Featuring a collection of glass plate, nitrate and acetate negatives, the living archive tells “the story of San Francisco, its transition from a stretch of sand dunes to an internationally acclaimed city, it’s rise from the rubble of the devastating earthquake of 1906 and the vital role public transportation played and continues to play in revitalizing the city.” The archive contains nearly 5,000 images, all neatly divided into 14 collections. You can enter the archive and start perusing here.
“It’s not about the grade,” I’d say to perturbed students asking me to change theirs: “it’s about what you learned.” No one will care what you got in first-year English Composition; they’ll care if you can write a sentence, a paragraph, a professional, elegant, or moving text. All of this is true, and yet (of course I never told them this) I still remember every grade I earned in every class I took in high school, college, and graduate school. Obsessive? Maybe. But it’s also symptomatic of that same compulsion that drives students to try, by any means, to get professors to bump their grades up at the end of the semester—fear of the “permanent record.” Like Seinfeld’s Elaine, struggling to expunge a black mark from her medical chart, we all fear the reams of documents—or archives of data—that catalogue our every misstep, stumble, failure or faux pas.
In many cases, this anxiety is justifiable, but as you can see here, the occasional bad mark didn’t stop famed writers Norman Mailer or E.E. Cummings from achieving literary greatness, even if those grades remain, in ink, on record today. See Mailer’s first-year Harvard College report card at the top of the post, academic year 1939–40. The bearish novelist did well, but for the C in his second semester of Engineering Science. Just above, we have Cummings’ report card from what is likely his fifth grade year given his age of 11 at the time. The 1905-06 grading system looks foreign to us now, but the C that Cummings received that year probably did not put him at the top of the class. Nor, I’m sure, did his 61 absences.
Ernest Hemingway, on the other hand, had little reason to hide the high school report card above, but if you look closely, you’ll see that the column of straight A’s does not mean what we might think. The Oak Park and River Forest Township High School only gave two letter grades, A for “Accepted” and D for “Deficient.” Still, Hemingway’s numerical percentages show his scholarly aptitude, though his 75 in Latin may have haunted him.
Hemingway’s modernist contemporary William Faulkner, you may know, struggled in school after the fourth grade, and eventually dropped out of high school after the 11th (though his father’s job at Ole Miss meant he could enroll there for the three semesters he attended). The seventh grade report card above does not show us his grades, and Faulkner’s teacher neglected to fill in the “Especially Good In” and “Especially Poor In” boxes. Nevertheless, Faulkner (then William Falkner), did well enough to move up, and his mother signed off on each month of the term but the last.
Finally we bring you the report card of Anne Sexton—née Harvey—for a 10th grade American Literature class at the Junior-Senior High School in Wellesley, Massachusetts, from which Sylvia Plath also graduated. As you can see, Sexton received a C in the class, with an F for effort in the first quarter. According to Beth Hinchliffe—a Wellesley native who conducted one of Sexton’s final interviews—the poet remembered the grade. She also remembered her teenage self as “ ‘a pimply, boy-crazy thing’ who was obsessed with flirting.”
Most of these report cards come from collections at the University of Texas’ Harry Ransom Center, a trove of historical and literary documents that, unlike some other archives, I’m very glad keeps permanent records. Anne Sexton’s report card comes to us via the always information-rich Brain Pickings.
Unlikely collaborations in pop music abound: Run DMC and Aerosmith? It works! U2 and Luciano Pavarotti? Why not? Robert Plant and Alison Krauss? Sure! Anyone and Kermit the Frog? Yes. They don’t always work out, but the attempts, whether kismet or trainwreck, tend to reveal a great deal about the partners’ strengths and weaknesses. Unlikely collaborations in feature film are somewhat rarer, though not for lack of wishing. I would guess the high financial stakes have something to do with this, as well as the sheer number of people required for the average production. One particularly salient example of an ostensible mismatch in animated movies—a planned co-creation by surrealist Salvador Dalí and populist Walt Disney—offers a fascinating look at how the two artists’ careers could have taken very different creative directions. The collaboration may also have fallen victim to a film industry whose economics discourage experimental duets.
We’ve previously featured the animated short— Destino—at the top of the post. The 6 and a half minute film shows us what Dalí and Disney’s planned project might have looked like. Recreated from 17 seconds of original animation and storyboards drawn by Dalí and released in 2003 by Disney’s nephew Roy, Destino gives us an almost perfect symbiosis of the two creators’ sensibilities, with Walt Disney’s Fantasia-like flights smoothly animating Dalí’s fluid dream imagery. According to Chris Pallant, author of Demystifying Disney, work between the two on the original project also moved smoothly, with little friction between the two artists. Meeting in 1945, Dalí and Disney “quickly developed an industrious working relationship” and “ease of collaboration.” Pallant writes that “Disney’s desire for absolute creative control changed, and, for the first time, the animators working within the studio felt the influence of other artistic forces.” I imagine it might prove difficult, if not impossible, to micromanage Salvador Dalí. In any case, the fruitful relationship produced results:
Destino reached a relatively advanced stage before being abandoned. By mid-1946 the Disney- Dalí collaboration encompassed approximately ’80 pen-and-ink sketches’ and numerous ‘storyboards, drawings and paintings that were created over nine months in 1945 and 1946.’
Roy E. Disney discovered Dalí’s Destino artwork in the late 90s, leading to his short re-creation of what might have been. Above, you can flip through a slideshow of twelve of those drawings and storyboards, courtesy of Park West Gallery, who represent the work. The Destino materials went on display at the Drawings Room in Figueres, Spain. The exhibition featured “1 oil painting, 1 watercolour, 15 preparatory drawings—10 of which are unpublished—and 9 photographs of Dalí in the creative process of this material, of the Disney couple in Port Lligat in 1957, and the Dalí couple in Burbank.” You can see many of those photographs in the exhibit’s pamphlet (in pdf here, in Spanish and English; cover image below), which offers a detailed description of the original project, including its narrative concept, a “love story” between a dancer and “baseball-player-cum-god Cronos” meant to represent “the importance of time as we wait for destiny to act on our lives.”
Inspired by a Mexican song by Armando Dominguez, Destino, on its face, seems like a very strange choice for Disney, who generally trafficked in more recognizable (and European) folk-tale sources. And yet, the exhibition pamphlet asserts, the co-production made a great deal of sense for Dalí, “if we consider that one Dalinian constant is his bringing together of the elitist artistic idea and mass culture (and vice versa) […]. Destino becomes a unique artistic product in which Dalinian expressiveness is combined with Disney’s fantasy and sonority, making it a film in which Dalí’s images take on movement and Disney’s figures become ‘Dalinised.’ ”
And yet, while both Dalí and Disney worked excitedly on the project, it was ultimately not to be, at least until almost sixty years later. Destino would have been part of a “package film,” like Fantasia, a compilation of short vignettes. John Hench, a Disney artist who worked on the project with Dalí, speculated that the company “foresaw the end” of such features. Pallant, however, goes further in speculating the film “would have resembled a potential box-office bomb” for Disney, who remarked later that is was “no fault of Dalí’s that the project… was not completed—it was simply a case of policy changes in our distribution plans.”
This cryptic remark, writes Pallant, alludes to Disney’s plans to focus his creative energy on “safe” feature-length projects “to strengthen the company’s position within the film industry.” While such a decision might have made good business sense, it probably doomed many more Destino-like ideas that might have made the Walt Disney company a very different entity indeed. One can only imagine what the studio might have become had Disney opted to pursue experiments like this instead of taking the more profitable route. Of course, given the market pressures on the movie industry, it’s also possible the studio might not have survived at all.
Upon his tragic early death at 40, John Lennon left behind a body of work few popular artists could hope to equal. And that’s only the published stuff. As we pointed out in a recent post on his home demos, the former Beatle also left hundreds of hours of tape recordings for his fans to sift through, and, as if that weren’t enough, Sotheby’s recently auctioned off a storehouse of original manuscripts and autographed drawings for two books Lennon wrote in the mid-sixties, In His Own Write (1964) and A Spaniard in the Works (1965), a Sherlock Holmes parody.
Lennon’s playful sense of humor and surreal imagination shine through the stories and poems in both books, as does his more moody broody side. If anything, Lennon’s wordplay and out-there line drawings closely resemble the work of Shel Silverstein, who was probably not an influence but certainly a kindred spirit. Sotheby’s specialist Gabriel Heaton cites as Lennon’s influence “the nonsense tradition of English literature,” and indeed Lewis Carroll comes to mind when reading his work. See, for example, “About The Awful,” his author’s statement for In His Own Write:
I was bored on the 9th of Octover 1940 when, I believe, the Nasties were still booming us led by Madolf Heatlump (who only had one). Anyway they didn’t get me. I attended to varicous schools in Liddypol. And still didn’t pass — much to my Aunties supplies. As a member of the most publified Beatles my (P, G, and R’s) records might seem funnier to some of you than this book, but as far as I’m conceived this correction of short writty is the most wonderfoul larf I’ve every ready.
God help and breed you all.
And then there’s the artwork. At the top, see an untitled ink drawing of a vicar leering at a nude couple (and holding in his hand “That Book”). The drawing above shows a clique of naked partiers, with the caption “Puffing and globbering they drugged theyselves rampling or dancing with wild abdomen, stubbing in wild postumes amonst themselves…”
Recalling the artwork in Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, directly above we have a simple illustration for a poem called “I Sat Belonely,” captioned with the poem’s first two lines: “I Sat Belonely Down a Tree, Humbled Fat and Small” (read the full poem here).
Another Silversteinian drawing is titled “A Lot of Flies on His Wife” from a short story called “No Flies on Frank,” whose title character speaks in an argot right out of James Joyce: “I carn’t not believe this incredible fact of truth about my very body which has not gained fat since mother begat me at childburn. Yea, though I wart through the valet of thy shadowy hut I will feed no norman. What grate qualmsy hath taken me thus into such a fatty hardbuckle.”
Just above, Lennon sketches a Picasso-like four-eyed guitarist in this untitled drawing (notice the tiny cyclist at his feet)—estimated by Sotheby’s between $15,000 and $25,000. The eighty nine lots that went up for auction included many other drawings (see more here) and some handwritten notes from Paul McCartney. All told, the sale netted close to $3 million, though for Lennon devotees, these artifacts are priceless. .
“When forced to leave my house for an extended period of time, I take my typewriter with me,” once wrote essayist-humorist David Sedaris. “Together we endure the wretchedness of passing through the X‑ray scanner. The laptops roll merrily down the belt, while I’m instructed to stand aside and open my bag. To me it seems like a normal enough thing to be carrying, but the typewriter’s declining popularity arouses suspicion and I wind up eliciting the sort of reaction one might expect when traveling with a cannon. ‘It’s a typewriter,’ I say. ‘You use it to write angry letters to airport security.’ ” But Sedaris, one of the last high-profile hold-outs against electronic word processing, wrote those words almost fifteen years ago — even before airport security really cracked down in our post‑9/11 reality. Surely he has since picked up and presumably learned to use a computer. We now find ourselves in an age when typewriter usage has transcended the status of an act of nostalgia and attained the status of an act of rebellion; if you insist on using a classic old Underwood Remington, or an Invicta, or a Continental Standard, or Olympia Monika Deluxe, well, you must really have a statement to make.
Yet I daresay that for all their mechanical heft, freedom from internet-borne distraction, and thoroughly analog aesthetic appeal, typewriters bring with them a number of burdens. We have their difficulty in clearing TSA lines, yes, but also their thirst for physical ink and paper (“I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed,” said Sedaris, “at least I took a few trees down with me”), and their noise — oh my, their noise. You can hear the varying sounds of 32 models belonging to many successive typewriter generations in the video at the top of the post. They don’t come as straight recordings, but as sounds reproduced by mouth to perfection by that one-in-a-million mimic Michael Winslow, best known from the Police Academy movies as Sergeant Larvell “Motor Mouth” Jones. “The History of the Typewriter Recited by Michael Winslow” originated in the mind of Spanish artist Ignacio Uriarte, who, according to Frieze, “has employed standard office supplies such as Biros, highlighters and jotters,” not to mention “the ubiquitous spreadsheet tool Microsoft Excel, perhaps soon facing its own obsolescence.” This production “tellingly culminates with the sounds of a machine from 1983, the year before the arrival of the first home computer with a graphical interface.” Which leads one to wonder: can Winslow do hard drive noises?
I spent this afternoon chatting with a travel writer about how we first allowed ourselves to start learning foreign languages. That notion may sound a bit odd, especially to those of you living in countries where everyone grows up trilingual. But Americans — even American travelers — have struggled with the concept of mastering languages other than English. Sometimes it has seemed merely unnecessary; at other times, downright impossible. But no matter our nationality, our increasingly globalized 21st-century lives have put to rest any and all excuses in which we might dress up our linguistic parochialism. Technology has also done more than its share, given the ever-growing abundance of free and effective language-learning resources on the internet. Take for example, our pretty massive list of Free Foreign Language Lessons. Or discover this trove of language learning resources from the U.S. Foreign Service Institute, a government agency long tasked with teaching the widest possible variety of tongues to diplomats and other officials stationed abroad. Though produced several decades ago, the lessons are still relevant .… and, more importantly, they’re in the public domain.
Most of the downloadables available for each of the over 40 languages on the site include include text lessons in PDF form and audio lessons, suitable for loading onto your mobile audio device of choice, in MP3 form. Naturally, you’ll find a more robust store of FSI resources for the much-spoken Chinese, Spanish, and French than you will for, say, Chinyanja, Lingala, and Sinhala — but how often do you run across means of learning that latter class of languages at all? I’ve found Japanese and Korean, my own East Asian languages of choice, decently represented; in fact, preparation for an extended trip to South Korea this week has seen me go into studying overdrive, making use of every online resource available. You can find more of them in our full list of free language lessons, where, if you’d like to learn any of the languages mentioned here — or maybe Arabic, Finnish, Swahili, or many tongues besides — you can get a painless start. We live in too big (and too interesting) a world not to take advantage of it.
A quick update for TED heads. In early 2011 we mentioned that someone put together a handy online spreadsheet that lists 875 TED Talks, with handy links to each video. It’s worth mentioning the spreadsheet again because this evolving Google doc now lists 1756 talks. That works out to more than 440 hours of “riveting talks by remarkable people.” Because the page gets updated on a regular basis, you’ll want to bookmark it and keep tabs on the new additions.
Canadian pianist Glenn Gould was one of those child prodigies whose spectacular talents were matched by some serious eccentricities. As an infant, Gould reportedly hummed rather than cried, he had perfect pitch at age 3, and he graduated at the age of 12 from the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. Unlike just about every other musician on the planet, Gould reportedly didn’t seem to need to spend hour upon hour practicing his instrument. Instead, he had the enviable ability to practice in his head. His interpretations of Brahms, Beethoven and especially Bach were hailed as genius.
Gould also tended to dress in a winter coat and gloves no matter what the temperature was outside. This resulted in Gould getting arrested in Miami for being a suspected vagrant. While performing, he would fall into something close to an ecstatic state, shaking his head and twisting his torso in a manner that raised more than a few eyebrows in the buttoned-down world of classical music. But perhaps his most famous eccentricity was that, like Jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, Gould had a habit of humming along as he played.
Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroitor made a pair of gorgeously shot documentaries about the pianist in 1959. Glenn Gould – Off the Record, which you can see above, shows Gould relaxing at his lakeside cottage north of Toronto. In the movie, we see that he leads a solitary life — his only companions are his piano and his pet dog – where he can focus completely on his music.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
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