Back in 2016, New York City staged a month-long festival celebrating Albert Camus’ historic visit to NYC in 1946. One event in the festival featured actor Viggo Mortensen giving a reading of Camus’ lecture,“La Crise de l’homme” (“The Human Crisis”) at Columbia University–the very same place where Camus delivered the lecture 70 years earlier–down to the very day (March 28, 1946). The reading was initially captured on a cell phone, and broadcast live using Facebook live video. But then came a more polished recording, courtesy of Columbia’s Maison Française. Note that Mortensen takes the stage around the 11:45 mark. You can read a transcript of “The Human Crisis” here.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in April, 2016.
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If you haven’t heard of Hugo Gernsback, you’ve surely heard of the Hugo Award. Next to the Nebula, it’s the most prestigious of science fiction prizes, bringing together in its ranks of winners such venerable authors as Ursula K. Le Guin, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Neil Gaiman, Isaac Asimov, and just about every other sci-fi and fantasy luminary you could think of. It is indeed fitting that such an honor should be named for Gernsback, the Luxembourgian-American inventor who, in April of 1926, began publishing “the first and longest-running English-language magazine dedicated to what was then not quite yet called ‘science fiction,’” notes University of Virginia’s Andrew Ferguson at The Pulp Magazines Project. Amazing Stories provided an “exclusive outlet” for what Gernsback first called “scientifiction,” a genre he would “for better and for worse, define for the modern era.” You can read and download hundreds of Amazing Stories issues, from the first year of its publication to the last, at the Internet Archive.
Like the extensive list of Hugo Award winners, the back catalog of Amazing Stories encompasses a host of geniuses: Le Guin, Asimov, H.G. Wells, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, and many hundreds of lesser-known writers. But the magazine “was slow to develop,” writes Scott Van Wynsberghe. Its lurid covers lured some readers in, but its “first two years were dominated by preprinted material,” and Gernsback developed a reputation for financial dodginess and for not paying his writers well or at all.
By 1929, he sold the magazine and moved on to other ventures, none of them particularly successful. Amazing Stories soldiered on, under a series of editors and with widely varying readerships until it finally succumbed in 2005, after almost eighty years of publication. But that is no small feat in such an often unpopular field, with a publication, writes Ferguson, that was very often perceived as “garish and nonliterary.”
In hindsight, however, we can see Amazing Stories as a sci-fi time capsule and almost essential feature of the genre’s history, even if some of its content tended more toward the young adult adventure story than serious adult fiction. Its flashy covers set the bar for pulp magazines and comic books, especially in its run up to the fifties. After 1955, the year of the first Hugo Award, the magazine reached its peak under the editorship of Cele Goldsmith, who took over in 1959. Gone was much of the eyepopping B‑movie imagery of the earlier covers. Amazing Stories acquired a new level of relative polish and sophistication, and published many more “literary” writers, as in the 1959 issue above, which featured a “Book-Length Novel by Robert Bloch.”
This trend continued into the seventies, as you can see in the issue above, with a “complete short novel by Gordon Eklund” (and early fiction by George R.R. Martin). In 1982, Ferguson writes, Amazing Stories was sold “to Gary Gygax of D&D fame, and would never again regain the prominence it had before.” The magazine largely returned to its pulp roots, with covers that resembled those of supermarket paperbacks. Great writers continued to appear, however. And the magazine remained an important source for new science fiction—though much of it only in hindsight. As for Gernsback, his reputation waned considerably after his death in 1967.
“Within a decade,” writes Van Wynsberghe, “science fiction pundits were debating whether or not he had created a ‘ghetto’ for hack writers.” In 1986, novelist Brian Aldiss called Gernsback “one of the worst disasters ever to hit the science fiction field.” His 1911 novel, the ludicrously named Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 is considered “one of the worst science fiction novels in history,” writes Matthew Lasar. It may seem odd that the Oscar of the sci-fi world should be named for such a reviled figure. And yet, despite his pronounced lack of literary ability, Gernsback was a visionary. As a futurist, he made some startlingly accurate predictions, along with some not-so-accurate ones. As for his significant contribution to a new form of writing, writes Lasar, “It was in Amazing Stories that Gernsback first tried to nail down the science fiction idea.” As Ray Bradbury supposedly said, “Gernsback made us fall in love with the future.” Enter the Amazing Stories Internet Archive here.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
Cellists unwilling to settle for any but the finest instrument must, sooner or later, make a pilgrimage to Cremona — or rather, to the Cremonas. One is, of course, the city in Lombardy that was home to numerous pioneering master luthiers, up to and including Antonio Stradivari. The other, lesser known Cremona is a workshop in Hirakata, an exurb of Osaka. There, a master luthier named Takao Iwai plies his trade, which you can see on detailed display in the ProcessX video above. In just under half an hour, it compresses his painstaking six-month process of making a cello wholly by hand.
The name of Iwai’s shop evokes a rich history of stringed instrument-making, but it also pays tribute to the place where he honed his own skills. He did so under the luthier Gio Batta Morassi, described in a tribute after his death in 2018 as having “made a significant contribution to the revival of Cremona’s modern violin-making,” and indeed having become “the godfather of the modern Italian Cremona school.”
He seemed to have welcomed students no matter their land of origin — France, China, Russia, and of course Japan — and through them “introduced the art of Italian violin making to the world and raised the level of international violin making.”
Iwai is hardly the first dedicated Japanese craftsman we’ve featured here on Open Culture, nor even the first dedicated to a European art form: take the sculptor Etsuro Sotoo, whose decades of work on Sagrada Família has earned him a reputation in his homeland as “the Japanese Gaudí.” After his time in Italy, Iwai chose to return to Japan, bringing his mastery of a foreign craft into a native culture highly conducive to its practice, where traditional Japanese instruments have long been made with the very same sense of detail and technique. If you’d like to witness that as well while you’re in Osaka, do pay a visit to Tsuruya Gakki in the port town of Sakai; maybe you’ll even get to see a shamisen being made.
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.
If you’ve studied French (or, indeed, been French) in the past couple of decades, you may well have played the card game Les Loups-garous de Thiercelieux. Known in English as The Werewolves of Millers Hollow, it casts its players as hunters, thieves, seers, and other types of rural villagers in the distant past. By night, some players also happen to be werewolves, liable to devour the others in their sleep. Though such beings may never actually have existed, they loom fairly large in French popular culture still today — not least, perhaps, because they loomed even larger two and a half centuries ago, such that history now acknowledges a period called the French Werewolf Epidemic.
“In the 1760s, nearly three hundred people were killed in a remote region of south-central France called the Gévaudan (today part of the département of Lozère),” says the Public Domain Review. “The killer was thought to be a huge animal, which came to be known simply as ‘the Beast’; but while the creature’s name remained simple, its reputation soon grew extremely complex.”
In the press, which speculated on this fearsome creature’s preferred methods of attack (decapitation, blood-drinking, etc.), “illustrators had a field day representing the Beast, whose appearance was reported to be so monstrous it beggared belief.”
By the winter of 1764–65, “the attacks in the Gévaudan had created a national fervor, to the point that King Louis XV intervened, offering a reward equal to what most men would have earned in a year.” In September of 1756, a lieutenant named François Antoine “shot the enormous ‘Wolf of Chazes,’ which was stuffed and put on display in Versailles.” This didn’t stop the killings, but “by now the Royal Court had lost interest. The story had played itself out, and public attention had moved on to other matters. Luckily a local nobleman, the Marquis d’Apcher, organized another hunt, and in June 1767 the hunter Jean Chastel laid low the last of what had turned out to be the Beasts of the Gévaudan.”
“The Beast’s stomach was filled with human remains and, by all posthumous accounts, did not look anything like a typical wolf,” says Dangerous Minds. “They were also able to ascertain that the animal was solely responsible for 95% of the attacks on humans from 1764 to 1767.” As to what the animal actually was, theories abound: maybe an unusually large or rabid wolf, maybe a hyena, maybe even a lion. As for the more fantastical theories that captured the public imagination of the time, they may have passed into the realm of myth, but those myths continue to inspire literature, film, television, and games. And as anyone who’s played Les Loups-garous de Thiercelieux a few times understands, the werewolf’s luck usually runs out.
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.
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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