Wagashi: Peruse a Digitized, Centuries-Old Catalogue of Traditional Japanese Candies

in Books, Food & Drink | October 30th, 2018

If you’ve been to Japan, or even to any of the Japan­ese neigh­bor­hoods in cities around the world, you’ve seen wagashi (和菓子). You’ve prob­a­bly, at least for a moment, mar­veled at their appear­ance as well: though essen­tial­ly noth­ing more than sweet treats, they’re made with such strik­ing vari­ety and refine­ment that you might hes­i­tate to bite into them.

First cre­at­ed in the 16th cen­tu­ry, when trade with Chi­na made sug­ar into a sta­ple in Japan, wagashi have devel­oped into one of the coun­try’s sig­na­ture del­i­ca­cies, appre­ci­at­ed for their taste but beloved for their form. You can browse and down­load a three-vol­ume cat­a­log of wagashi designs, itself cen­turies old, at the web site of Japan’s Nation­al Diet Library: vol­ume one, vol­ume two, vol­ume three.

The site also has a spe­cial sec­tion about wagashi, though in Japan­ese only. The cat­a­log itself, of course, also con­tains text in no oth­er lan­guage, but wagashi isn’t about words.

Even with­out know­ing Japan­ese, you can flip through each vol­ume’s pages (vol­ume one — vol­ume two - vol­ume three) and rec­og­nize the look of dozens of sweets you’ve seen or maybe even sam­pled in real life, where their col­ors may well look even more vivid than on the page.

Like most realms of tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese cul­ture, wagashi demands painstak­ing crafts­man­ship. Often brought out at fes­ti­vals and giv­en as gifts, it also cel­e­brates dif­fer­ent aspects of Japan: its sea­sons, its land­scapes, chap­ters of its his­to­ry, and even its works of lit­er­a­ture. Some wagashi designs do this abstract­ly, while oth­ers lean toward the rep­re­sen­ta­tive, repli­cat­ing real sights and sym­bols in a form both rec­og­niz­able and edi­ble.

Many wagashi, as Boing Boing’s Andrea James writes, “still look the same as they did hun­dreds of years ago when the art form flour­ished in the Edo peri­od” of the 17th and 18th cen­tu­ry. Insta­gram, as she points out, has proven a nat­ur­al online home for not just the kind of tra­di­tion­al wagashi seen in these cat­a­logs but designs that pay trib­ute to fig­ures of more recent vin­tage, such as Rilakku­ma and the aliens from Toy Sto­ry.

And though Hal­loween may not be an orig­i­nal­ly Japan­ese hol­i­day, it has­n’t stopped mod­ern wagashi-mak­ers from bring­ing out the ghosts, skulls, and jack-o-lanterns in force.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,000+ His­toric Japan­ese Illus­trat­ed Books Dig­i­tized & Put Online by the Smith­son­ian: From the Edo & Meji Eras (1600–1912)

Down­load Clas­sic Japan­ese Wave and Rip­ple Designs: A Go-to Guide for Japan­ese Artists from 1903

How Japan­ese Things Are Made in 309 Videos: Bam­boo Tea Whisks, Hina Dolls, Steel Balls & More

20 Mes­mer­iz­ing Videos of Japan­ese Arti­sans Cre­at­ing Tra­di­tion­al Hand­i­crafts

Enter a Dig­i­tal Archive of 213,000+ Beau­ti­ful Japan­ese Wood­block Prints

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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.

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RIP Todd Bol, Founder of the Little Free Library Movement: He Leaves Behind 75,000 Small Libraries That Promote Reading Worldwide

in Books, K-12, Libraries, Life, Literature | October 29th, 2018

“The Lit­tle Free Library: Bil­lions and bil­lions read.”

In the 2013 Ted‑X talk above, Todd Bol, founder of the Lit­tle Free Library move­ment, expressed the desire that one day, he might be able to boast that his labor of love had sur­passed McDon­alds with regard to the num­ber of cus­tomers’ served.

It’s clos­ing in…

Bol, who passed away ear­li­er this month, was inspired by Andrew Carnegie’s mis­sion of repay­ing his own good for­tune by estab­lish­ing 2,509 free pub­lic libraries.

The Lit­tle Free Libraries are vast­ly more numer­ous if less impos­ing than Carnegie’s state­ly edi­fices.

Some, like the pro­to­type Bol craft­ed with lum­ber sal­vaged from a garage door in his late mother’s hon­or, resem­ble doll hous­es.

One in Detroit is a dead ringer for Doc­tor Who’s TARDIS.

There’s a bright yel­low one embla­zoned with char­ac­ters from The Simp­sons, auto­graphed by series cre­ator Matt Groen­ing.

Oth­ers are housed in repur­posed suit­cas­es, stor­age cab­i­nets, or news­pa­per hon­or box­es.

While the non-prof­it Lit­tle Free Library store sells sev­er­al stur­dy, weath­er­proof mod­els and its web­site hosts a healthy col­lec­tion of blue­prints and tips for DIY­ers, Bol was nev­er doc­tri­naire about the aes­thet­ics, pre­fer­ring to leave that up to each vol­un­teer stew­ard.

He seemed proud­est of the libraries’ com­mu­ni­ty build­ing effect (though he was also pret­ty chuffed when Read­er’s Digest ranked the project above Bruce Spring­steen in its 2013 fea­ture ”50 Sur­pris­ing Rea­sons We Love Amer­i­ca.” )

While not entire­ly devoid of naysay­ers, the good­will sur­round­ing the Lit­tle Free Library move­ment can­not be under­es­ti­mat­ed.

A stew­ard who post­ed news of his dog’s death on the side of his library received sym­pa­thy cards from neigh­bors both known and unknown to him.

A stew­ard who spe­cial­izes in giv­ing away cook­books, and invites patrons to snip herbs from an adja­cent gar­den, fre­quent­ly wakes to find home­made quiche and oth­er good­ies on the doorstep.

And when an arson­ist torched a Lit­tle Free Library in Indi­anapo­lis, the com­mu­ni­ty ral­lied, vow­ing to get enough dona­tions to replace it with 100 more.

To date, stew­ards have reg­is­tered over 75,000, in 85 coun­tries, in ser­vice of Bol’s “Take a book, Leave a book” phi­los­o­phy.

Find a Lit­tle Free Library near you, learn how to become a stew­ard, or make a dona­tion on the project’s web­site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The New York Pub­lic Library Lets Patrons Check Out Ties, Brief­cas­es & Hand­bags for Job Inter­views

The Rise and Fall of the Great Library of Alexan­dria: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

Down­load 150 Free Col­or­ing Books from Great Libraries, Muse­ums & Cul­tur­al Insti­tu­tions: The British Library, Smith­son­ian, Carnegie Hall & More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Novem­ber 12 for anoth­er month­ly install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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A 16th Century Book That Opens Six Different Ways, Revealing Six Different Books in One

in Books, History, Technology | October 16th, 2018

Tech­nol­o­gy has come so far that we con­sid­er it no great achieve­ment when a device the size of a sin­gle paper book can con­tain hun­dreds, even thou­sands, of dif­fer­ent texts. But 21st-cen­tu­ry human­i­ty did­n’t come up with the idea of putting mul­ti­ple books in one, nor did we first bring that idea into being — not by a long shot. Medieval book his­to­ri­an Erik Kwakkel points, for exam­ple, to the “dos-à-dos” (back to back) bind­ing of the 16th and 17th cen­turies, which made for books “like Siamese twins in that they present two dif­fer­ent enti­ties joined at their backs: each part has one board for itself, while a third is shared between the two,” so “read­ing the one text you can flip the ‘book’ to con­sult the oth­er.”

Not long there­after, Kwakkel post­ed an arti­fact that blows the dos-à-dos out of the water: a 16th-cen­tu­ry book that con­tains no few­er than six dif­fer­ent books in a sin­gle bind­ing. “They are all devo­tion­al texts print­ed in Ger­many dur­ing the 1550s and 1570s (includ­ing Mar­tin Luther, Der kleine Cat­e­chis­mus) and each one is closed with its own tiny clasp,” he writes.

“While it may have been dif­fi­cult to keep track of a par­tic­u­lar text’s loca­tion, a book you can open in six dif­fer­ent ways is quite the dis­play of crafts­man­ship.” You can admire it — and try to fig­ure it out — from a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent angles at the Flickr account of the Nation­al Library of Swe­den, where it cur­rent­ly resides in the archives of the Roy­al Library.

Four or five cen­turies ago, a book like this would no doubt have impressed its behold­ers as much as or even more than the most advanced piece of hand­held con­sumer elec­tron­ics impress­es us today. But when the inter­net dis­cov­ered Kwakkel’s post, it became clear that this six-in-one devo­tion­al cap­ti­vates us in much the same way as a brand-new, nev­er-before-seen dig­i­tal device. “With a lit­er­a­cy rate hov­er­ing around an esti­mat­ed 5 to 10 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion dur­ing the Mid­dle Ages, only a select few of soci­ety’s upper ech­e­lons and reli­gious castes had use for books,” Andrew Taran­to­la reminds us. “So who would have use for a sex­tu­plet of sto­ries bound by a sin­gle, mul­ti-hinged cov­er like this? Some seri­ous­ly busy schol­ar.” And he writes that not on a site for enthu­si­asts of old books, Medieval his­to­ry, or reli­gious schol­ar­ship, but at the tem­ple of tech wor­ship known as Giz­mo­do.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Won­der­ful­ly Weird & Inge­nious Medieval Books

Napoleon’s Kin­dle: See the Minia­tur­ized Trav­el­ing Library He Took on Mil­i­tary Cam­paigns

Wear­able Books: In Medieval Times, They Took Old Man­u­scripts & Turned Them into Clothes

Europe’s Old­est Intact Book Was Pre­served and Found in the Cof­fin of a Saint

Behold the “Book Wheel”: The Renais­sance Inven­tion Cre­at­ed to Make Books Portable & Help Schol­ars Study (1588)

The Assassin’s Cab­i­net: A Hol­lowed Out Book, Con­tain­ing Secret Cab­i­nets Full of Poi­son Plants, Made in 1682

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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.

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Europe’s Oldest Intact Book Was Preserved and Found in the Coffin of a Saint

in Books, History | September 28th, 2018

Pho­to via the British Library

If you’re a British his­to­ry buff, next month is an ide­al time to be in Lon­don for the British Library’s “once-in-a-gen­er­a­tion exhi­bi­tion” Anglo-Sax­on King­doms: Art, Word, War, open­ing Octo­ber 19th and fea­tur­ing the illu­mi­nat­ed Lind­is­farne Gospels, Beowulf, Bede’s Eccle­si­as­ti­cal His­to­ry, the “world-famous” Domes­day Book, and Codex Ami­at­i­nus, a “giant Northum­bri­an Bible tak­en to Italy in 716” and return­ing to Eng­land for the first time in 1300 years. But with all of these man­u­script stars steal­ing the show, one spe­cial exhib­it might go over­looked, the St. Cuth­bert Gospel, the old­est sur­viv­ing intact Euro­pean book.

A Latin copy of the Gospel of John, the book was orig­i­nal­ly called the Stony­hurst Gospel, after its first own­er, Stony­hurst Col­lege. It acquired its cur­rent name because it was found inside the cof­fin of St. Cuth­bert, a her­mit monk who died in 687 and whose remains, leg­end has it, were incor­rupt­ible. This sup­posed mir­a­cle inspired a cult that placed offer­ings around Cuthbert’s tomb. Just when and how the small book made its way into his cof­fin remains a mys­tery. It was like­ly some­time between the 700s and 800s CE, when his body was moved to Durham due to Viking raids.

When Cuthbert’s cas­ket was opened in 1104, the book was found “in mirac­u­lous­ly per­fect con­di­tion,” writes the British Library, inside “a satchel-like con­tain­er of red leather with a bad­ly-frayed sling made of silken threads.” Schol­ars have dat­ed the book’s cre­ation to between 700 and 730, and its inter­est for aca­d­e­mics and lay peo­ple alike lies not only in the leg­end of St. Cuth­bert but in the book’s phys­i­cal qual­i­ties and its own uncor­rupt­ed nature. As Alli­son Meier writes at JSTOR Dai­ly, “the 1,300-year-old man­u­script retains its orig­i­nal pages and bind­ing,” a remark­able fact for a book of its age.

Its con­di­tion makes it an “impor­tant exam­ple of Insu­lar art, which was cre­at­ed on the British Isles and Ire­land between 600 and 900 CE.” The gen­er­al fea­tures of this style involve “the lay­er­ing of pat­tern, line, and col­or on seem­ing­ly flat sur­faces,” notes Oxford Bib­li­ogra­phies, in order to cre­ate “com­plex spa­tial pat­terns.” Schol­ar Robert D. Ste­vick describes these prop­er­ties on the ornate dyed leather cov­ers of the St. Cuth­bert Gospel:

There is inter­lace pat­tern in two pan­els on the front cov­er, step-pat­tern imply­ing two cross­es on the low­er cov­er, a promi­nent dou­ble vine scroll at the cen­ter of the front cover—elements of this ear­ly art that have been well cat­a­logued for their indi­vid­ual fea­tures as well as for their affini­ties to sim­i­lar dec­o­ra­tive ele­ments in oth­er arti­facts.

Bound with a sewing tech­nique that orig­i­nat­ed in North Africa (and there­fore often called “Cop­tic sewing”), the “sim­ple but ele­gant” book, Meier explains, “reflects the trans­mis­sion of pub­lish­ing knowl­edge across Europe” from the Mediter­ranean. Its small size and place­ment in a leather pouch is also sig­nif­i­cant. St. John’s Gospel “was some­times employed as a pro­tec­tive tal­is­man,” worn in a pouch on the body to ward off evil. Why one of Cuthbert’s admir­ers would have giv­en such a tal­is­man to his corpse remains unclear.

If you can’t make it to the British Library to see this fas­ci­nat­ing arti­fact in per­son, you can see its mirac­u­lous­ly well-pre­served bind­ing and pages in scans at the British Library site here.

via JSTOR Dai­ly

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold 3,000 Dig­i­tized Man­u­scripts from the Bib­lio­the­ca Palati­na: The Moth­er of All Medieval Libraries Is Get­ting Recon­struct­ed Online

1,000-Year-Old Man­u­script of Beowulf Dig­i­tized and Now Online

How Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Were Made: A Step-by-Step Look at this Beau­ti­ful, Cen­turies-Old Craft

Wear­able Books: In Medieval Times, They Took Old Man­u­scripts & Turned Them into Clothes

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

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Explore an Interactive, Online Version of Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, a 200-Year-Old Guide to the Colors of the Natural World

in Art, Biology, Books, Science | September 27th, 2018

In a post ear­li­er this year, we brought to your atten­tion Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colours. Used by artists and nat­u­ral­ists alike, the guide orig­i­nal­ly relied on writ­ten descrip­tion alone, with­out any col­or to be found among its pages. Instead, in the late eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry, Ger­man min­er­al­o­gist Abra­ham Got­t­lob Wern­er painstak­ing­ly detailed the qual­i­ties of the 110 col­ors he sur­veyed, by ref­er­ence to where they might be found on ani­mals, veg­eta­bles, and min­er­als. The col­or “Pearl Gray,” for exam­ple, might be locat­ed on the “Backs of black head­ed and Kittwake Gulls,” the “Back of Petals of Pur­ple Het­at­i­ca,” or on “Porce­lain Jasper.”

The lit­er­ary pos­si­bil­i­ties of this approach may seem vast. But its use­ful­ness to those engaged in the visu­al arts—or in close obser­va­tion of new species in, say, the Gala­pa­gos Islands—may have been some­what lack­ing until Scot­tish painter Patrick Syme updat­ed the guide in 1814 with col­or swatch­es, most of them using the very min­er­als Wern­er described.

It was the sec­ond edi­tion of Syme’s guide that accom­pa­nied Charles Dar­win on his 1831 voy­age aboard the HMS Bea­gle, where he “used it to cat­a­logue the flo­ra and fau­na that lat­er inspired his the­o­ry of nat­ur­al selec­tion,” as his­to­ri­an Daniel Lewis writes at Smith­son­ian.

While we might think of tax­onomies of col­or as prin­ci­pal­ly guid­ing artists, web design­ers, and house painters, they have been indis­pens­able for sci­en­tists. “They can indi­cate when a plant or ani­mal is a dif­fer­ent species or a sub­species,” Lewis notes; “in the 19th cen­tu­ry, the use of col­or to dif­fer­en­ti­ate species was impor­tant for what it said about evo­lu­tion and how species changed over time and from region to region.” For his­to­ri­ans of sci­ence, there­fore, Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colours rep­re­sents an essen­tial tool in the ear­ly devel­op­ment of evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy.

Oth­er col­or dic­tio­nar­ies fol­lowed, “designed to give peo­ple around the world a com­mon vocab­u­lary to describe the col­ors of every­thing from rocks and flow­ers to stars, birds, and postage stamps.” Some of these were high­ly spe­cial­ized, such as the two-vol­ume set cre­at­ed by the French Soci­ety of Chrysan­themists in 1905. All of them, how­ev­er, strove to meet the high bar set by Wern­er when it came to lev­el of detailed descrip­tion. These are guides that speak in human terms, in con­trast to the nomen­cla­ture most often used today, which “is real­ly a machine lan­guage,” Kelsey Cam­bell-Dol­laghan writes at Fast Com­pa­ny, “numer­i­cal hex codes craft­ed to com­mu­ni­cate with soft­ware on com­put­ers and print­ers.”

In recog­ni­tion of Wern­er and Syme’s con­tri­bu­tion to col­or nomen­cla­ture, Smith­son­ian Books recent­ly repub­lished the 1814 edi­tion of their guide, and the revised 1821 edi­tion has been avail­able for some time as scans at the Inter­net Archive. Now it has received a 21st update thanks to design­er Nicholas Rougeux, who has cre­at­ed an online inter­ac­tive ver­sion of the book, “with addi­tions like data visu­al­iza­tions of its 100 col­ors and inter­net-sourced pho­tographs of the ani­mals and min­er­als that the book references”—a fea­ture its cre­ators could nev­er have dreamed of. You can read Werner’s com­plete text, see all of the col­ors as illus­trat­ed and cat­e­go­rized by Syme, and even pur­chase through Rougeux’s site cool 36” x 24” posters like that above, start­ing at $27.80.

It’s true, view­ing the book online has its draw­backs, relat­ed to how Syme’s paint swatch­es are trans­lat­ed into hex codes, then dis­played dif­fer­ent­ly depend­ing on var­i­ous screen set­tings. But Rougeux has tried to com­pen­sate for this dif­fer­ence between print and screen. On a pub­licly acces­si­ble Google Doc, he has pro­vid­ed the hex codes “for each of the 18th-cen­tu­ry hues, from Skimmed Milk (#e6e1c9) to Veinous Blood Red (#3f3033).” Not near­ly as poet­ic as Werner’s descrip­tions, but it’s what we have to work with these days when ref­er­ence books get writ­ten for com­put­ers as much as they do for humans.

See the inter­ac­tive Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colours here.

via Fast Com­pa­ny

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colour, the 19th-Cen­tu­ry “Col­or Dic­tio­nary” Used by Charles Dar­win (1814)

Goethe’s Col­or­ful & Abstract Illus­tra­tions for His 1810 Trea­tise, The­o­ry of Col­ors: Scans of the First Edi­tion

The Vibrant Col­or Wheels Designed by Goethe, New­ton & Oth­er The­o­rists of Col­or (1665–1810)

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

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Download Classic Japanese Wave and Ripple Designs: A Go-to Guide for Japanese Artists from 1903

in Art, Books, Design, History | September 18th, 2018

Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese art may please so many of us, even those of us with lit­tle inter­est in Japan itself, because of the way it inhab­its the realm between rep­re­sen­ta­tion and abstrac­tion. But then, it does­n’t just inhab­it that realm: it has set­tled those bor­der­lands, made them its own, for much longer than most cul­tures have been doing any­thing at all. The space between art, strict­ly defined, and what we now call design has also seen few achieve­ments quite so impres­sive as those made in Japan, going all the way back to the rope mark­ings on the clay ves­sels used by the islands’ Jōmon peo­ple in the 11th cen­tu­ry BC.

Those ancient rope-on-clay mark­ings can eas­i­ly look like pre­de­ces­sors of the “wave pat­terns” still seen in Japan­ese art and design today. Since time almost immemo­r­i­al they have appeared on “swords (both blades and han­dles) and asso­ci­at­ed para­pher­na­lia (known as ‘sword fur­ni­ture’), as well as lac­quer­ware, Net­suke, reli­gious objects, and a host of oth­er items.”

So says the Pub­lic Domain Review, which has fea­tured a series of three books full of ele­gant wave and rip­ple designs orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in 1903 and now avail­able to down­load free at the Inter­net Archive (vol­ume one, vol­ume two, vol­ume three).

Called Hamon­shū, the books were pro­duced by the artist Mori Yuzan, “about whom not a lot is known,” adds the Pub­lic Domain review, “apart from that he hailed from Kyoto, worked in the Nihon­ga style” — or the “Japan­ese paint­ing” style of Japan­ese paint­ing, which emerged dur­ing the Mei­ji peri­od, a time of rapid West­ern­iza­tion in Japan.

He “died in 1917. The works would have act­ed as a kind of go-to guide for Japan­ese crafts­men look­ing to adorn their wares with wave and rip­ple pat­terns.” Though they do con­tain text, they require no knowl­edge of the Japan­ese lan­guage to appre­ci­ate the many illus­tra­tions they present.

Tak­en togeth­er, Mori’s books offer a com­plete spec­trum from tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese-style rep­re­sen­ta­tion — espe­cial­ly of land, water, moun­tains, sky, and oth­er nat­ur­al ele­ments — to a taste of the infi­nite vari­ety of abstract pat­terns that result. Such imagery remains preva­lent in Japan more than a cen­tu­ry after the pub­li­ca­tion of Hamon­shū, as any vis­i­tor to Japan today will see.

But now that the Inter­net Archive has made the books freely avail­able online (vol­ume one, vol­ume two, vol­ume three), they’ll sure­ly inspire work not just between rep­re­sen­ta­tion and abstrac­tion as well as between art and design, but between Japan­ese aes­thet­ics and those of every oth­er cul­ture in the world as well.

via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Japan­ese Wood­work­ing Mas­ters Cre­ate Ele­gant & Elab­o­rate Geo­met­ric Pat­terns with Wood

Mes­mer­iz­ing GIFs Illus­trate the Art of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood Join­ery — All Done With­out Screws, Nails, or Glue

Down­load 2,500 Beau­ti­ful Wood­block Prints and Draw­ings by Japan­ese Mas­ters (1600–1915)

1,000+ His­toric Japan­ese Illus­trat­ed Books Dig­i­tized & Put Online by the Smith­son­ian: From the Edo & Meji Eras (1600–1912)

The Art of Col­lo­type: See a Near Extinct Print­ing Tech­nique, as Lov­ing­ly Prac­ticed by a Japan­ese Mas­ter Crafts­man

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.

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Why You Should Read One Hundred Years of Solitude: An Animated Video Makes the Case

in Animation, Books, Literature | September 5th, 2018

Maybe we read some cel­e­brat­ed lit­er­ary works the way we eat kale or quinoa—you don’t exact­ly love it but they say it’s, like, a super­food. Not so Gabriel Gar­cia Marquez’s One Hun­dred Years of Soli­tude. When I first start­ed read­ing the nov­el, I couldn’t stop. Twelve hours and a cou­ple pots of cof­fee lat­er, I want­ed to read it again right away. It’s a page-turner—not some­thing one often says of lit­er­ary fic­tion beloved by high­brow crit­ics and academics—but I mean it as the high­est pos­si­ble com­pli­ment.

The book has every fea­ture of a binge-wor­thy soap opera: char­ac­ters we love and love to hate, doomed affairs, sex, vio­lence, end­less fam­i­ly squab­bling, tragedy, intrigue, melo­dra­ma…. Again, this is no crit­i­cism; Mar­quez loved telen­ov­e­las and even wrote a script for one. He want­ed his work to reach as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble, to thrill and enter­tain. But he did­n’t with­hold any lit­er­ary nutri­ents either.


The novel’s poet­ic lan­guage, his­tor­i­cal scope, and the­mat­ic and sym­bol­ic com­plex­i­ty has led crit­ics like William Kennedy to com­pare it to the book of Gen­e­sis, and led no small num­ber of read­ers to wild­ly pre­fer it to the Bible or any oth­er ancient book of mythol­o­gy.

If you’re one of the two or three peo­ple who hasn’t read the nov­el, and you don’t find all this praise ful­ly con­vinc­ing, con­sid­er the case made by Fran­cis­co Díez-Buzo in the TED-Ed ani­mat­ed video above.

The sto­ry, we learn, arrived as an epiphany Mar­quez had while he and his fam­i­ly were on the road to a vaca­tion des­ti­na­tion. He turned the car around, aban­doned the trip, and start­ed writ­ing immediately—an exam­ple of the total com­mit­ment many writ­ers promise them­selves they’ll one day get around to maybe work­ing on. Eigh­teen months and many pots of cof­fee lat­er, One Hun­dred Years of Soli­tude appeared, intro­duc­ing a world­wide read­er­ship to Mar­quez, mag­i­cal real­ism, and Latin Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture, pol­i­tics, and his­to­ry.

Most every read­er now has a vol­ume of Octavio Paz or Pablo Neru­da on the shelf, and nov­els by Mar­quez, Mario Var­gas Llosa, or Isabelle Allende. Before Cien años de soledad arrived, how­ev­er, this was rarely so out­side of Span­ish-speak­ing coun­tries. The nov­el cre­at­ed a glob­al appetite for rich Latin Amer­i­can tra­di­tions of sto­ry­telling and lyri­cal poet­ry. New trans­la­tions from the region began appear­ing every­where.

Like Faulkner’s entire cor­pus com­pressed into one vol­ume, the epic tale of sev­en gen­er­a­tions of Buendías in the fic­tion­al Colom­bian town of Macon­do is vast and sprawl­ing. It “is not an easy book to read,” says Díez-Buzo. Here, as you might expect, I dis­agree. It is hard­er not to read it once you’ve picked it up. But you will need to read it again, and again, and again.

So packed is the book with detail, allu­sion, his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ence, and nar­ra­tive that you could read it for the rest of your life and nev­er exhaust its lay­ers of mean­ing. As Harold Bloom put it, “every page is rammed full of life beyond the capac­i­ty of any sin­gle read­er to absorb… There are no wast­ed sen­tences, no mere tran­si­tions, in this nov­el, and you must notice every­thing at the moment you read it.” Pablo Neru­da called it “the great­est rev­e­la­tion in the Span­ish lan­guage since Don Quixote of Cervantes”—the found­ing text of Span­ish-lan­guage lit­er­a­ture and, indeed, of the nov­el form itself.

The super­nat­ur­al and the sur­re­al suf­fuse each page, rais­ing even mun­dane encoun­ters to a myth­ic dimen­sion, stag­ing his­to­ry as time­less dra­ma, played out over and over again through each gen­er­a­tion. In each rep­e­ti­tion, fan­tas­tic and fatal changes also “pro­duce a sense of his­to­ry,” says Díez-Buzo, “as a down­ward spi­ral the char­ac­ters seem pow­er­less to escape.”

It is this his­to­ry that Mar­quez described, when he accept­ed the Nobel Prize in 1982, as “a bound­less realm of haunt­ed men and his­toric women, whose unend­ing obsti­na­cy blurs into leg­end.” Marquez’s own fam­i­ly his­to­ry, full of “haunt­ed men and his­toric women,” served as a mod­el for his suc­ces­sion of fic­tion­al ances­tors. Latin Amer­i­cans, he said, “have not had a moment’s rest,” yet in the face of colo­nial­ist bru­tal­i­ty, civ­il war, dic­ta­tor­ships, “oppres­sion, plun­der­ing and aban­don­ment,” he declared, “we respond with life.” By some strange act of mag­ic, Mar­quez con­tained all of that life in one extra­or­di­nary nov­el.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez’s Extra­or­di­nary Nobel Prize Accep­tance Speech, “The Soli­tude Of Latin Amer­i­ca,” in Eng­lish & Span­ish (1982)

New Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez Dig­i­tal Archive Fea­tures More Than 27,000 Dig­i­tized Let­ters, Man­u­script Pages, Pho­tos & More

Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez Describes the Cul­tur­al Mer­its of Soap Operas, and Even Wrote a Script for One

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

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Discover “Journey of the Universe,” a Multimedia Project That Explores Humanity’s Place in the Epic History of the Cosmos

in Astronomy, Books, History | September 5th, 2018

Today we know what no pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion knew: the his­to­ry of the uni­verse and of the unfold­ing of life on Earth. Through the aston­ish­ing achieve­ments of nat­ur­al sci­en­tists world­wide, we now have a detailed account of how galax­ies and stars, plan­ets and liv­ing organ­isms, human beings and human con­scious­ness came to be.

With this knowl­edge, the ques­tion of what role we play in the 14-bil­lion-year his­to­ry of the uni­verse impos­es itself with greater poignan­cy than ever before. In ask­ing our­selves how we will tell the sto­ry of Earth to our chil­dren, we must inevitably con­sid­er the role of human­i­ty in its his­to­ry, and how we con­nect with the intri­cate web of life on Earth.

In Jour­ney of the Uni­verse–a mul­ti­me­dia edu­ca­tion­al project that fea­tures a book, film and free online courses–evolutionary philoso­pher Bri­an Thomas Swimme and his­to­ri­an of reli­gions Mary Eve­lyn Tuck­er pro­vide an ele­gant, sci­ence-based nar­ra­tive to tell this epic sto­ry, lead­ing up to the chal­lenges of our present moment. The authors describe the ori­gins of humans on Earth, how we devel­oped a sym­bol­ic con­scious­ness, and how our abil­i­ty to com­mu­ni­cate using sym­bols make humans a “plan­e­tary pres­ence.”

We are now faced with a new dynamic—one where the sur­vival of the species and entire ecosys­tems depend pri­mar­i­ly on human activ­i­ty, and the choic­es humans make.

Weav­ing togeth­er the find­ings of mod­ern sci­ence togeth­er with endur­ing wis­dom found in the human­is­tic tra­di­tions of the West, Asia, and indige­nous peo­ples, the authors explore cos­mic evo­lu­tion as a pro­found­ly won­drous process based on cre­ativ­i­ty, con­nec­tion, and inter­de­pen­dence, and they envi­sion an unprece­dent­ed oppor­tu­ni­ty for the world’s peo­ple to address the daunt­ing eco­log­i­cal and social chal­lenges of our times.

Devel­oped over sev­er­al decades, and inspired by the authors’ long col­lab­o­ra­tion with Thomas Berry, Jour­ney of the Uni­verse boasts an impres­sive ros­ter of sci­ence advi­sors includ­ing Ursu­la Good­e­nough, Craig Kochel, and Ter­ry Dea­con.

Jour­ney of the Uni­verse is a mul­ti­me­dia edu­ca­tion­al project that includes:

1.) The Jour­ney of the Uni­verse: A Sto­ry for Our Time Spe­cial­iza­tion avail­able on Cours­era, cre­at­ed by Yale.  This is a col­lec­tion of three Mas­sive Online Open Cours­es that take stu­dents through the sci­en­tif­ic and cul­tur­al cos­mol­o­gy found through­out Jour­ney of the Uni­verse, as well as deep into its lin­eage with cul­tur­al his­to­ri­an and cos­mol­o­gist Thomas Berry:

Course 1: Jour­ney of the Uni­verse: The Unfold­ing of Life

Course 2: Jour­ney of the Uni­verse: Weav­ing Knowl­edge and Action

Course 3: The World­view of Thomas Berry: The Flour­ish­ing of the Earth Com­mu­ni­ty

2) The Jour­ney of the Uni­verse Film, win­ner of the 2012 San Francisco/Northern Cal­i­for­nia Emmy® Award for best doc­u­men­tary. You can watch the trail­er for the film above

3) The Jour­ney of the Uni­verse Book, pub­lished by Yale Uni­ver­si­ty Press. Trans­lat­ed into French, Ital­ian, Span­ish, Ger­man, Turk­ish, Chi­nese, Kore­an, Indone­sian.

4) The Jour­ney of the Uni­verse Con­ver­sa­tion Series, a twen­ty-part edu­ca­tion­al series inte­grates the per­spec­tives of the sci­ences and the human­i­ties into a retelling of our 13.7 bil­lion year sto­ry. In a series of one-on-one inter­views, sci­en­tists, his­to­ri­ans, and envi­ron­men­tal­ists explore the unfold­ing sto­ry of the uni­verse and Earth and the role of the human in respond­ing to our present chal­lenges.

Devin O’Dea lives in San Fran­cis­co where he serves as the man­ag­er of the Jour­ney of the Uni­verse project: a col­lab­o­ra­tive, mul­ti­me­dia con­ver­sa­tion that draws togeth­er sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­er­ies with human­is­tic insights con­cern­ing the nature of the uni­verse.  Devin wel­comes all inter­ests and feed­back to Jour­ney mate­ri­als at devin@journeyoftheuniverse.org.

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