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The Story of the Lamp
Who was the “real” Aladdin? From Chinese to Arab in 300 Years and Who “wrote” Aladdin? The Forgotten Syrian Storyteller are a pair of articles written by Arafat A. Razzaque for Ajam Media Collective about the story of Aladdin. The essays cover a wide range, from next year’s Disney film to how the tale entered the 1001 Nights corpus when the Syrian storyteller Ḥannā Diyāb told it to French translator Antoine Galland. Yasmine Seale has a new translation into English coming later this month, keeping in mind “the particular voices of these two men”.
"The Radical Restaurants of Father Divine, Founder of Peace Mission"
The case was brought to Justice Lewis J. Smith, who sentenced Divine to a year in prison. But four days after the sentencing, the 55-year-old judge died of a sudden heart attack. When journalists asked for Divine’s reaction, his brazen response made headlines, and helped turn the cult leader into a media phenomenon: "I hated to do it," he reportedly said.— Heaven Was a Place in Harlem by Vince Dixon, about "the radical tableside evangelism of Father Divine — equal parts holy man, charlatan, civil rights leader, and wildly successful restaurateur".
"just whose side was Virgil on?"
Since the end of the first century A.D., people have been playing a game with a certain book. In this game, you open the book to a random spot and place your finger on the text; the passage you select will, it is thought, predict your future. If this sounds silly, the results suggest otherwise. The first person known to have played the game was a highborn Roman who was fretting about whether he’d be chosen to follow his cousin, the emperor Trajan, on the throne—Is the Aeneid a Celebration of Empire—or a Critique? by Daniel Mendelsohn. You can inquire about the future from the Aeneid on the Sortes Virgilianae website (English, Latin).
“Translation, a carrying over…”
Translating Poetry, Translating Blackness is a 2016 essay by John Keene about the necessity of translating more stories and poems by African and Afro-descendant writers from outside the Anglophone world into English. Recently the Asymptote Podcast devoted two episodes to responding to the essay, first in the summer when host Layla Benitez-James interviewed Lawrence Schimel, focusing on his translation of Trifonia Melibea Obono’s La Bastarda and the issues raised by being a Western, gay, white man translating an African, lesbian, black woman. Benitez-James returned to the subject last week after Keene received a MacArthur Genius Grant, and interviewed him about his essay.
"How Hannah Stands Up to Schizophrenia"
Hannah Bryndís Proppé-Bailey talks about how stand-up comedy and football help her deal with schizophrenia (autoplaying video, may blow dust into eyes) for UEFA’s Equal Game project. Earlier this year Hannah Jane Cohen interviewed her about her comedy.
"A comedy podcast about things that are actually sad."
The Alice Fraser Trilogy is a series of three stand-up specials where Australian comedian Alice Fraser tells the story of when her mother died, with digressions into her past and other subjects. It's available as a podcast [iTunes link]. For regular listeners of The Bugle, Alice Fraser will be familiar, but for those who aren't her comedy is a mix of absurdism, earnestness, wordplay and pessimism.
Women SF Writers of the 1970s
Fighting Erasure is a series by writer and critic James Davis Nicoll where he recommends books by female science fiction and fantasy writers who debuted in the 1970s. It's in ten parts: A-F, G, H, I-J, K, L, M, N-P, R-S, and T-Z. Some writers Nicoll hasn't read, or has missed, are discussed in comments. He was inspired to start the series by Jeanne Gomoll's classic 1987 essay An Open Letter to Joanna Russ, which noted that erasure of the previous decade's women writers and fans had already begun, and Susan Schwartz' 1982 article in the New York Times about women and science fiction.
"Funk Fillets From Iceland’s Groovy Side"
Breaking the Ice is an 87-minute long mixtape of rare Icelandic funk- and soul-inspired music from the 60s, 70s and 80s, made by Iceland-born, Oakland-based DJ Platurn, with the crate-digging assistance of his cousin Sveimhugi, and his father's extensive record collection. Released by Needle to the Groove Records, the project started life as a three-part series on the webzine Nerdtorious (parts 1, 2, 3). For more about Breaking the Ice, you can read an article by Brandon Roos, an interview with DJ Platurn by Marke B, a short introduction by DJ Platurn to eight of the seventy records in the mix, or watch a six-minute mini-documentary before diving into the mix. [via RÚV]
“It’s not just a game… it’s a Gayme!”
Caper in the Castro was probably the first LGBTQ computer game. The player takes on the “the role of a lesbian private detective, Tracker McDyke, in search of a kidnapped drag queen, Tessy LaFemme.” The adventure mystery game was designed for Apple’s HyperCard, by C. M. Ralph, and released in 1989 as CharityWare, which meant that if people enjoyed playing, they were encouraged to “make a donation to an AIDS Related charity of your choice for whatever amount you feel is appropriate”. Adrienne Shaw of the LGBTQ game archive wrote about the game and interviewed Ralph last year.
Moominmamma: "I believe she wants to be invisible for a while"
The Invisible Child by Tove Jansson, a Moomin short story translated by Thomas Warburton, as read by Bill Nighy.
Podcast about football ‘round the world
Game of Our Lives is a podcast about football, and as such its sights are currently set on the World Cup. The latest episode goes over the first few days of games, but the most interesting bit is the interview with Mani Djazmi, a blind British-Iranian football journalist. If you dip into the archive you’ll find that the focus of the host David Goldblatt, a football writer and sociologist, is on interviewing people from around the world with a perspective on football not often found in British or American sports pages. The first interview subject is Werner Herzog on football cinema, but you might also be interested in interviews with Supriya Nair on football in India, John Foot on Italia and football, and Shireen Ahmed on Muslim women and football.
RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ
The Spectacular Personal Mythology of Rammellzee by Hua Hsu is a fine introduction to the works of New York graffiti artist, sculptor, rapper, and painter Rammellzee, who passed away in 2010 at the age of 49. Known to hip hop afficionados for Beat Bop, his collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat and K-Rob, which was the subject of a Spin oral history. To get a feel for his aesthetic, this interview excerpted from the documentary Guerilla Art is a good place to start. If you want to know more, Alexxa Gotthardt wrote a good overview of his career and hip hop historian Dave Tompkins reminisced about Rammellzee and placed him in context.
"A tree can't make or break Christmas, only people can do that"
Joe Pera Helps You Find the Perfect Christmas Tree is a good-natured twenty minute comedy about a middle school choir teacher in Michigan who's looking for a perfect Christmas tree. This special led to an Adult Swim series called Joe Pera Talks With You which is unfortunately geolocked outside North America. The eponymous Joe Pera's website has a lot more of his material available online.
"I don't want any boring old heraldry. I want something new, fresh."
Historian Sara Öberg Strådal looks at some bizarre coats of arms on her Twitter [Threadreader]. All are found in Conrad von Grünenberg's Wappenbuch, which can be read in full online.
BBC SFX Library
BBC Sound Effects is a collection of over sixteen thousand sound effects that the British Broadcating Corporation has collected and made through the years. The archive is fully searchable, and you can listen to it all on the site or download them as wav-files. The breadth of the material is too extensive to give any kind of overview, but as examples you can listen to a beggar singing on Portobello Road, a conversation in a restaurant in France, lions roaring while crickets chirp and the sounds made when dialing a phone in China in the 1960s. [all example links are to wav-files]
"dangerous nothingness"
The Edge of Identity by Rachel Aviv for the New Yorker is a long article about Hannah Upp, a woman who disappeared in New York City in 2008 and was found twenty days later, having wandered the city in a fugue state. Aviv tells the story of Upp's life, before and since, and explores the science and history of dissociative amnesia.
"a wonderful summer with a very special bee"
Fiona Presly and bee behavior expert Lars Chittka wrote about Presly's pet wingless bumblebee [pdf] that she found last spring in her garden in Inverness. The Scotsman has an interview with them and The Dodo has a short account with many pictures.
No kings
It wasn't just Greece: Archaeologists find early democratic societies in the Americas is one of a pair of articles by Lizzie Wade about recent archeological studies of ancient Mesoamerican societies which have uncovered evidence that some were not autocratic but collective and democratic. It takes Tlaxcallan and Teotihuacan as its central examples, but looks further afield, even to societies outside the Americas. The second article, Kings of Cooperation, focuses on one example, the Olmec city of Tres Zapotes, which had seven centuries of collective rule in between times of kingship.
Spinning globe, moving continents
A globe which lets you see how the continents have shifted during the last 600 million years [via Simon Kuestenmacher].
Mostly not.
How Do Writers Get Paid? is a wide-ranging, informed, critical, and in-depth panel discussion on the ways authors are remunerated for their work, featuring copyright lawyer Zoë Rodriguez, SF writer Cory Doctorow, and literary agent Alex Adsett, moderated by Prof. Rebecca Giblin. The discussion takes place at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne, so has a bit of an Australian focus, but the US, Canada, the UK and, to a lesser extent, Western Europe, are discussed as well, and anyone with an interest in the topic will find much there. It can be watched as a video or listened to (podcast link).
"I like these girls."
Kathy Acker interviewed the Spice Girls in 1997 at the height of their fame, just before they performed on Saturday Night Live. Here's a photo of them all together. BBC's Unpopped podcast assembled a three-expert panel to put the interview in the context of Acker's and the Spice Girls' career.
"rivers are the lifeblood of the planet, and driftwood the nutrients"
From streams to estuaries to the deep ocean floor, driftwood shapes every environment it passes through. While there's an awareness that temperate rainforests are enriched with nitrogen from the marine environment, delivered by decomposing salmon, less well known is the fact that dead trees from those same forests travel to the sea and become a vital source of food and habitat. Driftwood is in need of a PR campaign, celebrity spokesperson, or publicist at the very least. Driftwood, it turns out, is also rapidly disappearing.The Trees That Sail to Sea by Brian Payton.
"The masculinization of fiction, 1800-1960"
The Transformation of Gender in English-Language Fiction is a long essay by Ted Underwood, David Bamman and Sabrina Lee that uses quantative analysis of over a hundred thousand works of fiction digitized by HathiTrust to look at the proportion of fiction written by women, and the proportion of female characters, from 1780-2007. To the authors' surprise both declined steadily and profoundly from 1800-1960, before rebounding. They also looked at gender divisions between male and female characters over the same period, finding that they had lessened. The Guardian has a short summary of the findings. And for more on gender representation in 19th Century fiction, the authors point to Understanding Gender and Character Agency in the 19th Century Novel by Matthew Jockers and Gabi Kirilloff.
"The first Phoenicians on this beach"
Hanno the Navigator was Carthaginian explorer who traveled south along the African coast in the sixth Century BCE. He left behind an account of his journey, a periplus, which among other things gave the world the word "gorilla", which may have been a kikongo phrase originally. It can be read in English translation on Livius along with scholarly notes by Jona Lendering. Hanno's brother Himilco was also an explorer, venturing north along the Atlantic coast of Europe. Lionel Casson puts Hanno in context of the history of exploration. While reading the links, you might want to listen to folk rocker Al Stewart's 2008 song Hanno the Navigator.
"If we write women out of history, we never know the truth of things."
This is How a Woman is Erased From Her Job by A. N. Devers is the story of how The Paris Review's second ever editor, Brigid Hughes, was pushed out of her position and written out of the magazine's history. The Paris Review was recently embroiled in scandal after its latest male top editor was featured prominently on the Shitty Media Men spreadsheet and left the magazine. After her ouster Hughes went on to found and edit the excellent magazine A Public Space.
"Martins seems to have needed light like she needed air"
A Visit to South Africa’s Strange, Astonishing Owl House is an article by Rosa Lyster [previously] about the art and life of outsider artist Helen Martins, and the museum of her work, The Owl House [previously discussed in 2002]. The Helen Martins Museum website has a gallery with high resolution photographs of her work and a few more can be seen here.
Dystopic dancing
Into the Dark is a music video for the new single by teenage indie duo Between Mountains from the rural Westfjords region of Iceland. The video portrays a society where dark-suited people must mimic everything their brightly-clothed betters do. Dancing ensues. The group, comprising Katla Vigdís Vernharðsdóttir and Ásrós Helga Guðmundsdóttir came to prominence after winning last year's Músíktilraunir, a national battle-of-the-bands. Their winning performance can be seen here (scroll down). They also performed for Seattle based KEXP last year, which can be seen here. While normally using keyboards and vocals, they do also sometimes break out an accordion.
The Cult of Mary Beard
How a late-blossoming classics don became Britain’s most beloved intellectual by Charlotte Higgins examines how Mary Beard went from being a Cambridge professor of classics to being the kind of celebrity who has poems written about her and is depicted in Lego. Twice.
"If I'd at least gotten closer to that impossible perfection..."
What We Talk About When We Talk About Translation is an essay by Deborah Smith, translator of Han Kang's novel The Vegetarian, among others. It is a response to various criticisms of her translation, first by translator and novelist Tim Parks, followed by Charse Yun, who also laid out complaints about it from Korean critics, though, as Kang Hyun-kyung reports, Smith has vociferous defenders in Korea. If you want a summary, Clare Armitstead, who comes down on Smith's side, recaps the controversy in The Guardian. Jiayang Fan touches on the dispute but focuses more on Han Kang and her upcoming books in Smith's translation in an essay in The New Yorker called Buried Words.
The Mesopotamian Pantheon
Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses is an overview of the pantheon originating among the Sumerians which was then taken up by various later cultures, including Babylonians and Assyrians. The site has entries on the fifty most important deities, from the obscure (Papsukkal, Geshtinanna, Tashmetu) to the well-known (Tiamat, Enki, Ishtar). The site also includes a glossary and a timeline of Mesopotamian history.
I would prefer not to, said the garbage chute
A man named Hlynur Hallgrímsson tried to throw a garbage bag down the garbage chute in his apartment building while a storm passed through Reykjavík last night.
“Doctors ordered her to lie on her side in bed and not move”
‘Reality shrivels. This is your life now’: 88 days trapped in bed to save a pregnancy by Katherine Heiny.
"We need the novel because paradise is always a lie"
the novel matters because it's fiction, and fiction, like truth, profoundly matters to the human species. In the age of Trump, when truth is so blatantly revealed as something dismissible, somehow simply no longer relevant, the novel matters even more, because to some extent we all live by fictions, we have all along survived by using them.The novel in the age of Trump by Ali Smith.
Transcribing decades-old science fiction fanzines
The James L. "Rusty" Hevelin Collection contains over ten thousand science fiction fanzines. The library of the University of Iowa is scanning them and has done more than 800 so far. It has set up a page on its DIY History site where people can transcribe old zines to make the computer searchable. For more about Rusty Hevelin, read his obituary, and for more about the collection read these two articles by Jacob Brogan from 2015 and 2017.
The 2017 Nobel Laureate in Literature is Kazuo Ishiguro
English novelist Kazuo Ishiguro perhaps best known for The Remains of the Day has been given this year's Nobel Prize in literature. If you want to know more about Ishiguro, the British Council has a good profile on him, but it might also be a good idea to read these two dialogues, one between him and fellow Nobel Laureate Kenzaburo Oe and another with Neil Gaiman [previously] or the Paris Review interview in the Art of Fiction series. For live updates, analysis and reaction, head to The Guardian's liveblog and The Comlete Review's Literary Saloon blog.
The Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris, 1892–1897
The Magus of Paris is an article by Alex Ross about Symbolist author and art impresario Joséphin Péladan, and the artists he championed in his The Salon de la Rose+Croix in the 1890s, which is the focus of the Guggenheim exhibition
Magical Symbolism. The website has various articles, including one about Symbolist poetry (with an accompanying SoundCloud page with readings) and another by Nat Trotman on putting on a 19 hour concert featuring only a single piece three and a half minutes in length called Vexations, by the best known participant in Péladan's salon, Erik Satie. New York Times' critic Joshua Barone staid for the whole duration. The first full performance of the piece was in 1963, organized by John Cage in New York and the Times covered it then too.
"so much mediocre work by men around"
In 2015, the novelist Catherine Nichols sent the opening pages of the book she was working on to fifty literary agents. She got so little response she decided to shift gender and try as 'George' instead. The difference amazed her. 'A third of the agents who saw his query wanted to see more, where my numbers never did shift from one in 25.' The words, as written by George, had an appeal that Catherine could only envy. She also, perhaps, felt a little robbed. 'He is eight and a half times better than me at writing the same book.'Anne Enright's Irish Laureate for Fiction lecture about sexism in publishing.
"people forgot they were there"
A Team of Women is Unearthing the Forgotten Legacy of Harvard’s Women 'Computers' by Alex Newman. From 1885 to 1927 over 80 women computed and analyzed astronomical data for Harvard University. Said data, mostly in the form of glass plate photographs, is in the process of being digitized by the Harvard Observatory as part of the DASCH Project. If you would like to know more about pioneering female astronomers such as Williamina Fleming or Henrietta Swan Leavitt, the Harvard Observatory has compiled some links. If you would like to take part in making their work available to the public, take part in Project PHaEDRA and transcribe their logbooks.
The Ancient Roots of "Make It New"
The Making of “Make It New” by Michael North is an exploration of the ancient Chinese origins of Ezra Pound's phrase "make it new". At first obscure, the phrase became well known when Pound became seen as the central figure of early English-language Modernism. In the latest issue of Translatlantica Clément Oudart puts North's article in context with recent scholarship in an introduction to a thematic issue on American modernism. In recent years Pound's centrality has been challenged, and his fascism has been recognized as fundamental to his poetry, as laid out in The Pound Error by Louis Menand. The phrase survives as a challenge to authors, and in 2014 Pankaj Mishra and Benjamin Moser discussed whether writers can still "make it new".
DC independent label makes its back catalogue available for streaming
Dischord Records' Bandcamp page has most of their back catalogue available for streaming (via Open Culture which also has a nice introductory article about the label). The DC based independent label is home to such legendary bands as Rites of Spring, Nation of Ulysses, Autoclave, Minor Threat and Fugazi, and also many, many others.
Ecological Cartography of the Anthropocene
The Atlas for the End of the World is a collection of maps visualizing various global dangers and changes, such as rising sea levels, human displacement from conflict, and deforestation, and related issues such as land use for raising meat, ecotourism, and access to water, also other more abstract matters like biological diversity and the human effect on it. You might want to start by reading the introduction and FAQ before checking out the photos of creatures that have tried to adapt to the changing world and the opening essay, Atlas for the End?, and the concluding one, Atlas for the Beginning.
"Eldridge Cleaver is in Algiers and he needs help, go see him"
I had made a home in Algeria; I was happy with my life and my work in the national press. In 1969, events took an extraordinary turn. Late one night I received a call from Charles Chikerema, the representative of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union, one of many African liberation movements with an office in the city. He told me that the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver was in town and needed help.–Short memoir by Elaine Mokhtefi about working with the Black Panthers in Algeria. Interview with Mokhtefi (audio and transcript).
"a love story between one woman and her vagina"
Yes, God, Yes is a 10 minute film by Karen Maine starring Natalia Dyer. It is based on Maine's experiences of growing up Catholic in the Midwest in the 1990s, and coming of age sexually in the age of America Online. Maine was interviewed by Marta Bausells about Yes, God, Yes in The Guardian.
Queen of Jamaican Culture
Miss Lou talks Jamaican proverbs and who is Miss Lou, you ask? She was Louise Bennett, poet, folklorist, television presenter, activist and all around Jamaican national treasure. Her archive is kept by McMaster University, and is especially rich in audio recordings, including interviews (e.g. with Sarah Ward on the BBC World Service), storytelling (e.g. her Anancy stories, part 1 and 2) and music (e.g. 1954 Folkways recording, parts 1 and 2). Her music can also be found on Spotify.
Images of classical Chinese artworks
The English-language website of Taiwan's National Palace Museum has over two thousand images available from its archive in high quality scans. You can search by keyword or browse by dynasty and category. For instance, you can take a look at Ming-era paintings, Song-era jade craftworks or Ch'ing-era ceramics. You can also download images from recent expeditions. If you haven't had your fill, you can then browse the museum's Chinese language websites for painting and antiquities, which have a combined 70 thousand images. If you don't know Chinese and want to use the search function, Google Translate might be of some help.
"There are plenty of other fishy names in the phone book."
Fish Story is a fourteen minute video documentary where Charlie Lyne tries to find out whether his friend Caspar Salmon's grandmother, Pauline, was invited to an event in Anglesey in Wales, along with other people with fish surnames, to be given a salmon by weatherman Sir Michael Fish.
"Today we are talking with Sid Meier, who needs no introduction ♪♫♩♬♪♫"
The Designer Notes podcast just completed a four part interview with game designer Sid Meier. Part one is about how he got into computer games and his early career. Part two is about the games that made him famous, focusing on Civilization. Part three continues into the founding and success of his company Firaxis. Part four brings us to the present day, as well as going into some other matters at the end. If you're interested enough in game design to listen to a seven hour interview with Sid Meier, dipping into the Designer Notes archive might be worth your time. It's hosted by Adam Saltsman, best known for making Canabalt, and Soren Johnson, designer of Civilization IV and other strategy games, who interviews Meier.
L'élection présidentielle de 2017, second tour
Polling stations across France opened this morning for the presidential election's second round of voting between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen (though the vote began in the Pacific). The final turn of a twisty campaign was a leak of emails from the Macron campaign on Friday. The opinion polls, historically quite accurate in France, indicate that Macron is the overwhelming favorite. His party, En Marche, is also polling well in the June legislative elections. Though the establishment has flocked behind Macron against the far-right Le Pen it has not gone as smoothly as was expected, which is Jeremy Hardin's topic in the essay Whose Republican Front?
Ancient History Encyclopedia
Ancient History Encyclopedia has been slowly but surely expanding since 2009. Besides the thousands of entries on various historical places, people and topics, there is a timeline search as well as maps. There's so much to check out you might as well just click random and see what you get (I got Lasus of Hermione, A Visual Glossary of Hindu Architecture and Samguk Sagi).
Indexing, National Day of
In our Google era, indexers are the unsung heroes of the publishing world argues Sam Leith, honorary president of the Society of Indexers, on National Indexing Day [pdf]. Among the varied uses of the index Leith highlights is the comedy index, the subject of a blog series by indexer Paula Clarke Bain, so far up to four entries: I, Partridge, Alan Partridge: Nomad, Toast on Toast and Ayoade on Ayoade: A Cinematic Odyssey.
Western depictions of women in power from the Ancient Greeks onwards
If the deep cultural structures legitimating women's exclusion are as I have argued, gradualism is likely to take too long for me, thank you very much. We have to be more reflective about what power is, what it is for, and how it is measured. To put it another way, if women aren't perceived to be fully within the structures of power, isn't it power that we need to redefine rather than women?–Women in Power by Mary Beard, also delivered in an extended version as a lecture, and she took questions afterwards. She discussed her essay and modern politics on the Talking Politics podcast (starting at 16:00).