97-Year-Old Philosopher Ponders the Meaning of Life: “What Is the Point of It All?”

in Film, Life, Philosophy | March 5th, 2019

If you’ve sat by the bed­side of a dying friend or rel­a­tive, or recov­ered from a ter­mi­nal ill­ness your­self, you may know too well: the con­cerns of yesterday—career anx­i­eties, polit­i­cal high stakes, per­son­al grudges—can slip away into the rear view, becom­ing small­er and more mean­ing­less as hours pass into final days. What takes their place? Maybe a savor­ing of the moment, maybe regrets over moments not savored, maybe a grow­ing acknowl­edg­ment that grat­i­tude mat­ters more than being right. Maybe a will­ing­ness to let go of pri­or ideas—not to adopt new ones, but to open to the ques­tions again.

Some­times, this expe­ri­ence is bewil­der­ing and fright­en­ing, espe­cial­ly when cou­pled with the pains of ill­ness and old age. What­ev­er insights one might have at the thresh­old of death, they can­not eas­i­ly over­come “life­long habits,” says Her­bert Fin­garette in the can­did short film Being 97, a doc­u­men­tary made in the last months of the con­trar­i­an Amer­i­can philosopher’s life. By the time of his death,” notes Aeon, “Fin­garette (1921–2018) had lived what most would con­sid­er a full and mean­ing­ful life. His mar­riage to his wife, Leslie, was long and hap­py. His career as a pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia was both accom­plished and con­tro­ver­sial.”

By this time, his wife of sev­en­ty years had been gone for sev­en. And at 97, phys­i­cal­ly frail and his career long over, Fin­garette was com­ing to terms with “lone­li­ness and absence” as well as with his need for help from oth­er peo­ple to do sim­ple tasks. After 42 years of teaching—and writ­ing on sub­jects like self-decep­tion, Con­fu­cian­ism, eth­i­cal respon­si­bil­i­ty, and addiction—he was also grap­pling with the fact he had been wrong about one par­tic­u­lar­ly press­ing mat­ter, at least.

Fin­garette became infa­mous when, with­out under­tak­ing any sci­en­tif­ic research him­self, he claimed in the 1988 book Heavy Drink­ing that alco­holism was a prob­lem of self con­trol, not a dis­ease. But he does not speak of the polit­i­cal furor in this minor con­tro­ver­sy. Eleven years lat­er, he took on an even heav­ier sub­ject in Death: Philo­soph­i­cal Sound­ings. “What I said was in a nut­shell,” he recalls, “is there’s no rea­son to be afraid or con­cerned or any­thing about death because when you die, there’s noth­ing. You’re not going to suf­fer, you’re not going to be unhap­py… you’re not going to be…. It’s not ratio­nal to be afraid of death.”

He admits, “I now think that is not a good state­ment, because I think it’s impor­tant to fig­ure out why it is then that peo­ple are afraid of death. Why am I con­cerned about it?” His best think­ing aside, “my sense of real­ism tells me, well, no good rea­son or not, it is some­thing that haunts me. I walk around the house and I ask myself, ‘What is the point of it all? There must be some­thing I’m miss­ing in this argu­ment.’” He asks, he says, know­ing “that there isn’t any good answer.” But that doesn’t stop him from look­ing for one. We see Fingarette’s life­long habits as a thinker push him for­ward in pur­suit of what he calls a “fool­ish ques­tion,” although he intu­its that “the answer might be… the silent answer.”

It’s a painful exis­ten­tial real­iza­tion for a man so devot­ed to log­i­cal argu­ment and pro­nounce­ments of cer­tain­ty. This film of Fin­garette in his last months is both a per­son­al­ly mov­ing por­trait and a dra­ma in minia­ture of a uni­ver­sal human dilem­ma: why is it so hard to accept the inevitable? Why do we have minds that strug­gle against it? The mul­ti­tude of pos­si­ble answers may be far less mean­ing­ful than the expe­ri­ence of the ques­tion itself, painful and tran­scen­dent as it is, whether we are griev­ing the loss of oth­ers, fac­ing our own mor­tal­i­ty, or, as in Fin­garet­te’s case, both at once.

Being 97 will be added to our list of Free Online Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Death: A Free Phi­los­o­phy Course from Yale Helps You Grap­ple with the Inescapable

Alan Watts Explains Why Death is an Art, Adven­ture and Cre­ative Act

When Aldous Hux­ley, Dying of Can­cer, Left This World Trip­ping on LSD, Expe­ri­enc­ing “the Most Serene, the Most Beau­ti­ful Death” (1963)

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

 

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A Visualization of the United States’ Exploding Population Growth Over 200 Years (1790 – 2010)

in Data, History, Maps | March 5th, 2019

The U.S. is bare­ly even an ado­les­cent com­pared to many oth­er coun­tries around the world. Yet it ranks third, behind Chi­na and India, in pop­u­la­tion. How did the coun­try go, in a lit­tle over 200 years, from 6.1 peo­ple per square mile in 1800 to 93 per square mile today? We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured maps of how the real estate came on the mar­ket. And we’ve brought you a map that tells the loca­tions and sto­ries of the peo­ples who used to live there. The map above takes a dif­fer­ent approach, show­ing pop­u­la­tion den­si­ty growth from 1790 to 2010, in num­bers based on Cen­sus records.

Orig­i­nal­ly appear­ing on Vivid Maps, the ani­mat­ed time­line con­tains no infor­ma­tion about the how, who, or why of things. But we know that since it only accounts for those who were count­ed, the num­bers of peo­ple actu­al­ly liv­ing with­in the bor­ders is often much high­er. “Not only did the pop­u­la­tion boom as a result of births and immi­grants,” writes Jeff Des­jardins at the site Visu­al Cap­i­tal­ist, “but the bor­ders of the coun­try kept chang­ing as well.” This change, and the fact that indige­nous peo­ple were not record­ed, leads to an inter­est­ing visu­al­iza­tion of west­ward expan­sion from the point of view of the set­tlers.

As Des­jardins notes, the state of Okla­homa appears as an “emp­ty gap” on the map in the late-1800s, light­ly shad­ed while its bor­ders are sur­round­ed by dark brown. This is because “the area was orig­i­nal­ly des­ig­nat­ed as Indi­an Ter­ri­to­ry…. How­ev­er, in 1889, the land was opened up to a mas­sive land rush, and approx­i­mate­ly 50,000 pio­neers lined up to grab a piece of the two mil­lion acres opened for set­tle­ment.” Thou­sands of the peo­ple liv­ing there had already, of course, been pushed off their land dur­ing the decades-long “Trail of Tears.” The ques­tion of who “exact­ly is count­ed as a whole per­son?” comes up in the com­ments on Visu­al Cap­i­tal­ist post, anoth­er key con­sid­er­a­tion for under­stand­ing this data in its prop­er con­text.

The ways peo­ple have been cat­e­go­rized are prod­ucts of con­tem­po­rary bias­es, polit­i­cal atti­tudes, and legal and social dis­crim­i­na­tions. These atti­tudes are not inci­den­tal to the pop­u­lat­ing of the coun­try, but mate­ri­al­ly inte­gral. As we see the mas­sive, yet huge­ly uneven, spread of peo­ple across the expand­ing coun­try, we might be giv­en the impres­sion that it con­sti­tutes a uni­fied surge of expan­sion and devel­op­ment, when the his­tor­i­cal real­i­ty, of course, is any­thing but. Of the many ques­tions we can ask of this data, “who ful­ly count­ed as an Amer­i­can dur­ing each of these peri­ods and why or why not?” might be one of the most rel­e­vant, in 1790 and today. Or, if you’d rather just watch the map fill up with sepia and burnt umber pix­els, to the tune of some mar­tial-sound­ing drum & bass, watch the video above.

via Visu­al Cap­i­tal­ist

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Native Lands: An Inter­ac­tive Map Reveals the Indige­nous Lands on Which Mod­ern Nations Were Built

Inter­ac­tive Map Shows the Seizure of Over 1.5 Bil­lion Acres of Native Amer­i­can Land Between 1776 and 1887

A Rad­i­cal Map Puts the Oceans–Not Land–at the Cen­ter of Plan­et Earth (1942)

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

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60 Free-to-Stream Movies for Women’s History Month: Classic Agnès Varda, a Portrait of Susan Sontag, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, and More

in Film | March 5th, 2019

March is Wom­en’s His­to­ry Month, and every month is a good one for watch­ing movies. Well aware of both those facts, the peo­ple behind free-to-user online stream­ing ser­vice Kanopy have made a range of 60 woman-cen­tric and most­ly woman-made films avail­able this month. Some of the women involved include Nou­velle Vague auteur Agnès Var­da, direc­tor of Cléo from 5 to 7 and The Beach­es of Agnès; Susan Son­tag, the pro­lif­ic writer and sub­ject of Regard­ing Susan Son­tag; and Gre­ta Ger­wig, who went from respect­ed indie-cin­e­ma actress to even more respect­ed indie-cin­e­ma direc­tor with 2017’s Lady Bird.

If the trail­ers for these films in this post intrigue you, you can, of course, go right to Kanopy to watch them in full. First, though, you’ll want to pull out your local library card. “We stream thought­ful enter­tain­ment to your pre­ferred device with no fees and no com­mer­cials by part­ner­ing with pub­lic libraries and uni­ver­si­ties,” says Kanopy­’s about page, explain­ing that you need only “log in with your library mem­ber­ship and enjoy our diverse cat­a­log with new titles added every month.”

To check and see whether your library (or uni­ver­si­ty) is among Kanopy­’s part­ners, just type it into the search win­dow on this page.

After log­ging in you can explore the full breadth of Kanopy­’s list of Wom­en’s His­to­ry Month selec­tions, which also includes doc­u­men­taries like Won­der Women: The Untold Sto­ry of Amer­i­can Super­heroines, The Girls in the Band: Female Jazz Musi­cians, Who Does She Think She Is?: A Por­trait of Female Artists, and Women of ’69: Unboxed: Women from the Six­ties Share their Sto­ries, as well as oth­er exam­i­na­tions of women in pol­i­tics, women in gam­ing, women in STEM, and women in prison. Once you’ve seen them all, you might con­sid­er explor­ing Kanopy­’s oth­er cin­e­mat­ic offer­ings, from a vari­ety of oth­er doc­u­men­taries to dra­ma, com­e­dy, and even hor­ror and thriller as well as sci­ence fic­tion and fan­ta­sy.

That last sec­tion, one can’t help but notice, comes head­ed by Mark Saw­ers’ No Men Beyond This Point, which takes as its set­ting a world that has­n’t been able to pro­duce male babies for the past 60 years. Its main char­ac­ter is the last man alive. Kanopy describes it as “a wry mock­u­men­tary that asks the ques­tion, what would the world be like if women were in charge?” How­ev­er pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive an answer to that ques­tion just popped into your head, all these films will sure­ly give it a bit more nuance, and at no charge at that.

Kanopy­’s own list of five Wom­en’s His­to­ry Month films rec­om­mend­ed from each of their major col­lec­tion runs as fol­lows:

Films Direct­ed by Women
  1. Lady Bird — Direct­ed by Gre­ta Ger­wig and nom­i­nat­ed for five Oscars, this warm, affect­ing com­e­dy fol­lows a high school­er who must nav­i­gate a lov­ing, but tur­bu­lent rela­tion­ship with her strong-willed moth­er over the course of her event­ful and poignant senior year of high school.
  2. Cleo from 5 to 7 — Direc­tor Agnes Var­da elo­quent­ly cap­tures Paris in the ‘60s with this real-time por­trait of a singer (Corinne Marc­hand) set adrift as she awaits test results fol­low­ing a biop­sy.
  3. The Mise­d­u­ca­tion of Cameron Post — Direct­ed by Desiree Akha­van and Grand Jury Prize win­ner at the Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val, the film fol­lows Cameron when she’s sent to a gay con­ver­sion ther­a­py cen­ter after get­ting caught with anoth­er girl in the back­seat of a car.
  4. Amer­i­can Hon­ey — Nom­i­nat­ed for six Film Inde­pen­dent Spir­it Awards and win­ner of two Spe­cial Jury Prizes at the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val, the film fol­lows an ado­les­cent girl from a trou­bled home who runs away with a trav­el­ing sales crew across the Amer­i­can Mid­west to sell sub­scrip­tions door-to-door.
  5. Made­line’s Made­line — From direc­tor Josephine Deck­er, the lines between per­for­mance and real­i­ty begin to blur when a young actress is pushed too far. An Offi­cial Selec­tion at the Berlin Inter­na­tion­al Fes­ti­val, Madeline’s Made­line stars Mol­ly Park­er (“Lost in Space”).
His­to­ry
  1. Ani­ta — Against a back­drop of sex, pol­i­tics, and race, Ani­ta reveals the inti­mate sto­ry of a woman who spoke truth to pow­er.
  2. Killing Us Soft­ly (Four-Part Series) — Jean Kil­bourne takes a fresh look at how print and tele­vi­sion adver­tise­ments bare a stun­ning pat­tern of dam­ag­ing gen­der stereo­types, dis­tort­ing the ideals of fem­i­nin­i­ty over the decades.
  3. Women of ’69: Unboxed — An inti­mate, per­son­al­ized por­trait of women of the 1960s through the eyes of one col­or­ful class that grad­u­at­ed in 1969 and start­ed to explore the New Old Age.
  4. Polit­i­cal Ani­mals — This mul­ti-award win­ning film tells the sto­ry of the civ­il rights strug­gle of this cen­tu­ry — the gay rights move­ment — through the eyes of the first four mem­bers of the LGBT Leg­isla­tive Cau­cus.
  5. The Girls in the Band — An award-win­ning doc­u­men­tary film that tells the poignant, untold sto­ries of female jazz and big band instru­men­tal­ists and their fas­ci­nat­ing, his­to­ry-mak­ing jour­neys from the late ‘30s to present day.
Major Fig­ures
  1. Regard­ing Susan Son­tag — An inti­mate and nuanced inves­ti­ga­tion into the life of one of the most impor­tant lit­er­ary, polit­i­cal and fem­i­nist icons of the 20th cen­tu­ry, Susan Son­tag.
  2. Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise — The film traces Dr. Angelou’s incred­i­ble jour­ney, shed­ding light on the untold aspects of her life through nev­er-before-seen footage, rare archival pho­tographs and videos in her own words.
  3. Jane’s Jour­ney — A 2010 film that fol­lows Jane Goodall across sev­er­al con­ti­nents, from her child­hood home in Eng­land to the Gombe Nation­al Park in Tan­za­nia, where she began her ground­break­ing research and where she still returns every year to enjoy the com­pa­ny of chim­panzees.
  4. The Beach­es of Agnes — From direc­tor Agnes Var­da, this cin­e­mat­ic self-por­trait touch­es on every­thing from the fem­i­nist move­ment and the Black Pan­thers to the filmmaker’s hus­band Jacques Demy and the birth of the French New Wave.
  5. Mavis! — An award-win­ning doc­u­men­tary on gospel/soul music leg­end and civ­il rights icon, Mavis Sta­ples and her fam­i­ly group, The Sta­ple Singers.
Cur­rent Events
  1. Wom­en’s March — Shot on loca­tion in five U.S. cities in 2017, this is a sto­ry about democ­ra­cy, human rights and what it means to stand up for val­ues in today’s Amer­i­ca.
  2. I am a Girl — Nom­i­nat­ed for four Aus­tralian Acad­e­my Awards includ­ing Best Doc­u­men­tary and Best Direc­tor, this inspi­ra­tional fea­ture-length doc­u­men­tary fol­lows six girls from around the world, paint­ing a clear pic­ture of the real­i­ty of what it means to be a female in the 21st cen­tu­ry.
  3. Miss Rep­re­sen­ta­tion — Writ­ten and direct­ed by Jen­nifer Siebel New­som, this film expos­es how main­stream media con­tributes to the under-rep­re­sen­ta­tion of women in posi­tions of pow­er and influ­ence in Amer­i­ca.
  4. Star­less Dreams — A stark tes­ti­mo­ni­al of the pre­vi­ous­ly unseen and unheard, this award-win­ning doc­u­men­tary plunges into the lives of young teenage girls shar­ing tem­po­rary quar­ters at a reha­bil­i­ta­tion and cor­rec­tion cen­ter on the out­skirts of Tehran.
  5. Hooli­gan Spar­row — Mav­er­ick activist Ye Haiyan (a.k.a Hooli­gan Spar­row) and her band of col­leagues trav­el to Hainan Province in south­ern Chi­na to protest the case of six ele­men­tary school girls who were sex­u­al­ly abused by their prin­ci­pal.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stream 48 Clas­sic & Con­tem­po­rary Ger­man Films Free Online: From Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis to Mar­garethe von Trotta’s Han­nah Arendt

1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, etc.

An Ambi­tious List of 1400 Films Made by Female Film­mak­ers

Watch Four Dar­ing Films by Lois Weber, “the Most Impor­tant Female Direc­tor the Amer­i­can Film Indus­try Has Known” (1913–1921)

The First Fem­i­nist Film, Ger­maine Dulac’s The Smil­ing Madame Beudet (1922)

11 Essen­tial Fem­i­nist Books: A New Read­ing List by The New York Pub­lic Library

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Watch Lin-Manuel Miranda Perform the Earliest Version of Hamilton at the White House, Six Years Before the Play Hit the Broadway Stage (2009)

in History, Music, Politics, Theatre | March 4th, 2019

Anoth­er immi­grant comin’ up from the bot­tom

His ene­mies destroyed his rep, Amer­i­ca for­got him… 

Holler if you can remem­ber a time when few Amer­i­cans were well-versed enough in found­ing father Alexan­der Hamil­ton’s ori­gin sto­ry to recite it in rhyme at the drop of a hat.

Believe it or not, as recent­ly as the sum­mer of 2015, when Lin-Manuel Miran­da’s Pulitzer Prize-win­ning Hamil­ton: An Amer­i­can Musi­cal explod­ed on Broad­way, Hamil­ton the man was, as the Tony award win­ning lyrics above sug­gest, large­ly for­got­ten, a rel­ic whose por­trait on the $10 bill aroused lit­tle curios­i­ty.

Back then, Hamil­ton was per­haps best known as the hap­less soul embod­ied by Michael Cera in the web series Drunk His­to­ry.

Ron Chernow’s 2005 biog­ra­phy served up a more nuanced por­trait to read­ers with the sta­mi­na to make it through his mas­sive tome.

That’s the book Miran­da famous­ly took along on vaca­tion in the peri­od between his musi­cal In the Heights’ Broad­way and Off-Broad­way runs.

The rest, as they say, is his­to­ry.

As is the above video, in which a 29-year-old Miran­da per­forms The Hamil­ton Mix­tape for Pres­i­dent Oba­ma, the First Lady, and oth­er lumi­nar­ies as part of a White House evening of poet­ry, music, and spo­ken word.

There’s your Hamil­ton (the musi­cal) ori­gin sto­ry.

Its cre­ator ini­tial­ly con­ceived of it as a hip hop con­cept album in which cel­e­brat­ed rap­pers would give voice to dif­fer­ent his­tor­i­cal char­ac­ters.

Music direc­tor Alex Lacamoire’s jubi­lant expres­sion at the White House piano con­firms that they had some inkling that they were on to some­thing very big.

A few months lat­er, Miran­da reflect­ed on the expe­ri­ence in an inter­view with Play­bill:

The whole day was a day that will exist out­side any oth­er day in my life. Any day that starts with you shar­ing a van to the White House with James Earl Jones is going to be a crazy day! I was the clos­ing act of the show and I had nev­er done this project in pub­lic before so I was already ner­vous. I looked at the Pres­i­dent and the First Lady only once and when I looked at him he was whis­per­ing some­thing to her and I couldn’t let that get to me. After­wards, George Stephanopou­los came up to me and said, “The Pres­i­dent is back there talk­ing about your song, he’s say­ing ‘Where is (Sec­re­tary of the Trea­sury) Tim­o­thy Geit­ner? We need him to hear the Hamil­ton rap!’” To hear that the Pres­i­dent enjoyed the song was a real dream come true. 

The Oba­mas enjoy­ment was such that they appeared in a pre-taped seg­ment to intro­duce the Hamil­ton cast at the 2016 Tony awards (a tough year for any oth­er musi­cal unlucky enough to have debuted in the same peri­od as this jug­ger­naut).

They also host­ed a Hamil­ton work­shop for DC-area youth, for which the Broad­way cast trav­eled down on their day off, per­form­ing the open­ing num­ber out of cos­tume. Biog­ra­ph­er Ron Cher­now was in the front row for that one, as Oba­ma remarked that “Hamil­ton is the only thing Dick Cheney and I agree on.”

(“Dick Cheney attend­ed the show tonight,” Miran­da tweet­ed after Cheney’s vis­it. “He’s the OTHER vice-pres­i­dent who shot a friend while in office.” Cur­rent Vice Pres­i­dent Mike Pence also took in a per­for­mance short­ly before his swear­ing in, though his appear­ance was met with a much less pithy response.)

As for The Hamil­ton Mix­tape, many of Miran­da’s dream rap­pers turned out for its record­ing, though the tracks they laid down diverge from the one per­formed live for the Oba­mas in 2009, which legions of ador­ing fans can chant along to thanks to the musi­cal’s over­whelm­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty. Instead, this mixtape’s con­tribut­ing artists were invit­ed to reimag­ine and expand upon the themes of the play—immigration, ambi­tion, and stubble—placing them in an explic­it­ly 21st-cen­tu­ry con­text.

Lis­ten to The Hamil­ton Mix­tape and the orig­i­nal cast record­ing of Hamil­ton for free on Spo­ti­fy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lin-Manuel Miran­da & Emi­ly Blunt Take You Through 22 Clas­sic Musi­cals in 12 Min­utes

A Whiskey-Fueled Lin-Manuel Miran­da Reimag­ines Hamil­ton as a Girl on Drunk His­to­ry

Hamilton’s Lin-Manuel Miran­da Cre­ates a 19-Song Playlist to Help You Get Over Writer’s Block

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She has yet to win the Hamil­ton lot­tery. Join her in New York City for the next install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain, this March. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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A Tactile Map of the Roman Empire: An Innovative Map That Allowed Blind & Sighted Students to Experience Geography by Touch (1888)

in History, Maps | March 4th, 2019

From curb cuts to safer play­grounds, the pub­lic spaces we occu­py have been trans­formed for the bet­ter as they become eas­i­er for dif­fer­ent kinds of bod­ies to nav­i­gate. Closed cap­tion­ing and print­able tran­scripts ben­e­fit mil­lions, what­ev­er their lev­el of abil­i­ty. Acces­si­bil­i­ty tools on the web improve everyone’s expe­ri­ence and pro­vide the impe­tus for tech­nolo­gies that engage more of our sens­es. While smell may not be a high pri­or­i­ty for devel­op­ers, atten­tion to a sense most sight­ed peo­ple tend to take for grant­ed could open up an age of using feed­back sys­tems to make visu­al media touch respon­sive.

One such tac­tile sys­tem designed for Smith­son­ian Muse­ums has devel­oped “new meth­ods for fab­ri­cat­ing repli­cas of muse­um arti­facts and oth­er 3D objects that describe them­selves when touched,” report­ed the Nation­al Reha­bil­i­ta­tion Infor­ma­tion Cen­ter in a Feb­ru­ary post for Low Vision Aware­ness Month. “Depth effects are achieved by vary­ing the height of relief of raised lines, and tex­ture fills help improve aware­ness of fig­ure-ground dis­tinc­tions.” Hap­tic feed­back tech­nol­o­gy, like that the iPhone and var­i­ous video game sys­tems have intro­duced over the past few years, promis­es to open up much more of the world to the visu­al­ly-impaired… and to every­one else.

One inven­tion intro­duced over a cen­tu­ry ago held out the same promise. The tac­tile map, “an inno­va­tion of the 19th cen­tu­ry,” writes Rebec­ca Onion at Slate, “allowed both blind and sight­ed stu­dents to feel their way across a giv­en geog­ra­phy.” One pop­u­lar­iz­er of the tac­tile map, for­mer school super­in­ten­dent L.R. Klemm, who made the exam­ple above, believed that “while the water­proof map could be used to teach stu­dents with­out sight,” it could also “fruit­ful­ly engage sight­ed stu­dents through the sense of touch.”

Though cre­at­ed in Europe, tac­tile maps have had a rel­a­tive­ly long his­to­ry in the U.S., debut­ing in 1837 with an atlas of the Unit­ed States devel­oped by Samuel Gri­d­ley Howe of the Perkins School for the Blind. (See Michi­gan above.) Klemm’s map up top, depict­ing the Roman Empire (284–476 CE), is a lat­er entry, patent­ed in 1888, and, he promis­es it’s a decid­ed improve­ment on ear­li­er mod­els. In an arti­cle that year for The Amer­i­can Teacher, he described “the painstak­ing process of cre­at­ing one of these relief maps,” notes Onion, “a process he used as anoth­er teach­ing tool, enlist­ing stu­dents to help him scrape and carve plas­ter casts into neg­a­tive shapes of moun­tain ranges and plateaus.”

Those stu­dents, he wrote, devel­oped “so clear a con­cep­tion of the topog­ra­phy and irri­ga­tion of the respec­tive coun­try that it can scarce­ly be improved.” Tac­tile accu­ra­cy meant a lot to Klemm. In text pub­lished along­side the map, he took Howe and oth­er pub­lish­ers to task for rais­ing water above land, an idea “so unnat­ur­al, that the mind nev­er thor­ough­ly becomes accus­tomed to it.” Klemm also cri­tiques a French map of “very per­fect con­struc­tion.” This hand­made ver­sion, he says, though inge­nious, is “expen­sive and very inef­fi­cient.” While its util­i­ty “in the case of insti­tu­tions, and for the use of pupils of the wealthy class­es is undoubt­ed… the cost­li­ness of maps con­struct­ed on such a prin­ci­ple places the advan­tages of the sys­tem beyond the reach of the blind gen­er­al­ly.”

Klemm’s con­cern for the qual­i­ty, accu­ra­cy, util­i­ty, and eco­nom­ic acces­si­bil­i­ty of this ear­ly acces­si­bil­i­ty tool is admirable. And though you can’t expe­ri­ence it through your screen, his method is prob­a­bly a vast­ly-improved way of learn­ing geog­ra­phy for many peo­ple, sight­ed or not. Tac­tile maps did not quite become gen­er­al use tech­nolo­gies, but their dig­i­tal prog­e­ny may soon have us all expe­ri­enc­ing more of the world through touch. View and down­load a larg­er (2D) ver­sion of Klem­m’s map and learn more at 19th Cen­tu­ry Dis­abil­i­ty Cul­tures & Con­texts.

via Slate

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vin­tage Geo­log­i­cal Maps Get Turned Into 3D Topo­graph­i­cal Won­ders

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, “the Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever Under­tak­en,” Is Free Online

A Rad­i­cal Map Puts the Oceans–Not Land–at the Cen­ter of Plan­et Earth (1942)

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

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An Animated Introduction to the Chaotic Brilliance of Jean-Michel Basquiat: From Homeless Graffiti Artist to Internationally Renowned Painter

in Animation, Art | March 4th, 2019

By the late 1970s, New York City had fall­en into such a sham­bol­ic state that nobody could have been expect­ed to notice the occa­sion­al streak of addi­tion­al spray paint here and there. But some­how the repeat­ed appear­ance of the word “SAMO” caught the atten­tion of even jad­ed Low­er Man­hat­tan­ites. That tag sig­ni­fied the work of Al Diaz and Jean-Michel Basquiat, the lat­ter of whom would cre­ate work that, four decades lat­er, would sell for over $110 mil­lion at auc­tion, a record-break­ing num­ber for an Amer­i­can artist. But by then he had already been dead for near­ly 20 years, brought down by a hero­in over­dose at 27, an age that reflects not just his rock-star sta­tus in life but his increas­ing­ly leg­endary pro­file after it.

“Born in 1960 to a Hait­ian father and a Puer­to Rican moth­er, Basquiat spent his child­hood mak­ing art and mis­chief in Boerum Hill,” Brook­lyn, says Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land art his­to­ry pro­fes­sor Jor­dana Moore Saggese in the ani­mat­ed Ted-Ed intro­duc­tion above. “While he nev­er attend­ed art school, he learned by wan­der­ing through New York gal­leries, and lis­ten­ing to the music his father played at home.”

He seems to have drawn inspi­ra­tion from every­thing around him, “scrib­bling his own ver­sions of car­toons, com­ic books and bib­li­cal scenes on scrap paper from his father’s office” (lead­ing to a method that has some­thing in com­mon with William Bur­roughs’ cut-up tech­niques). He also spent a great deal of artis­ti­cal­ly for­ma­tive time laid up in the hos­pi­tal after a car acci­dent, por­ing over a copy of Gray’s Anato­my giv­en to him by his moth­er, which “ignit­ed a life­long fas­ci­na­tion with anato­my that man­i­fest­ed in the skulls, sinew and guts of his lat­er work.”

A skull hap­pens to fea­ture promi­nent­ly in that $110 mil­lion paint­ing of Basquiat’s, but he also made lit­er­al­ly thou­sands of oth­er works in his short life, hav­ing turned full-time to art after SAMO hit it big on the Soho art scene. The day job he quit was at a cloth­ing ware­house, a posi­tion he land­ed, after a peri­od of unem­ploy­ment and even home­less­ness, when the com­pa­ny’s founder spot­ted him spray-paint­ing a build­ing at night. Suc­cess came quick­ly to the young Basquiat, but it cer­tain­ly did­n’t come with­out effort: still, when we regard his paint­ings today, don’t we feel com­pelled by not just what Saggesse calls a dis­tinc­tive “inven­tive visu­al lan­guage” and hyper-ref­er­en­tial “phys­i­cal evi­dence of Basquiat’s rest­less and pro­lif­ic mind,” but also of the glimpse they offer into the rare life lived at max­i­mum pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, max­i­mum inten­si­ty, and max­i­mum speed?

To delve deep­er into the world of Basquiat, you can watch two doc­u­men­taries online: Basquiat: Rage to Rich­es, and Jean Michel Basquiat-The Radi­ant Child.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Close Look at Basquiat’s Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Art in a New 500-Page, 14-Pound, Large For­mat Book by TASCHEN

The Odd Cou­ple: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, 1986

Google Puts Online 10,000 Works of Street Art from Across the Globe

Big Bang Big Boom: Graf­fi­ti Stop-Motion Ani­ma­tion Cre­ative­ly Depicts the Evo­lu­tion of Life

The Cre­ativ­i­ty of Female Graf­fi­ti & Street Artists Will Be Cel­e­brat­ed in Street Hero­ines, a New Doc­u­men­tary

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

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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40,000-Year-Old Symbols Found in Caves Worldwide May Be the Earliest Written Language

in History, TED Talks | March 1st, 2019

We may take it for grant­ed that the ear­li­est writ­ing sys­tems devel­oped with the Sume­ri­ans around 3400 B.C.E. The archae­o­log­i­cal evi­dence so far sup­ports the the­o­ry. But it may also be pos­si­ble that the ear­li­est writ­ing sys­tems pre­date 5000-year-old cuneiform tablets by sev­er­al thou­sand years. And what’s more, it may be pos­si­ble, sug­gests pale­oan­thro­pol­o­gist Genevieve von Pet­zinger, that those pre­his­toric forms of writ­ing, which include the ear­li­est known hash­tag marks, con­sist­ed of sym­bols near­ly as uni­ver­sal as emo­ji.

The study of sym­bols carved into cave walls all over the world—including pen­ni­forms (feath­er shapes), clav­i­forms (key shapes), and hand stencils—could even­tu­al­ly push us to “aban­don the pow­er­ful nar­ra­tive,” writes Frank Jacobs at Big Think, “of his­to­ry as total dark­ness until the Sume­ri­ans flip the switch.” Though the sym­bols may nev­er be tru­ly deci­pher­able, their pur­pos­es obscured by thou­sands of years of sep­a­ra­tion in time, they clear­ly show humans “undim­ming the light many mil­len­nia ear­li­er.”

While bur­row­ing deep under­ground to make cave paint­ings of ani­mals, ear­ly humans as far back as 40,000 years ago also devel­oped a sys­tem of signs that is remark­ably con­sis­tent across and between con­ti­nents. Von Pet­zinger spent years cat­a­logu­ing these sym­bols in Europe, vis­it­ing “52 caves,” reports New Scientist’s Ali­son George, “in France, Span, Italy and Por­tu­gal. The sym­bols she found ranged from dots, lines, tri­an­gles, squares and zigza­gs to more com­plex forms like lad­der shapes, hand sten­cils, some­thing called a tec­ti­form that looks a bit like a post with a roof, and feath­er shapes called pen­ni­forms.”

She dis­cov­ered 32 signs found all over the con­ti­nent, carved and paint­ed over a very long peri­od of time. “For tens of thou­sands of years,” Jacobs points out, “our ances­tors seem to have been curi­ous­ly con­sis­tent with the sym­bols they used.” Von Pet­zinger sees this sys­tem as a car­ry­over from mod­ern humans’ migra­tion into Europe from Africa. “This does not look like the start-up phase of a brand-new inven­tion,” she writes in her book The First Signs: Unlock­ing the mys­ter­ies of the world’s old­est sym­bols.

In her TED Talk at the top, von Pet­zinger describes this ear­ly sys­tem of com­mu­ni­ca­tion through abstract signs as a pre­cur­sor to the “glob­al net­work of infor­ma­tion exchange” in the mod­ern world. “We’ve been build­ing on the men­tal achieve­ments of those who came before us for so long,” she says, “that it’s easy to for­get that cer­tain abil­i­ties haven’t already exist­ed,” long before the for­mal writ­ten records we rec­og­nize. These sym­bols trav­eled: they aren’t only found in caves, but also etched into deer teeth strung togeth­er in an ancient neck­lace.

Von Pet­zinger believes, writes George, that “the sim­ple shapes rep­re­sent a fun­da­men­tal shift in our ancestor’s men­tal skills,” toward using abstract sym­bols to com­mu­ni­cate. Not every­one agrees with her. As the Brad­shaw Foun­da­tion notes, when it comes to the Euro­pean sym­bols, emi­nent pre­his­to­ri­an Jean Clottes argues “the signs in the caves are always (or near­ly always) asso­ci­at­ed with ani­mal fig­ures and thus can­not be said to be the first steps toward sym­bol­ism.”

Of course, it’s also pos­si­ble that both the signs and the ani­mals were meant to con­vey ideas just as a writ­ten lan­guage does. So argues MIT lin­guist Cora Lesure and her co-authors in a paper pub­lished in Fron­tiers in Psy­chol­o­gy last year. Cave art might show ear­ly humans “con­vert­ing acoustic sounds into draw­ings,” notes Sarah Gibbens at Nation­al Geo­graph­ic. Lesure says her research “sug­gests that the cog­ni­tive mech­a­nisms nec­es­sary for the devel­op­ment of cave and rock art are like­ly to be anal­o­gous to those employed in the expres­sion of the sym­bol­ic think­ing required for lan­guage.”

In oth­er words, under her the­o­ry, “cave and rock [art] would rep­re­sent a modal­i­ty of lin­guis­tic expres­sion.” And the sym­bols sur­round­ing that art might rep­re­sent an elab­o­ra­tion on the theme. The very first sys­tem of writ­ing, shared by ear­ly humans all over the world for tens of thou­sands of years.

via Big Think

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Was a 32,000-Year-Old Cave Paint­ing the Ear­li­est Form of Cin­e­ma?

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Old­est Writ­ing Sys­tem in the World: A Short, Charm­ing Intro­duc­tion

Dis­cov­er the Old­est Beer Recipe in His­to­ry From Ancient Sume­ria, 1800 B.C.

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

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Jim Morrison Declares That “Fat is Beautiful” .… And Means It

in Animation, Food & Drink, Health, Life, Music | March 1st, 2019

There’s a bit of cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance in a young rock god giv­ing voice to the fat pride move­ment some four decades after his death.

Years before social media ampli­fied celebri­ty weight gain cov­er­age to the realm of nation­al news, The Doors’ lead singer, Lizard King Jim Mor­ri­son, was the sub­ject of intense bod­i­ly scruti­ny.

The musician’s drug of choice—alcohol—swiftly added some extra cush­ion­ing to the sexy, shirt­less young lion image pho­tog­ra­ph­er Joel Brod­sky man­aged to cap­ture in 1967.

That lean, leather-pant­ed ver­sion is the one the Mor­ri­son direc­tor Patrick Smith went with for the Blank on Blank ani­ma­tion above, using audio from a 1969 inter­view with the Vil­lage Voice’s Howard Smith (no rela­tion).

Occa­sion­al­ly ani­ma­tor Smith bal­loons the 2‑D Morrison’s bel­ly for humor­ous effect, but let’s be frank. By today’s stan­dards, the 5’11 Mor­ri­son, who by his own esti­mate tipped the scales at 185lb, was hard­ly “fat.”

Pleas­ing­ly plump per­haps…

Fill­ing out…

Eat­ing (and drink­ing) like some­one whose bank account did­n’t require belt tight­en­ing.

His com­pas­sion toward gen­er­ous­ly pro­por­tioned bod­ies like­ly sprang from ear­ly expe­ri­ence.

As pho­tog­ra­ph­er Lin­da McCart­ney recalled in Lin­da McCartney’s The Sixties—Portrait Of An Era:

He … told me that he’d grown up as a fat kid that no one want­ed to know and that this had caused him a lot of emo­tion­al pain.

Then he explained what had brought it all to the sur­face. Appar­ent­ly he had been walk­ing around Green­wich Vil­lage that morn­ing and a girl who he knew as a child had spot­ted him and start­ed going crazy over him. That both­ered him because he sensed the hypocrisy of it all. When he was a fat mil­i­tary brat these peo­ple had reject­ed and ignored him but now, because of his new pub­lic image, they were fawn­ing over him.

That “new pub­lic image” is the one most of us think of first when think­ing of Jim Mor­ri­son, but as a flesh and blood exem­plar, it was unsus­tain­able. Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Brod­sky reflects:

The shot on the inner sleeve of the Great­est Hits album was pret­ty near the end, I think. By that time, he was so drunk he was stum­bling into the lights and we had to stop the ses­sion. Mor­ri­son nev­er real­ly looked that way again, and those pic­tures have become a big part of The Doors’ leg­end. I think I got him at his peak.

Mor­ri­son didn’t dwell on child­hood mis­eries in his Vil­lage Voice inter­view, nor did he show any self-loathing or regret for physiques past.

Rather, he gave voice to the pos­i­tive effects of his increased size. He felt like a tank, a beast—a body of con­se­quence.

(To con­sid­er the impli­ca­tions of bod­i­ly size for a female in Morrison’s world, have a look at car­toon­ist Péné­lope Bagieu’s Cal­i­for­nia Dreamin’: Cass Elliot before the Mamas and The Papas.)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“The Lost Paris Tapes” Pre­serves Jim Morrison’s Final Poet­ry Record­ings from 1971

The Last Known Pho­tos of Jim Mor­ri­son, Tak­en Days Before His Death in Paris (June 1971)

The Doors Play Live in Den­mark & LA in 1968: See Jim Mor­ri­son Near His Charis­mat­ic Peak

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in New York City March 11 for the next install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Elaborate Pictogram Ernest Hemingway Received in the Hospital During WWI: Can You Decode Its Meaning?

in History, Literature | March 1st, 2019

Every­one who knows the work of Ernest Hem­ing­way knows A Farewell to Arms, and every­one who knows A Farewell to Arms knows that Hem­ing­way drew on his expe­ri­ence as a Red Cross ambu­lance dri­ver in Italy dur­ing World War I. Just a few months after ship­ping out, the eigh­teen-year-old writer-to-be — filled, he lat­er said, with “a great illu­sion of immor­tal­i­ty” — got caught by mor­tar fire while tak­ing choco­late and cig­a­rettes from the can­teen to the front line. Recov­er­ing from his wounds in a Milanese hos­pi­tal, he fell in love with an Amer­i­can nurse named Agnes Han­nah von Kurowsky, who would become the mod­el for Cather­ine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms.

Hem­ing­way wrote that nov­el years after Kurowsky had left him for an Ital­ian offi­cer, but when their prospects still looked good, they received this curi­ous let­ter, which at first glance looks like noth­ing more than a few pages of doo­dles. “We think it may be a rebus or anoth­er type of pic­togram that uses pic­tures to rep­re­sent words, parts of words, or phras­es,” wrote Jes­si­ca Green, an intern at the John F. Kennedy Pres­i­den­tial Library where it turned up, in 2012. “Can you help us solve this puz­zle?” Quite a few Hem­ing­way-enthu­si­ast com­menters duti­ful­ly got to their inter­pre­tive work below Green’s post, bring­ing to bear their knowl­edge of the writer’s life and work on these ani­mals, musi­cal notes, grin­ning faces, and mugs of beer, all strung togeth­er with log­ic sym­bols.

If you need a hint, you might start with the appar­ent fact that the let­ter came from three of Hem­ing­way’s ambu­lance-dri­ver bud­dies. “The let­ter is a cheer­ful nar­ra­tive of the three friends’ recent hijinks,” writes Slate’s Rebec­ca Onion. “In the salu­ta­tion, the writ­ers used a foam­ing mug of beer to rep­re­sent Hemingway’s name (he was often called ‘Hem­ing­stein’); clear­ly, these were men who shared Hemingway’s love for ine­bri­a­tion.” But even before they addressed good old Hem­ing­stein, they addressed Kurowsky — as, in the visu­al lan­guage invent­ed for their pur­pos­es, a fry­ing pan with an egg in it. “Ag sounds like egg,” explains the deci­pher­ment Green lat­er post­ed to the JFK Library’s blog.

Green goes on to break down the pic­to­graph­ic let­ter sec­tion by sec­tion, from Brum­my, Bill, and Jenks’ plans to take leave time and come to Milan, Brum­my’s unfor­tu­nate recent expe­ri­ence with “mixed drinks made from Asti Spuman­ti, Rum, Cognac, Marsala, and Rock Syrup,” Jenks’ dri­ving of the bed­bugs in his bed into that of anoth­er dri­ver, and the glo­ri­ous results of Bil­l’s trim­ming and wax­ing of his mus­tache, and more besides. To mod­ern read­ers, the let­ter offers not just a glimpse into the sen­si­bil­i­ties of Hem­ing­way’s social cir­cle but life on the Ital­ian front in 1918. And for Hem­ing­way him­self, receiv­ing such an amus­ing piece of cor­re­spon­dence dur­ing six long months of recu­per­a­tion in the hos­pi­tal must sure­ly have done some­thing to lift the spir­its, though what effect its dis­tinc­tive com­po­si­tion­al style may have had on his own writ­ing seem­ing­ly remains to be stud­ied.

Click here to read a decod­ing of this pic­togram from 1918.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ernest Hemingway’s Very First Pub­lished Sto­ries, Free as an eBook

Ernest Hem­ing­way Cre­ates a Read­ing List for a Young Writer (1934)

Sev­en Tips From Ernest Hem­ing­way on How to Write Fic­tion

Hear Hem­ing­way Read Hem­ing­way, and Faulkn­er Read Faulkn­er (90 Min­utes of Clas­sic Audio)

Ernest Hemingway’s Favorite Ham­burg­er Recipe

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Download 10,000+ Books in Arabic, All Completely Free, Digitized and Put Online

in Books, e-books | February 28th, 2019

If you’ve con­sid­ered learn­ing a new lan­guage to open up a new realm of read­ing, you could do much worse than Ara­bic. Though its mas­tery may demand a con­sid­er­able amount of time, it repays the invest­ment as the lan­guage of not just a coun­try but an entire region of the world, and a region with a deep tex­tu­al his­to­ry at that. Any­one inter­est­ed in becom­ing a stu­dent of Ara­bic, casu­al­ly or seri­ous­ly, can get their start at our col­lec­tion of Ara­bic lessons avail­able free online, and when up to speed on read­ing might con­sid­er a vis­it to Ara­bic Col­lec­tions Online (ACO), a dig­i­tal library of Ara­bic-lan­guage texts now boast­ing 10,042 vol­umes across 6,265 sub­jects, all of them also avail­able free online.

With a list of con­tribut­ing part­ners includ­ing insti­tu­tions in both Amer­i­ca (New York Uni­ver­si­ty, Prince­ton, Cor­nell, Colum­bia) and the Mid­dle East (the Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ty in Cairo, the Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ty of Beirut and Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates Nation­al Archives) — and, as ArabLit notes, a $1.34 mil­lion grant received last August — ACO “aims to dig­i­tize, pre­serve, and pro­vide free open access to a wide vari­ety of Ara­bic lan­guage books in sub­jects such as lit­er­a­ture, phi­los­o­phy, law, reli­gion, and more.”

This mis­sion address­es not just a lack of wide­ly avail­able Ara­bic texts on the web, but the con­di­tion of much of the mate­r­i­al dig­i­tized, as “many old­er Ara­bic books are out-of-print, in frag­ile con­di­tion, and are oth­er­wise rare mate­ri­als that are in dan­ger of being lost.”

Though clear­ly an ever more valu­able resource for stu­dents of Ara­bic, ACO has much more to offer those already acquaint­ed with the joys of the lan­guage. ArabLit specif­i­cal­ly points out two of its fea­tured Egypt­ian titles this month, Taw­fiq al-Hakim’s Return of the Spir­it (عودة الروح), which Eng­lish trans­la­tor William May­nard Hutchins describes as “a glo­ri­ous­ly Roman­tic trib­ute to the sol­i­dar­i­ty of the Egypt­ian peo­ple of all class­es and reli­gions and to their good taste and excel­lent sense of humor,” andCol­ors (ألوان) by Taha Hus­sein, one of the coun­try’s most influ­en­tial intel­lec­tu­als of the 20th cen­tu­ry. But the full scope of Ara­bic-lan­guage lit­er­a­ture, as the already vast hold­ings of Ara­bic Col­lec­tions Online reveals, extends beyond Egypt, and far indeed beyond the past cou­ple of cen­turies. To those about to explore it,bil-taw­fiq.

via Goodread­er

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Ara­bic Lessons

How Ara­bic Trans­la­tors Helped Pre­serve Greek Phi­los­o­phy … and the Clas­si­cal Tra­di­tion

The Only Sur­viv­ing Text Writ­ten in Ara­bic by an Amer­i­can Slave Has Been Dig­i­tized & Put Online: Read the Auto­bi­og­ra­phy of Enslaved Islam­ic Schol­ar, Omar Ibn Said (1831)

70,000+ Reli­gious Texts Dig­i­tized by Prince­ton The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary, Let­ting You Immerse Your­self in the Curi­ous Works of Great World Reli­gions

A Map Show­ing How Much Time It Takes to Learn For­eign Lan­guages: From Eas­i­est to Hard­est

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The British Library Digitizes Its Collection of Obscene Books (1658–1940)

in Books, Literature | February 28th, 2019

Many peo­ple are cheat­ed out of an authen­tic edu­ca­tion in Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture because of a long­stand­ing puri­tan­i­cal approach to its cura­tion. One might spend a life­time read­ing the tra­di­tion­al canon with­out ever, for exam­ple, learn­ing much about the long his­to­ry of pop­u­lar porno­graph­ic British writ­ing, a genre that flour­ished in the 18th and 19th cen­turies as the pop­u­lar­i­ty of the nov­el explod­ed. Every­one knows the Mar­quis de Sade, even if they haven’t read him, not least because he lent his name to psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic the­o­ry. Many of us have read Voltaire’s randy satire, Can­dide. But few know the name John Cle­land, author of Fan­ny Hill, a bawdy British nov­el pub­lished in 1748, over forty years before de Sade’s Jus­tine.

A book that serves up its own wealth of psy­cho­sex­u­al insights, Fan­ny Hill does not dis­ap­point either as porno­graph­ic writ­ing or as enter­tain­ing fic­tion. Cle­land wrote the book while in debtors’ prison, after he “boast­ed to James Boswell, him­self no mean pornog­ra­ph­er… that he could write a sex­u­al­ly excit­ing sto­ry of ‘a woman of plea­sure’ with­out using a sin­gle ‘foul’ word,” writes John Suther­land at The Guardian. Cle­land suc­ceed­ed, in a nar­ra­tive loaded with crude­ly Shake­speare­an puns and euphemisms. The word­play in the title character’s name, an Angli­ciza­tion of mons vener­is (mound of Venus), will be imme­di­ate­ly appar­ent to speak­ers of British Eng­lish.


Upon its pub­li­ca­tion, how­ev­er, Cle­land was pros­e­cut­ed for “cor­rupt­ing the king’s sub­jects,” and the book was “duly buried and went on to become a cen­turies-long under­ground best­seller.” Such was the fate of many an obscene British nov­el. Thou­sands of these became prop­er­ty of the British Library, which “kept its dirt­i­est books locked away from the rest of its col­lec­tions,” notes Brig­it Katz at Smith­son­ian. “All vol­umes deemed to be in need of extra safe­guard­ing so that mem­bers of the pub­lic couldn’t get their hands on the saucy stories—or try to destroy them—were placed in the library’s ‘Pri­vate Case.’” Now, they are being dig­i­tized and made avail­able to Gale sub­scribers.

2,500 vol­umes from the Pri­vate Case col­lec­tion have become part of Gale’s Archives of Sex­u­al­i­ty and Gen­der research library, the first time much of this mate­r­i­al has been avail­able. “Pret­ty much any­thing to do with sex,” says British Library cura­tor Mad­dy Smith, was locked away “until around 1960, when atti­tudes to sex­u­al­i­ty were chang­ing.” Librar­i­ans only began cat­a­logu­ing this mate­r­i­al in the 1970s, but most of it remained obscure and fair­ly inac­ces­si­ble. The col­lec­tion dates to 1658. It includes a series called the Mer­ry­land Books, writ­ten in the 1740s by authors who took pseu­do­nyms like “Roger Pheuquewell” and described “the female anato­my metaphor­i­cal­ly as land ripe for explo­ration.”

It is not over­all a body of work giv­en to sub­tleties. Aside from some excep­tions, like Tele­ny or The Reverse of the Medal, a trag­ic gay romance attrib­uted to Oscar Wilde, these are also large­ly books “writ­ten by men, for men,” about women, Smith points out. “It’s to be expect­ed, but look­ing back, that’s what is shock­ing, how male-dom­i­nat­ed it is, the lack of female agency.” She might have also point­ed out that many women in the mid-18th cen­tu­ry were writ­ing and pub­lish­ing pop­u­lar nov­els, large­ly read by women, with frank com­ing-of-age descrip­tions of sex­u­al edu­ca­tion, seduc­tion, and even rape. And both men and women wrote about homo­sex­u­al­i­ty and gen­der flu­id­i­ty in ways that might sur­prise us.

The response to such books tend­ed to be moral­is­tic correction—as in the best-sell­ing Pamela, or Virtue Reward­ed by Samuel Richard­son—or las­civ­i­ous satire, as in the Mer­ry­land Books, Fan­ny Hill, and Hen­ry Fielding’s Shamela, a par­o­dy that turns Richardson’s chaste hero­ine into a schem­ing pros­ti­tute. These two nov­els were mas­sive­ly pop­u­lar and show the form as we know it devel­op­ing as a lit­er­ary con­ver­sa­tion between men about women’s sup­posed vices or virtues. We should read mid-18th cen­tu­ry porno­graph­ic lit­er­a­ture as an essen­tial part of the for­ma­tion of the British nov­el tra­di­tion.

At the Gale online col­lec­tion of these British Library trea­sures, one can do just that, then reach back a cen­tu­ry ear­li­er and for­ward 200 years to 1940, the last date in the Gale col­lec­tion, which “makes avail­able approx­i­mate­ly one mil­lion pages of con­tent that’s been locked away for many years, avail­able only via restrict­ed access.” (We must note that access is still restrict­ed to Gale sub­scribers). These pages come not only from the British Library but also from The Kin­sey Insti­tute and the New York Acad­e­my of Med­i­cine, who have both sup­plied a share of text­books and schol­ar­ly mono­graphs on sex. The “obscen­i­ty” of this mate­r­i­al lies in the eyes of its keepers—much will seem unre­mark­able today, and some can still seem plen­ty scan­dalous.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read 14 Great Banned & Cen­sored Nov­els Free Online: For Banned Books Week 2014

A Com­plete Dig­i­ti­za­tion of Eros Mag­a­zine: The Con­tro­ver­sial 1960s Mag­a­zine on the Sex­u­al Rev­o­lu­tion

John Waters Reads Steamy Scene from Lady Chatterley’s Lover for Banned Books Week (NSFW)

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

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