An Introduction to the Voynich Manuscript, the World’s Most Mysterious Book

in Books, History | July 8th, 2022

“The Voyn­ich man­u­script is a real medieval book, and has been car­bon-dat­ed to the ear­ly 1400s.” No mod­ern hoax, this noto­ri­ous­ly bizarre text has in fact “passed through the hands of many over the years,” includ­ing “sci­en­tists, emper­ors, and col­lec­tors.” Though “we still don’t know who actu­al­ly wrote it, the illus­tra­tions hint at the book’s orig­i­nal pur­pose,” hav­ing “much in com­mon with medieval herbals, astrol­o­gy guides, and bathing man­u­als.” Hence the like­li­hood of the Voyn­ich man­u­script being “some sort of med­ical text­book, although a very strange one by any mea­sure. Then there’s the writ­ing.”

This sum­ma­ry of the known his­to­ry and nature of the most mys­te­ri­ous man­u­script in exis­tence comes from the Youtube video above, “Secrets of the Voyn­ich Man­u­script.” Its chan­nel Hochela­ga has pre­vi­ous­ly been fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for episodes on medieval mon­sters, a guide to super­nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­na from renais­sance Ger­many, Hoku­sai’s ghost art, and the Bib­li­cal apoc­a­lypse.

In short, the Voyn­ich man­u­script could hard­ly find a more accom­mo­dat­ing wheel­house. And as in Hochela­ga’s oth­er videos, the sub­ject is approached not with total creduli­ty, but rather a clear and straight­for­ward dis­cus­sion of why gen­er­a­tion after gen­er­a­tion of enthu­si­asts have kept try­ing to fig­ure it out.

No aspect of the Voyn­ich man­u­script fas­ci­nates as much as its hav­ing been “writ­ten in a mys­tery lan­guage with a unique alpha­bet and gram­mat­i­cal rules.” It could be an exist­ing lan­guage ren­dered in code; it could be one cre­at­ed entire­ly and only for this book. Though attempts are made with some fre­quen­cy, “no one has been able to defin­i­tive­ly solve the Voyn­ich man­u­scrip­t’s lan­guage.” It could, of course, be that “we’ve fall­en for one big medieval prank,” but the video’s cre­ator does­n’t buy that expla­na­tion. Even in its incom­pre­hen­si­bil­i­ty, the text appears to pos­sess great com­plex­i­ty. If it were to be decod­ed, “would the mag­ic and mys­tery dis­ap­pear? Or would we uncov­er a whole new set of ques­tions and embark on anoth­er jour­ney entire­ly?”

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to “the World’s Most Mys­te­ri­ous Book,” the 15th-Cen­tu­ry Voyn­ich Man­u­script

The Mys­te­ri­ous Voyn­ich Man­u­script Gets Dig­i­tized: Explore the 15th-Cen­tu­ry Text That Lin­guists & Code-Break­ers Can’t Under­stand

The Voyn­ich Man­u­script: A New Doc­u­men­tary Takes a Deep Dive Into the Mys­ter­ies of the Bizarre Man­u­script

Has the Voyn­ich Man­u­script Final­ly Been Decod­ed?: Researchers Claim That the Mys­te­ri­ous Text Was Writ­ten in Pho­net­ic Old Turk­ish

The Writ­ing Sys­tem of the Cryp­tic Voyn­ich Man­u­script Explained: British Researcher May Have Final­ly Cracked the Code

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence May Have Cracked the Code of the Voyn­ich Man­u­script: Has Mod­ern Tech­nol­o­gy Final­ly Solved a Medieval Mys­tery?

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Why You Should Read The Handmaid’s Tale: A Timely Animated Introduction

in Books, Current Affairs, Politics | July 6th, 2022

Prophe­cies are real­ly about now. In sci­ence fic­tion it’s always about now. What else could it be about? There is no future. There are many pos­si­bil­i­ties, but we do not know which one we are going to have.

– Mar­garet Atwood

There is no need to explain why Mar­garet Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale has gone from read­ing like a warn­ing of the near-future to an alle­go­ry of the present after the U.S. Supreme Court’s rul­ing in Dobbs v. Jack­son Women’s Health Orga­ni­za­tion. Atwood’s sto­ry revolves around the fic­tion­al Repub­lic of Gilead, which takes over the U.S. after a fer­til­i­ty cri­sis dec­i­mates the pop­u­la­tion. Overnight, the fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­t­ian theoc­ra­cy divides women into two broad class­es – Hand­maids: chat­tel who per­form the labor of forced birth through forced con­cep­tion; and the infer­tile who prop up the patri­ar­chal rul­ing class as wives, over­seers, or slave labor in the pol­lut­ed “colonies.”

It’s a bleak tale, a sto­ry far less about hero­ism than the TV series based on the book would have viewers–who haven’t read it–believe. (The 5th sea­son, slat­ed for this July, seems to have been delayed until Sep­tem­ber with­out expla­na­tion.) Why should we read The Hand­maid­’s Tale? Because it is not only a work of dystopi­an futur­ism, but also a nar­ra­tivized account of what has already hap­pened to women around the world through­out his­to­ry to the present. The nov­el is a prism through which to view the ways women have been oppressed through repro­duc­tive slav­ery with­out the sci-fi sce­nario of a pre­cip­i­tous loss of human fer­til­i­ty.

As Atwood has explained, “when I wrote The Hand­maid­’s Tale, noth­ing went into it that had not hap­pened in real life some­where at some time.” Some of the worst offens­es were not well-known. “Female gen­i­tal muti­la­tion was tak­ing place,” says Atwood, “but if I had put it in 1985 [when the nov­el was writ­ten] prob­a­bly peo­ple wouldn’t have known what I was talk­ing about. They do now.” But we can still choose to over­look the infor­ma­tion. “Ignor­ing isn’t the same as igno­rance,” Atwood says in the nov­el, “you have to work at it.” The quote opens the 2018 TED-Ed les­son by Nao­mi Mer­cer above on Atwood’s book, walk­ing us through its sources in his­to­ry.

The Hand­maid­’s Tale, the les­son points out, is an exam­ple of “Spec­u­la­tive Fic­tion,” a form of writ­ing con­cerned with “pos­si­ble futures.” This theme unites both utopi­an and dystopi­an nov­els. Atwood’s books trade in the lat­ter, but any read­er of the genre will tell you how quick­ly a more per­fect fic­tion­al union becomes a night­mare. The Cana­di­an writer has offered this lit­er­ary inevitabil­i­ty as an expla­na­tion for the mul­ti­ple crises of Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy:

The real rea­son peo­ple expect so much of Amer­i­ca in mod­ern times is that it set out to be a utopia. That didn’t last very long. Nathaniel Hawthorne nailed it when he said the first thing they did when they got to Amer­i­ca was build a scaf­fold and a prison.

What Atwood does­n’t men­tion, as many crit­ics have point­ed out, are the slave pens and auc­tion hous­es, or the fact that Gilead close­ly resem­bles the slave-hold­ing Amer­i­can South in its theo­crat­ic patri­ar­chal Chris­t­ian hier­ar­chy and ulti­mate con­trol of wom­en’s bod­ies. And yet, the nov­el com­plete­ly side­steps race by hav­ing the Repub­lic of Gilead ship all of the coun­try’s Black peo­ple to the Mid­west (pre­sum­ably for forced labor). They are nev­er heard from again by the read­er.

This tac­tic has seemed irre­spon­si­ble to many crit­ics, as has the show’s side­step­ping through col­or­blind cast­ing, and the wear­ing of red cloaks and white bon­nets in imi­ta­tion of the book and show as a means of protest. “When we rely too heav­i­ly on ‘The Hand­maid­’s Tale,’ which ignores the pres­ence of race and racism,” says activist Ali­cia Sanchez Gill, “it real­ly dehu­man­izes and dis­miss­es our col­lec­tive expe­ri­ences of repro­duc­tive trau­ma.” Atwood’s “pos­si­ble future” pil­lages slav­ery’s past and con­ve­nient­ly gets rid of its descen­dants.

The trau­ma Gill ref­er­ences includes rape and forced birth, as well as the forced ster­il­iza­tions of the eugen­ics move­ment, car­ried out with the impri­matur of the Supreme Court (and con­tin­u­ing in recent cas­es). Kel­li Midg­ley, who found­ed Hand­maids Army DC, offers one expla­na­tion for using The Hand­maid­’s Tale as a protest sym­bol. Though she agrees to leave the cos­tumes at home if asked by orga­niz­ers, she says “we are try­ing to reach a broad­er audi­ence for peo­ple who need this mes­sage. We don’t need to tell Black women that their rights are endan­gered. They always have been.”

Maybe a new mes­sage after Dobbs v. Jack­son Wom­en’s Health Orga­ni­za­tion is that an assault on any­one’s rights threat­ens every­one. Or as Atwood wrote in a Cana­di­an Globe and Mail op-ed in 2018, “depriv­ing women of con­tra­cep­tive infor­ma­tion, repro­duc­tive rights, a liv­ing wage, and pre­na­tal and mater­nal care – as some states in the US want to do – is prac­ti­cal­ly a death sen­tence, and is a con­tra­ven­tion of basic human rights. But Gilead, being total­i­tar­i­an, does not respect uni­ver­sal human rights.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­garet Atwood Releas­es an Unburn­able Edi­tion of The Handmaid’s Tale, to Sup­port Free­dom of Expres­sion

Pret­ty Much Pop #10 Exam­ines Mar­garet Atwood’s Night­mare Vision: The Handmaid’s Tale

Hear Mar­garet Atwood’s Sto­ry “Stone Mat­tress,” Read by Author A. M. Homes 

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

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The Only Surviving Manuscript of John Milton’s Paradise Lost Gets Published in Book Form for the First Time

in Books, Literature | June 24th, 2022

In The Mar­riage of Heav­en and Hell, William Blake adds a note to the text that became a famous adage about John Mil­ton’s Par­adise Lost: the 10,000-line, 17th cen­tu­ry blank verse epic about the war between heav­en and hell and the failed test­ing of God’s pre­mi­um prod­uct, human beings. Mil­ton “wrote in fet­ters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at lib­er­ty when he wrote Dev­ils & Hell,” Blake declared, “because he was a true Poet and of the Dev­il’s par­ty with­out know­ing it.” The state­ment inspired “oth­er Roman­tic and Goth­ic writ­ers to view Satan as a hero,” the British Library writes.

Blake him­self illus­trat­ed Par­adise Lost in three sep­a­rate com­mis­sions over the course of his career as an engraver and print­er. His deep admi­ra­tion for the poem helped it become a “Bible of the Roman­tic move­ment,” writes the man­u­script pub­lish­er SP Books in their intro­duc­tion to a rare new book pub­li­ca­tion of the only sur­viv­ing man­u­script of the work.

Only 1,000 num­bered, large for­mat copies of this print­ing are avail­able. (We do hope a sub­se­quent edi­tion will appear, maybe with a tran­scrip­tion and anno­ta­tions. But it will not be as beau­ti­ful as this sky-blue cloth-cov­ered book with Blake’s full-col­or illus­tra­tions.)

The book pre­serves the only part of the poem that sur­vives in man­u­script: 798 lines from Book One of Par­adise Lost. These are not in Mil­ton’s hand — he had been blind since 1652, and the poem was first pub­lished in 1667. He con­ceived the epic in his 50s, his career in gov­ern­ment over after the Eng­lish Civ­il Wars and the brief peri­od of the Cromwells’ Pro­tec­torate end­ed in the Restora­tion of Charles II. “Mil­ton com­posed ‘Par­adise Lost’ aloud, in bed or (per wit­ness­es) ‘lean­ing back­wards oblique­ly in an easy chair,’ ” Lau­ren Chris­tensen writes at The New York Times, “mem­o­riz­ing the stan­zas to be tran­scribed in anoth­er’s hand.”

These first few hun­dred lines show why Satan seems so noble to Mil­ton’s read­ers; speech­es by and about him por­tray his doomed cam­paign as a right­eous assault on heav­en­ly tyran­ny. The Roman­tics’ use of Par­adise Lost reflects their own pre­oc­cu­pa­tions, while also echo­ing con­tem­po­rary sus­pi­cions of the poem. “The author­i­ties were con­cerned,” for exam­ple, Tom Paulin notes at The Lon­don Review of Books, by an image in Book One describ­ing Satan:

as when the sun new ris’n
Looks through the hor­i­zon­tal misty air
Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon
In dim eclipse dis­as­trous twi­light sheds
On half the nations, and with fear of change

Per­plex­es mon­archs.

“Accord­ing to Mil­ton’s ear­ly biog­ra­ph­er, the Irish repub­li­can John Toland, Charles II’s Licenser for the Press regard­ed these lines as sub­ver­sive,” Paulin points out, “and want­ed to sup­press the whole poem.” It’s sur­pris­ing he was able to pub­lish at all. Mil­ton had vocif­er­ous­ly sup­port­ed the Puri­tan rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies who over­threw the king’s father, Charles I, and removed his head. Mil­ton lat­er pub­lished sev­er­al pam­phlets in defense of regi­cide. In 1660, when Richard Cromwell’s Pro­tec­torate fell apart and Charles II returned, Mil­ton’s works were banned by roy­al decree and the poet went into hid­ing until a gen­er­al par­don.

Lat­er crit­ics have point­ed to Mil­ton’s polit­i­cal writ­ings as evi­dence that he knew exact­ly whose par­ty he was of. Cal­i­for­nia State Uni­ver­si­ty’s Michael Bryson has gone so far as to argue that Mil­ton was a secret athe­ist. In any case, he was a pas­sion­ate believ­er in the over­throw of kings and the estab­lish­ment of republics (for which he has become a lib­er­tar­i­an hero). Paulin sums up the crit­i­cal case for Par­adise Lost as an alle­go­ry for the “lost cause” of the rev­o­lu­tion:

Mil­ton knew that the poem he was dic­tat­ing to his ama­neuen­sis would be scru­ti­nized by the recent­ly restored monar­ch’s Licenser of the Press, so he cod­ed the Eng­lish peo­ple’s for­ma­tion of a repub­lic as the cre­ation of the “heav­ens and earth.” The idea passed the cen­sor by, just as it has passed by many read­ers, but it was nonethe­less Mil­ton’s found­ing inten­tion in com­pos­ing his epic.

The charge that Mil­ton made Satan a hero is hard to ignore when, read­ing Book One, we find the poet giv­ing the Chief of Fall­en Angels the best lines, as any­one who’s read Par­adise Lost will remem­ber. If you haven’t, just see the clas­sic exam­ple below.

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What mat­ter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom Thun­der hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not dri­ve us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambi­tion though in Hell:
Bet­ter to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.

Learn more about this rare man­u­script edi­tion at The New York Times’ review and pur­chase one (if one remains) at SP Books.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Milton’s Hand Anno­tat­ed Copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio: A New Dis­cov­ery by a Cam­bridge Schol­ar

The Oth­er­world­ly Art of William Blake: An Intro­duc­tion to the Vision­ary Poet and Painter

Spenser and Mil­ton (Free Course) 

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

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A Special New, Two-Volume Collection of Philip K. Dick Stories Comes Illustrated by 24 Different Artists

in Books, Literature | June 16th, 2022

Philip K. Dick­’s mul­ti­ple worlds have appeared in increas­ing­ly bet­ter edi­tions since the author passed away in 1982. In the 21st cen­tu­ry, respectable hard­backs and qual­i­ty paper have ful­ly replaced yel­lowed, pulpy pages. Maybe no edi­tion yet is more attrac­tive than the Folio Soci­ety of Lon­don’s two-vol­ume hard­back set of Dick­’s select­ed short sto­ries, illus­trat­ed by 24 dif­fer­ent artists and includ­ing tales that have sur­vived film adap­ta­tions, for bet­ter and worse, like “Pay­check,” “The Minor­i­ty Report,” and “We Can Remem­ber It for You Whole­sale.” The books will set you back $125, but that’s a small sum com­pared to the price of an ear­li­er, four-vol­ume Com­plete Short Sto­ries, pub­lished in a lim­it­ed edi­tion of 750, day-glo, hand-num­bered copies. These sold out in less than 48 hours and now go for $2,500 in rare online sales.

In death Dick has achieved what he sought in his writ­ing life: suc­cess as lit­er­ary author. He thought he would even­tu­al­ly pub­lish his real­ist fic­tion to earn the rep­u­ta­tion, vow­ing in 1960 that he would “take twen­ty to thir­ty years to suc­ceed as a lit­er­ary writer.” Instead, he’s famous for great fic­tion that just hap­pens to use the idiom of sci-fi to ask, as he wrote in an unde­liv­ered 1978 speech: “What is real­i­ty?” and “What con­sti­tutes an authen­tic human being?”

We tend to asso­ciate these exis­ten­tial, pre-post-mod­ernist ques­tions with nov­els and novel­las from the 60s and 70s that com­mu­ni­cate Dick­’s para­noid world­view — works nom­i­nat­ed for a Neb­u­la Award, for exam­ple, like Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep?, the source for the best of the film adap­ta­tions, Blade Run­ner.

Dick first won fame in 1963 when he was giv­en the Hugo Award for The Man in the High Cas­tle, a book that exceeds the bound­aries of genre to become, unmis­tak­ably, a PKD orig­i­nal. His ear­li­er sto­ries, on the oth­er hand, writ­ten through­out the 1950s when the author was in his twen­ties, tend to fol­low the con­ven­tions of the hard sci-fi of the time, with the same themes of space trav­el, robot­ics, and oth­er futur­is­tic tech­nol­o­gy that pre­dom­i­nate in Robert Hein­lein and Isaac Asi­mov. Super­fi­cial­ly, there might seem lit­tle to dis­tin­guish Dick­’s ear­ly sto­ries from oth­er writ­ing of the time pub­lished in pulps like Sci­ence Fic­tion Quar­ter­ly, Galaxy Sci­ence Fic­tion, and IF. 

But the ear­ly sto­ries show the unmis­tak­able touch of the lat­er nov­el­ist. There are the flash­es of humor, absur­di­ty, deep insight into the human psy­che, and the warmth and empa­thy Dick­’s nar­ra­tive voice nev­er lost even in his most bizarre fugues. In his first pub­lished sto­ry, “Roog,” sold in 1951, Dick imag­ines a dog who believes the garbage men come to steal the fam­i­ly’s food, leav­ing only the emp­ty met­al stor­age can behind. “Cer­tain­ly, I decid­ed,” he writes, “that dog sees the world quite dif­fer­ent­ly than I do, or any humans. And then I began to think, maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a pri­vate world, a world dif­fer­ent from those inhab­it­ed and expe­ri­enced by all oth­er humans.”

It’s a short leap from these thoughts to the idea that there might be no sin­gu­lar real­i­ty at all to fight over. Back then, he says, “I had no idea that such fun­da­men­tal issues could be pur­sued in the sci­ence fic­tion field. I began to pur­sue them uncon­scious­ly.” His uncon­scious led him, in 1954’s “Adjust­ment Team” — the source of a less-than-great film — to imag­ine anoth­er dog, one who talks and inter­feres in human affairs (a detail omit­ted, thank­ful­ly, from The Adjust­ment Bureau). Dick­’s ear­ly sto­ries often fea­tured com­i­cal ani­mals — such as the Okja-like Mar­t­ian pig in “Beyond Likes the Wub,” a high­ly-intel­li­gent crea­ture capa­ble of telepa­thy and deep feel­ing. While he would turn his atten­tion from ani­mals and aliens to androids, alter­nate real­i­ties, and altered states of con­scious­ness, Dick always had the abil­i­ty to turn the genre of sci­ence fic­tion into a lit­er­ary tool for the most dar­ing of philo­soph­i­cal inves­ti­ga­tions.

Learn more about the two-vol­ume Folio Soci­ety Select­ed Sto­ries of Philip K. Dick here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

33 Sci-Fi Sto­ries by Philip K. Dick as Free Audio Books & Free eBooks

Hear Philip K. Dick’s Famous Metz Speech: “If You Find this World Bad, You Should See Some of the Oth­ers” (1977)

Hear 6 Clas­sic Philip K. Dick Sto­ries Adapt­ed as Vin­tage Radio Plays

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

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Sun Tzu’s The Art of War: An Animated Chapter-by-Chapter Breakdown of the Ancient Chinese Treatise

in Books, History | June 13th, 2022

Though not a long book, The Art of War is nev­er­the­less an intim­i­dat­ing one. Com­posed in the Chi­na of the fifth cen­tu­ry BC, it comes down to us as per­haps the defin­i­tive analy­sis of mil­i­tary strat­e­gy, applic­a­ble equal­ly to East, West, antiq­ui­ty, and moder­ni­ty alike. Hence the minor but still-pro­duc­tive indus­try that puts forth adap­ta­tions, exten­sions, and rein­ter­pre­ta­tions of The Art of War for non-mil­i­tary set­tings, trans­pos­ing its lessons into law, busi­ness, sports, and oth­er realms besides. But if you want a han­dle on what its author, the gen­er­al and strate­gist Sun Tzu, actu­al­ly wrote, watch the illus­trat­ed video above.

A pro­duc­tion of Youtube chan­nel Eudai­mo­nia, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for a sim­i­lar­ly ani­mat­ed exe­ge­sis of Machi­avel­li’s The Prince, it runs more than two and a half hours in full. Far though it exceeds the length of the aver­age explain­er video, it does reflect the ten­den­cy of Sun Tzu’s suc­cinct obser­va­tions to expand, when seri­ous­ly con­sid­ered, into much wider and more com­plex dis­cus­sions. To each of the orig­i­nal tex­t’s chap­ters the Eudai­mo­nia video devotes a ten-to-fif­teen-minute sec­tion, con­vey­ing not just the con­tent of its lessons but also their rel­e­vance to the his­to­ry of human con­flict in the rough­ly two and a half mil­len­nia since they were writ­ten.

In chap­ter two, on wag­ing war, Sun Tzu writes that “in order to kill the ene­my, our men must be roused to anger.” It was in this spir­it that, dur­ing the Sec­ond World War, the Unit­ed King­dom’s Min­istry of Infor­ma­tion launched a media “anger cam­paign” meant to “increase resolve against the Ger­mans, as until then, the British had lit­tle sense of real hos­til­i­ty towards the aver­age Ger­man.” In the chap­ter on weak­ness­es and strengths, Sun Tzu rec­om­mends “the divine art of sub­tle­ty and secre­cy” as a means of becom­ing invis­i­ble and inaudi­ble to the ene­my — much as Julius Cae­sar did in the Gal­lic Wars, when he sent scout­ing ships “paint­ed in Venet­ian blue, which was a sim­i­lar col­or to that of the sea.”

Oth­er exam­ples come from diverse chap­ters of his­to­ry. These include the Amer­i­can Civ­il War, Gand­hi’s nego­ti­a­tion of Indi­an inde­pen­dence, the Napoleon­ic Wars, the British defeat in Zul­u­land, Joan of Arc’s siege of Orléans, the revolt against the Turk­ish led by T. E. Lawrence (bet­ter known as Lawrence of Ara­bia), and even Steve Jobs’ turn­around of a near­ly bank­rupt Apple. Most of us will nev­er find our­selves in sit­u­a­tions of quite these stakes. But giv­en that none of us can entire­ly avoid deal­ing with con­flict, we’d could do worse than to keep the guid­ance of Sun Tzu on our side.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Machiavelli’s The Prince Explained in an Illus­trat­ed Film

10 Rea­sons Why Hannibal’s Mil­i­tary Genius Still Cap­tures Our Imag­i­na­tion Today

What Ancient Chi­nese Phi­los­o­phy Can Teach Us About Liv­ing the Good Life Today: Lessons from Harvard’s Pop­u­lar Pro­fes­sor, Michael Puett

Hear an Ancient Chi­nese His­to­ri­an Describe The Roman Empire (and Oth­er Voic­es of the Past)

How Many U.S. Marines Could Bring Down the Roman Empire?

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Enter the Franz Kafka Caption Contest for a Chance to Win a New Book of the Author’s Drawings (Until June 13)

in Art, Books, Comics/Cartoons, Creativity, Literature | June 12th, 2022

Imag­ine if Franz Kaf­ka were charged with pick­ing the win­ning entries in The New York­er’s week­ly car­toon cap­tion con­test.

The punch­lines might become a lit­tle more obscure.

If that idea fills you with per­verse plea­sure, per­haps you should tod­dle over to Yale Uni­ver­si­ty Press’s Insta­gram to con­tribute some pos­si­ble cap­tions for eight of the inky draw­ings the tor­tured author made in a black note­book between 1901 and 1907.

The intend­ed mean­ing of these images, includ­ed in the new book, Franz Kaf­ka: The Draw­ings, are as up for grabs as any uncap­tioned car­toon on the back page of The New York­er.

In Con­ver­sa­tions with Kaf­ka, author Gus­tav Janouch recalled how their sig­nif­i­cance proved elu­sive even to their cre­ator, and also the frus­tra­tion his friend expressed regard­ing his artis­tic abil­i­ties:

I should so like to be able to draw. As a mat­ter of fact, I am always try­ing to. But noth­ing comes of it. My draw­ings are pure­ly per­son­al pic­ture writ­ing, whose mean­ing even I can­not dis­cov­er after a time.

Kaf­ka seems to have gone eas­i­er on him­self in a 1913 let­ter to fiancée Felice Bauer:

I was once a great drafts­man, you know… These draw­ings gave me greater sat­is­fac­tion in those days—it’s years ago—than any­thing else.

Artist Philip Har­ti­gan, who ref­er­enced the draw­ings in a jour­nal and sketch­book class for writ­ing stu­dents nails it when he describes how Kafka’s “quick min­i­mum move­ments … con­vey the typ­i­cal despair­ing mood of his fic­tion in just a few lines.”

You have until June 13 to make explic­it what Kaf­ka did not by leav­ing your pro­posed cap­tion for each draw­ing as a com­ment on Yale Uni­ver­si­ty Press’s Insta­gram, along the hash­tag #Kafka­Cap­tion­Con­test.

Win­ners will receive a copy of  Franz Kaf­ka: The Draw­ings. Entries will be judged by edi­tor Andreas Kilch­er of and the­o­rist Judith But­ler, who con­tributed an essay that you might con­sid­er min­ing for mate­r­i­al:

Was it a muf­fled death? Or per­haps it was no death at all, just a tum­bling of inter­course, a sex­u­al flur­ry?

Yes, that might go nice­ly with Kafka’s draw­ing of a seat­ed fig­ure col­lapsed over a table, below.

https://images.app.goo.gl/mGfZzLcpRXuyqqU68

Some alter­nate pro­pos­als from con­test hope­fuls:

I need­ed to bathe my bat­tered knuck­les with my tears.

He stud­ied his new­ly acquired rare stamp with a pow­er­ful loupe.

How can I make sure that all my let­ters and papers will be destroyed after my death? I know — I’ll ask my clos­est friend to take care of it!

This last is a ref­er­ence to Kafka’s lit­er­ary execu­tor, Max Brod, who defied Kafka’s explic­it wish that all of his work be burned upon his death, save The Meta­mor­pho­sis, and five short sto­ries: The Judg­ment, The Stok­er, In the Penal Colony, A Coun­try Doc­tor and A Hunger Artist.

Brod cut Kafka’s draw­ing of the stand­ing fig­ure, above, from his sketch­book and kept in an enve­lope with a few oth­ers. Some of the cur­rent cap­tion sug­ges­tions for this haunt­ing, nev­er before seen image:

my face is an umbrel­la to my tears

I could­n’t face myself.

I am the Wal­rus goo goo g’joob

https://images.app.goo.gl/e6v8xbuRin3qWcS56

Of the eight draw­ings in the cap­tion con­test, Drinker, may offer the most nar­ra­tive pos­si­bil­i­ties. A rep­re­sen­ta­tive sam­pling of the inven­tive­ness that’s come over the tran­som thus­far:

I, peri­od

Angered by the impu­dence of the caber­net, i had only the courage to berate its shad­ow

Wait­er! There’s a roach in my wine.

Enter Yale Uni­ver­si­ty Press’ Kaf­ka Cap­tion Con­test (or get a feel for the com­pe­ti­tion) here. Entries will be accept­ed through June 13. Full con­test rules are here. Good luck!

Explore the draw­ings and oth­er con­tents of Franz Kafka’s black note­book here.

Pur­chase Franz Kaf­ka: The Draw­ings, the first book to pub­lish the entire­ty of the author’s graph­ic out­put, here.

- 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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Werner Herzog’s New Novel, The Twilight World, Tells the Story of the WWII Japanese Soldier Who Famously Refused to Surrender

in Books, History | June 10th, 2022

As every­one knows, Japan con­ced­ed defeat in the Sec­ond World War on August 15, 1945. But as many also know, cer­tain indi­vid­ual Japan­ese sol­diers refused to sur­ren­der, each con­tin­u­ing to fight the war for decades in his own way. The most famous was Lieu­tenant Ono­da Hiroo, who hid out in the Philip­pines mount­ing guer­ril­la attacks — at first with a few fel­low sol­diers, and final­ly alone — until 1974. Ono­da became a celebri­ty upon retun­ing to his home­land, and his admir­ers weren’t only Japan­ese. In Tokyo to direct an opera in 1997, Wern­er Her­zog request­ed an intro­duc­tion to one man only: the sol­dier who’d fought the war for 30 years.

Now Ono­da has become the sub­ject of one of Her­zog’s lat­est projects: not a film, but a nov­el called The Twi­light World. In his native Ger­man (brought into Eng­lish by trans­la­tor-crit­ic Michael Hof­mann), Her­zog has writ­ten of not just his own meet­ing with Ono­da but nar­rat­ed Onoda’s own long expe­ri­ence in the Philip­pines.

“Onoda’s war is of no mean­ing for the cos­mos, for his­to­ry, for the course of the war,” goes one pas­sage quot­ed by A. O. Scott in The Atlantic. “Onoda’s war is formed from the union of an imag­i­nary noth­ing and a dream, but Onoda’s war, sired by noth­ing, is nev­er­the­less over­whelm­ing, an event extort­ed from eter­ni­ty.”

One thinks of the pro­tag­o­nists of Her­zog’s films, both imag­ined and real: the steamship-drag­ging rub­ber baron Bri­an Sweeney Fitzger­ald, the downed Navy pilot Dieter Den­gler, the delud­ed con­quis­ta­dor Lope de Aguirre, the ill-fat­ed wildlife activist Tim­o­thy Tread­well. In Onoda’s case as well, Scott writes, “Her­zog declines to treat him as a joke. He is clear­ly fas­ci­nat­ed by the absur­di­ty of this hero’s sit­u­a­tion, and also deter­mined to defend the dig­ni­ty of a man who had no choice but to per­se­vere in an impos­si­ble mis­sion.” Any­one famil­iar with Her­zog’s career, full of har­row­ing encoun­ters and unpre­dictable turns but clear­ly oper­at­ing by an iron log­ic all its own, can imag­ine why he saw in Ono­da a kin­dred spir­it.

Eight years after his death at the age of 91, Ono­da remains a fig­ure of gen­er­al fas­ci­na­tion, the sub­ject of his­to­ry videos viewed by mil­lions as well as last year’s Ono­da: 10,000 Nights of the Jun­gle, a fea­ture by French direc­tor Arthur Harari. Of course,  “the guy who stays in the field long after the war is over is, to mod­ern eyes, a com­i­cal, cau­tion­ary fig­ure, an avatar of patri­o­tism car­ried to ridicu­lous extremes,” writes Scott. “We rarely pause to look for motives oth­er than blind obe­di­ence, or to imag­ine what those years of phan­tom com­bat in the wilder­ness must have felt like.” Per­haps we twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry West­ern­ers sim­ply lack the imag­i­na­tive pow­er nec­es­sary to do so — all of us, that, is except Wern­er Her­zog. You can pre-order his nov­el, The Twi­light World, now. It hits the shelves next week, on June 14th.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Wern­er Her­zog Offers 24 Pieces of Film­mak­ing and Life Advice

Wern­er Her­zog Tells a Book Club Why The Pere­grine Is One of His Favorite Books, a 20th-Cen­tu­ry Mas­ter­piece

Wern­er Her­zog Dis­cov­ers the Ecsta­sy of Skate­board­ing: “That’s Kind of My Peo­ple”

The Dream Dri­ven Film­mak­ing of Wern­er Her­zog: Watch the Video Essay, “The Inner Chron­i­cle of What We Are: Under­stand­ing Wern­er Her­zog”

Time Trav­el Back to Tokyo After World War II, and See the City in Remark­ably High-Qual­i­ty 1940s Video

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Machiavelli’s The Prince Explained in an Illustrated Film

in Books, History, Politics | June 2nd, 2022

Nic­colò Machi­avel­li lived in a time before the inter­net, before radio and tele­vi­sion, before drones and weapons of mass destruc­tion. Thus one nat­u­ral­ly ques­tions the rel­e­vance of his polit­i­cal the­o­ries to the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry. Yet in dis­cus­sions about the dynam­ics of pow­er, no name has endured as long as Machi­avel­li’s. His rep­u­ta­tion as a the­o­rist rests most­ly on his 1532 trea­tise Il Principe, or The Prince, in which he pio­neered a way of ana­lyz­ing pow­er as it was actu­al­ly wield­ed, not as peo­ple would have liked it to be. How, he asked, does a ruler — a prince — attain his posi­tion in a state, and even more impor­tant­ly, how does he main­tain it?

You can hear Machi­avel­li’s answers to these ques­tions explained, and see them illus­trat­ed, in the 43-minute video above. It breaks The Prince down into sev­en parts sum­ma­riz­ing as many of the book’s main points, includ­ing “Do not be neu­tral,” “Destroy, do not would,” and “Be feared.”

These com­mand­ments would seem to align with Machi­avel­li’s pop­u­lar image as an apol­o­gist, even an advo­cate, for bru­tal and repres­sive forms of rule. But his enter­prise has less to do with offer­ing advice than with describ­ing how real fig­ures of pow­er, princes and oth­er­wise, had amassed and retained that pow­er.

The video comes from Eudai­mo­nia, a Youtube chan­nel that has also fea­tured sim­i­lar­ly ani­mat­ed exege­ses of Sto­icism and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Its cre­ator makes these ancient sources of knowl­edge acces­si­ble with not just his car­toon­ish illus­tra­tions, but also his inclu­sion of illu­mi­nat­ing exam­ples from more recent his­to­ry. In the case of The Prince, these come from eras like the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion, World War II, and even our own time of instant glob­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion, atten­tion-hun­gry media, and a seem­ing­ly weak polit­i­cal class. In much of the world, we live in a time much less nasty and brutish than Machi­avel­li’s. But look­ing at the effec­tive­ness (or lack there­of) of our own lead­ers, we have to admit that the prin­ci­ples of The Prince may not have gone out of effect.

To delve deep­er into the world of Machi­avel­li, you can watch a BBC doc­u­men­tary on the Renais­sance polit­i­cal the­o­rist below.

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Does “Machi­avel­lian” Real­ly Mean?: An Ani­mat­ed Les­son

How Machi­avel­li Real­ly Thought We Should Use Pow­er: Two Ani­mat­ed Videos Pro­vide an Intro­duc­tion

Salman Rushdie: Machiavelli’s Bad Rap

Intro­duc­tion to Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Yale Course

Allan Bloom’s Lec­tures on Machi­avel­li (Boston Col­lege, 1983)

6 Polit­i­cal The­o­rists Intro­duced in Ani­mat­ed “School of Life” Videos: Marx, Smith, Rawls & More

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

 

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