The Nature of Causation: A Free Online Course from Oxford

in | April 7th, 2017

From Mar­i­anne Tal­bot (Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty) comes a short course on The Nature of Cau­sa­tion. It cov­ers the fol­low­ing ground:

We have causal the­o­ries of ref­er­ence, per­cep­tion, knowl­edge, con­tent and numer­ous oth­er things. If it were to turn out that cau­sa­tion doesn’t exist, we would be in seri­ous trou­ble! Cau­sa­tion is so impor­tant in fact that it has been said that: “With regard to our total con­cep­tu­al appa­ra­tus, cau­sa­tion is the cen­tre of the cen­tre”, and it has been called called ‘the cement of the uni­verse’. In these lec­tures you will be intro­duced to the most influ­en­tial the­o­ries of cau­sa­tion, the moti­va­tions for them and argu­ments behind them, and the prob­lems they face.

This 6‑lecture course will be added to our list of Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es, a sub­set of our list, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

You can find the audio avail­able in oth­er for­mats here.

The Great War and Modern Philosophy: A Free Online Course

in | April 7th, 2017

Above, you can watch the lec­tures from a course called The Great War and Mod­ern Phi­los­o­phy. Taught by Nico­las de War­ren, Research Pro­fes­sor in Phi­los­o­phy at KU Leu­ven Uni­ver­si­ty, the course cov­ers this basic ground:

World War 1 was the orig­i­nal cat­a­stro­phe of the 20th-cen­tu­ry. This course inves­ti­gates the com­plex ways in which the First World War mobi­lized philo­soph­i­cal reflec­tion dur­ing the war and the var­ied ways in which philo­soph­i­cal thought respond­ed to the war.

Stu­dents in this course will be intro­duced to dif­fer­ent philo­soph­i­cal reac­tions to the First World War through dis­cus­sion and analy­sis of texts, doc­u­ments, images, art­works, film, and music. The rela­tion between phi­los­o­phy and poet­ry will also be explored. In this course, stu­dents will gain his­tor­i­cal knowl­edge, con­cep­tu­al under­stand­ing, and lit­er­a­cy for a clear­er grasp of the com­plex ways in which phi­los­o­phy and the Great War inter­sect­ed.

Peri­od­i­cal­ly, this course is offered as a MOOC, fea­tur­ing more pol­ished lec­tures, over on edX.

Thinkers cov­ered in the course include: Carl von Clause­witz, Carl Schmitt, Franz Rosen­zweig, Edmund Husserl, and more.

The Great War and Mod­ern Phi­los­o­phy will be added to our list of Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es, part of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Pink Floyd Adapts George Orwell’s Animal Farm into Their 1977 Concept Album, Animals (a Critique of Late Capitalism, Not Stalin)

in Music, Politics | April 7th, 2017

Pink Floyd will always be known for their mas­sive­ly suc­cess­ful con­cept albums, and David Gilmour and Roger Waters’ tense, and per­son­al­ly explo­sive, dynam­ic on albums like Dark Side of the Moon seems rem­i­nis­cent of anoth­er mas­ter­ful song­writ­ing duo known for rock high con­cepts. Indeed, “there would have been no Dark Side of the Moon, and no drag­ons-and-war­locks-themed prog-rock epics,” writes Jody Rosen at Slate, “had the Bea­t­les not decid­ed to don epaulets for their lark of an album cov­er and imper­son­ate a vaude­ville band.”

But where The Bea­t­les’ loose con­cep­tu­al mas­ter­pieces had their stormy and sad moments, they gen­er­al­ly kept things chip­per on albums like Sgt. Pep­per’s. Pink Floyd seemed deter­mined to do pre­cise­ly the oppo­site, set­ting a tem­plate for entire gen­res of met­al to fol­low. 1977’s Ani­mals espe­cial­ly reminds me of noth­ing so much as an album by Megadeth or Mastodon. Musi­cal and the­mat­ic sim­i­lar­i­ties abound: epic, boom­ing, doomy songs with lyrics com­plete­ly unin­ter­est­ed in charm­ing their lis­ten­ers. “Sheep,” for exam­ple, con­tains a mod­i­fied ver­sion of the 23rd Psalm: “The Lord is my shep­herd. He maketh me to hang on hooks in high places and coverteth me to lamb cut­lets.”

As the brutish title alerts us, Ani­mals is an adap­ta­tion of George’s Orwell’s Ani­mal Farm (and the ori­gin of Pink Floyd’s giant inflat­able pig). The schemat­ic alle­go­ry of Orwell’s book lends a high degree of coher­ence to Waters’ extend­ed songs—only five in total. But he sup­plies his own char­ac­ter­is­tic bile (he famous­ly spit on a fan dur­ing one tour, an inci­dent that inspired The Wall). It couldn’t be more appro­pri­ate. Where Orwell’s nov­el is a trans­par­ent attack on Stal­in­ism, Waters adapts his cri­tique to “the eco­nom­ic and ide­o­log­i­cal sys­tems with­in late-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry lib­er­al democ­ra­cies.” So argues Phil Rose in an in-depth study of Waters’ lyri­cal ideas. The album’s “pri­ma­ry con­cern… is to reveal the effects that tech­no­crat­ic cap­i­tal­ist rela­tions have on the nature of human beings and the evi­dent divi­sions that unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic struc­tures of pow­er cre­ate among us as indi­vid­u­als.”

Orwell showed the effects of “unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic struc­tures” by reduc­ing indi­vid­u­als to ani­mal types, and so does Waters, sim­pli­fy­ing the class­es fur­ther into three (and leav­ing out humans alto­geth­er): the rul­ing pigs, prae­to­ri­an and aspir­ing cap­i­tal­ist dogs, and the sheep, the mind­less mass­es. The open­er, “Pigs on the Wing (Part One)” (top), an urgent acoustic strum­mer that gets picked up at the end of the album in a strange­ly upbeat reprise, sets a dystopi­an tone with images that may now seem old hat (bear in mind Ani­mals debuted five years before Blade Run­ner).

If you did­n’t care what hap­pened to me,
And I did­n’t care for you,
We would zig zag our way through the bore­dom and pain
Occa­sion­al­ly glanc­ing up through the rain.
Won­der­ing which of the bug­gers to blame
And watch­ing for pigs on the wing.

Most of the songs began their lives as a rough col­lec­tion that came togeth­er after Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here. Waters insist­ed on the lit­er­ary con­ceit, against Gilmour’s objec­tions, but the themes had already been very much on his mind. “Dogs,” above, was once a sar­don­ic rant called “You’ve Got­ta Be Crazy,” and one of its bleak­est stan­zas sur­vives from that ear­li­er track:

You got­ta keep one eye look­ing over your shoul­der.
You know it’s going to get hard­er, and hard­er, and hard­er as you
get old­er.
And in the end you’ll pack up and fly down south,
Hide your head in the sand,
Just anoth­er sad old man,
All alone and dying of can­cer.

There may be no sharp­er an antithe­sis to “When I’m 64.” The image is made all the more dev­as­tat­ing by the homi­ci­dal para­noia sur­round­ing it. Not all of the Orwell over­lay works so well, but when it does, it does so with dev­as­tat­ing force. Con­sid­er these lines from “Sheep,” as ter­ri­fy­ing as any late Medieval judge­ment scene, and more effec­tive for an age that may not believe in hell but has seen the slaugh­ter­hous­es:

What do you get for pre­tend­ing the dan­ger’s not real.
Meek and obe­di­ent you fol­low the leader
Down well trod­den cor­ri­dors into the val­ley of steel.
What a sur­prise!
A look of ter­mi­nal shock in your eyes.
Now things are real­ly what they seem.

The band’s “bleak­est stu­dio album,” argues Brice Ezell at Con­se­quence of Sound, “feels eeri­ly rel­e­vant in these grave times.” I can’t help but agree. Pink Floyd great­ly inspired much of the heavy music to fol­low, doing as much as Black Sab­bath or Led Zep­pelin, I’d argue, to engage the imag­i­na­tions of met­al­heads and prog-rock sto­ry­tellers. Much of the music that fol­lowed them sounds very dat­ed, but forty years after its release, their gloomi­est record—which is say­ing a lot—seems more rel­e­vant than ever. Ani­mals ends on an ambiva­lent note, hope­ful but wary. The pigs are still on the wing, and the only rem­e­dy at hand, Waters sug­gests in the last few lines, may be to “know that I care what hap­pens to you / And I know that you care for me.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear How Clare Torry’s Vocals on Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky” Made the Song Go from Pret­ty Good to Stun­ning

Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” Pro­vides a Sound­track for the Final Scene of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

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

An Introduction to Game Theory & Strategic Thinking: A Free Course from Yale University

in Economics, Online Courses | April 7th, 2017

Taught by Ben Polak, an eco­nom­ics pro­fes­sor and now Provost at Yale Uni­ver­si­ty, this free course offers an intro­duc­tion to game the­o­ry and strate­gic think­ing. Draw­ing on exam­ples from eco­nom­ics, pol­i­tics, the movies and beyond, the lec­tures cov­er top­ics essen­tial to under­stand­ing Game theory–including “dom­i­nance, back­ward induc­tion, the Nash equi­lib­ri­um, evo­lu­tion­ary sta­bil­i­ty, com­mit­ment, cred­i­bil­i­ty, asym­met­ric infor­ma­tion, adverse selec­tion, and sig­nal­ing.”

Since Game The­o­ry offers “a way of think­ing about strate­gic sit­u­a­tions,” the course will “teach you some strate­gic con­sid­er­a­tions to take into account [when] mak­ing your choic­es,” and “to pre­dict how oth­er peo­ple or orga­ni­za­tions [will] behave when they are in strate­gic set­tings.”

The 24 lec­tures can be streamed above. (They’re also on YouTube and iTunes in audio and video). A com­plete syl­labus can be found be on this Yale web site. Texts used in the course are the fol­low­ing:

• A. Dix­it and B. Nale­buff. Think­ing Strate­gi­cal­ly, Nor­ton 1991
• J. Wat­son. Strat­e­gy: An Intro­duc­tion to Game The­o­ry, Nor­ton 2002
• P.K. Dut­ta. Strate­gies and Games: The­o­ry And Prac­tice, MIT 1999

Game The­o­ry will be added to our list of Free Eco­nom­ics Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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!

Watch Marcel Marceau Mime The Mask Maker, a Story Created for Him by Alejandro Jodorowsky (1959)

in Dance, Film | April 7th, 2017

Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky, as any­one who’s wit­nessed a movie of his play out onscreen might guess, has steeped him­self in the mys­ti­cal arts, but it would take an astute view­er to guess that he received some of his ear­li­est train­ing in the field of mime. Dur­ing his time in Paris in the 1950s, the Chilean-born film­mak­er, yet to shoot a sin­gle frame but hav­ing already run his own per­for­mance troupe back in San­ti­a­go, began study­ing under Éti­enne Decroux, not only a mas­ter of mime but a mas­ter teacher of mime. Jodor­owsky then joined and went on a world tour with a mime group led by one of Decroux’s espe­cial­ly promis­ing stu­dents, one Mar­cel Marceau.

Few today could think of mime with­out Marceau’s name com­ing to mind, and none could think of Marceau with­out hav­ing at least a sense that the man rede­fined the art. Per­form­ers had, of course, used their bod­ies to word­less­ly evoke dif­fer­ent ele­ments of the human expe­ri­ence since antiq­ui­ty, but Marceau — who could take his view­ers through an entire human life in four min­utes — brought it to anoth­er lev­el entire­ly.

Some of Jodor­owsky’s fans might say the same about the direc­tor, and in the video above they can wit­ness per­haps the two men’s only sur­viv­ing cre­ation: Marceau’s 1959 per­for­mance of The Mask Mak­er, a piece Jodor­owsky thought up for him.

“Jodor­owsky would say, ‘Mar­cel, will you accept if I give you an idea for a sto­ry?’ ” remem­bered Marceau in a late inter­view. “I replied, ‘Of course, if the idea is good.’ Jodor­owsky said, ‘What do you think of a man who tries on dif­fer­ent masks show­ing a vari­ety of emo­tions? He puts on a laugh­ing mask that gets stuck on his face; he tries des­per­ate­ly but it will not come off. He has to blind him­self to take it off his face.’ I did the chore­og­ra­phy myself, and then we shared the rights for this pan­tomime.” Two oth­er Marceau-Jodor­owsky works in mime fol­lowed, The Saber of the Samu­rai and “anoth­er cru­el tale” called The Eater of Hearts.

At once shocked and moved, accord­ing to Pro­ject­ed Fig­ures’ “Brief Guide to Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky,” by the “excess of vio­lence” in these mime rou­tines, Marceau nev­er­the­less per­formed them with what looks like the fullest com­mit­ment to the con­cept. Jodor­owsky in turn made use of what he’d learned from Marceau even as he switched arts and began mak­ing films. The influ­ence shows in his very first short film, 1957’s La Cra­vate, a word­less phys­i­cal per­for­mance for the cam­era. His­to­ry has­n’t record­ed whether Marceau ever watched it, but he’d sure­ly rec­og­nize his for­mer col­lab­o­ra­tor’s sen­si­bil­i­ty in the con­tent: it also goes by the Eng­lish title The Sev­ered Heads.

A 1975 ver­sion appears below:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­cel Marceau Mimes the Pro­gres­sion of Human Life, From Birth to Death, in 4 Min­utes

How Mar­cel Marceau Start­ed Mim­ing to Save Chil­dren from the Holo­caust

Ale­jan­dro Jodorowsky’s 82 Com­mand­ments for Liv­ing

Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky Explains How Tarot Cards Can Give You Cre­ative Inspi­ra­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

What It Cost to Shop at the Grocery Store in 1836, and What Goods You Could Buy

in Books, Business, Economics, History | April 7th, 2017

Click here to view the image in a larg­er for­mat.

Like many chil­dren in pos­ses­sion of a toy cash reg­is­ter, I was a big fan of play­ing store.

A short stint work­ing retail in a 90’s era Chica­go hip­pie cloth­ing empo­ri­um cured me of that for the most part.

But look­ing over the above page from Roswell C. Smith’s 1836 Prac­ti­cal and Men­tal Arith­metic on a New Plan, I must admit, I feel some of the old stir­rings, and not because I love math, even when it’s intend­ed to be worked on a slate.

Cof­fee, 35 cents per pound. A self-sharp­en­ing plough, $3.50. A whip, a buck four­teen. And a gal­lon of gin, 60 cents, which was “about two-thirds of a day’s wages for the aver­age non-farm white male work­er.” (View the prices in a larg­er for­mat here.)

But I’m less intrigued by the whole­sale price of the var­i­ous items Smith’s hypo­thet­i­cal coun­try store­keep­er would pay to stock his shelves in 1836, though I do love a bar­gain.

It’s more the type of goods list­ed on that inven­to­ry. They’re exact­ly the sort of items that fig­ure in one of the most mem­o­rable chap­ters of Lit­tle House on the Prairie—“Mr Edwards Meets San­ta Claus.”

Okay, so maybe not exact­ly the same. Author Lau­ra Ingalls Wilder was pret­ty explic­it about the sim­ple plea­sures of her 1870s and 80s child­hood. Her family’s bach­e­lor neigh­bor, Mr. Edwards, risked life and limb ford­ing a near-impass­able, late-Decem­ber creek, a bun­dle con­tain­ing his clothes, a cou­ple of tin cups, some pep­per­mint sticks, and two heart-shaped cakes, tied to his head. With­out his kind­ly ini­tia­tive, their stock­ings would have been emp­ty that year.

Pre­sum­ably, the Inde­pen­dence, Kansas gen­er­al store where Neigh­bor Edwards did his Christ­mas shop­ping would’ve stocked a lot of the same merch’ that Smith alludes to in the above frag­ment of a book­keep­ing-relat­ed sto­ry prob­lem. Online book­seller John Ptak, on whose blog the page was orig­i­nal­ly repro­duced, is keep­ing page 238 close to the vest (coin­ci­den­tal­ly the last item to be men­tioned on the inven­to­ry, almost as an after­thought, just one, priced at 50¢.)

Child­hood rec­ol­lec­tions aside, per­haps there was some­thing else in Mr. Edward’s bun­dle, some­thing the adult Lau­ra chose not to men­tion. The sort of host­ess gift that could’ve warmed Pa and Ma on those long, cold fron­tier nights…

Some gin, perhaps…or wine? Rum? Brandy?

Smith’s shop­keep­er would’ve been well pro­vi­sioned, lay­ing the stuff in by the bar­rel, hogshead, and pipe-full.

As for that “blad­der” of snuff, a post on the Snuff­house forum sug­gests that it wasn’t a euphemism, but the actu­al blad­der of a hog, paced with 4 pounds of snortin’ tobac­co.

Of course, Smith’s shop­keep­er would’ve also car­ried a healthy assort­ment of whole­some goods- hym­nals, children’s shoes, cal­i­co, satin, whips…

Per­haps we should do the math.

via Slate/JF Ptak

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Enter an Archive of 6,000 His­tor­i­cal Children’s Books, All Dig­i­tized and Free to Read Online

19th Cen­tu­ry Maps Visu­al­ize Measles in Amer­i­ca Before the Mir­a­cle of Vac­cines

Thomas Jefferson’s Hand­writ­ten Vanil­la Ice Cream Recipe

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

How Henry David Thoreau Revolutionized the Pencil

in Random | April 6th, 2017

Last Thurs­day was Nation­al Pen­cil Day, which com­mem­o­rates, accord­ing to The New York Pub­lic Library (NYPL), “the day in 1858 when Philadel­phia immi­grant Hymen Lip­man patent­ed his inven­tion for a pen­cil with an eras­er on top, cre­at­ing the con­ve­nient­ly-designed pen­cil we know and love.”

Of course, Lip­man’s inven­tion did­n’t take place in a vac­u­um. Through­out the 18th and 19th cen­turies, Amer­i­can inven­tors were hard at work, try­ing to find ways to make improve­ments to the pen­cil, whose his­to­ry traces back to 1564. Dur­ing those ear­ly days of our repub­lic, “Amer­i­can pen­cil-mak­ing was in sor­ry shape,” writes NYPL. “Poor mate­ri­als made domes­tic pen­cils smudgy and frail, in com­par­i­son to their supe­ri­or British coun­ter­parts, which were made of pur­er graphite.” So the press­ing ques­tion became: how to improve the qual­i­ty of the graphite? Enter Hen­ry David Thore­au, Amer­i­ca’s great essay­ist, poet, philoso­pher, abo­li­tion­ist, nat­u­ral­ist and tax resister. And appar­ent­ly inno­va­tor too:

Seek­ing employ­ment after study­ing at Har­vard, [Thore­au] worked at his father’s pen­cil fac­to­ry, which Edward Emer­son — son of Ralph Wal­do Emer­son — recalled as being some­what bet­ter than the typ­i­cal Amer­i­can pen­cil fac­to­ry at the time. Still, Hen­ry David Thore­au aspired to improve the fam­i­ly busi­ness, so he hit the books at the Har­vard Col­lege library to find out more.

…Hav­ing no knowl­edge of chem­istry, Hen­ry David nev­er­the­less came up with a for­mu­la to make a pen­cil rival­ing that made in Europe. It was the first of its kind in Amer­i­ca.

Soon, Thore­au pen­cils were tak­ing over the mar­ket, and the fam­i­ly’s busi­ness grew and grew. Thore­au pen­cils were award­ed twice by Mechan­ic Asso­ci­a­tions and gained a local rep­u­ta­tion in Boston for their qual­i­ty. Ralph Wal­do Emer­son him­self praised them. News of Thore­au’s pen­cils spread quick­ly, and soon, Pet­ros­ki writes, they were “with­out peer in this coun­try.”

Add an eras­er to Thore­au’s pen­cil, and you’ve got Hymen Lip­man’s patent for the pen­cil you’re pret­ty much using today. You can see pic­tures of Thore­au’s pen­cil over at The New York Pub­lic Library.

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 NYPL

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hen­ry David Thore­au on When Civ­il Dis­obe­di­ence and Resis­tance Are Jus­ti­fied (1849)

David Rees Presents a Primer on the Arti­sanal Craft of Pen­cil Sharp­en­ing

Pat­ti Smith on Vir­ginia Woolf’s Cane, Charles Dick­ens’ Pen & Oth­er Cher­ished Lit­er­ary Tal­is­mans

David Rees and His One-Man Arti­sanal Pen­cil Sharp­en­ing Ser­vice

Hen­ry David Thore­au on When Civ­il Dis­obe­di­ence Against Bad Gov­ern­ments Is Jus­ti­fied: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

10-Week Online Seminar Will Teach You to Be a Great Los Pollos Hermanos Employee: A Teaser for the New Season of Better Call Saul

in Television | April 6th, 2017

To get you ready for the new sea­son of Bet­ter Call Saul, the show’s cre­ators have put out a faux employ­ee train­ing video from the pro­pri­etor of Los Pol­los Her­manos, Gus­ta­vo Fring. You know Gus from Break­ing Bad, and some­thing tells me you’ll be meet­ing him again in Sea­son 3 of the pre­quel. It airs next Mon­day (4/10) at 10pm on AMC. Enjoy.

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!

Watch Derek Jarman’s Daring 12-Minute Promo Film for Marianne Faithfull’s 1979 Comeback Album Broken English (NSFW)

in Film, Music | April 6th, 2017

Note: There are a few not-safe-for-work scenes in the film.

The world of music video was in its infan­cy in the late 1970s. MTV had yet to exist, and pro­mo­tion­al films for sin­gles were seen as use­ful for the times when a show could­n’t book a band to play live, or the band just didn’t play live any more. Into this world fell many a com­mer­cial direc­tor, used to the pro­mo­tion side of the pro­mo film busi­ness. But there were also direc­tors like Derek Jar­man, the punk­est of UK direc­tors at that time. This new for­mat paid the bills in between fea­tures, and let him exper­i­ment.

Though he would go on to work with the Pet Shop Boys and The Smiths, Jarman’s first pro­mo video is above, for three songs from Mar­i­anne Faithfull’s mas­ter­piece of a new wave album, Bro­ken Eng­lish (1979).

Faith­full had been out of the pub­lic eye for years, hav­ing spent a lot of the ’70 try­ing to kick her drug habit. The anger and cyn­i­cism of this album, her cracked but com­mand­ing voice, and the elec­tron­ic sounds were such that many for­get she released two oth­er “come­back albums” before this one. On Bro­ken Eng­lish she force­ful­ly rewrites her own his­to­ry as an artist, not con­tent to be seen as a drug casu­al­ty or Mick Jagger’s ex-girl­friend.

Jar­man was known at the time as the con­tro­ver­sial film­mak­er of both the homo­erot­ic Sebas­tiane and the anti-Roy­al Jubilee, which more than any film at the time encap­su­lat­ed the UK punk scene. It’s both bru­tal and roman­tic and charm­ing­ly D.I.Y.

The Bro­ken Eng­lish pro­mo film fea­tures three songs, brack­et­ed by black and white footage of Faith­full wan­der­ing around Lon­don and play­ing Space Invaders in a local arcade. The first, “Witch’s Song,” is the clos­est to Jarman’s short films dur­ing that peri­od: lan­guid, ambigu­ous­ly gen­dered young peo­ple, apoc­a­lyp­tic dock­side ruins, reflect­ed mir­rors, occultism and debauch­ery. The sec­ond, “The Bal­lad of Lucy Jor­dan,” fea­tures scenes of domes­tic­i­ty dou­ble exposed and/or pro­ject­ed over footage of Faith­full. The final one, for the title track, is a short col­lage of 20th cen­tu­ry fas­cism and car­nage, fea­tur­ing Hitler, Mus­soli­ni, Oswald Mosley, British strikes, and self-immo­lat­ed monks.

The two artists got along so well that she record­ed the theme song for his film The Last of Eng­land, fea­tur­ing a very young Til­da Swin­ton.

Both Jar­man and Faith­full went on to suc­cess­ful­ly rein­vent them­selves, but for the 21st cen­tu­ry view­er, they are also both worth redis­cov­er­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Very Young Mar­i­anne Faith­full Sings Her First Hit, ‘As Tears Go By’ (1965)

Watch David Bowie & Mar­i­anne Faith­full Rehearse and Sing Son­ny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe” (1973)

Jean-Luc Godard Shoots Mar­i­anne Faith­full Singing “As Tears Go By” (1966)

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.

Edgar Allan Poe Published a “CliffsNotes” Version of a Science Textbook & It Became His Only Bestseller (1839)

in Literature, Science | April 6th, 2017

A fas­ci­nat­ing 20th cen­tu­ry lit­er­ary strain, “doc­u­men­tary poet­ics,” melds jour­nal­is­tic accounts, pho­tog­ra­phy, offi­cial texts and mem­os, pol­i­tics, and sci­en­tif­ic and tech­ni­cal writ­ing with lyri­cal and lit­er­ary lan­guage. Per­haps best exem­pli­fied by Muriel Rukeyser, the cat­e­go­ry also includes, at cer­tain times, James Agee, Langston Hugh­es, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and—currently—Claudia Rank­ine and “pow­er­house” new poet Sol­maz Sharif. It does not include Edgar Allan Poe, famous­ly alco­holic 19th cen­tu­ry mas­ter of the macabre and “father of the detec­tive sto­ry.”

But you’ll for­give me for think­ing, excit­ed­ly, that it just might, when I learned Poe had pub­lished a text called The Conchologist’s First Book (1839), a con­den­sa­tion, rearrange­ment, and “remix­ing,” as Rebec­ca Onion writes at Slate, of “an exist­ing… beau­ti­ful and expen­sive” sci­ence text­book, Thomas Wyatt’s Man­u­al of Con­chol­o­gy, includ­ing the orig­i­nal plates and a “new pref­ace and intro­duc­tion.”

My mind reeled: what won­drous hor­rors might the morose, roman­tic Poe have con­tributed to such an enter­prise, his best-sell­ing work, it turns out, in his life­time. (For which Poe was paid $50 and, typ­i­cal­ly, received no roy­al­ties). What kind of exper­i­men­tal mad­ness might these cov­ers con­tain?

As I might have assumed from the book’s total obscu­ri­ty, Poe’s writer­ly con­tri­bu­tions to the project were mea­ger. For all his genius as a sto­ry­teller, he could be a long-wind­ed bore as an essay­ist. It seems he thought this aspect of his voice was best suit­ed to the orig­i­nal writ­ing he did for Conchologist’s First. His biog­ra­phers, notes Uni­ver­si­ty of Hous­ton pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus John H. Lien­hard, all “mut­ter an embar­rassed apol­o­gy for Poe’s shady side-track—then hur­ry back to talk about The Raven.” Onion quotes one biog­ra­ph­er Jef­frey Mey­ers, who writes, “Poe’s bor­ing pedan­tic and hair-split­ting Pref­ace was absolute­ly guar­an­teed to tor­ment and dis­cour­age even the most pas­sion­ate­ly inter­est­ed school­boy.”

As for its “shadi­ness,” the book also elic­its embar­rass­ment from Poe devo­tees because, as esteemed biol­o­gist and his­to­ri­an of sci­ence Stephen J. Gould wrote in his excul­pa­to­ry essay “Poe’s Great­est Hit,” it was “basi­cal­ly a scam,” though “not so bad­ly done” as most allege. The nat­u­ral­ist Wyatt, a friend of Poe’s, had begged his pub­lish­er to release an abridged stu­dent edi­tion of his orig­i­nal lav­ish and pricey $8 text­book, which had not sold well. When the pub­lish­er balked, Wyatt con­tract­ed Poe to lend his name and con­sid­er­able edi­to­r­i­al skill to a more-or-less boot­leg “Cliff­s­Notes” ver­sion to be sold for $1.50. To make mat­ters worse, Poe and Wyatt were both accused of pla­gia­rism, hav­ing “lift­ed chunks of their book from an Eng­lish nat­u­ral­ist, Thomas Brown,” Lien­hard points out.

Gould defend­ed Poe as a rewriter of oth­ers’ work. “Yes, Poe pla­gia­rized,” as Lien­hard sum­ma­rizes the argu­ment. He pre­sent­ed Brown’s, and Wyat­t’s, work as his own, but, “flu­ent in French, [he] went back to read Georges Cuvi­er, the great French nat­u­ral­ist” and made his own trans­la­tions. He wrote his own intro­duc­to­ry mate­r­i­al, and he reor­ga­nized Wyatt’s book in such a way as to pro­vide “gen­uine­ly use­ful insight into bio­log­i­cal tax­on­o­my.” Poe’s edition—with its “for­mi­da­ble sub­ti­tle,” A Sys­tem of Tes­ta­ceous Mala­col­o­gy, arranged Express­ly for the Use of Schools—actu­al­ly proved a hit with stu­dents, and like­ly not only because it sold cheap. It was the only pub­li­ca­tion in Poe’s life­time to make it to a sec­ond edi­tion.

Maybe human­ist read­ers approach the work with bias­es firm­ly in place, expect­ing a genre that’s dry by its very nature to con­tain all the lit­er­ary bril­liance and enter­tain­ing intrigue of “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Lien­hard sug­gests as much, describ­ing irri­ta­tion at how his “lit­er­ary friends” ignore the sci­en­tif­ic work of writ­ers like Thore­au, Thomas Paine, Goethe, and poet Oliv­er Gold­smith. “Poe’s excur­sion into nat­ur­al phi­los­o­phy,” he writes, “was an embar­rass­ment to peo­ple who are embar­rassed by sci­ence in the first place.” Maybe.

Both Gould and Lien­hard shrug off the less-than-scrupu­lous cir­cum­stances of the book’s cre­ation, the lat­ter cit­ing a “cyn­i­cal remark” by play­wright Wil­son Mizn­er: “If you steal from one author, it’s pla­gia­rism. If you steal from many, it’s research.” At least he doesn’t go as far as Mark Twain, who once wrote in defense of Helen Keller, after she was charged with lit­er­ary bor­row­ing, “the ker­nel, the soul—let us go fur­ther and say the sub­stance, the bulk, the actu­al and valu­able mate­r­i­al of all human utterance—is pla­gia­rism.”

Read the first, 1839 edi­tion of The Conchologist’s First Book, pub­lished under Edgar A. Poe, at the Inter­net Archive, and the revised sec­ond, 1840 edi­tion at Google Books.

via Slate

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load The Com­plete Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Macabre Sto­ries as Free eBooks & Audio Books

Mark Twain’s Patent­ed Inven­tions for Bra Straps and Oth­er Every­day Items

Walt Whitman’s Unearthed Health Man­u­al, “Man­ly Health & Train­ing,” Urges Read­ers to Stand (Don’t Sit!) and Eat Plen­ty of Meat (1858)

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