Download Original Bauhaus Books & Journals for Free: A Digital Celebration of the Founding of the Bauhaus School 100 Years Ago

in Art, Books | March 28th, 2019

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In 1919, Ger­man archi­tect Wal­ter Gropius found­ed Bauhaus, the most influ­en­tial art school of the 20th cen­tu­ry. Bauhaus defined mod­ernist design and rad­i­cal­ly changed our rela­tion­ship with every­day objects. Gropius wrote in his man­i­festo Pro­gramm des Staatlichen Bauhaus­es Weimar that “There is no essen­tial dif­fer­ence between the artist and the arti­san.” His new school, which fea­tured fac­ul­ty that includ­ed the likes of Paul Klee, Lás­zló Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers and Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky, did indeed erase the cen­turies-old line between applied arts and fine arts.

Bauhaus archi­tec­ture sand­blast­ed away the ornate flour­ish­es com­mon with ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry build­ings, favor­ing instead the clean, sleek lines of indus­tri­al fac­to­ries. Design­er Mar­cel Breuer reimag­ined the com­mon chair by strip­ping it down to its most ele­men­tal form.

Her­bert Bay­er rein­vent­ed and mod­ern­ized graph­ic design by focus­ing on visu­al clar­i­ty. Gun­ta Stöl­zl, Mar­i­anne Brandt and Chris­t­ian Dell rad­i­cal­ly remade such diverse objects as fab­rics and tea ket­tles.

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Nowa­days, of course, get­ting one of those Bauhaus tea ket­tles, or even an orig­i­nal copy of Gropius’s man­i­festo, would cost a small for­tune. For­tu­nate­ly for design nerds, typog­ra­phy mavens and archi­tec­ture enthu­si­asts every­where, the good folks over at Mono­skop have post­ed online a whole set of beau­ti­ful­ly designed pub­li­ca­tions from the sto­ried school.

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Click here to pick out indi­vid­ual works or here to just get all of them. Sad­ly, though, you can’t down­load a teaket­tle.

The list of Books in the Mono­skop Bauhaus archive includes:

And here are some key Bauhaus jour­nals:

  1. bauhaus 1 (1926). 5 pages, 42 cm. Down­load (23 MB).
  2. bauhaus: zeitschrift für bau und gestal­tung 2:1 (Feb 1928). Down­load (17 MB).
  3. bauhaus: zeitschrift für gestal­tung 3:1 (Jan 1929). Down­load (17 MB).
  4. bauhaus: zeitschrift für gestal­tung 3:2 (Apr-Jun 1929). Down­load (15 MB).
  5. bauhaus: zeitschrift für gestal­tung 3:3 (Jul-Sep 1929). Down­load (16 MB).
  6. bauhaus: zeitschrift für gestal­tung 2 (Jul 1931). Down­load (15 MB).

Get more in the Mono­skop Bauhaus archive.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2015. We’re bring­ing it back to cel­e­brate the found­ing of the Bauhaus school 100 years ago–on April 1, 1919.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Bauhaus World, a Free Doc­u­men­tary That Cel­e­brates the 100th Anniver­sary of Germany’s Leg­endary Art, Archi­tec­ture & Design School

An Oral His­to­ry of the Bauhaus: Hear Rare Inter­views (in Eng­lish) with Wal­ter Gropius, Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe & More

Watch an Avant-Garde Bauhaus Bal­let in Bril­liant Col­or, the Tri­adic Bal­let, First Staged by Oskar Schlem­mer in 1922 

Har­vard Puts Online a Huge Col­lec­tion of Bauhaus Art Objects

How the Rad­i­cal Build­ings of the Bauhaus Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Archi­tec­ture: A Short Intro­duc­tion

The Female Pio­neers of the Bauhaus Art Move­ment: Dis­cov­er Gertrud Arndt, Mar­i­anne Brandt, Anni Albers & Oth­er For­got­ten Inno­va­tors

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

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William S. Burroughs’ Manifesto for Overthrowing a Corrupt Government with Fake News and Other Prophetic Methods: It’s Now Published for the First Time

in Books, Literature, Politics | March 25th, 2019

The Boy Scouts of Amer­i­ca have faced some deserved crit­i­cism, unde­served ridicule, and have been cru­el­ly used as props, but I think it’s safe to say that they still bear a pret­ty whole­some image for a major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans. That was prob­a­bly no less the case and per­haps a good deal more so in 1969, but the end of the six­ties was not by any stretch a sim­pler time. It was a peri­od, writes Scott McLemee, “when the My Lai Mas­sacre, the Man­son Fam­i­ly and the Weath­er Under­ground were all in the news.” The Zodi­ac Killer was on the loose, a gen­er­al air of bleak­ness pre­vailed.

William S. Bur­roughs respond­ed to this mad­ness with a counter-mad­ness of his own in “The Revised Boy Scout Man­u­al,” “an impas­sioned yet some­times inco­her­ent rebuke to ossi­fied polit­i­cal ide­olo­gies,” writes Kirkus. We can pre­sume Bur­roughs meant his instruc­tions for over­throw­ing cor­rupt gov­ern­ments to satir­i­cal­ly com­ment on the out­doorsy sta­tus quo youth cult. But we can also see the man­u­al tak­ing as its start­ing point cer­tain val­ues the Scouts cham­pi­on, at their best: obses­sive atten­tion to detail, Mac­Gyver-like inge­nu­ity, and good old Amer­i­can self-reliance.

Want to bring down the gov­ern­ment? You can do it your­self… with fake news.

Boing Boing quotes a long pas­sage from the book that shows Bur­roughs as a com­pre­hen­sive, if not quite whole­some, Scout advi­sor, describ­ing how one might use mass media’s meth­ods to dis­rupt its mes­sage, and to trans­mit mes­sages of your own. We might think he is fore­see­ing, even rec­om­mend­ing, tech­niques we now see used to a no-longer-shock­ing degree.

You have an advan­tage which your oppos­ing play­er does not have. He must con­ceal his manip­u­la­tions. You are under no such neces­si­ty. In fact you can adver­tise the fact that you are writ­ing news in advance and try­ing to make it hap­pen by tech­niques which any­body can use.

And that makes you NEWS. And a TV per­son­al­i­ty as well, if you play it right. 

You con­struct fake news broad­casts on video cam­era… And you scram­ble your fab­ri­cat­ed news in with actu­al news broad­casts.

We might read in Bur­roughs’ instruc­tions the meth­ods of YouTube pro­pa­gan­dists, social media manip­u­la­tors, and some of the most pow­er­ful peo­ple in the world. Bur­roughs does not rec­om­mend tak­ing over the media appa­ra­tus by seiz­ing its pow­er, but rather using tech­nol­o­gy to make “cut­up video tapes” and ham radio broad­casts fea­tur­ing doc­u­men­tary media spliced togeth­er with fab­ri­ca­tions. These “tech­niques could swamp the mass media with total illu­sion,” he writes. “It will be seen that the fal­si­fi­ca­tions in syl­lab­ic West­ern lan­guages are in point of fact actu­al virus mech­a­nisms.”

Bur­roughs is not sim­ply writ­ing a ref­er­ence for mak­ing fear­mon­ger­ing pro­pa­gan­da. Even when it comes to the sub­ject of fear, he some­times sounds as if he is revis­ing Sergei Eisenstein’s mon­tage the­o­ry for his own sim­i­lar­ly vio­lent times. “Let us say the mes­sage is fear. For this we take all the past fear shots of the sub­ject we can col­lect or evoke. We cut these in with fear words and pic­tures, with threats, etc. This is all act­ed out and would be upset­ting enough in any case. Now let’s try it scram­bled and see if we get an even stronger effect.”

What would this effect be? One “com­pa­ra­ble to post-hyp­not­ic sug­ges­tion”? Who is the audi­ence, and would they be, a la Clock­work Orange, a cap­tive one? Did Bur­roughs see peo­ple on street cor­ners screen­ing their cut-up videos, despite the fact that con­sumer-lev­el video tech­nol­o­gy did not yet exist? Is this a cin­e­mat­ic exper­i­ment, mass media-age occult rit­u­al, com­pendi­um of prac­ti­cal mag­ic for insid­er media adepts?

See what you can make of Bur­roughs’ “The Revised Boy Scout Man­u­al” (sub­ti­tled “an elec­tron­ic rev­o­lu­tion”). The book has been reis­sued by the Ohio State Press, with an after­word (read it here) by V. Vale, pub­lish­er of the leg­endary, rad­i­cal mag­a­zine RE/Search, who excerpt­ed a part of the “Revised Man­u­al” in the ear­ly 1980s and planned to pub­lish it in full before “a per­son­al rela­tion­ship blowup” put an end to the project.

McLemee titles his review of Burrough’s redis­cov­ered man­i­festo “Dis­tant Ear­ly Warn­ing,” and much of it does indeed sound eeri­ly prophet­ic. But we should also bear in mind the book is itself a coun­ter­cul­tur­al pas­tiche, designed to scram­ble minds for rea­sons only Bur­roughs tru­ly knew. He was a “prac­tic­ing Sci­en­tol­o­gist at the time” of the book’s com­po­si­tion, “albeit not for much longer,” and he does pre­scribe use of the e‑meter and makes scat­tered ref­er­ences to L. Ron Hub­bard. But as a prac­ti­tion­er of his own pre­cepts, Bur­roughs would not have writ­ten a mono­graph uncrit­i­cal­ly pro­mot­ing one belief sys­tem or anoth­er. (Well, maybe just the once.) He also quotes Hassan‑I Sab­bah, dis­cuss­es Mayan hiero­glyph­ics, and talks Gen­er­al Seman­tics.

“The Revised Boy Scout Man­u­al” “has ele­ments of lib­er­tar­i­an man­i­festo, para­mil­i­tary hand­book, revenge fan­ta­sy and dark satire,” McLemee writes, “and wher­ev­er the line between fic­tion and non­fic­tion may be, it’s nev­er clear for long.” In this, Bur­roughs only scram­bles ele­ments already in abun­dance at the end of the six­ties and in the ear­ly sev­en­ties, dur­ing which he revised and record­ed the work sev­er­al times as he tran­si­tioned him­self out of an orga­ni­za­tion that main­tained total con­trol through mass media. Like Mar­shall McLuhan, Noam Chom­sky and oth­ers, he was begin­ning to see this phe­nom­e­non every­where he looked. Bur­roughs’ most last­ing influ­ence may be that, like the late-60s Sit­u­a­tion­ists, he devised a cun­ning and effec­tive way to turn mass media in on itself, one with per­haps more sin­is­ter impli­ca­tions.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How William S. Bur­roughs Embraced, Then Reject­ed Sci­en­tol­ogy, Forc­ing L. Ron Hub­bard to Come to Its Defense (1959–1970)

How William S. Bur­roughs Used the Cut-Up Tech­nique to Shut Down London’s First Espres­so Bar (1972)

When William S. Bur­roughs Appeared on Sat­ur­day Night Live: His First TV Appear­ance (1981)

5 Ani­ma­tions Intro­duce the Media The­o­ry of Noam Chom­sky, Roland Barthes, Mar­shall McLuhan, Edward Said & Stu­art Hall

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

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William Faulkner’s Review of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

in Books | March 13th, 2019

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Images via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In the mid-20th cen­tu­ry, the two big dogs in the Amer­i­can lit­er­ary scene were William Faulkn­er and Ernest Hem­ing­way. Both were inter­na­tion­al­ly revered, both were mas­ters of the nov­el and the short sto­ry, and both won Nobel Prizes.

Born in Mis­sis­sip­pi, Faulkn­er wrote alle­gor­i­cal his­to­ries of the South in a style that is both ellip­ti­cal and chal­leng­ing. His works were marked by uses of stream-of-con­scious­ness and shift­ing points of view. He also favored titan­i­cal­ly long sen­tences, hold­ing the record for hav­ing, accord­ing to the Guin­ness Book of Records, the longest sen­tence in lit­er­a­ture. Open your copy of Absa­lom! Absa­lom! to chap­ter 6 and you’ll find it. Hem­ing­way, on the oth­er hand, famous­ly sand­blast­ed the florid prose of Vic­to­ri­an-era books into short, terse, decep­tive­ly sim­ple sen­tences. His sto­ries were about root­less, dam­aged, cos­mopoli­tan peo­ple in exot­ic loca­tions like Paris or the Serengeti.

If you type in “Faulkn­er and Hem­ing­way” in your favorite search engine, you’ll like­ly stum­ble upon this famous exchange — Faulkn­er on Hem­ing­way: “He has nev­er been known to use a word that might send a read­er to the dic­tio­nary.” Hem­ing­way: “Poor Faulkn­er. Does he real­ly think big emo­tions come from big words?” Zing! Faulkn­er report­ed­ly didn’t mean for the line to come off as an insult but Hem­ing­way took it as one. The inci­dent end­ed up being the most acri­mo­nious in the two authors’ com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ship.

While Faulkn­er and Hem­ing­way nev­er for­mal­ly met, they were reg­u­lar cor­re­spon­dents, and each was keen­ly aware of the other’s tal­ents. And they were com­pet­i­tive with each oth­er, espe­cial­ly Hem­ing­way who was much more inse­cure than you might sur­mise from his macho per­sona. While Hem­ing­way reg­u­lar­ly called Faulkn­er “the best of us all,” mar­veling at his nat­ur­al abil­i­ties, he also ham­mered Faulkn­er for resort­ing to tricks. As he wrote to Har­vey Bre­it, the famed crit­ic for The New York Times, “If you have to write the longest sen­tence in the world to give a book dis­tinc­tion, the next thing you should hire Bill Veek [sic] and use midgets.”

Faulkn­er, on his end, was no less com­pet­i­tive. He once told the New York Her­ald Tri­bune, “I think he’s the best we’ve got.” On the oth­er hand, he bris­tled when an edi­tor men­tioned get­ting Hem­ing­way to write the pref­ace for The Portable Faulkn­er in 1946. “It seems to me in bad taste to ask him to write a pref­ace to my stuff. It’s like ask­ing one race horse in the mid­dle of a race to broad­cast a blurb on anoth­er horse in the same run­ning field.”

When Bre­it asked Faulkn­er to write a review of Hemingway’s 1952 novel­la The Old Man and the Sea, he refused. Yet when a cou­ple months lat­er he got the same request from Wash­ing­ton and Lee University’s lit­er­ary jour­nal, Shenan­doah, Faulkn­er relent­ed, giv­ing guard­ed praise to the nov­el in a one para­graph-long review. You can read it below.

His best. Time may show it to be the best sin­gle piece of any of us, I mean his and my con­tem­po­raries. This time, he dis­cov­ered God, a Cre­ator. Until now, his men and women had made them­selves, shaped them­selves out of their own clay; their vic­to­ries and defeats were at the hands of each oth­er, just to prove to them­selves or one anoth­er how tough they could be. But this time, he wrote about pity: about some­thing some­where that made them all: the old man who had to catch the fish and then lose it, the fish that had to be caught and then lost, the sharks which had to rob the old man of his fish; made them all and loved them all and pitied them all. It’s all right. Praise God that what­ev­er made and loves and pities Hem­ing­way and me kept him from touch­ing it any fur­ther.

And you can also watch below a fas­ci­nat­ing talk by schol­ar Joseph Frus­cione about how Faulkn­er and Hem­ing­way com­pet­ed and influ­enced each oth­er. He wrote the recent book, Faulkn­er and Hem­ing­way: Biog­ra­phy of a Lit­er­ary Rival­ry .

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in July 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Ernest Hem­ing­way Cre­ates a Read­ing List for a Young Writer, 1934

See a Beau­ti­ful­ly Hand-Paint­ed Ani­ma­tion of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1999)

The Art of William Faulkn­er: Draw­ings from 1916–1925

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

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100-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor Helen Fagin Reads Her Letter About How Books Save Lives

in Books, History | March 6th, 2019

“Could you imag­ine a world with­out access to read­ing, to learn­ing, to books?” Helen Fagin, who pos­es that ques­tion, does­n’t have to imag­ine it: she expe­ri­enced that grim real­i­ty, and worse besides. “At twen­ty-one,” she con­tin­ues, “I was forced into Poland’s World War II ghet­to, where being caught read­ing any­thing for­bid­den by the Nazis meant, at best, hard labor; at worst, death.” There she oper­at­ed a school in secret where she taught Jew­ish chil­dren Latin and math­e­mat­ics, soon real­iz­ing that “what they need­ed wasn’t dry infor­ma­tion but hope, the kind that comes from being trans­port­ed into a dream-world of pos­si­bil­i­ty.”

That hope, in Fag­in’s wartime expe­ri­ence, came from books. “I had spent the pre­vi­ous night read­ing Gone with the Wind — one of a few smug­gled books cir­cu­lat­ed among trust­wor­thy peo­ple via an under­ground chan­nel, on their word of hon­or to read only at night, in secret.”

The next day she retold the sto­ry of Mar­garet Mitchel­l’s nov­el in her clan­des­tine class­room, where the stu­dents had expressed their desire for her to “tell us a book,” and one young girl expressed a spe­cial grat­i­tude, thank­ing Fagin “for this jour­ney into anoth­er world.” To hear how her sto­ry, and Fag­in’s, turned out, you can lis­ten to the 100-year-old Fagin her­self read the let­ter that tells the tale in the video above, and you can fol­low along with the text at Brain Pick­ings.

Brain Pick­ings founder Maria Popo­va has includ­ed Fag­in’s let­ter in the new col­lec­tion A Veloc­i­ty of Being: Illus­trat­ed Let­ters to Chil­dren about Why We Read by 121 of the Most Inspir­ing Humans in Our World. The book con­tains “orig­i­nal illus­trat­ed let­ters about the trans­for­ma­tive and tran­scen­dent pow­er of read­ing from some immense­ly inspir­ing humans,” Popo­va writes, from Jane Goodall and Mari­na Abramović to Yo-Yo Ma and David Byrne to Judy Blume and Neil Gaiman — the last of whom, as Fag­in’s cousin, offered Popo­va the con­nec­tion to this cen­te­nar­i­an liv­ing tes­ta­ment to the pow­er of read­ing. There are times when dreams sus­tain us more than facts,” writes Fagin, one sus­pects as much to the adult read­ers of the world as to the chil­dren. “To read a book and sur­ren­der to a sto­ry is to keep our very human­i­ty alive.”

via Brain Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Holo­caust Sur­vivor Vik­tor Fran­kl Explains Why If We Have True Mean­ing in Our Lives, We Can Make It Through the Dark­est of Times

96-Year-Old Holo­caust Sur­vivor Fronts a Death Met­al Band

Helen Keller Writes a Let­ter to Nazi Stu­dents Before They Burn Her Book: “His­to­ry Has Taught You Noth­ing If You Think You Can Kill Ideas” (1933)

Bri­an Eno Lists 20 Books for Rebuild­ing Civ­i­liza­tion & 59 Books For Build­ing Your Intel­lec­tu­al World

Stew­art Brand’s List of 76 Books for Rebuild­ing Civ­i­liza­tion

Ray Brad­bury Explains Why Lit­er­a­ture is the Safe­ty Valve of Civ­i­liza­tion (in Which Case We Need More Lit­er­a­ture!)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include 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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John Cleese Revisits His 20 Years as an Ivy League Professor in His New Book, Professor at Large: The Cornell Years

in Books, Comedy | March 6th, 2019

Cre­ative Com­mons image by Paul Box­ley

It takes real intel­li­gence to suc­cess­ful­ly make dumb com­e­dy. John Cleese and his Mon­ty Python col­leagues are a pre­mi­um exam­ple. You can call sketch­es like the “Min­istry of Sil­ly Walks” and “Dead Par­rot” sur­re­al­ist, and they are com­pa­ra­ble to the absur­dist stunts favored by cer­tain ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry mod­ern artists. But you can also call them very smart kinds of stu­pid, a descrip­tion of some of the high­est forms of com­e­dy, I’d say, and one that applies to so much of Cleese’s best work, from the Pythons, to Fawl­ty Tow­ers, to A Fish Called Wan­da. We are moved by stu­pid­i­ty, Cleese believes, and silli­ness is the engine of good com­e­dy. “Some­times very, very sil­ly things,” he says in the inter­view with Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty Press direc­tor Dean Smith below, “have the pow­er to touch us deeply.” Then he tells the old joke about a grasshop­per named Nor­man.

Is Cleese still fun­ny? Depends. Many lis­ten­ers of a recent BBC Radio 4 show found his act a lit­tle stale. He has also come off late­ly as a “clas­sic old man yelling at a cloud,” writes Fiona Sturges at The Guardian. (He called, sure­ly in jest, for the hang­ing of EU pres­i­dent Jean Claude Junck­er, for exam­ple, dur­ing the Brex­it cam­paign).

In cur­mud­geon­ly inter­views, he com­plains about hyper­sen­si­tiv­i­ty with exam­ples of jokes con­tem­po­rary audi­ences sim­ply don’t find amus­ing, or at least not com­ing from him. Cleese has railed about the evils of polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness, espe­cial­ly on col­lege cam­pus­es, while spend­ing the past 20 years as a “pro­fes­sor-at-large” on the pres­ti­gious cam­pus of Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty, where he has deliv­ered “incred­i­bly pop­u­lar events and classes—including talks, work­shops, and an analy­sis of A Fish Called Wan­da and The Life of Bri­an.”

These appear­ances draw hun­dreds of peo­ple, and their enor­mous pop­u­lar­i­ty should offer Cleese some reas­sur­ance that he may not need to fear cen­sor­ship, and that his wit—while it might not be as well appre­ci­at­ed in today’s mass entertainment—still has plen­ty of cur­ren­cy in places where smart peo­ple gath­er. From sem­i­nars on script writ­ing to lec­tures on psy­chol­o­gy and human devel­op­ment, Cleese’s appear­ances at Cor­nell lead to riv­et­ing, some­times hilar­i­ous, and often con­tro­ver­sial con­ver­sa­tions.

In the episodes here from the Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty Press pod­cast, you can hear Cleese’s full con­ver­sa­tion with Smith, part of the pro­mo­tion of his 2018 book Pro­fes­sor at Large: The Cor­nell Years, in which he includes an inter­view with Princess Bride screen­writer William Gold­man, a lec­ture about cre­ativ­i­ty called “Hare Brain, Tor­toise Mind,” a dis­cus­sion of facial recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy, and a talk on group dynam­ics with busi­ness stu­dents and fac­ul­ty. Like Cleese’s mind, these lec­tures and dis­cus­sions range far and wide, demon­strat­ing, once again in his long career, that it takes real smarts to not only speak with ease on sev­er­al aca­d­e­m­ic sub­jects, but to under­stand the mechan­ics of stu­pid­i­ty. You can pick up a copy of Pro­fes­sor at Large: The Cor­nell Years here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Cleese on How “Stu­pid Peo­ple Have No Idea How Stu­pid They Are” (a.k.a. the Dun­ning-Kruger Effect)

John Cleese Explains the Brain — and the Plea­sures of DirecTV

John Cleese’s Phi­los­o­phy of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Cre­at­ing Oases for Child­like Play

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

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Download 10,000+ Books in Arabic, All Completely Free, Digitized and Put Online

in Books, e-books | February 28th, 2019

If you’ve con­sid­ered learn­ing a new lan­guage to open up a new realm of read­ing, you could do much worse than Ara­bic. Though its mas­tery may demand a con­sid­er­able amount of time, it repays the invest­ment as the lan­guage of not just a coun­try but an entire region of the world, and a region with a deep tex­tu­al his­to­ry at that. Any­one inter­est­ed in becom­ing a stu­dent of Ara­bic, casu­al­ly or seri­ous­ly, can get their start at our col­lec­tion of Ara­bic lessons avail­able free online, and when up to speed on read­ing might con­sid­er a vis­it to Ara­bic Col­lec­tions Online (ACO), a dig­i­tal library of Ara­bic-lan­guage texts now boast­ing 10,042 vol­umes across 6,265 sub­jects, all of them also avail­able free online.

With a list of con­tribut­ing part­ners includ­ing insti­tu­tions in both Amer­i­ca (New York Uni­ver­si­ty, Prince­ton, Cor­nell, Colum­bia) and the Mid­dle East (the Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ty in Cairo, the Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ty of Beirut and Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates Nation­al Archives) — and, as ArabLit notes, a $1.34 mil­lion grant received last August — ACO “aims to dig­i­tize, pre­serve, and pro­vide free open access to a wide vari­ety of Ara­bic lan­guage books in sub­jects such as lit­er­a­ture, phi­los­o­phy, law, reli­gion, and more.”

This mis­sion address­es not just a lack of wide­ly avail­able Ara­bic texts on the web, but the con­di­tion of much of the mate­r­i­al dig­i­tized, as “many old­er Ara­bic books are out-of-print, in frag­ile con­di­tion, and are oth­er­wise rare mate­ri­als that are in dan­ger of being lost.”

Though clear­ly an ever more valu­able resource for stu­dents of Ara­bic, ACO has much more to offer those already acquaint­ed with the joys of the lan­guage. ArabLit specif­i­cal­ly points out two of its fea­tured Egypt­ian titles this month, Taw­fiq al-Hakim’s Return of the Spir­it (عودة الروح), which Eng­lish trans­la­tor William May­nard Hutchins describes as “a glo­ri­ous­ly Roman­tic trib­ute to the sol­i­dar­i­ty of the Egypt­ian peo­ple of all class­es and reli­gions and to their good taste and excel­lent sense of humor,” andCol­ors (ألوان) by Taha Hus­sein, one of the coun­try’s most influ­en­tial intel­lec­tu­als of the 20th cen­tu­ry. But the full scope of Ara­bic-lan­guage lit­er­a­ture, as the already vast hold­ings of Ara­bic Col­lec­tions Online reveals, extends beyond Egypt, and far indeed beyond the past cou­ple of cen­turies. To those about to explore it,bil-taw­fiq.

via Goodread­er

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Ara­bic Lessons

How Ara­bic Trans­la­tors Helped Pre­serve Greek Phi­los­o­phy … and the Clas­si­cal Tra­di­tion

The Only Sur­viv­ing Text Writ­ten in Ara­bic by an Amer­i­can Slave Has Been Dig­i­tized & Put Online: Read the Auto­bi­og­ra­phy of Enslaved Islam­ic Schol­ar, Omar Ibn Said (1831)

70,000+ Reli­gious Texts Dig­i­tized by Prince­ton The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary, Let­ting You Immerse Your­self in the Curi­ous Works of Great World Reli­gions

A Map Show­ing How Much Time It Takes to Learn For­eign Lan­guages: From Eas­i­est to Hard­est

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include 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 British Library Digitizes Its Collection of Obscene Books (1658–1940)

in Books, Literature | February 28th, 2019

Many peo­ple are cheat­ed out of an authen­tic edu­ca­tion in Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture because of a long­stand­ing puri­tan­i­cal approach to its cura­tion. One might spend a life­time read­ing the tra­di­tion­al canon with­out ever, for exam­ple, learn­ing much about the long his­to­ry of pop­u­lar porno­graph­ic British writ­ing, a genre that flour­ished in the 18th and 19th cen­turies as the pop­u­lar­i­ty of the nov­el explod­ed. Every­one knows the Mar­quis de Sade, even if they haven’t read him, not least because he lent his name to psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic the­o­ry. Many of us have read Voltaire’s randy satire, Can­dide. But few know the name John Cle­land, author of Fan­ny Hill, a bawdy British nov­el pub­lished in 1748, over forty years before de Sade’s Jus­tine.

A book that serves up its own wealth of psy­cho­sex­u­al insights, Fan­ny Hill does not dis­ap­point either as porno­graph­ic writ­ing or as enter­tain­ing fic­tion. Cle­land wrote the book while in debtors’ prison, after he “boast­ed to James Boswell, him­self no mean pornog­ra­ph­er… that he could write a sex­u­al­ly excit­ing sto­ry of ‘a woman of plea­sure’ with­out using a sin­gle ‘foul’ word,” writes John Suther­land at The Guardian. Cle­land suc­ceed­ed, in a nar­ra­tive loaded with crude­ly Shake­speare­an puns and euphemisms. The word­play in the title character’s name, an Angli­ciza­tion of mons vener­is (mound of Venus), will be imme­di­ate­ly appar­ent to speak­ers of British Eng­lish.


Upon its pub­li­ca­tion, how­ev­er, Cle­land was pros­e­cut­ed for “cor­rupt­ing the king’s sub­jects,” and the book was “duly buried and went on to become a cen­turies-long under­ground best­seller.” Such was the fate of many an obscene British nov­el. Thou­sands of these became prop­er­ty of the British Library, which “kept its dirt­i­est books locked away from the rest of its col­lec­tions,” notes Brig­it Katz at Smith­son­ian. “All vol­umes deemed to be in need of extra safe­guard­ing so that mem­bers of the pub­lic couldn’t get their hands on the saucy stories—or try to destroy them—were placed in the library’s ‘Pri­vate Case.’” Now, they are being dig­i­tized and made avail­able to Gale sub­scribers.

2,500 vol­umes from the Pri­vate Case col­lec­tion have become part of Gale’s Archives of Sex­u­al­i­ty and Gen­der research library, the first time much of this mate­r­i­al has been avail­able. “Pret­ty much any­thing to do with sex,” says British Library cura­tor Mad­dy Smith, was locked away “until around 1960, when atti­tudes to sex­u­al­i­ty were chang­ing.” Librar­i­ans only began cat­a­logu­ing this mate­r­i­al in the 1970s, but most of it remained obscure and fair­ly inac­ces­si­ble. The col­lec­tion dates to 1658. It includes a series called the Mer­ry­land Books, writ­ten in the 1740s by authors who took pseu­do­nyms like “Roger Pheuquewell” and described “the female anato­my metaphor­i­cal­ly as land ripe for explo­ration.”

It is not over­all a body of work giv­en to sub­tleties. Aside from some excep­tions, like Tele­ny or The Reverse of the Medal, a trag­ic gay romance attrib­uted to Oscar Wilde, these are also large­ly books “writ­ten by men, for men,” about women, Smith points out. “It’s to be expect­ed, but look­ing back, that’s what is shock­ing, how male-dom­i­nat­ed it is, the lack of female agency.” She might have also point­ed out that many women in the mid-18th cen­tu­ry were writ­ing and pub­lish­ing pop­u­lar nov­els, large­ly read by women, with frank com­ing-of-age descrip­tions of sex­u­al edu­ca­tion, seduc­tion, and even rape. And both men and women wrote about homo­sex­u­al­i­ty and gen­der flu­id­i­ty in ways that might sur­prise us.

The response to such books tend­ed to be moral­is­tic correction—as in the best-sell­ing Pamela, or Virtue Reward­ed by Samuel Richard­son—or las­civ­i­ous satire, as in the Mer­ry­land Books, Fan­ny Hill, and Hen­ry Fielding’s Shamela, a par­o­dy that turns Richardson’s chaste hero­ine into a schem­ing pros­ti­tute. These two nov­els were mas­sive­ly pop­u­lar and show the form as we know it devel­op­ing as a lit­er­ary con­ver­sa­tion between men about women’s sup­posed vices or virtues. We should read mid-18th cen­tu­ry porno­graph­ic lit­er­a­ture as an essen­tial part of the for­ma­tion of the British nov­el tra­di­tion.

At the Gale online col­lec­tion of these British Library trea­sures, one can do just that, then reach back a cen­tu­ry ear­li­er and for­ward 200 years to 1940, the last date in the Gale col­lec­tion, which “makes avail­able approx­i­mate­ly one mil­lion pages of con­tent that’s been locked away for many years, avail­able only via restrict­ed access.” (We must note that access is still restrict­ed to Gale sub­scribers). These pages come not only from the British Library but also from The Kin­sey Insti­tute and the New York Acad­e­my of Med­i­cine, who have both sup­plied a share of text­books and schol­ar­ly mono­graphs on sex. The “obscen­i­ty” of this mate­r­i­al lies in the eyes of its keepers—much will seem unre­mark­able today, and some can still seem plen­ty scan­dalous.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read 14 Great Banned & Cen­sored Nov­els Free Online: For Banned Books Week 2014

A Com­plete Dig­i­ti­za­tion of Eros Mag­a­zine: The Con­tro­ver­sial 1960s Mag­a­zine on the Sex­u­al Rev­o­lu­tion

John Waters Reads Steamy Scene from Lady Chatterley’s Lover for Banned Books Week (NSFW)

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

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Alice in Wonderland, Hamlet, and A Christmas Carol Written in Shorthand (Circa 1919)

in Books, Literature, Writing | February 27th, 2019

For hun­dreds of years before the reg­u­lar use of dic­ta­tion machines, word proces­sors, and com­put­ers, many thou­sands of court records, cor­re­spon­dence, jour­nal­ism, and so on cir­cu­lat­ed in trans­la­tion. All of these texts were orig­i­nal­ly in their native lan­guage, but they were tran­scribed in a dif­fer­ent writ­ing sys­tem, then trans­lat­ed back into the stan­dard orthog­ra­phy, by stenog­ra­phers using var­i­ous kinds of short­hand. In Eng­lish, this meant that a mess of irreg­u­lar, pho­net­i­cal­ly non­sen­si­cal spellings turned into a stream­lined, order­ly sym­bol­ic sys­tem, impen­e­tra­ble to any­one who had­n’t stud­ied it thor­ough­ly.

I do not know the rates of accu­ra­cy in short­hand writ­ing or trans­la­tion. Nor do I know how many orig­i­nal short­hand man­u­scripts still exist for comparison’s sake. But for cen­turies, short­hand sys­tems were used to record lec­tures, let­ters, and inter­views, and to write edicts, essays, arti­cles, etc., in Impe­r­i­al Chi­na, ancient Greece and Rome, and mod­ern Europe, North Amer­i­ca, and Japan.

The prac­tice reached a peak in the late nine­teenth and ear­ly 20th cen­turies, when stenog­ra­phy became a growth indus­try. Jack El-Hai at Won­ders and Mar­vels explains.

A cen­tu­ry ago, hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple around the world reg­u­lar­ly used short­hand. Sec­re­taries, stenog­ra­phers, court reporters, jour­nal­ists and oth­ers depend­ed on the elab­o­rate short­hand sys­tems that Isaac Pit­man and John Robert Gregg devel­oped in the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, and count­less schools and pub­lish­ers seized the busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ty to train them. Tal­ent­ed prac­ti­tion­ers could write at speeds up to 280 words per minute.

The texts of sys­tems like Pit­man and Gregg’s “grew increas­ing­ly com­plex,” then increas­ing­ly sim­pli­fied dur­ing lat­ter half of the 20th cen­tu­ry. “In 1903, the pub­lish­ers of the Gregg method released the first nov­el entire­ly ren­dered in shorthand—an 87-page edi­tion of Let­ters from a Self-Made Mer­chant to His Son by George Horace Latimer.”

More lit­er­a­ture in short­hand fol­lowed, mark­ing the Gregg sys­tem’s most baroque peri­od. Ten years lat­er saw the pub­li­ca­tion of Wash­ing­ton Irving’s The Leg­end of Sleepy Hol­low, then, in 1918, with Alice in Won­der­land, Ham­let, and A Christ­mas Car­ol, and sto­ries like Guy de Maupassant’s “The Dia­mond Neck­lace,” Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Descent into the Mael­ström.” All of this lit­er­ary short­hand is writ­ten in what is known as “Pre-Anniver­sary” Gregg, which con­tained the largest num­ber of sym­bols and devices. In 1929, a year-late “Anniver­sary Edi­tion” began a peri­od of sim­pli­fi­ca­tion that cul­mi­nat­ed in 1988, a cen­tu­ry after the system’s first pub­li­ca­tion.

The lit­er­a­ture pub­lished in Gregg short­hand joined in a his­to­ry of short­hand “used by (or to pre­serve the work of) every­one from Cicero to Luther to Shake­speare to Pepys,” writes the Pub­lic Domain Review. And yet, the “util­i­tar­i­an func­tion of short­hand sits a lit­tle odd­ly per­haps with lit­er­a­ture, giv­en the nov­el or the poem is a form asso­ci­at­ed with a dif­fer­ent realm: that of leisure.” One should not have to train in a spe­cial­ized phone­mic orthog­ra­phy to read and enjoy Alice in Won­der­land, but, on the off chance that you did so train, there is at least much enjoy­able and edi­fy­ing mate­r­i­al with which to prac­tice, or show off, your skills.

It would, I main­tain, be a fas­ci­nat­ing exer­cise to com­pare trans­la­tions of these well-known works from the short­hand with their orig­i­nals man­u­scripts writ­ten in the pho­net­ic chaos of the Eng­lish we rec­og­nize. Whether or not you have the skill to under­take this exper­i­ment, you can see many of these Gregg’s short­hand edi­tions here and at the Inter­net Archive. Just click on the embeds above to see larg­er images and view and down­load a vari­ety of for­mats.

via The Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold Lewis Carroll’s Orig­i­nal Hand­writ­ten & Illus­trat­ed Man­u­script for Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land (1864)

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

Learn 48 Lan­guages Online for Free: Span­ish, Chi­nese, Eng­lish & More 

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

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