Beethoven wasn’t just history’s greatest composer but also one of its greatest human beings

For Hume, poets were “liars by profession.” For Sir Philip Sidney, the poet "affirmeth" nothing and "therefore never lieth.” When, exactly, does literature lie?   

A Collection of Children’s School Notebooks from Around the World

For the past 15 years, the folks at the Exercise Book Archive have been compiling a collection of children’s school notebooks from around the world. In the extensive digital archive, you can find writings, drawings, and aimless doodling in exercise books from as far back as 1773 from countries like the US, Ghana, Latvia, Brazil, and Finland.

The Exercise Book Archive is an ever-growing, participatory archive of old exercise books that allows everyone to discover the history, education, and daily life of children and youth of the past through this unique material. The Archive includes hundreds of exercise books from more than 30 different countries and dated from the late 1700s to the early 2000s. It is preserved and managed by the Milan-based NPO Quaderni Aperti (literally, Open Exercise Books).

If you follow them on Instagram, they are pulling some interesting pieces out of the archive. And if you happen to have any old exercise books from your youth (or your parents’ or grandparents’ youth) lying around, you can donate them to the cause.

Beethoven wasn’t just history’s greatest composer but also one of its greatest human beings 

His drunkenness and deafness all fed into his audacious acts of musical risk-taking

 

Here Beethoven is using shock tactics. Music critics, unimpressed by the hallowed status of the ‘Ode to Joy’, still bicker like military historians over whether the composer miscalculated. I don’t think he did, but it’s an extreme example of the risk-taking that distinguishes Beethoven from every other composer, including the only two that posterity regards as his equals, Bach and Mozart. (For what it’s worth, I think the latter matched his level of inspiration but not quite his achievement, though I wouldn’t be saying that if Beethoven, like Mozart, had died at 35.) Those risks are the essence of Beethoven; it’s barely an exaggeration to say that he takes at least one on every page he writes. To put it another way, he’s always trying to achieve something new.

Some of his gambles have an in-your-face quality: the ear-splitting dissonances in the first movement of the Eroica symphony; the invasion of the ‘Agnus Dei’ of the Missa Solemnis by the drums of war and the singers’ neurotic response; or, less noisily, the simple piano chord that opens the Fourth Piano Concerto, which in that context is almost as obtrusive as the cry of ‘O Freunde…’.

Why rank all 5,279 movies of the 2010s? Or watch 31 consecutive hours of superhero movies? Welcome to the age of extreme film criticism - binging on steroids 

For example, in April 2018, AMC theaters offered a promotion in which they screened 12 Marvel movies in succession leading up to the release of the latest entry, Avengers: Infinity War. Who would willingly undergo such punishment? Hundreds of super-fans, and at least two esteemed film critics. IndieWire critic David Ehrlich and The New York Times’s Jason Bailey both attended the marathon in Times Square, where they joined Marvel fans in a 31-hour test of focus, sleep deprivation, intestinal fortitude, and nasal courage. Bailey wrote that many viewers chose to eat their breakfast in the lobby because, after 18 hours, the theater smelled like “day-old body odor, stale popcorn and old socks.”

Their published diaries, each rippling with gallows humor, read like letters from soldiers at war. Ehrlich says that the main theater looked like a scene from Lord of the Flies, later referring to the venue as a “boiling cauldron of farts.” Stuck somewhere between reporting and criticism, these are delightful reads with slippery purposes. Ehrlich sneaks in some thoughtful insights about the films, and Bailey makes an admirable attempt to understand the super-fan mindset, interviewing several of the attendees. Ultimately, it produces an effect similar to reality television. We read them gasping at what a critic must do to earn a living these days.