The Memory Palace
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Published On Mar 23,2012
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I’ll be doing a new, monthly series for Slate.com of Civil War stories. Same memory palace flavor (or flava, depending). Each will roughly correspond to an event that took place a hundred fifty years ago to the month. That’s the plan anyway. You can read about it the team-up (and listen to the first episode here). If you are a Civil War buff (which I am not, though this project is proving really fun), send me your suggestions for obscure and unique and otherwise delightful stories at nate@thememorypalace.us or through twitter or the facebook page.
This and future Civil War Stories (their title, super catchy) episode will appear as a standard memory palace episode through standard memory palace channels two weeks after the Slate release, which sounds more complicated than it is. In the meantime, there’ll be other memory palace episodes on other topics sprinkled in. Including a foray or two into personal history. So, update.
Published On Aug 05,2011 | Posted In Uncategorized >>
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Hiatus over.
The Memory Palace is back in business.
Published On Jul 05,2011 | Posted In Blog >>
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Hi there. The Memory Palace has been on a bit of a hiatus. It’ll be over soon. For real.
nate
Published On Jun 01,2011 | Posted In Blog >>
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I wrote an article for the public radio site, Transom.org. It’s a way-inside, inside look at the podcast. How it works (and doesn’t). Why things take a long time. It gets pretty deep into the public radio weeds, at times, but, if you want to go behind the curtain, it’s as good a place (until we get the permits and insurance worked out for the guided monorail tour of the Palace interiors, anyway) as you’ll find.
Published On Apr 07,2011 | Posted In Blog >>
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Proud to report that the memory palace will be, albeit briefly, in the mix of Slate’s fine podcasts. Three episodes will roll out on three mondays here in March. Do check out their other podcasts. I am a particular fan of their sports talk show, Hang* Up and Listen. If you are into that kind of thing.
Now, some of you have been asking what the hold up has been with the new episodes.
A: Thanks for asking.
B: Sorry about that.
C: I’ve been spending most of my time writing much of this book (oddly enough). It is due to come out in October. It is funny. And weirdly memory palace-y in several parts.
D. More episodes soon.
*An earlier version of this post referred to the show as “Shut up and Listen.” It was a mistake. But a much better name.
Published On Mar 07,2011 | Posted In Uncategorized >>
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was pleased to stumble upon the fact that the guy who did this…that became this… …also wrote this… …and this.
Published On Jan 11,2011 | Posted In Blog >>
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While listening to an interview on one of my local public radio stations with Bill Bryson about his new book on the history of (a very specific type of) “private life,” I was reminded of one of my favorite little historical phenomena.
It’s the flip-side to Episode 35(the Walkman one) and, in its way, to Episode 12 (the Marconi one). It’s simple. But lovely.
We’ve only been able to record audio for a hundred years and fifty years or so. It’s only been about a hundred and change that people could actually go out and hear recorded audio or buy a machine to play it in their homes. And so before that, before the phonautograph or the gramophone or the player piano or phonograph or the radio or the 16 gig iPod Nano with Multi-Touch, you only heard a musical performance once. If you fell in love with that song or an aria or a symphony or a chant you heard that one time, that one time might be all you got. You might wait decades to hear it performed again. And who knows how it would sound then? Sung by a different voice? Played by different hands? Who would you be the next time you heard it again? If you ever heard it again. 
Published On Nov 20,2010 | Posted In Uncategorized >>
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I’ve gotten a lot of emails asking why the podcast assembly line has slowed here at the Palace. First, it’s awfully heartening to know that people care enough to have noticed. Really.
Anyway, the podcast is still up and running, but has in fact been gummed up a bit by a couple of (paying) projects with looming deadlines. Both of which you will likely enjoy, assuming that you like the podcast, but neither of which I can talk about at the moment. Mysterious.
I will keep you posted and will continue to post here on the blog and poke away on new podcast episodes.
thanks
nate
Published On Nov 20,2010 | Posted In Uncategorized >>
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My favorite moment in the (underrated) James Bond movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (the one with the so-much-worse-than-Sean-Connery-it’s-bananas-but-better-in-hindsight-than-Moonraker-era-Roger-Moore, George Lazenby) is the scene after Bond has lost his Double O status and has to clear out his desk.* As he’s cleaning, he comes across all of these gadgets and souvenirs–some we remember from earlier adventures, others speak to these undocumented adventures beyond what we’ve been allowed to see. It is oddly moving.
Anyway, cleaning out some drawers here at The Memory Palace, I came across a CD of a radio documentary I did a few years ago about the history of music programming on the radio that I hadn’t thought about in awhile. It is no exploding pen, but some of you might like it. Link is here.
*Yes. This is my favorite moment in the movie. Even considering the ski chase. 
Published On Nov 07,2010 | Posted In Uncategorized >>
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I’ve been re-reading Tender is The Night and A: holds up, and B: there’s this passage from when Rosemary and Abe and Dick are walking around the WWI battlefields in France (in 1925; the book came out in 1934) that kills me. Because I am, in equal measure, both nerd and sap.
“See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.”
“Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco —”
“That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”
“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.”
“No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.”
“You want to hand over this battle to D. H. Lawrence,” said Abe.
“All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love,” Dick mourned persistently.
Published On Nov 04,2010 | Posted In Uncategorized >>
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