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?
Thoughts?
Image Credit: Handwriting – free texture by Crafty Dogma
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)
Image Credit: An Angel in the Deluge by Ici et Ailleurs
In no particular order:
Dakota McFadzean: Tries to create a new comic each day, usually published on his site once a week. Funny, sad and a bit nostalgic, McFadzean’s best work is like Peanuts for a new generation. Notable strips: Post Apocalyptic Puppy and anything featuring Dakota himself.
A Softer World: Written and photographed by Emily Horne and Joey Comeau, it’s a unique take on the genre using photos instead of illustrations. Offering a social commentary on the most mundane of experiences, it is sad, weird and often laugh-out-loud funny.
XKCD: Simple drawings, complex ideas; “a web comic of romance, sarcasm, math and language.” The guy who writes and illustrates these self-describes as a graduate with a degree in physics whose previous experience includes working on robots at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia. This strip was nominated by Dan Zambonini.
Beatonna: Excellent collection of mainly historically-based comics with a particular interest in the crazy Victorians. Written by Kate Beaton (whose personal website seems to be down at the moment) and nominated by Dave Joyner.
Garfield Minus Garfield: Nothing else to say really.
Honourable mentions go to Concerned (nominated by Jim O’Donnell) and User Friendly (nominated by John Greenaway – sorry I just didn’t get it!).
Do you have favourite online comics? Please share in the comments.
It’s frustrating how the media, hungry to fill their 24-hour schedule for thousands of television and online outlets, so easily present the hissy-fits and staged faux dissention of music celebrities as acts of rebellion.
I’d like to highlight some of the exploits of a real revolutionary: Bill Drummond. Sure, much – if not all – of what he did and does is for the same self-serving publicity purposes, but at least he does it with style and originality. And above all, he takes risks – the real mark of a rebel.
Sources for the following information include Wikipedia, The Independent, The Telegraph, KLF.de and Drummond’s Penkiln Burn website.
- 1977: Recording debut as guitar player with Big in Japan, alongside members Holly Johnson (Frankie Goes to Hollywood) and Ian Broudie (The Lightning Seeds). Later sets up Zoo Records, before becoming an A&R executive for Warners.
- Late 1970s: As manager for Echo & The Bunnymen (EATB), Drummond books tour venues based on the shape they make, “If you look at a map of the world, the whole tour’s in the shape of a rabbit’s ears.”
- 1980s: Ian Curtis, of Joy Division, commits suicide, sending their sales rocketing. Noticing this, Drummond tries to convince the EATB singer to kill himself (Note: another source relays this same story with Julian Cope, rather than EATB, possibly via Drummond’s solo song “Julian Cope is Dead”).
- 1980s: Drummond believes there’s a line of cosmic energy that bounced off Iceland, was channelled down a manhole in Merseyside (England), and exited the other side in Papua New Guinea. He tests this theory by getting EATB to play in Reykjavik while he stands on the manhole cover.
- 1986: Resigns from Warners via a press release, which states that he is nearly 33⅓ years old (33⅓ RPM being the speed at which vinyl albums revolve).
- 1987: Forms the group The Justified Ancients of Mu-Mu with Jimmy Cauty (later, of The Orb), whose first single All You Need Is Love is recorded in a week. The song, and later album (1987), makes blatant use of copyrighted samples, taking “plagiarism to its absurd conclusion”.
- 1987: After a legal conflict with ABBA regarding samples, the 1987 album is forcibly withdrawn from sale. Drummond and Cauty travel to Sweden hoping to talk to ABBA. Unable to get in contact with ABBA, they present the gold disc of the album to a prostitute, who they pretend is Agnetha “fallen on hard times”.
- 1987: Re-releases the 1987 album as “1987: The JAMs 45 Edits”, with all unauthorised samples removed, leaving long periods of protracted silence, and less than 25 minutes of music.
- 1988: Achieves a number one novelty hit, “Doctorin’ the Tardis” under the name The Timelords (with Cauty). It sells over a million copies.
- 1988: Co-writes the book, “The Manual (How to Have a Number One The Easy Way)” with Cauty, detailing instructions on how to create a novelty number one record. This later gets translated into a German stage musical.
- 1988: Drummond and Cauty form The KLF, who go on to pioneer ambient and trance electronic music.
- 1991: The KLF become the biggest-selling singles act of the year.
- 1992: Having received the Best British Group award, KLF perform at the Brit Awards with hardcore metal band Extreme Noise Terror, fire machine gun blanks into the industry-executive-filled audience, and dump a dead sheep at the aftershow party.
- 1992: At their peak, The KLF announce their retirement from the music industry and proceed to delete their entire back catalogue, ensuring no future revenue could be earned from it.
- 1993: Establishes the art foundation, “The K Foundation”, which awards a “worst artist of the year” award to Rachel Whiteread, the same winner of that year’s Turner Prize. Whiteread refuses to collect the £40,000 award – double that of the Turner Prize – until Drummond threatens to set fire to it outside the Tate.
- 1994: The K Foundation withdraws £1 million in cash, the remaining earnings from KLF. After failing to sell it (nailed to a board) to the Tate Gallery for £750,000, they burn it. Drummond later comments, “Our accountant couldn’t write it off as an artistic statement. We had to pay £330,000 extra. Which was unexpected”.
- 1995: Drummond buys A Smell of Sulphur in the Wind by his favourite artist, Richard Long, for $20,000. Six years later, he cuts it into 20,000 pieces (4mm x 11mm each) and sells each for $1.
- 1995: Drives around London on Christmas Eve, distributing over 6,000 cans of lager to the homeless and street-drinkers.
- 1999: Plans to destroy Stonehenge (but doesn’t).
- 2002: Puts up 100 posters in Liverpool, offering to have sex with anyone for £10,000, with a signed testimonial.
- 2003: Launches mydeath.net – a website where you can make preparations for your own death – with the tagline, “Prepare To Die”.
- 2003: Launches youwhores.com, a site for you to “advertise what you are willing to do and the price you are willing to do it for”.
- 2004: Devises an imaginary line from Belfast to Nottingham called “The Soup Line”. If anyone who lives in a town on the line asks him, he will visit and make a hearty vegetable broth.
For more information about Bill Drummond’s latest activities (including The17 Choir), see the Penkiln Burn website.
Photograph of Bill Drummond’s Twinned With Your Darkest Thought sign by Flickr User Squirmelia, under a Creative Commons license.
Poetry has always been passionate and even a wee bit sexy. From Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Kissing Helena, “Kissing Helena, together/With my kiss, my soul beside it/Came to my lips, and there I kept it …” to Dylan Thomas’s In My Craft or Sudden Art, “When only the moon rages/And the lovers lie abed/With all their griefs in their arms …” sex and love have been a natural theme throughout the ages.
In an excellent acknowledgment of this fact, a group called the Poetry Brothel are looking to throw off the shackles of black, itchy woolen turtlenecks and berets, and reclaim the fun, quirky spirit of poetry:
The Poetry Brothel is foremost interested in showcasing a diverse roster of emerging and established poets. However, our events are also interactive performance art pieces based on the concept of the prewar brothels in the United States and Europe. Each night The Madame presents a rotating cast of both male and female poets engaged in a night of literary debauchery and private poetry readings. The poets act as “whores,” making audience members “johns,” but instead of physical intimacy, the poets offer the intimacy of their poetry in private, one-on-one readings. For a small fee, all of the resident “whores” are available for these sequestered readings at any time during the event. Of course, any good brothel need a furtive “front” or cover; ours is part saloon and part salon, offering a full bar with absinthe, live music, live painting, fortune-tellers, gypsies, and gamblers with newly integrated performances and installations from our poets and other artists at each event. (source)
Where can I sign up?
Image: The Poetry Brothel xxx by mirosim
Subscribe