condensed footnote to the foregoing (for whose who weren't sure if they wanted to bother)

The essay on which I have requested advice is creeping slowly up towards 1500 words again after being about 1000. The original from which that was condensed was 2000 or more words extracted at random from my usual book-length ambition. Sorry.

To revisit my point, which may be completely specious: The rapid demise of some traditions or ways of doing things comes as no surprise. We know from Eric Hobsbawm (The Invention of Tradition), Hugh Trevor-Roper (The Invention of Scotland), Ian Buruma (Inventing Japan) and Ronald Hutton (Inventing...no, The Triumph of the Moon et al.) that many Immemorial Traditions aren't immemorial at all. Beyond that, quite enough genuinely ancient traditions have had to be reinvented today as niche markets.

But today, the habits of mind being displaced by new apps and options aren't comparable to the carving of cane-bottomed rocking chairs or Palauan storyboards. They're more like the customs of widespread spontaneous storytelling that were displaced by the spread of movies and television, after earlier being threatened by the popularity of novels and weekly magazines.

And that, surely, deserves a bit of thought beyond such preliminary efforts as Douglas Coupland's Generation A. Which itself deserves more thought than the New York Times reviewer gave it, or that I have thus far devoted to discovering its incompletely worked out underlying assumptions.

footnote to the footnote, one

It will be noted that my essay makes no mention of Twitter, because Twitter users will sometimes think in units of more than 140 characters.

you asked for it, you got it....

This is not quite the same topic as the one I am raising in the essay from hell (at least the overwhelming non-response from its recipients seems to indicate its infernal status), but it is hard to stay further on the edge than Edge:

http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_index.html

The Crowley Family Graveyard at Wal-Mart (No, This Is Not a Joke)

Just before the Deep Freeze set in, I was having a conversation at Mingei World Arts in which the topic of the now-demolished Avondale (previously known as Columbia) Mall came up. The first enclosed mall in the state of Georgia, it was built immediately adjacent to the family graveyard of descendants of early settler (in 1802) Benjamin Crowley, whose living relatives declined permission to move the graves elsewhere.

So a high wall was built around the family cemetery, and the mall parking lot was constructed around it, twelve feet below original ground level (hence the height of the peculiar structure...the headstones and grave sites are, if Wikipedia is to be believed, at the top).

The derelict mall was demolished in 2007, but the graveyard remained undesecrated during the subsequent construction of the Wal-Mart that opened in 2008.

The structure, which I once compared to something out of Edgar Allan Poe, was approved and its construction supervised by one John W. Crowley.

I thought some readers of joculum might find this an item of interest.