History, Communications, Comics, and Computers
My wife and I recently visited the Peabody Essex Museum‘s Lunar Attraction exhibit. One of the more unique features of the exhibit was that they put together a playlist and installed a listening station in the exhibit, where people could listen to […]
A friend posted Megan McArdle’s Bloomberg article “Seven Reasons We Hate Free-Range Parenting” on my Facebook feed today, and as I wrote my comments, it quickly became apparent that my response was just far too long for a Facebook comment. So I’m […]
A friend posted Megan McArdle’s Bloomberg article “Seven Reasons We Hate Free-Range Parenting” on my Facebook feed today, and as I wrote my comments, it quickly became apparent that my response was just far too long for a Facebook comment. So I’m […]
In April, the Society of Illustrators held the annual MOCCA Arts Festival, which I was lucky enough to speak at. They recorded it, and put it up on the web. So I thought I’d share it here in case anyone’s […]
“Sometimes we can coax these immigrants who come to us to dance and sing; but very rarely. They soon get shamed out of their cunning, and join our hosts of patrons who seek relief from monotonous toil in the dime show and the saloon, the “yellow” newspaper and magazine. Yes, it is we, with our over-commercialized life—commercialized drama and opera, commercialized book production and story-making—who have carried farthest this strangling of the arts of the folk. It is we through whom these participants in a living folk-culture sink to the lowest estate as passive patrons of our tawdry and tainted shows.
“No doubt the causes are complex. I shall not attempt an enumeration, but will limit myself to the consequences of the increasing vogue of the book, the mortal tyranny of print. I return, then, to my text that the book is killing the sensuous beauty and emotional appeal of literature. The book lies between us and the essentials of literary beauty. It lies between us and vital literary education. We read our lyrics and our stories, but we don’t sing them and recite them. We cannot even imagine tunes for them as we read—for those lovely lyrical overflows which flood Shakespeare’s plays with melody, for those songs of Burns, for those remaining folk-songs and ballads which are finding cold storage in our anthologies. They are gone with the crooning and lilting of our forefathers, with the singing games of childhood, with the great festivals of the folk.”
–From “The Blight of Literary Bookishness,” (1914) by Percival Chubb, Anti-Comics Crusader
This New Republic article on universities adopting policies that professors adopt “trigger warning” policies before material that may be potentially upsetting started a really interesting discussion among some of my friends on Facebook, and as I struggled with exactly what […]
“Of all the festering abominations, away with the Sunday newspaper. It is an imp of Hell and a child of the Devil… because it is a hodge-podge of lie, gossip, twaddle, and caricature. It ruins our Sundays, corrupts our morals, poisons our children and gives us head-aches.”
WEB DuBois, 1907
I’m trying to dig in to Herbert Crowley, and find a bit more about him. Please, if anyone has any ideas or suggestions, fire away! Dan Nadel has of course found a good bit of information. As has John Adcock. […]
“For some hours of the day practically the entire population of the Republic disappears under something in the nature of sixty thousand tons of woodpulp to the accompaniment of a noisy if not positively sanguinary struggle between Susie and Junior as to which has prior right to Mutt and Jeff.”
Stewart Chase, Leisure in a Machine Age, 1931
Comics Worlds and Art Worlds Bart Beaty’s recent book, Comics Versus Art, is a fascinating account of the relationship between comics and the fine arts, told through a series of case studies from the middle of the twentieth century to the […]
