Download Hundreds of 19th-Century Japanese Woodblock Prints by Masters of the Tradition

in Art | February 15th, 2016

We recent­ly fea­tured hun­dreds of Van Gogh’s paint­ings, sketch­es, and let­ters down­load­able from Ams­ter­dam’s Van Gogh Muse­um. But despite its name, that respect­ed insti­tu­tion has­n’t devot­ed itself entire­ly to the work of the 19th-cen­tu­ry post-impres­sion­ist painter; they’ve also got a seri­ous stock of art from rough­ly the same peri­od but the oth­er side of the world in the form of Japan­ese wood­block prints. And like their Van Gogh mate­ri­als, they’ve made them avail­able to all of us in high res­o­lu­tion files, free for the down­load­ing in their online col­lec­tions.

All of us will rec­og­nize this style of Japan­ese art, but not all of us will know its Japan­ese name: ukiyo‑e, or “pic­tures of the float­ing world” — that is, the world of scenic trav­els through strik­ing land­scapes as well as urban beau­ties, sports­men, actors, and ladies of the night that bloomed from the 17th to the 19th cen­turies.

Not only did that heady peri­od of Japan­ese his­to­ry pro­vide these wood­block prints their sub­jects, it also pro­vid­ed the tech­nol­o­gy used to pro­duce them with increas­ing col­or and com­plex­i­ty as well as a mer­chant-class audi­ence to pur­chase them as home decor.

The Van Gogh Muse­um’s selec­tions come from a time of dom­i­nance by a few still-acknowl­edged ukiyo‑e mas­ters whose names you’ll know, like Kat­sushi­ka Hoku­sai and Uta­gawa (also known as Ando) Hiroshige, the lat­ter of whose work the online col­lec­tion has 83 pieces cur­rent­ly down­load­able. One of them, Goyu from one series of illus­tra­tions of notable places and Yokkaichi: The Mie­gawa Riv­er and Nago Bay from anoth­er, appear at the top and sec­ond from the top. But the Van Gogh Muse­um has amassed even more work by Uta­gawa Kunisa­da, the most pro­lif­ic and best­selling ukiyo‑e artist of the day, whose On the River­bank, one sheet of a trip­tych, we have just above.

You can down­load any of the more than 500 pieces in the online col­lec­tion by these and dozens of oth­er ukiyo‑e artists (such as Toy­ohara Kunichi­ka, whose Illus­tra­tion of Cross­ing the Sum­i­da Riv­er in the Evening appears just above) by click­ing on the down arrow that appears in the low­er right when you view an indi­vid­ual image. Hav­ing just returned from a trip to Japan a cou­ple weeks ago, I can report that the coun­try has changed dra­mat­i­cal­ly and in many ways from the one Hoku­sai, Hiroshige, Kunisa­da and their col­leagues cap­tured, but still, some durable part of their aes­thet­ic essence remains. Besides, these prints must even at the time have had some­thing of the ele­giac about them, itself an endur­ing qual­i­ty of Japan­ese art. “Even in Kyoto,” as the poet Mat­suo Masho wrote two cen­turies before that, “I long for Kyoto.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hayao Miyazaki’s Beloved Char­ac­ters Reimag­ined in the Style of 19th-Cen­tu­ry Wood­block Prints

A Won­der­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed 1925 Japan­ese Edi­tion of Aesop’s Fables by Leg­endary Children’s Book Illus­tra­tor Takeo Takei

Down­load Hun­dreds of Van Gogh Paint­ings, Sketch­es & Let­ters in High Res­o­lu­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. 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.

The 120 Minutes Archive Compiles Clips & Playlists from 956 Episodes of MTV’s Alternative Music Show (1986–2013)

in Music, Television | February 15th, 2016

In the first cou­ple years after MTV’s 1981 debut, the fledg­ling cable net­work more or less repro­duced the 70’s album-ori­ent­ed rock radio for­mat with video accom­pa­ni­ment, to the exclu­sion of a num­ber of emerg­ing pop­u­lar artists (a fact David Bowie bemoaned in ’83). In the mid-80s, the net­work diver­si­fied: Michael Jackson’s “Bil­lie Jean” broke the col­or bar­ri­er in 1984, and in the fol­low­ing years, the net­work moved toward edgi­er music with shows like Headbanger’s Ball in ’85 (orig­i­nal­ly Heavy Met­al Mania) and, a few years lat­er, Yo! MTV Raps.

In 1986, anoth­er show appeared that solid­i­fied MTV’s status—for a few years at least—as a gen­uine source for new, “alter­na­tive” music, before that term became an emp­ty mar­ket­ing word. Tucked away in a mid­night to 2 A.M. slot, 120 Min­utes ini­tial­ly “guid­ed view­ers through the late ‘80s col­lege rock land­scape, which was large­ly inspired by trends hap­pen­ing in the UK at the time.”

So writes Tyler at Tylerc.com, who hosts the huge­ly impres­sive 120 Min­utes Archive, a recre­ation of the 27-year run of the two-hour music video, news, and inter­view show that broke many an “alter­na­tive” artist in the U.S. and gave many more a plat­form to pro­mote their music, caus­es, and per­son­al­i­ties. Enter the archive here.

I well remem­ber stay­ing up late, the vol­ume turned down as low as pos­si­ble so as not to wake the fam­i­ly, and catch­ing videos for the Pix­ies’ “Here Comes Your Man” (above) and R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World (As We Know It),” among so many oth­er bands art-pop, new wave, post-punk, indus­tri­al, etc. The show was like a video ana­logue to Trouser Press—and brows­ing the online data­base of that “’bible’ of alter­na­tive rock” will give you a good sense of 120 Min­utes’ breadth. Though it fea­tured a very healthy mix of hard­core, elec­tron­ic, and new wave music from both sides of the pond, the show often seemed to be dom­i­nat­ed by British bands like the Cure (whose Robert Smith once guest host­ed), Depeche Mode, the Psy­che­del­ic Furs, and (sec­ond from top) Big Audio Dyna­mite, Mick Jones’ post-Clash project, which Lou Reed dis­cuss­es briefly in the clip at the top from his 1986 stint as a guest host. (See sev­er­al more clips of his host­ing here.)

In the 90s, 120 Min­utes became a show­case for much more home­grown prod­uct as the “blender of post-punk, goth, indus­tri­al, and jan­gle-rock gave way… to a coa­lesced grunge move­ment” after the seis­mic debut of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” in 1991, with the likes of Mud­honey, Soundgar­den, the Dandy Warhols, and the Smash­ing Pump­kins tak­ing over for much of the British new wave. Those who came of age in the 90s will remem­ber the show’s host Matt Pin­field­’s obses­sive, rock critic’s approach to “the rise and fall of alter­na­tive rock.” Soon, the show became a heav­i­ly eclec­tic mix: Brit pop arrived (along with the bag­gy Mad­ch­ester of the Hap­py Mon­days, Stone Ros­es, etc.), and “post-grunge bands, left of cen­ter singer-song­writ­ers, west coast ska-inspired bands, and alter­na­tive hip hop acts” joined the playlist.

The mid-nineties seem like gold­en years in ret­ro­spect. Flush with cash, record com­pa­nies threw mon­ey at any­thing vague­ly Nir­vana-shaped, which enabled a num­ber of excel­lent bands and artists to break out of their local scenes and into larg­er stu­dios and stages like the trav­el­ing cir­cus of Lol­la­palooza. (The sit­u­a­tion also pro­duced a drag of deriv­a­tive, dumb­ed-down awful­ness.) Scroll through the playlists Tyler C has com­piled for 1994, for exam­ple, a year I fond­ly, most­ly, remem­ber, to get a sense of the range of artists and gen­res the show embraced by this time—from the ham­mer­ing indus­tri­al-met­al of Min­istry (above) to the hazy, ethe­re­al psych-folk of Mazzy Star (below). Post-Nir­vana “alter­na­tive rock” went so main­stream that the net­work even­tu­al­ly ran a com­pan­ion show every week­night called Alter­na­tive Nation, so named despite the fact that “alter­na­tive” came to mean pre­cise­ly the oppo­site of the out­sider sta­tus it had once described.

The boom times couldn’t last. As the mil­len­ni­um waned, so did the hey­day of alt-rock music videos. Real­i­ty TV and bub­blegum pop took over. “In the era of TRL,” writes Tyler C, “the future of 120 Min­utes on MTV was uncer­tain.” As MTV rel­e­gat­ed music videos—once its rai­son d’e­tre—to the mar­gins, 120 Min­utes became MTV’s “de fac­to rock show,” then moved to MTV 2, then off the air alto­geth­er in 2003 after a 17-year run. Then, as indie rock ascend­ed to pop­u­lar­i­ty, the show was revived for a 2003–2011 run as Sub­ter­ranean and again as 120 Min­utes until 2013.

Though Tyler C’s exhaus­tive archive con­tains few actu­al clips from the show, it does doc­u­ment 120 Min­utes’ entire his­to­ry, from its under­ground late 80s incep­tion, through the main­stream 90s, and into the sub­dued 2000’s, with playlists from each episode and, writes Buz­zfeed, “his­to­ries of what bands played, descrip­tions of tours the show appeared on, and anec­dotes where pos­si­ble.” You can watch full episodes of the show’s last cou­ple years with Matt Pin­field on MTV Hive (Many, like this one, broad­cast from New York’s Cake Shop).

The archive, Tyler told Buz­zfeed, res­onates with Gen X’ers because “it’s all about nostalgia”—and I can cer­tain­ly tes­ti­fy to that effect—and appeals to younger peo­ple “because that era of music in the ’90s was so impor­tant. It was the age of EVERYTHING alter­na­tive.” For those of us who lived through the decade, and who aged out of MTV’s demo­graph­ic around the time that Tyler aged in, it’s also an oppor­tu­ni­ty to catch up with lat­er sea­sons of the show we prob­a­bly missed. They may be as essen­tial someday—in their own way—as the ones we so wist­ful­ly recall.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First Live Per­for­mance of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” (1991)

Jim Jarmusch’s Anti-MTV Music Videos for Talk­ing Heads, Neil Young, Tom Waits & Big Audio Dyna­mite

The First 10 Videos Played on MTV: Rewind the Video­tape to August 1, 1981

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

Download Two Harry Potter Audio Books for Free (and Get the Rest of the Series for Cheap)

in Audio Books | February 15th, 2016

FYI: If you’re look­ing to down­load the Har­ry Pot­ter series as audio books, here’s a way to get two books in the series for free, and the rest at a steep dis­count.

In recent months, Audi­ble (the audio books com­pa­ny owned by Ama­zon) began mak­ing Har­ry Pot­ter books avail­able for down­load. Now here’s what you need to know: If you sign up for Audible’s 30-Day Free Tri­al Pro­gram, you can down­load two audio books for free, includ­ing two books from the Har­ry Pot­ter series. Then, once the free tri­al is over, you can decide whether you want to become an ongo­ing Audi­ble sub­scriber or not. Regard­less of what deci­sion you make, you can keep the two free audio books.

If you remain an Audi­ble sub­scriber (like I have), you can down­load addi­tion­al books at a rate of $14.95 each. That means you can get the remain­ing 5 books in the Har­ry Pot­ter series for $74.75 in total—which is sig­nif­i­cant­ly cheap­er than pay­ing $242.94, the price that Pot­ter­more cur­rent­ly charges for the set.

To get start­ed, you can go to this page, sign up for Audible’s 30-Day Free Tri­al Pro­gram, and then down­load your first two Har­ry Pot­ter books for free.

NB: Audi­ble is an Amazon.com sub­sidiary, and we’re a mem­ber of their affil­i­ate pro­gram.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

Down­load a Free Course from “The Great Cours­es” Through Audible.com’s Free Tri­al Pro­gram

How J.K. Rowl­ing Plot­ted Har­ry Pot­ter with a Hand-Drawn Spread­sheet

J.K. Rowl­ing Tells Har­vard Grads Why Suc­cess Begins with Fail­ure

Twi­light Series: How to Get Free Audio Books

Free Audio: Down­load the Com­plete Chron­i­cles of Nar­nia by C.S. Lewis

What Gravitational Waves Sound Like: New Audio of Black Holes Colliding Confirms Predictions Einstein Made 100 Years Ago

in Physics | February 12th, 2016

On Thurs­day, sci­en­tists announced that they had record­ed the sound of two black holes col­lid­ing a bil­lion light years away, pro­vid­ing the first real proof that grav­i­ta­tion­al waves actu­al­ly exist–something Albert Ein­stein pre­dict­ed 100 years ago in his famous paper on gen­er­al rel­a­tiv­i­ty. If you would like an intro­duc­tion to the whole con­cept of grav­i­ta­tion­al waves, I’d rec­om­mend watch­ing the ani­ma­tion below, cre­at­ed by PhD Comics–the same folks who cre­at­ed a handy ani­ma­tion explain­ing the Hig­gs Boson when it was con­firmed back in 2012.

But, for the moment, I’d real­ly like you to lis­ten to the “Grav­i­ta­tion­al Wave Chirp,” the audio record­ing unveiled by sci­en­tists this week. (Hear it up top.) As The New York Times describes it, the chirp ris­es to “the note of mid­dle C before abrupt­ly stop­ping,” And it’s like­ly to “take its place among the great sound bites of sci­ence,” rank­ing up there with Alexan­der Gra­ham Bell’s “Mr. Wat­son — come here” and Sputnik’s first beeps from orbit.” Decades from now, you can tell your grand­kids you heard it here first.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Hig­gs Boson, AKA the God Par­ti­cle, Explained with Ani­ma­tion

Free Online Physics Cours­es, part of our larg­er col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

Grav­i­ty Visu­al­ized by High School Teacher in an Amaz­ing­ly Ele­gant & Sim­ple Way

Music in the Brain: Scientists Finally Reveal the Parts of Our Brain That Are Dedicated to Music

in Music, Neuroscience | February 12th, 2016

The late neu­rol­o­gist and writer Oliv­er Sacks had a big hit back in 2007 with his book Musi­cophil­ia: Tales of Music and the Brain, address­ing as it did from Sacks’ unquench­ably brain- and music-curi­ous per­spec­tive a con­nec­tion almost all of us feel instinc­tive­ly. We know we love music, and we know that love must have some­thing to do with how our brains work, but for most of human his­to­ry we haven’t had many cred­i­ble expla­na­tions for what’s going on. But sci­ence has dis­cov­ered more about the rela­tion­ship between music and the brain, and we’ve post­ed about some of those fas­ci­nat­ing dis­cov­er­ies as they come out. (Have a look at all the relat­ed posts below.)

But now, a study from MIT’s McGov­ern Insti­tute for Brain Research has revealed exact­ly which parts of our brains respond specif­i­cal­ly to music. They’ve put out a brief video of this research, which you can watch above, explain­ing their process, which involved putting sub­jects into an MRI and play­ing them var­i­ous sounds, then study­ing how their brains respond­ed dif­fer­ent­ly to music than to, say, the spo­ken word or a flush­ing toi­let. Not look­ing to test any hypoth­e­sis in par­tic­u­lar, the research team found “strik­ing selec­tiv­i­ty” in which regions of the brain lit up, in their spe­cial­ly designed ana­lyt­i­cal mod­el, in response to music.

“Why do we have music?” asks the McGov­ern Insti­tute’s Dr. Nan­cy Kan­wish­er in a New York Times arti­cle on the research by Natal­ie Ang­i­er. “Why do we enjoy it so much and want to dance when we hear it? How ear­ly in devel­op­ment can we see this sen­si­tiv­i­ty to music, and is it tun­able with expe­ri­ence? These are the real­ly cool first-order ques­tions we can begin to address.” The piece also quotes Josef Rauscheck­er, direc­tor of the Lab­o­ra­to­ry of Inte­gra­tive Neu­ro­science and Cog­ni­tion at George­town Uni­ver­si­ty, cit­ing “the­o­ries that music is old­er than speech or lan­guage,” and that “some even argue that speech evolved from music,” which “works as a group cohe­sive. Music-mak­ing with oth­er peo­ple in your tribe is a very ancient, human thing to do.” Which all, of course, goes to sup­port the bold hypoth­e­sis put forth by the late Tow­er Records: No Music, No Life.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Neu­ro­science of Bass: New Study Explains Why Bass Instru­ments Are Fun­da­men­tal to Music

The Neu­ro­science of Drum­ming: Researchers Dis­cov­er the Secrets of Drum­ming & The Human Brain

Play­ing an Instru­ment Is a Great Work­out For Your Brain: New Ani­ma­tion Explains Why

New Research Shows How Music Lessons Dur­ing Child­hood Ben­e­fit the Brain for a Life­time

Why We Love Rep­e­ti­tion in Music: Explained in a New TED-Ed Ani­ma­tion

This is Your Brain on Jazz Impro­vi­sa­tion: The Neu­ro­science of Cre­ativ­i­ty

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy & Neu­ro­science Cours­es

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. 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.

LIFE Magazine’s Guide to Kissing, Circa 1942

in Life | February 12th, 2016

Once upon a time, in the mid­dle of World War II, there was a right way to do it. And a wrong way to do it. Are there rules in 2016? And what would they look like? That’s your home­work assign­ment for this Valen­tine’s Day week­end.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Broke­back Before Broke­back: The First Same-Sex Kiss in Cin­e­ma (1927)

The Sto­ry Behind Rodin’s ‘The Kiss’

Three “Anti-Films” by Andy Warhol: Sleep, Eat & Kiss

Celebrate Valentine’s Day with a Charming Stop Motion Animation of an E.E. Cummings’ Love Poem

in Animation, Literature, Music, Poetry | February 12th, 2016

Valentine’s Day draws nigh, and we can only assume our read­ers are des­per­ate­ly won­der­ing how to declaim love poet­ry with­out look­ing like a total prat.

Set it to music?

Go for it, but let’s not for­get the fate of that soul­ful young fel­low on the stairs of Ani­mal House when his sweet airs fell upon the ears of John Belushi.

Sarah Huff, a young and relent­less­ly crafty blog­ger, hit upon a much bet­ter solu­tion when ani­mat­ing E.E. Cum­mings’ 1952 poem [i car­ry your heart with me(i car­ry it in] for an Amer­i­can Lit­er­a­ture class’ final project at Sin­clair Com­mu­ni­ty Col­lege.

Her con­struc­tion paper cutouts are charm­ing, but what real­ly makes her ren­der­ing sing is the way she takes the pres­sure off by set­ting it to an entire­ly dif­fer­ent love song. (Echoes of Cum­mings’ goat-foot­ed bal­loon man in Ter­ra Schnei­der’s Bal­loon (a.k.a. The Begin­ning)?)

Released from the poten­tial per­ils of a too sonorous inter­pre­ta­tion, the poet’s lines gam­bol play­ful­ly through­out the pro­ceed­ings, spelled out in util­i­tar­i­an alpha­bet stick­ers.

It’s pret­ty pud­dle-won­der­ful.

Watch it with your Valen­tine, and leave the read aloud to the punc­tu­a­tion-averse Cum­mings, below.

[i car­ry your heart with me(i car­ry it in]

i car­ry your heart with me(i car­ry it in

my heart)i am nev­er with­out it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and what­ev­er is done

by only me is your doing,my dar­ling)

                                                      i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beau­ti­ful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are what­ev­er a moon has always meant

and what­ev­er a sun will always sing is you

here is the deep­est secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

high­er than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the won­der that’s keep­ing the stars apart

i car­ry your heart(i car­ry it in my heart

Relat­ed Con­tent:

E.E. Cum­mings Recites ‘Any­one Lived in a Pret­ty How Town,’ 1953

Famous Writ­ers’ Report Cards: Ernest Hem­ing­way, William Faulkn­er, Nor­man Mail­er, E.E. Cum­mings & Anne Sex­ton

The Mys­ti­cal Poet­ry of Rumi Read By Til­da Swin­ton, Madon­na, Robert Bly & Cole­man Barks

This is Your Brain in Love: The Stanford Love Competition Shows What Love Looks Like on an MRI

in Life, Neuroscience, Stanford | February 12th, 2016

We hear it so often it’s almost a cliché, one I’m sure I’ve repeat­ed with­out giv­ing it much thought: You can’t mea­sure love in a lab­o­ra­to­ry. But we prob­a­bly can, in fact. Or at least neu­ro­sci­en­tists can. Last year, one joint Chi­nese and Amer­i­can team of neu­ro­sci­en­tists did just that, defin­ing the feel­ing we call love as “a moti­va­tion­al state asso­ci­at­ed with a desire to enter or main­tain a close rela­tion­ship with a spe­cif­ic oth­er per­son.” This doesn’t cov­er the love of pets, food, or sun­sets, but it gets at what we cel­e­brate with can­dy and red tchotchkes every year around this time, as well as the love we have for friends or fam­i­ly.

Using fMRI scans of three groups of 100 men and women, the researchers found that an “in-love group had more increased activ­i­ty across sev­er­al brain regions involved in reward, moti­va­tion, emo­tion, and social func­tion­ing,” reports Med­ical Dai­ly. The longer peo­ple had been “in love,” the greater the brain activ­i­ty in these regions. Whether the brain states cause the emo­tion, or the emo­tion caus­es the brain states, or they are one in the same, I can’t say, but the fact remains: love can be quan­tifi­ably mea­sured.

Mean­while, Brent Hoff sep­a­rate­ly decid­ed to exploit this fact for what he calls a “Love Com­pe­ti­tion.” With the help of Stanford’s Cen­ter for Cog­ni­tive Neu­ro­bi­o­log­i­cal Imag­ing (CNI), Hoff enlist­ed sev­en con­tes­tants of vary­ing ages—from 10 to 75—and gen­ders to enter an fMRI machine and “love some­one as hard as they can” for five min­utes. Who­ev­er gen­er­ates the most activ­i­ty in regions “pro­duc­ing the neu­ro­chem­i­cal expe­ri­ence of love” wins. Gives you the warm fuzzies, right?

While “the idea that love can be mea­sured may seem deeply unro­man­tic,” writes Aeon mag­a­zine, “the results were any­thing but.” The con­tes­tants were not restrict­ed to roman­tic love. Ten-year-old Milo gives his love to a new baby cousin, because “she’s very cute.” Dr. Bob Dougher­ty of CNI pre­dicts ear­ly on that an “old­er guy” like him­self might win because expe­ri­ence would bet­ter help him con­trol the emo­tion. But at the begin­ning, it’s any­one’s game. Watch the com­pe­ti­tion above and find out who wins.

Giv­en that this is billed as the “1st Annu­al Love Com­pe­ti­tion,” might we expect anoth­er this year?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What is Love? BBC Phi­los­o­phy Ani­ma­tions Fea­ture Sartre, Freud, Aristo­phanes, Dawkins & More

This Is Your Brain on Jane Austen: The Neu­ro­science of Read­ing Great Lit­er­a­ture

Steven Pinker Explains the Neu­ro­science of Swear­ing (NSFW)

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

Hear Gabriel García Márquez’s Extraordinary Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, “The Solitude Of Latin America,” in English & Spanish (1982)

in Literature | February 11th, 2016

From the very begin­ning of Europe’s incur­sions into the so-called New World, the ecol­o­gy, the peo­ple, and the civ­i­liza­tions of the Amer­i­c­as became trans­mut­ed into leg­end and fan­ta­sy. Ear­ly explor­ers imag­ined the land­scape they encoun­tered as filled with marvels—creatures that arose from their own uncon­scious and from a lit­er­ary his­to­ry of exot­ic myths dat­ing back to antiq­ui­ty. And as the native peo­ple assumed the char­ac­ter of giants and mon­sters, sav­ages and demons in trav­el accounts, their cities became repos­i­to­ries of unimag­in­able wealth, ripe for the tak­ing.

Fore­most among these leg­ends was the city of El Dora­do. Sought by the Span­ish, Ital­ians, and Por­tuguese through­out the 15th and 16th cen­turies and by Wal­ter Raleigh in the 17th, “El Dora­do,” says folk­lorist Jim Grif­fith, “shift­ed geo­graph­i­cal loca­tions until final­ly it sim­ply meant a source of untold rich­es some­where in the Amer­i­c­as.” A cou­ple hun­dred years after Raleigh’s last ill-fat­ed expe­di­tion, Edgar Allan Poe sug­gest­ed the loca­tion of this city: “Over the Moun­tains of the Moon, down the Val­ley of the Shad­ow, ride, bold­ly ride… if you seek for El Dora­do.”

These colo­nial encoun­ters, and the fever­ish accounts they pro­duced, “con­tained the seeds,” says Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez in his 1982 Nobel Prize accep­tance speech, “of our present-day nov­els.” El Dora­do, “our so avid­ly sought and illu­so­ry land,” remained on imag­i­nary maps of explor­ers well past the age of explo­ration: “As late as the last cen­tu­ry, a Ger­man mis­sion appoint­ed to study the con­struc­tion of an inte­ro­cean­ic rail­road… con­clud­ed that the project was fea­si­ble” only if the rails were made of gold.

As Márquez’s work has often recount­ed, espe­cial­ly his epic One Hun­dred Years of Soli­tude, oth­er com­modi­ties suf­ficed when the gold didn’t mate­ri­al­ize, and the strug­gle between con­querors, adven­tur­ers, mer­ce­nar­ies, dic­ta­tors, and oppor­tunists on the one hand, and peo­ple fierce­ly deter­mined to sur­vive on the oth­er has made “Latin Amer­i­ca… a bound­less realm of haunt­ed men and his­toric women, whose unend­ing obsti­na­cy blurs into leg­end. We have not had a moment’s rest.”

Márquez’s speech, “The Soli­tude of Latin Amer­i­ca,” weaves togeth­er the region’s found­ing his­to­ry, its lit­er­a­ture, and its bloody civ­il wars, mil­i­tary coups, and “the first Latin Amer­i­can eth­no­cide of our time” into an accu­mu­lat­ing account of “immea­sur­able vio­lence and pain,” the result of “age-old inequities and untold bit­ter­ness… oppres­sion, plun­der­ing and aban­don­ment.” To this cat­a­logue, “we respond with life,” says Márquez, while “the most pros­per­ous coun­tries have suc­ceed­ed in accu­mu­lat­ing pow­ers of destruc­tion such as to anni­hi­late, a hun­dred times over… the total­i­ty of all liv­ing beings that have ever drawn breath on this plan­et of mis­for­tune.”

From the utopi­an dream of cities of gold and end­less wealth, we arrive at a dystopi­an world bent on destroy­ing itself. And yet,“faced with this awe­some real­i­ty,” Márquez refus­es to despair. He quotes from his lit­er­ary hero William Faulkner’s Nobel speech—“I decline to accept the end of man”—then artic­u­lates anoth­er vision:

We, the inven­tors of tales, who will believe any­thing, feel enti­tled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the cre­ation of the oppo­site utopia. A new and sweep­ing utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for oth­ers how they die, where love will prove true and hap­pi­ness be pos­si­ble, and where the races con­demned to one hun­dred years of soli­tude will have, at last and for­ev­er, a sec­ond oppor­tu­ni­ty on earth.

You can hear all of Márquez’s extra­or­di­nary speech read in Eng­lish at the top of the post, and in Span­ish by Márquez him­self below that. The lat­ter was made avail­able by Maria Popo­va, and you can read a full tran­script of the speech in Eng­lish at Brain Pick­ings.

via Brain Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read 10 Short Sto­ries by Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez Free Online (Plus More Essays & Inter­views)

Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez Describes the Cul­tur­al Mer­its of Soap Operas, and Even Wrote a Script for One

William Faulkn­er Reads His Nobel Prize Speech

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

Neil Gaiman Presents “How Stories Last,” an Insightful Lecture on How Stories Change, Evolve & Endure Through the Centuries

in Books, Literature | February 11th, 2016

Image by Thier­ry Ehrmann, via Flickr Com­mons

Every­body knows Neil Gaiman, but they all know him best for dif­fer­ent work: writ­ing com­ic books like Sand­man, nov­els like Amer­i­can Gods, tele­vi­sion series like Nev­er­where, movies like Mir­ror­Mask, an ear­ly biog­ra­phy of Duran Duran. What does all that — and every­thing else in the man’s pro­lif­ic career — have in com­mon? Sto­ries. Every piece of work Gaiman does involves him telling a sto­ry of one kind or anoth­er, and so his pro­file in the cul­ture has risen to great heights as, sim­ply, a sto­ry­teller. That made him just the right man for the job when the Long Now Foun­da­tion, with its mis­sion of think­ing far back into the past and far for­ward into the future, need­ed some­one to talk about how cer­tain sto­ries sur­vive through both those time frames and beyond.

“Do sto­ries grow?” Gaiman asks his years-in-the-mak­ing Long Now lec­ture, lis­ten­able on Sound­cloud right below or view­able as a video here. “Pret­ty obvi­ous­ly — any­body who has ever heard a joke being passed on from one per­son to anoth­er knows that they can grow, they can change. Can sto­ries repro­duce? Well, yes. Not spon­ta­neous­ly, obvi­ous­ly — they tend to need peo­ple as vec­tors. We are the media in which they repro­duce; we are their petri dish­es.” He goes on to bring out exam­ples from cave paint­ings, to secret retellings of Gone with the Wind in a Nazi con­cen­tra­tion camp, to a warn­ing to future gen­er­a­tions not to dig into nuclear waste sites — designed for pas­sage into the minds of pos­ter­i­ty as a robust­ly craft­ed sto­ry.

Sto­ries, writes the Long Now Foun­da­tion founder Stew­art Brand, “out­com­pete oth­er sto­ries by hang­ing over time. They make it from medi­um to medi­um — from oral to writ­ten to film and beyond. They lose unin­ter­est­ing ele­ments but hold on to the most com­pelling bits or even add some.” He knows that, Gaiman knows that, and I think that all of us who have told sto­ries sense its truth on an instinc­tive lev­el: “The most pop­u­lar ver­sion of the Cin­derel­la sto­ry (which may have orig­i­nat­ed long ago in Chi­na) has kept the glo­ri­ous­ly unlike­ly glass slip­per intro­duced by a care­less French telling.”

Anoth­er beloved British teller of tales, Dou­glas Adams, also had thoughts on the almost bio­log­i­cal nature of lit­er­a­ture. “We were talk­ing about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” Gaiman recalled else­where, “which was some­thing which resem­bled an iPad, long before it appeared. And I said when some­thing like that hap­pens, it’s going to be the death of the book. Dou­glas said no. Books are sharks.” And what did he mean by that? “Sharks have been around for a very long time. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the rea­son sharks are still in the ocean is that noth­ing is bet­ter at being a shark than a shark.” So not only do the best sto­ries evolve to last the longest, so do the forms they take.

You can find 18 sto­ries by Neil Gaiman (all free) in this col­lec­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

George Saun­ders Demys­ti­fies the Art of Sto­ry­telling in a Short Ani­mat­ed Doc­u­men­tary

48 Hours of Joseph Camp­bell Lec­tures Free Online: The Pow­er of Myth & Sto­ry­telling

Neil Gaiman Reads “The Man Who For­got Ray Brad­bury”

Where Do Great Ideas Come From? Neil Gaiman Explains

Aman­da Palmer Ani­mates & Nar­rates Hus­band Neil Gaiman’s Uncon­scious Mus­ings

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.