This past week, we referred you back to Neil Gaiman’s essay where he tried to explain the almost unexplainable: the source(s) of his great ideas. The sci-fi/fantasy writer had always struggled to put his finger on those sources, and he could never really find an origin in one particular spring. But, it turns out that Kurt Vonnegut never had that problem. On Twitter, one of our followers (@Iygia_Maria) flagged for us an illustrated quote by Vonnegut. He writes:
Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization. (Backwards City Review, 2004.)
We have released over a million images onto Flickr Commons for anyone to use, remix and repurpose. These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books digitised by Microsoft who then generously gifted the scanned images to us, allowing us to release them back into the Public Domain. The images themselves cover a startling mix of subjects: There are maps, geological diagrams, beautiful illustrations, comical satire, illuminated and decorative letters, colourful illustrations, landscapes, wall-paintings and so much more that even we are not aware of.
The librarians behind the project freely admit that they don’t exactly have a great handle on the images in the collection. They know what books the images come from. (For example, the image above comes from Historia de las Indias de Nueva-España y islas de Tierra Firme, 1867.) But they don’t know much about the particulars of each visual. And so they’re turning to crowdsourcing for answers. In fairly short order, the Library plans to release tools that will let willing participants gather information and deepen our understanding of everything in the Flickr Commons collection.
You can jump into the entire collection here, or view a set of highlights here. The latter happens to include a curious image. (See below.) It’s from an 1894 book called The United States of America. A study of the American Commonwealth, its natural resources, people, industries, manufactures, commerce, and its work in literature, science, education and self-government. And the picture features, according to the text, a “Typical figure, showing tendency of student life–stooping head, flat chest, and emaciated limbs.” It’s hard to know what to say about that.
To learn more about this British Library initiative, read this other Open Culture post which takes a deeper dive into the image collection.
Awkward as it feels to receive Christmas cards from people we don’t really know, who among us would turn one down from the one and only John Waters? Then again, the director of such landmarks in deliberately taste-free cinema as Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble would presumably delight in injecting a little aesthetic discomfort into our holiday routines. Waters, according to a New York Times Q&A about his taking on the road “A John Waters Christmas,” his “staged monologue about all things merry and dark,” has made and sent out his own inimitable Christmas cards for almost fifty years. “I started doing it in high school in 1964,” he explains. “I send out over 2,000 cards by now. Basically, I’m channeling Pia Zadora, who used to send out the best pricey holiday-related object to help spread her name and make it last all year.” His 2006 card above bears a genuine mugshot from the police department of Waters’ beloved Baltimore; other images have included a dramatic 1940s scene of Christmas ruined by a criminal Santa, indie-film acting icon Steve Buscemi made up convincingly as Waters, and Elizabeth Taylor shaven-headed after brain surgery. One year, he even attached a tree ornament containing a dead cockroach.
“Being a traditionalist, I’m a rabid sucker for Christmas,” Waters explains in his essay “Why I Love Christmas.” “November 1 kicks off the jubilee of consumerism, and I’m so riddled with the holidays season that the mere mention of a stocking stuffer sexually arouses me.” Preholiday activities he considers “the foreplay of Christmas,” and naturally, “Christmas cards are your first duty and you must send one (with a personal, handwritten message) to every single person you ever met, no matter how briefly.” And of course, “you must make your own cards by hand. ‘I don’t have time’ you may whine, but since the whole purpose of life is Christmas, you’d better make time, buster.” Waters has also assembled his very own Christmas album, featuring a variety of holiday songs performed by Tiny Tim, Stormy Weather, and even Alvin and the Chipmunks. The selection below, “First Snowfall” by the Coctails, uses the classically kitschy singing saw as a lead:
You may well hear it again if you happen to attend Waters’ own annual Christmas party in Baltimore, a tradition he’s kept up for nearly as long as he’s sent out the cards. “Everyone comes, from the mayor to Pat Sajak to a judge and a well-known criminal I helped get out of jail,” as he describes it to the Times.” There’s a bar on every floor of the house and a buffet table where you’ll see the guy that played the singing anus in Pink Flamingos standing next to the governor.” Forget the cards; I need an invitation.
Michael Shainblum released a new timelapse film this week called “Into the Atmosphere,” which is his visual tribute to California’s beautiful deserts, mountains and coastlines. Even if you’ve seen your fair share of timelapse films before, as I’m sure many of you have, you might be interested in this other newly-released film called “The Art of The Timelapse.” Produced by The Creators Project, the short film gives you a glimpse of what goes into making a timelapse — the requisite gear, the favorable lighting conditions, the ideal landscape, and more. Shainblum is your guide. You can find an archive of his films here.
If you’d like to dig deeper into the art of making timelapse films, we’d recommend checking out The Basics of Time Lapse Photography with Vincent Laforet, a four-part video series, on Canon’s education web site. The first episode appears below.
At least since that 17th century architect of the scientific revolution, Sir Francis Bacon (who was mostly right), people have been making predictions about the technologies and social advancements of the future. And since Bacon, scientists and futuristic writers have been especially in demand during times of great change and uncertainty, such as at the turn of the last century. In 1900, civil engineer John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. in Ladies’ Home Journal claimed to have surveyed “the most learned and conservative minds in America… the wisest and most careful men in our greatest institutions of science and learning.”
Specifying advances likely to occur 100 years thence, “before the dawn of 2001,” Watkins culled 28 predictions about such things as travel and the transmission of information over great distances, biological and genetic mutations, and the domestic comforts of the average consumer. Several of the predictions are very Baconian indeed—as per the strange list at the end of Bacon’s science fiction fragment New Atlantis, a text obsessed with altering the appearance of the natural world for no particular reason other than that it could be done. Watkins’ list includes such predictions as “Peas as Large as Beets,” “Black, Blue, and Green Roses,” and “Strawberries as Large as Apples.” Some are Baconian in more sinister ways, and these are also a bit more accurate. Take the below, for example:
There will be No Wild Animals except in menageries. Rats and mice will have been exterminated. The horse will have become practically extinct. A few of high breed will be kept by the rich for racing, hunting and exercise. The automobile will have driven out the horse. Cattle and sheep will have no horns. They will be unable to run faster than the fattened hog of to-day. A century ago the wild hog could outrun a horse. Food animals will be bred to expend practically all of their life energy in producing meat, milk, wool and other by-products. Horns, bones, muscles and lungs will have been neglected.
I would defer to ecologists and meat industry watchdogs to confirm my intuitions, but it does seem that some of this, excepting the extermination of vermin and horns, has come to pass or is very likely in regard to several species. Another prediction, this one about our own species, is laughably optimistic:
Everybody will Walk Ten Miles. Gymnastics will begin in the nursery, where toys and games will be designed to strengthen the muscles. Exercise will be compulsory in the schools. Every school, college and community will have a complete gymnasium. All cities will have public gymnasiums. A man or woman unable to walk ten miles at a stretch will be regarded as a weakling.
We’re much closer to the future of Pixar’s Wall‑E than anything resembling this scenario (unless you live in the world of Crossfit). Another prediction is both dead on and dead wrong at once. Claiming that there will be “from 350,000,000 to 500,000,000 people in the Americas and its possessions by the lapse of another century” did in fact turn out to be almost uncannily accurate—current estimates are somewhere around 300,000,000. The “possessions” alluded to, however, display the attitude of blithe Monroe doctrine expansionism that held the nation in its sway at the turn of the century. The prediction goes on to say that most of the “South and Central American republics would be voted into the Union by their own people.” A few more of Watkins’ predictions, some prescient, some preposterous:
Telephones Around the World. Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world.
Store Purchases by Tube. Pneumatic tubes instead of store wagons, will deliver packages and bundles.
Hot and Cold Air from Spigots. Rising early to build the furnace fire will be a task of the olden times.
Ready-Cooked Meals will be Bought from establishments similar to our bakeries of to-day [see the above Wall‑E reference]
There will be No C, X, or Q in our every-day alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary.
Aeriel War-Ships and Forts on Wheels. Giant guns will shoot twenty-five miles or more, and will hurl anywhere within such a radius shells exploding and destroying whole cities.
How Children will be Taught. A university education will be free to every man and woman.
Ah, if only that last one had come true! To read all of Watkins predictions in detail, click on the image above for a larger, readable, version of the full article.
As an arts major who doodled my way through every required science course in high school and college, I am deeply gratified by filmmaker Michel Gondry’s approach to documenting the ideas of Noam Chomsky. Having filmed about three hours worth of interviews with the activist, philosopher, and father of modern linguistics in a sterile MIT conference room, Gondry headed back to his charmingly analog Brooklyn digs to spend three years animating the conversations. It’s nice to see a filmmaker of his stature using books to jerry-rig his camera set up. At one point, he huddles on the floor, puzzling over some sequential drawings on 3‑hole punch paper. Seems like the kind of thing most people in his field would tackle with an iPad and an assistant.
Gondry may have felt intellectually dwarfed by his subject, but there’s a kind of genius afoot in his work too. Describing the stop-motion technique he used for Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, he told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, “I have a lightbox, and I put paper on it, and I animate with Sharpies, color Sharpies. And I have a 16-millimeter camera that is set up on a tripod and looks down, and I take a picture. I do a drawing and take a picture.”
A pretty apt summation—watch him in action above—but the curiosity and humanity so evident in such features as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mindand The Science of Sleep is a magical ingredient here, too. He attributes biological properties to his Sharpie markers, and takes a break from some of Chomsky’s more complex thoughts to ask about his feelings when his wife passed away. He doesn’t seem to mind that he might seem a bit of a schoolboy in comparison, one whose talents lie beyond this particular professor’s scope.
As Chomsky himself remarks in the trailer, below, “Learning comes from asking why do things work like that, why not some other way?”
Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? is available on iTunes.
Ayun Halliday puts her lifelong penchant for doodling to good use in her award-winning, handwritten, illustrated zine, The East Village Inky. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov… someone could design a personality test around which great 19th century Russian writers turned readers on to that most brooding and intense of national literatures. For me it was first Dostoevsky, with an obligatory high school reading of Crime and Punishment, whose ending I hated so much that I had to go on and read The Idiot, The Possessed, Notes From the Underground, and nearly everything else to find out what went wrong. And the mischievous fantasist Gogol I preferred even to Kafka as a young reader, so I’d probably score high on existential angst and absurdist tendencies on whatever we’re calling our literary Meyers-Briggs.
But we would have to include the 20th century successors: Solzhenitsyn, Bulgakov, Pasternak. The dissenters and exposers of Soviet cruelty and corruption who took on the traditions of stark, brutal realism and darkly comic allegory. All of these are traditions that literary gadabout Stephen Fry rightly points out “changed the literature, and particularly the literature of the novel, the world over.” Yet somehow, after the fall of the Soviet Union, it’s a literature we seemed to stop hearing about. However, “just because we stopped reading,” says Fry as host of the documentary above, Russia’s Open Book: Writing in the Age of Putin, “doesn’t mean the Russians stopped writing.” Produced by Intelligent Television and Wilton films and premiering online today (and on PBS on December 28), the film profiles six new Russian writers most of us haven’t read, but should.
Perhaps a particularly iconic figure for the Putin age, we first meet the controversial and somewhat macho novelist Zakhar Prilepin, whose nostalgia for the Soviet past has earned him the ire of liberals. Prilepin freely admits that his happy, “wonderful,” childhood explains his sympathy for the Soviet state. Despite these warm psychological origins, literary critic Alexander Gavrilov calls Prilepin’s first novel, 2005’s Pathologies, “an aggressive terrorist attack of a book,” for its harsh portrayal of the war in Chechnya. The book draws on Prilepin’s experiences as a veteran of two Chechen wars. His second novel, Sankya was shortlisted for the Russian Booker and National Bookseller prizes in 2006, and yet aside from a few short stories, Prilepin’s work has yet to be translated into English.
What has fascinated Westerners about Russia in the past is in part its deep veneration for its writers. In every age—Golden, Silver, or blood red—Russian writers held places of cultural prominence, or infamy. Lenin was a great writer of history and polemic. Even Putin soft-pedals his backing for the Syrian regime in a genteel open letter. To be a recognized writer in Russia means being a celebrity, or as Prilepin says, it’s “a kind of show business.” Russia’s Open Book narrator Juliet Stephenson quotes poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko: “In Russia, a poet is more than a poet.”
And then we meet contemporary Russian “activist, journalist, teacher, novelist, critic, and poet” Dmitry Bykov, a dead ringer for an earlier vintage of Saturday Night Live’s Horatio Sanz. His genial appearance hides deeply serious intent. A romantic inspired by the vibrancy of Russia’s political fight for “the dignity of all its citizens,” Bykov tells us “Before I went to the first protest, I’d stopped writing. Afterwards, I wrote a whole volume of lyric poetry. No politics, it’s all roses and rhymes.” Bykov’s 2006 Living Souls—which does exist, abridged, in English—takes up the great Russian tradition of the political fable. Other writers, like the boldly outspoken novelist (and former geneticist) Ludmila Ulitskaya, are much more ambivalent about political engagement. “But in some situations,” says Ulitskaya, “you can’t remain silent….”
It’s difficult perhaps for Westerners to appreciate the contemporary situations of these new Russian writers, given how little we seem to understand Russia’s internal political state (and given the relative absence of a viable U.S. foreign press service). After all, it’s no longer an existential necessity that we know our sworn enemy, as in the Cold War, nor is Russia treated any longer as Europe’s distinguished first cousin, as in its Imperial 19th century past. But the writers profiled in Russia’s Open Book make us keenly aware that the country’s literary culture is thriving, and deserving of our attention. To learn more about the makers of the film and the six contemporary writers profiled, visit the Russia’s Open Book website. And to expand your appreciation for Russian literature in general, spend some time at the Read Russia 2013 site here, a new initiative “to celebrate Russian literature and Russian book culture.” We also have many Russian classics in our Free eBooks and Audio Books collections.
Russia’s Open Book: Writing in the Age of Putin will be permanently listed in our collection of 600 Free Movies Online.
Heavy metal music enjoyed the pleasures of excess in the 1980s, an era when, if you believe certain biographers, writer-actor-auteur Orson Welles did the very same. Though some describe the life of the man who made Citizen Kane as having by then fallen into a final period of great decadence, he still managed to leave his mark on a number of unusual projects. Many of my generation fondly remember his performance as the man-made planet Unicron, eater of worlds, in 1986’s Transformers: The Movie, but those slightly older may have first encountered Welles’ late work on Battle Hymns, the debut album by sword-and-sorcery-minded metal (technically, “epic metal”) band Manowar, for whose track “Dark Avenger,” below, he provided suitably epic narration: “And they placed in his hands a sword made for him called Vengeance, forged in brimstone and tempered by the woeful tears of the Unavenged.” Who but Welles (or maybe Christopher Lee) could sell a line like that?
Five years later, Manowar would return to the Welles well for their fifth album Fighting the World, whose track “Defender,” below, features a posthumous appearance originally recorded as a demo during the Battle Hymns sessions. Fighting the World, incidentally, appeared as the first ever digitally recorded and mixed heavy metal album, an achievement unshyly declared on the band’s web site.
There you’ll also learn that Manowar not only included fantasy imagery in both their lyrics and on their covers before their colleagues did, but that they also designed and built their own speaker cabinets and guitars first, recorded songs in 16 languages first, and collaborated with “Germany’s bestselling fantasy author, Wolfgang Hohlbein” first. They also declare themselves “the loudest band in the world (a record they have broken on three separate occasions),” but give a place of even higher honor on the list to their distinction as “the only band ever to record with Orson Welles” — epic metal, metal, or otherwise.
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