Irish Navy Builds Ships Named After Samuel Beckett & James Joyce
It’s how things go around here. You do some research on Samuel Beckett’s plays (see post from earlier today) and you discover there’s a naval ship dedicated to the Irish playwright. Launched in November 2013 and commissioned in May 2014, LÉ Samuel Beckett (P61) patrols Irish waters, allowing the Irish navy to conduct search and rescue operations, undertake vessel boardings, and also protect fisheries. According to an Irish site, the ship “represents an updated and lengthened version of the original RÓISÍN Class OPVs… She is built to the highest international standards in terms of safety, equipment fit, technological innovation and crew comfort.” The cost, 56 million euros.
Of course, the Irish haven’t forgotten their other great literary son. LÉ James Joyce (P62) will be launched in May 2015. And guess what, LÉ Seamus Heaney may soon be on the horizon.
Does anyone know of another nation that honors its artists in such a way?
Read More...Play Mark Twain’s “Memory-Builder,” His Game for Remembering Historical Facts & Dates
Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, of course, but like any good luminary of 19th-century America, he also put together a few inventions on the side. These non-literary achievements of Twain’s included an “Improvement in Adjustable and Detachable Straps for Garments” (as the patent calls it) meant to replace suspenders, a “self-pasting” scrapbook”, and the “Memory-Builder, a game for acquiring and retaining all sorts of facts and dates.”
“Twain believed that memorization — a common strategy of 19th-century schooling — was a worthy, if tiresome, pursuit, and looked for ways to make it more interesting for annoyed students,” writes Slate’s Rebecca Onion. This line of thinking led him to create the Memory-Builder, which he described as a “game which shall fill the children’s heads with dates without study” in an 1883 letter to a friend. He explained the background of his educational philosophy in much fuller detail in a 1914 piece from Harper’s magazine:
Sixteen years ago when my children were little creatures the governess was trying to hammer some primer histories into their heads. Part of this fun — if you like to call it that — consisted in the memorizing of the accession dates of the thirty-seven personages who had ruled England from the Conqueror down. These little people found it a bitter, hard contract. It was all dates, they all looked alike, and they wouldn’t stick. Day after day of the summer vacation dribbled by, and still the kings held the fort; the children couldn’t conquer any six of them.
This experience gave rise to a couple of different learning methods, of which the Memory-Builder (patented in 1885) would prove the best-known. Though Twain worked out a way to play it on a cribbage board converted into a historical timeline, you can play a technologically much-updated but materially identical version of the game online (with the same cribbage pins and the same strangely intense focus on those royals) at the web site of the University of Oregon’s library. Alternatively, you can play an adaptation that deals with the life and times of Twain himself at the University of Virginia’s web site.
Whether or not the Memory-Builder can help you learn your history, you’ll have to find out for yourself. Not having caught on at the time, Twain’s game didn’t get far out of the prototype stage, but the idea behind it has survived in the form of one of Twain’s many so-very-quotable quotes: “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” Something tells me he’d approve of seeing his game on the internet, surely the tool that has done more to get education into the learner’s own hands than anything else in human history so far. (Um, have you seen our list of 1100 Free Online Courses?)
via Slate
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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture as well as the video series The City in Cinema and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Take a “Breath” and Watch Samuel Beckett’s One-Minute Play
As Samuel Beckett’s writing progressed through the ’60s, it became even more minimal, despairing, and bleak. It was as if he was paring away as much as he could to see if theater was left standing. If a painting could be one color like Ad Reinhardt, what would be the Reinhardt of theater? Jonathan Crow mentioned yesterday how Beckett’s 1969 play Breath, for instance, “runs just a minute long and features just the sound of breathing.” There is a bit more to it than that. Not a lot more, but yes, more. Here’s the play’s script in full:
Curtain.
1. Faint light on stage littered with miscellaneous rubbish. Hold for about five seconds.
2. Faint brief cry and immediately inspiration and slow increase of light together reaching maximum together in about ten seconds. Silence and hold about five seconds.
3. Expiration and slow decrease of light together reaching minimum together (light as in I) in about ten seconds and immediately cry as before. Silence and hold for about five seconds.
Beckett adds some notes:
Rubbish. No verticals, all scattered and lying.
Cry. Instant of recorded vagitus. Important that two cries be identical, switching on and off strictly synchronized light and breath.
Breath. Amplified recording.
Maximum light. Not bright. If 0 = dark and 10 = bright, light should move from about 3 to 6 and back.
The play came about when one of the most important English theater critics of his time Kenneth Tynan asked for short skits for an erotic revue he was putting on in 1969, called Oh! Calcutta. Others invitees included Jules Feiffer, John Lennon, Edna O’Brien, Jacques Levy, Sam Shepard, and Leonard Melfi. The plan was to perform each skit but keep each writer’s name a secret. Beckett reportedly wrote the play on a postcard and sent it to Tynan, then became enraged when he heard that instead of rubbish on stage, Tynan had used naked bodies *and* in fact had explicitly credited Beckett in the program. Breath wouldn’t get a proper staging until 1999 in London’s West End, as part of an evening with Beckett’s more substantial Krapp’s Last Tape. You can read reports of how the audience reacted.
Several directors have brought Breath to life. Artist Damien Hirst had a go for the 2002 Beckett on Film project. As seen above, his version has very spectacular rubbish gathered from a hospital and, glimpsed in the final seconds, a cigarette butt swastika.
Below, check out a more “traditional” interpretation of the play from the National Theatre School of Canada’s Tech Production class. After that comes a repeat of Hirst’s version, and then one more alternative, Darren Smyth’s 2009 TV static-filled attempt. (The rest of the video is a mixed bag of the Alan Parsons Project and a Tim Burton short, don’t ask why.)
Despite Beckett’s morose reputation, there’s always a black humor underneath it all. And if you’re going to ask the man to write an “erotic skit,” this is what you get, the futility of life from womb to tomb in a minute.
Finally, you can watch an informative mini lecture on the play, presented by Dr. Catherine Brown for the New College of the Humanities.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills and/or watch his films here.
Read More...The Books Samuel Beckett Read and Really Liked (1941–1956)
Samuel Beckett, Pic, 1″ by Roger Pic. Via Wikimedia Commons
Clad in a black turtleneck and with a shock of white hair, Samuel Beckett was a gaunt, gloomy high priest of modernism. After the 1955 premiere of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot (watch him stage a performance here), Kenneth Tynan quipped, ”It has no plot, no climax, no denouement; no beginning, no middle and no end.” From there, Beckett’s work only got more austere, bleak and despairing. His 1969 play Breath, for instance, runs just a minute long and features just the sound of breathing.
An intensely private man, he managed to mesmerize the public even as he turned away from the limelight. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1969, his wife Suzanne, fearing the onslaught of fame that the award would bring, decried it as a “catastrophe.”
A recently published collection of his letters from 1941–1956, the period leading up to his international success with his play Waiting for Godot, casts some light on at least one corner of the man’s private life – what books were piling up on his bed stand. Below is an annotated list of what he was reading during that time. Not surprisingly, he really dug Albert Camus’s The Stranger. “Try and read it,” he writes. “I think it is important.” He dismisses Agatha Christie’s Crooked House as “very tired Christie” but praises Around the World in 80 Days, “It is lively stuff.” But the book he reserves the most praise for is J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. “I liked it very much indeed, more than anything for a long time.”
You can see the full list below. It was originally published online by Cambridge University Press in 2011. Books with an asterisk next to the title can be found in our collection of 700 Free eBooks.
Andromaque* by Jean Racine: “I read Andromaque again with greater admiration than ever and I think more understanding, at least more understanding of the chances of the theatre today.”
Around the World in 80 Days* by Jules Verne: “It is lively stuff.”
The Castle by Franz Kafka: “I felt at home, too much so – perhaps that is what stopped me from reading on. Case closed there and then.”
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger: “I liked it very much indeed, more than anything for a long time.”
Crooked House by Agatha Christie: “very tired Christie”
Effi Briest* by Theodor Fontane: “I read it for the fourth time the other day with the same old tears in the same old places.”
The Hunchback of Notre Dame* by Victor Hugo
Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Lautreamont and Sade by Maurice Blanchot: “Some excellent ideas, or rather starting-points for ideas, and a fair bit of verbiage, to be read quickly, not as a translator does. What emerges from it though is a truly gigantic Sade, jealous of Satan and of his eternal torments, and confronting nature more than with humankind.”
Man’s Fate by Andre Malraux
Mosquitoes by William Faulkner: “with a preface by Queneau that would make an ostrich puke”
The Stranger by Albert Camus: “Try and read it, I think it is important.”
The Temptation to Exist by Emil Cioran: “Great stuff here and there. Must reread his first.”
La 628-E8* by Octave Mirbeau: “Damned good piece of work.”
via Cambridge University Press
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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
Read More...Watch Meryl Streep Have Fun with Accents: Bronx, Polish, Irish, Australian, Yiddish & More
Meryl Streep, frequently hailed as one of our Greatest Living Actresses — she claims there’s no such thing — commands a near-encyclopedic mastery of accents.
Others may prepare for their roles by working with a dialect coach or listening to tapes of native speakers, but Streep pushes to the limit, as indicated in the conversation with author Andre Dubus III, below.
She not only learned Polish in order to play a troubled Holocaust survivor in Sophie’s Choice, she thought deeply about the way gender roles and period inform vocal presentation.
Clearly a lot of effort goes into the performances that leave British critics cheering Streep as she sails above playing fields littered with American actors who dared attempt English accents.
Her commitment to her craft is inadvertently to blame for popularizing the phrase “dingo’s got my baby.”
How refreshing that this versatile and accomplished actor is not precious about her skills. She gamely trotted them out for the comedian Ellen DeGeneres’ parlor game, above. Looks like fun, provided one’s not an introvert. Each player draws a card labelled with an accent, sticks it to the brim of a silly hat, then tried to guess the accent, based on her partner’s impromptu performance.
“Brooklyn?” Streep giggles when the Louisiana-born DeGeneres has a go at Boston.
Her stab at the Bronx shows off her improv chops far better than the most recent stunt DeGeneres roped her into.
(For what it’s worth, Ben Affleck also excelled at this game. The late Robin Williams was less convincing, but characteristically irrepressible, even when called upon to impersonate speakers of other races.)
- Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and low budget theater impresario. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Read More...Watch an Animated Buckminster Fuller Tell Studs Terkel All About “the Geodesic Life”
Will humanity ever produce another mind quite like Buckminster Fuller’s? It doesn’t seem to have done so thus far. Even in Fuller’s own time, people couldn’t quite believe the intellectual idiosyncrasy of the inventor who came up with the geodesic dome, the Dymaxion Car, and much, much more. “Time and again,” he once said, “I am asked, ‘who else do you know who thinks the way you do, or does what you do?’ I find it very strange to have to answer, ‘I don’t know anybody else.’ It’s not because I think of myself as unique, but simply because I did choose a very different grand strategy.”
Fuller — or Bucky, his preferred nickname — says more about that grand strategy and the experiences that led him to develop it in the interviews, conducted by Studs Terkel in 1965 and 1970, from which that quote comes. You can hear it in the video above, which brings the material to life by visualizing the elements of Fuller’s life and ideas through the hand of animator Jennifer Yoo. The video recently debuted as part of The Experimenters, a three-episode series meant to animate the words of thinkers like Fuller, Jane Goodall, and Richard Feynman, concentrating on “the inspirations from each of their personal lives that helped influence their careers and earth-changing discoveries.”
Fuller enthusiasts have always insisted that his ideas have only grown more relevant with time, but now that the early 21st century has found us rethinking the way we live — how we do it and how we make spaces to do it in being perhaps Fuller’s most abiding obsession — his engagement with the concept of “continually doing more with less” really does sound smarter than ever. If you enjoy the patch of Bucky’s universe The Experimenters exposes, consider chasing these four minutes of “Buckminster Fuller on the Geodesic Life” with 42 hours of his video lecture series Everything I Know. The man didn’t just think differently from the rest of us, after all — he also thought a lot more.
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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture as well as the video series The City in Cinema and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Elementary School Students Perform in a Play Inspired by David Lynch’s Twin Peaks
Image by Janet McMillan appeared in The Milwaukee Record
For those of us with kids, the grade school play is usually a combination of parental pride and teeth-grating nostalgic civic lesson and/or Bible study. Not so at Milwaukee, WI’s Highland Community School where super cool drama teacher Barry Weber has written and produced Judy Plays with Fire, a love letter to David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks and other Lynchophilia.
The play has all the hallmarks of the director–red curtains, strobe lights, smoke machines, a Badalamenti-esque score–along with a backwards-speaking character in a red suit, two earnest and upstanding detectives, lumberjacks, rabbits, mysterious people in white masks, a Log Lady-like character who talks to a Slinky, and a middle America town called “Centerville” that, like Laura Palmer, is “full of secrets.” One character mimes Nina Simone’s “Don’t Let Me Be Understood” into a LED wand–shades of Dean Stockwell in Blue Velvet. Character names like Mr. Frost and the MacLachlans nod to the creators and actors behind Twin Peaks. The entire cast is played by 4th, 5th, and 6th graders, and apart from Mr. Weber, the production is crewed by Highland students as well.
This isn’t Weber’s first go at pushing the boundaries of school theater. His student theater group put on 2014’s ZERO, a cyberpunk tale, and a post-apocalyptic zombie production in 2010 called Penguin Attack.
The production got the attention of the Milwaukee Record who sent reporter Matt Wild out to see the three performance run that finished last Friday. He even gave it a bit of a Variety-style review, saying that
“In the case of Judy, (Maeve) Haley is terrific as the inquisitive Cooper surrogate, though diminutive CJ Young steals the show as the scheming Mr. Frost. Whether he’s barking orders to his flunkies or lording over his animatronic house band, Young—who had to take time off from acting two years ago due to conflicts with basketball practice—imbues his character with a surprising amount of gravitas and menace.”
Matt Wild also talked to Weber, who spoke of his desire to give kids more challenging works.
“I want to make sure that when I write the scripts there are no ‘trees,’” Weber says, referencing grade school plays that often give students thankless roles as inanimate objects. “I want to write the kind of plays that as a kid I would have really wanted to do. I certainly didn’t know who David Lynch was when I was a kid, but I’m sure I would have really enjoyed it.”
No video has surfaced yet to match the intriguing production stills, but we’re on the lookout. In the meantime, how well do you know Judy?
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills and/or watch his films here.
Read More...Philip K. Dick Makes Off-the-Wall Predictions for the Future: Mars Colonies, Alien Viruses & More (1981)
Philip K. Dick died in 1982, but readers — more readers than ever, in all probability — still thrill to his daring, unconventional imagination, and how tightly he could weave the inventions of that imagination into mundane reality. (Sometimes they wonder, as in his meeting with God, to what extent he himself could tell the two apart.) And like many strong-visioned writers of what roughly fell into the category of science fiction, Dick got consulted now and again as something of a futurist.
In 1980, David Wallechinsky, Amy Wallace, and Irving Wallace (the Book of Lists people) rounded up visions of the future from all manner of sages past and present, prescient and incompetent, in order to create The Book of Predictions. Dick’s contributions, republished in the September 2003 issue of fanzine PKD Otaku, go like this.
- 1983: The Soviet Union will develop an operational particle-beam accelerator, making missile attack against that country impossible. At the same time the U.S.S.R. will deploy this weapon as a satellite killer. The U.S. will turn, then, to nerve gas.
- 1984: The U.S. will perfect a system by which hydrogen, stored in metal hydrides, will serve as a fuel source, eliminating a need for oil.
- 1985: By or before this date there will be a titanic nuclear accident either in the U.S.S.R. or in the U.S., resulting in shutting down all nuclear power plants.
- 1986: Such satellites as HEAO‑2 will uncover vast, unsuspected high energy phenomenon in the universe, indicating that there is sufficient mass to collapse the universe back when it has reached its expansion limit.
- 1989: The U.S. and the Soviet Union will agree to set up one vast metacomputer as a central source for information available to the entire world; this will be essential due to the huge amount of information coming into existence.
- 1993: An artificial life form will be created in a lab, probably in the U.S.S.R., thus reducing our interest in locating life forms on other planets.
- 1995: Computer use by ordinary citizens (already available in 1980) will transform the public from passive viewers of TV into mentally alert, highly trained, information-processing experts.
- 1997: The first closed-dome colonies will be successfully established on Luna and Mars. Through DNA modification, quasi-mutant humans will be created who can survive under non-Terran conditions, i.e., alien environments.
- 1998: The Soviet Union will test a propulsion drive that moves a starship at the velocity of light; a pilot ship will set out for Proxima Centaurus, soon to be followed by an American ship.
- 2000: An alien virus, brought back by an interplanetary ship, will decimate the population of Earth, but leave the colonies on Luna and Mars intact.
- 2012: Using tachyons (particles that move backward in time) as a carrier, the Soviet Union will attempt to alter the past with scientific information.
Cherry-pickers among us will fixate on Dick’s near-hits: the development of DNA modification, a 1985 nuclear accident in the U.S.S.R. (Chernobyl happened in 1986), and computer use by ordinary citizens (though our status as “mentally alert, highly trained, information-processing experts” admittedly remains questionable). Others might prefer to highlight the most improbable, such as the eliminated need for oil, the creation of artificial life, and not just the 21st-century existence but eventual time-traveling capabilities of the Soviet Union.
Still, even in his fiction, Dick does have his moments of prophecy, especially for those who share his paranoia that we’ve unwittingly let ourselves slip into surveillance-state conditions. But I’ve always found him best, especially in the what-if-Japan-won-the-war story The Man in the High Castle, as a teller of alternate histories, whether of the past, present, or future. These predictions, stretching from just after the writer’s death to just before our time, strike me as nothing so much as the premises for the best novel Philip K. Dick never wrote.
You can find 33 of his stories online here.
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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture as well as the video series The City in Cinema and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Take the 146-Question Knowledge Test Thomas Edison Gave to Prospective Employees (1921)
I remember opening my college newspaper one day, and out of it fell what looked like an advertising supplement of unusually utilitarian design. Upon closer inspection, it contained a series of math‑y looking problems for the reader to work out and, if they did so, mail in to an address provided. Word soon began to circulate that this unusual leaflet came from no less an institution than Google itself, already well known as a provider of advanced search services but not quite yet as a benevolent provider of dream jobs (an image now satirized in movies like The Internship).
The unusual hiring practices of giant, innovative American technology companies have become the stuff of modern myth, but the usage of seemingly job-unrelated intellectual tests as a filter for potential employees has a much longer history. Thomas Edison, that original giant of American technological innovation, put forward the first famous example: a 146-question test on subjects of general knowledge from geography to history to physics to the price of gold.
“Americans obsessed over the test following [the] publication of many questions in the May 11, 1921 New York Times,” writes Paleofuture’s Matt Novak. “From there the test was debated, copied, and parodied in newspapers and magazines around the country.” If you’d like to get a sense of how you’d have fared in the scramble for a sweet Edison job, set your mind back to the early 1920s and tackle these questions as best you can:
1. What countries bound France?
2. What city and country produce the finest china?
3. Where is the River Volga?
4. What is the finest cotton grown?
5. What country consumed the most tea before the war?
6. What city in the United States leads in making laundry machines?
7. What city is the fur centre of the United States?
8. What country is the greatest textile producer?
9. Is Australia greater than Greenland in area?
10. Where is Copenhagen?
11. Where is Spitzbergen?
12. In what country other than Australia are kangaroos found?
13. What telescope is the largest in the world?
14. Who was Bessemer and what did he do?
15. How many states in the Union?
16. Where do we get prunes from?
17. Who was Paul Revere?
18. Who was John Hancock?
19. Who was Plutarch?
20. Who was Hannibal?
21. Who was Danton?
22. Who was Solon?
23. Who was Francis Marion?
24. Who was Leonidas?
25. Where did we get Louisiana from?
26. Who was Pizarro?
27. Who was Bolivar?
28. What war material did Chile export to the Allies during the war?
29. Where does most of the coffee come from?
30. Where is Korea?
31. Where is Manchuria?
32. Where was Napoleon born?
33. What is the highest rise of tide on the North American Coast?
34. Who invented logarithms?
35. Who was the Emperor of Mexico when Cortez landed?
36. Where is the Imperial Valley and what is it noted for?
37. What and where is the Sargasso Sea?
38. What is the greatest known depth of the ocean?
39. What is the name of a large inland body of water that has no outlet?
40. What is the capital of Pennsylvania?
41. What state is the largest? Next?
42. Rhode Island is the smallest state. What is the next and the next?
43. How far is it from New York to Buffalo?
44. How far is it from New York to San Francisco?
45. How far is it from New York to Liverpool?
46. Of what state is Helena the capital?
47. Of what state is Tallahassee the capital?
48. What state has the largest copper mines?
49. What state has the largest amethyst mines?
50. What is the name of a famous violin maker?
51. Who invented the modern paper-making machine?
52. Who invented the typesetting machine?
53. Who invented printing?
54. How is leather tanned?
55. What is artificial silk made from?
56. What is a caisson?
57. What is shellac?
58. What is celluloid made from?
59. What causes the tides?
60. To what is the change of the seasons due?
61. What is coke?
62. From what part of the North Atlantic do we get codfish?
63. Who reached the South Pole?
64. What is a monsoon?
65. Where is the Magdalena Bay?
66. From where do we import figs?
67. From where do we get dates?
68. Where do we get our domestic sardines?
69. What is the longest railroad in the world?
70. Where is Kenosha?
71. What is the speed of sound?
72. What is the speed of light?
73. Who was Cleopatra and how did she die?
74. Where are condors found?
75, Who discovered the law of gravitation?
76. What is the distance between the earth and sun?
77. Who invented photography?
78. What country produces the most wool?
79. What is felt?
80. What cereal is used in all parts of the world?
81. What states produce phosphates?
82. Why is cast iron called pig iron?
83. Name three principal acids?
84. Name three powerful poisons.
85. Who discovered radium?
86. Who discovered the X‑ray?
87. Name three principal alkalis.
88. What part of Germany do toys come from?
89. What States bound West Virginia?
90. Where do we get peanuts from?
91. What is the capital of Alabama?
92. Who composed “Il Trovatore”?
93. What is the weight of air in a room 20 by 30 by 10?
94. Where is platinum found?
95. With what metal is platinum associated when found?
96. How is sulphuric acid made?
97. Where do we get sulphur from?
98. Who discovered how to vulcanize rubber?
99. Where do we import rubber from?
100. What is vulcanite and how is it made?
101. Who invented the cotton gin?
102. What is the price of 12 grains of gold?
103. What is the difference between anthracite and bituminous coal?
104. Where do we get benzol from?
105. Of what is glass made?
106. How is window glass made?
107. What is porcelain?
108. What country makes the best optical lenses and what city?
109. What kind of a machine is used to cut the facets of diamonds?
110. What is a foot pound?
111. Where do we get borax from?
112. Where is the Assuan Dam?
113. What star is it that has been recently measured and found to be of enormous size?
114. What large river in the United States flows from south to north?
115. What are the Straits of Messina?
116. What is the highest mountain in the world?
117. Where do we import cork from?
118. Where is the St. Gothard tunnel?
119. What is the Taj Mahal?
120. Where is Labrador?
121. Who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner”?
122. Who wrote “Home, Sweet Home”?
123. Who was Martin Luther?
124. What is the chief acid in vinegar?
125. Who wrote “Don Quixote”?
126. Who wrote “Les Miserables”?
127. What place is the greatest distance below sea level?
128. What are axe handles made of?
129. Who made “The Thinker”?
130. Why is a Fahrenheit thermometer called Fahrenheit?
131. Who owned and ran the New York Herald for a long time?
132. What is copra?
133. What insect carries malaria?
134. Who discovered the Pacific Ocean?
135. What country has the largest output of nickel in the world?
136. What ingredients are in the best white paint?
137. What is glucose and how made?
138. In what part of the world does it never rain?
139. What was the approximate population of England, France, Germany and Russia before the war?
140. Where is the city of Mecca?
141. Where do we get quicksilver from?
142. Of what are violin strings made?
143. What city on the Atlantic seaboard is the greatest pottery centre?
144. Who is called the “father of railroads” in the United States?
145. What is the heaviest kind of wood?
146. What is the lightest wood?
Some of these questions, like those on the location of Copenhagen or the identity of Leonidas (you need think back only to 300), have grown easier with time. Some — “What is coke?” “What is vulcanite and how is it made?” — have grown harder. Others will require you to call upon not current knowledge, but period knowledge: sure, you know the number of states in the union now, but how about in 1921? And sure, you know which city is the fur center of the United States now, but how about in 1921?
Once you’ve made your guesses, you can check your answers over at Paleofuture. Edison’s test will almost certainly frustrate you — and if it doesn’t, you may have a career waiting not at Google, but on Jeopardy! — and it may even fill you with gratitude that we live in an age where hot employers check for raw brainpower, not the ability to memorize a seemingly random assortment of facts. But the test itself, like several of its questions, pulls a bit of a trick. The tremendous amount of attention it received when the public caught a glimpse of it reveals Edison’s mastery of the highest American force: publicity.
Note: Thanks to one of our readers, you can see how Edison defended the test in the pages of The New York Times.
via Paleofuture
Related Content:
Thomas Edison & His Trusty Kinetoscope Create the First Movie Filmed In The US (c. 1889)
Take The Near Impossible Literacy Test Louisiana Used to Suppress the Black Vote (1964)
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture as well as the video series The City in Cinema and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Say What You Really Mean with Downloadable Cindy Sherman Emoticons
As the world becomes increasingly dependent on virtual communication, the potential for misunderstanding is ever present. I resisted the use of emoticons and stickers at first. They struck me as the pictorial equivalent of LOL. If that’s the best you can manage, why try at all?
I’ve since reversed my position. Several things contributed to this change in attitude:
- The peace of mind that comes from any kind of confirmation that one’s message has indeed been received.
- The unsupportably terse communication style of a colleague. Whether intentional or not, his monosyllabic replies to my flurry of texts and emails seemed to indicate disdain… for me! Hey Buster, I’m busy too…
- My discovery that my phone’s built-in emoji vocabulary included an alien, a demonic Namahage, and a friendly looking pile of poo.
By curating my emotions and Facebook stickers carefully, I’ve cobbled together a visual shorthand vocabulary that works for me. It’s a matter of self respect. (And self preservation. My wardrobe’s already running afoul of the Secret Internet Police. Why give them ammo to accuse me of unseemly clinging to a long gone sticker-obsessed girlhood?)
If you think I’m overthinking this, you likely won’t be interested in downloading artist Hyo Hong’s Cindy Sherman-icons for your personal use.
Or maybe they’re exactly what you’ve been waiting for, you old art snob, you!
Either way… enjoy!
The Sherman-icons are a logical extension of other Hong projects that play with perceptions of non-face-to-face interactions, including the Upside Down Facebook Page, the New York Taxi Guestbook, and Hand-Written Facebook Comment.
If the purpose of an emoticon is to convey a certain feeling or attitude on the part of the respondent, the chameleonic Sherman is well suited to carry the burden. The photographer has served as her own model for four decades worth of portraits. She has embodied such archetypes as housewife, prostitute, dancer, actress, damsel in distress, and socialite. Her pursuit of certain truths often leads her to embrace the grotesque. Her willingness to look like hell in the service of her art continues to shock and sometimes offend. (Let’s just say my late mother-in-law was not a fan.)
How wonderful that this radical artist’s work is now available to you in a form that may prove every bit as useful as a gift shop tote bag or umbrella.
Feeling beaten down by life?
Suspicious of another’s motives?
Hopeful in a situation where hopes are almost certain to be dashed?
Do you really want to depend on a cartoon smiley face to get that across for you? (See below.)
No guarantee that Sherman-icon users’ impulses will be correctly interpreted on the receiving end, but it seems a risk worth taking.
Click here for easy 3‑step instructions for downloading and using Cindy Sherman-icons.
Related Content:
Cindy Sherman and the Art of Impersonation
Art for the One Percent: 60 Minutes on the Excess & Hubris of the International Art Market
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and performer whose next mission is portraying a decidedly Cindy Shermanesque business woman in a free reading of Lunchtime, Greg Kotis’ play of office romance in the time of the New York Deli Wars. Follow her @AyunHalliday
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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
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