Let’s give three cheers and quickly celebrate the birthday of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, born on this day in 1899. Above, we have a photo of Borges taken during a seemingly festive moment. According to the blog Me and My Big Mouth, the photo comes from the collection of Norman Thomas di Giovanni, whose biography Georgie and Elsa — Jorge Luis Borges and His Wife: The Untold Story will hit bookstores on September 2 (though it can be pre-ordered now). Paul Theroux calls the bio “a long, satisfying and penetrating gaze into the private life of an acknowledged genius, his work, his evasions, and his peculiar heartaches.”
If you care to turn this celebration into a full-day affair, we’d recommend listening to Borges’ 1967–8 Norton Lectures on Poetry, recorded at Harvard. The 9 lectures provide hours of intellectual stimulation. Or watch the free documentary, Jorge Luis Borges: The Mirror Man, which one reviewer called a “bit of everything – part biography, part literary criticism, part hero-worship, part book reading, and part psychology.”
You can find a few more Borges favorites from our archive right below.
Published in 1864, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground has a reputation as the first existentialist novel. It established a template for the genre with a portrait of an isolated man contemptuous of the sordid society around him, paralyzed by doubt, and obsessed with the pain and absurdity of his own existence. Also true to form, the narrative, though it has a plot of sorts, does not redeem its hero in any sense or offer any resolution to his gnawing inner conflict, concluding, literally, as an unfinished text. Thirteen years later, the great Russian writer, his health in decline but his literary reputation and financial prospects much improved, wrote a similar story, “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.”
In this tale, an unnamed narrator also meditates on his absurd state, to the point of suicide. But he observes this spiritual malaise at a distance, recalling the story as an older man from a vantage point of wisdom: “I am a ridiculous person,” the story begins, “Now they call me a madman. That would be a promotion if it were not that I remain as ridiculous in their eyes as before. But now I do not resent it, they are all dear to me now.” This character, unlike Dostoevsky’s bitter underground man, has had a transformative experience—a dream in which he experiences the full moral weight of his choices on a grand scale. In a moment of instant enlightenment, our protagonist becomes a kinder, more humane person concerned with the welfare of others.
It is the difference between these two tales which makes the static, internal Underground a very difficult story to adapt to the screen—as far as I know it hasn’t been done—and “Ridiculous Man,” with its vivid dream imagery and dynamic characterization, almost ideal. The 1992 animation (in two parts above) uses painstakingly hand-painted cells to bring to life the alternate world the narrator finds himself navigating in his dream. From the flickering lamps against the dreary, darkened cityscape of the ridiculous man’s waking life to the shifting, sunlit sands of the dreamworld, each detail of the story is finely rendered with meticulous care. Drawn and directed by Russian animator Alexander Petrov—who won an Academy Award for his 1999 adaptation of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea—this is clearly a labor of love, and of tremendous skill and patience.
The technique Petrov uses, writes Galina Saubanova, is one of“Finger Painting”: “Forcing the paint on the glass, the artist draws with his fingers, using brushes only in exceptional cases. One figure is one film frame, which flashes within 1/24 of a second while watching. Petrov draws more than a thousand paintings for one minute of his film.” In Russian with English subtitles taken from Constance Garnett’s translation, the twenty-minute “animated painting” sublimely realizes Dostoevsky’s tale of personal transformation with a lightness and lyricism that a live-action film cannot duplicate, although a 1990 BBC production called “The Dream” certainly has much to recommend it. If you like Petrov’s work, be sure to watch his Old Man and the Seahere. Also online are his short films “The Mermaid” (1997) and “My Love” (2006).
The BBC’s acclaimed podcast A History of the World in 100 Objects brought us just that: the story of human civilization as told through artifacts from the Egyptian Mummy of Hornedjitef to a Cretan statue of a Minoan Bull-leaper to a Korean roof tile to a Chinese solar-powered lamp. All those 100 items came from the formidable collection held by the British Museum, and any dedicated listener to that podcast will know the name of Neil MacGregor, the institution’s director. Now, MacGregor has returned with another series of historical audio explorations, one much more focused both temporally and geographically but no less deep than its predecessor. The ten-part Shakespeare’s Restless World“looks at the world through the eyes of Shakespeare’s audience by exploring objects from that turbulent period” — i.e., William Shakespeare’s life, which spanned the 1560s to the 1610s: a time of Venetian glass goblets, African sunken gold, chiming clocks, and horrific relics of execution.
These treasures illuminate not only the English but the global affairs of Shakespeare’s day. The Bard lived during a time when murderers plotted against Elizabeth I and James I, England expelled its Moors, Great Britain struggled to unite itself, humanity gained an ever more precise grasp on the keeping of time, and even “civilized” nations got spooked and slaughtered their own. Just as the study of Shakespeare’s plays reveals a world balanced on the tipping point between the modern consciousness and the long, slow awakening that came before, the study of Shakespeare’s time reveals a world that both retains surprisingly vivid elements of its brutal past and has already begun incorporating surprisingly advanced elements of the future to come. Even if you don’t give a hoot about the literary merits of Richard III, Titus Andronicus, or The Merchant of Venice, these real-life stories of political intrigue, gruesome bloodshed, and, er, Venice will certainly hold your attention. You can start with the “tabloid history of Shakespeare’s England” in the first episode of Shakespeare’s Restless World above, then continue on either at the series’ site or on iTunes. And if you find yourself getting into the series, you can get MacGregor’s companion book, Shakespeare’s Restless World: Portrait of an Era.
Last week saw me in line at one of Los Angeles’ most beloved bookstores, waiting for a signed copy of Haruki Murakami’s new novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimageupon its midnight release. The considerable hubbub around the book’s entry into English — to say nothing of its original appearance last year in Japanese, when it sold a much-discussed million copies in a single month — demonstrates, 35 years into the author’s career, the world’s unflagging appetite for Murakamiana. Just recently, we featured the artifacts of Murakami’s passion for jazz and a collection of his free short stories online, just as many others have got into the spirit by seeking out various illuminating inspirations of, locations in, and quotations from his work. The author of the blog Randomwire, known only as David, has done all three, and taken photographs to boot, in his grand three-part project of documenting Murakami’s Tokyo: the Tokyo of his beginnings, the Tokyo where he ran the jazz bars in which he began writing, and the Tokyo which has given his stories their otherworldly touch.
Murakami’s “depictions of the loneliness and isolation of modern Japanese life ingratiated him with the country’s youth who often struggle to assert their individuality in the face of societal notions of conformity,” David writes, noting also that “such comparisons fail to do justice to his unique brand of surreal fantasy and urban realism which seamlessly blends together dream, memory and reality against the backdrop of everyday life in Japan.” Knowing the city of Tokyo as well as he knows the Murakami canon, David works his way from the Denny’s where “Mari, while minding her own business, is interrupted by an old acquaintance Takahashi in After Dark”; to Waseda University, alma mater of both Murakami himself and Norwegian Wood’s protagonist Toru Watanabe; to both locations of Peter Cat, the jazz café and bar Murakami ran with his wife in the 1970s and early 80s; to Meiji Jingu stadium, where Murakami witnessed the home run that somehow convinced him he could write his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing; to DUG, another underground jazz bar visited by students like Toru Watanabe in the 1960s and still open today; to Metropolitan Expressway No. 3, from which1Q84’sprotagonist Aomame climbs down into a parallel reality.
David also drops into spots that, if they don’t count as fully Murakamian, at least count as Murakamiesque, such as an “antique shop-cum-café” opposite the first site of Peter Cat: “Like a surreal plot twist in one of Murakami’s books the scene of me sitting there amongst the mounds of antique junk drinking tea from a porcelain cup was verging on the absurd. More than once I glanced outside the window just to check that the real world hadn’t left me behind.” If you find he missed any patch of Murakami’s Tokyo along the way, let him know; he has, he notes at the end of part three, almost enough for a part four — just as much of Colorless Tsukuru’s follow-up has no doubt already cohered in Murakami’s imagination, that fruitful meeting place of the real and the absurd. Here are the links to the existing sections: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
Has a writer ever inspired as many adaptations and references as William Shakespeare? In the four hundred years since his death, his work has patterned much of the fabric of world literature and seen countless permutations on stage and screen. Less discussed are the visual representations of Shakespeare in fine art and illustration, but they are multitude. In one small sampling, Richard Altick notes in his extensive study Paintings from Books, that “pictures from Shakespeare accounted for about one fifth—some 2,300—of the total number of literary paintings recorded between 1760 and 1900” among British artists.
In the period Altick documents, a rapidly rising middle class drove a market for literary artworks, which were, “in effect, extensions of the books themselves: they were detached forms of book illustration, in which were constantly assimilated the literary and artistic tastes of the time.”
These works took the form of humorous illustrations—such as the As You Like It-inspired satirical piece at the top from 1824—and much more serious representations, like the undated Currier & Ives Midsummer-Night’s Dream lithograph above. Now, thanks to the Folger Shakespeare Library, these images, and tens of thousands more from their Digital Image Collection, are available online. And they’re free to use under a CC BY-SA Creative Commons license.
As Head of Collection Information Services Erin Blake explains, “basically this means you can do whatever you want with Folger digital images as long as you say that they’re from the Folger, and as long a you keep the cycle of sharing going by freely sharing whatever you’re making.” The Folger’s impressive repository has been called “the world’s finest collection of Shakesperean art.” As well as traditional paintings and illustrations, it includes “dozens of costumes and props used in nineteenth-century Shakespeare productions,” such as the embroidered velvet costume above, worn by Edwin Booth as Richard III, circa 1870. You’ll also find photographs and scans of “’extra-illustrated’ books filled with inserted engravings, manuscript letters, and playbills associated with particular actors or productions; and a great variety of souvenirs, comic books, and other ephemera associated with Shakespeare and his works.”
In addition to illustrations and memorabilia, the Folger contains “some 200 paintings” and drawings by fine artists like “Henry Fuseli, Benjamin West, George Romney, and Thomas Nast, as well as such Elizabethan artists as George Gower and Nicholas Hilliard.” (The striking print above by Fuseli shows Macbeth’s three witches hovering over their cauldron.) Great and varied as the Folger’s collection of Shakespearean art may be, it represents only a part of their extensive holdings. You’ll also find in the Digital Images Collection images of antique bookbindings, like the 1532 volume of a work by Agrippa von Nettescheim (Heinrich Cornelius), below.
The collection’s enormous archive of 19th century prints is an especial treat. Just below, see a print of that tower of 18th century learning, Samuel Johnson, who, in his famous preface to an edition of the Bard’s works declared, “Shakespeare is above all writers.” All in all, the immense digital collection represents, writes The Public Domain Review, “a huge injection of some wonderful material into the open digital commons.” Already, the Folger has begun adding images to Wikimedia Commons for use free and open use in Wikipedia and elsewhere on the web. And should you somehow manage, through some voracious feat of digital consumption, to exhaust this treasure hold of images, you need not fear—they’ll be adding more and more as time goes on. Enter the collection here.
Before Theodor Seuss Geisel AKA Dr. Seuss convinced generations of children that a wocket might just be in their pocket, he was the chief editorial cartoonist for the New York newspaper PM from 1940 to 1948. During his tenure he cranked out some 400 cartoons that, among other things, praised FDR’s policies, chided isolationists like Charles Lindbergh and supported civil rights for blacks and Jews. He also staunchly supported America’s war effort.
To that end, Dr. Seuss drew many cartoons that, to today’s eyes, are breathtakingly racist. Check out the cartoon above. It shows an arrogant-looking Hitler next to a pig-nosed, slanted-eye caricature of a Japanese guy. The picture isn’t really a likeness of either of the men responsible for the Japanese war effort – Emperor Hirohito and General Tojo. Instead, it’s just an ugly representation of a people.
In the battle for homeland morale, American propaganda makers depicted Germany in a very different light than Japan. Germany was seen as a great nation gone mad. The Nazis might have been evil but there was still room for the “Good German.” Japan, on the other hand, was depicted entirely as a brutal monolith; Hirohito and the guy on the street were uniformly evil. Such thinking paved the way for the U.S. Air Force firebombing of Tokyo, where over 100,000 civilians died, and for its nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it definitely laid the groundwork for one of the sorriest chapters of American 20th century history, the unconstitutional incarceration of Japanese-Americans.
Geisel himself was vocally anti-Japanese during the war and had no trouble with rounding up an entire population of U.S. citizens and putting them in camps.
But right now, when the Japs are planting their hatchets in our skulls, it seems like a hell of a time for us to smile and warble: “Brothers!” It is a rather flabby battle cry. If we want to win, we’ve got to kill Japs, whether it depresses John Haynes Holmes or not. We can get palsy-walsy afterward with those that are left.
Geisel was hardly alone in such beliefs but it’s still disconcerting to see ugly cartoons like these drawn in the same hand that did TheCat in the Hat.
In 1953, Geisel visited Japan where he met and talked with its people and witnessed the horrific aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima. He soon started to rethink his anti-Japanese vehemence. So he issued an apology in the only way that Dr. Seuss could.
He wrote a children’s book.
Horton Hears a Who!, published in 1954, is about an elephant that has to protect a speck of dust populated by little tiny people. The book’s hopeful, inclusive refrain – “A person is a person no matter how small” — is about as far away as you can get from his ignoble words about the Japanese a decade earlier. He even dedicated the book to “My Great Friend, Mitsugi Nakamura of Kyoto, Japan.”
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 one new drawing of a vice president with an octopus on his head daily.
T.S. Eliot may have been the most unavoidable force in American letters in the early 20th century, but he was probably not a very likable person. At least Ernest Hemingway didn’t think so. The burly novelist, often in the habit of telling fellow writers to “kiss my ass,” wrote in a July 1950 letter to writer and editor Harvey Breit that Eliot could do just that “as a man,” since he “never hit a ball out of the infield in his life and he would not have existed for dear old Ezra [Pound], the lovely poet and stupid traitor.” Of Pound’s “stupid” treason, Hemingway had previously written some choice words; Of Eliot’s sins—in addition to his failing to measure up to Yogi Berra, despite both of them hailing from St. Louis—Hemingway included the following: “Royalist, Anglo-Catholic and conservative”
Despite all this, however, Hemingway, like most of his modernist contemporaries, owed a debt to Eliot, whom Papa almost-grudgingly admitted was “a damned good poet and a fair critic,” though “there isn’t any law a man has to go and see [Eliot’s play] the Cocktail party” [sic]. Writes Wendolyn E. Tetlow, author of Hemingway’s In Our Time: Lyrical Dimensions, “despite Hemingway’s acid comments, however, he could not escape Eliot’s influence.” Of particular significance for Hemingway’s terse, elliptical style was the Eliot doctrine of the “objective correlative,” something of a refinement of Pound’s imagism. In Hemingway’s ruminations on his own process, it seems he could not have done without this poetic technique—one of encapsulating abstract concepts and fleeting, insubstantial emotions in the amber of concrete, discrete objects, symbols, and acts.
“Find what gave you the emotion,” Hemingway wrote in “The End of Something,” remarking on a schooner moving through a ruined mill town, “then write it down making it clear so the reader will see it and have the same feeling.” Eliot would never have been so vulgar as to plainly spell out his method in the text itself, like a set of instructions, but Hemingway does so again in Death in the Afternoon:
I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced.
Compare these passages with Eliot’s definition in his 1919 essay on Hamlet: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.” The influence—if not outright borrowing—is unmistakable. Yet Hemingway remained leery of Eliot “as a man.” In 1954, Robert Manning of The Atlanticvisited Hemingway in Cuba and found him surly on the subject and “not warm toward T.S. Eliot,” preferring instead to “praise Ezra Pound.” Hemingway would go so far, in fact, as to claim that Pound deserved Eliot’s Nobel.
We shouldn’t take any of this salty talk too seriously. After all, Hemingway, the great boaster, liked to trash people he envied. Even Joe Louis, whom you would think aspiring boxer Hemingway would hold in highest esteem, “never learned to box,” though he was, Papa admitted, “a good getter-upper.”
I know, it’s a dated reference now, but since I still watch the remade Battlestar Galactica series on Netflix, the mystical refrain—“All of this has happened before and will happen again”–still seems fresh to me. At any rate, it’s fresher than the clichéd “history repeats itself.” However you phrase it, the truism looks more and more like a genuine truth the more one studies ancient history, literature, and philosophy. The conflicts and concerns that feel so of the moment also occupied the minds and lives of people living hundreds, and thousands, of years ago, and whatever you make of that, it certainly helps put the present into perspective. Can we benefit from studying the wisdom, and the folly, of the ancients? To this question, I like to turn to an introductory essay C.S. Lewis penned to the work of a certain church father:
Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. […] If we read only modern books […] where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.
I may disagree with Lewis about many things, including that “clean sea breeze” of history, but I take to heart his point about reading the ancients to mitigate our modern biases and shine light on our blind spots. To that end, we present links to several excellent online courses on the ancients from institutions like Yale, NYU, and Stanford, free to peruse or take in full. See our master list—Free Courses in Ancient History, Literature & Philosophy—for 36 quality offerings. As always, certain courses provide more resources than others, and a few only offer their lectures through iTunes. These are decisions course administrators have made, not us! Even so, these free resources are invaluable to those wishing to acquaint, or reacquaint, themselves with the study of ancient humanities.
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