David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

in Books, Music | October 1st, 2013

Image by Avro, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

“David Bowie Is,” the exten­sive ret­ro­spec­tive exhib­it of the artist and his fab­u­lous cos­tumes, hit Toron­to last Fri­day (see our post from ear­li­er today), and as many peo­ple have report­ed, in addi­tion to those costumes—and pho­tos, instru­ments, set designs, lyric sheets, etc.—the show includes a list of Bowie’s favorite books. Described as a “vora­cious read­er” by cura­tor Geof­frey Marsh, Bowie’s top 100 book list spans decades, from Richard Wright’s raw 1945 mem­oir Black Boy to Susan Jacoby’s 2008 analy­sis of U.S. anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism in The Age of Amer­i­can Unrea­son.

Bowie’s always had a com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ship with the U.S., but his list shows a lot of love to Amer­i­can writ­ers, from the afore­men­tioned to Tru­man Capote, Hubert Sel­by, Jr., Saul Bel­low, Junot Diaz, Jack Ker­ouac and many more. He’s also very fond of fel­low Brits George Orwell, Ian McE­wan, and Julian Barnes and loves Mishi­ma and Bul­gakov.  You can read the full list below or over at Open Book Toron­to, who urges you to “grab one of these titles and set­tle in to read — and just think, some­where, at some point, David Bowie (or, to be more accu­rate, the man behind David Bowie, David Jones) was doing the exact same thing.” If that sort of thing inspires you to pick up a good book, go for it. You could also peruse the list, then puz­zle over the lit­er­ate Bowie’s lyrics to “I Can’t Read.” You can also explore a new relat­ed book–Bowie’s Book­shelf: The Hun­dred Books that Changed David Bowie’s Life.

1. Inter­views With Fran­cis Bacon by David Sylvester
2. Bil­ly Liar by Kei­th Water­house
3. Room At The Top by John Braine
4. On Hav­ing No Head by Dou­glass Hard­ing
5. Kaf­ka Was The Rage by Ana­tole Bro­yard
6. A Clock­work Orange by Antho­ny Burgess
7. City Of Night by John Rechy
8. The Brief Won­drous Life Of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
9. Madame Bovary by Gus­tave Flaubert
10. Ili­ad by Homer
11. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkn­er
12. Tadanori Yokoo by Tadanori Yokoo
13. Berlin Alexan­der­platz by Alfred Döblin
14. Inside The Whale And Oth­er Essays by George Orwell
15. Mr. Nor­ris Changes Trains by Christo­pher Ish­er­wood
16. Halls Dic­tio­nary Of Sub­jects And Sym­bols In Art by James A. Hall
17. David Bomberg by Richard Cork
18. Blast by Wyn­d­ham Lewis
19. Pass­ing by Nel­la Lar­son
20. Beyond The Bril­lo Box by Arthur C. Dan­to
21. The Ori­gin Of Con­scious­ness In The Break­down Of The Bicam­er­al Mind by Julian Jaynes
22. In Bluebeard’s Cas­tle by George Stein­er
23. Hawksmoor by Peter Ack­royd
24. The Divid­ed Self by R. D. Laing
25. The Stranger by Albert Camus
26. Infants Of The Spring by Wal­lace Thur­man
27. The Quest For Christa T by Christa Wolf
28. The Song­lines by Bruce Chatwin
29. Nights At The Cir­cus by Angela Carter
30. The Mas­ter And Mar­gari­ta by Mikhail Bul­gakov
31. The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
32. Loli­ta by Vladimir Nabokov
33. Her­zog by Saul Bel­low
34. Puck­oon by Spike Mil­li­gan
35. Black Boy by Richard Wright
36. The Great Gats­by by F. Scott Fitzger­ald
37. The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea by Yukio Mishi­ma
38. Dark­ness At Noon by Arthur Koestler
39. The Waste Land by T.S. Elliot
40. McTeague by Frank Nor­ris
41. Mon­ey by Mar­tin Amis
42. The Out­sider by Col­in Wil­son
43. Strange Peo­ple by Frank Edwards
44. Eng­lish Jour­ney by J.B. Priest­ley
45. A Con­fed­er­a­cy Of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
46. The Day Of The Locust by Nathanael West
47. 1984 by George Orwell
48. The Life And Times Of Lit­tle Richard by Charles White
49. Awop­bopaloobop Alop­bam­boom: The Gold­en Age of Rock by Nik Cohn
50. Mys­tery Train by Greil Mar­cus
51. Beano (com­ic, ’50s)
52. Raw (com­ic, ’80s)
53. White Noise by Don DeLil­lo
54. Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The South­ern Dream Of Free­dom by Peter Gural­nick
55. Silence: Lec­tures And Writ­ing by John Cage
56. Writ­ers At Work: The Paris Review Inter­views edit­ed by Mal­colm Cow­ley
57. The Sound Of The City: The Rise Of Rock And Roll by Char­lie Gillette
58. Octo­bri­ana And The Russ­ian Under­ground by Peter Sadecky
59. The Street by Ann Petry
60. Won­der Boys by Michael Chabon
61. Last Exit To Brook­lyn By Hubert Sel­by, Jr.
62. A People’s His­to­ry Of The Unit­ed States by Howard Zinn
63. The Age Of Amer­i­can Unrea­son by Susan Jaco­by
64. Met­ro­pol­i­tan Life by Fran Lebowitz
65. The Coast Of Utopia by Tom Stop­pard
66. The Bridge by Hart Crane
67. All The Emperor’s Hors­es by David Kidd
68. Fin­ger­smith by Sarah Waters
69. Earth­ly Pow­ers by Antho­ny Burgess
70. The 42nd Par­al­lel by John Dos Pas­sos
71. Tales Of Beat­nik Glo­ry by Ed Saun­ders
72. The Bird Artist by Howard Nor­man
73. Nowhere To Run The Sto­ry Of Soul Music by Ger­ri Hir­shey
74. Before The Del­uge by Otto Friedrich
75. Sex­u­al Per­son­ae: Art And Deca­dence From Nefer­ti­ti To Emi­ly Dick­in­son by Camille Paglia
76. The Amer­i­can Way Of Death by Jes­si­ca Mit­ford
77. In Cold Blood by Tru­man Capote
78. Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
79. Teenage by Jon Sav­age
80. Vile Bod­ies by Eve­lyn Waugh
81. The Hid­den Per­suaders by Vance Packard
82. The Fire Next Time by James Bald­win
83. Viz (com­ic, ear­ly ’80s)
84. Pri­vate Eye (satir­i­cal mag­a­zine, ’60s – ’80s)
85. Select­ed Poems by Frank O’Hara
86. The Tri­al Of Hen­ry Kissinger by Christo­pher Hitchens
87. Flaubert’s Par­rot by Julian Barnes
88. Mal­doror by Comte de Lautréa­mont
89. On The Road by Jack Ker­ouac
90. Mr. Wilson’s Cab­i­net of Won­der by Lawrence Weschler
91. Zanoni by Edward Bul­w­er-Lyt­ton
92. Tran­scen­den­tal Mag­ic, Its Doc­trine and Rit­u­al by Eliphas Lévi
93. The Gnos­tic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
94. The Leop­ard by Giuseppe Di Lampe­dusa
95. Infer­no by Dante Alighieri
96. A Grave For A Dol­phin by Alber­to Den­ti di Pira­jno
97. The Insult by Rupert Thom­son
98. In Between The Sheets by Ian McE­wan
99. A People’s Tragedy by Orlan­do Figes
100. Jour­ney Into The Whirl­wind by Euge­nia Ginzburg

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bri­an Eno Lists 20 Books for Rebuild­ing Civ­i­liza­tion & 59 Books For Build­ing Your Intel­lec­tu­al World

Bowie’s Book­shelf: A New Essay Col­lec­tion on The 100 Books That Changed David Bowie’s Life

David Bowie Releas­es Vin­tage Videos of His Great­est Hits from the 1970s and 1980s

David Bowie Recalls the Strange Expe­ri­ence of Invent­ing the Char­ac­ter Zig­gy Star­dust (1977)

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

Slavoj Žižek’s Pervert’s Guide to Ideology Decodes The Dark Knight and They Live

in Film, Philosophy | September 30th, 2013

Do we have a more ener­getic com­men­ta­tor on pop­u­lar cul­ture than Slavoj Žižek, the Sloven­ian phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor who has risen to the role the Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion calls “the Elvis of cul­tur­al the­o­ry”? In the 2006 essay film The Per­vert’s Guide to Cin­e­ma, Žižek offered psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic read­ings of such pic­tures as The Red Shoes, Alien, and The Matrix. (See him take on Ver­ti­go in a clip fea­tured here before.) Now he returns with a sequel, The Per­vert’s Guide to Ide­ol­o­gy. At the top, you can see him expound upon the role of ide­ol­o­gy in They Live, John Car­pen­ter’s 1988 sci­ence-fic­tion semi-com­e­dy in which wrestler “Row­dy” Rod­dy Piper hap­pens upon a pair of sun­glass­es that, when worn, reveal a host of sin­is­ter alien com­mand­ments behind adver­tis­ing and the media. “These glass­es func­tion like cri­tique-of-ide­ol­o­gy glass­es,” Žižek asserts.“We live, so we are told, in a post-ide­o­log­i­cal soci­ety. We are addressed by social author­i­ty not as sub­jects who should do their duty, but sub­jects of plea­sures: ‘Real­ize your true poten­tial,’ ‘Be your­self,’ ‘Lead a sat­is­fy­ing life.’ When you put the glass­es on, you see dic­ta­tor­ship in democ­ra­cy.”

Just above, Žižek looks into the ide­ol­o­gy of The Dark Knight, Christo­pher Nolan’s sec­ond Bat­man movie. “Who is Jok­er?” he asks. “Which is the lie he is oppos­ing? The tru­ly dis­turb­ing thing about The Dark Knight is that it ele­vates a lie into a gen­er­al social prin­ci­ple: the prin­ci­ple of orga­ni­za­tion of our social, polit­i­cal life, as if our soci­eties can remain sta­ble, can func­tion, only if based on a lie, as if the truth — and this telling the truth is embod­ied in Jok­er — means destruc­tion.” Last year at the Toron­to Inter­na­tion­al Film fes­ti­val, Žižek par­tic­i­pat­ed in an on-stage con­ver­sa­tion about the project (intro­duc­tion, part one, two), “explain­ing” in his inim­itably round­about fash­ion some of the think­ing behind these cin­e­mat­ic cul­tur­al analy­ses. The Per­vert’s Guide to Ide­ol­o­gy also uses oth­er big-name movies like Taxi Dri­ver, Titan­ic, West Side Sto­ry (and Jaws, some of which you can see him com­ment briefly upon in the trail­er) as jump­ing off points for extend­ed mono­logues on the unseen forces that he finds shape our beliefs and behav­ior. Unseen, of course, unless you’ve got those super­pow­ered sun­glass­es — or unless, even more uncon­ven­tion­al­ly, you’ve got a mind like Slavoj Žižek’s.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Žižek!: 2005 Doc­u­men­tary Reveals the “Aca­d­e­m­ic Rock Star” and “Mon­ster” of a Man

Good Cap­i­tal­ist Kar­ma: Zizek Ani­mat­ed

Slavoj Žižek: How the Marx Broth­ers Embody Freud’s Id, Ego & Super-Ego

A Shirt­less Slavoj Žižek Explains the Pur­pose of Phi­los­o­phy from the Com­fort of His Bed

After a Tour of Slavoj Žižek’s Pad, You’ll Nev­er See Inte­ri­or Design in the Same Way

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

Hergé Draws Tintin in Vintage Footage (and What Explains the Character’s Enduring Appeal)

in Comics/Cartoons | September 27th, 2013

“Tintin addicts are a mixed bunch,” writes New York­er crit­ic Antho­ny Lane, pro­fil­ing the beloved plus fours-clad, quiff-topped adven­tur­er and there­by reveal­ing him­self as one of the afflict­ed. “Steven Spiel­berg and Peter Jack­son [have] a three-pic­ture deal to bring Tintin to the big screen. I once heard Hugh Grant declare on a radio pro­gram that if he could take only one book to a desert island it would be King Ottokar’s Scep­tre (1939). [ … ] Gen­er­al de Gaulle declared that Tintin was his only inter­na­tion­al rival — he was envi­ous, per­haps, not just of Tintin’s fame but of the defi­ant­ly pos­i­tive atti­tude that he came to rep­re­sent.” Despite com­ing from Amer­i­ca, one of the few coun­tries nev­er to have tak­en whole­heart­ed­ly to the char­ac­ter, I too have read and re-read the 23 full-length com­ic books (or as we call them nowa­days, graph­ic nov­els) in which he stars, and I too envy his qual­i­ties, espe­cial­ly the use­ful amor­phous­ness of his iden­ti­ty: nei­ther man nor boy; nei­ther tra­di­tion­al nor mod­ern; pre­sum­ably Bel­gian, though for prac­ti­cal pur­pos­es state­less and apo­lit­i­cal; osten­si­bly a reporter, but no appar­ent need ever to file a sto­ry.

The late Har­ry Thomp­son sure­ly ranks as a top Tintin addict. A radio and tele­vi­sion pro­duc­er, com­e­dy writer, nov­el­ist, and cre­ator of Have I Got News for You, he also great­ly advanced the wide­spread avo­ca­tion of Eng­lish-lan­guage Tinti­nol­o­gy with his book Tintin: Hergé and his Cre­ation, pub­lished in 1991. Three years lat­er, he would star in this episode of Lon­don Week­end Tele­vi­sion’s doc­u­men­tary series Open­ing Shot on Tintin and his cre­ator (part one at the top, click for two and three). His analy­sis swift­ly assures any adult read­er just how and why they should go about pick­ing up and appre­ci­at­ing the tru­ly painstak­ing crafts­man­ship of these comics they so rel­ished in their youth. The broad­cast also fea­tures com­men­tary from Tintin’s Eng­lish trans­la­tors and, through archival footage, from Georges “Hergé” Remi him­self (seen draw­ing Tintin just above, and his com­pan­ion Cap­tain Had­dock below). Final­ly, we hear from more typ­i­cal Tintin read­ers in man-on-the-street inter­views — or rather, pre­co­cious-British-child-in-the-book­store inter­views: “My favorite char­ac­ter is Snowy, because he says real­ly rude things.” “My favorite book is Tintin in Amer­i­ca, because I like red Indi­ans.” How many of these kids, near­ly two decades on, can have resist­ed the siren song of Tinti­nol­o­gy them­selves?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Inscrutable Imag­i­na­tion of the Late Com­ic Artist Mœbius

Vis­it the World of Lit­tle Nemo Artist Win­sor McCay: Three Clas­sic Ani­ma­tions and a Google Doo­dle

The Con­fes­sions of Robert Crumb: A Por­trait Script­ed by the Under­ground Comics Leg­end Him­self (1987)

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

Sci-Fi Writer Robert Heinlein Imagines the Year 2000 in 1949, and Gets it Mostly Wrong

in History, Sci Fi | September 19th, 2013

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Two giants of 20^th cen­tu­ry sci­ence fic­tion: Robert Hein­lein and Isaac Asi­mov (see them togeth­er above, with L. Sprague de Camp in-between). Like every young sci-fi geek, I read them both assid­u­ous­ly, got lost in their dizzy­ing uni­vers­es that stretched across nov­els and sig­nif­i­cant teenage mile­stones. Even as an awk­ward kid, I could clear­ly iden­ti­fy an essen­tial dif­fer­ence in tone between their fore­casts of the future. Hein­lein, the Navy man forcibly retired from ser­vice by tuber­cu­lo­sis, had the dark­er vision, in which the brute force of mass mil­i­tarism con­tin­ued to thrive and hero­ic men of action car­ried the day. Asi­mov, the prac­tic­ing scientist—whose “Nor­by” series of kids books might be the cutest intro­duc­tion to sci-fi ever writ­ten by an American—favored a future that, if still quite dan­ger­ous, was man­aged by robots and their cre­ators, the tech­nocrats.

As we can plain­ly see, we are no less a bel­li­cose species than when these two authors wrote of the future, but Asi­mov seems to have had it right. The tech­nocrats came out on top; too many bat­tles are fought not by massed bat­tal­ions but by dead­ly fly­ing robots mak­ing (so we’re told) “sur­gi­cal” strikes. A few weeks ago, we brought you a series of tech­no­crat­ic pre­dic­tions of the year 2014 from Asi­mov, many of them sur­pris­ing­ly accu­rate. Today, we have a list of pre­dic­tions from Hein­lein, this time of the year 2000, and writ­ten in 1949 and pub­lished in 1952 in Galaxy mag­a­zine. How does his pre­dic­tive abil­i­ty stack up against his con­tem­po­rary? Well, I’d say that 2 (stripped of some exag­ger­a­tion), 8, and 11 either hit the mark or come pret­ty damn close. 19 is self-evi­dent­ly true, and 15 is arguably not ter­ri­bly far away, though it may not have seemed so in 2000. 4 is painful­ly iron­ic. The rest? Eh, not so much. Take a look and try to imag­ine your­self in Heinlein’s shoes in 1949. Not an easy task? Try to imag­ine what the world will look like in 2063. Which ver­sion of IOS will you be run­ning then?

1. Inter­plan­e­tary trav­el is wait­ing at your front door — C.O.D. It’s yours when you pay for it.

2. Con­tra­cep­tion and con­trol of dis­ease is revis­ing rela­tions between the sex­es to an extent that will change our entire social and eco­nom­ic struc­ture.

3. The most impor­tant mil­i­tary fact of this cen­tu­ry is that there is no way to repel an attack from out­er space.

4. It is utter­ly impos­si­ble that the Unit­ed States will start a “pre­ven­tive war.” We will fight when attacked, either direct­ly or in a ter­ri­to­ry we have guar­an­teed to defend.

5. In fif­teen years the hous­ing short­age will be solved by a “break­through” into new tech­nolo­gies which will make every house now stand­ing as obso­lete as priv­ies.

6. We’ll all be get­ting a lit­tle hun­gry by and by.

7. The cult of the pho­ny in art will dis­ap­pear. So-called “mod­ern art” will be dis­cussed only by psy­chi­a­trists.

8. Freud will be classed as a pre-sci­en­tif­ic, intu­itive pio­neer and psy­cho­analy­sis will be replaced by a grow­ing, chang­ing “oper­a­tional psy­chol­o­gy” based on mea­sure­ment and pre­dic­tion.

9. Can­cer, the com­mon cold, and tooth decay will all be con­quered; the rev­o­lu­tion­ary new prob­lem in med­ical research will be to accom­plish “regen­er­a­tion,” i.e., to enable a man to grow a new leg, rather than fit him with an arti­fi­cial limb.

10. By the end of this cen­tu­ry mankind will have explored this solar sys­tem, and the first ship intend­ed to reach the near­est star will be a‑building.

11. Your per­son­al tele­phone will be small enough to car­ry in your hand­bag. Your house tele­phone will record mes­sages, answer sim­ple inquiries, and trans­mit vision.

12. Intel­li­gent life will be found on Mars.

13. A thou­sand miles an hour at a cent a mile will be com­mon­place; short hauls will be made in evac­u­at­ed sub­ways at extreme speed.

14. A major objec­tive of applied physics will be to con­trol grav­i­ty.

15. We will not achieve a “World State” in the pre­dictable future. Nev­er­the­less, Com­mu­nism will van­ish from this plan­et.

16. Increas­ing mobil­i­ty will dis­en­fran­chise a major­i­ty of the pop­u­la­tion. About 1990 a con­sti­tu­tion­al amend­ment will do away with state lines while retain­ing the sem­blance.

17. All air­craft will be con­trolled by a giant radar net run on a con­ti­nent-wide basis by a mul­ti­ple elec­tron­ic “brain.”

18. Fish and yeast will become our prin­ci­pal sources of pro­teins. Beef will be a lux­u­ry; lamb and mut­ton will dis­ap­pear.

19. Mankind will not destroy itself, nor will “Civ­i­liza­tion” be destroyed.

Here are things we won’t get soon, if ever:

– Trav­el through time

– Trav­el faster than the speed of light

– “Radio” trans­mis­sion of mat­ter.

– Man­like robots with man­like reac­tions

– Lab­o­ra­to­ry cre­ation of life

– Real under­stand­ing of what “thought” is and how it is relat­ed to mat­ter.

– Sci­en­tif­ic proof of per­son­al sur­vival after death.

– Nor a per­ma­nent end to war.

Curi­ous­ly, nei­ther Hein­lein nor Asi­mov fore­saw that most ter­ri­bly banal and ubiq­ui­tous phe­nom­e­non of real­i­ty TV, but real­ly, what kind of mon­ster could have imag­ined such a thing?

via Lists of Note/i09

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts the Future in 1964 … And Kind of Nails It

Wal­ter Cronkite Imag­ines the Home of the 21st Cen­tu­ry … Back in 1967

Mar­shall McLuhan Announces That The World is a Glob­al Vil­lage

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

The Art of Handwriting as Practiced by Famous Artists: Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Marcel Duchamp, Willem de Kooning & More

in Art, History | September 17th, 2013

Click each image for a larg­er ver­sion

Did­n’t we used to hear all sorts of grum­bling about the dis­ap­pear­ance of the hand­writ­ten let­ter? What a relief those com­plaints seem now to have sub­sided, leav­ing us in peace to effi­cient­ly type to one anoth­er about how we find pieces of long­hand cor­re­spon­dence fas­ci­nat­ing pure­ly as arti­facts of our favorite his­tor­i­cal fig­ures. If you share that fas­ci­na­tion, have a look at The Art of Hand­writ­ing, an exhib­it from the Smith­so­ni­an’s Archives of Amer­i­can Art now on dis­play through Octo­ber 27 at Wash­ing­ton D.C.‘s Lawrence A. Fleis­chman gallery, which show­cas­es not only the artis­tic aspects of hand­writ­ing, but the hand­writ­ing of actu­al artists. “An artist might put pen to paper just as he or she would apply a line to a draw­ing,” says the exhi­bi­tion’s site. “For each artist, a lead­ing author­i­ty inter­prets how the pres­sure of line and sense of rhythm speak to that artist’s sig­na­ture style. And ques­tions of biog­ra­phy arise: does the hand­writ­ing con­firm assump­tions about the artist, or does it sug­gest a new under­stand­ing?” Plus, we have here the ide­al test of those hand­writ­ing analy­sis booths at coun­ty fairs — could they detect these artis­tic per­son­al­i­ties?

Just above, we have a page of abstract expres­sion­ist painter Willem de Koon­ing’s mis­sive in light-blue ink of March 28, 1966 to friend and fel­low abstract expres­sion­ist Michael Loew. (They’ve even includ­ed the enve­lope.) At the top of the post, you’ll find a page anoth­er painter, the famous­ly blos­som-focused Geor­gia O’Ke­effe, wrote to New Mex­i­co mod­ernist Cady Wells in 1939. The sub­ject of the let­ter? “O’Ke­effe wor­ries that Wells does­n’t like a paint­ing she has bought and sug­gests replace­ments; and describes an argu­ment she had with a friend.” That descrip­tion comes from the Smith­so­ni­an’s cat­a­log, as does this one: “[Jack­son] Pol­lock writes with descrip­tions of his new home in Springs, on Long Island, and dis­cuss­es his work and that of oth­er artists.” You can also view both pages of that evi­dent­ly unscan­dalous piece of com­mu­ni­ca­tion on the site. They’ve even got let­ters com­posed by hand in oth­er lan­guages, such as Mar­cel Duchamp writ­ing to his sis­ter Suzanne (below) on Jan­u­ary 15, 1916. Don’t wor­ry if you can’t read French, or if you think you can’t con­tex­tu­al­ize the per­son­al con­tent of any of the let­ters at all; focus on, as the Archives of Amer­i­can Art sug­gests, how “every mes­sage brims with the per­son­al­i­ty of the writer at the moment of inter­play between hand, eye, mind, pen, and paper.” That, and the that hope school­child­ren won’t have to endure cur­sive lessons many gen­er­a­tions longer.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vir­ginia Woolf’s Hand­writ­ten Sui­cide Note: A Painful and Poignant Farewell (1941)

Font Based on Sig­mund Freud’s Hand­writ­ing Com­ing Cour­tesy of Suc­cess­ful Kick­starter Cam­paign

Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s Hand­writ­ten Cast­ing Notes for The God­fa­ther

See F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Hand­writ­ten Man­u­scripts for The Great Gats­by, This Side of Par­adise & More

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

What Shakespeare’s Handwriting Looked Like

in History, Literature | September 16th, 2013

Last week, we post­ed on how schol­ars have tried to recov­er the orig­i­nal pro­nun­ci­a­tions of Shakespeare’s plays and poems when per­formed on the stage. Today, we bring you the bard’s orig­i­nal hand­writ­ing. Shakespeare’s hand­writ­ing has recent­ly become the focus of a new arti­cle by Pro­fes­sor Dou­glas Bruster at UT Austin, who is using an analy­sis of the playwright’s quirky spellings and pen­man­ship to solve a very old ques­tion of author­ship. The page of hand­writ­ing you see above is a frag­ment of a lost play called Sir Thomas More and it goes by the name of “Hand D” (click the image above, and then the image that appears — for a much larg­er ver­sion).

Bruster’s short essay, pub­lished this month in the Oxford jour­nal Notes & Queries, is far too inside base­ball for any­one but hard­core tex­tu­al schol­ars to make much sense of, but this New York Times arti­cle does a good job of dis­till­ing the fin­er points. Suf­fice it to say that thanks to Bruster’s painstak­ing analy­sis of Shakespeare’s dis­tinc­tive hand­writ­ing, we can be fair­ly cer­tain that a 1602 revi­sion of Thomas Kyd’s enor­mous­ly pop­u­lar Renais­sance play The Span­ish Tragedy—in the words of Shake­speare schol­ar Eric Ras­mussen—has the bard’s “fin­ger­prints all over it.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Shake­speare Sound­ed Like to Shake­speare: Recon­struct­ing the Bard’s Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion

A Sur­vey of Shakespeare’s Plays (Free Course)

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Sings Shakespeare’s Son­net 18

Shakespeare’s Satir­i­cal Son­net 130, As Read By Stephen Fry

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

A Planetary Perspective: Trillions of Pictures of the Earth Available Through Google Earth Engine

in Education, Environment, Google, Science, Technology | September 9th, 2013

In 1972 the Earth Resources Tech­nol­o­gy Satel­lite, or Land­sat, launched into space with a mis­sion to cir­cle the plan­et every 16 days and take pic­tures of the Earth. For more than forty years, the Land­sat pro­gram has cre­at­ed the longest ever con­tin­u­ous record of Earth’s sur­face.

Now those images are avail­able to every­one. And thanks to Google Earth Engine, it’s pos­si­ble to down­load and ana­lyze them.

Five years ago NASA and the U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey rewrote their pro­to­cols and made the images avail­able for free, tril­lions of them, a ridicu­lous­ly mas­sive col­lec­tion of pic­tures tak­en from more than 400 miles away, some of them unrec­og­niz­able.

Is that green patch in the Ama­zon basin a for­est or a pas­ture?

But with a lit­tle help from Google’s cloud, this data has amaz­ing pow­er. It used to be that only a big insti­tu­tion, like a uni­ver­si­ty or a coun­try, had the pro­cess­ing pow­er to down­load the data. With a sin­gle CPU it would take months to suck down the images. Now, it only takes a few hours. With that free­dom, small envi­ron­men­tal watch­dog agen­cies and mon­i­tor­ing groups have access to the same data that the big guys have had for years. All they need to do is write the algo­rithms to help inter­pret what they’re see­ing.

And best of all, we can all see the results.

Watch Las Vegas grow from a dusty casi­no town into sub­ur­ban sprawl.

See the Palm Islands bloom into being off the coast of Dubai between 1984 and 2012.

One of the most dev­as­tat­ing is to watch the her­ring­bone of roads devel­op in the Ama­zon over just 28 years.

Down­load GoogleEarth’s free plu­g­in to view pre­com­put­ed datasets, like this one ren­der­ing the few remain­ing places on the Earth that are more than a kilo­me­ter from the near­est road.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hiroshi­ma Atom­ic Bomb­ing Remem­bered with Google Earth

Google Presents an Inter­ac­tive Visu­al­iza­tion of 100,000 Stars

Cut­ting-Edge Tech­nol­o­gy Recon­structs the Bat­tle of Get­tys­burg 150 Years Lat­er

Kate Rix writes about edu­ca­tion and dig­i­tal media. Vis­it her web­site and fol­low her on Twit­ter. 

Jacques Lacan’s Confrontation with a Young Rebel: Classic Moment, 1972

in Psychology | September 4th, 2013

This is fas­ci­nat­ing to watch.

On Octo­ber 13, 1972, the charis­mat­ic and con­tro­ver­sial French the­o­rist and psy­cho­an­a­lyst Jacques Lacan is giv­ing a lec­ture at the Catholic Uni­ver­si­ty of Lou­vain, Bel­gium, when a young man with long hair and a chip on his shoul­der walks up to the front of the lec­ture hall and begins mak­ing trou­ble. He spills water and what appears to be flour all over Lacan’s lec­ture notes and then stam­mers his way into a strange speech that sounds as if it were tak­en straight out of Guy Debor­d’s The Soci­ety of the Spec­ta­cle:

“The com­pos­ite body which up to fifty years ago could be called ‘cul­ture’– that is, peo­ple express­ing in frag­ment­ed ways what they feel — is now a lie, and can only be called a ‘spec­ta­cle,’ the back­drop of which is tied to, and serves as, a link between all alien­at­ed indi­vid­ual activ­i­ties. If all the peo­ple here now were to join togeth­er and, freely and authen­ti­cal­ly, want­ed to com­mu­ni­cate, it’d be on a dif­fer­ent basis, with a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive. Of course this can’t be expect­ed of stu­dents who by def­i­n­i­tion will one day become the man­agers of our sys­tem, with their jus­ti­fi­ca­tions, and who are also the pub­lic who with a guilty con­science will pick up the remains of the avant-garde and the decay­ing ‘spec­ta­cle.’ ”

The 71-year-old Lacan nev­er los­es his com­po­sure. (His cig­ar appears bent out of shape, but it was that way from the begin­ning.) The audi­ence, too, retains a cer­tain Gal­lic non­cha­lance. Dan­ger­ous Minds sums it up in the head­line “The Sin­gle Most ‘French’ Moment in all of 1972: Jacques Lacan Accost­ed, But No One Stops Smok­ing.” The scene is from Jacques Lacan Speaks, a one-hour doc­u­men­tary by Bel­gian film­mak­er Françoise Wolff. You can watch the com­plete film, which includes Lacan’s extend­ed and rather cryp­tic response to the inci­dent and oth­er excerpts from the lec­ture, fol­lowed by Wolf­f’s inter­view with Lacan the fol­low­ing day, in our post: “Charis­mat­ic Psy­cho­an­a­lyst Jacques Lacan Gives Pub­lic Lec­ture (1972).”

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!

via Lit­er­ary Kicks

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Michel Fou­cault: Free Lec­tures on Truth, Dis­course & The Self

John Sear­le on Fou­cault and the Obscu­ran­tism in French Phi­los­o­phy

Phi­los­o­phy with a South­ern Drawl: Rick Rod­er­ick Teach­es Der­ri­da, Fou­cault, Sartre and Oth­ers

Der­ri­da: A 2002 Doc­u­men­tary on the Abstract Philoso­pher and the Every­day Man

Philosopher Portraits: Famous Philosophers Painted in the Style of Influential Artists

in Art, Philosophy | August 29th, 2013

Lud­wig Wittgenstein/Piet Mon­dri­an:

What do the Aus­tri­an-British philoso­pher Lud­wig Wittgen­stein and the Dutch painter Piet Mon­dri­an have in com­mon? For philoso­pher and artist Renée Jor­gensen Bolinger, the two have sim­i­lar beliefs about the log­ic of space.

“Many of Mon­dri­an’s pieces explore the rela­tion­ships between adja­cent spaces,” says Bolinger “and in par­tic­u­lar the for­ma­tive role of each on the bound­aries and pos­si­bil­i­ties of the oth­er. I based this paint­ing [see above] off of Wittgen­stein’s Trac­ta­tus, in which he devel­ops a the­o­ry of mean­ing ground­ed in the idea that propo­si­tions have mean­ing only inso­far as they con­strain the ways the world could be; a mean­ing­ful propo­si­tion is thus very like one of Mon­dri­an’s col­or squares, form­ing a bound­ary and lim­it­ing the pos­si­ble con­fig­u­ra­tions of the adja­cent spaces.”

A sec­ond-year PhD stu­dent in the phi­los­o­phy pro­gram at the Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, Bolinger stud­ied paint­ing a Bio­la Uni­ver­si­ty before mak­ing phi­los­o­phy her sec­ond major. “I actu­al­ly came to phi­los­o­phy quite late in my col­lege career,” Bolinger says, “only adding the major in my junior year. I was for­tu­nate to have two par­tic­u­lar­ly excel­lent and philo­soph­ic art teach­ers, Jonathan Puls and Jonathan Ander­son, who con­vinced me that my two pas­sions were not mutu­al­ly exclu­sive, and encour­aged me to pur­sue both as I began my grad­u­ate edu­ca­tion.”

Bolinger now works pri­mar­i­ly on the phi­los­o­phy of lan­guage, with side inter­ests in log­ic, epis­te­mol­o­gy, mind and polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy. She con­tin­ues to paint. We asked her how she rec­on­ciles her two pas­sions, which seem to occu­py oppo­site sides of the mind. “I do work in ana­lyt­ic phi­los­o­phy,” she says, “but it’s only half true that phi­los­o­phy and paint­ing engage oppo­site sides of the mind. The sort of real­ist draw­ing and paint­ing that I do is all about ana­lyz­ing the rela­tion­ships between the lines, shapes and col­or tones, and so still very left-brain. Nev­er­the­less, it engages the mind in a dif­fer­ent way than do the syl­lo­gisms of ana­lyt­ic phi­los­o­phy. I find that the two types of men­tal exer­tion com­ple­ment each oth­er well, each serv­ing as a pro­duc­tive break from the oth­er.”

Bolinger has cre­at­ed a series of philoso­pher por­traits, each one pair­ing a philoso­pher with an artist, or art style, in an intrigu­ing way. In addi­tion to Wittgen­stein, she paint­ed ten philoso­phers in her first series, many of them by request. They can all be seen on her Web site, where high qual­i­ty prints can be ordered.

G.E.M. Anscombe/Jackson Pol­lock:

Bolinger says she paired the British ana­lyt­ic philoso­pher Eliz­a­beth Anscombe with the Amer­i­can abstract painter Jack­son Pol­lock for two rea­sons: “First, the loose style of Pol­lock­’s action paint­ing fits the argu­men­ta­tive (and orga­ni­za­tion­al) style of Wittgen­stein’s Philo­soph­i­cal Inves­ti­ga­tions, which Anscombe helped to edit and was instru­men­tal in pub­lish­ing. Sec­ond, her pri­ma­ry field of work, in which she wrote a sem­i­nal text, is phi­los­o­phy of action, which has obvi­ous con­nec­tions to the themes present in any of Pol­lock­’s action paint­ings.”

Got­t­lob Frege/Vincent Van Gogh:

Bolinger paired the Ger­man logi­cian, math­e­mati­cian and philoso­pher Got­t­lob Frege with the Dutch painter Vin­cent Van Gogh as a tongue-in-cheek ref­er­ence to Van Gogh’s famous paint­ing The Star­ry Night and Frege’s puz­zle con­cern­ing iden­ti­ty state­ments such as “Hes­pe­rus is Phos­pho­rus,” or “the evening star is iden­ti­cal to the morn­ing star.”

Bertrand Russell/Art Deco:

Bolinger paint­ed the British logi­cian and philoso­pher Bertrand Rus­sell in the Art Deco style. “This pair­ing is a bit more about the gestalt, and a bit hard­er to artic­u­late,” says Bolinger. “The sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of form and reduc­tion to angled planes that takes place in the back­ground of this Art Deco piece are meant to cohere with Rus­sel­l’s locial atom­ism (the reduc­tion of com­plex log­i­cal propo­si­tions to their fun­da­men­tal log­i­cal ‘atoms’).”

Kurt Gödel/Art Nou­veau:

Bolinger paired the Aus­tri­an logi­cian Kurt Gödel with Art Nou­veau. “The Art Nou­veau move­ment devel­oped around the theme of mech­a­niza­tion and the rep­e­ti­tion of forms,” says Bolinger, “and cen­tral­ly involves a del­i­cate bal­ance between organ­ic shapes — typ­i­cal­ly a fig­ure that dom­i­nates the por­trait — and schema­tized or abstract­ed pat­terns, often derived from organ­ic shapes, but made uni­form and repet­i­tive (often seen in the flower motifs that orna­ment most Art Nou­veau por­traits). I paired this style with Kurt Gödel because his work was ded­i­cat­ed to defin­ing com­putabil­i­ty in terms of recur­sive func­tions, and using the notion to prove the Com­plete­ness and Incom­plete­ness the­o­rems.”

To see more of Renée Jor­gensen Bolinger’s philoso­pher por­traits, click here to vis­it her site. And if you like them all, the PhilPor­traits Cal­en­dar might be per­fect for you.

via Leit­er Reports

Relat­ed Con­tent:

10 Famous Philoso­phers in Words and Images

Pho­tog­ra­phy of Lud­wig Wittgen­stein Released by Archives at Cam­bridge

Phi­los­o­phy: Free Cours­es

John Searle Makes A Forceful Case for Studying Consciousness, Where Everything Else Begins

in Philosophy, TED Talks | August 26th, 2013

Con­scious­ness is the sin­gle most impor­tant aspect of our lives, says philoso­pher John Sear­le. Why? “It’s a nec­es­sary con­di­tion on any­thing being impor­tant in our lives,” he says. “If you care about sci­ence, phi­los­o­phy, music, art — what­ev­er — it’s no good if you are a zom­bie or in a coma.”

Sear­le is one of today’s pre­em­i­nent philoso­phers of mind. Author of the famous “Chi­nese Room” argu­ment against the pos­si­bil­i­ty of true arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, Sear­le has been a per­sis­tent thorn in the side of those who would reduce con­scious­ness to com­pu­ta­tion, or con­flate it with behav­ior. Despite its intrin­si­cal­ly sub­jec­tive nature, con­scious­ness is an irre­ducible bio­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­non, he says, “as much sub­ject to sci­en­tif­ic analy­sis as any oth­er phe­nom­e­non in biol­o­gy, or for that mat­ter the rest of sci­ence.”

Sear­le made his remarks at the May 3 TEDx con­fer­ence at CERN — the Euro­pean Orga­ni­za­tion for Nuclear Research — near Gene­va, Switzer­land. The video above gives a thought-pro­vok­ing overview of his basic con­clu­sions about con­scious­ness, but to delve deep­er into Sear­le’s phi­los­o­phy of mind — and also his phi­los­o­phy of lan­guage and soci­ety — see our ear­li­er post about his online Berke­ley lec­tures: “Phi­los­o­phy with John Sear­le: Three Free Cours­es.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

John Sear­le on Fou­cault and the Obscu­ran­tism in French Phi­los­o­phy

What Do Most Philoso­phers Believe? A Wide-Rang­ing Sur­vey Project Gives Us Some Idea

Down­load 90 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es and Start Liv­ing the Exam­ined Life