From filmmaker Steve Olpin comes a short documentary (a “documentary poem”) called Earth and Fire, about artist and primitive potter Kelly Magleby. The film follows Kelly as she travels into “the backcountry of Southern Utah with a knife and a buckskin for 10 days to try to learn about Anasazi pottery by doing it the way the Anasazi did it.” On her website, Kelly writes “My desire to make Anasazi pottery started with my interest in primitive and survival skills. I love the fact that you can go into the wild with nothing and get all you need to survive and even flourish from the earth. The idea that you can go out and dig up some ‘dirt’, shape it, paint it and fire it all using only materials found in nature is amazing to me.” On her site, she details her method for making the pottery. Find more info about the Anasazi and their pottery here and here.
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One of the greatest challenges for writers and greatest joys for readers of fantasy and science fiction is what we call “world building,” the art of creating cities, countries, continents, planets, galaxies, and whole universes to people with warring factions and nomadic truth seekers. Such writing is the natural offspring of the Medieval travelogue, a genre once taken not as fantasy but fact, when sailors, crusaders, pilgrims, merchants, and mercenaries set out to chart, trade for, and convert, and conquer the world, and returned home with outlandish tales of glittering empires and people with faces in their chests or hopping around on a single foot so big they could use it to shade themselves.
One of the most famous of such chroniclers, Sir John Mandeville, may now be mostly forgotten, but for centuries his Travels was so popular with aspiring navigators and literary men like Shakespeare, Milton, and Keats that “until the Victorian era,” writes Giles Milton, it was he, “not Chaucer, who was known as ‘the father of English prose.’”
Mandeville, like Marco Polo half a century before him, may have been part adventurer, part charlatan, but in any case, both drew their itineraries, as did later navigators like Columbus and Walter Raleigh, from a very long tradition: the making of speculative world maps, which far predates the early Middle Ages of pilgrimage and thirst for Eastern spices and gold.
In the Western tradition, we can trace world mapmaking all the way back to 6th century B.C.E., Pre-Socratic thinker Anaximander, student of Thales, whom Aristotle regarded as the first Greek philosopher. We have no copy of the map, but we have some idea what it might have looked since Herodotus described it in detail, a circular known world sitting atop an earth the shape of a drum. (Anaximander was also an original speculative astronomer.) His map contained two continents, or halves, “Europe” and “Asia”—which included the known countries of North Africa. “Two relatively small strips of land north and south of the Mediterranean Sea,” with ten inhabited regions in total, that illustrate the very early dichotomizing of the world—in this case divided top to bottom rather than west and east.
Anaximander may have been the first Greek geographer, but it is the 2nd century B.C.E. that Libyan-Greek scientist and philosopher Eratosthenes who has historically been given the title “Father of Geography” for his three-volume Geography, his discovery that the earth is round, and his accurate calculation of its circumference. Lost to history, Eratosthenes’ Geography has been pieced together from descriptions by Roman authors, as has his map of the world—at the top in a 19th-century reconstruction—showing a contiguous inhabited landmass resembling a lobster claw.
You’ll note that Eratosthenes drew primarily on Anaximander’s description of the world. In turn, his map had a significant influence on later Medieval geographers. A Babylonian world map, inscribed on a clay tablet around the time Anaximander imagined the world (and thought to be the earliest extant example of such a thing), may have influenced European map-making in the age of discovery as well. It depicts a flat, round world, with Babylon at the center (see the British Museum for a detailed translation and commentary of the map’s legend).
The Babylonian map is said to survive in the similar-looking “T and O map” (third image from top), representing the words orbis terrarium and originating from descriptions in 7th century C.E. Spanish scholar Isadora of Seville’s Etymologiae. The “T” is the Mediterranean and the “O” the ocean. In the version above, a recreation of an 8th century drawing, and every derivation thereafter, we see the three known continents, Asia, Europe, and Africa, with the holy city, Jerusalem, at the center. This map greatly informed early Medieval conceptions of the world, from crusaders to garrulous knights errant like Mandeville, and raconteur merchants like Polo, both of whom made quite an impression on Columbus and Raleigh, as did the circa 1300 map from Constantinople above, the oldest of many drawn from the thousands of coordinates in Roman geographer and astronomer Ptolemy’s Geographia.
It wouldn’t be until 100 years after the translation of Ptolemy’s text from Greek to Latin in 1407 that his geographical precision became widely known. Until this, “all knowledge of these co-ordinates had been lost in the West,” writes the British Library. This would not be so in the East, however, where world maps like Ibn Hawqal’s, above from 980 C.E., show the influence of Ptolemy, already so long dominant in geography in the Islamic world that it was beginning to wane. Many more world maps survive from 11–12th century Britain, Turkey, and Sicily, from 16th century Korea, and from that wandering age of Columbus and Raleigh, beginning to increasingly resemble the world maps we’re familiar with today. (See a 15th century reconstruction of Ptolemy’s geography below.)
For most of recorded history, knowledge of the world from any one place in it was almost wholly or partly speculative and imaginative, often peopled with monsters and wonders. “All cultures have always believed that the map they valorize is real and true and objective and transparent,” as Jerry Brotton Professor at Queen Mary University of London tells Uri Friedman at The Atlantic. Columbus believed in his speculative maps, even when he ran into islands off the coast of continents charted on none of them. We are still conceptual prisoners—or consumers, users, readers, viewers, audiences—of maps, though we’ve physically plotted every corner of the globe. Perspectives cannot be rendered objective. No gods-eye views exist.
Nonetheless, several culturally formative projections of the world since Ptolemy’s Geography and well before it have changed the whole world, pointing to the power of human imagination and the legendarily imaginative, as well as legendarily brutal, acts of “world building” in real life.
We all have a favorite Quentin Tarantino scene, but the director of Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, The Hateful Eight, and other movies that can seem made out of nothing but memorable scenes also has one of his own. “My favorite thing I think I’ve ever written is the scene at the French farmhouse at the beginning of Inglourious Basterds,” Business Insider quotes him as saying in a panel at San Diego Comic-Con. “The scene Tarantino refers to is the very first one of his brutal World War II epic” wherein “SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) arrives at a remote dairy farm in France that is suspected of hiding Jewish people. Landa sits down with the farmer (Denis Menochet) and questions him about the whereabouts of the Dreyfus family.” A “tense and sneaky psychological mind game” ensues.
You can learn exactly what makes those opening twenty minutes such a miniature masterpiece in the Lessons from the Screenplay video above. Drawing from psychological research on the nature of tension and suspense, series creator Michael Tucker highlights certain “key components of tension experiences,” including uncertainty, instability, and a lack of control, and shows how Tarantino uses them to heighten the tension as much as possible throughout these seventeen minutes.
“It’s like the suspense is a rubber band,” Tarantino says in a Charlie Rose interview clip included in the video, “and I’m just stretching it and stretching it and stretching it to see how far it can stretch.”
Tarantino also uses a suite of techniques that moviegoers have come to associate specifically with him, such as long stretches of dialogue that go off on extended tangents (“Part of my plan,” he says in another interview clip, “is to bury it in so much minutia about nothing that you don’t realize you’re being told an important plot point until it becomes important”), the charged consumption of food and drink, and the potential for carnage at any moment. “The fact that the audience is aware they’re watching a Tarantino film adds to the suspense,” says Tucker. “We know there will be consequences, and that Tarantino has no qualms about showing violence.” And after the tour de force of its opening, the movie still has well over two hours of pure Tarantinian cinema to go.
FYI: In 2011, Ward Farnsworth published a two-volume collection called Predator at The Chessboard: A Field Guide To Chess Tactics (Volume 1 — Volume 2) where he explains countless chess tactics in plain English. In this 700-page collection, “there are 20 chapters, about 200 topics within them, and over 1,000 [chess] positions discussed.” Now for the even better part: Farnsworth also made these volumes available free online. Just visit chesstactics.org and you can start making yourself a better chess player whenever you have the urge.
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Last year we alerted you to a short doc about authors and their relationship with writer’s block. Many were philosophical. Others like Philipp Meyer dismissed it: ““I don’t think writer’s block actually exists,” he said. “It’s basically insecurity.”
How seriously you take it or how terribly it affects you, we have a Spotify playlist created by Lin-Manuel Miranda of Hamilton fame called “Write Your Way Out.”
He revealed the playlist on his Twitter feed on March 20 with an apology that the mix took longer to make than expected. It is a mix, he said, “about writing, songs that feature great writing, and everything in between.” Like his other mixes, he’s thinking about us, that kindly Mr. Miranda.
The eclectic mix begins with “Happy Birthday Darling” from Bright Lights Big City (“Now when you write my son, make the choice, find your voice, look down deep in your heart”), then features English-language hip hop from the Hamilton Mixtape (Nas’ “Wrote My Way Out”) and Spanish-language hip hop from Calle 13 (“Adentro”), folk classics (Joni Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morning”, Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages”), even some jaunty pop from Vampire Weekend (“Oxford Comma”) and Sara Bareilles (“Love Song”). He ends with Raúl Esparza’s ballad “Why” from the musical Tick, Tick, BOOM!, which closes the mix with a paean to the healthy addiction of creativity. (“I make a vow, right here and now / I’m gonna spend my time this way,” he sings.)
It’s nice to know that Miranda fussed over this selection like one used to do back in the days of cassette tapes. Does that mean he has a crush on all of us?
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Music and writing are inseparable in the hippest modern novels, from Kerouac to Nick Hornby to Irvine Welsh. It might even be said many such books would not exist without their internal soundtracks. When it comes to hip, prolific modern novelist Haruki Murakami, we might say the author himself may not exist without his soundtracks, and they are sprawling and extensive. Murakami, who is well known for his intense focus and heroic achievements as a marathon and double-marathon runner, exceeds even this consuming passion with his near-religious devotion to music.
Murakami became a convert to jazz fandom at the age of 15 and until age 30 ran a jazz club. Then he suddenly became a novelist after an epiphany at a baseball game. (Hear Ilana Simons read his version of that story in her short animated film above). His first book’s story unfolded in an environment totally permeated by music and music fan culture. From then on, musical references spilled from his characters’ lips, and swirled around their heads perpetually.
What sets Murakami apart from other music-obsessed novelists is not only the degree of his obsession, but the breadth of his musical knowledge. He is as fluent in classical as he as in jazz and sixties folk and pop, and his range in each genre is considerable. He has so much to say about classical music, in fact, that he once published a book of six conversations between himself and Seiji Ozawa, “one of the world’s leading orchestral conductors.” Murakami’s 2013 Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage—its title a reference to Franz Liszt—contains perhaps his most eloquent statement on the role music plays in his life and work, phrased in universal terms:
Our lives are like a complex musical score. Filled with all sorts of cryptic writing, sixteenth and thirty-second notes and other strange signs. It’s next to impossible to correctly interpret these, and even if you could, and could then transpose them into the correct sounds, there’s no guarantee that people would correctly understand, or appreciate, the meaning therein.
Hoagy Carmichael, Lionel Hampton, Herbie Hancock, Gene Krupa, Django Reinhardt, Sergei Prokofiev, Frederic Chopin… it’s quite a mix, and one that may not only remind you of several moments in Murakami’s body of work, but will also give you a sampling of the soundtrack to its author’s imagination as he transcribes the “cryptic writing” we have to “transpose… into the correct sounds” as we try to make sense of it.
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Anyone who watched Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting from 1983 to 1994 knows the show had a bit of a surreal quality to it. With that soft voice, reduced often to a whisper, Ross slapped some paint onto the canvas, smeared it around, and eventually something magical appeared–a mountain, a stream, a forest, whatever. Nowadays, the show has experienced something of a renaissance and achieved cult status. 30 seasons of The Joy of Painting live on YouTube (legitimately, it seems), and they’ve become fodder for creative projects that take Bob Ross to new surreal heights. Exhibit 1, “Deeply Artificial Trees,” appears above.
This artwork represents what it would be like for an AI to watch Bob Ross on LSD (once someone invents digital drugs). It shows some of the unreasonable effectiveness and strange inner workings of deep learning systems. The unique characteristics of the human voice are learned and generated as well as hallucinations of a system trying to find images which are not there.
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What do we live in: the only universe that exists, or an elaborate computer simulation of a universe? The question would have fascinated Isaac Asimov, and that presumably counts as one of the reasons the Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate took it as its subject last year. Though the so-called “simulation hypothesis” has, in various forms, crossed the minds of thinkers for millennia, it’s enjoyed a particular moment in the zeitgeist in recent years, not least because Elon Musk has publicly stated his view that, in all probability, we do indeed live in a simulation. And, if you can’t trust the guy who hit it big with Tesla and PayPal on the nature of reality, who can you?
Well, you might also consider listening to the perspectives of New York University philosopher David Chalmers, MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark, and three theoretical physicists, James Gates of the University of Maryland, Lisa Randall of Harvard, and Zohreh Davoudi of MIT.
They, with moderation by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, dig into the simulation hypothesis for two hours, approaching from all different angles its origin, its plausibility, and its implications. Davoudi, who has done serious research on the question, brings her work to bear; Randall, who finds little reason to credit the notion that we live in a simulation in the first place, has more of an interest in why others find it so compelling all of a sudden.
Whether you believe it, reject it, or simply enjoy entertaining the idea, you can’t help but feel a strong reaction of one kind or another to the simulation hypothesis, and Tyson contributes his usual humor to knock the discussion back down to Earth whenever it threatens to become too abstract. But how should we respond to the possibility of living in computed reality in the here and now (or “here” and now,” if you prefer)? The Matrixproposed a kind of simulation-hypothesis world whose heroes break out, but we may ultimately have no more ability to see the hardware running our world than Mario can see the hardware running his. “If you’re not sure whether you’re actually simulated or not,” says Tegmark, “my advice to you is to go out there and live really interesting lives and do unexpected things so the simulators don’t get bored and shut you down.” In these unreal times, you could certainly do worse.
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