The trouble with months

Friday, February 5, 2021

The clean four calendar weeks of this February reminded my friend Kelli Anderson of “The International Fixed Calendar,” a 13-month calendar which she summarized this way:

• 28 days in every month
• Each week begins on Sun. / ends on Sat.
• Dates fall on the same day of the week every year
• To total 365 days, there’s a floater day
• From 1928-1989, Eastman-Kodak made all employees use it (wut??)

Here’s how the case was made in 1927 in an issue of The Outlook:

A “MONTH” does not mean anything. A day means something, A year means something. But a month? In the vernacular, what do you mean, month?

We cannot scrap our days or our years without scrapping the sun. We could but we do not want to scrap our weeks. Religious tradition, long habit, and convenience combine to make the week a very acceptable division of time. But we can (and, if we once come to see the awkwardness and inconvenience of them, we will) scrap our months….

A month is a wholly irrational division of time. It has no relation to anything in astronomy, or human experience. It is an inaccurate and varying measure of time that is a constant annoyance in business and a misleading unit in science. It has no religious significance.

A month is nothing but just a bad habit.

Harsh! But, I mean, they’re not completely wrong. Months are wacky! The idea of carving up time into new, industrial-friendly units seems insane, but then, all calendars are a little insane…

In Katherine Swift’s The Morville Hours, she writes:

Mankind has always had trouble with calendars. As human beings our personal experience of time may be infinitely elastic, but as societies we have always needed calendars, to fix future dates and record past ones. The earliest attempts may date back thirty thousand years. The trouble is that the natural markers of the passage of time — days, lunar months, and solar years — are all incommensurables. Attempts to combine them in a single calendar inevitably run into trouble. Taking the day as 1, the lunar cycle is approximately 29 days, 12 hours and 44 minutes, and the solar year 365 days, 5 hours and 48 minutes. The seasons and the calendar have always had a tendency to drift apart.

One of my favorite pages from *Keep Going*

Going back to that issue of The Outlook:

Long before the Christian era the Egyptians had a better set of months than we have. Then came along Julius Caesar and robbed February of a day and named one of the longer months after himself. Then came along Augustus Caesar and he took to himself the month that followed Julius’s, but because he wanted a month that was just as big as Julius’s he added a day to it. To do this he stole another day from February. Then he changed around some other days and left the set of calendar months in a jumble. And ever since then we have been putting up with this arbitrary arrangement as if it were as fixed as the tides and the circuit of the earth around the sun.

Now that every day is Groundhog Day, man-made time seems even more oppressive to me. With every new month, I think, “This’ll be the one!” and five days in, I want to murder it, and murder the calendar along with it.

If we have to have calendars, I do enjoy ones that that break me out of old ways of thinking about time. Last year, I had a lunar calendar hung up in my office, but this year we put up an astrological calendar that a fan sent me, not because we believe in astrology, but just to make time feel a little different, a little novel.

See also: Circular time vs. Linear time. Filed under: time

7 things to watch if you liked Derek DelGaudio’s In and Of Itself

Thursday, February 4, 2021

I really liked Derek DelGaudio’s new film directed by Frank Oz, In and Of Itself. (If you haven’t seen it, don’t read anything else about it, just go watch it.) I asked my friend, filmmaker and screenwriter James Francis Flynn, to make me a list of stuff to watch related to magic, illusion, and con artistry. Below is what he sent me.

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The Prestige
DelGaudio was a consultant on this 2006 Christopher Nolan film about rival stage magicians in turn of the century London.

Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay
A 2012 documentary about Ricky Jay, the famed magician, author, and historian, and those who inspired him to take up those trades.

Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants
A filmed stage show of Jay’s incredible sleight-of-hand work, directed by David Mamet.

House of Games
David Mamet’s directorial debut, which follows a successful author who becomes drawn into the underground world of card cheats and con artists.

The Sting
During The Great Depression, two professional grifters, played by Paul Newman and Robert Redford, plot to rip off a Chicago mob boss.

An Honest Liar
2014 documentary about James Randi, magician and professional skeptic who made it his life’s work to expose pseudoscientists, psychics, and fakes of all kinds.

Penn & Teller: Bullshit!
Showtime series wherein the magic duo often exposed cold readers, quacks, and scammers. As Penn said in the first episode, “Sure, we lie, cheat, and swindle; we’ve been known to deal in a bit of bullshit ourselves…One important difference: We tell you we’re lying.”

* * *

James Francis Flynn was born and raised in Oxford, Ohio. I met him when we were students at the Western College Program at Miami University. James currently works in TV and film and lives in Los Angeles with his wife and kids. Check out his latest short film, Social Distancing in Los Angeles, and his website: jamesfrancisflynn.com.

400 years of collage

Wednesday, February 3, 2021

“An Art Revolution, Made With Scissors and Glue” is a wonderfully-produced NYTimes “Close Read” column by Jason Farago, looking at Juan Gris’s 1914 “Still Life: The Table,” and talking about the Cubists’ use of collage and its impact on art.

My only quibble is with this sentence:

Okay, maybe it’s a little more than a quibble. I’ll let curator Patrick Elliott explain with this excerpt from his essay in the catalog for a thoughtful show I saw at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, “Cut And Paste: 400 Years of Collage”:

The idea of collage is so brilliant, so simple, so rich and imaginative in every way, that you might wonder why nobody had thought of it before. Well in fact they had, but historians of modern art have tended to ignore anything before 1912. Books on collage scarcely mention the fact that collage has a history stretching back hundreds of years. Almost all of the exhibitions of collage held around the world have started with Cubist collage. If pre-modern collage is discussed, it is treated dismissively as a hobby, as the world of amateurs, folk artists, women and children, or something the well-off did in private, at the dining-room table and showed only to family and friends.

This is a point I made in Newspaper Blackout: We think of collage and cut-up writing as a 20th-century invention, but there’s actually a 250-year-old history of cutting up texts, going at least as far back as Caleb Whitefoord skipping newspaper columns in the 1760s and Thomas Jefferson cutting up the gospels 50 years later. This work was done either in a pub to amuse friends (Whitefoord) or in private study (Jefferson), but it still happened.

I think the message of Farago’s piece — that we can all use the revolutionary tool of collage to process our overwhelming world — is strengthened by acknowledging this preceding work that is usually ignored, like Victorian scrapbooks, mosaic work, découpage, paper collé, etc. The innovation of Picasso, Braque, and Gris, was to do this thing that people were already doing, but do it as Art with a capital A. Now, we can take collage back from Art, and back into our spaces, where it first begin.

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Read more posts about collage

Well, it’s Groundhog Day, again

Tuesday, February 2, 2021

It’s the first February 2nd since our family’s lockdown began, and the “Every day is Groundhog Day” chapter of Keep Going, while truer than ever, isn’t quite as funny as it used to be.

The thing I’m trying to remind myself: that chapter is the oldest material in the book! I first delivered the material in a talk in 2015 and a blog post in 2017. The movie itself is 28 years old. A good parable doesn’t age, it just gets truer with time. (Just remember: it’s a comedy.)

Since many of us really have been reliving the same day over and over again, for almost a year now, what new wisdom is there to be gleaned? I’m not sure there is any, to be honest. What was true before the pandemic is truer now. What was awful before the pandemic is more awful. What was beautiful is more beautiful. Etc. (Just remember: it’s a comedy.)

What I know is that there is no finish line. Even when the pandemic lifts, if we’re lucky, we’ll still be here, trying to figure out what to do with our lives, trying to figure out what’s next. All we will get is more days to fill. The problem of how to fill them will not go away.

What I missed in the book is how much novelty we crave in our lives. Something — anything! — new. Something we’ve never seen or experienced before. A new book. A new show to watch. A new hobby. Seeking out these things and savoring them and celebrating them when we come across them.

I love in the movie how eventually Phil pours himself into his hobbies: playing the piano, ice sculpting, reading French poetry. To find things to do just for the sake of doing them, to discover practicing for practice’s sake, to find things it feels good to suck just a little less at each day… that’s the kind of stuff that makes life good. (Not to mention: exploring on foot, random acts of kindness, making gifts, and, of course, screaming into the void once in a while.)

Art, no matter how badly we do it, will always be here for us when we need meaning for our days.

Happy Groundhog Day, y’all. I’ll see you tomorrow.

A clean four weeks

Monday, February 1, 2021

It occurred to me this morning, looking at the calendar, that February is a clean four weeks, starting on a Monday. (1/2/21.) Feels like a good time to start a 28-day “Practice and Suck Less” challenge, so I made a new printable poster:

It is a firm belief of mine that February is a better month for resolutions than January. (Especially now that all Januarys are approximately 331 days long.) You could start a reading habit, a journaling habit, or just practice turning off your stupid phone for an hour before you go to bed and an hour after you wake up. (Me, I’m going to keep practicing Debussy’s “Deux Arabesques,” and work on a book proposal.)