We all know the name Marie Curie—or at least I hope we do. But for far too many people, that’s where their knowledge of women in science ends. Which means that thousands of young boys and girls who read about Isaac Newton and Louis Pasteur never also learn the story of Caroline Herschel (1750–1848), the first woman to discover a comet, publish with the Royal Society, and receive a salary for scientific work—as the assistant to the king’s astronomer, her brother, in 19th century England. Herschel discovered and catalogued new nebulae and star clusters; received a gold medal from the Royal Astronomical Society; and she and her brother William “increased the number of known star clusters,” writes the Smithsonian, “from 100 to 2,500.” And yet, she remains almost totally obscure.
Open a math or physics textbook and you may not come across the name Emmy Noether (1882–1935), either, despite the fact that she “proved two theorems,” the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) notes, “that were basic for both general relativity and elementary particle physics. One is still known as ‘Noether’s Theorem.’”
Noether fought hard for recognition in life. She received her Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Göttingen in 1907, and she eventually surpassed her scientist father and brothers. But at first, she could only secure work at the Mathematical Institute of Erlangen in a position without title or pay. And despite her brilliance, she was only allowed to teach at Göttingen University as the assistant to David Hilbert, also without a salary.
Noether suffered discrimination in Germany “owing not only to prejudices against women, but also because she was a Jew, a Social Democrat, and a pacifist.” Other prominent women in scientific history have encountered similarly intersecting forms of discrimination, and continue to do so. Much has changed since the times of Herschel and of Noether, but “there is much work to be done,” writes Eamon O’Flynn of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. “Part of making positive change includes celebrating the contributions women have made to science, especially those women overlooked in their time.” For this reason, the Perimeter Institute has created a poster series, called “Forces of Nature,” for “classrooms, dorm rooms, living rooms, offices, and physics departments.”
People all over the world enjoy Japanese tea, but few of them have witnessed a proper Japanese tea ceremony — and seeing as a proper Japanese tea ceremony can last up to four hours, many probably imagine they don’t have the endurance. But Japanese tea culture holds up meticulousness as a high virtue for the preparer, the drinker, and even more so the craftsman who makes the tea ware both of them use. In the video above, you can see one such master named Shimizu Genji at work in his studio in Tokoname, a city known as a ceramics center for hundreds and hundreds of years.
Shimizu, writes the proprietor of pottery site Artisticnippon.com about a visit to his workshop, “throws a block of clay onto the wheel, creating the teapot’s body, handle, spout and lid one after another, all from the same block. It really is quite mesmerising and awe-inspiring to watch.”
Once he assembles these formidably solid-looking but deceptively light pieces, he dries them out over three days, a process that offers “just one example of the time and care invested in the crafting of exquisite Tokoname teapots.” Finally comes the seaweed, of which certain pieces get a layer applied before firing. Afterward, the traces left by the seaweed create a “charred” patterning called mogake.
We would surely welcome any of Shimizu’s products, or those by the other respected practitioners of his tradition, into our home. But as with all Japanese crafts honed over countless generations, the process counts for just as much as the product, or even more so. Take, for instance, Shimizu’s process as captured by this video: we appreciate the concentration, deliberation, and sensitivity shown at each and every stage, and the pieces of the teapot as they come into existence don’t look half bad either. But if we become too attached to the final result we’ve been anticipating over these fourteen minutes — well, suffice it to say that the master craftsman has a lesson in impermanence in store for us.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Were you to google “Carl Jung and Nazism”—and I’m not suggesting that you do—you would find yourself hip-deep in the charges that Jung was an anti-Semite and a Nazi sympathizer. Many sites condemn or exonerate him; many others celebrate him as a blood and soil Aryan hero. It can be nauseatingly difficult at times to tell these accounts apart. What to make of this controversy? What is the evidence brought against the famed Swiss psychiatrist and onetime close friend, student, and colleague of Sigmund Freud?
Truth be told, it does not look good for Jung. Unlike Nietzsche, whose work was deliberately bastardized by Nazis, beginning with his own sister, Jung need not be taken out of context to be read as anti-Semitic. There is no irony at work in his 1934 paper The State of Psychotherapy Today, in which he marvels at National Socialism as a “formidable phenomenon,” and writes, “the ‘Aryan’ unconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish.” This is only one of the least objectionable of such statements, as historian Andrew Samuels demonstrates.
One Jungian defender admits in an essay collection called Lingering Shadows that Jung had been “unconsciously infected by Nazi ideas.” In response, psychologist John Conger asks, “Why not then say that he was unconsciously infected by anti-Semitic ideas as well?”—well before the Nazis came to power. He had expressed such thoughts as far back as 1918. Like the philosopher Martin Heidegger, Jung was accused of trading on his professional associations during the 30s to maintain his status, and turning on his Jewish colleagues while they were purged.
Yet his biographer Deirdre Bair claims Jung’s name was used to endorse persecution without his consent. Jung was incensed, “not least,” Mark Vernon writes at The Guardian, “because he was actually fighting to keep German psychotherapy open to Jewish individuals.” Bair also reveals that Jung was “involved in two plots to oust Hitler, essentially by having a leading physician declare the Führer mad. Both came to nothing.” And unlike Heidegger, Jung strongly denounced anti-Semitic views during the war. He “protected Jewish analysts,” writes Conger, “and helped refugees.” He also worked for the OSS, precursor to the CIA, during the war.
His recruiter Allen Dulles wrote of Jung’s “deep antipathy to what Nazism and Fascism stood for.” Dulles also cryptically remarked, “Nobody will probably ever know how much Prof. Jung contributed to the allied cause during the war.” These contradictions in Jung’s words, character, and actions are puzzling, to say the least. I would not presume to draw any hard and fast conclusions from them. They do, however, serve as the necessary context for Jung’s observations of Adolph Hitler. Nazis of today who praise Jung most often do so for his supposed characterization of Hitler as “Wotan,” or Odin, a comparison that thrills neo-pagans who, like the Germans did, use ancient European belief systems as clothes hangers for modern racist nationalism.
In his 1936 essay, “Wotan,” Jung describes the old god as a force all its own, a “personification of psychic forces” that moved through the German people “towards the end of the Weimar Republic”—through the “thousands of unemployed,” who by 1933 “marched in their hundreds of thousands.” Wotan, Jung writes, “is the god of storm and frenzy, the unleasher of passions and the lust of battle; moreover he is a superlative magician and artist in illusion who is versed in all secrets of an occult nature.” In personifying the “German psyche” as a furious god, Jung goes so far as to write, “We who stand outside judge the Germans far too much as if they were responsible agents, but perhaps it would be nearer the truth to regard them also as victims.”
“One hopes,” writes Per Brask, “evidently against hope, that Jung did not intend” his statements “as an argument of redemption for the Germans.” Whatever his intentions, his mystical racialization of the unconscious in “Wotan” accorded perfectly well with the theories of Alfred Rosenberg, “Hitler’s chief ideologist.” Like everything about Jung, the situation is complicated. In a 1938 interview, published by Omnibook Magazine in 1942, Jung repeated many of these disturbing ideas, comparing the German worship of Hitler to the Jewish desire for a Messiah, a “characteristic of people with an inferiority complex.” He describes Hitler’s power as a form of “magic.” But that power only exists, he says, because “Hitler listens and obeys….”
His Voice is nothing other than his own unconscious, into which the German people have projected their own selves; that is, the unconscious of seventy-eight million Germans. That is what makes him powerful. Without the German people he would be nothing.
Jung’s observations are bombastic, but they are not flattering. The people may be possessed, but it is their will, he says, that the Nazi leader enacts, not his own. “The true leader,” says Jung, “is always led.” He goes on to paint an even darker picture, having closely observed Hitler and Mussolini together in Berlin:
In comparison with Mussolini, Hitler made upon me the impression of a sort of scaffolding of wood covered with cloth, an automaton with a mask, like a robot or a mask of a robot. During the whole performance he never laughed; it was as though he were in a bad humor, sulking. He showed no human sign.
His expression was that of an inhumanly single-minded purposiveness, with no sense of humor. He seemed as if he might be a double of a real person, and that Hitler the man might perhaps be hiding inside like an appendix, and deliberately so hiding in order not to disturb the mechanism.
With Hitler you do not feel that you are with a man. You are with a medicine man, a form of spiritual vessel, a demi-deity, or even better, a myth. With Hitler you are scared. You know you would never be able to talk to that man; because there is nobody there. He is not a man, but a collective. He is not an individual, but a whole nation. I take it to be literally true that he has no personal friend. How can you talk intimately with a nation?
Read the full interview here. Jung goes on to further discuss the German resurgence of the cult of Wotan, the “parallel between the Biblical triad… and the Third Reich,” and other peculiarly Jungian formulations. Of Jung’s analysis, interviewer H.R. Knickerbocker concludes, “this psychiatric explanation of the Nazi names and symbols may sound to a layman fantastic, but can anything be as fantastic as the bare facts about the Nazi Party and its Fuehrer? Be sure there is much more to be explained in them than can be explained by merely calling them gangsters.”
It pays to think intelligently about the inevitable. And this course taught by Yale professor Shelly Kagan does just that, taking a rich, philosophical look at death. Here’s how the course description reads:
There is one thing I can be sure of: I am going to die. But what am I to make of that fact? This course will examine a number of issues that arise once we begin to reflect on our mortality. The possibility that death may not actually be the end is considered. Are we, in some sense, immortal? Would immortality be desirable? Also a clearer notion of what it is to die is examined. What does it mean to say that a person has died? What kind of fact is that? And, finally, different attitudes to death are evaluated. Is death an evil? How? Why? Is suicide morally permissible? Is it rational? How should the knowledge that I am going to die affect the way I live my life?
You can watch the 26 lectures above. Or find them on YouTube and iTunes in video and audio formats. For more information on this course, including the syllabus, please visit this Yale site.
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Once the primary domain of well-appointed professors with institutional connections and the budget to fly around the world, the discipline can soon be pursued by anyone with an internet connection, though there is, of course, no virtual substitute yet for engaging with art in three-dimensions. Claire Voon explains at Hyperallergic, “Pharos’s database is primarily aimed at scholars—although it is freely available for all to use—and is dedicated to uploading a work’s attribution and provenance as well as conservation, exhibition, and bibliographic histories.” All of the information, in other words, required for serious research.
While the current institutions are all based in North America and Europe, the “database will eventually expand,” writes Voon, “to include records from more photoarchives around the world.” Scholars and art lovers worldwide may not necessarily think of these treasures as kissable “sleeping beauties,” but their plentiful appearance in such rich detail and easy accessibility may indeed seem like a fairy tale come true.
In one account of human affairs, an all-powerful deity rules over everything. Nothing can occur without the knowledge and sanction of the omnipotent creator god. In a much more recent iteration, we inhabit an unimaginably complex computer simulation, in which every thing—ourselves included—has been created by all-powerful programmers. The first scenario gives millions of people comfort, the second… well, maybe only a handful of cult-like Silicon Valley techo-futurists. But in either case, the question inevitably arises: how is it possible that there is any such thing as true freedom? The idea that free will is an illusion has haunted philosophical thought for at least a couple thousand years.
But in the existentialist view, the real fear is not that we may have too little freedom, but that we may have too much—indeed that we may have the ultimate freedom, that of conscious beings who appeared in the universe unbidden and by chance, and who can only determine for themselves what form and direction their being might take. This was the early view of Jean-Paul Sartre. “We are left alone, without excuse”—he famously wrote in his 1946 essay “Existentialism is a Humanism”—“This is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free.” Freedom is a burden; without gods, devils, or software engineers to fault for our actions, or any predetermined course of action we might take, each of us alone bears the full weight of responsibility for our lives and choices.
Emerging from comforting visions of humanity as the center of the universe—says the narrator in the video above from philosophical animation channel Kurzgesagt—“we learned that the twinkling lights are not shining beautifully for us, they just are. We learned that we are not at the center of what we now call the universe, and that it is much, much older than we thought.” We learned that we are alone in the cosmos, on a completely insignificant speck of space dust, more or less. Even the concepts we use to explain this overwhelming situation are totally arbitrary in the face of our profound ignorance. Add to this the problem of our infinitesimally brief lifespans and inevitable death and you’ve got the perfect recipe for existential dread.
For this condition, Kurzgesagt recommends a remedy: “Optimistic Nihilism,” a philosophy that posits ultimate freedom in the midst of, and solely enabled by, the utter meaninglessness of existence: “If our life is the only thing we get to experience, then it’s the only thing that matters. If the universe has no principles, then the only principles relevant are the ones we decide on. If the universe has no purpose, then we get to dictate what its purpose is.” This is more or less a paraphrase of Sartre, who made virtually identical claims in what he called his “atheistic existentialism,” but with the added force in his “doctrine” that “there is no reality except in action… Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself.” We not only get to determine our purpose, he wrote, we have to do so, or we cannot be said to exist at all.
In the midst of this frighteningly radical freedom, Sartre saw the ultimate opportunity: to make of ourselves what we will. But this dizzying possibility may send us running back to comforting prefab illusions of meaning and purpose. How terrible, to have to decide for yourself the purpose of the entire universe, no? But the philosophy of “Optimistic Nihilism” goes on to expound a thesis similar to that of the Zen popularizer, Alan Watts, who has soothed many a case of existential dread with his response to the idea that we are somehow separate from the universe, either hovering above it or crushed beneath it. Humans are not, as Watts colorfully wrote, “isolated ‘egos’ inside bags of skin.” Instead, as the video goes on, “We are as much the universe as a neutron star, or a black hole, or a nebula. Even better, actually, we are its thinking and feeling part, the sensory organs of the universe.”
Neither Sartre nor Watts, with their very different approaches to the same set of existential concerns, would likely endorse the tidy summation offered by the philosophy of “Optimistic Nihilism.” But just as we would be foolish to expect a six-minute animated video to offer a complete philosophy of life, we would be painfully naïve to think of freedom as a condition of comfort and ease, built on rational certainties and absolute truths. For all of the disagreement about what we should do with radical existential freedom, everyone who recognizes it agrees that it entails radical uncertainty—the vertiginous sense of unknowing that is the source of our constant free-floating anxiety.
If we are to act in the face of doubt, mystery, ignorance, and the immensity of seemingly gratuitous suffering, we might heed John Keats’ prescription to develop “Negative Capability,” the ability to remain “content with half-knowledge.” This was not, as Lionel Trilling writes in an introduction to Keats’ letters, advice only for artists, but “a certain way of dealing with life”—one in which, Keats wrote elsewhere, “the only means of strengthening one’s intellect,” and thus a sense of identity, meaning, and purpose in life, “is to make up one’s mind about nothing—to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.”
Keats’ is a very Zen sentiment, a moody version of the “don’t-know mind” that recognizes emptiness and suffering as hallmarks of existence, and finds in them not a reason for optimism but for the indefinite suspension of judgement. Still, the approach of Romantic poets and Buddhist monks is not for everyone, and even Sartre eventually turned to orthodox Marxism to impose a meaning upon existence that claimed dependence on the hard facts of material conditions rather than the unbounded abstractions of the intellect.
Perhaps we are are free, at least, to commit to an ideology to assuage our existential dread. We are also free to adopt the tragic defiance of another Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, who confessed to something of an “Optimistic Nihilism” of his own. Only he referred to it as a “pessimism of the intellect” and “optimism of the will”—an attitude that recognizes the severe social and material limits imposed on us by our often painful, short, seemingly meaningless existence in a material world, and that strives nonetheless toward impossible ideals.
We’ve told you about the Great Courses Plus (now called Wondrium) before–a new video subscription service that lets you watch free courses (about 8,000 lectures in total) across a wide range of subjects, all taught by some of the best lecturers in the country. The topics cover everything from History, Philosophy, Literature, and Economics, to Math, Science, Professional Development, Cooking, and Photography. And you can binge-watch entire college courses in a matter of days by watching videos on your TV, tablet, laptop and smart phone, with the help of apps designed for Apple, Google Play, Kindle Fire, and Roku.
Interested in trying out this service? Right now, the Great Courses Plus/Wondrium is offering a special deal for Open Culture readers. If you click here, and sign up for a free trial, you can use this service for 30 days … for free. And then, if you would like, you can continue to subscribe and pay their normal prices. If you have time on your hands, this is a great way to keep your mind engaged and stream what PC Magazine has called “an excellent library of college-level lectures.”
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By the time of these recordings, Zappa’s Halloween shows were “already the stuff of legends,” we learn from the official source, Zappa.com. “While the shows began in the late ‘60s, around 1972, these monumental performances would become annual events, initially in Passaic, NJ and Chicago IL before moving to New York City in 1974, where they’d remain…. From October 28–31, Zappa and his band played six historic shows at the 3,000 capacity Palladium. All the performances were recorded with four being filmed, resulting in Zappa’s mammoth film project, ‘Baby Snakes.’”
The 1979 film failed to find an audience beyond Zappa’s rabidly loyal cult following, or a distributor beyond Zappa himself. Many of the songs Zappa and his band played during the series of concerts appeared that same year on Sheik Yerbouti (say it out loud), an album that made sure to piss people off. The song “Bobby Brown” was banned from the radio in the U.S.; The Anti-Defamation League demanded an apology, which Zappa refused, for the song “Jewish Princess,” which was only performed once, during the ’77 Halloween shows; and the album’s major hit, “Dancin’ Fool,” made audiences dance to a song that made fun of them.
Zappa’s anti-social antics were not bugs but features—he maintained a rabid fanbase no matter what he did because he was a phenomenally talented, irrepressibly creative musician who attracted the best players in the business. The 1977 Halloween show band—including madman drummer Terry Bozzio and King Crimson guitarist Adrian Belew—could not have been in finer form. Zappa’s arrogance may have rubbed non-fans of his music the wrong way, but to those who couldn’t get enough of his virtuoso prog-rock carnival, he had every reason to hold such people in contempt.
Zappa inspired so much devotion among fellow musicians that a number of them have agreed to tour with a hologram of the late guitarist-bandleader, to be produced by Eyellusion, “live music’s premier hologram production company,” explains the official Zappa site. The project has proven, in the words of Belew, who signed on then dropped out of the tour, “caustic and divisive.” It may also, whether you’re a fan of Zappa or not, seem more than a little spooky, and not in the fun trick-or-treat way. Maybe you, or your Zappa fan, would prefer to remember him as he was, in the flesh, sneering and shredding at the Palladium on Halloween night, 1977.
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.” So writes the narrator of “The Call of Cthulhu,” the best-known story by Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who, before he burnt out and died young, spent his whole literary career looking into that infinity and reporting on the psychological effects of what he sensed lurking there. What better writer to read on Halloween night, when — amid all the partying and the candy — we all permit ourselves a glimpse into the abyss?
Indeed, what better writer to hear on Halloween night? Once it gets dark, consider firing up this fourteen-hour Spotify playlist of H.P. Lovecraft audiobooks, featuring readings of not just “The Call of Cthulhu” but The Shadow over Innsmouth, “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Thing on the Doorstep,” and other stories besides. (If you don’t have Spotify’s free software, you can download it here.)
Though Lovecraft has a much wider readership now than he ever accrued in his lifetime, some of your guests might still never have heard his work and thus struggle to pin it down: is it horror? Is it suspense? Is it the macabre, the sort of thing perfected by Lovecraft’s predecessor in frightening American letters Edgar Allan Poe?
The word they need is “weird,” not in the modern sense of “somewhat unusual,” but in the early 20th-century sense — the sense of Weird Tales, the pulp magazine that published Lovecraft — of a heady blend of the supernatural, the mythical, the scientific, and the mundane. Joyce Carol Oates once wrote that Lovecraft’s stories, seldom sensational, “develop by way of incremental detail, beginning with quite plausible situations — an expedition to Antarctica, a trip to an ancient seaside town, an investigation of an abandoned eighteenth-century house in Providence, Rhode Island, that still stood in Lovecraft’s time. One is drawn into Lovecraft by the very air of plausibility and characteristic understatement of the prose, the question being When will weirdness strike?” An ideal question to ask while floating along the black sea of Halloween night.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
FYI: Illustrators Chris Skinner and Andrew Archer present a new illustrated edition of two Philip K. Dick’s novels, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? & A Scanner Darkly. And it comes in a great format. Read one novel, then flip the book upside down and enter the next altered reality.
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“Where would we be without books?” That question, sung over and over again by Sparks in the theme song of the long-running public-radio show Bookworm, gets a troubling answer in The Inksect, the animated film above by Mexican Filmmaker Pablo Calvillo. In the bookless dystopia it envisions, fossil fuels have run out — one premise it shares with many modern works of its subgenre — but the powers that be found a way to delay the inevitable by burning all of humanity’s printed matter for energy instead. “Soon after,” announce the opening titles, “we, the human race, devolved into illiterate cockroaches.”
But among those cockroaches, a few still remembered books, and not only did they remember them, they “knew that their powers could liberate our minds and help us evolve into human beings once again.”
Taking place in a grim, gray, technologically malevolent, and elaborately rendered New York City, the story follows the journey of one such relatively enlightened man-bug’s quest for not just a return to his prior form but to the richer, brighter world contained in and made possible by books. He catches a glimpse of Edgar Allan Poe with the raven of his most famous poem perched atop his head, a sight that might look absurd to us but inspires the protagonist to put pen to paper and write a single word: liberty.
The Inksect’s literary references don’t end with The Raven. Nor do they begin with it: you’ll no doubt have already made the connections between the film’s notions of a book-burning dystopia or men turning into cockroaches and their probable inspirations. Even apart from the many visually striking qualities on its surface, Calvillo’s film illustrates just how deeply works of literature, from Ray Bradbury and Franz Kafka and many other minds besides, lie buried in the foundation of our collective culture. Even a film so expressive of 21st-century anxieties has to understand and incorporate the concerns that humanity has always dealt with — and so often dealt with, in many different areas and many different ways, through books.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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