Ayn Rand Trashes C.S. Lewis in Her Marginalia: He’s an “Abysmal Bastard”

in Books, Philosophy, Religion | July 15th, 2014

Images via Wikimedia Commons

The political intersection of Ayn Randian libertarians and Evangelical conservatives is a baffling phenomenon for most of us outside the American right. It’s hard to reconcile the atheist arch-capitalist and despiser of social welfare with, for example, the Sermon on the Mount. But hey, mixed marriages often work out, right? Well, as for Rand herself, one would hardly find her sympathetic to religion or its expositors at any point in her career. Take her sound lashing of writer, scholar, and lay theologian C.S. Lewis, intellectual hero of Protestant Christianity. (Wheaton College houses his personal library, and there exists not only a C.S. Lewis Institute, but also a C.S. Lewis Foundation.) Lewis’ The Abolition of Man (1943), while ostensibly a text on education, also purports, like Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, to expound the principles of natural law and objective moral value. Rand would have none of it.

Religion journal First Things brings us excerpts from the edited collection, Ayn Rand’s Marginalia: Her critical comments on the writings of over 20 authors. In it, Rand glosses Lewis’s Abolition of Man with savage ferocity, calling the author an “abysmal bastard,” “cheap, drivelling non-entity” [sic], and “abysmal scum!” The screenshot above (Lewis left, Rand’s annotations right) from the First Things’ blog post offers a typical representation of Rand’s tone throughout, and includes some particularly elaborate insults.

The C.S. Lewis Foundation comments that Lewis “probably would not have approved of the level of venom, but he probably would not have liked Rand’s philosophy much either.” Another Christian academic has successfully squared an appreciation for both Rand and Lewis, but writes critically of Rand, who “seems to have interpreted Lewis’s book as a Luddite screed against science and technology,” part of her “tendency to caricature her opponents.” Certainly no one ever accused her of subtlety. “It’s pretty clear,” our professor continues, “that when showing students how to engage in scholarly discourse, Ayn Rand should not be the model.” No, indeed, but how she would thrive on the Internet.

Read more at First Things, and download a PDF of the Rand-annotated Lewis excerpts here.

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

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5 Free Short Stories by Nadine Gordimer

in Literature | July 15th, 2014

By now, you know that Nadine Gordimer has died. She was 90 years old. Back in 1991, when she won the Nobel Prize, The New York Times made this announcement:

Nadine Gordimer, whose novels of South Africa portray the conflicts and contradictions of a racist society, was named winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature today as her country finally begins to dismantle the system her works have poignantly explored for more than 40 years.

In a brief citation, the Swedish Academy, which confers the awards, referred to her as “Nadine Gordimer, who through her magnificent epic writing has — in the words of Alfred Nobel — been of very great benefit to humanity.”

The academy also added that “her continual involvement on behalf of literature and free speech in a police state where censorship and persecution of books and people exist have made her ‘the doyenne of South African letters.’ ”

Yesterday, The New Yorker commented that, although she wrote 15 novels, it was “through her short fiction Gordimer made her presence felt the most.” Gordimer published her very first short story, “Come Again Tomorrow,” in a Johannesburg magazine in 1938, when she was just 15 years old. Thirteen years later, there came another first — the first of many stories she published in The New Yorker (“A Watcher of the Dead”). Although many of Gordimer’s New Yorker stories remain locked up, available only to the magazine’s subscribers, we’ve managed to dig up several open ones. Above, you can watch Gordimer read her 1999 story called “Loot” while visiting Harvard University in 2005. The text has since been re-published on the Nobel Prize web site. Below, you can also listen to author Tessa Hadley read “City Lovers,” first published in The New Yorker in 1975. The story “focusses on a love affair between a white man and a ‘colored’ woman in Apartheid South Africa. It’s deeply political in its details—the man is a geologist at a mining company, the couple’s affair is illegal, and they cover it up by pretending that she is his servant. ”

Other Gordimer stories available online include “The First Sense” and “A Beneficiary”, published respectively in The New Yorker in 2006 and 2007. “The Second Sense” came out in The Virginia Quarterly, also in 2007. If you, dear Open Culture readers, happen to know of any other Gordimer stories published online, please let us know in the comments sections below, and we’ll add them to the roundup.

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Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock (1969)

in Music | July 14th, 2014

What must it have been like to have been at Woodstock? Like, really have been there, not just watched the film or the 2009 movie about Woodstock, not just have gone to any of the several million muddy, druggy outdoor festivals that proliferated in Woodstock’s wake, but really been there, man? I’ll never know. The real experience of the 1960s can feel as forever irretrievable as that of the 1860s. But, wow, am I glad for the development of moving pictures and live audio recording in that 100 years.

Not only can we see the throngs of happy hippies making their way across Max and Miriam Yasgur’s dairy farm in the initial few minutes above, but we do not have to smell them! Seriously, the footage leading up to Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock performance is fun, including a brief glimpse of Jerry Garcia hanging out with the people. But you’re here to see Jimi, so, if you can’t wait, skip to ahead. The crowd certainly waited—waited three days for Hendrix to close the festival Sunday night with his band Gypsy Sun & Rainbows. Then they waited some more, all night, in fact, until Hendrix finally took the stage at 8:00 a.m. that Monday morning, August 18, 1969. I imagine everyone who stayed would say it was well worth it. Part 2 of the video is here.

The performances, as you know, are legendarily blistering and include Hendrix’s famously screaming, feedback-drenched “Star-Spangled Banner.” See it above like you never could if you were knee-deep in mud and standing behind a crowd of thousands in the summer sun. Hear it above in audio from Internet Archive, who also have mp3 and ogg vorbis versions of each song for free download. And hear a radio documentary about that performance below. Enjoy!

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

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Tour the World’s Street Art with Google Street Art

in Art, Google, Travel | July 14th, 2014

By far the most enjoyable part of our recent family trip to London was the afternoon my young son and I spent in Shoreditch, groping our way to No Brow, a comics shop I had noticed on an early morning stroll with our hostess. Our route was evidence that I had forgotten the coordinates, the street name, the name of the shop… Eventually, I realized we were lost, and that is where the real fun began, as we retraced our steps using street art as bread crumbs.

Ah right, there’s that rooftop mushroom installation!

And there’s that Stik figure…

After a while, a FedEx man took pity on us, ruining our fun by steering us toward the proper address..

I’m not sure I could ever duplicate our trail, but I enjoy trying with Google Street Art. Armchair travelers can use it to project themselves to the heart of ephemeral, possibly illegal exhibitions all over the globe,.

Bogotá... Paris... New York’s legendary 5 Pointz, before the landlord clutched and whitewashed the entire thing in the dead of night. Each up close photo bears a highly informational caption, much more than you’d find in the street itself. Think of it as an after-the-fact digital museum. It’s appropriate, given the ephemeral nature of the work. An online presence is its best shot at preservation.

Those of us with something to contribute can add to the record with a user gallery or by tagging our photos with #StreetArtist.

Enter Google Street Art here.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, homeschooler and the Chief Primatologist of The East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

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Lost Kubrick: A Short Documentary on Stanley Kubrick’s Unfinished Films

in Film | July 14th, 2014

Living, as many do, in Los Angeles, and loving, as many do, the films of Stanley Kubrick, I managed to attend last year’s acclaimed Kubrick exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art more than once. The first time there, I marveled at all the artifacts they’d collected from the production of my favorite Kubrick films, the ones I’ve seen seven, eight, nine times: Dr. Strangelove, Barry Lyndon, 2001: A Space Odyssey, etc. But the second time, I focused on the rooms dedicated to the Kubrick films I’d never seen — the ones, in fact, that nobody has ever seen.

Several of his unfinished projects got far enough into pre-production to leave behind a considerable amount of intriguing research materials, script notes, shooting schedules, design sketches, and screen tests. The story of each project’s origin and demise reveals qualities of not just Kubrick’s much-examined working methods, but of his personality. “He was a man of such varied interests that he was always busy,” says former Warner Brothers executive John Calley in the short documentary above, Lost Kubrick. And if Kubrick had an interest, he instinctively threw himself into the making of a motion picture to do with it.

“Napoleon was one of the abiding interests of Stanley’s life,” says Anthony Frewin, Kubrick’s assistant on 2001, “along with extraterrestrial intelligence, the Holocaust, concentration camps, Julius Caesar, English place name etymology, and three thousand other things.” We’ve featured Kubrick’s Napoleon before, but Lost Kubrick also includes an examination of The Aryan Papers, his abandoned Holcaust project from the 1990s. I do wonder how it would have compared to Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg’s completed Holocaust project from the 1990s, which itself had an influence on Kubrick’s dropping The Aryan Papers. But Jurassic Park, Spielberg’s dinosaur project from that same time, convinced Kubrick that special effects technology had come far enough for him to move forward on A.I., which he would later hand over to Spielberg himself. The younger director seems to have fallen into the role of executor of Kubrick’s many ideas; just last year, he even announced plans to turn Kubrick’s Napoleon script into a television series. Personally, it makes me wonder less what Spielberg will do with the story of Napoleon than what Kubrick could have accomplished in this age of the television-series auteur.

Lost Kubrick will be added to our list, 285 Free Documentaries Online, part of our larger collection of 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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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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What Did Jane Austen Really Look Like? New Wax Sculpture, Created by Forensic Specialists, Shows Us

in History, Literature | July 14th, 2014

Last Wednesday, the Jane Austen Centre in Bath, England unveiled the wax sculpture above, which they say is the closest “anyone has come to the real Jane Austen in 200 years.” The figure, The Guardian reports, is the creation of forensic artist Melissa Dring, a “specialist team using forensic techniques which draw on contemporary eye-witness accounts,” and Emmy-winning costume designer Andrea Galer.

Austen often introduced her characters with broad descriptions—Emma Woodhouse is “handsome, clever, and rich,” Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Bingley simply “a single man in possession of a good fortune.” But her talent consisted in undermining such stock descriptions, and the societal assumptions they entail. Instead of types, she gave readers complicated individuals squirming uncomfortably inside the bonds of propriety and decorum. But what of Austen herself? Readers initially knew nothing of the author, as her novels were first published anonymously.

Since her death in 1817, biographers have told and retold her personal history, and she has become an almost cult-like figure for fans of her work. Some of the author’s first biographers were family members, including her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, who published A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1872 (above). In it, Austen-Leigh describes his aunt as “very attractive”: “Her figure was rather tall and slender, her step light and firm, and her whole appearance expressive of health and animation. In complexion she was a clear brunette with a rich colour; she had full round cheeks, with mouth and nose small and well-formed, bright hazel eyes, and brown hair forming natural curls round her face.”

Based partly on that description and others from niece Caroline, the wax figure, Dring told the BBC, is “pretty much like her.” Austen “came from a large… family and they all seemed to share the long nose, the bright sparkly eyes and curly brown hair. And these characteristics come through the generations.” Dring used Austen’s sister Cassandra’s famous portrait as a starting point, but noted that the sketch “does make it look like she’s been sucking lemons […] We know from all accounts of her, she was very lively, very great fun to be with and a mischievous and witty person.” All descriptions with which her devoted readers would doubtless agree. See more photos of the Austen wax sculpture here.

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

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Slavoj Žižek Charged With Plagiarizing A White Nationalist Magazine Article

in Current Affairs | July 14th, 2014

Anyone who does any sort of research-based writing knows how easy it is for an occasional close approximation of another’s prose to slip into a summary. Such instances rarely constitute plagiarism, but they can occupy an uncomfortable gray area. Recent allegations against Slovenian theorist Slavoj Žižek, however, charge the wholesale theft of entire passages of text, almost verbatim. It’s an unusual story, not least because of the source material Žižek allegedly lifted—an article in American Renaissance, identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a white supremacist publication.

As Critical Theory reports, the first hints of a possible borrowing came on July 8 from Steve Sailer, writing for the The Unz Review (an alternative outlet with its own sometimes peculiar preoccupations when it comes to race). Sailer points to a portion of Žižek’s 2006 article “A Plea for a Return to Différance (with a Minor Pro Domo Sua)” that is uncharacteristically lucid and, well, un-Žižek-like. The text in question summarizes Kevin MacDonald’s anti-Semitic evolutionary-psychology book The Culture of Critique. The day after Sailer’s observation, blogger Deogolwulf tracked down a review of the MacDonald book by Stanley Hornbeck in American Renaissance and placed Žižek and Hornbeck’s prose side by side. Observe the significant similarities and minor differences here.

In a July 11th article breaking the story, Newsweek wrote that it had contacted Deogolwulf and Sailer for comment, but neither responded by the time of publication. However, James Williams, senior managing editor for the journal Critical Inquiry, which published Žižek’s article, did, saying Žižek “absolutely” borrowed from Hornbeck. Had they known, said Williams, “we would have certainly asked him to remove the illegal passages.” Hornbeck also responded, calling the borrowing “contemptible.”

Did Žižek knowingly plagiarize American Renaissance (does Žižek even read American Renaissance)? According to Žižek himself, the answer is no. In an email to Critical Theory, he writes that the close resemblance between his article and Hornbeck’s review is the result of a summary of MacDonald’s work given to him by an unnamed “friend.” Here’s more from Žižek’s email. (Note: he uses the word “résumé” here in the sense of “summary”):

With regard to the recent accusations about my plagiarism, here is what happened. When I was writing the text on Derrida which contains the problematic passages, a friend told me about Kevin Macdonald’s theories, and I asked him to send me a brief resume. The friend send [sic] it to me, assuring me that I can use it freely since it merely resumes another’s line of thought. Consequently, I did just that – and I sincerely apologize for not knowing that my friend’s resume was largely borrowed from Stanley Hornbeck’s review of Macdonald’s book.

“The problematic passages,” Žižek continues in his defense, “are purely informative, a report on another’s theory for which I have no affinity whatsoever.” He adds at the end, “I nonetheless deeply regret the incident.”

It is true that unlike, say, Senator Rand Paul—who apparently passed off almost wholly plagiarized articles as his own original work—Žižek does not take any credit for MacDonald’s ideas and summarizes them only in an attempt to refute them. Nonetheless, as Newsweek notes (in an unfortunate choice of words), for conservative critics, Žižek is “a big scalp” and the matter a very serious one. Zizek’s “sloppy citations,” writes Critical Theory, have come under fire before—notably in his feud with Noam Chomsky, who caught Žižek misattributing a racist quote to him. (Žižek “admitted the mistake and apologized.”) This case seems much more severe for the length of the passages lifted as well as Žižek’s failure to check and cite his source. Charges of academic plagiarism frequently go to press. But with such a public figure (and film star) as the flamboyant Marxist Žižek, and such inflammatory far right source material, this particularly regrettable incident—unintentional as it may be—makes for some particularly sensationalist headlines.

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

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Thomas Jefferson’s Handwritten Vanilla Ice Cream Recipe

in Food & Drink, History | July 13th, 2014

Another thing you can credit Thomas Jefferson with — being the first known American to record an ice cream recipe. It’s one of 10 surviving recipes written by the founding father.

According to Monticello.org, ice cream began appearing “in French cookbooks starting in the late 17th century, and in English-language cookbooks in the early 18th century.” And there “are accounts of ice cream being served in the American colonies as early as 1744.” Jefferson likely tasted his fair share of the dessert while living in France (1784–1789), and it would continue to be served at Monticello upon his return. By the first decade of the 19th century, ice cream would become increasingly found in cookbooks published throughout the U.S.

You can see the entire recipe for Jefferson’s vanilla ice cream recipe here, and a read transcript below.

2. bottles of good cream.
6. yolks of eggs.
1/2 lb. sugar

mix the yolks & sugar
put the cream on a fire in a casserole, first putting in a stick of Vanilla.
when near boiling take it off & pour it gently into the mixture of eggs & sugar.
stir it well.
put it on the fire again stirring it thoroughly with a spoon to prevent it’s sticking to the casserole.
when near boiling take it off and strain it thro’ a towel.
put it in the Sabottiere[12]
then set it in ice an hour before it is to be served. put into the ice a handful of salt.
put salt on the coverlid of the Sabotiere & cover the whole with ice.
leave it still half a quarter of an hour.
then turn the Sabottiere in the ice 10 minutes
open it to loosen with a spatula the ice from the inner sides of the Sabotiere.
shut it & replace it in the ice
open it from time to time to detach the ice from the sides
when well taken (prise) stir it well with the Spatula.
put it in moulds, justling it well down on the knee.
then put the mould into the same bucket of ice.
leave it there to the moment of serving it.
to withdraw it, immerse the mould in warm water, turning it well till it will come out & turn it into a plate

via @Biblioklept

Ayn Rand Trashes C.S. Lewis in Her Marginalia: He’s an “Abysmal Bastard”

5 Free Short Stories by Nadine Gordimer

Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock (1969)

Tour the World’s Street Art with Google Street Art

Lost Kubrick: A Short Documentary on Stanley Kubrick’s Unfinished Films

What Did Jane Austen Really Look Like? New Wax Sculpture, Created by Forensic Specialists, Shows Us

Slavoj Žižek Charged With Plagiarizing A White Nationalist Magazine Article

Thomas Jefferson’s Handwritten Vanilla Ice Cream Recipe

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