William Faulkner attended the University of Mississippi and lasted only three semesters. He skipped classes, managed to pull a D in English, and then dropped out in 1920.
A far cry from his academic performance in 1907–1908 when, as a fourth grader, he got mostly E’s (presumably meaning “Excellent”), a yearly average of 96, and a high grade of 98 in Grammar.
The problem of violence, perhaps the true root of all social ills, seems irresolvable. Yet, as most thoughtful people have realized after the wars of the twentieth century, the dangers human aggression pose have only increased exponentially along with globalization and technological development. And as Albert Einstein recognized after the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—which he partly helped to engineer with the Manhattan Project—the aggressive potential of nations in war had reached mass suicidal levels.
After Einstein’s involvement in the creation of the atomic bomb, he spent his life “working for disarmament and global government,” writes psychologist Mark Leith, “anguished by his impossible, Faustian decision.” Yet, as we discover in letters Einstein wrote to Sigmund Freud in 1932, he had been advocating for a global solution to war long before the start of World War II. Einstein and Freud’s correspondence took place under the auspices of the League of Nation’s newly-formed International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, created to foster discussion between prominent public thinkers. Einstein enthusiastically chose Freud as his interlocutor.
In his first letter to the psychologist, he writes, “This is the problem: Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?” Well before the atomic age, Einstein alleges the urgency of the question is a matter of “common knowledge”—that “with the advance of modern science, this issue has come to mean a matter of life and death for Civilization as we know it.”
Einstein reveals himself as a sort of Platonist in politics, endorsing The Republic’s vision of rule by elite philosopher-kings. But unlike Socrates in that work, the physicist proposes not city-states, but an entire world government of intellectual elites, who hold sway over both religious leaders and the League of Nations. The consequence of such a polity, he writes, would be world peace—the price, likely, far too high for any world leader to pay:
The quest of international security involves the unconditional surrender by every nation, in a certain measure, of its liberty of action—its sovereignty that is to say—and it is clear beyond all doubt that no other road can lead to such security.
Einstein expresses his proposal in some sinister-sounding terms, asking how it might be possible for a “small clique to bend the will of the majority.” His final question to Freud: “Is it possible to control man’s mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychosis of hate and destructiveness?”
Freud’s response to Einstein, dated September, 1932, sets up a fascinating dialectic between the physicist’s perhaps dangerously naïve optimism and the psychologist’s unsentimental appraisal of the human situation. Freud’s mode of analysis tends toward what we would now call evolutionary psychology, or what he calls a “’mythology’ of the instincts.” He gives a mostly speculative account of the prehistory of human conflict, in which “a path was traced that led away from violence to law”—itself maintained by organized violence.
Freud makes explicit reference to ancient sources, writing of the “Panhellenic conception, the Greeks’ awareness of superiority over their barbarian neighbors.” This kind of proto-nationalism “was strong enough to humanize the methods of warfare.” Like the Hellenistic model, Freud proposes for individuals a course of humanization through education and what he calls “identification” with “whatever leads men to share important interests,” thus creating a “community of feeling.” These means, he grants, may lead to peace. “From our ‘mythology’ of the instincts,” he writes, “we may easily deduce a formula for an indirect method of eliminating war.”
And yet, Freud concludes with ambivalence and a great deal of skepticism about the elimination of violent instincts and war. He contrasts ancient Greek politics with “the Bolshevist conceptions” that propose a future end of war and which are likely “under present conditions, doomed to fail.” Referring to his theory of the competing binary instincts he calls Eros and Thanatos—roughly love (or lust) and death drives—Freud arrives at what he calls a plausible “mythology” of human existence:
The upshot of these observations, as bearing on the subject in hand, is that there is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity’s aggressive tendencies. In some happy corners of the earth, they say, where nature brings forth abundantly whatever man desires, there flourish races whose lives go gently by; unknowing of aggression or constraint. This I can hardly credit; I would like further details about these happy folk.
Nonetheless, he says wearily and with more than a hint of resignation, “perhaps our hope” that war will end in the near future, “is not chimerical.” Freud’s letter offers no easy answers, and shies away from the kinds of idealistic political certainties of Einstein. For this, the physicist expressed gratitude, calling Freud’s lengthy response “a truly classic reply…. We cannot know what may grow from such seed.”
This exchange of letters, contends Humboldt State University philosophy professor John Powell, “has never been given the attention it deserves.… By the time the exchange between Einstein and Freud was published in 1933 under the title Why War?, Hitler, who was to drive both men into exile, was already in power, and the letters never achieved the wide circulation intended for them.” Their correspondence is now no less relevant, and the questions they address no less urgent and vexing. You can read the complete exchange at professor Powell’s site here.
People come to know the world the way they come to map it—through their perceptions of how its elements are connected and of how they should move among them. This is precisely what the series is attempting by situating the map at the heart of cultural life and revealing its relationship to society, science, and religion…. It is trying to define a new set of relationships between maps and the physical world that involve more than geometric correspondence. It is in essence a new map of human attempts to chart the world.
If you head over to this page, then look in the upper left, you will see links to three volumes (available in a free PDF format). My suggestion would be to look at the gallery of color illustrations for each book, links to which you’ll find below. The image above, appearing in Vol. 2, dates back to 1534. It was created by Oronce Fine, the first chair of mathematics in the Collège Royal (aka the Collège de France), and it features the world mapped in the shape of a heart. Pretty great.
The character we know as “Woody Allen,” the persona we see in his films, the stammering neurotic weighed down by existential angst and a desperate horniness laced with intellectuality, was created not in his movies, but in his stand-up, recordings of which have been in and out of circulation since 1964. (They’re now available here.)
The director is reportedly even more embarrassed of these recordings than his films–and anyone who has seen his sit-down with critic Mark Cousins can attest, he can’t even stand to watch his films–but maybe that’s about the performance itself, and not the material.
I say that because in the clip above, a routine that Allen loved enough that he often used it to end his sets in the 60s, we can see the nascent idea for his Oscar-winning 2011 film Midnight in Paris.
Riffing on The Lost Generation, he imagines himself back in time, carousing with Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and famed Spanish bullfighter Manolete. It’s a one-two-three-and punchline joke we won’t ruin, but it’s interesting that consciously or subconsciously, this idea returned some five decades later to be fleshed out into one of Allen’s best late-period films. Was he always thinking of this routine as a someday film? In interviews from the time of the film’s release, he never mentions the stand-up bit.
Creating art is often like composting, and one never knows what might float to the top after years of influences and absorption. Listening to his stand-up, one can find the joke that he recycled for Annie Hall (“I was thrown out of NYU my freshman year, I cheated on my metaphysics final in college, I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me.”).
There’s also this routine about a scary subway ride:
The scene was later recreated in Bananas with a young Sylvester Stallone.
Allen’s pre-film career, when he was writing for television and his own stand-up, when his goals were to “write for Bob Hope and host the Oscars” makes for fascinating reading, and we’ll leave you with this history from WMFU. Nerdist has more thoughts on the relationship between The Lost Generation joke and Midnight in Paris here.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
As an unapologetic member of the “Millennial” generation, allow me to tell you how to win over a great many of us at a stroke: just appeal to our long-instilled affinity for Japanese animation and classic video games. Raised, like many of my peers born in the late 1970s and early 1980s, on a steady diet of those art forms — not that everyone knew to acknowledge them as art forms back then — I respond instinctively to either of them, and as for their intersection, well, how could I resist?
I certainly can’t resist the sterling example of anime-meets-retrogaming in action just above: an 8‑Bit Cinema double-feature, offering David and Henry Dutton’s pixelated renditions of hugely respected Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki’s films Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. In just under eight minutes, the video tellsboth stories — the former of a young girl transported into not just the spirit realm but into employment at one of its bathhouses; the latter of the unending struggle between humans and forest gods in 15th-century Japan — as traditional side-scrolling, platform-jumping video games.
Clearly labors of love by true classic gamers, these transformations get not just the graphics (which actually look better than real games of the era, in keeping with Miyazaki’s artistry) but the sound, music, and even gameplay conventions just right. I’d love to play real versions of these games, especially since, apart from an unloved adaptation of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Miyazaki’s movies haven’t plunged into the video-game realm.
And if you respond better to the aesthetic of classic gaming than to that of Japanese animation, do have a look at 8‑Bit Cinema’s other work, much of which you can sample in their show reel with clips from their versions of pictures like The Shining, Kill Bill, and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. I remember many childhood conversations about how video games would eventually look just like our favorite movies, animated or otherwise; little did we know that, one day, our favorite movies would also look just like video games.
H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds has terrified and fascinated readers and writers for decades since its 1898 publication and has inspired numerous adaptations. The most notorious use of Wells’ book was by Orson Welles, whom the author called “my little namesake,” and whose 1938 War of the Worlds Halloween radio play caused public alarm (though not actually a national panic). After the occurrence, reports Phil Klass, the actor remarked, “I’m extremely surprised to learn that a story, which has become familiar to children through the medium of comic strips and many succeeding and adventure stories, should have had such an immediate and profound effect upon radio listeners.”
Surely Welles knew that is precisely why the broadcast had the effect it did, especially in such an anxious pre-war climate. The 1898 novel also startled its first readers with its verisimilitude, playing on a late Victorian sense of apocalyptic doom as the turn-of-the century approached. But what contemporary circumstances eight years later, we might wonder, fueled the imagination of Henrique Alvim Corrêa, whose 1906 illustrations of the novel you can see here? Wells himself approved of these incredible drawings, praising them before their publication and saying, “Alvim Corrêa did more for my work with his brush than I with my pen.”
Indeed they capture the novel’s uncanny dread. Martian tripods loom, ghastly and cartoonish, above blasted realist landscapes and scenes of panic. In one illustration, a grotesque, tentacled Martian ravishes a nude woman. In a surrealist drawing of an abandoned London above, eyes protrude from the buildings, and a skeletal head appears above them. The alien technology often appears clumsy and unsophisticated, which contributes to the generally terrifying absurdity that emanates from these finely rendered plates.
Alvim Corrêa was a Brazilian artist living in Brussels and struggling for recognition in the European art world. His break seemed to come when the War of the Worlds illustrations were printed in a large-format, limited French edition of the book, with each of the 500 copies signed by the artist himself.
Unfortunately, Corrêa’s tuberculosis killed him four years later. His War of the Worlds drawings did not bring him fame in his lifetime or after, but his work has been cherished since by a devoted cult following. The original prints you see here remained with the artist’s family until a sale of 31 of them in 1990. (They went up for sale again recently, it seems.) You can see many more, as well as scans from the book and a poster announcing the publication, at Monster Brains and the British Library site.
If you’ve ever looked at a mindbending, impossible piece of architecture designed by M.C. Escher and thought, well, I would love to play that, then you just might love Back to Bed, a video game for Windows, Mac, Google Play and Playstation.
Similar to last year’s aesthetically beautiful architecture puzzle game Monument Valley, players make their way through 30 levels of increasingly difficult landscapes. You play a dog-like companion that tries to stop his sleep-walking owner Bob from falling off into space by placing objects in his path. But, as with these games, you must use logic to access some of the objects and thinking several moves ahead stretches the brain.
The giant, green apples recall Rene Magritte, melted watches are out of Dalí, and the voice that says “The stairs are not what they seem”? We have another Lynch fan in Bedtime Time Digital Games’ crew. And the whole narcolepsy theme has a bit of the ol’ Caligari going for it.
The small company consists of former students who created the game “in a freezing old warehouse on the harbor in Aalborg, Denmark,” according to their bio. They forged ahead with the game after a Kickstarter campaign and what sounds like many years later, they won the student showcase at San Francisco’s Independent Games Festival. That attracted investors and with actual funding, they’ve rewritten the game to make it really shine on HDTVs.
Despite the suspenseful gameplay, there’s much that’s relaxing in the worlds of Back to Bed, from its children book graphic design—everything looks airbrushed—to its hypnotic, hypnagogic sound, including a very Brian Eno-esque ambient soundtrack.
“Back to Bed, the game says out loud in a drone, half-awake voice when you finish a level. But this addictive game might just keep you up later than usual.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Last month, we featured poet, professor, and WFMU radio host Kenneth Goldsmith singing the theory of Theodor Adorno, Sigmund Freud, and Ludwig Wittgenstein — heavy reading, to be sure, but therein lay the appeal. How differently do we approach these formidable theoretical texts, Goldsmith’s project implicitly asks, if we receive them not just aurally rather than textually, but also in a light — not to say goofy — musical arrangement? But if it should drain you to think about questions like that, even as you absorb the thought of the likes of Adorno, Freud, and Wittgenstein, might we suggest Kenneth Goldsmith singing Harry Potter?
Perhaps the best-known modern exemplar of “light reading” we have, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books present themselves as ripe for adaptation, most notably in the form of those eight big-budget films released between 2001 and 2011. On the other end of the spectrum, with evidently no budget at all, comes Goldsmith’s 30-minute adaptation, which you can hear just above, or along with his various other sung texts at Pennsound. Here he sings, with ever-shifting musical accompaniment and through some otherworldly voice processing, what sounds like the final novel in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
“She tells a good story” — thus has every adult Harry Potter-reader I know explained the appeal of Rowling’s children’s novels even outside of the children’s demographic, especially as they awaited Deathly Hallows’ release in 2007. Having never dipped into the well myself, I couldn’t say for sure, but to my mind, if she tells a good enough story, that story will survive no matter the form into which you transpose it. The Potter faithful hold a variety of opinions about the degree of justice each movie does to their favorite novels, and even about the voice that reads them aloud in audiobook form, but what on Earth will they think of Goldsmith’s idiosyncratic rendition?
Update: Kenneth shot us an email a few minutes ago and filled out the backstory on this recording. Turns out the story is even more colorful than we first thought. He writes: “I was a DJ on WFMU from 1995–2010. In 2007, J.K. Rowling released the seventh and final Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Prior to the book’s release the day I went on the air at WFMU, someone had leaked a copy to the internet, enraging Scholastic Books, who threatened anybody distributing it with a heavy lawsuit. I printed out and sang in my horrible voice the very last chapter of the book on the air, thereby spoiling the finale of the series for anyone listening. During my show, the station received an angry call from Scholastic Books. It appears that their whole office was listening to WFMU that afternoon. Nothing ever came of it.”
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