Javier Jensen, an artist living down in Santiago, Chile, has breathed a little life into some beloved book covers. And when I say little, I mean little. His animated touches are nicely understated, hardly distracting from the original cover designs.
Every year for the past decade or so, we‘ve seen new, dire pronouncements of the death of print, along with new, upbeat rejoinders. This year is no different, though the prognosis has seemed especially positive of late in robust appraisals of the situation from entities as divergent as The Onion’s A.V. Club and financial giant Deloitte. I, for one, find this encouraging. And yet, even if all printed media were in decline, it would still be the case that the history of the modern world will mostly be told in the history of print. And ironically, it is online media that has most enabled the means to make that history available to everyone, in digital archives that won’t age or burn down.
One such archive, the British Library’s Flickr Commons project, contains over one million images from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. As the Library wrote in their announcement of these images’ release, they cover “a startling mix of subjects. There are maps, geological diagrams, beautiful illustrations, comical satire, illuminated and decorative letters, colourful illustrations, landscapes, wall-paintings and so much more that even we are not aware of.” Microsoft digitized the books represented here, and then donated them to the Library for release into the Public Domain.
One of the quirky features of this decidedly quirky assemblage is the Mechanical Curator, a bot-run blog that generates “randomly selected small illustrations and ornamentations, posted on the hour.” At the time of writing, it has given us an ad for the rather culturally dated artifact “Oriental Tooth Paste,” a product “prepared by Jewsbury & Brown.” Many of the other selections have considerably less frisson. Nonetheless, writes the Library, often “our newest colleague,” the Mechanical Curator, “plucks from obscurity, places all before you, and leaves you to work out the rest. Or not.”
Speaking of commerce, we also have an album devoted to advertisements, found by the community from, yes, the Mechanical Curator Collection. Here you will discover ads like “Oriental Tooth Paste” or that below for “Gentlemen’s & Boy’s Clothing 25 Per Cent. Under Usual London Prices” from 1894. Our conception of Victorian England as excessively formal gets confirmed again and again in these ads, which, like the random choice at the top of the post, contain their share of awkward or humorous historical notions.
Doubtless none of the proto-Mad Men of these very English publications foresaw such a marvel as the Mechanical Curator. Much less might they have foreseen such a mechanism arising without a monetizing scheme. But thanks to this free, newfangled algorithm’s efforts, and much assistance from “the community,” we have a digital record that shows us how public discourse shaped print culture, or the other way around. A fascinating, and at times bewildering, feature of this phenomenal archive is the requirement that we ourselves supply most of the cultural context for these austerely presented images.
The tale of an ailing New York-based playwright’s unwilling return to his ancestral home is a natural fit for Colbert, raised in Charleston, South Carolina by Northern parents. Recorded at the behest of Selected Shorts, a public radio program wherein well known performers interpret contemporary and classic short fiction, the story—hand picked by Colbert—is a risky choice for 2015.
Like all of O’Connor’s work, it’s darkly comedic, and rife with rich characterizations. It also makes repeated reference to “Negroes,” two of whom the reader—in Colbert’s case, a white man—is tasked with bringing to life. In this current climate, I suspect most white comedians would’ve played it safe with O’Connor’s lurid crowd pleaser, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” a staple of high school reading lists, which you can hear O’Connor, herself, read here.
Colbert sails through by bringing his Northwestern University theater training to bear. (O’Connor was a favorite of the Performance Studies department during his time there.)
Having spent years embodying a right wing windbag on his satirical Colbert Report, the comedian clearly relishes the opportunity to tackle a variety of roles, including the main character’s willfully superficial mother, his sour sister, and the aforementioned pre-Civil Rights-era African-American men, workers in the hero’s mother’s dairy barn. The Catholic Colbert also has fun with an unexpectedly less-than-erudite Jesuit priest.
As for O’Connor, she gets in a not-so-subtle jab at Gone with the Wind, as well as the sort of reader who, trying to be helpful, counsels an aspirant Southern writer to “put the War in there.”
Something tells me these two would have hit it off…I would’ve loved to hear him interview her along with George Clooney, Amy Schumer, and other first week guests.
I want their minds to be blown the way mine was at 15, when I picked up Slapstick, his 8th novel, for reasons I no longer remember. It wasn’t on recommendation of some beloved teacher, nor was there any Vonnegut on our home shelves, despite the fact that he was a local author. Whatever drew me to that book, thank god it did. It was the beginning of a lifelong romance.
What grabbed me so? His genius idea for bestowing an artificial extended family on every citizen, via the assignment of middle names:
I told him, ‘your new middle name would consist of a noun, the name of a flower or fruit or nut or vegetable or legume, or a bird or a reptile or a fish, or a mollusk, or a gem or a mineral or a chemical element — connected by a hyphen to a number between one and twenty.’ I asked him what his name was at the present time.
‘Elmer Glenville Grasso,’ he said.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘you might become Elmer Uranium‑3 Grasso, say. Everybody with Uranium as a part of their middle name would be your cousin.’
This held enormous appeal for me as the only child of an only child. Lonesome No More!
It also contained the most wonderful profanity I had ever heard:
You ask him his middle name, and when he tells you “Oyster-19” or “Chickadee‑1” or “Hollyhock-13” you say to him: Buster — I happen to be a Uranium‑3. You have one hundred and ninety thousand cousins and ten thousand brothers and sisters. You’re not exactly alone in this world. I have relatives of my own to look after. So why don’t you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don’t you take a flying fuck at the moooooooooooon?
Imagine my dismay when just two books later, Vonnegut gave Slapstick the lowest possible mark in a literary self evaluation published in Palm Sunday, below.
He wasn’t describing the difference between a B and a B+. In Vonnegut’s mind, Slapstick was a D. In other words, a minimally acceptable, deeply below average performance.
He later reflected to journalist Charlie Rose that he’d been overly hard on the title. But the critics had trashed it when it first appeared, and presumably critics knew best. So much for Vonnegut the rebel and class clown. This was a clear case of give the teacher the answer you think she wants.
I give it an A+, and so would you, if you’d discovered it when I did.
How about you? Any marks you’d change on Vonnegut’s report card?
People come to know the world the way they come to map it—through their perceptions of how its elements are connected and of how they should move among them. This is precisely what the series is attempting by situating the map at the heart of cultural life and revealing its relationship to society, science, and religion…. It is trying to define a new set of relationships between maps and the physical world that involve more than geometric correspondence. It is in essence a new map of human attempts to chart the world.
If you head over to this page, then look in the upper left, you will see links to three volumes (available in a free PDF format). My suggestion would be to look at the gallery of color illustrations for each book, links to which you’ll find below. The image above, appearing in Vol. 2, dates back to 1534. It was created by Oronce Fine, the first chair of mathematics in the Collège Royal (aka the Collège de France), and it features the world mapped in the shape of a heart. Pretty great.
Last month, we featured poet, professor, and WFMU radio host Kenneth Goldsmith singing the theory of Theodor Adorno, Sigmund Freud, and Ludwig Wittgenstein — heavy reading, to be sure, but therein lay the appeal. How differently do we approach these formidable theoretical texts, Goldsmith’s project implicitly asks, if we receive them not just aurally rather than textually, but also in a light — not to say goofy — musical arrangement? But if it should drain you to think about questions like that, even as you absorb the thought of the likes of Adorno, Freud, and Wittgenstein, might we suggest Kenneth Goldsmith singing Harry Potter?
Perhaps the best-known modern exemplar of “light reading” we have, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books present themselves as ripe for adaptation, most notably in the form of those eight big-budget films released between 2001 and 2011. On the other end of the spectrum, with evidently no budget at all, comes Goldsmith’s 30-minute adaptation, which you can hear just above, or along with his various other sung texts at Pennsound. Here he sings, with ever-shifting musical accompaniment and through some otherworldly voice processing, what sounds like the final novel in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
“She tells a good story” — thus has every adult Harry Potter-reader I know explained the appeal of Rowling’s children’s novels even outside of the children’s demographic, especially as they awaited Deathly Hallows’ release in 2007. Having never dipped into the well myself, I couldn’t say for sure, but to my mind, if she tells a good enough story, that story will survive no matter the form into which you transpose it. The Potter faithful hold a variety of opinions about the degree of justice each movie does to their favorite novels, and even about the voice that reads them aloud in audiobook form, but what on Earth will they think of Goldsmith’s idiosyncratic rendition?
Update: Kenneth shot us an email a few minutes ago and filled out the backstory on this recording. Turns out the story is even more colorful than we first thought. He writes: “I was a DJ on WFMU from 1995–2010. In 2007, J.K. Rowling released the seventh and final Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Prior to the book’s release the day I went on the air at WFMU, someone had leaked a copy to the internet, enraging Scholastic Books, who threatened anybody distributing it with a heavy lawsuit. I printed out and sang in my horrible voice the very last chapter of the book on the air, thereby spoiling the finale of the series for anyone listening. During my show, the station received an angry call from Scholastic Books. It appears that their whole office was listening to WFMU that afternoon. Nothing ever came of it.”
Most of us have internalized the content of a fair few of Aesop’s fables but have long since forgotten the source — if, indeed, we read it close to the source in the first place. Whether or not we’ve had any real awareness of the ancient Greek storyteller himself, we’ve certainly encountered his stories in countless much more recent interpretations over the decades. My personal favorite renditions came, skewed, in the form of the “Aesop and Son” segments on Rocky and Bullwinkle, but this 1925 Japanese edition of Aesop’s Fables, illustrated by hugely respected children’s artist Takeo Takei, must certainly rank in the same league.
Takei began his career in the early 1920s, illustrating children’s magazine covers, collections of Japanese folktales and original stories, and even youngster-oriented writings of his own. Even in that early period, he showed a professional interest in giving new aesthetic life to not just old stories but old non-Japanese stories, such as The Thousand and One Nights and Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. It was during that time that he took on the challenge of putting his own aesthetic stamp on Aesop.
You can see quite a few of Takei’s Aesop illustrations at the book design and illustration site 50watts, whose author notes that he found the images in the database of Japan’s National Diet Library. Even if you can’t read the Japanese, you’ll know the fables in question — “The Tortoise and the Hare,” “The North Wind and the Sun,” “The Wolf and the Crane” — after nothing more than a glance at Takei’s lively artwork, which takes Aesop’s well-known characters (often animals or natural forces personified) and dresses them up in the natty style of jazz-age Tokyo high society.
Takei would go on to enjoy a long career after illustrating Aesop’s Fables. A decade after its publication, he would begin producing his best-known series of works, the “kampon” (in Japanese, “published book”). With these 138 volumes, he explored the form of the illustrated children’s book in every way he possibly could, using, according to rarebook.com, “traditional methods of letterpress, woodblock, wood engraving, stencil, etching and lithography,” as well as clay block-prints and “definitely non-traditional images of woven labels, painted glass, ceramic, and cello-slides — transparencies composed of bright cellophane paper.” He would continue working working right up until his death in 1983, leaving a legacy of influence on Japanese visual culture as deep as the one Aesop left on storytelling.
Just yesterday we were musing on perusing rock stars’ bookshelves, and today we learn it has become a reality, if you live in London. Polymath and all-around swell person David Byrne opened the 22nd annual Meltdown Festival this last Monday, and in the spirit of London’s Poetry Library (which is hosting this part of the event), the former Talking Heads frontman has shipped over 250 books to stock his own lending library for the duration of the festival, until August 30.
In his Guardian essay explaining his decision to let you rifle through his collection of music books—some of which were used as research for his own How Music Works—Byrne waxes about the library he loved in his teenage years in suburban Baltimore:
We were desperate to know what was going on in the cool places, and, given some suggestions and direction, the library was one place where that wider exciting world became available. In my little town, the library also had vinyl that one could check out and I discovered avant-garde composers such as Xenakis and Messiaen, folk music from various parts of the world and even some pop records that weren’t getting much radio play in Baltimore. It was truly a formative place.
Byrne has set up a free-to-borrow system with a credit card on file just in case you abscond with the book, although he does admit it may happen and “so be it.” There’s also an added thrill:
Some of my books may have highlighted bits or notes scrawled in the margins. I hope nothing embarrassing.
Byrne’s programming for the Meltdown Festival can be seen here. Highlights include an a cappella workshop by Petra Haden, a showing of There Will Be Blood with live score by Jonny Greenwood and the London Contemporary Orchestra, the reappearance of Young Marble Giants, Young Jean Lee’s band Future Wife performing We’re Gonna Die with David Byrne as special guest; and many other selections of “Things David Thinks You Should Hear.”
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
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