Mountains have always beckoned to dissenters, rebels, and subversives. It is not only the air that thins out at higher elevations: the tendrils of the state do too. Small bands of people only need to hike a while to find a congenial refuge in the mountains; it’s far harder for imperial administrators with their vast caravans to locate all the hideouts. Throughout history, therefore, people have climbed upwards to escape the state. It is not only to take leave of the irksome tax collector; it’s also to break free of the problems that accompany dense populations – epidemics, conscription, and the threat of state-scale warfare. As a consequence, people who dwell in the mountains tend to be seen as unruly folks, be they Appalachian Americans or Highland Scots.
Can’t help but read this in the light of a Star Wars pilot script. Imperials, rebels, dissenters? Wasn’t Hoth a giant ice mountain? Or at least it had a mountain range. Also, see the dwarves from the Hobbit. Proper dissenter-rebels they were too.
Extending the observation further. Are mountain visitors dissenters, rebels, and subversives? Or only permanent residents?
Plenty of mind expanding ideas and observations in this year’s edition.
DB: what or who has had the biggest influence on your work? ECA: my family certainly was a big influence on me. my father was a geologist and draftsman for a texas oil company in the early 60s, and I got my love of tiny, neat writing and labeling things from him, as well as an affinity for maps. my mother was a painter whose oil portraits were all around me growing up. of course both of my older brothers influenced the stories and kinds of imaginary experiences I was exposed to and liked.
but my biggest influence as an illustrator and storyteller is walt disney. he is if anything in my book, an underrated storyteller/artist. to me, he’s focused completely on impact. all he cares about is how is this going to work on the viewer? his philosophy and mission is to be the stand-in for the viewer before a thing is made. so he’s focused on clarity and emotion and speed and pleasure and the whole symphonic experience of the story. as opposed to, say, making a totally faithful adaptation of kipling. this is what a storyteller should be like, a kind of advance team for the viewer/reader.
during the period in my early twenties when I was starting to do more writing (at the same time when I re-captured my love of maps in stories) I also started watching the movies I’d loved as a kid again. I’d sort of forgotten most of them. it was good timing, because I was finally out of the educational system, free from critique and judgment. I was just immersing myself in the works, free to embrace and love them on their own and to scrutinize what it was they were doing, how they were made, and why they worked. re-visiting the great works of your childhood is maybe a good thing for anyone to do who’s interested in stories and illustrating.
Fascinating how Eric’s father was a geologist and draftsman, and his mother a painter of oil portraits.
Eric’s work appears to combine each of his parent’s professions. The colored pencils, the portraits, the maps, the neat small writing, the labeling. The influences are there from both sides.
We all know Wes Anderson. But Wes’s younger brother, — Eric Chase Anderson, is way underrated. He’s an illustrator, documentarian, and novelist. He also played the voice of Kristofferson in the Fantastic Mr. Fox.
In this excerpt from The Life Aquaticwith Steve Zissou Criterion Collection edition collectors pamphlet, Eric and Wes share their drawing origin stories and how Eric’s drawings influence Wes’s movies.
It begins with little drawings. Little drawings lead to the set and character details that show up on film:
WES ANDERSON: In a review of somebody else’s movie in the paper the other day, a critic referred to me as a miniaturist or something like that. I guess because I put in a lot of physical details, and I like cooking up extra ideas to add to the sets and costumes, and inventing an imaginary world. But what I’m more inspired by is something that happened to me or someone in my life who had a strong effect on me, or a novel, short story, play, or a movie where the characters moved me, or where I was swept up in it. I do like little drawings, however. We do have stuff in the movies that is tiny, you know? A Swiss Army Knife, a punctuality award pin, something written in the margin of a book.
CRITERION: What’s a little thing in The Life Aquatic?
WA: The Kentucky Zissou fly.
Here they describe how their father’s work notebooks act as inspiration and source material:
ERIC CHASE ANDERSON: Which is one of two pieces of artwork I did for The Life Aquatic. The second is when they get to the bottom of the ocean and Bill Murray takes out a notebook and looks at it.
WA: This notebook is not exactly a crucial element of the story, or a crucial element of anything at all, but it’s personal because to me it’s really inspired by our father’s work notebooks.
ECA: Oh, yeah, right. Exactly.
WA: The way he organizes his stuff is very much, like, this points to that, and the little note indicates this over here, with lots of arrows. His brain is kind of graphic.
ECA: The source material is deeply embedded in our minds.
The Anderson brother’s drawing origin story:
C: Who started drawing first?
WA: Well, I started drawing first, because I had a four-year jump. I’m older.
ECA: I didn’t start drawing until I was in my midtwenties.
C: Really?
ECA: Yeah. I wasn’t necessarily good at it. I had to draw once in college. I had to design a poster for a play I directed. It looks just like my drawings now, except it was a cutout of an ant—like an old Saul Bass cutout—and I labeled the legs of the ant with things from the movie: mystery, car crash, dead brother.
WA: I had three types of drawings that I would obsessively draw. One was trees. Giant trees that people lived in, with people doing motorcycle jumps on one branch, a swimming pool built on another branch, elevators in the trunk, and a helipad.
C: Tree cities?
WA: Tree cities, basically. Then I had imaginary mansions. Then I had giant drum sets that would fill five pages taped together, with a guy in the middle and about two thousand drums.
This is obvious, but drawings make excellent gifts:
ECA: I made a Christmas present for Wes that was a map of this famous country house where I house-sat in Virginia. I didn’t know much about paints. It was something I was doing without really thinking about it. I gave it to Wes, and a year went by. The next Christmas, I made a couple more maps: a house map of where we grew up, with different things that we had experienced as kids, like escape routes from the second floor, you know, a loose floorboard, or where a pencil sharpener was, a strange angle in the bathroom. Wes and I had been collaborating on a Christmas present for my sister, which was a map of a minivan. We talked about it, and we both came up with the text that each of the four kids would have in relation to the van, Then overnight, Christmas Eve, I drew it. It was a good Christmas present.
WA: It was the process of him segueing from the maps being something that represent a space to telling stories—although even the first one that you did had an element of that.
ECA: Wes had an idea that I should make a map for the people at St. John’s, where we shot Rushmore. I sent it to Wes, but I didn’t package it well. It arrived spindled via FedEx, with a hole punched through it. He said, “It’s really good, but I think there’s a couple of changes you can make, and you can do it one more time.” That was fine, because the next time I did it, many more of the ideas were in much better shape to be presentable. Wes liked it so much he said, “There’s no way I’m giving it to St. John’s.”
WA: I made a good dupe for them.
And the process of how Eric’s drawings will influence Wes’s movie’s directly:
C: So, turning to The Royal Tenenbaums—now the drawings precede the making of the film.
ECA: I made wall paper for Richie’s room. First, I made drawings at home really small. Then those went to a warehouse, I think in Queens, where they used blueprint machines to blow up each little tiny drawing. Then they used a stencil to punch through and leave a charcoal line. Then they finished the outlines with a Sharpie.
WA: What it’s supposed to be is, the walls were painted on by Richie Tenenbaum, and they’re his record of the family’s memories. So for Tenebaums, Eric made, one, a set of drawings of all the sets I asked him to do; two, Richie’s drawings on his walls; three, a series of portraits of his sister; and four, the DVD itself— which has, I think, the best cover.
ECA: I have a memory of sitting in a coffee shop in Houston. I was there with Wes, and he was figuring out how to tell the beginning of The Royal Tenenbaums through a tour of the house and how to introduce all this information. He was thinking out loud, and I was kind of following him. It might have been one of those Christmastimes when mapmaking was in the air. I remember him saying, “It’s a map, but it’s not a map on paper. It’s a map in movie style. We have eight minutes of movie map.”
C: How much of this material comes from your shared experiences?
WA: Well, there’s always some inspiration from real life or from my personal experience. Some characters are inspired by a couple of my friends rolled together, and some come from two lines of a play I saw, and some come out of nowhere. There are a few drawings on Richie’s walls, for instance—an image of an archaeological excavation with the mother—which refer to our own past. There’s one thing on Richie’s wall that I didn’t suggest—an image of a day a tiger escaped from the zoo near their house. Well, that’s not in the movie or referred to anywhere. That was something Eric made up. Only now, at this moment, I realize, we should have added that into the movie. That would have been good for that beginning-of-the-movie section where it refers to different things in the family’s history. You can hear Alec Baldwin say . . .
ECA: “One day, a Bengal tiger walked down Archer Avenue.” The kids would be inside the basement, looking out the window through the burglar bars.
WA: What would be the thing he would say after that? There would be a cut to the front page, a tiger in the snow — we would have to make up the newspaper — “The Morning Sun reported that it was killed after eating three dogs and a Siamese.”
ECA: But the drawings sometimes have little bits of echoes of stories that we liked as kids — even if they didn’t really happen to us — because we all traded books and things. Imaginary events can be shared experiences too.
WA: That’s good. That’s what books and movies are. Imaginary events can be shared experiences too.
I find Eric Chase Anderson is similar to the late Jason Polan, in that whenever you see his illustrations, it compels you to pick up a pencil and draw.
The Kathrine Rundell cluster reading continues. This from her book Super-Infinite.
Here she gives a brilliant breakdown on the practice of common placing through the eyes of John Donne.
The practice of commonplacing – a way of seeking out and storing knowledge, so that you have multiple voices on a topic under a single heading – colours Donne’s work; one thought reaches out to another, across the barriers of tradition and ends up somewhere fresh and strange.
Hoarding can have negative connotations, but for commonplacing it’s required:
Because, simply, Donne wouldn’t be Donne if he hadn’t lived in a commonplacing era; it nurtured his collector’s sensibility, hoarding images and authorities. He had a magpie mind obsessed with gathering.
Commonplacing isn’t chewing up ideas and spitting them out. It’s combining disparate ideas into five course suppers.
Crucially for Donne, though, the commonplace book wasn’t designed to be used for the regurgitation of memorised gobbets: it was to offer the raw material for a combinatorial, plastic process.
From scraps to wholes. Also Dr. Johnson wasn’t a Donne fan.
For Donne, apparently unrelated scraps from the world were always forming new wholes. Commonplacing was a way to assess material for those new connections: bricks made ready for the unruly palaces he would build.
Donne’s heterogeneity, which so annoyed Johnson, wasn’t a game: it was a form of discipline. Commonplacing plucks ideas out of their context and allows you to put them down against other, startling ones.
Donne used the term “commonplacer” first?! Of course.
It’s telling that the first recorded use of the word ‘commonplacer’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is Donne’s.
The Dutch scholar Erasmus was also a commonplacing forefather. He codified the practice:
The commonplace book allowed readers to approach the world as a limitless resource; a kind of ever-ongoing harvesting. It was Erasmus, the Dutch scholar known as ‘the prince of the humanists’, who codified the practice. The compiler, he wrote, should ‘ make himself as full a list of place-headings as possible’ to put at the top of each page: for instance, beauty, friendship, decorum, faith, hope, the vices and virtues. It was both a form of scholarship and, too, a way of reminding yourself of what, as you moved through the world, you were to look out for: a list of priorities, of sparks and spurs and personal obsessions. Donne’s book must surely have had: angels, women, faith, stars, jealousy, gold, desire, dread, death. Then, Erasmus wrote
whatever you come across in any author, particularly if it is especially striking, you will be able to note it down in its appropriate place; be it a story or a fable or an example or a new occurrence or a pithy remark or a witty saying or any other clever form of words…Whenever occasion demands, you will have ready to hand a supply of material for spoken or written composition.
Who is the ideal commonplacer?
The ideal commonplacer is half lawyer, building up evidence in the case for and against the world, and half treasure hunter; and that’s what Donne’s mind was in those early days.
Most people blog and write online to share what they know. To look smart. It’s understandable. It’s human nature.
But I enjoyed online writer extraordinaire Adaobi‘s approach. Asking the online world questions.
Her question straight out – how does one become a polymath?
– How can I develop an up-to-date taste for what “good” looks like faster? – How can I reverse engineer great work faster? – How can I access my subconscious faster? – How can I ponder on multiple things simultaneously? – How can I identify top-tier talent in new fields? – How do I choose which skills to cultivate in a new field? – How can I develop a better sense of bad ideas? – How do I avoid dogma? – How can I ask better questions?
There are many reasons to learn about India. India is the world’s second most populous country and has a rich and diverse culture. It has a long and fascinating history, and has made significant contributions to science, mathematics, literature, and the arts. Understanding India and its people can give you a greater appreciation for the diversity of the world and can broaden your perspective. Additionally, India is an emerging economic and political power, so learning about the country can help you to understand the global landscape.
Also, GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer.
Here’s how ChatGPT explained it to me:
Generative: The model is capable of generating human-like text. It can produce coherent and contextually relevant responses given a prompt.
Pre-trained: Before being fine-tuned for specific tasks, the model goes through a pre-training phase. During this phase, it learns from a massive amount of text data, gaining a broad understanding of language patterns and structures.
Transformer: The Transformer is a type of deep learning architecture introduced in the paper “Attention Is All You Need” by Vaswani et al. It utilizes attention mechanisms to process input data in parallel, making it highly efficient for tasks like language modeling.
From Ishiguro’s Top 10 movies of all time entry on the Criterion Channel site. Ishiguro wrote the screenplay for the modern version of Ikiru – Living, which released in select American theaters this weekend.
I first saw Ikiru when I was a child growing up in England, and it had a profound influence on me. That’s not just because it was one of the very few Japanese movies I was able to see at that time, but because it said something really encouraging to me, something I held with me all through my student years and as I was becoming an adult. It told me you don’t have to be a superstar. You don’t have to do something magnificent that the world applauds you for. Chances are that life is going to be relatively ordinary—at least that’s what I had imagined for myself. For most of us, life is very circumscribed and humble and frustrating; it’s a daily grind. But with some supreme effort, even a small life can turn into something satisfying and magnificent.
Ideas of India became one of my favorite podcasts in 2022.
In the 2022 in Review episode producer Dallas Floer’s posed the question to Shruti Rajagopalan.
Why should we talk about India more?
Three summaries from their conversation:
Avoid cultural boo-boos. India is much more diverse than our immediate social circles. If you at the moment have young children, there’s a high likelihood they will marry someone Indian.
India’s population is young, and getting younger. The global talent pool will continue disperse from there.
As India’s infrastructure continues to develop, Indians will soon dominate the internet, YouTube, twitter, streaming apps, etc.
FLOER: I have a general question—and I think this rounds out this first part of the discussion nicely—but why should we talk about India more? Why should more people be listening to, not just your expertise, but anyone who spends their time doing research and talking about India?
RAJAGOPALAN: The world demographics are changing, and I think we are not good at looking at the 30-, 40-year horizon, because of Twitter and all the other things we talked about. We’re so in the moment of what’s happening now. If you look at global demographics—and I recently started a Substack, it’s called “Get Down and Shruti,” and the first post was on this topic—the developed world is depopulating, or at least, the fertility rates are dropping quite rapidly. In fact, China will start depopulating next year, and it’s so far the largest country in terms of population.
FLOER: Yes.
RAJAGOPALAN: India will not depopulate until 2065. India’s population, which is right now 1.4 billion, will continue to grow and then start to go down only in 2065 when it peaks. Over the next 40 years, China will lose a quarter of a billion people and India will gain a quarter of a billion people. That’s like the size of Brazil and three-quarters the size of the United States, so that’s big numbers. What this means is India is very young; it’s only going to get younger as the world gets older.
FLOER: Yes.
RAJAGOPALAN: One in five young people in the world actually live in India, and half the Indian population is below 25. Even for very self-serving reasons, if people have nothing to do with India, the global talent pool, the workforce is going to come from India. And as India starts peaking, then it’s going to come from Africa. That’s where we need to pay more attention. The world just doesn’t pay enough attention to India or Africa, so that’s the big picture.
The other part of it is, India is also a subcontinent. It’s 1.4 billion people. It’s stitched together as a collection of people with different—it’s actually, religiously, the most diverse place in the world. It’s linguistically the most diverse place in the world. There’s, of course, caste heterogeneity. For these reasons, it’s difficult to understand India. Thinking that India is your buddy from accounting or IT in your office, that’s like one type of India and one type of Indian that you may meet in your social circle or in the neighborhood or in the office place.
India is actually very diverse and requires a lot of context to actually understand. If the future is India, and you’re going to have more people coming to universities, and there’s a good chance that some of the older listeners in this episode, their children end up marrying an Indian they met in college.
FLOER: Sure.
RAJAGOPALAN: Even if the base reason is you don’t want to make a cultural boo-boo in front of your future in-laws, you’ve got to know some cultural context. You’ve got to know a little bit more about India. I think, for various reasons, of course, if you’re a university or if you’re hiring, if you work in the AI or tech space, all the talent there is coming from India. So for different groups, India might be more or less relevant. If you work in the climate space, you should really focus on India. It’s going to be one of the largest-growing spaces, which means we need to worry about technology and how to control carbon emissions. It’s different for different people, but I think everyone should pay more attention to India.
FLOER: Yes.
RAJAGOPALAN: More generally, the baseline has to increase. And then, depending on what you do, you may want to zero in on certain kinds of books and podcasts and experts. Most Indians now have access to electricity. About 800 million-plus Indians have access to a smartphone, so now they’re on the internet. We are slowly getting to a point where the internet will also get dominated by Indians. In terms of natural language processing, more people sound like me than sound like you, Dallas. More people will spell like me than spell like you and so on.
I think, with an overwhelming number of Indians on the internet, people will also see that landscape change faster than immigration or them visiting India. Their Netflix front page will change quite dramatically and so on.
