The Exquisite, Ephemeral Paper Cuttings of Hans Christian Andersen

in Art, Creativity, Literature, Museums | March 1st, 2021

Quick, name a melancholy Dane.

For most of us, the choice comes down to Hamlet or Hans Christian Andersen, author of such bittersweet tales as “The Little Match Girl,” “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” and “The Little Mermaid.”

Andersen’s personal life remains a matter of both speculation and fascination.

Was he gay? Asexual? A virgin with a propensity for massive crushes on unattainable women, who engaged prostitutes solely for conversation?

No one can say for sure.

What we know definitively is that he was a jolly and talented paper cutter.

He enchanted party guests of all ages with improvised stories as he snipped away, unfolding the sheet at tale’s end, a souvenir for some lucky young listener.

“You can imagine how many of them must have got torn or creased,” says art historian Detlef Klein, who co-curated the 2018 exhibition Hans Christian Andersen, Poet with Pen and Scissors. “You could often bend the figures a little, blow at them and then move them across the tabletop.”

Amazingly, 400 some survive, primarily in the Odense City Museums’ large collection.

Pierrots, dancers, and swans were frequent subjects. Spraddle-legged creature’s bellies served as proscenium theaters. Even the simplest feature some tricky, spindly bits—tightropes, umbrellas, delicate shoes.…

The most intricate pieces, like Fantasy Cutting for Dorothea Melchior below, were thoughtful homemade presents for close friends. (The Melchiors hosted Andersen’s 70th birthday party and he died during an extended visit to their country home.)

The cuttings bring fairy tales to mind, but they are not specific to the published work of Andersen. No Thumbelina. No Ugly Duckling. Not a mermaid in sight.

As Moy McCrory, senior lecturer in creative writing at the University of Derby, writes:

Andersen knew that his written work would outlast him: he was famous and successful, as were his tales. Yet he continued to work in these transient materials, their cheapness and availability making them of no value apart from their appeal to sentiment…Why work in a form that ought to have left no traces? I suggest that this showed how Andersen reacted to his fame, and to his own sense of being forever on the margins of the lived life. He moved amongst the educated and the famous, was friendly with Dickens, was patronized by nobles, but was outside those circles. His education was gained at some pains to himself, years after the usual dates for these activities (he would not even pass nowadays as a “mature student”, since his completion of elementary school only took place when he was a young adult). He was always placed outside the normal bounds of the society he kept.

Readers, we challenge you to play Pygmalion and release a fairy tale based on the images below.

All images, with the exception of The Royal Library Copenhagen’s The Botanist, directly above, are used with the permission of Odense City Museums, in accordance with a Creative Commons License.

Explore the Odense City Museums’ collection of Hans Christian Andersen’s papercuts here.

Bonus reading for those in need of a laugh: “The Saddest Endings of Hans Christian Andersen Stories” by the Toast’s Daniel M. Lavery.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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RIP Radical Poet and Revolutionary Publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919–2021)

in Literature, Poetry, Politics | February 24th, 2021

“Democracy is not a spectator sport,” Lawrence Ferlinghetti proclaimed on the wall of his City Lights bookstore, a San Francisco fixture since the poet, activist, and publisher founded the landmark with Peter D. Martin in 1953. Ferlinghetti, who died on Monday at age 101, was himself a fixture, a venerated steward of the counterculture. (See him read “Last Prayer,” above, in a clip from The Last Waltz). On his 100th birthday–on which the city instituted an annual “Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day”–Chloe Veltman interviewed him, describing the poet as “frail and nearly blind… but his mind is still on fire.” It was the same mind that started a publishing house in the 50s with the intent to stir an “international dissident ferment.”

Ferlinghetti and Martin started their bookstore with a mission: “to break literature out of its stuffy, academic cage,” Veltman writes, out of “its self-centered focus on what he calls ‘the me me me,’ and make it accessible to all.” City Lights was the first all-paperback bookstore, opened at a time, he says, when “paperbacks weren’t considered real books.”

For Ferlinghetti, literature and democracy were not separate pursuits. The idea was radical, and so were his patrons. “A bookstore is a natural place for poets to hang out,” Ferlinghetti told NPR’s Tom Vitale, “and they started showing up there”–“They” being East Coast Beats like Ginsberg, Kerouac, and the great, unsung Bob Kaufman.

Like a Northern California Shakespeare and Company, Ferlinghetti’s City Lights became the physical embodiment of a literary movement, especially after the infamous publication of Allen Ginsburg’s Howl and Other Poems, for which Ferlinghetti stood trial for obscenity, an event that “propelled the Beat generation into the international spotlight,” writes Evan Karp. “For the first and–arguably–only time, literature became a popular movement in the U.S.” Young people around the country realized that poetry was relevant to their politics (and lives), and vice versa.

Ferlinghetti published his own first book of poetry, Pictures of the Gone World, in the same year he published Ginsberg’s, but he has not received his critical due alongside the other Beats, despite the fact that his second book, 1958’s A Coney Island of the Mind, “sold more than 1 million copies over the year, ranking perhaps second to Howl as the most popular book of modern American poetry,” Fred Kaplan notes at Slate. (See him read the book’s first poem, “In Goya’s Greatest Scenes We Seem to See…,” from his City Lights office, above.)

Ferlinghetti himself never wanted to be identified with the movement. In a 2013 documentary, he emphatically says, “don’t call me a Beat. I was never a Beat poet.” He described his poetry as an “insurgent art”:

If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of

apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic.

You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words.…

His purpose, he writes, was to pierce a culture he calls “a freeway fifty lanes wide / a concrete continent / spaced with bland billboards / illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness.” From his Navy service in WWII–in which he saw the aftermath of Nagasaki weeks after the dropping of the atomic bombs–to the last days of the Trump administration, he kept his keen eye on America’s abuses. His “poetry is notoriously critical of politicians and the status quo,” Karp writes, and he was “unafraid to name names and take stances publicly” as a writer and a lifelong activist.

“Gerald Nicosia, the critic,” Vitale points out, “says Ferlinghetti’s two greatest accomplishments were fighting censorship, and inaugurating a small press revolution.” What did Ferlinghetti himself think of his place in the culture? “In Plato’s republic, poets were considered subversive, a danger to the republic,” he told The New York Times in 1998. “I kind of relish that role.” As for what might finally shake the country out of the anti-democratic spirit that has held its people hostage to corporations and a hostile government, he was not sanguine: “It would take a whole new generation not devoted to the glorification of the capitalist system,” he said. “A generation not trapped in the me, me, me.”

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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4,000 Priceless Scrolls, Texts & Papers From the University of Tokyo Have Been Digitized & Put Online

in Archives, Art, Books, History, Libraries, Literature | February 18th, 2021

The phrase “opening of Japan” is a euphemism that has outlived its purpose, serving to cloud rather than explain how a country closed to outsiders suddenly, in the mid-19th century, became a major influence in art and design worldwide. Negotiations were carried out at gunpoint. In 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry presented the Japanese with two white flags to raise when they were ready to surrender. (The Japanese called Perry’s fleet the “black ships of evil men.”) In one of innumerable historical ironies, we have this ugliness to thank for the explosion of Impressionist art (van Gogh was obsessed with Japanese prints and owned a large collection) as well as much of the beauty of Art Nouveau and modernist architecture at the turn of the century.

We may know versions of this already, but we probably don’t know it from a Japanese point of view. “As our global society grows ever more connected,” writes Katie Barrett at the Internet Archive blog, “it can be easy to assume that all of human history is just one click away. Yet language barriers and physical access still present major obstacles to deeper knowledge and understanding of other cultures.”

Unless we can read Japanese, our understanding of its history will always be informed by specialist scholars and translators. Now, at least, thanks to cooperation between the University of Tokyo General Library and the Internet Archive, we can access thousands more primary sources previously unavailable to “outsiders.”

“Since June 2020,” notes Barrett, “our Collections team has worked in tandem with library staff to ingest thousands of digital files from the General Library’s servers, mapping the metadata for over 4,000 priceless scrolls, texts, and papers.” This material has been digitized over decades by Japanese scholars and “showcases hundreds of years of rich Japanese history expressed through prose, poetry, and artwork.” It will be primarily the artwork that concerns non-Japanese speakers, as it primarily concerned 19th-century Europeans and Americans who first encountered the country’s cultural products. Artwork like the humorous print above. Barrett provides context:

In one satirical illustration, thought to date from shortly after the 1855 Edo earthquake, courtesans and others from the demimonde, who suffered greatly in the disaster, are shown beating the giant catfish that was believed to cause earthquakes. The men in the upper left-hand corner represent the construction trades; they are trying to stop the attack on the fish, as rebuilding from earthquakes was a profitable business for them.

There are many such depictions of “seismic destruction” in ukiyo‑e prints dating from the same period and the later Mino-Owari earthquake of 1891: “They are a sobering reminder of the role that natural disasters have played in Japanese life.”

You can see many more digitized artifacts, such as the charming book of Japanese ephemera above, at the Internet Archive’s University of Tokyo collection. Among the 4180 items currently available, you’ll also find many European prints and engravings held in the library’s 25 collections. All of this material “can be used freely without prior permission,” writes the University of Tokyo Library. “Among the highlights,” Barrett writes, “are manuscripts and annotated books from the personal collection of the novelist Mori Ōgai (1862–1922), an early manuscript of the Tale of Genji, [below] and a unique collection of Chinese legal records from the Ming Dynasty.” Enter the collection here.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Behold All 42 Maps from Jules Verne’s Extraordinary Voyages, the Author’s 54-Volume Collection of “Geographical Fictions”

in Literature, Maps | February 11th, 2021

Jules Verne’s tales of adventure take his characters around the world, through the deepest seas, even into the center of the Earth—on journeys, that is, difficult or impossible in the 19th century. Verne himself, however, spent most his life in France, writing of places he had not seen. In one apocryphal story, the young Jules Verne is caught trying to sneak aboard a ship bound for the Indies and promises his father he will henceforth travel “only in his imagination.” Whether or not he made such a vow, he seemed to keep it, though the idea that he never traveled at all is a “tiresome canard,” writes Terry Harpold in an essay titled “Verne’s Cartographies.”

Verne’s famed novels Twenty Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Around the World in Eighty Days constitute only a fraction of the 54-volume Voyages Extraordinaires, a collection of fiction conceived on the basis of a science we might not think of as a rich field for material.

“Of the 80 novels and other short stories he published,” geographer Lionel Dupuy writes, “62 make up the corpus of Extraordinary Voyages (Voyages Extraordinaires). These books, in which imagination played a vital role, were termed ‘geographical novels,’ a category the author himself used for them.”

Verne would also use the term “scientific novel,” but he made it clear which science he meant:

I always had a passion for studying geography, as others did for history or historical research. I really believe that it is my passion for maps and great explorers around the world that led me to write the first of my long series of geographical novels.

As a geographical novelist, and member of the Geographical Society from 1865 to 1898, it was only fitting that Verne include as many maps as he could in his quest, as he put it, “to depict the Earth, and not just the Earth, but the universe, for I have sometimes carried my readers far away from the Earth in my novels.” To that end, “thirty of the novels” in the first edition of Voyages Extraordinaires” published by Pierre-Jules Hetzel, “include one or more engraved maps,” Harpold points out. “There are forty-two such engravings in all.” View them here.

“These images and design elements are nuanced, graceful, and evocative; drafted and engraved by some of the finest artists of the time,” Harpold writes. “They represent the pinnacle of late nineteenth-century popular-scientific cartography.” They also represent the author of geographical fictions who, as both a scientist and artist, refused to let either form of thinking take over the text, combining myth and poetry with observation and measurement. As Dupuy puts it, “in Extraordinary Voyages, the passage from reality to imagination and back is encouraged by the emergence of a ‘marvelous’ that we can call ‘geographical.’”

In one sense, we might think of most kinds of fiction as geographical, in that they describe places we have never seen. This is particularly so in fictions that include maps of their imagined territories, such as those of William Faulkner, J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Louis Stevenson, and so on. We might look to Jules Verne as their towering forbear. “Several of the maps appearing in the Hetzel Voyages were drafted under Verne’s close supervision or were based on his sketches or designs. Maps in three of the novels (20,000 Leagues [top], Hatteras [further up], Three Russians) were drafted by Verne himself, whose talents in this regard were appreciable,” writes Harpold.

Verne’s maps mix real and fictional place names and are “always ambiguous and semiotically unstable objects.” They appear almost as admissions of the mythmaking that goes into the science of geography and the act of exploration. Near the end of his life, maps became more real to Verne than the world outside. As he grew too weary even to leave the neighborhood, he wrote to Alexandre Dumas fils, “If I have maintained a taste for work… , nothing remains of my youth. I live in the heart of my province and never budge from it, even to go to Paris. I travel only by maps.” See all of Verne’s maps from the Hetzel edition of Extraordinary Voyages, such as those for Around the World in Eighty Days (above) and Five Weeks in a Balloon (below), here.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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A New Yorker Cartoonist Explains How to Draw Literary Cartoons

in Comedy, Comics/Cartoons, Literature, Magazines | February 8th, 2021

“I enjoy poking fun at anything educated people do and civilized society perpetuates that is odd, frustrating, wacky, or hypocritical,” cartoonist Amy Kurzweil, above, recently told the New York Public Library’s Margo Moore.

Unsurprisingly, she’s been getting published in The New Yorker a lot of late.

The process for getting cartoons accepted there is the stuff of legend, though reportedly less grueling since Emma Allen, the magazine’s youngest and first-ever female cartoon editor, took over. Allen has made a point of seeking out fresh voices, and working with them to help mold their submissions into something in The New Yorker vein, rather than “this endless game of presenting work and then hearing ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”

Kurzweil has a fondness for literary themes (and the same brand of pencils that John Steinbeck, Truman Capote, and Vladimir Nabokov preferred—Blackwings—whether in her hand or, conversing with Allen on Zoom, above, in her ears.)

Getting the joke of a New Yorker cartoon often depends on getting the reference, and while both women seem tickled at the first example, Kurzweil’s mash-up of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and the picture book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, it may go over many readers’ heads.

The thing that holds it all together?

Madeleines, of course, though outside France, not every Proust lover is able to identify an inked representation of this evocative cookie by shape.

Kurzweil states that she has never actually read the children’s book that supplies half the context.

(It’s okay. Like the idea that memories can be triggered by certain nostalgic scents, its concept is pretty easy to grasp.)

Nor has she read philosopher Derek Parfit’s whopping 1,928-page On What Matters. Her inspiration for using it in a cartoon is her personal connection to the massive, unread three-volume set in her family’s library. Because both the size and the title are part of the joke, she directs the viewer’s eye to the unwieldy tome with a light watercolor wash.

She also has a good tip for anyone drawing a library scene—go figurative, rather than literal, varying sizes and shapes until the eye is tricked into seeing what is merely suggested.

A all-too-true literary experience informs her second example at the 4:30 mark—that of a little known author giving a reading in a bookstore. Despite a preference for drawing “fleshy things like people and animals” she forgoes depicting the author or those in attendance, giving the punchline instead to the event posters in the store’s window.

As she told the NYPL’s Moore:

A cartoon is always an opportunity to showcase a contemporary phenomenon by exaggerating it or placing it in a different context.

Over the last year, a huge number of New Yorker cartoons have concerned themselves with the domestic dullness of the pandemic, but when Allen asked if she has a favorite New Yorker cartoon cliché, Kurzweil went with “the Moby Dick trope, because whales are easy to draw, and I like a good metaphor for the unattainable.”

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She most recently appeared as a French Canadian bear who travels to New York City in search of food and meaning in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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Innovative Pinscreen Animations of Kafka’s “Before the Law”, Gogol’s “The Nose” & Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain” (1932–1972)

in Animation, Literature | January 21st, 2021

What do Franz Kafka, Nikolai Gogol, and Modest Mussorgsky have in common? They stand alone among their peers for their darkly humorous sensibilities, fascination with the grotesque, imaginative takes on cultural traditions, and a predisposition for the proto-surreal. Like the odd figure lurching through the first movement of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, they are gnomic artists: enigmatic and ambiguous, given to the aphoristic in stories and tone poems of monstrous and marvelous beings. It’s easy to imagine the three of them, or their works at least, in cryptic conversation with each other.

We might imagine that conversation as we watch three works by these major European artists—all of which we’ve featured on the site before—animated via the painstaking pinscreen method pioneered by husband-and-wife, Russian-and-French duo Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker.

The two invented the technique in the 1930s. Dedicated to this extremely labor-intensive process, they made 6 short films over a period of 50 years, including adaptations of Kafka’s “Before the Law,” narrated by Orson Welles, Gogol’s “The Nose,” and Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain.

We know the Mussorgsky piece as a terrifying vignette from Walt Disney’s Fantasia. Seven years before that marriage of classical music and animation came out in 1940, Alexeieff and Parker released their version, at the top. Steve Stanchfield at Cartoon Research calls it “one of the most unusual and unique looking animated films ever created.” Its “delightful and at times horrifying imagery… challenge the viewer to comprehend both their meaning and the mystery of how they were created.” The same could be said of “The Nose” (1963), whose improvised soundtrack by Hai-Minh adds dramatic tension to the eerie animation.

Each of these films uses the same method, a handmade pinscreen device in which thousands of pins are pushed by hand outward and inward for each frame to create areas of light or dark. The pair intended to move beyond the flatness of conventional cel animation techniques and capture the depth and contrast of chiaroscuro. They achieved this through the most achingly slow process imaginable, yet “the illusion of dimensional drawing in animation has rarely been created better,” Stanchfield writes, not even in the most sophisticated computer-generated imagery.

Alexeieff and Parker’s “Before the Law,” from a parable in Kafka’s The Trial, takes a picture-book approach to the animation that would reward younger viewers. Welles’ narration anchors the production with even more than his usual gravitas. In 1972, they returned to Mussorgsky, in the short Pictures at an Exhibition, above. Here, after a prologue in French and the stylizations of the opening Prelude, the figure of the “The Gnome” appears, a translucent homunculus hatching from an egg and dancing across the piano keys. I like to think Mussorgsky, Kafka, and Gogol would find this imagery irresistible.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Rarely-Seen Illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy Are Now Free Online, Courtesy of the Uffizi Gallery

in Art, Literature | January 20th, 2021

We know Dante’s Divine Comedy—especially its famous first third, Inferno—as an extended theological treatise, epic love poem, and vicious satire of church hypocrisy and the Florentine political faction that exiled Dante from the city of his birth in 1302. Most of us don’t know it the way its first readers did (and as Dante scholars do): a compendium in which “a number of medieval literary genres are digested and combined,” as Robert M. Durling writes in his translation of the Inferno.

These literary genres include vernacular traditions of romance poetry from Provence, popular long before Dante turned his Tuscan dialect into a literary language to rival Latin. They include “the dream-vision (exemplified by the Old French Romance of the Rose)”; “accounts of journeys to the Otherworld (such as the Visio Pauli, Saint Patrick’s Purgatory, the Navigatio Sancti Brendani)”; and Scholastic philosophical allegory, among other well-known forms of writing at the time.

By the time the Divine Comedy captured imaginations in the period of incunabula, or the infancy of the printed book, many of these associations and influences had receded. And by the time of the Counter-Reformation, the poem most impressed readers and illustrators of the text as a divine plan for a torture chamber and an encyclopedia of the tortures therein. Whatever other associations we have with Dante’s poem, we all know the nine circles of hell and have an ominous sense of what goes on there.

No doubt we also have in our mind’s eye some of the hundreds of illustrations made of the text’s gruesome depictions of hell, from Sandro Botticelli to Robert Rauschenberg. Illustrated editions of Dante’s poem began appearing in 1472, and the first fully illustrated edition in 1491. By the late 16th century, the poem had become a literary classic (the word Divine joined Comedy in the title in 1555). By this time, the tradition of depicting a literal, rather than a literary, hell was firmly established.

It was in this period that Frederico Zuccari made the beautiful illustrations you see here, completed, Angela Giuffrida writes at The Guardian, “during a stay in Spain between 1586 and 1588. Of the 88 illustrations, 28 are depictions of hell, 49 of purgatory and 11 of heaven. After Zuccari’s death in 1609, the drawings were held by the noble Orsini family, for whom the artist had worked, and later by the Medici family before becoming part of the Uffizi collection in 1738.”

The pencil-and-ink drawings have rarely been seen before because of their fragile condition. They were only exhibited publicly for the first time in 1865 for the 600th anniversary of Dante’s birth and of Italian unification. Now, they are on display, virtually, for free, as part of a “year-long calendar of events to mark the 700th anniversary of the poet’s death.” This is an extraordinary opportunity to see these illustrations, which have until now “only been seen by a few scholars and displayed to the public only twice, and only in part,” says Uffizi director Eike Schmidt.

Much of the promised “didactic-scientific comment” to accompany each drawing is marked as “upcoming” on the English version of the Uffizi site, but you can see high resolution scans of each drawing and zoom in to examine the many tortures of the damned and the grotesque demons who torment them. Learn much more at Khan Academy about how Dante’s literary epic in terza rima left “a lasting impression on the Western imagination for more than half a millennium,” solidifying and reshaping images of hell “into new guises that would become familiar to countless generations that followed.” If you like, you can also take a free course on Dante’s Divine Comedy from Yale University.

via MyModernMet/The Guardian

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Ursula K. Le Guin Stamp Getting Released by the US Postal Service

in Literature | January 19th, 2021

Here’s one thing that’s going right with America’s decaying postal system. They write on the USPS web site: “The 33rd stamp in the Literary Arts series honors Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018), who expanded the scope of literature through novels and short stories that increased critical and popular appreciation of science fiction and fantasy. The stamp features a portrait of Le Guin based on a 2006 photograph. The background shows a scene from her landmark 1969 novel “The Left Hand of Darkness,” in which an envoy from Earth named Genly Ai escapes from a prison camp across the wintry planet of Gethen with Estraven, a disgraced Gethenian politician. The artist for this stamp was Donato Giancola. The art director was Antonio Alcalá. The words “three ounce” on this stamp indicate its usage value. Like a Forever stamp, this stamp will always be valid for the value printed on it.” The postal service has not said precisely when the stamp will be released.

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The Exquisite, Ephemeral Paper Cuttings of Hans Christian Andersen

RIP Radical Poet and Revolutionary Publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919–2021)

4,000 Priceless Scrolls, Texts & Papers From the University of Tokyo Have Been Digitized & Put Online

Behold All 42 Maps from Jules Verne’s Extraordinary Voyages, the Author’s 54-Volume Collection of “Geographical Fictions”

A New Yorker Cartoonist Explains How to Draw Literary Cartoons

Innovative Pinscreen Animations of Kafka’s “Before the Law”, Gogol’s “The Nose” & Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain” (1932–1972)

Rarely-Seen Illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy Are Now Free Online, Courtesy of the Uffizi Gallery

Ursula K. Le Guin Stamp Getting Released by the US Postal Service

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