Archive for January 2014
“The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality… it takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library.”*…
Engraving from the Dell’Historia Naturale (1599) showing Naples apothecary Ferrante Imperato’s cabinet of curiosities, the first pictorial representation of such a collection.
In the latter half of the 17th century the English polymath Thomas Browne wrote Musaeum Clausum, an imagined inventory of “remarkable books, antiquities, pictures and rarities of several kinds, scarce or never seen by any man now living”…
In an age of data retrieval, when just about anything ever printed can be seen online and is eternally preserved there, and when modern anxiety is fueled by too much information, we would do well to remember that the loss of books and artefacts was catastrophic until very recently in human history. The great library of the Ptolemies at Alexandria was burnt by the Romans in the first century AD, a legendary collection of ancient wisdom whose loss haunted Renaissance scholarship. European savants of the 15th and 16th centuries were, in the midst of their astonishing revival of classical writing, all too aware of what was irrecoverable and even unknown to them.
Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) was such a scholar. His vast expertise in areas as diverse as embryology, anatomy, ornithology, ancient history and literature, etymology, local archaeology, and pharmacy, and his participation in the Baconian programme to rescue learning from the misapprehensions and erasures that had accumulated since the fall of man, made him especially sensitive to such losses. Musaeum Clausum, a small tract both playful and melancholy, seems to coalesce early-modern feelings about the unavailability of precious intellectual treasure.
Musaeum Clausum (the hidden library) is a fake catalogue of a collection that contained books, pictures, and artefacts. Such collections (and their elaborate indices) were a common phenomenon from about 1500 to 1700 and afterGentlemen and the nobility collected as a matter of polite engagement with knowledge and as a way of displaying wealth and learning; savants made arrays of plants, animals, and minerals as museums or ‘thesauruses’ of the natural world to record and organise their findings; imperial and monarchical collections were princely in their glamour, rarity, and sheer expenditure: these might contain natural-historical specimens but also trinkets and souvenirs from far-flung places, curiosities of nature and art, and historically significant items. For example, taxidermically preserved basilisks shared room with a thorn from Christ’s crown and feathered headdresses and weapons belonging to native American tribes. Browne takes these traditions of assemblage and makes a catalogue of marvellous things that have disappeared…
Browne’s is one of many examples of this form, the fake catalogue. Donne wrote one; Rabelais included one in Gargantua and Pantagruel. More typically such works were outright spoofs of learned curiosity, send-ups of random assemblages that John Evelyn judged to be no more than ‘indigested chaos’. But Browne, although he recognises the absurdity of some of his own items and is obviously trying for comic effect with certain ones, is probably more interested in a philosophy of antiquities, of the past and of existing knowledge as resurrected and preserved from the ravages of time and forgetfulness…
Read the full fascinating story at always-illuminating Public Domain Review.
* Michel Foucault
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As we engage encyclopedically, we might pause to send imaginative birthday greetings to Jules Ralph Feiffer; he was born on this date in 1929. A syndicated cartoonist, author, playwright, and screenwriter, he’s best known for his long-running Village Voice comic strip, Feiffer, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize.
Feiffer broke into the trade at age 16 as an assistant to the immortal Will Eisner, who was at the time producing the strip The Spirit. A couple of years later, Eisner countered Feiffer’s request for a raise with the offer of a page in the comic book version of The Spirit, which Feiffer used to create Clifford, his first successful strip. His Village Voice strip ran for 42 years, and for most that period, was carried in other newspapers around the U.S. Feiffer’s plays include Little Murders (1967), Feiffer’s People (1969), Elliot Loves (1990), The White House Murder Case, and Grown Ups. And after Mike Nichols adapted Feiffer’s (unproduced) play Carnal Knowledge as a 1971 film, Feiffer scripted Robert Altman’s Popeye, Alain Resnais’s I Want to Go Home, and the film adaptation of Little Murders.
In addition to the Pulitzer, Feiffer was the recipient of a George Polk Award for his cartoons, an Academy Award for his animated short Munro, and the Obie and Outer Circle Critics Awards (for Little Murders and The White House Murder Case). He was elected in 1995 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2004, he was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame; that same year he received the National Cartoonists Society’s Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award; and in 2006, he received the Creativity Foundation’s Laureate and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Writers Guild of America.
“Life is a desire, not a meaning”*…
Mashable created a map of what each state wants (according to Google’s Autocomplete).
The resulting map reads like a list of New Year’s resolutions made by Civil War veterans. Did you know, for example, that more than anything, Wyoming evidently wants an aircraft carrier? Are you close enough to Wisconsin that residents revealed their secret wish to be called “The Mitten State?” Who could forget existential Florida, whose only desire is simply “to know.”
Check out the map below and see what Google thinks your state wants most. If your state happens to be blank, it’s because Google says it doesn’t want anything, which has to count for something, right?
Mashable’s map was inspired by the somewhat more existential work of of Tumblr user Gaysquib, who used Google’s auto-complete to determine what each state is…
* Charlie Chaplin
[Update: here is Europe autocompleted; and here is the Middle East and Asia]
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As we deliberate on desire, we might recall that it was on this date in 1964 that the Beatles occupied the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time, when “I Want to Hold Your Hand” reached #1. It had already ascended to the pinnacle of the British charts: indeed, with advance orders exceeding one million copies in the U.K., “I Want to Hold Your Hand” would ordinarily have hit the top of the British record charts on its day of release (November 29, 1963), but it was blocked for two weeks by the group’s first million-seller, “She Loves You.” The release order was reversed in the U.S.: “I Want to Hold Your Hand” held the number one spot for seven weeks before being replaced by “She Loves You.” It remained on the U.S. charts for a total of fifteen weeks, and became the Beatles’ best-selling single worldwide.
Hi, Ho! Hi, Ho!…
*The data come from the government’s non-farm payroll report — which, as the name suggests, does not include farm jobs. Update: The report also excludes military personnel, government intelligence employees and some self-employed workers.
Over the past several years, the job market has (obviously) been pretty grim. The recession ended four and a half years ago, in June 2009. But there are still 1.3 million fewer U.S. jobs than there were in December 2007, when the recession began.
Still, when you look more closely, the picture is more nuanced. Since the recession started in December 2007:
- Health care has added 1.5 million jobs.
- Restaurants and bars have added roughly 700,000 jobs.
- The number of construction jobs has fallen by 1.6 million.
- The number of manufacturing jobs has fallen by 1.7 million.
- The number of government jobs has fallen by about 500,000.
For more on jobs lost and gained since the recession — and on average wages in different sectors — see Where The Jobs Are (And Aren’t).
Read the full story– and find a larger version of the chart– at Planet Money.
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As we remind ourselves that “career” is both a noun and a verb, we might recall that it was on this date in 1981 that millions of Polish workers boycott their jobs in support of a demand by Solidarity for a 5-day work week. Formed the prior year, Solidariyy was the first non–communist party-controlled trade union in a Warsaw Pact country; by 1981, it’s membership was roughly 10 million– about one third of the total working age population of Poland. It became a broader-based anti-bureaucratic social movement as the decade progressed, surviving authoritarian attempts to quash it, and by 1989 forced negotiations with the government, resulting in semi-free elections. A Solidarity-led coalition government was formed; and in December 1990, Solidarity’s leader, Lech Wałęsa, was elected President of Poland. Solidarity remains an active labor union.
“What would I put in a museum? Probably a museum!”*…
From our friends at Coudal Partners (c.f. here, here, and here), The Museum of Online Museums…
Here, you will find links from our archives to online collections and exhibits covering a vast array of interests and obsessions: Start with a review of classic art and architecture, and graduate to the study of mundane (and sometimes bizarre) objects elevated to art by their numbers, juxtaposition, or passion of the collector. The MoOM is organized into three sections.
The Museum Campus contains links to brick-and-mortar museums with an interesting online presence. Most of these sites will have multiple exhibits from their collections (or, in the case of the Smithsonian, displays of items not on display in the Washington museum itself).
Aside from the quarterly list of links, we pull out five collections of particular interest and highlight them. New to the MoOM this fall will be the The Benefactors’ Gallery, in which our Board of Directors will post links to their own and other notable collections.
One thing you won’t find at MoOM are collections of posters or maps. As particular interests of ours, posters and maps have their own departments in the coudal.com archives. Find them and be lost for hours. [Your correspondent was…]
*John Hodgman
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As we rethink the idea of “walls,” we might spare a fevered dream or two for Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marqués de Dalí de Pubol; he died on this date in 1989. Best known by the name with which he signed his artwork, Salvador Dali, he was a prominent Surrealist, whose work was distinguished by his fine draughtsmanship and his obsession with symbolism. Cited as an artistic influence by the likes of Damien Hirst, Noel Fielding, and Jeff Koons, it seems likely that Dali’s gifted self-promotion was similarly an inspiration to Warhol.
The only difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad.
– Salvador Dali
No reservation? No problem!…
Jeff Dekofsky explains Hilbert’s paradox of the Grand Hotel, a thought experiment proposed in the 1920s by German mathematician David Hilbert to illustrate some surprising properties of infinite sets, in this TED-Ed animated lecture…
email readers click here for video
As a special bonus, another amusing video (via Kottke)– an explanation of why it is that the sum of all positive integers (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + …) = -1/12… Euler actually proved this result in 1735, but the result was only made rigorous later; and now physicists have been seeing this result actually show up in nature. (Spoiler alert: the answer turns on what one means by “sum” mathematically…)
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As we pray for more fingers and toes, we might spare a thought for Harald August Bohr; he died on this date in 1951. While materially less well-known than his brother Niels, Harald was a formidable mathematician (founder of the field of almost periodic functions), a gifted athlete (an accomplished footballer who won a silver medal at the 1908 Summer Olympics as a member of Denmark’s team), an inspirational teacher (the annual award for outstanding teaching at the University of Copenhagen is called “the Harald” in his honor), and an out-spoken critic of the anti-Semitic policies that took root in the German mathematical establishment in the 1930s.
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