I love the Memory Palace podcast. I loved it when I first heard it more than a decade ago (!?). “Giants in Those Days” was the first episode I heard, on a road trip, heavily pregnant and driving to New Orleans for one last vacation together before the kiddo came. It was an apt introduction, since Nate DiMeo’s brief, lyrically written and beautifully scored stories that have the vivid specificity of roadside attractions. So I was excited to hear that DiMeo had a book coming out based on the podcast. It’s releasing in November, but I just finished reading a digital advanced review copy through NetGalley. I thought I’d briefly interrupt my Hippodrome stories to share my thoughts about it.
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. "View in Cardiff Glen, near Fort Dodge, Iowa." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1873. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e0-6206-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
To be honest, it’s still relevant to the blog as a whole since the Hippodrome also belongs within the purview of “Old Timey Americana Studies.” This a field that DiMeo explores with great empathy and an eye for the telling detail, telling brief and evocative stories that bounce across times and places but mostly do focus on the United States. The scope can sometimes be dizzying: one sample from the middle of the book goes from California in 1966 to Massachusetts in 1774 to natural history museums in the Midwest studying air pollution from the late nineteenth century to the 2010s. They are all brought together, though through a repeated set of images and interests — animals, inventions, places that have played an outsized role in the American imagination like circuses, sideshows, and Coney Island. But he does not romanticize these stories. He is clear-eyed about the racism that often animates these places, their American exceptionalism, the willingness of the public to be duped. The sympathy comes for people who are outsiders, debutantes leaving their comfortable lives behind to pursue knowledge or immigrant sandhogs who worked underwater to help construct the Brooklyn Bridge. (The sandhogs below are from the later construction of the Hudson & Manhattan Tunnels dug in 1908.)
Seymour B. Durst The Hudson & Manhattan Tunnels: Uniting New York and New Jersey in Picture and Story. American Photograph Co., 1908. HathiTrust, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100854803.
DiMeo plays around with form in some of the stories, writing them in six scenes, a timeline, 50 words. They all share a conversational tone, with rhetorical questions, sentence fragments, and direct address to his readers. I was most interested in the stories where he did things that podcasts can’t, like showing the pictures he’s describing or speaking negatively about the Sacklers who sponsored the Temple of Dendur at the Met. Most of all, I loved the section at the end of the book where DiMeo told stories about his life and his family. I absolutely loved getting a sense of how he arrived at the format his stories take. If there’s one thing I share with DiMeo, it’s the intense desire to imagine oneself inside the past, one fragment at a time. If you like the kinds of things I write about on here, I think you’ll like his work too.