Get to Know Socrates, Camus, Kierkegaard & Other Great Philosophers with the BBC’s Intelligent Radio Show, In Our Time

in Philosophy, Podcasts, Radio | November 19th, 2015

When writer, politician, and BBC radio and television personality Melvyn Bragg began his long-running radio program In Our Time, which brings academics together to discuss philosophy, history, science, religion, and culture, he didn’t think the show would last very long: “Six months,” he told The Scotsman in 2009, “but I’ll have a go.” Now, seventeen years after the show began in 1998, In Our Time is going strong, with millions of listeners from around the world who tune in on the radio, or download the In Our Time podcast. Though it’s easy to despair when faced with the onslaught of mass media devoted to triviality and sensationalism, Bragg has shown there’s still a sizable audience that cares about thoughtful engagement with matters of import, and in particular that cares about philosophy.

Though the subject takes a beating these days, especially in unfavorable comparisons to the hard sciences, the concerns articulated by philosophers over the centuries still inform our views of ethics, language, politics, and human existence writ large. In Our Time’s philosophy programs follow the same format as the show’s other topics—in Bragg’s words, he gets “three absolutely top-class academics to discuss one subject and explore as deeply as time allow[s].” In this case, the “subject,” is often a proper name, like Simone Weil, David Hume, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir or Socrates.

The show just as often tackles philosophical movements like Skepticism, Neoplatonism, or The Frankfurt School, that aren’t associated with only one thinker; likewise, Bragg and his guests have devoted their discussions to longstanding philosophical problems, like the existence of Free Will, and historical developments, like the Continental-Analytic Split in Western philosophy.

Though there is certainly no shortage of high quality resources for people who wish to learn more about philosophy—such as the many free courses, podcasts, and lectures we’ve featured on this site—few are as immediately accessible as In Our Time’s philosophy discussions. Bragg describes his preparation for each show as “swotting”—or cramming. He’s not an expert, but he’s knowledgeable enough to ask pertinent questions of his guests, who then go on to educate him, and the listeners, for the almost hour-long conversation. Hear how well the approach works in the In Our Time philosophy programs featured here. At the top, Bragg discusses the philosophy and activism of Bertrand Russell with academic philosophers A.C. Grayling, Mike Beaney, and Hilary Greaves. Below that, he talks Kierkegaard with Jonathan Ree, Clare Carlisle, and John Lippitt. Just above, hear Bragg discuss Jean-Paul Sartre with Jonathan Rée, Benedict O’Donohoe, and Christina Howells. Finally, below, hear his conversation on Karl Marx with Anthony Grayling, Francis Wheen, and Stedman Jones.

These four examples are but a small sampling of the many compelling In Our Time philosophy discussions. Explore, stream, and download dozens more at the BBC Radio 4 site or hear them on Youtube and iTunes here. And if any these conversations whet your appetite for more, then head over to our expansive archive of Free Philosophy Courses, and Free Philosophy eBooks.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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The Lord of the Rings Mythology Explained in 10 Minutes, in Two Illustrated Videos

in Education, Literature | November 18th, 2015

As a lover of fantasy and science fiction, but by no means a know-it-all fanboy, I know what it’s like to come to a fictional universe late. It can seem like everyone else has already read the canon, seen the movies, and memorized the genealogies, origin stories, magical arcana, number of ancient blood feuds, etc. For example, I grew up steeped in Star Trek but never watched Dr. Who. Now that British sci-fi show is seemingly everywhere, and I find myself intrigued. But who has the time to catch up on several decades of missed episodes? Some people may have felt similarly in the last few years about The Lord of the Rings, what with the number of J.R.R. Tolkien adaptations besieging theaters. If you haven’t read any of those books, Middle Earth—for all its air of medieval legend and Norse myth—can be a very confusing place.

Thanks to Peter Jackson’s films, for better or worse, Tolkien’s books have even more cultural currency than they did in the 70s, when Led Zeppelin mined them for lyrical inspiration, and “Frodo lives” graffiti appeared on overpasses everywhere.

This brings us to the videos we feature here. Presented in a rapid fire style like that of motormouth YA novelist and video educator John Green, “The Lord of the Rings Mythology Explained” is exactly that–two very quick tours, with illustrations, through the complex mythological world of Middle Earth, the setting of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit, and other books you’ve maybe never heard of. These videos were made before the final installment of Jackson’s interminable Hobbit trilogy, but they cover most major developments before and after the events in short book on which he based those films.

I’ll say this for the effort—Tolkien’s world is one I thought I knew, but I didn’t know it nearly as well as I thought. Like most people, frankly, I haven’t read the sourcebook of so much of that world’s genesis, The Silmarillion, which gets a survey in the first video at the top of the post. I’m much more familiar, and you may be as well—through books or films—with the mythologies of The Lord of the Rings trilogy proper, covered in the video above. If these two thorough explainers don’t satisfy your curiosity, you can likely have further questions answered at one of the videos’ sources, Ask Middle Earth, a site that solicits “any question about Middle Earth.” Another source, the work of comparative mythologist Verlyn Flieger, who specializes in Tolkien, also promises to be highly illuminating.

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J.R.R. Tolkien Snubs a German Publisher Asking for Proof of His “Aryan Descent” (1938)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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The First Feminist Film, Germaine Dulac’s The Smiling Madame Beudet (1922)

in Film, Gender | November 18th, 2015

Yesterday we featured The Seashell and the Clergyman, the first surrealist film, directed by Germaine Dulac in 1928. Given Dulac’s gender, for those playing the cinema history home game, it also counts as the first surrealist film directed by a woman. That alone would make for a sufficiently pioneering achievement for any career in film, but Dulac had already accomplished another important act of cinematic trailblazing with La Souriante Madame Beudet (The Smiling Madame Beudet), a short silent that also happens to hold the title of the first feminist film.

Where Dulac worked from a story by Antonin Artaud in the The Seashell and the Clergyman, she works here from a story originally by Guy de Maupassant, one revolving around a wife, the titular Madame Beudet, pushed to the brink by years of life with her boorish husband.

Madame Beudet at first finds some sweetness in her unenviable lot in life in the form of the rich fantasies in her head, realized onscreen with a suite of visual techniques similar to those Dulac would use to bring her audience into the romantically fraught psyche of the clergyman six years later. Eventually, though, she engineers a more permanent solution to her problems, placing a live bullet into the chamber of the revolver Monsieur Beudet uses in his constant self-pitying pantomimes of Russian roulette.

And where scholars label The Seashell and the Clergyman as a work of surrealism, they label The Smiling Madame Beudet as a work of impressionism. “Throughout the picture,” writes critic Nathan Southern, “Dulac uses such devices as slow motion, distortions, and superimposed images to paint Beudet’s various emotional states onscreen,” an intersection of form and substance that resulted in a picture that “instantly established Dulac as a force in world cinema.” Now, alongside The Seashell and the Clergyman, The Smiling Madame Beudet lays strong claim to the title of her masterwork. Dulac clearly had far better luck than the pitiable Madame Beudet who, despite her best efforts ends the film deeper in despair than she began it. As advanced an artistic sensibility as she had, the filmmaker here expresses a dictum of age-old simplicity: you can’t win ’em all.

Simone de Beauvoir Explains “Why I’m a Feminist” in a Rare TV Interview (1975)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

An Interactive Timeline Covering 14 Billion Years of History: From The Big Bang to 2015

in History | November 18th, 2015

For his final project in Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, Matan Stauber created Histography, an interactive timeline that covers 14 billion years of history. The timeline, writes Stauber, “draws historical events from Wikipedia, and it self-updates daily with new recorded events.” And the interface lets users see history in smaller chunks (decades at a time) or bigger ones (millions of years at a time). To get a vague feel for how Histography works, you can watch the video above. But really the best way to experience things is to dive right in here.

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via Kottke

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The First Surrealist Film The Seashell and the Clergyman, Brought to You By Germaine Dulac & Antonin Artaud (1928)

in Film | November 17th, 2015

When the subject of early surrealist film arises, most of us think of Salvador Dalí and Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, and not without good cause: even 86 years after its release, its nightmare images of piano-dragging and eyeball-slicing still lurk in our collective cinematic consciousness. But we can’t call it the very first surrealist film since, 87 years ago, French critic and filmmaker Germaine Dulac, in collaboration with no less an avant-garde luminary than Antonin Artaud, put out La Coquille et le clergyman, better know internationally as The Seashell and the Clergyman, which you can watch free above.

Un Chien Andalou met with a pleased reception, to Buñuel’s delight and Dalí’s disappointment. Dulac and Artaud’s project provoked a different reaction. “Advertised as ‘a dream on the screen,’ ” writes Senses of Cinema’s Maryann de Julio, “The Seashell and Clergyman’s premiere at the Studio des Ursulines on February 9, 1928 incited a small riot, and critical response to the film has ranged from the misinformed – some American prints spliced the reels in the wrong order – to the rapturous – acclaimed as the first example of a Surrealist film.”

The film takes place in the consciousness of the titular clergyman, a lusty priest who thinks all manner of impure thoughts about a general’s wife. In another Senses of Cinema article on Artaud’s film theory, Lee Jamieson writes that, in putting this troubled consciousness on film, it “penetrates the skin of material reality and plunges the viewer into an unstable landscape where the image cannot be trusted,” resulting in “a complex, multi-layered film, so semiotically unstable that images dissolve into one another both visually and ‘semantically,’ truly investing in film’s ability to act upon the subconscious.” It capitalizes, in other words, upon the now well-known principle that what is seen cannot be unseen.

But it also pushed cinema ahead in a way that Buñuel and Dali could run with the following year. De Julio’s article quotes Artaud’s own description of the challenge he saw the form as facing, and the one which The Seashell and the Clergyman attempts, in its way, to address: it could either become “pure or absolute cinema” or “this sort of hybrid visual art that persists in translating into images, more or less apt, psychological situations that would be perfectly at home on stage or in the pages of a book, but not on the screen.” He saw neither of these as “likely the true one,” and many filmmakers even today (David Lynch stands as a guiding light among those now living) continue the search for how best to tell stories on film in a manner suited to the advantages of film.

Even overshadowed by Un Chien Andalou, The Seashell and the Clergyman remains a popular silent film to re-score today, and you can watch the movie with a few different soundtracks online: from dark ambient artist Roto Visage, from musique concrète composer Delia Derbyshire (see right above), from large-scale experimental band Sons of Noel and Adrian, and many more besides.

The Seashell and the Clergyman has been added to our collection of Silent Films, a subset of our meta list 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Charles Dickens (Channeling Jorge Luis Borges) Created a Fake Library, with 37 Witty Invented Book Titles

in Books, Letters, Literature | November 17th, 2015

I don’t know about you, but I’ve sort of always associated Charles Dickens with the kind of humorless moralism and didactic sentimentality that are hallmarks of so much Victorian literature. That’s probably because the work of Dickens contains no small amount of humorless moralism and didactic sentimentality. But it also contains much wit and absurdity, inventive characterization and rich description. While novels like the short Hard Times, published in 1854, can seem more like thinly veiled tracts of moral philosophy than fully realized fictions, others, like the strange and whimsical Pickwick Papers—Dickens’ first—work as fanciful, lighthearted satires. The big, baggy novels like Great Expectations, Bleak House, and A Tale of Two Cities (find in our collection of Free eBooks) manage to skillfully combine these two impulses with his own twist on the gothic, such that Dickens’ work is not overwhelmed, as it might be, by sermonizing.

For all of this tidy summation of that giant of Victorian letters, one adjective now comes to mind that I would never have previously thought to apply at any time to the writer of A Christmas Carol: Borgesian, as in possessed of the scholastic wit of 20th century Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. I’m not the first to note a resemblance, but I must say it never would have occurred to me to think of the two names in the same sentence were it not for an extra-curricular activity Dickens engaged in while outfitting his London home, Tavistock House, in 1851. Letters of Note’s sister site Lists of Note brings us the following anecdote:

[Dickens] decided to fill two spaces in his new study with bookcases containing fake books, the witty titles of which he had invented. And so, on October 22nd, he wrote to a bookbinder named Thomas Robert Eeles and supplied him with the following “list of imitation book-backs” to be produced.

You can see the complete—completely Borgesian—list below. Borges is of course well known for inventing titles of books that have never existed, but seem like they should, in another dimension somewhere. His invention of alternate realities, and publications, manifests in most all of his stories, as well as in oddities like the Book of Imaginary Beings. Like Borges’ made-up books, Dickens’ contain just the right mix of the self-serious and the ridiculous, so as to make them at once plausible, cryptic, exotic, and hilarious—both Pickwickian and, indeed, proto-Borgesian.

History of a Short Chancery Suit
Catalogue of Statues of the Duke of Wellington
Five Minutes in China. 3 vols.
Forty Winks at the Pyramids. 2 vols.
Abernethy on the Constitution. 2 vols.
Mr. Green’s Overland Mail. 2 vols.
Captain Cook’s Life of Savage. 2 vols.
A Carpenter’s Bench of Bishops. 2 vols.
Toot’s Universal Letter-Writer. 2 vols.
Orson’s Art of Etiquette.
Downeaster’s Complete Calculator.
History of the Middling Ages. 6 vols.
Jonah’s Account of the Whale.
Captain Parry’s Virtues of Cold Tar.
Kant’s Ancient Humbugs. 10 vols.
Bowwowdom. A Poem.
The Quarrelly Review. 4 vols.
The Gunpowder Magazine. 4 vols.
Steele. By the Author of “Ion.”
The Art of Cutting the Teeth.
Matthew’s Nursery Songs. 2 vols.
Paxton’s Bloomers. 5 vols.
On the Use of Mercury by the Ancient Poets.
Drowsy’s Recollections of Nothing. 3 vols.
Heavyside’s Conversations with Nobody. 3 vols.
Commonplace Book of the Oldest Inhabitant. 2 vols.
Growler’s Gruffiology, with Appendix. 4 vols.
The Books of Moses and Sons. 2 vols.
Burke (of Edinburgh) on the Sublime and Beautiful. 2 vols.
Teazer’s Commentaries.
King Henry the Eighth’s Evidences of Christianity. 5 vols.
Miss Biffin on Deportment.
Morrison’s Pills Progress. 2 vols.
Lady Godiva on the Horse.
Munchausen’s Modern Miracles. 4 vols.
Richardson’s Show of Dramatic Literature. 12 vols.
Hansard’s Guide to Refreshing Sleep. As many volumes as possible.

As Flavorwire reports, designer Ann Sappenfield created her own fake bookbindings with Dickens’ titles (see some at the top of the page, courtesy of the NYPL). These are part of a New York Public Library exhibit called Charles Dickens: The Key to Character that ran in 2012–13. You can read Dickens original letter to Thomas Robert Eeles in The Letters of Charles Dickens here.

via Lists of Note/Flavorwire

Charles Dickens’ Hand-Edited Copy of His Classic Holiday Tale, A Christmas Carol

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

The Making of The Beatles’ Abbey Road: Alternate Album Cover Photos, Recording Session Outtakes & Interviews

in Music | November 17th, 2015

View post on imgur.com

A good part of my youth was spent in front of my old family hi-fi system, listening to Beatles records. This was music I knew no longer existed in the modern world—not on contemporary pop radio, and not on MTV… nowhere but on what seemed to me those ancient plastic disks. To my untrained ears, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s, Magical Mystery Tour, and especially Abbey Road sounded like they had come down from an advanced alien civilization.

What I was hearing in part—especially on Abbey Road—was the perfection of the studio as an instrument, and the major influence of the last, best fifth Beatle, George Martin. Not to diminish the incredible musicianship and songwriting abilities of the Beatles themselves, but without their engineers, without Martin at the controls, and without the state-of-the-art studios—EMI, then, of course, Abbey Road—those albums would have sounded much more down to earth: still great, no doubt, but not the symphonic masterpieces they are, especially—in my opinion—Abbey Road, the last album the Beatles recorded together (though not their final release).

So how did such a brilliant recording come to being? You can piece its construction together yourself by sorting through all of the stuff that didn’t make it on the record—outtakes, alternate album cover photos—as well as through interviews with Martin and the band. At the top of the post, see one of the cover photos that didn’t make the cut. A self-effacingly-named blog called Stuff Nobody Cares About has several more alternate photos from that session on August 8, 1969 (which McCartney conceptualized beforehand in a series of sketches). Before the album got its iconic look, it came together—pun intended—as iconic sound. Just above, you can hear George Martin describe the process of producing the band’s last recording, a “very happy record,” he says, compared to the tense, unhappy Let it Be. Afterward, hear George, Paul, and Ringo recollect their bittersweet memories of the sessions.

Near the end of the documentary clip, Paul McCartney says, “I’m really glad that most of the songs dealt with love, peace, understanding….” If that’s what “Mean Mr. Mustard” or “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” are about, color me surprised, but I’ve never been one to get too hung up on the meanings of the Beatles songs—it’s the menagerie of sounds I love, the unusual chord changes, and the witty little narratives, touching vignettes, and almost shockingly apt lyrical images (“Hold you in his armchair / You can feel his disease”).

But like the band themselves coming back together, the songs on Abbey Road—including that masterful closing medley—didn’t immediately fall into place; they were the product of much studio noodling and idiosyncratic Beatles brainstorming—an activity one part music hall comedy improv, one part genius happy accident, and one part good-natured family squabble. In the three clips above and below, hear the powerful Abbey Road medley come together, in fits and starts, with plenty of playful banter and off-the-cuff inspiration.

Hearing the making of Abbey Road doesn’t take away from the otherworldly final product, but it does bring the exalted personalities of the band back down to earth, showing them as hardworking musicians and natural writers and comedians who just happened to have made—with no shortage of help—some of the most mind-blowing music of the 20th century.

Hear the Isolated Vocal Tracks for The Beatles’ Climactic 16-Minute Medley on Abbey Road

The Beatles’ Rooftop Concert: The Last Gig Filmed in January 1969

The Beatles’ Final, “Painful” Photo Shoot: A Gallery of Bittersweet Images

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Haruki Murakami Novels Sold in Polish Vending Machines

in Books | November 17th, 2015

Out with the Coke cans, potato chips, Twix bars and other junk foods.

In with the Haruki Murakami novels.

That’s what happened last year when Muzu, a publisher in Poland, created three vending machines stocked with copies of Murakami’s Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and the Year of His Pilgrimage and then placed them in Polish train stations located in Warsaw, Poznan, and Wroclaw. It seemed like a natural thing to do, seeing that (notes the fan blog Haruki Murakami Stuff) Tsukuru Tazaki, the main character of the novel, “likes train stations and works as a train station designer for a Tokyo railway company.” Let’s cross our fingers and hope this is the start of a healthy trend.

via Vintage Anchor

Patti Smith Reviews Haruki Murakami’s New Novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Haruki Murakami’s Passion for Jazz: Discover the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Get to Know Socrates, Camus, Kierkegaard & Other Great Philosophers with the BBC’s Intelligent Radio Show, In Our Time

The Lord of the Rings Mythology Explained in 10 Minutes, in Two Illustrated Videos

The First Feminist Film, Germaine Dulac’s The Smiling Madame Beudet (1922)

An Interactive Timeline Covering 14 Billion Years of History: From The Big Bang to 2015

The First Surrealist Film The Seashell and the Clergyman, Brought to You By Germaine Dulac & Antonin Artaud (1928)

Charles Dickens (Channeling Jorge Luis Borges) Created a Fake Library, with 37 Witty Invented Book Titles

The Making of The Beatles’ Abbey Road: Alternate Album Cover Photos, Recording Session Outtakes & Interviews

Haruki Murakami Novels Sold in Polish Vending Machines

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