Last week we told you about an ambitious video series — The Great War — that will document how World War I unfolded, week-by-week, over a four-year period, from 1914 to 1918. A new video will be released every Thursday, and it will reflect on what happened during the same week 100 years prior. When complete, there should be close to 300 videos in the series.
Today, we’re staying in the same time period, but getting even more micro. Wittgenstein Day-by-Day is a Facebook page that “tracks [Ludwig] Wittgenstein’s diary entries as they were written 100 years ago,” writes Levi Asher on his blog Literary Kicks. During World War I, Wittgenstein served on the frontlines in a howitzer regiment in Galicia and was decorated several times for his courage (more on that here). While fighting, he continued writing philosophy — texts that would be gathered in Notebooks, 1914–1916 – while also recording his experiences in his diaries. Today’s entry on Wittgenstein Day-by-Day reads:
Wednesday 18th November, 1914: In his private diary, LW reports hearing more thunder from the front-line, as well as machine-gun fire and heavy artillery fire. He records feeling pleased that their commander is again being replaced by their Lieutenant. He notes that he has done quite a lot of (philosophical) work, and is in a good mood. However, he also notes that in his work there has been at a standstill, as he needs a major incident to move forward (GT2, S.22).
Continuing his thought from yesterday, LW tells himself that it is all simply a matter of the existence of the logical place. ‘But what the devil is this “logical place”?’, he then asks himself (NB, p.31).
Ruan Lingyu delivered one of the greatest performances in silent cinema, and yet to Western audiences, she is almost completely unknown.
Up until the Imperial Japanese Army invaded the city in 1937, Shanghai was the thriving, cosmopolitan cultural heart of China. The first Chinese film was made in Shanghai in 1905 and, for the next couple of decades, costumed retellings of traditional tales dominated the industry. Then, in the ‘30s, filmmakers like Sun Yu and Cheng Bugao started to make gritty, realistic movies about the struggles of the lower class. Perhaps the greatest of these films is Wu Yonggang’s 1935 masterpiece The Goddess, featuring an absolutely heartbreaking performance by Ruan. You can watch it above.
On paper, the story of The Goddess could easily be mistaken for films by Josef Von Sternberg or G.W. Pabst – a “fallen woman” weepie where the protagonist suffers for the sins of hypocritical society. Ruan plays the nameless lead, a beautiful, impoverished woman forced to sell her body to feed and educate her son. She soon falls in with The Boss, a porcine, dissolute gangster who serves as her pimp. She scrapes and struggles to keep her son out of the same gutter where she finds herself trapped. Yet, at every step, she and her son are taunted and shunned. When she spends everything she has to put her son into a good school, the child is expelled simply because the other parents don’t approve of her. “Even though I am a degenerate woman,” she begs to the school board, “don’t I have the right as a mother to raise him as a good boy?”
While silent film acting tended towards the histrionic, Ruan’s performance is naturalistic while still having an emotional rawness that few actors could match. Just watch the scene where the protagonist is watching her son perform during a school play. Her expression of unadulterated parental pride slowly curdles as she hears vicious whispers from nearby hausfraus. Like Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich, Ruan has a wounded beauty that simply rivets you to the screen.
Like many of the characters she played, Ruan came from humble beginnings and had perpetual romantic trouble. When her complicated personal life became the fodder for press, she took an overdose of sleeping pills on March 8, 1935, leaving behind a note that read, “Gossip is a fearful thing.” She was only 24. Ruan’s funeral procession was over three miles long and three women were reportedly so distraught over her death that they committed suicide. The funeral even ended up on the front page of the New York Times who called it “the most spectacular funeral of the century.”
In 1992, Maggie Cheung played Ruan for Stanley Kwan’s Center Stage(1992), which ended up winning a Best Actress prize at the Berlin International Film Festival.
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.
The UK’s Open University has become a dependable source of very short, online video introductions to all sorts of things, from weighty subjects like religion, economics, and literary theory to lighter, but no less interesting fare like the art and science of bike design. With breezy tone and serious intent, their animated “60-Second Adventures” make seemingly arcane academic ideas accessible to laypeople with no prior background. Now they’ve teamed up with writer and BBC broadcaster Melvyn Bragg of In Our Time fame for a series of video shorts that run just a little over 60 seconds each, with animations by Andrew Park of Cogni+ive, and narration by comedic actor Harry Shearer from Spinal Tap, The Simpsons, and, most recently, Nixon’s the One.
Drawn from Bragg’s BBC 4 radio program “A History of Ideas,” the shorts introduce exactly that—each one a précis of a longstanding philosophical problem like Free Will vs. Determinism (top) or the Problem of Evil (above). Unlike some similarly rapid outlines, these videos—like the tie-in Bragg radio program—don’t simply sketch out the issues in abstract; they draw from specific approaches from fields as diverse as neuroscience, moral philosophy, theology, and feminist theory. In the video on free will at the top, for example, Shearer introduces us to the Libet experiments, performed in the 1980s by neurologist Benjamin Libet to test our ability to make voluntary, conscious decisions. The “Free Will Defense” video above references—at least visually—Bertrand Russell’s notorious teapot in its rather skeptical presentation of this theological bugbear.
Some of the videos get even more specific, focusing in on the work of one thinker whose contributions are central to our understanding of certain concepts. Just above in “Feminine Beauty,” we have an introduction to existential philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s argument that feminine beauty, and gender presentation more generally, is socially constructed by prevailing patriarchal norms—a concept central to the feminist work of later thinkers like Judith Butler. And below, we have the 18th century concept of the “Sublime,” a supposedly higher, more threatening and ineffable aesthetic mode, as discussed in the work of conservative political philosopher Edmund Burke (also a subject dear to Immanuel Kant, who had his own take on the idea).
And for much more extensive discussions of these age-old philosophical questions with real living “philosophers, theologians, lawyers, neuroscientists, historians and mathematicians,” download episodes of Melvyn Bragg’s “A History of Ideas” show here or on iTunes.
David Byrne has played many roles: frontman of Talking Heads, architectural observer, composer of opera (specifically opera about Imelda Marcos, former first lady of the Philippines, the country from which I write this post today), enthusiastic musicalcollaborator, urban cycling advocate — and that only counts the ones he’s played here in Open Culture posts. (Someday, we’ve got to write up his love of Powerpoint.) But did you know he’s also done a free internet radio show, and for nearly a decade at that? “For one or two days a month I queue up David Byrne’s Radio Station on the web and listen to his two-hour loop of new, wonderful, delicious tunes,” writes Kevin Kelly in a Cool Tools post from 2008, just over halfway into the life of the show so far. “Rock-star Byrne is a professional musical pioneer, admirably eclectic in his taste, yet astutely discriminating at the same time. Over years of listening to all kinds of music — experimental, indie, international, fringe, classical, pop — he’s heard enough to make some great recommendations.”
Kelly cites such tantalizing Byrnean playlists as “Icelandic Pop,” “Opera highlights,” “Eclectic Stuff,” and “African Fusion Pop.” More recent sessions, which can run for three hours or longer, include “Southern Writers,” “Songs of Burt Bacharach,” and “Raga Rock.” A new playlist comes out every month. You can list to his August playlist, “Custom Jackets, Now and Then,” a celebration of women “who have been tainted or touched by country music” including Neko Case, Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, and Lucinda Williams. You can also hear a brand new November playlist on the davidbyrne.com front page, which uses a newer audio player than all the previous installments. “Viva Mexico Part 1” promises a selection of artists from that vibrant country who “have found ways to incorporate their Mexican musical heritage and culture into what might be called the global pop form,” resulting not in “imitations of North American or UK alt-rock” but songs that “sound like nothing but themselves.” And if you can’t trust David Byrne to know musical uniqueness when he hears it, who can you trust?
Increasingly Facebook seems a virtual pet cemetery, with images of recently departed cats and dogs buttressed with words of heartbreak and consolation. It feels hard-hearted to scroll past without laying a comment at each freshly dug cyber-mound, even when one has no personal relationship with the deceased, or, to large degree, the owner. The lazy man may “like” news of a beloved Airedale’s demise, but acknowledgment cannot always be said to equal respect.
And what, pray tell, is the protocol after? How many minutes should elapse before it is acceptable to post Throwback Thursday shots of one’s younger, big-haired self? What if one accidentally sends a Farmville notification to the bereaved?
On account of our birds, cats were not allowed in the house; but from a friend in London I received a present of a white kitten — Williamina — and she and her numerous offspring had a happy home at “Gad’s Hill.” … As the kittens grow older they became more and more frolicsome, swarming up the curtains, playing about on the writing table and scampering behind the bookshelves. But they were never complained of and lived happily in the study until the time came for finding them other homes. One of these kittens was kept, who, as he was quite deaf, was left unnamed, and became known by servants as “the master’s cat,” because of his devotion to my father. He was always with him, and used to follow him about the garden like a dog, and sit with him while he wrote. One evening we were all, except father, going to a ball, and when we started, left “the master” and his cat in the drawing-room together. “The master” was reading at a small table, on which a lighted candle was placed. Suddenly the candle went out. My father, who was much interested in his book, relighted the candle, stroked the cat, who was looking at him pathetically he noticed, and continued his reading. A few minutes later, as the light became dim, he looked up just in time to see puss deliberately put out the candle with his paw, and then look appealingly towards him. This second and unmistakable hint was not disregarded, and puss was given the petting he craved. Father was full of this anecdote when all met at breakfast the next morning.
One anecdote Mamie chose not to include is that when Dickens’ Bob, the deaf kitten mentioned above, left this earthly plane, the master turned him into a letter opener.
Well, not the whole cat, actually. Just a single paw, which the author had stuffed and attached to an ivory blade. The blade is engraved “C.D. In Memory of Bob 1862” which is more grave marker than most pussycats can hope for.
I certainly felt the need to hustle my then 12-year-old son past this unusual souvenir when it was displayed as part of the New York Public Library’s cozy exhibit, Charles Dickens: The Key to Character. The kid’s an animal lover who was in Oliver! at the time. I feared he’d respond with Tale of Two Cities-level peasant rage, which is acceptable, except when there’s a show that must go on.
Preserved!, a British taxidermy blog sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council offers a tender take on Dickens’ motivation. Over the years, he had several animals, including a pet raven, stuffed, but his closeness with Bob called for a special approach. 19th-century literature scholar Jenny Pyke writes that “the taxidermied cat paw stands out in its tactile softness and emotional tenderness. Most often, as popular as it was in the nineteenth century, taxidermy was consumed visually only, displayed in glass cases or crowded cabinets. With Bob’s paw, Dickens created an object meant to be held daily.”
It’s not for the squeamish, but I can see how this cannily orchestrated hand-holding could bring ongoing comfort. More than the fleeting condolences proliferating on Facebook, anyway.
It didn’t take long, only 25 hours, for Griffin Dunne and Susanne Rostock to raise enough money on Kickstarter to complete a documentary on novelist and essayist Joan Didion. Initially hoping to raise $80,000, they’ve already received commitments exceeding $211,000, and they still have four days to go.
We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live will be the first and only documentary about Joan Didion. And it will be made with Joan, using her own words. The trailer for the documentary just premiered on Vogue. It’s fitting, seeing that Didion landed her first job, at Vogue, after winning an essay contest sponsored by the magazine. She also published her seminal essay, ““On Self Respect” in Vogue in 1961.
This summer, we revisited a literacy test from the Jim Crow South. Given predominantly to African-Americans living in Louisiana in 1964, the test consisted of 30 ambiguous questions to be answered in 10 minutes. One wrong answer, and the test-taker was denied the right to vote. It was all part of the South’s attempt to impede free and fair elections, and ensure that African-Americans had no access to politics or mechanisms of power.
How hard was the test? You can take it yourself below (see an answer key here) and find out. Just recently, the same literacy test was also administered to Harvard students — students who can, if anything, ace a standardized test — and not one passed. The questions are tricky. But even worse, if push comes to shove, the questions and answers can be interpreted in different ways by officials grading the exam. Carl Miller, a resident tutor at Harvard and a fellow at the law school, told The Daily Mail: “Louisiana’s literacy test was designed to be failed. Just like all the other literacy tests issued in the South at the time, this test was not about testing literacy at all. It was a … devious measure that the State of Louisiana used to disenfranchise people that had the wrong skin tone or belonged to the wrong social class.” (Sometimes the test was also given to poor whites.) Above, you can watch scenes from the Harvard experiment and students’ reactions.
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