Hear James Joyce Reads From Ulysses and Finnegans Wake In His Only Two Recordings (1924/1929)
As much as it is about every part of Dublin that ever passed by James Joyce’s once-young eyes, Ulysses is also a book about books, and about writing and speech—as mythic invocation, as seduction, chatter, and rhetoric, fulsome and empty. Words—two-faced, like open books—carry with them at least two senses, the meaning of their present utterance, and the verso shades of history. This is at least partly the import of Joyce’s mythical method, as it is that of all expositors of ancient texts, from preachers and theologians to literary critics. It seems particularly significant, then, that the passage Joyce chose for the one and only recording of a reading from Ulysses comes from the “Aeolus” episode, which parodies Odysseus and his companions’ encounter with the god of wind.
Joyce sets the scene in the newspaper offices of the Freeman’s Journal, epitome of writing in the present tense, where reporters and editors give puffed-up speeches punctuated by reductive, pithy headlines. Amidst this business, erudite professor MacHugh and Stephen Dedalus wax literary and historical, making connections. MacHugh recites “the finest display of oratory” he ever heard—a defense of the revival of the Irish language that compares the Irish people to Moses and the ancient Hebrews spurning the seductions of an oppressive empire in the person of an Egyptian high priest: Vagrants and daylabourers are you called: the world trembles at our name.
Joyce recorded the passage in 1924 at the urging of Shakespeare and Company founder Sylvia Beach, who persuaded the HMV gramophone studio in Paris to make the record, under the provision that she would finance it and that the studio’s name would appear nowhere on the product. Ulysses, recall, was in many places under a ban for obscenity (not lifted in the U.S. until 1933 by Judge John Woolsey). The recording session was painful for Joyce, who needed two attempts on two separate days to complete it, plagued as he was by his failing eyes. And yet Joyce, Beach wrote in her notes, “was anxious to have the recording made… He had made up his mind, he told me, that this would be his only reading from Ulysses… it is more, one feels, than mere oratory.” You can read the speech here while listening to Joyce read above. Beach called Joyce’s reading a “wonderful performance.” “I never hear it,” she wrote, “without being deeply moved.”
While Beach may have been satisfied with the recording, her friend, linguist C.K. Ogden pronounced it “very bad,” meaning, writes Beach, “it was not a success technically” (though it was not, in any case, “at all a commercial venture”). You will notice this immediately as you struggle to hear Joyce’s muted reading. Anxious to preserve his voice in a clearer document, Ogden captured Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake five years later at the studio of the Ornithological Society in Cambridge (he boasted of owning “the two biggest recording machines in the world”). By this time, Joyce’s eyesight had almost completely dimmed. Ogden photographed the text and enlarged it so that the letters were a half-inch tall, yet Joyce still could barely make them out and “supposedly needed someone to whisper along” (Beach, who was not present, imagined he must have known the passage by heart).
Joyce chose to read from the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” section of the experimental text—a passage “overflowing,” writes Mental Floss, with “allusions to the world’s rivers.” He reads in the voice of an old washerwoman, and begins with a most succinct statement of the temporal dimensions of language: “I told you every telling has a tailing.” Where Ulysses foregrounds literary history, Finnegans Wake dives deep into geologic time, and privileges the oral over the written. These are the only two recordings Joyce ever made, and they surely mark what were for him central locations in both books, though he also chose them for their ease of reading aloud and, perhaps, memorizing.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.
Read More...The Ancient Tool Used in Japan to Strengthen Memory & Focus: The Abacus
William Gibson famously observed that the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. That line is often thought to have been inspired by Japan, which was already projecting a thoroughly futuristic image, at least in popular culture, by the time he made his debut with Neuromancer in 1984. But as anyone who’s spent enough time in the country understands — albeit not without frustration — even twenty-first-century Japan remains in many ways a pre-digital society. Many businesses only take cash, more than a few services require communication by fax, and there’s no substitute for a physical hanko seal on important documents. Even so, it may come as a surprise to learn that Japan still uses abacuses.
Or rather, Japan still uses abacuses as educational tools: you won’t see many shopkeepers pull them out while ringing up your purchases, but if you glance in the window of the right kind of private academy, you might well see young students furiously performing calculations the very old-fashioned way.
If they’re sufficiently advanced, as explained in the BBC video above, they won’t even have actual abacuses; they’ll just move around beads pictured in their heads. (It brings to mind how Dustin Hoffman’s savant in Rain Man explains his performance of seemingly impossible mental math: “I see it.”) Such intensive abacus education was common across northeast Asia in the mid-twentieth century, when the arithmetic skills it cultivated were important for both individual survival and national development.
It was that very development that tended to push the abacus into obsolescence. When Korea, where I live, could afford electronic calculators, the prestige associated with abacus mastery dissolved practically overnight. Determined Korean parents can still sign their children up for jupan classes, much as Chinese parents might encourage theirs to enter into suanpan competitions out of a sense of civilizational pride, but they have nothing like the status the soroban enjoys in Japan. That may be vindicated by neuroscientific research pointing toward the benefits learning the abacus can have on a developing brain’s cognitive functions. As the BBC video explains, abacus training enhances cognitive function by sharpening concentration, accelerating information processing, and strengthening visual memory, leading to improved memory and sustained focus. But as any enthusiast of Japanese craft culture knows, no matter how much harder it may be to do things with analog tools, sometimes it’s just more satisfying.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Dictionary of the Oldest Written Language–It Took 90 Years to Complete, and It’s Now Free Online
It took 90 years to complete. But, in 2011, scholars at the University of Chicago finally published a 21-volume dictionary of Akkadian, the language used in ancient Mesopotamia. Unspoken for 2,000 years, Akkadian was preserved on clay tablets and in stone inscriptions until scholars deciphered it during the last two centuries.
In the past, we’ve published audio that lets you hear the reconstructed sounds of Akkadian (Hear The Epic of Gilgamesh Read in the Original Akkadian and Enjoy the Sounds of Mesopotamia). Now, should you wish, you can download PDFs of U. Chicago’s Akkadian dictionary for free. All 21 volumes would cost well over $1,945 if purchased in hard copy. But the PDFs, they won’t run you a dime.
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Read More...The Greek Mythology Family Tree: A Visual Guide Shows How Zeus, Athena, and the Ancient Gods Are Related
It was long ago that polytheism, as the story comes down to us, gave way to monotheism. Humanity used to have many gods, and now almost every religious believer acknowledges just one — though which god, exactly, does vary. Some popular theories of “big history” hold that, as the scale of a society grows larger, the number of deities proposed by its faiths gets smaller. In that scheme, it makes sense that the growing Roman Empire would eventually adopt Christianity, and also that the gods it first inherited from the city-states of ancient Greece would be so numerous. Through our modern eyes, the various immortals invoked so readily by the Greeks look less like holy figures than a cast of characters in a long-running television drama.
Or maybe it would have to be a soap opera, given that most of them belong to one big, often troubled clan. Hence the structure of UsefulCharts’ Greek Mythology Family Tree, explained in the video above. Also available for purchase in poster form, it clearly diagrams the relationships between everyone in the Greek pantheon, from the highest “primordial gods” like Eros Elder and Gaia down to the children of Zeus and Poseidon.
However powerful they could be — and some were powerful indeed — none of these gods acted like the infallible, omniscient entities of the major religions we know today. They could act capriciously, vengefully and even nonsensically, a reflection of the often capricious‑, vengeful‑, and nonsensical-seeming nature of life in the ancient world.
For the Greeks themselves, these mythical gods and monsters offered not just an explanatory mechanism, but also a form of entertainment, given that nothing could go on in their elevated world without high drama. For us, they remain present in legends from which we still draw inspiration for our own larger-than-life stories of heroism and villainy, but also in our very language. Consider the ways in which we continue to evoke the likes of the time-ruling Chronos, the love-bringing Cupid, the androgynous Hermaphroditus, or the multi-headed Hydra in everyday speech. Though we may no longer need them to organize our societies, some of them have kept playing roles in the age of monotheism — which, whatever its other advantages, doesn’t require us to consult diagrams to know who’s who.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...300,000 Wondrous Nature Illustrations Put Online by The Biodiversity Heritage Library
Are we truly in the midst of a human-caused sixth mass extinction, an era of “biological annihilation”? Many scientists and popular science writers say yes, using terms like “Holocene” or “Anthropocene” to describe what follows the Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Triassic, and Cretaceous periods. Peter Brannen, the author of extinction history The Ends of the Earth has found at least one scientist who thinks the concept is “junk.” But Brannen quotes some alarming statistics. Chilling, even. “Until very recently,” he writes, “all vertebrate life on the planet was wildlife. But astoundingly, today wildlife accounts for only 3 percent of Earth’s land animals; human beings, our livestock, and our pets take up the remaining 97 percent of the biomass… almost half of the Earth’s land has been converted into farmland.”
This state of affairs does not bode well for the millions of remaining species getting edged out of their environments by agribusiness and climate change. We learn from extinctions past that the planet rebounds after unimaginable catastrophe. Life really does go on, though it may take millions of years to recover. But the current forms of life may disappear before their time. If we want to understand what is at stake besides our own fragile fossil-fuel-based civilizations, we need to connect to life emotionally as well as intellectually. Short of globe-hopping physical immersion in the Earth’s biodiversity, we could hardly do better than immersing ourselves in the tradition of naturalist writing, art, and photography that brings the world to us.
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), an “open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives,” has for many years been making it easy for people to connect to nature through nature writing and illustration. On Flickr, you can find 319,000 carefully curated images. The collection itself is subdivided into different photo albums drawn from historical publications. For example, The Freshwater Fishes of the British Isles (1911), The Bird (1869), and The Insect Book (1901).
This image archive offers expansive views of humanity’s encounter with the natural world, not only through statistics and academic jargon, but through the artistic recording of wonder, scientific curiosity, and deep appreciation. Enter the archive here.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.
Read More...J.R.R. Tolkien, Using a Tape Recorder for the First Time, Reads from The Hobbit for 30 Minutes (1952)
Having not revisited The Hobbit in some time, I’ve felt the familiar pull—shared by many readers—to return to Tolkien’s fairy-tale novel itself. It was my first exposure to Tolkien, and the perfect book for a young reader ready to dive into moral complexity and a fully-realized fictional world.
And what better guide could there be through The Hobbit than Tolkien himself, reading (above) from the 1937 work? In this 1952 recording in two parts (part 2 is below), the venerable fantasist and scholar reads from his own work for the first time on tape.
Tolkien begins with a passage that first describes the creature Gollum; listening to this description again, I am struck by how much differently I imagined him when I first read the book. The Gollum of The Hobbit seems somehow hoarier and more monstrous than many later visual interpretations. This is a minor point and not a criticism, but perhaps a comment on how necessary it is to return to the source of a mythic world as rich as Tolkien’s, even, or especially, when it’s been so well-realized in other media. No one, after all, knows Middle Earth better than its creator.
These readings were part of a much longer recording session, during which Tolkien also read (and sang!) extensively from The Lord of the Rings. A YouTube user has collected, in several parts, a radio broadcast of that full session, and it’s certainly worth your time to listen to it all the way through. It’s also worth knowing the neat context of the recording. Here’s the text that accompanies the video on YouTube:
When Tolkien visited a friend in August of 1952 to retrieve a manuscript of The Lord of the Rings, he was shown a “tape recorder”. Having never seen one before, he asked how it worked and was then delighted to have his voice recorded and hear himself played back for the first time. His friend then asked him to read from The Hobbit, and Tolkien did so in this one incredible take.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2012.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.
Read More...The Birth of Espresso: The Story Behind the Coffee Shots That Fuel Modern Life
Espresso is neither bean nor roast.
It is a method of pressurized coffee brewing that ensures speedy delivery, and it has birthed a whole culture.
Americans may be accustomed to camping out in cafes with their laptops for hours, but Italian coffee bars are fast-paced environments where customers buzz in for a quick pick-me-up, then head right back out, no seat required.
It’s the sort of efficiency the Father of the Modern Advertising Poster, Leonetto Cappiello, alluded to in his famous 1922 image for the Victoria Arduino machine (below).
Let 21st-century coffee aficionados cultivate their Zen-like patience with slow pourovers. A hundred years ago, the goal was a quality product that the successful businessperson could enjoy without breaking stride.
As coffee expert James Hoffmann, author of The World Atlas of Coffee points out in the above video, the Steam Age was on the way out, but Cappiello’s image is “absolutely leveraging the idea that steam equals speed.”
That had been the goal since 1884, when inventor Angelo Moriondo patented the first espresso machine (see below).
The bulk brewer caused a stir at the Turin General Exposition. Speed wise, it was a great improvement over the old method, in which individual cups were brewed in the Turkish style, requiring five minutes per order.
This “new steam machinery for the economic and instantaneous confection of coffee beverage” featured a gas or wood burner at the bottom of an upright boiler, and two sight glasses that the operator could monitor to get a feel for when to open the various taps, to yield a large quantity of filtered coffee. It was fast, but demanded some skill on the part of its human operator.
As Jimmy Stamp explains in a Smithsonian article on the history of the espresso machine, there were also a few bugs to work out.
Early machines’ hand-operated pressure valves posed a risk to workers, and the coffee itself had a burnt taste.
Milanese café owner Achille Gaggia cracked the code after WWII, with a small, steamless lever-driven machine that upped the pressure to produce the concentrated brew that is what we now think of as espresso.
Stamp describes how Gaggia’s machine also standardized the size of the espresso, giving rise to some now-familiar coffeehouse vocabulary:
The cylinder on lever groups could only hold an ounce of water, limiting the volume that could be used to prepare an espresso. With the lever machines also came some new jargon: baristas operating Gaggia’s spring-loaded levers coined the term “pulling a shot” of espresso. But perhaps most importantly, with the invention of the high-pressure lever machine came the discovery of crema – the foam floating over the coffee liquid that is the defining characteristic of a quality espresso. A historical anecdote claims that early consumers were dubious of this “scum” floating over their coffee until Gaggia began referring to it as “caffe creme,“ suggesting that the coffee was of such quality that it produced its own creme.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2021.
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Read More...What’s Entering the Public Domain in 2026: Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, All Quiet on the Western Front, Betty Boop & More
Though it isn’t the kind of thing one hears discussed every day, serious Disney fans do tend to know that Goofy’s original name was Dippy Dawg. But how many of the non-obsessive know that Mickey’s faithful pet Pluto was first called Rover? (We pass over in dignified silence the quasi-philosophical question of why the former dog is humanoid and the latter isn’t.) It is Rover, as distinct from Pluto, who passes into the public domain this new year, one of a cast of now-liberated characters including Blondie and Dagwood as well as Betty Boop — who, upon making her debut in Fleischer Studios’ Dizzy Dishes of 1930, has a somewhat canoid appearance herself. You can see them all in the video above from Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, with much more information available in their blog post marking this year’s “Public Domain Day.”
The year 1930, write the Center’s Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle, was one “of detectives, jazz, speakeasies, and iconic characters stepping onto the cultural stage — many of whom have been locked behind copyright for nearly a century.”
Novels that come available this year include William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, and Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage; among the films are Lewis Milestone’s Best Picture-winning All Quiet on the Western Front, Victor Heerman’s Marx Brothers picture Animal Crackers, and Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s L’Âge d’Or. In music, compositions like “I Got Rhythm” and “Embraceable You” by the Gershwin Brothers as well as recordings like “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” by Marian Anderson and “Sweet Georgia Brown” by Ben Bernie and His Hotel Roosevelt Orchestra have also, at long last, gone public.
Reflection on some of these works themselves suggests something about the importance of the public domain. With the title of Cakes and Ale, another book in this year’s crop, Somerset Maugham makes reference to “a classic public domain work, in this case Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night”; so, for that matter, does Faulkner, given that the line “as I lay dying” comes from the Odyssey. “To tell new stories, we draw from older ones,” write Jenkins and Boyle. “One work of art inspires another — that is how the public domain feeds creativity.” Today, we’re free to take explicit inspiration for our own work from Nancy Drew, “Just a Gigolo,” Blondie, Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow, Hitchcock’s Murder!, and much else besides. And by all means use Rover, but if you also want to bring in Dippy Dawg, you’re going to have to wait until 2028.
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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 the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Woody Guthrie Creates a Doodle-Filled List of 33 New Year’s Resolutions (1943): Beat Fascism, Write a Song a Day, and Keep the Hoping Machine Running
On January 1, 1943, the American folk music legend Woody Guthrie jotted in his journal a list of 33 “New Years Rulin’s.” Nowadays, we’d call them New Year’s Resolutions. Adorned by doodles, the list is down to earth by any measure. Family, song, taking a political stand, personal hygiene—they’re the values or aspirations that top his list. You can click the image above to view the list in a larger format. Below, we have provided a transcript of Guthrie’s Rulin’s.
1. Work more and better
2. Work by a schedule
3. Wash teeth if any
4. Shave
5. Take bath
6. Eat good — fruit — vegetables — milk
7. Drink very scant if any
8. Write a song a day
9. Wear clean clothes — look good
10. Shine shoes
11. Change socks
12. Change bed cloths often
13. Read lots good books
14. Listen to radio a lot
15. Learn people better
16. Keep rancho clean
17. Dont get lonesome
18. Stay glad
19. Keep hoping machine running
20. Dream good
21. Bank all extra money
22. Save dough
23. Have company but dont waste time
24. Send Mary and kids money
25. Play and sing good
26. Dance better
27. Help win war — beat fascism
28. Love mama
29. Love papa
30. Love Pete
31. Love everybody
32. Make up your mind
33. Wake up and fight
We wish you all a happy 2018.
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Note: This fine list originally appeared on our site back in 2014.
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Read More...
The Mystery of How a Samurai Ended up in 17th Century Venice
It wouldn’t surprise us to come across a Japanese person in Venice. Indeed, given the global touristic appeal of the place, we could hardly imagine a day there without a visitor from the Land of the Rising Sun. But things were different in 1873, just five years after the end of the sakoku policy that all but closed Japan to the world for two and a half centuries. On a mission to research the modern ways of the newly accessible outside world, a Japanese delegation arrived in Venice and found in the state archives two letters written in Latin by one of their countrymen, dated 1615 and 1616. Its author seemed to have been an emissary of Ōtomo Sōrin, a feudal lord who converted to Christianity and once sent a mission of four teenagers to meet the Pope in Rome — a mission that took place earlier, in 1586.
So who could this undocumented Japanese traveler in the fifteen-tens have been? That question lies at the heart of the story told by Evan “Nerdwriter” Puschak in his new video above. The letter’s signature of Hasekura Rokemon would’ve constituted a major clue, but the name seems not to have rung a bell with anyone at the time.
“In 1873, there was likely no one on planet Earth who knew why Hasekura Rokemon was in Venice in 1615,” says Puschak. The reasons have to do with the arrival of Christianity in Japan — or at least the arrival of the first major Jesuit missionary — in 1549. Not every ruler looked kindly on their work, and especially not Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who ordered them removed from the country in 1587 and later had 26 Catholics crucified in Nagasaki.
Hideyoshi was succeeded by the more tolerant Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616), during whose rule the Japanese-speaking Franciscan friar Luis Sotelo arrived in Japan. Over the ensuing decade, he worked not just to spread his faith but also to build hospitals, one of which successfully treated a European concubine of the feudal lord Date Masamune. The two men got on, realizing the mutual benefit their relationship could bring: perhaps Sotelo could found a new diocese in Date’s northern territory, and perhaps Date could establish links with the Spanish empire. In order to accomplish the latter, he had a ship built and a team assembled for a mission to Europe, including Sotelo himself. He sent with them a loyal retainer, a samurai by the name of Hasekura Rokemon — or to use his full name, Hasekura Rokuemon Tsunenaga, previously featured here on Open Culture for his meeting with the pope and adoption of Roman citizenship. He may have been Japanese, but a mere tourist he certainly wasn’t.
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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 the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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