Fiction, Essays, and Other Things

  Between 1893 and 95 a number of song titles, among them “Daisy Bell”, “The Sidewalks of New York” and “The Streets of Cairo”, sparked a mini artistic revolution. The singer, Dan W. Quinn, became one of the pioneers in recorded music. Music was not reinvented per se but it became a popular commodity and we have been witnesses to this evolution from vinyl to cassette, from CDs to mp3, right back to the resurgence of vinyl. In the dawn of the 20 th century a number of artists jumped on the musical bandwagon, including Marie Cahill, the Haydn Quartet and even Sousa’s Band began recording their standards like “Stars and Stripes Forever” and “In the Good Old Summertime”. With the growing popularity of ragtime, many found it easy to transfer their vaudeville hits to record or cylinder. Solidifying the industry was the establishment of a flurry of record companies to compete with the trail-blazer Edison Records, chief among them the Victor Talking Machine Company. In as much as the ...

  Though it remains a divisive work, Victory is almost universally classified as Joseph Conrad’s last significant novel. The varied responses themselves reveal much about the regard he held in critical circles at the time of publication, his use of literary devices (not altogether uncommon for Conrad) and the global state of affairs. The latter, perhaps, was a misunderstanding between author and readers; Conrad began writing Victory in April of 1912 and finished in May of 1914, a month after the assassination of the Arch Duke of Austria, often marked as the catalyst for the war. By the time the novel was published in October of 1915 it was greeted by a very different world than the one in which it began life. England was facing off the Central Powers and the Lusitania had met its watery grave. Victory , thus, came about as a relic of a bygone literary era. Conrad’s only explicit acknowledgement of the new world stage was the very title. He had rejected “Victory” originally precis...