…the trumpet that once announced from afar the laurelled mail, heart-shaking when heard screaming on the wind and proclaiming itself through the darkness to every village or solitary house on its route, has now given way for ever to the pot-wallopings of the boiler.

That’s Thomas DeQuincey, mourning the shift of nineteenth century mail delivery from horse to locomotive. The definitive social history of mail — which has yet to be written, as far as I can tell — will doubtless ride DeQuincey’s essay The English Mail-Coach, or, The Glory of Motion. It’s an incredible and reckless piece, connecting war, class, nostalgia, sublimity, and disaster into an ever-quickening system of transmission.

I’ve never read anything quite like the passage in section II when, riding on a night mail coach that is being driven by a one-eyed coachman who has nodded off — and whacked out on laudanum himself — DeQuincey trips out helplessly as the mail coach drifts into the wrong lane, bears down onto a little carriage carrying two lovers, smashes into it, *and keeps going.*

Though DeQuincey is enthralled by the inexorable post horses, and seems to deplore the trains that replaced them, in truth his horses are mechanistic in the first place–prosthetic beyond control–representative of human will that can’t be reigned in. And if steel rails prevent loverslane smashups, they facilitate all the more the inhuman speed that makes delivery a sublime business.

So transmission keeps quickening. Now it’s so fast, the very notion of delivery is starting to creak. Trains supplanted horses. Planes outpaced the trains. Email outmoded mail. Now, at least for the hungry generation treading us down, instant messaging is nudging out email. Ever notice that it’s not ‘instant mailing?’ When delivery time is whittled down to instantaneous, we seem beyond mail altogether, and we’re even more and even less in control.

Whenever I used to hear a graybeard greet the idea of email with bafflement or hostility, I would be baffled in turn: who wouldn’t want to cut out the stamps, the delays, the deferred gratification of snailmail? Email is free (ok, free with an internet connection and the time it took to set up an account), archivable, portable — email is good.

But now, confronted with instant messaging, I feel like a graybeard. I don’t want to be that accessible. I want windows of privacy, I want time to react, I want to consider considered replies. Combining IM with work has always made me feel rather like an outsourced customer service drone, forced to click a screen within 15 seconds to prove I’m paying attention. Combining IM with friends has always felt wasteful — too many snappy words whose wit wilts as fast as they’re replaced.

And yet, truth be told, just as DeQuincey’s horses and trains were stages of the same rush, so are email and instant messaging. Now that my mail swims a networked world, it made eminent sense to move my email to Gmail’s excellent platform (privacy qualms and data hostage threats notwithstanding). Exporting email that was hitherto locked up on my Mac was a chore, but doable, and now I can call up most anything that was ever sent to me, no matter where I am. Whenever I’m online a gentle Growl notification flashes a snippet of incoming mail, and Google has added chat right into their Gmail page.

So… I’m directly patched into a live network whenever I’m online. Yes, IM directly patched. Everything is imminently available. Growl: response. All this mechanized speed — Gmail is my latest surprise machine — and if I’m not careful… if I reply rashly… if I bungle an address…. Or if Google vaporizes my account… or if Gmail should crash altogether ….

The perilous instantaneous — I leave you with a bit from Jeffrey T. Schnapp’s fine essay “Crash (Speed as Engine of Individuation)” (Modernism/Modernity 6.1 (1999) 1-49):

Whether in the logic of amusement parks, modern transportation cultures, revolutionary movements, news media, or the cultural-political avant-gardes, thrill must follow thrill. Which means that accident must follow accident. De Quincey moves from mail-coaches to opiates; Marinetti from cars to airplanes to war; the thrill rider from attraction to attraction; the revolutionary dreams of permanent revolution.

What did you do on your spring vacation? Me, I communed with ancestors — and not just the vividly alive ones. My mother had collected a good deal of basic facts and figures about her family and my father’s, and had fed this data into genealogical software installed on her computer. All that rich data was trapped on a local system; to distribute some of it to interested descendants, she would print out, collate, update, supplement…. Spring break: time to transplant the family tree online.

Thanks to the Mormons, the world of digitized genealogy is stabilized into basic metadata; most any family tree software ports its data into GEDCOM files. That allowed us to easily move all those dates and obscure birth locales to a web-based presentation, using a GEDCOM to HTML converter.

Actually, not just a presentation — really a dynamic social platform. The open-source package that I chose, PhpGedView, allows registered members to upload all kinds of supplementary information — photos, notes, what have you (and what *do* you have from those ghostly predecessors?). It pours out data in any number of ways — fan charts, calendars, relationship maps, you name it. It offers a customizable portal, with any number of ways to communicate with fellow registrants. And it protects the privacy of the living: unregistered visitors won’t know how old I am or where I was born or even my name, though they can browse to their hearts’ content among the dead.

A pedigree chart stretches back back back…

Notes from my uncle supplement data and an uploaded picture of his grandfather, a line-o-type operator in Salmon Idaho.

I particularly like the “on this day in your history” feature, because everyday is an anniversary of some event — a birthday, a deathday, a wedding….

Mark your calendars: plenty to commemorate in May — though Saturdays are oddly event-free.

Yesterday, Grace Parker (my great-great grandmother) turned 143. Meanwhile Gunilla ‘Golda’ Endler, another great-great grandmother (oh I have lots of ‘em) will be 152 later this month. Only a few photos currently festoon our family tree; my mother has diligently digitized many old portraits, but at huge resolution so she could print out copies for family members, so this work has to be web-optimized. It happens, though, that the tree already contains pictures of our April birthday girls: both Grace (my mother’s side, born in Kansas, died in Oregon) and Golda (my father’s side, born in Belarus, died in Sweden).

Happy birthdays, ladies — you’re no spring chickens, and I’m sure you never gave each other’s world much thought, but here you are, linked through one of those improbable combinations of American circumstances, and settled side-by-side on the web. Settled, at least, for now; despite those lock-in gazes, we know you’re both migrators.