Chances are most of us won’t be immediately familiar with the eight mostly British playwrights reflecting on their process in the National Theatre’s video, above.
That’s a good thing.
It’s easier to choose which pieces of inspiring, occasionally conflicting writing advice to follow when the scale’s not weighted down by the thumb of celebrity.
(Though rest assured that there’s no shortage of people who do know their work, if the National Theater is placing them in the hot seat.)
It’s impossible to follow all of their suggestions on any given project, so go with your gut.
Or try your hand at one that doesn’t come naturally, especially if you’ve been feeling stuck.
These approaches are equally valid for those writing fiction, and possibly even certain types of poetry and song.
The National wins points for assembling a diverse group—there are four women and four men, three of whom are people of color.
Within this crew, it’s the women who overwhelmingly bring up the notions of permission and perfection, as in it’s okay to let your first draft be absolutely dreadful.
Most of the males are prone to plotting things out in advance.
And no one seems entirely at home marooned against a seamless white background on a plain wooden stool.
Jewish identity, school shootings, immigration, race, climate change, and homophobia are just some of the topics they have considered in their plays.
Some have worked in film and TV, adapted the classics, or written for young audiences.
They have won prestigious awards, seen their plays staged ‘round the globe, and had success with other artistic pursuits, including poetry, performance, and dance.
Clearly, you’ll find some great advice below, though it’s not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Let us know in the comments which rules you personally consider worth following.
Eleven Rules for Writing from Eight Contemporary Playwrights
1. Start
or
2. Don’t start. Let your idea marinate for a minimum of six months, then start.
3.. Have some sort of outline or plan before you start
4. Do some research
5. Don’t be judgmental of your writing while you’re writing
6. Embrace the terrible first draft
7. Don’t show anyone your first draft, unless you want to.
8. Know how it’s going to end
or
9. Don’t know how it’s going end
10. Work with others
11. Print it, and read it like someone experiencing it for the first time. No editing aloud. Get that pen out of your hand.
And now, it’s time to discover the work of the participating playwrights. Go see a show, or at least read about one in the links:
In 1975, the philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend published his highly contrarian Against Method, a book in which he argued that “science is essentially an anarchic enterprise,” and as such, ought to be accorded no more privilege than any other way of knowing in a democratic society. Motivated by concerns about science as a domineering ideology, he argued the historical messiness of scientific practice, in which theories come about not through elegant logical thinking but often by complete accident, through copious trial and error, intuition, imagination, etc. Only in hindsight do we impose restrictions and tidy rules and narratives on revolutionary discoveries.
Several years later, in the third, 1993 edition of the book, Feyerebend observed with alarm the same widespread anti-science bias that Carl Sagan wrote of two years later in Demon-Haunted World. “Times have changed,” he wrote, “Considering some tendencies in U.S. education… and in the world at large I think that reason should now be given greater weight.”
Feyerabend died the following year, but I wonder how he might revise or qualify a 2018 edition of the book, or whether he would republish it at all. Politically-motivated science denialism reigns. Indeed, a blithe denial of any observable reality, aided by digital technology, has become a dystopian new norm. But as the philosopher also commented, such circumstances may “occur frequently today… but may disappear tomorrow.”
In the recorded history of human inquiry across cultures and civilizations, we see ideas we call scientific co-existing with what we recognize as pseudo- and anti-scientific notions. The differences aren’t always very clear at the time. And then, sometimes, they are. During the so-called Age of Reason, when the development of the modern sciences in Europe slowly eclipsed other modes of explanation, one obscure group of contrarians persisted in almost comically stubborn unreason. Calling themselves the Muggletonians, the Protestant sect—like those today who deny climate change and evolution—resisted an overwhelming consensus of empirical science, the Copernican view of the solar system, despite all available evidence the contrary. In so doing, they left behind a series of “beautiful celestial maps,” notes Greg Miller at National Geographic, some of which resemble William Blake’s visual poetry.
The sect began in 1651, when a London tailor named John Reeve “claimed to have received a message from God” naming his cousin Lodowicke Muggleton as the “’last messenger for a great work unto this bloody unbelieving world.’… One of the main principles of their faith, a later observer wrote, was that ‘There is no Devil but the unclean Reason of men.’” Their view of the universe, based, of course, on scripture, resembles the Medieval Catholic view that Galileo attempted to correct, but their principle antagonist was not the Italian polymath or the earlier Renaissance astronomer Copernicus, but the great scientific mind of the time, Isaac Newton, whom Muggletonians railed against into the 19th and even 20th century. Muggletonians, Miller writes,” had remarkable longevity—the last known member died in 1979 after donating the sect’s archive of books and papers… to the British Library.”
These plates come from an 1846 book called Two Systems of Astronomy. Written by Muggletonian Isaac Frost, it “pitted the scientific system of Isaac Newton—which held that the gravitational pull of the sun holds the Earth and other planets in orbit around it—against an Earth-centered universe based on a literal interpretation of the Bible.” The plate above, for example, “attempts to show the absurdity of the Newtonian system by depicting our solar system as one of many in an infinite and godless universe.” Ironically, in attempting to ridicule Newton (who was himself a pseudo-scientist and Biblical literalist in other ways), the Muggletonians stumbled upon the view of modern astronomers, who extrapolate a mind-boggling number of possible solar systems in an observable universe of over 100 billion galaxies (though these systems are not enclosed cells crammed together side-by-side). Another plate, below, shows Frost’s depiction of the hated Newtonian system, with the Earth, Mars, and Jupiter orbiting the Sun.
The other maps, further up, all represent the Muggletonian view. Historian of science Francis Reid describes it thus:
According to Frost, Scripture clearly states that the Sun, the Moon and the Stars are embedded in a firmament made of congealed water and revolve around the Earth, that Heaven has a physical reality above and beyond the stars, and that the planets and the Moon do not reflect the Sun’s rays but are themselves independent sources of light.
Frost gave lectures at “establishments set up for the education of artisans and other workmen.” It seems he didn’t attract much attention and was frequently heckled by audience members. Like flat earthers, Muggletonians were treated as cranks, and unlike today’s religious anti-science crusaders, they never had the power to influence public policy or education. For this reason, perhaps, it is easy to see them as quaintly humorous. Frost’s maps, as Miller writes, “remain strangely alluring” for both their artistic quality and their astonishingly determined credulity. The plates are now part of the massive David Rumsey collection, which houses thousands of rare historical maps. For another fascinating look at religious cartography, see Miller’s National Geographic post “mapping the Apocalypse.”
A lifetime of rock star excess has taken its toll on Eddie Vedder’s voice but not on his talent. Most recent performances have tilted towards the gentle, the acoustic, the Americana, reflecting his larger embrace of the broad expanse of American music. And yes, he can still rock when needs be.
But these isolated vocal tracks–”Alive” above and “Black” and “Porch” below–show how powerful Vedder’s pipes were back in the day at the height of grunge. Vedder used a lot of vibrato, more than one can hear in the full band versions. He doesn’t use it so much when he holds a note, but on all the little notes in between.
And on “Porch” there’s a powerful pleading to the entire delivery that’s both vulnerable and hypermasculine at the same time. Where Kurt Cobain always seemed to be delivering rage inward, Vedder delivered it outwards, like the sound of mountains as a logging company got to work.
The videos try to match up concert footage with these studio tracks and the fact they sync so well show the consistency in his delivery. (The sped up tempo changes, not so much.)
Of course, isolated vocals also mean remixers attack! Here’s a few that might horrify a few grunge stalwarts.
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.
Back in 1915, French filmmakers decided to revisit the evolution of the bicycle during the 19th century, moving from the invention of the bicycle in 1818, to the bikes that emerged during the 1890s. As the resulting film above shows, the bike went from being clunky, cumbersome and seemingly perilous to ride, to taking on the tried and true shape that we still recognize today.
This film was preserved by the Netherlands’ EYE Film Institute. Hence the subtitles are in Dutch. But thanks to Aeon Magazine, you can read English translations below:
1. The draisine was invented only a century ago, in 1818 by Baron Drais de Sauerbrun.
2. [This subtitle never appears in the film.
3. The vehicle that lies between the draisine and the 1850 bicycle has an improved steering wheel and a fitted brake.
4. In 1863, Pierre Lallement invented pedals that worked on the front wheel.
5. Around 1868, a third wheel was added. Although these tricycles were heavier than the two-wheelers, they were safer.
6. Between 1867 and 1870, various improvements were made, including the increased use of rubber tyres.
7. In 1875, following an invention by the engineer Trieffault, the frame was made of hollow pipes.
8. Following the fashion of the day, the front wheel was made as large as possible.
9. In 1878, Renard created a bicycle with a wheel circumference of more than 7 feet. Just sitting down on one of these was an athletic feat!
11. At the beginning of 1879, Rousseau replaced the large front wheel with a smaller one, and the chain was introduced on the front wheel for driving power.
12. The bicycle of today.
For another look at the Birth of the Bike, you can watch a 1937 newsreel that gives its own narrative account. It comes the from British Pathé film archives.
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Somewhere within the Vatican exists the Vatican Secret Archives, whose 53 miles of shelving contains more than 600 collections of account books, official acts, papal correspondence, and other historical documents. Though its holdings date back to the eighth century, it has in the past few weeks come to worldwide attention. This has brought about all manner of jokes about the plot of Dan Brown’s next novel, but also important news about the technology of manuscript digitization. It seems a project to get the contents of the Vatican Secret Archives digitized and online has made great progress cracking a problem that once seemed impossibly difficult: turning handwriting into computer-searchable text.
In Codice Ratio is “developing a full-fledged system to automatically transcribe the contents of the manuscripts” that uses not the standard method of optical character recognition (OCR), which looks for the spaces between words, but a new way that can handle connected cursive and calligraphic letters. Their method, in the lingo of the field, “is to govern imprecise character segmentation by considering that correct segments are those that give rise to a sequence of characters that more likely compose a Latin word. We have designed a principled solution that relies on convolutional neural networks and statistical language models.”
This is a job, in other words, for artificial intelligence, but in partnership with human intelligence, a seldom-tapped source of which the scientists behind In Codice Ratio have harnessed: that of high-school students. Their special OCR software, writes the Atlantic’s Sam Kean, works by “dividing each word into a series of vertical and horizontal bands and looking for local minimums—the thinner portions, where there’s less ink (or really, fewer pixels). The software then carves the letters at these joints.” But the software “needs to know which groups of chunks represent real letters and which are bogus,” and so “the team recruited students at 24 schools in Italy to build the projects’ memory banks,” manually separating the letters the system had properly recognized from those over which it had stumbled.
And so the students became the system’s “teachers,” improving its ability to extract the content of handwriting, and not just handwriting but vast quantities of archaic handwriting, with every click they made. The encouraging results thus far mean that it probably won’t be long before large portions of the Vatican Secret Archives (which, contrary to its awkwardly translated name, is such a non-secret it even has its own official web site) will finally become easy to browse, search, copy, paste, and analyze. So they may, in the fullness of time, prove a fruitful resource indeed to writers of Catholicism-centric thrillers like Brown — who, after all, has already gone public with his enthusiasm for manuscript digitization.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
In addition to the iconic scene in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, or appearances in animated TV shows and video games, M.C. Escher’s work has adorned the covers of albums like Mott the Hoople’s 1969 debut and the speculative fiction of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges. A big hit with hippies and 1960s college students, writes Heavy Music Artwork, his mind-bending prints became associated with “questioning accepted views of normal experience and testing the limits of perception with hallucinogenic drugs.” While he appreciated his cult following, Escher “did not encourage their mystical interpretations of his images.” Replying to one enthusiastic fan of his print Reptiles, who claimed to see in it an image of reincarnation, Escher replied, “Madame, if that’s the way you see it, so be it.”
Rather than illustrate higher states of consciousness or metaphysical entities, Bruno Ernst writes in The Magic Mirror of M.C. Escher, the artist intended to create practical, “pictorial representation of intellectual understanding.” Illustrations, that is, of philosophical and scientific thought experiments. The son of a civil engineer, Escher began his studies in architecture before moving to drawing and printmaking.
The challenge of creating built environments—even seemingly impossible ones—always seemed to occupy his mind. Along with themes from the natural world, a high percentage of his works center on buildings—inspired by formative early years in Rome and his admiration for Islamic art and Spanish architecture.
In the 50s and 60s Escher’s art piqued the interest of academics and mathematicians, an audience he found more congenial to his vision. He corresponded with scientists and incorporated their ideas into his work, meanwhile claiming to be “absolutely innocent of training or knowledge in the exact sciences.” In the 50s, Escher “dazzled” the likes of mathematicians like Roger Penrose and HSM Coxeter. In turn, notes Maev Kennedy, he “was inspired by Penroses’s perspectival triangle and Coxeter’s work on crystal symmetry.”
For all the excitement he created among mathematicians, it took a bit longer for Escher to get noticed in the art world. When Penrose’s uncle showed Escher’s version of the perspectival triangle to Picasso, “Picasso had heard of the British mathematician but not of the Dutch artist.” Escher’s fame spread outside of the sciences in part through the interests of the counterculture. He may have shrugged off mystical and psychedelic readings of his prints, but he had an innate penchant for the marvelously weird (see his copy of a scene, for example, from Hieronymus Bosch, above, or his surreal print Gravity, below).
See the prints pictured here and a few dozen more digitized in high resolution at Digital Commonwealth, courtesy of Boston Public Library, who scanned their Escher collection and made it available to the public. Zoom into the fine details of prints like Inside Saint Peter’s, further up—a finely rendered but otherwise not-especially-Escher-like work—and the labyrinthine Ascending and Descending at the top. Whether—as Harvard Library curator John Overholt confesses—you’re a “nerd who loves M.C. Escher” for his mathematical mind, an artist with a mystical bent who loves him for his hallucinatory qualities, or some measure of both, you’ll find exactly the Escher you’re looking for in this digital gallery.
Growing up, I had a box set of Egyptian hieroglyphic stamps from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For a few weeks I used it to write coded letters to a friend, possessed of the same box set, who lived elsewhere in the neighborhood. Today’s smartphone-toting kids, of course, prefer text messaging, a medium which to date has offered little in the way of hieroglyphics, especially compared to the vast and ever-growing quasi-logographic library of emoji, all of them approved by the official emoji subcommittee of the Unicode Consortium. But Unicode itself, the industry-standard system for digitally encoding, representing, and handling text in the various writing systems of the world, may soon expand to include more than 2,000 hieroglyphics.
“Between 750 and 1,000 Hieroglyphs were used by Egyptian authors during the periods of the Old, Middle, and then New Kingdom (2687 BCE–1081 BCE),” writes Hyperallergic’s Sarah E. Bond. “That number later greatly increased during the Greco-Roman period, likely to around 7,000.”
During that time under Alexander the Great, the Ptolemies, and the Roman Empire, “the language grew, changed, and diversified over the course of thousands of years, a fact which can now be reflected through its digital encoding. Although Egyptian Hieroglyphs have been defined within Unicode since version 5.2, released in 2009, the glyphs were highly limited in number and did not stretch into the Greco-Roman period.”
That situation could greatly improve if the Unicode Consortium approves its revised draft of standards for encoding Egyptian Hieroglyphs currently on the table, a scroll through which reveals how much more of the visual (not to mention semantic) richness of this ancient writing system that could soon come available to anyone with a digital device. Its rich variety of tools, animals, icons (in both the old and modern senses), humans, and elements of human anatomy could do much for the Egyptologists of the world needing to efficiently send the content of the texts they study to one another. And though I recall getting plenty communicated with those 24 rubber stamps, who dares predict to what use those texting kids will put these thousands of digital hieroglyphics when they get them at their fingertips?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
In former ages, wars erupted over the finer points of religious doctrine, a historical phenomenon that can seem perplexing to modern secularists. We’re past such things, we think. But then let someone bring up the Oxford comma or the number of spaces one should put after a period, and you may see writers, editors, and teachers pick sides and maybe come to blows in their defense of seemingly trivial grammatical and typographical standards. These debates approach the vehemence of Medieval arguments over transubstantiation.
I exaggerate, but maybe only slightly. There have been times, I confess, when I’ve felt I would fight for the serial comma. I grind my teeth and feel a rush of rage when I see two spaces instead of one after the end of sentences. Irrational, perhaps, but such is the human devotion to orthodoxy in the details. And so, when Skidmore College researchers Rebecca Johnson, Becky Bui, and Lindsay Schmitt published a paper last month in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics claiming scientific support for a two-space period, they virtually lobbed a bomb into offices everywhere.
Angela Chen at The Verge parried with an article calling two spaces a “horrible habit.” The practice “remains bad,” she writes, “it’s ugly, it doesn’t help when it comes to what matters most (reading comprehension), and the experiment that supports its benefits uses an outdated font style.” (Don’t get me started on the font wars.) What was the experiment? The paper itself hides behind a redoubtable paywall, but Ars Technica’s Sean Gallagher gets to the gist of the study on a cohort of 60 Skidmore students.
Having identified subjects’ proclivities, the researchers then gave them 21 paragraphs to read (including one practice paragraph) on a computer screen and tracked their eye movement as they read using an Eyelink 1000 video-based eye tracking system. “Chin and forehead rests were used to minimize the reader’s head movements,” the Skidmore researchers wrote in their paper.
After the tracking, the researchers “evaluated the reading speed for each of the paragraph types presented in words per minute.… [they] found that two spaces at the end of a period slightly improved the processing of text during reading.” The study’s attempt to quantify the benefits of two spaces came after the American Psychological Association Manual’s most recent edition, which, for some reason, has changed camps to two spaces.
Gallagher explains the space debate as stemming from the major technological shift in word processing: “For anyone who learned their keyboarding skills on a typewriter rather than a computer… the double-space after the period is a deeply ingrained truth.” Speaking as such a person, it isn’t, but he’s right to note that typing teachers insisted on two spaces. Such was the standard until computers with variable-width fonts fully phased out typewriters.
So the Skidmore researchers raised the ire of Chen and others with their use of Courier New, a “fixed-width font that resembles typewritten text—used by hardly anyone for documents.” The blog Practical Typography analyzed the two space paper and remains unimpressed: “In sum—a small difference, limited to a certain category of test subjects, with numerous caveats attached. Not much to see here, I’m afraid.” (This description might accurately describe thousands of published studies.)
This war will rage on—the study fueling these recent skirmishes does not seem to justify two-spacers claiming victory. And anyway, good luck getting the rest of us to abandon faith in the one true space.
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