FYI: Ian McKellen, who first made his reputation performing at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1970s and 80s, has just released the first of a series of iPad apps meant to make Shakespeare’s plays more accessible, especially for high school and college students.
As McKellen explains above, Shakespeare’s plays were originally meant to be seen performed live in a theatre, not read as books. And so these apps feature actors performing dramatic scenes from the plays, while text scrolls by. They’ve just launched the first of 37 apps. It’s devoted to The Tempest, runs $5.99 on iTunes, and frankly seems well worth the price. Benedict Cumberbatch likes it. See below.
The full text of The Tempest as published in the First Folio.
A full digital version of Arden Shakespeare The Tempest.
The ability to switch between three different levels of notes depending on the level of reader’s needs.
A full breakdown and explanation of every character and all of their lines across every scene.
A linked historical time line of Shakespeare’s life, his plays, his theatres, and contemporary context to put it all into perspective.
Video explanations and discussions by both Sir Ian McKellen and Professor Sir Jonathan Bate on characters, themes, and the meaning of the play.
A full “play at a glance” with illustrations and summaries to explain the play’s plot with key quotes and events.
A history of all the major productions of The Tempest from the 17th century to the present day.
The option to make notes, copy and highlight text that can be collected, correlated and exported for later use.
The option to search the play’s full text and essays.
“What words would best describe a Tarkovsky film?” asks Lewis Bond, creator of the cinephile video-essay Youtube channel Channel Criswell. He offers a few right away: “Haunting, ethereal, hypnotic, serene.” But appreciators, scholars, and even critics of the work of Andrei Tarkovsky, the Soviet director of such austere yet visually rich, serious-minded yet dreamlike, and long artistically scrutinized pictures as Andrei Rublev, Solaris, Stalker, and The Mirror (watch them all free online here), could come up with many more. And though the man himself may have denied drawing any inspiration from similarly respected filmmakers — Bresson, Antonioni, Bergman, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, “I have no desire to imitate any of them” — few could avoid exposure to his own widespread and lasting influence on cinema.
Why has Tarkovsky’s work made such an impact? One might argue that the answer has do to with his commitment to “pure cinema,” or in Bond’s words, “to do with film that which couldn’t be done with other art forms.” Solaris may have emerged, extensively rethought, out of the source material of Stanislaw Lem’s eponymous science fiction novel, and Stalkermay have more recently provided the elements of a video game (which went on to become a series of novels itself), but none of Tarkovsky’s works can truly exist outside the medium, with all its emotional and experiential power, in which he and his collaborators made them.
In this video essay called “Poetic Harmony,” Bond identifies the purely cinematic qualities of Tarkovsky’s films: from the textures of their visual composition to their selective use of sound (and quietness as well) to build moods and the resistance of their abstraction and ambiguity to intellectual analysis (despite how much viewers continue to fling at them); from their lack of symbolism to their building of characters through not words but action, the connection of scenes through metaphor (as in Nostalghia, which cuts from a man who lights himself on fire to a man who struggles to light a candle), and their use of long takes to build the “pressure of time.” Tarkovsky enthusiasts could hardly disagree, though the time soon comes to put away what The Sacrifice’s central character calls “words, words, words” and simply watch.
When you’re done watching Bond’s video, you can watch many of Tarkovsky’s major films free online, thanks to Russian film studio Mosfilm.
For many of us, washi paper is the art supply equivalent of a dish that’s “too pretty to eat.” I love to look at it, but would be loathe to mar its beauty with my amateur creative efforts.
Kurotani has the distinction of being Japan’s oldest paper-making town, and as documented by filmmaker Kuroyanagi Takashi, above, the washi process has changed little in 800 years.
In the pre-industrial age, washi-making was seasonal. Farmers planted the paper mulberry (kozo), mitsumata, and gampi plants essential to the process along with their food crops. Come havest-time, they would soak these plants’ fibrous inner barks until they were soft enough to be cleaned and pounded.
Then as now, the resulting pulp was added mixed with liquid and a mucilage to yield a (not particularly delicious sounding, and definitely not too pretty to eat…) spreadable paste.
The sheets are formed on bamboo screens, then stacked and pressed until dry.
The end result is both strong and flexible, making it a favorite of bookbinders. Its absorbency is prized by printmakers, including Rembrandt.
If you have a yen to witness the labor-intensive, traditional process up close, Dutch washi craftsman Rogier Uitenboogaart runs a guest house as part of his studio in nearby Kamikoya.
The rest of us must content ourselves with Takashi’s meditative 5‑minute documentary.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She writes a monthly column about people who love their jobs for Mainichi Weekly, a bilingual Japanese newspaper. Follow her @AyunHalliday
The idea of “the author,” wrote Roland Barthes, “rules in manuals of literary history, in biographies of writers, in magazine interviews, and even in the awareness of literary men, anxious to unite, by their private journals, their person and their work.” We see this anxiety of authorship in much of Walt Whitman’s personal correspondence. The poet, “could be surprisingly anxious about his own disappearance,” writes Zachary Turpin in the introduction to a recently re-discovered series of Whitman essays called “Manly Health and Training.”
Whitman, however, was just as often anxious to disassociate his person from his work, whether juvenile short stories or his copious amount of journalism and occasional pieces. Originally published in the New York Atlas between 1858 and 1860, “Manly Health and Training”—“part guest editorial, part self-help column”—may indeed represent some of the work Whitman wished would disappear in his late-in-life attempts at “careerist revisionism.” As it happens, reports The New York Times, these articles did just that until Turpin, a graduate student in English at the University of Houston, found the essays last summer while browsing articles written under various journalistic pseudonyms Whitman used.
The work in question appeared under the name “Mose Velsor,” and it’s worth asking, as Barthes might, whether we should consider it by the poetic figure we call “Whitman” at all. Though we encounter in these occasionally “eyebrow-raising” essays the “more-than-typically self-contradictory Whitman,” Turpin comments, “these contradictions display little of the poetic dialecticism of Leaves of Grass”—first published, without the author’s name, in 1855.
The essays are piecemeal distillations of “a huge range of topics” of general interest to male readers of the time—in some respects, a 19th century equivalent of Men’s Health magazine. And yet, argues Ed Folsom, editor of The Walt Whitman Quarterly—which has published the nearly 47,000 word series of essays online—“One of Whitman’s core beliefs was that the body was the basis of democracy. The series is a hymn to the male body, as well as a guide to taking care of what he saw as the most vital unit of democratic living.” These themes are manifest along with the robust homoeroticism of Whitman’s poetry:
We shall speak by and by of health as being the foundation of all real manly beauty. Perhaps, too, it has more to do than is generally supposed, with the capacity of being agreeable as a companion, a social visitor, always welcome—and with the divine joys of friendship. In these particulars (and they surely include a good part of the best blessings of existence), there is that subtle virtue in a sound body, with all its functions perfect, which nothing else can make up for, and which will itself make up for many other deficiencies, as of education, refinement, and the like.
David Reynolds, professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, concurs: “there’s a kind of health-nut thing about ‘Leaves of Grass’ already. This series sort of codifies it and expands on it, giving us a real regimen.” To that end, two of “Mose Velsor”’s prominent topics are diet and exercise, and whether we consider “Manly Health and Training” a prose addendum to Whitman’s first book or mostly work-for-hire on a range of topics in his general purview, some of the advice, like the poetry, can often sound particularly modern, while at the same time preserving the quaintness of its age.
Anticipating the Paleo craze, for example, Whitman writes, “let the main part of the diet be meat, to the exclusion of all else.” His diet advice is far from systematic from essay to essay, yet he continually insists upon lean meat as the foundation of every meal and refers to beef and lamb as “strengthening materials.” The “simplest and most natural diet,” consists of eating mainly meat, Whitman asserts as he casts aspersions on “a vegetarian or water-gruel diet.” Whitman issues many of his dietary recommendations in the service of vocal training, recommending that his readers “gain serviceable hints from the ancients” in order to “give strength and clearness to their vocalizations.”
Aspirants to manliness should also attend to the ancients’ habit of frequenting “gymnasiums, in order to acquire muscular energy and pliancy of limbs.” Many of Whitman’s training regimens conjure images from The Road to Wellville or of stereotypical 19th-century strong men with handlebar mustaches and funny-looking leotards. But he does intuit the modern identification of a sedentary lifestyle with ill health and premature death, addressing especially “students, clerks, and those in sedentary or mental employments.” He exhorts proto-cubical jockeys and couch potatoes alike: “to you, clerk, literary man, sedentary person, man of fortune, idler, the same advice. Up!”
Whitman’s “warnings about the dangers of inactivity,” writes The New York Times, “could have been issued from a 19th-century standing desk,” a not unlikely scenario, given the many authors from the past who wrote on their feet. But should we picture Whitman himself issuing these proclamations on “Health and Training”? No image of the man himself, with cocked elbow and cocked hat, is affixed to the essays. The pseudonymous byline may be no more than a convention, or it may be a desire to inhabit another persona, and to distance the words far from those of “Walt Whitman.”
Did Whitman consider the essays hackwork—populist pabulum of the kind struggling writers today often crank out anonymously as “sponsored content”? The series, Turpin writes “is un-Whitmanian, even unpoetic,” its function “fundamentally utilitarian, a physiological and political document rooted in the (pseudo)sciences of the era.” Not the sort of thing one imagines the highly self-conscious poet would have wanted to claim. “During his lifetime,” Whitman “wasted no time reminding anyone of this series,” likely hoping it would be forgotten.
And yet, it’s interesting nonetheless to compare the exaggerated masculinity of “Manly Health and Training” with much of the belittling personal criticism Whitman received in his lifetime, represented perfectly by one Thomas Wentworth Higginson. This critic and harsh reviewer included Whitman’s “priapism,” his serving as a nurse during the Civil War rather than “going into the army,” and his “not looking… in really good condition for athletic work” as reasons why the poet “never seemed to me a thoroughly wholesome or manly man.”
In addition to thinly veiled homophobia, many of Higginson’s comments suggested, write Robert Nelson and Kenneth Price, that “as a social group, working-class men did not and could not possess the qualities of true manliness.” Perhaps we can read these early Whitman editorials, pseudonymous or not, as democratic instructions for using masculine health as a great social leveler and means to “make up for many other deficiencies, as of education, refinement, and the like.” Or perhaps “Manly Health and Training” was just another assignment—a way to pay the bills by peddling popular male wish-fulfillment while the poet waited for the rest of the world to catch up with his literary genius.
One thing I’ll miss about President Obama is his ability to deliver a good joke at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. My favorite line from Saturday night:
And then there’s Ted Cruz. Ted had a tough week. He went to Indiana –- Hoosier country –- stood on a basketball court, and called the hoop a “basketball ring.” What else is in his lexicon? Baseball sticks? Football hats? But sure, I’m the foreign one.
Bern!
And it’s always nice to see John Boehner and Obama sharing a good joke around a smoke. Fast forward to the 27 minute mark for that.
Below, we also have Larry Wilmore’s cutting routine:
The hand and typewritten labels identifying the collection’s 2500+ pigments boast none of the flashy “creativity” that J. Crew employs to peddle its cashmere Boyfriend Cardigans.
Images by Harvard News
The benign, and wholly unexciting-sounding “emerald green” is —unsurprisingly—the exact shade legions of Oz fans have come to expect. The thrills here are chemical, not conferred. A mix of crystalline powder copper acetoarsenite, this emerald’s fumes sickened penniless artists as adroitly as they repelled insects.
Look how nicely it goes with Van Gogh’s ruddy hair…
“Mummy” is perhaps the closest the Forbes collection comes to 21st- century pigment naming. As Harvard’s Director of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, Narayan Khandekar, notes in the video above, its mushroom shade is no great shakes. The source—the resin used to seal mummies’ bandages—is what distinguishes it.
Philosophy as an academic subject is regularly maligned in popular discourse. Philosophy majors get told that their studies are useless. Philosophy professors find their budgets cut, their courses scrutinized, and their character grossly impeached in propagandistic religious feature films. It’s enough to make one despair over the turgid air of anti-intellectualism that stifles conversation.
But before we start pining for bygone golden ages of rigorous critical thought, let us remember that philosophers have been a thorn in the side of the powerful since the inception of Western philosophy. After all, Socrates, the ancient Greek whose name we associate with philosophy’s most basic maxims and methods, was supposedly put to death for the crime of which today’s professorate so often stand accused: corrupting the youth.
We mostly know of Socrates’ life and death through the written dialogues of his star pupil, Plato, whom Alain de Botton calls in the first video above, “the world’s first true, and perhaps greatest, philosopher.” De Botton quickly explains in his animated School of Life introduction that the core of Plato’s philosophy constitutes a “special kind of therapy” geared toward Eudaimonia, or human fulfillment and well-being. From Plato, De Botton’s series of quick takes on famous philosophers continues, moving through the Enlightenment and the 19th and 20th centuries.
Key to Plato’s thought is the critical examination of Doxa, or the conventional values and “popular opinions” that reveal themselves as “riddled with errors, prejudice, and superstition.” Plato’s most famous illustration of the profound state of ignorance in which most of us live goes by the name “The Allegory of the Cave,” and receives a retelling with commentary by De Botton just above. The parable doesn’t only illustrate the utility of philosophy, as De Botton says; it also serves as a vivid introduction to Plato’s theory of the Forms—an ideal realm of which our phenomenal reality is only a debased copy.
The dualism between the real and the ideal long governed philosophical thought, though many competing schools like the Stoics expressed a healthy degree of skepticism. But we might say that it wasn’t until Immanuel Kant, whom you can learn about above, that Plato really met his match. Along with his famous ethical dictum of the “categorical imperative,” Kant also posited two distinct realms—the noumenal and the phenomenal. And yet, unlike Plato, Kant did not believe we can make any assertions about the properties or existence of the ideal. Whatever lies outside the cave, we cannot access it through our faulty senses.
These central questions about the nature of knowledge and mind not only make philosophy an immanently fascinating discipline—they also make it an increasingly necessary endeavor, as we move further into the realm of constructing artificial minds. Software engineers and video game developers are tasked with philosophical problems related to consciousness, identity, and the possibility of ethical free choice. And at the cutting edge of cognitive science—where evolutionary biology and quantum mechanics rub elbows—we may find that Plato and Kant both intuited some of the most basic problems of consciousness: what we take for reality may be nothing of the kind, and we may have no way of genuinely knowing what the world is like outside our senses.
As 17th century French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes feared, but found impossible to believe, our perception of the world may in fact be a deceptive, if useful, illusion. Learn more about Descartes above, and see De Botton’s full School of Life philosophy series at the top of the post. Or watch the series on Youtube.
There are 35 videos in total, which let you become acquainted with, and perhaps corrupted by, a range of thinkers who question orthodoxy and common sense, including Aristotle, Epicurus, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Arthur Schopenhauer, Albert Camus, Soren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Baruch Spinoza. Watch all of the videos in the playlist right below.
Every Steely Dan fan remembers the first time they listened to their music — not just heard it, but listened to it, actively taking notice of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen’s complexly anachronistic lyrics (long scrutinized by the band’s exegetes), jazz-and-rock-spanning compositional technique, ultra-discerning selection of session musicians, and immaculate studio craft which, by the standards of the 1970s, raised popular music’s bar through the ceiling.
Often, that first real listening session happens in the neighborhood of a high-end stereo dealer. For me, the album was Two Against Nature, their turn-of-the-21st century comeback, but for many more, the album was Aja, which came out in 1977 and soon claimed the status of Steely Dan’s masterpiece. At the end of side one comes “Deacon Blues,” one of their best-loved songs as well as a production that puts audiophile listening equipment to the test. You can see a breakdown of what went into it in Nerdwriter’s new video “How Steely Dan Composes a Song” above.
“There’s a reason why audiophiles use Steely Dan records to test the sound quality of new speakers,” says host Evan Puschak. “The band is among the most sonically sophisticated pop acts of the 20th and 21st centuries,” in both the technical and artistic senses. He goes on to identify some of the signature elements in the mix, including something called the “mu major cord”; the recording methods that allow “every instrument its own life” (especially those played by masters like guitarist Larry Carlton and drummer Bernard Purdie); the striking effect of “middle register horns sliding against each other”; and even saxophone soloist Pete Christlieb, whom Becker and Fagen discovered by chance on a Tonight Show broadcast.
Puschak doesn’t ignore the lyrics, without a thorough analysis of which no discussion of Steely Dan’s work would be complete. He mentions the band’s typically wry, sardonic tone, their detached perspective and notes of uncertainty, but in the case of this particular song, it all comes with a “hidden earnestness” that makes it one of the most poignant in their entire catalog. “ ‘Deacon Blues’ is about as close to autobiography as our tunes get,” admits Fagen in the television documentary clip just above, which puts him and Becker back into the studio to look back at the song track by isolated track.
“We’re both kids who grew up in the suburbs. We both felt fairly alienated. Like a lot of kids in the fifties, we were looking for some kind of alternative culture — some kind of escape, really — from where we found ourselves.” Becker describes the song’s eponymous protagonist, who dreams of learning to “work the saxophone” in order to play just how he feels, “drink Scotch whiskey all night long, and die behind the wheel,” as not a musician but someone who “just sort of imagines that would be one of the mythic forms of loserdom to which he might aspire. Who’s to say that he’s not right?”
You can learn even more about the making (and the magic) of “Deacon Blues” in Marc Myers’ interview with Becker and Fagen in the Wall Street Journal last year. “It’s the only time I remember mixing a record all day and, when the mix was done, feeling like I wanted to hear it over and over again,” says Becker. “It was the comprehensive sound of the thing.” Fagen acknowledges “one thing we did right” in the making of the song: “We never tried to accommodate the mass market. We worked for ourselves and still do.”
Having recently released a new album featuring acoustic versions of his big hits, Peter Frampton is now back on tour, playing in some smaller venues across the U.S. But no venue–not the Gillioz Theatre in Springfield, Missouri, nor the Tobin Center for Performing Arts in San Antonio, Texas–is quite as small as the one we’re featuring today. Above, watch Frampton perform at the desk of NPR’s All Songs Considered. The performance is part of NPR’s Tiny Desk series, and the setlist includes acoustic versions of “Baby, I Love Your Way,” “Lines On My Face,” and “All I Want To Be (Is By Your Side).” Other recent Tiny Desk performances include Graham Nash, Wilco, Natalie Merchant, and Ben Folds. Enjoy.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
The latest installment from Blank on Blank’s series of animated videos drops us inside the bohemian Portobello Hotel in London. It’s May, 1976, and we hear a young Patti Smith railing against the censorship of her music, using some colorful–that is to say, NSFW–words. She talks Rimbaud. The poetry and combat of rock. The dreams and hallucinations that feed her music. The stuff that would eventually earn her the cred to be called The Godmother of Punk.
The audio is part of a longer, two-hour interview with Mick Gold, which is available through Amazon and iTunes. Enjoy.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
We’ve all had those moments of struggle to come up with le mot juste, in our native language or a foreign one. But when we look for a particular word, where exactly do we go to find it? Neuroscientists at Berkeley have made a fascinating start on answering that question by going in the other direction, mapping out which parts of the brain respond to the sound of certain words, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to watch the action on the cerebral cortices of people listening to The Moth Radio Hour— a popular storytelling podcast you yourself may have spent some time with, albeit under somewhat different circumstances.
“No single brain region holds one word or concept,” writes TheGuardian’s Ian Sample on the “brain dictionary” thus developed by researcher Jack Gallant and his team. “A single brain spot is associated with a number of related words. And each single word lights up many different brain spots. Together they make up networks that represent the meanings of each word we use: life and love; death and taxes; clouds, Florida and bra. All light up their own networks.”
Sample quotes Alexander Huth, the first author on the study: “It is possible that this approach could be used to decode information about what words a person is hearing, reading, or possibly even thinking.” You can learn more about this promising research in the short video from Nature above, which shows how the team mapped out how, during those Moth listening sessions, “different bits of the brain responded to different kinds of words”: some regions lit up in response to those having to do with numbers, for instance, others in response to “social words,” and others in response to those indicating place.
You can also browse this brain dictionary yourself in 3D on the Gallant Lab’s web site, which lets you click on any part of the cortex and see a cluster of the words which generated the most activity there. The other neuroscientists quoted in the Guardian piece acknowledge both the thrilling (if slightly scary, in terms of thought-reading possibilities in the maybe-not-that-far-flung future) implications of the work as well as the huge amount of unknowns that remain. The response of the podcasting community has so far gone unrecorded, but surely they’d like to see the research extended in the direction of other linguistically intensive shows — Marc Maron’s WTF, perhaps.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
