How Quentin Tarantino Creates Suspense in His Favorite Scene, the Tension-Filled Opening Moments of Inglourious Basterds

in Film, Writing | April 13th, 2017

We all have a favorite Quentin Taran­ti­no scene, but the direc­tor of Pulp Fic­tion, Kill Bill, The Hate­ful Eight, and oth­er movies that can seem made out of noth­ing but mem­o­rable scenes also has one of his own. “My favorite thing I think I’ve ever writ­ten is the scene at the French farm­house at the begin­ning of Inglou­ri­ous Bas­ter­ds,” Busi­ness Insid­er quotes him as say­ing in a pan­el at San Diego Com­ic-Con. “The scene Taran­ti­no refers to is the very first one of his bru­tal World War II epic” where­in “SS Colonel Hans Lan­da (Christoph Waltz) arrives at a remote dairy farm in France that is sus­pect­ed of hid­ing Jew­ish peo­ple. Lan­da sits down with the farmer (Denis Meno­chet) and ques­tions him about the where­abouts of the Drey­fus fam­i­ly.” A “tense and sneaky psy­cho­log­i­cal mind game” ensues.

You can learn exact­ly what makes those open­ing twen­ty min­utes such a minia­ture mas­ter­piece in the Lessons from the Screen­play video above. Draw­ing from psy­cho­log­i­cal research on the nature of ten­sion and sus­pense, series cre­ator Michael Tuck­er high­lights cer­tain “key com­po­nents of ten­sion expe­ri­ences,” includ­ing uncer­tain­ty, insta­bil­i­ty, and a lack of con­trol, and shows how Taran­ti­no uses them to height­en the ten­sion as much as pos­si­ble through­out these sev­en­teen min­utes.

“It’s like the sus­pense is a rub­ber band,” Taran­ti­no says in a Char­lie Rose inter­view clip includ­ed in the video, “and I’m just stretch­ing it and stretch­ing it and stretch­ing it to see how far it can stretch.”

Taran­ti­no also uses a suite of tech­niques that movie­go­ers have come to asso­ciate specif­i­cal­ly with him, such as long stretch­es of dia­logue that go off on extend­ed tan­gents (“Part of my plan,” he says in anoth­er inter­view clip, “is to bury it in so much minu­tia about noth­ing that you don’t real­ize you’re being told an impor­tant plot point until it becomes impor­tant”), the charged con­sump­tion of food and drink, and the poten­tial for car­nage at any moment. “The fact that the audi­ence is aware they’re watch­ing a Taran­ti­no film adds to the sus­pense,” says Tuck­er. “We know there will be con­se­quences, and that Taran­ti­no has no qualms about show­ing vio­lence.” And after the tour de force of its open­ing, the movie still has well over two hours of pure Taran­tin­ian cin­e­ma to go.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Films of Quentin Taran­ti­no: Watch Video Essays on Pulp Fic­tion, Reser­voir Dogs, Kill Bill & More

Watch 34 of Quentin Tarantino’s Visu­al Ref­er­ences to Cit­i­zen Kane, Blade Run­ner, 8 1/2 & Oth­er Great Films

The Pow­er of Food in Quentin Tarantino’s Films

Decod­ing the Screen­plays of The Shin­ing, Moon­rise King­dom & The Dark Knight: Watch Lessons from the Screen­play

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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A Free 700-Page Chess Manual Explains 1,000 Chess Tactics in Plain English

in Games | April 13th, 2017

Image by Michael Mag­gs, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

FYI: In 2011, Ward Farnsworth pub­lished a two-vol­ume col­lec­tion called Preda­tor at The Chess­board: A Field Guide To Chess Tac­tics (Vol­ume 1 — Vol­ume 2) where he explains count­less chess tac­tics in plain Eng­lish. In this 700-page col­lec­tion, “there are 20 chap­ters, about 200 top­ics with­in them, and over 1,000 [chess] posi­tions dis­cussed.” Now for the even bet­ter part: Farnsworth also made these vol­umes avail­able free online. Just vis­it chesstactics.org and you can start mak­ing your­self a bet­ter chess play­er when­ev­er you have the urge.

Nat­u­ral­ly, Preda­tor At The Chess­board will be added to our col­lec­tion, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices.

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 and BlueSky.

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:

Clay­ma­tion Film Recre­ates His­toric Chess Match Immor­tal­ized in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

A Human Chess Match Gets Played in Leningrad, 1924

Man Ray Designs a Supreme­ly Ele­gant, Geo­met­ric Chess Set in 1920 (and It’s Now Re-Issued for the Rest of Us)

Play Chess Against the Ghost of Mar­cel Duchamp: A Free Online Chess Game

Watch Bill Gates Lose a Chess Match in 79 Sec­onds to the New World Chess Cham­pi­on Mag­nus Carlsen

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Hamilton’s Lin-Manuel Miranda Creates a 19-Song Playlist to Help You Get Over Writer’s Block

in Music, Writing | April 13th, 2017

Pho­to by Steve Jurvet­son, via Flickr Com­mons

Last year we alert­ed you to a short doc about authors and their rela­tion­ship with writer’s block. Many were philo­soph­i­cal. Oth­ers like Philipp Mey­er dis­missed it: ““I don’t think writer’s block actu­al­ly exists,” he said. “It’s basi­cal­ly inse­cu­ri­ty.”

How seri­ous­ly you take it or how ter­ri­bly it affects you, we have a Spo­ti­fy playlist cre­at­ed by Lin-Manuel Miran­da of Hamil­ton fame called “Write Your Way Out.”

He revealed the playlist on his Twit­ter feed on March 20 with an apol­o­gy that the mix took longer to make than expect­ed. It is a mix, he said, “about writ­ing, songs that fea­ture great writ­ing, and every­thing in between.” Like his oth­er mix­es, he’s think­ing about us, that kind­ly Mr. Miran­da.

The eclec­tic mix begins with “Hap­py Birth­day Dar­ling” from Bright Lights Big City (“Now when you write my son, make the choice, find your voice, look down deep in your heart”), then fea­tures Eng­lish-lan­guage hip hop from the Hamil­ton Mix­tape (Nas’ “Wrote My Way Out”) and Span­ish-lan­guage hip hop from Calle 13 (“Aden­tro”), folk clas­sics (Joni Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morn­ing”, Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages”), even some jaun­ty pop from Vam­pire Week­end (“Oxford Com­ma”) and Sara Bareilles (“Love Song”). He ends with Raúl Esparza­’s bal­lad “Why” from the musi­cal Tick, Tick, BOOM!, which clos­es the mix with a paean to the healthy addic­tion of cre­ativ­i­ty. (“I make a vow, right here and now / I’m gonna spend my time this way,” he sings.)

And don’t wor­ry if you don’t have Spo­ti­fy (which you can down­load here). He’s list­ed the tracks on his Twit­ter post too.

It’s nice to know that Miran­da fussed over this selec­tion like one used to do back in the days of cas­sette tapes. Does that mean he has a crush on all of us?

via Nerdist

Relat­ed Con­tent:

8 Writ­ers on How to Face Writer’s Block and the Blank Page: Mar­garet Atwood, Jonathan Franzen, Joyce Car­ol Oates & More

A Clever Super­cut of Writ­ers Strug­gling with Writer’s Block in 53 Films: From Bar­ton Fink to The Roy­al Tenen­baums

How Famous Writ­ers Deal With Writer’s Block: Their Tips & Tricks

Ray Brad­bury Gives 12 Pieces of Writ­ing Advice to Young Authors (2001)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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John Coltrane Draws a Picture Illustrating the Mathematics of Music

in Jazz, Math, Music | April 12th, 2017

Physi­cist and sax­o­phon­ist Stephon Alexan­der has argued in his many pub­lic lec­tures and his book The Jazz of Physics that Albert Ein­stein and John Coltrane had quite a lot in com­mon. Alexan­der in par­tic­u­lar draws our atten­tion to the so-called “Coltrane cir­cle,” which resem­bles what any musi­cian will rec­og­nize as the “Cir­cle of Fifths,” but incor­po­rates Coltrane’s own inno­va­tions. Coltrane gave the draw­ing to sax­o­phon­ist and pro­fes­sor Yusef Lateef in 1967, who includ­ed it in his sem­i­nal text, Repos­i­to­ry of Scales and Melod­ic Pat­terns. Where Lateef, as he writes in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, sees Coltrane’s music as a “spir­i­tu­al jour­ney” that “embraced the con­cerns of a rich tra­di­tion of auto­phys­iopsy­chic music,” Alexan­der sees “the same geo­met­ric prin­ci­ple that moti­vat­ed Einstein’s” quan­tum the­o­ry.

Nei­ther descrip­tion seems out of place. Musi­cian and blog­ger Roel Hol­lan­der notes, “Thelo­nious Monk once said ‘All musi­cans are sub­con­scious­ly math­e­mati­cians.’ Musi­cians like John Coltrane though have been very much aware of the math­e­mat­ics of music and con­scious­ly applied it to his works.”

Coltrane was also very much aware of Einstein’s work and liked to talk about it fre­quent­ly. Musi­can David Amram remem­bers the Giant Steps genius telling him he “was try­ing to do some­thing like that in music.”

Hol­lan­der care­ful­ly dis­sects Coltrane’s math­e­mat­ics in two the­o­ry-heavy essays, one gen­er­al­ly on Coltrane’s “Music & Geom­e­try” and one specif­i­cal­ly on his “Tone Cir­cle.” Coltrane him­self had lit­tle to say pub­li­cal­ly about the inten­sive the­o­ret­i­cal work behind his most famous com­po­si­tions, prob­a­bly because he’d rather they speak for them­selves. He pre­ferred to express him­self philo­soph­i­cal­ly and mys­ti­cal­ly, draw­ing equal­ly on his fas­ci­na­tion with sci­ence and with spir­i­tu­al tra­di­tions of all kinds. Coltrane’s poet­ic way of speak­ing has left his musi­cal inter­preters with a wide vari­ety of ways to look at his Cir­cle, as jazz musi­cian Corey Mwam­ba dis­cov­ered when he infor­mal­ly polled sev­er­al oth­er play­ers on Face­book. Clar­inetist Arun Ghosh, for exam­ple, saw in Coltrane’s “math­e­mat­i­cal prin­ci­ples” a “musi­cal sys­tem that con­nect­ed with The Divine.” It’s a sys­tem, he opined, that “feels quite Islam­ic to me.”

Lateef agreed, and there may be few who under­stood Coltrane’s method bet­ter than he did. He stud­ied close­ly with Coltrane for years, and has been remem­bered since his death in 2013 as a peer and even a men­tor, espe­cial­ly in his ecu­meni­cal embrace of the­o­ry and music from around the world. Lateef even argued that Coltrane’s late-in-life mas­ter­piece A Love Supreme might have been titled “Allah Supreme” were it not for fear of “polit­i­cal back­lash.” Some may find the claim ten­den­tious, but what we see in the wide range of respons­es to Coltrane’s musi­cal the­o­ry, so well encap­su­lat­ed in the draw­ing above, is that his recog­ni­tion, as Lateef writes, of the “struc­tures of music” was as much for him about sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­ery as it was reli­gious expe­ri­ence. Both for him were intu­itive process­es that “came into exis­tence,” writes Lateef, “in the mind of the musi­can through abstrac­tion from expe­ri­ence.”

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 and BlueSky.

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:

The Secret Link Between Jazz and Physics: How Ein­stein & Coltrane Shared Impro­vi­sa­tion and Intu­ition in Com­mon

John Coltrane’s Hand­writ­ten Out­line for His Mas­ter­piece A Love Supreme

John Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps’ Ani­mat­ed

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

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A 3,350-Song Playlist of Music from Haruki Murakami’s Personal Record Collection

in Literature, Music | April 12th, 2017

Music and writ­ing are insep­a­ra­ble in the hippest mod­ern nov­els, from Ker­ouac to Nick Horn­by to Irvine Welsh. It might even be said many such books would not exist with­out their inter­nal sound­tracks. When it comes to hip, pro­lif­ic mod­ern nov­el­ist Haru­ki Muraka­mi, we might say the author him­self may not exist with­out his sound­tracks, and they are sprawl­ing and exten­sive. Muraka­mi, who is well known for his intense focus and hero­ic achieve­ments as a marathon and dou­ble-marathon run­ner, exceeds even this con­sum­ing pas­sion with his near-reli­gious devo­tion to music.

Muraka­mi became a con­vert to jazz fan­dom at the age of 15 and until age 30 ran a jazz club. Then he sud­den­ly became a nov­el­ist after an epiphany at a base­ball game. (Hear Ilana Simons read his ver­sion of that sto­ry in her short ani­mat­ed film above). His first book’s sto­ry unfold­ed in an envi­ron­ment total­ly per­me­at­ed by music and music fan cul­ture. From then on, musi­cal ref­er­ences spilled from his char­ac­ters’ lips, and swirled around their heads per­pet­u­al­ly.

What sets Muraka­mi apart from oth­er music-obsessed nov­el­ists is not only the degree of his obses­sion, but the breadth of his musi­cal knowl­edge. He is as flu­ent in clas­si­cal as he as in jazz and six­ties folk and pop, and his range in each genre is con­sid­er­able. He has so much to say about clas­si­cal music, in fact, that he once pub­lished a book of six con­ver­sa­tions between him­self and Sei­ji Oza­wa, “one of the world’s lead­ing orches­tral con­duc­tors.”  Murakami’s 2013 Col­or­less Tsuku­ru Taza­ki and His Years of Pil­grim­age—its title a ref­er­ence to Franz Liszt—contains per­haps his most elo­quent state­ment on the role music plays in his life and work, phrased in uni­ver­sal terms:

Our lives are like a com­plex musi­cal score. Filled with all sorts of cryp­tic writ­ing, six­teenth and thir­ty-sec­ond notes and oth­er strange signs. It’s next to impos­si­ble to cor­rect­ly inter­pret these, and even if you could, and could then trans­pose them into the cor­rect sounds, there’s no guar­an­tee that peo­ple would cor­rect­ly under­stand, or appre­ci­ate, the mean­ing there­in.

“At times,” writes Scott Mes­low at The Week, “read­ing Murakami’s work can feel like flip­ping through his leg­en­dar­i­ly expan­sive record col­lec­tion.” While we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured playlists drawn from Murakami’s jazz obses­sion and from the gen­er­al vari­ety of his dis­crim­i­nat­ing (yet thor­ough­ly West­ern) musi­cal palate, these have been minus­cule by com­par­i­son with his per­son­al library of LPs, an “inspi­ra­tional… wall of 10,000 records,” the major­i­ty of which are jazz. Muraka­mi admits he always lis­tens to music when he works, and you can see part of his floor-to-ceil­ing record library, and huge speak­er sys­tem, in a pho­to of his desk on his attrac­tive­ly-designed web­site. Down below, we bring you one of the next best things to actu­al­ly sit­ting in his study, a playlist of 3,350 tracks from Murakami’s per­son­al col­lec­tion. (If you need Spo­ti­fy’s free soft­ware, down­load it here.)

Hoagy Carmichael, Lionel Hamp­ton, Her­bie Han­cock, Gene Kru­pa, Djan­go Rein­hardt, Sergei Prokofiev, Fred­er­ic Chopin… it’s quite a mix, and one that may not only remind you of sev­er­al moments in Murakami’s body of work, but will also give you a sam­pling of the sound­track to its author’s imag­i­na­tion as he tran­scribes the “cryp­tic writ­ing” we have to “trans­pose… into the cor­rect sounds” as we try to make sense of it.

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 and BlueSky.

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:

A 96-Song Playlist of Music in Haru­ki Murakami’s Nov­els: Miles Davis, Glenn Gould, the Beach Boys & More

Haru­ki Murakami’s Pas­sion for Jazz: Dis­cov­er the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar

A Dream­i­ly Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Haru­ki Muraka­mi, Japan’s Jazz and Base­ball-Lov­ing Post­mod­ern Nov­el­ist

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

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Artificial Neural Network Reveals What It Would Look Like to Watch Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting on LSD

in Art | April 12th, 2017

Any­one who watched Bob Ross’ The Joy of Paint­ing from 1983 to 1994 knows the show had a bit of a sur­re­al qual­i­ty to it. With that soft voice, reduced often to a whis­per, Ross slapped some paint onto the can­vas, smeared it around, and even­tu­al­ly some­thing mag­i­cal appeared–a moun­tain, a stream, a for­est, what­ev­er.  Nowa­days, the show has expe­ri­enced some­thing of a renais­sance and achieved cult sta­tus. 30 sea­sons of The Joy of Paint­ing live on YouTube (legit­i­mate­ly, it seems), and they’ve become fod­der for cre­ative projects that take Bob Ross to new sur­re­al heights. Exhib­it 1, “Deeply Arti­fi­cial Trees,” appears above.

This art­work rep­re­sents what it would be like for an AI to watch Bob Ross on LSD (once some­one invents dig­i­tal drugs). It shows some of the unrea­son­able effec­tive­ness and strange inner work­ings of deep learn­ing sys­tems. The unique char­ac­ter­is­tics of the human voice are learned and gen­er­at­ed as well as hal­lu­ci­na­tions of a sys­tem try­ing to find images which are not there.

For a lit­tle on the sci­ence of arti­fi­cial neur­al net­works, see this relat­ed item in our archive: What Hap­pens When Blade Run­ner & A Scan­ner Dark­ly Get Remade with an Arti­fi­cial Neur­al Net­work.

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 and BlueSky.

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:

Watch Bob Ross’ The Joy of Paint­ing Free Online: The First 27 Sea­sons

Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey Ren­dered in the Style of Picas­so; Blade Run­ner in the Style of Van Gogh

Neur­al Net­works for Machine Learn­ing: A Free Online Course

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Are We Living in a Computer Simulation?: A 2‑Hour Debate with Neil Degrasse Tyson, David Chalmers, Lisa Randall, Max Tegmark & More

in Philosophy, Science | April 12th, 2017

What do we live in: the only uni­verse that exists, or an elab­o­rate com­put­er sim­u­la­tion of a uni­verse? The ques­tion would have fas­ci­nat­ed Isaac Asi­mov, and that pre­sum­ably counts as one of the rea­sons the Isaac Asi­mov Memo­r­i­al Debate took it as its sub­ject last year. Though the so-called “sim­u­la­tion hypoth­e­sis” has, in var­i­ous forms, crossed the minds of thinkers for mil­len­nia, it’s enjoyed a par­tic­u­lar moment in the zeit­geist in recent years, not least because Elon Musk has pub­licly stat­ed his view that, in all prob­a­bil­i­ty, we do indeed live in a sim­u­la­tion. And, if you can’t trust the guy who hit it big with Tes­la and Pay­Pal on the nature of real­i­ty, who can you?

Well, you might also con­sid­er lis­ten­ing to the per­spec­tives of New York Uni­ver­si­ty philoso­pher David Chalmers, MIT cos­mol­o­gist Max Tegmark, and three the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cists, James Gates of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land, Lisa Ran­dall of Har­vard, and Zohreh Davou­di of MIT.

They, with mod­er­a­tion by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, dig into the sim­u­la­tion hypoth­e­sis for two hours, approach­ing from all dif­fer­ent angles its ori­gin, its plau­si­bil­i­ty, and its impli­ca­tions. Davou­di, who has done seri­ous research on the ques­tion, brings her work to bear; Ran­dall, who finds lit­tle rea­son to cred­it the notion that we live in a sim­u­la­tion in the first place, has more of an inter­est in why oth­ers find it so com­pelling all of a sud­den.

Whether you believe it, reject it, or sim­ply enjoy enter­tain­ing the idea, you can’t help but feel a strong reac­tion of one kind or anoth­er to the sim­u­la­tion hypoth­e­sis, and Tyson con­tributes his usu­al humor to knock the dis­cus­sion back down to Earth when­ev­er it threat­ens to become too abstract. But how should we respond to the pos­si­bil­i­ty of liv­ing in com­put­ed real­i­ty in the here and now (or “here” and now,” if you pre­fer)? The Matrix pro­posed a kind of sim­u­la­tion-hypoth­e­sis world whose heroes break out, but we may ulti­mate­ly have no more abil­i­ty to see the hard­ware run­ning our world than Mario can see the hard­ware run­ning his. “If you’re not sure whether you’re actu­al­ly sim­u­lat­ed or not,” says Tegmark, “my advice to you is to go out there and live real­ly inter­est­ing lives and do unex­pect­ed things so the sim­u­la­tors don’t get bored and shut you down.” In these unre­al times, you could cer­tain­ly do worse.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Are We Liv­ing Inside a Com­put­er Sim­u­la­tion?: An Intro­duc­tion to the Mind-Bog­gling “Sim­u­la­tion Argu­ment”

Richard Dawkins and Jon Stew­art Debate Whether Sci­ence or Reli­gion Will Destroy Civ­i­liza­tion

David Byrne & Neil deGrasse Tyson Explain the Impor­tance of an Arts Edu­ca­tion (and How It Strength­ens Sci­ence & Civ­i­liza­tion)

The Phi­los­o­phy of The Matrix: From Pla­to and Descartes, to East­ern Phi­los­o­phy

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Watch Animated Introductions to 13 Classic Authors: Kafka, Austen, Dostoevsky, Dickens & Many More

in Animation, Literature | April 12th, 2017

Pop­u­lar inde­pen­dent philoso­pher Alain de Bot­ton has been pro­vid­ing mini-intro­duc­tions to aca­d­e­m­ic sub­jects for sev­er­al years now through his School of Life. These take the form of ani­mat­ed pré­cis of the life and work of a hand­ful of promi­nent authors who might be con­sid­ered rep­re­sen­ta­tive, if not essen­tial, to the dis­ci­pline. In phi­los­o­phy, we have such indis­pens­able fig­ures as Pla­to, Rene Descartes, and Immanuel Kant. In polit­i­cal the­o­ry, we have Adam Smith, John Rawls, Karl Marx. Wher­ev­er we land—conservative, lib­er­al, or radical—we end up inter­act­ing with such thinkers. When it comes to the gen­er­al cat­e­go­ry of “Lit­er­a­ture,” how­ev­er, it seems to me it should be a bit more dif­fi­cult to choose only a few fig­ure­heads.

For a good part of Euro­pean his­to­ry, most peo­ple couldn’t read the lan­guages they spoke, but even those who could were hard­ly con­sid­ered lit­er­ate. This dis­tinc­tion was reserved for elites with clas­si­cal edu­ca­tions who read Latin and usu­al­ly Greek. Lit­er­a­ture meant Vir­gil, Ovid, Horace, Homer…. Even after the Ref­or­ma­tion and the spread of lit­er­a­cy in “vul­gar” tongues, the dis­dain for com­mon tongues remained. The rad­i­cal­ism of Dante and lat­er Cer­vantes was to write great lit­er­a­ture in their nation­al lan­guages. Dur­ing the 18th cen­tu­ry, the nov­el was often con­sid­ered pri­mar­i­ly mid­dle class women’s enter­tain­ment, and in much of the 19th, a pop­u­lar diver­sion rarely wor­thy of the high­est crit­i­cal appraisal.

The 20th cen­tu­ry brought not only mod­ernist rev­o­lu­tions but social rev­o­lu­tions that opened doors for women voic­es and writ­ers pre­vi­ous­ly rel­e­gat­ed to the mar­gins. In our cur­rent age, a diver­si­ty of writ­ers now firm­ly occu­py the cen­ter of cul­ture. The oughts were dom­i­nat­ed by Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-win­ning The Brief Won­drous Life of Oscar Wao, for exam­ple. This year’s Pulitzer win­ners include Col­son White­head and poet Tye­him­ba Jess. Nobel and Pulitzer win­ner Toni Mor­ri­son just swept up anoth­er award from the Amer­i­can Acad­e­my of Arts & Sci­ences. This is not to men­tion mul­ti­ple-award-win­ning inter­na­tion­al writ­ers like Derek Wal­cott, Gabriel Gar­cia Mar­quez, Chi­ma­man­da Ngozi Adichie.… Ven­er­a­ble west­ern lit­er­ary tra­di­tions have become glob­al in com­po­si­tion.

But in every peri­od of lit­er­ary his­to­ry, inter­na­tion­al writ­ers inter­act­ed, cor­re­spond­ed, influ­enced, and pla­gia­rized each oth­er. There is no sin­gle line of descent through the his­to­ry of lit­er­a­ture, no sin­gu­lar impe­r­i­al sto­ry that dom­i­nates its pro­duc­tion and recep­tion. Its loca­tion varies from age to age, its fam­i­lies are mas­sive and sprawl­ing, loose­ly con­nect­ed at the edges, but some­times only very loose­ly. Per­haps it is a tes­ta­ment to the patri­cian con­ser­vatism of phi­los­o­phy that it remains a field dom­i­nat­ed by respons­es to dead great men. Lit­er­a­ture has proven much more dynam­ic. De Botton’s choic­es in his intro­duc­to­ry video series on lit­er­a­ture do not quite reflect this dynamism. Why Voltaire and not, well, Cer­vantes, gen­er­al­ly con­sid­ered for cen­turies the father of the mod­ern nov­el form? Why no Faulkn­er, Gertrude Stein, Haru­ki Muraka­mi, or Toni Mor­ri­son? No Allen Gins­berg, Mar­garet Atwood, James Bald­win?

These authors and many oth­ers may sure­ly be to come. And we should bear in mind the source: not only is de Bot­ton a pop philoso­pher first and crit­ic sec­on­dar­i­ly, but he is also pro­mot­ing a schol­ar­ly approach to self-help. The authors he choos­es, there­fore, all have life lessons to impart of the kind de Bot­ton believes can help us be hap­pi­er, nicer peo­ple who have bet­ter rela­tion­ships. Charles Dick­ens, at the top, for exam­ple, teach­es us to sym­pa­thize with oth­ers and to care about “seri­ous things.” Jane Austen want­ed us to be “bet­ter and wis­er,” and her nov­els offer read­ers a course in per­son­al devel­op­ment. From the exis­ten­tial bleak­ness of Fyo­dor Dos­toyevsky, we can draw life lessons about hope and redemp­tion in the midst of human fail­ure. Even the claus­tro­pho­bic night­mares of Franz Kaf­ka have their util­i­ty as “redemp­tive, con­sol­ing art.” De Bot­ton large­ly relies on bio­graph­i­cal crit­i­cism and strays quite a ways from received inter­pre­ta­tions.

His casu­al approach to lit­er­a­ture as a didac­tic tool of per­son­al bet­ter­ment has the hall­marks of a very Vic­to­ri­an out­look, with both the draw­backs and the ben­e­fits such a view entails. While the School of Life series may have a nar­row view of who pro­duces art, cul­ture, and phi­los­o­phy, it also has a com­pelling argu­ment to make that such things mat­ter and mat­ter great­ly. The human­i­ties need all the help they can get, and de Bot­ton seems to argue that we need them more than ever as well. Most read­ers of Open Cul­ture, I imag­ine, would sure­ly agree. See de Botton’s full series, includ­ing such prac­ti­cal writ­ers as James Joyce, Mar­cel Proust, George Orwell, and Leo Tol­stoy, at the School of Life YouTube playlist.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tions to 25 Philoso­phers by The School of Life: From Pla­to to Kant and Fou­cault

6 Polit­i­cal The­o­rists Intro­duced in Ani­mat­ed “School of Life” Videos: Marx, Smith, Rawls & More

Alain de Bot­ton Shows How Art Can Answer Life’s Big Ques­tions in Art as Ther­a­py

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

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