Even those who paid next to no attention to their history teachers know about Magna Carta — or at least they know it first came about in 1215. To deliver all the other relevant details, we now have a new teacher in the form of Monty Python’s Terry Jones, who, on the occasion of this great charter’s 800th anniversary, provides the narration for these two short animations, “Magna Carta: Medieval” and “Magna Carta: Legacy,” that tell the rest of its story.
Originally issued by King John of England (r.1199–1216) as a practical solution to the political crisis he faced in 1215, Magna Carta established for the first time the principle that everybody, including the king, was subject to the law.
[ … ]
Three clauses of the 1225 Magna Carta remain on the statute book today. Although most of the clauses of Magna Carta have now been repealed, the many divergent uses that have been made of it since the Middle Ages have shaped its meaning in the modern era, and it has become a potent, international rallying cry against the arbitrary use of power.
These animations, of course, add a great deal of visual, narrative, and comedic vividness to this important piece of Western political history, following it from the reign of King John (“one of the worst kings in history”), through civil war, the creation of the United States of America, struggles for voting rights and the freedom of the press, right up to the writing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in a sense Magna Carta’s modern descendant. “Although very few of Magna Carta’s original clauses remain valid in English law,” says Jones, “it continues to inspire people worldwide. Not a bad legacy for an 800-year-old document.”
A piercingly dark piece of writing, taking the heart of a Dickens or Dostoevsky novel and carving away all the rest, Ernest Hemingway’s six-word story—fabled forerunner of flash- and twitter-fiction—is shorter than many a story’s title:
For sale, Baby shoes, Never worn.
The extreme terseness in this elliptical tragedy has made it a favorite example of writing teachers over the past several decades, a display of the power of literary compression in which, writes a querent to the site Quote Investigator, “the reader must cooperate in the construction of the larger narrative that is obliquely limned by these words.” Supposedly composed sometime in the ’20s at The Algonquin (or perhaps Luchow’s, depending on whom you ask), the six-word story, it’s said, came from a ten-dollar bet Hemingway made at a lunch with some other writers that he could write a novel in six words. After penning the famous line on a napkin, he passed it around the table, and collected his winnings. That’s the popular lore, anyway. But the truth is much less colorful.
In fact, it seems that versions of the six-word story appeared long before Hemingway even began to write, at least as early as 1906, when he was only 7, in a newspaper classified section called “Terse Tales of the Town,” which published an item that read, “For sale, baby carriage, never been used. Apply at this office.” Another, very similar, version appeared in 1910, then another, suggested as the title for a story about “a wife who has lost her baby,” in a 1917 essay by William R. Kane, who thought up “Little Shoes, Never Worn.” Then again in 1920, writes David Haglund in Slate, the supposed Hemingway line appears in a “1921 newspaper column by Roy K. Moulton, who ‘printed a brief note that he attributed to someone named Jerry,’ ”:
There was an ad in the Brooklyn “Home Talk” which read, “Baby carriage for sale, never used.” Would that make a wonderful plot for the movies?
Many more examples of the narrative device abound, including a 1927 comic strip describing a seven-word version—“For Sale, A Baby Carriage; Never Used!”—as “the greatest short story in the world.” The more that Haglund and Quote Investigator’s Garson O’Toole looked into the matter, the harder they found it to “believe that Hemingway had anything to do with the tale.”
It is possible Hemingway, wittingly or not, stole the story from the classifieds or elsewhere. He was a newspaperman after all, perhaps guaranteed to have come into contact with some version of it. But there’s no evidence that he wrote or talked about the six-word story, or that the lunch bet at The Algonquin ever took place. Instead, it appears that a literary agent, Peter Miller, made up the story whole cloth in 1974 and later published it in his 1991 book, Get Published! Get Produced!: A Literary Agent’s Tips on How to Sell Your Writing.
The legend of the bet and the six-word story grew: Arthur C. Clarke repeated it in a 1998 Reader’s Digest essay, and Miller mentioned it again in a 2006 book. Meanwhile, suspicions arose, and the final debunking occurred in a 2012 scholarly article in The Journal of Popular Culture by Frederick A. Wright, who concluded that no evidence links the six-word story to Hemingway.
So should we blame Miller for ostensibly creating an urban legend, or thank him for giving competitive minimalists something to beat, and inspiring the entire genre of the “six-word memoir”? That depends, I suppose, on what you think of competitive minimalists and six-word memoirs. Perhaps the moral of the story, fitting in the Twitter age, is that the great man theory of authorship so often gets it wrong; the most memorable stories and ideas can arise spontaneously, anonymously, from anywhere.
Image by Università Reggio Calabria, released under a C BY-SA 3.0 license.
In general, the how-to book—whether on beekeeping, piano-playing, or wilderness survival—is a dubious object, always running the risk of boring readers into despairing apathy or hopelessly perplexing them with complexity. Instructional books abound, but few succeed in their mission of imparting theoretical wisdom or keen, practical skill. The best few I’ve encountered in my various roles have mostly done the former. In my days as an educator, I found abstract, discursive books like Robert Scholes’ Textual Power or poet and teacher Marie Ponsot’s lyrical Beat Not the Poor Desk infinitely more salutary than more down-to-earth books on the art of teaching. As a sometime writer of fiction, I’ve found Milan Kundera’s idiosyncratic The Art of the Novel—a book that might have been titled The Art of Kundera—a great deal more inspiring than any number of other well-meaning MFA-lite publications. And as a self-taught audio engineer, I’ve found a book called Zen and the Art of Mixing—a classic of the genre, even shorter on technical specifications than its namesake is on motorcycle maintenance—better than any other dense, diagram-filled manual.
How I wish, then, that as a onetime (longtime) grad student, I had had access to the English translation, just published this month, of Umberto Eco’s How to Write a Thesis, a guide to the production of scholarly work worth the name by the highly celebrated Italian novelist and intellectual. Written originally in Italian in 1977, before Eco’s name was well-known for such works of fiction as The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum, How to Write Thesis is appropriately described by MIT Press as reading: “like a novel”: “opinionated… frequently irreverent, sometimes polemical, and often hilarious.”
For example, in the second part of his introduction, after a rather dry definition of the academic “thesis,” Eco dissuades a certain type of possible reader from his book, those students “who are forced to write a thesis so that they may graduate quickly and obtain the career advancement that originally motivated their university enrollment.” These students, he writes, some of whom “may be as old as 40” (gasp), “will ask for instructions on how to write a thesis in a month.” To them, he recommends two pieces of advice, in full knowledge that both are clearly “illegal”:
(a) Invest a reasonable amount of money in having a thesis written by a second party. (b) Copy a thesis that was written a few years prior for another institution. (It is better not to copy a book currently in print, even if it was written in a foreign language. If the professor is even minimally informed on the topic, he will be aware of the book’s existence.
Eco goes on to say that “even plagiarizing a thesis requires an intelligent research effort,” a caveat, I suppose, for those too thoughtless or lazy even to put the required effort into academic dishonesty.
Instead, he writes for “students who want to do rigorous work” and “want to write a thesis that will provide a certain intellectual satisfaction.” Eco doesn’t allow for the fact that these groups may not be mutually exclusive, but no matter. His style is loose and conversational, and the unseriousness of his dogmatic assertions belies the liberating tenor of his advice. For all of the fun Eco has discussing the whys and wherefores of academic writing, he also dispenses a wealth of practical hows, making his book a rarity among the small pool of readable How-tos. For example, Eco offers us “Four Obvious Rules for Choosing a Thesis Topic,” the very bedrock of a doctoral (or masters) project, on which said project truly stands or falls:
1. The topic should reflect your previous studies and experience. It should be related to your completed courses; your other research; and your political, cultural, or religious experience.
2. The necessary sources should be materially accessible. You should be near enough to the sources for convenient access, and you should have the permission you need to access them.
3. The necessary sources should be manageable. In other words, you should have the ability, experience, and background knowledge needed to understand the sources.
4. You should have some experience with the methodological framework that you will use in the thesis. For example, if your thesis topic requires you to analyze a Bach violin sonata, you should be versed in music theory and analysis.
Having suffered the throes of proposing, then actually writing, an academic thesis, I can say without reservation that, unlike Eco’s encouragement to plagiarism, these four rules are not only helpful, but necessary, and not nearly as obvious as they appear. Eco goes on in the following chapter, “Choosing the Topic,” to present many examples, general and specific, of how this is so.
Much of the remainder of Eco’s book—though written in as lively a style and shot through with witticisms and profundity—is gravely outdated in its minute descriptions of research methods and formatting and style guides. This is pre-internet, and technology has—sadly in many cases—made redundant much of the footwork he discusses. That said, his startling takes on such topics as “Must You Read Books?,” “Academic Humility,” “The Audience,” and “How to Write” again offer indispensable ways of thinking about scholarly work that one generally arrives at only, if at all, at the completion of a long, painful, and mostly bewildering course of writing and research.
FYI: You can download Eco’s book, How to Write a Thesis, as a free audiobook if you want to try out Audible.com’s no-risk, 30-day free trial program. Find details here.
Whether they submit to his mighty philosophical influence, resist it with all their own might, or fall somewhere in between, everyone who’s read the pronouncements of Friedrich Nietzsche (find his ebooks here) recognizes his voice — well, his textual voice, that is. Having died in 1900 after spending the last decade of his life in a mental breakdown, the author of Thus Spake Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evilhas an excuse for not leaving behind much in the way of audio material. But love Nietzsche or hate him, a reader has to wonder: what did the guy actually sound like?
Here to satiate our curiosity come Flavia Montaggio, Patricia Montaggio, and Imp Kerr, authors of the Investigative Genetics paper “DNA-based prediction of Nietzsche’s voice,” which supposedly offers a scientific means of doing just that. “We collected trace amounts of cellular material (Touch DNA) from books that belonged to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche,” reads the abstract, which goes on to describe the gathering of Nietzsche-related data eventually “converted into bio-measures that were used to 3D-print a vocal tract and larynx through which phonation was organically generated.” The result, after running everything through a series of text-to-speech simulations: “the first attempt at simulating the voice of a deceased person”:
It all seems legit, right? Or maybe you German-speakers out there will suspect something fishy, starting with the unlikely name of Imp Kerr. It actually belongs to “a Swedish-French artist living in New York City, mostly known for her fake American Apparel advertisement campaign,” or so reads the Wikipedia page quoted by a Language Log post on the project. “I have no idea whether anything in the Wikipedia article about Imp Kerr is true,” writes author Mark Liberman, “but it’s clear from internal evidence that the alleged Investigative Genetics article is a piece of performance art.”
Liberman breaks down the paper’s humorous elements, from its “many segments that display quasi-scientific terminology in meaningless or contradictory ways” to its simple inability to “restrain a certain telltale playfulness” (as when it deals with a resonance “lower than expected in regards of Nietzsche’s robust mandibles”). All this may remind you of the famous hoax wherein physicist Alan Sokal published a paperful of sheer nonsense in a respected cultural-studies journal. Or you may think of the film above, which purports, questionably, to show Nietzsche’s last days. It just goes to show that, if your ideas live on, you live on — or your readers will try to make you do so.
The entity to whom Dutch group, Lifehunters, attributes the museum quality artwork in the video prank above doesn’t exist. The “famous” Swedish artist’s handle –IKE Andrews –is but a puckish reference to IKEA, the purveyor of the 10€ print (oh snap, it’s not even an original!) various unnamed “art experts” are asked to evaluate, having been led to believe it’s something rare and wonderful. IKE Andrews’ fellow fictional entity, Borat, would be gratified by how readily these experts accept presenter Boris Lange’s suggestions as to the value of this work.
Only if you think IKEA achieved global dominance by choosing designs, patterns, and images in order for snotty hipsters to buy them ironically…
As several YouTube, Twitter, and blog commenters have mentioned, the print itself is pretty cool.
It’s a media frenzy, but interestingly, the artist is not coming forward to herald his or her role in the hoax.
Make that artists. Turns out IKE Andrews is a pair of Swiss street artists, Christian Rebecchi and Pablo Togni, who collaborate as NEVERCREW.
They have a fascination with cross sections. As their website somewhat murkily explains [all sic]:
These models, as such, from time to time actually contain more or less extensive realities, represented as autonomous systems of which the reality of the viewer becomes a part. This then the rapport becomes the very subject, mainly highlighted as the relationship between man and nature (between human being and its nature), but automatically extended to a vision of total and inevitable relationship between everything, between every part, where it is only the point of view, the position within a system, to define a selection.
We call the theme “living structures” and we like to see them as models of living systems. We would like our art to generate interest and curiosity, and the viewer to become a part of the mechanism with his or her thoughts, perspective and emotions.
Philosophy’s all well and good, but what’s it actually look like, this “Message in a Bottle”?
Well, it seems to me to be a bottle, implausibly halved lengthwise to reveal a bunch of steampunk stuff balanced atop robot spider legs, forming a cage around an ancient-looking whale. Also, a cloud raining yellow liquid, or possibly light. (Hopefully the latter). Oh! And it appears to have been painted on a brown paper bag.
I can think of plenty of people who’d not only like it, but find meaning in it, as the experts do. The only difference is the experts do so on camera, a fact not all of them are willing to laugh at, when host Lange informs them they’ve been punked.
The artists aren’t the only ones playing it cool. The internet may be exploding, but so far, neither IKEA, nor the Netherlands’ Arnhem Museum, where the prank was staged, have made mention of this business.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and mother of a teen filmmaker whose best known work was shot guerrilla style in a Red Hook, Brooklyn Ikea. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Back in 2012, I first told you about the amazing youth chamber orchestra from Cateura, Paraguay. The families from this small impoverished town, located alongside a vast landfill, can’t afford many luxuries — like buying instruments for their kids. But what they lack in money, they make up for in ingenuity and good spirit. The short documentary above gives you a glimpse of their touching story, showing how creative leaders in the community fashioned instruments with their own hands, turning oil cans into cellos, and aluminum bowls into violins. Watch them in action:
But why stop with the short story, when you can get the longer story. Last week, a full blown film called Landfill Harmonicpremiered at the SXSW Film Festival 2015. And now the film (see a short trailer here) will be screened at selected film festivals while the producers try to find a distributor who can bring the production to a wider audience. And, in another piece of good news, Simon & Schuster announced that it plans to publish a picture book about the Recycled Orchestra. Look for Ada’s Violin: The Story of the Recycled Orchestra of Paraguay in March 2016.
You can watch Landfill Harmonic at the festivals mentioned below. To keep tabs on future showings, follow this Facebook page.
New York Children’s Film Festival March 21, 2015
Environmental Film Festival DC March 25, 2015
Since last we wrote, Google Street Art has doubled its online archive by adding some 5,000 images, bringing the tally to 10,000, with coordinates pinpointing exact locations on all five continents (though as of this writing, things are a bit thin on the ground in Africa). Given the temporal realities of outdoor, guerrilla art, pilgrims may arrive to find a blank canvas where graffiti once flourished. (RIP New York City’s 5 Pointz, the “Institute of Higher Burning.”)
A major aim of the project is virtual preservation. As with performance art, documentation is key. Not all of the work can be attributed, but click on an image to see what is known. Guided tours to neighborhoods rich with street art allow armchair travelers to experience the work, and interviews with the artists dispel any number of stereotypes.
Cultural institutions like Turkey’s Pera Museum and Hong Kong’s Art Research Institute, and street art projects based in such hubs as Rome, Paris, Sydney, and Bangkok, have pulled together official collections of photos and videos, but you can play curator too.
It’s easy to add images to a collection of your own making that can be shared with the public at large or saved for private inspiration. Careful, you could lose hours…it’s like Pinterest for people who gravitate toward spray paint and rubbish strewn vacant lots over gingham wrapped Mason jars.
It’s been a long and brutal winter here on the east coast, so for my first foray, I prowled for Signs of Spring. One of my first hits was “Circling Birdies” by Cheko, above. Located in Granada, Spain, it’s one of the existing works Google has turned into a GIF with some light, logical animation.
Behold a bit of what typing “flower,” “baby animals,” “plants,” and “trees” into a search box can yield! You can enter Google Street Art here.
Artist: Walter Kershaw
London UK
Artists: Thrashbird and Renee Gagnon
Los Angeles, California.
Artist: unknown
Rochester, NY
Icy and Sot
Rochester NY
Artist: Kristy Sandoval
Los Angeles, CA
Artists: Regg and Violant
Alfragide Portugal
Artist: Klit
Alfragide, Portugal
A giant colorful beetle tries to fly between the ceiling and the floor of this parking lot. His wings seem filled with flower petals. So, the “Living Nature” project brought a set of huge insects that carry a note of living spirit to the space.
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