Last year I wrote about the funny things monks drew in the margins of their manuscripts. In that same vain here is a whole blog dedicated to some of the weird illustrations that show up in these old hand written books. Check out Little Red laying eggs and Ugly Skeleton.
Whoa! Look at all these clowns. We all worked hard over the weekend to get ready for our public show next week. So far it’s impressively stupid in parts, in other parts head-slappingly ludicrous, and in still other parts it’s full hearted and funny. If you happen to be in or around Florence this Wednesday, Thursday or Friday, you’ll have to stop in and see us.
If you still can’t get enough, check out this interview from the New Victory Theater, with some clowns I met last summer in NYC at the Brick International Clown Theatre Festival. Enjoy reading what Billy and Summer say about this world of working clowns.
Read this excellent New Yorker profile on professional pickpocket Apollo Robbins. He’s a fascinating performer to watch. Here is a link to a video introducing his techniques.
What I particularly like about the profile is what he says about the choreography of people’s attention, a particularly important principal in telling stories or making theater. He says, “attention is like water. It flows. It’s liquid. You create channels to divert it, and you hope that it flows the right way.”
“It’s stepping outside yourself and seeing through the other person’s eyes, thinking through the other person’s mind, but it’s happening on a subconscious level.” He went on, “I can analyze how I do things, but the actual doing it—when the synapses just start firing—I can’t explain.”
“A lot of magic is designed to appeal to people visually, but what I’m trying to affect is their minds, their moods, their perceptions,” he told me. “My goal isn’t to hurt them or to bewilder them with a puzzle but to challenge their maps of reality.”
Challenging a person’s map of reality is a tall order. It necessarily means getting up close to your audience, and in a pickpocket’s case litterally encroaching on their personal space. Approaching a person head-on will make them immediately uncomfortable. “So, what I do is I give you a point of focus, say a coin. Then I break eye contact by looking down, and I pivot around the point of focus, stepping forward in an arc, or a semicircle, till I’m in your space.”
In this case the fixed point is the channel that diverts attention and allows the artist to swoop in undetected and get very close. Close enough to rifle around in the someone’s pocket and do some rearranging. “Not to hurt them or to bewilder them, but to challenge their maps of reality.”
Photographer Eric Valli. I love the color quality of these photos. They remind me of the glossy pages of old National Geographics. Click through some of the other stories on his page, I liked Honey Hunters too.
I’m right in the middle of reading the great historical whodunit, medieval mystery, Dominican detective novel The Name of the Rose. In part, it’s a book about books. “Books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told,” says William of Baskerville, a surely Sherlockian character to his Watson, Adso. Curiosity has been killing certain illuminatiors one of whom is guilty of drawing diabolic doodles in the margins of his manuscript.
…I know what torment it is for the scribe, the rubricator, the scholar to spend the long winter hours at his desk, his fingers numb around the stylus (when even in a normal temperature, after six hours of writing, the fingers are seized by the terrible monk’s cramp and the thumb aches as if it had been trodden on). And this explains why we often find in the margins of a manuscript phrases left by the scribe as testimony to his suffering (and his impatience), such as “Thank God it will soon be dark,” or “Oh, if I had a good glass of wine,” or also “Today it is cold, the light is dim, this vellum is hairy, something is wrong.” As an ancient proverb says, three fingers hold the pen, but the whole body works. And aches.
-Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
I was reading another hypertext when I came across another reference to these complaints and doodles. Here is a little article on this very subject from a new issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. It’s worth a look.