feuilleton

Quartz presents a really fascinating and under-appreciated glimpse on the strange, strained affair that the Chinese government has with Western social-networking heralds and mavens.

The dominant sites are banned from public-consumption, although it is not as if the average Chinese citizens were unaware of their existence and most businesses and state organs maintain their own internet presence on the same blocked sites. Possibly in order to curb curiosity and assuage rebellion, the state news agency Xinhua is featuring a segment of selected tweeted and shared items to give its audience a glimpse of how China is portrayed around. The articles seem pretty anodyne and cherry-picked to cast the country in the best light, but then again most regimes have highly propagandised mouth-pieces. Learning of this and of the sobering, unfamiliar mirror universe of applications that the Chinese make do with reminded me of the living tradition of the “lectores”—that is, news-readers, of the Cuban cigar factories, which is a really rich and fascinating story in its own right. The scope is of course very different and attestedly, the individual whose job it was to read to the workers as they rolled cigars usually elevated by popular consent, there for the emendation of the others. The juxtaposition of someone first anchoring the national, official newspaper, however, and the moving on to literature in the afternoon—whether subversive, unvetted or otherwise, makes me wish that this broadcast feuilleton might prove just as entertaining and broadening.

5x5

put the needle on the record: hard-won footage of a stylus on vinyl on a microscopic-scale

your moment of zen: cat serenely balances anything placed on her foot

spoiler-alert: Interstellar’s four-dimensional finale was filmed on an actual set, not just a computer-generated green-screen

atomic gardening: lethal doses of radiation have been used since the 1950s to create heartier, mutated food-crops

moai: neglected colossal US presidential busts in search of a home

pulp fiction or the sackfull of news

Advances in printing and enterprising publishers of Europe’s early modern period led to an explosion of literacy and voracious appetite for reading material. Long before penny dreadfuls, comic books and social-mediums, itinerate salesmen touted a compact and cheap format called chapbooks (known as Volksbucher in German), a single sheet of paper folded to accommodate as many as twenty four pages and was stitched together rather than bound. Publishers, with low overhead and minimal exposure to the frailties of public taste, would sell supplies to sometimes hapless, wandering booksellers on credit, who went from door to door or had a booth at the market.
The seller’s prospects and the success or failure of given titles to sell provided invaluable feedback and helped determined what would be reprinted and the character of the genre. These pamphlets covered all sorts of topic, most literate adults also trying their hands at writing—history, education, health, politics, travelogues, often through anecdotal and superficially consulted sources with a repetition and formulaic approach, and often bore the viral, most popular woodcuts of the day—whether that illustration had anything to do with the content or not. Though much criticised as pap for the masses, the surviving bulk of these booklets are cultural artefacts that reveal aspects of life during the Renaissance that would not have been preserved elsewhere.

5x5

flight-path: merry prankster living near an airport welcomes fretful passengers to the wrong city

i want to believe: nature reserve in Vancouver had the most screen time of any of the X-Files stars

prefab: Chinese engineers and architects construct flat-pack skyscrapers in record time

the place of shining light: holographic projector used to recreate the Bamiyan Buddha

identity politics: 1967 Mike Wallace documentary on the homosexuals