Difficult Histories aired on WGXC from May 2011 to March 2015.

"Difficult Histories: Everyday Life In the Land of Rip Van Winkle" is a radio program hosted by Norman Douglas and Andrew Amelinckx, airing at 10 a.m. on the fourth Friday of each month during WGXC's "Morning Show."

"Difficult Histories" is supported, in part, by the New York Council for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Andrew Karl Francois Amelinckx grew up in Louisiana. He moved from NYC to the Hudson Valley in the fall of 2006 where he lives with his wife, Kara Thurmond, and dog, Boo. Andrew is a crime reporter for the Register-Star Newspaper in Hudson, NY.

Born at Washington DC, 9/11/59, academic overload nearly got Norman Douglas kicked out of Brown University, where he studied semiotics and film, but he quit instead, transferring to San Francisco Art Institute, where he graduated with honors and a BFA in Film Studies. After landing a job at CBS-TV News that nearly killed him for trying to change the system from within, he landed a job at The New York Times Morgue. This gave him a chance to write a lot of short stories and travel to Europe, where he stayed off and on for the next ten years—mostly in Paris, though he spent six months or more in the Spanish Pyrenees, Tuscany, Berlin, Norway, Austria, with a month or two each in the Czech Republic and Germany.

From 1991 to 1994, he founded and edited a Lower East Side arts & lit zine called Peau Sensible with his pal and nemesis, B.Kold, after the two of them turned down the helm of Steve Cannon's nefarious A Gathering of the Tribes Magazine. After the zine collapsed, Douglas and his partner, Norwegian Vibeke Jensen, started individual electric, i.e., the electromagnetic-mnemonic-experimental culture cell that used installation and intervention and a range of high- and low-tech media to address the late great fin-de-siècle and its peoples' pitiful attachment to economic ideologies that promote the myth of the independent individual and the mean-spirited roles that prop up the dangerously habit-forming fragmentation dba specialist hierarchy. Their inventiveness produced a host of projects displayed from Mexico City to Stockholm, including such showstoppers as 1993's "ceci n'est pas un peep show" in the closet at Tribes Gallery, and "carta nera" in the underground dance floor at NYC's bOb nightclub; the groundbreaking "mo[nu]ment v.1.0-v.1.6: Memory & Forgetfulness," which included a secret performance in the New York Times' underground Times Square archive and a sprawling installation at BMCC's Shirley Fiterman Gallery in the shadow of the now-defunct World Trade Center Tower 2 that traveled to Philadelphia and Goteborg in 1994; and 1997's unparalleled achievements, "Unlimited Free Space: Comprehensive Waterfront Plan," which began with an expedition around the perimeter of Manhattan and ended with a series of exploratory installations along the waterway bisecting the city of Graz, Austria (inspiring Vito Acconci's design for pedestrian access to the heretofore forgotten River Mur), and the giant-scaled storybook "Skrinet med det rare i: Glemmeboken" at the Kunstmuseum in Trondheim, Norway.

Coincident with these expressly temporary installations, Douglas, the multitaskmaster, began what remains his ongoing research for a pair of utopist lexica—All Writing is Fiction: A Book of Things, and The Dictionary of Imaginary Human Beings (with Apologies to Jorge Luis Borges)—addressing the fundamental socio-etymological firmament comprising manmade objects and man made into objects, respectively. Never one to shirk the gift of process, he has also completed a pair of novels for which he refuses to seek a publisher (and will likely do the same when he finishes the next one, about a writer who cannot write and so, has to get a job), a few screenplays (one of which is actually in production), a couple of expressionist plays, a pile of short stories, one or two decent poems, scores of reviews, a non-matriculated thesis outlining the curriculum of the future, numerous screeds, lampoons, rants, speeches, briefs, metafictions, letters, texts, audio files, videos, photographs, drawings, collages, postcards, and has often solved the world's problems on street corners, in barrooms, dinner parties, and wherever else his fellow humans remain confused by the state of things today. His performances with Patricia Winter throughout the nineties remain legendary, and the facts that he never had a 4.0 average nor attended RPI for the MFA are indisputable. Thankfully, he has no blog nor memoir in the works, and plans to do neither. Fluent in French, he can converse in Spanish. Need an assistant?