Wednesday, October 21, 2015

If this is Woden's Day it must be Nostrum

I was asked by someone, during the hurlyburly of Jumbo Bronco, if they should read Nostrum. Well, I thought, if you can handle something the size of War and Peace, Moby Dick and the novelization of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein combined, then you're probably up for it. Of course, there are so many options for how to consume this grande bouffe that one has to decide up front how to ingest it. While I have a fondness for the audio versions, they are incomplete, and they also lack the inside detail of the ebook version. The ebook has footnotes and editorial explanations and evaluations after many of the episodes, and sources of some of the tales that are told (Nostrum being, as you know, based on a true story). The online episodic version is, perhaps, the least thorough, but, like the original version of Star Wars (which was not known then as any damned New Hope), demonstrates the way it was at the beginning without editing (or, more to the point, without as much editing, not that I changed anything in the ebook, but I did make corrections occasionally). To demonstrate the difference between the ebook and the online version, I offer here the opening of the Ultimate version, Volume 1.

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Introduction

 

The following, slightly edited, is the introduction to Nostrum online:
Nostrum is a fictional look at the high school debate universe, written by Jules O'Shaughnessy and the Nostrumite. The first series of Nostrum was published in the 1990s in weekly episodes until the two authors essentially ran out of gas. Along the way they published enough material to make Tolstoy look like a piker, but for a while it had all been lost in the primeval mists of the original old AOL website. Then, thanks to the dedication of Jim Menick, who obviously had nothing better to do with his time, the episodes were republished online, both as print versions and audios. Menick made it through recording about half of the audios before he, too, ran out of gas. Audios of the original series, up through episode 72, are available, both at jimmenick.com and on iTunes. After episode 72, the episodes continue up through 181 in print only, at which point series one ended.
And that was where we thought it would all end, until Jules, unsuccessful in reclaiming the Moravian throne, returned to the United States and rejoined the Nostrumite in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to create Series 2. Some people call this Nostrum: The Next Generation. Others call it The Nostrum Strikes Back, or Nostrum Part Deux, or Nostrum 2: Just When You Thought It Was Safe to go Back Into the Debate Tournament. We simply call it a sad failure of imagination, but who listens to us, anyhow? Once again, Menick provided narration for the series, and both written and spoken versions of all of Series 2 are available on jimmenick.com.
As Series 2 faded into the past, the debate world let out a sigh of relief, thinking it was finally rid of this scourge, but then Jules and the Nostrumite, frustrated that in both previous series they had started the story early in the fictional debate season and never gotten even as far as Thanksgiving, decided to give it yet another shot, this time concentrating on the end of the season, specifically the Combat of Conquerors, long aluded to in the earlier series but never approached even closely. The time had come, they said, to rectify this oversight. Sadly, those episodes were never published.


Of course, some of the above isn’t true.
I, Jim Menick, all by my lonesome, began writing Nostrum because, as a parent judge and later a new coach traveling to debate tournaments every weekend, I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands, I liked to write, and I had something to write about. I created the team of Jules O’Shaughnessy and the Nostrumite as the pseudonyms for my authorship to protect my anonymity. I’m pretty sure plenty of people eventually knew it was me, but probably more people didn’t, and certainly not in the beginning, when I was just another soul on the forensic highway. My method of distributing the episodes was to send them out unsolicited on the popular ld-l listserver, one at a time, on Wednesdays during the season. I did this for many years, and entertained myself enormously.
After a while I just pooped out, but there were a couple of attempts to revive things. First I tried to create a new fictional universe at Tennessee Williams High School, then I went back to Nostrum. I never did get the momentum that I had had in the beginning, however.
This volume of the Ultimate Nostrum contains all the episodes of the original series, with some annotations, a dramatis personae and a Table of Contents of the episodes, which is pretty entertaining all by itself. A second volume will contain the messages that were sent out with each episode outlining the weekly adventures of Jules and the Nostrumite, plus the complete sets of TWHS, Nostrum 2 and the never-before-seen Nostrum 3.
So, settle back, my friend. The amount of material here is amazing. If you’re a part of the debate world, some of it may seem familiar, although like everything, debate has evolved in the years since this was written. The people, however, are about the same.
And as you read it, never forget, Nostrum is based on a true story.

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