A Concise Breakdown of How Time Travel Works in Popular Movies, Books & TV Shows

in Film, Literature, Sci Fi | January 24th, 2020

As least since H.G. Wells’ 1895 nov­el The Time Machine, time trav­el has been a promis­ing sto­ry­telling con­cept. Alas, it has sel­dom deliv­ered on that promise: whether their char­ac­ters jump for­ward into the future, back­ward into the past, or both, the past 125 years of time-trav­el sto­ries have too often suf­fered from inel­e­gance, incon­sis­ten­cy, and implau­si­bil­i­ty. Well, of course they’re implau­si­ble, every­one but Ronald Mal­lett might say — they’re sto­ries about time trav­el. But fic­tion only has to work on its own terms, not real­i­ty’s. The trou­ble is that the fic­tion of time trav­el can all too eas­i­ly stum­ble over the poten­tial­ly infi­nite con­vo­lu­tions and para­dox­es inher­ent in the sub­ject mat­ter.

In the Min­utePhysics video above, Hen­ry Reich sorts out how time-trav­el sto­ries work (and fail to work) using noth­ing but mark­ers and paper. For the time-trav­el enthu­si­ast, the core inter­est of such fic­tions isn’t so much the spec­ta­cle of char­ac­ters hurtling into the future or past but “the dif­fer­ent ways time trav­el can influ­ence causal­i­ty, and thus the plot, with­in the uni­verse of each sto­ry.” As an exam­ple of “100 per­cent real­is­tic trav­el” Reich points to Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, in which space trav­el­ers at light speed expe­ri­ence only days or months while years pass back on Earth. The same thing hap­pens in Plan­et of the Apes, whose astro­nauts return from space think­ing they’ve land­ed on the wrong plan­et when they’ve actu­al­ly land­ed in the dis­tant future.

But when we think of time trav­el per se, we more often think of sto­ries about how active­ly trav­el­ing to the past, say, can change its future — and thus the sto­ry’s “present.” Reich pos­es two major ques­tions to ask about such sto­ries. The first is “whether or not the time trav­el­er is there when his­to­ry hap­pens the first time around. Was “the time-trav­el­ing ver­sion of you always there to begin with?” Or “does the very act of time trav­el­ing to the past change what hap­pened and force the uni­verse onto a dif­fer­ent tra­jec­to­ry of his­to­ry from the one you expe­ri­enced pri­or to trav­el­ing?” The sec­ond ques­tion is “who has free will when some­body is time trav­el­ing” — that is, “whose actions are allowed to move his­to­ry onto a dif­fer­ent tra­jec­to­ry, and whose aren’t?”

We can all look into our own pasts for exam­ples of how our favorite time-trav­el sto­ries have dealt with those ques­tions. Reich cites such well-known time-trav­el­ers’ tales as A Christ­mas Car­ol, Ground­hog Day, and Bill & Ted’s Excel­lent Adven­ture, as well, of course, as Back to the Future, the most pop­u­lar drama­ti­za­tion of the the­o­ret­i­cal chang­ing of his­tor­i­cal time­lines caused by trav­el into the past. Rian John­son’s Loop­er treats that phe­nom­e­non more com­plex­ly, allow­ing for more free will and tak­ing into account more of the effects a char­ac­ter in one time peri­od would have on that same char­ac­ter in anoth­er. Con­sult­ing on that film was Shane Car­ruth, whose Primer — my own per­son­al favorite time-trav­el fic­tion — had already tak­en time trav­el “to the extreme, with time trav­el with­in time trav­el with­in time trav­el.”

Har­ry Pot­ter and the Pris­on­er of Azk­a­ban, Reich’s per­son­al favorite time-trav­el fic­tion, exhibits a clar­i­ty and con­sis­ten­cy uncom­mon in the genre. J.K. Rowl­ing accom­plish­es this by fol­low­ing the rule that “while you’re expe­ri­enc­ing your ini­tial pre-time trav­el pas­sage through a par­tic­u­lar point in his­to­ry, your time-trav­el­ing clone is also already there, doing every­thing you’ll even­tu­al­ly do when you time-trav­el your­self.” This sin­gle-time-line ver­sion of time trav­el, in which “you can’t change the past because the past already hap­pened,” gets around prob­lems that have long bedev­iled oth­er time-trav­el fic­tions. But it also demon­strates the impor­tance of self-con­sis­ten­cy in fic­tion of all kinds: “In order to care about the char­ac­ters in a sto­ry,” Reich says, “we have to believe that actions have con­se­quences.” Sto­ries, in oth­er words, must obey their own rules — even, and per­haps espe­cial­ly, sto­ries involv­ing time-trav­el­ing child wiz­ards.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What’s the Ori­gin of Time Trav­el Fic­tion?: New Video Essay Explains How Time Trav­el Writ­ing Got Its Start with Charles Dar­win & His Lit­er­ary Peers

Pro­fes­sor Ronald Mal­lett Wants to Build a Time Machine in this Cen­tu­ry … and He’s Not Kid­ding

Mark Twain Pre­dicts the Inter­net in 1898: Read His Sci-Fi Crime Sto­ry, “From The ‘Lon­don Times’ in 1904”

What Hap­pened When Stephen Hawk­ing Threw a Cock­tail Par­ty for Time Trav­el­ers (2009)

Pret­ty Much Pop #22 Untan­gles Time-Trav­el Sce­nar­ios in the Ter­mi­na­tor Fran­chise and Oth­er Media

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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Hear Christopher Tolkien (RIP) Read the Work of His Father J.R.R. Tolkien, Which He Tirelessly Worked to Preserve

in Books, Literature | January 17th, 2020

J.R.R. Tolkien is respon­si­ble for the exis­tence of Mid­dle-earth, the rich­ly real­ized fic­tion­al set­ting of the Lord of the Rings nov­els. But he also did his bit for the exis­tence of the much less fic­tion­al Christo­pher Tolkien, his third son as well as, in J.R.R.‘s own words, his “chief crit­ic and col­lab­o­ra­tor.” Christo­pher spent much of his life return­ing the favor, ded­i­cat­ing him­self to the orga­ni­za­tion, preser­va­tion, and pub­li­ca­tion of his father’s notes on Mid­dle-earth­’s elab­o­rate geog­ra­phy, his­to­ry, and mythol­o­gy until his own death this past Wednes­day at the age of 95.

Most fans of Tolkien père came to know the work of Tolkien fils through The Sil­mar­il­lion, the col­lec­tion of the for­mer’s pre­vi­ous­ly unpub­lished mythopoe­ic writ­ings on Mid­dle-Earth and the uni­verse that con­tains it. That book came out in 1977, four years after J.R.R. Tolkien’s death, and for a time there­after, write The New York Times’ Katharine Q. Seelye and Alan Yuhas, “Tolkien fans and schol­ars won­dered how much of The Sil­mar­il­lion was the work of the father and how much was the work of the son.”

In response, “Christo­pher pro­duced the 12-vol­ume The His­to­ry of Mid­dle-Earth (1996), a com­pi­la­tion of drafts, frag­ments, rewrites, mar­gin­al notes and oth­er writ­ings culled from 70 box­es of unpub­lished mate­r­i­al.”

Christo­pher Tolkien did­n’t just take over J.R.R. Tolkien’s duties as the stew­ard of Mid­dle-earth; he more or less grew up in the place, and even pro­vid­ed com­ments, at his father’s request, on the work that would become The Lord of the Rings. The pow­er of J.R.R. Tolkien’s sto­ry­telling, one often hears, owes in part to the writer’s thor­ough ground­ing in lit­er­ary and lin­guis­tic sub­jects like Eng­lish and Ger­man­ic philol­o­gy, hero­ic verse, Old Norse, Old Ice­landic, and medieval Welsh. Christo­pher Tolkien, in turn, made him­self into what Seelye and Yhuas call “an author­i­ty, above all, on the reams of writ­ing that his father pro­duced.” You can hear Christo­pher Tolkien read author­i­ta­tive­ly from the work of J.R.R. Tolkien in the videos pre­sent­ed here.

The first three clips from the top come two vinyl LPs released in 1977 and 1988 by Caed­mon Records (the pro­to-audio­book label that also put out Edgar Allan Poe read by Vin­cent Price and Basil Rath­bone as well as Hem­ing­way and Faulkn­er read by Hem­ing­way and Faulkn­er). All of their selec­tions come from The Sil­mar­il­lion, the Tolkien text that would nev­er have seen the light of day if not for Christo­pher’s efforts (and those of Guy Gavriel Kay, who would lat­er become a fan­ta­sy nov­el­ist him­self). But as a trib­ute to the man’s life so rig­or­ous­ly devot­ed to a body of work that has fas­ci­nat­ed so many, what could be more suit­able than the video above, his read­ing of the very end of the final book in the Lord of the Rings tril­o­gy, The Return of the King. Christo­pher Tolkien kept his father’s flame alive, and thanks to his work that flame will sur­vive him — and gen­er­a­tions of Tolkien read­ers to come.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear J.R.R. Tolkien Read from The Lord of the Rings and The Hob­bit in Vin­tage Record­ings from the Ear­ly 1950s

110 Draw­ings and Paint­ings by J.R.R. Tolkien: Of Mid­dle-Earth and Beyond

Map of Mid­dle-Earth Anno­tat­ed by Tolkien Found in a Copy of Lord of the Rings

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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Artist Ed Ruscha Reads From Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in a Short Film Celebrating His 1966 Photos of the Sunset Strip

in Art, Books, Film, Literature, Philosophy | January 13th, 2020

In 1956, the Pop artist Ed Ruscha left Okla­homa City for Los Ange­les. “I could see I was just born for the job” of an artist, he would lat­er say, “born to watch paint dry.” The com­ment encap­su­lates Ruscha’s iron­ic use of cliché as a cen­ter­piece of his work. He called him­self an “abstract artist… who deals with sub­ject mat­ter.” Much of his sub­ject mat­ter has been com­mon­place words and phrases—decontextualized and fore­ground­ed in paint­ings and prints made with care­ful delib­er­a­tion, against the trend toward Abstract Expres­sion­ism and its ges­tur­al free­dom.

Anoth­er of Ruscha’s sub­jects comes with some­what less con­cep­tu­al bag­gage. His pho­to­graph­ic books cap­ture mid-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca gas sta­tions and the city he has called home for over 50 years. In his 1966 book, Every Build­ing on the Sun­set Strip, Ruscha “pho­tographed both sides of Sun­set Boule­vard from the back of a pick­up truck,” writes film­mak­er Matthew Miller. “He stitched the pho­tos togeth­er to make one long book that fold­ed out to 27 feet. That project turned into his larg­er Streets of Los Ange­les series, which spanned decades.”

Miller, inspired by work he did on a 2017 short film called Ed Ruscha: Build­ings and Words, decid­ed to bring togeth­er two of Ruscha’s long­stand­ing inspi­ra­tions: the city of L.A. and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which Ker­ouac sup­pos­ed­ly wrote as a con­tin­u­ous 120-foot long scroll—a for­mat, Miller noticed, much like Every Build­ing on the Sun­set Strip. (Ruscha made his own artist’s book ver­sion of On the Road in 2009). Miller and edi­tor Sean Leonard cut Ruscha’s pho­tographs togeth­er in the mon­tage you see above, com­mis­sioned by the Get­ty Muse­um, while Ruscha him­self read selec­tions from the Ker­ouac clas­sic.

The con­nec­tion between their style and their use of lan­guage feels real­ly strong, but at the end of the day, I sim­ply thought it’d be great to hear Ed Ruscha read On the Road. Some­thing about Ed’s voice just feels right. Some­thing about his work just feels right. It’s like the images, the words, and the forms he makes were always meant to be togeth­er.”

Miller describes the painstak­ing process of select­ing the pho­tos and “con­struct­ing a mini nar­ra­tive that evoked Ed’s sen­si­bil­i­ties” at Vimeo. The artist’s “per­spec­tive seemed to speak to the sig­nage and archi­tec­ture of the city, while Kerouac’s voice felt like it was pulling in all the live­ly char­ac­ters of the street.” It’s easy to see why Ruscha would be so drawn to Ker­ouac. Both share a fas­ci­na­tion with ver­nac­u­lar Amer­i­can speech and icon­ic Amer­i­can sub­jects of adver­tis­ing, the auto­mo­bile, and the free­doms of the road.

But where Ruscha turns to words for their visu­al impact, Ker­ouac rel­ished them for their music. “For a while,” Miller writes of his project, “it felt like the footage want­ed one thing and the voiceover want­ed anoth­er.” But he and Leonard, who also did the sound design, were able to bring image and voice togeth­er in a short film that frames both artists as mid-cen­tu­ry vision­ar­ies who turned the ordi­nary and seem­ing­ly unre­mark­able into an expe­ri­ence of the ecsta­t­ic.

173 works by Ruscha can be viewed on MoMA’s web­site.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Music from Jack Kerouac’s Clas­sic Beat Nov­el On the Road: Stream Tracks by Miles Davis, Dex­ter Gor­don & Oth­er Jazz Leg­ends

Roy Licht­en­stein and Andy Warhol Demys­ti­fy Their Pop Art in Vin­tage 1966 Film

A Brief His­to­ry of John Baldessari, Nar­rat­ed by Tom Waits

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

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Why You Should Read Dune: An Animated Introduction to Frank Herbert’s Ecological, Psychological Sci-Fi Epic

in Animation, Books, Literature, Sci Fi | December 30th, 2019

A vision of human­i­ty’s future with­out most of the high tech­nol­o­gy we expect from sci­ence fic­tion, but with a sur­feit of reli­gions, mar­tial arts, and medieval pol­i­tics we don’t; pro­nun­ci­a­tion-unfriend­ly names and terms like “Bene Gesser­it,” “Kwisatz Hader­ach,” and “Muad’Dib”; a sand plan­et inhab­it­ed by giant killer worms: near­ly 55 years after its pub­li­ca­tion, Dune remains a strange piece of work. But apply­ing that adjec­tive to Frank Her­bert’s high­ly suc­cess­ful saga of inter­stel­lar adven­ture and intrigue high­lights not just the ways in which its intri­cate­ly devel­oped world is unfa­mil­iar to us, but the ways in which it is famil­iar — and has grown ever more so over the decades.

“Fol­low­ing an ancient war with robots, human­i­ty has for­bid­den the con­struc­tion of any machine in the like­ness of a human mind,” says Dan Kwartler in the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed intro­duc­tion to the world of Dune above. This edict “forced humans to evolve in star­tling ways, becom­ing bio­log­i­cal com­put­ers, psy­chic witch­es, and pre­scient space pilots,” many of them “reg­u­lar­ly employed by var­i­ous noble hous­es, all com­pet­ing for pow­er and new plan­ets to add to their king­doms.” But their super­hu­man skills “rely on the same pre­cious resource: the spice,” a mys­ti­cal crop that also pow­ers space trav­el, “mak­ing it the cor­ner­stone of the galac­tic econ­o­my.”

Her­bert sets Dune — the first of five books by him and many suc­ces­sors by his son Bri­an Her­bert and Kevin J. Ander­son — on the desert plan­et Arrakis, where the noble House Atrei­des finds itself relo­cat­ed. Before long, its young scion Paul Atrei­des “is cat­a­pult­ed into the mid­dle of a plan­e­tary rev­o­lu­tion where he must prove him­self capa­ble of lead­ing and sur­viv­ing on this hos­tile desert world.” Not that Arrakis is just some rock cov­ered in sand: an avid envi­ron­men­tal­ist, Her­bert “spent over five years cre­at­ing Dune’s com­plex ecosys­tem. The plan­et is check­ered with cli­mate belts and wind tun­nels that have shaped its rocky topog­ra­phy. Dif­fer­ing tem­per­ate zones pro­duce vary­ing desert flo­ra, and almost every ele­ment of Dune’s ecosys­tem works togeth­er to pro­duce the plan­et’s essen­tial export.”

Her­bert’s world-build­ing “also includes a rich web of phi­los­o­phy and reli­gion,” which involves ele­ments of Islam, Bud­dhism, Sufi mys­ti­cism, Chris­tian­i­ty, Judaism, and Hin­duism, all arranged in con­fig­u­ra­tions the likes of which human his­to­ry has nev­er seen. What Dune does with reli­gion it does even more with lan­guage, draw­ing for its vocab­u­lary from a range of tongues includ­ing Latin, Old Eng­lish, Hebrew, Greek, Finnish, and Nahu­atl. All this serves a sto­ry deal­ing with themes both eter­nal, like the decline of empire and the mis­placed trust in hero­ic lead­ers, and increas­ing­ly top­i­cal, like the con­se­quences of a feu­dal order, eco­log­i­cal change, and wars over resources in inhos­pitable, sandy places. At the cen­ter is the sto­ry of a man strug­gling to attain mas­tery of not just body but mind, not least by defeat­ing fear, described in Paul’s famous line as the “mind-killer,” the “lit­tle-death that brings total oblit­er­a­tion.”

The scope, com­plex­i­ty, and sheer odd­i­ty of Her­bert’s vision has repeat­ed­ly tempt­ed film­mak­ers and the film indus­try — and repeat­ed­ly defeat­ed them. Per­haps unsur­pris­ing­ly Alexan­der Jodor­owsky could­n’t get his plans off the ground for a 14-hour epic Dune involv­ing Pink Floyd, Sal­vador Dalí, Moe­bius, Orson Welles, and Mick Jag­ger. In 1984 David Lynch man­aged to direct a some­what less ambi­tious adap­ta­tion, but the nev­er­the­less enor­mous­ly com­plex and expen­sive pro­duc­tion came out as what David Fos­ter Wal­lace described as “a huge, pre­ten­tious, inco­her­ent flop.” Dune will return to the­aters in Decem­ber 2020 in a ver­sion direct­ed by Denis Vil­leneuve, whose recent work on the likes of Arrival and Blade Run­ner 2049 sug­gests on his part not just the nec­es­sary inter­est in sci­ence fic­tion, but the even more nec­es­sary sense of the sub­lime: a grandeur and beau­ty of such a scale and stark­ness as to inspire fear, much as every Dune read­er has felt on their own imag­ined Arrakis.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 14-Hour Epic Film, Dune, That Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky, Pink Floyd, Sal­vador Dalí, Moe­bius, Orson Welles & Mick Jag­ger Nev­er Made

Moe­bius’ Sto­ry­boards & Con­cept Art for Jodorowsky’s Dune

The Dune Col­or­ing & Activ­i­ty Books: When David Lynch’s 1984 Film Cre­at­ed Count­less Hours of Pecu­liar Fun for Kids

Why You Should Read The Mas­ter and Mar­gari­ta: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Bulgakov’s Rol­lick­ing Sovi­et Satire

Why You Should Read One Hun­dred Years of Soli­tude: An Ani­mat­ed Video Makes the Case

Why You Should Read Crime and Pun­ish­ment: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Dostoevsky’s Moral Thriller

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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Hear Neil Gaiman Read A Christmas Carol Just as Dickens Read It

in Audio Books, History, Literature | December 25th, 2019

gaiman dickens

Image by New York Pub­lic Library

Last Christ­mas, we fea­tured Charles Dick­ens’ hand-edit­ed copy of his beloved 1843 novel­la A Christ­mas Car­ol. He did that hand edit­ing for the pur­pos­es of giv­ing pub­lic read­ings, a prac­tice that, in his time, “was con­sid­ered a des­e­cra­tion of one’s art and a low­er­ing of one’s dig­ni­ty.” That time, how­ev­er, has gone, and many of the most pres­ti­gious writ­ers alive today take the read­ing aloud of their own work to the lev­el of art, or at least high enter­tain­ment, that Dick­ens must have sus­pect­ed one could. Some writ­ers even do a bang-up job of read­ing oth­er writ­ers’ work: mod­ern mas­ter sto­ry­teller Neil Gaiman gave us a dose of that on Mon­day when we fea­tured his recita­tion of Lewis Car­rol­l’s “Jab­ber­wocky” from mem­o­ry. Today, how­ev­er, comes the full meal: Gaiman’s telling of A Christ­mas Car­ol straight from that very Dick­ens-edit­ed read­ing copy.

Gaiman read to a full house at the New York Pub­lic Library, an insti­tu­tion known for its stim­u­lat­ing events, hol­i­day-themed or oth­er­wise. But he did­n’t have to hold up the after­noon him­self; tak­ing the stage before him, BBC researcher and The Secret Muse­um author Mol­ly Old­field talked about her two years spent seek­ing out fas­ci­nat­ing cul­tur­al arti­facts the world over, includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to the NYPL’s own col­lec­tion of things Dick­en­sian. You can hear both Old­field and Gaiman in the record­ing above. But per­haps the great­est gift of all came in the form of the lat­ter’s attire for his read­ing: not only did he go ful­ly Vic­to­ri­an, he even went to the length of repli­cat­ing the 19th-cen­tu­ry lit­er­ary super­star’s own severe hair part and long goa­tee. And School Library Jour­nal has pic­tures.

The sto­ry real­ly gets start­ed around the 11:25 mark. Gaiman’s read­ing will be added to our list of Free Audio Books. You can find the text of Dick­ens’ clas­sic in our col­lec­tion, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Neil Gaiman Teach­es the Art of Sto­ry­telling in His New Online Course

Hear Neil Gaiman Read Aloud 15 of His Own Works, and Works by 6 Oth­er Great Writ­ers: From The Grave­yard Book & Cora­line, to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven & Dick­ens’ A Christ­mas Car­ol

A Christ­mas Car­ol Pre­sent­ed in a Thomas Edi­son Film (1910)

O Frab­jous Day! Neil Gaiman Recites Lewis Carroll’s “Jab­ber­wocky” from Mem­o­ry

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Why the University of Chicago Rejected Kurt Vonnegut’s Master’s Thesis (and How a Novel Got Him His Degree 27 Years Later)

in Literature, Writing | December 18th, 2019

vonnegut drawing

Image by Daniele Prati, via Flickr Com­mons

Kurt Von­negut has been gone a dozen years now, but in that time his stock in the world of Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture has only risen. Just a few months ago we fea­tured the new­ly opened Kurt Von­negut Muse­um and Library here on Open Cul­ture, and we’ve also post­ed about every­thing from his writ­ing tips to his let­ters to his draw­ings. And we’ve fea­tured his con­cep­tion of “the shape of all sto­ries” as orig­i­nal­ly laid out in his mas­ter’s the­sis at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go, where between 1945 and 1947 he per­formed anthro­po­log­i­cal research into the Native Amer­i­can-inspired Ghost Dance reli­gious move­ment of the late 19th cen­tu­ry. “The fun­da­men­tal idea,” wrote Von­negut, “is that sto­ries have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper, and that the shape of a giv­en society’s sto­ries is at least as inter­est­ing as the shape of its pots or spear­heads.”

None of this flew with the anthro­pol­o­gy depart­ment. In an essay in his book Palm Sun­day Von­negut explains the unan­i­mous rejec­tion of his the­sis, “The Fluc­tu­a­tions Between Good and Evil in Sim­ple Tasks,” due to the fact that “it was so sim­ple and looked like too much fun. One must not be too play­ful.” Opt­ing not to have a sec­ond go before the com­mit­tee, the still-young Von­negut — with his har­row­ing expe­ri­ence in the Sec­ond World War only a cou­ple of years behind him — decid­ed to take a job as a pub­li­cist at Gen­er­al Elec­tric instead. In 1950, while still employed at GE, he would first pub­lish a piece of fic­tion: “Report on the Barn­house Effect” in Col­lier’s mag­a­zine. “Years lat­er,” says the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go Chron­i­cle’s obit­u­ary for Von­negut, “the uni­ver­si­ty accept­ed Cat’s Cra­dle as Vonnegut’s the­sis, award­ing him an A.M. in 1971.”

“This was not an hon­orary degree but an earned one,” said Von­negut in a 1973 inter­view, “giv­en on the basis of what the fac­ul­ty com­mit­tee called the anthro­po­log­i­cal val­ue of my nov­els. I snapped it up most cheer­ful­ly and I con­tin­ue to have noth­ing but friend­ly feel­ings for the Uni­ver­si­ty.” Indeed, Von­negut called his time as a Phoenix “the most stim­u­lat­ing years of my life.” Gen­er­a­tions of read­ers have found in Von­negut’s work — not just Cat’s Cra­dle, the one that final­ly got him his aca­d­e­m­ic cre­den­tials, but oth­er nov­els like Moth­er Night, Break­fast of Cham­pi­ons, and of course Slaugh­ter­house-Five as well — some of the most stim­u­lat­ing writ­ing to come out of post­war Amer­i­ca. And yet Von­negut, as he writes in Palm Sun­day, con­tin­ued to regard his first mas­ter’s the­sis as “my pret­ti­est con­tri­bu­tion to my cul­ture.” The more suc­cess­ful the cre­ator, it can often seem, the more dear he holds his fail­ures.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kurt Von­negut Dia­grams the Shape of All Sto­ries in a Master’s The­sis Reject­ed by U. Chica­go

Kurt Vonnegut’s Term Paper Assign­ment from the Iowa Writ­ers’ Work­shop Teach­es You to Read Fic­tion Like a Writer

Kurt Von­negut: Where Do I Get My Ideas From? My Dis­gust with Civ­i­liza­tion

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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Discover the Stendhal Syndrome: The Condition Where People Faint, or Feel Totally Overwhelmed, in the Presence of Great Art

in Art, History, Literature, Psychology, Travel | December 17th, 2019

Clutch imag­i­nary pearls, rest the back of your hand on your fore­head, look wan and strick­en, begin to wilt, and most peo­ple will rec­og­nize the symp­toms of your sar­casm, aimed at some pejo­ra­tive­ly fem­i­nized qual­i­ties we’ve seen char­ac­ters embody in movies. The “lit­er­ary swoon” as Iaian Bam­forth writes at the British Jour­nal of Gen­er­al Prac­tice, dates back much fur­ther than film, to the ear­ly years of the mod­ern nov­el itself, and it was once a male domain.

“Some­where around the time of the French Rev­o­lu­tion (or per­haps a lit­tle before it) feel­ings were let loose on the world.” Ratio­nal­ism went out vogue and pas­sion was in—lots of it, though not all at once. It took some decades before the dis­cov­ery of emo­tion reached the cli­max of Roman­ti­cism and denoue­ment of Vic­to­ri­an sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty:

Back in 1761, read­ers had swooned when they encoun­tered the ‘true voice of feel­ing’ in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s nov­el La Nou­velle Héloïse; by the end of the decade, all of Europe was being sen­ti­men­tal in the man­ner made fash­ion­able a few years lat­er by Lau­rence Sterne in his A Sen­ti­men­tal Jour­ney. Then there was Goethe’s novel­la, The Sor­rows of Young Werther (1774), which made its author a celebri­ty.

It’s impos­si­ble to over­state how pop­u­lar Goethe’s book became among the aris­to­crat­ic young men of Europe. Napoleon “reput­ed­ly car­ried a copy of the nov­el with him on his mil­i­tary cam­paign.” Its swoon­ing hero, whom we might be tempt­ed to diag­nose with any num­ber of per­son­al­i­ty and mood dis­or­ders, devel­ops a dis­turb­ing and debil­i­tat­ing obses­sion with an engaged woman and final­ly com­mits sui­cide. The nov­el sup­pos­ed­ly inspired many copy­cats and “the media’s first moral pan­ic.”

If we can feel such exal­ta­tion, dis­qui­et, and fear when in the grip of roman­tic pas­sion, or when faced with nature’s implaca­ble behe­moths, as in Kan­t’s Sub­lime, so too may we be over­come by art. Napoleon­ic nov­el­ist Stend­hal sug­gest­ed as much in a dra­mat­ic account of such an expe­ri­ence. Stend­hal, the pen name of Marie-Hen­ri Beyle, was no inex­pe­ri­enced dream­er. He had trav­eled and fought exten­sive­ly with the Grand Army (includ­ing that fate­ful march through Rus­sia, and back) and had held sev­er­al gov­ern­ment offices abroad. His real­ist fic­tion didn’t always com­port with the more lyri­cal tenor of the times.

Pho­to of the Basil­i­ca of San­ta Croce by Diana Ringo, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

But he was also of the gen­er­a­tion of young men who read Werther while tour­ing Europe, con­tem­plat­ing the vari­eties of emo­tion. He had held a sim­i­lar­ly unre­quit­ed obses­sion for an unavail­able woman, and once wrote that “in Italy… peo­ple are still dri­ven to despair by love.” Dur­ing a vis­it to the Basil­i­ca of San­ta Croce in 1817, he “found a monk to let him into the chapel,” writes Bam­forth, “where he could sit on a gen­u­flect­ing stool, tilt his head back and take in the prospect of Volterrano’s fres­co of the Sibyls with­out inter­rup­tion.” As Stend­hal described the scene:

I was already in a kind of ecsta­sy by the idea of being in Flo­rence, and the prox­im­i­ty of the great men whose tombs I had just seen. Absorbed in con­tem­plat­ing sub­lime beau­ty, I saw it close-up—I touched it, so to speak. I had reached that point of emo­tion where the heav­en­ly sen­sa­tions of the fine arts meet pas­sion­ate feel­ing. As I emerged from San­ta Croce, I had pal­pi­ta­tions (what they call an attack of the nerves in Berlin); the life went out of me, and I walked in fear of falling.

With the record­ing of this expe­ri­ence, Stend­hal “brought the lit­er­ary swoon into tourism,” Bam­forth remarks. Such pas­sages became far more com­mon­place in trav­el­ogues, not least those involv­ing the city of Flo­rence. So many cas­es sim­i­lar to Stend­hal’s have been report­ed in the city that the con­di­tion acquired the name Stend­hal syn­drome in the late sev­en­ties from Dr. Gra­ziel­la Magheri­ni, chief of psy­chi­a­try at the San­ta Maria Nuo­va Hos­pi­tal. It presents as an acute state of exhil­a­rat­ed anx­i­ety that caus­es peo­ple to feel faint, or to col­lapse, in the pres­ence of art.

Magheri­ni and her assis­tants com­piled stud­ies of 107 dif­fer­ent cas­es in 1989. Since then, San­ta Maria Nuo­va has con­tin­ued to treat tourists for the syn­drome with some reg­u­lar­i­ty. “Dr. Magheri­ni insists,” writes The New York Times, that “cer­tain men and women are sus­cep­ti­ble to swoon­ing in the pres­ence of great art, espe­cial­ly when far from home.” Stend­hal didn’t invent the phe­nom­e­non, of course. And it need not be sole­ly caused by suf­fer­ers’ love of the 15th cen­tu­ry.

The stress­es of trav­el can some­times be enough to make any­one faint, though fur­ther research may rule out oth­er fac­tors. The effect, how­ev­er, does not seem to occur with near­ly as much fre­quen­cy in oth­er major cities with oth­er major cul­tur­al trea­sures. “It is sure­ly the sheer con­cen­tra­tion of great art in Flo­rence that caus­es such issues,” claims Jonathan Jones at The Guardian. Try­ing to take it all in while nav­i­gat­ing unfa­mil­iar streets and crowds.… “More cyn­i­cal­ly, some might say the long queues do add a lay­er of stress on the heart.”

There’s also no dis­count­ing the effect of expec­ta­tion. “It is among reli­gious trav­el­ers that Stendhal’s syn­drome seems to have found its most florid expres­sion,” notes Bam­forth. Stend­hal admit­ted that his “ecsta­sy” began with an aware­ness of his “prox­im­i­ty of the great men whose tombs I had just seen.” With­out his pri­or edu­ca­tion, the effect might have dis­ap­peared entire­ly. The sto­ry of the Renais­sance, in his time and ours, has impressed upon us such a rev­er­ence for its artists, states­men, and engi­neers, that sen­si­tive vis­i­tors may feel they can hard­ly stand in the actu­al pres­ence of Flo­rence’s abun­dant trea­sures.

Per­haps Stend­hal syn­drome should be regard­ed as akin to a spir­i­tu­al expe­ri­ence. A study of reli­gious trav­el­ers to Jerusalem found that “oth­er­wise nor­mal patients tend­ed to have ‘an ide­al­is­tic sub­con­scious image of Jerusalem’” before they suc­cumbed to Stend­hal syn­drome. Carl Jung described his own such feel­ings about Pom­peii and Rome, which he could nev­er bring him­self to vis­it because he lived in such awe of its his­tor­i­cal aura. Those primed to have symp­toms tend also to have a sen­ti­men­tal nature, a word that once meant great depth of feel­ing rather than a cal­low or mawk­ish nature.

We might all expect great art to over­whelm us, but Stend­hal syn­drome is rare and rar­i­fied. The expe­ri­ence of many more trav­el­ers accords with Mark Twain’s 1869 The Inno­cents Abroad, or The New Pilgrim’s Progress, a fic­tion­al­ized mem­oir “lam­poon­ing the grandiose trav­el accounts of his con­tem­po­raries,” notes Bam­forth. It became “one of the best-sell­ing trav­el books ever” and gave its author’s name to what one researcher calls Mark Twain Malaise, “a cyn­i­cal mood which over­comes trav­el­ers and leaves them total­ly unim­pressed with any­thing UNESCO has on its uni­ver­sal her­itage list.” Sen­ti­men­tal­ists might wish these weary tourists would stay home and let them swoon in peace.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Your Brain on Art: The Emerg­ing Sci­ence of Neu­roaes­thet­ics Probes What Art Does to Our Brains

1.8 Mil­lion Free Works of Art from World-Class Muse­ums: A Meta List of Great Art Avail­able Online

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Puts 400,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

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

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“Don’t Try”: The Philosophy of the Hardworking Charles Bukowski

in Creativity, Life, Literature | December 13th, 2019

If Charles Bukows­ki were alive today, what would you ask him? Best to avoid the stan­dard ques­tions put to writ­ers about how or why they chose to become writ­ers — not just because Bukows­ki would sure­ly respond with a few col­or­ful­ly choice words of dis­missal, but because he embod­ied the lack of choice that char­ac­ter­izes the life of every seri­ous cre­ator. Accord­ing to the Pur­suit of Won­der video essay above, Bukows­ki dropped out of col­lege halfway through in order to write. After a peri­od spent “bounc­ing around the Unit­ed States, doing short-term blue-col­lar jobs while writ­ing hun­dred of short sto­ries,” none of which broke him into the lit­er­ary big time, came a high­ly unpro­duc­tive peri­od of blue-col­lar jobs with­out the accom­pa­ny­ing writ­ing.

At the end of a writ­ing-free decade, Bukows­ki “near­ly died from a seri­ous bleed­ing ulcer.” This got him back on track, as brush­es with mor­tal­i­ty tend to do: he sub­se­quent­ly quit his job at the post office and returned to writ­ing full-time. It was only a few years before he went back to work at the post office, but this time he kept writ­ing, putting in the real work at the type­writer before each shift at the day job. He did so with­out the prospect of suc­cess any­where in the off­ing, at least not before he reached mid­dle age. “It took Bukows­ki years and years of writ­ing and toil­ing and try­ing to final­ly have cir­cum­stances work out in his favor so he could gain trac­tion and find suc­cess as a writer,” says the video’s nar­ra­tor. And yet, as we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly not­ed here at Open Cul­ture, into Bukowski’s grave­stone are chis­eled these words: “Don’t try.”

“How could a man who became suc­cess­ful in ful­fill­ing his idea of him­self — a man who, although it took a while, found immense respect and recog­ni­tion for his craft, all because of his relent­less try­ing — how could this man leave the words don’t try as his final offer­ing?” We might inter­pret them in light of a let­ter from Bukows­ki to a friend, the writer and pub­lish­er William Packard. “Too many writ­ers write for the wrong rea­sons,” declared Bukows­ki. “They want to get famous or they want to get rich or they want to get laid by the girls with the blue­bells in their hair… When every­thing goes best, it’s not because you chose writ­ing, but because writ­ing chose you.” Bukows­ki did­n’t decide to be a writer; nobody actu­al­ly ded­i­cat­ed to a pur­suit ever had to decide which pur­suit it would be.

“We work too hard. We try too hard,” Bukows­ki writes to Packard. “Don’t try. Don’t work. It’s there. Look­ing right at us, aching to kick out of the closed womb.” He may have meant, as the video’s nar­ra­tor puts it, that “if you have to try to try, if you have to try to care about some­thing or have to try to want some­thing, per­haps you don’t care about it, and per­haps you don’t want it.” And “if the thought of not doing the thing hurts more than the thought of poten­tial­ly suf­fer­ing through the process, if the thought of a life with­out it or nev­er hav­ing tried it at all ter­ri­fies you, if it comes to you, through you, out of you, almost as if you’re not try­ing, per­haps Bukows­ki might say here, try, and ‘if you’re going to try, go all the way.’ ” That quote comes from Bukowski’s nov­el Fac­to­tum — the sto­ry of a writer in search of blue-col­lar work that won’t get in the way of his one true craft — and we might do well to take it one sen­tence fur­ther: “Oth­er­wise, don’t even start.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“Don’t Try”: Charles Bukowski’s Con­cise Phi­los­o­phy of Art and Life

Inspi­ra­tion from Charles Bukows­ki: You Might Be Old, Your Life May Be “Crap­py,” But You Can Still Make Good Art

Charles Bukows­ki Explains What Good Writ­ing and the Good Life Have in Com­mon

Is Charles Bukows­ki a Self-Help Guru? Hear Five of His Bru­tal­ly Hon­est, Yet Odd­ly Inspir­ing, Poems and Decide for Your­self

Charles Bukows­ki Explains How to Beat Depres­sion: Spend 3–4 Days in Bed and You’ll Get the Juices Flow­ing Again (NSFW)

Charles Bukows­ki Reads His Poem “The Secret of My Endurance” 

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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