A History of the Entire World in Less Than 20 Minutes

in Animation, History, Technology | February 1st, 2019

Thanks for watch­ing his­to­ry. I hope I men­tioned every­thing. — Bill Wurtz

Here at Open Cul­ture, we hap­pi­ly acknowl­edge that learn­ing is not a one-size-fits-all propo­si­tion.

The inter­net may be doing a num­ber on our atten­tion spans, but as the world has grown small­er, the edu­ca­tion­al buf­fet has grown rich­er, more var­ied, and vast­ly more afford­able.

Take for exam­ple the His­to­ry of the World.

Geog­ra­phy fans can approach the sub­ject via Ollie Bye’s year-by-year ani­mat­ed map.

John Green’s play­ful Crash Course series offers a won­der­ful respite for any kid grind­ing their way through AP World His­to­ry.

Those of a more tra­di­tion­al mind­set, who pre­fer a state­lier pace can lose them­selves in 46 lec­tures by Richard Bul­li­et, pro­fes­sor of his­to­ry at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty.

And then there’s world his­to­ry accord­ing Bill Wurtz, above, a cre­ator of short, anachro­nis­tic-look­ing videos, whose YouTube fame was kin­dled by Vine, a now defunct app for shar­ing short-form videos.

Chaf­ing at Vine’s 7‑second time con­straints, Wurtz under­took a more ambi­tious project, a con­densed His­to­ry of Japan that would employ the same tech­niques he brought to bear in his short­er works: graph­ic text, clip art, and Microsoft Paint draw­ings. He zeroed in on the sub­ject because he knew pre­cious lit­tle about Japan, and looked for­ward to doing some vir­gin research.

Wurtz fol­lowed up the 9‑minute His­to­ry of Japan, above, with His­to­ry of the Entire World, I guess.

The non­cha­lance of the title is reflect­ed in Wurtz’s offhand­ed nar­ra­tion. Any word or phrase over two syl­la­bles runs a risk of being trans­formed into an infomer­cial-wor­thy musi­cal jin­gle: space dust, the moon, Egypt…

You may bri­dle at first, but stick it out. Its charms sneak up on you.

Time is not par­tic­u­lar­ly rel­a­tive in Wurtz’s com­pressed uni­verse. Whether it’s 10 min­utes pass­ing before some major devel­op­ment or 500 mil­lion years, their pas­sage is accord­ed equal heft.

Humans show up around the four minute mark, grab­bing stuff, bang­ing rocks, fig­ur­ing out agri­cul­ture…

(Mesopotamia’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion as a “sweet dank val­ley” between the Tigris and Euphrates is a par­tic­u­lar high­light.)

This is the rare his­to­ry video where sci­ence plays a major role. It takes time out for weath­er updates—the floor is no longer lava, the entire world is now an ocean… it’s sober­ing to remem­ber that ozone is what made it safe for mul­ti-celled life forms to ven­ture forth on land.

Empires rise and fall, uncon­quer­able rulers are unseat­ed and for­got­ten.

(That’s the Tamil Kings. Nobody con­quers the Tamil Kings. Who are the Tamil Kings? Mer­chants prob­a­bly and they’ve got spices…)

Of course the prob­lem with a great overview such as this is the back end’s shelf life can prove rather short. It’s been a lit­tle over a year and a half since Wurtz post­ed the video, and thus far, his part­ing shots still feel pret­ty rel­e­vant: armed drones, 3d print­ing, plas­tic-choked oceans, and a seem­ing­ly unbridge­able gap between the desire to save the world and an actu­al plan for doing so.

Fried by 11 months of inten­sive research and labor on His­to­ry of the Entire World, I guess, Wurtz is cur­rent­ly tak­ing a leave of absence from his­to­ry. These days, he’s pour­ing his ener­gies into orig­i­nal music videos like “At the Air­port Ter­mi­nal.” He also devotes a bit of every day to  answer­ing fans’ ques­tions, rou­tine­ly turn­ing in upwards of a dozen suc­cinct hum­ble, all-low­er­case replies:

1.18.19  7:00 pm   what inspired you to make “the entire world, i guess”? was it a project you already had in mind from before or did you start it when you saw you could do more than just japan

it’s always a nice idea to try to explain the whole world in one video. it’s sure­ly some­thing i’ve always want­ed to do, but was­n’t confident/experienced/stupid enough to believe i could do it until after i had done japan which worked so well

1.18.19  12:53 am   are you ever going to make any­thing else as in depth as his­to­ry of japan or the world?

that would take so much time that by the time it was done you prob­a­bly would­n’t care any­more, but some­one else will so i still might do it

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, he’s the sub­ject of a live­ly sub-red­dit. One fan, red­dit user n44m, was inspired to plot the time­line of His­to­ry of the Entire World, I Guess, below.

To learn more about some of the civ­i­liza­tions, events and per­sons fea­tured in His­to­ry of the Entire World, I Guess, check out anoth­er fan’s anno­tat­ed tran­scrip­tion here.

And rather than nit­pick about cer­tain crit­i­cal bits of his­to­ry that were left on the cut­ting room floor, try writ­ing a script for your own his­to­ry based ani­ma­tion:

The more you learn, the more you find out how much you’re gonna have to leave out. It’s like 99%. That was painful. — Bill Wurtz

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Entire His­to­ry of Japan in 9 Quirky Min­utes

A Crash Course in World His­to­ry

The His­to­ry of the World in 46 Lec­tures From Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  See her onstage in New York City in Feb­ru­ary as host of  The­ater of the Apes book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

The Evolution of the Alphabet: A Colorful Flowchart, Covering 3,800 Years, Takes You From Ancient Egypt to Today

in History | January 31st, 2019

No mat­ter our native lan­guage, we all have to learn a writ­ing sys­tem. And whichev­er lan­guage we learn, its writ­ing sys­tem had to come from some­where. Take Eng­lish, the lan­guage you’re read­ing right now and one writ­ten in Latin script, which it shares with a range of oth­er tongues: the Euro­pean likes of French, Span­ish, and Ger­man, of course, but now also Ice­landic, Swahili, Taga­log, and a great many more besides. The video above by Matt Bak­er of Use­fulCharts explains just where this increas­ing­ly wide­spread writ­ing sys­tem came from, trac­ing its ori­gins all the way back to the Pro­to-Sinaitic script of Egypt in 1750 BCE.

As revealed in the video, or by the poster avail­able for pur­chase from Use­fulCharts, the let­ters used to write Eng­lish today evolved from there “through Phoeni­cian, ear­ly Greek and ear­ly Latin, to their present forms. You can see how some let­ters were dropped and oth­ers end­ed up evolv­ing into more than one let­ter.”

The col­or-cod­ing and direc­tion dot­ted lines help to make clear­ly leg­i­ble what was, in real­i­ty, an evo­lu­tion that hap­pened organ­i­cal­ly over about two mil­len­nia. Enough changed over that time, as Jason Kot­tke writes, that “it’s tough to see how the pic­to­graph­ic forms of the orig­i­nal script evolved into our let­ters; aside from the T and maybe M & O, there’s lit­tle resem­blance.”

Bak­er’s design for this poster, notes Colos­sal’s Kate Sierzuputows­ki, “was cre­at­ed in asso­ci­a­tion with his Writ­ing Sys­tems of the World chart which takes a look at 51 dif­fer­ent writ­ing sys­tems from around the world.” All of the research for both those posters informs his video on the his­to­ry of the alpha­bet, which looks at writ­ing sys­tems as they’ve devel­oped across a vari­ety of civ­i­liza­tions. You’ll notice that all of them respond in dif­fer­ent ways to the needs of the times and places in which they arose, and some pos­sess advan­tages that oth­ers don’t. (In Korea, where I live, one often hears the prais­es sung of the Kore­an alpha­bet, “the most sci­en­tif­ic writ­ing sys­tem in the world.”) But what the strengths of the descen­dant of mod­ern Latin 2000 years on will be — and whether it will con­tain any­thing resem­bling emo­ji — not even the most astute lin­guist knows.

via Colos­sal/Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Now I Know My LSD ABCs: A Trip­py Ani­ma­tion of the Alpha­bet

Dic­tio­nary of the Old­est Writ­ten Language–It Took 90 Years to Com­plete, and It’s Now Free Online

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

You Could Soon Be Able to Text with 2,000 Ancient Egypt­ian Hiero­glyphs

The His­to­ry of the Eng­lish Lan­guage in Ten Ani­mat­ed Min­utes

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.

The Real Locations of Ukiyo‑e, Historic Japanese Woodblock Prints, Plotted on a Google Map

in Art, History | January 31st, 2019

The undis­put­ed last great mas­ter of ukiyo‑e was Uta­gawa Hiroshige. He is best known for the many series he cre­at­ed of bucol­ic land­scapes, which offered col­lec­tors a chance to see parts of Japan they might nev­er reach. The Japan of his ear­ly 19th cen­tu­ry work holds a spe­cial place in Japan­ese hearts–a final look at an iso­lat­ed and beau­ti­ful coun­try just before the open­ing up of the ports to the West and, with it, indus­tri­al­iza­tion.

Apart from Mount Fuji, the loca­tions that Hiroshige drew have long gone, but “Com­put­er sci­ence under­grad, mar­tial artist, ukiyo‑e lover” and British res­i­dent George–he goes by the Twit­ter han­dle @Cascadesssss–has plot­ted the loca­tion of Hiroshige’s prints on an inter­ac­tive Google map that has gone quick­ly viral.

The red cir­cles rep­re­sent the series “One Hun­dred Famous Views of Edo,” the blue cir­cles “The Fifty-Three Sta­tions of the Tokai­do” (one of five main routes in Edo Japan), and the green “Famous Views of the Six­ty-odd Provinces,” the most expan­sive series show­ing scenes all the way from the The Two-sword Rocks of Bo Bay to the north province of Dewa and Mount Gas­san. Each loca­tion opens to a sep­a­rate web page with loca­tion infor­ma­tion, includ­ing lat­i­tude-lon­gi­tude num­bers. (Pull up a chair map-lovers, you might be here a long time.)

“The Fifty-Three Sta­tions of the Tokai­do” was Hiroshige’s most pop­u­lar series and unlike the oth­er two depict­ed hor­i­zon­tal land­scapes. The artist sketched these in 1832 as he rode in a pro­ces­sion from Edo (now Tokyo) to Kyoto and set to work on the prints once he returned home. The 55 prints (two extra draw­ings of the start­ing and end­ing points of the jour­ney) sold like crazy, as they cost about the same as a bowl of soup for the com­mon per­son.

“Famous Views of the Six­ty-odd Provinces” is dif­fer­ent in that Hiroshige did not make trips to see all these beloved locations–instead he put his own spin on exist­ing draw­ings found in guide books and oth­er sources. The total series of 70 prints took four years to com­plete, from 1853 to 1856.

By the time the “Provinces” series was wind­ing down, Hiroshige start­ed work on his final series “One Hun­dred Famous Views of Edo,” which he worked on until his death. Again, though liv­ing in Edo, Hiroshige drew from the works of oth­ers from decades before. This is also the artist at his most adventurous–some land­scapes are obscured by posts and bridge rail­ings or even a carp stream­er. One fea­tures what is rumored to be Hiroshige’s favorite geisha. These prints would go on to influ­ence West­ern artists, espe­cial­ly Vin­cent van Gogh.

Hiroshige pro­duced more series over his life–he died aged 61–and here’s hop­ing Cas­cadesssss plots more on his map soon.

via Spoon and Tam­a­go

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Enter a Dig­i­tal Archive of 213,000+ Beau­ti­ful Japan­ese Wood­block Prints

Down­load 2,500 Beau­ti­ful Wood­block Prints and Draw­ings by Japan­ese Mas­ters (1600–1915)

The Evo­lu­tion of The Great Wave off Kanaza­wa: See Four Ver­sions That Hoku­sai Paint­ed Over Near­ly 40 Years

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.

Watch The Beatles Perform Their Famous Rooftop Concert: It Happened 50 Years Ago Today (January 30, 1969)

in Music | January 30th, 2019

On Jan­u­ary 3oth 1969, The Bea­t­les took to the rooftop of the head­quar­ters of Apple Records, locat­ed at 3 Sav­ile Row, in cen­tral Lon­don. And there they played an impromp­tu last gig (a coda to their final offi­cial con­cert at Can­dle­stick Park on August 29, 1966), much to the delight of Lon­don­ers on near­by rooftops … and to the cha­grin of the police.

At the time, The Bea­t­les were record­ing their album, Let It Be, and the rooftop show let them run through var­i­ous tracks from those ses­sions. Songs played dur­ing the set include “Get Back,” where the Bea­t­les were accom­pa­nied by Bil­ly Pre­ston on the key­boards, and “Don’t Let Me Down” (above), “I’ve Got A Feel­ing,” “One After 909,” and “Dan­ny Boy.” And final­ly “Dig A Pony” and anoth­er ver­sion of “Get Back.”

Famous­ly, The Bea­t­les’ live lega­cy ends with the police shut­ting down the show (it was a noise vio­la­tion, you know?) and John Lennon utter­ing the immor­tal words, “I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and our­selves, and I hope we passed the audi­tion.” That’s going out in style…

Foot­note: It’s not clear which band played the first rooftop con­cert, but one thing is for cer­tain. Jef­fer­son Air­plane played their own rooftop gig on Decem­ber 7, 1968, and Jean-Luc Godard filmed it. Once again, the police pay a friend­ly vis­it. Watch it here.

Learn more about the Bea­t­les’ his­toric per­for­mance by pick­ing up a copy of the recent­ly-released book, The Roof: The Bea­t­les’ Final Con­cert, or down­load it from Audi­ble through this free tri­al offer.

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:

Audio: The Bea­t­les Play Their Final Con­cert at Can­dle­stick Park, 1966

A Vir­tu­al Tour of Every Place Ref­er­enced in The Bea­t­les’ Lyrics: In 12 Min­utes, Trav­el 25,000 Miles Across Eng­land, France, Rus­sia, India & the US

Musi­cian Plays Sig­na­ture Drum Parts of 71 Bea­t­les Songs in 5 Min­utes: A Whirl­wind Trib­ute to Ringo Starr

Neil Gaiman Teaches the Art of Storytelling in His New Online Course

in Online Courses, Writing | January 30th, 2019

How has Neil Gaiman, author of fic­tion in a vari­ety of forms rang­ing from nov­els and short sto­ries to com­ic books, radio plays, and films, man­aged to win over such a large and devot­ed fan base? Ask a mem­ber of that fan base, and you’ll more than like­ly hear an expla­na­tion along the lines of, “He knows how to tell a sto­ry.” That may sound like a sim­ple skill, but telling a sto­ry at Gaiman’s lev­el requires a deep-root­ed exper­tise in the essen­tial nature and still-unex­plored pos­si­bil­i­ties of sto­ry­telling itself — an exper­tise that Gaiman him­self has late­ly proven more than will­ing to share. A few years ago we fea­tured his lec­ture “How Sto­ries Last” here on Open Cul­ture; now, he’s come out with an online course on the art of sto­ry­telling at Mas­ter­Class.

“Human beings are sto­ry­telling crea­tures,” Gaiman says in the course’s trail­er above. “Sto­ries are vital. We con­vey truth with sto­ries. That is the mag­ic of fic­tion.” But even the author of sto­ries like The Sand­man, Nev­er­where, Star­dust, Amer­i­can Gods, Cora­line, and much more besides has cer­tain admis­sions to make about the prac­tice of writ­ing them: “Writ­ing a nov­el is like dri­ving through the fog with one head­light out,” for exam­ple.

“You can’t see very far ahead of your­self. But every now and again, the mists will clear.” And when it comes time to revise, he explains, “the process of doing your sec­ond draft is the process of mak­ing it look like you knew what you were doing all along.” What do you need most to make it through this har­row­ing process? The “con­vic­tion that you are bril­liant.”

Not that you don’t need any­thing else. The nine­teen lessons of Gaiman’s Mas­ter­Class cov­er every­thing from “using the ‘lie’ of a made-up sto­ry to tell a human truth,” to “how to over­come the fear of mak­ing mis­takes,” to tech­niques like “cold opens, with­hold­ing infor­ma­tion, find­ing emo­tion­al weight, and choos­ing mem­o­rable details,” to the art of world­build­ing, which Gaiman describes as “hon­est­ly, the joy of get­ting to play god.” Oth­er lessons pro­vide case stud­ies focus­ing on his short sto­ries, nov­els, and com­ic books, all of which have no doubt inspired many to tell sto­ries them­selves. But who, hear­ing Gaiman talk about sto­ry­telling, could pos­si­bly resist try­ing their hand at it?

You can sign up for Gaiman’s course here.

You can take this class by sign­ing up for a Mas­ter­Class’ All Access Pass. The All Access Pass will give you instant access to this course and 85 oth­ers for a 12-month peri­od.

FYI: If you sign up for a Mas­ter­Class course by click­ing on the affil­i­ate links in this post, Open Cul­ture will receive a small fee that helps sup­port our oper­a­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

18 Sto­ries & Nov­els by Neil Gaiman Online: Free Texts & Read­ings by Neil Him­self

Neil Gaiman Presents “How Sto­ries Last,” an Insight­ful Lec­ture on How Sto­ries Change, Evolve & Endure Through the Cen­turies

Neil Gaiman Reads “The Man Who For­got Ray Brad­bury”

Where Do Great Ideas Come From? Neil Gaiman Explains

How to Write a Best­selling Page Turn­er: Learn from The Da Vin­ci Code Author Dan Brown’s New Mas­ter­class

Mar­garet Atwood Offers a New Online Class on Cre­ative Writ­ing

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.

Enter an Online Interactive Documentary on Rembrandt’s The Night Watch and Learn About the Painting’s Many Hidden Secrets

in Art | January 30th, 2019

What pos­sessed the man who attacked Rembrandt’s The Night Watch with a bread knife in 1975, “jab­bing two-foot-long knife marks into the sur­face,” as Nina Sie­gal writes at The New York Times, “cut­ting a sev­en-foot-wide hole, and rip­ping off a sec­tion of the can­vas”? This was not the first time the paint­ing had been man­gled. In 1715, just a lit­tle over 70 years after the mon­u­men­tal work’s 1642 com­ple­tion, the Ams­ter­dam city gov­ern­ment decid­ed to move it, and removed a sig­nif­i­cant part to shrink it down for eas­i­er trans­port. The miss­ing top and left por­tions have nev­er been recov­ered.

It sur­vived intact for two cen­turies then faced its first knife attack in 1911. Then it sur­vived two World Wars only to endure the sec­ond attack. Then, in 1990, it was set upon by a man armed with sul­phuric acid.

Thanks to the quick think­ing of a Rijksmu­se­um guard, only the painting’s var­nish sus­tained injury. These are just some of the facts we learn in the inter­ac­tive doc­u­men­tary Expe­ri­ence The Night Watch, a joint cre­ation of NTR TV chan­nel and the Ams­ter­dam Rijksmu­se­um.

You can read or hear the painting’s his­to­ry in Dutch or Eng­lish, learn the names of the his­tor­i­cal fig­ures depict­ed in it, learn about Rembrandt’s com­mand of com­po­si­tion and chiaroscuro, and much more. (Enter the inter­ac­tive doc­u­men­tary here.) The painter’s mas­ter­ful, dra­mat­ic use of light and shad­ow to cre­ate a sense of depth—probably the most famous exam­ple of his use of the technique—is respon­si­ble for the painting’s usu­al title, since most of its view­ers have assumed that the assem­bled vol­un­teer mili­tia depict­ed in it came togeth­er in the dead of night. (The shad­ows had dark­ened con­sid­er­ably over the years until a thick lay­er of var­nish was removed in the 1940s.)

But Rembrandt’s mas­ter­piece was orig­i­nal­ly called Mili­tia Com­pa­ny of Dis­trict II under the Com­mand of Cap­tain Frans Ban­ninck Cocq, and it records not a troop of sea­soned sol­diers but a gentleman’s shoot­ing com­pa­ny, one of the bands of civic guards that had “effec­tive­ly devel­oped into a social club for well-to-do cit­i­zens” who would “turn up most­ly as cer­e­monies or to quell minor riots.” Each of the men memo­ri­al­ized paid to have his like­ness includ­ed. We may nev­er have known their names except that in 1715 they were added inside a shield paint­ed by an anony­mous artist for some rea­son. The work is full of oth­er such mys­ter­ies.

Who is the small girl in white, bathed in angel­ic light, to whom our eyes are inevitably drawn? “She does not have any trace­able iden­ti­ty,” our nar­ra­tor tells us, “she is Rembrandt’s inven­tion,” a sym­bol of the com­pa­ny. And yet behind her, almost com­plete­ly shroud­ed, is anoth­er girl, iden­ti­ty unknown, who most of us would prob­a­bly nev­er have noticed had she not been point­ed out. “In The Night Watch,” we dis­cov­er, “noth­ing is what it seems.”

Learn more of the painting’s secrets at the online doc­u­men­tary project here, see sim­i­lar­ly inter­ac­tive art his­to­ries from NTR on M.C. Esch­er and Hierony­mus Bosch, and, above, lis­ten to an Art­sy pod­cast fea­tur­ing Rijksmu­se­um cura­tor Pieter Roelofs and oth­er Rem­brandt experts who explain what makes The Night Watch so wild­ly famous that more than one per­son has felt dri­ven to destroy it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

300+ Etch­ings by Rem­brandt Now Free Online, Thanks to the Mor­gan Library & Muse­um

Rijksmu­se­um Dig­i­tizes & Makes Free Online 361,000 Works of Art, Mas­ter­pieces by Rem­brandt Includ­ed!

What Makes The Night Watch Rembrandt’s Mas­ter­piece

Enter an Online Inter­ac­tive Doc­u­men­tary on M.C. Escher’s Art & Life, Nar­rat­ed By Peter Green­away

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Bewil­der­ing Mas­ter­piece The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Daily Routine: The Discipline That Fueled Her Imagination

in Sci Fi, Writing | January 29th, 2019

Image by Gor­thi­an, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

“Some of us are Nor­man Mail­er,” said Ursu­la K. LeGuin in a 1976 inter­view with sci­ence-fic­tion fanzine Luna Month­ly, “but oth­ers of us are mid­dle-aged Port­land house­wives.” And though Le Guin may have thought of her­self as one of the lat­ter, “mid­dle-aged Port­land house­wife” is hard­ly the way the rest of us would describe her. Over a near­ly 60-year-long career, Le Guin pro­duced an enor­mous body of lit­er­ary work, includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to the six books in which she cre­at­ed the world of Earth­sea and oth­er acclaimed sci-fi nov­els like The Left Hand of Dark­ness, The Dis­pos­sessed, and The Lathe of Heav­en. And some­how she man­aged to write all of it between 7:15 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. each day.

Or that’s what her ide­al writ­ing sched­ule dic­tates, any­way. Recent­ly tweet­ed out by writer Michael J. Sei­dlinger as “the ide­al writ­ing rou­tine,” it first appeared in an inter­view she gave in 1988 (and more recent­ly reap­peared in Ursu­la Le Guin: The Last Inter­view and Oth­er Con­ver­sa­tions).

Begin­ning at the ear­ly hour of 5:30 in the morn­ing, the time to “wake up and lie there and think,” it con­tin­ues on to break­fast — and “lots” of it — at 6:15, and the com­mence­ment of the day’s “writ­ing, writ­ing, writ­ing” an hour lat­er, which lasts until lunch at noon. After that, Le Guin con­sid­ered what we con­sid­er her main work to be done, mov­ing on to such pur­suits as read­ing, music, cor­re­spon­dence, “maybe house clean­ing,” and din­ner. Past 8:15, she said, “I tend to be very stu­pid,” a state in which nobody could write the sort of books we remem­ber her for.

But how­ev­er orig­i­nal­ly she wrote, Le Guin was hard­ly excep­tion­al in liv­ing this way while doing it. “Be reg­u­lar and order­ly in your life, so that you may be vio­lent and orig­i­nal in your work,” said Gus­tave Flaubert, a max­im true for enough writ­ers that we also worked it in when we fea­tured an info­graph­ic on the dai­ly rou­tines of famous cre­ative peo­ple. In both Flaubert and Le Guin’s case (or in the case of a writer like Haru­ki Muraka­mi, who ris­es famous­ly ear­ly and runs famous­ly hard when work­ing on a book), their domes­tic lives, well-ordered to the point that an out­side observ­er would find them bor­ing, facil­i­tat­ed the cre­ation of lit­er­a­ture like none that had ever come before. This despite the fact that, on the sur­face, few nov­els could seem more dis­sim­i­lar than Flaubert and Le Guin’s, but each writer would have seen what the oth­er had in com­mon: specif­i­cal­ly, that they knew what it took to get the imag­i­na­tion well and tru­ly fired up.

via Michael J. Sei­dlinger

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Dai­ly Habits of Famous Writ­ers: Franz Kaf­ka, Haru­ki Muraka­mi, Stephen King & More

The Dai­ly Rou­tines of Famous Cre­ative Peo­ple, Pre­sent­ed in an Inter­ac­tive Info­graph­ic

Ursu­la Le Guin Gives Insight­ful Writ­ing Advice in Her Free Online Work­shop

Cel­e­brate the Life & Writ­ing of Ursu­la K. Le Guin (R.I.P.) with Clas­sic Radio Drama­ti­za­tions of Her Sto­ries

Ursu­la K. Le Guin Names the Books She Likes and Wants You to Read

Watch the New Trail­er for Worlds of Ursu­la K Le Guin, the First Fea­ture Film on the Pio­neer­ing Sci-Fi Author

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.

The Cleveland Museum of Art Digitizes Its Collection, Putting 30,000 Works Online and Into the Public Domain

in Art | January 29th, 2019

The lines of the descent from the plu­to­crat­ic wealth and auto­crat­ic pow­er of the late 19th cen­tu­ry to the worst atroc­i­ties of the ear­ly 20th might seem appar­ent to some peo­ple. So too can we trace from the Gild­ed Age an insti­tu­tion­al sys­tem of mon­u­ments to art, cul­ture, and high­er learn­ing unique to mod­ern times. Whether by virtue of greed, guilt, or noblesse oblige, or some of all of the above, wealthy indus­tri­al­ists sought to show—as Andrew Carnegie wrote in his “Gospel of Wealth”—that “the hous­es of some should be homes for all that is high­est and best in lit­er­a­ture and the arts, and for all the refine­ments of civ­i­liza­tion.”

The trea­sures of world cul­ture were donat­ed back to the world, but the proud benef­i­cence of their givers lived on in the insti­tu­tions. In the case of Cleve­land tele­graph mag­nate Jeptha Wade, who was him­self a daguerreo­typ­ist and por­trait painter, the mem­o­ry of the gen­er­ous gift con­tin­ues in Wade Park, home of the Fine Arts Gar­den and the Cleve­land Muse­um of Art, cre­at­ed from his bequest.

Now, over 125 years lat­er, Wade’s patron­age lives on online. “Brace your­self for some meme-wor­thy Egypt­ian cats and gif-able Renais­sance babies,” as Zachary Small jokes at Hyper­al­ler­gic.

The muse­um has just announced its dig­i­tal col­lec­tion with a poignant quote from its founder declar­ing it an eter­nal dona­tion to humankind: “The state­ment ‘for the ben­e­fit of all the peo­ple for­ev­er’ was writ­ten into Jeptha Wade’s 1892 deed of gift for the land on which the muse­um stands… reflect­ing its founders’ belief that muse­ums should be places for inspi­ra­tion and for cre­at­ing won­der and mean­ing in people’s lives.”

This may sound like osten­ta­tious rhetoric, but the announce­ment also tells us that its free dig­i­tal col­lec­tion is “using Open Access,” which means “the pub­lic now has the abil­i­ty to share, remix, and reuse images of as many as 30,000 CMA art­works—“near­ly half of the museum’s entire col­lec­tion,” notes Small—are now “in the pub­lic domain for com­mer­cial as well as schol­ar­ly and non­com­mer­cial pur­pos­es.” Take even a small sam­pling of their open col­lec­tions and you may find more than enough inspi­ra­tion, won­der, and mean­ing.

Take, for exam­ple, Van Gogh’s The Large Plane Trees, J.M.W. Turner’s The Burn­ing of the Hous­es of Lords and Com­mons, El Greco’s The Holy Fam­i­ly with Mary Mag­dalen, and Edouard Manet’s Berthe Morisot. Take work from Rem­brandt, Velázquez, Mon­et, Cezanne, Car­avag­gio, Pis­sar­ro, Degas, Rubens, Poussin, Rodin. Take mas­ter­ful works like ancient Egypt­ian New King­dom Head of Amen­hotep II Wear­ing the Blue Crown and Timurid peri­od Iran­ian Roy­al Recep­tion in a Land­scape—as well as many from cen­tral Africa, Chi­na, India, Japan and Korea.

The Open Access col­lec­tion has swelled to over 34,000 images that can be down­loaded as jpgs or high-res­o­lu­tion tiffs. These and over 60,000 more online works come with descrip­tions, cita­tions, exhi­bi­tion his­to­ries, and more. What­ev­er con­flu­ence of his­tor­i­cal and con­tem­po­rary events brought Cleve­land’s dig­i­tal col­lec­tion into being, it does indeed seem to be for the great ben­e­fit of a great num­ber of inter­net-con­nect­ed peo­ple around the world. Take full advan­tage of its new­ly pub­lic resources here.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art Insti­tute of Chica­go Puts 44,000+ Works of Art Online: View Them in High Res­o­lu­tion

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Puts 400,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

Google Puts Over 57,000 Works of Art on the Web

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

Watch a New Virtual Reality Production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: A Modern Take on a Classic Play

in Literature, Technology, Theatre | January 29th, 2019

Often com­pared to The Tem­pest, Samuel Beck­et­t’s Endgame may have as much of Shakespeare’s Ham­let in it, though the author was unwill­ing to acknowl­edge the influ­ence to Theodor Adorno. Beck­et­t’s cen­tral char­ac­ter, the blind, aged Hamm, spends all of his time in a throne harangu­ing the oth­er three, in a gloomy place, The New York Times’ Brooks Atkin­son wrote, “some­where between life and death.” Hamm might have been the Dan­ish prince grown old and bit­ter, left with noth­ing but what Beck­ett called Shakespeare’s “fat greasy words.”

In any case, Ham­let has long been thought of as a pro­to­type of the absurd, a play where lit­tle hap­pens because its pro­tag­o­nist is too haunt­ed to have rela­tion­ships with the liv­ing or make deci­sions, a con­di­tion he com­plains about in scene after scene. Trau­ma, exis­ten­tial paral­y­sis, crip­pling doubt punc­tu­at­ed by fits of rage and violence—these are the mak­ings of the 20th cen­tu­ry anti-hero. If the play has a clas­si­cal hero, a man of action and resolve, it is, absurd­ly, a dead man, Hamlet’s father, who testi­ly declares his pur­pose in his final speech, “to whet thy almost blunt­ed pur­pose.”

Should Ham­let be turned into an immer­sive VR and aug­ment­ed real­i­ty expe­ri­ence, allow­ing view­ers to inhab­it a char­ac­ter’s point of view, they might not opt to see things as the moody, depres­sive, speechi­fy­ing prince. In Ham­let 360: Thy Father’s Spir­it, we instead get to inhab­it the ghost, who only appears in the play a hand­ful of times but still fills every scene with his glow­er­ing pres­ence. The 60-minute VR “mod­ern adap­ta­tion” is a co-pro­duc­tion of Boston’s Com­mon­wealth Shake­speare Com­pa­ny and Google.

“Both extreme­ly long by the stan­dards of vir­tu­al real­i­ty and extreme­ly short by the stan­dards of Ham­let,” writes Eliz­a­beth Har­ris at The New York Times, the film “can be watched in 3‑D using a V.R. head­set or in two dimen­sions on a desk­top or mobile device” (see it above). On a vast, dark­ened set clut­tered with fine but shab­by fur­nish­ings in heaps, glow­ing lamps, a bath­tub, and a car, actors per­form con­densed scenes while we, as ghost, freely roam about, view­ing the action in three dimen­sions, a device intend­ed to give the view­er “a sense of agency and urgency as an omni­scient observ­er, guide and par­tic­i­pant,” the pro­duc­tion notes.

The film’s cre­ators, Har­ris writes, “hope that beyond the fresh expe­ri­ence it pro­vides, it will also serve as a tool to bring great the­ater to wider audiences—and bring big­ger audi­ences to the­ater.” It may have that effect, though one might feel it priv­i­leges dig­i­tal effects over the tru­ly immer­sive, full expe­ri­ence of Shakespeare’s “fat greasy words.” It’s hard to think the “great Shake­speare­an” Beck­ett would approve, but he found lit­tle to his lik­ing.

Younger, less can­tan­ker­ous audi­ences might, how­ev­er. “Many young people’s first expe­ri­ence of Shake­speare is not all that great,” says direc­tor Steven Maler. Ham­let 360 allows the Com­mon­wealth Shake­speare Com­pa­ny to “scale up” their mis­sion to “tru­ly democ­ra­tize Shake­speare and the­ater.”  Expe­ri­ence it for your­self above or on YouTube and learn more at Boston’s WGBH, who recent­ly pre­miered the film. The actors “deliv­er pow­er­ful per­for­mances,” the PBS sta­tion writes, “that bring the play for­ward to today, mak­ing it both cur­rent and time­less.”

via The New York Times

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Shake­speare Cours­es: Primers on the Bard from Oxford, Har­vard, Berke­ley & More

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

30 Days of Shake­speare: One Read­ing of the Bard Per Day, by The New York Pub­lic Library, on the 400th Anniver­sary of His Death

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

Nick Cave Answers the Hotly Debated Question: Will Artificial Intelligence Ever Be Able to Write a Great Song?

in Music, Technology | January 28th, 2019

Pho­to by Bled­dyn Butch­er via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Spike Jonze’s AI love sto­ry Her offered a sort of an answer to one of the crit­i­cal ques­tions posed about Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: Can machines feel love? Maybe, and maybe deeply, in a cer­tain sense, but maybe not for just one per­son and not for very long before they take off to explore lim­it­less oth­ers, which makes them sound like very seduc­tive but also very shal­low lovers.

Maybe it helps to keep that metaphor in mind when we read Nick Cave’s answer to a ques­tion a Sloven­ian fan posed in the Birth­day Party/Bad Seeds/Grinderman singer’s bru­tal­ly ten­der newslet­ter, The Red Right Hand. “Do you think,” asks Peter from Ljubl­jana, “AI will ever be able to write a good song?” Cave begins with a con­ces­sion: AI might “pro­duce a song that makes us feel,” and maybe “more intense­ly than any human song­writer could do.”

And yet, after list­ing a num­ber of human exam­ples, from Nir­vana to Prince to Iggy Pop to Nina Simone, Cave describes what makes their abil­i­ties alien to a machine mind:

We go to songs to make us feel some­thing – hap­py, sad, sexy, home­sick, excit­ed or what­ev­er – but this is not all a song does. What a great song makes us feel is a sense of awe. There is a rea­son for this. A sense of awe is almost exclu­sive­ly pred­i­cat­ed on our lim­i­ta­tions as human beings. It is entire­ly to do with our audac­i­ty as humans to reach beyond our poten­tial.

AI can­not die, at least in the sense we under­stand it. Nor is it con­strained by painful phys­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions, nor privy to fleet­ing phys­i­cal plea­sures. “Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, for all its unlim­it­ed poten­tial, sim­ply doesn’t have this capac­i­ty. How could it? And this is the essence of tran­scen­dence.” The holy or har­row­ing knowl­edge of fini­tude and fragili­ty, love and death and grief.

Anoth­er way to state the case comes from the most mov­ing of Cave’s fan let­ter answers, in which he con­soles a bereaved fan in Ver­mont with a descrip­tion of his own grief over the death of his son.

Maybe AI could write the sen­tence, “dread grief trails bright phan­toms in its wake.” But it could not write it from the heart of a bereaved par­ent who learns that “grief and love are for­ev­er inter­twined,” or from a place where super­nat­ur­al beliefs may be untrue yet still have super­nat­ur­al pow­er. Cave’s descrip­tion of his grief is also a descrip­tion of tran­scen­dence, of going beyond what is pos­si­ble to find what is time­less.

Like ideas, these spir­its speak of pos­si­bil­i­ty. Fol­low your ideas, because on the oth­er side of the idea is change and growth and redemp­tion. Cre­ate your spir­its. Call to them. Will them alive. Speak to them. It is their impos­si­ble and ghost­ly hands that draw us back to the world from which we were jet­ti­soned; bet­ter now and unimag­in­ably changed.

In answer to Peter’s ques­tion, he con­cludes with the poet­ic author­i­ty of a writer of great songs: “AI would have the capac­i­ty to write a good song, but not a great one. It lacks the nerve.”

Read Nick Cave’s full response here. And while there, sign up for his free newslet­ter.

via Austin Kleon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to Nick Cave’s Lec­ture on the Art of Writ­ing Sub­lime Love Songs (1999)

Ani­mat­ed Sto­ries Writ­ten by Tom Waits, Nick Cave & Oth­er Artists, Read by Dan­ny Devi­to, Zach Gal­i­fi­anakis & More

Nick Cave Nar­rates an Ani­mat­ed Film about the Cat Piano, the Twist­ed 18th Cen­tu­ry Musi­cal Instru­ment Designed to Treat Men­tal Ill­ness

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