Great cities are highly changeable by nature, though certain skyline-dominating landmarks endure. Visitors and residents alike romanticize the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, and the Colosseum. (That last one’s got real staying power)
Time has altered all of Parkinson’s and Miller’s locations over the last 90 years, as Miller’s 2013 footage shows. The iconic architecture may remain, but Covent Garden now caters to tourists, a rack of Boris Bikes flanks the Haymarket, and the West End reflects the sensibilities of ladies who dare appear in public in trousers.
Using Gustav Mahler’s Fourth Symphony as a sort of sonic mortar, Smith bricks the present day onto the British Film Institute’s recent restoration of Parkinson and Miller’s work. Actually, it’s more of a keyhole effect, through which viewers can peep into the past.
Assuming the medium (and species) survives, we may one day seem as quaint and the sepia-toned figures bustling through the earlier film. Unthinkable? What will the modern world surrounding our keyhole look like?
Ayun Halliday recommends the working man’s caff E Pellici in London’s East End the next time you’re in the mood for lunch with a side of history. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Give “The London Evolution Animation” seven minutes, and it will show you the historical development of London over the course of 2,000 years. The animation moves from the Roman port city of Londinium (circa 50 AD) through the Anglo-Saxon, Tudor, Stuart, Early Georgian, Late Georgian, Early Victorian and Late Victorian periods. It then brings you through the Early 20th Century and into Postwar London. Developed by The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, the animation was made with historical data about London’s road networks and buildings. The video recently appeared at the “Almost Lost” Exhibition in London, an exhibition that contemplated how digital maps can help us rethink the past, present and future of great cities.
If you find it difficult to read the text in the animation, you can view the video in a larger format here.
And in case you’re wondering, the enlarging yellow dots show “the position and number of statutorily protected buildings and structures built during each period.” More information on the animation can be found here.
We’ve previously documented the strange case of Arthur Conan Doyle’s fervent Spiritualism, which Mark Strauss of io9 aptly describes as “hard to reconcile [with] the man who created the literary embodiment of empirical thinking,” Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle was so eager to believe in the existence of fairies and what he called “psychic matters” that he was frequently taken in by hoaxes. But the physician and novelist’s seemingly odd views obtained widely among his contemporaries who sought confirmation of the afterlife and communion with their dead relatives, millions of whom were lost in the Civil War, then World War I.
Spiritualism provided a comfort to the bereaved, as well as ample opportunity for grifters and charlatans. And yet, Strauss points out, the rise of Spiritualism in the 19th century may also have been due to the rising influence of science in popular culture, as more and more people sought experimental evidence for their supernatural beliefs. Conan Doyle wrote twenty books on the subject, including the two-volume 1924 History of Spiritualism. In a speech he gave in May of 1930, just before his death, he explained the appeal. Hear the audio above and read a transcription below:
People ask, what do you get from spiritualism? The first thing you get is that it absolutely removes all fear of death. Secondly, it bridges death for those dear ones whom we may lose. We need have no fear that we are calling them back, for all that we do is to make such conditions as experience has taught us, will enable them to come if they wish. And the initiative lies always with them.
Two months later at a séance attended by thousands at the Royal Albert Hall, a medium claimed to have communicated with the Sherlock Holmes author. And four years after that, another medium, Noah Zerdin, held a séance attended by hundreds, and Conan Doyle is said to have been one of 44 who spoke from the beyond. This time, the event was recorded, on 26 acetate disks, which were only discovered 67 years later in 2001 by Zerdin’s son, who donated them to the British Library. The 1934 recordings featured in a 2002 BBC radio documentary called What Grandad Did in the Dark.
Just above, you can hear the supposed voice of Arthur Conan Doyle speaking from the spirit world. The audio is seriously spooky, but I’m not inclined to believe that it’s anything more than a hoax, although the technology of the time would make manipulation of the direct recordings difficult. So-called “spirit voices” in recordings such as this are known as EVP (“electronic voice phenomenon”), and there are many such examples of the genre at the British Library, including a batch of 60 tapes made by a Dr. Konstantin Raudive, “who believed that the dead could communicate with the living through the medium of radio waves.”
A post on the British Library site comments that “the recorded evidence is not especially convincing, being short comments or fragments that without the accompanying spoken ‘translation’ would probably not strike the listener as having any meaningful content.” The Conan Doyle audio seems a little more coherent, though it’s difficult to make out exactly what the voice says. Compare the two samples and draw your own conclusions. Or better yet, consider what Sherlock Holmes would make of this alleged “evidence.”
If you have an interest in how the internet has widened the very concept of education, you may well know about Google’s Art Project, a digital wealth of free visual art information and viewing opportunities we’ve featured before. And you more than likely know about Khan Academy, the highest-profile producer of educational videos on the internet. Now, from the combined power of their learning resources comes this collection of video introductions to over 100 important paintings. Ranging from between two to nine minutes and covering works of art created in eras from 575 B.C.E to the Second World War, these brief but intellectually dense and visually rich lessons bear the label of Smarthistory, “a multimedia web-book about art and art history” that merged with Khan Academy in 2011.
In the video at the top of the post, Smarthistory introduces us to Botticelli’s 1486 Tbe Birth of Venus, “one of the most iconic images in the history of Western art” — its content, its context, and its inspiration. The Birth of Venus might seem like one of those images that needs no introduction, but as all the information revealed in the video reminds us, most of us, if not art historians ourselves, could at least use a refresher.
Just above, we have Vincent van Gogh’s 1889 The Bedroom, a painting that, in the words of the artist himself, “ought to rest the brain — or rather, the imagination.” Though we all know the name of this particular post-Impressionist, we may not have seen this particular canvas of his before, a fact Smarthistory’s experts Beth Harris and Steven Zucker take into account when they explain to us how they themselves think about it. “What you’re talking about is the root of abstraction itself,” says Zucker. “It’s not that this is representative; it’s that the formal qualities of painting itself can have their own experiential aspect.” And they speak just as insightfully on the paintings we encounter, in one form or another, every so often in our daily lives. Edward Hopper’s 1942 Nighthawks, for instance, a replica of which I saw on the side of one coffee mug I used every day for years, gets discussed below as “an expression of wartime alienation” that delivers “an immediate implication that we are alone” that “makes us look for some sign of life, but we don’t see anything.” Smarthistory’s videos manage to reveal a great deal of emotional, technical, and historical knowledge on these and many other paintings in a fraction of the time it takes a student to cross campus for their art history lecture — let alone to sit through its entire slideshow. You can see all 100 videos in the collection here.
What, I wonder, would Sigmund Freud have made of Hannibal Lector? The fictional psychoanalyst, so sophisticated and in control, moonlighting as a bloodthirsty cannibal… a perfectly grim rejoinder to Freud’s ideas about humankind’s perpetual discontent with the painful repression of our darkest, most antisocial drives. While Freud’s primary taboo was incest, not cannibalism, I’m sure he would have appreciated the irony of an ultra-civilized psychiatrist who gives full steam to his most primal urges.
Freud—who was born on this day in 1856, in the small town of Freiberg—also had a carefully controlled image, though his passionate avocation was not for the macabre, salacious, or prurient, but for the archaeological. He once remarked that he read more on that subject than on his own, an exaggeration, most likely, but an indication of just how much his interest in cultural artifacts and ritual contributed to his theoretical explication of individual and social psychology.
In the film above, we see Freud in conversation with a friend, a professor of archaeology, whom the psychiatrist consulted on his extensive collection of antiquities. Later, we see Freud with his dog, then reclining outdoors with a book. Over this footage we hear the narration of Freud’s daughter Anna, who only allowed this film to be viewed by a small circle until her death in 1982.
Though Freud lived many decades into the era of recording technology, precious little film and audio of the founder of psychoanalysis exists. While the home movies at the top may be the only moving image of him, perhaps the only audio recording of his voice, above, was made in 1938, the year before his death. At 81 years old, Freud’s advanced jaw cancer left him in considerable torment. Nonetheless, he agreed to record this brief message for the BBC from his London home in Maresfield Gardens. Read a transcript of the speech, and see Freud’s handwritten copy, below.
I started my professional activity as a neurologist trying to bring relief to my neurotic patients. Under the influence of an older friend and by my own efforts, I discovered some important new facts about the unconscious in psychic life, the role of instinctual urges, and so on. Out of these findings grew a new science, psychoanalysis, a part of psychology, and a new method of treatment of the neuroses. I had to pay heavily for this bit of good luck. People did not believe in my facts and thought my theories unsavory. Resistance was strong and unrelenting. In the end I succeeded in acquiring pupils and building up an International Psychoanalytic Association. But the struggle is not yet over. –Sigmund Freud.
The Library of Congress online exhibit Sigmund Freud: Conflict & Culture has many more primary documents including a holograph page from Freud’s manuscript of Civilization and its Discontents, in which he theorized the bedrock impulse of serial killers, fictional and real: the so-called “Death Drive,” our “human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.”
“My life came to a standstill,” wrote Leo Tolstoy in his 1882 conversion memoir A Confession, “I could not breathe, eat, drink, and sleep, and I could not help doing these things.” So Tolstoy’s described his “arrest of life,” a period of severe depression that led to a very deep, personal brand of faith in his late middle age. The towering Russian novelist renounced worldly desires and came to identify with the poor, the former serfs of his aristocratic class. Tolstoy’s radical religious anarchism in his final years spread his fame far among the peasantry just as his literary achievements had brought him worldwide renown among the reading public. So famous was Tolstoy, William Nickell tells us, that Russian critic Vasily Rozanov wrote that “to be a Russian and not have [seen] Tolstoy was like being Swiss and not having seen the Alps.”
Nickell describes the occasions that Tolstoy appeared on film, the new medium that allowed the author’s millions of adoring fans to get a glimpse of him. Just as his life was punctuated by a radical departure from his earlier attitudes, his medium was in for a shock as film forever changed the way stories were told.
In those early days, however, it was very often simply a means of recording history, and we should be glad of that. It means we too can see Tolstoy, at the top on his 80th birthday. We see him vigorously sawing logs and piously giving alms to the poor. Also included in the initial footage are Tolstoy’s wife Sofya, his daughter Aleksandra, and aide and editor Vladimir Chertkov. Then, at 1:04, the scene shifts to Tolstoy’s deathbed and scenes of his funeral. The remaining 11 minutes give us some unidentified footage of the author. (If you’re able to read the title cards in Russian, please let us know!).
Just above, see a more complete film of Tolstoy’s death and funeral procession. The author died at age 82 after he abruptly decided to leave his wife, taking only a few possessions and his doctor. Read the dramatic story of Tolstoy’s last ten days in this translated excerpt from Pavel Basinsky’s award winning Leo Tolstoy: Escape from Paradise.
As you’d expect from a man who had to create, in painstaking detail, all the races that populate Middle-Earth, J.R.R. Tolkien had little time for simple racism. He had especially little time for the highest-profile simple racism of his day, the wave of anti-Jewish sentiment on which Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party rode straight into the Second World War. His first novel The Hobbit, predecessor to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, first appeared in 1937, a time when the situation in Europe had turned ominous indeed, and would get far uglier still. It didn’t take long after the book’s initial success for Berlin publisher Rütten & Loening to express their interest in putting out a German edition, but first — in observance, no doubt, of the Third Reich’s dictates — they asked for proof of Tolkien’s “Aryan descent.” The author drafted two replies, the less civil of which reads as follows:
25 July 1938 20 Northmoor Road, Oxford
Dear Sirs,
Thank you for your letter. I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject — which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.
Your enquiry is doubtless made in order to comply with the laws of your own country, but that this should be held to apply to the subjects of another state would be improper, even if it had (as it has not) any bearing whatsoever on the merits of my work or its sustainability for publication, of which you appear to have satisfied yourselves without reference to my Abstammung.
I trust you will find this reply satisfactory, and
remain yours faithfully,
J. R. R. Tolkien
“I have in this war a burning private grudge against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler,” Tolkien wrote to his son Michael three years later, by which time the war had reached a new height. “Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.”
He had already faced German forces in combat during his service in World War I, and had almost became one of World War II’s codebreakers after the British Foreign Office’s cryptographic department brought the possibility to him in early 1939. He did not, in the event, participate directly in the conflict, but he did leave behind an uncommonly eloquent paper trail documenting his stance of unambiguous antipathy for the Nazis and their ideology.
For more such fascinating perspectives vouchsafed to history through the mail, do have a look at Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience, the brand new book from the site of the same name. Tolkien’s letter above comes from it, as do many of the illuminating missives we’ve featured here before — and, without a doubt, those we’ll continue to feature in the future.
Want to download a Tolkien audio book for free? Start a 30-day free trial with Audible.com and you can download one of his major works in unabridged format. You can keep the book regardless of whether you continue with their great program or not. There are no strings attached.
You surely heard plenty about Shakespeare’s birthday yesterday. But did you hear about Shakespeare’s beehive? No, the Bard didn’t moonlight as an apiarist, though in his main line of work as a poet and dramatist he surely had to consult his dictionary fairly often. The question of whether humanity has an identifiable copy of such an illustrious reference volume gets explored in the new book Shakespeare’s Beehive: An Annotated Elizabethan Dictionary Comes to Lightby bookseller-scholars George Koppelman and Daniel Wechsler. In their study, they reveal that they may have come into possession of Shakespeare’s very own copy of Baret’s Alvearie, a popular classical quote-laden English-Latin-Greek-French dictionary the man who wrote King Lear would have found “the perfect tool, a honey-combed beehive of possibilities that may not have formed his way of thinking, but certainly fed his appetite and nourished his selection.” He would have, at least, if indeed he owned it. Some solid Shakespeare scholarship points toward his owning a copy of Baret’s Alvearie, but did he own this one, the richly annotated one these guys found on eBay?
Experts haven’t exactly stepped forward in force to back up their claim. Plausible objections include, as Adam Gopnik puts it in a (subscribers-only) New Yorker piece on this Alvearie in particular and humanity’s desire for Shakespearean artifacts in general: “the handwriting just doesn’t look like Shakespeare’s,” “since Shakespeare wrote Elizabethan English, any work of Elizabethan English is going to contain echoes of Shakespeare,” and, of all possible annotators of this particular physical book, Shakespeare “is a prime candidate only because we don’t know the names of all the other bird-loving, inquisitive readers who also liked their dabchicks and their French verbs.” Still, in a striking act of openness, Koppelman and Wechsler have made their — and Shakespeare’s? — Alvearie available for your digital perusal on their site. You have to register as a member first, but then you can draw your own conclusions about Koppelman and Weschler’s discovery — or, as even they call it, their “leap of faith.” Overenthusiastic words, perhaps, but seldom do either successful antiquarian book dealers or dedicated Shakespeare fans lack enthusiasm.
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