Thursday,4/22/04 - 13:27
Bibliographic Note on the Subsequent Entry
Just so you know, Fama, Ancient Roman goddess of the Information Superhighway (the kind of goddess used only for poetic purposes, not actually worshipped) is
"the swiftest traveller of all the ills on earth, thriving on movement, gathering strength as it goes; at the start a small and cowardly thing, it soon puffs itself up... At night she flits midway between earth and sky, through the gloom screeching, and she is perched like a look-out either upon a roof-top or some high turret; so she terrorizes whole cities, loud-speaker of truth, hoarder of mischievous falsehood equally."
(Aeneid 4.174, slightly silly translation from http://www.theoi.com/Khaos/Pheme.htm)
Where I personally come in is the "puffing up" part. You see -- although the first quotation in the subsequent entry is from a dissertation -- the rest is from the internet. What that means is that 2004 cluelessness shares responsibility with 1904 cluelessness for the series of confusion I've accounted here.
The phrase "hidden doctrines not entirely accessible to the Western mind" is from a brochure cited in David G. Schwartz, Suburban Xanadu: The Casino Resort on the Las Vegas Strip, 1945-1978, 2000: 348 -- a doctoral dissertation from UCLA, but I'm not going to look up how to cite that. Schwartz' dissertation is also a real book now, the kind you can go buy, except the published version notably doesn't include the cheesecake photo of the swimsuit model in a mushroom cloud hat. Also, this isn't a real footnote, so I'm not going to give you Schwartz' citation info for the brochure that this was found in.
These are the two main sites I used for information on the East India pavilion at the 1904 World's Fair:
http://www.boondocksnet.com/expos/wfe_1904_foreign.html, http://exhibits.slpl.org/lpe/data/LPE240024302.asp?thread=240029406
Another reference to the Jain temple in the Castaways:
http://www.a2zlasvegas.com/hotels/history/h-mirage.html
Unfortunately when I first started tracking down this place on the web, I didn't write down all the URLs. I found a reference to the current state of the temple on a Jain message board, but when I tried to regoogle it a month later, it had disappeared. Goddammit. Why, it's as if information on the web shared the same transience as the thing I'm using the web to research.
And are you wondering if there's a moral to the story? Why am I scampering around the web to research this temple anyway? Why would I present it as history without theory when I generally despise that tendency in scholarly historians? I think what makes the replica temple so fascinating to me is that it's what John Berger calls a starry place, an example of too many things. For one, it embodies the abstract connection between the World's Fairs, Las Vegas, exoticism, and religion, which I keep bumping into in my research. I also find myself enjoying the procession of simulacra or near simulacra and thinking about their mysteries by a Tim Powersy light. But then I catch myself and wonder whether it's entirely ethical to see something magical in this misuse of other peoples and their sacred sites. I also wonder what use the Jains today are making of a replica temple with this kind of history.
Long live Diaryland!
The five most recent entries:
More Naval Gazing - Saturday, 8/13/05
Anniversary Diving - Friday, 8/12/05
Academic Tip of the Week - Tuesday, May. 17, 2005
How to tell a Midwesterner - Sunday, 4/24/05
Academic Feelings - Thursday, 4/21/05
Ted's most recent entry:
Monday, May 12