Updated: Love and longing, hope and fear — these threads run throughout all literature, whether we’re talking about the great ancient epics, or contemporary novels written in the East or the West. That’s the main premise of Invitation to World Literature, a multimedia program organized by David Damrosch (Harvard University), and made with the backing of WGBH and Annenberg Media.
The program features 13 half-hour videos, which move from The Epic of Gilgamesh (circa 2500 BCE) through García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude(1967). And, collectively, these videos highlight over 100+ writers, scholars, artists, and performers with a personal connection to world literature. Philip Glass, Francine Prose, Harold Ramis, Robert Thurman, Kwame Anthony Appiah — they all make an appearance.
Permanently housed in the Literature section of our collection of 1,300 Free Online Courses, Invitation to World Literature features the following lectures:
Painting of Asimov on his throne by Rowena Morill
When New York City hosted The World’s Fair in 1964, Isaac Asimov, the prolific sci-fi author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, took the opportunity to wonder what the world would look like 50 years hence — assuming the world survived the nuclear threats of the Cold War. Writing in The New York Times, Asimov imagined a world that you might partly recognize today, a world where:
“Gadgetry will continue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs. Kitchen units will be devised that will prepare ‘automeals,’ heating water and converting it to coffee; toasting bread; frying, poaching or scrambling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on. Breakfasts will be ‘ordered’ the night before to be ready by a specified hour the next morning.”
“Communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone. The screen can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books. Synchronous satellites, hovering in space will make it possible for you to direct-dial any spot on earth, including the weather stations in Antarctica.”
“[M]en will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better. By 2014, electroluminescent panels will be in common use. Ceilings and walls will glow softly, and in a variety of colors that will change at the touch of a push button.”
“Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence.”
“The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes.”
“[H]ighways … in the more advanced sections of the world will have passed their peak in 2014; there will be increasing emphasis on transportation that makes the least possible contact with the surface. There will be aircraft, of course, but even ground travel will increasingly take to the air a foot or two off the ground.”
“[V]ehicles with ‘Robot-brains’ … can be set for particular destinations … that will then proceed there without interference by the slow reflexes of a human driver.”
“[W]all screens will have replaced the ordinary set; but transparent cubes will be making their appearance in which three-dimensional viewing will be possible.”
“[T]he world population will be 6,500,000,000 and the population of the United States will be 350,000,000.” And later he warns that if the population growth continues unchecked, “All earth will be a single choked Manhattan by A.D. 2450 and society will collapse long before that!” As a result, “There will, therefore, be a worldwide propaganda drive in favor of birth control by rational and humane methods and, by 2014, it will undoubtedly have taken serious effect.” [See our Walt Disney Family Planning cartoon from earlier this week.]
“Ordinary agriculture will keep up with great difficulty and there will be ‘farms’ turning to the more efficient micro-organisms. Processed yeast and algae products will be available in a variety of flavors.”
“The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders. Schools will have to be oriented in this direction.… All the high-school students will be taught the fundamentals of computer technology will become proficient in binary arithmetic and will be trained to perfection in the use of the computer languages that will have developed out of those like the contemporary “Fortran.”
“[M]ankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014.”
“[T]he most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work!” in our “a society of enforced leisure.”
Isaac Asimov wasn’t the only person who peered into the future during the 60s and got it right. You can find a few more on-the-mark predictions from contemporaries below:
Between 1979 and 1981, the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould collaborated on a series of documentary films with the French violinist, writer and filmmaker Bruno Mansaingeon. In the scenes presented here, Gould plays a pair of movements from Johann Sebastian Bach’sThe Art of Fugue.
Gould was nearing the end of his life when he gave these performances. He died of a stroke on October 4, 1982, only a few days after his 50th birthday. Similarly, The Art of Fugue was one of Bach’s final projects. He worked on it over the last decade of his life, and the unfinished manuscript was published after his death, perhaps also from a stroke, in 1750 at the age of 65.
The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080, is made up of 14 fugues and 4 canons, each exploring the contrapuntal possibilities of a single musical subject. Gould plays “Contrapunctus I” in the video above. Below, he plays “Contrapunctus IV.”
We were among millions deeply saddened to learn today that Seamus Heaney had passed away at age 74. Called the greatest Irish poet since Yeats, Heaney was not only a national treasure to his home country but to the global poetry community. The 1995 Nobel laureate worked in a rich bardic tradition that mined mythic language and imagery, Celtic and otherwise, to get at primeval human verities that transcend culture and nation.
One prominent theme in Heaney’s work—connected to the Irish struggle, but accessible to anyone—is the persistence of tribalism and its damaging effects on future generations. In one of his darker poems, “Punishment,” one I’ve often taught to undergraduates, Heaney’s speaker implicates himself in the execution of a woman found buried in a bog many centuries later. In the last two stanzas, the speaker betrays empathy clothed in helpless recognition of the tribal violence and hypocrisy at the heart of all systems of justice.
I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,
who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.
The theme of tribal violence and its consequences is central to the Old English poem Beowulf, which Heaney famously translated into a rich new idiom suited for a post-colonial age but still consonant with the distinctive poetic rhythms of its language. You can hear Heaney read his translation of Beowulf online. Above, we have the Prologue. (Apologies in advance for the irritating ad that precedes it.) The remainder of the reading appears on YouTube — listen to Part 1 and Part 2. Plus find more of Heaney’s work at the Poetry Foundation.
Finally, you can also listen to his Nobel lecture delivered on 7 December 1995. It was posted on YouTube today, and we thought it worth your while. It’s presented in full below.
What’s the difference between borscht and alt-country music?
Uh, pretty much everything, except for singer-songwriter, Neko Case, the most recent in a long list of celebrities to share Ukrainian beet soup recipes with an adoring public.
Filmed at the behest of Rookie, an online magazine by and for teenage girls, Neko’s videotaped lesson is both basic and refreshingly unexacting. Her status as the child of Ukrainian immigrants affords her the street cred to tell viewers they should take it as a sign they’re on the right track should someone of eastern European extraction insist they’re doing it wrong. (Her on-camera version is gluten-free, and—prior to the addition of sour cream and chicken stock—lactose-free and vegan, as well.)
Interested in sampling her version? Put the laptop on the counter. You won’t miss anything if you commence chopping right away. The demo is as casual as her lack of styling, clocking in at nearly twenty minutes, including tips for tear-free onion cutting, celery leaf usage, and the making of mirepoix.
Here at Open Culture, we’ve often featured the many sides of Tom Waits: actor, poetry reader, favored David Letterman guest. More rarely, we’ve posted material dedicated to showcasing him practicing his primary craft, writing songs and singing them. But when a full-fledged Tom Waits concert does surface here, prepare to settle in for an unrelentingly (and entertainingly) askew musical experience. In March, we posted Burma Shave, an hour-long performance from the late seventies in which Waits took on “the persona of a down-and-out barfly with the soul of a Beat poet.” Today, we fast-forward a decade to Big Time, by which point Waits could express the essences of “avant-garde composer Harry Partch, Howlin’ Wolf, Frank Sinatra, Astor Piazzolla, Irish tenor John McCormack, Kurt Weill, Louis Prima, Mexican norteño bands and Vegas lounge singers.” That evocative quote comes from Big Time’s own press notes, as excerpted by Dangerous Minds, which calls the viewing experience “like entering a sideshow tent in Tom Waits’s brain.”
Watch the 90-minute concert film in its entirety, though, and you may not find it evocative enough. In 1987, Waits had just put out the album Franks Wild Years, which explores the experience of his alter-ego Frank O’Brien, whom Waits called “a combination of Will Rogers and Mark Twain, playing accordion — but without the wisdom they possessed.” The year before, the singer actually wrote and produced a stage play built around the character, and the Franks Wild Years tour through North America and Europe made thorough use of Waits’ theatrical bent in that era. Its final two shows, at San Francisco’s Warfield Theatre and Los Angeles’ Wiltern Theatre, along with footage from gigs in Dublin, Stockholm and Berlin, make up the bulk of Big Time’s material. As for its sensibility, well, even Waits fans may feel insecure, and happily so, about quite what to expect. (Fans of The Wire, I should note, will find something familiar indeed in this show’s rendition of “Way Down in the Hole.”)
“Many of Mondrian’s pieces explore the relationships between adjacent spaces,” says Bolinger “and in particular the formative role of each on the boundaries and possibilities of the other. I based this painting [see above] off of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, in which he develops a theory of meaning grounded in the idea that propositions have meaning only insofar as they constrain the ways the world could be; a meaningful proposition is thus very like one of Mondrian’s color squares, forming a boundary and limiting the possible configurations of the adjacent spaces.”
A second-year PhD student in the philosophy program at the University of Southern California, Bolinger studied painting a Biola University before making philosophy her second major. “I actually came to philosophy quite late in my college career,” Bolinger says, “only adding the major in my junior year. I was fortunate to have two particularly excellent and philosophic art teachers, Jonathan Puls and Jonathan Anderson, who convinced me that my two passions were not mutually exclusive, and encouraged me to pursue both as I began my graduate education.”
Bolinger now works primarily on the philosophy of language, with side interests in logic, epistemology, mind and political philosophy. She continues to paint. We asked her how she reconciles her two passions, which seem to occupy opposite sides of the mind. “I do work in analytic philosophy,” she says, “but it’s only half true that philosophy and painting engage opposite sides of the mind. The sort of realist drawing and painting that I do is all about analyzing the relationships between the lines, shapes and color tones, and so still very left-brain. Nevertheless, it engages the mind in a different way than do the syllogisms of analytic philosophy. I find that the two types of mental exertion complement each other well, each serving as a productive break from the other.”
Bolinger has created a series of philosopher portraits, each one pairing a philosopher with an artist, or art style, in an intriguing way. In addition to Wittgenstein, she painted ten philosophers in her first series, many of them by request. They can all be seen on her Web site, where high quality prints can be ordered.
G.E.M. Anscombe/Jackson Pollock:
Bolinger says she paired the British analytic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe with the American abstract painter Jackson Pollock for two reasons: “First, the loose style of Pollock’s action painting fits the argumentative (and organizational) style of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, which Anscombe helped to edit and was instrumental in publishing. Second, her primary field of work, in which she wrote a seminal text, is philosophy of action, which has obvious connections to the themes present in any of Pollock’s action paintings.”
Gottlob Frege/Vincent Van Gogh:
Bolinger paired the German logician, mathematician and philosopher Gottlob Frege with the Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh as a tongue-in-cheek reference to Van Gogh’s famous painting The Starry Night and Frege’s puzzle concerning identity statements such as “Hesperus is Phosphorus,” or “the evening star is identical to the morning star.”
Bertrand Russell/Art Deco:
Bolinger painted the British logician and philosopher Bertrand Russell in the Art Deco style. “This pairing is a bit more about the gestalt, and a bit harder to articulate,” says Bolinger. “The simplification of form and reduction to angled planes that takes place in the background of this Art Deco piece are meant to cohere with Russell’s locial atomism (the reduction of complex logical propositions to their fundamental logical ‘atoms’).”
Kurt Gödel/Art Nouveau:
Bolinger paired the Austrian logician Kurt Gödel with Art Nouveau. “The Art Nouveau movement developed around the theme of mechanization and the repetition of forms,” says Bolinger, “and centrally involves a delicate balance between organic shapes — typically a figure that dominates the portrait — and schematized or abstracted patterns, often derived from organic shapes, but made uniform and repetitive (often seen in the flower motifs that ornament most Art Nouveau portraits). I paired this style with Kurt Gödel because his work was dedicated to defining computability in terms of recursive functions, and using the notion to prove the Completeness and Incompleteness theorems.”
Points for creativity go to Eleanor Macnair, who recently launched the “Photographs rendered in Play-Doh” Tumblr. Given the name of the Tumblr, I probably don’t have to explain the concept. I think you get it. Above we have “Photographer Dennis Stock holds a camera in front of his face, 1955” — the original by Andreas Feininger (right), and the recreation by Ms. Macnair (left). Also on the Tumblr you’ll find, among others:
“Nan and Brian in Bed, New York City, 1983” by Nan Goldin (original — play doh)
“Dovima with elephants, evening dress by Dior, Cirque d’Hiver, August 1955” by Richard Avedon (original — play doh)
Alfred Hitchcock, like several other of the twentieth century’s best-known auteurs, made some of his most widely seen work by turning books into movies. Or rather, he hired other writers to turn these books into screenplays, which he then turned into movies — which, the way these things go, often bore little ultimate resemblance to their source material. In the case of his 1951 picture Strangers on a Train, based upon The Talented Mr. Ripley author Patricia Highsmith’s first novel of the same name, Hitchcock burned through a few such hired hands. First he engaged Whitfield Cook, whose treatment bolstered the novel’s homoerotic subtext. Then he importuned a series of the brightest living lights of American literature — Thornton Wilder, John Steinbeck, Dashiell Hammett — to have a go at the full screenplay, none of whom could bring themselves sign on to the job. Then along came the only respected “name” writer who could rise — or, given that many at first thought Highsmith’s novel tawdry, sink — to the job: Philip Marlowe’s creator, Raymond Chandler.
The Big Sleep author wrote and submitted a first draft of Strangers on a Train. Then a second. He would hear no feedback from the director except the message informing him of his firing. Hitchcock pursued “Shakespeare of Hollywood” Ben Hecht to come up with the next draft, but Hecht offered his young assistant Czenzi Ormonde instead. Together with Hitchcock’s wife and associate producer, Ormonde completely rewrote the script in less than three weeks. When Chandler later got hold of the film’s final script, he sent Hitchcock his assessment, as featured on Letters of Note:
December 6th, 1950
Dear Hitch,
In spite of your wide and generous disregard of my communications on the subject of the script of Strangers on a Train and your failure to make any comment on it, and in spite of not having heard a word from you since I began the writing of the actual screenplay—for all of which I might say I bear no malice, since this sort of procedure seems to be part of the standard Hollywood depravity—in spite of this and in spite of this extremely cumbersome sentence, I feel that I should, just for the record, pass you a few comments on what is termed the final script. I could understand your finding fault with my script in this or that way, thinking that such and such a scene was too long or such and such a mechanism was too awkward. I could understand you changing your mind about the things you specifically wanted, because some of such changes might have been imposed on you from without. What I cannot understand is your permitting a script which after all had some life and vitality to be reduced to such a flabby mass of clichés, a group of faceless characters, and the kind of dialogue every screen writer is taught not to write—the kind that says everything twice and leaves nothing to be implied by the actor or the camera. Of course you must have had your reasons but, to use a phrase once coined by Max Beerbohm, it would take a “far less brilliant mind than mine” to guess what they were.
Regardless of whether or not my name appears on the screen among the credits, I’m not afraid that anybody will think I wrote this stuff. They’ll know damn well I didn’t. I shouldn’t have minded in the least if you had produced a better script—believe me. I shouldn’t. But if you wanted something written in skim milk, why on earth did you bother to come to me in the first place? What a waste of money! What a waste of time! It’s no answer to say that I was well paid. Nobody can be adequately paid for wasting his time.
(Signed, ‘Raymond Chandler’)
Note that Chandler, ever the writer, points out his own “extremely cumbersome sentence” even as he summons so much vitriol for what he considers a lifeless script. As a longtime resident of Los Angeles by this point, and one who had already worked on the screenplays for The Blue Dahlia and Double Indemnity, he knew well the procedures of “the standard Hollywood depravity.” But nothing, to his mind, could excuse such “clichés,” “faceless characters,” and dialogue that “says everything twice and leaves nothing to be implied.” We could all, no matter what sort of work we do, learn from Chandler’s unwavering attention to his craft, and we’d do especially well to bear in mind his preemptive objection to the argument that, hey, at least he got a big check: “Nobody can be adequately paid for wasting his time.”
Before William Faulkner more or less defined the genre of Southern literature with his folksy short stories, tragicomic epic novels, and studies in the stream of damaged consciousness, he made a very sincere effort as a poet with a 1924 collection called The Marble Faun. Published in 500 copies with the assistance of his friend Phil Stone, who paid $400 dollars to get the work in print, Faulkner’s poetry did not go over well. Although later judgments have been kinder, the publisher called it “not really a very good book of poetry” and most of the print run was remaindered. The young Faulkner fared much better however with another of his early creative endeavors: art.
Between 1916 and 1925, the University of Mississippi—which Faulkner attended for three semesters before dropping out in 1920—paid him for drawings published in the university newspaper Ole Miss and its humor magazine The Scream. The drawings, like that of a dancing couple at the top, show the influence of jazz-age art-deco graphic illustration as well as that of English illustrator and aesthete Aubrey Beardsley (who gets a name-check in Faulkner’s 1936 novel Absalom, Absalom!). Beardsley’s influence seems especially evident in the drawing above, from a 1917–18 edition of Ole Miss.
Many of Faulkner’s illustrations are much simpler cartoons, particularly those he did for The Scream, such as the 1925 drawing above of two men and a car. Even simpler, the line drawing of an airplane below recalls the author’s fascination with aviation, manifested in his failed attempt to join the U.S. Air Force, his successful acceptance into the R.A.F., and his non-Mississippi 1935 novel Pylon, about a rowdy crew of barnstormers in a fictionalized New Orleans called “New Valois.” You can see more of Faulkner’s drawings here and read his early prose and poetry in an out-of-print collection housed online at the Internet Archive, which has been now added to our collection of Free eBooks.
Albert Einstein’s activities as a passionate advocate for peace were well-documented during his lifetime. His celebrity as a famous physicist and one of the world’s most recognizable faces lent a great deal of weight to his pacifism, a view otherwise not given much consideration in the popular press at almost any time in history. However, according to a 2006 book titled Einstein on Race and Racism by Fred Jerome and Roger Taylor, the scientist was also as passionate about combating racism and segregation as he was about combating war. This facet of Einstein’s life was virtually ignored by the media, as was a visit he made in 1946 to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the first degree-granting college for African-Americans and the alma mater of Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall.
Invited to Lincoln to receive an honorary degree, Einstein gave a lecture on physics but also bluntly addressed the racial animus that held the country in its grip, reportedly calling racism, “a disease of white people” and saying he “did not intend to be quiet” about his opposition to segregation and racist public policy. Lest anyone think the Nobel-prize-winning physicist was pandering to his audience, the Harvard Gazette offers a comprehensive summary of Einstein’s support of progressive anti-racist causes, including his personal support of members of Princeton’s black community (he paid one man’s college tuition), a town Princeton native Paul Robeson once called “the northernmost town in the south.”
Einstein formed relationships with several prominent black leaders—inviting opera singer Marian Anderson to stay in his home after she was refused a room at the Nassau Inn and appearing as a character witness for W.E.B. Dubois when the latter stood accused of “failing to register as a foreign agent.” But it was his 20-year friendship with Robeson that seems central to his involvement in civil rights causes. The Harvard Gazette writes:
Einstein met Paul Robeson when the famous singer and actor came to perform at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre in 1935. The two found they had much in common. Both were concerned about the rise of fascism, and both gave their support to efforts to defend the democratically elected government of Spain against the fascist forces of Francisco Franco. Einstein and Robeson also worked together on the American Crusade to End Lynching, in response to an upsurge in racial murders as black soldiers returned home in the aftermath of World War II.
At the time of the Gazette article, 2007, a movie about Einstein and Robeson’s friendship was apparently in the works, with Danny Glover as Robeson and Ben Kingsley as Einstein. The project is apparently stalled, but with the upsurge in popular interest in the history of civil rights—with the overturning of the Voting Rights Act and the widespread coverage of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington—perhaps the project will see new life soon. I certainly hope so.
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