A Vintage Advertising Film Intelligently Satirizes the Selling of the American Dream: Watch The Your Name Here Story (1960)

in Film, History | April 15th, 2020

When did the United States of America attain peak earnestness? It had to have happened sometime in the long 1950s, beginning with victory in the Second World War and ending with the cultural shifts of the early 60s. Though individual Americans back then might express discontent and even cynicism about the nation, U.S. mass culture kept the dial set to triumphant optimism. And in midcentury America there was no cultural force quite as mass as advertising, which broadcast its messages in not just the media of print, radio, television, and billboard, but film as well. This golden age of American earnestness coincides with the golden age of the Calvin Company, once the country’s dominant maker of advertising, educational, and industrial films.

Founded in Kansas City in 1931, the Calvin Company capitalized early on the advertising potential of 16-millimeter film. At first considered suitable only for “home movies,” the format turned out to be ideal for sales pitches, corporate training sessions, and classroom screenings. Calvin’s client list soon grew to include General Mills, Goodyear, Monsanto, Westinghouse, and Encyclopedia Britannica, as well as the Navy, the Air Force, and the Office of Education.

That we can still watch some of the company’s many productions today we owe to the efforts of Rick Prelinger, whose eponymous film archives we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture. At the Internet Archive you can watch such Calvin classics as Coffee Break, Forty Billion Enemies, Fifty Years of Powered Flight, The Bright Young Newcomer, and Enforcing Rules and Procedures.

None have the reputation of The Your Name Here Story, produced by Calvin in 1960 as “the first truly all-purpose film.” While previous jobs were made to order, painstakingly tailored by an ever-expanding staff of filmmakers to the needs the commissioning clients, The Your Name Here Story is completely generic. “From the dawn of human history, a better way of life has been man’s dream,” booms its narrator, launching into an opening whose epic form will be familiar to anyone who’s put off writing a term paper until the night before. After telling the story of civilization — especially American civilization — in a brisk two minutes, the film arrives in high-tech modernity. Alas, “despite the world’s highest living standards, the average American remained vaguely discontent, aware that his goal of a better way of life had still not been fully realized. There was something missing.”

“Gad, it’s ironic,” says a prototypical American husband of the day, lying awake alongside his wife, both of them sleepless with dissatisfaction. “With all our technology and industrial know-how, we still don’t have the one thing that could give us a better way of life.” That “one thing” is anything the company that licenses The Your Name Here Story happens to make, footage of which they can easily insert into the various spaces provided throughout the film. “In countless ways, directly and indirectly, YOUR PRODUCT HERE serves the nation and its citizens,” says the narrator, crediting whatever it may be with playing a vital role in helping them to “achieve success,” “enjoy healthful recreation,” “grow bigger crops,” “strengthen our national defense,” and of course “get real smoking satisfaction.”

Some may now watch most of The Your Name Here Story before catching on to the film’s satirical intent. That owes to the fact that the Calvin Company itself defined the look and feel of the organizational culture of the 1950s, at least as it remains in cultural memory. Originally created as a bit of fun for the “Calvin Workshop,” the company’s annual gathering of industrial film producers and technicians, the film’s spoofs of what Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari has termed the “military-industrial-scientific complex” almost feel made for audiences of the future. Among the Calvin Company’s surviving films we also find 1956’s A Magic Bond, directed by no less notable a son of Kansas City than Robert Altman. Knowing what we now do of its self-aware corporate culture, does it comes as a surprise that Calvin would have been the training ground for Hollywood’s pre-eminent smart-aleck?

via Aeon

Eisenhower Answers America: The First Political Advertisements on American TV (1952)

Before Mad Men: Familiar and Forgotten Ads from 1950s to 1980s Now Online

A Gallery of Mad Magazine’s Rollicking Fake Advertisements from the 1960s

Sell & Spin: The History of Advertising, Narrated by Dick Cavett (1999)

Download 6600 Free Films from The Prelinger Archives and Use Them However You Like

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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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Why is Vermeer’s “Girl with the Pearl Earring” Considered a Masterpiece?: An Animated Introduction

in Art, History | April 14th, 2020

Longtime Open Culture readers will have encountered Johannes Vermeer here in various forms: his paintings have appeared as animations, as the subject of a documentary, and even free for the download in high resolution as well as viewable in augmented reality. Though painted in the mid-17th-century Netherlands, the Dutch master’s work now appeals to modern viewers everywhere. Most who enter Vermeer’s world pass through the gateway of Girl with a Pearl Earring, his 1665 portrait of just that. What is it about that young lady against a plain black background, so much simpler an image than the detailed domestic interiors that constitute most of Vermeer’s oeuvre, that captivates us?

In the TED-Ed lesson above, art historian James Earle places Girl with a Pearl Earring in context with the rest of Vermeer’s work, revealing how it fits in as well as how it stands apart. “Instead of being like a set piece in a theatrical narrative scene, she becomes a psychological object,” Earle says. “Her eye contact and slightly parted lips, as if she is about to say something, draw us into her gaze” — one aspect of what’s made the painting’s reputation as “the Mona Lisa of the North.”

Though not a member of the nobility or clergy, the traditional sources for subjects of portraiture in Vermeer’s day, this “anonymous girl” is ennobled by how the artist depicts her. This reflects the changing political and economic realities of the Netherlands at the time, a country that had “turned against the ruling aristocracy and the Catholic Church.”

Cities like Vermeer’s hometown of Delft, Earle tells us, “were unsupervised by kings or bishops, so many artists like Vermeer were left without traditional patrons.” But the ascendant merchant class, driven by the innovation of the Dutch East India Company, produced new ones. These middle-class patrons preferred to be depicted with symbols of their own worldliness: maps hanging on the wall in domestic interiors, or more ostentatiously the “oriental turban” worn by the subject of Girl with a Pearl Earring. They also tended to appear with symbols of wealth of the kind almost parodied by the implausibly large pearl earring itself. “Likely just a glass or tin drop varnished to look like a pearl,” the object nonetheless appears to posses considerable shape and weight” — at least before “a detailed view shows that it’s just a floating smudge of paint.” But what a smudge, in the beholding of which “we are reminded of Vermeer’s power as an illusion-maker.”

Master of Light: A Close Look at the Paintings of Johannes Vermeer Narrated by Meryl Streep

Paintings by Caravaggio, Vermeer, & Other Great Masters Come to Life in a New Animated Video

See the Complete Works of Vermeer in Augmented Reality: Google Makes Them Available on Your Smartphone

Ingenious Improvised Recreations of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, Using Materials Found Around the House

Meet Notorious Art Forger Han Van Meegeren, Who Fooled the Nazis with His Counterfeit Vermeers

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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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One of the Earliest Known Uses of the “F‑word” Discovered: It Appears in a 1568 Anthology Compiled During a Plague

in History, Language | April 8th, 2020

“Wan fukkit funling”: as an insult, these words would today land a minor blow at most. Not so in Scotland of the early 16th century, in which William Dunbar and Walter Kennedy, two of the land’s well-known poets, faced off before the court of King James IV in a contest of rhyme. The event is memorialized in the poem “The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie,” one of 400 anthologized in what’s known as the Bannatyne Manuscript. Compiled in 1568 by an Edinburgh merchant named George Bannatyne, stuck at home while a plague swept his city — a condition many can relate to these days — it now enjoys pride of place at the National Library of Scotland as a cultural treasure, not least because it contains what may be the oldest recorded use of the F‑word.

The Bannatyne Manuscript and “wan fukkit funling” (whose appearance you can see in the image at the top of the post, in the sixth line from the bottom) play an important part in the new BBC Scotland documentary Scotland – Contains Strong Language. The hour-long program, writes The Scotsman’s Brian Ferguson, “sees actress, singer and theatre-maker Cora Bissett trace the nation’s long love affair with swearing and insults, despite the long-standing efforts of religious leaders to condemn it as a sin.” Ferguson quotes Bissett describing the importance of this particular “flyting” (“the 16th century equivalent of a rap battle”) as follows: “When Kennedy addresses Dunbar, there is the earliest surviving record of the word ‘f***’ in the world.”

“In the poem, Dunbar makes fun of Kennedy’s Highland dialect, for instance, as well as his personal appearance, and he suggests his opponent enjoys sexual intercourse with horses,” writes Ars Technica’s Jennifer Ouellette. “Kennedy retaliates with attacks on Dunbar’s diminutive stature and lack of bowel control, suggesting his rival gets his inspiration from drinking ‘frogspawn’ from the waters of a rural pond.” All highly amusing, to be sure, but given how few of us English-speakers will immediately recognize in “wan fukkit funling” the curse with which we’ve grown so intimately familiar, does this really count as an example of usage in English?

‘To me, that looks more like Scots than Middle English,” writes Boing Boing’s Thom Dunn, “although both languages were derived from Olde English.” (He also reminds us not to confuse Scots with the separate language of Scottish Gaelic.) Medieval historian Kristin Uscinski writes in to Ars Technica to point out a certain “Roger F$#%-by-the-Navel who appears in some court records from 1310–11” — previously featured, of course, here on Open Culture. Historians and linguists will surely continue doing their own kind of battle to determine what counts as the first true F‑word, making more discoveries about the English language’s heritage of swearing along the way. One thing is certain: if any nation has made a rich use of that heritage, it’s Scotland.

via BoingBoing

The Very First Written Use of the F Word in English (1528)

Steven Pinker Explains the Neuroscience of Swearing (NSFW)

Stephen Fry, Language Enthusiast, Defends The “Unnecessary” Art Of Swearing

Read A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, a Hilarious & Informative Collection of Early Modern English Slang (1785)

A Lecture About the History of the Scots Language … in Scots: How Much Can You Comprehend?

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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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Meet Notorious Art Forger Han Van Meegeren, Who Fooled the Nazis with His Counterfeit Vermeers

in Art, History | April 7th, 2020

People love stories of successful criminals. They must possess some admirable qualities, we assume, some great daring or cunning or keen insight. Myths supplant reality, and we forget about the networks of enablers that help ruthless but not especially bright people succeed. But successful art forgers present us with another case entirely. “Forgers, by nature, prefer anonymity,” notes the site Essential Vermeer 3.0, “and therefore are rarely remembered.” Yet the evidence of their mastery lies incontrovertibly before us, fooling collectors, curators, and even art historians. Fakes, may be “the great art of our age.”

Or so claims the subtitle of 2013 book Forged, in which philosopher and conceptual artist Jonathon Keats surveys the careers of six notorious forgers, including Dutch artist Han van Meegeren, who “tricked the world—and the Nazis—with his counterfeit Vermeer paintings,” the TED-Ed lesson above tells us.

Van Meegeren’s biography seems almost scripted. Having failed to interest critics in his work as a young man, he became embittered and decided to revenge himself upon the art world with fakes. His choice of Vermeer was “ambitious” to say the least, given the Baroque painter’s reputation for a unique technical brilliance.

He worked for six years to re-create Vermeer’s materials and techniques and perfect an aging process for his canvases. The forensic science that would today detect such methods was not sufficiently advanced at the time. Yet “even today,” the lesson notes, authenticity is a matter of the “subjective judgment of specialists.” Van Meegeren used such dependence on authority against the experts by creating a work he knew would fill in a historical gap, an early religious period of Vermeer’s from which no works survived; also, conveniently, a period when the artist’s talents were less developed.

“In 1937,” Essential Vermeer writes, “Abraham Bredius… one of the most authoritative art historians,” who had “dedicated a great part of his life to the study of Vermeer” pronounced van Meegeren’s fake Vermeer, Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus (detail above), “a hitherto unknown painting by a great master, untouched, on the original canvas, and without any restoration, just as it left the painter’s studio.” His praise was so effusive it allowed no room for doubt. This was “the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft… every inch a Vermeer.”

Van Meegeren counterfeited works by several other Dutch masters and “was so good,” says the narrator of a Sotheby’s profile, above, “that he duped art experts, museums, and even Hitler’s right-hand man Hermann Göring.” And here, the usual admiration for art forgers—who can seem like heroic tricksters next to their greedy, overconfident marks—takes a patriotic turn. Tried for collaboration, the forger argued he was in fact a national hero for trading another counterfeit Vermeer, Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery (below), to Göring for 200 works of looted Dutch art.

Van Meegeren’s defense depended on him convincing the court that he had made the painting. This took some doing. He had even forgone using models so there would be no witnesses. As Sotheby’s Director of Scientific Research James Martin and art historian Jonathan Lopez show us, van Meegeren’s work really was that convincing, its flaws nearly undetectable. He did serve two years for forgery and fraud, but in the end achieved his early desire for artistic fame and his later wish to be regarded as an outlaw hero. Perhaps more than most art world forgers, he is deserving of both reputations.

How a Book Thief Forged a Rare Edition of Galileo’s Scientific Work, and Almost Pulled it Off

F for Fake: Orson Welles’ Short Film & Trailer That Was Never Released in America

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

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A 1665 Advertisement Promises a “Famous and Effectual” Cure for the Great Plague

in Current Affairs, History | April 7th, 2020

There is a level of avarice and depravity in defrauding victims of an epidemic that should shock even the most jaded. But a look into the archives of history confirms that venal mountebanks and con artists have always followed disaster when it strikes. In 1665, the Black Death reappeared in London, a disease that had ravaged medieval Europe for centuries and left an indelible impression on cultural memory. After the rats began to spread disease, terror spread with it. Then came the advertisements for sure cures.

“Everyone dreaded catching the disease,” notes the British Library. “Victims were often nailed into their houses in an attempt to stop the spread… They usually died within days, in agony and madness from fevers and infected swellings.” This grotesque scene of panic and pain seemed like a growth market to “quack doctors selling fake remedies. There were many different pills and potions,” and they “were often very expensive to buy and claimed, falsely, to have been successfully used in previous epidemics.”

Surely, there were many in the medical profession, such as it was, who genuinely wanted to help, but no honest doctor could claim, as the broadside above does, to have discovered a “Famous and Effectual MEDICINE TO CURE THE PLAGUE.” So confident is this ad that it lists the names and locations of several people supposedly cured (and promises to have cured “above fifty more”). You can go look up “Andrew Baget, in St. Gile’s,” or “Mrs. Adkings. In Coven Garden,” or “Mary-Waight, in Bedford-Bury.” Ask them yourself! Only, that might be a little difficult as you’ve currently got the plague…. (See a transcription of the advertisement here.)

This particular example appears to have been a guild effort. At the bottom of the pamphlet we find a list of merchants offering the needed ingredients for the medicine, which sufferers would presumably mix themselves, having first visited the shops of Mr. Leonard Sowersby, Mr. Heywoods, Mr. Owens, Mr. Goodlaks, a second Mr. Heywoods, and Mrs. Elizabeth Calverts (potentially infecting others all the time.) Customers were clearly desperate. They aren’t even given the stamp of a physician’s approval, only the merchants’ promise that others have returned from the brink by means of an “infallible Powder” that also cures “Small-Pox, Fevers, Agues, and Surfeits.” Children should take half a dose.

17th century physicians fared little better against the plague than doctors had over 300 years earlier when the disease first made its appearance in Europe in 1347, traveling from Asia to Italy. They did what they could, as the BBC points out, recommending “mustard, mint sauce, apple sauce and horseradish” as dietary aids. Other attempted 14th century cures included “rubbing onions, herbs or a chopped up snake (if available) on the boils or cutting up a pigeon and rubbing it over an infected body.”

This sounded specious to many people at the time. One 1380 source, Jean Froissart’s Chronicles, stated sarcastically, “doctors need three qualifications: to be able to lie and not get caught; to pretend to be honest; and to cause death without guilt.” Such qualifications have always suited those intent on careers in government or finance, where times of trouble can be highly profitable. We are fortunate, however, for the advances of modern medicine, and for medical professionals who risk their lives daily for victims of COVID-19, even if some other human qualities haven’t changed since people tried to end pandemics by marching through the streets whipping themselves.

Download Classic Works of Plague Fiction: From Daniel Defoe & Mary Shelley, to Edgar Allan Poe

Why You Should Read The Plague, the Albert Camus Novel the Coronavirus Has Made a Bestseller Again

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

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Pandemic Literature: A Meta-List of the Books You Should Read in Coronavirus Quarantine

in Books, History, Literature | April 2nd, 2020

Describing conditions characteristic of life in the early 21st century, future historians may well point to such epidemic viral illnesses as SARS, MERS, and the now-rampaging COVID-19. But those focused on culture will also have their pick of much more benign recurring phenomena to explain: topical book lists, for instance, which crop up in the 21st-century press at the faintest prompting by current events. As the coronavirus has spread through the English-speaking world over the past month, pandemic-themed reading lists have appeared in all manner of outlets: Time, PBS, the Hollywood Reporter, the Guardian, the Globe and Mail, Haaretz, Vulture, Electric Literature, and others besides.

As mankind’s oldest deadly foe, disease has provided themes to literature since literature’s very invention. In the European canon, no such work is more venerable than The Decameron, written by Renaissance humanist Giovanni Boccaccio in the late 1340s and early 1350s. “His protagonists, seven women and three men, retreat to a villa outside Florence to avoid the pandemic,” writes The Guardian’s Lois Beckett, referring to the bubonic plague, or “Black Death,” that ravaged Europe in the mid-14th century. “There, isolated for two weeks, they pass the time by telling each other stories” — and “lively, bizarre, and often very filthy stories” at that — “with a different theme for each day.”

A later outbreak of the bubonic plague in London inspired Robinson Crusoe author Daniel Defoe to write the A Journal of the Plague Year. “Set in 1655 and published in 1722, the novel was likely based, in part, on the journals of the author’s uncle,” writes the Globe and Mail’s Alec Scott. Defoe’s diarist “speaks of bodies piling up in mass graves, of sudden deaths and unlikely recoveries from the brink, and also blames those from elsewhere for the outbreak.” A Journal of the Plague Year appears on these reading lists as often as Albert Camus’ The Plague, previously featured here on Open Culture. “Camus’ famous work about the inhabitants of an Algerian town who are stricken by the bubonic plague was published back in 1947,” writes PBS’ Courtney Vinopal, “but it has struck a chord with readers today living through the coronavirus.”

Of novels published in the past decade, none has been selected as a must-read in coronavirus quarantine as often as Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. “After a swine flu pandemic wipes out most of the world’s population, a group of musicians and actors travel around newly formed settlements to keep their art alive,” says Time. “Mandel showcases the impact of the pandemic on all of their lives,” weaving together “characters’ perspectives from across the planet and over several decades to explore how humanity can fall apart and then, somehow, come back together.” Ling Ma’s darkly satirical Severance also makes a strong showing: Electric Literature describes it as “a pandemic-zombie-dystopian-novel, but it’s also a relatable millennial coming-of-age story and an intelligent critique of exploitative capitalism, mindless consumerism, and the drudgery of bullshit jobs.”

Since a well-balanced reading diet (and those of us stuck at home for weeks on end have given much thought to balanced diets) requires both fiction and nonfiction, several of these lists also include works of scholarship, history, and journalism on the real epidemics that have inspired all this literature. Take Richard Preston’s bestseller The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus, which Gregory Eaves at Medium calls “a hair-raising account of the appearance of rare and lethal viruses and their ‘crashes’ into the human race.” For an episode of history more comparable to the coronavirus, there’s John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, “a tale of triumph amid tragedy, which provides us with a precise and sobering model as we confront the epidemics looming on our own horizon.”

Below you’ll find a meta-list of all the novels and nonfiction books included on the reading lists linked above. As for the books themselves — libraries and bookstores being a bit difficult to access in many parts of the world at the moment — you might check for them in our collection of books free online, the temporarily opened National Emergency Library at the Internet Archive, and our recent post on classic works of plague literature available to download. However you find these books, happy reading — or, more to the point, healthy reading.

Fiction

Ammonite by Nicola Griffith
The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton
Beauty Salon by Mario Bellatin
Bird Box by Josh Malerman
Blindness by José Saramago
The Book of M by Peng Shepherd
The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin
Bring Out Your Dead by J.M. Powell
The Child Garden by Geoff Ryman
The Children’s Hospital by Chris Adrian
The Companion by Katie M. Flynn
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
The Dog Stars by Peter Heller
The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
The Eyes of Darkness by Dean Koontz
Find Me by Laura van den Berg
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
Journal of the Plague Years by Norman Spinrad
The Last Man by Mary Shelley
The Last Town on Earth by Thomas Mullen
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter
The Passage trilogy by Justin Cronin
The Plague by Albert Camus
The Power by Naomi Alderman
Real Life by Brandon Taylor
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Room by Emma Donoghue
Severance by Ling Ma
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
The Stand by Stephen King
They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell
The Training Commission by Ingrid Burrington and Brendan Byrne
The Transmigration of Bodies by Yuri Herrera
The White Plague by Frank Herbert
Wilder Girls by Rory Power
World War Z by Max Brooks
The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks
The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson
Zone One by Colson Whitehead

Nonfiction

The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The Epidemic That Shaped Our History by Molly Caldwell Crosby
And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts
The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara W. Tuchman
Flu: The Story Of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It by Gina Kolata
The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson
The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John Barry
The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly
History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
The Hot Zone The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus by Richard Preston
Networked Disease: Emerging Infections in the Global City by A. Harris Ali and Roger Keil
Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World by Laura Spinney
Pox: An American History by Michael Willrich

Why You Should Read The Plague, the Albert Camus Novel the Coronavirus Has Made a Bestseller Again

The History of the Plague: Every Major Epidemic in an Animated Map

Free Courses on the Coronavirus: What You Need to Know About the Emerging Pandemic

The National Emergency Library Makes 1.5 Million Books Free to Read Right Now

800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices

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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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Download Classic Works of Plague Fiction: From Daniel Defoe & Mary Shelley, to Edgar Allan Poe

in Books, History, Literature | March 31st, 2020

The apotheosis of prestige realist plague film, Steven Soderburgh’s 2011 Contagion, has become one of the most popular features on major streaming platforms, at a time when people have also turned increasingly to books of all kinds about plagues, from fantasy, horror, and science fiction to accounts that show the experience as it was in all its ugliness—or at least as those who experienced it remembered the events. Such a work is Daniel Defoe’s semi-fictional history “A Journal of the Plague Year,” a book he wrote “in tandem with an advice manual called ‘Due Preparations for the Plague,’ in 1722,” notes Jill Lepore at The New Yorker.

In 1722, Defoe had reason to believe the plague might come back to London, and wreak the devastation it caused in 1665, the “plague year” he detailed, when one in every five Londoners died. This was not a story of heroes making sacrifices to save the city. “Everyone behaved badly, though the rich behaved the worst,” Lepore writes. “Having failed to heed warnings to provision, they sent their poor servants out for supplies,” spreading the infection throughout the city. Defoe earnestly hoped to head off such catastrophe. He wrote to issue an admonition, as he put it, “both to us and to posterity, though we should be spared from that portion of this bitter cup.”

The cup, Lepore writes, “has come out of its cupboard.” But so too has the resilience found in Albert Camus’ 1946 novel Le Peste (The Plague), based on a real cholera outbreak in Algeria in 1849. Though fictional, it draws on Camus’ study of historical plagues and his experience as a member of the French Resistance. Camus seems to have found the plague as metaphor particularly uplifting, nicknaming his twins Catherine and Jean, “Plague” and “Cholera,” respectively.

Whether we see it as a story of a siege brought on by sickness, or an allegory of an occupation, Camus wrote of the novel that “the inhabitants, finally freed, would never forget the difficult period that made them face the absurdness of their existence and the precariousness of the human condition. What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plagues as well. It helps men to rise above themselves.” Defoe might disagree, but plagues in his time were not also accompanied by widespread Nazism, a double crisis that might doubly force us to “reflect on what is real, what is important, and become more human,” says Catherine Camus of the soaring new popularity of her father’s novel.

We can do this through reading in our real-life quarantine. “Reading is an infection,” Lepore writes, “a burrowing into the brain: books contaminate, metaphorically, and even microbiologically” as physical objects capable of ferrying germs. Plagues are mass-existential crises on the level of WWII or the Lisbon earthquake that shook the faith of Europe’s intellectuals. They are also settings for love and terror, from Boccaccio and Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Edgar Allan Poe and Margaret Atwood.

Vulture has published an “essential list” of 20 plague books to read, including many of the classics mentioned above, and a book that is hardly remembered but might be thought of as an ancestor to Atwood’s plague-ridden futures: Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, published in 1826 during the second of two virulent cholera pandemics. In the novel, Shelley claims to have discovered the story in prophetic writing about the end of the 21st century, telling of a disease that wipes out the human race. If you’d rather not indulge that kind of fantasy just yet, you’ll find varying degrees of imaginative and soberly realist fiction and history in the list of plague classics below, all freely available at Project Gutenberg.

A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe

History of the Plague in London by Daniel Defoe

Loimologia: or, an Historical Account of the Plague in London in 1665 by Hodges et al.

The Last Man by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Plague Ship by Andre Norton

The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe

The Plague by Teddy Keller

The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio

A History of Epidemics in Britain by Charles Creighton

A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume II

An account of the plague which raged at Moscow, in 1771 by Charles de Mertens

A brief Journal of what passed in the City of Marseilles, while is was afflicted with the Plague, in the Year 1720 by Pichatty de Croislainte

Cherry & Violet: A Tale of the Great Plague by Anne Manning

Libraries may have shut their possibly contaminated books behind closed doors, bookstores may be deemed nonessential, but reading—and writing—about plague years feels like a necessary cultural activity to help us understand who we are apt to become in such times.

The History of the Plague: Every Major Epidemic in an Animated Map

Isaac Newton Conceived of His Most Groundbreaking Ideas During the Great Plague of 1665

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

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Take a 3D Tour Through Ancient Giza, Including the Great Pyramids, the Sphinx & More

in Architecture, History, Technology | March 31st, 2020

Imagine the pyramids of ancient Egypt, and a vivid image comes right to mind. But unless you happen to be an Egyptologist, that image may possess a great deal more vividness than it does detail. We all have a rough sense of the pyramids’ size (impressively large), shape (pyramidical), texture (crumbly), and setting (sand), almost wholly derived from images captured over the past century. But what about the pyramids in their heyday, more than 4,500 years ago? Do we know enough even to begin imagining how they looked, let alone how people made use of them? Harvard Egyptologist Peter Der Manuelian does, and in the video above he gives us a tour through 3D models that reconstruct the Giza pyramid complex (also known as the Giza necropolis) using both the best technology and the fullest knowledge available today.

“You’ll see we’ve had to remove modern structures and excavators, debris dumps,” says Der Manuelian as the camera flies, dronelike, in the direction of the Great Sphinx. “We studied the Nile, and we had to move it much closer to the Giza pyramids, because in antiquity, the Nile did flow closer. And we’ve tried to rebuild each and every structure.”

Of the Sphinx, this model boasts “the most accurate reconstruction that has ever been attempted so far,” and Der Manuelian shows it in two possible colors schemes, one with only the head painted, one with the entire body painted in “the reddish brown reserved for male figures.” He also shows the pyramid temple of Khafre, both in the near-completely ruined state in which it exists today, and in full digital reconstruction, complete with seated statues the Fourth-Dynasty pharaoh Khafre himself.

The model accommodates more than just the built environment. Der Manuelian shows a model bark with another statue being carried into one of the chambers, explaining that it allows researchers to determine “whether or not it’s big enough or small enough to actually fit between the doors of the temple.” Elsewhere in the model we see a re-enactment of the “Opening of the Mouth ceremony,” the “reanimation ceremony for the deceased king, meant to magically and ritually bring him back to life for the netherworld.” The rendering takes place inside the temple of the Pyramid of Khufu, peopled with human characters. But “how many should there be? What should they be wearing? Where are the regular Egyptians? Are they allowed anywhere near this ceremony, or indeed are they allowed anywhere near Giza at all?” The greater the detail in which researchers reconstruct the ancient world, the more such questions come to the surface.

In the video just above, Der Manuelian explains more about the importance of 3D modeling to Egyptology: how it uses the existing research, what it has helped modern researchers understand, and the promise it holds for the future. The latter includes much of interest even to non-Egyptologists, such as tourists who might like to familiarize themselves with Giza necropolis in the days when the Opening of the Mouth ceremonies still took place — or any era of their choice — before setting foot there themselves. These videos come from “Pyramids of Giza: Ancient Egyptian Art and Archaeology,” Der Manuelian’s online course at edX, a worthwhile learning experience if you’ve got your own such trip planned — or just the kind of fascination that has gripped people around the world since the Egyptomania of the nineteenth century. The technology with which we study Egypt has advanced greatly since then, but for many, the mysteries of ancient Egypt itself have only become more compelling.

via The Kid Should See This

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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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

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Take a 3D Tour Through Ancient Giza, Including the Great Pyramids, the Sphinx & More

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