John Oliver kicked off his new series “Great Minds: People Who Think Good” with an extended interview with Stephen Hawking. For a moment there, it all feels a bit like a classic Ali G interview. (Remember Sacha Baron Cohen’s priceless interview with Noam “Norman” Chomsky?) But, soon enough, you realize that Hawking is in on the joke. And he delivers some good lines, with the hint of a smile.
Though I seldom long for my native culture when abroad, when the need for a hit of Americana does arise (and I say this currently writing from Seoul, South Korea), I fill my iPod with old time radio. Many shows from America’s “Golden Age” of wireless broadcasting can fill this need, but one could do much worse than Dimension X, the early-1950s science-fiction program we featured earlier this month, or its late-1950s successor X Minus One, whose episodes you can also find at the Internet Archive. Both showcase American culture at its mid-20th-century finest: forward-looking, temperamentally bold, technologically adept, and saturated with earnestness but for the occasional surprisingly knowing irony or bleak edge of darkness. That last comes courtesy of these shows’ writing talent, a group which includes such canonical names as Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein.
X Minus One’s run, which lasted from April 1955 to January 1958, included a heaping helping of the evidently highly radio-adaptable Ray Bradbury: his stories “And The Moon Be Still As Bright,” “Mars is Heaven,” “The Veldt,” “Dwellers in Silence,” “Zero Hour,” “To the Future,” and “Marionettes, Inc.,” all appeared as episodes. From Robert A. Heinlein’s harder-bitten body of work the show produced “Universe,” “Requiem,” and “The Roads Must Roll.” Isaac Asimov, one of the most scientific of that era’s science-fiction writers, wrote the source material for “Nightfall,” “C‑Chute,” and “Hostess.” The pen of Philip K. Dick, surely the most purely imaginative of the bunch, for its part produced “The Defenders” and “Colony.” America let fly all sorts of visions of the future back then, from the optimistic to the pessimistic, the utopian to the dystopian, the progressive to the regressive. The aforementioned writers did it best by mixing all those sensibilities into each of their visions, which you can hear, along with those of many others, in X Minus One’s robust archive. You can stream several of the episodes below.
Marcel Proust, the author of the great modernist work À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), was the very definition of the sensitive artist. Perpetually battling bouts of depression and ill health, Proust lived at home with his parents until their deaths. Though he became a recluse later in life, sleeping by day and writing feverishly at night, he poured his soul into his epic novel, detailing his struggles in a manner that has connected deeply with generations of readers. Proust has become over the years an icon of artistic sincerity.
In the late nineteenth century, the confession book was all the rage in England. It asked readers to answer a series of personal questions designed to reveal their inner characters. In 1890, Proust, still a teenager, took this questionnaire, answering the questions with frank sincerity. The original manuscript was uncovered in 1924, two years after Proust’s death, and in 2003, it was auctioned off for roughly $130,000. You can see the original 1890 manuscript above and, if your French isn’t up to snuff, we have a translation below.
Many decades later, French TV host Bernard Pivot started using this exact type of questionnaire to interview thinkers, leaders and celebrities. It proved to be a great device for getting a glimpse into the inner workings of a star’s mind. James Lipton adapted the questionnaire for his own show, Inside the Actors Studio(watch above), while misattributing its origins to Proust. Nonetheless, the name ‘The Proust Questionnaire” stuck. The quiz is also a regular feature in the magazine Vanity Fair. You can read the responses from the likes of Rachel Maddow, Harrison Ford and Louis CK, whose answers read like an extension of his stand up routine. And if you’re eager to take the test yourself, you can do so here.
The principal aspect of my personality:
The need to be loved; more precisely, the need to be caressed and spoiled much more than the need to be admired.
The quality that I desire in a man:
Manly virtues, and frankness in friendship.
The quality that I desire in a woman:
Feminine charms.
Your chief characteristic:
[Left Blank]
What I appreciate most about my friends:
To have tenderness for me, if their personage is exquisite enough to render quite high the price of their tenderness.
My main fault:
Not knowing, not being able to “want”.
My favorite occupation:
Loving.
My dream of happiness:
I am afraid it be not great enough, I dare not speak it, I am afraid of destroying it by speaking it.
What would be my greatest misfortune?
Not to have known my mother or my grandmother.
What I should like to be:
Myself, as the people whom I admire would like me to be.
The country where I should like to live:
A country where certain things that I should like would come true as though by magic, and where tenderness would always be reciprocated.
My favorite color:
The beauty is not in the colors, but in their harmony.
My favorite bird:
The swallow.
My favorite prose authors:
Currently, Anatole France and Pierre Loti.
My favorite poets:
Baudelaire and Alfred de Vigny.
My heroes in fiction:
Hamlet.
My favorite heroines in fiction.
Bérénice.
My favorite composers:
Beethoven, Wagner, Schumann.
My favorite painters:
Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt.
My heroes in real life:
Mr. Darlu, Mr. Boutroux.
My heroines in history:
Cleopatra.
My favorite names:
I only have one at a time.
What I hate most of all:
What is bad about me.
Historical figures that I despise the most:
I am not educated enough.
The military event that I admire most:
My military service!
The gift of nature that I would like to have:
Will-power, and seductiveness.
How I want to die:
Improved—and loved.
My present state of mind:
Boredom from having thought about myself to answer all these questions.
Faults for which I have the most indulgence:
Those that I understand.
My motto:
I should be too afraid that it bring me misfortune.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
The letter above goes to show two things. George Raymond Richard Martin, otherwise known as George R.R. Martin, or simply as GRRM, had fantasy and writing in his blood from a young age. Decades before he wrote his fantasy novel series A Song of Ice and Fire, which HBO adapted intoGame of Thrones, a 15-year-old George R. Martin sent a fan letter to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the legendary creators of Spider-Man, the Hulk, Thor, the X‑Men and the Fantastic Four(called “F.F.” in the letter). When you read the note, you can immediately tell that young Martin was steeped in sci-fi and fantasy literature. He could also string together some fairly complex sentences during his teenage years — sentences that many adults would struggle to write. But here’s the cool part for me. Wunderkind Martin lived in good old Bayonne, NJ, the town where yours truly has deep family roots. You can find the cover of the much-praised F.F. #17 below.
The Disney Channel aired Tim Burton’s Hansel and Gretel only once, on Halloween night in 1983, but it must have given those few who saw the broadcast much to ponder over the following three decades. For all that time, the 35-minute adaptation of that old German folktale stood as perhaps the hardest-to-see item in the Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas auteur’s catalog. Of course, back in 1983, the 25-year-old Burton hadn’t yet made either of those movies, nor any of the other belovedly askew features for which we know him today. He had to his name only a couple of animated shorts made at CalArts and a stop-motion homage to his hero Vincent Price. Still, that added up to enough to land him this project, his first live-action film made as an adult, which he used as an outlet for his fascination with Japan.
Using an all-Japanese cast, shooting with the 16-millimeter aesthetic of old martial arts movies, and taking a special-effects technique or two from the Godzilla manual, Burton’s Hansel and Gretel looks (and sounds) like no version of the story you’ve seen before, or will likely ever see again. But at least you can now watch it as often as you like, owing to its recent sudden appearance on Youtube after that long absence from public viewability, broken only by screenings at the Museum of Modern Art and the Cinémathèque Française. In it we expereince the intersection of the grotesque as represented by Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the grotesque as represented by the Burtonian sensibility, the new and strange freedom of early cable television, and the sheer audacity of a young filmmaker — not to mention a heck of a hand-to-hand combat session between Hansel, Gretel, and the Witch who would make them dinner. Her dinner, that is.
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Feelings about James Joyce’s Ulysses tend to fall roughly into one of two camps: the religiously reverent or the exasperated/bored/overwhelmed. As popular examples of the former, we have the many thousand celebrants of Bloomsday—June 16th, the date on which the novel is set in 1904. These revelries approach the level of saints’ days, with re-enactments and pilgrimages to important Dublin sites. On the other side, we have the reactions of Virginia Woolf, say, or certain friends of mine who left wry comments on Bloomsday posts about picking up something more “readable” to celebrate. (A third category, the scandalized, has more or less died off, as scatology, blasphemy, and cuckoldry have become the stuff of sitcoms.) Another famous reader, Carl Jung, seems at first to damn the novel with some faint praise and much scathing criticism in a 1932 essay for Europäische Revue, but ends up, despite himself, writing about the book in the language of a true believer.
A great many readers of Jung’s essay may perhaps nod their heads at sentences like “Yes, I admit I feel I have been made a fool of” and “one should never rub the reader’s nose into his own stupidity, but that is just what Ulysses does.” To illustrate his boredom with the novel, he quotes “an old uncle,” who says “’Do you know how the devil tortures souls in hell? […] He keeps them waiting.’” This remark, Jung writes, “occurred to me when I was plowing through Ulysses for the first time. Every sentence raises an expectation which is not fulfilled; finally, out of sheer resignation, you come to expect nothing any longer.” But while Jung’s critique may validate certain hasty readers’ hatred of Joyce’s nearly unavoidable 20th century masterwork, it also probes deeply into why the novel resonates.
For all of his frustration with the book—his sense that it “always gives the reader an irritating sense of inferiority”—Jung nonetheless bestows upon it the highest praise, comparing Joyce to other prophetic European writers of earlier ages like Goethe and Nietzsche. “It seems to me now,” he writes, “that all that is negative in Joyce’s work, all that is cold-blooded, bizarre and banal, grotesque and devilish, is a positive virtue for which it deserves praise.”Ulysses is “a devotional book for the object-besotted white man,” a “spiritual exercise, an aesthetic discipline, an agonizing ritual, an arcane procedure, eighteen alchemical alembics piled on top of one another […] a world has passed away, and is made new.” He ends the essay by quoting the novel’s entire final paragraph. (Find longer excerpts of Jung’s essay here and here.)
Jung not only wrote what may be the most critically honest yet also glowing response to the novel, but he also took it upon himself in September of 1932 to send a copy of the essay to the author along with the letter below. Letters of Note tells us that Joyce “was both annoyed and proud,” a fittingly divided response to such an ambivalent review.
Dear Sir,
Your Ulysses has presented the world such an upsetting psychological problem that repeatedly I have been called in as a supposed authority on psychological matters.
Ulysses proved to be an exceedingly hard nut and it has forced my mind not only to most unusual efforts, but also to rather extravagant peregrinations (speaking from the standpoint of a scientist). Your book as a whole has given me no end of trouble and I was brooding over it for about three years until I succeeded to put myself into it. But I must tell you that I’m profoundly grateful to yourself as well as to your gigantic opus, because I learned a great deal from it. I shall probably never be quite sure whether I did enjoy it, because it meant too much grinding of nerves and of grey matter. I also don’t know whether you will enjoy what I have written about Ulysses because I couldn’t help telling the world how much I was bored, how I grumbled, how I cursed and how I admired. The 40 pages of non stop run at the end is a string of veritable psychological peaches. I suppose the devil’s grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman, I didn’t.
Well, I just try to recommend my little essay to you, as an amusing attempt of a perfect stranger that went astray in the labyrinth of your Ulysses and happened to get out of it again by sheer good luck. At all events you may gather from my article what Ulysses has done to a supposedly balanced psychologist.
With the expression of my deepest appreciation, I remain, dear Sir,
Yours faithfully,
C. G. Jung
With this letter of introduction, Jung was “a perfect stranger” to Joyce no longer. In fact, two years later, Joyce would call on the psychologist to treat his daughter Lucia, who suffered from schizophrenia, a tragic story told in Carol Loeb Schloss’s biography of the novelist’s famously troubled child. For his care of Lucia and his careful attention to Ulysses, Joyce would inscribe Jung’s copy of the book: “To Dr. C.G. Jung, with grateful appreciation of his aid and counsel. James Joyce. Xmas 1934, Zurich.”
Words like “adorable” and “cute” don’t come readily to mind when talking about Danish director Lars von Trier, but that’s exactly how you can describe the stop motion animated film he made when he was 11 years old. Sure, you can also describe the two-minute short — Turen til Squashland: En Super Pølse Film (The Trip to Squash Land: A Super Sausage Film) — as creepy and vaguely unsettling, adjectives much more commonly applied to the filmmaker.
Von Trier is, of course, cinema’s reigning bad boy. His Antichrist is a scarring descent into madness filled with bad sex, talking foxes and horrifically graphic self-mutilation. Anyone who’s seen the movie will never look at a pair of scissors in the same way. His 2011 movie Melancholia is a glorious ode to depression and global annihilation; a beautiful anti-revelry on how much everything in the world sucks. And his most recent movie, Nymphomaniac, is a 4‑hour long movie — divided in two, Kill Bill style — featuring some of the most joyless unsimulated onscreen couplings this side of the Paris Hilton sex tape.
Turen til Squashland, on the other hand, is about a sentient sausage who rides a black whale to rescue a bunny rabbit. The film was shot by the tweenaged Trier (he added the ‘von’ to his name in film school) on his Super 8mm camera in 1967. In terms of technique and design, it is shockingly good. The short has a naïve sweetness that Wes Anderson often aspires to while having the uncanny dream-like quality of an early David Lynch movie.
It’s tempting to parse Turen til Squashland to gain some insight into von Trier’s later auteurist obsessions. Does von Trier’s tendency to place the vulnerable and the loveable in the clutches of a cruel and heartless villain start here? While the ever-adorable Björk ends up dangling from the end of a rope in Dancer in the Dark, the bunny in this movie thankfully makes it out alive. Castration is another reoccurring theme in von Trier’s work. Does that have anything to do with the free-range sausage protagonist? And does the talking fox in Antichrist have its origins in this movie’s trio of head spinning rabbits?
The one element, however, that has no connection to his later work is the short’s end, which shows a placard reading “Slut.” That has nothing to do with his latest movie or von Trier’s complicated relationship with women. The word “slut” means “The End” in Danish.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
The origins of circumcision remain unclear. According to this online essay, a stele (carving on stone) from the 23rd century B.C.E. suggests that an author named “Uha” was circumcised in a mass ritual. He wrote:
“When I was circumcised, together with one hundred and twenty men, there was none thereof who hit out, there was none thereof who was hit, and there was none thereof who scratched and there was none thereof who was scratched.”
By the time you get to 4,000 B.C.E., you start to find exhumed Egyptian bodies that show signs of circumcision. And then come the artistic depictions. The Sakkara depiction comes with the perhaps helpful written warning,“Hold him and do not allow him to faint.”
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