Zurich in 1914 (although according to what I’ve found he would’ve been 12 at the time, not sure how long he stayed there) and “apparently exposed to the Dadaist movement then taking shape in Zurich - or at least its intellectual fallout - and brought its principles back with him when he returned to study music in Bloomington.” If Monk stayed in Europe until he was 18, this would’ve been around 1920, then he was definitely old enough to have had meaningful contact with the Dada crowd.

If this is true we’ve found a direct connection between the Book Nook/Carmichael crowd and first wave Dada. In the early 80s when a friend of mine named his dorm room “The Cabaret Voltaire” and made Dada inspired flyers for our band Your Real Dad we had no idea that there could be any sort of connection between Zurich in the teens and the small southern Midwestern town we lived in.

I wasn’t sure exactly how old Carl Moenkhaus was but he seemed pretty frail in the mid-80s and did indeed die while I lived in the building. A bit more research turned up the fact that there was a zoology professor at Indiana named William Moenkhaus. As most professors at IU came from elsewhere, not the local community, and the last name not being a common one, I figured it was a good chance that Carl was closely related to Monk.

Then I came across this entry in the 1930 census. It appears that William “Monk” and Carl were both sons of William, Sr, 12 years apart. And given the fact that census takers in those days went from house to house and the next entry is for Alfred Kinsey (yes, THAT Kinsey) it appears that they were adjacent neighbors.

If only I’d known some of this at the time. What amazing stories could I have learned from Carl? The lesson from this is that history, amazing history, is all around us, all the time, no matter where we are. Don’t hesitate to reach out and gather as much of it as you can, before it’s too late.

–Stephen Lee Canner

I had no idea until this morning that the earliest known recording was recorded as early as 1860.

The recording of “Au Clair de la Lune”, recorded in 1860, is thought to be the oldest known recorded human voice.

A phonograph of Thomas Edison singing a children’s song in 1877 was previously thought to be the oldest record.

You can hear the creepy, ghostly sounding track here.

- Stephen Lee Canner

A nice little piece from This American Life about a pre-WWI, southern mystery:

The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar

- Stephen Lee Canner

I had initially intended to blog about my entire SXSW experience, but after writing out what was basically an abbreviated version of Day One I realized that each post would be very long, even in abbreviated form, and that each day seemed like one big name drop. So instead, I’ll just list the highlights of my week here:

Meeting Kim Fowley and spending much of SXSW with him. The man’s been everywhere and done everything and has some amazing stories.

Seeing Roky Erickson receive his Austin Music Award.

Meeting the Belfast contingent that were in town: the band Driving By Night (all very, very nice guys,) promoter Joe Dougan, and a few others.

Seeing the Teen Sensations, The Stems, and Muck and the Mires.

Meeting Art Fein, Danny Fields, and the Cowsills.

Seeing a riveting set by The Builders and The Butchers.

And most of all coming out the other end not so much with any big industry connections but with a very clear sense of what needs to be done at this point. I kept telling everyone I knew over the last month that this SXSW was going to be epic. And I can honestly say it really was.

- Stephen Lee Canner

Reading Dee Brown’s entertaining Wondrous Times on the Frontier recently, I came across a mention of Oscar Wilde, who while touring the United States in 1882, met a boy on a train who was selling pirated editions of a “slight book of poems” he had recently published. Wilde was, of course, indignant, but according to the account seems to have made a sort of peace with the boy who later gave him some oranges as a gift. Wilde was evidently much less chagrined at the potential loss of income than at the shoddy quality of the printing job. Digging for more on this incident I came across an article from the New York Times, July 23, 1883, recounting a lecture that Wilde had given in London. The article has a slightly different account:

He talked of himself in his ‘Impressions of America’ as if he were illustrious there and here, over and over again he spoke of himself as ‘the poet’. He saw a boy selling his ‘pirated poems’ at 10 cents. The boy offered him pea-nuts, but he could not think of buying pea-nuts from a boy who was selling a pirated edition of his poems. So the vendor of pea-nuts said: ‘Do buy, I have never sold to a poet yet.’

This made me wonder whether there are collectors of pirated 19th century editions of the works of “great authors” out there, especially editions released more or less contemporaneously with the original. A bit more research told me that Wilde’s pirated editions do show up in his bibliographies and are mentioned here and there elsewhere. A quick check of online booksellers shows that pirated editions of his books list from around twenty dollars to the thousand dollar range. One copy of Wilde’s Ravenna, listed at over eight hundred dollars, was described as the “First pirated edition.”

Pirated editions of 19th century books say a lot more to me than do first editions. If a book was pirated to any great extent then we’re dealing with a book that really had some sort of effect on the public at large. The fact that copies of Wilde’s poems were selling for a dime a copy, not a dollar, meant that they were meant for a general audience, not the educated elite. Granted, many of the people that purchased these volumes might not have been lovers of poetry, but perhaps they were lovers of spectacle, and by all accounts Wilde’s visit to North America was a bit of a spectacle. The existence of these pirated editions in the United States as early as 1882 doesn’t mean that Oscar Wilde’s writing had much, if any, effect on the country at large at that early date, but it does hint that perhaps the very spirit of his character did.

–Stephen Lee Canner