Hunting for the earliest documented picture of a reader with a medieval book.

medievalfragments

By Erik Kwakkel (@erik_kwakkel)

When I started this post I set out to answer a very simple query: what is the oldest photograph we have of a real reader interacting with a medieval manuscript? The quest was sparked by a 19th-century photograph I tweeted last weekend of the Cincinnati Public Library, a picture that is both attractive and powerful. It takes us into a large, dark room, with high ceilings. Light is sprinkled over high stacks of books, which look like matchboxes. Cast-iron pillars hold up the ceiling and give the place the appearance of a cathedral, where readers come to worship the book. In front of a bookcase we see a man taking a book off the shelf. Wearing a white shirt and contrasting sharply with his dark surroundings, he is demanding our attention: the reader is the focus of this scene.

The photograph looks unreal, more…

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Anatomy of a Rebel

Is it easy to spot a rebel from a sea of crowd? It shouldn’t be that difficult given that rebel should stand out from the rest by his very nature. However, I observe that we make a crucial mistake in identifying a rebel. The defining qualities of a rebel, I believe, are quite different from the ones that we normally attach to this specimen. So what are these defining qualities I allude to?

 By design, a rebel chooses not to conform. So is that boy in your class, who throws a chalk at the teacher, a rebel? Is the girl, who gets 4 piercings on her eyebrows and ears, a rebel? Is that office worker, who finds excuses to shirk his work and still get a raise, a rebel?

I’ll answer all the above questions in the negative. Why you may ask? Think about it. A rebel is someone who does not CONFORM. This conformity is defined in the context of the norms, trends and fashion set by one’s immediate peer group. This is the group in which you exist for a majority of the time, outside of your family, and are always trying to appease and seek acceptance from.

So if you are teenager binging and smoking at the college fresher’s party, you are not a rebel. You are just conforming to what has been defined cool by your peers. Same goes for the class clown and the bad-ass who rides a bike without a license. They are just conforming for the sake of being “cool”. It is not rebellion, just plain and simple conformity.

The Acme syndrome

Come to the edge.
We might fall.
Come to the edge.
It’s too high!
COME TO THE EDGE!
And they came,
And he pushed,
And they flew.

– Christopher Logue

The education and social environment I grew up in exhibits something I like to call the Acme syndrome.

The term harks back to my days in school when I used to watch a lot of cartoons. It was a time when a lot of new cartoon channels (Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, Pogo, Hungama, Disney etc.) were establishing their presence in India. I, and I have reason to believe that many others of my age, found the content entertaining. Yet, at the same time these cartoons were what Randy Pausch calls ‘a head fake’ in his last lecture. I also found myself learning about new cultures, history, geography, music among other things while I watched these cartoons.

Among these cartoons, Looney Tunes was the pick of the lot because of the variety of voices, the wackiness and its numerous pop culture references. It is one of the characters, Wile E. Coyote, that inspired my observation about the Acme syndrome. Whenever Mr Wile E. went out to catch his prey, the elusive Roadrunner, he would order elaborate booby traps from a company called Acme. Every single time, probably owing more to his own fault, the trap backfired. I was always left wondering that why he never tried out the same device more than once.

It is similar how we educate kids. We stigmatize their mistakes always keeping them in the fear of punishment if they make a wrong move. This philosophy might have its origins in military schools where future soldiers had to internalise the fact that mistakes could be fatal. But the method has lost relevance in public schools, not only does for social sciences but even core sciences and mathematics, as Marvin Minsky explains in this essay. I feel that recognising the existence of this ACME syndrome is the first step before we can think about any real educational reforms.

Alan Moore on Sexual content

Alan Moore had no qualms in calling ‘Lost Girls’ pornography. He wanted to call it by its proper name instead a rosy name such as erotica which is possibly a word invented by the elite to justify and possibly romaticise their consumption of sexually explicit content.

Certainly it seemed to us [Moore and Gebbie] that sex, as a genre, was woefully under-represented in literature. Every other field of human experience—even rarefied ones like detective, spaceman or cowboy—have got whole genres dedicated to them. Whereas the only genre in which sex can be discussed is a disreputable, seamy, under-the-counter genre with absolutely no standards: [the pornography industry]—which is a kind of Bollywood for hip, sleazy ugliness.