“Everybody knows that Einstein did something astonishing,” writes Bertrand Russell in the opening passage of ABC of Relativity, “but very few people know exactly what it was. It is generally recognized that he revolutionized our conception of the physical world, but the new conceptions are wrapped up in mathematical technicalities. It is true that there are innumerable popular accounts of the theory of relativity, but they generally cease to be intelligible just at the point where they begin to say something important.”
Eighty-seven years after it was written, ABC of Relativity still stands as one of the most intelligible introductions to Albert Einstein’s theories. Russell wrote the book in 1925 as a companion to his earlier volume, ABC of Atoms. The project of writing books for a general readership was born of necessity. Russell had no academic appointment, and needed the money. But as Peter Clark explains in his introduction to the Routledge fifth edition to ABC of Relativity, the early 1920s were also a time when Russell was becoming increasingly preoccupied with social and political issues. He believed that many of the social ills of the period, including the rise of nationalism, were consequences of a widespread and entrenched irrationality, born of ignorance and a lack of education. Writes Clark:
It was certainly a heroic period in Russell’s life, when he earnestly believed that the sort of blind unthinking prejudice–which he conceived to be fundamentally responsible for the horrors of the First World War–could be transcended by the dissemination of knowledge and the exercise in critical reasoning power by all classes of society. His huge output in this period was designed to bring within, as far as possible, everyone’s grasp the freedom of thought and action which knowledge and learning brings. That spirit of enlightenment certainly pervades the ABC of Relativity.
Thanks to UbuWeb, you can listen to an abridged audio version of ABC of Relativity online. The book is read by English actor Derek Jacobi (who also starred in the film we featured last week on Alan Turing: Breaking the Code). Jacobi reads one of the later editions of ABC of Relativity. In 1959, and again in 1969, Russell consented to revisions by physicist Felix Pirani. Chapter 11 was rewritten by Pirani to incorporate the expansion of the universe, which wasn’t announced by Edwin Hubble until four years after the first edition of Russell’s book. The one troubling thing about the text, as it now stands, is that Pirani didn’t limit himself to the revisions made under Russell’s supervision. He made more changes in 1985, fifteen years after Russell’s death.
Stellar courses focusing on Einstein’s physics can also be found in our big collection of Free Courses Online. Just scroll down to the Physics section.
Haruki Murakami holds the titles of both the most popular novelist in Japan and the most popular Japanese novelist in the wider world. After publishing Norwegian Woodin 1987, a book often called “the Japanese Catcher in the Rye,” Murakami’s notoriety exploded to such an extent that he felt forced out of his homeland, a country whose traditional ways and — to his mind — conformist mindset never sat right with him in the first place. Though he returned to Japan in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake and the Tokyo underground gas attacks, he remained an author shaped by his favorite foreign cultures — especially America’s. This, combined with his yearning to break from established Japanese literary norms, has generated enough international demand for his work to sell briskly in almost every language in which people read novels.
I myself once spent a month doing nothing but reading Murakami’s work, and this BBC documentary Haruki Murakami: In Search of this Elusive Writer makes a valiant attempt to capture what about it could raise such a compulsion. Rupert Edwards’ camera follows veteran presenter Alan Yentob through Japan, from the midnight Tokyo of After Hours to the snowed-in Hokkaido of A Wild Sheep Chase, in a quest to find artifacts of the supremely famous yet media-shy novelist’s imaginary world. Built around interviews with fans and translators but thick with such Murakamiana as laid-back jazz standards, grim school hallways, sixties pop hits, women’s ears, vinyl records, marathon runners, and talking cats, the broadcast strives less to explain Murakami’s substance than to simply reflect it. If you find your curiosity piqued by all the fuss over 1Q84, Murakami’s latest, you might watch it as something of an aesthetic primer.
In his 1955 classic, Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov described the facial features of his scandalous protagonist, Humbert Humbert, in small bits. When taken together, here’s what you get:
Gloomy good looks… Clean-cut jaw, muscular hand, deep sonorous voice… broad shoulders … I was, and still am, despite mes malheurs, an exceptionally handsome male; slow-moving, tall, with soft dark hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanor. Exceptional virility often reflects in the subject’s displayable features a sullen and congested something that pertains to what he has to conceal. And this was my case… But instead I am lanky, big-boned, wooly-chested Humbert Humbert, with thick black eyebrows… A cesspoolful of rotting monsters behind his slow boyish smile… aging ape eyes… Humbert’s face might twitch with neuralgia.
In a rather brilliant move, Brian Joseph Davis has run these descriptions through law enforcement composite sketch software and brought Humbert Humbert almost to life. (See above.) And he has done the same for a cast of other literary characters on his Tumblr, called The Composites. Other characters getting the perp treatment include Emma Bovary (Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary), Edward Rochester (Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre), and Keith Talent (Martin Amis’ London Fields), among others. Find them all here. h/t Metafilter
Today is the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens. He was born in Portsmouth, England on February 7, 1812, the second of eight children. When he was 12 years old his father was sent to debtors’ prison, along with most of his family, and Charles went to live with a friend of the family, an impoverished old lady. He was forced to quit school and work in a blacking factory, where he pasted labels on jars of shoe polish.
Dickens never forgot those early traumas. He incorporated his experiences and observations of social injustice into his works, including David Copperfield, Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol. (Find free novels below.) He was the most popular writer of Victorian England, a virtual rock star in the days before recorded music and movies. His stories, published serially in magazines, were eagerly awaited by the public. Most have remained in print ever since.
The Dickens bicentenary is being celebrated with special events around the world, including a wreath-laying ceremony this morning at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, where actor and filmmaker Ralph Fiennes, author Claire Tomalin, and two of Dickens’s descendants are scheduled to give readings. For a listing of events today and throughout the year, go to Dickens2012.org. Also take a look at the short retrospective of Dickens-inspired movies (above) from the British Film Institute.
To help celebrate, we have gathered together some of the best Dickens material from across the Web:
Oliver Twist: Another classic by David Lean, this 1948 film stars John Howard Davies as Oliver and Alec Guinness as Fagin. In 1999 it was ranked 46th on the BFI’s list of the top 100 British films of all time.
A Tale of Two Cities: The 1958 film by Ralph Thomas, starring Dirk Bogarde as Sydney Carton and Dorothy Tutin as Lucie Manette. The film was shot in France’s Loire Valley, with several thousand U.S. soldiers, posted in nearby Orleans, cast as extras.
A Christmas Carol: George C. Scott gives an excellent performance as Ebenezer Scrooge in this critically acclaimed 1984 film directed by Clive Donner. It premiered in America on CBS television, and was released theatrically in Great Britain.
David Copperfield: A 2000 U.S.-Irish television adaptation starring Hugh Dancy as David Copperfield, Michael Richards as Wilkins Micawber and Sally Field as Betsey Trotwood.
The Pickwick Papers: A 1952 film, adapted and directed by Noel Langley and starring James Hayter as Samuel Pickwick.
Today is the birthday of James Joyce, who was born in Dublin on February 2, 1882, and wrote in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
To celebrate his life, we present an August 1929 recording of Joyce reading a melodious passage from the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” chapter of his Work in Progress, which would be published ten years later as Finnegans Wake. The recording was made in Cambridge, England, at the arrangement of Joyce’s friend and publisher Sylvia Beach. “How beautiful the ‘Anna Livia’ recording is,” wrote Beach in her memoir, Shakespeare and Company, “and how amusing Joyce’s rendering of an Irish washerwoman’s brogue!”
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Here’s one way to become a better writer. Listen to the advice of writers who earn their daily bread with their pens. During the past week, lists of writing commandments by Henry Miller, Elmore Leonard (above) and William Safire have buzzed around Twitter. (Find our Twitter stream here.) So we decided to collect them and add tips from a few other veterans — namely, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, and Neil Gaiman. Here we go:
1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”
3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4. Work according to the program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5. When you can’t create you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people; go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like it–but go back to it the next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.
1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Margaret Atwood (originally appeared in The Guardian)
1. Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.
2. If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.
3. Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.
4. If you’re using a computer, always safeguard new text with a memory stick.
5. Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.
6. Hold the reader’s attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don’t know who the reader is, so it’s like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What fascinates A will bore the pants off B.
7. You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you’re on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.
8. You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.
9. Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.
10. Prayer might work. Or reading something else. Or a constant visualisation of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.
1. Write.
2. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
3. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
4. Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
5. Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
6. Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
7. Laugh at your own jokes.
8. The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.
William Safire (the author of the New York Times Magazine column “On Language”)
1. Remember to never split an infinitive.
2. The passive voice should never be used.
3. Do not put statements in the negative form.
4. Verbs have to agree with their subjects.
5. Proofread carefully to see if you words out.
6. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be by rereading and editing.
7. A writer must not shift your point of view.
8. And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction. (Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.)
9. Don’t overuse exclamation marks!!
10. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.
11. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
12. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
13. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.
14. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
15. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
16. Always pick on the correct idiom.
17. The adverb always follows the verb.
18. Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives.
Today is the birthday of Richard Brautigan, whose funny and imaginative books were a touchstone for the 1960s counterculture and have remained an inspiration to free spirits ever since. He would have been 77.
In this video, uploaded to the Internet exactly a year ago, Ianthe Brautigan Swensen reads her father’s story, “One Afternoon in 1939,” from his collection Revenge of the Lawn. Ianthe was one year old in 1961 when her father sat down with a portable typewriter on a family camping trip to write his most famous work, Trout Fishing in America, and she was 24 when he took his own life in 1984. Now she’s a writer and a teacher.
In 2001 Brautigan Swensen published You Can’t Catch Death: A Daughter’s Memoirabout her life with a difficult but loving father who liked to take her with him to his favorite San Francisco haunts during the 60s. “When I’m here,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle on a visit to the city in 2000, “I still feel my father walking the streets, I still feel my hand in his. And that’s a very happy feeling.”
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This past summer, Jonathan Pararajasingham, a neurosurgeon in London, created a montage of 100 renowned academics, mostly all scientists, talking about their thoughts on the existence of God. (Find it in two parts here and here.) Now’s he back with a new video, 30 Renowned Writers Speaking About God. It runs 25 minutes, and it offers as much a critique of orthodox religious belief as it does a literary tribute to humanism and rationalism. Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Salman Rushdie (who kindly tweeted us this weekend), Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth — they all make an appearance. The full list of writers appears below the jump.
And, before we close, let me say this. Whenever we post videos like these, we get the question. Why the occasional focus on atheism/rationalism/humanism? And the simple answer comes down to this: If you cover writers, academics and scientists, the thinking skews in that direction. Yes, there are exceptions, but they are in shorter supply. But if someone pulls them together and makes a montage, we’ll likely feature it too. H/T RichardDawkins.net
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