What Is Kafkaesque?: The Philosophy of Franz Kafka
It’s difficult to imagine that there was ever a time without the word “Kafkaesque.” Yet the term would have meant nothing at all to anyone alive at the same time as Franz Kafka — including, in all probability, Kafka himself. Born in Prague in 1883, he grew up under a stern, demanding, and perpetually disappointed father, then made his way through college and entered the workforce. He ended up at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, where he was “subject to long hours, unpaid overtime, massive amounts of paperwork, and absurd, complex, bureaucratic systems,” says the narrator of the Pursuit of Wonder video above. But it was during that same period that he wrote The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika.
Of course, Kafka didn’t actually publish those eventually acclaimed books in his lifetime. After his death, that task would fall to Max Brod, the writer’s only real friend, and it entailed violating the author’s explicitly stated wishes. On his deathbed, Kafka “instructed Max Brod to burn all of his unpublished manuscripts”; instead, Brod “spent the following year or so working to organize and publish his notes and manuscripts.” Now that he’s been gone more than a century, Kafka’s reputation as one of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century is more than secure, and it would take a dedicated contrarian indeed to argue that Brod did wrong not to toss his papers onto the bonfire.
Perhaps Kafka’s reputation would have found a way to grow one way or another, respond as his writing does to a psychological discomfort we’ve all felt to one degree or another, in one setting or another: doing our taxes, waiting in airport security lines, calling tech support. On such occasions, we reach for the term “Kafkaesque,” which “tends to refer to the bureaucratic nature of capitalistic, judiciary, and government systems, the sort of complex, unclear processes in which no one individual ever has a comprehensive grasp on what is going on, and the system doesn’t really care.” Typical Kafka protagonists are “faced with sudden, absurd circumstances. There are no explanations, and in the end, there is no real chance of overcoming them.”
These characters are “outmatched by the arbitrary, senseless obstacles they face, in part because they can’t understand or control any of what is happening.” They feel “the unyielding desire for answers in conquest over the existential problems of anxiety, guilt, absurdity, and suffering, paired with an inability to ever really understand or control the source of the problems and effectively overcome them.” Yet “even in the face of absurd, despairing circumstances, Kafka’s characters don’t give up. At least initially, they continue on and fight against their situations, trying to reason, understand, or work their way out of the senselessness, but in the end, it is ultimately to no avail.” To Kafka, it was all part of another day in modernity. Here in the twenty-first century, it seems we may need to start looking for an even more powerful adjective.
Related content:
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Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque Love Letters
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...How Dave Brubeck’s Time Out Changed Jazz
Music video essay maestro Polyphonic is back. What I dig about his videos is that he takes on some of the true warhorses of modern popular music and manages to find something new to say. Or at least he presents familiar stories in a new and modern way to an audience who may be hearing ELO, Queen, or Neil Young for the first time.
His upload explores Dave Brubeck’s groundbreaking jazz album Time Out. This is an album that regularly tops best-of lists, gets reissued constantly, and is so ubiquitous in some circles that it’s hard, like Led Zeppelin’s fourth album, to hear the album with fresh ears.
Polyphonic touches on something right at the beginning of the video that deserves a full video essay of its own–the State Department’s mission to send American jazz musicians around the world as cultural ambassadors. This is a part of history that has receded from memory, but had a major influence not just on Brubeck, but so many records at that time. Brubeck joined Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, and Dizzy Gillespie on a musical tour that reached many countries behind the Iron Curtain, and were able to critique America’s racist history while also promoting its musical culture. (PBS made a fine documentary on the mission in 2018.) But for the purposes of this video essay, and regarding Brubeck’s career, it was the polyrhythms and folk music that he heard while traveling through countries like Turkey (from which he developed “Blue Rondo a la Turk”) that remained with him on his return.
Time Out was Brubeck’s fourteenth album for Columbia Records, but his breakthrough. Up to that point he and his quartet had released a number of live albums recorded at colleges (which promoted a safe but hip studious kind of jazz) and several albums of jazz covers, such as Dave Digs Disney. But Time Out was a fully formed concept album of sorts: an exploration into time signatures that jazz hadn’t really touched yet.
As Polyphonic points out, Joe Morello, Brubeck’s drummer, was indeed well versed in complicated time signatures from his classical background as a violinist. It was Morello who experimented with a groove in 5/4 time that became the backbone of “Take Five.” Brubeck knew a good thing when he heard it and gives Morello one of the best solos of the entire LP.
Best of all, Time Out is one those classic albums because of how it mixes the experimental with the commercial, a hard feat in any era, but even more impressive in that best of all jazz years, 1959. Brubeck continued to explore time signatures on this album’s sequel Time Further Out, which is also recommended.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.
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Watch an Incredible Performance of “Take Five” by the Dave Brubeck Quartet (1964)
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts.
Read More...Why “The Girl from Ipanema” Is a Richer & Weirder Song Than You Realized
Say what you want about YouTube’s negative effects (endless soy faces, influencers, its devious and fascist-leaning algorithms) but it has offered to creators a space in which to indulge. And that’s one of the reasons I’ve been a fan of Adam Neely’s work. A jazz musician and a former student at both the Berklee College of Music and the Manhattan School of Music, his YouTube channel is a must for those with an interest in the how and why of music theory. If not for Neely’s talent and YouTube’s platform we wouldn’t have the above: a 30 minute (!) exploration of the bossa nova standard, “The Girl from Ipanema.” And it is worth every single minute. (Even the composer Antonio Carlos Jobim himself could not have convinced traditional television execs to give him that long an indulgence.)
Seeing we haven’t featured Neely on Open Culture before, let this be a great introduction, because this is one of his better videos. It also helps that the subject matter just happens to be one of the most covered standards in pop history.
Its legacy is one of lounge lizards and kitsch. Neely shows it being used as a punchline in The Blues Brothers and as mood music in V for Vendetta. I remember it being hummed by two pepperpots (Graham Chapman and John Cleese) in a Monty Python skit. And Neely gives us the “tl;dw” (“too long, didn’t watch”) summary up front: the song’s history concerns blues music, American cultural hegemony, and the influence of the Berklee College’s “The Real Book.” There’s also loads of music theory thrown in too, so it helps to know just a little going in.
Neely first peels back decades of elevator music covers to get to the birth of the song, and its multiple parents: the Afro-Brazilian music called Samba, the hip nightclubs of Rio de Janeiro during the 1950s, the hit film Black Orpheus which brought both samba and bossa nova (the “new wave”) to an international audience, Jobim and other musicians’ interest in American blues and jazz chords, and American interest from musicians like Stan Getz. All this is a back and forth circuit of influences that results in this song, which borrows its structure from Tin Pan Alley composers like Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, and inserts a sad, self-pitying B‑section after two A‑section lyrics about a young woman passing by on a beach (lyrics by Vinicius de Moraes, who also wrote the screenplay to Black Orpheus).
The key in which you play the song also reveals the cultural divide. Play it in F and you are taking sides with the Americans; play it in Db and you are keeping it real, Brazilian style. Neely breaks apart the melody and the chord sequences, pointing out its repetition (which makes it so catchy) but also its ambiguity, which explains endless YouTube videos of musicians getting the chord sequence wrong. And, what exactly *is* the true chord sequence? And how is it a riff on, of all things, Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train”? Neely also shows the progression of various covers of the song, and what’s been added and what’s been deleted. Leaving things out, as he illustrates with a clip from Leonard Bernstein’s 1973 Harvard lectures, is what gives art its magic.
There’s so much more to this 30 minute clip, but you really should watch the whole thing (and then hit subscribe to his channel). This essay is exactly what YouTube does best, and Neely is the best of teachers, a smart, self-deprecating guy who mixes intellect with humor. Plus, you’ll be humming the song for the rest of the day, just a bit more aware of the reason behind the ear worm.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2020.
Related Content:
Getz and Gilberto Perform ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ (and the Woman Who Inspired the Song)
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
Read More...Historian Answers Burning Questions About The Renaissance
Courtesy of Wired, historian Alexander Bevilacqua (Williams College) answers the internet’s burning questions about the cultural rebirth that came to be known as The Renaissance. In 30+ minutes, Bevilacqua covers an array of questions, including: When did The Renaissance begin? What exactly was the Renaissance? Why do paintings like the Mona Lisa and The Birth of Venus remain so famous centuries later? What did people’s diets consist of during The Renaissance? How was their hygiene? How did Brunelleschi build a dome in Florence that defied gravity? What is inside Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks? And the questions go on…
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!
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Read More...The 48 Laws of Power Explained in 30 Minutes: “Never Outshine the Master,” “Re-Create Yourself,” and More
Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power has been a popular book since its first publication over a quarter-century ago. Judging by the discussion that continues among its fervent (and often proselytizing) fans, it’s easy to forget that its title isn’t How to Become Powerful. Granted, it may sometimes get filed in the self-help section, and certain of the laws it contains — “Never outshine the master,” “Always say less than necessary,” “Enter action with boldness” — read like straightforward recommendations. Yet like Machiavelli, one of the book’s many historical sources, it’s much more interesting to read as a study of power itself.
In the video above from Greene’s official YouTube channel, you can hear all 48 laws accompanied by brief explanations in less than 30 minutes. Some of them may give you pause: are “Get others to do the work for you, but always take the credit,” “Pose as a friend, work as a spy,” and “Crush your enemy totally” really meant to be taken straightforwardly?
Perhaps they both are and aren’t. Descriptive of the ways in which individuals have accrued power over the course of human history (images of whom provide visual accompaniment), they can also be metaphorically transposed into a variety of personal and professional situations without turning you into some kind of evil mastermind.
When The 48 Laws of Power came out in 1999, we didn’t live on the internet in the way we do now. Re-read today, its laws apply with an uncanny aptness to a social-mediated world in which we’ve all become public personalities online. We may not always say less than necessary, but we do know how important it can be to “court attention at all costs.” Some of us “cultivate an air of unpredictability”; others “play to people’s fantasies,” in some cases going as far as to “create a cult-like following.” The most adept put in work to “create compelling spectacles” in accordance with “the art of timing,” taking care to “never appear too perfect.” Though Machiavelli himself would understand practically nothing about our technology, he would surely understand our world.
Related content:
Machiavelli’s The Prince Explained in an Illustrated Film
What Does “Machiavellian” Really Mean?: An Animated Lesson
Salman Rushdie: Machiavelli’s Bad Rap
Allan Bloom’s Lectures on Machiavelli (Boston College, 1983)
The Nature of Human Stupidity Explained by The 48 Laws of Power Author Robert Greene
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Flannery O’Connor: Friends Don’t Let Friends Read Ayn Rand
In a letter dated May 31, 1960, Flannery O’Connor, the author best known for her classic story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (listen to her read the story here) penned a letter to her friend, the playwright Maryat Lee. It begins rather abruptly, likely because it’s responding to something Maryat said in a previous letter:
I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.
The letter, which you can read online or find in the book The Habit of Being, then turns to other matters.
O’Connor’s critical appraisal of Ayn Rand’s books is pretty straightforward. But here’s one factoid worth knowing. Mickey Spillane (referenced in O’Connor’s letter) was a hugely popular mystery writer, who sold some 225 million books during his lifetime. According to his Washington Post obit, “his specialty was tight-fisted, sadistic revenge stories, often featuring his alcoholic gumshoe Mike Hammer and a cast of evildoers.” Critics, appalled by the sex and violence in his books, dismissed his writing. But Ayn Rand defended him. In public, she said that Spillane was underrated. In her book The Romantic Manifesto, Rand put Spillane in some unexpected company when she wrote: “[Victor] Hugo gives me the feeling of entering a cathedral–Dostoevsky gives me the feeling of entering a chamber of horrors, but with a powerful guide–Spillane gives me the feeling of listening to a military band in a public park–Tolstoy gives me the feeling of an unsanitary backyard which I do not care to enter.”
All of this goes to show that _____. We’ll let you fill in the blank.
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!
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Hear Flannery O’Connor Read “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (1959)
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Read More...Édouard Manet Illustrates Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, in a French Edition Translated by Stephane Mallarmé (1875)
Edgar Allan Poe achieved almost instant fame during his lifetime after the publication of The Raven (1845), but he never felt that he received the recognition he deserved. In some respects, he was right. He was, after all, paid only nine dollars for the poem, and he struggled before and after its publication to make a living from his writing.
Poe was one of the first American writers to do so without independent means. His work largely met with mixed reviews and he was fired from job after job, partly because of his drinking. After his death, however, Poe’s influence dominated emerging modernist movements like that of the decadent poetry of Charles Baudelaire (who called Poe his “twin soul”) and his symbolist disciple Stéphane Mallarmé.
Mallarmé would write of Poe, “His century appalled at never having heard / That in this voice triumphant death had sung its hymn.” To bring that hymn of death, the raven’s cry of “Nevermore,” to French readers, he made a translation of The Raven, Le Corbeau, in 1875 at age 33.
Poe also had a tremendous influence on the visual arts in France. Illustrating the text was none other than Édouard Manet, the painter credited with the genesis of impressionism. The resulting engravings, rendered in dark, heavy smudges, give us the poem’s unnamed, bereaved speaker as the young Mallarmé, unmistakable with his pushbroom mustache.
Sadly, the New York Public Library tells us, “the publication was not a commercial success.” (See Manet’s design for a poster and the book cover at the top of the post.)
The book also illustrates the reciprocal relationship between Poe and French art and literature. Chris Semtner, curator of a Richmond, Virginia exhibit on this mutual influence, remarks that Poe “read Voltaire among other French authors”—such as Alexandre Dumas—“in college” and found them highly influential. Likewise, Poe left his mark not only on Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Manet, but also Paul Gauguin, Odilon Redon, and Henri Matisse.
You can read Le Corbeau here in a dual language edition, with all the original illustrations. View and download high-res scans of the engravings here. And just above, listen to The Raven read aloud in Mallarmé’s French, courtesy of the Internet Archive.
Related Content:
Gustave Doré’s Splendid Illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (1884)
Aubrey Beardsley’s Macabre Illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Stories (1894)
Harry Clarke’s Hallucinatory Illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s Stories (1923)
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...
Google Creates a Career Certificate That Prepares Students for Cybersecurity Jobs in 6 Months
In 2023, Google launched several online certificate programs designed to help students land an entry-level job, without necessarily having a college degree. This includes a certificate program focused on Cybersecurity, a field that stands poised to grow as companies become more digital and face mounting cyberattacks.
Offered on Coursera’s educational platform, the new Google Cybersecurity Professional Certificate features eight online courses, which will collectively help students learn how to:
- Understand the importance of cybersecurity practices and their impact for organizations.
- Identify common risks, threats, and vulnerabilities, as well as techniques to mitigate them.
- Protect networks, devices, people, and data from unauthorized access and cyberattacks using Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools.
- Gain hands-on experience with Python, Linux, and SQL.
The Cybersecurity Professional Certificate also now includes six new videos that explain how to use AI in cybersecurity. The videos cover everything from using artificial intelligence to help identify bugs and system vulnerabilities, to refining code and prioritizing alerts with AI.
Students can take individual courses in these professional certificate programs for free. (Above, you can watch a video from the first course in the cybersecurity certificate program, entitled “Foundations of Cybersecurity.”) However, if you would like to receive a certificate, Coursera will charge $49 per month (after an initial 7‑day free trial period). That means that the Cybersecurity Professional Certificate, designed to be completed in 6 months, will cost roughly $300 in total.
Once students complete the cybersecurity certificate, they can add the credential to their LinkedIn profile, resume, or CV. As a perk, students in the U.S. can also connect with 150+ employers (e.g., American Express, Colgate-Palmolive, T‑Mobile, Walmart, and Google) who have pledged to consider certificate holders for open positions. According to Coursera, this certificate can prepare students to become an entry-level “cybersecurity analyst and SOC (security operations center) analyst.”
You can start a 7‑day free trial of the Cybersecurity Professional Certificate here. Alternatively, if you sign up for Coursera Plus, whose price has been reduced by 40% until December 2, 2024, you can enroll in the cybersecurity certificate program at no charge. Find out more here.
Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture.
Read More...An Introduction to the Astonishing Book of Kells, the Iconic Illuminated Manuscript
Whatever set of religious or cultural traditions you come from, you’ve probably seen a Celtic cross before. Unlike a conventional cross, it has a circular ring, or “nimbus,” where its arms and stem intersect. The sole addition of that element gives it a highly distinctive look, and indeed makes it one of the representative examples of Insular iconography — that is, iconography created within Great Britain and Ireland in the time after the Roman Empire. Perhaps the most artistically impressive Celtic cross in existence is found on one of the pages of the ninth-century Book of Kells (view online here), which itself stands as the most celebrated of all Insular illuminated manuscripts.
On what’s called the “carpet page” of the Book of Kells, explains Smarthistory’s Steven Zucker in the video above, “we see a cross so elaborate that it almost ceases to be a cross.” It has “two crossbeams, and these delicate circles with intricate interlacing in each of them, but the circles are so large that they almost overwhelm the cross itself.”
That’s hardly the only image of note in the book, which contains the four Gospels of the New Testament, among other texts, as well as numerous and extravagant illustrations, all of them executed painstakingly by hand on its vellum pages back when it was created, circa 800, in the scriptorium of a medieval monastery. These illustrations include, as Zucker’s colleague Lauren Kilroy puts it, “the earliest representation of the Virgin and Child in a manuscript in Western Europe.”
This is hardly a volume one approaches lightly — especially if one approaches it in person, as Zucker and Kilroy did on their visit to Trinity College Dublin. “When we were standing in front of the book,” says Kilroy, they “noticed how many folios formed the book itself” (which would have required the skin of more than 100 young calves). Coming to grips with the sheer quantity of material in the Book of Kells is one thing, but understanding how to interpret it is another still. Hence the free online course previously featured here on Open Culture, which can help you more fully appreciate the book in its digitized form available online. Even if the cross, Celtic or otherwise, stirs no particular religious feelings within you, the Book of Kells has much to say about the civilization that produced it: a civilization that, insular though it may once have been, would go on to change the shape of the world.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Learn Data Analytics & AI with Google, and Fast-Track Your Career
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We’re living in the age of data and artificial intelligence (AI). Every second, vast amounts of data are being generated, processed, and analyzed. And increasingly AI plays a central role in how that data gets managed. For companies, governments, and individuals alike, understanding data is essential. This makes Data Analytics—especially when accompanied by AI skills—a valuable asset for most professionals.
Enter Google, which recently launched a professional certificate in Data Analytics–one that will “have you job-ready in less than 6 months.” Offered on the Coursera platform, the Data Analytics Professional Certificate consists of eight courses, including “Foundations: Data, Data, Everywhere,” “Prepare Data for Exploration,” “Data Analysis with R Programming,” and “Share Data Through the Art of Visualization.” And now the course sequence has incorporated videos exploring how to leverage artificial intelligence when working with data. Overall this program “includes over 180 hours of instruction and hundreds of practice-based assessments, which will help you simulate real-world data analytics scenarios that are critical for success in the workplace.”
Upon completion, students–even those who haven’t pursued a college degree–can directly apply for jobs (e.g., junior or associate data analyst, database administrator, etc.) with Google and over 150 U.S. employers, including Deloitte, Target, and Verizon. You can start a 7‑day free trial and explore the courses here. If you continue beyond the free trial, Google/Coursera will charge $49 per month. That translates to about $300 after 6 months, the time estimated to complete the certificate.
Finally, it’s worth mentioning that anyone who enrolls in this certificate before November 30, 2024 will get access to Google AI Essentials at no cost.
Explore the Data Analytics Certificate by watching the video above. Learn more about the overall Google career certificate initiative here. And find other Google professional certificates here.
Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture.
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