8,400 Stunning High-Res Photos From the Apollo Moon Missions Are Now Online

in Photography, Science | October 5th, 2015

The Apol­lo pro­gram, launched in 1961 by John F. Kennedy, flew its first manned mis­sion in 1968, and the fol­low­ing sum­mer, Neil Arm­strong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin met the pro­gram’s man­date, mak­ing their his­toric Apol­lo 11 Moon Land­ing. In the ensu­ing few years, sev­er­al more space­craft and crews either orbit­ed or land­ed on the Moon, and for a brief moment, pop­u­lar mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers reg­u­lar­ly fea­tured pho­tographs of those expe­di­tions on their cov­ers and front pages. Look­ing every bit the authen­tic vin­tage Has­sel­blad pho­tos they are, the images you see here were tak­en by Apol­lo astro­nauts on their var­i­ous mis­sions and sent home in rolls of hun­dreds of sim­i­lar pic­tures.

These astro­nauts snapped pho­tos inside and out­side the space­craft, in orbit and on the moon’s sur­face, and in 2004 NASA began dig­i­tiz­ing the result­ing cache of film. Luck­i­ly for the pub­lic, devot­ed space enthu­si­ast and archivist, Kipp Teague—an IT direc­tor at Lynch­burg Col­lege in Virginia—has post­ed a huge num­ber of these pho­tos (8,400 to be exact) on his Project Apol­lo Archive Flickr account.

Teague ini­tial­ly began acquir­ing the pho­tos in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Eric Jones’ Apol­lo Lunar Sur­face Jour­nal, “a record of the lunar sur­face oper­a­tions con­duct­ed by the six pairs of astro­nauts who land­ed on the Moon from 1969 to 1972.” Under­stand­ably, so many peo­ple expressed inter­est in the pho­tographs that Teague refor­mat­ted them in high­er res­o­lu­tion and gave them their own home on the web. The Plan­e­tary Soci­ety informs us, “every pho­to tak­en on the lunar sur­face by astro­nauts with their chest-mount­ed Has­sel­blad cam­eras is includ­ed in the col­lec­tion.”

While Teague and Jones’ oth­er sites use pho­tos that have been processed to increase their clar­i­ty, light­ing, and col­or, the pho­tos on Project Apol­lo Archive remain in their orig­i­nal state. “Brows­ing the entire set,” writes the Plan­e­tary Soci­ety, “takes on the feel­ing of look­ing through an old fam­i­ly pho­to album.” Indeed, espe­cial­ly if you grew up in the late-six­ties/ear­ly-sev­en­ties at the height of the space pro­gram’s pop­u­lar­i­ty.

A good many of the pho­tos are rather pro­ce­dur­al shots of craters and clouds, espe­cial­ly those from ear­li­er mis­sions. But quite a few frame the breath­tak­ing vis­tas, tech­ni­cal details, and awestruck, if exhaust­ed, faces you see here. So many pho­tos were tak­en and uploaded in suc­ces­sion that click­ing rapid­ly through a pho­to­stream can pro­duce an almost flip­book effect. You can browse the archive by album, each one rep­re­sent­ing a reel from dif­fer­ent Apol­lo missions—including that famous 11th (top, and below)—though Teague has yet to post high res­o­lu­tion images from Apol­lo 8 and 13.

It seemed after Apollo’s demise in the mid-sev­en­ties that pho­tographs like these doc­u­ment­ed a lost age of NASA explo­ration, and that the once-great gov­ern­ment agency would cede its inno­v­a­tive role to pri­vate com­pa­nies like Elon Musk’s Space X, who have been much less forth­com­ing about releas­ing media to the pub­lic, mak­ing pro­pri­etary claims over their space pho­tog­ra­phy in par­tic­u­lar. But thanks in part to Space X and the coop­er­a­tion of Cana­di­an, Euro­pean, Russ­ian, and Japan­ese space pro­grams, NASA’s Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion has raised the agency’s pub­lic pro­file con­sid­er­ably in the past sev­er­al years. Though still painful­ly under­fund­ed, NASA’s cool again.

Even more pro­file-rais­ing is the Mars Rover pro­gram, whose recent find­ing of water has refu­eled spec­u­la­tions about life on the Red Plan­et. As films like the recent, astro­naut-approved The Mar­t­ian and a raft of oth­ers show, our col­lec­tive imag­i­na­tion has long bent toward human explo­ration of Mars. Estab­lish­ing a base on Mars, after all, is Space X’s stat­ed mis­sion. Look­ing at these stun­ning vin­tage pho­tos of the Apol­lo Lunar mis­sions makes me long to see what the first astro­nauts to walk on Mars send back. We prob­a­bly won’t have to wait long once they’re up there. We’ll like­ly get Insta­gram uploads, maybe even some with fake vin­tage Has­sel­blad fil­ters. It won’t be quite the same; few cur­rent events can com­pete with nos­tal­gia. But I like to think we can look for­ward in the near future to a renais­sance of manned—and woman-ed—space explo­ration.

See many hun­dreds more Apol­lo Lunar Mis­sion pho­tos at Project Apol­lo Archive and fol­low the archive on Face­book for updates.

via The Plan­e­tary Soci­ety

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Land­ing on the Moon: July 20, 1969

Mankind’s First Steps on the Moon: The Ultra High Res Pho­tos

Neil Arm­strong, Buzz Aldrin & Michael Collins Go Through Cus­toms and Sign Immi­gra­tion Form After the First Moon Land­ing (1969)

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

It’s Banned Books Week: Listen to Allen Ginsberg Read His Famously Banned Poem, “Howl,” in San Francisco, 1956

in Books, Literature, Poetry | September 30th, 2015

Accord­ing to Ruth Gra­ham in Slate, Banned Books Week is a “crock,” an unnec­es­sary pub­lic   indul­gence since “there is basi­cal­ly no such thing as a ‘banned book’ in the Unit­ed States in 2015.” And though the aware­ness-rais­ing week’s spon­sor, the Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion, has shift­ed its focus to book cen­sor­ship in class­rooms, most of the chal­lenges posed to books in schools are sil­ly and eas­i­ly dis­missed. Yet, some oth­er cas­es, like that of Perse­po­lis—Mar­jane Satrapi’s graph­ic nov­el mem­oir of her Iran­ian child­hood dur­ing the revolution—are not. The book was pulled from Chica­go Pub­lic School class­rooms (but not from libraries) in 2013.

Even now, teach­ers who wish to use the book in class­es must com­plete “sup­ple­men­tal train­ing.” The osten­si­bly objec­tion­able con­tent in the book is no more graph­ic than that in most his­to­ry text­books, and it’s easy to make the case that Perse­po­lis and oth­er chal­lenged mem­oirs and nov­els that offer per­spec­tives from oth­er coun­tries, cul­tures, or polit­i­cal points of view have inher­ent edu­ca­tion­al val­ue. One might be tempt­ed to think that school offi­cials pulled the book for oth­er rea­sons. Per­haps we need Banned Books Week after all.

Anoth­er, per­haps fuzzi­er, case of a “banned” book—or poem—from this year involves a high school teacher’s fir­ing over his class­room read­ing of Allen Gins­berg’s porno­graph­ic poem “Please Mas­ter.” The case of “Please Mas­ter” should put us in mind of a once banned book writ­ten by Gins­berg: epic Beat jere­mi­ad “Howl.” When the poem’s pub­lish­er, Lawrence Fer­linghet­ti, attempt­ed to import British copies of the poem in 1957, the books were seized by cus­toms, then he and his busi­ness part­ner were arrest­ed and put on tri­al for obscen­i­ty. After writ­ers and aca­d­e­mics tes­ti­fied to the poem’s cul­tur­al val­ue, the judge vin­di­cat­ed Fer­linghet­ti, and “Howl.”

But the tri­al demon­strat­ed at the time that the gov­ern­ment reserved the right to seize books, stop their pub­li­ca­tion and sale, and keep mate­r­i­al from the read­ing pub­lic if it so chose. As with this year’s dust-up over “Please Mas­ter,” the agents who con­fis­cat­ed “Howl” sup­pos­ed­ly object­ed to the sex­u­al con­tent of Gins­berg’s poem (and like­ly the homo­sex­u­al con­tent espe­cial­ly). But that rea­son­ing could also have been cov­er for oth­er objec­tions to the poem’s polit­i­cal con­tent. “Howl,” after all, was very sub­ver­sive in its day, and in a way served as a kind of man­i­festo against the sta­tus quo. It had a “cat­a­clysmic impact,” writes Fred Kaplan, “not just on the lit­er­ary world but on the broad­er soci­ety and cul­ture.”

We’ve fea­tured var­i­ous read­ings of “Howl” in the past, and if you’ve some­how missed hear­ing those, nev­er heard the poem read at all, or nev­er read the poem your­self, then con­sid­er dur­ing this Banned Books Week tak­ing the time to read it and hear it read—by the poet him­self. You can hear the first record­ed read­ing by Gins­berg, in 1956 at Port­land’s Reed Col­lege. You can hear anoth­er impas­sioned Gins­berg read­ing from 1959. And above, hear Gins­berg read the poem in 1956, in San Fran­cis­co, where it was first pub­lished and where it stood tri­al.

You can also hear Gins­berg fan James Franco—who played the poet in a film called Howl—read the poem over a visu­al­ly strik­ing ani­ma­tion of its vivid imagery. And if Gins­berg isn’t your thing, con­sid­er check­ing out the ALA’s list of chal­lenged or banned books for 2014–2015. (I could cer­tain­ly rec­om­mend Perse­po­lis.) While pro­hibit­ing books from the class­room may seem a far cry from gov­ern­ment cen­sor­ship, Banned Books Week reminds us that many peo­ple still find cer­tain kinds of books deeply threat­en­ing, and should push us to ask why that is.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

High School Teacher Reads Allen Ginsberg’s Explic­it Poem “Please Mas­ter” and Los­es His Job

The First Record­ing of Allen Gins­berg Read­ing “Howl” (1956)

Allen Gins­berg Reads His Famous­ly Cen­sored Beat Poem, Howl (1959)

James Fran­co Reads a Dream­i­ly Ani­mat­ed Ver­sion of Allen Ginsberg’s Epic Poem ‘Howl’

Find great poems in our col­lec­tion, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices

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

The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps Podcast, Now at 370 Episodes, Expands into Eastern Philosophy

in Philosophy, Podcasts | September 25th, 2015

Per­haps you’ve heard of a phe­nom­e­non called “pod­fade,” where­in a pod­cast — par­tic­u­lar­ly an ambi­tious pod­cast — begins by putting out episodes reg­u­lar­ly, then miss­es one or two, then lets more and more time elapse between each episode, one day ceas­ing to update entire­ly. It pleas­es us to report that The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps, the pod­cast offer­ing just that, on whose progress we’ve kept you post­ed over the past three years, not only shows no signs of pod­fade, but has even broad­ened its man­date to include a greater vari­ety of philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tions than before.

For those who haven’t heard the show, The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps comes from Peter Adam­son, phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at Lud­wig Max­i­m­il­ians Uni­ver­si­ty Munich and King’s Col­lege Lon­don, and “looks at the ideas, lives and his­tor­i­cal con­text of the major philoso­phers as well as the less­er-known fig­ures of the tra­di­tion.”

The main show has put out 379 episodes so far, begin­ning with the pre-Socrat­ics (specif­i­cal­ly Thales) and most recent­ly exam­in­ing Fran­cis­can pover­ty, and now a new branch has grown, start­ing from Adam­son and col­lab­o­ra­tor Jonar­don Ganer­i’s intro­duc­tion to Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy. (Hear the first episode of the Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy series below.)

Episodes of this new series on the Indi­an tra­di­tion, Adam­son writes, “will appear in alter­nat­ing weeks with episodes on Euro­pean phi­los­o­phy.” He also men­tions a “fur­ther ambi­tion to cov­er the oth­er philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tions of Asia (espe­cial­ly Chi­nese) and also African phi­los­o­phy and the phi­los­o­phy of the African dias­po­ra, but of course India will take a while so you’ll have to be patient if you are wait­ing for me to get to that!”

You can sub­scribe to The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps’ Indi­an phi­los­o­phy series on its very own pod­cast RSS feed, or on iTunes here. Philo­soph­i­cal­ly-mind­ed binge-lis­ten­ers beware; you could lose a lot of time to these two shows. “I’ve been doing my laun­dry to it for months and I’m only up to Mai­monides,” says one com­menter on a Metafil­ter thread about the new series. “I am total­ly not ready for this Patañ­jali.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

200+ Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

A His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy in 81 Video Lec­tures: A Free Course That Explores Phi­los­o­phy from Ancient Greece to Mod­ern Times

Death: A Free Phi­los­o­phy Course from Yale

Intro­duc­tion to Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Online Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, and the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

18-Year-Old James Joyce Writes a Fan Letter to His Hero Henrik Ibsen (1901)

in Literature | September 20th, 2015

When it comes to the­o­ries of artis­tic lin­eage, few have been as influ­en­tial as Harold Bloom’s The Anx­i­ety of Influ­ence, in which the august lit­er­ary crit­ic argues, “Poet­ic Influence—when it involves two strong, authen­tic poets—always pro­ceeds by a mis­read­ing of the pri­or poet, an act of cre­ative cor­rec­tion that is actu­al­ly and nec­es­sar­i­ly a mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion.” This kind of misreading—what Bloom calls “mis­pri­sion”—often takes place between two artists sep­a­rat­ed by vast gulfs of time and space: the influ­ence of Dante on T.S. Eliot, for exam­ple, or of Shake­speare on Her­man Melville.

When we come to a study of James Joyce (1882–1941), how­ev­er, we find the ground­break­ing mod­ernist cor­re­spond­ing direct­ly with one of his fore­most lit­er­ary heroes, Nor­we­gian play­wright Hen­rik Ibsen (1828–1906), whom Maria Popo­va calls Joyce’s “spir­i­tu­al and men­tal ances­tor.” As Bloom points out, Joyce described Ibsen’s work as being “of uni­ver­sal import.” He  extolled and defend­ed Ibsen’s then-con­tro­ver­sial work in his stu­dent days, both in a 1900 lec­ture he deliv­ered at Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege, Dublin, and in an essay he pub­lished that same year in the Lon­don jour­nal Fort­night­ly Review. (See the young Joyce above in 1902, at 20 years of age.)

Joyce’s arti­cle, “Ibsen’s New Dra­ma,” focused on the play­wright’s lat­est, When We Dead Awak­en, and was warm­ly received by Ibsen him­self, who—through his Eng­lish trans­la­tor William Archer—described the essay as “velvil­lig,” or “benev­o­lent.” Archer con­veyed Ibsen’s sen­ti­ments in a let­ter soon after the essay’s pub­li­ca­tion, and there­after, Joyce’s essay—writes the James Joyce Cen­tre—was “no longer just a review but a review that Ibsen had read and praised.”

Thus began a three-year cor­re­spon­dence between Joyce and Archer, and a friend­ly relationship—at some remove—between Joyce and Ibsen. In 1901, on the play­wright’s 73rd birth­day, Joyce wrote a let­ter to Ibsen direct­ly. He men­tions the cir­cum­stances of the review and express­es much youth­ful admi­ra­tion, self-con­fi­dence, and grat­i­tude for Ibsen’s response. The young Joyce laments that his “imma­ture and hasty arti­cle” came to Ibsen’s atten­tion first, “rather than some­thing bet­ter,” and boasts, “I have claimed for you your right­ful place in the his­to­ry of dra­ma.”

Read the let­ter in full below, in all its exu­ber­ant ego­tism. Accord­ing to James Joyce A to Z: The Essen­tial Ref­er­ence to the Life and Work, as he matured, the nov­el­ist “drew upon Ibsen less for cre­ative encour­age­ment than for psy­cho­log­i­cal inspi­ra­tion. In Joyce’s mind, Ibsen remained the mod­el of the artist who defies con­ven­tion­al cre­ative approach­es and who remains true to the demands of an indi­vid­ual aes­thet­ic.” Whether Joyce “mis­read” and “cre­ative­ly cor­rect­ed” Ibsen is a ques­tion I leave for oth­ers. You can read many more “fan let­ters” writ­ten by oth­er famous authors to their lit­er­ary heroes—including George R.R. Mar­tin to Stan Lee, Charles Dick­ens to George Eliot, and Ray Brad­bury to Robert Heinlein—at Fla­vor­wire.

Hon­oured Sir,

I write to you to give you greet­ing on your sev­en­ty-third birth­day and to join my voice to those of your well-wish­ers in all lands. You may remem­ber that short­ly after the pub­li­ca­tion of your lat­est play ‘When We Dead Awak­en’, an appre­ci­a­tion of it appeared in one of the Eng­lish reviews — The Fort­night­ly Review — over my name. I know that you have seen it because some short time after­wards Mr. William Archer wrote to me and told me that in a let­ter he had from you some days before, you had writ­ten, ‘I have read or rather spelled out a review in the Fort­night­ly Review by Mr. James Joyce which is very benev­o­lent and for which I should great­ly like to thank the author if only I had suf­fi­cient knowl­edge of the lan­guage.’ (My own knowl­edge of your lan­guage is not, as you see, great but I trust you will be able to deci­pher my mean­ing.) I can hard­ly tell you how moved I was by your mes­sage. I am a young, a very young man, and per­haps the telling of such tricks of the nerves will make you smile. But I am sure if you go back along your own life to the time when you were an under­grad­u­ate at the Uni­ver­si­ty as I am, and if you think what it would have meant to you to have earned a word from one who held so high a place in your esteem as you hold in mine, you will under­stand my feel­ing. One thing only I regret, name­ly, that an imma­ture and hasty arti­cle should have met your eye, rather than some­thing bet­ter and wor­thi­er of your praise. There may not have been any will­ful stu­pid­i­ty in it, but tru­ly I can say no more. It may annoy you to have your work at the mer­cy of striplings but I am sure you would pre­fer even hot­head­ed­ness to nerve­less and ‘cul­tured’ para­dox­es.

What shall I say more? I have sound­ed your name defi­ant­ly through a col­lege where it was either unknown or known faint­ly and dark­ly. I have claimed for you your right­ful place in the his­to­ry of the dra­ma. I have shown what, as it seemed to me, was your high­est excel­lence — your lofty imper­son­al pow­er. Your minor claims — your satire, your tech­nique and orches­tral har­mo­ny — these, too, I advanced. Do not think me a hero-wor­ship­per. I am not so. And when I spoke of you, in debat­ing-soci­eties, and so forth, I enforced atten­tion by no futile rant­i­ng.

But we always keep the dear­est things to our­selves. I did not tell them what bound me clos­est to you. I did not say how what I could dis­cern dim­ly of your life was my pride to see, how your bat­tles inspired me — not the obvi­ous mate­r­i­al bat­tles but those that were fought and won behind your fore­head — how your will­ful res­o­lu­tion to wrest the secret from life gave me heart, and how in your absolute indif­fer­ence to pub­lic canons of art, friends and shib­bo­leths you walked in the light of inward hero­ism. And this is what I write to you of now.

Your work on earth draws to a close and you are near the silence. It is grow­ing dark for you. Many write of such things, but they do not know. You have only opened the way — though you have gone as far as you could upon it — to the end of ‘John Gabriel Bork­man’ and its spir­i­tu­al truth — for your last play stands, I take it, apart. But I am sure that high­er and holi­er enlight­en­ment lies — onward.

As one of the young gen­er­a­tion for whom you have spo­ken I give you greet­ing — not humbly, because I am obscure and you in the glare, not sad­ly because you are an old man and I a young man, not pre­sump­tu­ous­ly, nor sen­ti­men­tal­ly — but joy­ful­ly, with hope and with love, I give you greet­ing.

Faith­ful­ly yours,

James A. Joyce

via Fla­vor­wire

Relat­ed Con­tent:

James Joyce Reads From Ulysses and Finnegans Wake In His Only Two Record­ings (1924/1929)

James Joyce’s “Dirty Let­ters” to His Wife (1909)

The Very First Reviews of James Joyce’s Ulysses: “A Work of High Genius” (1922)

Vir­ginia Woolf Writes About Joyce’s Ulysses, “Nev­er Did Any Book So Bore Me,” and Quits at Page 200

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

The Drawings & Paintings of Richard Feynman: Art Expresses a Dramatic “Feeling of Awe”

in Art, Physics, Science | September 10th, 2015

I first encoun­tered bon­go-play­ing physi­cist Richard Feyn­man in a col­lege com­po­si­tion class geared toward sci­ence majors. I was not, mind you, a sci­ence major, but a dis­or­ga­nized sopho­more who reg­is­tered late and grabbed the last avail­able seat in a required writ­ing course. Skep­ti­cal, I thumbed through the read­ing in the col­lege book­store. As I browsed Sure­ly You’re Jok­ing, Mr. Feyn­man!—the first of many pop­u­lar mem­oirs released by the affa­ble con­trar­i­an scientist—the human­ist in me perked up. Here was a guy who knew how to write; a the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist who spoke the lan­guage of every­day peo­ple.

Feyn­man cul­ti­vat­ed his pop­ulist per­sona to appeal to those who might be oth­er­wise turned off by abstract, abstruse sci­en­tif­ic con­cepts. Like Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson, his name has come to stand for the best exam­ples of pop­u­lar sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tion. It is often through one of Feynman’s acces­si­ble, non-spe­cial­ist books or pre­sen­ta­tions that peo­ple learn of his work with the Man­hat­tan project, his con­tri­bu­tions to quan­tum mechan­ics, and his Nobel Prize. But Feynman’s extracur­ric­u­lar pursuits—from safe-crack­ing to drum­ming to exper­i­ment­ing with LSD—were also gen­uine expres­sions of his idio­syn­crat­ic char­ac­ter, as was anoth­er of his pas­sions for which he is not very well known: art.

Feyn­man took up the pur­suit at the age of 44, and con­tin­ued to draw and paint for the rest of his life, sign­ing his work “Ofey.” Many of his draw­ings dis­play the awk­ward, off-kil­ter per­spec­tive of the begin­ner, and a great many oth­ers look very accom­plished indeed. In an intro­duc­to­ry essay to a pub­lished col­lec­tion of his art­work, Feyn­man describes what moti­vat­ed him to take up this par­tic­u­lar avo­ca­tion:

I want­ed very much to learn to draw, for a rea­son that I kept to myself: I want­ed to con­vey an emo­tion I have about the beau­ty of the world. It’s dif­fi­cult to describe because it’s an emo­tion. It’s anal­o­gous to the feel­ing one has in reli­gion that has to do with a god that con­trols every­thing in the uni­verse: there’s a gen­er­al­i­ty aspect that you feel when you think about how things that appear so dif­fer­ent and behave so dif­fer­ent­ly are all run ‘behind the scenes’ by the same orga­ni­za­tion, the same phys­i­cal laws. It’s an appre­ci­a­tion of the math­e­mat­i­cal beau­ty of nature, of how she works inside; a real­iza­tion that the phe­nom­e­na we see result from the com­plex­i­ty of the inner work­ings between atoms; a feel­ing of how dra­mat­ic and won­der­ful it is. It’s  — of sci­en­tif­ic awe — which I felt could be com­mu­ni­cat­ed through a draw­ing to some­one who had also had that emo­tion. I could remind him, for a moment, of this feel­ing about the glo­ries of the uni­verse.

As you can see above, he took his work seri­ous­ly. Most of his draw­ings con­sist of por­traits and nudes, with the occa­sion­al land­scape or still life. You can see more exten­sive gal­leries of Feynman’s art at Amus­ing­Plan­et, Muse­um Syn­di­cate and Brain Pick­ings.

Feynman’s preoccupation—and full immersion—in the rela­tion­ship between the arts and sci­ences marks him as a Renais­sance man in per­haps the purest def­i­n­i­tion of the term: his approach close­ly resem­bles that of Leonar­do da Vin­ci, a like­ness that comes to the fore in the work below, which is either a col­lec­tion of sketch­es doo­dled over with for­mu­lae, or a col­lec­tion of for­mu­lae cov­ered with doo­dles. Either way, it’s a per­fect rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the vision­ary mind of Feyn­man and his regard for ordi­nary lan­guage, peo­ple, and objects—and for “sci­en­tif­ic awe.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Physics Cours­es

The Feyn­man Lec­tures on Physics, The Most Pop­u­lar Physics Book Ever Writ­ten, Now Com­plete­ly Online

Richard Feynman’s Let­ter to His Depart­ed Wife: “You, Dead, Are So Much Bet­ter Than Any­one Else Alive” (1946)

Learn How Richard Feyn­man Cracked the Safes with Atom­ic Secrets at Los Alam­os

‘The Char­ac­ter of Phys­i­cal Law’: Richard Feynman’s Leg­endary Course Pre­sent­ed at Cor­nell, 1964

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

The History of Cartography, the “Most Ambitious Overview of Map Making Ever,” Now Free Online

in Books, Maps | September 3rd, 2015

Worth a quick men­tion: The Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go Press has made avail­able online — at no cost — the first three vol­umes of The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy. Or what Edward Roth­stein, of The New York Times, called “the most ambi­tious overview of map mak­ing ever under­tak­en.” He con­tin­ues:

Peo­ple come to know the world the way they come to map it—through their per­cep­tions of how its ele­ments are con­nect­ed and of how they should move among them. This is pre­cise­ly what the series is attempt­ing by sit­u­at­ing the map at the heart of cul­tur­al life and reveal­ing its rela­tion­ship to soci­ety, sci­ence, and reli­gion…. It is try­ing to define a new set of rela­tion­ships between maps and the phys­i­cal world that involve more than geo­met­ric cor­re­spon­dence. It is in essence a new map of human attempts to chart the world.

If you head over to this page, then look in the upper left, you will see links to three vol­umes (avail­able in a free PDF for­mat). My sug­ges­tion would be to look at the gallery of col­or illus­tra­tions for each book, links to which you’ll find below. The image above, appear­ing in Vol. 2, dates back to 1534. It was cre­at­ed by Oronce Fine, the first chair of math­e­mat­ics in the Col­lège Roy­al (aka the Col­lège de France), and it fea­tures the world mapped in the shape of a heart. Pret­ty great.

Vol­ume 1

Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions

Vol­ume 2: Part 1

Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 1–24)
Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 25–40)

Vol­ume 2: Part 2

Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 1–16)
Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 17–40)

Vol­ume 2: Part 3

Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 1–8)
Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 9 –24)

Vol­ume 3: Part 1

Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 1–24)
Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 25–40)

Vol­ume 3: Part 2

Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 41–56)
Gallery of Col­or Illus­tra­tions (Plates 57–80)

Note: If you buy Vol 1. on Ama­zon, it will run you $248. As beau­ti­ful as the book prob­a­bly is, you’ll prob­a­bly appre­ci­ate this free dig­i­tal offer­ing. The series will be added to our col­lec­tion, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Won­der­ful Sci­en­tif­ic Map of the Moon from 1679: Can You Spot the Secret Moon Maid­en?

Galileo’s Moon Draw­ings, the First Real­is­tic Depic­tions of the Moon in His­to­ry (1609–1610)

New York Pub­lic Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Down­load and Use

Woody Allen Tells a Classic Joke About Hemingway, Fitzgerald & Gertrude Stein in 1965: A Precursor to Midnight in Paris

in Comedy, Film | September 3rd, 2015

The char­ac­ter we know as “Woody Allen,” the per­sona we see in his films, the stam­mer­ing neu­rot­ic weighed down by exis­ten­tial angst and a des­per­ate horni­ness laced with intel­lec­tu­al­i­ty, was cre­at­ed not in his movies, but in his stand-up, record­ings of which have been in and out of cir­cu­la­tion since 1964. (They’re now avail­able here.)

The direc­tor is report­ed­ly even more embar­rassed of these record­ings than his films–and any­one who has seen his sit-down with crit­ic Mark Cousins can attest, he can’t even stand to watch his films–but maybe that’s about the per­for­mance itself, and not the mate­r­i­al.

I say that because in the clip above, a rou­tine that Allen loved enough that he often used it to end his sets in the 60s, we can see the nascent idea for his Oscar-win­ning 2011 film Mid­night in Paris.

Riff­ing on The Lost Gen­er­a­tion, he imag­ines him­self back in time, carous­ing with Hem­ing­way, Gertrude Stein, Picas­so, F. Scott and Zel­da Fitzger­ald, and famed Span­ish bull­fight­er Manolete. It’s a one-two-three-and punch­line joke we won’t ruin, but it’s inter­est­ing that con­scious­ly or sub­con­scious­ly, this idea returned some five decades lat­er to be fleshed out into one of Allen’s best late-peri­od films. Was he always think­ing of this rou­tine as a some­day film? In inter­views from the time of the film’s release, he nev­er men­tions the stand-up bit.

Cre­at­ing art is often like com­post­ing, and one nev­er knows what might float to the top after years of influ­ences and absorp­tion. Lis­ten­ing to his stand-up, one can find the joke that he recy­cled for Annie Hall (“I was thrown out of NYU my fresh­man year, I cheat­ed on my meta­physics final in col­lege, I looked with­in the soul of the boy sit­ting next to me.”).

There’s also this rou­tine about a scary sub­way ride:

The scene was lat­er recre­at­ed in Bananas with a young Sylvester Stal­lone.

Allen’s pre-film career, when he was writ­ing for tele­vi­sion and his own stand-up, when his goals were to “write for Bob Hope and host the Oscars” makes for fas­ci­nat­ing read­ing, and we’ll leave you with this his­to­ry from WMFU. Nerdist has more thoughts on the rela­tion­ship between The Lost Gen­er­a­tion joke and Mid­night in Paris here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Woody Allen Lists the Great­est Films of All Time: Includes Clas­sics by Bergman, Truf­faut & Felli­ni

Woody Allen’s Type­writer, Scis­sors and Sta­pler: The Great Film­mak­er Shows Us How He Writes

Watch an Exu­ber­ant, Young Woody Allen Do Live Stand Up on British TV (1965)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Very Early Concert Footage of the B‑52s, When New Wave Music Was Actually New (1978)

in Music | August 27th, 2015

I recall with unchar­ac­ter­is­tic clar­i­ty the first time I heard the B‑52s. Forced on a youth-group ski trip by my par­ents, I arrived an angry thir­teen-year-old wan­na-be punk: mohawk, ripped jeans, patched leather jack­et, dis­af­fect­ed scowl, and feigned air of ado­les­cent cyn­i­cal world-weari­ness. Pop music, I had already decid­ed, was for suck­ers. The only sounds that spoke to me were loud, abra­sive, and delib­er­ate­ly unlove­ly. Then some­one in our dorm put on “Rock Lob­ster” and it blew my nar­row mind. Though the osten­si­ble pur­pose of this church-spon­sored vaca­tion was to stir up some Protes­tant piety, I came away con­vert­ed instead to the gospel of new wave. I cred­it my awak­en­ing to Kate Pierson’s oth­er­world­ly wail, Cindy Wilson’s throaty har­monies, and Ricky Wilson’s bizarrely tuned gui­tar.

Maybe it wasn’t quite that dra­mat­ic, but it was a deci­sive moment in my young fan­dom, after which I found myself seek­ing out the odd, angu­lar, jan­g­ly sounds I’d first heard on that B‑52s record—and find­ing them in John­ny Marr’s Smiths gui­tar work, every ear­ly R.E.M. album, and in more morose form, in The Cure, Psy­che­del­ic Furs, and count­less mopey British post-punks. What sur­prised me at the time was learn­ing how many of these bands arrived on the scene at the same time as the nas­ti­er, grit­ti­er bands that scored my angst-rid­den entry into cal­low teenage-hood. We’re famil­iar with the sto­ry of new wave bands like Talk­ing Heads and Television’s begin­nings at CBGB’s. But around that same time, in 1976, Georgia’s B‑52s got their start in the col­lege town of Athens. As one inter­vie­wee says—in the above short doc­u­men­tary on the South­ern art-rock scene that also birthed R.E.M.—“the B‑52s start­ed the music scene as we think of it.”

Tak­ing their sound from surf rock, 50s doo-wop and girl group har­monies, and a weird­ness that is Athens’ own, the B‑52s carved out a space for them­selves with­in music that had some­thing in com­mon with the Ramones except it was hyper-col­or­ful, thrift-store kitschy, and unapolo­get­i­cal­ly campy. Their warped take on 50s and 60s dance rock—complete with Pier­son and Wilson’s “B‑52” bee­hives—first broke out with “Rock Lob­ster” (a song John Lennon once cred­it­ed with influ­enc­ing his come­back). You can see them open with the song at the top in 1978 at Atlanta’s Down­town Cafe, just pri­or to the release of their debut album. (Stick around to watch the rest of the 28-minute set.) Fred Schnei­der, the band’s wry, flam­boy­ant front­man, intro­duces each band mem­ber with a series of quirky pseu­do­nyms. Above, they do my per­son­al favorite, “52 Girls”—with its pound­ing tom-tom surf rhythms and sung-shout­ed lyrics about “The prin­ci­pal girls of the USA.” Just below catch anoth­er ear­ly gig from 1980, at New Jersey’s Capi­tol The­ater.

The B‑52s plugged along through the 80s—suffered the loss of Ricky Wil­son to AIDS—then hit it very big on the pop charts with “Love Shack” and “Roam” from 1989’s Cos­mic Thing. For my mon­ey, though, noth­ing beats the glo­ri­ous joy­ful­ness of their debut, which sounds like the most fun any band has ever had mak­ing a record togeth­er.

Though the band has always been a high­ly col­lab­o­ra­tive ensem­ble, Kate Pierson’s huge voice came to shape their sound over the years. She would go on to record the torch song “Can­dy” with Iggy Pop and the ridicu­lous, love-it-or-hate-it “Shiny Hap­py Peo­ple” with her home­town peers R.E.M. Now, at 67, she’s putting out her first solo album, Gui­tars and Micro­phones. Lis­ten to the super-catchy title track above, and hear an inter­view with Pier­son on NPR here and anoth­er on WBEZ’s Sound Opin­ions here. For more on the B‑52s ear­ly years, see ret­ro­spec­tives on Dan­ger­ous Minds and Pitch­fork. You owe it to your­self to get to know this band. They may not change your life like they did mine, but they might just expand your under­stand­ing of pop music’s pos­si­bil­i­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the Talk­ing Heads Play a Vin­tage Con­cert in Syra­cuse (1978)

The Ramones in Their Hey­day, Filmed “Live at CBGB,” 1977

Blondie Plays CBGB in the Mid-70s in Two Vin­tage Clips

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

H.P. Lovecraft’s Monster Drawings: Cthulhu & Other Creatures from the “Boundless and Hideous Unknown”

in Art, Literature | August 18th, 2015

If you’ve ever played Call of Cthul­hu, the table­top role-play­ing game based on the writ­ing of H.P. Love­craft, you’ve felt the frus­tra­tion of hav­ing char­ac­ter after painstak­ing­ly-cre­at­ed char­ac­ter go insane or sim­ply drop dead upon catch­ing a glimpse of one of the many hor­rif­ic beings infest­ing its world. But as the count­less read­ers Love­craft has posthu­mous­ly accu­mu­lat­ed over near­ly eighty years know, that just sig­nals faith­ful­ness to the source mate­r­i­al: Love­craft’s char­ac­ters tend to run into the same prob­lem, liv­ing, as they do, in what French nov­el­ist Michel Houelle­becq (one of his notable fans, a group that also includes Stephen King, Joyce Car­ol Oates, and Jorge Luis Borges) calls “an open slice of howl­ing fear.”

Read enough of Love­craft’s mid­dle-class east-coast pro­fes­sion­al nar­ra­tors’ mor­tal strug­gles for the words to con­vey what he called “the bound­less and hideous unknown” that sud­den­ly con­fronts them, and you start to won­der what these crea­tures actu­al­ly look like. The clear­est word-pic­ture comes in the 1928 sto­ry “The Call of Cthul­hu,” whose nar­ra­tor describes the tit­u­lar ancient malevolence—avoiding instan­ta­neous men­tal break­down by look­ing at an idol rather than the being itself—as “a mon­ster of vague­ly anthro­poid out­line, but with an octo­pus-like head whose face was a mass of feel­ers, a scaly, rub­bery-look­ing body, prodi­gious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, nar­row wings behind.”

And so mod­ern Love­craftians have enjoyed a new vari­a­tion of that giant octo­pus-drag­on-man form on “Cthul­hu for Pres­i­dent” shirts each and every elec­tion year. (You can find one for 2016 here.) While that phe­nom­e­non would sure­ly have sur­prised Love­craft him­self, con­stant­ly and fruit­less­ly as he strug­gled in life, I like to think he’d have approved of the designs, which align in fear­some spir­it with the sketch­es he made. At the top of the post you can see one sketch of the Cthul­hu idol, drawn in 1934 on a piece of cor­re­spon­dence with writer R.H. Bar­low, Love­craft’s friend and the even­tu­al execu­tor of his estate.

If “The Call of Cthul­hu” ranks as Love­craft’s best-known work, his 1936 novel­la At the Moun­tains of Mad­ness sure­ly comes in a close sec­ond. Just above, we have an illus­trat­ed page of the writer’s plot notes for this unfor­get­table cau­tion­ary tale of an Antarc­tic expe­di­tion that hap­pens dis­as­trous­ly upon the mind-bend­ing ruins of a city pre­vi­ous­ly thought only a myth – and the mon­sters that inhab­it it. It exem­pli­fies the defin­ing qual­i­ty of Love­craft’s mythol­o­gy, where, as Slate’s Rebec­ca Onion puts it, “ancient beings of pro­found malev­o­lence lurk just below the sur­face of the every­day world.”

“Moun­tains fea­tured sev­er­al species of for­got­ten, intel­li­gent beings, includ­ing the ‘Elder Things.’ The sketch on the right side of this page of notes (click here to view it in a larg­er for­mat), with its anno­ta­tions (‘body dark grey’; ‘all appendages not in use cus­tom­ar­i­ly fold­ed down to body’; ‘leath­ery or rub­bery’) rep­re­sents Love­craft work­ing out the specifics of an Elder Thing’s anato­my.” That such things lurked in Love­craft’s imag­i­na­tion have made his state of mind a sub­ject of decades and decades of rich dis­cus­sion among his enthu­si­asts. But just the body count racked up by Cthul­hu, the Elder Things, and the oth­er denizens of this unfath­omable realm should make us thank­ful that Love­craft saw them in his mind’s eye so we would­n’t have to.

Note: The sec­ond image on this page was fea­tured in the 2013 exhi­bi­tion held at Brown Uni­ver­si­ty, “The Shad­ow Over Col­lege Street: H. P. Love­craft in Prov­i­dence.” The Brown Uni­ver­si­ty Library is the home to the largest col­lec­tion of H. P. Love­craft mate­ri­als in the world.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

H.P. Love­craft Gives Five Tips for Writ­ing a Hor­ror Sto­ry, or Any Piece of “Weird Fic­tion”

H.P. Love­craft High­lights the 20 “Types of Mis­takes” Young Writ­ers Make

H.P. Lovecraft’s Clas­sic Hor­ror Sto­ries Free Online: Down­load Audio Books, eBooks & More

Love­craft: Fear of the Unknown (Free Doc­u­men­tary)

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

A Look Inside Hannah Arendt’s Personal Library: Download Marginalia from 90 Books (Heidegger, Kant, Marx & More)

in Archives, Philosophy, Politics | August 14th, 2015

It does seem pos­si­ble, I think, to over­val­ue the sig­nif­i­cance of a writer’s library to his or her own lit­er­ary pro­duc­tions. We all hold on to books that have long since ceased to have any pull on us, and lose track of books that have great­ly influ­enced us. What we keep or don’t keep can be as much a mat­ter of hap­pen­stance or sen­ti­ment as delib­er­ate per­son­al archiv­ing. But while we may not always be con­scious cura­tors of our lives’ effects, those effects still speak for us when we are gone in ways we may nev­er have intend­ed. In the case of famous—and famous­ly controversial—thinkers like Han­nah Arendt, what is left behind will always con­sti­tute a body of evi­dence. And in some cases—such as that of Arendt’s teacher and one­time lover Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger’s glar­ing­ly anti-Semit­ic Black Note­books—the evi­dence can be irrev­o­ca­bly damn­ing.

In Arendt’s case, we have no such smok­ing gun to sub­stan­ti­ate argu­ments that, despite her own back­ground, Arendt was anti-Jew­ish and blamed the vic­tims of the Holo­caust. Dur­ing the so-called “Eich­mann wars” in the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, a tor­rent of crit­i­cism bom­bard­ed Arendt’s Eich­mann in Jerusalem, the com­pi­la­tion of dis­patch­es she penned as an observ­er of the Nazi arch-bureaucrat’s tri­al. These days, writes Corey Robin in The Nation, “while the con­tro­ver­sy over Eich­mann remains, the con­tro­ver­sial­ists have moved on.” The debate now seems more cen­tered on Arendt’s book itself than on her moti­va­tions. What do Arendt’s obser­va­tions reveal to us today about the log­ic of total­i­tar­i­an­ism and geno­ci­dal state actions? One way to approach the ques­tions of mean­ing in Eich­mann, and in her mon­u­men­tal The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism, is to exam­ine the sources of her thought—and her use of those sources.

Arendt’s library—much of it on view online thanks to Bard col­lege—offers us a unique oppor­tu­ni­ty to do just that, not only by giv­ing us access to the spe­cif­ic edi­tions and trans­la­tions that she her­self read and saved (for what­ev­er rea­son), but also by offer­ing insight into what Arendt con­sid­ered impor­tant enough in those texts to under­line and anno­tate. In Bard’s dig­i­tal col­lec­tion of “Arendt Mar­gin­a­lia”—selec­tions of her anno­tat­ed books in down­load­able PDFs—we see a polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy informed by Aris­to­tle (see a page from her copy of Nico­machean Ethics above), Pla­to, and Kant, but also by con­ser­v­a­tive Ger­man polit­i­cal the­o­rist Carl Schmitt, a mem­ber and active sup­port­er of Nazism, and of course, by Hei­deg­ger, whose work occu­pies a cen­tral place in her library: in Ger­man and Eng­lish (like his Ear­ly Greek Think­ing above, inscribed by the trans­la­tor), and in pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary sources.

While it may go too far to claim, as promi­nent schol­ar Bernard Wasser­stein did in 2009, that an exam­i­na­tion of Arendt’s sources shows her inter­nal­iz­ing the val­ues of Nazis and anti-Semi­tes, the pre­pon­der­ance of con­ser­v­a­tive Ger­man thinkers in her per­son­al library does give us a sense of her intel­lec­tu­al lean­ings. But we can­not draw broad con­clu­sions from a cur­so­ry sur­vey of a life­time of read­ing and re-read­ing, though we do see a par­tic­u­lar­ly Aris­totelian strain in her think­ing: that the indi­vid­ual is only as healthy as his or her polit­i­cal cul­ture. What schol­ars of Arendt will find in Bard’s dig­i­tal col­lec­tion are ample clues to the devel­op­ment and evo­lu­tion of her phi­los­o­phy over time. What lay read­ers will find is the out­line of a course on the sources of Arendt-ian thought, includ­ing not only Greeks and Ger­mans, but the Amer­i­can poet Robert Low­ell, who wrote a glow­ing pro­file of Arendt and con­tributed at least four signed books of his to her library.

I say “at least” because the Bard dig­i­tal col­lec­tion is yet incom­plete, rep­re­sent­ing only a por­tion of the phys­i­cal media in the college’s phys­i­cal archive of “approx­i­mate­ly 4,000 vol­umes, ephemera and pam­phlets that made up the library in Han­nah Arendt’s last apart­ment in New York City.” What we don’t have online are books inscribed to her by Jew­ish schol­ar and mys­tic Ger­shom Scholem, by W.H. Auden and Ran­dall Jar­rell, and many oth­ers. Nonethe­less the “Arendt Mar­gin­a­lia” gives us an oppor­tu­ni­ty to peer into a writer and scholar’s process, and see her wres­tle with the thought of her pre­de­ces­sors and con­tem­po­raries. The full Arendt col­lec­tion gives us even more to sift through, includ­ing pri­vate cor­re­spon­dence and record­ings of pub­lic speech­es. The dig­i­ti­za­tion of these sources offers many oppor­tu­ni­ties for those who can­not trav­el to New York and access the phys­i­cal archives to delve into Arendt’s intel­lec­tu­al world in ways pre­vi­ous­ly only avail­able to pro­fes­sion­al aca­d­e­mics.

Relat­ed Con­tents:

Enter the Han­nah Arendt Archives & Dis­cov­er Rare Audio Lec­tures, Man­u­scripts, Mar­gin­a­lia, Let­ters, Post­cards & More

Han­nah Arendt Dis­cuss­es Phi­los­o­phy, Pol­i­tics & Eich­mann in Rare 1964 TV Inter­view

Han­nah Arendt’s Orig­i­nal Arti­cles on “the Banal­i­ty of Evil” in the New York­er Archive

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