Speaker 1: I've got a great book.
Speaker 2: I want to recommend you got to get started reading it,
Speaker 2: though it's going to take you fifty years.
Speaker 1: It's one more thing, Oh jees more Armstrong and Getty.
Speaker 3: One more thing is it Ulysses? Because I think I've
Speaker 3: been working on that for nine months and I haven't
Speaker 3: finished it yet.
Speaker 2: Ulysses is a pamphlet you get at your doctor's office.
Speaker 3: Compared to this book, stay with us. It's a business card.
Speaker 3: I'm going to talk about this on Tuesday's Armstrong and
Speaker 3: Getty radio show. I don't think we've ever done a
Speaker 3: tease in the One More Thing podcast for the radio show,
Speaker 3: but just came across this. So when they started cracking
Speaker 3: down on illegals up in Wisconsin where you got a
Speaker 3: lot of dairy farm stuff like that, a variety of
Speaker 3: dairy farmers started getting robots and you got one farm
Speaker 3: now that produces three times more milk per worker now
Speaker 3: because of the robots they hired doing a bunch of
Speaker 3: work on the dairy farm.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Interesting, Yeah, it's achieved the same thing and artificially hymen
Speaker 2: them wage. Would I suppose I hope you don't convince
Speaker 2: his people. Hey, it's worth it to invest in the technology.
Speaker 1: Now, let's do it.
Speaker 3: I gotta hope you don't get your teeth pulled off.
Speaker 3: Nobody wants that get your ringer?
Speaker 1: Is the old saying used to go?
Speaker 3: Made Katie WinCE enough? Very that would be that would
Speaker 3: be very painful. In my opinion, Yes, I think so ill.
Speaker 3: Nobody does laundry anymore with that sort of system where
Speaker 3: you're actually putting clothes through a ringer to dry them out.
Speaker 3: We have dryers now, so the chance of getting your
Speaker 3: breasticle caught in a ringer is.
Speaker 1: Very righted, it's much lower, certainly.
Speaker 2: Apparently back in the day that that saying was popularized,
Speaker 2: women didn't have enough, like multiple shirts to throw one
Speaker 2: on during the process of the ringing.
Speaker 3: Good God, that would hurt. Oh was that a regular occurrence?
Speaker 3: My grandma were so alive. I'd ask her because she
Speaker 3: had laundry like that regular enough cord question to ask.
Speaker 4: My grandma, Yeah, agreed, any any any I can only
Speaker 4: imagine it's not probably not as bad as the balls,
Speaker 4: but I mean any incident with the boob is just not.
Speaker 3: Get your testicles caught in the ringer. You're doing your
Speaker 3: laundry in a weird way.
Speaker 1: I get more leverage.
Speaker 2: So I find this so interesting and I would love
Speaker 2: to I am going to dig into this a little more.
Speaker 2: The article is entitled the Strangest Book in Harvard Library,
Speaker 2: but it's the strangest book in any library. And this
Speaker 2: piece was written by Ted Joya, who I love. I'd
Speaker 2: never heard of the Inmand Diary.
Speaker 3: Jackie, had you ever heard of that?
Speaker 2: You're very literary? He has not, Folks, Katie, the Inmand
Speaker 2: Diary no, by like how Jack just walked. I've lost
Speaker 2: interest myself. I feel like.
Speaker 3: I've heard of it, but I don't remember what it is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I just walked off.
Speaker 2: On the opening page, the book's editor makes a bold
Speaker 2: claim this work has no counterpart in any literature that
Speaker 2: I am aware of. The author, Arthur Inman, was obsessed
Speaker 2: with winning some sort of fame or immortality, but he
Speaker 2: really had no way to do it. As he himself wrote,
Speaker 2: the only way for him to win fame, perhaps even immortality,
Speaker 2: would be to write a diary unlike any ever written.
Speaker 2: It would contain the kind of information that he had
Speaker 2: looked for and never found in other diaries, which Joy
Speaker 2: points out seems like an impossible goal, because there are many, many, dozens,
Speaker 2: if not hundreds, of diaries from Augustine to Rousseau to whatever,
Speaker 2: Samuel peeps right, who had famous diaries that are fascinating
Speaker 2: relics of their time. So what could Arthur Edman do
Speaker 2: in the twentieth century that hadn't already been done before?
Speaker 2: Adding to the challenge, Inmann had practically nothing to write about,
Speaker 2: or so it seemed. He was a semi invalid who
Speaker 2: spent most of his life in.
Speaker 1: A darkened room.
Speaker 3: Oh geez, even recluses like Proust and Pyncheon are gadabouts
Speaker 3: by Commerson writes, joy, Wow, he spent his whole life
Speaker 3: in a darkened room and then kept a diary and
Speaker 3: I'm supposed to read it.
Speaker 1: Brace yourself.
Speaker 2: Yet, Inman wrote some seventeen million words and filled one
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty five volumes now housed in Harvard's Houton Library.
Speaker 2: That's roughly twenty five times as long as the Bible.
Speaker 2: He devoted forty years to this project from nineteen nineteen,
Speaker 2: and he continued working on until shortly after his death
Speaker 2: in nineteen sixty. Before his death, rather, he didn't work
Speaker 2: on it after his death. Before in nineteen sixty.
Speaker 3: June sixth, nineteen twenty eight.
Speaker 2: Well, sitting in the room again, same dark room I
Speaker 2: referred to in yesterday's post, And for that matter, the
Speaker 2: day before you ever wonder about getting your tit and
Speaker 2: a ringer? Ill, I bought myself a ringer, And as
Speaker 2: much as I cranked and pressed my chest against anyway, no.
Speaker 3: Weird thing happened got my testicle.
Speaker 1: Cat. I thought I had more leverage.
Speaker 3: I was squatting down to get a good firm footing.
Speaker 1: And well, he'll never guess what happened next.
Speaker 2: Back to the actual diary, here's where it gets crazy.
Speaker 2: So here's the twist that actually got him the immortality
Speaker 2: in a way that he was looking for. He took
Speaker 2: ads in the newspaper offering to hire talkers who would
Speaker 2: tell him the wildest and most intimate details of their lives.
Speaker 2: The end result was a diary with more than one
Speaker 2: thousand characters' striving with one another to provide the most compelling, uncensored,
Speaker 2: perfectly honest narratives of their lives.
Speaker 3: That is fascinating. There needs to be an abridged version.
Speaker 2: Of this, though, oh yes, please, yes, please, Abridging it
Speaker 2: would take thirty years. That crowd sourced approach turned the
Speaker 2: Inmand journals into a compendium of confessions unlike anything ever
Speaker 2: written down.
Speaker 1: To be sure, so he.
Speaker 2: Paid his talkers, as he called them, a dollar an hour,
Speaker 2: which you know, depending on when in the project it was,
Speaker 2: you know, at least enough money to show up, particularly
Speaker 2: because a lot of these people he talked to were
Speaker 2: kind of down and outers. He often went beyond listening
Speaker 2: having sexual relations with some of the women who.
Speaker 1: Took the job.
Speaker 3: What by by any definition, outo.
Speaker 2: And he'd say, you know, he'd have him spill their
Speaker 2: sexual secrets or whatever. And I'm guessing he'd say, you know,
Speaker 2: this is kind of getting me horned up, how about you?
Speaker 3: And if they said, yeah, kind of, you know, that's
Speaker 3: a good line. Yeah, well I don't do it.
Speaker 2: Frank Man inn't them. But by any definition, he was
Speaker 2: a creepy guy whose behavior violated all reasonable norms, even
Speaker 2: as editor Daniel Aaron admits that this disturbed individual's massive
Speaker 2: journal quote is the autobiography of a warped and deeply
Speaker 2: troubled man whose aberrations call for psychiatric probing.
Speaker 3: That's super interesting. They gotta have ai A bridget, because
Speaker 3: it would take too long for any human obviously. Oh,
Speaker 3: you can feed that into AI and have it a
Speaker 3: bridget somehow and turn it into a you know, a
Speaker 3: manageable eight hundred pages or something.
Speaker 2: Or you'd have to hire a team of twenty five
Speaker 2: you know, like grad students in editing or something.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 3: He often closed the diaries with the send off, I.
Speaker 1: Wish I were dead. Wow.
Speaker 2: Yet he also saw himself in a heroic light, dreaming
Speaker 2: of the posthumous fame his massive diary would eventually bring.
Speaker 3: You well, see you tomorrow, wish I was dead.
Speaker 2: His talkers were extraordinarily trusting in handed Perhaps the darkened
Speaker 2: room in the quasi anonymity of the setting made it
Speaker 2: feel like an actual confessional. Maybe it's even simpler. People
Speaker 2: wanted to reveal their darkest secrets and still do as
Speaker 2: cites somebody sayas, and we'll seek out settings where it
Speaker 2: can happen. Or perhaps the reality is more banal and tragic.
Speaker 2: These folks simply needed the cash, and Edmand was the
Speaker 2: only person paying for their secrets. Sometimes Inman's talkers showed
Speaker 2: up with stories to tell, but if they were reticent,
Speaker 2: he would immediately start probing. Here is his account of
Speaker 2: a first meeting with missus Haviland, never brought back for
Speaker 2: a second session because she was too quote unquote sweet.
Speaker 2: I asked her how old she was, how long she'd
Speaker 2: been married, whether she loved her husband, whether he loved her,
Speaker 2: whether she loved her son or husband best, why she'd
Speaker 2: been to the hospital lately, whether she used contraceptives, how
Speaker 2: much salary your husband made, who her ancestors were, how
Speaker 2: she budgeted her money, if she believed in God? How
Speaker 2: many friends she had, What did she look forward to
Speaker 2: in life? What sort of childhood she'd had? Was she
Speaker 2: calm or emotional? Did she read like music, the movies?
Speaker 1: And so on?
Speaker 3: Most of her answers I believed some I didn't. Let's see,
Speaker 3: So is this available anywhere? Is it online or anything?
Speaker 1: That is a good question I can dig into that.
Speaker 2: I don't recall seeing that I read the article, but
Speaker 2: it was a couple of weeks ago, and I've just
Speaker 2: been holding on to it.
Speaker 1: He writes.
Speaker 2: I doubt that inmund Diary could still be published by
Speaker 2: Harvard University Press nowadays. There's just too much in its pages.
Speaker 2: In its pages rather to upset dismay, shock, and appall.
Speaker 2: And if you aren't offended by Inman's dealings with his talkers,
Speaker 2: you will inevitably invariably find his opinions on politics, society, religion, race,
Speaker 2: and a host of other matters reprehensible in whole.
Speaker 1: Or in part. Well, let me make it clear.
Speaker 3: Go ahead.
Speaker 2: Uh. If you're the kind of person who needs a
Speaker 2: trigger warning, proceed no further.
Speaker 3: Wow, Well, the guy I would read this sort of
Speaker 3: thing for that sort of stuff, that's what you're looking for,
Speaker 3: and he says.
Speaker 1: It's a historian.
Speaker 3: It's just absolutely I'm valuable. So I'm looking at h Amazon,
Speaker 3: number one bookseller in the world, The Inman Diary of
Speaker 3: Public and Private Conficient Confession by Arthur C. Inman. There
Speaker 3: all are volumes you can buy The Inmand Diary of
Speaker 3: Public and Private Confession. Yeah, it's split into two pieces.
Speaker 3: It looks like from a darkened room, the Inmand Diary.
Speaker 1: Huh. I'll have to look into this more.
Speaker 3: But it's got to be way, way way abridged obviously.
Speaker 2: Right, which is good. But they mentioned he mentions. Inman's
Speaker 2: talkers didn't seem very interested in self censorship, and many
Speaker 2: clearly savored the opportunity to tell their raw stories without
Speaker 2: fear of consequences or judgment. They're a strange assortment. But
Speaker 2: where else will you find a book written in the
Speaker 2: nineteen thirties, or on a single page you encounter a
Speaker 2: first hand account of pimping, prostitution, bootlegging, bribing, drug addiction, homosexuality, rape,
Speaker 2: illegal gambling, drunkenness, police violence, a stint in bellevue, and
Speaker 2: even glimmerings of a philosophy of life. The appearance of
Speaker 2: a skilled musician who tickle the ivories is just an extra.
Speaker 2: Do you doubt me? Here's an extract from the testimony
Speaker 2: of Anthony Obruso of age twenty four.
Speaker 1: It's a whole page.
Speaker 3: That's truly interesting. I'm uh, you know, maybe I heard
Speaker 3: about it last year and I forgot. I'm capable of that,
Speaker 3: but I'm surprised I didn't know about this, and I'm
Speaker 3: going to look into it. The volumes that are available, Yeah,
Speaker 3: I see one here from ninety six.
Speaker 4: It's a bridge down to It's down to five hundred
Speaker 4: and ninety two pages.
Speaker 3: God taste doable, Wow, seven million words or whatever reason
Speaker 3: it was, Yeah, making five hundred pages out of it.
Speaker 2: Hit me with a link that link if you would, Katie.
Speaker 2: I mean, I could replicate your search, but why all right,
Speaker 2: let me just hit you with one paragraph. I guess
Speaker 2: from the nineteen thirties. I was making seventeen dollars. This
Speaker 2: is the piano player. I was making seventeen dollars a week.
Speaker 2: I hired a room. One day, I decided to find
Speaker 2: out what women was all about. I knew where the
Speaker 2: red light district was. He it's a black guy, and
Speaker 2: he like writes it in the dialect, so I'll just
Speaker 2: read what's in front of me. I knew where the
Speaker 2: red light district was, so I went there. I got
Speaker 2: myself a Southern girl. She showed me what it was
Speaker 2: all about. I took to it like a fish to
Speaker 2: water me too.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: She was a country girl to come to New York to
Speaker 2: make a success. She'd hit the bumps and landed up
Speaker 2: a prostitute. She was twenty three. She tried waking for
Speaker 2: a boss, but didn't like it none, so it was
Speaker 2: on her own. She was a nice baby. She took
Speaker 2: dope and wanted me to, but I told her no, dice.
Speaker 2: She didn't make me pay. Three other prostitutes I had
Speaker 2: did though. Then there was a stenographer. It wasn't a
Speaker 2: matter of sex with her. I just liked her. Oh yes,
Speaker 2: there was a housemaid in the Bronx. She didn't cost
Speaker 2: me nothing. As a matter of fact, I borrowed money
Speaker 2: from her and never paid it back.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: Then he gets into all the rest of it. You know,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna hit you with one more bit. I became
Speaker 2: more and more of an inebriate. One night, a taxi
Speaker 2: hit me. Then I got to see in things. I
Speaker 2: saw a street car running off the tracks and heading
Speaker 2: straight for me. I guess I screamed. A cop grabbed me.
Speaker 2: I socked him.
Speaker 1: He socked me.
Speaker 3: Then he takes me to the psycho pathic ward at
Speaker 3: Bellevue Hospital.
Speaker 1: What a place.
Speaker 2: I was there for two weeks. They gave me ether
Speaker 2: and alcohol to cure me. You'd never seen such a
Speaker 2: place as them. Two wards. Drunks sprawling on the floor
Speaker 2: on mattresses, drunks trembling and seeing things and having dts
Speaker 2: and losing up their guts. Guards beating up drunks. Insane
Speaker 2: men and straight jackets and insane men out of straight jackets,
Speaker 2: and moaning and hollering and shouting. Honestly, mister mmon, it
Speaker 2: was the first time in my life that I had
Speaker 2: ever given thought to my fellow creatures as individuals. Hitherto
Speaker 2: I had just lived, done no thinking whatsoever. It was
Speaker 2: also the first time I had ever given my thought
Speaker 2: to my future.
Speaker 1: Jeez, I did some thinking.
Speaker 3: That's pretty good. That's pretty good.
Speaker 1: Wow, the inmund Diaries.
Speaker 3: I'll check it out.
Speaker 5: Check it out to tell the story of my dad
Speaker 5: squatting over a campfire and there were some high pitched
Speaker 5: yells and well, anyway.
Speaker 3: It's a good story, well short but compelling.
Speaker 5: No, no, I'm not going to tell the whole thing.
Speaker 3: Well, I guess that's it. What a cliffhanger is?
Speaker 1: What the hell