The Getty Makes Nearly 88,000 Art Images Free to Use However You Like

in Archives, Museums | March 8th, 2024

Since the J. Paul Getty Museum launched its Open Content program back in 2013, we’ve been featuring their efforts to make their vast collection of cultural artifacts freely accessible online. They’ve released not just digitized works of art, but also a great many art history texts and art books in general. Just this week, they announced an expansion of access to their digital archive, in that they’ve made nearly 88,000 images free to download on their Open Content database under Creative Commons Zero (CC0). That means “you can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.”

The Getty suggests that you “add a print of your favorite Dutch still life to your gallery wall or create a shower curtain using the Irises by Van Gogh.” But if you search the open content in their archive yourself, you can surely get much more creative than that.

The portal’s interface lets you search by creation date (with a timeline graph stretching back to the year 6000 BC), medium (from agate and alabaster to woodcut and zinc), object type (including paintings, photographs, and sculptures, of course, but also akroteria, horse trappings, and tweezers), and culture. The selection reflects the wide mandate of the Getty’s collection, which encompasses as many of the civilizations of the world as it does the eras of human history.

In the Getty’s open-content archive, you’ll find ancient sculpture from Greece, Rome and many other parts of the world besides; a fragmentary oinochoe (that is, a wine jug) from third-century-BC Ptolemaic Egypt; lavishly illuminated medieval books of hours (of the kind previously featured here on Open Culture); works by such innovative French painters as Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas; the stereoscopic photography of Carleton H. Graves, who in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century captured places from Denmark and Palestine, to Japan and Korea; the daring abstractions of artists like Hannes Maria Flach, Jaromír Funke, and Francis Bruguière. But what you do with them is, of course, entirely up to you. Enter the collection here.

A Search Engine for Finding Free, Public Domain Images from World-Class Museums

100,000 Free Art History Texts Now Available Online Thanks to the Getty Research Portal

Download Great Works of Art from 40+ Museums Worldwide: Explore Artvee, the New Art Search Engine

The Smithsonian Puts 4.5 Million High-Res Images Online and Into the Public Domain, Making Them Free to Use

Download Over 325 Free Art Books From the Getty Museum

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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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Behold Soviet Animations of Ray Bradbury Stories

in Animation, Film, Literature | March 7th, 2024

Sergei Bondarchuk directed an 8‑hour film adaptation of War and Peace (1966–67), which ended up winning an Oscar for Best Foreign Picture. When he was in Los Angeles as a guest of honor at a party, Hollywood royalty like John Wayne, John Ford, and Billy Wilder lined up to meet the Russian filmmaker. But the only person that Bondarchuk was truly excited to meet was Ray Bradbury. Bondarchuk introduced the author to the crowd of bemused A‑listers as “your greatest genius, your greatest writer!”

Ray Bradbury spent a lifetime crafting stories about robots, Martians, space travel and nuclear doom and, in the process, turned the formerly disreputable genre of Sci-Fi/Fantasy into something respectable. He influenced legions of writers and filmmakers on both sides of the Atlantic from Stephen King to Neil Gaiman to Francois Truffaut, who adapted his most famous novel, Fahrenheit 451, into a movie.

That film wasn’t the only adaptation of Bradbury’s work, of course. His writings have been turned into feature films, TV movies, radio shows and even a video game for the Commodore 64. During the waning days of the Cold War, a handful of Soviet animators demonstrated their esteem for the author by adapting his short stories.

Vladimir Samsonov directed Bradbury’s Here There Be Tygers, which you can see above. A spaceship lands on an Eden-like planet. The humans inside are on a mission to extract all the natural resources possible from the planet, but they quickly realize that this isn’t your ordinary rock. “This planet is alive,” declares one of the characters. Indeed, not only is it alive but it also has the ability to grant wishes. Want to fly? Fine. Want to make streams flow with wine? Sure. Want to summon a nubile maiden from the earth? No problem. Everyone seems enchanted by the planet except one dark-hearted jerk who seems hell-bent on completing the mission.

Samsonov’s movie is stylized, spooky and rather beautiful – a bit like as if Andrei Tarkovsky had directed Avatar.

Another one of Bradbury’s shorts, There Will Come Soft Rain, has been adapted by Uzbek director Nazim Tyuhladziev (also spelled Nozim To’laho’jayev). The story is about an automated house that continues to cook and clean for a family of four unaware that they all perished in a nuclear explosion. While Bradbury’s version works as a comment on both American consumerism and general Cold War dread, Tyuhladziev’s version goes for a more religious tact. The robot that runs the house looks like a mechanical snake (Garden of Eden, anyone?). The robot and the house become undone by an errant white dove. The animation might not have the polish of a Disney movie, but it is surprisingly creepy and poignant.

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

Enjoy 15+ Hours of the Weird and Wonderful World of Post Soviet Russian Animation

Watch Dziga Vertov’s Unsettling Soviet Toys: The First Soviet Animated Movie Ever (1924)

Watch the Surrealist Glass Harmonica, the Only Animated Film Ever Banned by Soviet Censors (1968)

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

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How Humanity Got Hooked on Coffee: An Animated History

in Food & Drink, History | March 7th, 2024

Few of us grow up drinking coffee, but once we start drinking it, even fewer of us ever stop. According to legend, the earliest such case was a ninth-century Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi, who noticed how much energy his ruminant charges seemed to draw from eating particular red berries. After chewing a few of them himself, he experienced the first caffeine buzz in human history. Despite almost certainly never having existed, Kaldi now lends his name to a variety of coffee shops around the world, everywhere from Addis Ababa to Seoul, where I live.

His story also opens the animated TED-Ed video above, “How Humanity Got Hooked on Coffee.” We do know, explains its narrator, that “at some point before the fourteen-hundreds, in what’s now Ethiopia, people began foraging for wild coffee in the forest undergrowth.” Early on, people consumed coffee plants by drinking tea made with their leaves, eating their berries with butter and salt, and — in what proved to be the most enduring method — “drying, roasting, and simmering its cherries into an energizing elixir.” Over the years, demand for this elixir spread throughout the Ottoman Empire, and in the fullness of time made its way outward to both Asia and Europe.

In no European city did coffee catch on as aggressively as it did in London, whose coffee houses proliferated in the mid-seventeenth-century and became “social and intellectual hotbeds.” Later, “Paris’ coffee houses hosted Enlightenment figures like Diderot and Voltaire, who allegedly drank 50 cups of coffee a day.” (In fairness, it was a lot weaker back then.) Producing and transporting the ever-increasing amounts of coffee imbibed in these and other centers of human civilization required world-spanning imperial operations, which were commanded with just the degree of caution and sensitivity one might imagine.

The world’s first commercial espresso machine was showcased in Milan in 1906, a signal moment in the industrialization and mechanization of the coffee experience. By the mid-nineteen-fifties, “about 60 percent of U.S. factories incorporated coffee breaks.” More recent trends have emphasized “specialty coffees with an emphasis on quality beans and brewing methods,” as well as certification for coffee production using “minimum wage and sustainable farming.” Whatever our considerations when buying coffee, many of us have made it an irreplaceable element of our rituals both personal and professional. Not to say what we’re addicted: this is the 3,170th Open Culture post I’ve written, but only the 3,150th or so that I’ve written while drinking coffee.

The Birth of Espresso: The Story Behind the Coffee Shots That Fuel Modern Life

How Caffeine Fueled the Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution & the Modern World: An Introduction by Michael Pollan

The Curious Story of London’s First Coffeehouses (1650–1675)

Black Coffee: Documentary Covers the History, Politics & Economics of the “Most Widely Taken Legal Drug”

“The Virtues of Coffee” Explained in 1690 Ad: The Cure for Lethargy, Scurvy, Dropsy, Gout & More

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Frank Herbert Explains the Origins of Dune (1969)

in Books, Literature, Sci Fi | March 6th, 2024

Dune: Part Two has been playing in theaters for less than a week, but that’s more than enough time for its viewers to joke about the aptness of its title. For while it comes, of course, as the second half of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s influential sci-fi novel, it also contains a great many heaps of sand. Such visuals honor not just the story’s setting, but also the form of Herbert’s inspiration to write Dune and its sequels in the first place. The idea for the whole saga came about, he says in the 1969 interview above, because he’d wanted to write an article “about the control of sand dunes.”

“I’m always fascinated by the idea of something that is either seen in miniature and that can be expanded to the macrocosm or which, but for the difference in time, in the flow rate, and the entropy rate, is similar to other features which we wouldn’t think were similar,” he goes on to explain. When viewed the right way, sand dunes turn out to behave “like waves in a large body of water; they just are slower. And the people treating them as fluid learn to control them.” After enough research on this subject, “I had something enormously interesting going for me about the ecology of deserts, and it was — for a science fiction writer, anyway — it was an easy step from that to think: What if I had an entire planet that was a desert?”

That may have turned out to be one of the defining ideas of Dune, but there are plenty of others in there with it. “We all know that many religions began in a desert atmosphere,” Herbert says, “so I decided to put the two together because I don’t think that any one story should have any one thread. I build on a layer technique, and of course putting in religion and religious ideas you can play one against the other.” And “of course, in studying sand dunes, you immediately get into not just the Arabian mystique but the Navajo mystique and the mystique of the Kalahari primitives and all.” From his technical curiosity about sand, the story’s host of ecological, religious, linguistic, political, and indeed civilizational themes emerged.

Conducted in Herbert’s Fairfax, California home in 1969 by literature professor and science-fiction enthusiast Willis E. McNelly (who would later compile The Dune Encyclopedia), the interview goes down a number of intellectual byways that will be fascinating to curious fans. In its eighty minutes, Herbert reflects on everything from corporations to hippies, the tarot to Zen, and Lawrence of Arabia to John F. Kennedy. The late president’s then-just-beginning sanctification in America gets him talking about one of Dune’s threads in particular, about the “way a messiah is created in our society.” The elevation of a messiah is an act of myth-making, after all, and “man must recognize the myth he is living in.”

The Dune Graphic Novel: Experience Frank Herbert’s Epic Sci-fi Saga as You’ve Never Seen It Before

The Dune Encyclopedia: The Controversial, Definitive Guide to the World of Frank Herbert’s Sci-Fi Masterpiece (1984)

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

The Dune Franchise Tries Again — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #110

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Almost 500 Etchings by Rembrandt Now Free Online, Courtesy of the Morgan Library & Museum

in Uncategorized | March 6th, 2024

Seventeenth-century Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn may have more name recognition than nearly any other European artist, his popularity due in large part to what art historian Alison McQueen identifies in her book of the same name as “the rise of the cult of Rembrandt.” Popular Rembrandt veneration brought us in the 20th century such corporate appropriations of the painter’s legacy as Rembrandt toothpaste and money market firm Rembrandt Funds (particularly ironic, “given the notoriety of Rembrandt’s bankruptcy in 1656”). “In contemporary popular culture,” writes McQueen, “Rembrandt’s name has such resonance that the headline of an article in the New York Times Magazine in 1995 referred to the trendy barber Franky Avila as ‘the Rembrandt of Barbers.’”

By invoking Rembrandt’s name, the author knew his readers would understand that this connection implies that Avila’s skill with a razor equals that of Rembrandt’s with his paintbrush or etching needle… even if a reader has never actually seen any work by Rembrandt.

Indeed, though any person on the street will likely know the artist’s name, most would be hard-pressed to name any of his paintings, except perhaps his well-known self-portraits, which have adorned t‑shirts, posters, and iPhone cases. I might not have known much more about Rembrandt than those self-portraits either had I not lived in Washington, DC, where I had free access to many of his paintings at the National Gallery of Art. The Dutch master was astonishingly prolific, painting, drawing, and etching hundreds of portraits of himself and his patrons, as well as hundreds of still lifes, landscapes, scenes from mythology, and many, many Biblical subjects.

Nowadays, you can see Rembrandt’s paintings for free online, whether from the National Gallery of Art’s collection, that of the National Gallery in London, or of the Dutch Rijksmuseum. And for another side of his genius, you can now go to the site of New York’s Morgan Library and Museum, who have digitized “almost 500 images from the Morgan’s exceptional collection of Rembrandt etchings,” celebrating his “unsurpassed skill and inventiveness as a master storyteller.” There are, of course, plenty of self-portraits, like the 1630 “Self Portrait in a Cap, Open-Mouthed” at the top of the post, and there are portraits of others, like that of the artist’s mother, above, from 1633. There are religious scenes like the 1655 “Abraham’s Sacrifice” below, and landscapes like “The Three Trees,” further down, from 1643.

These are the four main categories that the Morgan uses to organize this impressive collection, but you’ll also find there more humble, domestic subjects, like the 1640 “Sleeping Puppy,” below. Writes Hyperallergic, “The Morgan holds in its collection most of the roughly 300 known etchings by Rembrandt, including rare, multiple versions (hence the discrepancy in number of etchings versus number of images.)” Like his highly accomplished paintings, Rembrandt’s etchings “are famous for their dramatic intensity, penetrating psychology, and touching humanity,” as well as, of course, for the extraordinary skill with which the artist made these works of art. Thanks to the “cult of Rembrandt,” we all know the artist’s name and reputation; now, thanks to digital collections from National Galleries, the Rijksmuseum, and now the Morgan, we can become experts in his work as well. Enter the Morgan collection of sketches here.

Note: Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

The Largest & Most Detailed Photograph of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch Is Now Online: Zoom In & See Every Brush Stroke

Two Tiny Rembrandt Paintings Have Been Rediscovered & Put On Display in Amsterdam

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

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 20 ) |

Hear Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Performed in Classical Latin

in Language, Music | March 5th, 2024

By the early nineteen-nineties, at least in the United States, Latin instruction in schools wasn’t what it had once been. Students everywhere had long been showing impatience and irreverence about their having to study that “dead language,” of course. But surely it had never felt quite so irrelevant as it did in a world of shopping malls, cable television, and the emerging internet. Thirty years ago, few students would have freely chosen to do their Latin homework when they could have been, say, listening to Nirvana. But now, in the age of Youtube, they can have both at once.

In the video above, the_miracle_aligner covers “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in a medieval (or “bardcore”) style, using not just period instrumentation but also a translation of its lyrics into Latin. Since its release a few years ago, this Colosseum-worthy version of the song that defined grunge has drawn thousands upon thousands of appreciative comments from enthusiasts of Nirvana and Latin alike.

As one of the latter points out, “most Latin words rhyme because of conjugation,” and when they don’t, the language’s unusual freedom of word order provides plenty of opportunity to make it work. Still, the song contains more than its share of truly inspired choices: another commenter calls it “just immaculate” how “the ‘hello, how low’ rhymes as ‘salvé, parve.’ ”

As tends to be the way with those of us here in the twenty-first century inclined to dig deep into a language like Latin, some take the opportunity to get into character: “I vividly remember the night Gaius Kurtus Cobainius the Elder premiered this song at the Amphitheater of Pompey in the Summer of 91AD. The plebs went nuts and were throwing Sesterti and Denari on the stage. I even saw a patrician woman lift her tunic! Oh how I miss those days.” In whatever language it’s sung, the instantly recognizable “Smells Like Teen Spirit” will send any Generation-Xers in earshot right back to the strenuous slacking of their own youth. And the cry “Oblectáte, nunc híc sumus” would have cut as sharply in the age of bread and circuses as it did in the MTV era — or, for that matter, as it does now.

How Nirvana’s Iconic “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Came to Be: An Animated Video Narrated by T‑Bone Burnett Tells the True Story

Hip 1960s Latin Teacher Translated Beatles Songs into Latin for His Students: Read Lyrics for “O Teneum Manum,” “Diei Duri Nox” & More

Nirvana’s “Come As You Are” Played By Musicians Around the World

The First Live Performance of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (1991)

What Ancient Latin Sounded Like, And How We Know It

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

The Decimal Point Is 150 Years Older Than We Thought, Emerging in Renaissance Italy

in History, Math | March 5th, 2024

Historians have long thought that the decimal point first came into use in 1593, when the German mathematician Christopher Clavius wrote an astronomy text called Astrolabium. It turns out, however, that the history of the decimal point stretches back another 150 years–to the work of the Venetian merchant Giovanni Bianchini. In his text Tabulae primi mobilis, written during the 1440s, Bianchini used the decimal point to calculate the coordinates of planets. In so doing, he invented a system of decimal fractions, which, in turn, made the calculations underpinning modern science more efficient and less complex, notes Scientific American.

Glen Van Brummelen, a historian of mathematics, recently recounted to NPR how he discovered Bianchini’s innovation:

I was working on the manuscript of this astronomer, Giovanni Bianchini. I saw the dots inside of a table — in a numerical table. And when he explained his calculations, it became clear that what he was doing was exactly the same thing as we do with the decimal point. And I’m afraid I got rather excited at that point. I grabbed my computer, ran up and down the dorm hallway looking for colleagues who still hadn’t gone to bed, saying, this person’s working with the decimal point in the 1440s. I think they probably thought I was crazy.

In a new article appearing in the journal Historia Mathematica, Van Brummelen explains the historical significance of the decimal point, and what this discovery means for the historical development of mathematics. You can read it online.

How the Ancient Greeks Shaped Modern Mathematics: A Short, Animated Introduction

The Map of Mathematics: An Animated Video Shows How All the Different Fields in Math Fit Together

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Puzzle of Docudramas — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #167

in Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | March 5th, 2024

When we’ve already heard about someone’s personal scandal in the news, do we need to also see it dramatized with A‑list actors? Your hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Lawrence Ware, Sarahlyn Bruck, and Al Baker discuss Todd Haynes’ 2023 film May December fictionalizing the long-aftermath of the much publicized Mary Kay Letourneau story.

The main events of May December are fictional (based on a story by screenwriter Samy Burch along with Alex Mechanik): An actress (Natalie Portman) researching her future role visits the renamed Letourneau (Julianne Moore) and her now-adult husband (Charles Melton), whom she seduced (molested) starting at age 12. So is this art film fundamentally unlike the other recent dramatizations that we touch on, including Joe vs. Carole, Inventing Anna, Dirty John, The Act, The Shrink Next Door, and The Thing About Pam? We also talk about Reality. as an example of films depicting how horrible it is to be arrested.

Note that while Amanda Knox’s story was made into a TV movie, the prestige TV drama version is still in process. Her podcast is called Labyrinths.

One of the articles we reviewed about May December is this one from Vox.

Follow us @law_writes, @sarahlynbruck, @ixisnox, @MarkLinsenmayer.

Hear more Pretty Much Pop, including recent episodes that you haven’t seen on this site. Support the show and hear bonus talking for this and nearly every other episode at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by choosing a paid subscription through Apple Podcasts.

This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network.

Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts.

by Mark Linsenmayer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Most Beautiful Shots in Cinema History: Scenes from 100+ Films

in Film | March 4th, 2024

If you’re an even mildly enthusiastic filmgoer, these two short compilations from The Solomon Society will get your life flashing before your eyes. They transport me to my ninth birthday screening of The Nightmare Before Christmas; my VHS viewings of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off at home sick from school; the obsession with Blade Runner that put me on the road to cinephilia; the thrill I got in high school from aesthetically daring yet cineplex-screened major motion pictures like Fight Club and The Cell; my induction into auteur cinema through Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, 2001: A Space Odyssey (seen at Seattle’s space-age Cinerama in the actual year of 2001), A Clockwork Orange, and The Shining; the surprise public debut Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master — which happened to follow a revival screening of The Shining.

Of course, you’ll experience a flood of different movie-related memories than I did. Maybe these videos will bring back the exhilaration of seeing Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, or even Reservoir Dogs, back in the nineties. The story of my own cinephile life could hardly be told without reference to early Wes Anderson pictures like Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums.

But perhaps you’ve felt more of an impact from the later, even more visually intricate work of his that appears here, like The Darjeeling Limited or The Grand Budapest Hotel. Or you could be a movie-lover of a different stripe altogether, for whom nothing satisfies quite like a classic blockbuster, be it the original Star Wars or a long-acclaimed drama like The Shawshank Redemption.

The second of these videos begins with a clip of an interview with no less an auteur than Orson Welles. Asked where he got the confidence to make Citizen Kane, he replies, “Ignorance. Sheer ignorance. There is no confidence to equal it. I thought you could do anything with a camera that the eye could do or the imagination could do. And I didn’t know that there were things you couldn’t do, so anything I could think up in my dreams, I attempted to photograph.” It’s safe to say that none of the dozens upon dozens of shots collected here could have been captured by filmmakers overly conscious of the impossible. But however striking they look individually, they’re all even more powerful in their proper context: their context within not just the film, but also the life of the beholder.

The Cinematography That Changed Cinema: Exploring Akira Kurosawa, Stanley Kubrick, Peter Greenaway & Other Auteurs

How Famous Paintings Inspired Cinematic Shots in the Films of Tarantino, Gilliam, Hitchcock & More: A Big Supercut

Signature Shots from the Films of Stanley Kubrick: One-Point Perspective

The Greatest Cut in Film History: Watch the “Match Cut” Immortalized by Lawrence of Arabia

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 10 ) |

Keith Richards Performs “I’m Waiting For The Man”: A New Tribute to Lou Reed

in Life, Music | March 4th, 2024

“To me, Lou stood out. The real deal! Something important to American music and to ALL MUSIC! I miss him and his dog.” — Keith Richards

On what would have been Lou Reed’s 82nd birthday (March 2), Keith Richards released a cover of “I’m Waiting for the Man,” a track originally written by Reed in 1966, then recorded by the Velvet Underground the next year. Previously covered by David Bowie, OMD, and French singer Vanessa Paradis, the song makes sense in Keith Richards’ hands. As one YouTuber put it, “Seeing Keith perform this Velvet Underground classic is watching him take a victory lap over his addiction. He’s been away from that life for decades and now he’s telling the story about someone else, even though he lived it for a long time. This is a triumph for him.”

Richards’ cover will appear on the forthcoming album The Power of the Heart: A Tribute to Lou Reed, where songs move from Reed’s “groundbreaking years with the Velvets into his majestic solo career.” Contributors include Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Rufus Wainwright, Lucinda Williams, Rickie Lee Jones, Bobby Rush, and Rosanne Cash. The album will be released on Record Store Day (April 20th). Get more deets here.

Below, as a bonus, watch Reed and Bowie perform “I’m Waiting for the Man” together, apparently at Reed’s 50th birthday bash in 1997.

Keith Richards Shows Us How to Play the Blues, Inspired by Robert Johnson, on the Acoustic Guitar

Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson’s Three Rules for Living Well: A Short and Succinct Life Philosophy

Chuck Berry Takes Keith Richards to School, Shows Him How to Rock (1987)

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

How Jane Austen Changed Fiction Forever

in Books, Literature, Writing | March 1st, 2024

Though Jane Austen hasn’t published a novel since 1817 — with her death that same year being a reasonable excuse — her appeal as a literary brand remains practically unparalleled in its class. This century has offered its own film and television versions of all her major novels from Sense and Sensibility to Persuasion, and even minor ones like Sandition and Lady Susan. As for the looser adaptations and Austen-inspired works in other media, it would be difficult even to count them. But to understand why Austen endures, we must go back to Austen herself: to novels, that is, and to the entertainingly innovative manner in which she wrote them.

At the beginning of her very first book says Evan Puschak, Austen “did something that changed fiction forever.” Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, has in his latest video chosen Sense and Sensibility as an example with which to explain the key technique that set its author’s work apart. When, in the scene in question, the dying Henry Dashwood makes his son John promise to take care of his three half-sisters, the younger man inwardly resolves to himself to give them a thousand pounds each. “Yes, he would give them three thousand pounds,” Austen writes. “It would be liberal and handsome! It would be enough to make them completely easy. Three thousand pounds! He could spare so little a sum with a little inconvenience.”

What, exactly, is going on here? Before this passage, Puschak explains, “the narrator is describing the thoughts and feelings of John Dashwood.” But then, “something changes: it’s suddenly as if we’re inside John’s mind. And yet, the point of view doesn’t change: we’re still in the third person.” This is a notable early example of what’s called “free indirect style,” which literary critic D. A. Miller describes as a “technique of close writing that Austen more or less invented for the English novel.” When she employs it, “the narration’s way of saying is constantly both mimicking, and distancing itself from, the character’s way of seeing.”

In his book Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style, Miller pays a good deal of attention to the later Emma, with its “unprecedented prominence of free indirect style.” When, in Austen’s hand, that style “mimics Emma’s thoughts and feelings, it simultaneously inflects them into keener observations of its own; for our benefit, if never for hers, it identifies, ridicules, corrects all the secret vanities and self-deceptions of which Emma, pleased as Punch, remains comically unconscious. And this is generally what being a character in Austen means: to be slapped silly by a narration whose constant battering; however satisfying — or terrifying — to readers, its recipient is kept from even noticing.” Austen may have been a novelist of great technical proficiency and social acuity, but she also understood the eternal human pleasure of sharing a laugh at the delusional behind their back.

Related content:

An Animated Introduction to Jane Austen

Download the Major Works of Jane Austen as Free eBooks & Audio Books

15-Year-Old Jane Austen Writes a Satirical History Of England: Read the Handwritten Manuscript Online (1791)

This Is Your Brain on Jane Austen: The Neuroscience of Reading Great Literature

Jane Austen Writes a Letter to Her Sister While Hung Over: “I Believe I Drank Too Much Wine Last Night”

The Jane Austen Fiction Manuscript Archive Is Online: Explore Handwritten Drafts of Persuasion, The Watsons & More

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Getty Makes Nearly 88,000 Art Images Free to Use However You Like

Behold Soviet Animations of Ray Bradbury Stories

How Humanity Got Hooked on Coffee: An Animated History

Frank Herbert Explains the Origins of Dune (1969)

Almost 500 Etchings by Rembrandt Now Free Online, Courtesy of the Morgan Library & Museum

Hear Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Performed in Classical Latin

The Decimal Point Is 150 Years Older Than We Thought, Emerging in Renaissance Italy

The Puzzle of Docudramas — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #167

The Most Beautiful Shots in Cinema History: Scenes from 100+ Films

Keith Richards Performs “I’m Waiting For The Man”: A New Tribute to Lou Reed

How Jane Austen Changed Fiction Forever

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