Oh My God! Winston Churchill Received the First Ever Letter Containing “O.M.G.” (1917)

omg letter 1

Win­ston Churchill is one of those pre­pos­ter­ous­ly out­sized his­tor­i­cal fig­ures who seemed to be in the mid­dle of every major event. Even before, as Prime Min­is­ter, he steeled the resolve of his peo­ple and faced down the Third Reich jug­ger­naut; even before he loud­ly warned of the Nazi men­ace before it was polite to do so; even before he was pil­lo­ried in the press for the dis­as­trous Gal­lipoli inva­sion dur­ing WWI, Churchill was a famous and con­tro­ver­sial fig­ure. As a young cav­al­ry offi­cer, he left his post in India to report on the bloody colo­nial cam­paign in the Swat Val­ley in present-day Pak­istan. His huge­ly pop­u­lar arti­cles pushed the mil­i­tary slang word “sniper” into pop­u­lar use. Dur­ing the sec­ond Boer War, Churchill was not only cap­tured at gun­point by future South African prime min­is­ter Louis Botha but he man­aged to suc­cess­ful­ly escape from his POW camp. And after being pushed out of the gov­ern­ment fol­low­ing Gal­lipoli, he returned to the mil­i­tary as a Lieu­tenant Colonel and com­mand­ed a bat­tal­ion of troops in France. He also won a Nobel Prize for Lit­er­a­ture in 1953 and was, as we’ve recent­ly seen, a pret­ty good painter too.

Add to this one more tri­umph: he unwit­ting­ly had a hand in shap­ing the speech pat­terns of teenaged girls some 50 years after his death. Churchill was the recip­i­ent of a mis­sive con­tain­ing the first ever usage of the oft-texted acronym “O.M.G.”. Accord­ing to the Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary, O.M.G.’s ori­gins can be traced back to a let­ter to Churchill from Admi­ral John Arbuth­not Fish­er, sent on Sep­tem­ber 9, 1917. After com­plain­ing about the state of affairs of the Navy dur­ing the war, Fish­er clos­es with the fol­low­ing lame joke: “I hear that a new order of Knight­hood is on the tapis – O.M.G. (Oh! My God!) – Show­er it on the Admi­ral­ty!!”

Churchill’s rela­tion­ship with Fish­er was com­plex. While he was the First Lord of the Admi­ral­ty, Churchill brought Fish­er out of retire­ment in 1911 to head the roy­al navy. Their rela­tion­ship went south in 1915 fol­low­ing the fail­ure of the Dar­d­anelles cam­paign. Churchill was still round­ly blamed most­ly because of Fisher’s loud, pub­lic protes­ta­tions. (In fact, had the naval offi­cers pushed through the Dar­d­anelles to Con­stan­tino­ple, as Churchill com­mand­ed, the war would have like­ly end­ed years ear­li­er than it did.) Yet, much to his wife’s dis­may, Churchill remained cor­dial enough with Fish­er to exchange friend­ly notes.

The first online usage of O.M.G., by the way, came on a usenet forum about soap operas in 1994. Churchill does not appear to be con­nect­ed to that instance.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Win­ston Churchill’s Paint­ings: Great States­man, Sur­pris­ing­ly Good Artist

Col­or Footage of Win­ston Churchill’s Funer­al in 1965

Ani­mat­ed: Win­ston Churchill’s Top 10 Say­ings About Fail­ure, Courage, Set­backs, Haters & Suc­cess

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

Behold a Beautiful Archive of 10,000 Vintage Cameras at Collection Appareils

Photosphere

Dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy has bestowed many gifts, and some few hor­rors: self­ies, nat­u­ral­ly, as well as even less dig­ni­fied self-por­traits, of the sort cer­tain politi­cians send out; mass sur­veil­lance, as well as the abil­i­ty of aver­age cit­i­zens to pro­duce impor­tant pieces of evi­dence and to doc­u­ment his­to­ry; hard times for pro­fes­sion­al pho­tog­ra­phers, as well as the full democ­ra­ti­za­tion of the medi­um. What it has almost ren­dered obso­lete is the mech­a­nism that enabled pho­to­graph­ic images in the first place. In place of cam­eras, we have smart­phones, the hat­ed Glass… maybe some­time in the future no exter­nal device at all. Giv­en this tra­jec­to­ry, it’s entire­ly under­stand­able that all sorts of people—steampunks, anti­quar­i­ans, Lud­dites, ana­log fetishists, mid­dle-age hip­sters, etc.—would grow nos­tal­gic not only for the cracked, stri­at­ed mono­chrome pati­na of vin­tage pho­tographs, but also for the boxes—large and small, sim­ple and high­ly complicated—that pro­duced them.

Argus A

And what won­der­ful box­es they were! Before the onslaught of iden­ti­cal, cheap con­sumer point-and-shoots and (gasp!) dis­pos­ables, or the util­i­tar­i­an bricks of pro­fes­sion­al gear, the cam­era was very often a work of art in its own right. Today, we bring you a sam­pling of these objets—ele­gant, intri­cate, stream­lined, and down­right adorable. These are but a tiny frac­tion of the vin­tage cam­era trea­sures you’ll find rep­re­sent­ed at Col­lec­tion Appareils, an online ref­er­ence of 10,000 ana­log cam­eras run by Syl­vain Hal­gand, a French­man sore­ly afflict­ed with the “insid­i­ous dis­ease” of col­lect­ing.

Wit­ness at the top the Pho­to­s­phere No. 1, man­u­fac­tured by the Com­pag­nie Fran­caise de Pho­togra­phie in 1899—a tru­ly beau­ti­ful arti­fact. No less styl­ish, but far more cam­era-like to our eyes, see the Argus A above. Made in the U.S. between 1936 and 1941, this may have been the most pop­u­lar 35mm of all time. Though not as well known as the Leica A, “it’s a safe bet that Argus sold more cam­eras in their first twen­ty years than Leica has sold in their first 70 years.”

Gap Box

Above, we have the first “point and shoot,” the Gap Box 6x9, a curi­ous­ly attrac­tive device made in France in 1950. This cam­era “played a very impor­tant role by mak­ing pho­tog­ra­phy acces­si­ble to the gen­er­al pub­lic,” allow­ing “any­one to take pic­tures at the low­est price and in the most sim­ple way.”

The Compass

Then there are the styl­ized and the stream­lined. Just above, see a very fine machine called The Com­pass, man­u­fac­tured by Swiss watch­mak­er Le Coul­tre between 1937 and 1940. And below, gaze upon the grace­ful Haneel Tri-Vision, made in Los Ange­les in 1946.

Tri-Vision

Almost equal­ly appeal­ing in their design sim­plic­i­ty are the irre­sistibly cute minia­ture cam­eras, such as the “Mick­ey Mouse” below. Man­u­fac­tured in Ger­many in 1958, these tiny things—despite the “copy­right” notice on the lens—may have dis­ap­peared quick­ly “due to them not actu­al­ly being sanc­tioned by the Dis­ney Cor­po­ra­tion.” They were, how­ev­er, sold with a “large card­board Mick­ey Mouse that ‘held’ the cam­era.”

Mickey Mouse

See also the Coro­net Midget. Made in Eng­land in 1934, this 5‑shilling cam­era “must be one of the most pop­u­lar of all small cam­eras to col­lect.” The com­pa­ny mar­ket­ed its own 6‑exposure film for the Midget, which came in a choice of five col­ors.

Coronet Midget

Coronet Midget 2

From the cou­ture to the high-tech to the quirky and inven­tive (like the Lark “Sar­dine Can” below), the French vin­tage cam­era archive makes avail­able a visu­al his­to­ry of the cam­era that may exist nowhere else. It is the his­to­ry of an object that defined the 20th cen­tu­ry, and that may ful­ly dis­ap­pear some­time soon in the 21st. And while we can spend sev­er­al hours a day mar­veling over the prod­ucts of these fine devices, it’s a rare treat to see the things them­selves in such an aston­ish­ing vari­ety of shapes, sizes, col­ors, and degrees of design inge­nu­ity. Take some time to get acquaint­ed with the evo­lu­tion of the hand­held cam­era before dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy final­ly ren­ders it extinct.

Lark Sardine

Via Laugh­ing Squid/ Messy Nessy Chic/PetaPix­el

Images cour­tesy of Col­lec­tion Appareils.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Yale Launch­es an Archive of 170,000 Pho­tographs Doc­u­ment­ing the Great Depres­sion

Design­ers Charles & Ray Eames Cre­ate a Pro­mo­tion­al Film for the Ground­break­ing Polaroid SX-70 Instant Cam­era (1972)

Alfred Stieglitz: The Elo­quent Eye, a Reveal­ing Look at “The Father of Mod­ern Pho­tog­ra­phy”

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

Watch Dragnet’s 1967 LSD Episode: #85 on TV Guide’s List of the Greatest Episodes of All Time

Jack Webb’s sem­i­nal cop show Drag­netwhich first ran on tele­vi­sion through most of the ’50s, was known for its grit­ty real­ism. In every episode, the show’s robot­ic, lacon­ic lead, Detec­tive Joe Fri­day, would nav­i­gate the seedy under­world and even­tu­al­ly get his man.

Though Drag­net rivaled only I Love Lucy in pop­u­lar­i­ty, Webb pulled the plug on the series in 1959. But he could­n’t stay away.  In Jan­u­ary 1967, Webb launched a reboot of Drag­net. This time, Fri­day, quite pos­si­bly the squarest per­son on the plan­et, takes on youth cul­ture. Case in point, the series’ inau­gur­al show, which you can watch above, where Fri­day and his new part­ner Bill Gan­non stum­ble upon that strange new soci­etal scourge LSD. Inci­den­tal­ly, this is also the first episode of Drag­net to be shot in col­or. Make of that what you will.

When Fri­day and Gan­non inves­ti­gate a com­plaint about some­one eat­ing bark, they dis­cov­er a teenag­er who paint­ed his face Brave­heart-style and is bab­bling about the pilot light at the cen­ter of the Earth. This is Blue­boy AKA Ben­jamin Carv­er and clear­ly, he is trip­ping. He’s also sell­ing lousy acid to Mar­cia Brady look-alikes.

The show is a fas­ci­nat­ing time cap­sule on a num­ber of lev­els. First, this episode was made while LSD was still legal. (Acid was banned Cal­i­for­nia in Octo­ber 1966. Not long, one imag­ines, after the episode was shot.) Fri­day and Gan­non shake their heads in frus­tra­tion over their legal impo­tence, espe­cial­ly lat­er when they dis­cov­er Blue­boy dead from an over­dose. Just in case you didn’t get the show’s moral (drugs = bad) Webb lards the episode with ter­ri­fy­ing facts about the drug. “LSD is so potent that a sin­gle pound of the prepa­ra­tion can turn every per­son in Los Ange­les coun­ty into a total psy­chot­ic. The pop­u­la­tion of the coun­ty – sev­en mil­lion peo­ple.”

Media crit­ic Michele Hilmes argues, how­ev­er, that the show might just be speak­ing out of both sides of its mouth. To an old­er gen­er­a­tion, Drag­net is a cop show preach­ing law and order. To the younger gen­er­a­tion, Webb’s heavy-hand­ed­ness cross­es the line into par­o­d­ic camp.

Jack Webb so embod­ied the role of Joe Fri­day that he all but became the LAPD in the pop­u­lar imag­i­na­tion. When Webb died in 1982, he was buried with full police hon­ors and his badge num­ber, 714, was offi­cial­ly retired from the force. It’s curi­ous that a cop so unre­lent­ing­ly smug would become the paragon of LA’s finest.

Thom Ander­sen mem­o­rably summed up the series in his sem­i­nal essay film Los Ange­les Plays Itself. “Drag­net admirably expressed the con­tempt the LAPD had for the law-abid­ing civil­ians it was pledged ‘to pro­tect and to serve.’ It pro­tect­ed us from our­selves, and it served us despite our best efforts to make the job more dif­fi­cult. … Friday’s heavy-hand­ed irony nev­er lets up. None of the wit­ness­es or sus­pects he ques­tions pen­e­trates his wall of con­de­scen­sion. Of course, Drag­net isn’t a doc­u­men­tary por­trait of the LAPD, and its detec­tives weren’t real­ly like Joe Fri­day. What’s scary is that he rep­re­sent­ed the department’s ide­al.”

Accord­ing to Andrew Gra­ham’s Drag­net blogTV Guide vot­ed this episode #85 on its list of the great­est TV episodes of all time.

via Neatora­ma

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Artist Draws Nine Por­traits on LSD Dur­ing 1950s Research Exper­i­ment

Watch The Bicy­cle Trip: An Ani­ma­tion of The World’s First LSD Trip in 1943

Ken Kesey’s First LSD Trip Ani­mat­ed

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

Bob Dylan’s Thanksgiving Radio Show: A Playlist of 18 Delectable Songs

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Image by Row­land Scher­man, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

If you’re look­ing for a sound­track for Thanks­giv­ing, you could do worse than to let Bob Dylan cre­ate it for you.

From May 2006 until April 2009, Dylan host­ed the Theme Time Radio Hour, a week­ly radio show on XM Satel­lite Radio. Each show revolved around a dif­fer­ent theme (e.g., “Weath­er,” “Drink­ing” or “Base­ball”). But the episodes all had one thing in com­mon — they pre­sent­ed lis­ten­ers with an eclec­tic mix of music, every­thing from LL Cool J and Chuck Berry, to They Might Be Giants, Bil­lie Hol­i­day, and John­ny Cash. Try­ing to describe the radio show, the­ater crit­ic Ter­ry Tea­chout wrote in The Wall Street Jour­nal: “To lis­ten to Theme Time Radio Hour is to redis­cov­er the sense of musi­cal adven­ture that old-fash­ioned disc jock­eys with strong­ly indi­vid­ual per­son­al­i­ties offered in the days before big-mon­ey sta­tions pinned their fis­cal hopes to the rigid Top 40-style playlists that took the fun out of radio.”

Today we bring you Episode 30 of Sea­son 1, “Thanks­giv­ing Left­overs,” which orig­i­nal­ly aired on Novem­ber 22, 2006. The show fea­tures 18 songs, select­ed and intro­duced by Dylan. The songs (find a list below) aren’t dish­es cooked fresh. No, they’re “left­overs” — tunes that Dylan had hoped to squeeze into pre­vi­ous radio shows but nev­er quite man­aged to do. Yet, togeth­er, they make for a pret­ty good meal. You can stream them all above. And if you like what you hear, head over to the Theme Time Radio Hour Archive, where they’ve appar­ent­ly archived all 100 episodes, audio includ­ed.

  1. “Turkey In The Straw” — Lib­er­ace (1952)
  2. “Hal­lelu­jah, I’m A Bum” — Har­ry McClin­tock (1926)
  3. “Let Me Play With Your Poo­dle” — Tam­pa Red & Big Maceo (1942)
  4. “Yard Dog” — Al Fer­ri­er (1972)
  5. “The Turkey Hop” — The Robins with John­ny Otis Orches­tra (1950)
  6. “Hon­ey­suck­le Rose” — Fats Waller (1934)
  7. “Twelve Red Ros­es” — Bet­ty Har­ris (1966)
  8. “Don’t Let The Stars Get In Your Eyes” — Skeets McDon­ald (1952)
  9. “Them There Eyes” — Bil­lie Hol­i­day (1939)
  10. “Angel Eyes” — Jesse Belvin (1959)
  11. “Gun­slingers” — Mighty Spar­row (1963)
  12. “Let’s Be Friends” — Bil­ly Wright (1955)
  13. “Whiskey Is The Dev­il (In Liq­uid Form)” — The Bailes Broth­ers (1947)
  14. “Teach Me Tonight” — Dinah Wash­ing­ton (1954)
  15. “Teacher Teacher” — Rock­pile (1980)
  16. “Iodine In My Cof­fee” — Mud­dy Waters (1952)
  17. “You Eat Too Much” — Harold Bur­rage (1956)
  18. “Pie In The Sky” — Cis­co Hous­ton (1960)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bob Dylan Reads From T.S. Eliot’s Great Mod­ernist Poem The Waste Land

Mar­i­lyn Monroe’s Hand­writ­ten Turkey-and-Stuff­ing Recipe

Bob Dylan and The Grate­ful Dead Rehearse Togeth­er in Sum­mer 1987. Lis­ten to 74 Tracks.

George Orwell’s Final Warning: Don’t Let This Nightmare Situation Happen. It Depends on You!

More than 60 years after his death and the close­ly pre­ced­ing pub­li­ca­tion of his best-known nov­el 1984, we look to George Orwell as a kind of prophet of the ills of cor­po­ratism, social­ism, author­i­tar­i­an­ism, total­i­tar­i­an­ism — any pow­er­ful ‑ism, essen­tial­ly, in which we can find nasty, free­dom-destroy­ing impli­ca­tions. The BBC doc­u­men­tary Orwell: A Life in Pic­tures, which we fea­tured a few years back, makes a point of high­light­ing Orwell’s “warn­ing” to what he saw as a fast corporatizing/socializing/authoriatarianizing/totalitarianizing world. In the film’s final dra­ma­tized scene above (watch the com­plete film here), the re-cre­at­ed Orwell him­self makes the fol­low­ing omi­nous pre­dic­tion:

Allow­ing for the book, after all, being a par­o­dy, some­thing like 1984 could actu­al­ly hap­pen. This is the direc­tion the world is going in at the present time. In our world, there will be no emo­tions except fear, rage, tri­umph, and self-abase­ment. The sex instinct will be erad­i­cat­ed. We shall abol­ish the orgasm. There will be no loy­al­ty except loy­al­ty to the Par­ty. But always there will be the intox­i­ca­tion of pow­er. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of vic­to­ry, the sen­sa­tion of tram­pling on an ene­my who’s help­less. If you want a pic­ture of the future, imag­ine a boot stamp­ing on a human face, for­ev­er. The moral to be drawn from this dan­ger­ous night­mare sit­u­a­tion is a sim­ple one: don’t let it hap­pen. It depends on you.

This fic­tion­al­ized Orwell — much like the real Orwell — does­n’t mince words. But as with most unminced words, these mask a more com­pli­cat­ed real­i­ty. Though Orwell fans may find each indi­vid­ual piece of this speech rec­og­niz­able, espe­cial­ly the bit about the boot and the face, the man him­self nev­er spoke it — not in this form, any­way.

It mix­es doc­u­ment­ed state­ments of Orwell’s with words from the text of 1984, and its dra­mat­ic clos­er [“Don’t let it hap­pen. It depends on you!”] comes, as writes Barnes and Noble’s Steve King, from a post-pub­li­ca­tion press release direct­ed by pub­lish­er Fredric War­burg toward read­ers who “had mis­in­ter­pret­ed [Orwell’s] aim, tak­ing the nov­el as a crit­i­cism of the cur­rent British Labour Par­ty, or of con­tem­po­rary social­ism in gen­er­al.” The quo­ta­tion from the press release was “soon giv­en the sta­tus of a last state­ment or deathbed appeal, giv­en that Orwell was hos­pi­tal­ized at the time and dead six months lat­er.”

You can read more at georgeorwellnovels.com, which pro­vides a great deal of con­text on this press release, which runs, in full, as fol­lows:

It has been sug­gest­ed by some of the review­ers of Nine­teen Eighty-Four that it is the author’s view that this, or some­thing like this, is what will hap­pen inside the next forty years in the West­ern world. This is not cor­rect. I think that, allow­ing for the book being after all a par­o­dy, some­thing like Nine­teen Eighty-Four could hap­pen. This is the direc­tion in which the world is going at the present time, and the trend lies deep in the polit­i­cal, social and eco­nom­ic foun­da­tions of the con­tem­po­rary world sit­u­a­tion.

Specif­i­cal­ly the dan­ger lies in the struc­ture imposed on Social­ist and on Lib­er­al cap­i­tal­ist com­mu­ni­ties by the neces­si­ty to pre­pare for total war with the U.S.S.R. and the new weapons, of which of course the atom­ic bomb is the most pow­er­ful and the most pub­li­cized. But dan­ger lies also in the accep­tance of a total­i­tar­i­an out­look by intel­lec­tu­als of all colours.

The moral to be drawn from this dan­ger­ous night­mare sit­u­a­tion is a sim­ple one: Don’t let it hap­pen. It depends on you.

George Orwell assumes that if such soci­eties as he describes in Nine­teen Eighty-Four come into being there will be sev­er­al super states. This is ful­ly dealt with in the rel­e­vant chap­ters of Nine­teen Eighty-Four. It is also dis­cussed from a dif­fer­ent angle by James Burn­ham in The Man­age­r­i­al Rev­o­lu­tion. These super states will nat­u­ral­ly be in oppo­si­tion to each oth­er or (a nov­el point) will pre­tend to be much more in oppo­si­tion than in fact they are. Two of the prin­ci­pal super states will obvi­ous­ly be the Anglo-Amer­i­can world and Eura­sia. If these two great blocks line up as mor­tal ene­mies it is obvi­ous that the Anglo-Amer­i­cans will not take the name of their oppo­nents and will not dra­ma­tize them­selves on the scene of his­to­ry as Com­mu­nists. Thus they will have to find a new name for them­selves. The name sug­gest­ed in Nine­teen Eighty-Four is of course Ing­soc, but in prac­tice a wide range of choic­es is open. In the U.S.A. the phrase “Amer­i­can­ism” or “hun­dred per cent Amer­i­can­ism” is suit­able and the qual­i­fy­ing adjec­tive is as total­i­tar­i­an as any­one could wish.

If there is a fail­ure of nerve and the Labour par­ty breaks down in its attempt to deal with the hard prob­lems with which it will be faced, tougher types than the present Labour lead­ers will inevitably take over, drawn prob­a­bly from the ranks of the Left, but not shar­ing the Lib­er­al aspi­ra­tions of those now in pow­er. Mem­bers of the present British gov­ern­ment, from Mr. Attlee and Sir Stafford Cripps down to Aneurin Bevan will nev­er will­ing­ly sell the pass to the ene­my, and in gen­er­al the old­er men, nur­tured in a Lib­er­al tra­di­tion, are safe, but the younger gen­er­a­tion is sus­pect and the seeds of total­i­tar­i­an thought are prob­a­bly wide­spread among them. It is invid­i­ous to men­tion names, but every­one could with­out dif­fi­cul­ty think for him­self of promi­nent Eng­lish and Amer­i­can per­son­al­i­ties whom the cap would fit.

Read­ers can still find plen­ty to quib­ble with in Orwell, but sure­ly that counts as a point toward his sta­tus as an endur­ing­ly fas­ci­nat­ing writer. The les­son, how­ev­er much we may mis­in­ter­pret its deliv­ery — and indeed, how much Orwell him­self may some­times seem to mis­de­liv­er it — holds steady: don’t let it hap­pen. How not to let it hap­pen, of course, remains a mat­ter of active inquiry.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

George Orwell Explains in a Reveal­ing 1944 Let­ter Why He’d Write 1984

For 95 Min­utes, the BBC Brings George Orwell to Life

The Only Known Footage of George Orwell (Cir­ca 1921)

George Orwell and Dou­glas Adams Explain How to Make a Prop­er Cup of Tea

George Orwell’s Five Great­est Essays (as Select­ed by Pulitzer-Prize Win­ning Colum­nist Michael Hiltzik)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Digital Nietzsche: Download Nietzsche’s Major Works as Free eBooks

Nietzsche

In times of deep dis­tress I’ve often found the bru­tal, unspar­ing can­dor of Friedrich Niet­zsche a strange com­fort. While whol­ly enam­ored of the aris­to­crat­ic, Hel­lenis­tic past of lit­er­ary inven­tion, the often bil­ious Ger­man philoso­pher nonethe­less had no illu­sions about the nature of pow­er, which does as it will and is not held in check by what we take for com­mon val­ues. In Niet­zsche’s diag­no­sis, no set of values—or what he calls in The Geneal­o­gy of Morals “moral prejudices”—is ever dis­in­ter­est­ed, tran­scen­dent or “dis­con­nect­ed.” Instead, wrote Niet­zsche, the lan­guage of tra­di­tion­al moral­i­ty is gen­er­al­ly syn­ony­mous with the lan­guage of pow­er, thus:

The master’s right of giv­ing names goes so far that it is per­mis­si­ble to look upon lan­guage itself as the expres­sion of the pow­er of the mas­ters: they say “this is that, and that,” they seal final­ly every object and every event with a sound, and there­by at the same time take pos­ses­sion of it.

It is “because of this ori­gin,” writes the con­trar­i­an Niet­zsche, “that the word ‘good’ is far from hav­ing any nec­es­sary con­nec­tion with altru­is­tic acts, in accor­dance with the super­sti­tious belief of these moral philoso­phers.” Niet­zsche described Chris­tian­i­ty as “hos­tile to life” and called for a “reval­u­a­tion of all val­ues,” exco­ri­at­ing Judeo-Chris­t­ian beliefs as “slave moral­i­ty.” The rad­i­cal icon­o­clasm expressed in works like The Geneal­o­gy of Morals sits side by side with what can seem like the most reac­tionary val­oriza­tions of “nobil­i­ty” and hier­ar­chy. Niet­zsche may have had noth­ing but con­tempt for lib­er­al, bour­geois soci­ety, but he did not seek to replace it with egal­i­tar­i­an social­ism or any­thing of the kind. It is this some­times jar­ring con­trast between his seem­ing­ly right­ist pol­i­tics and his unsys­tem­at­ic dis­man­tling of the ide­o­log­i­cal mech­a­nisms by which state pow­er jus­ti­fies itself that make Niet­zsche such a con­fus­ing philoso­pher, one so eas­i­ly mis­in­ter­pret­ed and mis­read.

The most famous mis­read­ing of Niet­zsche was a delib­er­ate one, orches­trat­ed by his anti-Semit­ic sis­ter Elis­a­beth, friend and admir­er of Hitler, who cor­rupt­ed her broth­er’s late work and adapt­ed it to Nazi ide­ol­o­gy. And yet, despite Niet­zsche’s seem­ing dis­dain for what he vague­ly termed, among oth­er things, an “under race” of com­mon peo­ple, he also loathed anti-Semi­tism and nation­al­ism and would have been infu­ri­at­ed to see his work used as it was by Ger­man and Ital­ian fas­cists. Lat­er read­ings of Niet­zsche, like those of the late Wal­ter Kauf­mann or Niet­zsche schol­ar and philoso­pher Babette Babich, place him in dia­logue with Hegel, Kant, and Aris­to­tle, and with the Exis­ten­tial­ists. Niet­zsche has been called an exis­ten­tial­ist thinker him­self, as well as a prag­ma­tist, nat­u­ral­ist, and pre-postmodernist—all des­ig­na­tions that get at impor­tant aspects of his thought, e.g. his stress on con­tin­gency, on the phys­i­cal basis of thought, and on the rel­a­tive, per­spec­ti­val nature of truth.

This very broad overview doesn’t pre­tend to do jus­tice to the depth and vari­ety of Niet­zschean thought. If you wish to under­stand his work, you should, of course, read it for your­self. And so you can, near­ly all of it, online. Below, find links to almost all of the philoso­pher’s major works, in Kin­dle, PDF, HTML, ePub, and oth­er for­mats. For some excel­lent guides through Nietzsche’s think­ing, con­sid­er lis­ten­ing to Wal­ter Kaufmann’s 1960 lec­tures and watch­ing the Niet­zsche seg­ment in Human, All Too Human, a 3‑part doc­u­men­tary series that also pro­files Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger and Jean-Paul Sartre. Pro­fes­sor Babich’s site has links to many of her arti­cles online and the site Niet­zsche Cir­cle has a large links sec­tion with many help­ful resources. But of course, there’s no sub­sti­tute for the orig­i­nal. Below, in chrono­log­i­cal order, find most of the com­plete works of Friedrich Niet­zsche. Iron­ic, pes­simistic, joy­ous, cre­ative, and scathing, they make for intrigu­ing, frus­trat­ing, enlight­en­ing, and ulti­mate­ly life-affirm­ing read­ing.

All of these texts appear in our col­lec­tion of Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks as well as in our larg­er col­lec­tion, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load Wal­ter Kaufmann’s Lec­tures on Niet­zsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre & Mod­ern Thought (1960)

Human, All Too Human: 3‑Part Doc­u­men­tary Pro­files Niet­zsche, Hei­deg­ger & Sartre

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

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

A Year in the Life of Earth’s CO2: A Striking Visualization

Dur­ing the same week when House Repub­li­cans passed a bill for­bid­ding sci­en­tists from advis­ing the EPA on its own research, NASA cli­mate sci­en­tists (coin­ci­den­tal­ly but maybe incon­ve­nient­ly) released a video doc­u­ment­ing A Year in the Life of Earth­’s CO2. Accord­ing to NASA, “The visu­al­iza­tion is a prod­uct of a sim­u­la­tion called ‘Nature Run,’ ” which “ingests real data on atmos­pher­ic con­di­tions and the emis­sion of green­house gas­es and both nat­ur­al and man-made par­tic­u­lates. The mod­el is then left to run on its own and sim­u­late the nat­ur­al behav­ior of the Earth’s atmos­phere.”  The video above visu­al­izes how car­bon diox­ide in the atmos­phere trav­eled around the globe from Jan­u­ary 2006 through Decem­ber 2006. Hope­ful­ly the take-away isn’t look at all the pret­ty col­ors. The video is in the pub­lic domain and can be down­loaded here.

To learn more about cli­mate change, see the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chicago’s course, Glob­al Warm­ing. It’s a free 23-lec­ture course pre­sent­ed by David Archer, a pro­fes­sor in the Depart­ment of The Geo­phys­i­cal Sci­ences.

Dostoyevsky Got a Reprieve from the Czar’s Firing Squad and Then Saved Charles Bukowski’s Life

Yes­ter­day we fea­tured Charles Bukowski’s first-ever record­ed read­ings. Per­haps you found them, in their way, inspi­ra­tional, but for me the feel­ing of inspi­ra­tion always leads to a ques­tion — who inspired my inspir­er? In the case of Bukows­ki, the poet has, in his work, clear­ly named one of his main inspi­ra­tions: the work of 19th-cen­tu­ry Russ­ian nov­el­ist Fyo­dor Dos­toyevsky. The author of Crime and Pun­ish­ment might at first seem to have lit­tle in com­mon with the author of Ham on Rye, but often the most res­o­nant inspi­ra­tions don’t involve much direct resem­blance. And as Bukows­ki remem­bers in the poem he gave Dos­toyevsky’s name (albeit in one of the oth­er stan­dard spellings), his ances­tor in the world of let­ters did more than just get him writ­ing:

Dos­to­evsky

against the wall, the fir­ing squad ready.
then he got a reprieve.
sup­pose they had shot Dos­to­evsky?
before he wrote all that?
I sup­pose it would­n’t have
mat­tered
not direct­ly.
there are bil­lions of peo­ple who have
nev­er read him and nev­er
will.
but as a young man I know that he
got me through the fac­to­ries,
past the whores,
lift­ed me high through the night
and put me down
in a bet­ter
place.
even while in the bar
drink­ing with the oth­er
dere­licts,
I was glad they gave Dos­to­evsky a
reprieve,
it gave me one,
allowed me to look direct­ly at those
ran­cid faces
in my world,
death point­ing its fin­ger,
I held fast,
an immac­u­late drunk
shar­ing the stink­ing dark with
my
broth­ers.

You can also lis­ten to “Dos­to­evsky” read aloud at the top of the post. Those with a work­ing knowl­edge of its name­sake’s life might think back to Dos­toyevsky’s time in prison, recount­ed briefly in the “Siber­ian exile (1849–1854)” sec­tion of his Wikipedia page. Arrest­ed on trumped-up charges of con­spir­a­cy for sim­ply read­ing the wrong books, he was sen­tenced to “eight years of exile with hard labour at a kator­ga prison camp in Omsk, Siberia, fol­lowed by a term of com­pul­so­ry mil­i­tary ser­vice.” Today, any of us can read Bukowski’s rough-and-tum­ble verse to get us through hard times; we can also, as Bukows­ki did, read Dos­toyevsky (see our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks). But Dos­toyevsky him­self, con­sid­ered par­tic­u­lar­ly dan­ger­ous by his jail­ers, was “per­mit­ted to read noth­ing but his New Tes­ta­ment.” Hard times indeed.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear 130 Min­utes of Charles Bukowski’s First-Ever Record­ed Read­ings (1968)

A Read­ing of Charles Bukowski’s First Pub­lished Sto­ry, “After­math of a Lengthy Rejec­tion Slip” (1944)

So You Want to Be a Writer?: Charles Bukows­ki Explains the Dos & Don’ts

Charles Bukows­ki Rails Against 9‑to‑5 Jobs in a Bru­tal­ly Hon­est Let­ter (1986)

Crime and Pun­ish­ment by Fyo­dor Dos­toyevsky Told in a Beau­ti­ful­ly Ani­mat­ed Film by Piotr Dumala

Fyo­dor Dos­to­evsky Draws Elab­o­rate Doo­dles In His Man­u­scripts

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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