One of the busiest, most in-demand artists of the 19th century, Gustave Doré made his name illustrating works by such authors as Rabelais, Balzac, Milton, and Dante. In the 1860s, he created one of the most memorable and popular illustrated editions of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, while at the same time completing a set of engravings for an 1866 English Bible. He probably could have stopped there and assured his place in posterity, but he would go on to illustrate a 1872 guide to London, a new edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and several more hugely popular works.
In 1884, he produced 26 steel engravings for an illustrated edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s gloomy classic “The Raven.” Like all of his illustrations, the images are rich with detail, yet in contrast to his earlier work, particularly the fine lines of his Quixote, these engravings are softer, characterized by a deep chiaroscuro appropriate to the mood of the poem.
Above see the plate depicting the first lines of the poem, the haunted speaker, “weak and weary,” slumped over one of his many “quaint and curious volume[s] of forgotten lore.” Below, see the raven tapping, “louder than before,” at the window lattice.
By the time Doré’s edition saw publication, Poe’s most famous work had already achieved recognition as one of the greatest of American poems. Its author, however, had died over thirty years previous in near-poverty. A catalog description from a Penn State Library holding of one of Doré’s “Raven” editions compares the two artists:
The careers of these two men are fraught with both popular success and unmitigated disappointment. Doré enjoyed phenomenal monetary success as an illustrator in his life-time, however his true desire, to be acknowledged as a fine artist, was never realized. The critics of his day derided his abilities as an artist even as his popularity soared.
One might say that Poe suffered the opposite fate—recognized as a great artist in his lifetime, he never achieved financial stability. We learn from the Penn State Rare Collections library that Doré received the rough equivalent of $140,000 for his illustrated edition of “The Raven.” Poe, on the other hand, was paid approximately nine dollars for his most famous poem.
Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague De Camp at the Navy Yard in 1944
Robert Heinlein was born in 1907, which put him on the mature side by the time of the United States’ entry into World War II. Isaac Asimov, his younger colleague in science fiction, was born in 1920 (or thereabouts), and thus of prime fighting age. But in the event, they made most of their contribution to the war effort in the same place, the Naval Aviation Experimental Station in Philadelphia. By 1942, Heinlein had become the preeminent sci-fi writer in America, and the 22-year-old Asimov, a graduate student in chemistry at Columbia, had already made a name for himself in the field. It was Heinlein, who’d signed on to run a materials testing laboratory at the Yard, who brought Asimov into the military-research fold.
Having once been a Navy officer, discharged due to tuberculosis, Heinlein jumped at the chance to serve his country once again. During World War II, writes John Redford at A Niche in the Library of Babel, “his most direct contribution was in discussions of how to merge data from sonar, radar, and visual sightings with his friend Cal Laning, who captained a destroyer in the Pacific and was later a rear admiral. Laning used those ideas to good effect in the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944, the largest naval battle ever fought.” Asimov “was mainly involved in testing materials,” including those used to make “dye markers for airmen downed at sea. These were tubes of fluorescent chemicals that would form a big green patch on the water around the guy in his life jacket. The patch could be seen by searching aircraft.”
Asimov scholars should note that a test of those dye markers counts as one of just two occasions in his life that the aerophobic writer ever dared to fly. That may well have been the most harrowing of either his or Heinlein’s wartime experiences, they were both involved in the suitably speculative “Kamikaze Group,” which was meant to work on “invisibility, death rays, force fields, weather control” — or so Paul Malmont tells it in his novel The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown. You can read a less heightened account of Heinlein and Asimov’s war in Astounding, Alec Nevala-Lee’s history of American science fiction.
Their time together in Philadephia wasn’t long. “As the war ended, Asimov was drafted into the Army, where he spent nine months before he was able to leave, where he returned to his studies and writing,” according to Andrew Liptak at Kirkus Reviews. “Heinlein contemplated returning to writing full time, as a viable career, rather than as a side exercise.” When he left the Naval Aviation Experimental Station, “he resumed writing and working on placing stories in magazines.” In the decades thereafter, Heinlein’s work took on an increasingly militaristic sensibility, and Asimov’s became more and more concerned with the enterprise of human civilization broadly speaking. But pinning down the influence of their war on their work is an exercise best left to the sci-fi scholars.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
In the video above, poet, artist, National Book Award winner, and “godmother of punk” Patti Smith reads a selection from Virginia Woolf’s 1931 experimental novel The Waves, accompanied on piano and guitar by her daughter Jesse and son Jackson. The “reading” marked the opening of “Land 250,” a 2008 exhibition of Smith’s photography and artwork from 1965 to 2007, at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris.
I put the word “reading” in quotes above because Smith only reads a very short passage from Woolf’s novel. The rest of the dramatic performance is Smith in her own voice, possibly improvising, possibly reciting her homage to Woolf—occasioned by the fact that the start of the exhibition fell on the 67th anniversary of Woolf’s death by suicide. Of Woolf’s death, Smith says, “I do not think of this as sad. I just think that it’s the day that Virginia Woolf decided to say goodbye. So we are not celebrating the day, we are simply acknowledging that this is the day. If I had a title to call tonight, I would call it ‘Wave.’ We are waving to Virginia.”
Smith’s choice of a title for the evening is significant. She titled her 1979 album Wave, her last record before she went into semi-retirement in the 80s. And her exhibition included a set of beautiful photographs taken at Woolf’s Sussex retreat, Monk’s House. Her performance seems like an unusual confluence of voices, but Woolf might have enjoyed it, since so much of her work explored the uniting of separate minds, over the barriers of space and time. While Smith expresses her indebtedness to Woolf, one wonders what the upper-class Bloomsbury daughter of a well-connected and artistic family would have thought of the working-class punk-poet from the Lower East Side? It’s impossible to say, of course, but somehow it’s fitting that they meet through Woolf’s The Waves.
Woolf’s novel (she called it a “playpoem”) blends the voices of six characters, but Woolf didn’t think of them as characters at all, but as aspects of a greater, ever-shifting whole. As she once wrote in a letter:
The six characters were supposed to be one. I’m getting old myself now—I shall be fifty next year; and I come to feel more and more how difficult it is to collect oneself into one Virginia; even though the special Virginia in whose body I live for the moment is violently susceptible to all sorts of separate feelings. Therefore I wanted to give the sense of continuity.
Speculation over Woolf’s mental health aside, her references to voices in her letters, diaries, and in her eloquent letter to Leonard Woolf before she died, were also statements of her craft—which embraced the inner voices of others, not letting any one voice be dominant. I like to think Woolf would have been delighted with the fierceness of Smith—in some ways, Virginia Woolf anticipated punk, and Patti Smith. In her own voice below, you can hear her describe the words of the English language as “irreclaimable vagabonds,” who “if you start a Society for Pure English, they will show their resentment by starting another for impure English…. They are highly democratic.”
The recording below comes from an essay published in a collection—The Death of the Moth and Other Essays—the year after Woolf’s death. The talk was called “Craftsmanship,” part of a BBC radio broadcast from 1937, and it is the only surviving recording of Woolf’s voice.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2013.
The Carnegie Hall YouTube Channel sets the scene:
On January 28, 2023, pianist Yuja Wang joined The Philadelphia Orchestra and conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin at Carnegie Hall for a once-in-a-lifetime, all-Rachmaninoff marathon that featured the composer’s four piano concertos plus his “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.” Throughout the performance, Wang—along with Nézet-Séguin, members of the orchestra, and concertgoers in attendance—wore devices to track their heartbeats.
Unprecedented and insanely demanding, Wang made history. These five pieces include two-and-a-half hours of music, 621 pages of score, and more than 97,000 piano notes.
How high did Wang’s heart rate go? We won’t provide spoilers. It plays out above.
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It doesn’t take an expert in the field to know that, around the world, there is much disagreement on the subject of religion. But as explained in the UsefulCharts video above by Matt Baker, whose PhD in Religious Studies makes him an expert in the field, every source does agree on the fact that the four largest religions in the world are Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. “These are the undisputed ‘big four,’ ” Baker says, and they’ve thus been the subjects of the various videos and charts he’s made explaining their histories and characteristics. But in his area of expertise, he adds, “it is often said that there are five major world religions.”
The fifth major religion, as you may have already guessed, is Judaism, though its sixteen million adherents don’t enter the same numerical league as the world’s 1.9 billion Muslims or 2.4 billion Christians. The Jewish faith punches well above its weight in respects like its age, and its being “the parent religion to both Christianity and Islam.” Coming in at 400 million believers is a religion, or category of religions, that to many readers may seem much less familiar than Judaism: Chinese folk religion, or as Baker calls it, “Chinese Syncretism,” referring to its mixture of different ideas and traditions.
You can get up to speed on Chinese Syncretism, as well as Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, in the two-hour video at the top of the post, which compiles Baker’s UsefulCharts explanations of those religions’ evolutions and all the intellectual, doctrinal, and cultural branches that have grown in the process. To Christianity, the biggest of the big four, Baker has devoted an entire series, presented in its entirety in the three-hour video just above. You may be able to describe the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism, but what about the differences between, say, the Syriac Catholic Church, the Evangelical Free Church of America, and the Mekane Yesus Church of Ethiopia?
Baker can and does describe those differences, using his own family tree-style charts as a visual aid. Only one viewing may not be enough to gain a clear understanding of what separates each Christian denomination from every other. But it will certainly be enough to instill an understanding that, in an important sense, there is such thing as Christianity, singular; better, perhaps, to speak of the many and varied Christianities than have been practiced over the millennia. The same goes, in different ways, for the other major world religions, and if you zoom in far enough, even the minor ones turn out to be rich with their own complexities. But then, as Baker surely would agree, there are no minor religions — at least if you’re curious enough about them.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Much has been written about the loss of color in the twenty-first century. Our environments offered practically every color known to man not so very long ago — and in certain eras, granted, it got to be a bit much. But now, everything seems to have retreated to a narrow palette of grays and browns, not to mention stark black and white. We should consider the possibility that this time of “color loss” is a kind of ascetic repentance after a long feast. That analogy holds on more than one level: technology and industrialization made food abundant and thus inexpensive, and it did the very same thing with colors.
There was a time when colors didn’t come cheap. People had plenty of black, reds, and browns in their lives, but producing the pigments for hues not often seen in nature entailed going to the ends of the earth (or in the case of ultramarine blue, the bottom of the sea). We all know that, for a long time starting around the day of Julius Caesar, purple was the color of royalty. The choice wasn’t an accident: Caesar’s “Tyrian purple” of choice was extravagantly expensive, owing to the fact that it could be extracted only from the glands of a particular Mediterranean sea snail. You can learn more about this process from the Business Insider video above.
“Thousands of snails were required to produce a single ounce of purple dye,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Sonja Anderson, quoting Pliny the Elder. Though well understood for a few decades now, the world of ancient purple-dye production continues to yield scientific discoveries. “Archaeologists were excavating recently in the Bronze Age town of Kolonna, on the Greek island of Aegina, when they discovered two Mycenaean buildings,” Anderson writes. “As the researchers write in a study published in the journal PLOS ONE, the buildings date to the 16th century B.C.E., and the older one contained pigmented ceramics, grinding tools and heaps of broken mollusk shells: all indicative of a purple dye factory.”
Notably, these well-preserved 3,600-year-old ruins date from a time long before purple acquired its prestige. “There is no indication in the Bronze Age that purple was a symbol of power and that purple-colored textiles were only reserved for the elite or leaders, as in Roman or Byzantine times,” says archaeologist Lydia Berger, co-author of the study. And when the Byzantine Empire fell, the knowledge of Tyrian purple was lost with it, only to be recovered early in this century. These days, one does hear occasional rumors of a color comeback, and a rich purple leading the charge would bring with it a certain historical satisfaction. In any case, we all remember one cultural royal in particular who surely would have approved.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
From Wired comes this: “Professor of English and Medieval Literature Dr. Dorsey Armstrong answers your questions about the Middle Ages from Twitter. Why is it called the “Middle” Ages? [What did medieval English sound like?] What activities did people do for fun? Why were animals tried in court for crimes? Answers to these questions and many more await—it’s Medieval Support.”
The Purdue professor has also created a number of well-reviewed lecture series on The Great Courses. Pro tip: If you are a member of Audible.com, you can get a number of them for free.
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There may be as many doors into Alcoholics Anonymous in the 21st century as there are people who walk through them—from every world religion to no religion. The “international mutual-aid fellowship” has had “a significant and long-term effect on the culture of the United States,” writes Worcester State University professor of psychology Charles Fox at Aeon. Indeed, its influence is global. From its inception in 1935, A.A. has represented an “enormously popular therapy, and a testament to the interdisciplinary nature of health and wellness.”
A.A. has also represented, at least culturally, a remarkable synthesis of behavioral science and spirituality that translates into scores of different languages, beliefs, and practices. Or at least that’s the way it can appear from browsing the scores of books on A.A.’s 12-Steps and Buddhism, Yoga, Catholicism, Judaism, Indigenous faith traditions, shamanist practices, Stoicism, secular humanism, and, of course, psychology.
Historically, and often in practice, however, the (non)organization of worldwide fellowships has represented a much narrower tradition, inherited from the evangelical (small “e”) Christian Oxford Group, or as A.A. founder Bill Wilson called them, “the ‘O.G.’” Wilson credits the Oxford Group for the methodology of A.A.: “their large emphasis upon the principles of self-survey, confession, restitution, and the giving of oneself in service to others.”
The Oxford Group’s theology, though qualified and tempered, also made its way into many of A.A.’s basic principles. But for the recovery group’s genesis, Wilson cites a more secular authority, Carl Jung. The famous Swiss psychiatrist took a keen interest in alcoholism in the 1920s. Wilson wrote to Jung in 1961 to express his “great appreciation” for his efforts. “A certain conversation you once had with one of your patients, a Mr. Rowland H. back in the early 1930’s,” Wilson explains, “did play a critical role in the founding of our Fellowship.”
Jung may not have known his influence on the recovery movement, Wilson says, although alcoholics had accounted for “about 13 percent of all admissions” in his practice, notes Fox. One of his patients, Rowland H.—or Rowland Hazard, “investment banker and former state senator from Rhode Island”—came to Jung in desperation, saw him daily for a period of several months, stopped drinking, then relapsed. Brought back to Jung by his cousin, Hazard was told that his case was hopeless short of a religious conversion. As Wilson puts it in his letter:
[Y]ou frankly told him of his hopelessness, so far as any further medical or psychiatric treatment might be concerned. This candid and humble statement of yours was beyond doubt the first foundation stone upon which our Society has since been built.
Jung also told Hazard that conversion experiences were incredibly rare and recommended that he “place himself in a religious atmosphere and hope for the best,” as Wilson remembers. But he did not specify any particular religion. Hazard discovered the Oxford Group. He might, as far as Jung was concerned, have met God as he understood it anywhere. “His craving for alcohol was the equivalent,” wrote the psychiatrist in a reply to Wilson, “on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God.”
In his reply letter to Wilson, Jung uses religious language allegorically. AA took the idea of conversion more literally. Though it wrestled with the plight of the agnostic, the Big Book concluded that such people must eventually see the light. Jung, on the other hand, seems very careful to avoid a strictly religious interpretation of his advice to Hazard, who started the first small group that would convert Wilson to sobriety and to Oxford Group methods.
“How could one formulate such an insight that is not misunderstood in our days?” Jung asks. “The only right and legitimate way to such an experience is that it happens to you in reality and it can only happen to you when you walk on a path which leads you to a higher understanding.” Sobriety could be achieved through “a higher education of the mind beyond the confines of mere rationalism”—through an enlightenment or conversion experience, that is. It might also occur through “an act of grace or through a personal and honest contact with friends.”
Though most founding members of AA fought for the stricter interpretation of Jung’s prescription, Wilson always entertained the idea that multiple paths might bring alcoholics to the same goal, even including modern medicine. He drew on the medical opinions of Dr. William D. Silkworth, who theorized that alcoholism was in part a physical disease, “a sort of metabolism difficulty which he then called an allergy.” Even after his own conversion experience, which Silkworth, like Jung, recommended he pursue, Wilson experimented with vitamin therapies, through the influence of Aldous Huxley.
His search to understand his mystical “white light” moment in a New York detox room also led Wilson to William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience. The book “gave me the realization,” he wrote to Jung, “that most conversion experiences, whatever their variety, do have a common denominator of ego collapse at depth.” He even thought that LSD could act as such a “temporary ego-reducer” after he took the drug under supervision of British psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond. (Jung likely would have opposed what he called “short cuts” like psychedelic drugs.)
In the letters between Wilson and Jung, as Ian McCabe argues in Carl Jung and Alcoholics Anonymous, we see mutual admiration between the two, as well as mutual influence. “Bill Wilson,” writes McCabe’s publisher, “was encouraged by Jung’s writings to promote the spiritual aspect of recovery,” an aspect that took on a particularly religious character in Alcoholics Anonymous. For his part, Jung, “influenced by A.A.’s success… gave ‘complete and detailed instructions’ on how the A.A. group format could be developed further and used by ‘general neurotics.’” And so it has, though more on the Oxford Group model than the more mystical Jungian. It might well have been otherwise.
Read more about Jung’s influence on AA over atAeon.
Note: Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.
Few depictions of ancient Roman life neglect to reference all the time ancient Romans spent at the baths. One gets the impression that their civilization was obsessed with cleanliness, in contrast to most of the societies found around the world at the time, but that turns out hardly to be the case. In fact, bathing seems to have been a secondary activity at Roman baths, which were “places to meet friends, make connections, perhaps even score a dinner invitation”; “places to buy a snack, have a massage, or face the dreaded tweezers of the hair remover”; “places to escape from a harsh and status-driven world; “places to be Roman.”
So says Garrett Ryan, creator of the ancient-history Youtube channel Told in Stone, in the new video above. He might have added that Roman baths were “third places.” Popularized by the late sociologist Ray Oldenburg with the 1989 book The Great Good Place, the concept of the third place stands in contrast to our first and second places, home and work.
A bookstore could be a third place, or a café, or any “hangout” occupying that hard-to-define (and by the late twentieth century in America, hard-to-find) realm between public and private. If it makes you feel connected to the community in which you live — indeed, if it makes you feel like you live in a community at all — it may well be a third place.
Roman baths weren’t just impressive sociologically, but also technologically. Ryan explains their architecture, water supply, heating systems, and cleaning procedures, such as they were. He quotes Marcus Aurelius as describing bath water as “a repulsive blend of oil, sweat, and filth”; in all likelihood, it was “only changed when it became so cloudy that it repelled bathers.” Sanitation practices appear much improved at Hammam Essalihine in Algeria, one of the very few ancient Roman baths in continuous use since its construction. Ryan documents his trip there in the video just above from his other channel Scenic Routes to the Past. Though captivated by the sight of a real Roman bath functioning just as designed, he must have been too consumed by thoughts of antiquity to remember to pack that modern necessity, a swimsuit.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
The most widely known work by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japanese artist Hokusai, 神奈川沖浪裏, is usually translated into English as The Great Wave off Kanagawa. That version of the title reflects the iconic scene depicted in the image well enough, though I can’t help but feel that we should be talking about waves, plural. Granted, the Japanese language hardly makes a fuss about plurality and singularity in the first place, but even by the standards of ukiyo‑e woodblock prints, this is a work of art that takes many forms. It’s not just that there are a lot of parodies floating around, but that no single “original” even exists.
“There’s not just one impression of the Great Wave, as many people think. There were originally thousands of them,” says scientist Capucine Korenberg in the British Museum video above. Back in the mid-nineteenth century, “Japanese prints were very cheap, and you could buy them for the same amount of money you could buy a double helping of soup and noodles.” Demand for the Great Wave in particular was such that experts reckon that at least 8,000 prints were sold, having been made “until the woodblocks just started to be so worn out that they couldn’t be used anymore.” Again, note the plural: if the blocks used to make the image were replaced, we’d expect to see differences in the actual image over time.
We’ve discussed before how the Great Wave went through several iterations over four decades before Hokusai found the form recognized around the world still today. But if you look at a print of the final version closely enough — and know enough about Hokusai’s art — you can tell whether it came from an earlier edition or a later one. It was no less an expert than longtime Tokyo-based printmaker and Hokusai enthusiast David Bull (previously featured here on Open Culture) who noticed that “he could see small differences between the strokes” of the three Great Wave prints owned by the British Museum. Hearing this sent Korenberg on a quest to determine their exact chronological order.
Many factors complicated this task, including the amount of ink and pressure applied to the woodblock during its creation, as well as the chances of modification or partial replacement of particular blocks along the way. In the end, she found it “more certain than ever” that the British Museum’s three Great Waves came from the same key block, which would have been modeled after Hokusai’s drawing. But along the way, she did make a discovery: it was previously thought that 111 identified prints existed, but she confirmed two more, bringing the total up to 113. Determining the fate of the other 7,887 is a task best left to the even more obsessive ukiyo-e-hunters out there.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Albert Einstein developed his theory of special relativity in 1905, and then mentally mapped out his theory of general relativity between 1907 and 1915. For years to come, the rest of the world would try to catch up with Einstein, trying to understand the gist, let alone the full implications, of his groundbreaking ideas.
Above, you can watch one such attempt. Produced by Max and David Fleischer, best known for their Betty Boop and Superman cartoons, The Einstein Theory of Relativity used the power of animation to explain relativity to a broad, non-scientific audience in 1923. One of the first educational science films ever made, the silent animated film was created with the assistance of science journalist Garrett P. Serviss and other experts who had a handle on Einstein’s theories. According to a biography of Max Fleischer, the film was “an out-and-out success.” “The critics and the public applauded it. And Einstein did too, apparently deeming it an “excellent attempt to illustrate an abstract subject.”
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