Stephen King Creates a List of His 10 Favorite Novels

in Books | April 10th, 2018

Image by The USO, via Flickr Com­mons

If you’ve ever had to name your ten favorite of any­thing, you know how much trick­i­er such a list is to com­pose than it sounds. Not because you don’t know of ten books, movies, albums, or what have you, of course, but because you don’t know if the favorites that come to mind today would also come to mind tomor­row. Stephen King, a man appar­ent­ly often asked for top-how­ev­er-many lists (see the relat­ed posts below for more exam­ples), acknowl­edges this truth in his approach to the task, as when he drew up this top-ten-favorite-books list for Goodreads:

• Lord of the Flies by William Gold­ing
• Ship of Fools by Kather­ine Anne Porter
• Water­ship Down by Richard Adams
• The Orphan Mas­ter’s Son by Adam John­son
• The Hair of Harold Roux by Thomas Williams
• Blood Merid­i­an by Cor­mac McCarthy
• Invis­i­ble Man by Ralph Elli­son
• 1984 by George Orwell
• Amer­i­can Pas­toral by Philip Roth
• The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

“Any list like this is slight­ly ridicu­lous,” King admits. “On anoth­er day, ten dif­fer­ent titles might come to mind, like The Exor­cist, or All the Pret­ty Hors­es in place of Blood Merid­i­an. On anoth­er day I’d be sure to include Light in August or Scott Smith’s superb A Sim­ple Plan. The Sea, the Sea, by Iris Mur­doch. But what the hell, I stand by these. Although Antho­ny Powell’s nov­els should prob­a­bly be here, espe­cial­ly the sub­lime­ly titled Casanova’s Chi­nese Restau­rant and Books Do Fur­nish a Room. And Paul Scott’s Raj Quar­tet. And at least six nov­els by Patri­cia High­smith. What about Patrick O’Bri­an? See how hard this is to let go?”

Thus King, as pro­lif­ic in his appre­ci­a­tion of nov­els as he is in his writ­ing of nov­els, expands his num­ber of selec­tions from ten to at least 28. You can actu­al­ly com­pare this list to one he made on anoth­er day by hav­ing a look at anoth­er “all-time favorite book list” of his we fea­tured a few years ago. The com­mon titles between them include Lord of the Flies, Blood Merid­i­an, and 1984. (Light in August and the Raj Quar­tet also made it onto the list prop­er.) We might draw from King’s lists the les­son that we should­n’t sweat tasks like this too much: the impor­tant thing isn’t to nail down an unchang­ing per­son­al canon, but to spread the love across the aes­thet­ic and intel­lec­tu­al spec­trum (how many of us would think to name the likes of Roth, Tolkien, Orwell, and Porter all in one place?) and, even more impor­tant than that, to sim­ply keep read­ing.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Stephen King’s Top 10 All-Time Favorite Books

Stephen King’s Top 20 Rules for Writ­ers

Stephen King Cre­ates a List of 96 Books for Aspir­ing Writ­ers to Read

Stephen King Cre­ates a List of 82 Books for Aspir­ing Writ­ers (to Sup­ple­ment an Ear­li­er List of 96 Rec­om­mend Books)

Stephen King’s 22 Favorite Movies: Full of Hor­ror & Sus­pense

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Doc Martens Now Come Adorned with William Blake’s Art, Thanks to a Partnership with Tate Britain

in Art, Design | April 9th, 2018

On a recent trip to Port­land, I found myself at the city’s flag­ship Pearl Dis­trict Dr. Martens’ store and was instant­ly trans­port­ed back to much younger days when I scrimped and saved to buy my first pair of “Docs” at the local DC punk bou­tique. Big and clunky, the boots and shoes have been asso­ci­at­ed with out­sider and alter­na­tive cul­ture for decades (and, sad­ly, through no fault of their own, with neo-Nazis, as a recent Port­land con­tro­ver­sy remind­ed). The brand has since applied its “Air­Wair” sole to styles much less evoca­tive of leather-clad punks, but the originals–the eight-eye “1460” boot and three-eye “1461” shoe–will for­ev­er retain their icon­ic sta­tus, in the clas­sic col­ors of black and “oxblood” red.

“Orig­i­nal­ly a mod­est work-boot that was even sold as a gar­den­ing shoe,” as the company’s his­to­ry tells it, the near­ly inde­struc­tible footwear first achieved cult sta­tus in work­ing-class British sub­cul­tures in the ear­ly days of “glam, punk, Two Tone, and ear­ly goth.”

The flam­boy­ance of the Dr. Martens’ clien­tele gave it license to exper­i­ment with unortho­dox styles, like shiny patent leather in eye-pop­ping col­ors, an ani­mal print series and, most recent­ly, an artist series, fea­tur­ing 1460s and 1461s cov­ered in leather repro­duc­tions of paint­ings by artists like Hierony­mus Bosch, Gian­ni­co­la Di Pao­lo, and William Hog­a­rth (unfor­tu­nate­ly all sold out on their web­site).

One of the recent addi­tions to this pan­theon seems like a per­fect fit: the William Blake Docs, offer­ing your “choice of gnos­tic kicks for a night out,” as Dan­ger­ous Minds quips. A part­ner­ship with Tate Britain, the boot ver­sion is wrapped in Blake’s Satan Smit­ing Job with Sore Boils (c. 1826) and the shoe dis­plays The House of Death (c. 1795). See both paint­ings below.

Like anoth­er new addi­tion to the artist series—with art­work from J.M.W. Turn­er—the Blake Dr. Martens draw on the work of a vio­lent­ly orig­i­nal Eng­lish artist with solid­ly work­ing-class roots. Unlike his con­tem­po­rary Turn­er, Blake spent most of his days in obscu­ri­ty, cre­at­ing a DIY visu­al and poet­ic mythol­o­gy rich enough to counter the reli­gious and philo­soph­i­cal hege­mo­ny of the day, which was a total­ly punk rock thing to do in the 18th cen­tu­ry.

“I must cre­ate a sys­tem, or be enslaved by anoth­er man’s,” Blake wrote. Does the stamp­ing of his icon­o­clas­tic art­work on a cul­tur­al­ly icon­ic, com­mer­cial­ly suc­cess­ful boot (and shoe, and leather satchel, and T‑shirt) mean that he’s been absorbed into exact­ly the kind of sys­tem he spent his life oppos­ing? Isn’t that just punk’s eter­nal dilem­ma.…

See a short film from Tate Britain cel­e­brat­ing their col­lab­o­ra­tion with Dr. Martens at the shoemaker’s web­site and see much more William Blake in the Relat­ed Con­tent links below.

If you want to snag your own William Blake Dr. Martens, you can find the 3‑Eye Oxfords and 1460 Boot on Ama­zon.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William Blake’s Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Illus­tra­tions of John Milton’s Par­adise Lost

William Blake’s Mas­ter­piece Illus­tra­tions of the Book of Job (1793–1827)

William Blake’s Last Work: Illus­tra­tions for Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy (1827)

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

Enter “The Magazine Rack,” the Internet Archive’s Collection of 34,000 Digitized Magazines

in Magazines | April 5th, 2018

Before we kept up with cul­ture through the inter­net, we kept up with cul­ture through mag­a­zines. That his­tor­i­cal fact may at first strike those of us over 30 as triv­ial and those half a gen­er­a­tion down as irrel­e­vant, but now, thanks to the Inter­net Archive, we can all eas­i­ly expe­ri­ence the depth and breadth of the mag­a­zine era as some­thing more than an abstrac­tion or an increas­ing­ly dis­tant mem­o­ry. In keep­ing with their appar­ent mis­sion to become the pre­dom­i­nant archive of pre-inter­net media, they’ve set up the Mag­a­zine Rack, a down­load­able col­lec­tion of over 34,000 dig­i­tized mag­a­zines and oth­er month­ly pub­li­ca­tions.

Mag­a­zines haven’t gone away, of course, and at the Inter­net Archive’s Mag­a­zine Rack you can do just what you might have done at a tra­di­tion­al mag­a­zine rack: flip through brand new issues of pub­li­ca­tions like Tech Advi­sor, Avi­a­tion His­to­ry, and Amer­i­ca’s Civ­il War. But quite unlike a tra­di­tion­al mag­a­zine rack, where recen­cy was all, you can also read back issues — in some cas­es quite far-back issues, stretch­ing all the way to the mid-18th cen­tu­ry. The Lon­don Mag­a­zine, or, Gen­tle­man’s Month­ly Intel­li­gencer vol. XXII for the Year 1753, the old­est mag­a­zine on these dig­i­tal shelves, offers such arti­cles as “Remark­able acci­dents,” “Dan­ger of the empire’s being with­out a head,” and “Life and char­ac­ter of Christi­na, queen of Swe­den.”

As British mag­a­zines of the past go, it also delight­ed me per­son­al­ly to find in the Mag­a­zine Rack many issues of Com­put­er and Video Games (also known as CVG) which did much, giv­en its inex­plic­a­ble avail­abil­i­ty at the library of the Seat­tle sub­urb where I grew up, to shape my world­view. Oth­er titles cater­ing to “nerdy” inter­ests, broad­ly speak­ing, have — per­haps pre­dictably — been archived with a spe­cial exten­sive­ness: com­put­er and gam­ing mag­a­zines have their own vast sec­tions, but the col­lec­tions of ear­ly Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can, sci-fi fan mag­a­zine Star­log, vin­tage men’s mag­a­zines (some, of course, NSFW), and the long-run­ning ama­teur radio jour­nal 73 Mag­a­zine come not far behind.

The Mag­a­zine Rack also con­tains plen­ty of pub­li­ca­tions of the kind we tend to ref­er­ence here on Open Cul­ture, includ­ing quite a few titles devot­ed to pulp fic­tion, the influ­en­tial Moe­bius- and H.R. Giger-fea­tur­ing “adult fan­ta­sy mag­a­zine” Heavy Met­al, the Hugo Award-win­ning sci­ence fic­tion mag­a­zine IF, and the made-for-PDF-for­mat inter­na­tion­al art mag­a­zine Rev­o­lu­tion­art. Spend enough brows­ing time there and you’ll remem­ber — or learn — that, espe­cial­ly in the print-sat­u­rat­ed twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, mag­a­zines did­n’t just let us keep up with the cul­ture, they helped cre­ate it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Dig­i­tal Archive of Heavy Met­al, the Influ­en­tial “Adult Fan­ta­sy Mag­a­zine” That Fea­tured the Art of Moe­bius, H.R. Giger & More

Read 1,000 Edi­tions of The Vil­lage Voice: A Dig­i­tal Archive of the Icon­ic New York City Paper

A Com­plete Dig­i­ti­za­tion of Eros Mag­a­zine: The Con­tro­ver­sial 1960s Mag­a­zine on the Sex­u­al Rev­o­lu­tion

Down­load the Com­plete Archive of Oz, “the Most Con­tro­ver­sial Mag­a­zine of the 60s,” Fea­tur­ing R. Crumb, Ger­maine Greer & More

Enter the Pulp Mag­a­zine Archive, Fea­tur­ing Over 11,000 Dig­i­tized Issues of Clas­sic Sci-Fi, Fan­ta­sy & Detec­tive Fic­tion

Enter a Huge Archive of Amaz­ing Sto­ries, the World’s First Sci­ence Fic­tion Mag­a­zine, Launched in 1926

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

When David Bowie Became Nikola Tesla: Watch His Electric Performance in The Prestige (2006)

in Film, Music | April 5th, 2018

Only two major actors have played inven­tor Niko­la Tes­la in pop cul­ture: one is John C. Reil­ly and the oth­er is David Bowie. As much as I love this episode of Drunk His­to­ry, let’s talk about the Star­man him­self, who Christo­pher Nolan cast as Tes­la in his 2006 film The Pres­tige.

By 2005, Bowie was in seclu­sion. As elu­ci­dat­ed in the recent BBC doc, The Last Five Years, the singer was recu­per­at­ing from a heart attack on his Real­i­ty tour, a tour that would turn out to be his last.

Nolan begged Bowie to take the role:

Tes­la was this oth­er-world­ly, ahead-of-his-time fig­ure, and at some point it occurred to me he was the orig­i­nal Man Who Fell to Earth. As some­one who was the biggest Bowie fan in the world, once I made that con­nec­tion, he seemed to be the only actor capa­ble of play­ing the part…It took me a while to con­vince him, though—he turned down the part the first time. It was the only time I can ever remem­ber try­ing again with an actor who passed on me.

Bowie relent­ed and above you can see his best moment in the film (or *the* best moment in the film)–where Tes­la enters through a show­er of elec­tric­i­ty to greet Robert (Hugh Jack­man) and Alley (Andy Serkis). It’s a rock star entrance, for sure.

Nolan con­tin­ues:

The expe­ri­ence of hav­ing him on set was won­der­ful. Daunt­ing, at first. He had a lev­el of charis­ma beyond what you nor­mal­ly expe­ri­ence, and every­one real­ly respond­ed to it. I’ve nev­er seen a crew respond to any movie star that way, no mat­ter how big. But he was very gra­cious and under­stood the effect he had on peo­ple. Every­one has fond mem­o­ries of get­ting to spend time with him or speak to him for a lit­tle bit. I only worked with him briefly—four or five days—but I did man­age to sneak a cou­ple moments to chat with him, which are very trea­sured mem­o­ries of mine. Nor­mal­ly when you meet stars, no mat­ter how star­ry they are, when you see them as peo­ple, some of that mys­tique goes away. But not with David Bowie. I came away from the expe­ri­ence being able to say I was still his biggest fan, and a fan who had the very mirac­u­lous oppor­tu­ni­ty to work with him for a moment. I loved the fact that after hav­ing worked with him, I had just the same fas­ci­na­tion with his tal­ent and his charis­ma. I thought that was quite mag­i­cal.

Despite a very brief role in a film called August and an appear­ance around the same year on Ricky Ger­vais’ Extras, this would be Bowie’s last major film role, and real­ly his last filmed appear­ance until 2013, when he shot pro­mos for The Next Day.

A look at the YouTube com­ments sug­gest that many view­ers watched The Pres­tige and had no idea who was play­ing Tes­la. And that might have just tick­led the man, play­ing a magi­cian in recluse high up in the moun­tains, more in com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the invis­i­ble gods than the mor­tals.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch David Bowie Star in His First Film Role, a Short Hor­ror Flick Called The Image (1967)

Ricky Ger­vais Cre­ates Out­landish Com­e­dy with David Bowie

David Bowie Sings in a Won­der­ful M.C. Esch­er-Inspired Set in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth

Niko­la Tesla’s Pre­dic­tions for the 21st Cen­tu­ry: The Rise of Smart Phones & Wire­less, The Demise of Cof­fee, The Rule of Eugen­ics (1926/35)

The Peri­od­ic Table of David Bowie: A Visu­al­iza­tion of the Sem­i­nal Artist’s Influ­ence and Influ­ences

The David Bowie Book Club Gets Launched by His Son: Read One of Bowie’s 100 Favorite Books Every Month

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

Brian Eno’s Advice for Those Who Want to Do Their Best Creative Work: Don’t Get a Job

in Art, Economics, Music | April 2nd, 2018

“Once upon a time, artists had jobs,” writes Katy Wald­man in a recent New York Times Mag­a­zine piece. “Think of T.S. Eliot, con­jur­ing ‘The Waste Land’ (1922) by night and over­see­ing for­eign accounts at Lloyds Bank dur­ing the day, or Wal­lace Stevens, scrib­bling lines of poet­ry on his two-mile walk to work, then hand­ing them over to his sec­re­tary to tran­scribe at the insur­ance agency where he super­vised real estate claims.” Or Willem de Koon­ing paint­ing signs, James Dick­ey writ­ing slo­gans for Coca-Cola, William Car­los Williams writ­ing pre­scrip­tions, Philip Glass installing dish­wash­ers – the list goes on.

Wald­man sug­gests that we con­sid­er day jobs not just bill-pay­ing grinds but deliv­ery sys­tems for “the same replen­ish­ing min­istries as sleep or a long run: reliev­ing cre­ative angst, restor­ing the artist to her body and to the tex­ture of imme­di­ate expe­ri­ence.” Bri­an Eno thinks dif­fer­ent­ly. “I often get asked to come and talk at art schools,” he says in the clip above, “and I rarely get asked back, because the first thing I always say is, ‘I’m here to per­suade you not to have a job.’ ”

That does­n’t mean, he empha­sizes, that you should “try not to do any­thing. It means try to leave your­self in a posi­tion that you do the things you want to do with your time, and where you take max­i­mum advan­tage of what­ev­er your pos­si­bil­i­ties are.”

Eas­i­er said than done, of course, which is why Eno wants to “work to a future where every­body is in a posi­tion to do that,” enact­ing some form of uni­ver­sal basic income, the gen­er­al idea of which holds that soci­ety will func­tion bet­ter if it guar­an­tees all its mem­bers a cer­tain stan­dard of liv­ing regard­less of employ­ment sta­tus. But if that stan­dard ris­es too high, might it run the risk of soft­en­ing the rig­ors and loos­en­ing the lim­i­ta­tions need­ed to encour­age true cre­ativ­i­ty? Musi­cian Daniel Lanois, who has worked with Eno on the pro­duc­tion of sev­er­al U2 albums as well as ambi­ent music projects, describes learn­ing that les­son from his col­lab­o­ra­tor in the Louisiana Chan­nel video just above.

“At the peak of my son­ic exper­i­men­ta­tions with Bri­an Eno, we only ever used four box­es,” says Lanois. “That’s when we start­ed get­ting these real­ly beau­ti­ful tex­tures and human-like sounds from machines. We got to be experts at those few tools.” The lim­i­ta­tions under which they worked in the stu­dio may not have fol­lowed from any par­tic­u­lar phi­los­o­phy, but the actu­al expe­ri­ence taught them how a rich­er artis­tic result can arise, para­dox­i­cal­ly, from more strait­ened cir­cum­stances. Since the begin­ning of art, its prac­ti­tion­ers have always had to find inno­v­a­tive ways around obsta­cles, whether those obsta­cles have to do with tech­nol­o­gy, sides, time, mon­ey, or any­thing else besides. As Lanois reas­sur­ing­ly puts it, “I can imag­ine that if you have lim­i­ta­tion, even finan­cial lim­i­ta­tion, that might be okay, man.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William Faulkn­er Resigns From His Post Office Job With a Spec­tac­u­lar Let­ter (1924)

Charles Bukows­ki Rails Against 9‑to‑5 Jobs in a Bru­tal­ly Hon­est Let­ter (1986)

Bri­an Eno Explains the Loss of Human­i­ty in Mod­ern Music

The Genius of Bri­an Eno On Dis­play in 80 Minute Q&A: Talks Art, iPad Apps, ABBA, & MoreBri­an Eno on Why Do We Make Art & What’s It Good For?: Down­load His 2015 John Peel Lec­ture

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

The Employ­ment: A Prize-Win­ning Ani­ma­tion About Why We’re So Dis­en­chant­ed with Work Today

Hear Alan Watts’s 1960s Pre­dic­tion That Automa­tion Will Neces­si­tate a Uni­ver­sal Basic Income

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Patti Smith’s 40 Favorite Books

in Books, Music | April 2nd, 2018

Image of Pat­ti Smith per­form­ing in Rio de Janeiro by Dai­go Oli­va

As a lit­tle girl, Pat­ti Smith found lib­er­a­tion in words — first through the bed­time prayers she made up her­self, and lat­er in books. “I was com­plete­ly smit­ten by the book,” she writes in her mem­oir, Just Kids.  “I longed to read them all, and the things I read of pro­duced new yearn­ings.”

Smith found a role mod­el in Jo, the tomboy writer in Louisa May Alcot­t’s Lit­tle Women. “She gave me the courage of a new goal,” writes Smith, “and soon I was craft­ing lit­tle sto­ries and spin­ning long yarns for my broth­er and sis­ter.” As a teenag­er she dis­cov­ered the French Sym­bol­ist poets Charles Baude­laire and espe­cial­ly Arthur Rim­baud, who inspired her and helped shape her own artis­tic per­sona as a poet and punk rock­er.

Despite her fame as a rock ’n’ roll musi­cian, Smith has always described her­self as essen­tial­ly a book­ish per­son. It was around the time of Smith’s appear­ance at the 2008 Mel­bourne Inter­na­tion­al Arts Fes­ti­val, accord­ing to Ver­ti­go, that Smith released this list of her favorite books. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, it’s an eclec­tic and fas­ci­nat­ing group of books:

• The Mas­ter and Mar­gari­ta by Mikhail Bul­gakov
• Jour­ney to the East by Her­mann Hesse
• The Glass Bead Game by Her­mann Hesse
• Heart of Dark­ness by Joseph Con­rad
• Moby Dick by Her­man Melville
• Bil­ly Budd by Her­man Melville
• Songs of Inno­cence by William Blake
• The Wild Boys by William Bur­roughs
• Howl by Allen Gins­berg
• A Sea­son in Hell by Arthur Rim­baud
• Illu­mi­na­tions by Arthur Rim­baud
• Wittgen­stein’s Pok­er by David Edmonds and John Eidi­now
• Vil­lette by Char­lotte Bronte
• The Process by Brion Gysin
• Cain’s Book by Alexan­der Troc­chi
• Cori­olanus by William Shake­speare
• The Hap­py Prince by Oscar Wilde
• The Shel­ter­ing Sky by Paul Bowles
• Against Inter­pre­ta­tion by Susan Son­tag
• The Obliv­ion Seek­ers by Isabelle Eber­hardt
• The Women of Cairo by Gérard de Ner­val
• Under the Vol­cano by Mal­colm Lowry
• Dead Souls by Niko­lai Gogol
• The Book of Dis­qui­et by Fer­nan­do Pes­soa
• The Death of Vir­gil by Her­mann Broch
• Raise High the Roof Beam, Car­pen­ters by J.D. Salinger
• Fran­ny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
• The Scar­let Let­ter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• A Night of Seri­ous Drink­ing by René Dau­mal
• Swann in Love by Mar­cel Proust
• A Hap­py Death by Albert Camus
• The First Man by Albert Camus
• The Waves by Vir­ginia Woolf
• Big Sur by Jack Ker­ouac
• Any­thing by H.P. Love­craft
• Any­thing by W.G. Sebald
• The Thief’s Jour­nal or any­thing by Jean Genet
• The Arcades Project or any­thing by Wal­ter Ben­jamin
• Poet in New York by Fed­eri­co Gar­cía Lor­ca
• The Lost Hon­or of Katha­ri­na Blum by Hein­rich Böll
• The Palm-Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuo­la
• Ice or any­thing by Anna Kavan
• The Divine Pro­por­tion by  H.E. Hunt­ley
• Nad­ja by André Bre­ton

Smith’s read­ing rec­om­men­da­tions have no doubt evolved since the list was giv­en. Ear­li­er this year a writer for Elle asked what books she would sug­gest. “I could rec­om­mend a mil­lion,” Smith respond­ed. “I would just say read any­thing by [Rober­to] Bolaño. Re-read all the great clas­sics. Read The Scar­let Let­ter, read Moby Dick, read [Haru­ki] Muraka­mi. But Rober­to Bolaño’s 2666 is the first mas­ter­piece of the 21st cen­tu­ry.”

You can find a num­ber of the texts list­ed above in our col­lec­tion, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in April 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

Hayao Miyaza­ki Picks His 50 Favorite Children’s Books

29 Lists of Rec­om­mend­ed Books Cre­at­ed by Well-Known Authors, Artists & Thinkers

How Bill Gates Reads Books

in Books | April 2nd, 2018

If you’re a ded­i­cat­ed read­er of our site, you know that we’ve peri­od­i­cal­ly high­light­ed Bill Gates’ favorite books. (See his lists from 2015, 2016 and 2017, plus this rec­om­men­da­tion made ear­li­er this year.) You also know that his read­ing diet skews heav­i­ly towards non-fiction–towards books like Enlight­en­ment Now by Steven Pinker, Sapi­ens: A Brief His­to­ry of Humankind by Noah Yuval Harari, and Mind­set: The New Psy­chol­o­gy of Suc­cess by Car­ol S. Dweck.

That’s what Gates likes to read. But how about how he reads? How does Gates get the most out of his time spent read­ing? As he explains in the Quartz video above, it boils down to this:

1. Take Notes in the Mar­gins: That sim­ple step helps ensure that you’re real­ly pay­ing atten­tion and engag­ing crit­i­cal­ly with the text. It lets you “take in new knowl­edge and attach it to knowl­edge you already have.”
2. Don’t Start What You Can’t Fin­ish: Gates does­n’t explain why you should nev­er cut your loss­es. Maybe it’s a form of self-dis­ci­pline. Maybe it’s a fear of miss­ing out on what a book promis­es to deliv­er. Or maybe it’s the sunk cost fal­la­cy. Either way, Gates does rec­om­mend pick­ing your books care­ful­ly before you get start­ed.
3. Paper Books, Not eBooks: Bet­ter for mar­gin­a­lia, for sure.
4. Block Out an Hour of Read­ing Time: You can’t read a seri­ous book in a short sit­ting. To real­ly engage with a book, give it a good hour each day. A tall order, I known, in our age of ever-declin­ing atten­tion spans.

To be sure, you have your own read­ing prac­tices to rec­om­mend. Please don’t hes­i­tate to add them to the com­ments sec­tion below.

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:

Bill Gates, Book Crit­ic, Names His Top 5 Books of 2015

Six Books (and One Blog) Bill Gates Wants You to Read This Sum­mer

Take Big His­to­ry: A Free Short Course on 13.8 Bil­lion Years of His­to­ry, Fund­ed by Bill Gates

View Bill Gates’ Mobile Library: The Books & Cours­es That Help Him Change The World

The 1,700+ Words Invented by Shakespeare*

in English Language, Literature, Theatre | April 2nd, 2018

One of the favorite ref­er­ence books on my shelves isn’t a style guide or dic­tio­nary but a col­lec­tion of insults. And not just any col­lec­tion of insults, but Shakespeare’s Insults for Teach­ers, an illus­trat­ed guide through the playwright’s barbs and put-downs, designed to offer com­ic relief to the belea­guered edu­ca­tor. (Books and web­sites about Shakespeare’s insults almost con­sti­tute a genre in them­selves.) I refer to this slim, humor­ous hard­back every time dis­cus­sions of Shake­speare get too pon­der­ous, to remind myself at a glance that what read­ers and audi­ences have always val­ued in his work is its light­ning-fast wit and inven­tive­ness.

While perus­ing any curat­ed selec­tion of Shakespeare’s insults, one can’t help but notice that, amidst the puns and bawdy ref­er­ences to body parts, so many of his wise­cracks are about lan­guage itself—about cer­tain char­ac­ters’ lack of clar­i­ty or odd ways of speak­ing. From Much Ado About Noth­ing there’s the col­or­ful, “His words are a very fan­tas­ti­cal ban­quet, just so many strange dish­es.” From The Mer­chant of Venice, the sar­cas­tic, “Good­ly Lord, what a wit-snap­per you are!” From Troilus and Cres­si­da, the deri­sive, “There’s a stewed phrase indeed!” And from Ham­let the sub­tle shade of “This is the very coinage of your brain.”

Indeed, it can often seem that Shakespeare—if we grant his his­toric­i­ty and authorship—is often writ­ing self-dep­re­cat­ing notes about him­self. “It is often said,” writes Fras­er McAlpine at BBC Amer­i­ca, that Shake­speare “invent­ed a lot of what we cur­rent­ly call the Eng­lish lan­guage…. Some­thing like 1700 [words], all told,” which would mean that “out of every ten words,” in his plays, “one will either have been new to his audi­ence, new to his actors, or will have been pass­ing­ly famil­iar, but nev­er writ­ten down before.” It’s no won­der so much of his dia­logue seems to car­ry on a meta-com­men­tary about the strange­ness of its lan­guage.

We have enough trou­ble under­stand­ing Shake­speare today. The ques­tion McAlpine asks is how his con­tem­po­rary audi­ences could under­stand him, giv­en that so much of his dic­tion was “the very coinage” of his brain. Lists of words first used by Shake­speare can be found aplent­ly. There’s this cat­a­log from the exhaus­tive mul­ti-vol­ume lit­er­ary ref­er­ence The Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary, which lists such now-every­day words as “acces­si­ble,” “accom­mo­da­tion,” and “addic­tion” as mak­ing their first appear­ance in the plays. These “were not all invent­ed by Shake­speare,” the list dis­claims, “but the ear­li­est cita­tions for them in the OED” are from his work, mean­ing that the dictionary’s edi­tors could find no ear­li­er appear­ance in his­tor­i­cal writ­ten sources in Eng­lish.

Anoth­er short­er list links to an excerpt from Charles and Mary Cow­den Clarke’s The Shake­speare Key, show­ing how the author, “with the right and might of a true poet… mint­ed sev­er­al words” that are now cur­rent, or “deserve” to be, such as the verb “artic­u­late,” which we do use, and the noun “co-mart”—meaning “joint bargains”—which we could and maybe should. At ELLO, or Eng­lish Lan­guage and Lin­guis­tics Online, we find a short tuto­r­i­al on how Shake­speare formed new words, by bor­row­ing them from oth­er lan­guages, or adapt­ing them from oth­er parts of speech, turn­ing verbs into nouns, for exam­ple, or vice ver­sa, and adding new end­ings to exist­ing words.

“Whether you are ‘fash­ion­able’ or ‘sanc­ti­mo­nious,’” writes Nation­al Geo­graph­ic, “thank Shake­speare, who like­ly coined the terms.” He also appar­ent­ly invent­ed sev­er­al phras­es we now use in com­mon speech, like “full cir­cle,” “one fell swoop,” “strange bed­fel­lows,” and “method in the mad­ness.” (In anoth­er BBC Amer­i­ca arti­cle, McAlpine lists 45 such phras­es.) The online sources for Shakespeare’s orig­i­nal vocab­u­lary are mul­ti­tude, but we should note that many of them do not meet schol­ar­ly stan­dards. As lin­guists and Shake­speare experts David and Ben Crys­tal write in Shakespeare’s Words, “we found very lit­tle that might be classed as ‘high-qual­i­ty Shake­speare­an lex­i­cog­ra­phy’” online.

So, there are rea­sons to be skep­ti­cal about claims that Shake­speare is respon­si­ble for the 1700 or more words for which he’s giv­en sole cred­it. (Hence the aster­isk in our title.) As not­ed, a great many of those words already exist­ed in dif­fer­ent forms, and many of them may have exist­ed as non-lit­er­ary col­lo­qui­alisms before he raised their pro­file to the Eliz­a­bethan stage. Nonethe­less, it is cer­tain­ly the case that the Bard coined or first used hun­dreds of words, writes McAlpine, “with no obvi­ous prece­dent to the lis­ten­er, unless you were schooled in Latin or Greek.” The ques­tion, then, remains: “what on Earth did Shakespeare’s [most­ly] une­d­u­cat­ed audi­ence make of this influx of new­ly-mint­ed lan­guage into their enter­tain­ment?”

McAlpine brings those poten­tial­ly stu­pe­fied Eliz­a­bethans into the present by com­par­ing watch­ing a Shake­speare play to watch­ing “a three-hour long, open air rap bat­tle. One in which you have no idea what any of the slang means.” A good deal would go over your head, “you’d maybe get the gist, but not the full impact,” but all the same, “it would all seem ter­ri­bly impor­tant and dra­mat­ic.” (Cos­tum­ing, props, and stag­ing, of course, helped a lot, and still do.) The anal­o­gy works not only because of the amount of slang deployed in the plays, but also because of the inten­si­ty and reg­u­lar­i­ty of the boasts and put-downs, which makes even more inter­est­ing one data scientist’s attempt to com­pare Shakespeare’s vocab­u­lary with that of mod­ern rap­pers, whose lan­guage is, just as often, the very coinage of their brains.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Do Rap­pers Have a Big­ger Vocab­u­lary Than Shake­speare?: A Data Sci­en­tist Maps Out the Answer

Hear 55 Hours of Shakespeare’s Plays: The Tragedies, Come­dies & His­to­ries Per­formed by Vanes­sa Red­grave, Sir John Giel­gud, Ralph Fiennes & Many More

What Shakespeare’s Eng­lish Sound­ed Like, and How We Know It

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

Japanese Designer Creates Incredibly Detailed & Realistic Maps of a City That Doesn’t Exist

in Maps | March 30th, 2018

When he first spent time in Japan­ese cities, urban design and his­to­ry pro­fes­sor Bar­rie Shel­ton “was baf­fled, irri­tat­ed, and even intim­i­dat­ed by what I saw. Yet at the same time I found myself ener­gized, ani­mat­ed, and indeed inspired by them. The effect was lib­er­at­ing and my intu­ition was quick to sug­gest that fur­ther explo­ration of their chaot­ic vital­i­ty might be extreme­ly reward­ing.” That explo­ration involved vis­its to “alleys, shrine and tem­ple precincts, high­ways, rail­way sta­tions (and their ‘mag­net­ic’ fields), roof-tops, obser­va­tion decks, arcades, under­ground streets, bars, gar­dens,” and so on, and no less essen­tial­ly includ­ed “almost com­pul­sive por­ing over city maps (old and new).”

It all cul­mi­nat­ed in Shel­ton’s book Learn­ing from the Japan­ese City, a study that can help any West­ern­er bet­ter under­stand the likes of Tokyo, Osa­ka, Kyoto, Kanaza­wa, Hiroshi­ma, Fukuo­ka, or indeed Nago­mu­ru City. You won’t find that last, how­ev­er, on any map of Japan, nor will you find it in the coun­try itself. It exists in the land of Naira, which itself exists in the mind of Japan­ese graph­ic design­er and car­tog­ra­ph­er Imaizu­mi Takayu­ki. Imaizu­mi’s painstak­ing, ongo­ing work has pro­duced maps of Nago­mu­ru City that look at it in dif­fer­ent ways in dif­fer­ent eras, which you can browse on Let’s Go to the Imag­i­nary Cities! On this page you can explore scrol­lable maps of the city by first select­ing one of its thir­ty regions; just below that, you can also down­load a large PDF map of the entire metrop­o­lis.

Imaizu­mi’s urban car­to­graph­ic vision is so rich­ly real­ized that it has pro­duced art exhi­bi­tions, a book, and even a vari­ety of phys­i­cal arti­facts. On one page, for instance, you’ll find pho­tographs of the con­tents of sev­er­al imag­i­nary wal­lets lost on the imag­i­nary streets of Nago­mu­ru City by its imag­i­nary cit­i­zens. On anoth­er appear the imag­i­nary cash cards issued by the imag­i­nary Nago­mu­ru Bank, com­plete with a pair of imag­i­nary mas­cots with­out which, as any­one with any expe­ri­ence of Japan knows, no card would be com­plete. These arti­facts and oth­ers have all come as a result of the project Imaizu­mi began at just ten years old, a brief his­to­ry of which Japan­ese-read­ers can take in here.

“If I can imag­ine a fic­tive nation,” writes Roland Barthes in Empire of Signs, “I can give it an invent­ed name, treat it declar­a­tive­ly as a nov­el­is­tic object,” then “iso­late some­where in the world (far­away) a cer­tain num­ber of fea­tures (a term employed in lin­guis­tics), and out of all these fea­tures delib­er­ate­ly form a sys­tem. It is this sys­tem which I call: Japan.” Imaizu­mi chose to call his sys­tem Nago­mu­ru City, but one imag­ines that all its care­ful­ly cre­at­ed and posi­tioned fea­tures and details — the train lines and sta­tions, the shrines and tem­ples, the hous­ing devel­op­ments, the con­ve­nience stores, all the things cel­e­brat­ed in both Empire of Signs and Learn­ing from the Japan­ese City — would have fired up Barthes’ imag­i­na­tion just as much as did the real Japan.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Invis­i­ble Cities Illus­trat­ed: Artist Illus­trates Each and Every City in Ita­lo Calvino’s Clas­sic Nov­el

Invis­i­ble Cities Illus­trat­ed: Three Artists Paint Every City in Ita­lo Calvino’s Clas­sic Nov­el

William Faulkn­er Draws Maps of Yok­na­p­ataw­pha Coun­ty, the Fic­tion­al Home of His Great Nov­els

Japan­ese Design­ers May Have Cre­at­ed the Most Accu­rate Map of Our World: See the Autha­Graph

Artist Re-Envi­sions Nation­al Parks in the Style of Tolkien’s Mid­dle Earth Maps

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Models for “American Gothic” Pose in Front of the Iconic Painting (1942)

in Art, Life | March 27th, 2018

Grant Wood’s “Amer­i­can Goth­ic” now hangs at the Art Insti­tute of Chica­go. And on the muse­um’s web­site you’ll find a lit­tle back­ground infor­ma­tion intro­duc­ing you to the icon­ic 1930 paint­ing:

The impe­tus for the paint­ing came while Wood was vis­it­ing the small town of Eldon in his native Iowa. There he spot­ted a lit­tle wood farm­house, with a sin­gle over­sized win­dow, made in a style called Car­pen­ter Goth­ic. [See it here.] “I imag­ined Amer­i­can Goth­ic peo­ple with their faces stretched out long to go with this Amer­i­can Goth­ic house,” he said. He used his sis­ter and his den­tist as mod­els for a farmer and his daugh­ter, dress­ing them as if they were “tin­types from my old fam­i­ly album.” The high­ly detailed, pol­ished style and the rigid frontal­i­ty of the two fig­ures were inspired by Flem­ish Renais­sance art, which Wood stud­ied dur­ing his trav­els to Europe between 1920 and 1926. After return­ing to set­tle in Iowa, he became increas­ing­ly appre­cia­tive of mid­west­ern tra­di­tions and cul­ture, which he cel­e­brat­ed in works such as this. Amer­i­can Goth­ic, often under­stood as a satir­i­cal com­ment on the mid­west­ern char­ac­ter, quick­ly became one of America’s most famous paint­ings and is now firm­ly entrenched in the nation’s pop­u­lar cul­ture. Yet Wood intend­ed it to be a pos­i­tive state­ment about rur­al Amer­i­can val­ues, an image of reas­sur­ance at a time of great dis­lo­ca­tion and dis­il­lu­sion­ment. The man and woman, in their sol­id and well-craft­ed world, with all their strengths and weak­ness­es, rep­re­sent sur­vivors.

Above, you can see Wood’s sis­ter and dentist–otherwise known as Nan Wood Gra­ham and Dr. B.H. McKeeby–posing in front of “Amer­i­can Goth­ic” in 1942. That’s when the paint­ing first went on dis­play in its home­town, Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It’s a fair­ly meta moment. Gra­ham and McK­ee­by look down­right dour in the pic­ture, just as in the paint­ing.

Grant Wood died of pan­cre­at­ic can­cer in ’42, and his sis­ter even­tu­al­ly moved to North­ern Cal­i­for­nia, where she became the care­tak­er of his lega­cy. She did, after all, owe him a debt. “Grant made a per­son­al­i­ty out of me,” she said. “I would have had a very drab life with­out [Amer­i­can Goth­ic].”

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 Art­sy/Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“The Artist Project” Reveals What 127 Influ­en­tial Artists See When They Look at Art: An Acclaimed Video Series from The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art

Whit­ney Muse­um Puts Online 21,000 Works of Amer­i­can Art, By 3,000 Artists

Smith­son­ian Dig­i­tizes & Lets You Down­load 40,000 Works of Asian and Amer­i­can Art