In 2013, a boat traveled from Rotterdam to Amsterdam, with a timelapse camera installed 30 meters high. The resulting film “gives a unique and stunning view of the old Dutch waterways, in 4K.” And lots of bridges along the way.
All images were shot with a Canon 550d at an interval of 3 seconds. 30,000 pictures were taken in total. Initially, “the film couldn’t be published due to restrictions. After a few years it was forgotten.” But now it has been resurrected, and it’s online.
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Those in a position to know suggest that vermin shy away from yellowish-greens such as that favored by the Emperor because they “resemble areas of intense lighting.”
We’d like to offer an alternate theory.
Could it be that the critters’ ancestors passed down a cellular memory of the perils of arsenic?
Napoleon, like thousands of others, was smitten with a hue known as Scheele’s Green, named for Carl Wilhelm Scheele, the German-Swedish pharmaceutical chemist who discovered oxygen, chlorine, and unfortunately, a gorgeous, toxic green pigment that’s also a cupric hydrogen arsenite.
Scheele’s Green, aka Schloss Green, was cheap and easy to produce, and quickly replaced the less vivid copper carbonate based green dyes that had been in use prior to the mid 1770s.
The color was an immediate hit when it made its appearance, showing up in artificial flowers, candles, toys, fashionable ladies’ clothing, soap, beauty products, confections, and wallpaper.
A month before Napoleon died, he included the following phrase in his will: My death is premature. I have been assassinated by the English oligopoly and their hired murderer…”
His exit at 51 was indeed untimely, but perhaps the wallpaper, and not the English oligopoly, is the greater culprit, especially if it was hung with arsenic-laced paste, to further deter rats.
When Scheele’s Green wallpaper, like the striped pattern in Napoleon’s bathroom, became damp or moldy, the pigment in it metabolized, releasing poisonous arsenic-laden vapors.
Napoleon’s First Valet Louis-Joseph Marchand recalled the “childish joy” with which the emperor jumped into the tub where he relished soaking for long spells:
The bathtub was a tremendous oak chest lined with lead. It required an exceptional quantity of water, and one had to go a half mile away and transport it in a barrel.
Baths also figured in Second Valet Louis Étienne Saint-Denis’ recollections of his master’s illness:
His remedies consisted only of warm napkins applied to his side, to baths, which he took frequently, and to a diet which he observed from time to time.
In Napoleon’s case, arsenic was likely just one of many compounds taxing an already troubled system. In the course of treatments for a variety of symptoms—swollen legs, abdominal pain, jaundice, vomiting, weakness—Napoleon was subjected to a smorgasbord of other toxic substances. He was said to consume large amounts of a sweet apricot-based drink containing hydrocyanic acid. He had been given tarter emetic, an antimonal compound, by a Corsican doctor. (Like arsenic, antimony would also help explain the preserved state of his body at exhumation.) Two days before his death, his British doctors gave him a dose of calomel, or mercurous chloride, after which he collapsed into a stupor and never recovered.
As Napoleon was vomiting a blackish liquid and expiring, factory and garment workers who handled Scheele’s Green dye and its close cousin, Paris Green, were suffering untold mortifications of the flesh, from hideous lesions, ulcers and extreme gastric distress to heart disease and cancer.
Fashion-first women who spent the day corseted in voluminous green dresses were keeling over from skin-to-arsenic contact. Their seamstresses’ green fingers were in wretched condition.
In 2008, an Italian team tested strands of Napoleon’s hair from four points in his life—childhood, exile, his death, and the day thereafter. They determined that all the samples contained roughly 100 times the arsenic levels of contemporary people in a control group.
Napoleon’s son and wife, Empress Josephine, also had noticeably elevated arsenic levels.
Had we been alive and living in Europe back then, ours likely would have been too.
All that green!
But what about the wallpaper?
A scrap purportedly from the dining room, where Napoleon was relocated shortly before death, was found by a woman in Norfolk, England, pasted into a family scrapbook above the handwritten caption, This small piece of paper was taken off the wall of the room in which the spirit of Napoleon returned to God who gave it.
In 1980, she contacted chemist David Jones, whom she had recently heard on BBC Radio discussing vaporous biochemistry and Victorian wallpaper. She agreed to let him test the scrap using non-destructive x‑ray fluorescence spectroscopy. The result?
.12 grams of arsenic per square meter. (Wallpapers containing 0.6 to 0.015 grams per square meter were determined to be hazardous.)
Dr. Jones described watching the arsenic levels peaking on the lab’s print out as “a crazy, wonderful moment.” He reiterated that the house in which Napoleon was imprisoned was “notoriously damp,” making it easy for a 19th century fan to peel off a souvenir in “an inspired act of vandalism.”
Death by wallpaper and other environmental factors is definitely less cloak and dagger than assassination by the English oligopoly, hired murderer, and other conspiracy theories that had thrived on the presence of arsenic in samples of Napoleon’s hair.
As Dr. Jones recalled:
…several historians were upset by my claim that it was all an accident of decor…Napoleon himself feared he was dying of stomach cancer, the disease which had killed his father; and indeed his autopsy revealed that his stomach was very damaged. It had at least one big ulcer…My feeling is that Napoleon would have died in any case. His arsenical wallpaper might merely have hastened the event by a day or so. Murder conspiracy theorists will have to find new evidence!
We can’t resist mentioning that when the emperor was exhumed and shipped back to France, 19 years after his death, his corpse showed little or no decomposition.
Green continues to be a noxious color when humans attempt to reproduce it in the physical realm. As Alice Rawthorn observed The New York Times:
The cruel truth is that most forms of the color green, the most powerful symbol of sustainable design, aren’t ecologically responsible, and can be damaging to the environment.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She most recently appeared as a French Canadian bear who travels to New York City in search of food and meaning in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
There was a time in America when you could sit down in the evening, turn on a television talk show, and hear a conversation with Akira Kurosawa. That time was the early 1980s, and that talk show came hosted, of course, by Dick Cavett, to whom no cultural current — and indeed no culture — was too foreign for broadcast. With pictures like Rashomon, Ikiru, Seven Samurai, and Throne of Blood, Kurosawa established himself in the 1950s as the most acclaimed Japanese auteur alive, with prominent admirers all over the world, Cavett included. “Kurosawa no dai-fan desu,” he says in the filmmaker’s native language before living the Kurosawa dai-fan’s dream of having a chat with the master himself.
Kurosawa, Cavett also notes, had never been interviewed on television in Japan, a fact that might have struck a Western cinephile as indicative of the bewildering lack of support he suffered in his home country. “Why does he think he is so revered in the West as a filmmaker,” Cavett asks his interpreter (Japanese Film Directors author Audie Bock), yet “has trouble getting money up in Japan to make a film?”
To this inquiry, which must have struck him as unusually or even refreshingly direct, Kurosawa first replies thus: “I certainly can’t explain that either.” In fact his then-most recent film Kagemusha had taken years to reach production; while unable to shoot, a despairing but undeterred Kurosawa hand-painted its every scene.
Only with the support of George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola (who went on to co-star with Kurosawa in a Suntory whiskey commercial) could Kagemusha eventually be realized. The picture thus escaped the realm of such unmade Kurosawa as an adaptation of Masuji Ibuse’s novel Black Rain, which would at the end of the 1980s pass into the hands of his more eccentric but also-acclaimed contemporary Shohei Imamura. Kurosawa tells the story when asked if he’d ever considered making a film about Hiroshima, just one aspect of the director’s mind and experiences about which Cavett expresses curiosity. Others include the prewar Tokyo in which he grew up, his family’s samurai lineage, his pacifist detestation of violence (perhaps the source of his own films’ violent power), and his Western influences. “Would he like to have made a film with John Wayne and Toshiro Mifune?” Cavett asks. Though the notion strikes Kurosawa as “very difficult,” it’s surely the stuff of a dai-fan’s dreams.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
Photo by C. Fritz, Muséum d’Histoire naturelle de Toulouse
Brian Eno once defined art as “everything you don’t have to do.” But just because humans can live without art doesn’t mean we should—or that we ever have—unless forced by exigent circumstance. Even when we spent most of our time in the business of survival, we still found time for art and music. Marsoulas Cave, for example, “in the foothills of the French Pyrenees, has long fascinated researchers with its colorful paintings depicting bison, horses and humans,” Katherine Kornei writes at The New York Times. This is also where an “enormous tan-colored conch shell was first discovered, an incongruous object that must have been transported from the Atlantic Ocean, over 150 miles away.”
The 18,000-year-old shell’s 1931 discoverers assumed it must have been a large ceremonial cup, and it “sat for over 80 years in the Natural History Museum of Toulouse.” Only recently, in 2016, did researchers suspect it could be a musical instrument. Philippe Walter, director of the Laboratory of Molecular and Structural Archeology at the Sorbonne, and Carole Fritz, who leads prehistoric art research at the French National Center for Scientific Research, rediscovered the shell, as it were, when they revised old assumptions using modern imaging technology.
Fritz and her colleagues had studied the cave’s art for 20 years, but only understood the shell’s peculiarities after they made a 3D digital model. “When Walter placed the conch into a CT scan,” writes Lina Zeldovich at Smithsonian, “he indeed found many curious human touches. Not only did the ancient artists deliberately cut off the tip, but they also punctured or drilled round holes through the shell’s coils, through which they likely inserted a small tube-like mouthpiece.” The team also used a medical camera to look closely at the shell’s interior and examine unusual formations. Kornei describes the shell further:
This shell might have been played during ceremonies or used to summon gatherings, said Julien Tardieu, another Toulouse researcher who studies sound perception. Cave settings tend to amplify sound, said Dr. Tardieu. “Playing this conch in a cave could be very loud and impressive.”
It would also have been a beautiful sight, the researchers suggest, because the conch is decorated with red dots — now faded — that match the markings found on the cave’s walls.
The decoration on the shell looks similar to an image of a bison on the cave wall, suggesting it may have been played near that painting for some reason. The conch resembles similar “seashell horns” found in New Zealand and Peru, but it is much, much older. It may have originated in Spain, along with other objects found in the cave, and may have traveled with its owners or been exchanged in trade, explains archeologist Margaret W. Conkey at the University of California, who adds, writes Zeldovich, that “the Magdalenian people also valued sensory experiences, including those produced by wind instruments.
Many thousands of years later, we too can hear what those early humans heard in their cave: musicologist Jean-Michel Court gave a demonstration, producing the three notes above, which are close to C, C‑sharp and D. The shell may have had more range, and been more comfortable to play, with its mouthpiece, likely made of a hollow bird bone. The shell is hardly the oldest instrument in the world. Some are tens of thousands of years older. But it is the oldest of its kind. Whatever its prehistoric owners used it for—a call in a hunt, stage religious ceremonies, or a celebration in the cave—it is, like every ancient instrument and artwork, only further evidence of the innate human desire to create.
Ever since COVID-19 struck, poverty levels have reached a crisis point in New Mexico, so much so that New Mexico food banks have become overloaded with requests, and they can’t keep up with demand. To provide assistance, a star-studded lineup of musicians banded together this weekend to stage the Food for Love Benefit Concert. Featured in the five hour performance were David Byrne (he gives a dance lesson), Jackson Brown, Shawn Colvin, The Chicks, Lyle Lovett, Kurt Vile, and many more. This video (above) will be available for a limited time–until midnight MST on Monday, February 15. Donations to support New Mexico’s food banks can be made here. To date, they’ve raised $704,000, or enough to provide 2.8 million meals.
Who wouldn’t love to take a road trip with beloved cartoonist and educator Lynda Barry? As evidenced by Grandma’s Way Out Party, above, an early-90s documentary made for Twin Cities Public Television, Barry not only finds the humor in every situation, she’s always up for a detour, whether to a time honored destination like Mount Rushmore or Old Faithful, or a more impulsive pitstop, like a Washington state car repair shop decorated with sculptures made from cast off mufflers or the Montana State Prison Hobby Store.
Alternating in the driver’s seat with then-boyfriend, storyteller Kevin Kling, she makes up songs on her accordion, clowns around in a cheap cowgirl hat, samples an oversized gas station donut, and chats up everyone she encounters.
At the World’s Only Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota, she breaks the ice by asking a bearded local guy in official Corn Palace cap and t‑shirt if his job is the fulfillment of a long held dream.
“Nah,” he says. “I thought it was a joke … in Fargo, they call it the world’s biggest bird feeder. We do have the biggest birds in South Dakota. They get fed good.”
He leads them to Cal Schultz, the art teacher who designed over 25 years worth of murals festooning the exterior walls. Nudged by Barry to pick a favorite, Schultz chooses one that his 9th grade students worked on.
“I would have loved to have been in his class,” Barry, a teacher now herself, says emphatically. “I would have given anything to have worked on a Corn Palace when I was 14-years-old.”
This point is driven home with a quick view of her best known creation, the pigtailed, bespectacled Marlys, ostensibly rendered in corn—an honor Marlys would no doubt appreciate.
Barry has long been lauded for her understanding of and respect for children’s inner lives, and we see this natural affinity in action when she befriends Desmond and Jake, two young participants in the Crow Fair Pow Wow, just south of Billings, Montana.
Frustrated by her inability to get a handle on the proceedings (“Why didn’t I learn it in school!? Why wasn’t it part of our curriculum?”), Barry retreats to the comfort of her sketchbook, which attracts the curious boys. Eventually, she draws their portraits to give them as keepsakes, getting to know them better in the process.
The drawings they make in return are treasured by the recipient, not least for the window they provide on the culture with which they are so casually familiar.
Barry and Kling also chance upon the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, and after a bite at the Road Kill Cafe (“from your grill to ours”), Barry waxes philosophical about the then-unusual sight of so much tattooed flesh:
There’s something about the fact that they want something on them that they can’t wash off, that even on days when they don’t want people to know they’re a biker, it’s still there. And I have always loved that about people, like …drag queens who will shave off their eyebrows so they can draw perfect eyebrows on, or anybody who knows they’re different and does something to themselves physically so that even on their bad days, they can’t deny it. Because I think that in the end, that’s sort of what saves your life, that you wear your colors. You can’t help it.
The aforementioned muffler store prompts some musings that will be very familiar to anyone who has immersed themselves inMaking Comics, Picture This, or any other of Barry’s instructional books containing her wonderfully loopy, intuitive creative exercises:
I think this urge to create is actually our animal instinct. And what’s sad is if we don’t let that come through us, I don’t think we have a full life on this earth. And I think we get sick because of it. I mean, it’s weird that it’s an instinct, but it’s an option, just like you can take a wild animal, a beautiful, wild animal and put him in a zoo. They live, they’re fine in their cage, but you don’t get to see them do the thing that a cheetah does best, which is, you know, just run like the wind and be able to jump and do the things… I mean, it’s our instinct, it’s instinctual, it’s our beautiful, beautiful, magical, poetic, mysterious instinct. And every once in a while, you see the flower of it come right up out of a gas station.
After 1653 miles and one squabble after overshooting a scheduled stop (“You don’t want me to go to Butte!”), the two arrive at their final destination, Barry’s childhood home in Seattle. The occasion? Barry’s Filipino grandmother’s 83rd birthday, and plans are afoot for a potluck bash at the local VFW hall. Fans will swoon to meet this venerated lady and the rest of Barry’s extended clan, and hear Barry’s reflections on what it was like to grow up in a working class neighborhood where most of the families were multi-racial.
“I walked in and it was everything Lynda said,” Kling marvels.
Indeed.
The journey is everything we could have hoped for, too.
The idea of a film score seems clear enough. Writers, directors, and editors make a visual story, then composers enhance it with songs, cues, and themes. But things are never so straightforward in practice. Music is always a part of the process, whether in the screenwriter’s choice of accompaniment (Tarantino chooses film music as soon as he has an idea for a film), the director’s mood during filming, or the “temp score” editors use. Musicals are obvious exceptions, but on the whole, story and images come first, if not in the process, then in the viewer’s imagination.
A music video works differently, “scoring” prerecorded music with images, which then become accompaniment, a secondary part added later as enhancement. It is “an undertaking Vincent de Boer knows well,” Grace Ebert writes at Colossal. “The Netherlands-based artist has been working with the jazz quartet Ill Considered since 2017, listening to the band’s largely improvised melodies and creating abstract animations, alongside stills for its 11 album covers, to match.” In his most recent collaboration with the band, however, de Boer got to take the lead.
“The Stroke” began with a painstaking animation that took two years to complete, a process you can see documented in the making-of video above. “With the help of his creative partner Hans Schuttenbeld, de Boer hand-drew 4,056 frames that range from dark, geometric shapes to gangly creatures to scenes that morph from one trippy composition to the next.” De Boer describes the six and a half-minute piece as “the story of a brushstroke: a trace of a movement performed by the artist with his instrument, the paintbrush.”
Once de Boer finished the film, he passed it on to Ill Considered, “who recorded an entirely improvised track on its first viewing.” The two come together at the top in a music video that “matches the jazzy riffs with de Boer’s shapeshifting sequences in a cohesive conversation between the two artforms.” Can we call it a “music video” in a traditional sense? Or a kind of ekphrasis in sound? Would we know, without the backstory, that the images came first?
Ill Considered has also released “The Stroke” as an LP, “packaged with 12 of de Boer’s original artworks on the cover and inside” (see a selection above and below)–a further challenge to our seeming desire to rank sound and image. Which came first? Does it matter? Can we see what Ill Considered heard when they improvised over de Boer’s swirling drawings? Can we hear what de Boer was playing with the “instrument” of his brush? One thinks of the synesthesia of Kandinsky, who saw music in his paintings, and of David Bowie, sitting in his blue room, wondering about the gift of sound and vision….
Many different words could describe the state of public transportation in America today. In recent decades, more and more of a consensus seems to have settled around one word in particular: that it “sucks.” Given its “antiquated technology, safety concerns, crumbling infrastructure,” and often “nonexistence,” says the narrator of the video above, “it’s not hard to argue that the U.S. public transportation network is just not good.” That narrator, Sam Denby, is the creator of Wendover Productions, a Youtube channel all about geography, technology, economics, and the infrastructure where all three intersect. He believes not only that America’s public transit sucks, but that the country’s “lack of solid public transportation almost defines American culture.”
This would make a certain sense in a poor, small, struggling country — but not in the United States of America, described not long ago by Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic as “accustomed to thinking of itself as the best, most efficient, and most technologically advanced society in the world.”
As anyone making their first visit will experience, America’s still-formidable wealth and power doesn’t square with the experience on the ground, or indeed under it: whether by subway, bus, or streetcar, the task of navigating most U.S. cities is characterized by inconvenience, discomfort, and even impossibility. This in a country whose public transportation once really was the envy of the world: at the turn of the 20th century, its cities boasted 11,000 miles of streetcar track alone.
In the mid-2010s, by Denby’s reckoning, “the combined mileage of every tram, subway, light rail, and commuter rail system” added up only to 5,416. What happened in the hundred or so years between? He cites among other factors the production of the first widely affordable automobiles in the 1920s, and later that of buses, with their lower operating costs than streetcars — but as commonly operated today, their lower-quality transit experience as well. (Resentment about this large-scale replacement of urban streetcar systems runs deep enough to make some consider it a conspiracy.) The U.S. “grew up as the car grew up, so its cities were built for cars,” especially in its more recently settled west. Indirect subsides lowered the cost of gas, and from the 1950s the building of the Interstate Highway System made it easy, at least for at time, to commute between city and suburb.
As pointed out in the Vox videos “Why American Public Transit Is So Bad” and “How Highways Wrecked American Cities,” these massive roads ran not around or under cities (as they do in much of Europe and Asia) but straight through their centers, part of a larger process of “urban renewal” that ironically destroyed quite a few of what dense urban neighborhoods the U.S. had. More than half a century of highway-building, suburbanization, and strict zoning later, most Americans find themselves unable to get where they need to go without buying a car and driving themselves. The situation is even worse for those traveling between cities, as examined above in Wendover Productions’ “Why Trains Suck in America.” As an American, I take a certain satisfaction in hearing these questions addressed — but I take an even greater one in being an American living abroad.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
Prince is having an afterlife the opposite of most rock stars. Where the years after death seems to bring our gods down to human size, the more stories I hear about Prince, the more I am convinced he was either beyond human or one of the very few constantly working at maximum potential. But not only that, he also helped others realize their own potential, especially members of his touring band.
I hope that’s your takeaway after having watched not just this mini-doc of his 2007 Super Bowl HalfTime show, but reading this thoroughly entertaining oral history of the event from The Ringer. Even if football is not your thing, and you consider the halftime show to be cheesy, this one year was not. Prince considered it one of his crowning achievements, and it was going to be the end point of the memoirs he planned to write.
Half-time shows had traditionally been the venue for marching bands and color guard, but by the 1990s they had turned into Hollywood productions, with pop stars and dancers. However, they had also been dealt a blow with Nipplegate, when Justin Timberlake ripped open Janet Jackson’s corset and exposed a metal pastie in 2004. Middle America reeled, people thought of the children, the FCC levied some fines, and the NFL went into defensive mode, programming the kind of Boomer-safe artists that would please as many people as possible: The Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney. (I mean, all amazing artists, mind you. Just nothing dangerous.)
Prince was different. He wasn’t going to do this like an aging rock star, just come on out and play the hits. He could have done and he certainly had the back catalog to do so. Instead, he put together a show that could stand on its own, a mix of his hits and a wild selection of cover versions: Queen’s “We Will Rock You”, “Proud Mary”, Hendrix/Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower”, and the Foo Fighters’ “Best of You.”
The day of the Super Bowl in Miami it rained, Florida-style. Monsoon weather. Yet, Prince and his band went ahead, defying the elements. The dancers—Maya and Nancy McClean—put grips on their high heel boots so as not to slip on the glass-like stage, formed in the shape of Prince’s “symbol”. There was an understandable panic: would somebody be electrocuted? Would this be Prince’s last concert?
But no. Prince seemed to transcend the elements. Ruth Arzate, Prince’s personal assistant/manager asked the musician’s hairstylist: “Am I hallucinating or is there no rain on him?” You could see a couple of droplets on his shoulder. And we’re looking and she’s like, “It just looks like a fine mist on his face.””
Prince ended the concert with “Purple Rain,” which you can see above, singing *in the rain* and then busting out a solo for the ages behind billowing fabric as a shadow, wielding that symbol guitar like a glorious phallus.
Halftime show production designer Bruce Rogers says it best:
“To me, it’s about one guy in the middle of a hundred thousand people and a hundred million people on television, and it’s your moment to be Prince at the Super Bowl and Mother Nature is dropping thousands and thousands of gallons of rain. I always thought how cool the guy is to rise up and just get stormed upon, and just bring what he brought. That was so special.”
There are several takeaways from the Ringer piece: how Prince would glide around on custom-made Heelys. How he would perform in meetings with a full band instead of just playing a CD. How when a cable accidentally got run over before the show a roadie literally held the stripped cable together for 20 or so minutes, running the risk of electrocution, to keep the show going. But my favorite takeaway is this quote, from Chicago Tribune’s Mark Caro: “He took this massively overscaled event and just sort of bent it to his will.”
Super Bowl XLI became a Prince concert with a football game on either side of it, and that’s because he made it so.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
You don’t have an accent — or rather, everyone has an accent, but we don’t notice our own, especially if we associate mostly with people of similar cultural backgrounds. For however we might like to describe ourselves, the way we speak reveals who we are: as dialect coach Erik Singer puts it in the Wired video above, “Accent is identity.” Among the forces shaping that identity he names not just geography but socioeconomic background, generation, ethnicity and race, and other “individual factors.” The result is that a large and varied continent like North America has given rise to a wide variety of accents in the English language alone.
In the video Singer and four other specialist language experts demonstrate a great many of these North American accents, identifying the most distinctive characteristics of each. The classic Boston accent, for example, is “non-rhotic,” referring to the dropping of “R” sounds that make possible such classic phrases as “pahk yah cah in Havahd Yard.” It differs in many ways from those common in places like Rhode Island and New York City, relatively close together though all three areas may seem: the diversity of accents on the U.S. east coast versus its more recently settled west coast underscores the fact that regional accents need time, usually a matter of generation upon generation, to emerge.
The way Philadelphians talk illustrates what Singer calls “the ‘on’ line,” north of which most pronounce “on” as if it rhymes with “don,” and south of which — Philly and below — most pronounce “on” as if rhymes with “dawn.” You don’t even have to cross the Pennsylvania border to find another unique accent. Only in Pittsburgh do people “smooth the ‘mouth’ dipthong,” a dipthong being a syllable composed of two distinct vowels — here, the “ou” in “mouth” — the “smoothing out” of which turns it into a single (and to non-Pittsburghers, unusual-sounding) vowel.
By the end of these 20 minutes, Singer and his crew have made it only as far as the “Piney Woods Belt” of the American south, whose accents bring to many of our minds the voice of Scarlett O’Hara and Blanche DuBois. They’ve also touched on such linguistic curiosities as Gullah creole; the Elizabethan inflection of Ocracoke Island, North Carolina,” previously featured here on Open Culture; and in some ways the most curious of all, the broadly designated “general American” speech that has emerged in recent decades. This is only the first video of a series [update: it’s now available below], so keep an eye on Wired’s Youtube channel for the next installment of the linguistic journey — and keep an ear out for all the subtle varieties of English you can catch in the meantime.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
Jules Verne’s tales of adventure take his characters around the world, through the deepest seas, even into the center of the Earth—on journeys, that is, difficult or impossible in the 19th century. Verne himself, however, spent most his life in France, writing of places he had not seen. In one apocryphal story, the young Jules Verne is caught trying to sneak aboard a ship bound for the Indies and promises his father he will henceforth travel “only in his imagination.” Whether or not he made such a vow, he seemed to keep it, though the idea that he never traveled at all is a “tiresome canard,” writes Terry Harpold in an essay titled “Verne’s Cartographies.”
“Of the 80 novels and other short stories he published,” geographer Lionel Dupuy writes, “62 make up the corpus of Extraordinary Voyages (Voyages Extraordinaires). These books, in which imagination played a vital role, were termed ‘geographical novels,’ a category the author himself used for them.”
Verne would also use the term “scientific novel,” but he made it clear which science he meant:
I always had a passion for studying geography, as others did for history or historical research. I really believe that it is my passion for maps and great explorers around the world that led me to write the first of my long series of geographical novels.
As a geographical novelist, and member of the Geographical Society from 1865 to 1898, it was only fitting that Verne include as many maps as he could in his quest, as he put it, “to depict the Earth, and not just the Earth, but the universe, for I have sometimes carried my readers far away from the Earth in my novels.” To that end, “thirty of the novels” in the first edition of Voyages Extraordinaires” published by Pierre-Jules Hetzel, “include one or more engraved maps,” Harpold points out. “There are forty-two such engravings in all.” View them here.
“These images and design elements are nuanced, graceful, and evocative; drafted and engraved by some of the finest artists of the time,” Harpold writes. “They represent the pinnacle of late nineteenth-century popular-scientific cartography.” They also represent the author of geographical fictions who, as both a scientist and artist, refused to let either form of thinking take over the text, combining myth and poetry with observation and measurement. As Dupuy puts it, “in Extraordinary Voyages, the passage from reality to imagination and back is encouraged by the emergence of a ‘marvelous’ that we can call ‘geographical.’”
In one sense, we might think of most kinds of fiction as geographical, in that they describe places we have never seen. This is particularly so in fictions that include maps of their imagined territories, such as those of William Faulkner, J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Louis Stevenson, and so on. We might look to Jules Verne as their towering forbear. “Several of the maps appearing in the Hetzel Voyages were drafted under Verne’s close supervision or were based on his sketches or designs. Maps in three of the novels (20,000 Leagues [top], Hatteras [further up], Three Russians) were drafted by Verne himself, whose talents in this regard were appreciable,” writes Harpold.
Verne’s maps mix real and fictional place names and are “always ambiguous and semiotically unstable objects.” They appear almost as admissions of the mythmaking that goes into the science of geography and the act of exploration. Near the end of his life, maps became more real to Verne than the world outside. As he grew too weary even to leave the neighborhood, he wrote to Alexandre Dumas fils, “If I have maintained a taste for work… , nothing remains of my youth. I live in the heart of my province and never budge from it, even to go to Paris. I travel only by maps.” See all of Verne’s maps from the Hetzel edition of Extraordinary Voyages, such as those for Around the World in Eighty Days (above) and Five Weeks in a Balloon (below),here.
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