Stephen King’s Top 10 All-Time Favorite Books

in Literature | November 5th, 2014

stephenking

Image by The USO, via Flickr Com­mons

So you might think that if Stephen King – the guy who wrote such hor­ror clas­sics like Car­rie and The Stand – were to rat­tle off his top ten favorite books, it would fea­ture works by the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Love­craft or maybe J. R. R. Tolkien — authors who have, like King, cre­at­ed endur­ing dark, Goth­ic worlds filled with super­nat­ur­al events and malev­o­lent forces. But you’d be wrong. Author J. Ped­er Zane asked scores of writ­ers about their favorite nov­els for his 2007 book The Top Ten: Writ­ers Pick Their Favorite Books. The list King sub­mit­ted in reply appears below. When pos­si­ble, we’ve added links to the texts that you can read for free online, tak­en from our col­lec­tion, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices.

1. The Gold­en Argosy, The Most Cel­e­brat­ed Short Sto­ries in the Eng­lish Lan­guage – edit­ed by Van Cart­mell and Charles Grayson

2. The Adven­tures of Huck­le­ber­ry Finn – Mark Twain

3. The Satan­ic Vers­es – Salman Rushdie

4. McTeague – Frank Nor­ris

5. Lord of the Flies – William Gold­ing

6. Bleak House – Charles Dick­ens

7. 1984 – George Orwell

8. The Raj Quar­tet – Paul Scott

9. Light in August – William Faulkn­er

10. Blood Merid­i­an – Cor­mac McCarthy

King, it seems, prefers books that explore basic defects in the human char­ac­ter to spooky tales of fan­ta­sy. In oth­er words, he’s inter­est­ed in sto­ries that are actu­al­ly ter­ri­fy­ing. Orwell’s por­trait of a man break­ing under the pres­sure of total­i­tar­i­an­ism or William Golding’s para­ble about a group of boys devolv­ing into beasts are down­right trou­bling. Frank Norris’s saga about the men­da­cious McTeague isn’t exact­ly com­fort­ing either. And McCarthy’s grim and spec­tac­u­lar­ly vio­lent mas­ter­piece Blood Merid­i­an might make you crawl into a fetal posi­tion and weep for human­i­ty. (That was my reac­tion, any­way.)

The most strik­ing thing about the list, how­ev­er, is how uni­form­ly high­brow it is. All books would fit right in on the syl­labus of an upper lev­el Eng­lish col­lege course. On the oth­er hand, David Fos­ter Wal­lace, when asked for his top ten, filled his list with such mass mar­ket crowd pleasers as The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Har­ris, The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clan­cy and, at num­ber two, King’s The Stand.

via CS Mon­i­tor

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen King Reveals in His First TV Inter­view Whether He Sleeps With the Lights On (1982)

David Fos­ter Wallace’s Sur­pris­ing List of His 10 Favorite Books, from C.S. Lewis to Tom Clan­cy

Stephen King’s Top 20 Rules for Writ­ers

Stephen King Cre­ates a List of 96 Books for Aspir­ing Writ­ers to Read

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 vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

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How to Dance Your Dissertation: See the Winning Video in the 2014 “Dance Your PhD” Contest

in Biology, Dance | November 5th, 2014

We’ve seen how mod­ern dance can explain key con­cepts in sta­tis­tics (e.g. cor­re­la­tion and sam­pling error). So why could­n’t dance also illus­trate the con­clu­sions of a plant biol­o­gy doc­tor­al dis­ser­ta­tion?

Uma Nagen­dra, a grad­u­ate stu­dent at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Geor­gia, has just won the 2014 edi­tion of the “Dance Your Ph.D.” con­test. Spon­sored by Sci­ence and High­Wire Press, the con­test asks grad stu­dents to “explain their Ph.D. research in the most jar­gon-free medi­um of all: dance.” (More cri­te­ria can be found over at the con­test’s tips & tricks page.) Accord­ing to Sci­ence mag­a­zine, Nagen­dra likes to spend “a good deal of her [free] time hang­ing upside down from a trapeze doing cir­cus aeri­als.” It’s a cre­ative out­let for her. And it offers a good way, it turns out, to visu­al­ize the con­clu­sions of her dis­ser­ta­tion explor­ing “Plant-soil feed­backs after severe tor­na­do dam­age.”

The “Dance Your Ph.D.” con­test allows each con­tes­tant to sub­mit a video with a short piece of descrip­tive text. Here is what Nagen­dra wrote:

Many of the pat­terns we see in forests around the world are caused by the rela­tion­ships that plants have with organ­isms in the soil. Some very diverse forests can only sup­port as many dif­fer­ent tree species as they do because soil-borne dis­eases pre­vent any one species from tak­ing over. But what hap­pens when a tor­na­do comes along? Do the plants and soil organ­isms main­tain this diver­si­ty-pro­mot­ing rela­tion­ship?

My PhD research focus­es on how sev­er­al dif­fer­ent species of tree seedlings in the south­ern Appalachi­an moun­tains inter­act with soil organisms—and how tor­na­does might mix things up. I study many dif­fer­ent species. As an exam­ple, we can look at white pine (Pinus strobus), and the many pathogens that attack the roots of its seedlings.

The dance begins in an undis­turbed for­est. Because trees live for so long in one place, a mature pine tree accu­mu­lates a unique group of fun­gi around its roots—including pathogens that cause dis­eases in tree seedlings (in this case, Pythi­um and Rhi­zoc­to­nia). White pine seedlings that are very close to a mature tree are more like­ly to be attacked by these pathogens—causing stunt­ed growth, or even death. The far­ther away a seedling is from a mature tree, the less like­ly it is to get infect­ed. These dis­tant seedlings are more like­ly to sur­vive to matu­ri­ty. A pat­tern emerges where the mature pine trees are spaced far apart—leaving room for seedlings of oth­er species to grow, and cre­at­ing a diverse for­est.

In the mid­dle of the dance, we wit­ness the tornado—and how it changes the for­est envi­ron­ment. The mature pine tree dies, and the for­est floor is no longer shad­ed. The soil becomes hot­ter and dri­er. With­out the liv­ing mature tree as a host, spe­cial­ist pathogens are less active, and many die. Because of this, I am pre­dict­ing that plant-soil rela­tion­ships in recent­ly tor­na­do-dam­aged areas may be much weak­er. In the last part of the dance, seedlings close to the (killed) mature tree are no longer at greater risk for dis­ease; they grow and sur­vive the same as their more dis­tant sib­lings. The chang­ing plant-soil rela­tion­ships after dis­tur­bances might be one piece in the puz­zle of how diverse ecosys­tems change over time.

via Explore

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sta­tis­tics Explained Through Mod­ern Dance: A New Way of Teach­ing a Tough Sub­ject

The Illus­trat­ed Guide to a Ph.D.

Ser­i­al Entre­pre­neur Damon Horowitz Says “Quit Your Tech Job and Get a Ph.D. in the Human­i­ties”

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What Are Literature, Philosophy & History For? Alain de Botton Explains with Monty Python-Style Videos

in Education, History, Literature, Philosophy | November 5th, 2014

Once upon a time, ques­tions about the use-val­ue of art were the height of philis­tin­ism. “All art is quite use­less,” wrote the aes­thete Oscar Wilde, pre­sag­ing the atti­tudes of mod­ernists to come. Explain­ing this state­ment in a let­ter to a per­plexed fan, Wilde opined that art “is not meant to instruct, or to influ­ence action in any way.” But if you ask Alain de Bot­ton, founder of “cul­tur­al enter­prise” The School of Life, art—or lit­er­a­ture specifically—does indeed have a prac­ti­cal pur­pose. Four to be pre­cise.

In a pitch that might appeal to Dale Carnegie, de Bot­ton argues that lit­er­a­ture: 1) Saves you time, 2) Makes you nicer, 3) Cures lone­li­ness, and 4) Pre­pares you for fail­ure. The for­mat of his video above—“What is Lit­er­a­ture For?”—may be for­mu­la­ic, but the argu­ment may not be so con­trary to mod­ernist dic­ta after all. Indeed, as William Car­los Williams famous­ly wrote, “men die mis­er­ably every day / for lack / of what is found” in poet­ry. How many peo­ple per­ish slow­ly over wast­ed time, mean­ness, lone­li­ness, and bro­ken dreams?

Like de Botton’s short video intro­duc­tions to philoso­phers, which we fea­tured in a pre­vi­ous post, “What is Lit­er­a­ture For?” comes to us with Mon­ty Python-like ani­ma­tion and pithy nar­ra­tion that makes quick work of a lot of com­plex ideas. Whether you find this inspir­ing or insipid will depend large­ly on how you view de Botton’s broad-brush, pop­ulist approach to the human­i­ties in gen­er­al. In any case, it’s true that peo­ple crave, and deserve, more acces­si­ble intro­duc­tions to weighty sub­jects like lit­er­a­ture and phi­los­o­phy, sub­jects that—as de Bot­ton says above in “What is Phi­los­o­phy For?”—can seem “weird, irrel­e­vant, bor­ing.…”

Here, con­tra Lud­wig Wittgenstein’s claims that all phi­los­o­phy is noth­ing more than con­fu­sion about lan­guage, de Bot­ton expounds a very clas­si­cal idea of the dis­ci­pline: “Philoso­phers are peo­ple devot­ed to wis­dom,” he says. And what is wis­dom for? Its appli­ca­tion, unsur­pris­ing­ly, is also emi­nent­ly prac­ti­cal. “Being wise,” we’re told, “means attempt­ing to live and die well.” As some­one once indoc­tri­nat­ed into the Byzan­tine cult of aca­d­e­m­ic human­i­ties, I have to say this def­i­n­i­tion seems to me espe­cial­ly reduc­tive, but it does accord per­fect­ly with The School of Life’s promise of “a vari­ety of pro­grammes and ser­vices con­cerned with how to live wise­ly and well.”

Last­ly, we have de Botton’s expla­na­tion above, “What Is His­to­ry For?” Most peo­ple, he claims, find the sub­ject “bor­ing.” Giv­en the enor­mous pop­u­lar­i­ty of his­tor­i­cal dra­ma, doc­u­men­tary film, nov­els, and pop­u­lar non-fic­tion, I’m not sure I fol­low him here. The prob­lem, it seems, is not so much that we don’t like his­to­ry, but that we can nev­er reach con­sen­sus on what exact­ly hap­pened and what those hap­pen­ings mean. This kind of uncer­tain­ty tends to make peo­ple very uncom­fort­able.

Unboth­ered by this prob­lem, de Bot­ton press­es on, argu­ing that his­to­ry, at its best, pro­vides us with “solu­tions to the prob­lems of the present.” It does so, he claims, by cor­rect­ing our “bias toward the present.” He cites the obses­sive jack­ham­mer­ing of 24-hour news, which shouts at us from mul­ti­ple screens at all times. I have to admit, he’s got a point. With­out a sense of his­to­ry, it’s easy to become com­plete­ly over­whelmed by the inces­sant chat­ter of the now. Per­haps more con­tro­ver­sial­ly, de Bot­ton goes on to say that his­to­ry is full of “good ideas.” Watch the video above and see if you find his exam­ples per­sua­sive.

All three of de Botton’s videos are brisk, upbeat, and very opti­mistic about our capac­i­ty to make good use of the human­i­ties to bet­ter our­selves. Per­haps some of the more skep­ti­cal among us won’t be eas­i­ly won over by his argu­ments, but they’re cer­tain­ly wor­thy of debate and offer some very pos­i­tive ways to approach the lib­er­al arts. If you are per­suad­ed, then dive into our col­lec­tions of free lit­er­a­ture, his­to­ry and phi­los­o­phy cours­es high­light­ed in the sec­tion below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

78 Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es: From Ancient Greece to The Mod­ern World

55 Free Online Lit­er­a­ture Cours­es: From Dante and Mil­ton to Ker­ouac and Tolkien

Down­load 100 Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es & Start Liv­ing the Exam­ined Life

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

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Download the Complete Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Masterpiece

in Books, Literature | November 4th, 2014

sherlock_holmes_in_public-domain

I still remem­ber the thrill I felt when I hap­pened upon a set of the com­plete Sher­lock Holmes sto­ries at an antique store. For a mere ten dol­lars, I acquired hand­some­ly bound, suit­ably pati­na-of-age-bear­ing edi­tions of each and every one of the sleuth of 221B Bak­er Street’s adven­tures that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ever wrote. In addi­tion to this thrill, I also got a few sur­pris­es: first that all of those sto­ries com­bined — the sto­ries that made Holmes and his assis­tant Dr. John Wat­son into house­hold names of near­ly 130 years’ stand­ing — fit into two not-espe­cial­ly-large books; sec­ond, that Holmes solved his mys­ter­ies not just in 56 short sto­ries but four nov­els as well; and third, that many of those short sto­ries and nov­els dif­fered intrigu­ing­ly in tone and con­tent from my expec­ta­tions. So many mod­ern adap­ta­tions — all those tele­vi­sion series up to the BBC’s new and expen­sive-look­ing Sher­lock, the ear­ly CD-ROM com­put­er game, Hayao Miyaza­k­i’s steam­punk ani­ma­tion Sher­lock Hound, Guy Ritchie’s Robert Downey Jr.-showcasing Hol­ly­wood films — have con­vinced us we “know” Sher­lock Holmes, which makes it all the more fas­ci­nat­ing to inves­ti­gate, as it were, the orig­i­nal lit­er­a­ture.

These days, espe­cial­ly giv­en the recent rul­ing (just re-affirmed by the Supreme Court) that Conan Doyle’s Sher­lock Holmes sto­ries “are no longer cov­ered by Unit­ed States copy­right law and can be freely used by cre­ators with­out pay­ing any licens­ing fee to the Conan Doyle estate,” you can down­load the com­plete Sher­lock Holmes canon in a vari­ety of ebook for­mats, from PDF to ePub to ASCII to MOBI for Kin­dle. If you pre­fer lis­ten­ing to read­ing, Lib­rivox has made avail­able three dif­fer­ent ver­sions of Sher­lock Holmes in audio­book form. How­ev­er you choose tech­no­log­i­cal­ly to expe­ri­ence the Sher­lock Holmes canon, I rec­om­mend tak­ing it on chrono­log­i­cal­ly, begin­ning with the 1887 nov­el A Study in Scar­let — less a mys­tery, to my mind, than the scary tale of a mur­der­ous Mor­mon sect — to 1927’s “The Adven­ture of Shoscombe Old Place,” Holmes’ final Conan Doyle-penned adven­ture. Some­where in the mid­dle — in 1893’s “The Final Prob­lem,” to be pre­cise — Holmes’ cre­ator tried to kill the beloved detec­tive off, but the read­ing pub­lic would have none of it. What about Sher­lock Holmes sto­ries had got them so hooked that they could suc­cess­ful­ly demand a res­ur­rec­tion? Now you, too, can find out, with­out even hav­ing to spend the ten dol­lars, let alone go to the antique store.

Bonus: Below, you can lis­ten to The New Adven­tures of Sher­lock Holmes, an old-time radio show that aired in the US from Octo­ber 2, 1939 to July 7, 1947.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sher­lock Holmes Is Now in the Pub­lic Domain, Declares US Judge

Arthur Conan Doyle Dis­cuss­es Sher­lock Holmes and Psy­chics in a Rare Filmed Inter­view (1927)

Arthur Conan Doyle & The Cot­tin­g­ley Fairies: How Two Young Girls Fooled Sher­lock Holmes’ Cre­ator

Arthur Conan Doyle Fills Out the Ques­tion­naire Made Famous By Mar­cel Proust (1899)

1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices

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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27 More “Essential Films for the Student of Philosophy,” As Suggested By Open Culture Readers

in Film, Philosophy | November 4th, 2014

A post of ours last week on philo­soph­i­cal films piqued the inter­est of many a film-lov­ing, philo­soph­i­cal­ly-inclined read­er, and raised an impor­tant and per­haps unan­swer­able ques­tion: just what is a “philo­soph­i­cal film”? Does such a crea­ture even exist? Read­er Albert Hoff­man sug­gest­ed that “a real­ly great movie always is a philo­soph­i­cal movie, always opens the path to impor­tant philo­soph­i­cal ques­tions.” I find that state­ment hard to dis­pute, but then find myself also agree­ing with anoth­er read­er, Assy­outi, who writes “all bad films can be resources for philo­soph­i­cal dis­cus­sion.” Why not? What a philo­soph­i­cal film is depends, per­haps, on the def­i­n­i­tion of words like “philo­soph­i­cal,” “film,” and “is.”

In any case, the orig­i­nal­ly ref­er­enced list of 44 “essen­tial movies for the stu­dent of phi­los­o­phy,” com­piled in 2010 by Matt Whit­lock for Mubi, laid out some fair­ly spe­cif­ic cri­te­ria, name­ly that such films “(seem to be) incar­na­tions of clas­sic philo­soph­i­cal thought exper­i­ments or movies that have a major philo­soph­i­cal prob­lem as a main theme.” Yet, in addi­tion to films that fea­ture philoso­phers as char­ac­ters or par­tic­i­pants, this seems to me broad enough to cov­er an enor­mous range of movies—from Hitchock’s Ver­ti­go, a favorite of “pervert’s guide” the­o­rist Slavoj Žižek (above), and near­ly every film crit­ic every­where, to (speak­ing of bad films) Bill and Ted’s Excel­lent Adven­ture.

As I men­tioned in the pre­vi­ous post, the four years since Whitlock’s list have pro­duced a num­ber of movies that deserve inclu­sion, sev­er­al of which were high­light­ed in the com­ments. Addi­tion­al­ly, read­ers men­tioned sev­er­al over­looked films that cer­tain­ly meet the bar. And if we are to loosen up our definitions—and why not—the list expands even fur­ther. In that spir­it of inclu­sion, we offer an adden­dum to Whitlock’s 44, below, with the ever-nec­es­sary dis­claimer that this new list does not in any way exhaust the sub­ject. We do hope, how­ev­er, to spark fur­ther dis­cus­sion and, more impor­tant­ly, intro­duce inter­est­ing, thinky movies for read­ers to dis­cov­er. So, with­out fur­ther pre­am­ble, here are 27 more “essen­tial movies for the stu­dent of phi­los­o­phy,” in no par­tic­u­lar order, as sug­gest­ed by our always astute Open Cul­ture read­ers:

  1. Mind­walk (1990)
  2. Rosen­crantz & Guilden­stern Are Dead (1990)
  3. My Din­ner With Andre (1981)
  4. Step­pen­wolf (1974)
  5. Wings of Desire (1987)
  6. Cocteau’s Orphic Tril­o­gy—Blood of a Poet (1930), Orphee (1950), Tes­ta­ment of Orpheus (1959) [yes, this is three films, but we’ll count them as one for the pur­pos­es of this list]
  7. Pos­si­ble Worlds (2000)
  8. The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
  9. The Holy Moun­tain (1973)
  10. THX 1138 (1970)
  11. 99 Francs (2007)
  12. Un Chien Andalou (1929)
  13. Enter the Void (2009)
  14. Stalk­er (1979) — fea­tured ear­li­er today on OC
  15. Viva La Muerte (1971)
  16. I Stand Alone (1998)
  17. Iris (2001)
  18. World on a Wire (1973)
  19. Locke (2013)
  20. The Wid­ow of Saint-Pierre (2000)
  21. The Tri­al (1962)
  22. Life of Bri­an (1979)
  23. Being There (1979)
  24. Bladerun­ner (1982)
  25. Out­landish: Strange For­eign Bod­ies (2009)
  26. Is the Man Who Is Tall Hap­py? (2013) — see the trail­er above.
  27. Thir­teen Con­ver­sa­tions About One Thing (2001)

As you sure­ly know, the list that pleas­es every­one has yet to be invent­ed, so if you don’t find your sug­ges­tions on this one, please don’t take offense. The exer­cise has been more than worth the price of the tick­et for me—I’ve added quite a few titles to my nev­erend­ing list of films I absolute­ly must see before that whole buck­et thing. No doubt even the hippest among you has found a sur­prise or two here to add to yours. And if you’re dying to add num­ber 28, 29, 30, etc. then, please, let us know in the com­ments below. Or, if you want even more sug­ges­tions, check out the titles that were men­tioned on our Face­book page.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

44 Essen­tial Movies for the Stu­dent of Phi­los­o­phy

Watch The Idea, the First Ani­mat­ed Film to Deal with Big, Philo­soph­i­cal Ideas (1932)

Daniel Den­nett and Cor­nel West Decode the Phi­los­o­phy of The Matrix in 2004 Film

Two Ani­ma­tions of Plato’s Alle­go­ry of the Cave: One Nar­rat­ed by Orson Welles, Anoth­er Made with Clay

The Drink­ing Par­ty, 1965 Film Adapts Plato’s Sym­po­sium to Mod­ern Times

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

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Hear/Download Kurt Cobain’s Unearthed, Experimental Mixtape, “Montage Of Heck” (1986)

in Music | November 4th, 2014

Dan­ger­ous Minds has helped unearth Kurt Cobain’s “Mon­tage Of Heck” — a 1986 exper­i­men­tal col­lage of sounds that Cobain culled from his “wide-rang­ing col­lec­tion of LPs, manip­u­lat­ed record­ings of the radio, … Nir­vana demos,” and oth­er audio sources. Made with a four-track cas­sette recorder, the 36-minute record­ing fea­tures sounds ripped from record­ings by Simon & Gar­funkel, The Bea­t­les, Cher, James Brown, John Den­ver, The Par­tridge Fam­i­ly, George Michael and Queen. But if you think you’re going to hear an upbeat sam­pling of pop songs when you click play, you’ve got anoth­er thing com­ing.

Over at Vimeo, you can actu­al­ly down­load the audio track, and there you will find one com­ment that puts the mix­tape into some per­spec­tive. Owl Berg writes, “It’s no sur­prise that Kurt col­lab­o­rat­ed with William Bur­roughs on The “Priest” They Called Him. They were so obvi­ous­ly on the same wave­length. Here we have evi­dence of Kurt apply­ing the cut-up tech­nique which comes straight from Bur­roughs’ writ­ing and tape exper­i­ments, with results that are equal­ly fun­ny and fright­en­ing and mind-blow­ing and essen­tial to scrub­bing our minds clean of our pre­con­cep­tions about sound.” You can revis­it Bur­roughs’ and Cobain’s 1992 col­lab­o­ra­tion by vis­it­ing this post in our archive.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The “Priest” They Called Him: A Dark Col­lab­o­ra­tion Between Kurt Cobain & William S. Bur­roughs

William S. Bur­roughs “Sings” R.E.M. and The Doors, Backed by the Orig­i­nal Bands

Pat­ti Smith’s Cov­er of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” Strips the Song Down to its Heart

William S. Bur­roughs on the Art of Cut-up Writ­ing

William S. Burrough’s Avant-Garde Movie ‘The Cut Ups’ (1966)

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28 Important Philosophers List the Books That Influenced Them Most During Their College Days

in Books, Philosophy | November 3rd, 2014

Philosophy-Library-940x725

The web site Demasi­a­do Aire recent­ly asked “some of the world’s most impor­tant philoso­phers which three books influ­enced them the most while under­grad­u­ate stu­dents.” And, from what we can tell, they got a good response. 28 influ­en­tial philoso­phers duti­ful­ly jot­ted their lists, and, for at least the past day, Demasi­a­do Aire has been offline, seem­ing­ly over­whelmed by traf­fic. Thanks to the Inter­net Archive’s Way­back Machine, we can recov­er these lists and pro­vide you with a few high­lights. We have added links to the texts cit­ed by the philoso­phers. The free texts have an aster­isk (*) next to them.

Charles Tay­lor (McGill Uni­ver­si­ty):

–Phénoménolo­gie de la Per­cep­tion, Mau­rice Mer­leau-Pon­ty

–The Broth­ers Kara­ma­zov*, Fyo­dor Dos­to­evsky

–Jalons pour une théolo­gie du Laï­cat, Yves Con­gar

Daniel Den­nett (Tufts Uni­ver­si­ty):

“That’s easy:

–Word and Object, Quine.

–The con­cept of mind*, Gilbert Ryle

–Philo­soph­i­cal Inves­ti­ga­tions, Lud­wig Wittgen­stein

“I got to study with Quine and Ryle, but Wittgen­stein had died before I encoun­tered his work”.

Alexan­der Nehamas (Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty):

–Apol­o­gy of Socrates*, Pla­to

–Nico­machean Ethics*, Aris­to­tle

–Ethics*, Spin­oza

“Also, I should point out that Nietzsche’s On the Geneal­o­gy of Moral­i­ty* had a huge effect on me when I was a grad­u­ate stu­dent and had a for­ma­tive influ­ence on my philo­soph­i­cal devel­op­ment”.

David Chalmers (Aus­tralian Nation­al Uni­ver­si­ty):

“I was an under­grad­u­ate stu­dent in math­e­mat­ics rather than phi­los­o­phy, but the answer is”:

–Gödel, Esch­er Bach, Dou­glas Hof­s­tadter

–The Mind’s I, Dou­glas Hof­s­tadter & Daniel Den­nett

–Rea­sons and Per­sons, Derek Parfit

You can view lists by oth­er philoso­phers, includ­ing Alain de Bot­ton, Wendy Brown, Peter Mil­li­can, and more here. The image above comes via by MjYj.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

44 Essen­tial Movies for the Stu­dent of Phi­los­o­phy

Down­load 100 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es and Start Liv­ing the Exam­ined Life

Philoso­pher Por­traits: Famous Philoso­phers Paint­ed in the Style of Influ­en­tial Artists

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

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Kandinsky, Klee & Other Bauhaus Artists Designed Ingenious Costumes Like You’ve Never Seen Before

in Art | November 3rd, 2014

bauhaus-costumes-2

Artists of the Bauhaus school—includ­ing founder Wal­ter Gropius, Paul Klee, Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky, Piet Mon­dri­an and others—broke rad­i­cal­ly with famil­iar tra­di­tion and made min­i­mal­ist, abstract, and some­times shock­ing state­ments with their work. We know this his­to­ry, but you prob­a­bly haven’t seen these cul­tur­al fig­ures phys­i­cal­ly embody their aes­thet­ic prin­ci­ples as they do in the pho­tographs here, from cos­tume par­ties the Bauhaus school held through­out the twen­ties.

As Rachel Doyle at Curbed writes, “if you thought Bauhaus folk were good at design­ing cof­fee tables, just have a look at their costumes—as bewitch­ing and sculp­tur­al as any oth­er stu­dent project, but with an amaz­ing flam­boy­ance not oft ascribed to the move­ment.”

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The whim­si­cal cos­tume parties—to which, wrote Hun­gar­i­an archi­tect Farkas Mol­nár, artists devot­ed “the great­est expen­di­tures of energy”—represented fur­ther attempts to tran­scend “medieval con­di­tions” and inte­grate “today’s sci­en­tif­ic and tech­no­log­i­cal advances… into gen­er­al cul­ture.” So wrote Mol­nár in a 1925 essay, “Life at the Bauhaus,” where he describes the play­ful­ly seri­ous con­di­tions at the school. These par­ties, he asserts, were supe­ri­or to “fan­cy-dress balls” orga­nized by artists in oth­er cities in that “our cos­tumes are tru­ly orig­i­nal. Every­one pre­pares his or her own. Nev­er a one that has been seen before. Inhu­man, or humanoid, but always new.” Every­one par­tic­i­pat­ed, it seems, from the newest stu­dent to, as Mol­nár calls them, “the big­wigs”:

Kandin­sky prefers to appear decked out as an anten­na, Itten as an amor­phous mon­ster, Feininger as two right tri­an­gles, Moholy-Nagy as a seg­ment tran­spierced by a cross, Gropius as Le Cor­busier, Muche as an apos­tle of Maz­daz­nan, Klee as the song of the blue tree. A rather grotesque menagerie…

Might that be Kandin­sky in the pho­to­graph at the top? Just who is this lumi­nous fig­ure? Why did Gropius dress up as Le Cor­busier, and what, exact­ly, does “the song of the blue tree” look like? We can iden­ti­fy at least one of these artists—the bald man in black at the cen­ter of the pho­to­graph below is Oskar Schlem­mer, painter, sculp­tor, design­er, and chore­o­g­ra­ph­er. Schlem­mer gave Bauhaus cos­tume design its most for­mal con­text with the Tri­adic Bal­let, a pro­duc­tion, writes Dan­ger­ous Minds, that “com­bined his work in both sculp­ture and the­ater to cre­ate the inter­na­tion­al­ly acclaimed extrav­a­gan­za which toured from 1922 to 1929.”

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The ballet’s “18 cos­tumes,” writes Curbed, “were designed by match­ing geo­met­ric forms with anal­o­gous parts of the human body: a cylin­der for the neck, a cir­cle for the heads…. These elab­o­rate cos­tumes [see pho­to of per­form­ers below]… total­ly upped the ante at the Bauhaus school’s reg­u­lar cos­tume balls.” Schlem­mer “made no secret of the fact that he con­sid­ered the styl­ized, arti­fi­cial move­ments of mar­i­onettes to be aes­thet­i­cal­ly supe­ri­or to the nat­u­ral­is­tic move­ments of real humans.” His bal­let, Dan­ger­ous Minds remarks, may be “the least ‘human’ dance per­for­mance ever con­ceived.”

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It may come as no sur­prise then that the Tri­adic Bal­let influ­enced some of the hyper-styl­ized alien cos­tum­ing of David Bowie’s Zig­gy Star­dust tour. Per­haps even more than the pho­tographs of rev­el­ers from the cos­tume par­ties, the Tri­adic Bal­let, which has been peri­od­i­cal­ly revived since its 1922 debut, pre­serves the fas­ci­nat­ing inno­va­tions Bauhaus artists envi­sioned for the human form. Just below, watch a 1970 film pro­duc­tion recre­at­ing many of the orig­i­nal designs, and see more pho­tographs of Bauhaus cos­tumes at The Char­nel-House.

via Curbed

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Home­made Hand Pup­pets of Bauhaus Artist Paul Klee

Time Trav­el Back to 1926 and Watch Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky Cre­ate an Abstract Com­po­si­tion

Bauhaus, Mod­ernism & Oth­er Design Move­ments Explained by New Ani­mat­ed Video Series

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

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