Peter Sellers Calls Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange “Violent,” “The Biggest Load of Crap I’ve Seen” (1972)

In an age when The Walk­ing Dead pro­vides a week­ly dose of head-explod­ing gore, it’s easy to for­get how shock­ing the vio­lence of Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange (1971) felt to view­ers at the time. Antho­ny Burgess’ nov­el was about crime and pun­ish­ment, the dif­fer­ences and/or sim­i­lar­i­ties between street-lev­el thugs and state-sanc­tioned vio­lence, and the impor­tance of vio­lence in a free soci­ety. Kubrick, hav­ing blown up the world a decade ear­li­er at the end of Dr. Strangelove, took on all these issues and made them into pure cin­e­ma. It elic­its a response even now—I have friends who res­olute­ly refuse to watch the film—despite its years spent on the com­post pile of post-mod­ern cul­ture.

For an exam­ple of how strong­ly peo­ple felt, check this quote from Peter Sell­ers, being inter­viewed by Gene Siskel in the Chica­go Sun-Times in 1972, five months after the film pre­miered in the States.

Peter Sell­ers: I hat­ed A Clock­work Orange. I thought it was the biggest load of crap I’ve ever seen for years. Amoral. I think because of the vio­lence around today it’s lam­en­ta­ble that a direc­tor of Stan­ley Kubrick’s dis­tinc­tion and abil­i­ty should lend him­self to such a sub­ject. I’m not say­ing that you can’t pick up that book [the Antho­ny Burgess nov­el upon which the film is based], read it, and put it down. But to make it as a film, with all the vio­lence we have in the world today – to add to it, to put it on show – I just don’t under­stand where Stan­ley is at.

Gene Siskel: Are you say­ing that it will influ­ence peo­ple to com­mit vio­lence that they would oth­er­wise not com­mit?

Peter Sell­ers: I think it adds to it.

Sell­ers had worked with Kubrick on both Dr. Strangelove and Loli­ta, so for a star to talk so ill of a for­mer direc­tor was quite shock­ing. He con­tin­ues in the inter­view to also denounce the vio­lence in Hitchcock’s Fren­zy, which had just been released. When Siskel press­es him on the por­tray­al of vio­lence and its neces­si­ty in a world that want­ed more truth and real­ism in its films, Sell­ers falls back on his recent involve­ment in yoga:

I must tell you first of all that I’m a yogi. I am against vio­lence com­plete­ly. Hare ommm. So you now know why. So there’s real­ly no point in ask­ing any more ques­tions about it.

Dur­ing the orig­i­nal pro­mo­tion for the film, Kubrick con­sid­ered crit­i­cisms of its vio­lence absurd:

No one is cor­rupt­ed watch­ing A Clock­work Orange any more than they are by watch­ing Richard III… The film has been accept­ed as a work of art, and no work of art has ever done social harm, though a great deal of social harm has been done by those who have sought to pro­tect soci­ety against works of art which they regard­ed as dan­ger­ous.

Yet as copy­cat crimes—or crimes that the UK’s press like to sug­gest were so—increased in the months after its release, Kubrick removed his film from cir­cu­la­tion in Britain. Despite Kubrick being behind the deci­sion, it was gen­er­al­ly thought that the UK had “banned” the film. It remained so until Kubrick’s death in 1999. Britain final­ly got to see an uncut ver­sion of the film in…you guessed it…2001.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds/ Stan­ley Kubrick Tum­blr

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Peter Sell­ers Cov­ers the Bea­t­les’ “A Hard Day’s Night,” “She Loves You” & “Help!”

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

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Rare 1965 Inter­view with The New York­er

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.

Free Online: Watch the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Arguably the Most Respected Filmmaker of All Time


If you enjoy film in an even slight­ly seri­ous way, you’ve sure­ly heard the name Andrei Tarkovsky brought up dozens and dozens of times, some­times — or, if you run in cinephilic cir­cles, invari­ably — in the con­text of ver­tig­i­nous­ly high praise. Film-lovers wor­ship Tarkovsky, as do many oth­er film­mak­ers: no less an auteur than Ing­mar Bergman called him “the best of them all” (after dis­miss­ing Godard as “affect­ed” and Hitch­cock as “infan­tile”), “the one who invent­ed a new lan­guage, true to the nature of film, as it cap­tures life as a reflec­tion, life as a dream.”

Oth­er artists, too, have paid Tarkovsky trib­ute: Geoff Dyer devot­ed an entire book not to the direc­tor’s career, but to just one of his movies, Stalk­er (see its orig­i­nal trail­er above). As we told you five years ago, and it deserves repeat­ing again, you can watch Stalk­er (here) free onlinealong with oth­er major Tarkovsky films. Stalk­er alone can give you a pow­er­ful sense of just why the sev­en fea­ture films Tarkovsky left behind when he died in 1986 have only drawn more acco­lades over time. And it will per­haps whet your appetite to start watch­ing four oth­er Tarkovsky films free online on this page, includ­ing his 15th-cen­tu­ry Russ­ian icon-painter biopic (to only par­tial­ly describe it) Andrei Rublev and his Stanis­law Lem adap­ta­tion (and “answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey”) Solaris. 

You can also watch 1975’s Mir­ror, which some Tarkovsky enthu­si­asts con­sid­er his great­est work. If you do watch it, bear in mind the Bergman quote above: if the best of all film­mak­ers won that title by ren­der­ing life as a dream, then it only stands to rea­son that Mir­ror, the most dream­like of all his work, would rise to the top of his fil­mog­ra­phy. It will make you under­stand why, despite the hun­dreds and thou­sands of pages on Tarkovsky’s work writ­ten by crit­ics, aca­d­e­mics, and pure fans, you can only appre­ci­ate these films through direct expe­ri­ence. As with the dif­fi­cul­ty of describ­ing a dream com­pelling­ly in words, text can’t do jus­tice to Tarkovsky, but when you watch one of his cin­e­mat­ic dreams, you dream it along with him — and like the most vivid dreams, frag­ments of them will stick with you for­ev­er.

Note: The Tarkovsky films list­ed above were put online by the offi­cial Youtube chan­nel of Mos­film, the stu­dio for which Tarkovsky made the films.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tarkovsky Films Now Free Online

Watch Solaris (1972), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Haunt­ing Vision of the Future

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Shot by Shot: A 22-Minute Break­down of the Director’s Film­mak­ing

“Auteur in Space”: A Video Essay on How Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Tran­scends Sci­ence Fic­tion

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mas­ter­piece Stalk­er Gets Adapt­ed into a Video Game

Watch Stalk­er, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mind-Bend­ing Mas­ter­piece Free Online

A Poet in Cin­e­ma: Andrei Tarkovsky Reveals the Director’s Deep Thoughts on Film­mak­ing and Life

Andrei Tarkovsky Cre­ates a List of His 10 Favorite Films (1972)

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Very First Films: Three Stu­dent Films, 1956–1960

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­maand the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

100 Novels All Kids Should Read Before Leaving High School

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Last year, a Slate essay called “Against YA” by Ruth Gra­ham irked thou­sands of read­ers who took offense at her argu­ment that although grown-ups “bran­dish their copies of teen nov­els with pride…. [a]dults should feel embar­rassed about read­ing lit­er­a­ture writ­ten for chil­dren.” Whether we label her arti­cle an instance of sham­ing, trolling, or just the expres­sion of a not-espe­cial­ly con­se­quen­tial, “fud­dy-dud­dy opin­ion,” what it also served to highlight—as so many oth­er thought­ful and not-so-thought­ful online essays have done—is the huge sales num­bers of so-called YA, a lit­er­ary boom that shows no signs of slow­ing. Young adult fic­tion, along with children’s books in gen­er­al, saw dou­ble dig­it growth in 2014, a phe­nom­e­non in part dri­ven by those sup­pos­ed­ly self-infan­tiliz­ing adults Gra­ham faults.

The grown-ups read­ing teen books do so, Gra­ham writes, because “today’s YA, we are con­stant­ly remind­ed, is world­ly and adult-wor­thy.” Maybe, maybe not, but there is anoth­er ques­tion to ask here as well, whol­ly apart from whether the age 30–44 cohort who account for 28 per­cent of YA sales “should” be buy­ing and read­ing YA books. And that ques­tion is: should young adults read Young Adult fic­tion? And what counts as Young Adult fic­tion any­way? A 2012 NPR list of the “100 Best-Ever Teen Nov­els” includes the expect­ed Har­ry Pot­ter and Hunger Games series (at num­bers one and two, respec­tive­ly), as well as more “lit­er­ary,” but still obvi­ous, choic­es like John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars and S.E. Hinton’s clas­sic The Out­siders.

It also includes Dou­glas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Frank Herbert’s Dune, Ursu­la K. Le Guin’s Earth­sea series, and Ray Bradbury’s Fahren­heit 451. It what sense do all of these very dif­fer­ent kinds of books—some very com­plex and chal­leng­ing, some very much less so—qualify as “teen nov­els”? Per­haps some of the fuzzi­ness about qual­i­ty and appro­pri­ate­ness comes from the fact that many “Top-what­ev­er” lists like NPR’s are com­piled by read­ers, of all ages. And enjoy­ment, not edi­fi­ca­tion, usu­al­ly tops a gen­er­al read­er­ship’s list of cri­te­ri­on for “top”-ness. How­ev­er, what would such a list look like if strict­ly com­piled by edu­ca­tors?

You can find out in anoth­er top 100 list: the 100 Fic­tion Books All Chil­dren Should Read Before Leav­ing Sec­ondary School – Accord­ing to 500 Eng­lish Teach­ers (cre­at­ed at the request of Britain’s Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion for the Teach­ing of Eng­lish and TES mag­a­zine). There’s a good bit of crossover with the read­er-cho­sen NPR list; the Har­ry Pot­ter books come in at sixth place. Both lists fea­ture clas­sics like Harp­er Lee’s To Kill a Mock­ing­bird. But the teacher-cho­sen list also includes more “adult” writ­ers like Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, and Toni Mor­ri­son. One teacher quot­ed in an Express arti­cle describes his own cri­te­ria: “It’s always a bal­anc­ing act in the books that teach­ers select. Do you go for some­thing that stu­dents will enjoy and lap up and read, or do you go for some­thing that will help them cut their teeth?”

There seems to be a good bal­ance of both here. You can see the first ten titles below, with links to free online ver­sions where avail­able. The com­plete list of 100 books for teenagers is here.

1 Nine­teen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell (Ama­zon)

2 To Kill A Mock­ing­bird, by Harp­er Lee (free eBook)

3 Ani­mal Farm, by George Orwell (free eBook)

4 Lord Of The Flies, by William Gold­ing (Ama­zon)

5 Of Mice And Men, by John Stein­beck (Ama­zon)

6 The Har­ry Pot­ter series, by J K Rowl­ing (Ama­zon)

7 A Christ­mas Car­ol, by Charles Dick­ens (free eBook)

8 The Catch­er In The Rye, by J D Salinger (Ama­zon)

9 Great Expec­ta­tions, by Charles Dick­ens (free eBook)

10 Pride And Prej­u­dice, by Jane Austen (free eBook)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 20 Pop­u­lar High School Books Avail­able as Free eBooks & Audio Books

The Best Books of 2012: Lists by The New York Times, NPR, The Guardian and More

74 Essen­tial Books for Your Per­son­al Library: A List Curat­ed by Female Cre­atives

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

Sea-Serpents, Vampires, Pirates & More: The Public Domain Review’s Second Book of Essays

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The image above is a ver­sion of Sebas­t­ian Münster’s 16th-cen­tu­ry chart of sea mon­sters, star­ring all kinds of fan­tas­ti­cal denizens of the deep: from ship-eat­ing ser­pents and giant lob­sters to some kind of seal-octo­pus hybrid. Fea­tured in the open­ing essay on the his­to­ry of sea ser­pents, the image is one of nine­ty-nine illus­tra­tions to adorn the pages of The Pub­lic Domain Review’s won­der­ful new book of select­ed essays.

That the col­lec­tion should begin with this most elu­sive of snakes is per­haps par­tic­u­lar­ly appro­pri­ate. Rep­re­sent­ing as it does the very idea of ter­ra incog­ni­ta, the sea ser­pent is a fig­ure which echoes on in so many of the essays which fol­low, if we see these “lands unknown” to be not mere­ly geo­graph­i­cal but to refer also to the less­er known realms of knowl­edge. All man­ner of oft-over­looked his­to­ries are explored in the book. We learn of the strange skele­tal tableaux of Fred­erik Ruysch, pay a vis­it to Humphry Davy high on laugh­ing gas, and peruse the pages of the first ever pic­ture book for chil­dren (which includes a won­der­ful table of Latin ani­mal sounds). There’s also fire­works in art, pet­ty pirates on tri­al, brain­wash­ing machines, truth-reveal­ing dis­eases, synes­thet­ic auras, Byron­ic vam­pires, and Charles Darwin’s pho­to­graph col­lec­tion of asy­lum patients. Togeth­er the fif­teen essays chart a won­der­ful­ly curi­ous course through the last five hun­dred years of his­to­ry, tak­ing us on a jour­ney through some of the dark­er, stranger, and alto­geth­er more intrigu­ing cor­ners of the past.

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You can find out more about the book through The Pub­lic Domain Review’s web­site. If you want it before Christ­mas (and we think it’d make an excel­lent present for that his­to­ry-lov­ing rel­a­tive!), then make sure to order by mid­night on Wednes­day 18th Novem­ber. Orders before this date will also ben­e­fit from a spe­cial reduced price.

–Adam Green is the co-founder and edi­tor of The Pub­lic Domain Review.

Freed Slave Writes Letter to Former Master: You Owe Us $11,680 for 52 Years of Unpaid Labor (1865)

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No mat­ter how long I live, the dehu­man­iz­ing insan­i­ty of racism will nev­er fail to aston­ish and amaze me. Not only does it vis­it great phys­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal vio­lence upon its vic­tims, but it leaves those who embrace it unable to feel or rea­son prop­er­ly. Con­tem­po­rary exam­ples abound in excess, but many of the most egre­gious come from the peri­od in U.S. his­to­ry when an entire class of peo­ple was deemed prop­er­ty, and allowed to be treat­ed any way their own­ers liked. In such a sit­u­a­tion, odd­ly, many slave mas­ters thought of them­selves as humane and benev­o­lent, and thought their slaves well-treat­ed, though they would nev­er have trad­ed places with them for any­thing.

One such exam­ple of this bewil­der­ing log­ic comes from a let­ter written—or dic­tat­ed, rather—by a man named Jor­dan Ander­son (or some­times Jour­dan Ander­son), pic­tured above: a man enslaved to one Colonel Patrick Hen­ry Ander­son in Big Spring, Ten­nessee. When he was freed from sub­jec­tion in 1864, Jor­dan moved to Ohio, found work—was paid for it—and set­tled down for the next 40 years to raise his chil­dren with his wife Aman­da. As Allen G. Breed and Hil­lel Ital­ie write, “he lived qui­et­ly and would like­ly have been for­got­ten, if not for a remark­able let­ter to his for­mer mas­ter pub­lished in a Cincin­nati news­pa­per short­ly after the Civ­il War.”

As did many for­mer slave own­ers, Colonel Ander­son found that he could not keep up his hold­ings after los­ing his cap­tive labor force. Des­per­ate to save his prop­er­ty, he had the temer­i­ty to write to Jor­dan and ask him to return and help bring in the har­vest. We do not, it seems, have the Colonel’s let­ter, but we can sur­mise from Jordan’s response what it contained—promises, as the for­mer slave writes, “to do bet­ter for me than any­body else can.” We can also sur­mise, giv­en Jordan’s sar­don­ic ref­er­ences, that the for­mer mas­ter may have shot at him—and that some­one named “Hen­ry” intend­ed to shoot him still. We can sur­mise that the Colonel’s sons may have raped Jordan’s daugh­ters, Matil­da and Cather­ine, giv­en the har­row­ing descrip­tion of them “brought to shame by the vio­lence and wicked­ness of their young mas­ters.”

And, of course, we know for cer­tain that Jor­dan received no rec­om­pense for his many years of hard work: “there was nev­er any pay-day for the negroes,” he writes, “any more than for the hors­es and cows.” Despite all this—and it is beyond my com­pre­hen­sion why—Colonel Ander­son expect­ed that his for­mer slave would return to help prop up the fail­ing plan­ta­tion. On this score, Jor­dan pro­pos­es a test of the Colonel’s “sin­cer­i­ty.” Tal­ly­ing up all the wages he and his wife were owed for their com­bined 52 years of work, less “what you paid for our cloth­ing” and doctor’s vis­its, he presents his for­mer own­er with a bill for “eleven thou­sand six hun­dred and eighty dol­lars” and an address to which he can mail the pay­ment. “If you fail to pay us for faith­ful labors in the past, we can have lit­tle faith in your promis­es in the future,” he writes. You can read the full letter—which appeared at Let­ters of Note—below.

Day­ton, Ohio,

August 7, 1865

To My Old Mas­ter, Colonel P.H. Ander­son, Big Spring, Ten­nessee

Sir: I got your let­ter, and was glad to find that you had not for­got­ten Jour­don, and that you want­ed me to come back and live with you again, promis­ing to do bet­ter for me than any­body else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yan­kees would have hung you long before this, for har­bor­ing Rebs they found at your house. I sup­pose they nev­er heard about your going to Colonel Mar­t­in’s to kill the Union sol­dier that was left by his com­pa­ny in their sta­ble. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still liv­ing. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the bet­ter world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was work­ing in the Nashville Hos­pi­tal, but one of the neigh­bors told me that Hen­ry intend­ed to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

I want to know par­tic­u­lar­ly what the good chance is you pro­pose to give me. I am doing tol­er­a­bly well here. I get twen­ty-five dol­lars a month, with vict­uals and cloth­ing; have a com­fort­able home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learn­ing well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preach­er. They go to Sun­day school, and Mandy and me attend church reg­u­lar­ly. We are kind­ly treat­ed. Some­times we over­hear oth­ers say­ing, “Them col­ored peo­ple were slaves” down in Ten­nessee. The chil­dren feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no dis­grace in Ten­nessee to belong to Colonel Ander­son. Many dark­eys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you mas­ter. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be bet­ter able to decide whether it would be to my advan­tage to move back again.

As to my free­dom, which you say I can have, there is noth­ing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Mar­shal-Gen­er­al of the Depart­ment of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back with­out some proof that you were dis­posed to treat us just­ly and kind­ly; and we have con­clud­ed to test your sin­cer­i­ty by ask­ing you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us for­get and for­give old scores, and rely on your jus­tice and friend­ship in the future. I served you faith­ful­ly for thir­ty-two years, and Mandy twen­ty years. At twen­ty-five dol­lars a month for me, and two dol­lars a week for Mandy, our earn­ings would amount to eleven thou­sand six hun­dred and eighty dol­lars. Add to this the inter­est for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our cloth­ing, and three doc­tor’s vis­its to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the bal­ance will show what we are in jus­tice enti­tled to. Please send the mon­ey by Adams’s Express, in care of V. Win­ters, Esq., Day­ton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faith­ful labors in the past, we can have lit­tle faith in your promis­es in the future. We trust the good Mak­er has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in mak­ing us toil for you for gen­er­a­tions with­out rec­om­pense. Here I draw my wages every Sat­ur­day night; but in Ten­nessee there was nev­er any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the hors­es and cows. Sure­ly there will be a day of reck­on­ing for those who defraud the labor­er of his hire.

In answer­ing this let­ter, please state if there would be any safe­ty for my Mil­ly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-look­ing girls. You know how it was with poor Matil­da and Cather­ine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the vio­lence and wicked­ness of their young mas­ters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the col­ored chil­dren in your neigh­bor­hood. The great desire of my life now is to give my chil­dren an edu­ca­tion, and have them form vir­tu­ous habits.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for tak­ing the pis­tol from you when you were shoot­ing at me.

From your old ser­vant,

Jour­don Ander­son.

Sev­er­al his­to­ri­ans have researched the authen­tic­i­ty of Jordan’s dic­tat­ed let­ter and the his­tor­i­cal details of his life in Ten­nessee and Ohio. As Kot­tke report­ed, a man named David Gal­braith found infor­ma­tion about Jordan’s life after the letter’s pub­li­ca­tion, includ­ing ref­er­ences to him and his wife and fam­i­ly in the 1900 Ohio cen­sus. Kot­tke pro­vides many addi­tion­al details about Jordan’s post-slav­ery life and that of his many chil­dren and grand­chil­dren, and the Dai­ly Mail has pho­tographs of the for­mer Ander­son plan­ta­tion and Jor­dan Anderson’s mod­ern-day descen­dants. They also quote his­to­ri­an Ray­mond Win­bush, who tracked down some of the Colonel’s descen­dants still liv­ing in Big Spring.

Colonel Ander­son, it seems, was forced to sell the land after his plea to Jor­dan failed, and he died not long after at age 44. (Jor­dan Ander­son died in 1907 at age 81.) “What’s amaz­ing,” says Win­bush, “is that the cur­rent liv­ing rel­a­tives of Colonel Ander­son are still angry at Jor­dan for not com­ing back.” Yet anoth­er exam­ple of how the ignominy of the past, no mat­ter how much we’d pre­fer to for­get it, nev­er seems very far behind us at all.

via Let­ters of Note

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1.5 Mil­lion Slav­ery Era Doc­u­ments Will Be Dig­i­tized, Help­ing African Amer­i­cans to Learn About Their Lost Ances­tors

Visu­al­iz­ing Slav­ery: The Map Abra­ham Lin­coln Spent Hours Study­ing Dur­ing the Civ­il War

Watch Vet­er­ans of The US Civ­il War Demon­strate the Dread­ed Rebel Yell (1930)

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

The Lost Poems of Pablo Neruda: Help Bring Them to the English Speaking World for the First Time

This past week­end, the Chilean gov­ern­ment acknowl­edged what many had long sus­pect­ed — that, writes NPR, “the Nobel Prize-win­ning poet Pablo Neru­da might have been killed [or, to be more pre­cise, mur­dered] dur­ing the after­math of the 1973 coup that brought Gen. Augus­to Pinochet to pow­er.” Pre­vi­ous­ly the gov­ern­ment had main­tained that prostate can­cer was the cause of death.

If you’re look­ing for a hap­pi­er rev­e­la­tion, then I can tell you this: Last year, Chilean archivists “dis­cov­ered a cache of pre­vi­ous­ly unseen and unpub­lished poems writ­ten by Neru­da. The collection—written in note­books and on scraps of paper in the poet’s own hand—includes a sam­pling of the ardent love poems for which Neru­da is famous.” That’s accord­ing to Cop­per Canyon Press, which has been entrust­ed by Pablo Neruda’s estate “to bring these lost poems to a North Amer­i­can audi­ence for the first time.” And it will only hap­pen with your help.

Right now, Cop­per Canyon Press has a Kick­starter cam­paign under­way to raise a total of $50,000. Funds will go towards  the pro­duc­tion of a beau­ti­ful book trans­lat­ed by the award-win­ning trans­la­tor and poet For­rest Gan­der. With 23 days to go, they have so far $32,2215 raised. But there’s still $18,000+ to go, and it would be great if Open Cul­ture read­ers could help move the nee­dle. Those who sup­port this project will be among the first to read these lost poems in Eng­lish. And speak­ing of firsts, don’t miss these relat­ed items in our archive: Hear Pablo Neru­da Read His Poet­ry In Eng­lish For the First Time, Days Before His Nobel Prize Accep­tance (1971) and Pablo Neruda’s His­toric First Read­ing in the US (1966) in our archive.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“The Me Bird” by Pablo Neru­da: An Ani­mat­ed Inter­pre­ta­tion

Poems as Short Films: Langston Hugh­es, Pablo Neru­da and More

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

Edvard Munch’s The Scream Animated to the Psychedelic Sounds of Pink Floyd: The Winter Version

Back in the spring, we fea­tured Roman­ian ani­ma­tor Sebas­t­ian Cosor’s ani­ma­tion of Edvard Munch’s The Scream set to Pink Floy­d’s “The Great Gig in the Sky.” But the win­ter­time has almost come, which neces­si­tates not just a change in the clothes we wear, but a change in the ani­ma­tions of The Scream we watch. For­tu­nate­ly, Cosor has already put togeth­er a sea­son­al­ly appro­pri­ate ver­sion of his ear­li­er video, which you can see above.

The set­ting of Munch’s orig­i­nal Scream paint­ing can, with its depop­u­lat­ed land­scape under a hot orange sky, look pret­ty hell­ish, even before you notice the ago­nized fel­low writhing in the mid­dle of it. Would­n’t it feel alto­geth­er more pleas­ant under a snow­fall? And the scream­er him­self — sure­ly he’d give off a jol­lier vibe if he wore a San­ta hat? Cosor has answered these ques­tions and oth­ers in this humor­ous two-minute CGI film, which once again unites 1970s psy­che­del­ic rock with late-19th/ear­ly-2oth-cen­tu­ry Nor­we­gian paint­ing.

Some may con­sid­er this a kind of des­e­cra­tion of an impor­tant work of art (whether they mean the Nor­we­gian paint­ing or the psy­che­del­ic rock), but even those who don’t might har­bor one seri­ous objec­tion: isn’t the mid­dle of Novem­ber a bit ear­ly to haul out the Christ­mas stuff? Fair enough, as the hol­i­day dec­o­ra­tions in stores and pub­lic places do seem to appear a lit­tle ear­li­er each year. But if we can’t make an excep­tion for the case of a fes­tive pro­duc­tion as strange as this, for what can we make an excep­tion?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Edvard Munch’s Famous Paint­ing The Scream Ani­mat­ed to the Sound of Pink Floyd’s Pri­mal Music

30,000 Works of Art by Edvard Munch & Oth­er Artists Put Online by Norway’s Nation­al Muse­um of Art

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­maand the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Michio Kaku & Brian Green Explain String Theory in a Nutshell: Elegant Explanations of an Elegant Theory

A few years ago, String The­o­ry seemed the prime can­di­date for the “long-sought The­o­ry of Every­thing,” the holy grail of physics that will reveal, writes Jim Holt in The New York­er, “how the uni­verse began and how it will end… in a few ele­gant equa­tions, per­haps con­cise enough to be embla­zoned on a T‑shirt.” Pop­u­lar physi­cist and sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tor Bri­an Greene has tout­ed the the­o­ry everywhere—in his book The Ele­gant Uni­verse and PBS series of the same name; in inter­view after inter­view, a World Sci­ence Fes­ti­val forum and TED talk….  Giv­en such evan­ge­lism, you’d think he’d have his ele­va­tor pitch for string the­o­ry down pat. And you’d be right. In an io9 Q&A, he defined it in just 14 words: “It’s an attempt to uni­fy all mat­ter and all forces into one math­e­mat­i­cal tapes­try.”

All of this might make string the­o­ry sound sim­ple to under­stand, even for a lay per­son like myself. But is it? Well, you will find no short­age of primers online in addi­tion to Greene’s exhaus­tive expla­na­tions. There’s even a “String The­o­ry for Dum­mies.” If you’d pre­fer to avoid being insult­ed by the title of that instruc­tion­al series, you can also watch the video above of anoth­er excel­lent pop­u­lar physics com­mu­ni­ca­tor, Michio Kaku, explain­ing string the­o­ry, with help­ful visu­al aids, in four min­utes flat. He quick­ly lays out such essen­tial com­po­nents as the mul­ti­verse, the big bang, worm­holes, and the cheer­ful inevitabil­i­ty of the death of the uni­verse. The short talk is excerpt­ed from Kaku’s Float­ing Uni­ver­si­ty pre­sen­ta­tion “The Uni­verse in a Nut­shell,” which you can watch in full here.

For all of Kaku’s ref­er­ences to Ein­stein and the equa­tions of string the­o­ry, how­ev­er, he doesn’t quite explain to us what those equa­tions are or how and why physi­cists arrived at them, per­haps because they’re writ­ten in a math­e­mat­i­cal lan­guage that might as well come from an alien dimen­sion as far as non-spe­cial­ists are con­cerned. But we can still learn much more about the the­o­ry as lay peo­ple. Above, watch Greene’s short TED talk on string the­o­ry from 2005 for more straight talk on the con­cepts involved. And as for whether the pos­si­bly unfal­si­fi­able the­o­ry is still, ten years lat­er, a can­di­date for the grand­ly uni­fy­ing “The­o­ry of Every­thing,” see his arti­cle from this past Jan­u­ary in the Smith­son­ian mag­a­zine.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Physics Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Michio Kaku Explains the Physics Behind Absolute­ly Every­thing

What Is Déjà Vu? Michio Kaku Won­ders If It’s Trig­gered by Par­al­lel Uni­vers­es

The Feyn­man Lec­tures on Physics, The Most Pop­u­lar Physics Book Ever Writ­ten, Now Com­plete­ly Online

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

Dostoevsky Draws Doodles of Raskolnikov and Other Characters in the Manuscript of Crime and Punishment

Raskolnikov Svidrigailov

Like many of us, Russ­ian lit­er­ary great Fyo­dor Dos­to­evsky liked to doo­dle when he was dis­tract­ed. He left his hand­i­work in sev­er­al manuscripts—finely shad­ed draw­ings of expres­sive faces and elab­o­rate archi­tec­tur­al fea­tures. But Dostoevsky’s doo­dles were more than just a way to occu­py his mind and hands; they were an inte­gral part of his lit­er­ary method. His nov­el­is­tic imag­i­na­tion, with all of its grand excess­es, was pro­found­ly visu­al, and archi­tec­tur­al.

“Indeed,” writes Dos­to­evsky schol­ar Kon­stan­tin Barsht, “Dos­to­evsky was not con­tent to ‘write’ and ‘take notes’ in the process of cre­ative think­ing.” Instead, in his work “the mean­ing and sig­nif­i­cance of words inter­act rec­i­p­ro­cal­ly with oth­er mean­ings expressed through visu­al images.” Barsht calls it “a method of work spe­cif­ic to the writer.” We’ve shared a few of those man­u­script pages before, includ­ing one with a doo­dle of Shake­speare.

Crime and Punish Doodles

Now we bring you a few more pages of doo­dles from the author of Crime and Pun­ish­ment, a nov­el that, per­haps more so than any of his oth­ers, offers such vivid descrip­tions of its char­ac­ters that I can still clear­ly remem­ber the pic­tures I had of them in my mind the first time I read it in high school.

My visu­al­iza­tions of the angry, des­per­ate stu­dent Raskol­nikov and the sleazy socio­path­ic Svidri­gailov do not exact­ly resem­ble the faces doo­dled at the the top of the post, but that is how their author saw them, at least in this ear­ly, man­u­script stage of the nov­el.

The oth­er faces here may be those of Sonya, police inves­ti­ga­tor Por­firy Petro­vich, recidi­vist alco­holic father Semy­on Marmelodov, and oth­er char­ac­ters in the nov­el, though it’s not clear exact­ly who’s who.

Crime and Punish Doodles 2

Dos­to­evsky had much in com­mon with his nov­el­’s pro­tag­o­nist when he began the nov­el in 1865. Reduced to near-des­ti­tu­tion after gam­bling away his for­tune, the writer was also in des­per­ate straits. The sto­ry, writes lit­er­ary crit­ic Joseph Franks, was “orig­i­nal­ly con­ceived as a long short sto­ry or novel­la to be writ­ten in the first per­son,” like the fever­ish novel­la Notes From the Under­ground. In Dos­to­evsky’s man­u­script note­books, “exten­sive frag­ments of this orig­i­nal work are to be found here intact.”

Franks quotes schol­ar Edward Wasi­olek, who pub­lished a trans­la­tion of the note­books in 1967: “They con­tain draw­ings, jot­tings about prac­ti­cal mat­ters, doo­dling of var­i­ous sorts, cal­cu­la­tions about press­ing expens­es, sketch­es, and ran­dom remarks.” In short, “Dos­to­evsky sim­ply flipped his note­books open any time he wished to write,” or to prac­tice his cal­lig­ra­phy, as he does on many pages.

Crime and Punish Doodles 3

The pages of the Crime and Pun­ish­ment note­books resem­ble all of the man­u­script pages of his nov­els in their orna­men­tal hap­haz­ard­ness. You can see many more exam­ples from nov­els like The Idiot, The Pos­sessed, and A Raw Youth at the Russ­ian site Cul­ture, includ­ing the sketchy self por­trait below, next to a few sums that indi­cate the author’s per­pet­u­al pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with his trou­bled eco­nom­ic affairs.

Dostoevsky Self Portrait

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Fyo­dor Dos­to­evsky Draws Elab­o­rate Doo­dles In His Man­u­scripts

Dos­to­evsky Draws a Pic­ture of Shake­speare: A New Dis­cov­ery in an Old Man­u­script

The Dig­i­tal Dos­to­evsky: Down­load Free eBooks & Audio Books of the Russ­ian Novelist’s Major Works

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

The Interior of the Hindenburg Revealed in 1930s Color Photos: Inside the Ill-Fated Airship

Hindenburg 1

We’ve all seen the Hin­den­burg. Specif­i­cal­ly, we’ve all seen it explod­ing, an inci­dent cap­tured on film on that fate­ful day of May 6, 1937 — fate­ful for those aboard, of course, but also fate­ful for the pas­sen­ger air­ship indus­try, which nev­er recov­ered from this worst of all pos­si­ble press. The con­tem­po­rary rise of Pan Amer­i­can Air­lines did­n’t help, either, so now, when we want to go to a far­away land, we’ve usu­al­ly got to take a jet. I hap­pen to be mov­ing to Korea tomor­row, and to get there I sim­ply don’t have the choice of an air­ship (Hin­den­burg- class or oth­er­wise) nor have I ever had that choice. I’ve thus nev­er seen the inside of an air­ship — until today.

Hindenburg 2

These col­or images reveal the inte­ri­or of not just any old 1930s air­ship but the Hin­den­burg itself, look­ing as gen­teel and well-appoint­ed as you might expect, with accom­mo­da­tions up to and includ­ing, some­where below its hydro­gen-filled bal­loon, a smok­ing room. It brings to mind Sideshow Bob’s off­hand com­ment on one Simp­sons episode lament­ing the pas­sage of “the days when avi­a­tion was a gentleman’s pur­suit, back before every Joe Sweat­sock could wedge him­self behind a lunch tray and jet off to Raleigh-Durham.” But then, it also brings to mind anoth­er episode in which Bart gets a check­book print­ed with flip­book-style images of the famous Hin­den­burg dis­as­ter news­reel footage.

Hindenburg 3

That clip, often dubbed with Her­bert Mor­rison’s “Oh, the human­i­ty!” repor­to­r­i­al nar­ra­tion, has famil­iar­ized us with the last large pas­sen­ger air­ship’s exte­ri­or, but these images of its inte­ri­or have had less expo­sure. For more, have a look at Airships.net: a Diri­gi­ble and Zep­pelin His­to­ry Site, which offers a wealth of detail on the Hin­den­burg’s pas­sen­ger decks, con­trol car, flight instru­ment, flight con­trols, crew areas, and keel.

Passenger-Lounge1

The more you learn about air­ships, the more intrigu­ing a form of trav­el they seem — until you learn about all the oth­er dis­as­ters that pre­ced­ed the Hin­den­burg, any­way. And that aside, giv­en its top speed of 84 miles per hour, it would take a sim­i­lar­ly retro air­ship at least sev­en times longer to get me to Korea than a jet, so I guess I’ll have to stick with the air­lines for now.

Dining-Room-21

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Oh the Human­i­ty

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry Of Avi­a­tion: From da Vinci’s Sketch­es to Apol­lo 11

The Mir­a­cle of Flight, the Clas­sic Ear­ly Ani­ma­tion by Ter­ry Gilliam

Col­in Mar­shall writes else­where on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­maand the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Hear the Writing of French Theorists Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard & Roland Barthes Sung by Poet Kenneth Goldsmith

DerridaGoldsmith

Jacques Der­ri­da, Jean Bau­drillard, Roland Barthes… to my fresh­man ears, the names of these French the­o­rists sound­ed like pass­words to an occult world of strange and for­bid­ding ideas. I start­ed col­lege in the mid-90s, when Eng­lish depart­ments glee­ful­ly claimed post­struc­tural­ism as their birthright. Aca­d­e­m­ic cam­paigns against the fuzzy log­ic of these thinkers had not yet gath­ered much steam, though con­ser­v­a­tive cul­ture war­riors were already on the warpath against post­mod­ernism. Very short­ly after my intro­duc­tion to French post­struc­tural­ist thought, ana­lyt­i­cal pos­i­tivists launched for­mi­da­ble cam­paigns to ban­ish crit­i­cal the­o­ry to the mar­gins.

The back­lash against obscu­ran­tist the­o­ry made a good case, with pub­lic sham­ings like the “Sokal Hoax” and Phi­los­o­phy and Lit­er­a­ture’s Bad Writ­ing Con­test. Such dis­plays made the work of many Euro­pean philoso­phers and their adher­ents seem indeed—as Noam Chom­sky said of Der­ri­da, Slavoj Žižek, and Jacques Lacan—like so much vac­u­ous “pos­tur­ing.” But as potent as these cri­tiques may be, I’ve nev­er cared much for them; they seem to miss the point of more cre­ative kinds of the­o­ry, which is not, I think (as phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor Eric Schwitzgebel alleges) “intel­lec­tu­al author­i­tar­i­an­ism and cow­ardice,” but instead an explorato­ry attempt to expand the rigid bound­aries of lan­guage and cog­ni­tion, and to enact the mean­der­ings of dis­cur­sive thought in prose that cap­tures its “errantry” (to take a term from Mar­tini­quan poet, nov­el­ist, and aca­d­e­m­ic Edouard Glis­sant.)

In any case, the debate was not new at all, but only a lat­er iter­a­tion of the old Continental/Analytic divide that has long pit­ted expo­nents of Anglo­phone clar­i­ty against the some­times awk­ward prose of thinkers like Kant and Hegel. And I hap­pen to think that Kant, Hegel, and, yes, even lat­er Con­ti­nen­tals like Derrida—despite the delib­er­ate obscu­ri­ty of their writing—are inter­est­ing thinkers who deserve to be read. They even deserve to be sung, bad­ly, by poets—namely by con­cep­tu­al poet Ken­neth Gold­smith, who is also found­ing edi­tor of Ubuweb, senior edi­tor of PennSound, and one­time host of a radio show on glo­ri­ous­ly weird, free-form radio sta­tion WFMU.

With his nat­ty sense of style and seri­ous appre­ci­a­tion for absur­di­ty, Gold­smith has sung to lis­ten­ers the work of Wal­ter Ben­jamin, Lud­wig Wittgen­stein, and Sig­mund Freud; he has giv­en us an avant-garde musi­cal ren­di­tion of Har­ry Pot­ter; and he has turned selec­tions of Theodor Adorno’s grim Min­i­ma Moralia into 80s hard­core punk. Now, we bring you more of Goldsmith’s musi­cal inter­ven­tions: his goof­ball singing of Der­ri­da over an icy min­i­mal­ist com­po­si­tion by Anton Webern (top); of Bau­drillard over a lounge-pop instru­men­tal by Fran­cis Lai (mid­dle); and of Roland Barthes over the All­man Broth­ers (above).

As an added bonus, if you can call it that, hear Gold­smith war­ble Marx­ist the­o­rist Fred­er­ic Jame­son over Coltrane, just above. Do these ridicu­lous musi­cal exer­cis­es make these thinkers any eas­i­er to digest? I doubt it. But they do seem to say to the many haters of crit­i­cal the­o­ry and post­mod­ern French phi­los­o­phy, “hey, light­en up, will ya?”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky Slams Žižek and Lacan: Emp­ty ‘Pos­tur­ing’

John Sear­le on Fou­cault and the Obscu­ran­tism in French Phi­los­o­phy

The The­o­ry of Wal­ter Ben­jamin, Lud­wig Wittgen­stein & Sig­mund Freud Sung by Ken­neth Gold­smith

30 Min­utes of Har­ry Pot­ter Sung in an Avant-Garde Fash­ion by UbuWeb’s Ken­neth Gold­smith

Theodor Adorno’s Crit­i­cal The­o­ry Text Min­i­ma Moralia Sung as Hard­core Punk Songs

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


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