A Modern Drummer Plays a Rock Gong, a Percussion Instrument from Prehistoric Times

in History, Music | August 8th, 2018

Rock Gong. It sounds like a B‑52s song. But a rock gong is not a New Wave surf-rock par­ty groove. It’s not a neo-syn­th­pop act, hip hop group, or indie band (not yet). It’s a pre­his­toric instrument—as far away in time as one can get from syn­the­siz­ers and elec­tric gui­tars. Rock gongs are ancient, maybe as old as humankind. But they’re still groovy, in their way. As they say, the groove is in the play­er, not the instru­ment.

Rock gongs, or “litho­phones,” if you want to get tech­ni­cal, have been found all over the African con­ti­nent, in South Amer­i­ca, Aus­tralia, Azer­bai­jan, Eng­land, Hawaii, Ice­land, India, and every­where else pre­his­toric peo­ple lived. Not the cul­tur­al prop­er­ty of any one group, the rock gong came, rather, from a uni­ver­sal human insight into the nat­ur­al son­ic prop­er­ties of stone. (One the­o­ry even spec­u­lates that Stone­henge might have been a mas­sive col­lec­tion of rock gongs.)

Though some schol­ars have sug­gest­ed that the term “rock gong” should be reserved for sta­tion­ary, rather than portable, rocks that were used as instru­ments, the British Muse­um seems untrou­bled by the dis­tinc­tion. In the video above, archae­ol­o­gist Cor­nelia Kleinitz explains the prin­ci­ples of rock gongs found in Sudan to mod­ern rock drum­mer Liam Williamson of the band Cats on the Beach.

You can hear one of those Nubian rock gongs in its nat­ur­al habi­tat, before it was moved to the British Muse­um, in the clip just above. The rock, the nar­ra­tor tells us, has been “worn smooth by the action of peo­ple play­ing it more than 7,000 years ago. Long before the Romans, long before the Pharaohs.” Ear­ly humans would have searched long and hard for rocks that res­onat­ed at par­tic­u­lar fre­quen­cies, for ring­ing rocks that could be com­bined into scales for ear­ly xylo­phones or pro­duce a vari­ety of tones like a steel drum.

Despite their antiq­ui­ty, the study of rock gongs is a rather recent phe­nom­e­non, part of the emerg­ing field of archaeoa­coustics. “Method­olog­i­cal­ly,” write the authors of a 2016 paper on the sub­ject, “this field of research is still  in its infan­cy,” and there is much researchers do not know about the uses and vari­eties of rock gongs around the world. As Kleinitz explains to Williamson in the video at the top, archae­ol­o­gists are try­ing to under­stand the con­text in which the Nubian gongs at the British Muse­um would have been played, whether as instru­ments for rit­u­als, sig­nal­ing, fun, or all of the above.

As for the tech­niques involved in rock gong play­ing, we can only guess, but Williamson does his best to adapt his drum chops to the ancient stone kit. One crit­i­cal dif­fer­ence between our mod­ern human musi­cal instru­ments and this ancient kind, Kleinitz notes, is that the lat­ter were inte­grat­ed into the land­scape; their dis­tinc­tive sound depend­ed not only on the rock itself, but on its inter­ac­tion with the wild and unpre­dictable envi­ron­ment around it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear a 9,000 Year Old Flute—the World’s Old­est Playable Instrument—Get Played Again

What Did Ancient Greek Music Sound Like?: Lis­ten to a Recon­struc­tion That’s ‘100% Accu­rate’

Vis­it an Online Col­lec­tion of 61,761 Musi­cal Instru­ments from Across the World

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

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Meet Ellen Rubin (aka The Popuplady) and Her Collection of 9,000 Pop-Up Books

in Art, Books, Design, History | August 2nd, 2018

It’s unusu­al to encounter a pop-up book for sale in a thrift store.

Their enthu­si­as­tic child own­ers tend to work them so hard, that even­tu­al­ly even sen­ti­men­tal val­ue is trashed.

Stuck slid­er bars and torn flaps scotch the ele­ment of sur­prise.

Scenes that once sprang to crisp atten­tion can bare­ly man­age a flac­cid 45° angle.

One good yank and Cinderella’s coach gives way for­ev­er, leav­ing an unsight­ly crust of dried glue.

Their nat­ur­al ten­den­cy toward obso­les­cence only serves to make author Ellen G. K. Rubin’s inter­na­tion­al col­lec­tion of more than 9000 pop-up and move­able books all the more aston­ish­ing.

The Popuplady—an hon­orif­ic she sports with pride—would like to cor­rect three com­mon­ly held beliefs about the objects of her high­ly spe­cial­ized exper­tise:

  1. They are not a recent phe­nom­e­non. One item in her col­lec­tion dates back to 1547.
  2. They were not orig­i­nal­ly designed for use by chil­dren (as a 1933 flip book with pho­to illus­tra­tions on how women can become bet­ter sex­u­al part­ners would seem to indi­cate.)
  3. They were once con­ceived of as excel­lent edu­ca­tion­al tools in such weighty sub­jects as math­e­mat­ics, astron­o­my, med­i­cine… and, as men­tioned above, the boudoir.

A Yale trained physician’s assis­tant, she found that her hob­by gen­er­at­ed much warmer inter­est at social events than her dai­ly toil in the area of bone mar­row trans­plants.

And while paper engi­neer­ing may not be not brain surgery, it does require high lev­els of artistry and tech­ni­cal prowess. It galls Rubin that until recent­ly, paper engi­neers went uncred­it­ed on the books they had ani­mat­ed:

Paper engi­neers are the artists who take the illus­tra­tions and make them move. They are pup­pet­mas­ters, but they hand the strings to us, the read­er.

As seen in Atlas Obscu­ra’s video, above, Rubin’s col­lec­tion includes a mov­ing postage stamp, a num­ber of wheel-shaped volvelles, and a one-of-a-kind ele­phant-themed mini-book her friend, paper engi­neer, Edward H. Hutchins, cre­at­ed from ele­phant dung paper she found on safari.

She has curat­ed or served as con­sul­tant for a num­ber of pop-up exhi­bi­tions at venues includ­ing the Brook­lyn Pub­lic Library, the Biennes Cen­ter of the Lit­er­ary Arts and the Smithsonian’s Nation­al Muse­um of Amer­i­can His­to­ry. See a few more exam­ples from her col­lec­tion, which were dis­played as part of the latter’s Paper Engi­neer­ing: Fold, Pull, Pop & Turn exhi­bi­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Raven: a Pop-up Book Brings Edgar Allan Poe’s Clas­sic Super­nat­ur­al Poem to 3D Paper Life

French Book­store Blends Real People’s Faces with Book Cov­er Art

Won­der­ful­ly Weird & Inge­nious Medieval Books

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

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Watch the First “Interactive” TV Show: Winky Dink and You Encouraged Kids to Draw on the Screen (1953)

in History, Television | August 2nd, 2018

Near­ly every­one born with­in the past fif­teen years nat­u­ral­ly thinks of screens as both touch­able and respon­sive to touch. But smart­phones, tablets, and the oth­er devices those kids have nev­er known a world with­out will always look like tech­no­log­i­cal mar­vels to their grand­par­ents’ gen­er­a­tion. Grow­ing up in the 1950s as part of one of tele­vi­sion’s most enthu­si­as­tic view­er­ships, they expe­ri­enced the rise of that then-mar­velous medi­um and the var­i­ous con­cepts it tried out before set­tling into con­ven­tion. Some may even remem­ber hap­py Sat­ur­day morn­ings with CBS’ Winky Dink and You, the show that they did­n’t just watch but actu­al­ly “inter­act­ed” with by break­ing out their crayons and draw­ing on the screen.

First aired in 1953, Winky Dink and You came host­ed by Jack Bar­ry, a famous tele­vi­sion per­son­al­i­ty since the begin­ning of tele­vi­sion broad­cast­ing. (He would remain so until his death in the mid-1980s, hav­ing bounced back from the quiz show scan­dals of the lat­er 1950s.) His ani­mat­ed side­kick, the tit­u­lar Winky Dink, was voiced by Mae Ques­tel, best known as the voice of Bet­ty Boop and Olive Oyl. “Winky Dink said he want­ed the chil­dren to mail away for a ‘Mag­ic Win­dow,’ which was actu­al­ly a cheap­ly pro­duced, thin sheet of plas­tic that adhered to the TV screen by sta­t­ic elec­tric­i­ty,” writes Winky Dink-gen­er­a­tion colum­nist Bob Greene. “Along with the plas­tic sheet that arrived in the mail were ‘mag­ic crayons.’ Chil­dren were encour­aged to place the sheet on their TV screen and watch the show each Sat­ur­day, so that Winky Dink could tell them what to do.”

Winky Dink, and Bar­ry, often told them to draw in the miss­ing parts of a pic­ture, or to con­nect dots that would reveal a cod­ed mes­sage. In the episode above, writes Pale­o­fu­ture’s Matt Novak, Bar­ry invites kids to “draw things on Winky Dink’s fam­i­ly mem­bers, like flow­ers on the but­ton hole of Uncle Slim’s jack­et, or an entire­ly new nose on the old guy. Uncle Slim sneezes in reac­tion to get­ting a nose drawn on his face, as you might expect” — by the stan­dards of 1950s chil­dren’s pro­gram­ming, “com­e­dy gold.” Dull though it may sound today, Winky Dink and You dates from an era when tele­vi­sion “was still seen as an edu­ca­tion force for good,” when “Amer­i­cans weren’t quite jad­ed enough to believe TV was a pas­sive tech­nol­o­gy that didn’t actu­al­ly stim­u­late the mind.”

And though the show man­aged to move two mil­lion mag­ic screens, con­cerns about X‑rays ema­nat­ing from pic­ture tubes (as well as the like­li­hood of impa­tient kids draw­ing right on the glass) end­ed its run in 1957. But in a sense, its lega­cy lives on: a much-cir­cu­lat­ed quote attrib­uted to Bill Gates describes Winky Dink and You “the first inter­ac­tive TV show,” and it does indeed seem to have pio­neered a kind of con­tent that has only in recent years reached full tech­no­log­i­cal pos­si­bil­i­ty. Any­one who has watched young chil­dren of the 21st cen­tu­ry play on smart­phones and tablets will notice a strik­ing resem­blance to the activ­i­ties led by Winky Dink and Bar­ry. Dif­fer­ent reboots have been attempt­ed in dif­fer­ent eras, but has the time come for a Winky Dink and You app?

(via Pale­o­fu­ture)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Duck and Cov­er: The 1950s Film That Taught Mil­lions of School­child­ren How to Sur­vive a Nuclear Bomb

1950 Super­man Poster Urged Kids to Defend All Amer­i­cans, Regard­less of Their Race, Reli­gion or Nation­al Ori­gin

1950s Bat­man Car­toon Tells Kids: “Don’t Believe Those Crack­pot Lies About Peo­ple Who Wor­ship Dif­fer­ent­ly”

Did Stan­ley Kubrick Invent the iPad in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Before Mad Men: Famil­iar and For­got­ten Ads from 1950s to 1980s Now Online

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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Who Was Joan Vollmer, the Wife William Burroughs Allegedly Shot While Playing William Tell?

in History, Literature | July 26th, 2018

Pop­u­lar cul­ture knows William S. Bur­roughs pri­mar­i­ly for three of the things he did in life: using drugs, writ­ing Naked Lunch, and killing his wife. If pop­u­lar cul­ture remem­bers that wife, Joan Vollmer, it most­ly remem­bers her for the man­ner of her death: shot, they say, as a result of Bur­roughs’ drunk­en imi­ta­tion of William Tell. But in life she played an impor­tant role in the intel­lec­tu­al devel­op­ment of not just Bur­roughs but oth­er major Beat writ­ers as well, includ­ing Allen Gins­berg and Jack Ker­ouac. As Bren­da Knight writes in Women of the Beat Gen­er­a­tion, Vollmer “was sem­i­nal in the cre­ation of the Beat rev­o­lu­tion; indeed the fires that stoked the Beat engine were start­ed with Joan as patron and muse.”

When her first hus­band Paul Adams was draft­ed into World War II, Vollmer moved in with her fel­low future woman of the Beat Gen­er­a­tion, and future wife of Jack Ker­ouac, Edie Park­er. Into their series of Upper West Side apart­ments came a wide vari­ety of sub­stance-abus­ing artists, Bur­roughs, Ker­ouac, and Gins­berg includ­ed. Vollmer’s new coterie, as well as her own amphet­a­mine addic­tion, so appalled Adams that he left her upon his return from the mil­i­tary. She took up with Bur­roughs in 1946, lat­er becom­ing his com­mon-law wife and the moth­er of their child, William Bur­roughs, Jr.. In seem­ing­ly con­stant flight from the law, they moved from New York to Texas to New Orleans to Mex­i­co City, where the fate­ful game of William Tell would hap­pen in 1951.

But did that game of William Tell hap­pen? His­to­ry has record­ed that Vollmer did indeed die by gun­shot, but as to exact­ly how or why it hap­pened, nobody quite knows. Hence the inves­ti­ga­tions that aca­d­e­mics, Beat Gen­er­a­tion enthu­si­asts, and oth­ers have con­duct­ed since. The Bur­roughs-themed site Real­i­tyS­tu­dio has one page on Bur­roughs and the William Tell Leg­end and anoth­er gath­er­ing doc­u­ments on the death of Joan Vollmer. You can get fur­ther in depth by read­ing “The Death of Joan Vollmer Bur­roughs: What Real­ly Hap­pened?”, a 70-page research paper by James Grauer­holz, Bur­roughs’ biog­ra­ph­er and the execu­tor of his lit­er­ary estate.

Despite his con­sid­er­able inter­est in Bur­roughs, Grauer­holz does­n’t show an out­sized inter­est in absolv­ing the writer of his crime. But he does know more than enough to cast doubt on, or at least add nuance to, the sim­ple sto­ry every­one “knows.” Bur­roughs him­self, though he gave con­tra­dic­to­ry accounts of the event at dif­fer­ent times, nev­er denied shoot­ing Vollmer. He did, how­ev­er, blame a kind of demon­ic pos­ses­sion for it: “I am forced to the appalling con­clu­sion that I would have nev­er become a writer but for Joan’s death,”  he wrote in the intro­duc­tion to a 1985 edi­tion of his nov­el Queer. “I live with the con­stant threat of pos­ses­sion, and a con­stant need to escape from pos­ses­sion, from Con­trol.”

Vollmer’s death, in Bur­roughs’ view, “brought me in con­tact with the invad­er, the Ugly Spir­it, and maneu­vered me into a life long strug­gle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.” Sound like self-jus­ti­fi­ca­tion though that may, the fact remains that Bur­roughs’ life freight­ed him with plen­ty of con­di­tions to write his way out of. It also went on for 46 years after the end of Vollmer’s which, though short, saw her become, as Knight writes, “the whet­stone against which the main Beat writ­ers — Allen, Jack, and Bill — sharp­ened their intel­lect. Wide­ly con­sid­ered one of the most per­cep­tive peo­ple in the group, her strong mind and inde­pen­dent nature helped bull­doze the Beats toward a new sen­si­bil­i­ty.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William S. Bur­roughs Reads & Sings His Exper­i­men­tal Prose in a Big, Free 7‑Hour Playlist

How William S. Bur­roughs Embraced, Then Reject­ed Sci­en­tol­ogy, Forc­ing L. Ron Hub­bard to Come to Its Defense (1959–1970)

How William S. Bur­roughs Used the Cut-Up Tech­nique to Shut Down London’s First Espres­so Bar (1972)

How to Jump­start Your Cre­ative Process with William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Tech­nique

Hear a Great Radio Doc­u­men­tary on William S. Bur­roughs Nar­rat­ed by Iggy Pop

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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Watch the Original TV Coverage of the Historic Apollo 11 Moon Landing: Recorded on July 20, 1969

in History, Science, Television | July 24th, 2018

Dur­ing a recent din­ner a few friends and I found our­selves rem­i­nisc­ing about for­ma­tive moments in our col­lec­tive youth. The con­ver­sa­tion took a decid­ed­ly down­beat turn when a nation­al­ly tele­vised moment we all remem­bered all too well came up: the 1986 explo­sion of the space shut­tle Chal­lenger. Like mil­lions of oth­er schoolkids at the time we had been glued to the live broad­cast, and became wit­ness­es to hor­ror. “It was NASA’s dark­est tragedy,” writes Eliz­a­beth How­ell at Space.com, an acci­dent that “changed the space pro­gram for­ev­er.”

The con­trast with our par­ents’ indeli­ble mem­o­ries of a tele­vised space broad­cast from sev­en­teen years ear­li­er could not be stark­er. On July 20, 1969, the nation wit­nessed what could eas­i­ly be called NASA’s great­est tri­umph, the Apol­lo 11 moon land­ing, which not only real­ly hap­pened, but was broad­cast live on CBS, with com­men­tary by Wal­ter Cronkite and for­mer astro­naut Wal­ly Schirra and live audio from Mis­sion Con­trol in Hous­ton and Buzz Aldrin him­self, “whose job dur­ing the land­ing,” Jason Kot­tke writes, “was to keep an eye on the LM (lunar module)’s alti­tude and speed.”

We don’t hear much from Neil Armstrong—“he’s busy fly­ing and furi­ous­ly search­ing for a suit­able land­ing site. But it’s Arm­strong that says after they land, ‘Hous­ton, Tran­quil­i­ty Base here. The Eagle has land­ed.’” Kottke’s fas­ci­nat­ing descrip­tion of the events points out details that height­en the dra­ma, such as the fact that Armstrong’s heartrate “peaked at 150 beats per minute at land­ing” (his rest­ing heartrate was 60 bpm). At around 10 min­utes to land­ing, the astro­nauts link to Mis­sion Con­trol cut out briefly, which must have been ter­ri­fy­ing.

“Then there were the inter­mit­tent 1201 and 1202 pro­gram alarms, which nei­ther the LM crew nor Hous­ton had encoun­tered in any of the train­ing sim­u­la­tions.” These turn out “to be a sim­ple case,” notes NASA, “of the com­put­er try­ing to do too many things at once.” Giv­en that the Lunar Module’s com­put­er only had 4KB of mem­o­ry, this is hard­ly a sur­prise. What is aston­ish­ing is that such a rel­a­tive­ly prim­i­tive machine could han­dle the task at all.

The film view­ers saw on their screens was not, of course, a live feed—CBS did not have cam­eras in space or on the moon—but rather an ani­ma­tion.

The CBS ani­ma­tion shows the fake LM land­ing on the fake Moon before the actu­al land­ing — when Buzz says “con­tact light” and then “engine stop”. The ani­ma­tion was based on the sched­uled land­ing time and evi­dent­ly couldn’t be adjust­ed. The sched­uled time was over­shot because of the crater and boul­ders sit­u­a­tion men­tioned above.

There were, how­ev­er, cam­eras mount­ed on the Lunar Mod­ule, and that 16mm footage of the land­ing, which you can see above, was lat­er released. And then there’s that moon walk (which real­ly hap­pened), which you can see below—blurry and indis­tinct but no less amaz­ing.

Just a lit­tle over eight years “since the flights of Gagarin and Shep­ard,” NASA writes, “fol­lowed quick­ly by Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s chal­lenge to put a man on the moon before the decade is out,” it hap­pened. Arm­strong, Aldrin, and Michael Collins land­ed on the moon. Arm­strong and Aldrin walked around and col­lect­ed sam­ples for two hours, then returned safe­ly to Earth. In a post-flight press con­fer­ence, Arm­strong called the suc­cess­ful mis­sion “a begin­ning of a new age,” and it was, though his opti­mism would seem almost quaint when a cou­ple decades lat­er, the U.S. turned its sights on weaponiz­ing space.

Read more about this extra­or­di­nary event at NASA and Kot­tke.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Daugh­ter Vivian Debunks the Age-Old Moon Land­ing Con­spir­a­cy The­o­ry

The Source Code for the Apol­lo 11 Moon Land­ing Mis­sion Is Now Free on Github

Neil Arm­strong, Buzz Aldrin & Michael Collins Go Through Cus­toms and Sign Immi­gra­tion Form After the First Moon Land­ing (1969)

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

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Rare Photos of Frida Kahlo, Age 13–23

in Art, History, Photography | July 23rd, 2018

“Before they were famous” pho­tos are a click­bait sta­ple, espe­cial­ly if they reveal a hereto­fore unseen side of some­one whose image is tight­ly con­trolled:

The smol­der­ing activist-actress-direc­tor as a gawky, open-faced sopho­more, her hair moussed to the very lim­its of her mod­el­ing school test shots?

The ris­ing polit­i­cal star, pim­ple-faced and cen­ter-part­ed, pos­ing with the oth­er three mem­bers of his high school’s Dun­geons and Drag­ons Club?

What about ever­green art star Fri­da Kahlo?

Though her hus­band, mural­ist Diego Rivera, was the one who urged her to adopt the tra­di­tion­al Tehua­na dress of their native Mex­i­co as a uni­form of sorts, Fri­da engi­neered her image by plac­ing her­self cen­ter stage in dozens of alle­gor­i­cal, inti­mate self-por­traits.

Much of her work alludes to the hor­rif­ic acci­dent she suf­fered at 18, and the tor­tu­ous treat­ments and surg­eries she under­went as a result for the rest of her life.

It shaped the way she saw her­self, and, in turn, the way we see her. Her endur­ing appeal is such that even those who aren’t over­ly famil­iar with her work feel they have a pret­ty good han­dle on her, thanks to her ubiq­ui­ty on tote­bags, appar­el, and var­i­ous gift relat­ed items—even Fri­da Kahlo action fig­ures and paper dolls.

We know this lady, right?

What a plea­sure to get to know her bet­ter. A col­lec­tion of pho­tos that has recent­ly come to light intro­duces us to a younger, more can­did Frida—both before and after the acci­dent, when she returned to her stud­ies at Nation­al Prepara­to­ry School.

Tak­en togeth­er with the por­traits made by her pho­tog­ra­ph­er father, they show ear­ly evi­dence of the force­ful per­son­al­i­ty that would dom­i­nate and define her pub­lic image, Mary Jane-style pumps with socks, a mid­dy blouse, and a vari­ety of blunt bobs aside.

Some of the lat­er pho­tos in this batch speak to her increas­ing inter­est in dis­tin­guish­ing her­self from her female peers. Her exper­i­ments in cross dress­ing ensured she would stand out in every group pho­to, a dash­ing fig­ure in suit, tie, and slicked back hair.

Though this peri­od of her life is less a mat­ter of pub­lic record, it gets its due in the 2017 graph­ic nov­el Fri­da: The Sto­ry of Her Life by Van­na Vin­ci. Some of the oth­ers in these pho­tos, includ­ing her sis­ters and her first boyfriend, Ale­jan­dro Gómez Arias, appear as char­ac­ters, as does Death in the form of print­mak­er José Guadalupe Posada’s La Calav­era Cat­ri­na—per­haps the only image for­mi­da­ble enough to hold its own against the fab­u­lous Fri­da.

Fri­da Kahlo The Sto­ry of Her Life p. 22–23

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vis­it the Largest Col­lec­tion of Fri­da Kahlo’s Work Ever Assem­bled: 800 Arti­facts from 33 Muse­ums, All Free Online

1933 Arti­cle on Fri­da Kahlo: “Wife of the Mas­ter Mur­al Painter Glee­ful­ly Dab­bles in Works of Art”

The Fri­da Kahlo Action Fig­ure

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

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Peter Jackson’s New Film on World War I Features Incredible Digitally-Restored Footage From the Front Lines: Get a Glimpse

in Education, Film, History | July 18th, 2018

Per­haps one of the most crim­i­nal­ly over­looked voic­es from World War I, Siegfried Sas­soon, was, in his time, enor­mous­ly pop­u­lar with the British read­ing pub­lic. His war poems, as Mar­garet B. McDow­ell writes in the Dic­tio­nary of Lit­er­ary Biog­ra­phy, are “harsh­ly real­is­tic laments or satires” that detail the gris­ly hor­rors of trench war­fare with unspar­ing­ly vivid images and com­men­tary. In lieu of the mass medi­um of tele­vi­sion, and with film still emerg­ing from its infan­cy, poets like Sas­soon and Wil­fred Owen served an impor­tant func­tion not only as artists but as mov­ing, first­hand doc­u­men­tar­i­ans of the war’s phys­i­cal and emo­tion­al rav­ages.

It is unfor­tu­nate that poet­ry no longer serves this pub­lic func­tion. These days, video threat­ens to eclipse even jour­nal­is­tic writ­ing as a pri­ma­ry means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, a devel­op­ment made espe­cial­ly trou­bling by how eas­i­ly dig­i­tal video can be faked or manip­u­lat­ed by the same tech­nolo­gies used to pro­duce block­buster Hol­ly­wood spec­ta­cles and video games. But a fas­ci­nat­ing new use of that tech­nol­o­gy, Peter Jack­son shows us above, will also soon bring the grainy, indis­tinct film of the past into new life, giv­ing footage of WWI the kind of star­tling imme­di­a­cy still con­veyed by Sassoon’s poet­ry.

Jack­son is cur­rent­ly at work on what he describes as “not the usu­al film that you would expect on the First World War,” and as part of that doc­u­men­tary work, he has dig­i­tal­ly enhanced footage from the peri­od, “incred­i­ble footage of which the faces of the men just jump out at you. It’s the faces, it’s the peo­ple that come to life in this film. It’s the human beings that were actu­al­ly there, that were thrust into this extra­or­di­nary sit­u­a­tion that defined their lives in many cas­es.” In addi­tion to restor­ing old film, Jack­son and his team have combed through about 600 hours of audio inter­views with WWI vet­er­ans, in order to fur­ther com­mu­ni­cate “the expe­ri­ence of what it was like to fight in this war” from the point of view of the peo­ple who fought it.

The project, com­mis­sioned by the Impe­r­i­al War Muse­ums, “will debut at the BFI Lon­don Film Fes­ti­val lat­er this year,” reports The Inde­pen­dent, “lat­er air­ing on BBC One. A copy of the film will also be giv­en to every sec­ondary school in the coun­try for the 2018 autumn term.” No word yet on where the film can be seen out­side the UK, but you can check the site 1418now.org.uk for release details. In the mean­while, con­sid­er pick­ing up some of the work of Siegfried Sas­soon, whom crit­ic Peter Levi once described as “one of the few poets of his gen­er­a­tion we are real­ly unable to do with­out.”

Learn more about the war at the free course offer­ings below.

via Twist­ed Sifter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Great War and Mod­ern Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Online Course 

The Bat­tle to Fin­ish a PhD: World War I Sol­dier Com­pletes His Dis­ser­ta­tion in the Trench­es (1916)

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

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Archaeologists Think They’ve Discovered the Oldest Greek Copy of Homer’s Odyssey: 13 Verses on a Clay Tablet

in History, Literature | July 13th, 2018

The Home­r­ic epics are thought to have been com­posed in the 8th cen­tu­ry BCE. In the case of these ancient poems, how­ev­er, “com­posed” is a very ambigu­ous term. While archae­o­log­i­cal and lin­guis­tic research dates Homer’s ver­sions of the poems to some­where between 650 and 750, BCE., a schol­ar­ly con­sen­sus agrees these tales exist­ed hun­dreds of years before, in oral form, trans­mit­ted by wan­der­ing bards and mod­i­fied often in the telling. While they are thought to have been writ­ten down in Homer’s age, “any glimpse into Homer before medieval times is rare,” notes the Smith­son­ian, “and any insight into the com­po­si­tion of the epics is pre­cious.”

Before the medieval man­u­script tra­di­tion, begin­ning in the 10th cen­tu­ry CE, the largest extant copies of the Ili­ad and Odyssey come from what is known as the “Home­r­ic papyri,” frag­ments such as the Bankes Papyrus dis­cov­ered in Egypt in the 19th cen­tu­ry. Now, it’s being report­ed in news sites all over the web that the old­est writ­ten copy of the Odyssey has been found—or rather 13 vers­es of it, carved into a clay tablet and dis­cov­ered in the ancient city of Olympia in south­ern Greece. While the dat­ing has not been ful­ly con­firmed, experts believe the arti­fact comes from the Roman era, some­time before the 3rd cen­tu­ry CE.

While the dis­cov­ery may be sig­nif­i­cant, we should be care­ful to qual­i­fy the many claims made for its sta­tus. Like the poem itself, the sto­ry of this dis­cov­ery has seemed to change in its retellings. The tablet is the old­est find in Greece, not in the world. “Find­ing a bit of Homer in home soil,” says Mal­colm Heath, pro­fes­sor of Greek lan­guage and lit­er­a­ture at Leeds Uni­ver­si­ty, “will obvi­ous­ly give the Greeks a warm glow.” But, as The Times reports, “the ear­li­est sur­viv­ing frag­ments of the Odyssey” are actu­al­ly “bits of graf­fi­ti scratched into clay by school­boys at Olbia on the Black Sea coast of what is now Ukraine.” These frag­ments are “at least 600 years old­er than the Olympia tablet.”

Fur­ther­more, the Der­veni papyrus, dis­cov­ered in Egypt, which may include a quote from the poem, has been dat­ed as far back as 340 BCE. Nonethe­less, the new dis­cov­ery is still unusu­al, not only for its place of ori­gin, but also because of the medi­um. As Cam­bridge University’s Tim Whit­marsh notes, “It’s rare to find con­tin­u­ous text of Homer writ­ten out at such length in clay.” The tablet includes a notable word sub­sti­tu­tion that will cer­tain­ly be of inter­est to schol­ars, par­tic­u­lar­ly those at work on the “Homer Mul­ti­text project.”

That project, Smith­son­ian writes, is gath­er­ing all the frag­ments togeth­er “so they can be com­pared and put in sequence to pro­vide a broad­er view of Homer’s epics.” A view that shows us, as the project explains, “that there is not one orig­i­nal text that we should try to recon­struct,” but rather an unknown num­ber of vari­a­tions, tran­scribed and altered over the course of hun­dreds of years and scat­tered all over the ancient world. All of these frag­ments are fas­ci­nat­ing exam­ples, writes Sci­ence Alert, “of the way writ­ten texts can sur­vive through the cen­turies, or even mil­len­nia,” just as the sto­ry itself shows how oral tra­di­tions can sur­vive just as long with­out any need for writ­ten lan­guage at all.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

One of the Best Pre­served Ancient Man­u­scripts of The Ili­ad Is Now Dig­i­tized: See the “Bankes Homer” Man­u­script in High Res­o­lu­tion (Cir­ca 150 C.E.)

See The Ili­ad Per­formed as a One-Woman Show in a Mon­tre­al Bar by McGill Uni­ver­si­ty Clas­sics Pro­fes­sor Lynn Kozak

Emi­ly Wil­son Is the First Woman to Trans­late Homer’s Odyssey into Eng­lish: The New Trans­la­tion Is Out Today

Hear What Homer’s Odyssey Sound­ed Like When Sung in the Orig­i­nal Ancient Greek

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

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