The 10 Rules for Students and Teachers Popularized by John Cage: “Nothing Is a Mistake,” “Consider Everything an Experiment” & More

in Creativity | July 20th, 2018

The Bri­an Eno archive More Dark than Shark recent­ly post­ed on its Twit­ter account a list of twelve rules for stu­dents and teach­ers used by John Cage. Though much has been writ­ten about the artis­tic affini­ties between Eno and Cage, both of whose com­po­si­tions have pushed the bound­aries of how we think about music itself, they also both have a deep con­nec­tion to the idea of using rules to enhance the expe­ri­ence of cre­ation. Where Eno has his deck of cre­ative process-enhanc­ing Oblique Strate­gies cards, Cage had this list of rules first com­posed by an edu­ca­tor, silkscreen artist, and nun named Sis­ter Cori­ta Kent.

Kent came up with the list, writes Brain­pick­ings’ Maria Popo­va, “as part of a project for a class she taught in 1967–1968. It was sub­se­quent­ly appro­pri­at­ed as the offi­cial art depart­ment rules at the col­lege of LA’s Immac­u­late Heart Con­vent, her alma mater, but was com­mon­ly pop­u­lar­ized by Cage, whom the tenth rule cites direct­ly.”

That tenth rule, more of a meta-rule, reminds the read­er that “we’re break­ing all the rules” by “leav­ing plen­ty of room for X quan­ti­ties.” But one can eas­i­ly imag­ine how the pre­vi­ous nine, hav­ing as much to do with the enjoy­ment of the work of learn­ing, teach­ing, and cre­at­ing as with its rig­or­ous per­for­mance, might appeal to Cage as well. The com­plete list runs as fol­lows:

RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then try trust­ing it for a while.

RULE TWO: Gen­er­al duties of a stu­dent: Pull every­thing out of your teacher; pull every­thing out of your fel­low stu­dents.

RULE THREE: Gen­er­al duties of a teacher: Pull every­thing out of your stu­dents.

RULE FOUR: Con­sid­er every­thing an exper­i­ment.

RULE FIVE: Be self-dis­ci­plined: this means find­ing some­one wise or smart and choos­ing to fol­low them. To be dis­ci­plined is to fol­low in a good way. To be self-dis­ci­plined is to fol­low in a bet­ter way.

RULE SIX: Noth­ing is a mis­take. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.

RULE SEVEN: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to some­thing. It’s the peo­ple who do all of the work all of the time who even­tu­al­ly catch on to things.

RULE EIGHT: Don’t try to cre­ate and ana­lyze at the same time. They’re dif­fer­ent process­es.

RULE NINE: Be hap­py when­ev­er you can man­age it. Enjoy your­self. It’s lighter than you think.

RULE TEN: We’re break­ing all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leav­ing plen­ty of room for X quan­ti­ties.

HINTS: Always be around. Come or go to every­thing. Always go to class­es. Read any­thing you can get your hands on. Look at movies care­ful­ly, often. Save every­thing. It might come in handy lat­er.

Some of the rules on Ken­t’s list, which has now exert­ed its influ­ence for half a cen­tu­ry, sound faint­ly like the Oblique Strate­gies Eno and the painter Peter Schmidt would come up with in the 1970s. Take rule num­ber six, “Noth­ing is a mis­take,” which brings to mind the Oblique Strat­e­gy “Hon­or thy error as a hid­den inten­tion.” But we’re all on the same field when it comes to tech­niques to move our minds in worth­while new direc­tions, as Cage, Kent, Eno, Schmidt, and most oth­er seri­ous stu­dents, teach­ers, and cre­ators might agree. They’d cer­tain­ly agree that, all rules aside, every­thing ulti­mate­ly comes down to doing the work itself, day in and day out. “Craft,” as Eno once said,” is what enables you to be suc­cess­ful when you’re not inspired.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Impres­sive Audio Archive of John Cage Lec­tures & Inter­views: Hear Record­ings from 1963–1991

How to Get Start­ed: John Cage’s Approach to Start­ing the Dif­fi­cult Cre­ative Process

Lis­ten to John Cage’s 5 Hour Art Piece: Diary: How To Improve The World (You Will Only Make Mat­ters Worse)

Nota­tions: John Cage Pub­lish­es a Book of Graph­ic Musi­cal Scores, Fea­tur­ing Visu­al­iza­tions of Works by Leonard Bern­stein, Igor Stravin­sky, The Bea­t­les & More (1969)

Jump Start Your Cre­ative Process with Bri­an Eno’s “Oblique Strate­gies” Deck of Cards (1975)

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.

Watch “The Hangman,” a Classic Animated Film That Explores What Happens When No One Dares to Stand Up to Evil

in Film | July 13th, 2018

Last Fri­day, I was down­town at an open air cin­e­ma to watch a col­lec­tion of ani­mat­ed shorts. It was also a beast­ly hot night with roar­ing sun­down­ers, a very present dan­ger of being clocked in the head by falling palm fronds, and an exis­ten­tial dan­ger of fire in the hills. The oth­er exis­ten­tial dan­ger was that of the author­i­tar­i­an turn of this coun­try that, at that moment, seemed so far away from our pic­nic bas­kets and wine in a can.

In the mid­dle of the pro­gram of well made but light and fluffy shorts came the above ani­mat­ed film, “The Hang­man.” The ver­sion above is not the restored ver­sion we saw, but it’s pret­ty much the same, give or take a scratch. Les Gold­man and Paul Julian’s 1964 short deliv­ers a moral mes­sage along the same lines as anti-Nazi pas­tor Mar­tin Niemöller’s “First they came for the Social­ists” statement–currently a meme you’ve prob­a­bly seen pass through your social feed. And though the nar­ra­tive, based on the poem by Mau­rice Ogden, is easy to suss out as it trun­dled towards its mor­tal con­clu­sion, it did not stop the fact that the ram­bunc­tious Fri­day night audi­ence fell dead silent upon its con­clu­sion. You may too.

The poem first appeared in a 1954 issue of Mass­es and Main­stream, a month­ly Marx­ist pub­li­ca­tion that con­tin­ued pub­lish­ing through the worst excess­es of the McCarthy hear­ings to an under­stand­ably van­ish­ing read­er­ship. The poem has occa­sion­al­ly been taught in the con­text of the Holo­caust, but any kind of creep­ing fas­cism will do. Not much is real­ly known about Ogden, who wrote the poem under the pseu­do­nym Jack Denoya in its orig­i­nal pub­li­ca­tion. (He is pos­si­bly the same man who taught at Coast Com­mu­ni­ty Col­lege in Cos­ta Mesa, CA, and min­is­tered at Orange Coast Uni­tar­i­an Uni­ver­sal­ist Church.)

The ani­mat­ed ver­sion, with its mod­ernist look influ­enced by UPA’s ani­ma­tion stu­dio, came out one year after Mass­es and Main­stream fold­ed. Dur­ing that Fri­day night view­ing, I sus­pect­ed the nar­ra­tor to be Ken Nor­dine, who record­ed a vocal jazz album around that time. But actu­al­ly the voice belongs to Her­schel Bernar­di, a film and the­ater actor who would have been known to Broad­way fans for his star­ring role in Fid­dler on the Roof but to tele­vi­sion fans as Char­lie Tuna in the Stark­ist com­mer­cials. Before all that, how­ev­er, he was a vic­tim of the Hol­ly­wood black­list, which made him a per­fect choice to nar­rate “The Hang­man.”

Direc­tor Paul Julian illus­trat­ed much of the back­ground art used in Warn­er Bros. car­toons, and his claim to pop cul­ture fame is pro­vid­ing the “beep beep” sound for the Road Run­ner car­toons by the same stu­dio. Pro­duc­er Les Gold­man went on to pro­duce sev­er­al oth­er influ­en­tial ani­mat­ed shorts, such as “The Dot and the Line” and “The Phan­tom Toll­booth.”

How­ev­er, “The Hang­man” is seri­ous food for thought in these fraught times, and it’s good to see it back in cir­cu­la­tion, thanks to cura­tor Ron Dia­mond. Here’s to hop­ing his­to­ry doesn’t repeat itself.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch a Sur­re­al 1953 Ani­ma­tion of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart,” Vot­ed the 24th Best Car­toon of All Time

A Short Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Karl Marx

The Best Ani­mat­ed Films of All Time, Accord­ing to Ter­ry Gilliam

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.

Why Med Schools Are Requiring Students to Take Art Classes, and How It Makes Med Students Better Doctors

in Art, Health, Psychology, Science | July 11th, 2018

I have fol­lowed sev­er­al debates recent­ly about the lack of arts and human­i­ties edu­ca­tion in STEM pro­grams. One argu­ment runs thus: sci­en­tists, engi­neers, and pro­gram­mers often move into careers design­ing prod­ucts for human use, with­out hav­ing spent much time learn­ing about oth­er humans. With­out required cours­es, say, in psy­chol­o­gy, phi­los­o­phy, soci­ol­o­gy, lit­er­a­ture, etc., stu­dents can end up unthink­ing­ly repro­duc­ing harm­ful bias­es or over­look­ing seri­ous eth­i­cal prob­lems and social inequities.

Tech­no­log­i­cal mal­prac­tice is bad enough. Med­ical mal­prac­tice can have even more imme­di­ate­ly harm­ful, or fatal, effects. We might take for grant­ed that a doctor’s “bed­side man­ner” is pure­ly a mat­ter of per­son­al­i­ty, but many med­icals schools have decid­ed they need to be more proac­tive when it comes to train­ing future doc­tors in com­pas­sion­ate lis­ten­ing. And some have begun using the arts to fos­ter cre­ative think­ing and empa­thy and to improve doc­tor-patient com­mu­ni­ca­tion. The ver­bal­ly-abu­sive Dr. House aside, the best diag­nos­ti­cians actu­al­ly have sym­pa­thet­ic ears.

As Dr. Michael Flana­gan of Penn State’s Col­lege of Med­i­cine puts it, “Our job is to elic­it infor­ma­tion from our patients. By com­mu­ni­cat­ing more effec­tive­ly and estab­lish­ing rap­port with patients so they are more com­fort­able telling you about their symp­toms, you are more like­ly to make the diag­no­sis and have high­er patient sat­is­fac­tion.” From the patient side of things, an accu­rate diag­no­sis can mean more than “sat­is­fac­tion”; it can mean the dif­fer­ence between life and death, long-term suf­fer­ing or rapid recov­ery.

Can impres­sion­ist paint­ing make that dif­fer­ence? Dr. Flana­gan thinks it’s a start. His sem­i­nar “Impres­sion­ism and the Art of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion” asks fourth-year med­ical stu­dents to engage with the work of Vin­cent van Gogh and Claude Mon­et, in exer­cis­es “rang­ing from obser­va­tion and writ­ing activ­i­ties to paint­ing in the style of said artists,” notes Art­sy. “Through the process, they learn to bet­ter com­mu­ni­cate with patients by devel­op­ing insights on sub­jects like men­tal ill­ness and cog­ni­tive bias.” Why not just study these sub­jects in psy­chol­o­gy cours­es?

One answer comes from Penn State asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of art his­to­ry Nan­cy Locke, who presents to Flanagan’s class­es. “Art can make peo­ple see their lives dif­fer­ent­ly,” she says, “Doc­tors will see peo­ple reg­u­lar­ly with cer­tain prob­lems.” And they can begin to schema­tize their patients the way they schema­tize dis­eases and dis­or­ders. “But a paint­ing can con­tin­ue to be chal­leng­ing, and there are always new ques­tions to ask.” Impres­sion­ist paint­ing rep­re­sents only one road, among many oth­ers, to the ambi­gu­i­ties of the human mind.

Anoth­er Penn State pro­fes­sor, Dr. Paul Haidet, direc­tor of med­ical edu­ca­tion research, offered a sem­i­nar on jazz and med­ical com­mu­ni­ca­tions to fourth-year stu­dents in 2014 and 2015. As he men­tions in the video above, Flana­gan him­self took the course. “Just as one jazz musi­cian pro­vides space to anoth­er to impro­vise,” he tells Penn State News, “as physi­cians we need to pro­vide space to our patients to com­mu­ni­cate in their own style. It was a trans­for­ma­tion­al expe­ri­ence, unlike any­thing I ever had in med­ical school myself.” He was inspired there­after to intro­duce his paint­ing course.

One could imag­ine class­es on the Vic­to­ri­an nov­el, mod­ernist poet­ry, or impro­vi­sa­tion­al dance hav­ing sim­i­lar effects. Oth­er med­ical schools have cer­tain­ly agreed. Dr. Del­phine Tay­lor, asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of med­i­cine at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty Med­ical Cen­ter, “empha­sizes that arts-focused activ­i­ties are impor­tant in train­ing future doc­tors to be present and aware,” Art­sy writes, “which is more and more dif­fi­cult today giv­en the per­va­sive­ness of tech­nol­o­gy and media.” Arts pro­grams have also been adopt­ed in the med­ical schools at Yale, Har­vard, and UT Austin.

The prece­dents for incor­po­rat­ing the arts into a sci­ence edu­ca­tion abound—many a famous sci­en­tist has also had a pas­sion for lit­er­a­ture, pho­tog­ra­phy, paint­ing, or music. (Ein­stein, for exam­ple, wouldn’t be part­ed from his vio­lin.) As the arts and sci­ences grew fur­ther apart, for rea­sons hav­ing to do with the struc­ture of high­er edu­ca­tion and the dic­tates of mar­ket economies, it became far less com­mon for sci­en­tists and doc­tors to receive a lib­er­al arts edu­ca­tion. On the oth­er hand, todays lib­er­al arts stu­dents might ben­e­fit from more required STEM cours­es, but that’s a sto­ry for anoth­er day.

via Art­sy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Byrne & Neil deGrasse Tyson Explain the Impor­tance of an Arts Edu­ca­tion (and How It Strength­ens Sci­ence & Civ­i­liza­tion)

Your Brain on Art: The Emerg­ing Sci­ence of Neu­roaes­thet­ics Probes What Art Does to Our Brains

The Musi­cal Mind of Albert Ein­stein: Great Physi­cist, Ama­teur Vio­lin­ist and Devo­tee of Mozart

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

Jimmy Page Visits Oxford University & Tells Students How He Went from Guitar Apprentice to Creating Led Zeppelin

in Music | July 10th, 2018

It’s maybe a cul­tur­al tru­ism that icon­o­clasts who live long enough even­tu­al­ly become icons. So I sup­pose it shouldn’t sur­prise us much to see a rock ‘n’ roll hero like Jim­my Page stand­ing behind the podi­um at the Oxford Union, for a lec­ture and Q&A series put on by the famed debat­ing soci­ety. But as he tells his audi­ence, it isn’t his first time at Oxford—he made an appear­ance at 16, accom­pa­ny­ing beat poet and nov­el­ist Roys­ton Ellis on gui­tar. (It was Ellis, Page notes, who sug­gest­ed the quirky spelling of the Bea­t­les to John Lennon.) This sto­ry leads to Page’s auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal sketch of how he became a musi­cian by lis­ten­ing to “the music com­ing over from Amer­i­ca” and the skif­fle ver­sions of the same by Eng­lish musi­cian Lon­nie Done­gan.

It’s a sto­ry famil­iar to fans not only of Page but of every British inva­sion band inspired by the Amer­i­can blues and R&B. But it’s always inter­est­ing, espe­cial­ly for Amer­i­cans, to hear it told. Home­grown tra­di­tion­al music we take for grant­ed sound­ed to the young Page like “it was com­ing from Mars.”

He describes the influ­ence of Done­gan as a “por­tal” to the blues and rock ‘n’ roll, which bands like the Yard­birds picked up in the ear­ly six­ties. Men­tion of that sem­i­nal Eng­lish band leads Page to recount his sec­ond time at Oxford, to see the Yard­birds at Queen’s Col­lege, a fate­ful night that end­ed with Page join­ing the band on bass after Paul Samwell-Smith quit. By that time, he had served what he calls a “three-year appren­tice­ship” as a stu­dio musi­cian, arranger, and com­pos­er.

These rem­i­nisces set the tenor for Page’s short address, a series of vignettes from his ven­er­a­ble career, full of fas­ci­nat­ing digres­sions and asides. At around 13 min­utes in, he con­cludes that his “life­time achieve­ment” was to “do some­thing which was ini­tial­ly my hob­by, turn that into some­thing which was a very pro­fes­sion­al process, but still a very cre­ative one… and to inspire young musi­cians.” After his short speech, the pro­gram tran­si­tions to an inter­view for­mat, and Page expands on and clar­i­fies many of his com­ments. His affa­ble humil­i­ty and desire to share his wis­dom and expe­ri­ence make this very enjoy­able view­ing for any­one inter­est­ed in Page’s life and work, or in the his­to­ry of rock ‘n’ roll more gen­er­al­ly, which can­not be told with­out him, and for which he is a very able chron­i­cler.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

13-Year-Old Jim­my Page Plays Gui­tar on TV in 1957, an Ear­ly Moment in His Spec­tac­u­lar Career

Jim­my Page Unplugged: Led Zeppelin’s Gui­tarist Reveals His Acoustic Tal­ents in Four Videos (1970–2008)

Jim­my Page Tells the Sto­ry of “Kash­mir”

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

Learn the History of Indian Philosophy in a 62 Episode Series from The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps: The Buddha, Bhagavad-Gita, Non Violence & More

in Philosophy | July 10th, 2018

The belief in a sin­gu­lar, coher­ent “West­ern tra­di­tion” in phi­los­o­phy has led to a very insu­lar, Euro­cen­tric view in phi­los­o­phy depart­ments, as Jay L. Garfield and Bryan W. Van Nor­den write in a New York Times op-ed. “No oth­er human­i­ties dis­ci­pline demon­strates this sys­temic neglect of most of the civ­i­liza­tions in its domain,” they argue, “The present sit­u­a­tion is hard to jus­ti­fy moral­ly, polit­i­cal­ly, epis­tem­i­cal­ly or as good edu­ca­tion­al and research train­ing prac­tice.” In his fol­low-up book Tak­ing Back Phi­los­o­phy Van Nor­den argues that edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions should “live up to their cos­mopoli­tan ideals” by expand­ing the canon and teach­ing non-West­ern philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tions.

One phi­los­o­phy edu­ca­tor, Peter Adam­son, pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at the LMU in Munich and King’s Col­lege Lon­don, has tak­en up the chal­lenge of teach­ing glob­al philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tions through his pop­u­lar pod­cast The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps, with series on the Islam­ic World, Africana, and India. With expert co-authors and guests, Adamson’s pod­casts help us nav­i­gate cul­tur­al and his­tor­i­cal dif­fer­ences with­out water­ing down the sub­stance of diverse bod­ies of thought.

These sur­veys of non-West­ern tra­di­tions aim to be as exhaus­tive as the pod­cast’s cov­er­age of Clas­si­cal, Lat­er Antiq­ui­ty, and Medieval peri­ods in Europe. We’ve fea­tured Adamson’s pod­casts on Islam­ic and Indi­an phi­los­o­phy in an ear­li­er post. Now we revis­it his series on Indi­an phi­los­o­phy, which has grown sub­stan­tial­ly in the inter­val, from thir­ty-two to six­ty-two episodes, divid­ed into three categories—“Origins,” “Age of the Sutra,” and “Bud­dhists and Jains.”

Indi­an Philosophy—Origins

Indi­an Philosophy—Age of the Sutra

Indi­an Philosophy—Buddhists and Jains

Very broad­ly, much Indi­an phi­los­o­phy can be under­stood as a cen­turies-long con­flict between the six ortho­dox Vedic schools (asti­ka) and the het­ero­dox (nas­ti­ka) schools, includ­ing Bud­dhism, Jain­ism, and Car­va­ka, a mate­ri­al­ist phi­los­o­phy that denied all meta­phys­i­cal doc­trines. While some strains among these schools of thought can be asso­ci­at­ed with indi­vid­ual names, like Kana­da, Patañ­jali, or Nagar­ju­na, much ancient Indi­an phi­los­o­phy “is rep­re­sent­ed by a mass of texts,” as Luke Muehlhauser writes in his short guide, “for which the authors and dates of com­po­si­tion are most­ly unknown.”

Adamson’s free pod­cast sur­vey of Indi­an phi­los­o­phy makes for enter­tain­ing, infor­ma­tive lis­ten­ing. You can down­load every episode in .zip form at the links above. Or find links to the indi­vid­ual episodes right below. To keep up with trends in the study of Indi­an phi­los­o­phy in Eng­lish, be sure to fol­low the Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy Blog. And for an excel­lent list of “Read­ings on the Less Com­mon­ly Taught Philoso­phies (LCTP),” see this post by Bryan Van Nor­den here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Learn Islam­ic & Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy with 107 Episodes of the His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps Pod­cast

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy, from 600 B.C.E. to 1935, Visu­al­ized in Two Mas­sive, 44-Foot High Dia­grams

The Philo­soph­i­cal Appre­ci­a­tion of Rocks in Chi­na & Japan: A Short Intro­duc­tion to an Ancient Tra­di­tion

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

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

Teaching Tolerance to Activists: A Free Course Syllabus & Anthology

in Current Affairs, Education, Life, Politics | July 9th, 2018

The waters of acad­e­mia have grown chop­py of late, and many vet­er­an sailors have found them­selves ill-equipped to nav­i­gate the brave new world stu­dent activists are forg­ing at a break­neck pace.

Trig­ger warn­ings. Safe spaces. Cur­ric­u­la restruc­tured with an eye toward iden­ti­ty. Swift judg­ments for those who fail to com­ply.

Admis­sions brochures and cam­pus tours make fre­quent men­tion of their institution’s com­mit­ment to social jus­tice. They have to—many high school­ers share the under­grads’ beliefs.

Those of us whose col­lege years are but a dis­tant mem­o­ry should­n’t depend on our school’s alum­ni mag to paint an accu­rate pic­ture of the bat­tles that may be rag­ing with­in. Sus­tain­abil­i­ty, pre­ferred pro­nouns, and inclu­sive bath­room facil­i­ties may get a men­tion, but the offi­cial organ’s unlike­ly to peek into the abyss where tol­er­ance goes to die.

Cul­tur­al schol­ar Frances Lee, a queer trans per­son of col­or recov­er­ing from a forced con­ver­sion to evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian­i­ty, took a hard look at the prob­lem of intol­er­ance with­in activist cir­cles as a sec­ond year Mas­ters stu­dent in Cul­tur­al Stud­ies at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton.

Pub­lished exact­ly one year ago, their essay, Kin Aes­thet­ics: Excom­mu­ni­cate Me from the Church of Social Jus­tice, was plain­spo­ken about the neg­a­tive side effects of social progress in activist cir­cles, and by exten­sion, on cam­pus:

Telling peo­ple what to do and how to live out their lives is endem­ic to reli­gious and to dog­mat­ic activism. It’s not that my com­rades are the boss­es of me, but that dog­mat­ic activism cre­ates an envi­ron­ment that encour­ages peo­ple to tell oth­er peo­ple what to do. This is espe­cial­ly promi­nent on Face­book. Scrolling through my news feed some­times feels Iike slid­ing into a pew to be blast­ed by a frag­ment­ed, fren­zied ser­mon. I know that much of the media post­ed there means to dis­ci­pline me to be a bet­ter activist and com­mu­ni­ty mem­ber. But when dic­tates aren’t fol­lowed, a com­mon pro­ce­dure of pun­ish­ment ensues. Pun­ish­ments for saying/doing/believing the wrong thing include sham­ing, scold­ing, call­ing out, iso­lat­ing, or evis­cer­at­ing someone’s social stand­ing. Dis­ci­pline and pun­ish­ment have been used for all of his­to­ry to con­trol and destroy peo­ple. Why is it being used in move­ments meant to lib­er­ate all of us? We all have made seri­ous mis­takes and hurt oth­er peo­ple, inten­tion­al­ly or not. We get a chance to learn from them when those around us respond with kind­ness and patience. Where is our humil­i­ty when exam­in­ing the mis­takes of oth­ers? Why do we posi­tion our­selves as moral­ly supe­ri­or to the low­ly un-woke?

The essay’s viral suc­cess gives extra oomph to “Wok­er Than Thou: Left­ist Activist Iden­ti­ty For­ma­tions,” a com­mu­ni­ty course Lee designed and taught ear­li­er this year.

Intend­ed for com­mu­ni­ty lead­ers, polit­i­cal activists, and orga­niz­ers, Lee wel­comed any­one with any inter­est in the sub­ject, pro­vid­ed they were will­ing “to stay open to dis­sent­ing or unpop­u­lar ideas for the sake of dis­cus­sion, instead of fore­clos­ing cer­tain top­ics or ideas by judg­ing them as not wor­thy of atten­tion.”

The 10-week syl­labus delved into such rel­e­vant top­ics as Call-out Cul­ture, the False Promis­es of Empa­thy, and of course “wok­e­ness,” a term Lee takes care to attribute to Black cul­ture.

While not all of the required read­ings can be found online, Lee pro­vides a wealth of links to those that can.

Titles include Uni­ver­si­ty of San Fran­cis­co Pro­fes­sor Rhon­da Magee’s “Address­ing Social Injus­tice with Com­pas­sion,” author Andrea Smith’s “The Prob­lem with Priv­i­lege,” Trau­ma Stew­ard­ship Insti­tute founder Lau­ra van Der­noot Lipsky’s TEDx Talk on sys­tem­at­ic oppres­sion and lib­er­a­tion the­o­ry.

There’s even a Suf­jan Stevens song that evolved from cheap shots at skater Tonya Harding’s expense to some­thing that con­sid­ered the “whole­ness of the per­son… with dig­ni­ty and grace.”

Fol­low­ing Lee’s course mate­ri­als seems a much more ratio­nal way to con­front the cur­rent social cli­mate than bing­ing on con­fes­sion­al essays by lib­er­al arts pro­fes­sors who feel ham­strung by not-unfound­ed fears that their stu­dents could cost them their jobs … and the good rep­u­ta­tion required to secure anoth­er.

For fur­ther read­ing, Lee offers free down­loads of Toward An Ethics of Activism: A Com­mu­ni­ty Inves­ti­ga­tion of Humil­i­ty, Grace and Com­pas­sion in Move­ments for Jus­tice, an anthol­o­gy that “seeks to dis­rupt dog­mat­ic, exclu­sion­ary activist cul­ture with kind­ness and con­nec­tion.”

Find Frances Lee’s “Wok­er Than Thou” syl­labus here.

Down­load a PDF of the anthol­o­gy Toward An Ethics of Activism here. (A screen read­er acces­si­ble ver­sion is also avail­able.)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Slavoj Žižek Calls Polit­i­cal Cor­rect­ness a Form of “Mod­ern Total­i­tar­i­an­ism”

Noam Chom­sky Explains the Best Way for Ordi­nary Peo­ple to Make Change in the World, Even When It Seems Daunt­ing

Dr. Jane Goodall Is Now Teach­ing an Online Course on Con­ser­va­tion, Ani­mal Intel­li­gence & Activism

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

The Iconic Urinal & Work of Art, “Fountain,” Wasn’t Created by Marcel Duchamp But by the Pioneering Dada Artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

in Art, Gender, History | July 5th, 2018

In the intro­duc­tion to her book Broad Strokes, writer and art his­to­ry schol­ar Brid­get Quinn describes her dis­cov­ery of Lee Kras­ner, accom­plished abstract expres­sion­ist painter who just hap­pened to have been mar­ried to Jack­son Pol­lock. That bio­graph­i­cal detail war­rant­ed Kras­ner a foot­note, but lit­tle more, in the art books Quinn stud­ied in col­lege. Learn­ing of Kras­ner sent Quinn on a quest to find oth­er women left behind by art his­to­ry. “My fix­a­tion with these artists went beyond fem­i­nism,” she writes, “if it had any­thing to do with it at all. I iden­ti­fied with these painters and sculp­tors the way my friends iden­ti­fied with Joy Divi­sion or The Clash or Hüsker Dü.”

Much has changed since 1987, when Quinn’s fan­dom began, but Kras­ner is still one of the few female artists to have ever had a ret­ro­spec­tive show at New York’s Muse­um of Mod­ern Art. And one artist every stu­dent of art his­to­ry should know, Baroness Elsa von Frey­tag-Lor­ing­hoven, remains almost com­plete­ly obscure. What’s so impor­tant about von Frey­tag-Lor­ing­hoven? She was a pio­neer­ing Dada artist and poet—well-known in the 1910s and 20s. “Her work was cham­pi­oned by Ernest Hem­ing­way and Ezra Pound,” writes John Hig­gs at the Inde­pen­dent (she appears in Pound’s Can­to XCV). She “is now rec­og­nized as the first Amer­i­can Dada artist, but it might be equal­ly true to say she was the first New York punk, 60 years too ear­ly.”

Von Frey­tag-Lor­ing­hoven also deserves the cred­it, it seems, for one of the most ground­break­ing art objects to ever appear in a gallery: Foun­tain, the uri­nal signed “R. Mutt” that Mar­cel Duchamp claimed as his own and which has made him a leg­end in the his­to­ry of art. The sto­ry, I imag­ine, might seem depress­ing­ly famil­iar to every woman who has ever had a male boss pub­lish her work with his name on it. Even more frus­trat­ing­ly, the “glar­ing truth has been known for some time in the art world,” accord­ing to the blog of art mag­a­zine See All This. Yet, “each time it has to be acknowl­edged, it is met with indif­fer­ence and silence.”

The truth first emerged in a let­ter from Duchamp to his sister—discovered in 1982 and dat­ed April 11th, 1917, a few days before the exhib­it in which Foun­tain first appeared—in which he “wrote that a female friend using a male alias had sent it in for the New York exhi­bi­tion.” The name, “Richard Mutt,” was a pseu­do­nym cho­sen by Frey­tag-Lor­ing­hoven, who was liv­ing in Philadel­phia at the time and whom Duchamp knew well, once pro­nounc­ing that “she is not a Futur­ist. She is the future.” (See her Por­trait of Mar­cel Duchamp, above, in a 1920 pho­to­graph by Charles Sheel­er.)

Why did she nev­er claim Foun­tain as her own? “She nev­er had the chance,” notes See All This. The uri­nal was reject­ed by the exhi­bi­tion orga­niz­ers (Duchamp resigned from their board in protest), and it was prob­a­bly, sub­se­quent­ly thrown away; noth­ing remained but a pho­to­graph by Alfred Stieglitz. Von Frey­tag-Lor­ing­hoven died ten years lat­er in 1927.

It was only in 1935 that sur­re­al­ist André Bre­ton brought atten­tion back to Foun­tain, attribut­ing it to Duchamp, who accept­ed author­ship and began to com­mis­sion repli­cas. The 1917 piece “was des­tined to become one of the most icon­ic works of mod­ern art. In 2004, some five hun­dred artists and art experts her­ald­ed Foun­tain as the most influ­en­tial piece of mod­ern art, even leav­ing Picasso’s Les Demoi­selles d’Avignon behind.”

Duchamp’s let­ter is not the only rea­son his­to­ri­ans have for think­ing of Foun­tain as von Freytag-Loringhoven’s work. “Baroness Elsa had been find­ing objects in the street and declar­ing them to be works of art since before Duchamp hit upon the idea of ‘ready­mades,’” writes Hig­gs. One such work, a “cast-iron plumber’s trap attached to a wood­en box, which she called God” (above), was also mis­at­trib­uted, “assumed to be the work of an artist called Mor­ton Liv­ingston Schaum­berg, although it is now accept­ed that his role in the sculp­ture was lim­it­ed to fix­ing the plumber’s trap to its wood­en base.”

“Foun­tain is base, crude, con­fronta­tion­al and fun­ny,” writes Hig­gs, “Those are not typ­i­cal aspects of Duchamp’s work, but they sum­ma­rize the Baroness and her art per­fect­ly.” Duchamp lat­er claimed to have bought the uri­nal him­self, but lat­er research has shown this to be unlike­ly. Hig­gs’ book Stranger Than We Can Imag­ine explores the issues in more depth, as does an arti­cle in Dutch pub­lished in the See All This sum­mer issue. What would it mean for the art estab­lish­ment to acknowl­edge von Freytag-Loringhoven’s author­ship? “To attribute Foun­tain to a woman and not a man,” the mag­a­zine writes, “has obvi­ous, far-reach­ing con­se­quences: the his­to­ry of mod­ern art has to be rewrit­ten. Mod­ern art did not start with a patri­arch, but with a matri­arch.”

Learn more about Elsa von Frey­tag-Lor­ing­hoven at The Art Sto­ry.

via See All This

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Mar­cel Duchamp Read “The Cre­ative Act,” A Short Lec­ture on What Makes Great Art, Great

The Female Pio­neers of the Bauhaus Art Move­ment: Dis­cov­er Gertrud Arndt, Mar­i­anne Brandt, Anni Albers & Oth­er For­got­ten Inno­va­tors

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

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

The 100 Best One-Hit Wonder Songs: A Streamable Playlist Curated by Consequence of Sound

in Music | June 7th, 2018

So Con­se­quence of Sound has post­ed a list of The 100 Best One-Hit Won­der Songs, and before we dive in, we should point out that they’ve real­ly tried to do their best in the face of his­to­ry. I’m sure there are those out there who have been out­raged some way or anoth­er at the arbi­trary nature of the “one-hit won­der” des­ig­na­tion over the years. I know I have thrown a fit to see Mad­ness’ “Our House” called a one-hit-won­der in the States with­out men­tion­ing their 30 or so Top 40 hits in the UK.

If Amer­i­can chart suc­cess is a judge, the CoS writ­ers says, Beck would be a one-hit-won­der along with Radio­head. No, what we’re real­ly gun­ning for are artists who real­ly only have one bona fide hit to their name, and after­wards pret­ty much dis­ap­peared into the ether.

The Vapors’ “Turn­ing Japan­ese” is def­i­nite­ly one of those. Released in a flood of new wave/­post-punk fer­vor, it’s a catchy ear­worm that would both define the band and then entrap them. They nev­er had anoth­er hit and iron­i­cal­ly had cho­sen this as their sec­ond sin­gle, wor­ried that they might become a one-hit-won­der. Whoops!

And while the ‘70s and ‘80s are seen as the height of the one-hit-won­der, the 1990s sure are worth recon­sid­er­ing. We didn’t know it then, but the music indus­try was just about to col­lapse with the arrival of Nap­ster and the Inter­net, and the rise of elec­tron­i­ca brought with it a cor­nu­copia of one-off downtempo/triphop tracks, col­lege-rock­/­post-grunge anthems, and this sin­gle from Toronto’s finest, Len:

(Ah, 1999. Just before the world implod­ed.)

You can lis­ten to Con­se­quence of Sound’s list on Spo­ti­fy, if you so choose:

So what hap­pened to the one-hit-won­der? YouTube. Where else can you find nov­el­ty hits, par­o­dy songs, and pop cul­tur­al touch­stones these days? The major labels cer­tain­ly aren’t releas­ing them. That might be good for users, but it’s gonna be hell for pop his­to­ri­ans attempt­ing to assem­ble a com­pa­ra­ble list in the future.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Same Song Sung in 15 Places: A Won­der­ful Case Study of How Land­scape & Archi­tec­ture Shape the Sounds of Music

All of the Songs Played on “WKRP in Cincin­nati” in One Spo­ti­fy Playlist: Stream 202 Clas­sic Tracks

A His­to­ry of Rock ‘n’ Roll in 100 Riffs

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.

Robert Rauschenberg’s 34 Illustrations of Dante’s Inferno (1958–60)

in Art, Literature | May 23rd, 2018

Per­haps more than any oth­er post­war avant-garde Amer­i­can artist, Robert Rauschen­berg matched, and maybe exceed­ed, Mar­cel Duchamp’s puck­ish irrev­er­ence. He once bought a Willem de Koon­ing draw­ing just to erase it and once sent a telegram declar­ing that it was a por­trait of gal­lerist Iris Clert, “if I say so.” Rauschen­berg also excelled at turn­ing trash into trea­sure, repur­pos­ing the detri­tus of mod­ern life in works of art both play­ful and seri­ous, con­tin­u­ing to “address major themes of world­wide con­cern,” wrote art his­to­ri­an John Richard­son in a 1997 Van­i­ty Fair pro­file, “by uti­liz­ing tech­nol­o­gy in ever more imag­i­na­tive and inven­tive ways…. Rauschen­berg is a painter of history—the his­to­ry of now rather than then.”

What, then, pos­sessed this artist of the “his­to­ry of now” to take on a series of draw­ings between 1958 and 1960 illus­trat­ing each Can­to of Dante’s Infer­no? “Per­haps he sensed a kin­dred spir­it in Dante,” writes Gre­go­ry Gilbert at The Art News­pa­per, “that encour­aged his ver­nac­u­lar inter­pre­ta­tions of the clas­si­cal text and his rad­i­cal mix­ing of high and low cul­tures.”

Crit­ic Charles Dar­went reads Rauschenberg’s moti­va­tions through a Freudi­an lens, his Infer­no series a sub­li­ma­tion of his homo­sex­u­al­i­ty and repres­sive child­hood: “The young Rauschen­berg… came to see Mod­ernist art as a vari­ant of his Tex­an par­ents’ fun­da­men­tal Chris­tian­i­ty.”

The most straight­for­ward account has Rauschen­berg con­ceiv­ing the project in order to be tak­en more seri­ous­ly as an artist. Such bio­graph­i­cal expla­na­tions tell us some­thing about the work, but we learn as much or more from look­ing at the work itself, which hap­pens to be very much a his­to­ry of now at the end of the 1950s. Though Rauschen­berg based the illus­tra­tions on John Ciardi’s 1954 trans­la­tion of the Divine Com­e­dy, they were not meant to accom­pa­ny the text but to stand on their own, the Ital­ian epic—or its famous first third—providing a back­drop of ready-made iron­ic com­men­tary on images Rauschen­berg ripped from news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines such as Life and Sports Illus­trat­ed.

“To cre­ate these col­lages,” explains MIT’s List Visu­al Arts Cen­ter, “he would use a sol­vent to adhere the images to his draw­ing sur­face, then over­lay them with a vari­ety of media, includ­ing pen, gouache (an opaque water­col­or), and pen­cil.” Steeped in a Cold War atmos­phere, the illus­tra­tions incor­po­rate fig­ures like John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, who, in the 50s, Gilbert writes, “served as one of Joseph McCarthy’s polit­i­cal hench­men dur­ing the Red Scare.” We see in Rauschenberg’s col­lage draw­ings allu­sions to the Civ­il Rights move­ment and the decade’s anti-Com­mu­nist para­noia as well its reac­tionary sex­u­al pol­i­tics. “Polit­i­cal and sex­u­al con­tent… need­ed to be cod­ed,” Gilbert claims, in such an “ultra­con­ser­v­a­tive era.”

For exam­ple, we see a like­ly ref­er­ence to the artist’s gay iden­ti­ty in the Can­to XIV illus­tra­tion, above. The text “describes the pun­ish­ment of the Sodomites, who are con­demned for eter­ni­ty to walk across burn­ing sand. Rauschen­berg depicts the theme through a homo­erot­ic image of a male nude… jux­ta­posed with a red trac­ing of the artist’s own foot.” Maybe Dar­went is right to sup­pose that had Dante’s poem not exist­ed, Rauschen­berg “would have been the man to invent it”—or to invent its mid-20th cen­tu­ry visu­al equiv­a­lent. He draws atten­tion to the poem’s auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal cen­ter, its sub­ver­sive humor, and its den­si­ty of ref­er­ences to con­tem­po­rary 15th cen­tu­ry Ital­ian pol­i­tics, adapt­ing all of these qual­i­ties for moder­ni­ty.

But the illus­tra­tion of Can­to XIV—depicting “The Vio­lent Against God, Nature, and Art”—also encodes Rauschenberg’s vio­lent tram­pling of artis­tic con­ven­tion. Many crit­ics see this series as the artist’s reac­tion against Abstract Expres­sion­ism (like that of De Koon­ing). And while he “may have felt a cre­ative kin­ship with Dante,” writes Gilbert, “he also admit­ted to the art crit­ic Calvin Tomkins his impa­tience with the poet’s self-right­eous moral­i­ty, a state­ment like­ly direct­ed against this Can­to.” Like his 1953 Erased de Koon­ing Draw­ing, Rauschenberg’s Infer­no draw­ings also per­form an act of erasure—or the cre­ation of a palimpsest, with Dante’s poem scratched over by the artist’s wild, child­like strokes.

In recog­ni­tion of the way these illus­tra­tions repur­pose, rather than accom­pa­ny, the Infer­no, MoMA recent­ly com­mis­sioned an edi­tion of Rauschenberg’s 34 draw­ings, accom­pa­nied not by the straight trans­la­tion by Cia­r­di but poems by Kevin Young and Robin Coste Lewis, whose por­tion of the book is titled “Dante Comes to Amer­i­ca: 20 Jan­u­ary 17: An Era­sure of 17 Can­tos from Ciardi’s Infer­no, after Robert Rauschen­berg.” Rather than view­ing the illus­tra­tions against Dante’s work itself, we can read their par­tic­u­lar Amer­i­can pro­to-pop art char­ac­ter against lit­er­ary “era­sures” like Lewis’s “Can­to XXIII,” below. See the full series of Rauschenberg’s 34 illus­tra­tions at the Rauschen­berg Foun­da­tion web­site here.

Can­to XXIII.
by Robin Coste Lewis

                “I Go with The Body That Was Always Mine”

Silent, one fol­low­ing the oth­er,
the Fable hunt­ed us down.
O weary man­tle of eter­ni­ty,
turn left, reach us down
into that nar­row way in silence.

Col­lege of Sor­ry Hyp­ocrites, I go
with the body that was always mine,
bur­nished like coun­ter­weights to keep
the peace. One may still see the sort of peace

we kept. Mar­vel for a while over that:
the cross in Hel­l’s eter­nal exile.
Some­where there is some gap in the wall,
pit through which we may climb

to the next brink with­out the need
of sum­mon­ing the Black Angels
and forc­ing them to raise us from this sink.
Near­er than hope, there is a bridge

that runs from the great cir­cle, that cross­es
every ditch from ridge to ridge.
Except—it is broken—but with care.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Free Course on Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

New Robert Rauschen­berg Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tion Lets You Down­load Free High-Res Images of the Artist’s Work

Hear Dante’s Infer­no Read Aloud by Influ­en­tial Poet & Trans­la­tor John Cia­r­di (1954)

Artists Illus­trate Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy Through the Ages: Doré, Blake, Bot­ti­cel­li, Mœbius & More

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

A New Scientific Study Supports Putting Two Spaces After a Period … and a Punctuation War Ensues

in Writing | May 9th, 2018

Pho­to via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In for­mer ages, wars erupt­ed over the fin­er points of reli­gious doc­trine, a his­tor­i­cal phe­nom­e­non that can seem per­plex­ing to mod­ern sec­u­lar­ists. We’re past such things, we think. But then let some­one bring up the Oxford com­ma or the num­ber of spaces one should put after a peri­od, and you may see writ­ers, edi­tors, and teach­ers pick sides and maybe come to blows in their defense of seem­ing­ly triv­ial gram­mat­i­cal and typo­graph­i­cal stan­dards. These debates approach the vehe­mence of Medieval argu­ments over tran­sub­stan­ti­a­tion.

I exag­ger­ate, but maybe only slight­ly. There have been times, I con­fess, when I’ve felt I would fight for the ser­i­al com­ma. I grind my teeth and feel a rush of rage when I see two spaces instead of one after the end of sen­tences. Irra­tional, per­haps, but such is the human devo­tion to ortho­doxy in the details. And so, when Skid­more Col­lege researchers Rebec­ca John­son, Becky Bui, and Lind­say Schmitt pub­lished a paper last month in Atten­tion, Per­cep­tion, & Psy­chophysics claim­ing sci­en­tif­ic sup­port for a two-space peri­od, they vir­tu­al­ly lobbed a bomb into offices every­where.

Angela Chen at The Verge par­ried with an arti­cle call­ing two spaces a “hor­ri­ble habit.” The prac­tice “remains bad,” she writes, “it’s ugly, it doesn’t help when it comes to what mat­ters most (read­ing com­pre­hen­sion), and the exper­i­ment that sup­ports its ben­e­fits uses an out­dat­ed font style.” (Don’t get me start­ed on the font wars.) What was the exper­i­ment? The paper itself hides behind a redoubtable pay­wall, but Ars Tech­ni­ca’s Sean Gal­lagher gets to the gist of the study on a cohort of 60 Skid­more stu­dents.

Hav­ing iden­ti­fied sub­jects’ pro­cliv­i­ties, the researchers then gave them 21 para­graphs to read (includ­ing one prac­tice para­graph) on a com­put­er screen and tracked their eye move­ment as they read using an Eye­link 1000 video-based eye track­ing sys­tem. “Chin and fore­head rests were used to min­i­mize the read­er’s head move­ments,” the Skid­more researchers wrote in their paper.

After the track­ing, the researchers “eval­u­at­ed the read­ing speed for each of the para­graph types pre­sent­ed in words per minute.… [they] found that two spaces at the end of a peri­od slight­ly improved the pro­cess­ing of text dur­ing read­ing.” The study’s attempt to quan­ti­fy the ben­e­fits of two spaces came after the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion Man­u­al’s most recent edi­tion, which, for some rea­son, has changed camps to two spaces.

Gal­lagher explains the space debate as stem­ming from the major tech­no­log­i­cal shift in word pro­cess­ing: “For any­one who learned their key­board­ing skills on a type­writer rather than a com­put­er… the dou­ble-space after the peri­od is a deeply ingrained truth.” Speak­ing as such a per­son, it isn’t, but he’s right to note that typ­ing teach­ers insist­ed on two spaces. Such was the stan­dard until com­put­ers with vari­able-width fonts ful­ly phased out type­writ­ers.

So the Skid­more researchers raised the ire of Chen and oth­ers with their use of Couri­er New, a “fixed-width font that resem­bles type­writ­ten text—used by hard­ly any­one for doc­u­ments.” The blog Prac­ti­cal Typog­ra­phy ana­lyzed the two space paper and remains unim­pressed: “In sum—a small dif­fer­ence, lim­it­ed to a cer­tain cat­e­go­ry of test sub­jects, with numer­ous caveats attached. Not much to see here, I’m afraid.” (This descrip­tion might accu­rate­ly describe thou­sands of pub­lished stud­ies.)

This war will rage on—the study fuel­ing these recent skir­mish­es does not seem to jus­ti­fy two-spac­ers claim­ing vic­to­ry. And any­way, good luck get­ting the rest of us to aban­don faith in the one true space.

via The Verge

Relat­ed Con­tent:

His­tor­i­cal Plaque Memo­ri­al­izes the Time Jack Ker­ouac & William S. Bur­roughs Came to Blows Over the Oxford Com­ma (Or Not)

Cor­mac McCarthy’s Three Punc­tu­a­tion Rules, and How They All Go Back to James Joyce

Theodor Adorno’s Phi­los­o­phy of Punc­tu­a­tion

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