It is my habit, when travel looms, to case the Internet for obscure museums my destination might have to offer. Once loaded, I fixate. Chat me up about my itinerary, and you will definitely come away with the impression that these offbeat locales are the trip’s primary raison d’être.
It’s shocking how rarely I actually make it to one of these off-the-beaten path gems. Time flies and I rarely travel alone these days.
Take a recent family trip to London. Every time I brought up the Museum of Brands, my husband expressed reservations. “But what is it, exactly, other than a bunch of old labels?” he’d press.
I hemmed and hawed, realizing on the cellular level that neither he nor the kids could see the beauty in old labels. Dinosaurs, maybe. Vespas, no doubt. But old labels? This is how I found myself giving the British Museum nearly three times the Museum of Brand’s admission charge to join a mighty throng of pensioners, squinting at a handful of boring button fragments and a chunk of wood that no longer resembled a Viking Ship.
Next time, I swear…
How fortunate for me and my ilk that Chicago design firm Coudal Partners is committed to laboring far outside its expected scope. In addition to championing Stanley Kubrick and poetry, they’ve taken it upon themselves to consolidate a panoply of digital collections into the Museum of Online Museums. (The preferred acronym is MoOM, FYI.)
Meanwhile, the talk of the town here in New York City is the reappearance of Mmuseumm, an eclectic, non-profit housed in a 60-square-foot Tribeca elevator shaft. MoOM, take note.
The prolific Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, and many other works both inside and outside the realm of science fiction, apparently suffered no shortage of creativity. Prolific in his fiction writing, he also proved generous in his encouragement of younger writers: we’ve previously featured not just his twelve essential pieces of writing advice but his secret to life and love. He even wrote enough on the subject of writing to constitute an entire book, the collection Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity. In the 1973 title piece, Bradbury, hardly known as a Buddhist, explains his use of the term zen for its “shock value”: “The variety of reactions to it should guarantee me some sort of crowd, if only of curious onlookers, those who come to pity and stay to shout. The old sideshow Medicine Men who traveled about our country used calliope, drum, and Blackfoot Indian, to insure open-mouthed attention. I hope I will be forgiven for using ZEN in much the same way, at least here at the start. For, in the end, you may discover I’m not joking after all.”
He breaks down his own idea of zen in his writing process by first asking himself, “Now while I have you here before my platform, what words shall I whip forth painted in red letters ten feet tall?” He paints the following, and after each we include selections from the essay:
WORK. “It is, above all, the word about which your career will revolve for a lifetime. Beginning now you should become not its slave, which is too mean a term, but its partner. Once you are really a co-sharer of existence with your work, that word will lose its repellent aspects. [ … ] We often indulge in made work, in false business, to keep from being bored. Or worse still we conceive the idea of working for money. The money becomes the object, the target, the end-all and be-all. Thus work, being important only as a means to that end, degenerates into boredom. Can we wonder then that we hate it so?”
RELAXATION. “Impossible! you say. How can you work and relax? How can you create and not be a nervous wreck? [ … ] Tenseness results from not knowing or giving up trying to know. Work, giving us experience, results in new confidence and eventually in relaxation. The type of dynamic relaxation again, as in sculpting, where the sculptor does not consciously have to tell his fingers what to do. The surgeon does not tell his scalpel what to do. Nor does the athlete advise his body. Suddenly, a natural rhythm is achieved. The body thinks for itself.”
DON’T THINK! “The writer who wants to tap the larger truth in himself must reject the temptations of Joyce or Camus or Tennessee Williams, as exhibited in the literary reviews. He must forget the money waiting for him in mass-circulation. He must ask himself, ‘What do I really think of the world, what do I love, fear, hate?’ and begin to pour this on paper. Then, through the emotions, working steadily, over a long period of time, his writing will clarify; he will relax because he thinks right and he will think even righter because he relaxes. The two will become interchangeable. At last he will begin to see himself.”
FURTHER RELAXATION. “We should not look down on work nor look down on the forty-five out of fifty-two stories written in our first year as failures. To fail is to give up. But you are in the midst of a moving process. Nothing fails then. All goes on. Work is done. If good, you learn from it. If bad, you learn even more. Work done and behind you is a lesson to be studied. There is no failure unless one stops. Not to work is to cease, tighten up, become nervous and therefore destructive of the creative process. [ … ] Isn’t it obvious by now that the more we talk of work, the closer we come to Relaxation.”
“Have I sounded like a cultist of some sort? A yogi feeding on kumquats, grapenuts and almonds here beneath the banyan tree? Let me assure you I speak of all these things only because they have worked for me for fifty years. And I think they might work for you. The true test is in the doing. Be pragmatic, then. If you’re not happy with the way your writing has gone, you might give my method a try. If you do, I think you might easily find a new definition for Work. And the word is LOVE.”
You can read much more about Bradbury’s method of working, relaxing, not thinking, and relaxing further still — and his thoughts on the joy of writing, keeping the muse fed, establishing a thousand-or-two-words-a-day habit, and “how to climb the tree of life, throw rocks at yourself, and get down without breaking your bones or your spirit” — in the book, Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity.
One of the great polymaths of the 19th century, Lewis Carroll (pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) —mathematician, logician, author, poet, Anglican cleric—took to the new medium of photography with the same alacrity he applied to all of his pursuits. Though he may be described as a hobbyist in the sense that he never pursued the art professionally, he nonetheless “became a master of the medium, boasting a portfolio of roughly 3,000 images and his very own studio.”
So says a recent article by Gannon Burgett on Carroll’s “24-year career as a photographer,” during which he made a number of portraits, including one of then-poet laureate of England Alfred, Lord Tennyson. His subjects also included “landscapes, dolls, dogs, statues, paintings, trees and even skeletons.”
Carroll excelled at a developing method called the wet collodion process, which replaced the daguerreotype as the primary means of photographic image-making. This process seems to have been something like painting in oils, requiring a great deal of dexterity and chemical know-how, and similarly subject to decay when done improperly. Carroll particularly valued this method for its difficulty (he described it in detail in some lines added to a poem called “Hiawatha’s Photographing”)—so much so that once a dry developing process came into being, he abandoned the medium altogether, complaining that it became so easy anyone could do it. Carroll’s obsessive focus on process mirrored an obsession with his favorite photographic subjects, young children, including Tennyson’s son Hallam (above). Most famously, Carroll obsessively photographed the young Alice Liddell (top and below as “The Queen of May”), daughter of family friend Henry George Liddell and inspiration for Carroll’s most famous fictional character.
Many of Carroll’s photographs of Alice and other children can seem downright prurient to our eyes. As Carroll’s biographer Jenny Woolf writes in a 2010 essay for the Smithsonian, “of the approximately 3,000 photographs Dodgson made in his life, just over half are of children—30 of whom are depicted nude or semi-nude.”
Some of his portraits—even those in which the model is clothed—might shock 2010 sensibilities, but by Victorian standards they were… well, rather conventional. Photographs of nude children sometimes appeared on postcards or birthday cards, and nude portraits—skillfully done—were praised as art studies […]. Victorians saw childhood as a state of grace; even nude photographs of children were considered pictures of innocence itself.
Woolf admits that Carroll’s interest, as scholars have speculated for decades, may have been less than innocent, prompting Vladimir Nabokov to propose “a pathetic affinity” between Carroll and the narrator of Lolita. The evidence for Carroll’s possible pedophilia is highly suggestive but hardly conclusive. Burgett summarizes the claims as only speculative at best: “The entire controversy is an almost century-long debate, and one that doesn’t seem to be making any major progress in either direction.” In a Slate review of Woolf’s Lewis Carroll biography, Seth Lerer also acknowledges the controversy, but reads the photographs of Alice, her sisters, and friends as representative of larger trends, as “brilliant testimonies to the taste, the sentiment, and perhaps the sexuality of mid-Victorian England.”
A great part of this Victorian sensibility consists of the “recognition that all life involves role-playing,” hence the recurring photos of the girls in dress-up—as figures from myth and literature and exotic Orientalist characters, such as the photo above of Alice and her sister Lorina as “Chinamen.” “These are the tableaux of Victorian melodrama,” writes Lerer, “images on stage-sets of the imagination.” We see another of Carroll’s favorite photographic subjects, Alexandra “Xie” Kitchin, daughter of a colleague, also given the Orientalist treatment below, posed as an off-duty tea merchant.
Carroll’s carefully staged child photographs are very much like those of other photographers of the period like Mary Cowden Clarke and Julia Margaret Cameron, who also photographed Alice Liddell, even into her adulthood. Cameron’s photographs also included child nudes, to a similar effect as Carroll’s—the depiction of a “state of grace” in which children appear as nymphs, “gypsies” or other such types supposedly belonging to Edenic worlds untouched by adult cares. Given the context Woolf, Lerer and others provide, it’s reasonable to view Carroll’s child photography as consistent with the tastes of the day. (Though no one suggests this as an alibi for Carroll’s possibly troubling proclivities.)
As it stands, the photographs of Alice and other children open a fascinating, if sometimes discomfiting, window on an age that viewed childhood very differently than our own. They also give us a view of Carroll’s strange inner world, one not unlike the unsettling fantasy realm of 20th century folk artist Henry Darger. Unlike Darger, Carroll’s work brought him widespread fame in his lifetime, but like that reclusive figure, the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass was a shy, introspective man whose imaginative landscape possessed a logic all its own, charged with magic, threat, and longing for lost childhood innocence.
See a galleries of Carroll’s photographs of Alice and other children here and here, and see this site for more general info on Carroll’s photography.
Viral video #1: In a new ad for the Science Channel’s series, Through the Wormhole, actorMorgan Freeman uses helium to entice viewers into thinking about how physicists are studying gravity in places where it acts quite strangely. It’s kind of a cryptic message, but it grabs your attention, doesn’t it? Through the Wormhole returns to the airwaves, with Season 5, on June 4th.
Viral Video #2 asks you to imagine what happens when you put the grass in Neil deGrasse Tyson. “Everything is star stuff. This pizza, this cheese, this pepperoni.” That’s a reboot of Cosmos that may actually get ratings.
In the pre-zipper era, what better way to show off your shapely arms or calves than a row of gorgeous and functional buttons?
Need to pay a debt, or bestow a love token on a fetching suitor? Pluck a button from your garment, and consider the matter closed.
The first campaign buttons? Actual buttons! Thanks, George Washington!
It is, as Charles Dickens noted, following a visit to a Birmingham button factory, “a serious thing to attempt to learn about buttons.” It should come as no surprise that the great champion of the oppressed not only did his homework, but wound up having rather a lot to say on the subject.
Judging by his account of what he witnessed in Birmingham, most would assume that the button-making process requires specialized machinery, a number of specialized materials, and a large, nimble-fingered workforce.
Not so, as filmmaker Miranda July demonstrates in the extremely illuminating how-to video, above.
Yes, certain steps will require a high degree of concentration. Don’t expect to successfully Ferberize—or in layman’s terms, put holes in—your buttons on the first attempt. Stick with it, though. Even an experienced fabricant de bouton like July will occasionally have trouble with things like granular compounds and high voltage hardeners.
As a newcomer to the exciting world of button-making, I really appreciated July’s clear, step-by-step instruction, as well as her encouraging vibe. The project requires a degree of skill and patience that may elude younger viewers, but I can attest that my 13-year-old son was absolutely riveted throughout. He may never produce any buttons, but he can’t wait to share his newfound knowledge with all his friends!
In closing, let us revisit Dickens, whose enthusiasm lives on in July, a fellow writer and Aquarian, 162 years his junior:
It is wonderful, is it not? that on that small pivot turns the fortune of such multitudes of men, women, and children, in so many parts of the world; that such industry, and so many fine faculties, should be brought out and exercised by so small a thing as the Button.
While we often recommend Letters of Note for the hits of history’s most illuminating pieces of incidental correspondence, do consider also making a regular visits to Slate’s history blog The Vault. There you’ll find such written artifacts as the one pictured in part above, astutely written up by occasional Open Culture contributor Rebecca Onion: “In 1863, as he considered seeking a government clerkship, Walt Whitman asked his friend and advocateRalph Waldo Emerson for a letter of recommendation. Emerson, for decades a respected name in American letters, knew the secretaries of state and treasury personally, and Whitman hoped that a note from him would help the younger poet secure steady employment in Washington.” This note runs, in a transcript from the Walt Whitman archive, as follows:
Concord Massachusetts 10 January 2, 1863
Dear Sir,
Mr Walt Whitman, of New York, writes me that he is seeking employment in the public service in Washington, & perhaps some application on his part has already been made to yourself. Will you permit me to say that he is known to me as a man of strong original genius, combining, with marked eccentricities, great powers & valuable traits of character: a self-relying large-hearted man, much beloved by his friends; entirely patriotic & benevolent in his theory, tastes, & practice. If his writings are in certain points open to criticism, they show extraordinary power, & are more deeply American, democratic, & in the interest of political liberty, than those of any other poet.
A man of his talents & dispositions will quickly make himself useful, and, if the government has work that he can do, I think it may easily find that it has called to its side more valuable aid than it bargained for.
With entire respect,
Your obedient servant,
R. W. Emerson.
Hon Salmon P. Chase, | Secretary of the Treasury.
Any of us, I feel certain, would love having such an eloquently praise-filled letter of recommendation sent on our behalf by a friend, a teacher, a former employer, or a pillar of American Transcendentalism. But even with that, the author of Leaves of Grass didn’t find the road to a day gig particularly smooth — in large part, of course, because of having written Leaves of Grass. Whitman, whose “reputation preceded him in job interviews, reported that Salmon Chase, the secretary of the treasury and addressee of this letter, was vehemently against the idea of employing the author of Leaves, a book that celebrated open sexuality in a way that Chase found distasteful.” He would even get fired from another job specifically “because of objections to his poetry.” Well, they can’t say Emerson didn’t warn them about Whitman’s “marked eccentricities” — such as his tendency to write some of the most enduring verse in American history.
What music puts you in the mood to write? At the moment, I have on Alice Coltrane’s “Battle at Armageddon” from her 1971 Universal Consciousness, a work of psychedelic free jazz that makes my fingers skitter over the keyboard and sends thoughts racing through my mind. Should Coltrane’s mystic jazz counter the mood I want to summon, I might find something less syncopated, more lugubrious, ominous, melancholy, serene, etc. (Perhaps Grouper’s atmospheric suite of reverb-drenched tone-poems The Man Who Died in His Boat.)
This interaction between the ears, the fingers, and the writing mind struck our interest back in 2012, and we put out a call to readers to suggest the best pieces of music to write by. Some readers found that silence made for the best—or only—accompaniment. Many more made recommendations ranging from Miles Davis, to minimalist composer Steve Reich, sitar maestro Ravi Shankar, the classic Krautrock sound of Neu!, the dub reggae of King Tubby, the violin Sonatas of Bach, and the ambient soundscapes of Brian Eno. We took it upon ourselves to compile a sampling of your suggestions with Youtube videos at the time. Now we offer above a more portable Spotify version of our “music to write by” playlist—over 13 hours of music. (Stream it above. Or find it online here. If you need to download Spotify, grab the software here.) I’ve added Alice Coltrane, Grouper, and the beautiful …Until We Felt Red(2006) from one of my favorite guitarists, Kaki King.
I hope this playlist inspires you, or at least inspires you to make your own. While it could go on indefinitely, the key to a good mixtape is the art of judicious selection. Please tell us in the comments, what would you absolutely have to add? What artists, composers, and musicians get you in the mood to write, help you shift tempos, or move you from major to minor keys while you compose, whether you write nonfiction, poetry, technical manuals, or the Great American Whatever? We’ll add many of your suggestions to the playlist over the next few days.
Earlier this year, Gregor Weichbrodt, a German college student, took all of the geographic stops mentioned in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, plugged them into Google Maps, and ended up with a 45-page manual of driving directions, divided into chapters paralleling those of Kerouac’s original book. Now he’s back with a culinary mashup. Not mashed potatoes, but mashed up recipes for cooking chicken.
“Cooking recipes from the web have been collected and mixed randomly together,” and the result is Chicken Infinite, an avant-garde recipe for making chicken that spans some 532 pages. According to Weichbrodt, Chicken Infinite –available as a free PDF or paperback– “plays with the concept of instructions itself” that you regularly see on websites or in manuals. It’s a concept that cut-up artist William S. Burroughs could love. As for how Chicken Infinite actually tastes, someone (with a little time and a sense of adventure) will have to let us know.
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