Brian Eno Creates a List of 20 Books That Could Rebuild Civilization

in Books | March 10th, 2022

Cre­ative Com­mons image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Artist and music pro­duc­er Bri­an Eno wrote one of my very favorite books: A Year with Swollen Appen­dices, which takes the form of his per­son­al diary of the year 1995 with essay­is­tic chap­ters (the “swollen appen­dices”) on top­ics like “edge cul­ture,” gen­er­a­tive music, new ways of , pre­ten­sion, CD-ROMs (a rel­e­vant top­ic back then), and pay­ment struc­tures for record­ing artists (a rel­e­vant top­ic again today). It also includes a fair bit of Eno’s cor­re­spon­dence with Stew­art Brand, once edi­tor of the Whole Earth Cat­a­log and now pres­i­dent of the Long Now Foun­da­tion, “a coun­ter­point to today’s accel­er­at­ing cul­ture” meant to “help make long-term think­ing more com­mon” and “cre­ative­ly fos­ter respon­si­bil­i­ty in the frame­work of the next 10,000 years.”

It so hap­pens that Eno now sits on the Long Now Foundation’s board and has had a hand in some of its projects. Nat­u­ral­ly, he con­tributed sug­gest­ed read­ing mate­r­i­al to the foun­da­tion’s Man­u­al of Civ­i­liza­tion, a col­lec­tion of books human­i­ty could use to rebuild civ­i­liza­tion, should it need rebuild­ing. Eno’s full list, which spans his­to­ry, pol­i­tics, phi­los­o­phy, soci­ol­o­gy, archi­tec­ture, design, nature, and lit­er­a­ture, runs as fol­lows:

If you’d like to know more books that have shaped Eno’s think­ing, do pick up a copy of A Year with Swollen Appen­dices. Like all the best diarists, Eno makes plen­ty of ref­er­ences to his day-to-day read­ing mate­r­i­al, and at the very end — beyond the last swollen appen­dix — he includes a bib­li­og­ra­phy (below), on which you’ll find more from Christo­pher Alexan­der, a reap­pear­ance of Rorty’s Con­tin­gency, Irony and Sol­i­dar­i­ty, and even Stew­ard Brand’s own How Build­ings Learn (on a tele­vi­sion ver­sion of which the two would col­lab­o­rate). You can find other writ­ers and thinker­s’s con­tri­bu­tions to the Man­u­al of Civ­i­liza­tion here.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

Jump Start Your Cre­ative Process with Bri­an Eno’s “Oblique Strate­gies”

Bri­an Eno on Cre­at­ing Music and Art As Imag­i­nary Land­scapes (1989)

What Books Could Be Used to Rebuild Civ­i­liza­tion?: Lists by Bri­an Eno, Stew­art Brand, Kevin Kel­ly & Oth­er For­ward-Think­ing Minds

What Books Should Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Read?: Tell Us Your Picks; We’ll Tell You Ours

Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Should Read

The 10 Great­est Books Ever, Accord­ing to 125 Top Authors (Down­load Them for Free)

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Free Coloring Books from The Public Domain Review: Download & Color Works by Hokusai, Albrecht Dürer, Harry Clarke, Aubrey Beardsley & More

in Art, Books, Creativity, History | March 4th, 2022

Did you some­how miss that the Pub­lic Domain Review has got­ten in on the adult col­or­ing book craze?

If so, don’t feel bad. There were prob­a­bly a lot of oth­er news items vying for your atten­tion back in March of 2020, when the first vol­ume was released “for diver­sion, enter­tain­ment and relax­ation in times of self-iso­la­tion.”

By the time the sec­ond vol­ume made its debut less than two months lat­er, the first had been down­loaded some 30,000 times.

Tell your scarci­ty men­tal­i­ty to stand down. You may be late to the par­ty, but all 40 images can still be down­loaded for free, “to ease and aid plea­sur­able focus in these odd­est of times.”

It’s our belief that odd times call for odd images so we’re repro­duc­ing some of our favorites below, though be advised there are also plen­ty of calm­ing botan­i­cal prints and grace­ful maid­ens for those crav­ing a less chal­leng­ing col­or­ing expe­ri­ence.

Behold Saint Antho­ny Tor­ment­ed by Demons by Mar­tin Schon­gauer (c. 1470–75), above!

And below, the 13-year-old Michelangelo’s repro­duc­tion in tem­pera on a wood pan­el. Biog­ra­phers Gior­gio Vasari and Ascanio Con­divi both told how the young artist vis­it­ed the fish mar­ket, seek­ing inspi­ra­tion for the demons’ scales. Per­haps you will be inspired by the bare­ly teenaged High Renais­sance master’s palette, though it’s YOUR col­or­ing page, so you do you.

In “Fill­ing in the Blanks: A Pre­his­to­ry of the Adult Col­or­ing Craze”, his­to­ri­ans Melis­sa N. Mor­ris and Zach Carmichael recount how pub­lish­er Robert Say­er’s illus­trat­ed book, The Florist, “for the use & amuse­ment of Gen­tle­men and Ladies” was pub­lished with the explic­it under­stand­ing that read­ers were meant to col­or in its botan­i­cal­ly semi-inac­cu­rate images:


Com­prised of pic­tures of var­i­ous flow­ers, the author gives his (pre­sum­ably) adult read­ers detailed instruc­tions for paint mix­ing and col­or choice (includ­ing the delight­ful sound­ing “gall-stone brown”).

Per­haps you will bring some of Sayer’s sug­gest­ed col­ors to bear on the above image from Parisian book­seller Richard Breton’s Les songes dro­la­tiques de Pan­ta­gru­el (1565), a col­lec­tion of 120 grotesque wood­cut fig­ures intend­ed as a trib­ute to the bawdy writer (and priest!) François Rabelais, or a pos­si­bly just a can­ny mar­ket­ing ploy.

Next, let’s col­or this perky fel­low from Gio­van­ni Bat­tista Nazari’s famous alchem­i­cal trea­tise on metal­lic trans­mu­ta­tion, Del­la tra­mu­ta­tione metal­li­ca sog­ni tre from 1599. 

The “winged pig in the world” by Dutch engraver and map­mak­er Cor­nelis Anthon­isz doesn’t look very cheer­ful, does he? He’s on top of the impe­r­i­al orb, but he’s also an alle­go­ry of the cor­rupt world. Hope­ful­ly, this will get sort­ed by the time pigs fly.

As to Ambroise Paré’s 1598 ren­der­ing of a “cam­phur” … well, let’s just say THIS is what a prop­er uni­corn should look like.

Accord­ing to an anno­tat­ed check­list that accom­pa­nied the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Museum’s Clois­ters’ 75th Anniver­sary exhi­bi­tion Search for the Uni­corn, Paré, a pio­neer­ing French bar­ber sur­geon, claimed that it live(d) in the Ara­bi­an Desert, and that its horn can cure var­i­ous mal­adies, espe­cial­ly poi­son­ing.”

There’s a lot to unpack there. Think about it as you col­or.

Hoku­sai, Albrecht Dür­er, and Aubrey Beard­s­ley, are among the artists whose work you’ll encounter, “arranged in vague order of dif­fi­cul­ty — from a sim­ple 17th-cen­tu­ry kimono pat­tern to an intri­cate thou­sand-flow­ered illus­tra­tion.”

Down­load Vol­ume 1 of the Pub­lic Domain Review Col­or­ing book in US Let­ter or A4 for­mat.

And here is Vol­ume 2 in US Let­ter or A4 for­mat.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Free Col­or­ing Books from 101 World-Class Libraries & Muse­ums: Down­load and Col­or Hun­dreds of Free Images

A Free Shake­speare Col­or­ing Book: While Away the Hours Col­or­ing in Illus­tra­tions of 35 Clas­sic Plays

Down­load 150 Free Col­or­ing Books from Great Libraries, Muse­ums & Cul­tur­al Insti­tu­tions: The British Library, Smith­son­ian, Carnegie Hall & More

The Dro­lat­ic Dreams of Pan­ta­gru­el: 120 Wood­cuts Envi­sion the Grotesque Inhab­i­tants of Rabelais’ World (1565)

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel: 120 Woodcuts Envision the Grotesque Inhabitants of Rabelais’ World (1565)

in Art, Books, History | March 3rd, 2022

George Orwell lives on, to vary­ing degrees of apt­ness, in the form of the word Orwellian. David Lynch has, with­in his life­time, made nec­es­sary the term Lynchi­an. Though few of us will leave such adjec­ti­val lega­cies of our own, we should at least aspire to do so, and that task requires look­ing back to the orig­i­nal mas­ter: François Rabelais. Mer­ri­am-Web­ster defines Rabelaisian as “marked by gross robust humor, extrav­a­gance of car­i­ca­ture, or bold nat­u­ral­ism.” Rabelais expressed this sen­si­bil­i­ty at great length in La vie de Gar­gan­tua et de Pan­ta­gru­el, a pen­ta­l­o­gy of elab­o­rate satir­i­cal nov­els pub­lished from the 1530s to the 1560s — and more recent­ly endorsed by Harold Bloom, Joseph Brod­sky, Hen­ry Miller, and Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe.

Rabelais died in the 1550s, hence the still-unre­solved ques­tions about the author­ship of the fifth and final Gar­gan­tua and Pan­ta­gru­el book: was it com­plet­ed from his notes? Was it, in fact, a fab­ri­ca­tion by anoth­er writer?

Such was the pub­lic’s hunger for the Rabelaisian that mul­ti­ple dif­fer­ent “fifth books” were pub­lished. The sat­is­fac­tion of that same insa­tiable demand seems also to have moti­vat­ed the pub­li­ca­tion of Les Songes Dro­la­tiques de Pan­ta­gru­el ou sont con­tenues plusieurs fig­ures de l’in­ven­tion de maitre François Rabelais. This slim vol­ume, writes the Pub­lic Domain Review’s Adam Green, “is made up entire­ly of images — 120 wood­cuts depict­ing a series of fan­tas­ti­cal­ly bizarre and grotesque fig­ures, rem­i­nis­cent of some of the more inven­tive and twist­ed cre­ations of Brueghel or Bosch.”

There is no main text, just a pref­ace where­in pub­lish­er Richard Bre­ton writes that “the great famil­iar­i­ty I had with the late François Rabelais has moved and even com­pelled me to bring to light the last of his work, the dro­lat­ic dreams of the very excel­lent and won­der­ful Pan­ta­gru­el.” Yet, as Green explains, “the book’s won­der­ful images are very unlike­ly to be the work of Rabelais him­self — the attri­bu­tion prob­a­bly a clever mar­ket­ing ploy.” You can view these amus­ing and grotesque images at the Pub­lic Domain Review, and in the con­text of the book as pre­served at the Inter­net Archive. “Be warned,” says Intrigu­ing His­to­ry, the artist “seems to enjoy the use of a lot of phal­lic imagery, along with frogs, fish and ele­phants.” But who is the artist?

“The cre­ator of the prints is now wide­ly thought to be François Desprez,” writes Green, “a French engraver and illus­tra­tor” who pub­lished a cou­ple of sim­i­lar­ly imag­i­na­tive sets of images with Bre­ton in 1567. Who­ev­er made them, these Rabelaisian wood­cuts remained sur­re­al enough through the cen­turies to catch the eye of none oth­er than Sal­vador Dalí, who in 1973 paid trib­ute to them with a set of lith­o­graphs of his own. (You can see more exam­ples at the Lock­port St. Gallery.) As far as the title, an exe­ge­sis at Poe­mas del río Wang offers a clar­i­fi­ca­tion: “Dro­lat­ic is an adjec­tive of dream,” and so “we must ask what kind of dream is this. It is cer­tain­ly the dream of rea­son, as it gives birth to mon­sters” — mon­sters, as a satirist like Rabelais well under­stood, not alto­geth­er unlike our­selves.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Bizarre Car­i­ca­tures & Mon­ster Draw­ings

H.P. Lovecraft’s Mon­ster Draw­ings: Cthul­hu & Oth­er Crea­tures from the “Bound­less and Hideous Unknown”

Visu­al­iz­ing Dante’s Hell: See Maps & Draw­ings of Dante’s Infer­no from the Renais­sance Through Today

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Bewil­der­ing Mas­ter­piece The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

The Aberdeen Bes­tiary, One of the Great Medieval Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts, Now Dig­i­tized in High Res­o­lu­tion & Made Avail­able Online

Behold Fan­tas­ti­cal Illus­tra­tions from the 13th Cen­tu­ry Ara­bic Man­u­script Mar­vels of Things Cre­at­ed and Mirac­u­lous Aspects of Things Exist­ing

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The New Herbal: A Masterpiece of Renaissance Botanical Illustrations Gets Republished in a Beautiful 900-Page Book

in Art, Biology, Books, History | February 24th, 2022

We’ve all have heard of the fuch­sia, a flower (or genus of flow­er­ing plant) native to Cen­tral and South Amer­i­ca but now grown far and wide. Though even the least botan­i­cal­ly lit­er­ate among us know it, we may have occa­sion­al trou­ble spelling its name. The key is to remem­ber who the fuch­sia was named for: Leon­hart Fuchs, a Ger­man physi­cian and botanist of the six­teenth cen­tu­ry. More than 450 years after his death, Fuchs is remem­bered as not just the name­sake of a flower, but as the author of an enor­mous book detail­ing the vari­eties of plants and their med­i­c­i­nal uses. His was a land­mark achieve­ment in the form known as the herbal, exam­ples of which we’ve fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture from ninth- and eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry Eng­land.

But De His­to­ria Stir­pi­um Com­men­tarii Insignes, as this work was known upon its ini­tial 1542 pub­li­ca­tion in Latin, has worn uncom­mon­ly well through the ages. Or rather, Fuchs’ per­son­al, hand-col­ored orig­i­nal has, com­ing down to us in 2022 as the source for Taschen’s The New Herbal. “A mas­ter­piece of Renais­sance botany and pub­lish­ing,” accord­ing to the pub­lish­er, the book includes “over 500 illus­tra­tions, includ­ing the first visu­al record of New World plant types such as maize, cac­tus, and tobac­co.”

Buy­ers also have their choice of Eng­lish, Ger­man, and French edi­tions, each with its own trans­la­tions of Fuchs’ “essays describ­ing the plants’ fea­tures, ori­gins, and med­i­c­i­nal pow­ers.” (You can also read a Dutch ver­sion of the orig­i­nal online at Utrecht Uni­ver­si­ty Library Spe­cial Col­lec­tions.)

Nat­u­ral­ly, some of the infor­ma­tion con­tained in these near­ly five-cen­tu­ry-old sci­en­tif­ic writ­ings will be a bit dat­ed at this point, but the appeal of the illus­tra­tions has nev­er dimmed. “Fuchs pre­sent­ed each plant with metic­u­lous wood­cut illus­tra­tions, refin­ing the abil­i­ty for swift species iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and set­ting new stan­dards for accu­ra­cy and qual­i­ty in botan­i­cal pub­li­ca­tions.” Over 500 of them go into the book: “Weigh­ing more than 10 pounds,” writes Colos­sal’s Grace Ebert, “the near­ly 900-page vol­ume is an ode to Fuchs’ research and the field of Renais­sance botany, detail­ing plants like the leafy gar­den bal­sam and root-cov­ered man­drake.”

Taschen’s repro­duc­tions of these works of botan­i­cal art look to do jus­tice to Leon­hart Fuchs’ lega­cy, espe­cial­ly in the bril­liance of their col­ors. It’s enough to rein­force the assump­tion that the man has received trib­ute not just through fuch­sia the flower but fuch­sia the col­or as well. But such a dual con­nec­tion turns out to be in doubt: the col­or’s name derives from rosani­line hydrochlo­ride, also known as fuch­sine, orig­i­nal­ly a trade name applied by its man­u­fac­tur­er Renard frères et Franc. The name fus­chine, in turn, derives from fuchs, the Ger­man trans­la­tion of renard. The New Herbal is, of course, a work of botany rather than lin­guis­tics, but it should nev­er­the­less stim­u­late in its behold­ers an aware­ness of the inter­con­nec­tion of knowl­edge that fired up the Renais­sance mind.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed con­tent:

Two Mil­lion Won­drous Nature Illus­tra­tions Put Online by The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library

Dis­cov­er Emi­ly Dickinson’s Herbar­i­um: A Beau­ti­ful Dig­i­tal Edi­tion of the Poet’s Col­lec­tion of Pressed Plants & Flow­ers Is Now Online

A Beau­ti­ful 1897 Illus­trat­ed Book Shows How Flow­ers Become Art Nou­veau Designs

His­toric Man­u­script Filled with Beau­ti­ful Illus­tra­tions of Cuban Flow­ers & Plants Is Now Online (1826)

A Curi­ous Herbal: 500 Beau­ti­ful Illus­tra­tions of Med­i­c­i­nal Plants Drawn by Eliz­a­beth Black­well in 1737 (to Save Her Fam­i­ly from Finan­cial Ruin)

1,000-Year-Old Illus­trat­ed Guide to the Med­i­c­i­nal Use of Plants Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Haruki Murakami’s Five Favorite Books

in Books | February 23rd, 2022

Image bySo­ci­ety for Cul­ture, Art and Inter­na­tion­al Coop­er­a­tion Adli­gat, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

You could say that Haru­ki Muraka­mi is a Japan­ese writer. And giv­en that he was born in Japan to Japan­ese par­ents, grew up in Japan, and lives in Japan still today, you’d have geog­ra­phy, cul­ture, and biol­o­gy on your side. Yet Alfred Birn­baum, one of Murakami’s own Eng­lish trans­la­tors, has called him “an Amer­i­can writer who hap­pens to write in Japan­ese.” To under­stand how this could be requires a con­sid­er­a­tion of not just Murakami’s writ­ing, but the writ­ers whose books inspired him. Take the hard-boiled nov­el­ist Ray­mond Chan­dler, whose The Long Good­bye appears on the list of Murakami’s five favorite books just post­ed at Lit­er­ary Hub.

“I have trans­lat­ed all the nov­els of Ray­mond Chan­dler,” Muraka­mi once said. “I like his style so much. I have read The Long Good­bye five or six times.” He must have read it for the first time in Kobe, where he grew up in the 1950s and 60s, and whose book­stores offered an abun­dance of pulp fic­tion left behind by depart­ing U.S. mil­i­tary per­son­nel. Chan­dler’s would have been one of the lit­er­ary voic­es he inter­nal­ized before sit­ting down to write his own first nov­el, Hear the Wind Sing, using the high­ly unusu­al method of begin­ning the sto­ry in Eng­lish, or what Eng­lish he com­mand­ed. He then trans­lat­ed this Philip Marlov­ian exper­i­ment back into Japan­ese, begin­ning a lit­er­ary career of four decades and count­ing.

A trans­la­tor when not writ­ing his own fic­tion, Muraka­mi has also ren­dered in his native lan­guage F. Scott Fitzger­ald’s The Great Gats­by, per­haps the most sym­bol­i­cal­ly Amer­i­can nov­el of them all. Lit­er­ary Hub quotes him as say­ing that “had it not been for Fitzgerald’s nov­el, I would not be writ­ing the kind of lit­er­a­ture I am today (indeed, it is pos­si­ble that I would not be writ­ing at all, although that is nei­ther here or there).” His prose is also the medi­um through which many Japan­ese read­ers have expe­ri­enced J.D. Salinger’s The Catch­er in the Rye: “I enjoyed it when I was sev­en­teen, so I decid­ed to trans­late it. I remem­bered it as being fun­ny, but it’s dark and strong. I must have been dis­turbed when I was young.”

None of Murakami’s top five books are Japan­ese, but not all of them Amer­i­can. The list also includes Franz Kafka’sThe Cas­tle, anoth­er book he encoun­tered as a Kobe teenag­er: “It gave me a tremen­dous shock. The world Kaf­ka described in that book was so real and so unre­al at the same time that my heart and soul seemed torn into two pieces.” Though the two writ­ers have their styl­is­tic dif­fer­ences, “so real and so unre­al at the same time” could just as well describe what­ev­er genre it is that Muraka­mi has invent­ed and con­tin­ues to advance today. “Most writ­ers get weak­er and weak­er as they age,” he once said, “but Dos­to­evsky didn’t. He kept get­ting big­ger and greater. He wrote The Broth­ers Kara­ma­zov in his late fifties.” Muraka­mi is now in his ear­ly sev­en­ties, but who — even among those famil­iar with his inspi­ra­tions — would dare pre­dict what sort of nov­el he’ll give us next?

via Lit­er­ary Hub

Relat­ed con­tent:

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Trans­lates The Great Gats­by, the Nov­el That Influ­enced Him Most

David Fos­ter Wallace’s Sur­pris­ing List of His 10 Favorite Books, from C.S. Lewis to Tom Clan­cy

Bruce Spring­steen Lists 20 of His Favorite Books: The Books That Have Inspired the Song­writer & Now Mem­oirist

Stephen King Cre­ates a List of His 10 Favorite Nov­els

Philip Roth (RIP) Cre­ates a List of the 15 Books That Influ­enced Him Most

The Books Samuel Beck­ett Read and Real­ly Liked (1941–1956)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Dune Encyclopedia: The Controversial, Definitive Guide to the World of Frank Herbert’s Sci-Fi Masterpiece (1984)

in Books, Literature, Sci Fi | February 22nd, 2022


When David Lynch’s Hol­ly­wood ver­sion of Dune opened in the­aters in 1984, Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios dis­trib­uted a print­ed a glos­sary to keep its audi­ences from get­ting con­fused. They got con­fused any­way, in part because of the film’s hav­ing been hol­lowed out in edit­ing, and in part because the sheer elab­o­rate­ness of Frank Her­bert’s alter­nate real­i­ty pos­es poten­tial­ly insur­mount­able chal­lenges to faith­ful adap­ta­tion. Even many of the orig­i­nal Dune nov­els’ read­ers need­ed more help than a cou­ple pages of def­i­n­i­tions could offer. Luck­i­ly for them, the same year that saw the release of Lynch’s Dune also saw the pub­li­ca­tion of The Dune Ency­clo­pe­dia, autho­rized by Her­bert him­self.

“Here is a rich back­ground (and fore­ground) for the Dune Chron­i­cles, includ­ing schol­ar­ly bypaths and amus­ing side­lights,” Her­bert writes in the book’s intro­duc­tion. “Some of the con­tri­bu­tions are sure to arouse con­tro­ver­sy, based as they are on ques­tion­able sources.” He could­n’t have known how right he was. Today The Dune Ency­clo­pe­dia stands as what Inverse’s Ryan Britt calls “the most con­tro­ver­sial Dune book ever”; long out of print, it may well also be the most expen­sive, with a cur­rent Ama­zon price of $1,300 in hard­cov­er and $833 in paper­back. (You can also find it online, at the Inter­net Archive.)

Still, The Dune Ency­clo­pe­dia has its appre­ci­a­tors, not least the direc­tor of the lat­est (and most suc­cess­ful) cin­e­mat­ic attempt to real­ize Her­bert’s vision. As Brit tells it, “an anony­mous (though pre­vi­ous­ly reli­able) source stat­ed that Denis Vil­leneuve is a big fan of The Dune Ency­clo­pe­dia. But when he tried to plant ref­er­ences to the book in the new film, his ‘hand was slapped by the estate.’ ” The rea­son seems to involve the Ency­clo­pe­dia’s con­flicts with the nov­els: not those writ­ten by Her­bert him­self but, accord­ing to the Dune Wiki, “the lat­er two pre­quel trilo­gies and sequel duol­o­gy writ­ten after Frank Her­bert’s death by Bri­an Her­bert (Frank Her­bert’s son) and Kevin J. Ander­son, which they state com­plete the orig­i­nal series.”

Though co-signed by the The Dune Ency­clo­pe­dia’s main author, lit­er­ary schol­ar Willis E. McNel­ly, Bri­an Her­bert and Kevin J. Ander­son­’s let­ter declar­ing the work’s de-can­on­iza­tion omits the fact “that the Ency­clo­pe­dia is and always was a fal­li­ble in-uni­verse doc­u­ment that open­ly mis­rep­re­sents known his­to­ry and adds his­tor­i­cal embell­ish­ments.” It is, in oth­er words, a book about Dune as well as a part of Dune. Not every book in our real­i­ty offers a per­fect­ly true account of his­to­ry, of course, and the same holds for the real­i­ty Frank Her­bert cre­at­ed. This form implies the con­tin­u­ing pos­si­bil­i­ty of expand­ing Dune’s lit­er­ary uni­verse by writ­ing the books that exist with­in it, not just ency­clo­pe­dias and scrip­ture but, say epic sci-fi nov­els as well. What fan, after all, would­n’t want to read the Dune of Dune?

Relat­ed con­tent:

Why You Should Read Dune: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Frank Herbert’s Eco­log­i­cal, Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci-Fi Epic

Rare Book Fea­tur­ing the Con­cept Art for Jodorowsky’s Dune Goes Up for Auc­tion (1975)

The Dune Graph­ic Nov­el: Expe­ri­ence Frank Herbert’s Epic Sci-fi Saga as You’ve Nev­er Seen It Before

The Glos­sary Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios Gave Out to the First Audi­ences of David Lynch’s Dune (1984)

The Dune Col­or­ing & Activ­i­ty Books: When David Lynch’s 1984 Film Cre­at­ed Count­less Hours of Pecu­liar Fun for Kids

The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Sci­ence Fic­tion: 17,500 Entries on All Things Sci-Fi Are Now Free Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

in Books, History | February 15th, 2022

Image by via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Back in col­lege, I spot­ted A Peo­ple’s His­to­ry of the Unit­ed States in the bags and on the book­shelves of many a fel­low under­grad­u­ate. By that time, Howard Zin­n’s alter­na­tive telling of the Amer­i­can sto­ry had been pop­u­lar read­ing mate­r­i­al for a cou­ple of decades, just as it pre­sum­ably remains a cou­ple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zin­n’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. his­to­ry through non-stan­dard points of view remain wide­ly influ­en­tial. Just last month, Rad­i­cal Reads fea­tured the read­ing list he orig­i­nal­ly drew up for the Social­ist Work­er, pitched at “activists inter­est­ed in mak­ing their own his­to­ry.”

Zin­n’s rec­om­men­da­tions nat­u­ral­ly include the work of oth­er his­to­ri­ans, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peo­ples of Ear­ly Amer­i­ca (“a pio­neer­ing work of ‘mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism’ deal­ing with racial inter­ac­tions in the colo­nial peri­od”) to Vin­cent Hard­ing’s There Is a Riv­er: The Black Strug­gle for Free­dom in Amer­i­ca (an “excel­lent start on Black his­to­ry”) to Samuel Yel­len’s Amer­i­can Labor Strug­gles (which “brings to life the great labor con­flicts of Amer­i­can his­to­ry”).

His sug­gest­ed books cov­er not just the 20th cen­tu­ry but eras like the Civ­il War, and even, exten­sive­ly, the time of Christo­pher Colum­bus. For those who take their analy­ses of the past in com­i­cal­ly illus­trat­ed form, Zinn also high­lights Lar­ry Gonick­’s The Car­toon His­to­ry of the Unit­ed States as “fun­ny and remark­ably rich in its con­tent.”

Cer­tain Zinn picks stand out as being of spe­cial inter­est to Open Cul­ture read­ers. These include Noam Chom­sky’s Year 501, in which “the nation’s most dis­tin­guished intel­lec­tu­al rebel gives us huge amounts of infor­ma­tion about recent Amer­i­can for­eign pol­i­cy”; Richard Hof­s­tadter’s The Amer­i­can Polit­i­cal Tra­di­tion, with its “icon­o­clas­tic view of Amer­i­can polit­i­cal lead­ers, includ­ing Jef­fer­son, Jack­son, Lin­coln, Wil­son and the two Roo­sevelts, sug­gest­ing more con­sen­sus than dif­fer­ence at the top of the polit­i­cal hier­ar­chy”; and W.E.B. DuBois’ Black Recon­struc­tion, “a direct counter to the tra­di­tion­al racist accounts of Recon­struc­tion, pre­sent­ing the nar­ra­tive from the Black point of view.” Zinn also prais­es The Six­ties, “a vivid his­to­ry, well-writ­ten, thought­ful, by one of the activists of that era”: Todd Gitlin, who died ear­li­er this month.

Despite its under­stand­able incli­na­tion toward non­fic­tion, Zin­n’s list also has room for sev­er­al clas­sic Amer­i­can nov­els like John Stein­beck­’s The Grapes of Wrath, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watch­ing God. You may remem­ber some of these books from your own high-school and uni­ver­si­ty days, but what­ev­er you got out of them back then, you’ll expe­ri­ence them more rich­ly by revis­it­ing them now, deep­er into your own intel­lec­tu­al jour­ney. As Zin­n’s own life and work demon­strat­ed, you can always find more angles from which to view the polit­i­cal, social, and cul­tur­al his­to­ry of your coun­ty — the far­ther removed from those you were shown in school, the bet­ter.

via Rad­i­cal Reads

Relat­ed con­tent:

Matt Damon Reads Howard Zinn’s “The Prob­lem is Civ­il Obe­di­ence,” a Call for Amer­i­cans to Take Action

African-Amer­i­can His­to­ry: Mod­ern Free­dom Strug­gle (A Free Course from Stan­ford)

Howard Zinn’s “What the Class­room Didn’t Teach Me About the Amer­i­can Empire”: An Illus­trat­ed Video Nar­rat­ed by Vig­go Mortensen

Amer­i­can Lit­er­a­ture, From the Begin­nings to the Civ­il War: A Free Online Course from NYU

Noam Chom­sky Defines What It Means to Be a Tru­ly Edu­cat­ed Per­son

Adorn Your Gar­den with Howard the Zinn Monk

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The First Illustrated Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses Gets Published, Featuring the Work of Spanish Artist Eduardo Arroyo

in Art, Books, Literature | February 14th, 2022

This year will see the long-delayed pub­li­ca­tion of a ver­sion of Ulysses that Joyce did­n’t want you to read — not James Joyce, mind you, but the author’s grand­son Stephen Joyce. Up until his death in 2020, Stephen Joyce opposed the pub­li­ca­tion of his grand­fa­ther’s best-known book in an illus­trat­ed edi­tion. But he only retained the pow­er actu­al­ly to pre­vent it until Ulysses’ 2012 entry into the pub­lic domain, which made the work freely usable to every­one who want­ed to. In this case, “every­one” includes such nota­bles as neo-fig­u­ra­tive artist Eduar­do Arroyo, described by the New York Times’ Raphael Min­der as “as one of the great­est Span­ish painters of his gen­er­a­tion.”

At the time of Ulysses’ copy­right expi­ra­tion, Arroyo had long since fin­ished his own set of more than 300 illus­tra­tions for Joyce’s cel­e­brat­ed and famous­ly intim­i­dat­ing nov­el. Arroyo not­ed in a 1991 essay, writes Min­der, that “imag­in­ing the illus­tra­tions kept him alive when he was hos­pi­tal­ized in the late 1980s for peri­toni­tis, an inflam­ma­tion of the abdom­i­nal lin­ing.”

The ini­tial hope was for an Arroyo-illus­trat­ed edi­tion to mark the 50th anniver­sary of Joyce’s death in 1991, but with­out the per­mis­sion of the author’s estate, the project had to be put on hold for a cou­ple of decades. When that time came, it was tak­en up again by two pub­lish­ers, Barcelon­a’s Galax­ia Guten­berg and New York’s Oth­er Press.

“Some of Arroyo’s black-and-white illus­tra­tions are print­ed in the mar­gins of the book’s pages, while oth­ers are dou­ble-page paint­ings whose vivid col­ors are rem­i­nis­cent of the Pop Art that inspired him.” His draw­ings, water­col­ors and col­lages include “eclec­tic images of shoes and hats, bulls and bats, as well as some sex­u­al­ly explic­it rep­re­sen­ta­tions of scenes that drew the wrath of cen­sors a cen­tu­ry ago.” For Ulysses’ “710 pages of inner mono­logue and dia­logue, stream of con­scious­ness, blank verse, Greek clas­sics, and the venues and byways of Dublin, 1904,” as the Los Ange­les Times’ Jor­dan Riefe puts it, are as well known for their for­mi­da­ble com­plex­i­ty as it is for the pow­er they once had to scan­dal­ize polite soci­ety.

Arroyo, who died in 2018, stayed faith­ful to Ulysses’ con­tent. (“Of course there are graph­ic nudes,” Riefe adds, “espe­cial­ly in lat­er chap­ters.”) He also suc­ceed­ed in com­plet­ing an ardu­ous project that the most notable artists of Joyce’s day refused even to attempt. “Joyce him­self had asked Picas­so and Matisse to illus­trate it,” writes Galax­ia Guten­berg’s Joan Tar­ri­da, “but nei­ther took on the task. Matisse pre­ferred to illus­trate The Odyssey,” Ulysses’ own struc­tur­al inspi­ra­tion, “which deeply offend­ed Joyce.” What Joyce would make of Arroy­o’s vital and mul­ti­far­i­ous illus­tra­tions, more of which you can sam­ple at Lit­er­ary Hub, is any schol­ar’s guess — but then, did­n’t he say some­thing about want­i­ng to keep the schol­ars guess­ing for cen­turies?

You can now pur­chase a copy of Ulysses: An Illus­trat­ed Edi­tion.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Hen­ri Matisse Illus­trates James Joyce’s Ulysses (1935)

Read Ulysses Seen, A Graph­ic Nov­el Adap­ta­tion of James Joyce’s Clas­sic

Hen­ri Matisse Illus­trates Baudelaire’s Cen­sored Poet­ry Col­lec­tion, Les Fleurs du Mal

Read the Orig­i­nal Seri­al­ized Edi­tion of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1918)

Every Word of Joyce’s Ulysses Print­ed on a Sin­gle Poster

Why Should You Read James Joyce’s Ulysses?: A New TED-ED Ani­ma­tion Makes the Case

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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