When Franz Kafka Invented the Answering Machine (1913)

in History, Literature, Technology | November 10th, 2016

We’ve all had the experience, punctuated by interminable waiting, of circling over and over again through some enormous company’s automatic telephone answering system. Whether or not it counts as genuinely “Kafkaesque” may be up for debate, but we do have some evidence that the technology itself, or at least the idea of it, does indeed trace back to the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial himself. This comes out in Kafka biographer Reiner Stach’s new book of photographs, letters, and other discoveries called Is that Kafka? 99 Finds.

“Although Kafka was timid and skeptical in his interactions with the latest technical gadgets—particularly when they intervened in social communication—he was always fascinated by people who knew how to handle these devices as a matter of course,” writes Stach in an excerpt at the Paris Review. “That included his fiancée Felice Bauer, who worked in the Berlin offices of Carl Lindström AG, where she was in charge of marketing for the ‘parlograph,’ a dictation machine.” It must have required no great leap of Kafka’s formidable imagination to dream up “a cross between a telephone and a parlograph,” which he described in a 1913 letter to Bauer:

The invention of a cross between a telephone and a parlograph, it really can’t be that hard. Surely by the day after tomorrow you’ll be reporting to me that the project is already a success. Of course that would have an enormous impact on editorial offices, news agencies, etc. Harder, but doubtless possible as well, would be a combination of the gramophone and the telephone. Harder because you can’t understand a gramophone at all, and a parlograph can’t ask it to speak more clearly. A combination of the gramophone and the telephone wouldn’t have such great significance in general either, but for people like me, who are afraid of the telephone, it would be a relief. But then people like me are also afraid of the gramophone, so we can’t be helped at all. By the way, it’s a nice idea that a parlograph could go to the telephone in Berlin, call up a gramophone in Prague, and the two of them could have a little conversation with each other. But my dearest the combination of the parlograph and the telephone absolutely has to be invented.

The modern answering machine took some time to develop, attaining its first commercially successful form, the Electronic Secretary, in 1949, a quarter-century after Kafka’s death. But alas, unbeknownst to him, someone had also beaten him to it when first he thought it up. “The combination of a telephone and a dictation machine had already been invented and patented — including the functions of an answering machine,” writes Stach, citing the engineer Ernest O. Kumberg’s invention of something called the “Telephonograph” in 1900. This might seem like just one more disappointment in a life full of them, but remember: just over a century on, when voicemail and even newer technologies have replaced the answering machine, nobody describes anything with the word “Kumbergian.”

You can pick up a copy of Is that Kafka? 99 Finds here.

via The Paris Review

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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Videos Recreate Isaac Newton’s Neat Alchemy Experiments: Watch Silver Get Turned Into Gold

in History, Science | November 1st, 2016

Yesterday we featured an online archive of “chymical” manuscripts from the hand of Isaac Newton, who, in addition to modern physics and mathematics, practiced the magical, medieval art of alchemy. Found among his alchemical papers was a recipe for “sophick mercury,” a chemical believed to create the “Philosopher’s stone,” the occult substance that supposedly turns base metals like lead into pure gold. Did such magic ever rise to the level of repeatable science or was it pure mythological fantasy?

For well over two hundred years after Newton’s death in 1727, nearly everyone believed the latter. However, when the physicist and mathematician’s alchemical papers went on auction at Sotheby’s in 1936, “the world of Isaac Newton scholarship received a rude shock,” writes Indiana University’s archive project The Chymistry of Isaac Newton. Hundreds of alchemy manuscripts that had been quietly suppressed by Newton’s relatives and hidden away in private collections came to light all at once.

In the intervening years, Newton scholars and science historians have had to reassess his considerable level of investment in occult arts. And they’ve come to see alchemy as an important precursor to modern chemistry. As IU science historian William Newman “points out,” io9 tells us, “alchemy wasn’t always the laughable idea it is today.”

Although his alchemical manuscripts were in constant conversation with ancient and mystical sources, “Newton’s chymistry was in many cases fully operational and explicable in modern chemical terminology,” writes Newman, who has done much of the work to recover the chemical science amidst Newton’s alchemical pseudoscience.

In the videos you see here, Indiana University seeks to “drive this point home” with lessons that can “be employed in schools as an integral part of their science education curricula.” We begin at the top with a classical alchemical experiment, the “transmutation” of silver into gold. In this case the medallion is already composed of a silver-gold alloy. It’s an experiment in which “alchemists’ knowledge of chemistry actually helped them con their contemporaries into believing they could transform silver into gold,” notes Newman. Once the medallion is dipped in nitric acid, much of the silver dissolves, giving the impression of it having been changed into pure gold.

Further up, we have other “chymical” experiments from Newton’s alchemy, like the “transmutation”—or plating—of iron into copper and the creation of a silica garden, illustrating so-called mineral “vegetation.” In experiments like the one below it, the creation of the “Tree of Diana”—in which a crystalline growth emerges from an amalgam of silver and mercury—we see how alchemists were inspired to create alternate terminology for the products of their experiment that sound to modern ears like unscientific nonsense. This mystical jargon often served to confuse or ward off the uninitiated, who would be unable to make a “Tree of Diana” even if they had the ingredients on hand, unless they already knew the procedure and the product.

The last two modules, further up and just above, demonstrate copper and iron shot dissolving in solutions of silver nitrate and copper nitrate, respectively. Educators and the generally curious should download Indiana University’s lesson plan on “Newton’s ‘Chymistry’ of Metal Solubilities.” Therein, you learn that “Newton spent more time on his alchemy than he did on his physics and math combined!” though most of his alchemical work remains unpublished. The few, more respectably-worded, experiments Newton did publish in his lifetime come from “Query 31” of his masterpiece, the Opticks. It is from these procedures that the lessons derive.

But even as we see the ostensibly straightforward chemical instructions Newton published, we should remember that these came from decades of research in the much murkier, occult field of alchemy. You’ll find more information on Newton’s chemistry here and here, as well as at these many related websites.

via io9

In 1704, Isaac Newton Predicts the World Will End in 2060

Sir Isaac Newton’s Papers & Annotated Principia Go Digital

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

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Isaac Newton’s Recipe for the Mythical ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ Is Being Digitized & Put Online (Along with His Other Alchemy Manuscripts)

in Archives, History, Science | October 31st, 2016

In his 1686 Principia Mathematica, Isaac Newton elaborated not only his famous Law of Gravity, but also his Three Laws of Motion, setting a centuries-long trend for scientific three-law sets. Newton’s third law has by far proven his most popular: “every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” In Arthur C. Clarke’s 20th century Three Laws, the third has also attained wide cultural significance. No doubt you’ve heard it: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Clarke’s third law gets invoked in discussions of the so-called “demarcation problem,” that is, of the boundaries between science and pseudoscience. It also comes up, of course, in science fiction forums, where people refer to Ted Chiang’s succinct interpretation: “If you can mass-produce it, it’s science, and if you can’t, it’s magic.” This makes sense, given the central importance the sciences place on reproducibility. But in Newton’s pre-industrial age, the distinctions between science and magic were much blurrier than they are now.

Newton was an early fellow of the British Royal Society, which codified repeatable experiment and demonstration with their motto, “Nothing in words,” and published the Principia. He later served as the Society’s president for over twenty years. But even as the foremost representative of early modern physics—what Edward Dolnick called “the clockwork universe”—Newton held some very strange religious and magical beliefs that we would point to today as examples of superstition and pseudoscience.

In 1704, for example, the year after he became Royal Society president, Newton used certain esoteric formulae to calculate the end of the world, in keeping with his long-standing study of apocalyptic prophecy. What’s more, the revered mathematician and physicist practiced the medieval art of alchemy, the attempt to turn base metals into gold by means of an occult object called the “Philosopher’s stone.” By Newton’s time, many alchemists believed the stone to be a magical substance composed in part of “sophick mercury.” In the late 1600s, Newton copied out a recipe for such stuff from a text by American-born alchemist George Starkey, writing his own notes on the back of the document.

You can see the “sophick mercury” formula in Newton’s hand at the top. The recipe contains, in part, “Fiery Dragon, some Doves of Diana, and at least seven Eagles of mercury,” notes Michael Greshko at National Geographic. Newton’s alchemical texts detail what has long been “dismissed as mystical pseudoscience full of fanciful, discredited processes.” This is why Cambridge University refused to archive Newton’s alchemical papers in 1888, and why his 1855 biographer wondered how he could be taken in by “the obvious production of a fool and a knave.” Newton’s alchemy documents passed quietly through many private collectors’ hands until 1936, when “the world of Isaac Newton scholarship received a rude shock,” writes Indiana University’s online project, The Chymistry of Isaac Newton:

In that year the venerable auction house of Sotheby’s released a catalogue describing three hundred twenty-nine lots of Newton’s manuscripts, mostly in his own handwriting, of which over a third were filled with content that was undeniably alchemical.

Marked “not to be printed” upon his death in 1727, the alchemical works “raised a host of interesting questions in 1936 as they do even today.” Those questions include whether or not Newton practiced alchemy as an early scientific pursuit or whether he believed in a “secret theological meaning in alchemical texts, which often describe the transmutational secret as a special gift revealed by God to his chosen sons.” The important distinction comes into play in Ted Chiang’s discussion of Clarke’s Third Law:

Suppose someone says she can transform lead into gold. If we can use her technique to build factories that turn lead into gold by the ton, then she’s made an incredible scientific discovery. If on the other hand it’s something that only she can do… then she’s a magician.

Did Newton think of himself as a magician? Or, more properly given his religiosity, as God’s chosen vessel for alchemical transformation? It’s not entirely clear what he believed about alchemy. But he did take the practice of what was then called “chymistry” as seriously as he did his mathematics. James Voelkel, curator of the Chemical Heritage Foundation—who recently purchased the Philosophers’ stone recipe—tells Livescience that its author, Starkey, was “probably American’s first renowned, published scientist,” as well as an alchemist. While Newton may not have tried to make the mercury, he did correct Starkey’s text and write his own experiments for distilling lead ore on the back.

Indiana University science historian William Newman “and other historians,” notes National Geographic, “now view alchemists as thoughtful technicians who labored over their equipment and took copious notes, often encoding their recipes with mythological symbols to protect their hard-won knowledge.” The occult weirdness of alchemy, and the strange pseudonyms its practitioners adopted, often constituted a means to “hide their methods from the unlearned and ‘unworthy,’” writes Danny Lewis at Smithsonian. Like his fellow alchemists, Newton “diligently documented his lab techniques” and kept a careful record of his reading.

“Alchemists were the first to realize that compounds could be broken down into their constituent parts and then recombined,” says Newman, a principle that influenced Newton’s work on optics. It is now acknowledged that—while still considered a mystical pseudoscience—alchemy is an important “precursor to modern chemistry” and, indeed, as Indiana University notes, it contributed significantly to early modern pharmacology” and “iatrochemistry… one of the important new fields of early modern science.” The sufficiently advanced technology of chemistry has its origins in the magic of “chymistry,” and Newton was “involved in all three of chymistry’s major branches in varying degrees.”

Newton’s alchemical manuscript papers, such as “Artephius his secret Book” and “Hermes” sound nothing like what we would expect of the discoverer of a “clockwork universe.” You can read transcriptions of these manuscripts and several dozen more at The Chymistry of Isaac Newton, where you’ll also find an Alchemical Glossary, Symbol Guide, several educational resources, and more. The manuscripts not only show Newton’s alchemy pursuits, but also his correspondence with other early modern alchemical scientists like Robert Boyle and Starkey, whose recipe—titled “Preparation of the [Socphick] Mercury for the [Philosophers’] stone by the Antinomial Stellate Regulus of Mars and Luna from the Manuscripts of the American Philosopher”—will be added to the Indiana University online archive soon.

Sir Isaac Newton’s Papers & Annotated Principia Go Digital

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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 ) |

Odd Vintage Postcards Document the Propaganda Against Women’s Rights 100 Years Ago

in Gender, History, Politics | October 25th, 2016

The vicious, vitriolic imagery and rhetoric of this election season can seem overwhelming, but as even casual students of history will know, it isn’t anything new. Each time historic social change occurs, reactionary counter-movements resort to threats, appeals to fear, and demeaning caricatures—whether it’s anti-Reconstruction propaganda of the 19th century, anti-Civil Rights campaigns 100 years later, or anti-LGBT rights efforts today.

At the turn of the century, the women’s suffrage movement faced significant levels of abuse and resistance. One photograph has circulated, for example, of a suffrage activist lying in the street as police beat her. (The woman in the photo is not Susan B. Anthony, as many claim, but a British suffragist named Ada Wright, beaten on “Black Friday” in 1910.) It’s an arresting image that captures just how violently men of the day fought against the movement for women’s suffrage. [It’s also worth noting, as many have: the early suffrage movement campaigned only for white women’s right to vote, and sometimes actively resisted civil rights for African-Americans.]

As you can see from the sample anti-suffrage postcards here—dating from the late 19th to early 20th centuries— propaganda against the women’s vote tended to fall into three broad categories: Disturbingly violent wish-fulfillment involving torture and physical silencing; characterizations of suffragists as angry, bitter old maids, hatchet-wielding harridans, or domineering, shrewish wives and neglectful mothers; and, correspondingly, depictions of neglected children, and husbands portrayed as saintly victims, emasculated by threats to traditional gender roles, and menaced by the suggestion that they may have to care for their children for even one day out of the year!

These postcards come from the collection of Catherine Palczewski, professor of women’s and gender studies at the University of Northern Iowa. She has been collecting these images, from both the U.S. and Britain, for 15 years. On her website, Palczewski quotes George Miller’s comment that postcards like these “offer a vivid chronicle of American political values and tastes.” Palczewski describes these particular images as “a fascinating intersection [that] occurred between advocacy for and against woman suffrage, images of women (and men), and postcards. Best estimates are that approximately 4,500 postcards were produced with a suffrage theme.”

As she notes in the quote above, the postcards printed during this period did not all oppose women’s suffrage. “Suffrage advocates,” writes Palczewski, “recognized the utility of the postcard as a propaganda device” as well. Pro-suffrage postcards tended to serve a documentary purpose, with “real-photo images of the suffrage parades, verbal messages identifying the states that had approved suffrage, or quotations in support of extending the vote to women.” For all their attempts at presenting a serious, informative counterweight to incendiary anti-suffrage images like those you see here, suffrage activists often found that they could not control the narrative.

As Lisa Tickner writes in The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907–1914, postcard producers without a clear agenda often used photos and illustrations of suffragists to represent “topical or humorous types” and “almost incidentally” undercut advocates’ attempts to present their cause in a newsworthy light. The image of the suffragette as a trivial figure of fun persisted into the mid-twentieth century (as we see in Glynis Johns’ comically neglectful Winifred Banks in Walt Disney’s 1964 Mary Poppins adaptation).

Palczewski’s site offers a brief history of the “Golden Age” (1893–1918) of political postcards and organizes the collection into categories. One variety we might find particularly charming for its use of cats and kittens actually has a pretty sinister origin in the so-called “Cat-and-Mouse Act” in the UK. Jailed suffragists had begun to stage hunger strikes, and journalists provoked public outcry by portraying force-feeding by the government as a form of torture. Instead, striking activists were released when they became weak. “If a woman died after being released,” Palczewski explains, “then the government could claim it was not to blame.” When a freed activist regained her strength, she would be rearrested. “On November 29, 1917,” Palczewski writes, “the US government announced it plans to use Britain’s cat and mouse approach.”

You can see many more historical pro- and anti-suffrage postcards at Palczewski’s website, and you are free to use them for non-commercial purposes provided you attribute the source. You are also free, of course, to draw your own comparisons to today’s hyperbolic and often violently misogynist propaganda campaigns.

via Dangerous Minds

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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 ( 4 ) |

Stephen Fry Narrates 4 Philosophy Animations On the Question: How to Create a Just Society?

in Animation, History, Philosophy | October 25th, 2016

How do we create a just society? 50,000 years or so at it and humanity still has a long way to go before figuring that out, though not for lack of trying. The four animated videos of “What Is Justice?”—a miniseries within BBC Radio 4 and the Open University’s larger project of animating the ideas of philosophers throughout history and explaining them in the voices of various famous narrators—tell us what John Rawls, Henry David Thoreau, and the Bible, among other sources, have to say on the subject of justice. Stephen Fry provides the voice this time as the videos illustrate the nature of these ideas, as well as their complications, before our eyes.

Imagine you had to create a just society yourself, but “you won’t know what kind of a person you’ll be in the society you design.” This thought experiment, first described by Rawls in his 1971 book A Theory of Justice as the “veil of ignorance,” supposedly encourages the creation of “a much fairer society than we now have. There would be extensive freedom and equality of opportunity. But there wouldn’t be extremes of high pay, unless it could be shown that the poorest in society directly benefited as a result.” An intriguing idea, but one easier articulated than agreed upon, let alone realized.

Much earlier in history, you find the simpler principle of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” an “ancient form of punishment known as lex talionis, or the law of retaliation.” Any reader of the Bible will have a strong sense of this idea’s importance in the ancient world, though we’d do well to remember that back then, it “was a way of encouraging a sense of proportion — not wiping out a whole community in retaliation for the killing of one man, for example.” While harsh punishment could, in theory, deter potential criminals, “severe legal violence can create martyrs and increase society’s problems.” The rule of law, naturally, has everything to do with the creation and maintenance of a just society, though not every law furthers the cause.

But you’ve no doubt heard of one that has: habeas corpus, the legal principle mandating that “no one, not even the president, monarch, or anyone else in power, can detain someone illegally.” Instead, “they need to bring the detainee in question before a court and allow that court to determine whether or not this person can legally be held.” Yet not every authority has consistently implemented or upheld habeas corpus or other justice-ensuring laws. At times like those, according to Thoreau, you must engage in civil disobedience: “follow your conscience and break the law on moral grounds rather than be a cog in an unjust system.” It’s a dirty job, creating a just society, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. And though we may not all have given it as much thought as a Rawls or a Thoreau, we’ve all got a role to play in it.

Justice: Putting a Price Tag on Life & How to Measure Pleasure

Free: Listen to John Rawls’ Course on “Modern Political Philosophy” (Recorded at Harvard, 1984)

47 Animated Videos Explain the History of Ideas: From Aristotle to Sartre

What is the Self? Watch Philosophy Animations Narrated by Stephen Fry on Sartre, Descartes & More

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

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

in History, Literature, Music | October 21st, 2016

Image by via Wikimedia Commons

It’s been a humanist truism for some time to say that Shakespeare speaks to every age, transcending his time and place through the sheer force of his universal genius. But any honest student first encountering the plays will tell you differently, as will many a seasoned scholar who works hard to place the writer and his work in historical context. Even onetime director of London’s National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner, once said, “I’ll admit that I hardly ever go to a performance of one of Shakespeare’s plays without experiencing blind panic during the first five minutes. I sit there thinking… I have no idea what these people are talking about.”

Of course, none of that means we can’t learn to appreciate Shakespeare, and we do not need a graduate-level education to do so. But much of his archaic language and obscure references will always sound foreign to modern ears. How much more so, then, the language of the ancient Greeks, whether in translation or no? Although we’ve also been taught to think of the Homeric epics as containers of universal truth and beauty, the world of Homer was, in many ways, an alien one—and the literature of ancient Greece was far closer to song than even Shakespeare’s musical speeches.

In fact, “before writing was generally known among the Greeks,” the University of Cincinnati notes, “poets recited and sang stories for audiences at the courts of city leaders and at festivals. A poet could actually improvise a tale in the six-beat rhythm of Greek verse if he knew the plot of his story.” We do not know whether Homer was one enterprising scribe or “a group of poets whose works on the theme of Troy were collected” under one name. But in either case, that poet or poets heard the tales of Hector and Achilles, Odysseus and Penelope, and all those meddling gods sung before they wrote them down. Now, thanks to Georg Danek of the University of Vienna and Stefan Hagel of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, we have some idea of what those songs may have sounded like.

“In the course of the last years,” write Danek and Hagel, “we have developed a technique of singing the Homeric epics, which is appropriate for the primarily oral tradition from which these poems emerge.” The two scholars caution that their theoretical recreations are “not to be understood as the exact reconstruction of a given melody, but as an approach to the technique the Homeric singers used to accommodate melodic principles to the demands of the individual verse.” Accompanied by a four-stringed lyre-like instrument called a phorminx, “the Homeric bard” would improvise the “melody at the same time as he improvised his text, which was unique in every performance.” In the audio above, you can hear Danek and Hagel’s melodic recreation of lines 267–366 of book 8 of the Odyssey, in which Demodocus sings about the love of Ares and Aphrodite.

At their site, the two scholars present an abstract of their Homeric singing theory, with musicological and linguistic evidence for the recreation. Their technical criteria will confuse the non-specialist, and none but ancient Greek speakers will understand the recording above. But it brings us a little closer to experiencing Homer’s epic poetry, “the foundation stones of European Literature,” as the ancient Greeks might have experienced it.

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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 ( 18 ) |

An Immersive Audio Tour of the East Village’s Famed Poetry Scene, Narrated by Jim Jarmusch

in History, Life, Podcasts, Poetry | October 21st, 2016

Image by Michiel Hendryckx, via Wikimedia Commons

A peek at the photos on a realtor’s listing for a New York City one bedroom apartment formerly occupied by Beat poet Allen Ginsberg is a dispiriting reminder of how much the East Village has changed.

And that listing is over six years old!

Daniel Maurer, the editor of Bedford + Bowery, and a Ginsberg fan whom history has compelled to take over a portion of his hero’s formerly sprawling digs, wrote amusingly of shoddy renovations and his upstairs neighbor, punk rock icon Richard Hell:

Orlovsky’s name is still on the mailbox – which is just about the only thing still around from his day. After his death, the place was gut renovated with luxurious modern amenities like a mini fridge that comes up to mid-thigh and a stove that’s so tiny and ineffectual I just use it for cookbook storage. Soon after I moved in I took a trip to Ikea and recognized my kitchen cabinets there.

That’s why I was amused to read a piece in the Wall Street Journal … in which my upstairs neighbor, Richard Hell, talked about his rent-stabilized two-bedroom apartment and its “funkiness that you don’t find in Manhattan much anymore.”

Hell describes his “worn unvarnished wood floors that groan when you walk on them, cracks in the plaster walls, sagging original moldings.” That’s exactly what I was looking for in an apartment two years ago.

Maurer is far from alone in the desire to edge closer to a bygone cultural moment. Radio producer Pejk Malinovski spent three years crafting Passing Stranger, a site-specific audio tour of the East Village poetry scene, below.

A Dane who relocated to New York in 2003, Malinovski was intrigued by the scene-related anecdotes of his friend, poet Ron Padgett, who pointed out his former haunts on strolls about the neighborhood. His interest piqued, Malinovski immersed himself in Daniel Kane’s All Poets Welcome, The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960’s, another history that comes fortified with archival audio clips.

Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, a longtime Lower East Side resident who studied with poet Kenneth Koch in his youth, was tapped to provide the audio tour’s narration, with music compliments of composer John Zorn, the artistic director of The Stone, an experimental East Village performance space. Below, Jarmusch explains what attracted him to the project:

No matter if geographic constraints prevent you from downloading Malinovski’s tour for a two mile, 90 minute amble around the much-changed East Village. In some ways, the virtual tour is better. Rather than trying to take it all in in a single, pre-plotted session, you’re free to wander at will, enjoying such interactive features as maps and photos, in addition to interviews, readings, and reminiscences.

The 10th stop on the tour deposits you across the street from 437 East 12th Street, Ginsberg’s aforementioned former residence, on the steps of a church that no longer exists. Mary Help of Christians Roman Catholic Church was demolished shortly after Passing Stranger hit the streets, but its memory lives on thanks to its celebrated appearance in Ginsberg’s work:

Fourth Floor, Dawn, Up All Night Writing Letters

Pigeons shake their wings on the copper church roof

out my window across the street, a bird perched on the cross

surveys the city’s blue-grey clouds. Larry Rivers

‘ll come at 10 AM and take my picture. I’m taking

your picture, pigeons. I’m writing you down, Dawn.

I’m immortalizing your exhaust, Avenue A bus.

O Thought, now you’ll have to think the same thing forever!

- Allen Ginsberg, New York, June 7, 1980

Ginsberg himself is brought to vivid life by his secretary and fellow poet, Bob Rosenthal, who recalls how visitors would call up from the street, then wait for Ginsberg to toss down keys, wrapped in a dirty sock. He also name checks Mr. Buongiorno, the 437 East 12th St neighbor who served as Mary Help of Christians’ bell ringer.

You can hear those bells in the background of your Passing Stranger tour, though producer Malinovski uses ambient sound sparingly, to avoid overwhelming those using the tour on the noisy streets of the actual East Village.

You can download the full walking tour of Passing Stranger—named for Walt Whitman’s opening salutation in “To a Stranger”—here.

Explore Passing Stranger’s trivia-filled interactive website—featuring audio from Amiri Baraka, Hettie Jones, Eileen Myles, and Jack Kerouac, among others—here.

Poems included on the Passing Stranger audio tour of the East Village, in order of appearance:

Kenneth Koch, “To my Audience” (excerpt)

Frank O’Hara, Ode to Joy (To hell with it) (excerpt)

Ted Berrrigan “Dear Margie, Hello”

Ron Padgett “Poema del City from Toujours l’amour”

Walt Whitman, “To a Stranger”

Taylor Mead, “Motorcycles”

Bernadette Mayor, “Sonnet (You jerk, you didn’t call me up)”

Diane Di Prima, “Revolutionary Letters” (excerpt)

Galway Kinnell, “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ” (excerpt)

Miquel Piñero, “A Lower East Side Poem” (excerpt)

Jack Kerouac, “American Haiku” (excerpt)

Bill Berkson / Frank O’Hara, “Song Heard Around St. Bridget’s”

John Ashbery, “Just Walking Around, from A Wave”

Joe Brainard, “I Remember” (excerpt)

Alice Notley, “10 Best Comic Books”

WH Auden, “September 1, 1939” (excerpt)

Anne Waldman, “Fast Speaking Woman” (excerpt)

Lewis Warsh, “Eye Contact” (excerpt)

Dick Gallup / Ted Berrigan, “80th Congress”

Abraham Lincoln, “My Childhood-Home I See Again” (excerpt)

Leroi Jones, “Bang, bang, outishly” (excerpt)

Hettie Jones, “Ode to My Kitchen Sink”

Brenda Coultas, “A Handmade Museum” (excerpt)

ee cummings, ”i was sitting in mcsorley’s…”

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Entire History of Japan in 9 Quirky Minutes

in History | October 19th, 2016

If you peruse our collection of Free Online History Courses, you’ll find plenty of enriching history courses from top-notch universities, all presented in a fairly conventional style. And certainly nothing like the short history lesson you’ll find above. Created by American musician and video blogger Bill Wurtz, this “History of Japan” walks idiosyncratically through 40,000 years of history in 9 minutes, covering the rise of technology and religion, the influence of China on Japan’s language and brand of buddhism, the rise of the samurai, the country’s vexed relationship with the West, the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and more. Released in February, the video has already clocked more than 17 million views on YouTube–pretty good considering that Wurtz created the video as “a prototype to see if I could do a long video in the first place.” In a recent Q & A, Wurtz suggested that he may well try to revive another project he’s been working on–a History of the United States. Stay tuned for that.

You can read a script for the History of Japan video here.

Note: The Great Courses is now offering a 30-Day Free Trial, giving you access to a video library of great courses. If you’re not familiar with them, The Great Courses travels across the US, recording great professors lecturing on topics that will appeal to any lifelong learner. If you’re interested in streaming their courses online–whenever you want and however much you want–get details on their a 30-Day Free Trial here.

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

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The Entire History of Japan in 9 Quirky Minutes

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