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

in Art, History, Technology, Travel | May 22nd, 2015

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time at the Indianapolis Star, where my mother worked in what was then referred to as the “women’s pages.” She kept me busy returning the photos that accompanied marriage and engagement announcements, using the SASEs the young brides had supplied. After that, I’d hit the printing floor, where veteran workers sported square caps folded from the previous day’s edition, as that day’s issue clacked on tracks overhead. If I was lucky, someone would make me a gift of my name, set in hot type.

The Star still publishes — I shudder to report that its website seems to have renamed it IndyStar… — but cultural and digital advances have relegated all of the particulars mentioned above to the scrap pile.

They came rushing back with wild, Proustian urgency when Osamu Yamamoto, a master printer at Benrido Collotype Atelier in Kyoto, mentions the smell of the ink, in the short documentary above, how over the years, it has seeped into his skin, and become a part of his being.

Collotype, defined by the Getty Conservation Institute as “a screenless photomechanical process that allows high-quality prints from continuous-tone photographic negatives,” has been on the way out since the 70s. As master printer Yamamoto notes, it’s a low-efficiency, small batch operation, involving messy matrixes, hand-operated presses, and heavy iron machines that give off a sort of animal warmth when working.

Rather than pressmen’s caps, Benrido’s shirtless printers wear hachimaki, rubber aprons, and purple disposable gloves.

Filmmaker Fritz Schumann (whose film on the oldest hotel in Japan we previously featured before) evokes the workplace — one of two remaining collotype companies in the world — through small details like the plastic-wrapped digital Hamtaro clock and also by drawing viewers’ attention to the number of years logged by each employee. The art of collotype takes a long time to master and novices appear to be in short supply.

Should we conceive of this operation as a quaint relic, creeping along thanks to the whimsy of a few nostalgia buffs?

Surprisingly, no. The laborious collotype process remains the best way to duplicate precious artworks and historic documents. The way the ink interacts with reticulations in the gelatin surface atop results in subtleties that pixellated digital images cannot hope to achieve.

Visitors to the studio may support the enterprise by picking up a handful of collotype-printed postcards in the gift shop, but the office of the Japanese Emperor is the one who’s really keeping them in business, with orders to copy hundreds of delicate, centuries old scrolls, paintings and letters.

Like a circle in a circle…cultural preservation via cultural preservation! Perhaps the smell of the ink will prevail.

Mark Twain Wrote the First Book Ever Written With a Typewriter

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

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Yoko Ono Lets Audience Cut Up Her Clothes in Conceptual Art Performance (Carnegie Hall, 1965)

in History, Music, Theatre | May 19th, 2015

Back before it was common practice to preface one’s web posts with the phrase “trigger warning” (which, BTW, might well apply here)…

Before the Internet…

And slightly before the public revelation of her relationship with John Lennon turned a Japanese avant-garde artist into an American household name…

Yoko Ono maintained an aura of imperviousness onstage at Carnegie Hall, as audience members accepted the challenge to cut away her clothing one piece at a time.

This now-famous conceptual performance was documented by filmmakers Albert and David Maysles, who captured nervous laughter and audience commentary along with the onstage action. (Ono had previously performed the piece twice in Japan where—with the exception of one man who wielded the scissors as if intending to stab her—audiences proved reticent and respectful.)

What does Cut Piece mean?

The motionlessness Ono imposed upon herself (and all subsequent performers of the work) keeps things open to interpretation.

It’s been hailed as a deeply symbolic feminist work and represented in the press of the time as an uninhibited, interactive strip show. Many an academic paper has been written.

With so much control ceded to the audience, even the performer couldn’t predict for certain whether the intention of the piece would synch with the reality.

Cut Piece cannot be mistaken for pure improvisation, however. Like John Cage’s 4’33”, it has a score, complete with variations:

Cut Piece

First Version for single performer:

Performer sits on stage with a pair

of scissors placed in front of him.

It is announced that members of the audience

may come on stage–one at

a time–to cut a small piece of the

performer’s clothing to take with them.

Performer remains motionless

throughout the piece.

Piece ends at the performer’s

option.

Ono has said that the impulse for Cut Piece came from the desire to create art free from ego, the “mentality of saying, ‘here you are, take anything you want, any part you want,’ rather than pushing something you chose on someone else.”

She also took inspiration from a familiar childhood story about the Buddha selflessly giving his own body to provide food for a hungry tiger. It seems an apt metaphor, given the facial expressions of certain audience participants. Were they faking a confidence they didn’t feel, or were they just jerks?

Did I mention the trigger warning?

Documentation, as any performance artist will tell you, is not quite the same as being there. Reenactments, too, may fall short of the original.

Ono reprised the work in 2003, at the age of 70, noting that her motivation had shifted from rage to love, and a desire for world peace.

When artist Jon Hendricks performed it in 1968, he did so in a thrift store suit, thus ignoring its creator’s conviction that part of its power came from starting out in one’s best clothes.

It’s all very ballsy, and horrifying, and compelling, and a little hard to watch.

Would you consider trying it in your local library, community hall, or as part of a school fundraiser?

A longer analysis and history of Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece can be found here courtesy of Kevin Concannon.

Download the John Lennon/Yoko Ono “War is Over (If You Want It)” Poster in 100+ Languages

John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s Two Appearances on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971 and 72

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

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Mark Twain & Helen Keller’s Special Friendship: He Treated Me Not as a Freak, But as a Person Dealing with Great Difficulties

in History, Letters, Literature | May 13th, 2015

Sometimes it can seem as though the more we think we know a historical figure, the less we actually do. Helen Keller? We’ve all seen (or think we’ve seen) some version of The Miracle Worker, right?—even if we haven’t actually read Keller’s autobiography. And Mark Twain? He can seem like an old family friend. But I find people are often surprised to learn that Keller was a radical socialist firebrand, in sympathy with workers’ movements worldwide. In a short article in praise of Lenin, for example, Keller once wrote, “I cry out against people who uphold the empire of gold…. I am perfectly sure that love will bring everything right in the end, but I cannot help sympathizing with the oppressed who feel driven to use force to gain the rights that belong to them.”

Twain took a more pessimistic, ironic approach, yet he thoroughly opposed religious dogma, slavery, and imperialism. “I am always on the side of the revolutionists,” he wrote, “because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.” While a great many people grow more conservative with age, Twain and Keller both grew more radical, which in part accounts for another little-known fact about these two nineteenth century American celebrities: they formed a very close and lasting friendship that, at least in Keller’s case, may have been one of the most important relationships in either figure’s life.

Twain’s importance to Keller, and hers to him, begins in 1895, when the two met at a lunch held for Keller in New York. According to the Mark Twain Library’s extensive documentary exhibit, Keller “seemed to feel more at ease with Twain than with any of the other guests.” She would later write, “He treated me not as a freak, but as a handicapped woman seeking a way to circumvent extraordinary difficulties.” Twain was taken as well, surprised by “her quickness and intelligence.” After the meeting, he wrote to his benefactor Henry H. Rogers, asking Rogers to fund Keller’s education. Rogers, the Mark Twain Library tells us, “personally took charge of Helen Keller’s fortunes, and out of his own means made it possible for her to continue her education and to achieve for herself the enduring fame which Mark Twain had foreseen.”

Twain wrote to his wealthy friend, “It won’t do for America to allow this marvelous child to retire from her studies because of poverty. If she can go on with them she will make a fame that will endure in history for centuries.” Thereafter, the two would maintain a “special friendship,” sustained not only by their political sentiments, but also by a love of animals, travel, and other personal similarities. Both writers came to live in Fairfield County, Connecticut at the end of their lives, and she visited him at his Redding home, Stormfield, in 1909, the year before his death (see them there at the top of the post, and more photos here). Twain was especially impressed by Keller’s autobiography, writing to her, “I am charmed with your book—enchanted.” (See his endorsement in a 1903 advertisement, below.)

Twain also came to Keller’s defense, ten years later, after reading in her book about a plagiarism scandal that occurred in 1892 when, at only twelve years old, she was accused of lifting her short story “The Frost King” from Margaret Canby’s “Frost Fairies.” Though a tribunal acquitted Keller of the charges, the incident still piqued Twain, who called it “unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque” in a 1903 letter in which he also declared: “The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterance—is plagiarism.” What differs from work to work, he contends is “the phrasing of a story”; Keller’s accusers, he writes protectively, were “solemn donkeys breaking a little child’s heart.” (The exquisitely-worded letter is well worth reading in full at Letters of Note).

We also have Twain—not playwright William Gibson—to thank for the “miracle worker” title given to Keller’s teacher, Anne Sullivan. (See Keller, Sullivan, Twain, and Sullivan’s husband John Macy above at Twain’s home). As a tribute to Sullivan for her tireless work with Keller, he presented her with a postcard that read, “To Mrs. John Sullivan Macy with warm regard & with limitless admiration of the wonders she has performed as a ‘miracle-worker.’” In his 1903 letter to Keller, he called Sullivan “your other half… for it took the pair of you to make complete and perfect whole.”

Twain praised Sullivan effusively for “her brilliancy, penetration, originality, wisdom, character, and the fine literary competencies of her pen.” But he reserved his highest praise for Keller herself. “You are a wonderful creature,” he wrote, “The most wonderful in the world.” Keller’s praise of her friend Twain was no less lofty. “I have been in Eden three days and I saw a King,” she wrote in his guestbook during her visit to Stormfield, “I knew he was a King the minute I touched him though I had never touched a King before.” The last words in Twain’s autobiography, the first volume anyway—which he only allowed to be published in 2010—are Keller’s; “You once told me you were a pessimist, Mr. Clemons,” he quotes her as saying, “but great men are usually mistaken about themselves. You are an optimist.”

Mark Twain Writes a Rapturous Letter to Walt Whitman on the Poet’s 70th Birthday (1889)

Helen Keller Speaks About Her Greatest Regret — Never Mastering Speech

Helen Keller & Annie Sullivan Appear Together in Moving 1930 Newsreel

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 10 ) |

The Death Masks of Great Authors: Dante, Goethe, Tolstoy, Joyce & More

in History | May 13th, 2015

Charles Guiteau, the man who assassinated James Garfield, tried to argue in court that he just shot the president — the doctors actually killed him. Though Guiteau was ultimately hanged for his crime in 1882, he did have a point. Garfield’s doctor, William Bliss, jammed his unsterilized fingers in the presidential wound in an attempt to pull out the bullet. So did a host of other specialists. President Garfield died 80 days later of, among other things, sepsis. It was later concluded that the president would have likely survived if the doctors had kept their hands to themselves.

Garfield’s death was one of the catalysts that helped popularize Joseph Lister’s ideas about bacteria, a concept that vastly improved the quality of medical care. A hundred years later, for example, Ronald Reagan suffered from almost an identical bullet wound and was back to work within weeks.

In the 19th century and centuries before, diseases weren’t well understood and death was mysterious and divine. In the evangelical revivals of the mid-19th century, the end of life was seen as something to embrace. After all, God was calling his believers back home. Then with a growing understanding of germs, that sense of wonder with our mortality changed. “God hadn’t called the individual to him,” writes Deborah Lutz, scholar of Victorian culture, in The New York Times this week. “Rather, a malady had overtaken the body. Rather than dying at home, the sick were carted off to hospitals.” Death, in other words, became divorced from everyday life.

So from our 21st century viewpoint, the Victorians’ (and their predecessors’) tendency to collect mementos of the dead, like death masks, might seem gruesome. But from their point of view, our panicked denial of death would probably seem foolish and perverse. Mortality, after all, is a fact of life.

Princeton University’s Laurence Hutton Collection has dozens of death masks of famous politicians, philosophers and authors. People like Isaac Newton, Abraham Lincoln and Leo Tolstoy. There’s something humbling about seeing these titans of Western culture captured at such an intimate moment. Stripped of all the markers of class and rank, they look like people you might see on the street.

Aside from a rather unconvincing effigy of Queen Elizabeth, the collection features few masks of great women. No Jane Austens or Emily Dickinsons here. The collection also, sadly, lacks a mask of James Garfield.

Above you can find death masks of literary figures from the 14th to early 20th centuries. From top to bottom, you will see James Joyce, Goethe, Leo Tolstoy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dante and William Wordsworth.

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

Hear Thomas Edison’s Creepy Talking Dolls: An Invention That Scared Kids & Flopped on the Market

in History, Technology | May 8th, 2015

When studying history’s most famous creators, we must never forget that they always produced failures as well as successes, and often failures as impressive as their successes. Take Thomas Edison, widely regarded as the great American inventor for his work on the light bulb, the movie camera, and the phonograph. We all know about those achievements, all of which shaped technologies which went on to near-universal use, but have you heard of Edison’s still-pioneering but rather less well-known work in the field of talking dolls?

Many of us in the past few generations grew up with talking dolls of one kind or another. But had we been children in 1890, we might have grown up with the very first talking dolls, for which Edison designed an internal mechanism that played one of several wax cylinders pre-recorded with various child-oriented songs, prayers, and nursery rhymes. Or rather, we might have grown up with them if we came from wealthy families: they cost between $10 and $20 in 1890 dollars, or up to $526 in today’s dollars.

And even at that price, Edison’s talking dolls provided not just the lowest of lo-fi listening experiences, but resoundingly creepy ones at that. “The public reacted as one does when confronted with a grandmother’s massive doll collection: You averted your eyes in fear,” writes PBS’ Joshua Barajas. “After six weeks into production, the dolls were deemed too scary and pulled from the market, the New York Times reported.”

But now, thanks to optical audio-scanning technology unimaginable in Edison’s day, we can hear the dolls’ renditions of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” “Hickory, Dickory, Dock,” and — most eerily of all — “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” just as the children of 1890 would have heard them. But even this seriously wrongheaded-seeming product paved the way for not just the less disturbing Furbys and Teddy Ruxpins of more recent childhoods, but, given its unprecedented use of auto recordings made for entertainment purposes, the entire record industry — and, of course, the minor but robust subgenre of talking-doll horror movies.

via PBS News Hour

A Brief, Animated Introduction to Thomas Edison (and Nikola Tesla)

Thomas Edison & His Trusty Kinetoscope Create the First Movie Filmed In The US (c. 1889)

Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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

What’s It Like to Fight in 15th Century Armor?: A Surprising Demonstration

in History | May 7th, 2015

Above, Le Musée National du Moyen-Âge (otherwise known as The National Museum of the Middle Ages) and The University of Geneva recreate fight scenes from the 15th century, demonstrating the movements and techniques of combatants who clanked around in full suits of armor. If you’re like me, you’re watching with surprise — surprised by their agility and dexterity. Wasn’t quite expecting that!

If you don’t read French, it’s worth noting that the video starts with a demonstration of mobility, then explores medieval fighting techniques, from stabbing an opponent right between the eyes, to striking a mortal blow on the ground. The video was brought to the web by Le Figaro.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

Yoda’s Long Lost Twin Found in a 14th Century Illuminated Manuscript

Wonderfully Weird & Ingenious Medieval Books

See The Guidonian Hand, the Medieval System for Reading Music, Get Brought Back to Life

140 Free Online History Courses

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Short, Strange & Brutal Stint as an Elementary School Teacher

in Education, History, Philosophy | May 6th, 2015

Ludwig Wittgenstein finished writing the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the achievement for which most of us remember him, in 1918; three years later came its first publication in Germany. And to what problem did Wittgenstein put his luminous philosophical mind in the interim? Teaching a class of elementary schoolers in rural Austria. “Well on his way to being considered the greatest philosopher alive,” as Spencer Robins puts it in a thorough Paris Review post on Wittgenstein’s teaching stint, he also found himself “convinced he was a moral failure.” Searching for a solution, he got rid of his family fortune, left the “Palais Wittgenstein” in which he’d grown up, and out of “a romantic idea of what it would be like to work with peasants—an idea he’d gotten from reading Tolstoy,” went to teach kids in the middle of nowhere. See them all above.\

“I am to be an elementary-school teacher in a tiny village called Trattenbach,” Wittgenstein wrote to his own teacher and friend Bertrand Russell in a letter dated October 23, 1921. A month later, in another letter, he described his circumstances as those of “odiousness and baseness,” complaining that “I know human beings on the average are not worth much anywhere, but here they are much more good-for-nothing and irresponsible than elsewhere.” The great philosopher’s experiment in primary education would appear not to have gone well.

And yet Wittgenstein comes off, by many accounts, as an exemplary and almost unbelievably engaged teacher. He and his students, in Robins’ words, “designed steam engines and buildings together, and built models of them; dissected animals; examined things with a microscope Wittgenstein brought from Vienna; read literature; learned constellations lying under the night sky; and took trips to Vienna, where they stayed at a school run by his sister Hermine.” Hermine herself remembered the kids “positively climbing over each other in their eagerness” to answer their philosopher-teacher’s questions, and at least one particularly promising kid among them received Wittgenstein’s extensive extracurricular instruction — and even an offer of adoption.

We might also consider Wittgenstein a champion, in his own way, of equal treatment for the sexes: unlike other teachers in rural early 20th-century Austria, he expected the girls to solve the very same vertiginously difficult math problems he put to the boys. But by the same token, he doled out corporal punishment to them just as equally when they got the answer wrong, and even when they didn’t grasp the concepts at hand as swiftly as he might have liked. This rough treatment culminated in “the Haidbauer incident,” an occasion of child-smacking consequential enough in Wittgenstein’s life to merit its own Wikipedia page, and which effectively ended his educational involvement with youngsters. The incident reportedly left an 11-year-old schoolboy “unconscious after being hit on the head during class.”

“Ultimately, he was to alienate the villagers of Trattenbach with his tyrannical and often bullying behavior, the result of a mind unable to empathize with the stage at which some of his pupils found themselves in their learning,” writes education blogger Alex Beard in his own post on Wittgenstein-as teacher. “Today we would admire his high expectations and the purity of his intention as an educator, but look rather less kindly on the Ohrfeige (ear-boxing) and Haareziehen (hair-pulling) that his students later recalled.” We modern-day Wittgenstein fans have to ask ourselves what wonders we might we have learned had fate assigned our elementary-school selves to his classroom — and whether we would have graduated to our next year unscathed.

Wittgenstein and Hitler Attended the Same School in Austria, at the Same Time (1904)

Wittgenstein Day-by-Day: Facebook Page Tracks the Philosopher’s Wartime Experience 100 Years Ago

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Gets Adapted Into an Avant-Garde Comic Opera

See the Homes and Studies of Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche & Other Philosophers

Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Benedict Cumberbatch Reads a Letter Alan Turing Wrote in “Distress” Before His Conviction For “Gross Indecency”

in History, Letters | May 5th, 2015

A pioneer of computer science, Alan Turing’s name comes up in nearly every conversation about artificial intelligence. His “Turing Test” purports to indicate whether and when a machine has acquired intelligence and ability indistinguishable from that of a human, and his work with the Bletchley Park cryptography group during WWII helped the British break the Enigma code used by the Nazis. Those who came to learn about Turing from the recent biopic The Imitation Game, with Benedict Cumberbatch starring as the tormented mathematician, know this part of his life in particular, as well as the part of his life that tragically led to his early death at age 41.

Turing was gay, but forced to hide it because of British law. In 1952, he was convicted of “gross indecency” for his relationship with another man. Before pleading guilty to the supposed offence, Turing wrote the letter below to his colleague and friend Norman Routledge.

Employing a dark sense of humor and signing off “Yours in distress,” he gives every indication that he is fearful not only for himself, but for the fate of his work. Just above, see Benedict Cumberbach read the letter, which begins with a paragraph of small talk from an obviously ongoing conversation then abruptly turns to the trouble at hand.

My dear Norman,

I don’t think I really do know much about jobs, except the one I had during the war, and that certainly did not involve any travelling. I think they do take on conscripts. It certainly involved a good deal of hard thinking, but whether you’d be interested I don’t know. Philip Hall was in the same racket and on the whole, I should say, he didn’t care for it. However I am not at present in a state in which I am able to concentrate well, for reasons explained in the next paragraph.

I’ve now got myself into the kind of trouble that I have always considered to be quite a possibility for me, though I have usually rated it at about 10:1 against. I shall shortly be pleading guilty to a charge of sexual offences with a young man. The story of how it all came to be found out is a long and fascinating one, which I shall have to make into a short story one day, but haven’t the time to tell you now. No doubt I shall emerge from it all a different man, but quite who I’ve not found out.

Glad you enjoyed broadcast. Jefferson certainly was rather disappointing though. I’m afraid that the following syllogism may be used by some in the future.

Turing believes machines think
Turing lies with men
Therefore machines do not think

Yours in distress,

Alan

Turing had long wrestled with his sexuality, but had also long come to terms with it at the time of the letter. As the Cumberbatch-starring film dramatizes (with some license), over ten years earlier, during the war, he had attempted to marry the only female member of the main Bletchley group, Joan Clarke, then confided his sexuality to her.

Clarke was mostly nonplussed and Turing broke off the engagement. You can get much more insight about Turing’s struggle, and what he was actually like, from two of the women who worked with him, including Clarke herself in an interview above. Below, another of the Bletchley team—one of the thousands of “Bletchleyettes”—named Olive Baily discusses her impressions of Turing. To learn much more about his life, watch The Strange Life and Death of Dr. Turing, in two parts on Youtube.

via Letters of Note

The Enigma Machine: How Alan Turing Helped Break the Unbreakable Nazi Code

Watch Breaking the Code, About the Life & Times of Alan Turing (1996)

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

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

Yoko Ono Lets Audience Cut Up Her Clothes in Conceptual Art Performance (Carnegie Hall, 1965)

Mark Twain & Helen Keller’s Special Friendship: He Treated Me Not as a Freak, But as a Person Dealing with Great Difficulties

The Death Masks of Great Authors: Dante, Goethe, Tolstoy, Joyce & More

Hear Thomas Edison’s Creepy Talking Dolls: An Invention That Scared Kids & Flopped on the Market

What’s It Like to Fight in 15th Century Armor?: A Surprising Demonstration

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Short, Strange & Brutal Stint as an Elementary School Teacher

Benedict Cumberbatch Reads a Letter Alan Turing Wrote in “Distress” Before His Conviction For “Gross Indecency”

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search