Ask aloud whether reality is real, and you’re liable to be regarded as never truly having left the freshman dorm. But that question has received, and continues to receive, consideration from actual scientists. The Big Think video above assembles seven of them to explain how they think about it, and how they see its relevance to the enterprise of human understanding. For the most part, they seem to agree that, even if we accept that something called “reality” objectively exists, of more immediate relevance is the fact that we can’t perceive that reality directly. Any information we receive about it comes to our brain through our senses, and they have their own ways of interpreting things.
As cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman puts it, our senses are “making up the tastes, odors, and colors that we experience. They’re not properties of an objective reality; they’re actually properties of our senses that they’re fabricating.” What’s physically objective “would continue to exist even if there were no creatures to perceive it.”
Therefore, “colors, odors, tastes, and so on are not real in that sense,” yet they are “real experiences”; the trick of separating what exists in objective reality from what only exists in our minds as a result of that objective reality — “the beginning of the scientific method,” as evolutionary biologist Heather Heying describes it — is an even more complicated endeavor than it sounds.
“Reality, for us, is what we can sense without sensory surfaces, and what we can make sense of with the signals in our brain,” says Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain author Lisa Feldman Barrett in the video just above. “Trapped in its own dark, silent box called your skull,” your brain “has no knowledge of what is going on around it in the world, or in the body.” It does receive signals from the senses, “which are the outcome of some changes in the world or in the body, but the brain doesn’t know what the changes are.” With only information about effects, it uses past experience to construct guesses about their causes and contexts. We might also call that function imagination, and no scientists worth their salt can do without a good deal of it.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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If you go to hear Patti Smith in concert, you expect her to sing “Beneath the Southern Cross,” “Because the Night,” and almost certainly “People Have the Power,” the hit single from Dream of Life. Like her 1975 debut Horses, that album had a cover photo by Robert Mapplethorpe, whom Smith describes as “the artist of my life” in Just Kids, her memoir of their long and complex relationship. A highly personal work, that book also includes the text of the brief but powerful goodbye letter she wrote to Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS in 1989. If you go to hear Smith read a letter aloud, there’s a decent chance it’ll be that one.
“Often as I lie awake I wonder if you are also lying awake,” Smith wrote to Mapplethorpe, then in his final hospitalization and already unable to receive any further communication. “Are you in pain, or feeling alone? You drew me from the darkest period of my young life, sharing with me the sacred mystery of what it is to be an artist. I learned to see through you and never compose a line or draw a curve that does not come from the knowledge I derived in our precious time together. Your work, coming from a fluid source, can be traced to the naked song of your youth. You spoke then of holding hands with God. Remember, through everything, you have always held that hand. Grip it hard, Robert, and don’t let it go.”
Smith speaks these words in the Letters Live video at the top of the post, shot just a few weeks ago in The Town Hall in Manhattan. “Of all your work, you are still your most beautiful,” she reads, “the most beautiful work of all,” and it’s clear that, 35 years after Mapplethorpe’s death, she still believes it. That may come across even more clearly than in Smith’s earlier reading of the letter featured here on Open Culture back in 2012. As the years pass, Robert Mapplethorpe remains frozen in time as a culturally transgressive young artist, but Patti Smith lives on, still playing the rock songs that made her name in the seventies while in her seventies. And unlike many cultural figures at her level of fame, she’s remained wholly herself all the while — no doubt thanks to inspiration from her old friend.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Whoops, we misattributed that last one. It’s actually Rumpelstiltskin’s doing, but the by-morning-or-else deadline that drives the Brothers Grimm favorite is not dissimilar to the ultimatum posed to disgraced medieval monk Herman the Recluse: produce a giant book that glorifies your monastery and includes all human knowledge by sunrise, or we brick you up Cask of Amontillado-style.
Why else would a book as high-minded as the Codex Gigas (Latin for Giant Book) contain a full-page glamour portrait of the devil garbed in an ermine loincloth and cherry red claws?
Perhaps it’s the 13th-century equivalent of “sex sells.” What better way to keep your book out of the remainder bin of history than to include an eye-catching glimpse of the Prince of Darkness? Hedge your bets by positioning a splendid vision of the Heavenly City directly opposite.
Notable illustrations aside, the Codex Gigas holds the distinction of being the largest extant medieval illuminated manuscript in the world.
Weighing in at 165 lbs, this 3‑foot-tall bound whale required the skins of 160 donkeys, at the rate of two pages per donkey. (Ten pages devoted to St. Benedict’s rules for monastic life were literally cut from the manuscript at an unknown date.)
It’s a lot.
A National Geographic documentary concluded that the sprawling manuscript would’ve required a minimum of 5 years of full-time, single-minded labor. More likely, the work was spread out over 25 to 30 years, with various authors contributing to the different sections. In addition to a complete Bible, the “Devil’s Bible” includes an encyclopedia, medical information, a calendar of saints’ days, Flavius Josephus’ histories The Jewish Warand Jewish Antiquities and some practical advice on exorcising evil spirits.
Ernest Hemingway seemed to feud with most of the prominent male artists of his time, from Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot to F. Scott Fitzgerald. He had a “very strange relationship” with Orson Welles—the two came to blows at least once—and he reportedly slapped Max Eastman in the face with a book. All his bluster and bravado make his warm friendship with James Joyce seem all the more remarkable. They are a literary odd couple if ever there was one: Joyce the labyrinthine thinker of Byzantine thoughts and creator of symbolic systems so dense they constitute an entire field of study; physically weak and—despite his infamous carnal appetites—intellectually monkish, Joyce exemplifies the artist as a reclusive contemplative. Hemingway, on the other hand, well… we know his reputation.
Hemingway’s 1961 obituary in The New York Times characterized Joyce as “a thin, wispy and unmuscled man with defective eyesight” (perhaps the result of a syphilis infection), and also notes that the two writers “did a certain amount of drinking together” in Paris. As the narrator of the rare film clip of Joyce informs us above, the Ulysses author would pick drunken fights, then duck behind his burly friend and say, “Deal with him, Hemingway. Deal with him.” (That scene also gets mentioned in The Times obituary.) Hemingway, who convinced himself at one time he had the makings of a real pugilist, was likely happy to oblige. Joyce, writes Hemingway biographer James R. Mellow, “was an admirer of Hemingway’s adventurous lifestyle” and worried aloud that his books were too “suburban” next to those of his friend, of whom he said in a Danish interview, “he’s a good writer, Hemingway. He writes as he is… there is much more behind Hemingway’s form than people know.”
Joyce, notes Kenneth Schyler Lynn in Hemingway, realized that “neither as a man nor as an artist was [Hemingway] as simple as he seemed,” though he also remarked that Hemingway was “a big powerful peasant, as strong as a buffalo. A sportsman. And ready to live the life he writes about. He would never have written it if his body had not allowed him to live it.” One detects more than a hint of Hemingway in Joycean characters like Dubliners’ Ignatious Gallaher or Ulysses’ Hugh “Blazes” Boylan—strong, adventurous types who overawe introverted main characters. That’s not to say that Joyce explicitly drew on Hemingway in constructing his fiction, but that in the boastful, outgoing American, he saw what many of his semi-autobiographical characters did in their more bullish counterparts—a natural foil.
Hemingway returned Joyce’s compliments, writing to Sherwood Anderson in 1923, “Joyce has a most god-damn wonderful book” and pronouncing Joyce “the greatest writer in the world.” He was “unquestionably… staggered,” writes Lynn, “by the multilayered richness” of Ulysses. But its density may have proven too much for him, as “his interest in the story gave out well before he finished it.” In Hemingway’s copy of the novel, “only the pages of the first half and of Molly Bloom’s concluding soliloquy are cut.” Hemingway tempered his praise with some blunt criticism; unlike Joyce’s praise of his writing, the American did not admire Joyce’s tendency towards autobiography in the character of Stephen Dedalus.
“The weakness of Joyce,” Hemingway opined, was his inability to understand that “the only writing that was any good was what you made up, what you imagined… Daedalus [sic] in Ulysses was Joyce himself, so he was terrible. Joyce was so damn romantic and intellectual.” Of course Stephen Dedalus was Joyce—that much is clear to anyone. How Hemingway, who did his utmost to enact his fictional adventures and fictionalize his real life, could fault Joyce for doing the same is hard to reckon, except perhaps, as Joyce certainly felt, Hemingway led the more adventurous life.
“Blake belonged to the Romantic age, but stands utterly alone in that age, both as an artist and as a poet,” says gallerist-Youtuber James Payne in his new Great Art Explained video above. “He is someone who invented his very own form of graphic art, which organically fused beautiful images with powerful poetry, while he also forged his own distinctive philosophical worldview and created an original cosmology of gods and spirits designed to express his ideas about love, freedom, nature, and the divine.” It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call him a visionary, not least since he experienced actual visions throughout almost his entire life.
Not just a visual artist but “one of the greatest poets in the English language,” Blake produced a body of work in which word and image are inseparable. Though it “addresses contemporary subjects like social inequality and poverty, child exploitation, racial discrimination, and religious hypocrisy,” its worldliness is exceeded by its otherworldliness. What compels us is as much the power of art itself as the “vast and complicated mythology” underlying the project on which Blake worked until the very end of his life. His ideal was “liberty from tyranny in all forms,” political, religious, scientific, and any other kind besides; in pursuing it, he could hardly have limited himself to just one plane of existence.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Stephen King has no doubt forgotten writing more books than most of us will ever publish. But even now, in his prolific “late career,” if you ask him to name his own most favored works, he can do it without hesitation. Stephen Colbert tried that out a few years ago on The Late Show, when the writer made an appearance to promote his then-latest book Billy Summers. The first of Stephen King’s top five by Stephen King is “Survivor Type,” a 1982 short story about “a physician who gets stranded on a little island, and he’s smuggling heroin, and he’s starving, so he eats himself piece by piece.”
“Survivor Type” may be a deep cut — and one that initially struggled for publication, being so disturbing that King remembers “even men’s magazines” turning it down — but it’s nevertheless been adapted into five different films since the twenty-tens alone. King may have enjoyed massive book sales throughout almost the entirety of his career, but it certainly hasn’t hurt his brand that so many of his works have become movies and television shows, many of them cultural phenomena in their own right. Take the case of Misery, another of King’s selections, the 1990 feature-film version of which gave us Kathy Bates’ Oscar-winning performance as a crazed fan who kidnaps her favorite novelist.
Misery was directed by Rob Reiner, who’d worked with King’s material before: in 1986, he turned the story “The Body” into Stand by Me, which is now considered a high point in the categories of eighties teen-star vehicles and early-sixties nostalgia pictures. After seeing its first screening, King declared it “the best film ever made out of anything I’ve written” — before characteristically adding, “which isn’t saying much.” (That same year, recall, King not just wrote but directed Maximum Overdrive, a spectacle of malevolent machines taking over a truck stop that he later described as a “moron movie.”)
King also enthuses about his 2006 novel Lisey’s Story, as well as its Apple TV+ series adaptation, which had just come out at the time. Also still-new was the second televisual rendition of The Stand, King’s 1978 novel set in the aftermath of an apocalyptic pandemic. “Any similarities to what’s going on now are just too close for comfort,” he says to Colbert in this COVID-era clip, though it’s ambiguous whether the book actually makes his top five. Colbert suggests filling out the list with Billy Summers, presumably on the principle that every writer favors his most recent work. But where would King rank the three novels he’s cranked out since?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Charles Bukowski didn’t do TV — or at least he didn’t do American TV. Like a Hollywood movie star shooting a Japanese commercial, he did make an exception for a gig abroad. It happened in 1978, when the poet received an invitation from the popular French literary talk show Apostrophes. Bukowski wasn’t the first foreigner to grace its set: a few years earlier, Vladimir Nabokov had come in advance of the French translation of Ada, but only under the conditions that he be allowed to pre-write his answers and read them off notecards, and to drink whiskey from a teapot during the interview. No such niceties for the author of Ham on Rye,who was set up with earpiece interpretation and Sancerre straight from the bottle.
Or rather, bottles, plural: Bukowski had polished off one of them by the time Apostrophes host Bernard Pivot opened the live broadcast by asking him how it felt to be celebrated on French television. Already drunk, Bukowski responded in a slurred and dismissive fashion. Things deteriorated from there, and Bukowski kept rambling as the other panelists tried to carry on their conversation. At one point François Cavanna ventured a “Bukowski ta gueule”; soon thereafter, Pivot opted for a more direct “Bukowski, shut up,” which prompted the guest of honor’s unsteadily impromptu departure. “Pivot bid him au revoir with a Gallic shrug,” writes Howard Sounes in Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life.
“The next day, he didn’t remember anything, of course, but the whole of France was running to book shops to buy his books,” says Barfly director Barbet Schroeder in the documentary The Ordinary Madness of Charles Bukowski. “In a few hours they were all sold out.” This succès de scandale made Bukowski even more of a literary rock star in France than he’d already become. The episode has also been widely remembered in the Francophone world since the death of Bernard Pivot earlier this month, never failing to make the much-circulated lists of Apostrophes’ most memorable broadcasts during its fifteen-year run.
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“Six million people watched him,” writes Adam Nossiter in Pivot’s New York Times obituary, “and nearly everybody wanted to be on his show. And nearly everybody was, including French literary giants like Marguerite Duras, Patrick Modiano, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Marguerite Yourcenar and Georges Simenon.” (One very special episode even brought on “a haggard-looking Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, not long out of the Soviet Union.”) Apart from Bukowski, Apostrophes’ guest list also included a very different American with an equally enthusiastic French readership: the late Paul Auster, who — like most of the cultural figures whose appearances on the show you can sample on this Youtube playlist — preceded Pivot to that great talk show in the sky.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
It sounds like a third grade math problem: “If Ray Bradbury wrote the first draft of Fahrenheit 451 (1953) on a coin-operated typewriter that charged 10 cents for every 30 minutes, and he spent a total of $9.80, how many hours did it take Ray to write his story?” (If you’re doing the math, that’s great, but you might be in the wrong class.)
Bradbury’s composition of Fahrenheit 451 demonstrates two of the prolific writer’s most insistent demands among his many practical nuggets of writing advice: 1. Always write, all the time; a short story a week, as he told a writer’s symposium in 2001. And, as he told the same group, 2. “Live in the library! Live in the library, for Christ’s sake. Don’t live on your goddamn computer and the internet and all that crap.”
Granted, the library—and the school, and the office, and all the rest of it—now lives in the “goddamn computer” for many of us. But Bradbury’s elaboration of why he ended up in the library in the early 1950s, specifically the basement of UCLA’s Powell Library, will be relatable to any working parent. As he wrote in 1982, he found himself “twice driven; by children to leave at home, and by a typewriter timing device…. Time was indeed money.”
This was a different time, so you’ll need to adjust the currency for 21st century inflation. Also, Bradbury had the 50s’ writer-husband’s prerogative to beg off the childcare. As he explains:
In all the years from 1941 to that time, I had done most of my typing in the family garages… behind the tract house where my wife, Marguerite, and I raised our family. I was driven out of the garage by my loving children, who insisted on coming around to the window and singing and tapping on the panes.
Devoted father Bradbury “had to choose between finishing a story or playing with the girls. I chose to play, of course, which endangered the family income. An office had to be found. We couldn’t afford one.” Bradbury did not write all of Fahrenheit 451 in the library basement. “He ended up with the novella version,” notes UCLA Magazine, “originally called The Fireman and did not come back to it until a publishing company asked if he could add more to the story.”
The speed at which Bradbury wrote, both to save money and to get home to his children, did not cause him to get careless. He looked back on the book 22 years later with pride. “I have changed not one thought or word,” wrote Bradbury in his introduction. He didn’t notice until later that he had named main characters after a paper company, Montag, and pencil company, Faber.
Bradbury told the magazine in 2002, “It was a passionate and exciting time for me. Imagine what it was like to be writing a book about book burning and doing it in a library where the passions of all those authors, living and dead, surrounded me.” When it came to finding the book’s title, however, supposedly the temperature at which books burn, not only did the library fail him, but so too did the university’s chemistry department. To learn the answer, and finish the book, Bradbury finally had to call the fire department.
The popular image of the medieval suit of armor looks formidable enough that any of us could be forgiven for assuming that, with its steel-plated protection, we’d emerge from even the most harrowing battle without a scratch. Yet if we really found ourselves transported to, say, the French side in the Battle of Agincourt, we’d probably feel a keen sense of just where those English arrows could nevertheless land a fatal hit. This is the matter investigated in detail in the video above, a production of Tod’s Workshop, a British maker of “accurate and detailed historical reproduction crossbows, sword scabbards, swords, daggers and other medieval weapons, and artifacts.”
This isn’t some backyard target-practice session for Medieval Times habitués, but a gathering of experts in a variety of relevant fields. Tod’s Workshop proprietor Tod Todeschini brings on both the company’s armorer and fletcher (that is, maker of arrows), as well as arms-and-armor historian Toby Capwell and a highly skilled archer named Joe.
It is Joe’s task to shoot a great many of the workshop’s faithfully crafted early-fifteenth-century arrows at its faithfully crafted early-fifteenth-century suit of armor in order to provide a visual — and, in slow motion, visceral — demonstration of just how well it could really hold up against the mighty English longbow.
In some respects, the suit acquits itself nicely: many of Joe’s arrows simply bounce off plate armor, sometimes snapping in the process. But whenever a shot hits something other than a plate, things get considerably dicier. The layers of chainmail in the gaps between helmet and breastplate or breastplate and pauldron (which covers the shoulder) turn out to be more vulnerable than they look, and as for the wholly un-plated groin area, the less said the better. The year 1415, the hosts explain, was before the development of the head-to-toe suit of armor that comes to mind today when we think of medieval knights — a development no doubt inspired in part by the fate of the numerous but hopelessly outgunned French army at Agincourt.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Say you were a fan of Steven Spielberg’s moving coming-of-age drama Empire of the Sun, set in a Japanese internment camp during World War II and starring a young Christian Bale. Say you read the autobiographical novel on which that film is based, written by one J.G. Ballard. Say you enjoyed it so much, you decided to read more of the author’s work, like, say, 1973’s Crash, a novel about people who develop a sexual fetish around wounds sustained in staged automobile accidents. Or you pick up its predecessor, The Atrocity Exhibition, a book William S. Burroughs described as stirring “sexual depths untouched by the hardest-core illustrated porn.” Or perhaps you stumble upon Concrete Island, a warped take on Defoe that strands a wealthy architect and his Jaguar on a highway intersection.
You may experience some dissonance. Who was this Ballard? A realist chronicler of 20th century horrors; perverse explorer of—in Burroughs’ words—“the nonsexual roots of sexuality”; sci-fi satirist of the bleak post-industrial wastelands of modernity? He was all of these, and more. Ballard was a brilliant futurist and his dystopian novels and short stories anticipated the 80s cyberpunk of William Gibson, exploring with a twisted sense of humor what Jean Lyotard famously dubbed in 1979 The Postmodern Condition: a state of ideological, scientific, personal, and social disintegration under the reign of a technocratic, hypercapitalist, “computerized society.” Ballard had his own term for it: “media landscape,” and his dark visions of the future often correspond to the virtual world we inhabit today.
In addition to his fictional creations, Ballard made several disturbingly accurate predictions in interviews he gave over the decades (collected in a book titled Extreme Metaphors). In 1987, with the film adaptation of Empire of the Sun just on the horizon and “his most extreme work Crash re-released in the USA to warmer reaction,” he gave an interview to I‑D magazine in which he predicted the internet as “invisible streams of data pulsing down lines to produce an invisible loom of world commerce and information.” This may not seem especially prescient (see, for example, E.M. Forster’s 1909 “The Machine Stops” for a chilling futuristic scenario much further ahead of its time). But Ballard went on to describe in detail the rise of the Youtube celebrity:
Every home will be transformed into its own TV studio. We’ll all be simultaneously actor, director and screenwriter in our own soap opera. People will start screening themselves. They will become their own TV programmes.
The themes of celebrity obsession and technologically constructed realities resonate in almost all of Ballard’s work and thought, and ten years earlier, in an essay for Vogue, he described in detail the spread of social media and its totalizing effects on our lives. In the technological future, he wrote, “each of us will be both star and supporting player.”
Every one of our actions during the day, across the entire spectrum of domestic life, will be instantly recorded on video-tape. In the evening we will sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters, and then stitch these together into a heightened re-enactment of the day. Regardless of our place in the family pecking order, each of us within the privacy of our own rooms will be the star in a continually unfolding domestic saga, with parents, husbands, wives and children demoted to an appropriate supporting role.
Though Ballard thought in terms of film and television—and though we ourselves play the role of the selecting computer in his scenario—this description almost perfectly captures the behavior of the average user of Facebook, Instagram, etc. (See Ballard in the interview clip above discuss further “the possibilities of genuinely interactive virtual reality” and his theory of the 50s as the “blueprint” of modern technological culture and the “suburbanization” of reality.) In addition to the Vogue essay, Ballard wrote a 1977 short story called “The Intensive Care Unit,” in which—writes the site Ballardian—“ordinances are in place to prevent people from meeting in person. All interaction is mediated through personal cameras and TV screens.”
So what did Ballard, who died in 2009, think of the post-internet world he lived to see and experience? He discussed the subject in 2003 in an interview with radical publisher V. Vale (who re-issued The Atrocity Exhibition). “Now everybody can document themselves in a way that was inconceivable 30, 40, 50 years ago,” Ballard notes, “I think this reflects a tremendous hunger among people for ‘reality’—for ordinary reality. It’s very difficult to find the ‘real,’ because the environment is totally manufactured.” Like Jean Baudrillard, another prescient theorist of postmodernity, Ballard saw this loss of the “real” coming many decades ago. As he told I‑D in 1987, “in the media landscape it’s almost impossible to separate fact from fiction.”
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