Evan Bibbee

I am currently editing a manuscript of mine. I have never been good at editing my own writing, ever, as you can probably tell from all of the typos, sentence fragments, and run-ons in my blog posts. I enjoy vomiting words and then hitting publish, just because I don’t want to edit them. It brings me absolutely no joy.

Of course, as the stakes get higher, I want my writing to not just be good enough, but potentially great. Or maybe I’m just getting older, I don’t know.

So I did what I have always done: I started to buy books. I picked up Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, which I hated, and then Developmental Editing: A Handbook for Freelancers, Authors, and Publishers which is proving to be a much better resource. I also bought What Editors Do: The Art, Craft, and Business of Book Editing and it was really interesting to read about what various editors do in their roles.

I am reading these books at the same time that I am reading books about writing. Those books were soul-affirming, celebrating the art and craft and joy of writing. Where are the soul-affirming books about editing? Do they exist? The one exception has been some talk about editing and revising in Thunder and Lightning by Natalie Goldberg, but other than that, nothing.

I took my lamentations to Twitter, because is me, and Margy Thomas reached out to me about a book she is currently writing about exactly that topic, as well as a series of free videos on editing for #AcWriMo, called a kinder, gentler approach to editing:

This Academic Writing Month, November 2018, I’m trying something new. Every day throughout #AcWriMo, I’m going to release a short video with a reflection question that I’m using in my writing practice that day. If these questions resonate with you, you’re invited to use them in your own practice throughout the month too, in whatever way you find most useful.

[…]

Unlike other approaches to #AcWriMo, this exercise is not about pursuing quantitative goals that revolve around word quotas, time logs, and submission deadlines. Instead, we are pursuing an intention: we aim to make the kind of deep conceptual progress that is hard to measure (and hard to brag about on Twitter) but indispensable to producing writing that will ultimately be powerful and compelling for the reader.

I am REALLY looking forward to this series as I gear up to write (and edit) in November.

The great Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, it is said, drew his conceptions of god and the universe from his work as an optician, grinding lenses day after day. He lived a life singularly devoted to glass, in which his “evenings to evenings are equal.” So wrote Jorge Luis Borges in a poetic appreciation of Spinoza, of which he later commented, “[Spinoza] is polishing crystal lenses and is polishing a rather vast crystal philosophy of the universe. I think we might consider those tasks parallel. Spinoza is polishing his lenses, Spinoza is polishing vast diamonds, his ethics.”

The polishing of lenses, and work in optics generally, has a long philosophical pedigree, from the experiments of Renaissance artists and scholars, to the natural philosophers of the Scientific Revolution who made their own microscopes and pondered the nature of light. Over a century after Spinoza’s birth, polymath artist and thinker Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published his great work on optics, just one of many directions he turned his gaze. Unlike Spinoza, Goethe had little use for concepts of divinity or for systematic thinking.

But unlike many freethinking aristocratic dilettantes who were a fixture of his age, Goethe–-writes poet Philip Brantingham—“was a universal genius, one of those talents whose works transcend race, nation, language-and even time.” It’s a dated concept, for sure, but when we think of genius in the old Romantic sense, we most often think of Goethe, as a poet, philosopher, and scientist. When he turned his attention to optics and the science of color, Goethe refuted the theories of Newton and created some enduring scientific art, which would later inspire philosophical iconoclasts like Wittgenstein and expressionist painters like Wassily Kandinsky.

We’ve featured Goethe’s most important scientific work, Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors), in a previous post. Now we can bring you the superior images above, from a first edition scan at Stockholm’s Hagerstromer Medical Library, who host a collection of scanned illustrations from dozens of first editions of naturalist texts. The collection spans a once suppressed physiology text by Descartes—another optics theorist—to Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring, the book that “launched the modern conservationist movement.” In-between, find scans of illustrations and photographs from the works of Carl Linnaeus, Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, and dozens of other natural philosophers and scientists who made significant contributions to medical science.

In the case of Goethe’s Theory of Colors (1810), we get a high-quality look at the images in what the author himself considered his best work. “Known as a fierce attack on Newton’s demonstration that white light is composite,” writes the Hagerstromer Library, “Goethe’s colour theory remains an epochmaking work.” Goethe’s illustrations came directly from “a large number of observations of subjective colour-perceptions, recorded with all the exactness of a scientist and the keen insight of an artist.” It’s partly the bridging of sciences and the arts—of Enlightenment and Romanticism—that has made Goethe such a remarkable figure in European intellectual history. But as many of the finely illustrated, carefully observed texts at the Hagerstromer Medical Library show, he wasn’t alone in that regard.

In addition to these classic texts, the Hagerstromer also hosts the Wunderkammer, an eclectic archive of (often quite bizarre) naturalist images and illustrations from the 16th to the 20th centuries. One MetaFilter user describes the collection thus:

Wunderkammer is a collection of high resolution images from old books in the Hagströmer Medical Library. Some of my favorites are sea anemones, nerve cells, rooster chasing off a monster, 16th Century eye surgery, muscles and bones of the hand and arm, elephant-headed humanoid and cupping. It can also be browsed by tag, broken up into subject (e.g. beast), emotion (e.g. strange), technique (e.g. chromolithography) and era (e.g. 18th Century).

via Metafilter

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Goethe’s Colorful & Abstract Illustrations for His 1810 Treatise, Theory of Colors: Scans of the First Edition is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

This past fall semester, the Open Library of the Humanities, or OLH, officially launched their publishing arm. The OLH is:

a charitable organisation dedicated to publishing open access scholarship with no author-facing article processing charges (APCs). We are funded by an international consortium of libraries who have joined us in our mission to make scholarly publishing fairer, more accessible, and rigorously preserved for the digital future.

As you can tell by the spelling, it originated out of the UK. The project leads are Martin Paul Eve, Senior Lecturer in Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London, and Caroline Edwards is Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. What started as a network of scholars, programmers, and librarians has evolved into a collective to support open-access publishing.

It currently publishes seven open access journals, but is seeking articles from across the humanities to submit for peer-review for what they are calling a “megajournal.”  The list of libraries supporting the initiative is long and impressive, and there seems to be a new library adding their support every other day. The platform is also working to “flip” existing subscription journals to an open-access model, but one where authors are never asked to pay. This means that scholarly society journals, for example, can keep their brand, their editorial practices, and still see a financial return, if necessary (because OLH works a bit like a “subscription” for supporting libraries)… but they can also go OA. The platform has already converted one journal [http://poetry.openlibhums.org/] and Eve says there are four more lined up for January [http://lingoa.eu/ - see The Chronicle's coverage of this particular development here].

Open-access is a fraught topic (although really, why?) in academia and academic publishing, particularly in the humanities, where grants don’t typically cover the cost of paying for open-access publishing the way science grants can and have, particularly overseas. How do we create sustainable platforms for open-access publishing? The MLA has recently introduced CORE (which ProfHacker Kathleen Fitzpatrick helped shape and wrote about, while Brain Croxall outlined some of the difficulties of going this route). Other institutions, such as my own, have introduced open access repositories for faculty.

What I appreciate about OLH is that I don’t have to try and find a journal that is interested in my particular form of research, as long as it fits somewhere in “the humanities”. Will that make it more likely to get published? Probably not, but it will certainly make me more likely to submit.

Would you submit or edit for OLH? What is your experience with Open Access publishing? 

Image: Library Bookshelf

Remember disfiguring binders with band logos and lyrics, doodling in the margins of textbooks, idly marking the fore edges with ball point designs?

At most, such pursuits helped pass a few minutes in study hall.

How long would it take to undo all this handiwork?

Clearly much, much longer than it took to create. In the above episode of the Japanese documentary series, The Fascinating Repairmen, Tokyo-based book conservator Nobuo Okano brings over 30 years of experience to bear on a tattered, middle school English-to-Japanese dictionary. This is not the sort of job that can be rushed.

Its original owner must be driven by sentiment in hiring a master craftsman to restore the book as a present for his college-bound daughter. Surely it would be just as easy, possibly even more convenient, for the young woman in question to look up vocabulary online. If keeping things old school is the goal, I guarantee a recently published paperback would prove far cheaper than conservator Okano’s laborious fix.

He spends four hours just turning and pressing its battered pages—all 1000 of them—with tweezers and a tiny pink iron.

He also scrapes the spine free of crumbling glue, resets tattered maps, preserves the old cover’s title as a decorative element for the new one, and dispatches the initials of a teenage crush with one chop of his blade. (So much for sentiment…)

One need not speak Japanese to admire the painstaking craftsmanship that will keep this beat-up old book out of the landfill.

Other episodes follow other craftspeople as they lavish attention on a suitcase, grater, and a stuffed toy penguin. Watch a complete playlist here.

via Colossal

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

In 1960, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir ventured to Cuba during, as he wrote, the “honeymoon of the revolution.” Military strongman Fulgencio Batista’s regime had fallen to Fidel Castro’s guerilla army and the whole country was alight with revolutionary zeal. As Beauvoir wrote, “after Paris, the gaiety of the place exploded like a miracle under the blue sky.”

At the time, Sartre and de Beauvoir were internationally renown, the intellectual power couple of the 20th century. Beauvoir’s book, The Second Sex (1949), laid the groundwork for the feminism movement, and her book The Mandarins won France’s highest literary award in 1954. Sartre’s name had become a household word. The philosophy he championed – Existentialism – was being read and debated around the world. And his political activism — loudly condemning France’s war in Algeria, for instance — had given him real moral authority. When Sartre was arrested in 1968 for civil disobedience, Charles de Gaulle pardoned him, noting, “You don’t arrest Voltaire.” As Deirdre Bair notes in her biography of Beauvoir, “Sartre became the one intellectual whose presence and commentary emerging governments clamored for, as if he alone could validate their revolutions.” So it’s not terribly surprising that Fidel Castro wined and dined the two during their month in Cuba.

Cuban photographer Alberto Korda captured the couple as they met with Castro, Che Guevara and other leaders of the revolution. One picture (above) is of Guevara in his combat boots and trademark beret, lighting a cigar for the French philosopher. Sartre looks small and unhealthy compared to the strapping, magnetic revolutionary. Sartre was apparently impressed by the time he spent with the guerilla leader. When Che died in Bolivia seven years later, Sartre famously wrote that Guevara was “not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age.”

Later, Korda caught them as they were guided through the streets of Havana. And as you can see (below), that iconic image of Guevara, later plastered on T-shirts and Rage Against the Machine album covers, is on that same role of film.

When the couple returned to Paris, Sartre wrote article after article extolling the revolution. Beauvoir, who was equally impressed, wrote, “For the first time in our lives, we were witnessing happiness that had been attained by violence.”

Yet their enthusiasm for the regime cooled when they returned to Cuba a year later. The streets of Havana had little of the joy as the previous year. When they talked to factory workers, they heard little but parroting of the official party line. Beauvoir and Sartre ultimately denounced Castro (along with a bunch of other intellectual luminaries like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Octavio Paz) in an open letter that criticized him for the arrest of Cuban poet Herberto Padillo.

You can read more about the life and photography of Alberto Korda in the 2006 book, Cuba: by Korda.

Photos above by Alberto Korda.

via Critical Theory

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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring one new drawing of a vice president with an octopus on his head daily.  The Veeptopus store is here.

Photos of Jean-Paul Sartre & Simone de Beauvoir Hanging with Che Guevara in Cuba (1960) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

The post Photos of Jean-Paul Sartre & Simone de Beauvoir Hanging with Che Guevara in Cuba (1960) appeared first on Open Culture.

On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. Most of us know this — or at least if we don’t know the exact date, we know it happened in 1914, 100 years ago. We also know that the spark of the killing ignited the international geopolitical tinderbox just waiting to flame into the First World War. Yet as military historians often remind us, no one event can really start a conflict of that unprecedented scale any more than one event can stop it. The second half of the year 1914 saw a series of interrelated crises, responses, counter-crises, and counter responses that, these hundred years on, few of us could cite off the top of our heads.

We can compensate for the century between us and the Great War by reading up on it, of course. Of the countless volumes available, I personally recommend Geoff Dyer’s The Missing of the Somme. But nothing brings home the detailed reality of this ever-more-distant “huge murderous public folly,” in the words of J.B. Priestly, like looking at color photos from the front.

That color photography exists of anything in mid-1910s Europe, much less as momentous and disastrous a period as World War I, still surprises some people. We owe these shots to the efforts of German photographer Hans Hildebrand, as well as to his country’s already-established appreciation for the art and adeptness in engineering its tools. “In 1914, Germany was the world technical leader in photography and had the best grasp of its propaganda value,” writes R.G. Grant in World War I: The Definitive Visual History. “Some 50 photographers were embedded with its forces, compared with 35 for the French. The British military authorities lagged behind. It was not until 1916 that a British photographer was allowed on the Western Front.” But among his countrymen, only Hildebrand took pictures in color.

“The overwhelming majority of photos taken during World War I were black and white,” writes Spiegel Online, where you can browse a gallery of eighteen of his photos, “lending the conflict a stark aesthetic which dominates our visual memory of the war.” Hildebrand’s images thus stand out with their almost unreal-looking vividness, a result achieved not simply by his use of color film, but by his relatively long experience with a still fairly new medium. He’d already founded a color film society in his native Stuttgart three years before the Archduke’s assassination, and had tried his hand at autochrome printing as early as 1909.

Though not himself a dyed-in-the-wool propagandist, he did need to pose the soldiers for these photos, due to the lack of a film sensitive enough to capture actual action. Still, they give us a clearer idea of the situation than do most contemporary images. Hardly a glorification, Hildebrand’s work seems to speak to what those of us now, one hundred years in the future, would come to see in World War I: its misery, its oppressive sense of futility, and the haunting destruction it left behind.

via Dangerous Minds

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

The First Color Photos From World War I, on the German Front is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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Back in January, 2012, we mentioned that the Guggenheim (the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed modern art museum in NYC) had put 65 art catalogues on the web, all free of charge.

We’re happy to report that, between then and now, the number of free texts has grown to 109. Published between 1937 and 1999, the art books/catalogues offer an intellectual and visual introduction to the work of Alexander Calder, Edvard Munch, Francis Bacon, Gustav Klimt & Egon Schiele, Fernand Léger, and Kandinsky. Plus there are other texts (e.g., Masterpieces of Modern Art and Abstract Expressionists Imagists) that tackle meta movements and themes.

Anyone interested in the history of the Guggenheim will want to spend time with a collection called “The Syllabus.” It contains five books by Hilla Rebay, the museum’s first director and curator. Together, they let you take a close look at the art originally housed in the Guggenheim when the museum first opened its doors in 1939.

To read any of these 109 free art books, you will just need to follow these simple instructions. 1.) Select a text from the collection. 2.) Click the “Read Catalogue Online” button. 3.) Start reading the book in the pop-up browser, and use the controls at the very bottom of the pop-up browser to move through the book. 4.) If you have any problems accessing these texts, you can find alternate versions on Archive.org.

You can find many more free art books from the Getty and the Met below.

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The Guggenheim Puts 109 Free Modern Art Books Online is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

The post The Guggenheim Puts 109 Free Modern Art Books Online appeared first on Open Culture.