In 2012, Bradley Wiggins became the first English cyclist to win the granddaddy of all cycling races, the Tour de France. In 2013, Chris Froome became the second. After back-to-back victories, the Brits have every reason to celebrate, and perhaps that’s why the Open University created The Science Behind the Bikeearlier this year — a series of four short videos exploring how science has changed the physics, technology and physiology of cycling. Now, still giddy, they’ve followed up with a five-part video series called The Design Behind the Bike. Even if you’re down on cycling as a professional sport, you can still appreciate the artistry that goes into making an elegant bike. Watch the entire series in one sitting above, or catch the individual installments here: History of Bikes & Bikes Design, The Aesthetics, Wheels, Materials, and Frame Design. All clips can be found on YouTube and iTunes too.
Book lists, despite what younger readers born into Buzzfeed’s ruthless listsicle monopoly may think, have always been popular. Some, like David Bowie’s Top 100 Books, give us a sense of the artist’s development. Others, like Joseph Brodsky’s List of 84 Books for Basic Conversation, provide a Nobel prize-winning benchmark for knowledge. Even though the books are within the reach of most readers, systematically digesting such lists often tries one’s patience. Despite the lack of will or interest in working through someone else’s literary education, however, glancing through such personal anthologies provides us with a glimpse into the maker’s life—be it their private tastes, or their social mores.
In late October, The Times Literary Supplement’s Michael Caines unearthed another Top 100 list; this one, however, has the distinction of hailing from 1898. At the turn of the 20th century, a journalist and author of numerous books on the Brontë sisters named Clement K. Shorter tried his hand at compiling the 100 Best Novels for a journal called The Bookman. The ground rules were simple: the list could feature only one novel per novelist, and living authors were excluded. Today, Shorter’s compendium looks somewhat hit-or-miss. There are some indisputable classics (many of which can be found in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books collections) and some other texts that have faded into oblivion. Still—one can’t help but experience a certain historical frisson at a 19th century listsicle. Here it goes:
1. Don Quixote — 1604 — Miguel de Cervantes
2. The Holy War — 1682 — John Bunyan
3. Gil Blas — 1715 — Alain René le Sage
4. Robinson Crusoe — 1719 — Daniel Defoe
5. Gulliver’s Travels — 1726 — Jonathan Swift
6. Roderick Random — 1748 — Tobias Smollett
7. Clarissa — 1749 — Samuel Richardson
8. Tom Jones — 1749 — Henry Fielding
9. Candide — 1756 — Françoise de Voltaire
10. Rasselas — 1759 — Samuel Johnson
11. The Castle of Otranto — 1764 — Horace Walpole
12. The Vicar of Wakefield — 1766 — Oliver Goldsmith
13. The Old English Baron — 1777 — Clara Reeve
14. Evelina — 1778 — Fanny Burney
15. Vathek — 1787 — William Beckford
16. The Mysteries of Udolpho — 1794 — Ann Radcliffe
17. Caleb Williams — 1794 — William Godwin
18. The Wild Irish Girl — 1806 — Lady Morgan
19. Corinne — 1810 — Madame de Stael
20. The Scottish Chiefs — 1810 — Jane Porter
21. The Absentee — 1812 — Maria Edgeworth
22. Pride and Prejudice — 1813 — Jane Austen
23. Headlong Hall — 1816 — Thomas Love Peacock
24. Frankenstein — 1818 — Mary Shelley
25. Marriage — 1818 — Susan Ferrier
26. The Ayrshire Legatees — 1820 — John Galt
27. Valerius — 1821 — John Gibson Lockhart
28. Wilhelm Meister — 1821 — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
29. Kenilworth — 1821 — Sir Walter Scott
30. Bracebridge Hall — 1822 — Washington Irving
31. The Epicurean — 1822 — Thomas Moore
32. The Adventures of Hajji Baba — 1824 — James Morier (“usually reckoned his best”)
33. The Betrothed — 1825 — Alessandro Manzoni
34. Lichtenstein — 1826 — Wilhelm Hauff
35. The Last of the Mohicans — 1826 — Fenimore Cooper
36. The Collegians — 1828 — Gerald Griffin
37. The Autobiography of Mansie Wauch — 1828 — David M. Moir
38. Richelieu — 1829 — G. P. R. James (the “first and best” novel by the “doyen of historical novelists”)
39. Tom Cringle’s Log — 1833 — Michael Scott
40. Mr. Midshipman Easy — 1834 — Frederick Marryat
41. Le Père Goriot — 1835 — Honoré de Balzac
42. Rory O’More — 1836 — Samuel Lover (another first novel, inspired by one of the author’s own ballads)
43. Jack Brag — 1837 — Theodore Hook
44. Fardorougha the Miser — 1839 — William Carleton (“a grim study of avarice and Catholic family life. Critics consider it the author’s finest achievement”)
55. The Three Musketeers — 1845 — Alexandre Dumas
56. The Wandering Jew — 1845 — Eugène Sue
57. Emilia Wyndham — 1846 — Anne Marsh
58. The Romance of War — 1846 — James Grant (“the narrative of the 92nd Highlanders’ contribution from the Peninsular campaign to Waterloo”)
59. Vanity Fair — 1847 — W. M. Thackeray
60. Jane Eyre — 1847 — Charlotte Brontë
61. Wuthering Heights — 1847 — Emily Brontë
62. The Vale of Cedars — 1848 — Grace Aguilar
63. David Copperfield — 1849 — Charles Dickens
64. The Maiden and Married Life of Mary Powell — 1850 — Anne Manning (“written in a pastiche seventeenth-century style and printed with the old-fashioned typography and page layout for which there was a vogue at the period …”)
65. The Scarlet Letter — 1850 — Nathaniel Hawthorne
66. Frank Fairleigh — 1850 — Francis Smedley (“Smedley specialised in fiction that is hearty and active, with a strong line in boisterous college escapades and adventurous esquestrian exploits”)
67. Uncle Tom’s Cabin — 1851 — H. B. Stowe
68. The Wide Wide World — 1851 — Susan Warner (Elizabeth Wetherell)
69. Nathalie — 1851 — Julia Kavanagh
70. Ruth — 1853 — Elizabeth Gaskell
71. The Lamplighter — 1854 — Maria Susanna Cummins
72. Dr. Antonio — 1855 — Giovanni Ruffini
73. Westward Ho! — 1855 — Charles Kingsley
74. Debit and Credit (Soll und Haben) — 1855 — Gustav Freytag
75. Tom Brown’s School-Days — 1856 — Thomas Hughes
77. John Halifax, Gentleman — 1857 — Dinah Mulock (a. k. a. Dinah Craik; “the best-known Victorian fable of Smilesian self-improvement”)
78. Ekkehard — 1857 — Viktor von Scheffel
79. Elsie Venner — 1859 — O. W. Holmes
80. The Woman in White — 1860 — Wilkie Collins
81. The Cloister and the Hearth — 1861 — Charles Reade
82. Ravenshoe — 1861 — Henry Kingsley (“There is much confusion in the plot to do with changelings and frustrated inheritance” in this successful novel by Charles Kingsley’s younger brother, the “black sheep” of a “highly respectable” family)
83. Fathers and Sons — 1861 — Ivan Turgenieff
84. Silas Marner — 1861 — George Eliot
85. Les Misérables — 1862 — Victor Hugo
86. Salammbô — 1862 — Gustave Flaubert
87. Salem Chapel — 1862 — Margaret Oliphant
88. The Channings — 1862 — Ellen Wood (a. k. a. Mrs Henry Wood)
89. Lost and Saved — 1863 — The Hon. Mrs. Norton
90. The Schönberg-Cotta Family — 1863 — Elizabeth Charles
91. Uncle Silas — 1864 — Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
92. Barbara’s History — 1864 — Amelia B. Edwards (“Confusingly for bibliographers, she was related to Matilda Betham-Edwards and possibly to Annie Edward(e)s …”)
93. Sweet Anne Page — 1868 — Mortimer Collins
94. Crime and Punishment — 1868 — Feodor Dostoieffsky
95. Fromont Junior — 1874 — Alphonse Daudet
96. Marmorne — 1877 — P. G. Hamerton (“written under the pseudonym Adolphus Segrave”)
97. Black but Comely — 1879 — G. J. Whyte-Melville
98. The Master of Ballantrae — 1889 — R. L. Stevenson
99. Reuben Sachs — 1889 — Amy Levy
100. News from Nowhere — 1891 — William Morris
In addition to the canon, Shorter—unable to heed his own cautious counsel and throwing the door open to the winds of literary passion—included 8 books by living novelists whom he called “writers whose reputations are too well established for their juniors to feel towards them any sentiments other than those of reverence and regard:”
“One can say anything so long as one does not say ‘I.’ ” Marcel Proust wrote these words to his fellow Frenchman of letters André Gide, and they constitute valuable advice for any novelist as well as a useful key to understanding Proust’s own work. We think of Proust — especially today, the hundredth anniversary of Swann’s Way, which opens his masterwork Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps perdu) — as an important French novelist, an important modern novelist, an important fin-de-siècle novelist, and so on. We also think of Proust as an important gay novelist. And we owe that, in some sense, to Gide, who revealed the closeted Proust’s homosexuality in their published correspondence after Proust’s death. Sexuality has since become a major element of the robust field of Proust criticism, and the letter above surely gives its scholars material — or at least those scholars willing to examine the author’s biography alongside his work.
The author of Remembrance of Things Pastonce suffered, according to Letters of Note, from an obsession with masturbation. “As a teenager this caused problems for his family, not least his father, a professor of hygiene, who like many of the day believed that such a worrying habit could cause homosexuality if left unchecked.” Given 10 francs by Proust père, Marcel went off to the neighborhood brothel to, in theory, get himself set straight. And the outcome of this “cure”? We defer to the sixteen-year-old Proust himself, who in the letter above tells the whole sordid story to his grandfather:
18 May 1888
Thursday evening.
My dear little grandfather,
I appeal to your kindness for the sum of 13 francs that I wished to ask Mr. Nathan for, but which Mama prefers I request from you. Here is why. I so needed to see if a woman could stop my awful masturbation habit that Papa gave me 10 francs to go to a brothel. But first, in my agitation, I broke a chamber pot: 3 francs; then, still agitated, I was unable to screw. So here I am, back to square one, waiting more and more as hours pass for 10 francs to relieve myself, plus 3 francs for the pot. But I dare not ask Papa for more money so soon and so I hoped you could come to my aid in a circumstance which, as you know, is not merely exceptional but also unique. It cannot happen twice in one lifetime that a person is too flustered to screw.
I kiss you a thousand times and dare to thank you in advance.
I will be home tomorrow morning at 11am. If you are moved by my situation and can answer my prayers, I will hopefully find you with the amount. Regardless, thank you for your decision which I know will come from a place of friendship.
Marcel.
Many thanks to Letters of Note for uncovering this illuminating and — intentionally? unintentionally? — comedic piece of correspondence from literary history, and to Fabien Bonnet and Larst Onovich, to whom Letters of Note, in turn, gives credit.
Yes, you read correctly: there exists a piece of theater whose production brought together three of the most ardently-followed, iconoclastic creators of recent decades. First staged in 1990 at Hamburg’s Thalia Theater, The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets appeared as the fruit of multidisciplinary labor from renowned avant-garde director Robert Wilson, best known for extra-long-form productions like Einstein on theBeach, created with Philip Glass;raggedly American singer-songwriter Tom Waits, a musician with no small theatrical bent himself; and William S. Burroughs, writer of Naked Lunch, Junkie, and other texts that have blown away generations of counterculturally inclined reading minds. They based their tale of a hapless young file clerk in love and his fateful pact with the devil on the German folktale-cum-opera Der Freischütz. Hence the work’s premiere in Germany, and the German dialogue in the television version of the full production above.
But worry not, non-Germanophones; the Waits-composed songs remain in English, and as with anything directed by Wilson, you buy the ticket as much to a striking pure visual experience as to anything else. You can hear and see more from Waits and Wilson about what went into The Black Rider in the half-hour TV documentary just above. (The narrator may speak German, but everyone else involved speaks English.) For a pure musical experience of The Black Rider, pull up Waits’ eponymous album, released in 1993. (See also the bootleg The Black Rider Outtakes.) And now, with twenty years’ distance from The Black Rider’s American debut, maybe we can put the question to ourselves of whether it counts as a streak of poor taste or a stroke of artistic genius to have Burroughs, of all people, pen his own version of a story that — spoiler alert — ends with the protagonist fated to shoot his own bride.
Next year marks the 40th anniversary of a modern classic, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. And surely no other film has even come close to making the construction of an aqueduct so thrilling.
For sure, the sizable servings of incest, corruption, and greed help carry Robert Towne’s brilliant screenplay. But under Towne’s script are the bones of another story, the story of an engineering feat that eclipsed the Panama Canal. Yes we’re talking about the building of the great Los Angeles aqueduct starting in 1908.
In the preface to the script Towne wrote this, “the great crimes in California have been committed against the land—and against the people who own it and future generations. It was only natural that the script should evolve into the story of a man who raped the land and his own daughter.”
Towne didn’t worry about sticking to the facts (he set the action of Chinatown in the 1930s—an inherently more glamorous period, especially in Los Angeles). Some even argue that the film creates an entirely different (and wrong) history of the project that is remembered as fact.
It’s been all over the news recently: two Swedish design students, Anna Haupt and Terese Alstin, have created what they call an “invisible bike helmet.” This description is a little misleading. The Hövding, as it’s been branded, is not invisible so much as it’s contained, in a puffy, high tech collar, as an airbag that deploys upon impact and protects the wearer from the typical head trauma cyclists suffer in accidents.
Working with a head trauma specialist and staging accidents to collect movement patterns, Haupt and Alstin defiantly took on what they saw as a male-dominated design establishment. “Easy,” they say, “it only took us seven years.” They raised ten million dollars and pushed forward with a certain amount of Scandinavian bravado. The short doc above opens with a few quotes from the pair. “We’re going to save the world,” they tell us, “it’s chicken to be a realist.” Upon seeing their design, they say, a professor remarked (in English), “I have to sit down… you’re going to be millionaires.”
Haupt and Alstin’s bombast is seductive, but the product may not live up to the hype quite yet. As Tech Crunch reported last year, “Hövding costs $600 and only works once. There’s also been some complaints about the design and an early version had trouble with the zipper.” Nonetheless, it’s still an amazing invention that will only improve with future real world testing. At present, it could save the lives of those well-heeled cyclists who can’t stand to wear clunky, traditional bike helmets. In Europe, at least, where the helmet is currently for sale and safety approved.
The video above was made by director Fredrik Gertton, who has successfully Kickstarted an advocacy film he calls Bikes Vs. Cars that seems well worth a look for those concerned about the future of urban transportation.
Few science fiction novels have resonated as strongly with popular culture as William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). The book, wherein the first trickles of Internet culture coalesced into the gritty film noir world so dear to readers of Philip K. Dick, became one of the seminal reads of the 1980s. The cyberpunk genre was born.
Since its appearance, Gibson’s work has continuously echoed in popular culture. While movies have tried to distill his impending, tech-filled dystopianism, the most appropriate, if not the most striking tributes, have come in the form of video games. From 1993’s Shadowrun, to the somber mix of conspiracy and technology of the Deus Ex trilogy, video games were inherently suited to the visual portrayal of cyberpunk. The most ambitious of these was spearheaded by one of counterculture’s most prominent proponents: Dr. Timothy Leary.
Leary is best known as the psychologist who championed LSD and psilocybin use, engaging in meticulous research—both personal and professional—of their effects. By the 1980s, the same Leary who had popularized the phrase “turn on, tune in, drop out” was now proselytizing computer use with the phrase “turn on, boot up, jack in.” To those who doubted his about-face, Leary declared, “the PC is the LSD of the 1990s.”
In addition to having created several transcendental computer games of his own design (a version of Mind Mirror, where players improve their personalities, sold 65,000 copies under Electronic Arts, and is available on Facebook), Leary had plans to build a formidable version of Neuromancer. As you can see in this clip, he was an ardent Gibson fan; not surprising, considering the self-betterment that emerged from the fusion of technology and humanity in Gibson’s work.
In the clip above, the New York Public Library’s Donald Mennerich discusses his archival work on Leary’s unfinished game, which was recently unearthed by Leary’s estate. Although he had made little headway, Leary had a grandiose design for his “mind movie:” Devo would handle the music, Keith Haring would take care of the visuals, and Helmut Newton would include his photography. Two characters were based on Grace Jones and David Byrne. The story was to be written by Leary, alongside William S. Burroughs.
While Leary’s Neuromancer failed to materialize, a version of the game was later made by Interplay. Although most of the big names had dropped off the roster, Devo’s “Some Things Never Change” was still used as the theme. And, while Leary’s oeuvre lies in the archives, the gameplay from Interplay’s version, seen here, is still good for a hit of ‘80s nostalgia.
Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue changed jazz. It changed music, period. So I take it very seriously. But when I see the animated sheet music of the first cut, “So What,” I can’t help but think of Charles Schultz’s Peanuts cartoons, and their Vince Guaraldi compositions. I mean no offense to Miles. His modal jazz swings, and it’s fun, as fun to listen to as it is to watch in rising and falling arpeggios. The YouTube uploader, Dan Cohen, gives us this on his channel Animated Sheet Music, with apologies to Jimmy Cobb for the lack of drum notation.
Also from Cohen’s channel, we have Charlie Parker’s music animated. Never one to keep up with his admin, Parker left his estate unable to recuperate royalties from compositions like “Confirmation” (above).
Nonetheless, everyone knows it’s Bird’s tune, and to see it animated above is to see Parker dance a very different step than Miles’ post-bop cool, one filled with complex melodic paragraphs instead of chordal phrases.
And above, we have John Coltrane’s massive “Giant Steps,” with its rapid-fire bursts of quarter notes, interrupted by half-note asides. Coltrane’s iconic 1960 composition displays what Ira Gitler called in a 1958 Downbeat piece, “sheets of sound.” Gitler has said the image he had in his head was of “bolts of cloth undulating as they unfurled,” but he might just as well have thought of sheets of rain, so multitude and heavy is Coltrane’s melodic attack.
See Cohen’s Animated Sheet Music channel for two more Charlie Parker pieces, “Au Privave” and “Bloomdido.”
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