Visualizing Slavery: The Map Abraham Lincoln Spent Hours Studying During the Civil War

in History | September 13th, 2013

Emancipation_proclamation

If you look close­ly at Fran­cis Bick­nell Car­pen­ter’s 1864 paint­ing “First Read­ing of the Eman­ci­pa­tion Procla­ma­tion by Pres­i­dent Lin­coln” (see above — click image for a larg­er ver­sion) you will notice a map in the low­er right-hand cor­ner, next to the group that includes Lin­coln and his cab­i­net.

The map in the paint­ing was a doc­u­ment Lin­coln con­sult­ed often dur­ing the Civ­il War. It was cre­at­ed by the Unit­ed States Coast Sur­vey using data from the 1860 Cen­sus to show the geo­graph­ic dis­tri­b­u­tion of the South’s vast slave pop­u­la­tion.

Car­pen­ter lived in the White House for six months while work­ing on his paint­ing, and accord­ing to his­to­ri­an Susan Schul­ten, author of Map­ping the Nation: His­to­ry and Car­tog­ra­phy in 19th Cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca, the artist encoun­tered Lin­coln por­ing over the map on more than one occa­sion.

SlaveryMap

The map (click it to see a larg­er ver­sion) is an ear­ly exam­ple of sta­tis­ti­cal car­tog­ra­phy. The slave pop­u­la­tion of each coun­ty is rep­re­sent­ed numer­i­cal­ly and through a grad­ed scale of shad­ing. The high­er the num­ber of slaves, the dark­er the shade. In a 2010 piece in the New York Times “Opin­ion­a­tor” blog, Schul­ten writes:

The map reaf­firmed the belief of many in the Union that seces­sion was dri­ven not by a notion of “state rights,” but by the defense of a labor sys­tem. A table at the low­er edge of the map mea­sured each state’s slave pop­u­la­tion, and con­tem­po­raries would have imme­di­ate­ly noticed that this cor­re­spond­ed close­ly to the order of seces­sion. South Car­oli­na, which led the rebel­lion, was one of two states which enslaved a major­i­ty of its pop­u­la­tion, a fact stark­ly rep­re­sent­ed on the map.

The map helped Lin­coln visu­al­ize what he was up against. Areas along the Atlantic coast and Mis­sis­sip­pi Riv­er, for exam­ple, are dark­ly shad­ed. The white pop­u­lace in those areas was fanat­i­cal­ly resis­tant to eman­ci­pa­tion. “Con­verse­ly,” writes Schul­ten, “the map illus­trat­ed the degree to which entire regions — like east­ern Ten­nessee and west­ern Vir­ginia — were vir­tu­al­ly devoid of slav­ery, and thus poten­tial sources of resis­tance to seces­sion. Such a map might have rein­forced Pres­i­dent Abra­ham Lin­col­n’s belief that seces­sion was ani­mat­ed by a minor­i­ty and could be reversed if South­ern Union­ists were giv­en suf­fi­cient time and sup­port.”

For more on Lin­col­n’s map, vis­it Rebec­ca Onion’s post at Slate.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“Ask a Slave” by Azie Dungey Sets the His­tor­i­cal Record Straight in a New Web Series

The Civ­il War and Recon­struc­tion: A Free Course

The Poet­ry of Abra­ham Lin­coln

The Last Sur­viv­ing Wit­ness of the Lin­coln Assas­si­na­tion

African-Amer­i­can His­to­ry: Mod­ern Free­dom Strug­gle – YouTube – iTunes – Clay Car­son, Stan­ford  (in our col­lec­tion of 750 Free Online Cours­es)

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Dark Side of the Rainbow: Pink Floyd Meets The Wizard of Oz in One of the Earliest Mash-Ups

in Film, Music | September 13th, 2013

Dude, I’m seri­ous; you cue up The Wiz­ard of Oz, you cue up Dark Side of the Moon, and you start ’em up at the same time. It total­ly works. Too many syn­chronic­i­ties to explain away. Blow your mind, man.

Laugh though we may at those who con­sid­er it an intense evening to enter their pre­ferred state of mind, shall we say, and feel for res­o­nances between a 1939 MGM musi­cal and Pink Floy­d’s eighth album, we can’t deny that the mash-up Dark Side of the Rain­bow, as they call it (when they don’t call it Dark Side of Oz or The Wiz­ard of Floyd), has become a seri­ous, if mod­est, cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non.

In fact, since enthu­si­asm for play­ing Dark Side of the Moon while watch­ing The Wiz­ard of Oz goes back at least as far as Usenet dis­cus­sions in the mid-nineties, it may well count as the first inter­net mash-up ever. Word of the view­ing expe­ri­ence’s uncan­ni­ness has, since then, extend­ed far beyond the wood-pan­eled-base­ment set; even an insti­tu­tion as osten­si­bly square as the cable chan­nel Turn­er Clas­sic Movies once aired The Wiz­ard of Oz with Dark Side of the Moon as its sound­track.

Clear­ly, peo­ple get some­thing out of the com­bi­na­tion no mat­ter their state of mind. At the very least, they get amuse­ment at the coin­ci­dences where the album’s sounds and lyri­cal themes meet and seem­ing­ly match the events of the pic­ture. Dark-side-of-the-rainbow.com offers a thor­ough­ly anno­tat­ed list of these inter­sec­tions, from the fad­ing-in heart­beat that opens the album align­ing with the appear­ance of the movie’s title:

In this con­cept album, we have [sym­bol­i­cal­ly] the begin­ning of human life. Many par­ents begin the process of nam­ing the child, as soon as they become aware of its exis­tence, often before they even know the sex of the child. Here, we have the name of a movie, which just hap­pens to be the name of one of the char­ac­ters in the movie, just as we are becom­ing aware of this new life.

To the lyric that accom­pa­nies Dorothy’s entry into Munchkin­land:

“Get a job with more pay and you’re OK”: Dorothy does­n’t know it yet, but she is about to be pro­mot­ed from farm girl to slay­er of wicked witch­es.

To the album-clos­ing heart­beat that plays as the Tin Man receives a heart of his own:

On the album, this heart­beat going dead rep­re­sents death. Tin Man’s new heart, which we can hear tick­ing, sym­bol­izes rebirth. Once again, this con­trast of what we see in the movie, and what we hear on the album is about pro­vid­ing bal­ance. And as this is how the sto­ry ends, this bal­ance speaks of how, in the end, the fairy­tale has indeed over­come the tragedy.

Pink Floyd them­selves have dis­avowed any com­po­si­tion­al intent in this mat­ter (Alan Par­sons, who engi­neered the record­ing, calls the very idea “a com­plete load of eye­wash”), and even Dark Side of the Rain­bow’s most ded­i­cat­ed enthu­si­asts sel­dom doubt them. Some may insist that the band, already adept at com­pos­ing film scores, did it all sub­con­scious­ly, but to me, the endur­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty of this ear­ly mash-up stands as evi­dence of some­thing far more inter­est­ing: mankind’s unend­ing ten­den­cy — com­pul­sion, even — to find pat­terns where none may exist. “When coin­ci­dences pile up in this way, one can­not help being impressed by them—for the greater the num­ber of terms in such a series, or the more unusu­al its char­ac­ter, the more improb­a­ble it becomes.” Carl Jung wrote that about the psy­cho­log­i­cal con­cept of syn­chronic­i­ty. If only he’d lived to watch this.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

BBC Radio Play Based on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon Stream­ing Free For Lim­it­ed Time

Pink Floyd Pro­vides the Sound­track for the BBC’s Broad­cast of the 1969 Moon Land­ing

Watch Pink Floyd Plays Live in the Ruins of Pom­peii (1972)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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John Cleese’s Philosophy of Creativity: Creating Oases for Childlike Play

in Creativity | September 13th, 2013

Though he became known for the phys­i­cal com­e­dy of char­ac­ters like the irate own­er of a dead par­rot, a min­is­ter of sil­ly walks, and the always buf­foon­ish Basil Fawl­ty, John Cleese is actu­al­ly a very deep thinker. This will prob­a­bly come as no sur­prise to fans of Mon­ty Python’s intel­lec­tu­al humor, but it’s still a treat to see him, out of char­ac­ter, get­ting seri­ous about ideas, even if he can’t resist the odd joke or ten. His sub­ject? Cre­ativ­i­ty. His forum? Well, in the video above, we see Cleese at the 2009 World Cre­ativ­i­ty Forum in Ger­many. In a 2010 guest post on this talk, Maria Popo­va of Brain Pick­ings called the event “part cri­tique of modernity’s hus­tle-and-bus­tle, part hand­book for cre­at­ing the right con­di­tions for cre­ativ­i­ty.” What does John Cleese have to say about cre­at­ing those con­di­tions?

By com­bin­ing anoth­er talk from Cleese from 1991 (below), we are able to piece togeth­er a Cleese phi­los­o­phy of cre­ativ­i­ty. He begins in his ’91 talk by telling peo­ple what cre­ativ­i­ty is not, and why lec­tur­ing on it is “a com­plete waste of time.” The rea­son? It can­not be explained. “It is lit­er­al­ly inex­plic­a­ble.”

Draw­ing on research from his friend Bri­an Bates, a psy­chol­o­gist as Sus­sex Uni­ver­si­ty, Cleese claims that those con­sid­ered more cre­ative do not dif­fer in any sig­nif­i­cant way from their equal­ly intel­li­gent and tal­ent­ed peers, and there­fore, they do not pos­sess any spe­cial skills or abil­i­ties that would qual­i­fy as “cre­ativ­i­ty.” As a one­time stu­dent of the sci­ences at Cam­bridge, Cleese has a high regard for data and obser­va­tion, and in each of these talks, he applies a sci­en­tif­ic method to his sub­ject.

What, then, has he learned from observ­ing his own work habits and look­ing at the research? What can he pos­i­tive­ly say about cre­ativ­i­ty? For one thing, it is not a skill or an apti­tude, it is a “mood,” one Cleese describes as “child­like” in that it aids one in the abil­i­ty to play. Cleese makes a sim­i­lar point in his 2009 talk at the top, empha­siz­ing that acquir­ing this mood is dif­fi­cult but not impos­si­ble. As all artists know, gen­uine cre­ative insights occur when ratio­nal thought ceases—during dream­states or moments of absorp­tion so intense that self-con­scious­ness, anx­i­ety, and the needling cares of the day drop away. As Cleese put it at the World Cre­ativ­i­ty Forum, “if you’re rac­ing around all day, tick­ing things off a list, look­ing at your watch, mak­ing phone calls and gen­er­al­ly just keep­ing all the balls in the air, you are not going to have any cre­ative ideas.” This explains why the offices of com­pa­nies like Google are full of toys, why the work­days of the Mad Men “cre­atives” often resem­ble preschool, and why artists’ work spaces tend to be so intrigu­ing to peer into. They are, as Cleese terms them, “oases” from the pun­ish­ing pace of the worka­day world.

In Cleese’s con­sid­ered opin­ion, such oases, both phys­i­cal and men­tal, are the pre­con­di­tions for child­like won­der to over­ride adult rou­tine ways of think­ing. Of course as Cleese and his hard-work­ing co-cre­ators also show us, a great deal of grown-up dis­ci­pline is required to bring cre­ative ideas to fruition. The trick, Cleese says, is in mak­ing the space to engage in child­like play with­out rely­ing on child­ish spontaneity—he rec­om­mends sched­ul­ing time to be cre­ative, giv­ing one­self a “start­ing time and a fin­ish time” and there­by set­ting “bound­aries of space, bound­aries of time.” Of course, this kind of mind­ful struc­tur­ing is some­thing only a mature adult mind can do. See­ing this grown-up side of Cleese gives us a new appre­ci­a­tion for the con­sis­tent­ly child­like char­ac­ters he’s cre­at­ed over the years, and for the role of con­scious atten­tion in safe­guard­ing and nur­tur­ing uncon­scious insight.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Lynch Explains How Med­i­ta­tion Enhances Our Cre­ativ­i­ty

Mal­colm McLaren: The Quest for Authen­tic Cre­ativ­i­ty

Mihaly Czik­szent­mi­ha­lyi Explains Why the Source of Hap­pi­ness Lies in Cre­ativ­i­ty and Flow, Not Mon­ey

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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“Ask a Slave” by Azie Dungey Sets the Historical Record Straight in a New Web Series

in Comedy, History | September 13th, 2013

Any­one whose job involves inter­ac­tion with the gen­er­al pub­lic will be sub­ject­ed to a cer­tain num­ber of bone­head­ed ques­tions on any giv­en day. Those num­bers sky­rock­et when one must remain in both cos­tume and char­ac­ter, charged with bring­ing his­to­ry to life.

Azie Dungey, the cre­ator and star of the new web series, Ask a Slave, claims to have “played every black woman of note that ever lived” when she was employed as an his­toric inter­preter in the Wash­ing­ton DC area. These includ­ed Car­o­line Bran­ham, Martha Wash­ing­ton’s enslaved lady’s maid, a gig that com­pelled her to keep a record of ques­tions posed by vis­i­tors to Mount Ver­non.

Now, as the tea-sip­ping, fic­tion­al Lizzie Mae, Dungey is able to answer those ques­tions with greater free­dom. A mid­dle-aged, seem­ing­ly edu­cat­ed white man won­ders if a news­pa­per ad is what led to Lizzie Mae’s posi­tion in the home of “such a dis­tin­guished Found­ing Father” as George Wash­ing­ton.

“Did I read the adver­tise­ment in the news­pa­per?” Lizzie Mae echoes pleas­ant­ly.  “Why, yes. It said Want­ed: One house­maid. No pay. Prefer­ably mulat­to, saucy with breed­ing hips. Must work 18 hour a days, sev­en days a week, no hol­i­days. But you get to wear a pret­ty dress, and if you’re lucky you just might car­ry some famous white man’s bas­tard child. So, you bet­ter believe I read that and I ran right over and said, “Sign me up!””

Her default tone is one of pro­fes­sion­al­ly patient indul­gence, though occa­sion­al­ly, the mask slips, as when anoth­er vis­i­tor asserts that “slav­ery isn’t real­ly that bad.”

Stick­ing to the his­toric inter­preter’s schtick of not rec­og­niz­ing non-peri­od inven­tions like cam­eras pays div­i­dends when the sub­ject turns to intern­ships, the under­ground rail­road, and what George Wash­ing­ton thinks of Abra­ham Lin­coln free­ing all his slaves.

The best mate­r­i­al, as they say, writes itself.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Amer­i­can Founders and Their World

Ayun Hal­l­i­day doc­u­ments an unex­pect­ed detour to Mount Ver­non in The Big Rum­pus. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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Read 30 Free Essays & Stories by David Foster Wallace on the 5th Anniversary of His Death

in e-books, Literature | September 12th, 2013

800px-David_Foster_WallaceLet me start with the first lines that appeared in The New York Times five years ago: “David Fos­ter Wal­lace, whose prodi­gious­ly obser­vant, exu­ber­ant­ly plot­ted, gram­mat­i­cal­ly and ety­mo­log­i­cal­ly chal­leng­ing, philo­soph­i­cal­ly prob­ing and cul­tur­al­ly hyper-con­tem­po­rary nov­els, sto­ries and essays made him an heir to mod­ern vir­tu­osos like Thomas Pyn­chon and Don DeLil­lo, an exper­i­men­tal con­tem­po­rary of William T. Voll­mann, Mark Leyn­er and Nichol­son Bak­er and a clear influ­ence on younger tour-de-force styl­ists like Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer, died on Fri­day at his home in Clare­mont, Calif. He was 46.” It’s not your con­ven­tion­al obit­u­ary. No, it has a lit­er­ary style befit­ting the writer we lost on Sep­tem­ber 12, 2008. And five years after DFW’s death, we might want to pause and revis­it his many sto­ries and essays still avail­able on the web. To mark this mourn­ful occa­sion, we’ve updat­ed and expand­ed our list, 30 Free Essays & Sto­ries by David Fos­ter Wal­lace on the Web, which fea­tures some time­ly and mem­o­rable pieces — “9/11: The View From the Mid­west,” “Con­sid­er the Lob­ster,” and Fed­er­er as Reli­gious Expe­ri­ence,” just to name just a few. Below we’ve also high­light­ed some of our favorite David Fos­ter Wal­lace posts pub­lished over the years. Hope you enjoy vis­it­ing or revis­it­ing this mate­r­i­al as much as I have.

David Fos­ter Wallace’s 1994 Syl­labus: How to Teach Seri­ous Lit­er­a­ture with Light­weight Books

‘This Is Water’: Com­plete Audio of David Fos­ter Wallace’s Keny­on Grad­u­a­tion Speech (2005)

David Fos­ter Wal­lace Breaks Down Five Com­mon Word Usage Mis­takes in Eng­lish

David Fos­ter Wal­lace: The Big, Uncut Inter­view (2003)

Vis­it the David Fos­ter Wal­lace Audio Archive

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René Magritte’s Early Art Deco Advertising Posters, 1924–1927

in Art | September 12th, 2013

norine 1The Bel­gian painter René Magritte cre­at­ed some of the most enig­mat­ic and icon­ic works in Sur­re­al­ist art. But before he moved to Paris in 1927 and began forg­ing rela­tion­ships with André Bre­ton and the Sur­re­al­ists, Magritte strug­gled in Brus­sels as a free­lance com­mer­cial artist, cre­at­ing adver­tise­ments in the Art Deco style.

In 1924 Magritte began design­ing posters and adver­tise­ments for the cou­turi­er Hon­orine “Norine” Deschri­jver and her hus­band Paul-Gus­tave Van Hecke, own­ers of the Bel­gian fash­ion com­pa­ny Norine. Van Hecke also owned art gal­leries, and was an ear­ly cham­pi­on of sur­re­al­ism. Van Hecke would even­tu­al­ly pay Magritte a stipend in exchange for the right to mar­ket his sur­re­al­ist works. In the 1924 adver­tis­ing poster above, Magritte por­trays a woman in high heels pre­tend­ing to be Lord Lis­ter, the gen­tle­man thief from Ger­man pulp fic­tion, wear­ing “an after­noon coat cre­at­ed by Norine.”

magritte6

Magritte designed some 40 sheet music cov­ers, most of them in the Art Deco style, accord­ing to Hrag Var­tan­ian at Hyper­al­ler­gic. The one above, “Arli­ta,” is from about 1925. The French and Dutch sub­ti­tles read “The Song of Light.”

Magritte 3 Mask

The har­le­quin-themed image above is anoth­er adver­tise­ment for Norine, cir­ca 1925. Magritte paint­ed it in water­col­or and gouache. The pen­ciled inscrip­tion at the bot­tom reads “une robe du soir par Norine” — “an evening gown by Norine.”

Magritte 4 Primevere

In 1926 Magritte was com­mis­sioned to cre­ate the poster above for the pop­u­lar singer Marie-Louise Van Eme­len, bet­ter known as Primevère. An orig­i­nal print is cur­rent­ly up for sale at Christie’s and is expect­ed to bring some­where between $18,000 and $25,000.

For more of Magrit­te’s Art Deco sheet music cov­ers, vis­it Hyper­al­ler­gic.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Philoso­pher Por­traits: Famous Philoso­phers Paint­ed in the Style of Influ­en­tial Artists

The Art of William Faulkn­er: Draw­ings from 1916–1925

Bauhaus, Mod­ernism & Oth­er Design Move­ments Explained by New Ani­mat­ed Video Series

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A Bluegrass Version of Metallica’s Heavy Metal Hit, “Enter Sandman”

in Music | September 12th, 2013

On the strength of its hit sin­gle Enter Sand­man, Metal­li­ca’s epony­mous 1991 album even­tu­al­ly went plat­inum, and the band became one of the biggest heavy met­al acts around. Since then, the influ­ence of “Enter Sand­man” has rip­pled out into the larg­er cul­ture. Since 1999, Mar­i­ano Rivera, sure­ly the great­est relief pitch­er in the his­to­ry of base­ball, has rit­u­al­ly made his entrance to the game with “Enter Sand­man” pro­vid­ing the sound­track. (Per­haps a strange pick for a mild-man­nered, deeply reli­gious man. But some­how it works.) And the song has been cov­ered umpteen times — by oth­er met­al bands (most notably Motör­head) but also by Weird Al Yankovic, Pat Boone, and the blue­grass band called Iron Horse.

Formed over a decade ago in the record­ing cap­i­tal of Mus­cle Shoals, Alaba­ma, Iron Horse fea­tures Tony Robert­son on man­dolin, Vance Hen­ry on gui­tar, Ricky Rogers on bass, and Antho­ny Richard­son on ban­jo. And, togeth­er, they’ve tak­en some risks along the way.

In 2003, they released Fade to Blue­grass: Trib­ute to Metal­li­ca, a col­lec­tion of ten Metal­li­ca songs done in blue­grass fash­ion — “or at least as blue­grass as it’s pos­si­ble for Metal­li­ca songs to be.” Speak­ing about the album on their web­site, they write:

Metallica’s thun­der­ing drums, heart-pound­ing gui­tars and anguished vocals tell the sto­ry of peo­ple lost in the hus­tle of mod­ern soci­ety. Blue­grass music sings the tale of peo­ple stuck between heav­en and hell, the farm and the city and love and hate. In many ways Metal­li­ca and blue­grass are broth­ers, one raised in the urban jun­gle and the oth­er in the coun­try. So what hap­pens when these two estranged sib­lings get togeth­er? Fade to Blue­grass: Trib­ute to Metal­li­ca has the answer. Ban­jo and man­dolin replace elec­tric gui­tars and high lone­some har­monies soar in place of growl­ing vocals to cre­ate a sur­pris­ing and mov­ing trib­ute. Per­formed with pas­sion and skill by Alaba­ma blue­grass band Iron Horse, and fea­tur­ing clas­sics such as “Unfor­giv­en,” “Enter Sand­man” and “Fade to Black,” Fade to Blue­grass: Trib­ute to Metal­li­ca is a fam­i­ly reunion between broth­ers heavy met­al and blue­grass.

You can watch Iron Horse per­form “Enter Sand­man” above. And below you can see that Metal­li­ca’s lead gui­tarist Kirk Ham­mett approves:

via Devour

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Steve Mar­tin on the Leg­endary Blue­grass Musi­cian Earl Scrug­gs

Pickin’ & Trim­min’ in a Down-Home North Car­oli­na Bar­ber­shop: Award-Win­ning Short Film

Steve Mar­tin Writes Song for Hymn-Deprived Athe­ists

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The Curious History of Punctuation: Author Reveals the Beginnings of the #, ¶, ☞, and More

in English Language, History | September 12th, 2013

ShadyCharactersAll things we humans use, from our advanced mobile phones to our very arms and legs, reached their cur­rent states through a process of evo­lu­tion. The same, nat­u­ral­ly, goes for our punc­tu­a­tion marks. These tools we use to sep­a­rate, con­nect, or draw atten­tion to our words and sen­tences had dif­fer­ent forms and uses in bygone times, and Scot­land-based med­ical visu­al­iza­tion soft­ware pro­gram­mer Kei­th Hous­ton has tak­en it upon him­self to trace paths through all of them. In the intro­duc­tion to his his­to­ry-of-punc­tu­a­tion blog Shady Char­ac­ters, he recounts his unlike­ly source of inspi­ra­tion in Eric Gill’s Essay on Typog­ra­phy: “my inter­est was piqued by the unusu­al char­ac­ter resem­bling a reversed cap­i­tal ‘P’ — ‘¶’ — which pep­pered the text at appar­ent­ly ran­dom inter­vals.” This lit­tle-dis­cussed mark, called a pil­crow, led Hous­ton to ask the sort of ques­tions that dri­ve his project: “How did the pilcrow’s curi­ous reverse‑P form come about? What were the roots of its pithy, half-famil­iar name? What caused it to fall out of use, and hav­ing done just that, why did Eric Gill see fit to place them seem­ing­ly at ran­dom in his only pub­lished work on typog­ra­phy? What, in oth­er words, was the pil­crow all about?”

guillelmus-cropped

In a recent New York­er post, Hous­ton works toward the answers by look­ing back to the pil­crow’s pre­cur­sors. “Before there was any oth­er punc­tu­a­tion there was the para­graphos—from the Greek para-, ‘beside,’ and graphein, ‘write’,” he explains. “A sim­ple hor­i­zon­tal stroke placed in the left mar­gin beside a line of text, the para­graphos was used in ancient Greece to call atten­tion to con­cep­tu­al changes in an oth­er­wise unbro­ken block of text: a new top­ic, per­haps, or a new stan­za in a poem.” This, over the cen­turies, became the pil­crow, just as “the Latin abbre­vi­a­tion ‘lb,’ for the Roman term libra pon­do, or ‘pound weight,’ ” turned into the #, or the hash mark, or — bet­ter yet —the octothor­pe. As for ☞, that lit­tle hand, Hous­ton tells us its prop­er name: man­icule, “tak­en,” nat­u­ral­ly enough, “from the Latin man­icu­lum, or ‘lit­tle hand.’ ” With ear­li­est use found in the Domes­day Book of 1086, the man­icule, “a mark that read­ers drew to call out points of inter­est,” enjoyed great preva­lence until the fif­teenth-cen­tu­ry print­ing press came along, when, “with print­ed ver­sions of the symbol—and of oth­er ref­er­ence marks such as * and †—now avail­able to writ­ers, ‘autho­rized’ notes began to spring up in the mar­gins, encroach­ing upon the space once avail­able to the read­er.”

manicule

Hous­ton’s work on the his­to­ry of punc­tu­a­tion has now tak­en the form of a book: Shady Char­ac­ters: The Secret Life of Punc­tu­a­tion, Sym­bols & Oth­er Typo­graph­i­cal Marks. But you can still read a wealth of his schol­ar­ship on the pil­crow, octothor­pe, the man­icule, and oth­er sym­bols both cur­rent and for­got­ten, on his blog, all clear­ly orga­nized on its table of con­tents. Who could turn down that good day’s read­ing‽

via The New York­er

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cor­mac McCarthy’s Three Punc­tu­a­tion Rules, and How They All Go Back to James Joyce

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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