Eric Cline is a man of the Bronze Age. “If I could be reincarnated backwards,” he says in the lecture above, “I would choose to live back then. I’m sure I would not live more than about 48 hours, but it’d be a good 48 hours.” He may give himself too little credit: as he goes on to demonstrate in the hour that follows, he has as thorough an all-around knowledge of life in the Bronze Age as anyone alive in the 21st century. But of course, his prospects for survival in that era — or indeed anyone’s — depend on which part of it we’re talking about. The Bronze Age lasted a long time, from roughly 3300 to 1200 BC — at the end of which, ancient-history specialists agree, civilization collapsed.
What the specialists don’t quite agree on is how it happened. Cline makes his own case in the book 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed. The title, which seems to have been the result of the publishing industry’s invincible enthusiasm for naming books after years, may soon need an update: as Cline admits, it reflects a convention among scholars about how to label the titular event that has just been revised, and has since been revised back. And in any case, the collapse of civilization among the distinct but interconnected Egyptians, Hittites, Canaanites, Cypriots, Minoans, Mycenaeans, Assyrians, and Babylonians of the Bronze Age took not a year, he explains, but more like a century.
This complicated process has no one explanation — and more to the point, no one cause. Many flourishing cities of Bronze Age civilization were indeed destroyed by 1177 BC or soon thereafter. The “old, simple explanation” for this was that “a drought caused famine, which eventually caused the Sea Peoples to start moving and creating havoc, which caused the collapse.” Cline opts to include these factors and others, including earthquakes and rebellions, whose effects spread to afflict all parts of this early “globalized” part of the world. The result was a “systems collapse,” involving the breakdown of “central administrative organization,” the “disappearance of the traditional elite class,” the “collapse of the centralized economy,” as well as “settlement shifts and population decline.”
Systems collapses have also happened in other places and at other times. Given the enormous intensification of globalization since the Bronze Age and the continued threats issued by the natural world, could another happen here and now? Pointing to the climate change, famines and droughts, earthquakes, rebellions, acts of bellicosity, and economic troubles in evidence today, Cline adds that “the only thing missing are the Sea Peoples” — and even then suggests that ISIS and refugees from Syria could be playing a similarly disruptive role. Given that this talk has racked up more than five and a half million views so far, it seems he makes a convincing case, though the appeal could owe as much to his jokes. Not all of us, he acknowledges, will accept the relevance of the subject: “It’s history,” as we reassure ourselves. “It never repeats itself.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
The extended Sherlock Holmes Universe, as we might call it, has grown so vast in the last century (as with other franchises that have universes) that it’s possible to call oneself a fan without ever having read the source material. Depending on one’s persuasion, this is either heresy or the inevitable outcome of so much mediation by Holmesian high priests, none of whom can resist writing Holmes fan fiction of their own. But Sherlockians agree: the true Holmes Canon (yes, it’s capitalized) consists of only 60 works — 56 short stories and four novels, excluding apocrypha. No more, no less. (And they’re in the public domain!)
The Canon safeguards Arthur Conan Doyle’s work against the extra-voluminous flood of pastichists, parodists, and imposters appearing on the scene since Holmes’ first appearance in 1892. (Doyle personally liked Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie’s Holmes parody, “The Adventure of the Two Collaborators,” so much he included it in his autobiography.) The Holmes Canon remains untouchable for its wit, ingenuity, and the true strangeness of its detective — a portrait of perhaps the most emotionally avoidant protagonist in English literature when we first meet him:
All emotions, and [love] particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer—excellent for drawing the veil from men’s motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his.
How to make such a cold fish compelling? With a host of quirks, an ingenious mind, a “Bohemian soul,” some unsavory qualities, and at least one or two human attachments, if you can call them that. Sherlock’s cold, logical exterior masks considerable passion, inspiring fan theories about an ancestral relationship to Star Trek’s Spock.
But of course, we see Holmes almost entirely through the eyes of his sidekick and amanuensis, James Watson, who has his biases. When Holmes stepped out of the stories and into radio and screen adaptations, he became his own man, so to speak — or a series of leading men: Basil Rathbone, John Gielgud, Ian McKellen, Michael Caine, Robert Downey, Jr., Benedict Cumberbatch, and the late Christopher Lee, who played not one of Doyle’s characters, but four, beginning with his role as Sir Henry Baskerville, with Peter Cushing as Holmes, in a 1959 adaptation.
In 1962, Lee took on the role of Holmes himself in a German-Italian production, Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace, an original story based on Doyle’s work. He played Holmes’ smarter but unmotivated older brother, Mycroft, in 1970, then played a much older Holmes twice more in the 90s, pausing along the way for the role of Arnaud, a character in another Doyle adaptation, The Leather Funnel, in 1973 and the narrator of a 1985 Holmes documentary, The Many Faces of Sherlock Holmes. In an extraordinary career, Lee became an icon in the worlds of horror, science fiction, fantasy, and Sherlock Holmes, a genre all its own, into which he fit perfectly.
In the videos here, you can hear Lee read four of the last twelve Holmes stories Doyle wrote in the final decade of his life. These were collected in 1927 in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. We begin, at the top, with the very last of the 56 canonical stories, “The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place.” Lee may never have played Dr. Watson, but we can imagine him bringing his familiar gravitas to that role, too, as he narrates in his deep mellifluous voice. Find links to 7 more stories from Doyle’s last collection, read by Lee, on Metafilter, and hear him narrate The Many Faces of Sherlock Holmes, just below.
As Chris Hedges discovered as a battle-hardened reporter, war is a force that gives us meaning. Whether we sublimate violence in entertainment, have paid professionals and state agents do it for us, or carry it out ourselves, human beings cannot seem to give up their most ancient vice; “we demonize the enemy,” Hedges wrote, “so that our opponent is no longer human,” and “we view ourselves, our people, as the embodiment of absolute goodness…. Each side reduces the other to objects — eventually in the form of corpses.” Each new generation inherits old hatreds, and so forth.…
Maybe one way to break cycles of violence is with controlled violence — using bare fists to settle scores, and walking away with only bruises, a little hurt pride, but no lasting wounds? That’s the idea behind Takanakuy, an Andean festival that takes place each year at Christmas in the province of Chumbivilcas, in the mountains of Peru. The region has a police force made up of around three officers, the nearest courthouse is “a stomach-wrecking 10-hour drive through the mountains,” notes Vice, who bring us the video above. Potentially explosive disputes naturally arise, and must be settled outside the law.
Rather than rely on state intervention, residents wait to slug it out on Takanakuy. The name of the festival come from Quechua — the region’s indigenous language — and means “to hit each other” or, more idiomatically, “when the blood is boiling.” But combatants have had upwards of twelve months to cool before they step into a ring of cheering spectators and go hand-to-hand with an opponent. Fights are also officiated by referees, who do crowd control with short rope whips and call a fight as soon as someone goes down. Takanakuy is ritualized combat, not bloodsport. Although traditionally dominated by men, women, and children also participate in fights, which usually only last a couple minutes or so.
“Some traditionalists disapprove of female participation in Takanakuy,” writes photojournalist Mike Kai Chen at The New York Times, but “an increasing number of women in Chumbivilcas are defying convention and stepping up to fight in front of their community.” Male fighters wear boots, flashy leather chaps, and elaborate, hand-sewn masks with taxidermied birds on top. Women wear elegant dresses with fine embroidery, and wrap their wrists in colorful embroidered cloth. “The ultimate aim is to begin the new year in peace. For this reason every fight… begins and ends with a hug”… or, at the very least, a handshake.
The festival also involves much dancing, eating, drinking, craft sales, and Christmas celebrations. Suemedha Sood at BBC Travel compares Takanakuy to Seinfeld’s “Festivus,” the alt-winter holiday for the airing of grievances and feats of strength. But it’s no joke. “The festival seeks to resolve conflict, strengthen community bonds and hopefully, arrive at a greater peace.” Libertarian economists Edwar Escalante and Raymond March frame Takanakuy as “a credible mechanism of law enforcement in an orderly fashion with social acceptance.” For indigenous teacher and author and participant Victor Laime Mantilla, it’s something more, part of “the fight to reclaim the rights of indigenous people.”
“In the cities,” says Mantilla, “the Chumbivilcas are still seen as a savage culture.” But they have kept the peace amongst themselves with no need for Peruvian authorities, fusing an indigenous music called Huaylia with other traditions that date back even before the Incas. Takanakuy arose as a response to systems of colonial oppression. When “justice in Chumbivilcas was solely administered by powerful people,” Mantilla says, “people from the community always lost their case. What can I do with a justice like that? I’d rather have my own justice in public.”
Ancient Greeks did not live among ruins. This is, of course, an obvious truth, but one we run the risk of forgetting if we watch too many historical fantasies set in their time and place as popularly imagined. That Western civilization as we know it today came to know Ancient Greece through the ravaged built environments left behind has colored its modern-day perception — or, rather drained it of color. In recent years, a big deal has been made about the finding that Ancient Greek statues weren’t originally pure white, but painted in bright hues that faded away over the centuries. What does that imply for the rest of the place?
We don’t have a time machine in which to travel back to Ancient Greece and have a look around. We do, however, have the digital reconstructions of artist Ádám Németh. “My archaeological renderings are accurate to the time period, due to extensive research on references and reviews of sources found online, in libraries and in museums, and also ongoing discussions with archaeologists,” he writes.
“My main goal, through reconstructions, is to make history interesting and accessible for everybody.” Even those more or less ignorant of the ancient world can take a glance at his images of an intact and colorful Temple of Hadrian, Curetes Street, and Fountain of Trajan.
All of these sites were located in the Ancient Greek city of Ephesus, now a part of Turkey. Though it doesn’t draw quite the numbers of, say, Hagia Sophia, Ephesus stands nevertheless as a pillar of Turkish tourism. Indeed, you can go there and examine its actual pillars, none of which have come through the ages standing anything like as mightily Németh depicts them. Comparisons posted by Marina Amaral on Twitter put former glory alongside current ruin, though even the Temple of Hadrian, Curetes Street, and the Fountain of Trajan as they are today have been pieced together into a somewhat more complete state than that in which they were rediscovered. Even real antiquity, in other words, is to some degree a reconstruction. See more of Németh’s reconstructions here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
He writes in the preface that these recipes are intended to provide “musical interludes for the salivary glands,” warning readers that “no one should use this novel for a cookbook. Any serious cook should have the reliable originals in his or her library anyway.”
So with that caveat in mind…
Early on, the narrator/titular character, née Rudy Waltz, shares a recipe from his family’s former cook, Mary Hoobler, who taught him “everything she knew about cooking and baking”:
MARY HOOBLER’S CORN BREAD
Mix together in a bowl half a cup of flour, one and a half cups of yellow corn-meal, a teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of sugar, and three teaspoons of baking powder.
Add three beaten eggs, a cup of milk, a half cup of cream, and a half cup of melted butter.
Pour it into a well-buttered pan and bake it at four hundred degrees for fifteen minutes.
Cut it into squares while it is still hot. Bring the squares to the table while they are still hot, and folded in a napkin.
Barely two paragraphs later, he’s sharing her barbecue sauce. It sounds delicious, easy to prepare, and its placement gives it a strong flavor of Slaughterhouse-Five’s“so it goes” and “Poo-tee-weet?” — as ironic punctuation to Father Waltz’s full on embrace of Hitler, a seeming non sequitur that forces readers to think about what comes before:
When we all posed in the street for our picture in the paper, Father was forty-two. According to Mother, he had undergone a profound spiritual change in Germany. He had a new sense of purpose in life. It was no longer enough to be an artist. He would become a teacher and political activist. He would become a spokesman in America for the new social order which was being born in Germany, but which in time would be the salvation of the world.
This was quite a mistake.
MARY HOOBLER’S BARBECUE SAUCE
Sauté a cup of chopped onions and three chopped garlic cloves in a quarter of a pound of butter until tender.
Add a half cup of catsup, a quarter cup of brown sugar, a teaspoon of salt, two teaspoons of freshly ground pepper, a dash of Tabasco, a tablespoon of lemon juice, a teaspoon of basil, and a tablespoon of chili powder.
Bring to a boil and simmer for five minutes.
Rudy’s father is not the only character to falter.
Rudy’s mistake happens in the blink of an eye, and manages to upend a number of lives in Midland City, a stand in for Indianapolis, Vonnegut’s hometown.
His family loses their money in an ensuing lawsuit, and can no longer engage Mary Hoobler and the rest of the staff.
Young Rudy, who’s spent his childhood hanging out with the servants in Mary’s cozy kitchen, finds it “easy and natural” to cater to his parents in the manner to which they were accustomed:
As long as they lived, they never had to prepare a meal or wash a dish or make a bed or do the laundry or dust or vacuum or sweep, or shop for food. I did all that, and maintained a B average in school, as well.
What a good boy was I!
EGGS À LA RUDY WALTZ (age thirteen)
Chop, cook, and drain two cups of spinach.
Blend with two tablespoons of butter, a teaspoon of salt, and a pinch of nutmeg.
Heat and put into three oven-proof bowls or cups.
Put a poached egg on top of each one, and sprinkle with grated cheese.
Bake for five minutes at 375 degrees. Serves three: the papa bear, the mama bear, and the baby bear who cooked it—and who will clean up afterwards.
By high school, Rudy’s heavy domestic burden has him falling asleep in class and reproducing complicated desserts from recipes in the local paper. (“Father roused himself from living death sufficiently to say that the dessert took him back forty years.”)
LINZER TORTE (from the Bugle-Observer)
Mix half a cup of sugar with a cup of butter until fluffy.
Beat in two egg yolks and half a teaspoon of grated lemon rind.
Sift a cup of flour together with a quarter teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of cinnamon, and a quarter teaspoon of cloves. Add this to the sugar-and-butter mixture.
Add one cup of unblanched almonds and one cup of toasted filberts, both chopped fine.
Roll out two-thirds of the dough until a quarter of an inch thick.
Line the bottom and sides of an eight-inch pan with dough.
Slather in a cup and a half of raspberry jam.
Roll out the rest of the dough, make it into eight thin pencil shapes about ten inches long. Twist them a little, and lay them across the top in a decorative manner. Crimp the edges.
Bake in a preheated 350-degree oven for about an hour, and then cool at room temperature.
A great favorite in Vienna, Austria, before the First World War!
Rudy eventually relocates to the Grand Hotel Oloffson in Port au Prince, Haiti, which is how he manages to survive the — SPOILER — neutron bomb that destroys Midland City.
Here is a recipe for chocolate seafoams, courtesy of one of Midland City’s fictional residents:
MRS. GINO MARTIMO’S SPUMA DI CIOCCOLATA
Break up six ounces of semisweet chocolate in a saucepan.
Melt it in a 250-degree oven.
Add two teaspoons of sugar to four egg yolks, and beat the mixture until it is pale yellow.
Then mix in the melted chocolate, a quarter cup of strong coffee, and two tablespoons of rum.
Whip two-thirds of a cup of cold, heavy whipping cream until it is stiff. Fold it into the mixture.
Whip four egg whites until they form stiff peaks, then fold them into the mixture.
Stir the mixture ever so gently, then spoon it into cups, each cup a serving.
Refrigerate for twelve hours.
Serves six.
Other recipes in Rudy’s repertoire originate with the Grand Hotel Oloffson’s most valuable employee, headwaiter and Vodou practitioner Hippolyte Paul De Mille, who “claims to be eighty and have fifty-nine descendants”:
He said that if there was any ghost we thought should haunt Midland City for the next few hundred years, he would raise it from its grave and turn it loose, to wander where it would.
We tried very hard not to believe that he could do that.
But he could, he could.
HAITIAN FRESH FISH IN COCONUT CREAM
Put two cups of grated coconut in cheesecloth over a bowl.
Pour a cup of hot milk over it, and squeeze it dry.
Repeat this with two more cups of hot milk. The stuff in the bowl is the sauce.
Mix a pound of sliced onions, a teaspoon of salt, a half teaspoon of black pepper, and a teaspoon of crushed pepper.
Sauté the mixture in butter until soft but not brown.
Add four pounds of fresh fish chunks, and cook them for about a minute on each side.
Pour the sauce over the fish, cover the pan, and simmer for ten minutes. Uncover the pan and baste the fish until it is done—and the sauce has become creamy.
Serves eight vaguely disgruntled guests at the Grand Hotel Oloffson.
HAITIAN BANANA SOUP
Stew two pounds of goat or chicken with a half cup of chopped onions, a teaspoon of salt, half a teaspoon of black pepper, and a pinch of crushed red pepper. Use two quarts of water.
Stew for an hour.
Add three peeled yams and three peeled bananas, cut into chunks.
Simmer until the meat is tender. Take out the meat. What is left is eight servings of Haitian banana soup.
Bon appétit!
The recipe that closes the novel is couched in an anecdote that’s equal parts scatology and epiphany.
As a daughter of Indianapolis who was a junior in high school the year Deadeye Dick was published, I can attest that Polka-Dot Brownies would have been a hit at the bake sales of my youth:
POLKA-DOT BROWNIES
Melt half a cup of butter and a pound of light-brown sugar in a two-quart saucepan. Stir over a low fire until just bubbly.
Cool to room temperature.
Beat in two eggs and a teaspoon of vanilla.
Stir in a cup of sifted flour, a half teaspoon of salt, a cup of chopped filberts, and a cup of semisweet chocolate in small chunks.
Spread into a well-greased nine-by-eleven baking pan.
Bake at two hundred and thirty-five degrees for about thirty-five minutes.
Cool to room temperature, and cut into squares with a well-greased knife.
Enjoy, in moderation of course.
I was wearing my best suit, which was as tight as the skin of a knackwurst. I had put on a lot of weight recently. It was the fault of my own good cooking. I had been trying out a lot of new recipes, with considerable success. — Rudy Waltz
There are capitals unlikely to be much afflicted by rising sea levels — Indianapolis, say, or La Paz — but Venice looks set for a much more dire fate. Still, there is hope for the Floating City, a hope held out by large-scale engineering projects like the one profiled in the Tomorrow’s Build video above. Called MOSE (an acronym standing for MOdulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico), the system consists of “78 gates, each 20 meters wide, that rise up out of the water when flooding is imminent.” This sounds like just the ticket for a city that, “built in the middle of a lagoon,” has “been susceptible to a natural phenomenon known as acqua alta, or ‘high water,’ since its founding in the fifth century.”
MOSE is now “finally up and running, eighteen years after construction began” — and a decade after its original completion deadline. This was too late, unfortunately, to spare Venice from the 2019 flood that ranked as its worst in 50 years, leaving 80 percent of the city underwater.
“The good news is, it passed the first major test,” successfully protecting the city in October of last year “from a 1.3‑meter high tide, and it’s performed multiple times since. But this doesn’t mean that flooding’s been stopped entirely. In December, it was unable to prevent an unexpectedly high tide from sweeping in and drenching the city once again.” Technically, that incident wasn’t MOSE’s fault: “Weather forecasters underestimated how high the water would get, so authorities kind of didn’t think to switch it on.”
This speaks to the difficulty of not just designing and installing a complex mechanical defense mechanism, but also of getting it to work in concert with the other systems already performing functions of their own (and at various levels of reliability). At a cost of over €6 billion (or $7 billion), MOSE has become “far more expensive than first predicted,” and thus faces that much higher a burden of self-justification, especially given the cloud of “corruption, environmental opposition, and questions about its long-term effectiveness” hanging over it. Seen in action, MOSE remains an unquestionably impressive work of engineering, but its associated headaches have surely converted some to the position on Venice once advanced by no less a scholar and lover of that storied city than Jan Morris: “Let her sink.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Here are some things you may not know about Vincent Price:
He was once a young man.
Before becoming a horror icon in the 1950s, he was a successful character actor. “Only a third of his movies that he made were actually horror films,” says his daughter, Victoria Price. “He made 105 films. People don’t realize he had an extensive career in theater and radio.”
He came from a wealthy St. Louis family and harbored early anti-semitic views and a misguided admiration for Hitler in the 1930s.
He completely changed his views after moving to New York and was placed on Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s “Premature Anti-Nazi Sympathizer list” in the 1950s, along with Eleanor Roosevelt, notes Susan King at the L.A. Times, a list that “raised questions about those who had been against the Nazis before the U.S. went to war with Germany.”
He was a gourmet cook, had a degree in art history, and worked for nine years in the sixties as an art consultant for Sears….
He was blacklisted for being anti-Nazi too early….
After being denied work for almost a year, as Price’s daughter writes in her 1999 memoir, Vincent Price: A Daughter’s Biography, he chose to sign a “secret oath” offered by the FBI to salvage his career. Perhaps not coincidentally, he took a radio part soon afterward in Australia, as a split narrator/Winston Smith in a 1955 Lux Radio Theater adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984, perhaps fearful of a future in which secret oaths became the norm.
Orwell himself had made it perfectly clear what he feared. “Radical in his politics and in his artistic tastes,” Lionel Trilling wrote in a New Yorker review the year the book came out, “Orwell is wholly free of the cant of radicalism”; his talent as a writer of fiction is to make “common sense” political observations serve plot and character. Perhaps the most chilling of these arrives in the first few paragraphs of 1984:
In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people’s windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.
We may be reminded of the distinctions between what “Orwellian” means and what it does not, as Noah Tavlin describes in a recent explainer: if someone’s “talking about mass surveillance and intrusive government, they’re describing something authoritarian, but not necessarily Orwellian.” Authoritarianism is pure brute force. The Orwellian requires a constant misuse of language, a violent twisting of conscience, a perpetual shouting of lies as truth until the two are indistinguishable. No one is served by this but nihilistic oligarchs, Trilling writes:
The rulers of Orwell’s State know that power in its pure form has for its true end nothing but itself, and they know that the nature of power is defined by the pain it can inflict on others. They know, too, that just as wealth exists only in relation to the poverty of others, so power in its pure aspect exists only in relation to the weakness of others, and that any power of the ruled, even the power to experience happiness, is by that much a diminution of the power of the rulers.
Orwellian societies exist solely to spread hatred and misery, even to their detriment, a point Price made at the end of another radio broadcast, a 1950 episode of NBC’s The Saint, in which the actor denounced racism and religious prejudice. Not long afterward, his name appeared on McCarthy’s list.
Price learned that the government could deprive him of his happiness unless he swore fealty to an insanely nonsensical political morality. His daughter offers the experience as one reason for his love of playing villains. “Most of the villains that he played had been wronged in some way. There was a reason for their villainy.”
A few years ago we posted Kurt Vonnegut’s letter of advice to humanity, written in 1988 but addressed, a century hence, to the year 2088. Whatever objections you may have felt to reading this missive more than 70 years prematurely, you might have overcome them to find that the author of Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions single-mindedly importuned his fellow man of the late 21st century to protect the natural environment. He issues commandments to “reduce and stabilize your population” to “stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems,” and to “stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars,” among other potentially drastic-sounding measures.
Commandment number seven amounts to the highly Vonnegutian “And so on. Or else.” A fan can easily imagine these words spoken in the writer’s own voice, but with Vonnegut now gone for well over a decade, would you accept them spoken in the voice of Benedict Cumberbatch instead?
First commissioned by Volkswagen for a Time magazine ad campaign, Vonnegut’s letter to 2088 was later found and republished by Letters of Note. The associated Letters Live project, which brings notable letters to the stage (and subsequently internet video), counts Cumberbatch as one of its star readers: he’s given voice to wise correspondence by the likes of Sol LeWitt, Albert Camus, and Alan Turing.
Cumberbatch even has experience with letters by Vonnegut, having previously read aloud his rebuke to a North Dakota school board that allowed the burning of Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut’s work makes clear that he didn’t suffer fools gladly, and that he considered book-burning one of the infinite varieties of folly he spent his career cataloging. In light of his letter to 2088, the same went for humanity’s poor stewardship of their planet. Vonnegut may not have been a conservationist, exactly, but nor, in his view, was nature itself, a force that needs “no help from us in taking the planet apart and putting it back together some different way, not necessarily improving it from the viewpoint of living things.” This is, of course, the personifying view of a novelist, but a novelist who never forgot his sense of humor — nor his tendency to play the prophet of doom.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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