Free: 356 Issues of Galaxy, the Groundbreaking 1950s Science Fiction Magazine

in Magazines, Sci Fi | November 13th, 2024

Along with Astound­ing Sci­ence Fic­tion and The Mag­a­zine of Fan­ta­sy and Sci­ence Fic­tion, Galaxy Mag­a­zine was one of the most impor­tant sci­ence fic­tion digests in 1950s Amer­i­ca. Ray Brad­bury wrote for it–including an ear­ly ver­sion of his mas­ter­piece Fahren­heit 451–as did Robert A. Hein­lein, Isaac Asi­mov, Fred­erik Pohl, Theodore Stur­geon, Cord­wain­er Smith, Jack Vance, and numer­ous oth­ers.

Now a fair­ly decent col­lec­tion of issues (356 in total) is avail­able for your perusal at archive.org for absolute­ly free. It’s not com­plete yet, but it’s close.

When Galaxy appeared in Octo­ber 1950, it promised a kind of sci­ence fic­tion dif­fer­ent from the space operas of pre­vi­ous decades. As an “annu­al report” writ­ten by pub­lish­er H.L. Gold pro­claimed,

…oth­er pub­lish­ers thought the idea of offer­ing mature sci­ence fic­tion in an attrac­tive, adult for­mat was down­right fun­ny. They knew what sold–shapely female endo­morphs with bronze bras, embat­tled male meso­morphs clad in mus­cle, and fright­ful alien mon­sters in search of a human soul.

And while Astound­ing Sci­ence Fic­tion was focused on technology–suited for an Amer­i­ca that had fun­da­men­tal­ly changed since WWII–H.L. Gold’s Galaxy focused on ideas, humor, satire, psy­chol­o­gy and soci­ol­o­gy. It also had one of the best pay rates in the indus­try, and offered some of its writ­ers exclu­sive con­tracts. And the writ­ers respond­ed in kind and fol­lowed their own obsessions–although Gold often pitched ideas.

(Iron­i­cal­ly, though immersed in sto­ries of inner and out­er space, Gold was an acute ago­ra­phobe, and stayed in his apart­ment, com­mu­ni­cat­ing by phone.)

After a wob­bly start graph­ics-wise, Gold hired Ed Emsh­willer in 1951 to paint cov­ers, whose often humor­ous style (e.g. this Christ­mas issue below) suit­ed the humor inside the issue.

Con­fi­dent in their sta­ble of writ­ers, Galaxy pro­duced the won­der­ful birth­day cov­er at the top, fea­tur­ing car­i­ca­tures of every­body from Brad­bury to Asi­mov. There’s also a guide to see who’s who.

A series of editors–including Fred­erik Pohl–took over from Gold after a car acci­dent in 1961, and by 1977–eight years after Pohl’s departure–the mag­a­zine was on its decline. There were more iter­a­tions, reprints, antholo­gies, and online ver­sions, but the essen­tial run is here. And those first ten years changed Amer­i­can sci­ence fic­tion for­ev­er, paving the way for exper­i­men­tal writ­ers like Philip K. Dick and William Gib­son.

You could start with the Ray Brad­bury sto­ry (“The Fire­man”) we told you about, or Robert A. Heinlein’s “The Pup­pet.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Enter a Huge Archive of Amaz­ing Sto­ries, the World’s First Sci­ence Fic­tion Mag­a­zine, Launched in 1926

The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Sci­ence Fic­tion: 17,500 Entries on All Things Sci-Fi Are Now Free Online

Isaac Asimov’s Foun­da­tion Tril­o­gy: Hear the 1973 Radio Drama­ti­za­tion

Sci-Fi Radio: Hear Radio Dra­mas of Sci-Fi Sto­ries by Ray Brad­bury, Philip K. Dick, Ursu­la K. LeGuin & More (1989)

X Minus One: Hear Clas­sic Sci-Fi Radio Sto­ries from Asi­mov, Hein­lein, Brad­bury & Dick

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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A New 3D Scan, Created from 25,000 High-Resolution Images, Reveals the Remarkably Well-Preserved Wreck of Shackleton’s Endurance

in Film, History | November 13th, 2024

Pho­tos on this page cour­tesy of the Falk­lands Mar­itime Her­itage 

Few who hear the sto­ry of the Endurance could avoid reflect­ing on the apt­ness of the ship’s name. A year after set­ting out on the Impe­r­i­al Trans-Antarc­tic Expe­di­tion in 1914, it got stuck in a mass of drift­ing ice off Antarc­ti­ca. There it remained for ten months, while leader Sir Ernest Shack­le­ton and his crew of 27 men wait­ed for a thaw. But the Endurance was being slow­ly crushed, and even­tu­al­ly had to be left to its watery grave. What secures its place in the his­to­ry books is the sub-expe­di­tion made by Shack­le­ton and five oth­ers in search of help, which ensured the res­cue of every sin­gle man who’d been on the ship.

This har­row­ing jour­ney has, of course, inspired doc­u­men­taries, includ­ing this year’s Endurance from Nation­al Geo­graph­ic, which debuted at the Lon­don Film Fes­ti­val last month and will come avail­able to stream on Dis­ney+ lat­er this fall. “The doc­u­men­tary incor­po­rates footage and pho­tos cap­tured dur­ing the expe­di­tion by Aus­tralian pho­tog­ra­ph­er Frank Hur­ley, who [in 1914] brought sev­er­al cam­eras along for the jour­ney,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Sarah Kuta. “Film­mak­ers have col­or-treat­ed Hurley’s black-and-white images and footage for the first time. They also used arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to recre­ate crew mem­bers’ voic­es to ‘read’ their own diary entries.”

The fruits of an even more tech­no­log­i­cal­ly impres­sive project have been released along with Endurance: a 3D dig­i­tal mod­el “cre­at­ed from more than 25,000 high-res­o­lu­tion images cap­tured after the icon­ic ves­sel was dis­cov­ered in March 2022.”

As we not­ed at the time here on Open Cul­ture, the ship was found to be in remark­ably good con­di­tion after well over a cen­tu­ry spent two miles beneath the Wed­dell Sea. “Endurance looks much like it did when it sank on Novem­ber 21, 1915. Every­day items used by the crew — includ­ing din­ing plates, a boot and a flare gun — are still eas­i­ly rec­og­niz­able among the pro­tect­ed wreck­age.”

Endurance has, in oth­er words, endured. Its intact­ness — which “makes it look as though the ship,” writes CNN.com’s Jack Guy, “has been mirac­u­lous­ly lift­ed out of the Wed­dell Sea onto dry land in one piece” — is, in its way, as improb­a­ble and impres­sive as Shack­le­ton and com­pa­ny’s sur­vival of its fate­ful first expe­di­tion. The degree of detail cap­tured by this new scan (not tech­no­log­i­cal­ly fea­si­ble back at the time of the last acclaimed doc­u­men­tary on this sub­ject), should make pos­si­ble fur­ther, even deep­er research into the sto­ry of the Endurance. But one ques­tion will remain unan­swer­able: would that sto­ry have res­onat­ed quite as long had the ship kept its orig­i­nal name, Polaris?

via Smithsonian.com

Relat­ed con­tent:

The First Full 3D Scan of the Titan­ic, Made of More Than 700,000 Images Cap­tur­ing the Wreck’s Every Detail

How an Ancient Roman Ship­wreck Could Explain the Uni­verse

See the Well-Pre­served Wreck­age of Ernest Shackleton’s Ship Endurance Found in Antarc­ti­ca

Hear Ernest Shack­le­ton Speak About His Antarc­tic Expe­di­tion in a Rare 1909 Record­ing

New­ly Dis­cov­ered Ship­wreck Proves Herodotus, the “Father of His­to­ry,” Cor­rect 2500 Years Lat­er

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Mushroom Color Atlas: An Interactive Web Site Lets You Explore the Incredible Spectrum of Colors Created from Fungi

in Art, Nature | November 13th, 2024

Enter the Mush­room Col­or Atlas, and you can dis­cov­er the “beau­ti­ful and sub­tle col­ors derived from dye­ing with mush­rooms.” Fea­tur­ing 825 col­ors, each asso­ci­at­ed with dif­fer­ent types of mush­rooms, the inter­ac­tive atlas lets you appre­ci­ate the broad spec­trum of col­ors latent in the fun­gi king­dom. The shades, tints, and hues will sur­prise you.

Julie Beel­er, a design­er liv­ing in Ore­gon, first launched the inter­ac­tive Mush­room Col­or Atlas back in 2021. Now, she has released a com­pan­ion book, The Mush­room Col­or Atlas: A Guide to Dyes and Pig­ments Made from Fun­gi. Illus­trat­ed by Yuli Gates, the book is “equal parts art book, field guide, and col­or dis­til­la­tion work­shop.” You can order your copy today. The same goes for a Mush­room Col­or Atlas poster.

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, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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 Stun­ning, Hand-Illus­trat­ed Book of Mush­rooms Drawn by an Over­looked 19th Cen­tu­ry Female Sci­en­tist

Björk Takes You on a Jour­ney into the Vast King­dom of Mush­rooms with the New Doc­u­men­tary Fun­gi: Web of Life

The Beau­ti­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed Atlas of Mush­rooms: Edi­ble, Sus­pect and Poi­so­nous (1827)

John Cage Had a Sur­pris­ing Mush­room Obses­sion (Which Began with His Pover­ty in the Depres­sion)

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Stanley Kubrick’s Annotated Copy of Stephen King’s The Shining

in Books, Film | November 12th, 2024

The web site Over­look Hotel has post­ed pic­tures of Stan­ley Kubrick’s per­son­al copy of Stephen King’s nov­el The Shin­ing. The book is filled with high­light­ed pas­sages and large­ly illeg­i­ble notes in the margin—tantalizing clues to Kubrick’s inten­tions for the movie.

The site fea­tures a pic­ture of the book’s care­worn cov­er along with two spreads from the book’s inte­ri­or —pages 8–9, where Jack Tor­rance is being inter­viewed by hotel man­ag­er Mr. Ull­man, and pages 86–87 where hotel cook Dick Hal­lo­rann talks to Jack’s son Dan­ny about the tele­path­ic abil­i­ty called “shin­ing.”

Much of the mar­gin­a­lia is mad­den­ing­ly hard to deci­pher. One of the notes I could make out reads:

Maybe just like their [sic] are peo­ple who can shine, maybe there are places that are spe­cial. Maybe it has to do with what hap­pened in them or where they were built.

Kubrick is clear­ly work­ing to trans­late King’s book into film. Oth­er notes, how­ev­er, seem whol­ly unre­lat­ed to the movie.

Any prob­lems with the kitchen – you phone me.

When The Shin­ing came out, it was greet­ed with tepid and non­plussed reviews. Since then, the film’s rep­u­ta­tion has grown, and now it’s con­sid­ered a hor­ror mas­ter­piece.

At first view­ing, The Shin­ing over­whelms the view­er with pun­gent images that etch them­selves in the mind—those creepy twins, that rot­ting senior cit­i­zen in the bath­tub, that del­uge of blood from the ele­va­tor. Yet after the fifth or sev­enth view­ing, the film reveals itself to be far weird­er than your aver­age hor­ror flick. For instance, why is Jack Nichol­son read­ing a Play­girl mag­a­zine while wait­ing in the lob­by? What’s the deal with that guy in the bear suit at the end of the movie? Why is Dan­ny wear­ing an Apol­lo 11 sweater?

While Stephen King has had dozens of his books adapt­ed for the screen (many are flat-out ter­ri­ble), of all the adap­ta­tions, this is one that King active­ly dis­likes.

“I would do every­thing dif­fer­ent,” com­plained King about the movie to Amer­i­can Film Mag­a­zine in 1986. “The real prob­lem is that Kubrick set out to make a hor­ror pic­ture with no appar­ent under­stand­ing of the genre.” King lat­er made his own screen ver­sion of his book. By all accounts, it’s nowhere as good as Kubrick’s.

Per­haps the rea­son King loathed Kubrick’s adap­ta­tion so much is that the famous­ly secre­tive and con­trol­ling direc­tor packed the movie with so many odd signs, like Danny’s Apol­lo sweater, that seem to point to a mean­ing beyond a tale of an alco­holic writer who descends into mad­ness and mur­der. The Shin­ing is a semi­otic puz­zle about …what?

Crit­ic after crit­ic has attempt­ed to crack the film’s hid­den mean­ing. Jour­nal­ist Bill Blake­more argued in his essay “The Fam­i­ly of Man” that The Shin­ing is actu­al­ly about the geno­cide of the Native Amer­i­cans. His­to­ri­an Geof­frey Cocks sug­gests that the movie is about the Holo­caust. And con­spir­a­cy guru Jay Wei­d­ner has argued pas­sion­ate­ly that the movie is in fact Kubrick’s cod­ed con­fes­sion for his role in stag­ing the Apol­lo 11 moon land­ing. (On a relat­ed note, see Dark Side of the Moon: A Mock­u­men­tary on Stan­ley Kubrick and the Moon Land­ing Hoax.)

Rod­ney Ascher’s 2012 doc­u­men­tary Room 237 jux­ta­pos­es all of these wild­ly diver­gent read­ings, bril­liant­ly show­ing just how dense and mul­ti­va­lent The Shin­ing is. You can see the trail­er for the doc­u­men­tary above.

Note: Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Kubrick Schol­ar Dis­cov­ers an Eerie Detail in The Shin­ing That’s Gone Unno­ticed for More Than 40 Years

How Stan­ley Kubrick Adapt­ed Stephen King’s The Shin­ing into a Cin­e­mat­ic Mas­ter­piece

Free Doc­u­men­tary View from the Over­look: Craft­ing The Shin­ing Looks at How Kubrick Made “the World’s Scari­est Movie”

Rare 1960s Audio: Stan­ley Kubrick’s Big Inter­view with The New York­er

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.

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How Designing Buildings Upside-Down Revolutionized Architecture, Making Possible St. Paul’s Cathedral, Sagrada Família & More

in Architecture, History, Physics | November 12th, 2024

For 142 years now, Sagra­da Família has been grow­ing toward the sky. Or at least that’s what it seems to be doing, as its ongo­ing con­struc­tion real­izes ever more ful­ly a host of forms that look and feel not quite of this earth. It makes a kind of sense to learn that, in design­ing the cathe­dral that would remain a work in progress near­ly a cen­tu­ry after his death, Antoni Gaudí built a mod­el upside-down, mak­ing use of grav­i­ty in the oppo­site way to which we nor­mal­ly think of it as act­ing on a build­ing. But as archi­tec­ture YouTu­ber Stew­art Hicks explains in the video above, Gaudí was hard­ly the first to use that tech­nique.

Take St. Paul’s Cathe­dral, which Christo­pher Wren decid­ed to make the tallest build­ing in Lon­don in 1685. It includ­ed what would be the high­est dome ever built, at 365 feet off the ground. “For a tra­di­tion­al dome design to reach this height, it would have to span an open­ing that’s 160 feet or 49 meters wide, but this made it much too heavy for the walls below,” says Hicks. “Exist­ing tech­niques for build­ing this just could­n’t work.” Enter sci­en­tist-engi­neer Robert Hooke, who’d already been fig­ur­ing out ways to mod­el forces like this by hang­ing chains from the ceil­ing.

“Hooke’s genius was that he real­ized that the chain in his exper­i­ments was cal­cu­lat­ing the per­fect shape for it to remain in ten­sion, since that’s all it can do.” He explained domes as, phys­i­cal­ly, “the exact oppo­site of the chains. His famous line was, ‘As hangs the flex­ile line, so but invert­ed will stand the rigid arch.’ ” In oth­er words, “if you flip the shape of Hooke’s chain exper­i­ments upside down, the forces flip, and this shape is the per­fect com­pres­sion sys­tem.” Hence the dis­tinc­tive­ly elon­gat­ed-look­ing shape of the dome on the com­plet­ed St. Paul’s Cathe­dral, a depar­ture from all archi­tec­tur­al prece­dent.

The shape upon which Wren and Hooke set­tled turned out to be very sim­i­lar to what archi­tec­ture now knows as a cate­nary curve, a con­cept impor­tant indeed to Gaudí, who was “famous­ly enam­ored with what some call organ­ic forms.” He made detailed mod­els to guide the con­struc­tion of his projects, but after those he’d left behind for Sagra­da Família were destroyed by anar­chists in 1936, the builders had noth­ing to go on. Only in 1979 did the young archi­tect Mark Bur­ry “imag­ine the mod­els upside-down,” which brought about a new under­stand­ing of the build­ing’s com­plex, land­scape-like forms. It was a sim­i­lar phys­i­cal insight that made pos­si­ble such dra­mat­ic mid-cen­tu­ry build­ings as Anni­bale Vitel­lozzi and Pier Nervi’s Palazzet­to del­lo Sport and Eero Saari­nen’s TWA Flight Cen­ter: pure Space Age, but root­ed in the Enlight­en­ment.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How the World’s Biggest Dome Was Built: The Sto­ry of Fil­ip­po Brunelleschi and the Duo­mo in Flo­rence

How This Chica­go Sky­scraper Bare­ly Touch­es the Ground

Why Hasn’t the Pantheon’s Dome Col­lapsed?: How the Romans Engi­neered the Dome to Last 19 Cen­turies and Count­ing

An Archi­tec­tur­al Tour of Sagra­da Família, Antoni Gaudí’s Auda­cious Church That’s Been Under Con­struc­tion for 142 Years

A Guid­ed Tour of the Largest Hand­made Mod­el of Impe­r­i­al Rome: Dis­cov­er the 20x20 Meter Mod­el Cre­at­ed Dur­ing the 1930s

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

 

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Bertrand Russell’s 10 Commandments for Living in a Healthy Democracy

in Life, Politics | November 11th, 2024

russell rules 2

Image by J. F. Horra­bin, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Bertrand Rus­sell saw the his­to­ry of civ­i­liza­tion as being shaped by an unfor­tu­nate oscil­la­tion between two oppos­ing evils: tyran­ny and anar­chy, each of which con­tains the seed of the oth­er. The best course for steer­ing clear of either one, Rus­sell main­tained, is lib­er­al­ism.

“The doc­trine of lib­er­al­ism is an attempt to escape from this end­less oscil­la­tion,” writes Rus­sell in A His­to­ry of West­ern Phi­los­o­phy. “The essence of lib­er­al­ism is an attempt to secure a social order not based on irra­tional dog­ma [a fea­ture of tyran­ny], and insur­ing sta­bil­i­ty [which anar­chy under­mines] with­out involv­ing more restraints than are nec­es­sary for the preser­va­tion of the com­mu­ni­ty.”

In 1951 Rus­sell pub­lished an arti­cle in The New York Times Mag­a­zine, “The Best Answer to Fanaticism–Liberalism,” with the sub­ti­tle: “Its calm search for truth, viewed as dan­ger­ous in many places, remains the hope of human­i­ty.” In the arti­cle, Rus­sell writes that “Lib­er­al­ism is not so much a creed as a dis­po­si­tion. It is, indeed, opposed to creeds.” He con­tin­ues:

But the lib­er­al atti­tude does not say that you should oppose author­i­ty. It says only that you should be free to oppose author­i­ty, which is quite a dif­fer­ent thing. The essence of the lib­er­al out­look in the intel­lec­tu­al sphere is a belief that unbi­ased dis­cus­sion is a use­ful thing and that men should be free to ques­tion any­thing if they can sup­port their ques­tion­ing by sol­id argu­ments. The oppo­site view, which is main­tained by those who can­not be called lib­er­als, is that the truth is already known, and that to ques­tion it is nec­es­sar­i­ly sub­ver­sive.

Rus­sell crit­i­cizes the rad­i­cal who would advo­cate change at any cost. Echo­ing the philoso­pher John Locke, who had a pro­found influ­ence on the authors of the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence and the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion, Rus­sell writes:

The teacher who urges doc­trines sub­ver­sive to exist­ing author­i­ty does not, if he is a lib­er­al, advo­cate the estab­lish­ment of a new author­i­ty even more tyran­ni­cal than the old. He advo­cates cer­tain lim­its to the exer­cise of author­i­ty, and he wish­es these lim­its to be observed not only when the author­i­ty would sup­port a creed with which he dis­agrees but also when it would sup­port one with which he is in com­plete agree­ment. I am, for my part, a believ­er in democ­ra­cy, but I do not like a regime which makes belief in democ­ra­cy com­pul­so­ry.

Rus­sell con­cludes the New York Times piece by offer­ing a “new deca­logue” with advice on how to live one’s life in the spir­it of lib­er­al­ism. “The Ten Com­mand­ments that, as a teacher, I should wish to pro­mul­gate, might be set forth as fol­lows,” he says:

1: Do not feel absolute­ly cer­tain of any­thing.

2: Do not think it worth­while to pro­duce belief by con­ceal­ing evi­dence, for the evi­dence is sure to come to light.

3: Nev­er try to dis­cour­age think­ing, for you are sure to suc­ceed.

4: When you meet with oppo­si­tion, even if it should be from your hus­band or your chil­dren, endeav­or to over­come it by argu­ment and not by author­i­ty, for a vic­to­ry depen­dent upon author­i­ty is unre­al and illu­so­ry.

5: Have no respect for the author­i­ty of oth­ers, for there are always con­trary author­i­ties to be found.

6: Do not use pow­er to sup­press opin­ions you think per­ni­cious, for if you do the opin­ions will sup­press you.

7: Do not fear to be eccen­tric in opin­ion, for every opin­ion now accept­ed was once eccen­tric.

8: Find more plea­sure in intel­li­gent dis­sent than in pas­sive agree­ment, for, if you val­ue intel­li­gence as you should, the for­mer implies a deep­er agree­ment than the lat­ter.

9: Be scrupu­lous­ly truth­ful, even when truth is incon­ve­nient, for it is more incon­ve­nient when you try to con­ceal it.

10. Do not feel envi­ous of the hap­pi­ness of those who live in a fool’s par­adise, for only a fool will think that it is hap­pi­ness.

Wise words then. Wise words now.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in March, 2013.

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, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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:

Bertrand Russell’s Advice to Peo­ple Liv­ing 1,000 Years in the Future: “Love is Wise, Hatred is Fool­ish”

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live and Learn More

Philoso­pher Bertrand Rus­sell Talks About the Time When His Grand­fa­ther Met Napoleon

Aldous Hux­ley Tells Mike Wal­lace What Will Destroy Democ­ra­cy: Over­pop­u­la­tion, Drugs & Insid­i­ous Tech­nol­o­gy (1958)

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Watch the Original Nosferatu, the Classic German Expressionist Vampire Film, Before the New Remake Arrives This December

in Film | November 11th, 2024

F. W. Mur­nau’s Nos­fer­atu, far and away the most influ­en­tial ear­ly vam­pire movie, came out 102 years ago. For about ten of those years, Robert Eggers has been try­ing to remake it. He would­n’t be the first: Wern­er Her­zog cast Klaus Kin­s­ki as the blood-suck­ing aris­to­crat at the cen­ter of his own ver­sion in 1979, and, though not a remake, E. Elias Mer­hige’s Shad­ow of the Vam­pire, from 2000, brought fresh atten­tion to Mur­nau’s Nos­fer­atu by grotesque­ly fic­tion­al­iz­ing its pro­duc­tion. In the lat­ter pic­ture, Willem Dafoe plays Max Schreck, the actor who took on the orig­i­nal role of the Drac­u­la-inspired Count Orlok, as an actu­al vam­pire.

Dafoe changes sides in Eggers’ Nos­fer­atu, due out this Christ­mas (see trail­er below), by appear­ing as a vam­pire hunter. Play­ing Count Orlok is Bill Skars­gård, sure to be unrec­og­niz­able in full cos­tume and make­up. “This Orlok is more of a folk vam­pire than any oth­er film ver­sion,” says Eggers in a recent Van­i­ty Fair inter­view. “That means he’s a dead per­son. And he’s not like, ‘I look great and I’m dead.’ ” What’s more, “for the first time in a Drac­u­la or Nos­fer­atu sto­ry, this guy looks like a dead Tran­syl­van­ian noble­man. Every sin­gle thing he’s wear­ing down to the heels on his shoes is what he would’ve worn.” And lest any view­er with knowl­edge of ancient Roman­ian cul­ture accuse the film of blithe inac­cu­ra­cy, he also speaks a ver­sion of the extinct Dacian lan­guage.

This atten­tion to detail will come as no sur­prise to fans of Eggers, who’s made his name with the his­tor­i­cal films The Witch, The Light­house, and The North­man, all praised for their dis­tinc­tive folk­loric tex­tures. But with Nos­fer­atu, he pays direct homage to what’s pre­sum­ably one of the major influ­ences on his cin­e­mat­ic style. “The ver­sion that I watched as a kid didn’t have music,” he remem­bers. “It might not have had the same impact if it had had a cheesy organ score or synth score.” The video he watched was “a degrad­ed 16-mil­lime­ter print” that had “cer­tain frames where Max Schreck­’s eyes looked like cat eyes. It’s the ver­sion that gave rise to the leg­ends of Max Schreck actu­al­ly being a vam­pire.”

Grow­ing up in the rur­al New Hamp­shire of the nineties, Eggers’ inter­est in see­ing Nos­fer­atu meant that he “had to dri­ve to the town that was pop­u­lat­ed and had a video store to order it, and then it came in the mail a month and a half lat­er.” Today, we can watch it when­ev­er we like, free online, and if you hap­pen nev­er to have seen it, you should cer­tain­ly do so before catch­ing the new remake. If reac­tions to ear­ly screen­ings are any­thing to judge by, this new inter­pre­ta­tion of the mate­r­i­al more than stands on its own dead, accu­rate­ly heeled feet. But as Eggers sure­ly under­stands bet­ter than any­one, you can’t approach the dankly seduc­tive realm of Count Orlok with­out also being pulled back into cin­e­ma his­to­ry.

Relat­ed con­tent:

10 Great Ger­man Expres­sion­ist Films: Nos­fer­atu, The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari & More

What Is Ger­man Expres­sion­ism? A Crash Course on the Cin­e­mat­ic Tra­di­tion That Gave Us Metrop­o­lis, Nos­fer­atu & More

Time Out Lon­don Presents The 100 Best Hor­ror Films: Start by Watch­ing Four Hor­ror Clas­sics Free Online

Hor­ror Leg­end Christo­pher Lee Reads Bram Stoker’s Drac­u­la

101 Free Silent Films: The Great Clas­sics

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Behold the Oldest Written Text in the World: The Kish Tablet, Circa 3500 BC

in History, Writing | November 8th, 2024

Image by José-Manuel Ben­i­to, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Some refer to the writ­ten Chi­nese lan­guage as ideo­graph­ic: that is, struc­tured accord­ing to a sys­tem in which each sym­bol rep­re­sents a par­tic­u­lar idea or con­cept, whether abstract or con­crete. That’s true of cer­tain Chi­nese char­ac­ters, but only a small minor­i­ty. Most of them are actu­al­ly logographs, each of which rep­re­sents a word or part of a word. But if you dig deep enough into their his­to­ry — and the his­to­ry of oth­er Asian lan­guages that use Chi­nese-derived vocab­u­lary — you’ll find that some start­ed out long ago as pic­tographs, designed visu­al­ly to rep­re­sent the thing to which they referred.

That does­n’t hold true for Chi­nese alone: it appears, in fact, that all writ­ten lan­guages began as forms of pic­to­graph­ic “pro­to-writ­ing,” at least judg­ing by the ear­li­est texts cur­rent­ly known to man. If we look at the old­est of them all, the lime­stone “Kish tablet” unearthed from the site of the epony­mous ancient Sumer­ian city in mod­ern-day Iraq, we can in some sense “read” sev­er­al of the sym­bols in its text, even five and a half mil­len­nia after it was writ­ten. “The writ­ing on its sur­face is pure­ly pic­to­graph­ic,” says the nar­ra­tor of the brief IFLScience video below, “and rep­re­sents a mid­point between pro­to-writ­ing and the more sophis­ti­cat­ed writ­ing of the cuneiform.”

Cuneiform, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, was used by the ancient Baby­lo­ni­ans to label maps and record stew recipes, among oth­er impor­tant tasks. “First devel­oped around 3200 B.C. by Sumer­ian scribes in the ancient city-state of Uruk, in present-day Iraq, as a means of record­ing trans­ac­tions, cuneiform writ­ing was cre­at­ed by using a reed sty­lus to make wedge-shaped inden­ta­tions in clay tablets,” says Archae­ol­o­gy mag­a­zine. Over 3,000 years, this ear­li­est prop­er script “was used by scribes of mul­ti­ple cul­tures over that time to write a num­ber of lan­guages oth­er than Sumer­ian, most notably Akka­di­an, a Semit­ic lan­guage that was the lin­gua fran­ca of the Assyr­i­an and Baby­lon­ian Empires.”

Cuneiform was also used to write the Scheil dynas­tic tablet, which dates from the ear­ly sec­ond mil­len­ni­um BC. That means we can read it, and thus know that it com­pris­es a lit­er­ary-his­tor­i­cal text that lists off the reigns of var­i­ous rulers of Sumer­ian cities. We should note that the Scheil dynas­tic tablet is also, some­times, referred to as the “Kish tablet,” which sure­ly caus­es some con­fu­sion. But for the anony­mous writer of the ear­li­er Kish tablet, who would have lived about two mil­len­nia ear­li­er, the emer­gence of cuneiform and all the civ­i­liza­tion­al devel­op­ments it would make pos­si­ble lay far in the future. His pic­to­graph­ic text may nev­er be deci­phered prop­er­ly or mapped to a his­tor­i­cal­ly doc­u­ment­ed lan­guage, but at least we can tell that he must sure­ly have had hands and feet more or less like our own.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Old­est Known Sen­tence Writ­ten in an Alpha­bet Has Been Found on a Head-Lice Comb (Cir­ca 1700 BC)

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Old­est Writ­ing Sys­tem in the World: A Short, Charm­ing Intro­duc­tion

Dic­tio­nary of the Old­est Writ­ten Lan­guage – It Took 90 Years to Com­plete, and It’s Now Free Online

How Writ­ing Has Spread Across the World, from 3000 BC to This Year: An Ani­mat­ed Map

40,000-Year-Old Sym­bols Found in Caves World­wide May Be the Ear­li­est Writ­ten Lan­guage

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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