The great British empiricist Francis Bacon once remarked that Johannes Gutenberg’sprinting press “changed the whole face and state of the world.” Although Gutenberg did not independently devise the press, he invented a mass-production process of moveable type and concocted an oil-based ink which, when combined with the wooden press, revolutionized the flow of information. Books could now be published in vast quantities, at only a fraction of the time required previously.
For his first seminal printing, Gutenberg picked the Bible — an obvious choice for a Christian, and in retrospect, perhaps the only book whose historical significance rivals that of Gutenberg’s invention. Produced in 1454 or 1455, the few surviving copies of Gutenberg’s Bible remain exemplars of the printer’s forethought and craftsmanship; the page dimensions, it is believed, were devised by Gutenberg to echo the golden ratio of Greek aesthetics. The first page appears above.
On October 10th, Canadian writer Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature. And if you’re not familiar with her work, we suggest that you spend time reading the 18 Free Short Stories we gathered in our celebratory post.
Traditionally, recipients of the Nobel Prize travel to Sweden to accept the award in mid December. But the 82-year-old writer, citing poor health, decided to stay home and forego making the customary acceptance speech in Stockholm. (See past speeches by Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, V.S. Naipaul and others here.) Fans of Munro weren’t left empty-handed, however. From the comfort of her daughter’s home in Victoria, British Columbia, Munro sat down for an informal, 30-minute interview and talked about many things: how she first began writing and telling stories; how she gained (and lost) confidence as a writer; how she mentally maps out her stories; how she has become a different writer with age; how the writing life for women has changed over the years; and much more. You can watch the complete Nobel interview above.
During his final decade, Friedrich Nietzsche’s worsening constitution continued to plague the philosopher. In addition to having suffered from incapacitating indigestion, insomnia, and migraines for much of his life, the 1880s brought about a dramatic deterioration in Nietzsche’s eyesight, with a doctor noting that his “right eye could only perceive mistaken and distorted images.”
Nietzsche himself declared that writing and reading for more than twenty minutes had grown excessively painful. With his intellectual output reaching its peak during this period, Nietzsche required a device that would let him write while making minimal demands on his vision.
So he sought to buy a typewriter in 1881. Although he was aware of Remington typewriters, the ailing philosopher looked for a model that would be fairly portable, allowing him to travel, when necessary, to more salubrious climates. The Malling-Hansen Writing Ball seemed to fit the bill:
“In the year 1875, a quick writing apparatus, designed by Mr. L. Sholes in America, and manufactured by Mr. Remington, was introduced in London. This machine was superior to the Malling-Hansen writing apparatus; but the writing ball in its present form far excels the Remington machine. It secures greater rapidity, and its writing is clearer and more precise than that of the American instrument. The Danish apparatus has more keys, is much less complicated, built with greater precision, more solid, and much smaller and lighter than the Remington, and moreover, is cheaper.”
Despite his initial excitement, Nietzsche quickly grew tired of the intricate contraption. According to Eberwein, the philosopher struggled with the device after it was damaged during a trip to Genoa; an inept mechanic trying to make the necessary repairs may have broken the writing ball even further. Still, Nietzsche typed some 60 manuscripts on his writing ball, including what may be the most poignant poetic treatment of typewriters to date:
“THE WRITING BALL IS A THING LIKE ME:
MADE OF IRON YET EASILY TWISTED ON JOURNEYS.
PATIENCE AND TACT ARE REQUIRED IN ABUNDANCE
AS WELL AS FINE FINGERS TO USE US.”
In addition to viewing several of Nietzsche’s original typescripts at the Malling-Hansen Society website, those wanting a closer look at Nietzsche’s model can view it in the video above. Felix Herbst, the video’s creator, has kindly provided a functional writing ball simulator on his website. I’d encourage you to give typing a shot—there’s something oddly satisfying about the crisp imprints made by its clattering metallic keys.
I believe it was Jacques Derrida, though I don’t recall exactly where, who said that some of the most revealing text of any work can be found in the footnotes. In documentarian Errol Morris’ recent photo-essay series on Lincoln for The New York Times, footnotes, chronologies, snippets of interview, and endlessly recursive references continuously intrude on the stories he tells. In this way, the series, called “The Interminable, Everlasting Lincolns,” enacts the tension Morris identifies as “the push-pull of history,” a contest between several ways of approaching the past: “Facts vs. beliefs. Our desire to know the origins of things vs. our desire to rework, to reconfigure the past to suit our own beliefs and predilections. Perhaps nothing better illustrates this than two radically different predispositions to objects—the storyteller vs. the collector.”
The way story after story inevitably nests within each historical artifact seems to be Morris’ overarching theme as he charts the history of Lincoln iconography by reference to a single image, a photo of Lincoln by Alexander Gardner that exists in only one known original print, called O‑118 after collector of Lincoln photography Lloyd Ostendorf (see the retouched version above, the original print below). This print, along with 13 others, was made either four or five days before Lincoln’s assassination.
Morris’ fascination with this photograph is as variously motivated as the number of different views he adopts in examining its provenance, its history, and its meaning. For one thing, O‑118 is supposedly the last photograph taken of Lincoln alive. In 1922, The New York Times published the original print (above) with text by James Young, who wrote:
Probably no other photograph of Lincoln conveys more clearly the abiding sadness of the face. The lines of time and care are deeply etched, and he has the look of a man bordering upon old age, though he was only 56. Proof that the camera was but a few feet away may be found by scrutiny of the picture…. The print has been untouched, and this picture is an exact likeness of the President as he looked in the week of his death.
The photo’s caption also included information that Morris makes a great deal of: “The Cracked Negative Caused it To Be Discarded. It Has Only Once Before Been Published, and Then in a Retouched Form.” For one thing, Morris seems to associate the photograph with what Walter Benjamin called “aura”; The print, it seems, was the only one Gardner was able to make before the cracked negative became useless and mass production from the source impossible. Un-retouched, the print shows a “fracture cutting through the top of Lincoln’s head.” For the storyteller, writes Morris, “the crack is the beginning of a legend—the legend of a death foretold. The crack seems to anticipate the bullet fired into the back of Lincoln’s head at Ford’s Theater on Good Friday, April 14, 1865.” Using the rhetorical term for “a figure of anticipation,” a narrative feature that foreshadows, foretells, or prophesies, Morris calls this “the proleptic crack.”
His winding narrative, replete with the antiquarian minutiae of collectors, moves from the day—February 5, 1865—that Lincoln and his son Tad walked to Gardner’s studio on 7th Street in Washington, DC for the photo session, through the use of photography as an aid to Lincoln painters and sculptors, to the meaning of Lincoln for such diverse people as Leo Tolstoy, Marilyn Monroe, and our current President. Morris’ series ranges far and wide, visiting with historians and collectors along the way, and telling many a story, some freely speculative, some wistful, some tragic, and all somehow circling back to O‑118. Like much of Morris’ documentary work, it’s an exercise in collage—of the methods of the scholar, the essayist, and the archivist—and like its subject, it’s a fractured, but everlastingly fascinating meditation. Follow Morris’ entire series below.
Every creative writer gets asked the question at least once at a social event with non-writers: “Where do you get your ideas?” To the asker, writing is a dark art, full of mysteries only the initiated understand. To the writer—as Neil Gaiman tells us in an essay on his website—the question misses the point and misjudges the writer’s task. “Ideas aren’t the hard bit,” he says.
Creating believable people who do more or less what you tell them to is much harder. And hardest by far is the process of simply sitting down and putting one word after another to construct whatever it is you’re trying to build: making it interesting, making it new.
Sometimes hardest of all is the “simply sitting down” and writing when there’s nothing, no ideas. The work’s still got to get done, after all. Gaiman used to treat the question facetiously, answering with one of a few waggish and “not very funny” prepared answers. But people kept asking, including the seven-year-old classmates of his daughter, and he decided to tell them the truth, “I make them up, out of my head.” It’s not the answer most wanted to hear, but it’s the truth. As he inarguably shows, ideas are like opinions: “Everyone’s got an idea for a book, a movie, a story, a TV series.” And they can come from anywhere.
Gaiman, feeling that he owed his daughter’s classmates a thoughtful, detailed answer, responded with the below, which we’ve put into list form.
Ideas come from daydreaming. “The only difference between writers and other people,” says Gaiman, “is that we notice when we’re doing it.”
Ideas come from asking yourself simple questions, like “What if…?” (“you woke up with wings?… your sister turned into a mouse?.…), “If only…” (“a ghost would do my homework”) and “I wonder….” (“what she does when she’s alone”), etc…. These questions, in turn, generate other questions.
Ideas are only starting points. You don’t have to figure out the plot. Plots “generate themselves” from “whatever the starting point is.”
Ideas can be people (“There’s a boy who wants to know about magic”); places (“There’s a castle at the end of time, which is the only place there is”); images (“A woman, sifting in a dark room filled with empty faces.”)
Ideas can come from two things “that haven’t come together before.” (“What would happen if a chair was bitten by a werewolf?)
Granted some of Gaiman’s examples may be more intriguing or fantastic than what you or I might propose, but anyone can do these exercises. The idea, however, is just the starting point. “All fiction,” he writes, “is a process of imagining.” So what comes next? “Well,” says Gaiman, “then you write.” Yes, it is that simple, and that hard.
Tell us, readers, do you find any of Gaiman’s idea sources helpful? Where do you get your ideas?
I had an adolescent fascination with Ed Wood. I mean that literally: I spent a sizable chunk of my adolescence watching the films of, reading about, and even reading the books by writer-director (and occasional cross-dresser) Edward D. Wood Jr. What, I asked, could have driven the man to make, and keep on making, the films that would ultimately define the category, quite popular during my teen years, of “so bad it’s good” cinema? None of his numerous, all unabashedly low-budget pictures have done more for that form than 1959’s Plan 9 from Outer Space, a breathless, nearly budgetless tale in which Wood throws together aliens, zombies, looming nuclear annihilation, and Bela Lugosi. Well, he almost throws in Bela Lugosi: as depicted in Tim Burton’s 1994 biopic Ed Wood, he characteristically spliced in existing footage of the by-then deceased icon of horror film, cast his wife’s chiropractor (instructed to hold a cape over his face) as a double, billed Lugosi as the star, and hoped for the best.
You can watch the fruit of that and other highly unorthodox filmmaking efforts on the part of Wood and his faithful bunch of long-suffering collaborators at the top of the post. Just below, we have a clip from Ed Wood, which in large part deals with how its indefatigable protagonist, played by a wholesomely gung-ho Johnny Depp, came to make Plan 9 in the first place. This montage recreates the shooting of sequences Wood’s fans will have long since burned into their visual memory: George “The Animal” Steele as Swedish ex-wrestler Tor Johnson rising ineptly from the grave, Bill Murray as would-be transsexual Bunny Breckenridge affectlessly giving his henchman orders to execute the title plan, a trio of toy flying saucers lowered on fishing wire into a model Hollywood. In 1980, Michael and Harry Medved dubbed Plan 9 “worst movie ever made,” initiating its ascent from decades of obscurity to the status of, as John Wirt puts it, “the ultimate cult flick.” Critics tend to regard Ed Wood as a “good” movie, and Wood’s projects, especially Plan 9, as “bad” movies, yet both entertain at very high levels indeed, making us ask an important question, another one I asked myself in the thick of my Wood period: what makes a movie “good” or “bad,” anyway?
The French refer to the decade between 1920 and 1929 as les Années folles, “the crazy years,” which is apt when you consider how the French middle and upper classes generally loosened their brassieres and defined modern bohemia, à laCoco Chanel.
But the American moniker — the Roaring 20s — fits too. Nearly everything about that decade roared: cars, jazz, manufacturing, construction.
Din, in fact, came to define the age, particularly in big cities and especially in New York. An unnamed Japanese visitor was quoted upon his visit to that city in 1920: “My first impression of New York was its noise. When I know what they mean, I will understand civilization.”
A Princeton history professor took that challenge at face value, while capturing a broader industrial era. The Roaring Twenties is an audio (and to some extent video) archive of what New York City sounded like from 1900 to 1933. Professor Emily Thompson and designer Scott Mahoy have created a lovely site that’s fun to explore. The archive includes a beautiful 1933 map of New York City loaded with links to noise complaints (screenshot at top), complete with documentation. New York had long been a place where people from all over the world lived on top of one another, but noise levels were shifting—getting louder and more varied, that is—and the city was inundated with complaints about ferry whistles, radio shops, street traffic, the clatter of restaurant dishwashing, and all manner of construction.
Sensitivity to the city’s volume was high. The city’s Noise Abatement Commission measured the “deafening effect” of sound in Times Square. The women’s cafeteria in the New York Life Insurance building was designed with state-of-the-art acoustics to keep the noise of the city out and the sound of office workers in.
Cortlandt Street in lower Manhattan was lined with radio shops, each broadcasting different music. Don’t miss that video, which you’ll find by scanning the Space tab map.
You can also move through time on the site, listening to the city’s cacophony from the early 1900s up to the 1930s, or browse a menu of noise sources from home sounds to the noise of the harbors and rivers. Again, you can visit the The Roaring Twenties site here.
You may remember our October post on Ingmar Bergman’s evaluation of his equally titanic colleagues in cinema, from Jean-Luc Godard (“affected”) to Alfred Hitckcock (“infantile”). Though the Bergman faithful and fans Andrei Tarkovsky often find much to disagree about, the Swedish director of pictures like Wild Strawberries and Persona had the absolute highest praise for the Russian director of pictures like Andrei Rublev and Solaris. (Watch Tarkovsky’s major films free online here.) “When film is not a document, it is dream,” said Bergman. “That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn’t explain. He is a spectator, capable of staging his visions in the most unwieldy but, in a way, the most willing of media. All my life I have hammered on the doors of the rooms in which he moves so naturally.”
And now we have a few more words the older master spoke about the younger, whom he physically outlived — but, by his own admission, couldn’t artistically outdo — thanks to a certain Tyler Harris, who posted them to My Criterion. In his remarks there, Bergman continues with the metaphor of Tarkovsky an an inhabitant of a realm of dreams: “Suddenly, I found myself standing at the door of a room the keys of which had, until then, never been given to me,” Bergman said of first watching Andrei Rublev, which he named at the Göteborg Film Festival 1994 as a favorite. “I felt encouraged and stimulated: someone was expressing what I had always wanted to say without knowing how.” He also selected Federico Fellini’s La Strada, which prompted a background story about his ill-fated collaboration with Fellini and Akira Kurosawa under legendary producer Dino de Laurentiis. Kurosawa’s own Rashomon, which you can watch free online, also appears on this favorites list of Bergman’s, which runs, alphabetically, as follows:
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