The Strangest Books in the World: Discover The Madman’s Library, a Captivating Compendium of Peculiar Books​ & Manuscripts

in Books | April 14th, 2021

If you are a fre­quent read­er of Open Cul­ture, or the many blogs we tend to read — espe­cial­ly those con­cerned with the rare, unusu­al, and obscure — it’s like­ly you’ve encoun­tered some of the books in The Madman’s Library, Edward Brooke-Hitching’s fan­tas­tic new vol­ume of lit­er­ary odd­i­ties. If not, you’re prob­a­bly famil­iar with a few of the cat­e­gories he iden­ti­fies under his sub­ti­tle, “The Strangest Books, Man­u­scripts and Oth­er Lit­er­ary Curiosi­ties from His­to­ry.” These include “Books Made of Flesh and Blood,” such as a Qur’an writ­ten in 50 pints of Sad­dam Hussein’s blood. If such arti­facts don’t qual­i­fy as “lit­er­ary curiosi­ties,” it’s hard to know what does.

Brooke-Hitch­ing grants the des­ig­na­tion “curios­i­ty” is sub­jec­tive, and cul­tur­al­ly deter­mined, “but after near­ly a decade of search­ing through cat­a­logues of libraries, auc­tion hous­es and anti­quar­i­an book deal­ers around the world,” he writes in his intro­duc­tion,” works of unde­ni­able pecu­liar­i­ty leapt out.”

Or as he tells Smith­son­ian in an inter­view, “the more books you see, the more your radar is sen­si­tive to some­thing that pings with its strange­ness.” He pulls out the first book in his bag as an exam­ple: a self-pub­lished col­lec­tion of poet­ry by Char­lie Sheen.

Per­haps few oth­er peo­ple have laid eyes on such an enor­mous col­lec­tion of odd­ball bib­li­o­graph­ic trea­sures. These are not only books made of strange — and even dead­ly — mate­ri­als; they are also books whose con­tents or his­to­ries are just plain weird.

The chap­ter ‘Curi­ous Col­lec­tions’… fea­tures sim­i­lar projects of obses­sive ded­i­ca­tion, from medieval man­u­scripts of fan­tas­tic beasts, and guides to crim­i­nal slang of Geor­gian Lon­don (with plen­ty of las­civ­i­ous high­lights pro­vid­ed), to Cap­tain Cook’s secret ‘atlas of cloth’ and the unex­pect­ed­ly homi­ci­dal sto­ry of the ori­gin of the Oxford Eng­lish dic­tio­nary. Else­where, ‘Lit­er­ary Hoax­es’ presents the best of the ancient tra­di­tion of decep­tive writing–lies in book form–whether it be for satire, self pro­mo­tion or as an instru­ment of revenge.

Of the lat­ter, Brooke-Hitch­ing cites Jonathan Swift’s series of pam­phlets writ­ten under a pseu­do­nym, “a suc­cess­ful cam­paign to con­vince all of Lon­don of the pre­ma­ture death of a char­la­tan prophet he despised.” In a chap­ter titled ‘Works of the Super­nat­ur­al,’ Brooke-Hitch­ing gives us the exam­ple of W.B. Yeats’ wife George, who tran­scribed “4000 pages of spir­i­tu­al dic­ta­tion in the first three years of their mar­riage.” Her auto­mat­ic writ­ing was pub­lished in a com­pi­la­tion called A Vision in 1925, but “through sev­en edi­tions it was only Yeats’ name” on the title page.

There are ‘Books that aren’t Books,’ such as a skull inscribed with a prayer and a col­lec­tion of auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal frag­ments embroi­dered on the linen jack­et of an incar­cer­at­ed seam­stress; there are ‘Cryp­tic Books” like the Voyn­ich Man­u­script and poet­ry writ­ten in code. Part lit­er­ary detec­tive sto­ry, part bib­li­o­graph­ic odyssey through time, part lit­er­ary curios­i­ty all its own (though more of the cof­fee-table vari­ety), The Madman’s Library is a feast for bib­lio­philes and odd­balls of all kinds. Pick up a copy here and see sev­er­al more of excep­tion­al­ly curi­ous books over at Smith­son­ian.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

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

A Medieval Book That Opens Six Dif­fer­ent Ways, Reveal­ing Six Dif­fer­ent Books in One

Won­der­ful­ly Weird & Inge­nious Medieval Books

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

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The History of Tattoos Gets Beautifully Documented in a New Book by Legendary Tattoo Artist Henk Schiffmacher (1730–1970)

in Art, Books, Design | March 30th, 2021

I always think tat­toos should com­mu­ni­cate. If you see tat­toos that don’t com­mu­ni­cate, they’re worth­less. —Henk Schiff­mach­er, tat­too artist

Tat­too­ing is an ancient art whose grip on the Amer­i­can main­stream, and that of oth­er West­ern cul­tures, is a com­par­a­tive­ly recent devel­op­ment.

Long before he took up—or went under—a tat­too nee­dle, leg­endary tat­too artist and self-described “very odd duck type of guy,” Henk Schiff­mach­er was a fledg­ling pho­tog­ra­ph­er and acci­den­tal col­lec­tor of tat­too lore.

Inspired by the immer­sive approach­es of Diane Arbus and jour­nal­ist Hunter S. Thomp­son, Schiff­mach­er, aka Han­ky Panky, attend­ed tat­too con­ven­tions, seek­ing out any sub­cul­ture where inked skin might reveal itself in the ear­ly 70s.

As he shared with fel­low tat­too­er Eric Per­fect in a char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly rol­lick­ing, pro­fane inter­view, his instincts became honed to the point where he “could smell” a tat­too con­cealed beneath cloth­ing:

The kind of tat­toos you used to see in those days, you do not see any­more, that stuff made in jail, in the Ger­man jails, like, you’d like see a guy who’d tat­tooed him­self as far as his right hand could reach and the whole right (side) would be empty…I always loved that stuff which was nev­er meant to be art which is straight from the heart.

When tat­too artists would write to him, request­ing prints of his pho­tos, he would save the let­ters, telling Hero’s Eric Good­fel­low:

I would get stuff from all over the world. The whole enve­lope would be dec­o­rat­ed, and the let­ter as well. I have let­ters from the Leu Fam­i­ly and they’re com­plete pieces of art, they’re hand paint­ed with all kinds of illus­tra­tions. Also peo­ple from jail would write let­ters, and they would take time to write in between the lines in a dif­fer­ent colour. So very, very unique let­ters.

Such cor­re­spon­dence formed the ear­li­est hold­ings in what is now one of the world’s biggest col­lec­tions of con­tem­po­rary and his­tor­i­cal tat­too ephemera.

Schiff­mach­er (now the author of the new Taschen book, TATTOO. 1730s-1970s) real­ized that tat­toos must be doc­u­ment­ed and pre­served by some­one with an open mind and vest­ed inter­est, before they accom­pa­nied their recip­i­ents to the grave. Many fam­i­lies were ashamed of their loved ones’ inter­est in skin art, and apt to destroy any evi­dence of it.

On the oth­er end of the spec­trum is a por­tion of a 19th-cen­tu­ry whaler’s arm, per­ma­nent­ly embla­zoned with Jesus and sweet­heart, pre­served in formalde­hyde-filled jar. Schiff­mach­er acquired that, too, along with vin­tage tools, busi­ness cards, pages and pages of flash art, and some tru­ly hair rais­ing DIY ink recipes for those jail­house stick and pokes. (He dis­cuss­es the whaler’s tat­toos in a 2014 TED Talk, below).

His col­lec­tion also expand­ed to his own skin, his first can­vas as a tat­too artist and proof of his ded­i­ca­tion to a com­mu­ni­ty that sees its share of tourists.

Schiffmacher’s com­mand of glob­al tat­too sig­nif­i­cance and his­to­ry informs his pref­er­ence for com­mu­nica­tive tat­toos, as opposed to obscure ice break­ers requir­ing expla­na­tion.

When he first start­ed con­ceiv­ing of him­self as an illus­trat­ed man, he imag­ined the delight any poten­tial grand­chil­dren would take in this graph­ic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of his life’s adven­tures—“like Pip­pi Long­stock­ing’s father.”

While his Tat­too Muse­um in Ams­ter­dam is no more, his col­lec­tion is far from moth­balled. Ear­li­er this year, Taschen pub­lished TATTOO. 1730s-1970s. Henk Schiff­macher’s Pri­vate Col­lec­tion, a whop­ping 440-pager the irre­press­ible 69-year-old artist hefts with pride. You can pur­chase the book direct­ly via Ama­zon.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Meet Amer­i­ca & Britain’s First Female Tat­too Artists: Maud Wag­n­er (1877–1961) & Jessie Knight (1904–1994)

Why Tat­toos Are Per­ma­nent? New TED Ed Video Explains with Ani­ma­tion

Browse a Gallery of Kurt Von­negut Tat­toos, and See Why He’s the Big Goril­la of Lit­er­ary Tat­toos

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er, the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and the human alter ego of L’Ourse.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Women Street Photographers: The Web Site, Instragram Account & Book That Amplify the Work of Women Artists Worldwide

in Books, Photography | March 24th, 2021

It’s almost impos­si­ble not to won­der how reclu­sive artists of the past — like anony­mous street pho­tog­ra­ph­er and Chica­go nan­ny Vivian Maier — would fare in the age of Tum­blr and Insta­gram. Would Maier have become inter­net famous? Would she have post­ed any of her pho­tographs? The lit­tle we know about her makes it hard to answer the ques­tion. Maier lived a life of abstemious self-nega­tion. “She nev­er exhib­it­ed her work,” Alex Kot­lowitz writes at Moth­er Jones, “she didn’t share her pho­tos with any­one, except some of the chil­dren in her care.”

And yet, Maier was known to enjoy con­ver­sa­tions about film and the­ater with knowl­edge­able peo­ple. One sus­pects that if she had been able to stay in touch with like minds, she might have been encour­aged by a sup­port­ive com­mu­ni­ty she couldn’t find any­where else. We might imag­ine her, for exam­ple, sub­mit­ting a select few pho­tographs to Women Street Pho­tog­ra­phers, a project that began in 2017 as an Insta­gram account and has since “bur­geoned into a web­site, artist res­i­den­cy, series of exhi­bi­tions, film series, and now a book pub­lished this month by Pres­tel,” Grace Ebert writes at Colos­sal.

For women street pho­tog­ra­phers liv­ing and work­ing today, the project offers what founder Gul­nara Samoilo­va says she need­ed and couldn’t find: “I soon began to real­ize that with this plat­form, I could cre­ate every­thing I had always want­ed to receive as a pho­tog­ra­ph­er: the kinds of sup­port and oppor­tu­ni­ties that would have helped me grow dur­ing those for­ma­tive and piv­otal points on my jour­ney.” The project is inter­na­tion­al in scope, bring­ing togeth­er the work of 100 women from 31 coun­tries, “a tiny sam­pling of what’s out there.”

In her intro­duc­tion to the 224-page book, Samoilo­va describes the impor­tance of such a col­lec­tion:

Street pho­tog­ra­phy is both a record of the world and a state­ment of the artist them­selves: it is how they see the world, who they are, what cap­tures their atten­tion, and fas­ci­nates them. There’s a won­der­ful mix­ture of art and arti­fact, poet­ry and tes­ti­mo­ny that makes street pho­tog­ra­phy so appeal­ing. It’s both doc­u­men­tary and fine art at the same time, yet high­ly acces­si­ble to peo­ple out­side the pho­tog­ra­phy world.

There are Vivian Maiers around the world dri­ven to doc­u­ment their sur­round­ings, whether any­one ever sees their work or not. Maier made her pho­tographs “for all the right rea­sons,” says Chica­go artist Tony Fitz­patrick. “She made them because to not make them was impos­si­ble. She had no choice.” But per­haps she might have cho­sen to show her work if she had access to plat­forms like Women Street Pho­tog­ra­phers. We can be grate­ful for such out­lets now: they offer per­spec­tives that we can find nowhere else. Women Street Pho­tog­ra­phers will announce the win­ners of its inau­gur­al vir­tu­al exhi­bi­tion “on or around April 1.”

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Meet Ger­da Taro, the First Female Pho­to­jour­nal­ist to Die on the Front Lines

Take a Visu­al Jour­ney Through 181 Years of Street Pho­tog­ra­phy (1838–2019)

Vivian Maier, Street Pho­tog­ra­ph­er, Dis­cov­ered

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

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Haruki Murakami Has Created New T‑Shirts Featuring Words & Imagery from Norwegian Wood, 1Q84 and More

in Books, Fashion | March 4th, 2021

Haru­ki Muraka­mi is a nov­el­ist, but for some time his name has been no less a glob­al brand than, say, Uniqlo’s. Though both the man and the cloth­ing com­pa­ny hap­pen to have come into exis­tence in Japan in 1949, this com­par­i­son goes beyond mere nation­al­i­ty. In their home­land, both Uniq­lo and Muraka­mi came into their own in the 1980s, the decade when the for­mer opened its first casu­al-wear shop and the lat­ter pub­lished the name-mak­ing A Wild Sheep Chase and the cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non that was Nor­we­gian Wood. Hav­ing assid­u­ous­ly cul­ti­vat­ed mar­kets out­side Japan, both have become inter­na­tion­al­ly known in the 21st cen­tu­ry: just as Uniq­lo now has shops all over the world, Murakami’s books have been trans­lat­ed into at least 50 lan­guages.

There­fore, per­haps Muraka­mi and Uniqlo’s con­ver­gence was only a mat­ter of time. “Haru­ki Muraka­mi and Uniq­lo have teamed up for a line of T‑shirts inspired by the author’s nov­els like Nor­we­gian Wood and 1Q84, as well as his radio pro­gram,” writes Spoon & Tam­ago’s John­ny Wald­man.

With graph­ics con­tributed by sources like illus­tra­tor and fre­quent Muraka­mi col­lab­o­ra­tor Masaru Fuji­mo­to, “the col­lec­tion show­cas­es the world of his mas­ter­piece nov­els, his love for music, and of course cats.” The reverse of the Muraka­mi Radio shirt, seen at the top of the post, even fea­tures this unam­bigu­ous quo­ta­tion of the man him­self: “Books, music, and cats have been my friends from way back.”

More than a few of Murakami’s fans could no doubt say the same. They’ll also delight in the nuances of the words and images on the sev­en oth­er Muraka­mi shirts Uniq­lo has cre­at­ed for sale from March 15th. Many have read Nor­we­gian Wood, but rel­a­tive­ly few will notice that Uniqlo’s shirt based on that book comes in the very same red-and-green col­or scheme as its two-vol­ume Japan­ese first edi­tion. Far from draw­ing only on the pop­u­lar­i­ty of such big hits, the col­lec­tion also pays trib­ute to Murakami’s less­er-known works: his sopho­more effort Pin­ball, 1973, for instance, which went with­out a major Eng­lish trans­la­tion for 35 years.

Still unpub­lished out­side Asia are most of Murakami’s essays, which he’s been writ­ing on music, food, trav­el, and a vari­ety of oth­er sub­jects near­ly as long as he’s been a nov­el­ist. But this Novem­ber, Knopf will pub­lish Muraka­mi T: The T‑Shirts I Love, a book doc­u­ment­ing his impres­sive col­lec­tion includ­ing T‑shirts “from The Beach Boys con­cert in Hon­olu­lu to the shirt that inspired the beloved short sto­ry ‘Tony Tak­i­tani,’ ” all “accom­pa­nied by short, frank essays that have been trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish for the first time.” Writ­ing essays or fic­tion, what­ev­er the lan­guage in which they appear, Murakami’s work remains broad­ly appeal­ing yet dis­tinc­tive­ly his own, belong­ing at once every­where and nowhere in the world — more than a bit, come to think of it, like Uniqlo’s cloth­ing. On March 15, pur­chase the shirts online here.

via Spoon & Tam­a­go

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Became a DJ on a Japan­ese Radio Sta­tion for One Night: Hear the Music He Played for Delight­ed Lis­ten­ers

Why Should You Read Haru­ki Muraka­mi? An Ani­mat­ed Video on His “Epic Lit­er­ary Puz­zle” Kaf­ka on the Shore Makes the Case

Dress Like an Intel­lec­tu­al Icon with Japan­ese Coats Inspired by the Wardrobes of Camus, Sartre, Duchamp, Le Cor­busier & Oth­ers

Vin­tage Lit­er­ary T‑Shirts

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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When Sci-Fi Legend Ursula K. Le Guin Translated the Chinese Classic, the Tao Te Ching

in Books, Gender, Literature, Religion | March 3rd, 2021

Bren­da (laugh­ing): Can you imag­ine a Taoist adver­tis­ing agency? “Buy this if you feel like it. If it’s right. You may not need it.”

Ursu­la: There was an old car­toon in The New York­er with a guy from an adver­tis­ing agency show­ing his ad and the boss is say­ing “I think you need a lit­tle more enthu­si­asm Jones.” And his ad is say­ing, “Try our prod­uct, it real­ly isn’t bad.”

Per­haps no Chi­nese text has had more last­ing influ­ence in the West than the Tao Te Ching, a work so ingrained in our cul­ture by now, it has become a “change­less con­stant,” writes Maria Popo­va. “Every gen­er­a­tion of admir­ers has felt, and con­tin­ues to feel, a pre­science in these ancient teach­ings so aston­ish­ing that they appear to have been writ­ten for their own time.” It speaks direct­ly to us, we feel, or at least, that’s how we can feel when we find the right trans­la­tion.

Admir­ers of the Taoist clas­sic have includ­ed John Cage, Franz Kaf­ka, Bruce Lee, Alan Watts, and Leo Tol­stoy, all of whom were deeply affect­ed by the mil­len­nia-old philo­soph­i­cal poet­ry attrib­uted to Lao Tzu. That’s some heavy com­pa­ny for the rest of us to keep, maybe. It’s also a list of famous men. Not every read­er of the Tao is male or approach­es the text as the utter­ances of a patri­ar­chal sage. One famous read­er had the audac­i­ty to spend decades on her own, non-gen­dered, non-hier­ar­chi­cal trans­la­tion, even though she didn’t read Chi­nese.

It’s not quite right to call Ursu­la Le Guin’s Tao Te Ching a trans­la­tion, so much as an inter­pre­ta­tion, or a “ren­di­tion,” as she calls it. “I don’t know Chi­nese,” she said in an inter­view with Bren­da Peter­son, “but I drew upon the Paul Carus trans­la­tion of 1898 which has Chi­nese char­ac­ters fol­lowed by a translit­er­a­tion and a trans­la­tion.” She used the Carus as a “touch­stone for com­par­ing oth­er trans­la­tions,” and start­ed, in her twen­ties, “work­ing on these poems. Every decade or so I’d do anoth­er chap­ter. Every read­er has to start anew with such an ancient text.”

Le Guin drew out inflec­tions in the text which have been obscured by trans­la­tions that address the read­er as a Ruler, Sage, Mas­ter, or King. In her intro­duc­tion, Le Guin writes, “I want­ed a Book of the Way acces­si­ble to a present-day, unwise, unpow­er­ful, per­haps unmale read­er, not seek­ing eso­teric secrets, but lis­ten­ing for a voice that speaks to the soul.” To imme­di­ate­ly get a sense of the dif­fer­ence, we might con­trast edi­tions of Arthur Waley’s trans­la­tion, The Way and Its Pow­er: a Study of the Tao Te Ching and Its Place in Chi­nese Thought, with Le Guin’s Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Pow­er of the Way.

Waley’s trans­la­tion “is nev­er going to be equaled for what it does,” serv­ing as a “man­u­al for rulers,” Le Guin says. It was also designed as a guide for schol­ars, in most edi­tions append­ing around 100 pages of intro­duc­tion and 40 pages of open­ing com­men­tary to the main text. Le Guin, by con­trast, reduces her edi­to­r­i­al pres­ence to foot­notes that nev­er over­whelm, and often don’t appear at all (one note just reads “so much for cap­i­tal­ism”), as well as a few pages of end­notes on sources and vari­ants. “I didn’t fig­ure a whole lot of rulers would be read­ing it,” she said. “On the oth­er hand, peo­ple in posi­tions of respon­si­bil­i­ty, such as moth­ers, might be.”

Her ver­sion rep­re­sents a life­long engage­ment with a text Le Guin took to heart “as a teenage girl” she says, and found through­out her life that “it obvi­ous­ly is a book that speaks to women.” But her ren­der­ing of the poems does not sub­stan­tial­ly alter the sub­stance. Con­sid­er the first two stan­zas of her ver­sion of Chap­ter 11 (which she titles “The uses of not”) con­trast­ed with Waley’s CHAPTER XI.

Waley

We put thir­ty spokes togeth­er and call it a wheel;
But it is on the space where there is noth­ing that the
use­ful­ness of the wheel depends.
We turn clay to make a ves­sel;
But it is on the space where there is noth­ing that the
use­ful­ness of the ves­sel depends.

Le Guin

Thir­ty spokes
meet in the hub.
Where the wheel isn’t
is where is it’s use­ful.

Hol­lowed out,
clay makes a pot.
Where the pot’s not
is where it’s use­ful.

Le Guin ren­ders the lines as delight­ful­ly folksy oppo­si­tions with rhyme and rep­e­ti­tion. Waley piles up argu­men­ta­tive claus­es. “One of the things I love about Lao Tzu is he is so fun­ny,” Le Guin com­ments in her note,” a qual­i­ty that doesn’t come through in many oth­er trans­la­tions. “He’s explain­ing a pro­found and dif­fi­cult truth here, one of those coun­ter­in­tu­itive truths that, when the mind can accept them, sud­den­ly dou­ble the size of the uni­verse. He goes about it with this dead­pan sim­plic­i­ty, talk­ing about pots.”

Such images cap­ti­vat­ed the earthy anar­chist Le Guin. She drew inspi­ra­tion for the title of her 1971 nov­el The Lathe of Heav­en from Taoist philoso­pher Chuang Tzu, per­haps show­ing how she reads her own inter­ests into a text, as all trans­la­tors and inter­preters inevitably do. No trans­la­tion is defin­i­tive. The bor­row­ing turned out to be an exam­ple of how even respect­ed Chi­nese lan­guage schol­ars can mis­read a text and get it wrong. She found the “lathe of heav­en” phrase in James Legge’s trans­la­tion of Chuang Tzu, and lat­er learned on good author­i­ty that there were no lath­es in Chi­na in Chuang Tzu’s time. “Legge was a bit off on that one,” she writes in her notes.

Schol­ar­ly den­si­ty does not make for per­fect accu­ra­cy or a read­able trans­la­tion. The ver­sions of Legge and sev­er­al oth­ers were “so obscure as to make me feel the book must be beyond West­ern com­pre­hen­sion,” writes Le Guin. But as the Tao Te Ching announces at the out­set: it offers a Way beyond lan­guage. In Legge’s first few lines:

The Tao that can be trod­den is not the endur­ing and
unchang­ing Tao. The name that can be named is not the endur­ing and
unchang­ing name.

Here is how Le Guin wel­comes read­ers to the Tao — not­ing that “a sat­is­fac­to­ry trans­la­tion of this chap­ter is, I believe, per­fect­ly impos­si­ble — in the first poem she titles “Tao­ing”:

The way you can go 
isn’t the real way. 
The name you can say 
isn’t the real name.

Heav­en and earth
begin in the unnamed: 
name’s the moth­er
of the ten thou­sand things.

So the unwant­i­ng soul 
sees what’s hid­den,
and the ever-want­i­ng soul 
sees only what it wants.

Two things, one ori­gin, 
but dif­fer­ent in name, 
whose iden­ti­ty is mys­tery.
Mys­tery of all mys­ter­ies! 
The door to the hid­den.

All images of the text cour­tesy of Austin Kleon. 

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Ursu­la K. Le Guin Names the Books She Likes and Wants You to Read

Ursu­la K. Le Guin’s Dai­ly Rou­tine: The Dis­ci­pline That Fueled Her Imag­i­na­tion

Ursu­la K. Le Guin Stamp Get­ting Released by the US Postal Ser­vice

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

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Why the Flood of Musician Memoirs? An Exploration by Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #84

in Books, Music, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | March 3rd, 2021

There’s been an explo­sion of rock and roll auto­bi­ogra­phies in recent years, with pret­ty much every music leg­end (and many oth­ers) being invit­ed by some pub­lish­er or oth­er to write or dic­tate their sto­ry. What’s the par­tic­u­lar appeal of this kind of recount­ing, what’s the con­nec­tion between writ­ing and read­ing these books on the one hand and pro­duc­ing and lis­ten­ing to the actu­al music on the oth­er? Do we get a rough­ly equiv­a­lent ben­e­fit from a biog­ra­phy, doc­u­men­tary, or film depic­tion of the per­son­’s life?

Your hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt along with guest Lau­ra Davis-Chanin, author of her own music mem­oir, each picked a book, cov­er­ing Elvis Costel­lo, Car­rie Brown­stein, Ozzy Osbourne, and Deb­bie Har­ry respec­tive­ly. Reflect­ing on these read­ing expe­ri­ences we com­pare the author’s pur­pos­es in writ­ing the book, how con­fes­sion­al or drug-addled or twist­ed the sto­ry is, what is empha­sized and what’s not, and what res­onat­ed in the sto­ry beyond the idio­syn­crat­ic recount­ing of that per­son­’s life.

Check out Lau­ra’s two books, hear her talk about her musi­cal adven­tures on Naked­ly Exam­ined Music, and hear her dis­cuss clas­sic lit­er­a­ture on Phi Fic.

Some of the NEM episodes where Mark talked with guests about their auto-biogra­phies fea­tured Chris Frantz of Talk­ing Heads, Jim Peterik of Sur­vivor, Andy Pow­ell of Wish­bone Ash, Dan­ny Seraphine of Chica­go and John Andrew Fredrick of The Black Watch.

We did­n’t use much research for this episode, but you can read lists of par­tic­u­lar­ly good music mem­oirs from Rolling Stone and The Guardian. The Oak­land Press has an arti­cle about music biogra­phies and auto­bi­ogra­phies emerg­ing at the end of 2020.

Hear more of this pod­cast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

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A List of 132 Radical, Mind-Expanding Books from Rage Against the Machine

in Books, Music, Politics | March 2nd, 2021

If you like Rage Against the Machine, but don’t like their “polit­i­cal bs,” you haven’t actu­al­ly lis­tened to Rage Against the Machine, whose entire rai­son d’être is con­tained with­in the name. What is “the Machine”? Let’s hear it from the band them­selves. Singer Zack de la Rocha point­ed out that the title of their sec­ond album, 1996’s Evil Empire, came from “Ronald Reagan’s slan­der of the Sovi­et Union in the eight­ies, which the band feels could just as eas­i­ly apply to the Unit­ed States.”

The Machine is cap­i­tal­ism and mil­i­tarism, what Dwight D. Eisen­how­er once famous­ly called the “mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al com­plex” but which has fold­ed in oth­er oppres­sive mech­a­nisms since the coin­ing of that phrase, includ­ing the prison-indus­tri­al com­plex and immi­gra­tion-indus­tri­al com­plex. The Machine is a mega-com­plex with a lot of mov­ing parts, and the mem­bers of RATM have done the work to crit­i­cal­ly exam­ine them, inform­ing their music and activism with read­ing and study.

Evil Empire, for exam­ple, fea­tured in its lin­er notes a pho­to of “a pile of rad­i­cal books,” “and the group post­ed a lengthy read­ing list to com­ple­ment it on their site,” declares the site Rad­i­cal Reads. Debates often rage on social media over whether activists should read the­o­ry. One answer to the ques­tion might be the com­mit­ment of RATM, who have stead­fast­ly lived out their con­vic­tions over the decades while also, osten­si­bly, read­ing Marx, Mar­cuse, and Fanon.

There are more acces­si­ble the­o­rists on the list: fierce essay­ists like for­mer death row inmate and Black Pan­ther Mumia Abu-Jamal and Hen­ry David Thore­au, whose Walden and “Civ­il Dis­obe­di­ence” both appear. The Anar­chist Cook­book shows up, but so too does Dr. Suess’ The Lorax, biogra­phies of Miles Davis and Bob Mar­ley, Taschen’s Dali: The Paint­ings, James Joyce’s A Por­trait of the Artist of a Young Man, and Hen­ry Miller’s Trop­ic of Can­cer. This is not a list of strict­ly “polit­i­cal” books so much as a list of books that open us up to oth­er ways of see­ing.

These are also, in many cas­es, books we do not encounter unless we seek them out. “I cer­tain­ly didn’t find any of those books at my Uni­ver­si­ty High School library,” de la Rocha told MTV in 1996, “Many of those books may give peo­ple new insight into some of the fear and some of the pain they might be expe­ri­enc­ing as a result of some of the very ugly poli­cies the gov­ern­ment is impos­ing upon us right now.” Doubt­less, he would still endorse the sen­ti­ment. The work­ings of the Machine, after all, don’t seem to change much for the peo­ple on the bot­tom when it gets new man­age­ment at the top.

Read the full list of Evil Empire book rec­om­men­da­tions on Good Reads. And as a bonus, hear a Spo­ti­fy playlist of rad­i­cal music just above, com­piled by RATM gui­tarist Tom Morel­lo. The 241 song list runs

via Rad­i­cal Reads

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Tom Morel­lo Responds to Angry Fans Who Sud­den­ly Real­ize That Rage Against the Machine’s Music Is Polit­i­cal: “What Music of Mine DIDN’T Con­tain Polit­i­cal BS?”

Hear a 4 Hour Playlist of Great Protest Songs: Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Bob Mar­ley, Pub­lic Ene­my, Bil­ly Bragg & More

The Entire Archives of Rad­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy Go Online: Read Essays by Michel Fou­cault, Alain Badiou, Judith But­ler & More (1972–2018)

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

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Anthony Bourdain Talks About the Big Break That Changed His Life–at Age 44

in Books, Food & Drink, Television | February 23rd, 2021

In 1999, Antho­ny Bourdain’s career seemed to have stalled. While his “prin­ci­pal voca­tion remained his posi­tion as exec­u­tive chef” at New York’s Les Halles, rest­less intel­li­gence and wan­der­lust kept him look­ing for oth­er oppor­tu­ni­ties. “He was 43 years old, rode hard and put up wet,” writes Eliz­a­beth Nel­son at The Ringer, “a recov­er­ing addict with a num­ber of debts and a pen­chant for find­ing trou­ble in fail­ing restau­rants across the city.” He had fought for and won an unde­ni­able mea­sure of suc­cess, but he hard­ly seemed on the thresh­old of the major celebri­ty chef­dom he would main­tain until his death twen­ty years lat­er in 2018.

Then, “in the spring of 2000, his sub­li­mat­ed lit­er­ary ambi­tions sud­den­ly caught up with and then quick­ly sur­passed his cook­ing.” Bourdain’s mem­oir Kitchen Con­fi­den­tial “became an imme­di­ate sen­sa­tion,” intro­duc­ing his icon­o­clasm, acer­bic wit, and out­ra­geous con­fes­sion­al style to mil­lions of read­ers, who would soon become view­ers of his try-any­thing trav­el­ogue series, A Cook’s Tour, No Reser­va­tions, The Lay­over, and Parts Unknown, as well as loy­al read­ers of his sub­se­quent books, and even fic­tion like as Gone Bam­boo, a crime nov­el soon to become a TV series.

How did Bour­dain first get his win­ning per­son­al­i­ty before the mass­es? It all start­ed with a 1999 New York­er arti­cle called “Don’t Eat Before Read­ing This,” the pre­de­ces­sor to Kitchen Con­fi­den­tial and an essay that begins with what we might now rec­og­nize as a pro­to­typ­i­cal­ly Bour­dain­ian sen­tence: “Good food, good eat­ing, is all about blood and organs, cru­el­ty and decay.” In the inter­view clip above, from Bourdain’s final, 2017 inter­view with Fast Com­pa­ny, he talks about how the sto­ry led to his “huge break” just a cou­ple days after it ran, when a Blooms­bury edi­tor called with an offer of “the stag­ger­ing­ly high price of fifty thou­sand dol­lars to write a book.”

Every­one who loves Bourdain’s writing—and who loved his gen­er­ous, ecu­meni­cal culi­nary spirit—knows why Kitchen Con­fi­den­tial changed his life overnight, as he says. Yes, “food is pain,” as he writes in the book’s “First Course,” but also, “food is sex”—”the delights of Por­tuguese squid stew, of Well­fleet oys­ters on the half­shell, New Eng­land clam chow­der, of greasy, won­der­ful, fire-red chori­zo sausages, kale soup, and a night when the striped bass jumped right out of the water and onto Cape Cod’s din­ner tables.” Bourdain’s prose lingers over every delight, prepar­ing us for the escapades to come.

In Kitchen Con­fi­den­tial, the exhaus­tion, “sheer weird­ness,” and con­stant “threat of dis­as­ter,” that attend New York kitchen life (and life “inside the CIA”—the Culi­nary Insti­tute of Amer­i­ca, that is), becomes fleshed out with scenes of culi­nary deca­dence the likes of which most read­ers had nev­er seen, smelled, or tast­ed. Fans craved more and more from the chef who wrote, in 1999, just before he would become a best­selling house­hold name, “my career has tak­en an eeri­ly appro­pri­ate turn: these days, I’m the chef de cui­sine of a much loved, old-school French brasserie/bistro where… every part of the animal—hooves, snout, cheeks, skin, and organs—is avid­ly and appre­cia­tive­ly pre­pared and con­sumed.”

Read Bourdain’s New York­er essay here and see his full 2017 inter­view with Fast Com­pa­ny just above.

via @Yoh31

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Life Lessons from Antho­ny Bour­dain: How He Devel­oped His Iron Pro­fes­sion­al­ism, Achieved Cre­ative Free­dom & Learned from Fail­ure

Watch Antho­ny Bourdain’s Free Show, Raw Craft Where He Vis­its Crafts­men Mak­ing Gui­tars, Tat­toos, Motor­cy­cles & More (RIP)

Michael Pol­lan Explains How Cook­ing Can Change Your Life; Rec­om­mends Cook­ing Books, Videos & Recipes

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

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