When the words London and underground come together, the first thing that comes to most of our minds, naturally, is the London Underground. But though it may enjoy the honorable distinction of the world’s first railway to run below the streets, the stalwart Tube is hardly the only thing buried below the city — and far indeed from the oldest. The video above makes a journey through various subterranean strata, starting with the paving stone and continuing through the soil, electric cables, and gas pipelines beneath. From there, things get Roman.
First comes the Billingsgate Roman House and Baths and the Roman amphitheater, two preserved places from what was once called Londinium. Below that level run several now-underground rivers, just above the depth of Winston Churchill’s private bunker, which is now maintained as a museum.
Farther down, at a depth of 66 feet, we find the remains of London’s tube system — not the Tube, but the pneumatic tube, a nineteenth-century technology that could fire encapsulated letters from one part of the city to another. More effective and longer lived was the later, more deeply installed London Post Office Railway, which was used to make deliveries until 2003.
At 79 feet underground, we finally meet with the Underground — or at least the first and shallowest of its eleven lines. The Tube has long become an essential part of the lives of most Londoners, but around the same depth exists another facility known to relatively few: the Camden catacombs, a system of underground passages once used to stable the horses who worked on the railways. Further down are the network of World War II-era “deep shelters,” one of which hosted the planning of D‑Day; below them is a still-functional facility instrumental to the defeat of different enemies, typhus and cholera. That would be London’s sewer system, for which we should spare a thought if we’ve ever walked along the Thames and appreciated the fact that it no longer stinks.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
In 2006, David Foster Wallace published a piece in the New York Times Magazine headlined “Roger Federer as Religious Experience.” Even then, he could declare Federer, “at 25, the best tennis player currently alive. Maybe the best ever.” Much had already been written about “his old-school stoicism and mental toughness and good sportsmanship and evident overall decency and thoughtfulness and charitable largess.” Less easily commented upon — because much less easily described — was the aesthetic transcendence of his performance on the court, which Wallace thought best witnessed in person.
“If you’ve watched tennis only on television, you simply have no idea how hard these pros are hitting the ball, how fast the ball is moving, how little time the players have to get to it, and how quickly they’re able to move and rotate and strike and recover,” Wallace writes. “And none are faster, or more deceptively effortless about it, than Roger Federer.” Was that one of the observations the champion had in mind this past weekend, eighteen years later — and two years after his own retirement from the game — when he took the tree-stump lectern before Dartmouth’s class of 2024 and declared that “Effortless is a myth”?
That was one of three “tennis lessons” — that is, lessons for life derived from his long and hugely successful experience in tennis — that Federer lays out in the commencement address above. The second, “It’s only a point,” is a notion of which it’s all too easy to lose sight of amid the balletic intensity of a match. The third, “Life is bigger than the court,” is one Federer himself now must learn in the daily life after his own “graduation” that stretches out before him. For a man still considered one of the greatest players ever to pick up a racket, is there life after professional tennis?
Federer acknowledges the irony of his not having gone to college, but choosing instead to leave school at sixteen in order to devote himself to his sport. “In many ways, professional athletes are our culture’s holy men,” Wallace writes in another essay. “They give themselves over to a pursuit, endure great privation and pain to actualize themselves at it, and enjoy a relationship to perfection that we admire and reward.” But when their athletic careers inevitably end, they find themselves in a greatly heightened version of the situation we all do when we come to the end of our institutionalized education, wondering what could or should come next.
Clearly, Federer doesn’t suffer from the kind of inarticulacy and unreflectiveness that Wallace diagnosed over and over in other professional athletes about whom he wrote. In profiling player Michael Joyce, for instance, Wallace saw that Joyce and his colleagues lived in “a world that, like a child’s world, is very serious and very small” — but which Federer has long displayed an uncommon ability to see beyond. Still, as he must know, that guarantees him a satisfying second act no more than even world-beating success in any given field guarantees any of us general well-being in life. Wallace, too, knew that full well — and of course, he was no mean commencement speaker himself.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
In 1849, a little over 175 years ago, Edgar Allan Poe was found dead in a Baltimore gutter under mysterious circumstances very likely related to violent election fraud. It was an ignominious end to a life marked by hardship, alcoholism, and loss. After struggling for years as the first American writer to try and make a living from his art, and failing in several publishing ventures and positions, Poe achieved few of his aims, barely getting by financially and only managing to attract a little—often negative—notice for now-famous poems like “The Raven.” Contemporaries like Ralph Waldo Emerson disparaged the poem and a later generation of writers, including William Butler Yeats, pronounced him “vulgar.”
But of course, as we know, a countercurrent of Poe appreciation took hold among writers, artists, and filmmakers interested in mystery, horror, and the supernatural—to such a degree that in the previous century, nearly every artist even passingly associated with darker themes has interpreted Poe as a rite of passage. We’ve featured a reading of “The Raven” by the often-sinister Christopher Walken.
At the top of the post, you can hear another version of the Queens-born actor reading Poe’s best-known work, a poem designed to produce what the author called a “unity of effect” with its incantatory repetitions. This recording comes from a collection of celebrity Poe readings called Closed on Account of Rabies, which also features such unique takes on the classic horror writer’s work as that above, “The Tell-Tale Heart” as read by Iggy Pop.
Just above, hear a lesser-known poem by Poe called “Ulalume” read by Jeff Buckley, with an accompanying soundtrack of low, pulsing, vaguely Western-inspired music that well suits Buckley’s formal, rhythmic recitation. The use of music on this album has divided many Poe fans, and admittedly, some tracks work better than others. On Buckley’s “Ulalume,” the music heightens tension and provides a perfect atmosphere for imagining “the misty mid region of Weir,” its “ghoul-haunted woodland,” and the “scoriac rivers” of lava pouring from the poet’s heart. On Marianne Faithful’s reading of “Annabelle Lee,” below, a score of keening synths can seem overwrought and unnecessary.
The remainder of the 1997 album, which you can purchase here, treats us to readings from 80s goth-rock stars Diamanda Galas and Gavin Friday, Bad Lieutenant director Abel Ferrara, Blondie singer Debbie Harry, and gravel-voiced New Orleans bluesman Dr. John, among others.
In June of 2014, Harvard University’s Houghton Library put up a blog post titled “Caveat Lecter,” announcing “good news for fans of anthropodermic bibliopegy, bibliomaniacs, and cannibals alike.” The occasion was the scientific determination that a book in the Houghton’s collection long rumored to have been bound in human skin — the task of whose retrieval once served, they say, as a hazing ritual for student employees — was, indeed, “without a doubt bound in human skin.” What a difference a decade makes: not only has the blog post been deleted, the book itself has been taken out of from circulation in order to have the now-offending binding removed.
“Harvard Library has removed human skin from the binding of a copy of Arsène Houssaye’s book Des destinées de l’âme (1880s),” declares a strenuously apologetic statement issued by the university. “The volume’s first owner, French physician and bibliophile Dr. Ludovic Bouland (1839–1933), bound the book with skin he took without consent from the body of a deceased female patient in a hospital where he worked.” Having been in the collection since 1934, the book was first placed there by John B. Stetson, Jr., “an American diplomat, businessman, and Harvard alumnus” (not to mention an heir to the fortune generated by the eponymous hat).
“Bouland knew that Houssaye had written the book while grieving his wife’s death,” writes Mike Jay in the New York Review of Books, “and felt that this was an appropriate binding for it — ‘a book on the human soul merits that it be given human clothing.’ ” He also “included a note stating that “this book is bound in human skin parchment on which no ornament has been stamped to preserve its elegance.” This copy of Des destinées de l’âme isn’t the only book rumored — or, with the peptide mass fingerprinting (PMF) technology developed over the past decade, confirmed — to have been bound in human skin. “The oldest reputed examples are three 13th-century Bibles held at the Bibliothèque Nationale in France, write the New York Times’ Jennifer Schuessler and Julia Jacobs.
Jay also mentions the especially vivid example of “an 1892 French edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Gold Bug, adorned with a skull emblem, is genuine human skin: Poe en peau humaine.” In general, Schuessler and Jacobs note, the largest number of human skin-bound books “date from the Victorian era, the heyday of anatomical collecting, when doctors sometimes had medical treatises and other texts bound in skin from patients or cadavers.” Now that this practice has been retroactively judged to be not just deeply disturbing but officially problematic (to use the vogue term of recent years) it’s up to the anthropodermic-bibliopegy enthusiasts out there to determine whether to put the items in their own collections to the PMF test — or to leave a bit of macabre mystery in the world of antiquarian book-collecting.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
The Middle East is hardly the world’s most harmonious region, and it only gets more fractious if you add in South Asia and the Mediterranean. But there’s one thing on which many residents of that wide geographical span can agree: Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī. One might at first imagine that a thirteenth-century poet and mystical philosopher who wrote in Persian, with occasional forays into Turkish, Arabic, and Greek, would be a niche figure today, if known at all. In fact, Rumi, as he’s commonly known, is now one of the most popular writers in not just the Middle East but the world; English reinterpretations of his verse have even made him the best-selling poet in the United States.
“The transformative moment in Rumi’s life came in 1244, when he met a wandering mystic known as Shams of Tabriz,” writes the BBC’s Jane Ciabattari. She quotes Brad Gooch, author of Rumi’s Secret: The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love, describing them as having an “electric friendship for three years,” after which Shams disappeared. “Rumi coped by writing poetry,” which includes 3,000 poems written for “Shams, the prophet Muhammad and God. He wrote 2,000 rubayat, four-line quatrains. He wrote in couplets a six-volume spiritual epic, The Masnavi.” He did all this work in service of what, in the animated TED-Ed lesson above, Stephanie Honchell Smith calls his ultimate goal: “the reunification of his soul with God through the experience of divine love.”
How is such a love to be accessed? “Love resides not in learning, not in knowledge, not in pages in books,” Rumi declared. “Wherever the debates of men may lead, that is not the lover’s path.” He pursued it through devotion to Shams’ Sufism, “participating in ritualized dancing and preaching the religion of love through lectures, poetry, and prose.” Later in life, he shifted “from ecstatic expressions of divine love to verses that guide others to discover it for themselves,” incorporating “ideas, stories, and quotes from Islamic religious texts, Arabic and Persian literature and earlier Sufi writings and poetry.” Perhaps there can be no full appreciation of Rumi’s work without a scholar’s understanding of the languages and cultures he knew. But if his sales figures are anything to go by, the longing into which his complex work taps is universal.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
We live in an era of genre. Browse through TV shows of the last decade to see what I mean: Horror, sci-fi, fantasy, superheroes, futuristic dystopias…. Take a casual glance at the burgeoning global film franchises or merchandising empires. Where in earlier decades, horror and fantasy inhabited the teenage domain of B‑movies and comic books, they’ve now become dominant forms of popular narrative for adults. Telling the story of how this came about might involve the kind of lengthy sociological analysis on which people stake academic careers. And finding a convenient beginning for that story wouldn’t be easy.
Do we start with The Castle of Otranto, the first Gothic novel, which opened the door for such books as Dracula and Frankenstein? Or do we open with Edgar Allan Poe, whose macabre short stories and poems captivated the public’s imagination and inspired a million imitators? Maybe. But if we really want to know when the most populist, mass-market horror and fantasy began—the kind that inspired television shows from the Twilight Zone to the X‑Files to Supernatural to The Walking Dead—we need to start with H.P. Lovecraft, and with the pulpy magazine that published his bizarre stories, Weird Tales.
Debuting in 1923, Weird Tales, writes The Pulp Magazines Project, provided “a venue for fiction, poetry and non-fiction on topics ranging from ghost stories to alien invasions to the occult.” The magazine introduced its readers to past masters like Poe, Bram Stoker, and H.G. Wells, and to the latest weirdness from Lovecraft and contemporaries like August Derleth, Ashton Smith, Catherine L. Moore, Robert Bloch, and Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian).
In the magazine’s first few decades, you wouldn’t have thought it very influential. Founder Jacob Clark Hennenberger struggled to turn a profit, and the magazine “never had a large circulation.” But no magazine is perhaps better representative of the explosion of pulp genre fiction that swept through the early twentieth century and eventually gave birth to the juggernauts of Marvel and DC.
Weird Tales is widely accepted by cultural historians as “the first pulp magazine to specialize in supernatural and occult fiction,” points out The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (though, as we noted before, an obscure German title, Der Orchideengarten, technically got there earlier). And while the magazine may not have been widely popular, as the Velvet Underground was to the rapid spread of various subgenera of rock in the seventies, so was Weird Tales to horror and fantasy fandom. Everyone who read it either started their own magazine or fanclub, or began writing their own “weird fiction”—Lovecraft’s term for the kind of supernatural horror he churned out for several decades.
Fans of Lovecraft can read and download scans of his stories and letters to the editor published in Weird Tales at the links below, brought to us by The Lovecraft eZine (via SFFaudio).
Fans of early pulp horror and fantasy—–or grad students writing their thesis on the evolution of genre fiction—can view and download dozens of issues of Weird Tales, from the 20s to the 50s, at the links below:
Brilliant. This moving manuscript depicts a single musical sequence played front to back and then back to front. Give the video a little time to unfold and enjoy.
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What’s popular in the metropolis sooner or later makes its way out into the provinces. This phenomenon has become more difficult to notice in recent years, not because it’s slowed down, but because it’s sped way up, owing to near-instantaneous cultural diffusion on the internet. Well within living memory, however, are the days when whatever was cool in, say, New York or Los Angeles would take time to catch on in the rest of the US. This went for fashions, movies, and bands, of course, but also for mind-altering substances: distant-future archaeologists are as likely to unearth a Velvet Underground album and the remains of its owner’s stash in the ruins of Cleveland as those of Chelsea.
A roughly analogous discovery from the ancient world was recently made by Dutch zooarchaeologists Maaike Groot and Martijn van Haasteren and archaeobotanist Laura I. Kooistra, who this past February published a paper in the journal Antiquity on “evidence of the intentional use of black henbane (Hyoscyamus niger) in the Roman Netherlands.” A member of the nightshade family, black henbane is “an extremely poisonous plant species that can also be used as a medicinal or psychoactive drug,” the researchers write. It may have been the latter purpose that encouraged the creation of a peculiar artifact: “a sheep/goat bone that had been hollowed out, sealed on one side by a plug of a black material and filled with hundreds of black henbane seeds.”
“Physiological reactions to black henbane were well documented throughout the Ancient Mediterranean world,” writes Hyperallergic’s Elaine Velie. She quotes Greek philosopher Plutarch as describing its effects as “not so properly called drunkenness” but rather “alienation of mind or madness.” Pliny the Elder “discussed the plant’s medicinal, hallucinatory, and potentially lethal effects, noting that although it could be taken to heal ailments ranging from coughs to fever, the drug could also cause insanity and derangement. The Greek and Roman physician Dioscorides wrote that black henbane and its close cousins could alleviate pain, but cause disorientation when boiled.”
It would be natural to assume that this hollowed-out, plugged bone functioned as some kind of pipe for smoking henbane. Though Groot, van Haasteren, and Kooistra don’t find evidence for that, neither do they rule out the possibility that it was the stash box, if you like, of some resident of the Roman Netherlands two millennia ago. Groot points out to Velie the especially fascinating element of a “potential link between medicinal knowledge described by Roman authors in Roman Italy and people actually using the plant in a small village on the edge of the empire.” Though far from Rome itself, this henbane stash’s owner presumably used it however the Romans did. If it met with disapproval, this individual could have resorted to a still-familiar refrain: “Hey, it’s medicinal.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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