Watch High Maintenance: A Critically-Acclaimed Web Series About Life & Cannabis

in Film, Life, Television | April 4th, 2014

Web series might have a rep­u­ta­tion for being ama­teur­ish, but that’s not entire­ly fair. High Main­te­nance, cre­at­ed by hus­band and wife team Ben Sin­clair and Kat­ja Blich­feld, for instance, is a high­ly pol­ished web series, fea­tur­ing sub­tle char­ac­ter­i­za­tions, wry humor and some of the tight­est writ­ing this side of Louis C.K.’s series Louie.

Each episode, which gen­er­al­ly runs between five and fif­teen min­utes, is about a new char­ac­ter — gen­er­al­ly a young pro­fes­sion­al Brook­lynite — who is wrestling with life’s small prob­lems. The one com­mon denom­i­na­tor is their name­less put-upon pot deal­er, played by Sin­clair. The show oper­ates on the same world of neu­ro­sis, self-absorp­tion and lone­li­ness as does Louie and Lena Dunham’s Girls. Mar­i­jua­na is the thing that makes their urban woes a lit­tle more palat­able.

Sin­clair recent­ly described his series to the New York­er:

The thing about weed is, we didn’t want to use it as a punch line. Instead, it’s this sub­stance that, like choco­late, caus­es peo­ple to expose their own foibles. Peo­ple become so human in pur­suit of this thing. And the inter­ac­tion they have with the per­son bring­ing it is often trag­ic, because there are a lot of lone­ly peo­ple out there who order it and then that is their human inter­ac­tion for the day.

The sto­ry of each episode hinges on the character’s inter­ac­tion with the deal­er. In the episode titled “Hei­di” (above) – one of my favorites – the deal­er tells a guy that the viva­cious lass he has fall­en for after meet­ing her on OK Cupid has a dark secret.

The episode “Brad Pitts” oper­ates in an entire­ly dif­fer­ent tone. A woman suf­fer­ing from can­cer is feel­ing too nau­se­at­ed to eat until her mid­dle-aged friend calls up Sin­clair. The results are not quite what any­one expect­ed.

In “Rachel,” an author, played by Down­ton Abbey’s Dan Stevens, strug­gles with both cre­ative and iden­ti­ty issues.

And final­ly, “Olivia” is about two of the most awful, tox­ic twits you would ever care to (not) meet:

You can watch all of the episodes here. And at some point this month (prob­a­bly 4/20) three new episodes are slat­ed to pre­miere.

H/T @sheerly

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan Extols the Virtues of Cannabis (1969)

Alice B. Tok­las Talks About Her Famous Recipe for Hashish Fudge

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

10 Wonderful Illustrations from the Original Manuscript of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince

in Art, K-12 | April 3rd, 2014

From Jan­u­ary 24 through April 27, 2014, The Mor­gan Library and Muse­um is stag­ing an exhi­bi­tion on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Lit­tle Prince, a sto­ry that speaks to the hearts and minds of chil­dren and adults alike. Though Saint-Exupéry was French, he wrote and pub­lished his great tale while liv­ing in New York City in 1943. Twen­ty five years lat­er, in 1968, the Mor­gan acquired the orig­i­nal man­u­script, which is now on dis­play.

If you can’t trav­el to New York, you can vir­tu­al­ly pore over ten orig­i­nal illus­tra­tions from Le Petit Prince online. We’d rec­om­mend click­ing here, and then click­ing on the Full Screen icon in the bot­tom right-hand side of the first illus­tra­tion you see. Then start flip­ping through the pages and enjoy. As the Mor­gan notes, the pages are “replete with crossed-out words, cig­a­rette burns, and cof­fee stains.” You’ll find one such burn on the illus­tra­tion imme­di­ate­ly above.

via Metafil­ter/Brain Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent:

200 Free Kids Edu­ca­tion­al Resources: Video Lessons, Apps, Books, Web­sites & More

Watch Ani­ma­tions of Oscar Wilde’s Children’s Sto­ries “The Hap­py Prince” and “The Self­ish Giant”

The Inter­na­tion­al Children’s Dig­i­tal Library Offers Free eBooks for Kids in Over 40 Lan­guages

Mark Twain Cre­ates a List of His Favorite Books For Adults & Kids (1887)

Watch the Funky, Oscar-Winning Animated Film Featuring the Music of Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass (1966)

in Animation, Comedy, Music | April 3rd, 2014

The first part of this 1966 Oscar win­ning ani­mat­ed short is so utter­ly charm­ing, I’m sur­prised it has­n’t spawned a con­tem­po­rary remake. The theme—a brave lit­tle flea going up against greedy devel­op­ers who are trans­form­ing his rus­tic home­land into a high rise vaca­tion par­adise for cig­ar-chomp­ing high rollers and their stacked molls—sounds like the sort of thing that might appeal to Dream­works.

Of course, we’d need to flesh out the char­ac­ters if we’re shoot­ing for fea­ture length. Give that sham­bling don­key and plump-bot­tomed hen some wise­crack­ing atti­tude, and maybe some mir­rored shades. I’m think­ing some­thing in the Chris Rock/Whoopie Goldberg/Nathan Lane-type vein. Get a kid to voice the flea. Does­n’t mat­ter who, as long as he’s relat­able and bland. Who’s that kid with the hair?

Obvi­ous­ly, we’re talk­ing 3D CGI. If we thought we could sell the kid­dies on a retro 20th-cen­tu­ry vibe, we’d bring in Wes Ander­son or Tim Bur­ton. They’re sort of into that creepy stop motion  deal, right?

Speak­ing of retro, we could maybe hang onto a bit of the “Span­ish Flea” thing out of respect and because of the char­ac­ter being a flea and all. I’m think­ing maybe a hip hop remix as the cred­its roll? Find out if that kid with the hair raps. I for­get what he’s famous for…

Enough!

The orig­i­nal is absolute­ly per­fect as is, funky and fun­ny, with loads of loose‑y goose‑y per­son­al­i­ty. Like the Herb Alpert and the Tijua­na Brass sound that dri­ves it, it’s both kid-friend­ly and a bit adult. (If that gyrat­ing chang­ing cabana puts you in mind of the Dat­ing Game, it’s like­ly more than the “Span­ish Flea”/“Bachelor’s Theme” con­nec­tion. Sure­ly I was not the only child view­er tan­ta­lized by the thought of what might hap­pen when the win­ning bach­e­lor and bach­e­lorette flew off togeth­er to take their shared vaca­tion-prize.)

The oth­er half of the short, a riff on “Tijua­na Taxi,” anoth­er hit from Alpert’s 1965 album, Going Places, is pret­ty great too.

Pro­duced by leg­endary ani­ma­tor John Hub­ley and his wife, Faith, this lit­tle two-for-the-price-of-one gem fea­tures con­tri­bu­tions by some of the peri­od’s oth­er greats: Ger­ard Bald­win, Phil Dun­can, Emery Hawkins, Bar­rie Nel­son, Rod Scrib­n­er, and Ed Smith. If it leaves you with a taste for more, have a look at the Hub­leys’ work for Dizzy Gille­spie, which we fea­tured last week.

A Herb Alpert and the Tijua­na Brass Dou­ble Fea­ture won the Acad­e­my Award for Best Ani­mat­ed Short Film in 1966. You can find it in our col­lec­tion of 675 Free Online Movies, plus our col­lec­tion of 35 Free Oscar Win­ning Films Online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dizzy Gille­spie Wor­ries About Nuclear & Envi­ron­men­tal Dis­as­ter in Vin­tage Ani­mat­ed Films

Father and Daugh­ter: An Oscar-Win­ning Ani­mat­ed Short Film

Saul Bass’ Oscar-Win­ning Ani­mat­ed Short Pon­ders Why Man Cre­ates

Ayun Hal­l­i­day was also trans­fixed by the pruri­ence of Match Game 74. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

Stanley Kubrick Narrates a Promo Reel for Dr. Strangelove: Features Unused Takes

in Film | April 3rd, 2014

Yes­ter­day we fea­tured a trail­er for Cit­i­zen Kane nar­rat­ed by its direc­tor, a cer­tain Orson Welles. Today we give you footage of anoth­er film that needs no intro­duc­tion spo­ken over by anoth­er film­mak­er who does­n’t need one, either: Stan­ley Kubrick­’s Dr. Strangelove: or, How I Learned to Stop Wor­ry­ing and Love the Bomb. But instead of a pol­ished trail­er, Kubrick put togeth­er this near­ly twen­ty-minute “pro­mo reel,” which appears in a two-part playlist above. “Split over two parts and record­ed off the wall from the pro­jec­tion of the rare 35mm reel, the pro­mo reel fea­tures some alter­nate takes not used in the final cut,” writes Cain Rodriguez at Indiewire. “While we’re not exact­ly sure what the reel’s orig­i­nal func­tion was — maybe to pla­cate investors since the satir­i­cal ele­ments are some­what down­played — we’re glad to see this has sur­faced online.” Kubrick recounts the sto­ry of Dr. Strangelove — one as deeply famil­iar as ancient myth to those who have, like me, seen the movie count­less times, always the­atri­cal­ly. He does so in a sur­pris­ing­ly flat, straight­for­ward man­ner, giv­en that the final prod­uct turned out so thor­ough­ly shot through with the black com­e­dy of the absurd.

Over audi­ble pro­jec­tor noise, he tells of all the now-famil­iar ele­ments: the B52‑s cir­cling con­stant­ly, refu­el­ing in midair; Brigadier Gen­er­al Jack Rip­per’s sud­den order to bomb Rus­sia; Gen­er­al Buck Turgid­son’s wee-hour depar­ture for the “War Room”; the siege of Burpel­son Air Force Base; Group Cap­tain Lionel Man­drake’s strug­gle for the recall code and sub­se­quent con­fronta­tion with the “prevert”-fixated Colonel Bat Guano; Pres­i­dent Merkin Muf­fley’s bad news-break­ing call to Russ­ian Pre­mier Dmitri Kissoff; the tit­u­lar Ger­man expa­tri­ate sci­en­tist’s plan to restart soci­ety after the nuclear apoc­a­lypse. But as Kubrick talks about these scenes, some of the most mem­o­rable in 20th-cen­tu­ry cin­e­ma, we see dif­fer­ent ver­sions of them than the ones to which we’ve long grown accus­tomed: dif­fer­ent angles, dif­fer­ent cuts, even dif­fer­ent lines. Despite down­play­ing the com­e­dy, this reel does hint at the bril­liance of the mate­r­i­al, and more­over of Kubrick­’s then-coun­ter­in­tu­itive treat­ment of it. But can any­one who saw it have imag­ined to what an extent the final film would change the way we think about U.S. for­eign pol­i­cy, mil­i­tary intel­li­gence, and the very con­cept of glob­al ther­monu­clear war?

via Cinephil­ia and Beyond

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Inside Dr. Strangelove: Doc­u­men­tary Reveals How a Cold War Sto­ry Became a Kubrick Clas­sic

Aban­doned Alter­nate Titles for Two Great Films: Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and Hitchcock’s Ver­ti­go

Watch Orson Welles’ Trail­er for Cit­i­zen Kane: As Inno­v­a­tive as the Film Itself

675 Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, etc.

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

How a Young Sigmund Freud Researched & Got Addicted to Cocaine, the New “Miracle Drug,” in 1894

in Psychology, Science | April 3rd, 2014

As David Bowie had his cocaine peri­od, so too did Sig­mund Freud, begin­ning in 1894 and last­ing at least two years. Unlike the rock star, the doc­tor was just at the begin­ning of his career, “a ner­vous fel­low” of 28 “who want­ed to make good,” says Howard Markel, author of An Anato­my of Addic­tion: Sig­mund Freud, William Hal­st­ed, and the Mir­a­cle Drug Cocaine. Markel tells Ira Fla­tow in the NPR Sci­ence Fri­day episode below that Freud “knew if he was going to get a pro­fes­sor­ship, he would have to dis­cov­er some­thing great.”

Freud’s exper­i­ments with the drug led to the pub­li­ca­tion of a well-regard­ed paper called “Über Coca,” which he described as “a song of praise to this mag­i­cal sub­stance” in a “pret­ty racy” let­ter to his then-fiancé Martha Bernays. (He also promised she would be unable to resist the advances of: “a big, wild man who has cocaine in his body.”) Two years lat­er, his health suf­fer­ing, Freud appar­ent­ly stopped all use of the drug and rarely men­tioned it again.

[T]he accom­plished young phsyi­ol­o­gist Ernst von Fleis­chl-Marx­ow, whose mor­phine addic­tion Freud had tried to treat with cocaine, with dis­as­trous results. As Freud wrote almost three decades lat­er, “the study on coca was an ­allotri­on” — an idle pur­suit that dis­tracts from seri­ous respon­si­bil­i­ties — “which I was eager to con­clude.”

The drug was at the time tout­ed as a panacea, and Fleis­chl-Marx­ow, Markel says, was “the first addict in Europe to be treat­ed with this new ther­a­peu­tic.” Freud also used him­self as a test sub­ject, unaware of the addic­tive prop­er­ties of his cure for his friend’s addic­tion and his own depres­sion and ret­i­cence.

While Freud con­duct­ed his exper­i­ments, anoth­er med­ical pioneer—American sur­geon William Hal­st­ed, one of Johns Hop­kins “four found­ing physi­cians”—simul­ta­ne­ous­ly found uses for the drug in his prac­tice. Freud and Hal­st­ed nev­er met and worked com­plete­ly inde­pen­dent­ly in entire­ly dif­fer­ent fields, says Markel in the news seg­ment above, but “their lives were braid­ed togeth­er by a fas­ci­na­tion with cocaine,” as addicts, and as read­ers and writ­ers of “sev­er­al med­ical papers about the lat­est, newest mir­a­cle drug of their era, 1894.” Hal­stead is respon­si­ble for many of the mod­ern sur­gi­cal tech­niques with­out which the prospect of surgery by today’s stan­dards is unimag­in­able —the prop­er han­dling of exposed tis­sue, oper­at­ing in asep­tic envi­ron­ments, and sur­gi­cal gloves. He inject­ed patients with cocaine to numb regions of their body, allow­ing him to oper­ate with­out ren­der­ing them uncon­scious.

Hal­st­ed, too, used him­self as a guinea pig. “No doc­tor knew at this point,” says Markel above, “of the ter­ri­ble addic­tive effects of cocaine” before Freud and Halsted’s exper­i­ments. Both men irrev­o­ca­bly changed their fields and almost destroyed their own lives in the process (see a short doc­u­men­tary on Halsted’s med­ical advances below). In Freud’s case, much of the work of psy­cho­analy­sis has come to be seen as pseudoscience—his work on dreams sig­nif­i­cant­ly so, as Markel says above: “Cocaine haunts the pages of the Inter­pre­ta­tion of Dreams. The mod­el dream is a cocaine dream.” The “talk­ing cure,” how­ev­er, engen­dered by the “loos­en­ing of the tongue” Freud expe­ri­enced while on cocaine, endures as, of course, do Halsted’s inno­va­tions.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Freud’s Thought Explained in Yale Psych Course (Find Full Course on our List of 875 Free Online Cours­es)

Sig­mund Freud Speaks: The Only Known Record­ing of His Voice, 1938

Sig­mund Freud’s Home Movies: A Rare Glimpse of His Pri­vate Life

Jean-Paul Sartre Writes a Script for John Huston’s Film on Freud (1958)

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

80 Massive Open Online Courses Getting Started in April: Enroll in a MOOC Today

in MOOCs | April 3rd, 2014

We’re see­ing about 80 MOOCs get­ting start­ed in April. It’s a far cry from the 180 that got under­way in Jan­u­ary. But still not bad. You can vis­it our com­pre­hen­sive list of MOOCs here and find a course that speaks to you. Some of the ones that caught our eye include:

• Street Fight­ing Math – MIT on edx – April 8 (7 weeks)
• Design Think­ing – Macro­me­dia Uni­ver­si­ty on iver­si­ty – April 14 (4 weeks)
• Warhol – Uni­ver­si­ty of Edin­burgh on Cours­era – April 21 (5 weeks)
• Start Writ­ing Fic­tion – The Open Uni­ver­si­ty on Future­learn – April 28 (8 weeks)

Don’t miss any­thing from Open Cul­ture in 2014. Sign up for our Dai­ly Email or RSS Feed. And we’ll send cul­tur­al curiosi­ties your way, every day.

What Books Should Every Intelligent Person Read?: Tell Us Your Picks; We’ll Tell You Ours

in Books | April 2nd, 2014

Back in 2011 we fea­tured astro­physi­cist Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s list of the books “every sin­gle intel­li­gent per­son on the plan­et” should read. His picks include the Bible (“to learn that it’s eas­i­er to be told by oth­ers what to think and believe than it is to think for your­self”); Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (“to learn that cap­i­tal­ism is an econ­o­my of greed, a force of nature unto itself”); and Machi­avel­li’s The Prince (“to learn that peo­ple not in pow­er will do all they can to acquire it, and peo­ple in pow­er will do all they can to keep it”). The list, which has gen­er­at­ed a great deal of inter­est and dis­cus­sion, leads you to think about the very nature of not just what con­sti­tutes essen­tial read­ing, but what defines an “intel­li­gent per­son.” Should every such indi­vid­ual real­ly read any book in par­tic­u­lar? Does it mat­ter if oth­ers already acknowl­edge these books as essen­tial, or can they have gone thus far undis­cov­ered?

Admirably, Tyson man­ages to com­pile his selec­tions of books well-known across the Eng­lish-speak­ing world into a list that, as a whole, some­how avoids dull­ness or pre­dictabil­i­ty. In eschew­ing obscu­ran­tism, he makes the per­haps dar­ing impli­ca­tion that an intel­li­gent per­son must con­nect to a wide­ly shared cul­ture, rather than demon­strat­ing their brain­pow­er by get­ting through vol­ume upon lit­tle-read vol­ume, writ­ten in the most labyrinthine lan­guage, expound­ing on the most abstract sub­ject mat­ter, or grap­pling with the knot­ti­est philo­soph­i­cal prob­lems. This inspires me to high­light five more pieces of read­ing mate­r­i­al, all intel­lec­tu­al­ly stim­u­lat­ing but acces­si­bly writ­ten, all ref­er­enced fre­quent­ly in count­less areas of human endeav­or, and all avail­able in our col­lec­tion of free eBooks:

• Mar­cus Aure­lius’ Med­i­ta­tions (iPad/iPhone – Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats), because the ideas that “you have pow­er over your mind, not out­side events,” or that “the hap­pi­ness of your life depends upon the qual­i­ty of your thoughts,” or that “every­thing we hear is an opin­ion, not a fact” and “every­thing we see is a per­spec­tive, not the truth” apply as much today as they did in antiq­ui­ty.
• Miguel de Cer­vantes’ Don Quixote (iPad/iPhone (Vol 1 – Vol 2) – Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats), because we could all use a firmer grasp on what we mean when we label some­one “quixot­ic,” a sim­ple descrip­tion that takes its name from a sur­pris­ing­ly com­plex and unex­pect­ed­ly admirable char­ac­ter.
• James Joyce’s A Por­trait of the Artist as a Young Man (iPad/iPhone – Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats) because, what­ev­er ideas you may have about Joyce — pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive — if you haven’t yet cracked his first nov­el, I guar­an­tee a read­ing expe­ri­ence unlike any you might expect.
• Michel de Mon­taigne’s Essays (iPad/iPhone – Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats), because not only do his pieces exem­pli­fy (because they prac­ti­cal­ly invent­ed) the strongest short form to cap­ture the paths of human thought, but they feel espe­cial­ly rel­e­vant now in this inter­net-dri­ven “age of the essay.”
• Alex­is de Toc­queville’s Democ­ra­cy in Amer­i­ca (vol­ume 1: iPad/iPhone – Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats — Read Online; vol­ume 2: iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats — Read Online), because the French­man’s diag­no­sis of the advan­tages and lia­bil­i­ties of this then-young and exper­i­men­tal coun­try still give us much to con­sid­er today, not just in regard to Amer­i­ca, but — now that so many coun­tries have gone demo­c­ra­t­ic, each in their own way — most of the world.

None will have come as news to you, but some it may take you a moment to real­ize that, hey, you nev­er did get around to them in the first place. Take in books like these, and not only will they res­onate rich­ly with every­thing else already knock­ing around your brain — you do read Open Cul­ture, after all — but they’ll let you in on what, exact­ly, all those read­ers and writ­ers around the world and through his­to­ry have meant when they cite them so read­i­ly.

We also invite you to tell us: which books, freely avail­able or oth­er­wise, do you con­sid­er essen­tial read­ing for the intel­li­gent? Have I missed the boat by fail­ing to include Finnegans Wake (Read Online), say, or the Trac­ta­tus Logi­co-Philo­soph­i­cus (iPad/iPhone — Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats — Read Online)? Let loose your own rec­om­men­da­tions and we’ll cre­ate a com­pi­la­tion of your best picks in the com­ings days.

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Read an Excerpt of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1926 Translation of Beowulf Before It’s Finally Published Next Month

in Books, Literature, Poetry | April 2nd, 2014

For the first time, J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1926 trans­la­tion of the 11th cen­tu­ry epic poem Beowulf will be pub­lished this May by Harper­Collins, edit­ed and with com­men­tary by his son Christo­pher. The elder Tolkien, says his son, “seems nev­er to have con­sid­ered its pub­li­ca­tion.” He left it along with sev­er­al oth­er unpub­lished man­u­scripts at the time of his death in 1973. The edi­tion will also include a sto­ry called Sel­l­ic Spell and excerpts from a series of lec­tures on Beowulf Tolkien deliv­ered at Oxford in the 1930s. Tolkien did pub­lish one of those lec­tures, “The Mon­ster and the Crit­ic,” in 1936. In this “epoch-mak­ing paper,” writes Sea­mus Heaney in the intro­duc­tion to his huge­ly pop­u­lar 1999 dual lan­guage verse edi­tion, Tolkien treat­ed the Beowulf poet as “an imag­i­na­tive writer,” not a his­tor­i­cal recon­struc­tion. His “bril­liant lit­er­ary treat­ment changed the way the poem was val­ued and ini­ti­at­ed a new era—and new terms—of appre­ci­a­tion.” This very same thing could be said of Heaney’s trans­la­tion which, true to his stat­ed goals, brought the poem out of aca­d­e­m­ic con­fer­ences and class­rooms and into liv­ing rooms and cof­fee shops every­where. (You can hear Heaney read from that trans­la­tion here.)

Nowhere in Heaney’s intro­duc­tion to his ver­sion does he men­tion Tolkien’s trans­la­tion of the poem, so we must pre­sume he did not know of it. Long before Tolkien’s lec­tures and trans­la­tion, Beowulf had been per­haps the most revered poem in the Eng­lish lan­guage, at least since the 18th cen­tu­ry, when the sole man­u­script was res­cued from fire and and trans­lat­ed and dis­sem­i­nat­ed wide­ly. Despite that sta­tus, Beowulf was not actu­al­ly writ­ten in English—not an Eng­lish we would recognize—but in Old Eng­lish, or Anglo-Sax­on. As read­ers of Heaney’s dual trans­la­tion will know, that dis­tant provin­cial ances­tor of the mod­ern glob­al lan­guage, named for the mix­ture of Ger­man­ic peo­ples who inhab­it­ed Eng­land 1000 years ago, appears most­ly alien to us now. (To add to the strange­ness, its unfa­mil­iar alpha­bet once con­sist­ed entire­ly of runes).

The poem, more­over, is not set in Eng­land, but where Shake­speare set his Ham­let, Den­mark. Its tit­u­lar hero, a prince from Geat (ancient Swe­den), stalks a mon­ster named Gren­del on behalf of Dan­ish king Hroð­gar, killing the monster’s moth­er along the way. Tolkien’s almost uni­ver­sal­ly beloved body of fic­tion was deeply influ­enced by Beowulf. Nev­er­the­less, his trans­la­tion may be less acces­si­ble than Heaney’s, though no less beau­ti­ful, per­haps, for dif­fer­ent rea­sons. In Heaney’s verse, one hears Ted Hugh­es, some echoes of Mil­ton, Heaney’s own voice. If we are to cred­it the red­di­tor who post­ed a now-defunct 2003 arti­cle from Cana­di­an news­pa­per Nation­al Post that quotes from Tolkien’s trans­la­tion, the Hob­bit author’s verse hews to a more direct cor­re­spon­dence with the Anglo Sax­on, a lan­guage made of giant rocks and tim­ber and crash­ing waves, not ele­gant, elab­o­rat­ed claus­es. The Nation­al Post arti­cle announces the dis­cov­ery at Oxford of the Tolkien trans­la­tion by Eng­lish Pro­fes­sor Michael Drout (a sto­ry he’s since debunked), and quotes from both Heaney and Tolkien. See the com­par­i­son below:

Heaney’s trans­la­tion:

Time went by, the boat was
on water,
in close under the cliffs.
Men climbed eager­ly up the
gang­plank,
sand churned in surf, war­riors
loaded
a car­go of weapons, shin­ing
war-gear
in the ves­sel’s hold, then
heaved out,
away with a will in their
wood-wreathed ship.

Tolkien’s trans­la­tion of Beowulf and his men set­ting sail:

On went the hours:
on
ocean afloat
under cliff was their craft.
Now climb blithe­ly
brave man aboard;
break­ers pound­ing
ground the shin­gle.
Gleam­ing har­ness
they hove to the bosom of the
bark, armour
with cun­ning forged then cast
her forth
to voy­age tri­umphant,
valiant-tim­bered
fleet foam twist­ed.

One won­ders what the recent­ly depart­ed Irish poet would have said had he lived to read this Tolkien edi­tion. Might it, as Heaney said of his lec­tures, change the way the poem is val­ued? Or might he see it resem­bling oth­er dif­fi­cult attempts to make mod­ern Eng­lish repli­cate the strong­ly inflect­ed built-in rhythms of Anglo-Saxon—a lan­guage, Tolkien once said, from “the dark hea­then ages beyond the mem­o­ry of song.”

You can pre-order a copy of Tolkien’s trans­la­tion of Beowulf here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sea­mus Heaney Reads His Exquis­ite Trans­la­tion of Beowulf and His Mem­o­rable 1995 Nobel Lec­ture

Dis­cov­er J.R.R. Tolkien’s Per­son­al Book Cov­er Designs for The Lord of the Rings Tril­o­gy

“The Tolkien Pro­fes­sor” Presents Three Free Cours­es on The Lord of the Rings

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

Now You Can Learn to Speak Klingon with Rosetta Stone

in Language Lessons | April 1st, 2014

For only $269, you can learn to speak Klin­gon with Roset­ta Stone.

Our big col­lec­tion of Free Lan­guage Lessons offers tuto­ri­als in Bam­bara, Bul­gar­i­an, Ice­landic, Yid­dish and more. But Klin­gon? That, sad­ly, you can only get at Roset­ta Stone. Their soft­ware is com­pat­i­ble with Win­dows XP+ and OS X+, requires a CD-Rom dri­ve and a head­set with a micro­phone, and it lets you have live con­ver­sa­tion ses­sions with native speak­ers. By the time you’re done, you should be able to make small talk in Klin­gon — order food at a restau­rant, make a hotel reser­va­tion, ask for direc­tions. You know, the basics.

Beautiful Equations: Documentary Explores the Beauty of Einstein & Newton’s Great Equations

in Math, Science | April 1st, 2014

Like many right-brained peo­ple, artist and crit­ic Matt Collings finds high­er math mys­ti­fy­ing, a word that implies both bewil­der­ment and won­der. Faced with the equa­tions that make, for exam­ple, Stephen Hawking’s work pos­si­ble, most of us are left sim­i­lar­ly slack-jawed. Collings apt­ly describes the realm of the­o­ret­i­cal physics—which so con­tra­dicts our every­day experience—as “an alien world,” with its equa­tions like “incom­pre­hen­si­ble hiero­glyphs.” He decid­ed to enter this world, to “learn about some of the most impor­tant equa­tions in sci­ence.” His angle? He views them as art, “mas­ter­pieces” that “explain the world we live in.” Collings spends his hour-long BBC spe­cial Beau­ti­ful Equa­tions chat­ting with Stephen Hawk­ing and oth­er the­o­rists about such par­a­digm-shift­ing equa­tions as Einstein’s for­mu­la for spe­cial rel­a­tiv­i­ty and Newton’s laws of grav­i­ty.

In an era char­ac­ter­ized by sci­en­tists encroach­ing on the arts—to claim Mar­cel Proust as a neu­ro­sci­en­tist, Jane Austen as game the­o­rist—it’s refresh­ing to see a human­i­ties per­son engage the world of math, using the only schema he knows to make sense of what seems to him unin­tel­li­gi­ble. Unlike those sci­en­tists-turned-lit­er­ary crit­ics, Collings doesn’t make any large claims or assert exper­tise. He plays the hum­ble every­man, own­ing his igno­rance, his most endear­ing and effec­tive tool since it pro­vides the basis for his inter­locu­tors’ reme­di­al, and friend­ly, expla­na­tions. The results are an intel­li­gent primer for lay­folk, a refresh­er for the more knowl­edge­able, and per­haps an enter­tain­ing diver­sion for experts, who will like­ly have their quib­bles with Collings’ nec­es­sar­i­ly basic pre­sen­ta­tion. But he is not on the hunt for complexity—quite the oppo­site. As the title of the spe­cial indi­cates, Collings’ inquiry seeks to find out just what makes the work of New­ton, Ein­stein, and oth­ers so pro­found­ly, sim­ply ele­gant.

Aes­thet­ic feel­ing is not at all alien to math—far from it, in fact. As Bertrand Rus­sell famous­ly wrote in his essay “Mys­ti­cism and Log­ic”: “Math­e­mat­ics, right­ly viewed, pos­sess­es not only truth, but supreme beau­ty.” Rus­sel­l’s point has been empir­i­cal­ly val­i­dat­ed by recent neu­ro­science. As BBC.com report­ed in Feb­ru­ary, a study in the jour­nal Fron­tiers in Human Neu­ro­science found that in the brains of math­e­mati­cians, “the same emo­tion­al brain cen­tres used to appre­ci­ate art” are “acti­vat­ed by ‘beau­ti­ful’ maths.” While the con­cept of beau­ty itself may be impos­si­ble to quan­ti­fy, when it comes to equa­tions, sci­en­tists (or at least their brains) know it when they see it. The rest of us, like Collings, may require an appre­ci­a­tion course to under­stand the awe inspired by the math that, as our host puts it, so ele­gant­ly cap­tures the “enor­mi­ty of the uni­verse.”

You can find Beau­ti­ful Equa­tions list­ed in our col­lec­tion of Free Doc­u­men­taries, part of our larg­er col­lec­tion of 675 Free Movies Online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Einstein’s Big Idea: E=mc²

Sev­en Ques­tions for Stephen Hawk­ing: What Would He Ask Albert Ein­stein & More

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