Hear 2.5 Hours of the Classical Music in Haruki Murakami’s Novels: Liszt, Beethoven, Janáček, and More

in Books, Literature, Music | October 25th, 2024

Haruki Murakami’s hit novel 1Q84 features a memorable scene in a taxicab on a gridlocked freeway whose radio is playing Leoš Janáček’s Sinfonietta. “It is, as the book suggests, truly the worst possible music for a traffic jam,” writes Sam Anderson in a New York Times Magazine profile of the novelist: “busy, upbeat, dramatic — like five normal songs fighting for supremacy inside an empty paint can.” Murakami tells Anderson that he “chose the Sinfonietta because that is not a popular music at all. But after I published this book, the music became popular in this country… Mr. Seiji Ozawa thanked me. His record has sold well.”

In addition to being a world-famous conductor, the late Ozawa was also, as it happens, a personal friend of Murakami’s; the two even published a book, Absolutely on Music, that transcribes a series of their conversations about the former’s vocation and the latter’s avocation, a distinction with an unclear boundary in Murakami’s case.

“I have lots of friends who love music, but Haruki takes it way beyond the bounds of sanity,” writes Ozawa, and indeed, Murakami has always made music a part of his work, both in his process of creating it and in its very content. His books offer numerous references to Western pop (especially of the nineteen-sixties), jazz, and also classical recordings — fifteen of which you can hear in the video from NTS radio above.

We’ve previously featured NTS, the London-based online radio station known for its deep dives on themes from spiritual jazz to Hunter S. Thompson, for its “Haruki Murakami Day” broadcast of music from his novels. Opening with Le mal du pays from Franz Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage, the NTS Guide to Classical Music from Murakami Novels continues on to “Vogel als Prophet” from Robert Schumann’s Waldszenen, and thereafter includes Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 In A Major, Mendelssohn’s Cleveland Quartet, Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer, and much else besides. You may not be able to recall where you’ve seen all of these pieces mentioned in Murakami’s work right away, but you’ll surely recognize the Sinfonietta the moment it comes along.

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

A 26-Hour Playlist Featuring Music from Haruki Murakami’s Latest Novel, Killing Commendatore

Haruki Murakami Day: Stream Seven Hours of Mixes Collecting All the Jazz, Classical & Classic American Pop Music from His Novels

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 Medieval Masterpiece, the Book of Kells, Is Now Digitized and Available Online

in Art, Books, History | September 25th, 2024

If you know nothing else about medieval European illuminated manuscripts, you surely know the Book of Kells. “One of Ireland’s greatest cultural treasures” comments Medievalists.net, “it is set apart from other manuscripts of the same period by the quality of its artwork and the sheer number of illustrations that run throughout the 680 pages of the book.” The work not only attracts scholars, but almost a million visitors to Dublin every year. “You simply can’t travel to the capital of Ireland,” writes Book Riot’s Erika Harlitz-Kern, “without the Book of Kells being mentioned. And rightfully so.”

The ancient masterpiece is a stunning example of Hiberno-Saxon style, thought to have been composed on the Scottish island of Iona in 806, then transferred to the monastery of Kells in County Meath after a Viking raid (a story told in the marvelous animated film The Secret of Kells). Consisting mainly of copies of the four gospels, as well as indexes called “canon tables,” the manuscript is believed to have been made primarily for display, not reading aloud, which is why “the images are elaborate and detailed while the text is carelessly copied with entire words missing or long passages being repeated.”

Its exquisite illuminations mark it as a ceremonial object, and its “intricacies,” argue Trinity College Dublin professors Rachel Moss and Fáinche Ryan, “lead the mind along pathways of the imagination…. You haven’t been to Ireland unless you’ve seen the Book of Kells.” This may be so, but thankfully, in our digital age, you need not go to Dublin to see this fabulous historical artifact, or a digitization of it at least, entirely viewable at the online collections of the Trinity College Library. (When you click on the previous link, make sure you scroll down the page.) The pages, originally captured in 1990, “have recently been rescanned,” Trinity College Library writes, using state-of-the-art imaging technology. These new digital images offer the most accurate high-resolution images to date, providing an experience second only to viewing the book in person.”

What makes the Book of Kells so special, reproduced “in such varied places as Irish national coinage and tattoos?” asks Professors Moss and Ryan. “There is no one answer to these questions.” In their free online course on the manuscript, these two scholars of art history and theology, respectively, do not attempt to “provide definitive answers to the many questions that surround it.” Instead, they illuminate its history and many meanings to different communities of people, including, of course, the people of Ireland. “For Irish people,” they explain in the course trailer above, “it represents a sense of pride, a tangible link to a positive time in Ireland’s past, reflected through its unique art.”

But while the Book of Kells is still a modern “symbol of Irishness,” it was made with materials and techniques that fell out of use several hundred years ago, and that were once spread far and wide across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. In the video above, Trinity College Library conservator John Gillis shows us how the manuscript was made using methods that date back to the “development of the codex, or the book form.” This includes the use of parchment, in this case calf skin, a material that remembers the anatomical features of the animals from which it came, with markings where tails, spines, and legs used to be.

The Book of Kells has weathered the centuries fairly well, thanks to careful preservation, but it’s also had perhaps five rebindings in its lifetime. “In its original form,” notes Harlitz-Kern, the manuscript “was both thicker and larger. Thirty folios of the original manuscript have been lost through the centuries and the edges of the existing manuscript were severely trimmed during a rebinding in the nineteenth century.” It remains, nonetheless, one of the most impressive artifacts to come from the age of the illuminated manuscript, “described by some,” says Moss and Ryan, “as the most famous manuscript in the world.” Find out why by seeing it (virtually) for yourself and learning about it from the experts above.

For anyone interested in getting a copy of The Book of Kells in a nice print format, see The Book of Kells: Reproductions from the manuscript in Trinity College, Dublin.

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800 Illuminated Medieval Manuscripts Are Now Online: Browse & Download Them Courtesy of the British Library and Bibliothèque Nationale de France

Killer Rabbits in Medieval Manuscripts: Why So Many Drawings in the Margins Depict Bunnies Going Bad

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

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Jack Kerouac’s Hand-Drawn Cover for On the Road (1952)

in Art, Books | August 19th, 2024

This falls under the category, “If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself.”

In 1950, when Jack Kerouac released his first novel, The Town and the City, he was less than impressed by the book cover produced by his publisher, Harcourt Brace. (Click here to see why.) So, in 1952, when he began shopping his second novel, the great beat classic On the Road, Kerouac went ahead and designed his own cover. He sent it to a potential publisher A.A. Wyn, with a little note typed at the very top:

Dear Mr. Wyn:

I submit this as my idea of an appealing commercial cover expressive of the book. The cover for “The Town and the City” was as dull as the title and the photo backflap. Wilbur Pippin’s photo of me is the perfect On the Road one … it will look like the face of the figure below.

J.K.

Wyn turned down the novel, and it wouldn’t get published until 1957. It would, however, become a bestseller and be published with many different covers through the years. They’re all on display here.

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J. G. Ballard Demystifies Surrealist Paintings by Dalí, Magritte, de Chirico & More

in Art, Books, Literature | August 14th, 2024

Before his signature works like The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, and High-Rise, J. G. Ballard published three apocalyptic novels, The Drowned World, The Burning World, and The Crystal World. Each of those books offers a different vision of large-scale environmental disaster, and the last even provides a clue as to its inspiration. Or rather, its original cover does, by using a section of Max Ernst’s painting The Eye of Silence. “This spinal landscape, with its frenzied rocks towering into the air above the silent swamp, has attained an organic life more real than that of the solitary nymph sitting in the foreground,” Ballard writes in “The Coming of the Unconscious,” an article on surrealism written shortly after The Crystal World appeared in 1966.

First published in an issue of the magazine New Worlds (which also contains Ballard’s take on Chris Marker’s La Jetée), the piece is ostensibly a review of Patrick Waldberg’s Surrealism and Marcel Jean’s The History of Surrealist Painting, but it ends up delivering Ballard’s short analyses of a series of paintings by various surrealist masters.

The Eye of Silence shows the landscapes of our world “for what they are — the palaces of flesh and bone that are the living facades enclosing our own subliminal consciousness.” The “terrifying structure” at the center of René Magritte’s The Annunciation is “a neuronic totem, its rounded and connected forms are a fragment of our own nervous systems, perhaps an insoluble code that contains the operating formulae for our own passage through time and space.”

In Giorgio de Chirico’s The Disquieting Muses, “an undefined anxiety has begun to spread across the deserted square. The symmetry and regularity of the arcades conceals an intense inner violence; this is the face of catatonic withdrawal”; its figures are “human beings from whom all transitional time has been eroded.” Another work depicts an empty beach as “a symbol of utter psychic alienation, of a final stasis of the soul”; its displacement of beach and sea through time “and their marriage with our own four-dimensional continuum, has warped them into the rigid and unyielding structures of our own consciousness.” There Ballard writes of no less familiar a canvas than The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí, whom he called “the greatest painter of the twentieth century” more than 40 years after “The Coming of the Unconscious” in the Guardian.

A decade thereafter, that same publication’s Declan Lloyd theorizes that the experimental billboards designed by Ballard in the fifties (previously featured here on Open Culture) had been textual reinterpretations of Dalí’s imagery. Until the late sixties, Ballard says in a 1995 World Art interview, “the Surrealists were very much looked down upon. This was part of their attraction to me, because I certainly didn’t trust English critics, and anything they didn’t like seemed to me probably on the right track. I’m glad to say that my judgment has been seen to be right — and theirs wrong.” He understood the long-term value of Surrealist visions, which had seemingly been obsolesced by World War II before, “all too soon, a new set of nightmares emerged.” We can only hope he won’t be proven as prescient about the long-term habitability of the planet.

via Flashbak

What Makes Salvador Dalí’s Iconic Surrealist Painting “The Persistence of Memory” a Great Work of Art

An Introduction to René Magritte, and How the Belgian Artist Used an Ordinary Style to Create Extraordinarily Surreal Paintings

When Our World Became a de Chirico Painting: How the Avant-Garde Painter Foresaw the Empty City Streets of 2020

J. G. Ballard’s Experimental Text Collages: His 1958 Foray into Avant-Garde Literature

An Introduction to Surrealism: The Big Aesthetic Ideas Presented in Three Videos

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Behold the Kräuterbuch, a Lavishly Illustrated Guide to Plants and Herbs from 1462

in Art, Books, History, Nature | July 29th, 2024

When Konrad von Megenberg published his Buch der Natur in the mid-fourteenth century, he won the distinction of having assembled the very first natural history in German. More than half a millennium later, the book still fascinates — not least for its depictions of cats, previously featured here on Open Culture. Even the works derived from it have charms of their own: take the Kräuterbuch (or “Book of Herbs”) from 1462, in which Duke Albrecht III of Bavaria’s personal physician Johannes Hartlieb adapts a section of the Buch der Natur with its own full complement of 160 illustrations.

“Hartlieb’s subject is plants, mostly herbs, and their medical uses,” says the Library of Congress, on whose site you can view and download the book. “What makes the Kräuterbuch special is the side-by-side presentation of text and images. The high cost of such a richly decorated book makes it unlikely that it was actually used by doctors or pharmacists of the time.”

But even if they lack a certain scientific practicality, these botanical presentations have a bright, simple boldness that, in some respect, suits our visual aesthetics here in the early twenty-first century; you could call it a renaissance equivalent of flat design.

“Each chapter of the Kräuterbuch follows a traditional system of botanical classification derived from the Greek philosopher Theophrastus,” writes Hunter Dukes at the Public Domain Review, which also offers a gallery of the book’s illustrations. “Animals are portrayed as pharmacologically knowledgeable, such as in an account of deer rubbing themselves on pepperweed (Lepidium latifolium) to remove hunters’ arrows”; another section holds that “deadly carrots (Thapsia) aid beggars in their deceptions — rubbed on the face, they will produce signs of leprosy, which can also be cured with vinegar.” Discussing the poisonous mandrake (see image immediately above), Hartlieb carries forward von Megenberg’s suggestion “that its magical properties should be kept secret from commoners,” who, naturally, would never be in possession of such a lavish tome. Now all of us can access the Kräuterbuch — and most of us know that we’d be better off not messing around with mandrake at all.

via the Public Domain Review

Hortus Eystettensis: The Beautifully Illustrated Book of Plants That Changed Botanical Art Overnight (1613)

A Curious Herbal: 500 Beautiful Illustrations of Medicinal Plants Drawn by Elizabeth Blackwell in 1737 (to Save Her Family from Financial Ruin)

Behold a 15th-Century Italian Manuscript Featuring Medicinal Plants with Fantastical Human Faces

The Surprising Map of Plants: A New Animation Shows How All the Different Plants Relate to Each Other

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Behold James Sowerby’s Strikingly Illustrated New Elucidation of Colours (1809)

in Art, Books | July 18th, 2024

James Sowerby was an artist dedicated to the natural world. It thus comes as no surprise that he was also enormously interested in color, especially given the era in which he lived. Born in 1757, he made his professional start as a painter of flowers: a viable career path in those days, at least to those with Sowerby’s talent and dedication. It was in 1790 that he began what would end up being the 23-years-in-the-making English Botany, the landmark 36-volume work for which he remains best known today. Its 2,592 images captured the full range of his country’s flora, some of them in hues that readers had never before encountered in real life.

Alas, writes Joyce Dixon at Shaping Colour, “as the years passed, Sowerby watched with dismay as the bright hues of his hand-colored engravings began to fade and decay — the inevitable action of time and chemical instability working away at his watercolor pigments.” This inspired another ambitious artistic-scientific project: “to develop a standard, universal and permanent method of representing natural color.” In 1809, he invented a device he called the “Chromatometer,” which “presented a standard, measurable prismatic spectrum to the user.” Looking through a prism, that user could theoretically “pinpoint specific colors in the spectrum revealed by the prism, offering a standard reference for a specific hue” identified in reality.

The Chromatometer never proved viable, writes Paul Sorene at Flashbak, “because it was too fiddly and botanists often worked at night,” but the work that documented it lives on. A New Elucidation of Colours, Original, Prismatic and Material: Showing Their Concordance in the Three Primitives, Yellow, Red and Blue: and the Means of Producing, Measuring and Mixing Them: with some Observations on the Accuracy of Sir Isaac Newton presents a system of color theory based on red, yellow, and blue (unlike modern systems, not red, green, and blue). At the same time that Sowerby was developing it, his countryman Thomas Young was putting together a scientific theory of his own about how all perception of color arises from the eye combining just three wavelengths — a theory that turned out to be true.

You can read or download A New Elucidation at the Wellcome Collection or the Internet Archive. These digitized versions include all of Sowerby’s original illustrations, for use with the Chromatometer and otherwise, which remain aesthetically compelling these two centuries later. But as underscored by the copious amounts of text, they reflect a time when humanity was coming into an understanding of not just how to replicate colors reliably and accurately, but of the nature of color itself. Sowerby may not have had the last word on the subject, despite having corrected no less a forebear than Newton, but his investigations can only have helped him look even more closely at the natural kingdoms he meant to capture — including that of minerals, which was also beckoning at the time.

via Flashbak

The Woman Who Theorized Color: An Introduction to Mary Gartside’s New Theory of Colours (1808)

Goethe’s Theory of Colors: The 1810 Treatise That Inspired Kandinsky & Early Abstract Painting

A Visionary 115-Year-Old Color Theory Manual Returns to Print: Emily Noyes Vanderpoel’s Color Problems

The Vibrant Color Wheels Designed by Goethe, Newton & Other Theorists of Color (1665–1810)

The Book of Colour Concepts: A New 800-Page Celebration of Color Theory, Including Works by Newton, Goethe, and Hilma af Klint

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

How Choose Your Own Adventure Books Became Beloved Among Generations of Readers

in Books, Games | July 15th, 2024

We’ve all read plenty of literature written in the first person, and plenty of literature written in the third person. The second person, with its main subject of neither “I” nor “he” or “she” but “you,” is considerably harder to come by, and the writers who take it up tend to be experimenters (like B. S. Johnson or Georges Perec) or brazen in some other sense (like the Jay McInerney of Bright Lights, Big City). But if you grew up in the America of the nineteen-eighties or nineties, there’s a decent chance you absorbed a mega-dose of second-person narrative without even realizing it. It would have come in the form of Choose Your Own Adventure books, with that tantalizing promise on their covers: “YOU’RE THE STAR OF THE STORY!”

You can hear the story of Choose Your Own Adventure books themselves told in the Galaxy Media Video at the top of the post — or, with greater homage paid to the branching-text form, in this recent New Yorker piece by Leslie Jamison. Reading a “Choose book,” she writes, “you got to imagine that you were getting into trouble in outer space, or in the future, or under the sea. You got to make choices every few pages: Do you ask the ghost about her intentions, or run away? Do you rebel against the alien overlords, or blindly obey them?”

The second-person voice gave these books a bracing immediacy, but their real appeal lay, of course, in the choices they offered, and even more so in the consequences: sometimes glory, sometimes death, and more often a fate unsettlingly in between.

The concept from which Choose Your Own Adventure books evolved was first conceived in the seventies by Edward Packard, a lawyer with a habit of consulting his children about what should happen next in their bedtime stories. His name will sound familiar indeed to anyone who lived a Choose books-laden childhood. He wrote the very first volume, The Cave of Time from 1979, as well as many that followed, including such memorably frightening or bizarre early issues as The Mystery of Chimney Rock, with its perilous haunted house, and Inside UFO 54–40, which offered a glimpse of paradise only to readers who “cheated” by ignoring its fixed decision paths.

Back in the early nineties, when I was combing second-hand shops for Choose Your Own Adventure books, I quickly came to prefer the volumes from the late seventies and early eighties, with their exotically passé aesthetics and their relatively unsanitized content. In the video just above, writer-Youtuber Jason Arnopp looks at The Mystery of Chimney Rock and the later The Horror of High Ridge, whose illustrations of murderous Old West apparitions (none of whom have any regard for the lives of the wholesome-looking, sweater-clad teens at the center of the story) have stuck with me to this day. Adulthood has turned out to involve no confrontations with bloodthirsty ghosts wielding tomahawks and hot pokers. Nevertheless, Choose Your Own Adventure books taught generations of us the important lesson that there’s no such thing as a clear-cut decision; you’ve just got to turn the page and hope for the best.

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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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Behold Gustave Doré’s Dramatic Illustrations of the Bible (1866)

in Art, Books, Religion | July 9th, 2024

One occasionally hears it said that, thanks to the internet, all the books truly worth reading are free: Shakespeare, Don Quixote, the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, the Divine Comedy, the Bible. Can it be a coincidence that all of these works inspired illustrations by Gustave Doré? When he was active in mid-nineteenth-century France, he worked in a variety of forms, including painting, sculpture, and even comics and caricatures. But he lives on through nothing so much as his woodblock-print illustrations of what we now consider classics of Western literature — and, in the case of La Grande Bible de Tours, a text we could describe as “super-canonical.”

Doré took on the task of designing 241 engravings for a luxurious new French-language edition of the Vulgate Bible in the mid-eighteen-sixties. The project “offered him an almost endless series of intensely dramatic events,” writes biographer Joanna Richardson: “the looming tower of Babel, the plague of darkness in Egypt, the death of Samson, Isaiah’s vision of the destruction of Babylon.”

All provided practically ideal showcases for the elements of Doré’s intensely Romantic style: “the mountain scenes, the lurid skies, the complicated battles, the almost unremitting brutalism.” But along with the Old Testament “massacres and murders, decapitations and avenging angels” come Victorian angels, Victorian women, and Victorian children, “sentimental or wise beyond their years.”

Those choices may have been motivated by the simultaneous publication of La Grande Bible de Tours in both France and the United Kingdom. In any event, the edition proved successful enough on both sides of the Channel that a major exhibition of Doré’s work opened in London the very next year.

Though visibly rooted in their time and place — as well as in the artist’s personal sensibilities and the aesthetic currents in which he was caught up — Doré’s visions of the Bible still make an impact with their rich and immediately recognizable chiaroscuro portrayals of scenes that have long resonated through the whole of Western culture. You can see the whole series on Wikipedia, or as collected in The Doré Gallery of Bible Illustrations at Project Gutenberg — all, of course, for no charge.

Gustave Doré’s Exquisite Engravings of Cervantes’ Don Quixote

Gustave Doré’s Macabre Illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (1884)

Behold Gustave Doré’s Illustrations for Rabelais’ Grotesque Satirical Masterpiece Gargantua and Pantagruel

The Adventures of Famed Illustrator Gustave Doré Presented in a Fantasic(al) Cutout Animation

Salvador Dalí’s Illustrations for the Bible (1963)

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Hear 2.5 Hours of the Classical Music in Haruki Murakami’s Novels: Liszt, Beethoven, Janáček, and More

The Medieval Masterpiece, the Book of Kells, Is Now Digitized and Available Online

Jack Kerouac’s Hand-Drawn Cover for On the Road (1952)

J. G. Ballard Demystifies Surrealist Paintings by Dalí, Magritte, de Chirico & More

Behold the Kräuterbuch, a Lavishly Illustrated Guide to Plants and Herbs from 1462

Behold James Sowerby’s Strikingly Illustrated New Elucidation of Colours (1809)

How Choose Your Own Adventure Books Became Beloved Among Generations of Readers

Behold Gustave Doré’s Dramatic Illustrations of the Bible (1866)

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