H.P. Lovecraft Writes “Waste Paper: A Poem of Profound Insignificance,” a Devastating Parody of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1923)

in Literature, Poetry | March 15th, 2018

Image by Lucius B. Trues­dell and Lady Mor­rell, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Howard Phillips Love­craft, as his ever-grow­ing fan base knows, sel­dom spared his char­ac­ters — or at least their san­i­ty — from the vast, unspeak­able hor­rors lurk­ing beneath his imag­ined real­i­ty. Not that he showed much more mer­cy as a crit­ic either, as his assess­ment of “The Waste Land” (1922) reveals. Though now near-uni­ver­sal­ly respect­ed, T.S. Eliot’s best-known poem failed to impress Love­craft, who, in his jour­nal The Con­ser­v­a­tive, wrote in 1923 that

We here behold a prac­ti­cal­ly mean­ing­less col­lec­tion of phras­es, learned allu­sions, quo­ta­tions, slang, and scraps in gen­er­al; offered to the pub­lic (whether or not as a hoax) as some­thing jus­ti­fied by our mod­ern mind with its recent com­pre­hen­sion of its own chaot­ic triv­i­al­i­ty and dis­or­gan­i­sa­tion. And we behold that pub­lic, or a con­sid­er­able part of it, receiv­ing this hilar­i­ous melange as some­thing vital and typ­i­cal; as “a poem of pro­found sig­nif­i­cance”, to quote its spon­sors.

Eliot’s work, Love­craft argued, sim­ply could­n’t hold up in the mod­ern world, where “man has sud­den­ly dis­cov­ered that all his high sen­ti­ments, val­ues, and aspi­ra­tions are mere illu­sions caused by phys­i­o­log­i­cal process­es with­in him­self, and of no sig­nif­i­cance what­so­ev­er in an infi­nite and pur­pose­less cos­mos.” Sci­ence, in his view, has made non­sense of tra­di­tion and “a rag-bag of unre­lat­ed odds and ends” of the soul. A poet like Eliot, it seems, “does not know what to do about it; but com­pro­mis­es on a lit­er­a­ture of analy­sis, chaos, and iron­ic con­trast.”

Look­ing on even this hatch­et job, Love­craft must have felt he’d failed to slay the beast, and so he com­posed a par­o­dy of “The Waste Land” enti­tled “Waste Paper” in late 1922 or ear­ly 1923. This “Poem of Pro­found Insignif­i­cance,” which Love­craft schol­ar S.T. Joshi calls the writer’s “best satir­i­cal poem,” begins thus:

Out of the reach­es of illim­itable light
The blaz­ing plan­et grew, and forc’d to life
Unend­ing cycles of pro­gres­sive strife
And strange muta­tions of undy­ing light
And bore­some books, than hell’s own self more trite
And thoughts repeat­ed and become a blight,
And cheap rum-hounds with moon­shine hootch made tight,
And quite con­trite to see the flight of fright so bright

You can read the whole thing, includ­ing its prob­a­bly apoc­ryphal half-epi­graph from the Greek poet Gly­con, at the H.P. Love­craft Archive. “In many parts of this quite lengthy poem,” Joshi writes, “he has quite faith­ful­ly par­o­died the insu­lar­i­ty of mod­ern poet­ry — its abil­i­ty to be under­stood only by a small coterie of read­ers who are aware of inti­mate facts about the poet.”

Love­craft also tried his hand at non-par­o­d­ic poet­ry, though his­to­ry remem­bers him much less for that than for strik­ing a more pri­mal chord with his sui gener­is “weird fic­tion,” whose para­me­ters he was deter­min­ing at the same time he was sav­aging his con­tem­po­rary Eliot. And though sci­en­tif­ic progress has marched much far­ther on since the 1920s, espe­cial­ly as regards the under­stand­ing of the human mind and what­ev­er now pass­es for a soul, both men’s bod­ies of work have only gained in res­o­nance.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

H.P. Lovecraft’s Clas­sic Hor­ror Sto­ries Free Online: Down­load Audio Books, eBooks & More

H.P. Lovecraft’s Mon­ster Draw­ings: Cthul­hu & Oth­er Crea­tures from the “Bound­less and Hideous Unknown”

H.P. Love­craft Gives Five Tips for Writ­ing a Hor­ror Sto­ry, or Any Piece of “Weird Fic­tion”

Love­craft: Fear of the Unknown (Free Doc­u­men­tary)

T.S. Eliot Reads His Mod­ernist Mas­ter­pieces “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

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

Enter Digital Archives of the 1960s Fluxus Movement and Explore the Avant-Garde Art of John Cage, Yoko Ono, John Cale, Nam June Paik & More

in Art | March 15th, 2018

When it comes to the influ­ence of the arts on every­day life, it can seem like our real­i­ty derives far more from Jeff Koons’ “aug­ment­ed banal­i­ty” than from the Fluxus move­ment’s play­ful exper­i­ments with chance oper­a­tions, con­cep­tu­al rig­or, and impro­visato­ry per­for­mance. But per­haps in a Jeff Koons world, these are pre­cise­ly the qual­i­ties we need. Main­ly based in New York, and “tak­ing shape around 1959,” notes the Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa’s Fluxus: A Field Guide, “the inter­na­tion­al cohort of artists known as Fluxus exper­i­ment­ed with—or bet­ter yet between—poet­ry, the­ater, music, and the visu­al arts.” Big names like John Cage and Yoko Ono might give the unini­ti­at­ed a sense of what the 60s art move­ment was all about. An “inter­dis­ci­pli­nary aes­thet­ic,” writes Ubuweb, that “brings togeth­er influ­ences as diverse as Zen, sci­ence, and dai­ly life and puts them to poet­ic use.”

Of course, there’s more to it than that… but Fluxus artists keep us won­der­ing what that might be, sug­gest­ing that ordi­nary expe­ri­ence and the stuff of every­day life pro­vide all the mate­r­i­al we need. Japan­ese artist Mieko Shio­mi describes Fluxus as a “prag­mat­ic con­scious­ness” that makes us “see things dif­fer­ent­ly in every­day life after per­form­ing or see­ing Fluxus works.”

The def­i­n­i­tions of Fluxus, you might notice, can begin to sound a bit cir­cu­lar, maybe because they are entire­ly beside the point. George Maci­u­nas, who named and co-found­ed the move­ment, called Fluxus “a way of doing things.” He called it a num­ber of oth­er things as well.

Maci­u­nas’ 1963 “Fluxus Man­i­festo” makes all the right man­i­festo moves, para­phras­ing Tris­tan Tzara’s “Dada Man­i­festo” in its promise to “purge the world of bour­geois sick­ness, ‘intel­lec­tu­al,’ pro­fes­sion­al & com­mer­cial­ized cul­ture,” and so on. He begins with a dic­tio­nary def­i­n­i­tion of Fluxus, involv­ing the symp­toms of dysen­tery, and “the mat­ter just dis­charged.” But the art of Fluxus, aim­ing at a “non art real­i­ty,” seems mild-man­nered by con­trast with this iron­ic blus­ter.

Though it could also be dan­ger­ous at times, Fluxus was always a form of play, often seem­ing­ly con­tent­less, as in Nam June Paik’s “Zen for Film,” a silent, eight-minute film almost entire­ly com­posed of a fuzzy white screen or, in the most noto­ri­ous exam­ple, John Cage’s “musi­cal” com­po­si­tion, 4.33.

Fluxus has become so close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with the musi­cal exper­i­ments and per­for­mance art of Cage and Ono that the cen­tral­i­ty of poet­ry and the visu­al arts to the move­ment can go unre­marked. Maci­u­nas him­self was a high­ly skilled graph­ic artist and an aspir­ing bour­geois pro­pri­etor: he first sought to turn Fluxus into a com­mer­cial cor­po­ra­tion and designed a num­ber of prod­ucts such as chess sets, posters, and a wood­en box filled with assem­blages of small art objects cre­at­ed by his fel­low Fluxus artists. He lat­er admit­ted, “no one was buy­ing it.” Of course, plen­ty of peo­ple did, just not in a way that returned on his siz­able cash invest­ment. See an “unbox­ing” of Maci­u­nas’ Flux Box 2, above and try not to think of Wes Ander­son.

Like their Dada fore­bears, Fluxus artists worked in every medi­um. At the Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa Library’s Fluxus Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tion, you can find visu­al art by Maci­u­nas and his col­leagues, like Joseph Beuy’s “Fluxus West” post­card, fur­ther up, George Brecht’s Fluxus Games and Puz­zles below it, and A‑Yo’s “Fin­ger Box,” above. At Mono­skop, you’ll find links to more art, film, music, and books by and about artists like Yoko Ono and Fluxus poet Dick Higgens.

At Ubuweb, you’ll find a Flux­film Anthol­o­gy, dat­ing from 1962–1970 and con­tain­ing short films by Paik, Ono, Maci­u­nas, George Brecht, and many more (includ­ing a 1966 short from John Cale). And at Ubuweb: Sound, you’ll find eight cas­settes worth of Fluxus and Fluxus-inspired music, from 1962 to 1992, like the Wolf Vostell “music sculp­ture,” Le Cri / The Cry, from 1990, above. The Fluxus approach may seem puck­ish­ly quaint, even pre­cious, next to the slick hyper­re­al­i­ty of Snapchat, but you will expe­ri­ence the every­day world around you quite dif­fer­ent­ly after immers­ing your­self in the con­cep­tu­al process-world of Fluxus.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

The Music of Avant-Garde Com­pos­er John Cage Now Avail­able in a Free Online Archive

When John Cage & Mar­cel Duchamp Played Chess on a Chess­board That Turned Chess Moves Into Elec­tron­ic Music (1968)

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

Google Launches Three New Artificial Intelligence Experiments That Could Be Godsends for Artists, Museums & Designers

in Art, Photography, Technology | March 9th, 2018

You’ll recall, a few months ago, when Google made it pos­si­ble for all of your Face­book friends to find their dop­pel­gängers in art his­to­ry. As so often with that par­tic­u­lar com­pa­ny, the fun dis­trac­tion came as the tip of a research-and-devel­op­ment-inten­sive ice­berg, and they’ve revealed the next lay­er in the form of three arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence-dri­ven exper­i­ments that allow us to nav­i­gate and find con­nec­tions among huge swaths of visu­al cul­ture with unprece­dent­ed ease.

Google’s new Art Palette, as explained in the video at the top of the post, allows you to search for works of art held in “col­lec­tions from over 1500 cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions,” not just by artist or move­ment or theme but by col­or palette.

You can spec­i­fy a col­or set, take a pic­ture with your phone’s cam­era to use the col­ors around you, or even go with a ran­dom set of five col­ors to take you to new artis­tic realms entire­ly.

Admit­ted­ly, scrolling through the hun­dreds of chro­mat­i­cal­ly sim­i­lar works of art from all through­out his­to­ry and across the world can at first feel a lit­tle uncan­ny, like walk­ing into one of those hous­es whose occu­pant has shelved their books by col­or. But a vari­ety of promis­ing uses will imme­di­ate­ly come to mind, espe­cial­ly for those pro­fes­sion­al­ly involved in the aes­thet­ic fields. Famous­ly col­or-lov­ing, art-inspired fash­ion design­er Paul Smith, for instance, appears in anoth­er pro­mo­tion­al video describ­ing how he’d use Art Palette: he’d “start off with the col­ors that I’ve select­ed for that sea­son, and then through the app look at those col­ors and see what gets thrown up.”

In col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art, Google’s Art Rec­og­niz­er, the sec­ond of these exper­i­ments, uses machine learn­ing to find par­tic­u­lar works of art as they’ve var­i­ous­ly appeared over decades and decades of exhi­bi­tion. “We had recent­ly launched 30,000 instal­la­tion images online, all the way back to 1929,” says MoMA Dig­i­tal Media Direc­tor Shan­non Dar­rough in the video above. But since “those images did­n’t con­tain any infor­ma­tion about the actu­al works in them,” it pre­sent­ed the oppor­tu­ni­ty to use machine learn­ing to train a sys­tem to rec­og­nize the works on dis­play in the images, which, in the words of Google Arts and Cul­ture Lab’s Freya Mur­ray, “turned a repos­i­to­ry of images into a search­able archive.”

The for­mi­da­ble pho­to­graph­ic hold­ings of Life mag­a­zine, which doc­u­ment­ed human affairs with char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly vivid pho­to­jour­nal­ism for a big chunk of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, made for a sim­i­lar­ly entic­ing trove of machine-learn­able mate­r­i­al. “Life mag­a­zine is one of the most icon­ic pub­li­ca­tions in his­to­ry,” says Mur­ray in the video above. “Life Tags is an exper­i­ment that orga­nizes Life mag­a­zine’s archives into an inter­ac­tive ency­clo­pe­dia,” let­ting you browse by every tag from “Austin-Healey” to “Elec­tron­ics” to “Live­stock” to “Wrestling” and many more besides. Google’s invest­ment in arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence has made the his­to­ry of Life search­able. How much longer, one won­ders, before it makes the his­to­ry of life search­able?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Google’s Free App Ana­lyzes Your Self­ie and Then Finds Your Dop­pel­ganger in Muse­um Por­traits

Google Gives You a 360° View of the Per­form­ing Arts, From the Roy­al Shake­speare Com­pa­ny to the Paris Opera Bal­let

Google Art Project Expands, Bring­ing 30,000 Works of Art from 151 Muse­ums to the Web

Google Cre­ates a Dig­i­tal Archive of World Fash­ion: Fea­tures 30,000 Images, Cov­er­ing 3,000 Years of Fash­ion His­to­ry

Google Launch­es a Free Course on Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: Sign Up for Its New “Machine Learn­ing Crash Course”

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

One Man Shows You How to Play Kraftwerk’s “The Robots” with Just One Synthesizer

in Music | March 8th, 2018

Clau­dio aka Doc­tor Mix runs a YouTube chan­nel where he uploads tuto­ri­als on mix­ing and pro­duc­ing music, reviews of audio gear and instru­ments, and hawks his online mix­ing and mas­ter­ing ser­vice. But the above video caught our atten­tion. Using just one syn­the­siz­er, the brand new *ana­log* Arturia MatrixBrute (what a name!), Doc­tor Mix recre­ates the Kraftwerk hit “The Robots.” (Which, if you are a long­time read­er of this site, you know we love.)

Doc­tor Mix builds up the song piece by piece, and while the orig­i­nal band used sev­er­al dif­fer­ent synths to cre­ate the track, the MatrixBrute is able to han­dle every­thing, as it has a sequencer/drum pads built in, and pro­gram­ma­ble sounds that in this sup­ple­men­tal video, Doc­tor Mix will sell to you. (He even is able to use a vocoder with the machine to into­nate its Russ­ian lyrics: “Ja tvoi slu­ga / Ja tvoi rabot­nik”)

It all looks so easy, doesn’t it?

When Kraftwerk record­ed Man Machine, the 1978 land­mark album that leads off with “The Robots,” they had accu­mu­lat­ed years’ worth of synths and oth­er equip­ment, along with synths that had been cus­tom-built for the band, like the “Syn­thanor­ma Sequen­z­er” made by stu­dio Mat­ten & Wiech­ers to han­dle the repet­i­tive loops they start­ed using on their pre­vi­ous album Trans Europe Express.

Along with that and elec­tron­ic-drum pads (first seen on TV in 1975), the band also used the Moog Mini-Moog, the ARP Odyssey, and a Roland Space-Echo, which pro­vid­ed the vocoder sounds.

At the time, band mem­ber Ralf Hüt­ter said of the mak­ing of the album: “We are play­ing the machines, the machines play us, it is real­ly the exchange and the friend­ship we have with the musi­cal machines which make us build a new music.”

But we’ll hand it to Doc­tor Mix: the Arturia MatrixBrute is a good ol’ fash­ioned ana­log machine, and a lot of the new gear reviewed on his site shows that the warm tones of ana­log equip­ment is hav­ing a renais­sance. Warm up those vac­cu­um tubes, kids, the oth­er sound of the ‘70s is back!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kraftwerk’s First Con­cert: The Begin­ning of the End­less­ly Influ­en­tial Band (1970)

The Case for Why Kraftwerk May Be the Most Influ­en­tial Band Since the Bea­t­les

Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Com­pos­er Karl­heinz Stock­hausen Presents “Four Cri­te­ria of Elec­tron­ic Music” & Oth­er Lec­tures in Eng­lish (1972)

Kraftwerk Plays a Live 40-Minute Ver­sion of their Sig­na­ture Song “Auto­bahn:” A Sound­track for a Long Road Trip (1974)

The Psy­che­del­ic Ani­mat­ed Video for Kraftwerk’s “Auto­bahn” from 1979

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Public Economics: A Free Online Course from Harvard

in | March 4th, 2018

Course descrip­tion: This is the first of two cours­es in the grad­u­ate pub­lic eco­nom­ics sequence at Har­vard. This one-semes­ter course cov­ers basic issues in the opti­mal design of tax and social insur­ance poli­cies, with empha­sis on com­bin­ing the­o­ret­i­cal mod­els with empir­i­cal evi­dence. Top­ics include effi­cien­cy costs and inci­dence of tax­a­tion, income tax­a­tion, trans­fer and wel­fare pro­grams, pub­lic goods and exter­nal­i­ties, opti­mal social insur­ance (exclud­ing social secu­ri­ty), and wel­fare analy­sis in behav­ioral mod­els.

It was taught by Raj Chet­ty when he was at Har­vard. He now teach­es at Stan­ford.

Pub­lic Eco­nom­ics (avail­able above or via this playlist on YouTube) will be added to our col­lec­tion of Free Eco­nom­ics Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Public Economics and Finance: A Free Online Course from NYU

in | March 4th, 2018

Course descrip­tion: Pub­lic finance (also known as pub­lic eco­nom­ics) ana­lyzes the impact of pub­lic pol­i­cy on the allo­ca­tion of resources and the dis­tri­b­u­tion of income in the econ­o­my. In this course, you will learn how to use the tools of micro­eco­nom­ics and empir­i­cal analy­sis to ana­lyze the eco­nom­ic effects of pub­lic expen­di­tures and tax­a­tion.

This course requires a work­ing knowl­edge of cer­tain pre­req­ui­site cours­es, name­ly Sta­tis­tics, Micro­eco­nom­ics, and Finan­cial Man­age­ment.

It was taught by Niru­pa­ma Rao, when she taught at NYU. She now teach­es at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan.

Pub­lic Eco­nom­ics and Finance (avail­able above or via this playlist on YouTube) will be added to our col­lec­tion of Free Eco­nom­ics Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

The Truth Behind Jane Austen’s Fight Club: Female Prize Fights Were a Thing During the 18th Century

in Gender, History, Literature, Sports | February 23rd, 2018

The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. 

The sec­ond rule of Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Fight Club! 

- Chuck Palah­niuk, Fight Club

Could it be a case of autho­r­i­al over­sight that all sub­se­quent rules are exclu­sive­ly con­cerned with such prac­ti­cal mat­ters as dress and fight dura­tion?

Giv­en the macho rep­u­ta­tion of both the book and the film adap­ta­tion, it seems like the third rule of Fight Club should be: you DO NOT talk about the fact that a fair num­ber of Edwar­dian ladies were badass bare knuck­le fight­ers.

Because doing so might dimin­ish Fight Club’s street cred just a bit­sy…

Film­mak­er (and pop­u­lar audio­book nar­ra­tor) Emi­ly Jan­ice Card has a good deal of fun in Jane Austen’s Fight Club, above, mar­ry­ing Palahniuk’s tropes to the social mores of England’s Regency peri­od.

“No corsets, no hat pins and no cry­ing,” Tyler Dur­den stand-in Lizzie instructs the eager young ladies in her cir­cle. Soon, they’re proud­ly sport­ing bruis­es beneath their bon­nets and stray blood spots on their tea dress­es.

While young women of the fic­tion­al Ben­net sis­ters’ social class refrained from bru­tal fisticuffs, there’s ample evi­dence of female com­bat­ants from the pro­le­tar­i­an ranks. They fought for mon­ey, and occa­sion­al­ly to set­tle a dis­agree­ment, train­ing hard for weeks in advance.

Their bouts drew spec­ta­tors to the amphithe­ater owned by box­ing pro­mot­er James Figg, and the mar­velous­ly named Hock­ley in the Hole, a seedy estab­lish­ment whose oth­er attrac­tions includ­ed bear­bait­ing, bull­bait­ing, and fight­ing with broadswords and cud­gels.

The female fist fight­ers chal­lenged each oth­er with paid notices in local papers, like this one from “cham­pi­oness and ass-dri­ver” Ann Field of Stoke New­ing­ton:

Where­as I, Ann Field, of Stoke New­ing­ton, ass-dri­ver, well known for my abil­i­ties, in box­ing in my own defense wher­ev­er it hap­pened in my way, hav­ing been affront­ed by Mrs. Stokes, styled the Euro­pean Cham­pi­oness, do fair­ly invite her to a tri­al of her best skill in Box­ing for 10 pounds, fair rise and fall; and ques­tion not but to give her such proofs of my judg­ment that shall oblige her to acknowl­edge me Cham­pi­oness of the Stage, to the sat­is­fac­tion of all my friends.

Mrs. Stokes prompt­ly announced her readi­ness to come out of retire­ment:

I, Eliz­a­beth Stokes, of the City of Lon­don, have not  fought in this way since I fought the famous box­ing- woman of Billings­gate 29 min­utes, and gained a com­plete vic­to­ry (which is six years ago); but as the famous Stoke New­ing­ton ass-woman dares me to fight her for the 10 pounds, I do assure her I will not fail meet­ing her for the said sum, and doubt not that the blows which I shall present her with will be more dif­fi­cult for her to digest than any she ever gave her ass­es.

Rather than keep­ing mum on Fight Club, these female pugilists shared Muham­mad Ali’s flare for drum­ming up inter­est with irre­sistibly cocky word­play.

Ref­er­ences to adver­saries fight­ing in “close jack­et, short pet­ti­coats, and hol­land draw­ers … with white stock­ings and pumps” sug­gest that the adver­saries played to the spec­ta­tors’ pruri­ence, though not always. Unlike the 20th-cen­tu­ry stunt of biki­ni clad jel­lo wrestling, sex appeal was not oblig­a­tory.

In a chap­ter devot­ed to pub­lic enter­tain­ments, sports and amuse­ments, Alexan­der Andrews, author of The Eigh­teenth Cen­tu­ry or Illus­tra­tions of the Man­ners and Cus­toms of Our Grand­fa­thers, doc­u­ments how the Mer­ry Wives of Wind­sor, a crew com­prised of “six old women belong­ing to Wind­sor town” took out an ad seek­ing “any six old women in the uni­verse to outscold them.”

On June 22nd, 1768, a woman called Bruis­ing Peg “beat her antag­o­nist in a ter­ri­ble man­ner” to win a new chemise, val­ued at half a guinea.

In 1722, Han­nah Hyfield of New­gate Mar­ket, resolved to give her chal­lenger, Eliz­a­beth Wilkin­son, “more blows than words,” promis­ing to deliv­er “a good thump­ing.” Both par­ties agreed to hold a half-crown in their fists for the dura­tion of the fight. William B. Boul­ton, author of 1901’s Amuse­ments of Old Lon­don, spec­u­lates that this was a prac­ti­cal mea­sure to min­i­mize scratch­ing and hair-pulling.

Time trav­el to an 18th-cen­tu­ry female bare knuck­les fight via Female Sin­gle Com­bat Club’s exhaus­tive cov­er­age,  Sarah Murden’s excel­lent analy­sis of John Collet’s paint­ing, The Female Bruis­ers, above, or Jere­my Freeston’s short doc­u­men­tary avail­able on YouTube.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Author Chuck Palah­niuk Read Fight Club 4 Kids

Ste­vie Nicks “Shows Us How to Kick Ass in High-Heeled Boots” in a 1983 Women’s Self Defense Man­u­al

Ernest Hemingway’s Delu­sion­al Adven­tures in Box­ing: “My Writ­ing is Noth­ing, My Box­ing is Every­thing.”

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

How to Write Like an Architect: Short Primers on Writing with the Neat, Clean Lines of a Designer

in Architecture, Design, How to Learn for Free, Writing | February 12th, 2018

We have anoth­er nation­al cri­sis on our hands.

Our chil­dren are not only ill-equipped to read maps and tell time with ana­log clocks, their hand­writ­ing is in seri­ous decline.

For­get cur­sive, which went the way of the dodo ear­li­er in the mil­len­ni­um. Young­sters who are dab hands on the key­board may have lit­tle impulse—or opportunity—to prac­tice their print­ing.

Does it mat­ter?

It sure as shootin’ might be dur­ing a zom­bie inva­sion, giv­en the atten­dant break­down of dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion and the elec­tric­i­ty that pow­ered it.

But even in less dire times, leg­i­ble pen­man­ship is a good skill to mas­ter.

As Vir­ginia Berninger, pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus and prin­ci­pal inves­ti­ga­tor of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Washington’s Inter­dis­ci­pli­nary Learn­ing Dis­abil­i­ties Cen­ter, told The New York Times, “Hand­writ­ing — form­ing let­ters — engages the mind, and that can help chil­dren pay atten­tion to writ­ten lan­guage.”

Hand let­ter­ing is also a com­plex neu­ro­log­i­cal process, a work­out involv­ing var­i­ous cog­ni­tive, motor, and neu­ro­mus­cu­lar func­tions.

There’s also a school of thought that teach­ers who still accept hand­writ­ten assign­ments uncon­scious­ly award the high­est grades to pupils with the neat­est pen­man­ship, which is eas­i­er on tired eyes. Some­thing to keep in mind for those gear­ing up to take the hand­writ­ten essay por­tions of the SAT and ACT.

Let’s remem­ber that let­ters are real­ly just shapes.

The Finns and French have long-estab­lished uni­for­mi­ty with regard to hand­writ­ing. In the absence of class­room instruc­tion, Amer­i­cans have the free­dom to peruse var­i­ous pen­man­ship styles, iden­ti­fy their favorite, and work hard to attain it.

(This writer is proof that pen­man­ship can become part of the DNA through prac­tice, hav­ing set out to dupli­cate my mother’s delight­ful, eccen­tric-to-the-point-of-illeg­i­bile hand at around the age of 8. I added a few per­son­al quirks along the way. The result is I’m fre­quent­ly bam­boo­zled into serv­ing as scribe for what­ev­er group I hap­pen to find myself in, and my chil­dren can claim they could­n’t read the impor­tant hand­writ­ten instruc­tions hur­ried­ly left for them on Post-Its.)

His­tor­i­cal­ly, the most leg­i­ble Amer­i­can pen­man­ship belongs to archi­tects.

Their pre­cise­ly ren­dered all caps sug­gest metic­u­lous­ness, account­abil­i­ty, steadi­ness of char­ac­ter…

And almost any­one can achieve it, regard­less of whether those are qual­i­ties they per­son­al­ly pos­sess.

All it takes is deter­mi­na­tion, time, and—as taught by Doug Patt in his How to Archi­tect series, above—more tools than can be simul­ta­ne­ous­ly oper­at­ed with two hands:

an Ames let­ter­ing guide

a par­al­lel rule or t‑square

a small plas­tic tri­an­gle cus­tomized with bits of tape

a .5mm Pen­tel draft­ing pen­cil

If this sounds need­less­ly labo­ri­ous, keep in mind that such spe­cial­ty equip­ment may appeal to reluc­tant hand writ­ers with an inter­est in engi­neer­ing, robot­ics, or sci­en­tif­ic exper­i­men­ta­tion.

(Be pre­pared for some frus­tra­tion if this is the student’s first time at the rodeo with these instru­ments. As any vet­er­an com­ic book artist can attest, few are born know­ing how to use an Ames let­ter­ing guide.)

It should be not­ed that Patt’s alpha­bet devi­ates a bit from tra­di­tion­al stan­dards in the field.

His pref­er­ence for breath­ing some life into his let­ters by not clos­ing their loops, squash­ing tra­di­tion­al­ly cir­cu­lar forms into ellipses, and using “dynam­ic angles” to ren­der cross­pieces on a slant would like­ly not have passed muster with archi­tec­ture pro­fes­sors of an ear­li­er age, my sec­ond grade teacher, or the font design­ers respon­si­ble for the com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed “hand let­ter­ing” grac­ing the bulk of recent archi­tec­tur­al ren­der­ings.

He’s like­ly the only expert sug­gest­ing you make your Ks and Rs rem­i­nis­cent of actor Ralph Mac­chio in the 1984 film, The Karate Kid.

There’s lit­tle chance you’ll find your­self groov­ing to Patt’s videos for any­thing oth­er than their intend­ed pur­pose. Where­as the late Bob Ross’ Joy of Paint­ing series has legions of fans who tune in sole­ly for the med­i­ta­tive ben­e­fits they derive from his mel­low demeanor, Patt’s rapid fire instruc­tion­al style is that of the busy mas­ter, deft­ly exe­cut­ing moves the fledg­ling stu­dent can only but fum­ble through.

But if the Karate Kid taught us any­thing, it’s that prac­tice and grit lead to excel­lence. If the above demon­stra­tion whips by too quick­ly, Patt expands on the shap­ing of each let­ter in 30-sec­ond video tuto­ri­als avail­able as part of a $19 online course.

Those look­ing for archi­tec­tur­al low­er case, or tech­niques for con­trol­ling the thick­ness of their lines can find them in the episode devot­ed to let­ter­ing with a .7mm Pen­tel mechan­i­cal draft­ing pen­cil.

Explore fur­ther secrets of the archi­tects on Patt’s How to Archi­tect chan­nel or 2012 book, also called How to Archi­tect.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art of Hand­writ­ing as Prac­ticed by Famous Artists: Geor­gia O’Keeffe, Jack­son Pol­lock, Mar­cel Duchamp, Willem de Koon­ing & More

Dis­cov­er What Shakespeare’s Hand­writ­ing Looked Like, and How It Solved a Mys­tery of Author­ship

Helen Keller Had Impec­ca­ble Hand­writ­ing: See a Col­lec­tion of Her Child­hood Let­ters

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

Download 240+ Free eBooks on Design, Data, Software, Web Development & Business from O’Reilly Media

in Computer Science, Data, Design, e-books | February 9th, 2018

Last year we high­light­ed for you 20 Free eBooks on Design from O’Reilly Media. Lit­tle did we know that we were just scratch­ing the sur­face of the free ebooks O’Reil­ly Media has to offer.

If you head over to this page, you can access 240+ free ebooks cov­er­ing a range of dif­fer­ent top­ics. Below, we’ve divid­ed the books into sec­tions (and pro­vid­ed links to them), indi­cat­ed the num­ber of books in each sec­tion, and list­ed a few attractive/representative titles.

You can down­load the books in PDF for­mat. An email address–but no cred­it card–is required. Again the com­plete list is here.

• Busi­ness & Lead­er­ship (10 ebooks total)
  • The Secrets Behind Great One-on-One Meet­ings
  • Your Crit­i­cal First 10 Days as a Leader
  • more
• Data & Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (95 ebooks total)
  • The Glob­al Impact of Open Data
  • The Big Data Trans­for­ma­tion
  • What Is Data Sci­ence?
  • What Is Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence?
  • Ana­lyz­ing Data in the Inter­net of Things
  • more
• Design (21 ebooks)
  • Design Essen­tials
  • Design­ing for the Future
  • Expe­ri­ence Design
  • more
• Hard­ware & the Inter­net of Things (24 ebooks)
  • What Is the Inter­net of Things?
  • Build­ing a Hard­ware Busi­ness
  • Pitch­ing Your IoT Project
  • more
• Software/Programming (36 ebooks)
  • A Whirl­wind Tour of Python
  • Java: The Leg­end
  • 20 Python Libraries You Aren’t Using (But Should)
  • more
• Secu­ri­ty (8 ebooks)
  • Pri­va­cy and the Inter­net of Things
  • Crack­ing Secu­ri­ty Mis­con­cep­tions
  • more
• Web Devel­op­ment & Per­for­mance (19 ebooks)
  • Get­ting Start­ed with the Web
  • Devel­op­ing Great Web APIs
  • Mod­ern Javascript
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• Web Ops & DevOps (31)
  • Mobile App Ana­lyt­ics
  • Mod­ern Web Oper­a­tions
  • DevOps in Prac­tice
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Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in Jan­u­ary 2017.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 20 Free eBooks on Design from O’Reilly Media

Read 700 Free eBooks Made Avail­able by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia Press

A New Free eBook Every Month from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go Press

800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices

Hear Freddie Mercury’s Vocals Soar in the Isolated Vocal Track for “Somebody to Love”

in Music | February 6th, 2018

For some time now, cer­tain fans of Queen have sought the elu­sive answer to the ques­tion “what made Fred­die Mer­cury such an incred­i­ble singer?” That he was an incred­i­ble singer—one of the great­est in terms of vocal range, emo­tive pow­er, stage pres­ence, song­writ­ing, etc.—is hard­ly a fact in dis­pute. Or it shouldn’t be. You don’t need to love Queen’s music to acknowl­edge its bril­liance, and mar­vel at its frontman’s seem­ing­ly super­hu­man pow­er and sta­mi­na. The expla­na­tions for it are mul­ti­ple and have become far more sophis­ti­cat­ed in recent years.

Sci­en­tif­ic research has exam­ined the pos­si­ble phys­i­o­log­i­cal struc­ture of Mercury’s vocal chords, and con­clud­ed that he was able to vibrate sev­er­al vocal folds at once, cre­at­ing sub­har­mon­ics and a vibra­to faster than that of any oth­er singer. It’s a com­pelling the­o­ry, albeit a lit­tle gross. Who wants to lis­ten to “Some­body to Love”’s glo­ri­ous, swoop­ing soul­ful vers­es and Broad­way show­stop­per cho­rus­es and pic­ture vibrat­ing vocal folds? Mer­cury was a show­man, not a singing machine—and his unique inflec­tions derived not only from biol­o­gy but also—argues Rudi Dolezal, direc­tor of Fred­die Mer­cury: The Untold Sto­ry—from cul­ture.

Mercury’s for­ma­tive expe­ri­ences as a child in Zanz­ibar and India, and the “cul­ture shock” of his move to Lon­don as a teenag­er, may have con­tributed to his expan­sive vocal prowess: “it was mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism that was com­bined in Fred­die Mer­cury,” says Dolezal, sug­gest­ing that Mercury’s voice went places no one else’s did in part because he com­bined the strengths of East­ern and West­ern music. Maybe. Mer­cury grew up emu­lat­ing Eng­lish and Amer­i­can artists like Cliff Richard and Lit­tle Richard, but one of his biggest influ­ences was Bol­ly­wood super­star Lata Mangeshkar.

Mer­cury him­self had his own unusu­al the­o­ry, believ­ing that his dis­tinc­tive over­bite some­how played a part in his singing abil­i­ty, which is why he nev­er had his teeth straight­ened despite a life­time of self-con­scious­ness about them. Maybe the most hon­est fan answer to the ques­tion might be, “who cares?” Just enjoy it—over-analysis of the parts takes away from the expe­ri­ence of Queen’s bom­bas­tic the­atri­cal whole. That’s fair enough, I sup­pose, but if there’s any voice worth obsess­ing over it’s Mercury’s.

If you’re still in doubt about why, lis­ten to the iso­lat­ed vocal track at the top for “Some­body to Love” from start to fin­ish. You’ll hear a singer who sounds capa­ble of doing pret­ty much any­thing that it’s pos­si­ble to do with the human voice except sing off-key. Yes, of course, it’s impres­sive in con­text, with the band’s vocal har­monies lift­ing Mercury’s voice like a great pair of wings. Take them away, how­ev­er, and strip away all of the song’s instru­men­ta­tion, and Mercury’s vocal seems to soar even high­er. I’d kind of like to know how he did that.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Made Fred­die Mer­cury the Great­est Vocal­ist in Rock His­to­ry? The Secrets Revealed in a Short Video Essay

Sci­en­tif­ic Study Reveals What Made Fred­die Mercury’s Voice One of a Kind; Hear It in All of Its A Cap­pel­la Splen­dor

Fred­die Mer­cury: The Untold Sto­ry of the Singer’s Jour­ney From Zanz­ibar to Star­dom

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