“Breton believed art and literature could represent the unconscious mind,” says the video’s narrator Peter Capaldi, well known as one of the Doctors of Doctor Who. He then names some artists who agreed with Breton on this point, such as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, and Rene Magritte — just a few of the Surrealists. “Surreal,” as an adjective, has perhaps fallen victim to debasement by overuse in the past 84 years. But Breton had specific ideas about Surrealism’s potential effects, its sources of power, and its methods.
Desire, for instance, “was central to the Surrealist vision of love, poetry, and liberty. It was the key to understanding human beings.” Surrealist artistic practices included putting objects “that were not normally associated with one another together, to make something that was playful and disturbing at the same time in order to stimulate the unconscious mind.” Think of Dalí’s 1936 Lobster Telephone, made out of those very objects. “It’s about food and sex,” Capaldi pronounces. The Surrealist vision also extended to more complicated endeavors, such as elaborate paintings and films that still fascinate today.
You can catch up on Surrealist film here on Open Culture, beginning with Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dalí’s nightmarish 1929 short Un Chien Andalou, continuing on to the Surrealist feature Dreams That Money Can Buy (a collaboration by the likes of Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Fernand Léger and Hans Richter), and the history of Surrealist cinema as presented by David Lynch, a filmmaker widely considered one of the movement’s modern heirs. Whether Breton would recognize the Surrealist sensibility in its current manifestations will remain a matter of debate, but who could watch this Unlock Art primer and fail to sense the fascination its basic ideas — or basic compulsions, perhaps — still hold today?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Take an innocuous statement like, “we should teach children about the life of Helen Keller.” What reasonable, compassionate person would disagree? Hers is a story of triumph over incredible adversity, of perseverance and friendship and love. Now, take a statement like, “we should teach children the political writing of Helen Keller,” and you might see brawls in town halls and school board meetings. This is because Helen Keller was a committed socialist and serious political thinker, who wrote extensively to advocate for economic cooperation over competition and to support the causes of working people. She was an activist for peace and justice who opposed war, imperialism, racism, and poverty, conditions that huge numbers of people seem devoted to maintaining—both in her lifetime and today.
Keller’s moving, persuasive writing is eloquent and uncompromising and should be taught alongside that of other great American rhetoricians. Consider, for example, the passage below from a letter she wrote in 1916 to Oswald Villard, then Vice-President of the NAACP:
Ashamed in my very soul I behold in my own beloved south-land the tears of those who are oppressed, those who must bring up their sons and daughters in bondage to be servants, because others have their fields and vineyards, and on the side of the oppressor is power. I feel with those suffering, toiling millions, I am thwarted with them. Every attempt to keep them down and crush their spirit is a betrayal of my faith that good is stronger than evil, and light stronger than darkness…. My spirit groans with all the deaf and blind of the world, I feel their chains chafing my limbs. I am disenfranchised with every wage-slave. I am overthrown, hurt, oppressed, beaten to the earth by the strong, ruthless ones who have taken away their inheritance. The wrongs of the poor endure ring fiercely in my soul, and I shall never rest until they are lifted into the light, and given their fair share in the blessings of life that God meant for us all alike.
It is difficult to choose any one passage from the letter because the whole is written with such expressive feeling. This is but one document among many hundreds in the new Helen Keller archive at the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), which has digitized letters, essays, speeches, photographs, and much more from Keller’s long, tireless career as a writer and public speaker. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the archive includes over 250,000 digital images of her work from the late 19th century to well into the 20th. There are many films of Keller, photos like that of her and her dog Sieglinde at the top, a collection of her correspondence with Mark Twain, and much more.
In addition to Keller’s own published and unpublished work, the archive contains many letters to and about her, press clippings, informative AFB blog posts, and resources for students and teachers. The site aims to be “fully accessible to audiences who are blind, deaf, hard-of-hearing, low vision, or deafblind.” On the whole, this project “presents an opportunity to encounter this renowned historical figure in a new, dynamic, and exciting way,” as AFB writes in a press release. “For example, despite her fame, relatively few people know that Helen Keller wrote 14 books as well as hundreds of essays and articles on a broad array of subjects ranging from animals and atomic energy to Mahatma Gandhi.”
And, of course, she was a lifelong advocate for the blind and deaf, writing and speaking out on disability rights issues for decades. Indeed, it’s difficult to find a subject in which she did not take an interest. The archive’s subject index shows her writing about games, sports, reading, shopping, swimming, travel, architecture and the arts, education, law, government, world religions, royalty, women’s suffrage, and more. There were many in her time who dismissed Keller’s unpopular views, calling her naïve and claiming that she had been duped by nefarious actors. The charge is insulting and false. Her body of work shows her to have been an extraordinarily well-read, wise, cosmopolitan, sensitive, self-aware, and honest critical thinker.
Two years after the NAACP letter, Keller wrote an essay called “Competition,” in which she made the case for “a better social order” against a central conceit of capitalism: that “life would not be worth while without the keen edge of competition,” and that without it “men would lose ambition, and the race would sink into dull sameness.” Keller advances her counterargument with vigorous and incisive reasoning.
This whole argument is a fallacy. Whatever is worth while in our civilization has survived in spite of competition. Under the competitive system the work of the world is badly done. The result is waste and ruin [….] Profit is the aim, and the public good is a secondary consideration. Competition sins against its own pet god efficiency. In spite of all the struggle, toil and fierce effort the result is a depressing state of destitution for the majority of mankind. Competition diverts man’s energies into useless channels and degrades his character. It is immoral as well as inefficient, since its commandment is “Thou shalt compete against thy neighbor.” Such a rule does not foster Truthfulness, honesty, consideration for others. [….] Competitors are indifferent to each other’s welfare. Indeed, they are glad of each other’s failure because they find their advantage in it. Compassion is deadened in them by the necessity they are under of nullifying the efforts of their fellow-competitors.
Keller refused to become cynical in the face of seemingly indefatigable greed, cruelty, and hypocrisy. Though not a member of a mainstream church (she belonged to the obscure Christian sect of Swedenborgianism), she exhorted American Christians to live up to their professions—to follow the example of their founder and the commandments of their sacred text. In an essay written after World War I, she argued movingly for disarmament and “the vital issue of world peace.” While making a number of logical arguments, Keller principally appeals to the common ethos of the nation’s dominant faith.
This is precisely where we have failed, calling ourselves Christians we have fundamentally broken, and taught others to break most patriotically, the commandment of the Lord, “Thou shalt not kill” [….] Let us then try out Christianity upon earth—not lip-service, but the teaching of Him who came upon earth that “all men might have life, and have it more abundantly.” War strikes at the very heart of this teaching.
We can hear Helen Keller’s voice speaking directly to us from the past, diagnosing the ills of her age that look so much like those of our own. “The mythological Helen Keller,” writes Keith Rosenthal, “has aptly been described as a sort of ‘plaster saint;’ a hollow, empty vessel who is little more than an apolitical symbol for perseverance and personal triumph.” Though she embodied those qualities, she also dedicated her entire life to careful observation of the world around her, to writing and speaking out on issues that mattered, and to caring deeply about the welfare of others. Get to know the real Helen Keller, in all her complexity, fierce intelligence, and ferocious compassion, at the American Foundation for the Blind’s exhaustive digital archive of her life and work.
The field jacket, the mohawk, the “real rain” that will “wash all this scum off the streets,” the virtuoso tracking shot over the aftermath of a massacre, “You talkin’ to me?”: so many elements of Taxi Driver have found permanent places in cinematic culture, and almost as many have found permanent places in the culture, period. Thanks to its wide-ranging influence as well as its presence that endures more than forty years on, even those who’ve never seen the movie in some sense already know it.
What makes Taxi Driver so powerful? Lewis Bond, video essayist and creator of Channel Criswell, sets out to answer that question in the two-part, feature-length analysis above. Martin Scorsese’s fifth film, and the second of his collaborations with Robert de Niro, Taxi Driver came out in 1976.
Adapting the film noir tradition for an even more cynical post-Vietnam era, it ostensibly mounted a grim critique of America. Audiences of the 1970s, especially audiences of New Yorkers, might have readily identified with the judgments of moral, social and urban decay bitterly aired by de Niro as Travis Bickle.
But before long, those first viewers surely realized that they were watching a work of art both more complex and more universal than that. Bond’s reading of the film gets right to the study at its heart of isolation, hypocrisy, purity, corruption, desire, and vengeance, characteristics found in but hardly unique to the human experience in 70s New York City. “Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film is a film that does not grow dated, or over-familiar,” writes Roger Ebert in a 2004 appreciation. “I have seen it dozens of times. Every time I see it, it works; I am drawn into Travis’ underworld of alienation, loneliness, haplessness and anger.”
Ebert understands, as Bond does, that “utter aloneness is at the center of Taxi Driver, one of the best and most powerful of all films, and perhaps it is why so many people connect with it even though Travis Bickle would seem to be the most alienating of movie heroes. We have all felt as alone as Travis. Most of us are better at dealing with it.” Yet over the past four decades, even as New York has emerged from near-bankruptcy to become one of the most expensive and glamorous of all cities, real-life Travis Bickles have visited their violent, misbegotten vengeance all over America. Making Taxi Driver, Scorsese and his collaborators thoughtthey were capturing the dying gasp of a city. Instead, they captured an aspect of the human condition that haunts us more than ever today.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Born out of evening reading of spooky stories on a rain-soaked holiday, Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein has resonated through the years into pop culture, a warning against science and technology, of how the thirst for knowledge can literally create monsters. If you’ve been binging Westworld or loved Ex Machina you are seeing Shelley’s legacy, both filled with scientific creations that question their own reason for existence.
Just like those works are products of our era, Frankenstein did not just arise from a dream state—-Shelley was influenced by the concerns, events, and news of her day.
“Annotated for scientists, engineers, and creators of all kinds,” is how the website describes the project, created in January 2018 by Arizona State University to honor the bicentennial of the book’s publication. “Frankenbook gives readers the opportunity to trace the scientific, technological, political, and ethical dimensions of the novel, and to learn more about its historical context and enduring legacy.”
You will have to sign up (just an email and a password is necessary) to actually see the novel, but once in, you can get reading. Along the way on the right hand side of the margin, a cluster of black dots indicate if a section is annotated. Click on the dots with your mouse and the annotation will appear. (The annotations are also available at the end of each of the novel’s three parts for those who just want to read the novel straight through.)
Dozens of experts have contributed to the annotations so far, and opening an account allows you to submit your own to the editors for consideration. You can also filter annotations by one of eight themes: “Equity & Inclusion” (social justice issues), “Health & Medicine,” “Influences and Adaptations,” “Mary Shelley” (personal information about the author), “Motivations & Sentiments,” “Philosophy & Politics,” “Science,” and “Technology.”
The site also features several essays on the novel’s various themes, including ones by Cory Doctorow, Anne K. Mellor, Josephine Johnston, and others.
If you’ve been putting off reading Shelley’s classic for whatever reason, this is probably the best chance to read it. And if you’ve read it before, it’s time to revisit it alongside a host of virtual experts. The web, that Promethian creation of our own time, is actually good for some things, you know!
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
From Shamoon Zamir, a literature professor at NYU Abu Dhabi, comes a “research archive of historical and contemporary photography from the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA),” designed to be fully accessible to the public. We’re told:
Today, Akkasah: The Center for Photography at NYU Abu Dhabi boasts an archive of 62,000 images from the UAE and across the MENA region – of which 9,000 are already digitized and available online — the only of its kind in the Middle East. These images offer new insights into the history and rapid transformation of the UAE and the broader Arab world. They include historical collections ranging from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth, covering a variety of themes and topics, from early images of the Holy Lands and from the Ottoman Empire, to images from family albums, institutional archives and the history of Egyptian cinema.
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Pregnancy and parenting are “extreme experiences that stretch our understanding,” writes Lily Gurton-Wachter at the Los Angeles Review of Books. They “push us beyond comfort or even comprehension.” Women risk their own lives to give life to a stranger, a tiny human whose future is entirely uncertain. Parents live with constant dread of all that could befall their children, an anxious state, but also a vulnerability that can make us deeply sensitive to the fragility of human life. Gurton-Wachter compares motherhood to going to war, “a profound, frightening, exhilarating, transformative experience at the boundary of life, an experience from which one comes back a different person.”
It’s a comparison Sylvia Plath would likely appreciate. With her ability to compress personal experience in collections of surprising, often violent, images, Plath expressed deep ambivalence about motherhood, undercutting a tradition of sentimental idealization, giving voice to fear, discomfort, bewilderment, and mystery.
In “Metaphors,” from 1960’s Colossus, she begins with a playful description of pregnancy as “a riddle in nine syllables.” Within a few lines she feels effaced and starts to “see herself merely as a ‘means,’” notes Shenandoah, “almost an incubator… This culminates with the last line, where she realizes that she is forever changed, irrevocably”: “Boarded the train,” she writes, “there’s no getting off.”
In 1961, after the birth of her daughter, Frieda, Plath wrote “Morning Song, which might be read as almost an extension of “Metaphors.” It is “one of her most unusual poems,” writes Maria Popova at Brain Pickings, “both paean and requiem for new motherhood—the love, the strangeness, the surreal and magnetic disorientation of it.” Published posthumously in Ariel, the poem addresses itself to the new arrival, in a series of stanzas that capture the awe and anxiety of those first hours after her birth. In the audio above from the Academy of American Poets’ annual Poetry & the Creative Mind event, hear Meryl Streep read the poem “with uncommon sensitivity,” Popova writes, “to the innumerable nuances it holds.” As you listen, read along below.
MORNING SONG
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.
Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.
I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.
All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.
One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square
Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.
All throughout his career, Carl Sagan cited the events in his formative years that set him on the road to becoming, well, Carl Sagan: the introduction to “skepticism and wonder” provided by his parents; his visit to the 1939 New York World’s Fair; his first trips to the public library, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Hayden Planetarium; his discovery of Astounding Science Fiction Magazine and its fantastic visions undergirded by genuine knowledge. That last happened around the same time he entered the sixth grade at David A. Boody Junior High School, where he would eventually return, decades later, to teach the lesson seen in the video above.
“As a child, it was my immense good fortune to have parents and a few teachers who encouraged my curiosity,” Sagan says in voiceover. “This was my sixth-grade classroom. I came back here one afternoon to remember what it was like.” Anyone watching him handing out the “breathtaking pictures of other worlds that had been radioed back by the Voyager spacecraft” and addressing the excited students’ questions will understand that, in addition to his formidable hunger for knowledge and deep understanding of his subjects, Sagan also possessed a quality rare in the scientific community: the ability and willingness to talk about science clearly and engagingly, and transmit his excitement about science, to absolutely anyone.
The clip also provides a sense of what it was like to learn directly from Sagan. In the interview clip above, no less a science guy than Bill Nye talks about his own experience taking Sagan’s classes at Cornell in the 1970s. “If you saw his series Cosmos — the original Cosmos — his lectures were like those television shows,” says Nye. He goes on to tell the story of meeting Sagan again, at his ten-year class reunion. “I said I want to do this show about science for kids. He said, ‘Focus on pure science. Kids resonate to pure science.’ That was his verb, resonate.” And so, when Bill Nye the Science Guy debuted a few years later, it spent most of its time not on the fruits of science — “bridges, dams, and civil engineering works and gears” and so on — but on science itself.
Carl Sagan co-founded the Planetary Society in 1980. Nye, drawn by its mission of “empowering the world’s citizens to advance planetary science and exploration,” joined that same year. After speaking at Sagan’s memorial a decade and a half later, Nye found himself on its board of directors. Then he became Vice President, and then “there was a dinner party, there was wine or something, and now I’m the CEO.” In that way and others, Nye continues Sagan’s legacy, and Nye hardly counts as Sagan’s only successor. “This is how we know nature,” as Nye puts Sagan’s view of science. “It’s the best idea humans have ever come up with.” That view, whether expressed in Sagan’s own work or that of the countless many he has directly or indirectly influenced, will surely continue to inspire generations of learners, inside or outside the classroom.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Whatever historians have to say about his political legacy, Barack Obama will be remembered as charming, diplomatic, thoughtful, and very well-read. He honed these personal qualities not only as a politician but as a scholar, writer, and teacher, roles that require intellectual curiosity and openness to other points of view. The former president was something of a dream come true for teachers and librarians, who could point to him as a shining example of a world leader who loves to read, talk about books, and share books with others. All kinds of books: from novels and poetry to biography, philosophy, sociology, and political and scientific nonfiction; books for children and books for young adults.
It is refreshing to look back at his tenure as a reliable recommender of quality books during his eight years in office. (See every book he recommended during his two terms here.) Reading gave him the ability to “slow down and get perspective,” he told Michiko Kakutani last year. He hoped to use his office, he said, “to widen the audience for good books. At a time when so much of our politics is trying to manage this clash of cultures brought about by globalization and technology and migration, the role of stories to unify—as opposed to divide, to engage rather than to marginalize—is more important than ever.”
While many people have been hoping he would weigh in on deeply disturbing current events, he “has been relatively quiet on social media of late,” notes Thu-Huong Ha at Quartz. But he has continued to use his platform to recommend good books, suggesting that the perspectives we gain from reading are as critical as ever. “In a Facebook post published on Saturday, Obama recommended some of the nonfiction he’s read recently, focused on government, inequality, and history, with one book that addresses immigration. Together the recommendations are an intellectual antidote to the current US president, who eschews reading,” says Ha.
The list below includes Obama’s brief commentary on each book and article.
Journalist Alex Wagner investigates a potential new twist in her family’s history. “What she came up with,” Obama writes, “is a thoughtful, beautiful meditation on what makes us who we are—the search for harmony between our own individual identities and the values and ideals that bind us together as Americans.”
Economist Enrico Moretti argues that there are three Americas: brain-hub cities like Austin and Boston; cities once dominated by traditional manufacturing; and the cities in between. “Still a timely and smart discussion of how different cities and regions have made a changing economy work for them,” writes Obama, “and how policymakers can learn from that to lift the circumstances of working Americans everywhere.”
Political scientist Patrick J. Deneen argues that liberalism is not the result of the natural state of politics and lays out the ideology’s inherent contradictions. “In a time of growing inequality, accelerating change, and increasing disillusionment with the liberal democratic order we’ve known for the past few centuries,” says the former president, “I found this book thought-provoking.”
In The Atlantic, Matthew Stewart, author of The Management Myth, defines a “cognitive elite,” a “9.9%” of Americans who value meritocracy and, he argues, are complicit in the erosion of democracy. “Another thought-provoking analysis, this one about how economic inequality in America isn’t just growing, but self-reinforcing,” says Obama.
Mitch Landrieu, the former mayor of New Orleans, Louisiana, writes in his memoir of the personal history and reckoning with race that led him to take down four Confederate statues in 2017. “It’s an ultimately optimistic take from someone who believes the South will rise again not by reasserting the past, but by transcending it,” writes Obama.
This report for the nonprofit RAND Corporation, available as a free ebook, attempts to study the erosion of fact-based policy making and discourse in the US. “A look at how a selective sorting of facts and evidence isn’t just dishonest, but self-defeating,” says Obama.
While the former president no longer has the power to sway policy, he can still inspire millions of people to read—essential for staying balanced, informed, and reflective in our perilous times.
Just a little more than a year after Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell took his own life, his daughter Toni, only 13 years old, released an achingly beautiful tribute to her father. Recorded for Father’s Day, she sings a poignant version of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” a song her father also performed live on many occasions. Indeed you can hear his voice on this track too. It’s a duet of sorts.
Released on YouTube, the song came accompanied by this short letter:
Daddy, I love you and miss you so much. You were the best father anyone could ask for. Our relationship was so special, and you were always there for me. You gave me courage when I didn’t have any. You believed in me when I didn’t. I miss your love everyday. Recording this song with you was a special and amazing experience I wish I could repeat 100 times over and I know you would too. Happy Father’s Day daddy, nothing compares to you. — Toni
We might assume that 21st-century technology enables us to produce fabric in all imaginable colors, most of them totally unknown to our ancestors. Yet none of it has ever quite replicated the striking hues achieved by dyers of centuries and centuries ago. That premise underlies the slow and painstaking work of Sachio Yoshioka, whose family’s fabric-dyeing heritage goes back to Japan’s Edo period of the 17th to the mid-19th century. Having taken over his father’s workshop Textiles Yoshioka in 1988, he has spent the past thirty years working only with traditional plant dyes, the kind that once, in a time long before his family even got into the dyeing business, made his homeland so colorful.
The Japanese dyeing tradition, in this reading of its history, reached its long apex of brilliance in the Nara and Heian periods, which together lasted from the years 710 to 1185. Most of the world admires Japanese aesthetic sensibilities, but often with reference to internationally well-known concepts like wabi-sabi that idealize the rustic, the imperfect, and the subdued. Unlike in the Edo period, when the strict Tokyugawa Shogunate mandated that common people stick to grays and browns, Nara and Heian cities would have been rich with vivid reds, blues, yellows, oranges, and even purples, all in varieties one seldom sees even today, in Japan or anywhere else.
Hence Yoshioka’s mission to practice and even refine the same labor-intensive dyeing methods used back then. Formerly a student of philosophy as well as a publisher of books on the history of color and fabric arts, he now seems devoted to what goes on in his Kyoto workshop. You can watch what he and his assistants do there in the video from the Victoria and Albert Museum above. Composed of four short films, it includes a segment on Yoshioka’s production of paper flowers for the Omizutori festival at the Tōdai-ji Buddhist temple in Nara, the historical capital outside Kyoto, that culminates in an evening fire ceremony.
That fire ceremony, called Otaimatsu, remains as compelling a spectacle today as it must have been more than a millennium ago, just as surely as the colors Yoshioka has rediscovered have lost none of their allure since then. His dedication to the work of traditional dyeing — work his daughter Sarasa will take into its sixth generation — comes not out of a desire to pay tribute to Japanese history, nor even out of filial piety, but something much simpler: “The colors you can obtain from plants are so beautiful,” he says. “This is the one and only reason I do what I do.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Imagine a jellyfish waltzing in a library while thinking about quantum mechanics. “If everything has gone relatively well in your life so far,” cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky says in the TED Talk above, “you probably haven’t had that thought before.” But now you have, all thanks to language, the remarkable ability by which “we humans are able to transmit our ideas across vast reaches of space and time” and “knowledge across minds.”
Though we occasionally hear about startling rates of language extinction — Boroditsky quotes some estimates as predicting half the world’s languages gone in the next century — a great variety still thrive. Does that mean we have an equal variety of essentially different ways of thinking? In both this talk and an essay for Edge.org, Boroditsky presents intriguing pieces of evidence that what language we speak does affect the way we conceive of the world and our ideas about it. These include an Aboriginal tribe in Australia who always and everywhere use cardinal directions to describe space (“Oh, there’s an ant on your southwest leg”) and the differences in how languages label the color spectrum.
“Russian speakers have to differentiate between light blue, goluboy, and dark blue, siniy,” says the Belarus-born, American-raised Boroditsky. “When we test people’s ability to perceptually discriminate these colors, what we find is that Russian speakers are faster across this linguistic boundary. They’re faster to be able to tell the difference between a light and dark blue.” Hardly a yawning cognitive gap, you might think, but just imagine how many such differences exist between languages, and how the habits of mind they shape potentially add up.
“You don’t even need to go into the lab to see these effects of language; you can see them with your own eyes in an art gallery,” writes Boroditsky in her Edge essay. “How does an artist decide whether death, say, or time should be painted as a man or a woman? It turns out that in 85 percent of such personifications, whether a male or female figure is chosen is predicted by the grammatical gender of the word in the artist’s native language.” More Germans paint death as a man, and more Russians paint it as a woman. Personally, I’d like to see all the various ways artists speaking all the world’s languages paint that waltzing jellyfish thinking about quantum mechanics in the library. We’d better hurry commissioning them, though, before too many more of those languages vanish.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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