The thesis of the article Handwriting is History by Anne Trubek seems so obvious, but yet it’s something that I’d never considered before, despite that 99.9% of the writing I do is on my computer. Growing up and moving through the education system, a huge emphasis was always placed on the ability to write by hand – not just spelling, grammar and general proficiency in language, but actually the ability to draw those characters out by hand as a way of making meaning.
On a recent airport layover, I set out to write a bunch of letters and postcards for people back home. It was painful: my hand, fingers and wrist ached and my penmanship was atrocious. Worst of all, I found myself frustratingly incapable of making the words appear on the paper quickly enough to avoid many of them getting lost somewhere between my brain and the ink as it settled on the paper. I found writing by hand to be wildly inefficient.
Despite this experience, as I read Handwriting is History, I still found it difficult to accept the idea that we may live in a world where writing things out by hand is no longer necessary. What about lovely handwritten notes? What about handwriting as an art form? What about the personality of our handwriting? Surely all those concepts cannot be supplanted by choosing a font in our word processing software? Trubek has alarmingly good answers for most if not all of these questions, mainly rooted in the reality that handwriting is not and has never been about individuality: “when we worry about losing our individuality, we are likely misremembering our schooling, which included rote, rigid lessons in handwriting. We have long been taught the “right” way to form letters.”
Trubek also has solid grounds to conclude that even today we still politicize handwriting and attribute characteristics like intelligence to someone who has a ‘good hand’. She cites a study done at Vanderbilt University called The Handwriting Effect, which found that “teachers form judgments, positive or negative, about the literacy merit of text based on its overall legibility … when teachers rate multiple versions of the same paper differing only in terms of legibility, they assign higher grades to neatly written versions of the paper than the same versions with poorer penmanship.”
The conclusion of the article is that at its core, writing is about communicating ideas. Doing whatever we can to create a wide space through which our thoughts can flow unencumbered, or as unencumbered as possible, should be our primary concern when choosing a tool. Why then, do we continue to put so much focus on teaching proper handwriting techniques to children in schools when it is quite likely that lovely penmanship is something they will never need?
In addition to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the heartbreaking story of Henrietta Lacks, the US has recently admitted to and apologized for experimentation they did on prisoners, mental patients and soliders in Guatemala in the 1940s. In addition to using tax dollars to pay infected prostitutes to sleep with prisoners, officials also did things such as pour “the bacteria onto scrapes made on their penises, faces or arms, and in some cases it was injected by spinal puncture.” (source) This activity happened at the same time the US was involved in prosecuting Nazis for committing similar crimes in concentration camps across Europe.
The ‘purpose’ of the study was to look at the effects of penicillin on the disease but although the infected were treated with the drug “whether everyone was cured is not clear”. Perhaps it is no surprise that Doctor John Cutler was behind this study and was also the driving force between the reprehensible Tuskegee Study, which he defended throughout his life.
This continues the seemingly endless dark history of the practice of medical experimentation on human beings, without their consent.
From 1963 to 1966, researchers at the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island infected … children [with disabilities] with hepatitis to test gamma globulin against it. And in 1963, elderly patients at the Brooklyn Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital were injected with live cancer cells to see if they caused tumors. (source)
The last week of September is banned books week in Canada and the US. As in, not a week to ban books or celebrate their banning, but rather one to spend time discovering some of the great titles that have found themselves outlawed and to wonder at a culture that justifies the sometimes active attempt to oppress its own artifacts. In honor of this week, the American Library Association has put together a nifty list of the top ten reasons books have been historically banned (source):
The Top Ten Ludicrous Reasons To Ban A Book
“Encourages children to break dishes so they won’t have to dry them.” (A Light in the Attic, by Shel Silverstien)
“It caused a wave of rapes.” (Arabian Nights, or One Thousand and One Nights)
“If there is a possibility that something might be controversial, then why not eliminate it?” (Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown)
“Tarzan was ‘living in sin’ with Jane.” (Tarzan, by Edgar Rice Burroughs)
“It is a real ‘downer.’” (Diary of Anne Frank, by Anne Frank)
“The basket carried by Little Red Riding Hood contained a bottle of wine, which condones the use of alcohol.” (Little Red Riding Hood, by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm K. Grimm)
“One bunny is white and the other is black and this ‘brainwashes’ readers into accepting miscegenation.” (The Rabbit’s Wedding, by Garth Williams)
“It is a religious book and public funds should not be used to purchase religious books.” (Evangelical Commentary on the Bible, by Walter A. Elwell, ed.)
“A female dog is called a bitch.” (My Friend Flicka, by Mary O’Hara)
“An unofficial version of the story of Noah’s Ark will confuse children.” (Many Waters, by Madeleine C. L’Engle)
The American Library Association (ALA) also has a great compendium of statistics on the banning of books. Some notable facts include that by far the most common reason for banning a book is because it is considered sexually explicit, and parents are overwhelmingly the initiators of book challenges and bans.
1. Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling
2. Alice series, by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
3. The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier
4. And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson/Peter Parnell
5. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
6. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou
7. Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz
8. His Dark Materials (series), by Philip Pullman
9. ttyl; ttfn; l8r g8r (series), by Myracle, Lauren
10. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky
1. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
3. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
5. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
6. Ulysses, by James Joyce
7. Beloved, by Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
9. 1984, by George Orwell 10. The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner
The crazy thing is, people still attempt to ban books – regularly. If you live in the US and you know of a book that is being challenged or banned, you can report it on the ALA website. In the meantime, hug a librarian or independent bookseller because without them many of these classic books would no longer be in circulation.
There are thousands of websites and self-help books dedicated to helping artists (and wanna-be artists) find the inspiration required to become the next great writer, painter, musician …
The Ancient Greeks believed that goddesses (called muses) were the inspiration for most art and went as far as to offer supplication in return for being in their favour. In a recent Ted talk, Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of the best-selling travel memoir Eat, Pray, Love, reintroduced this idea when she suggested that some kind of force outside of the the artist is at least partially responsible for the act of creation. As an example, according to Gilbert, Tom Waits was driving on a freeway when a great melody came into his head. He was unable to write it down but was afraid to loose it so he appealed to the muses: “Excuse me. Can you not see I’m driving? Do I look like I can write down a song right now? If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment … otherwise go bother somebody else today. Go bother Leonard Cohen.” According to Gilbert, at this moment Waits entered into a new relationship with his creativity that was “peculiar, wondrous, bizarre collaboration and conversation between Tom and the strange external genius that was not Tom.” (source)
For those of us who don’t necessarily believe in fairies, muses or an external divinity, a more practical alternative to mystical intervention is that our subconscious minds have the potential to act on our conscious desires and motivations. The New York Times article Who’s Minding the Mind highlights numerous studies that show that “once covertly activated, an unconscious goal persists with the same determination that is evident in our conscious pursuits.” (source)
There are many examples of artists who say that complete or nearly complete masterpieces came to them while they were asleep, including:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge claims that Kubla Khan came to him in its entirety in an opium induced dream. According to the writer’s own account, when he woke up he began fervently composing line after line of poetry until he was interrupted by a visitor. After returning to the work he struggled to complete the rest of the poem because he could not remember the rest of the lines. Critics on the whole say that Kubla Khan is unlike most of Coleridge’s other work. (source)
According to his own account, Robert Louis Stevenson’s inspiration for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came to him in a dream: “For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers.” (source)
The melody for Yesterday, the most covered Beatles song in their entire catalog, came in its entirety to Paul McCartney in a dream. It came to him so completely that for months he was convinced that he’d plagiarized it and would play it for friends and record executives to try to determine its origins before finally accepting it as his own. (source)
In her introduction to the 1931 edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley “revealed that she got the story from a dream, in which she saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with a uneasy, half vital motion.” (source)
Japanese born Shinya Kimura creates beautiful custom motorcycles. He’s best known for what is referred to as ‘Zero Style’, a concept that can be traced back to the Japaneses aesthetic tradition of wabi sabi:
A Zero-style bike is typically based around a rigid gooseneck, a pre-1984 Harley Davidson engine, springer front end, spoked wheels and often includes parts of the bike remaining in bare metal.The inspiration came from wabi sabi (austere refinement) and the beauty of the raw materials and incorporating the essence of wa (harmony) into his designs. (source)
Amy Thibodeau is originally from the Canadian Prairies, spent the last few years in one of the world's greatest cities, London, UK and is spending the next year traveling around the world. She is interested in everything, but lately is mostly fixated on art, politics, creative writing, cuddly animals and experimenting with different kinds of photography. You can find her on her personal blog Making Strange, posting to her photography project Lost and Looking, on Twitter @amythibodeau, or working as a freelance content strategist via Contentini.
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