i made a pretty cool and exciting find today, though likely it is cool and exciting to few besides myself. it involves my old magazines project, in which i have scanned thousands of pages from old music magazines that have sat on my shelves for years, converted the stories to text using ocr software, and made the stories available online. i‘ve done this in fits and starts, wrestling with the movable type content management system and loving it save for its slowness. i took a bit of a break from the project for about 5 or 6 weeks, focusing on my dictionary web site project, but all the while scanning magazines for future web site use.
anyway, the project has interested me for a lot of reasons, not least of which is my academic and semi-professional background in classical music. the old magazines are classical music centric, and in its day the magazine was very widely read and i suppose it was influential.
so i had been surprised at how little is written about the magazine. a handful of attempts were made at research and summary but the foci didn‘t interest me much. my interest in the magazine is in its musicology content and interviews with the great pianists of the day. much of that stuff remains unpublished anywhere since it first appeared.
so today i started kicking the tires on that project again and imagine my surprise when i found a 200-page dissertation focused on the magazine, specifically on its portrayals of women during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. at first i was like, duh, are my searchie skills so lame that missed this? but i was relieved on that count to find that the paper was published last month, coinciding with my hiatus from the subject.
the specific subject of women as depicted in the pages of that magazine is of interest to me, though the broader matters of general history of the magazine and its transitions have been revelatory. so many things i did not know about this magazine which has occupied so much of my energies and attentions both recently and since 20 years go, whence my collecting of the magazines began.
anyway, it was a fun read, over fertile territory, esp where the collecting and scarcity of the issues was concerned. it sounds like this person digitized every single edition, which is cool, and will not stop me from doing the same for my own purposes. holy shit, as a matter of fact i just blew more $ on a 48 pound box full of these magazines, many of which i already have but many of which i do not have, or which i could use duplicates.
fascinating entrails from my day…
it just poured poured poured motherfucking rain here, Florida-style. thunder, lightningslaps, noise, horror, terror, confusion, 4 horsemen of the apocalypse racing the wrong way up a one way street, people running, car alarms wailing (why?), and then 3 minutes later the skies are clear and the sun is out. that was fun.
