Much has been written about the loss of color in the twenty-first century. Our environments offered practically every color known to man not so very long ago — and in certain eras, granted, it got to be a bit much. But now, everything seems to have retreated to a narrow palette of grays and browns, not to mention stark black and white. We should consider the possibility that this time of “color loss” is a kind of ascetic repentance after a long feast. That analogy holds on more than one level: technology and industrialization made food abundant and thus inexpensive, and it did the very same thing with colors.
There was a time when colors didn’t come cheap. People had plenty of black, reds, and browns in their lives, but producing the pigments for hues not often seen in nature entailed going to the ends of the earth (or in the case of ultramarine blue, the bottom of the sea). We all know that, for a long time starting around the day of Julius Caesar, purple was the color of royalty. The choice wasn’t an accident: Caesar’s “Tyrian purple” of choice was extravagantly expensive, owing to the fact that it could be extracted only from the glands of a particular Mediterranean sea snail. You can learn more about this process from the Business Insider video above.
“Thousands of snails were required to produce a single ounce of purple dye,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Sonja Anderson, quoting Pliny the Elder. Though well understood for a few decades now, the world of ancient purple-dye production continues to yield scientific discoveries. “Archaeologists were excavating recently in the Bronze Age town of Kolonna, on the Greek island of Aegina, when they discovered two Mycenaean buildings,” Anderson writes. “As the researchers write in a study published in the journal PLOS ONE, the buildings date to the 16th century B.C.E., and the older one contained pigmented ceramics, grinding tools and heaps of broken mollusk shells: all indicative of a purple dye factory.”
Notably, these well-preserved 3,600-year-old ruins date from a time long before purple acquired its prestige. “There is no indication in the Bronze Age that purple was a symbol of power and that purple-colored textiles were only reserved for the elite or leaders, as in Roman or Byzantine times,” says archaeologist Lydia Berger, co-author of the study. And when the Byzantine Empire fell, the knowledge of Tyrian purple was lost with it, only to be recovered early in this century. These days, one does hear occasional rumors of a color comeback, and a rich purple leading the charge would bring with it a certain historical satisfaction. In any case, we all remember one cultural royal in particular who surely would have approved.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
From Wired comes this: “Professor of English and Medieval Literature Dr. Dorsey Armstrong answers your questions about the Middle Ages from Twitter. Why is it called the “Middle” Ages? [What did medieval English sound like?] What activities did people do for fun? Why were animals tried in court for crimes? Answers to these questions and many more await—it’s Medieval Support.”
The Purdue professor has also created a number of well-reviewed lecture series on The Great Courses. Pro tip: If you are a member of Audible.com, you can get a number of them for free.
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There may be as many doors into Alcoholics Anonymous in the 21st century as there are people who walk through them—from every world religion to no religion. The “international mutual-aid fellowship” has had “a significant and long-term effect on the culture of the United States,” writes Worcester State University professor of psychology Charles Fox at Aeon. Indeed, its influence is global. From its inception in 1935, A.A. has represented an “enormously popular therapy, and a testament to the interdisciplinary nature of health and wellness.”
A.A. has also represented, at least culturally, a remarkable synthesis of behavioral science and spirituality that translates into scores of different languages, beliefs, and practices. Or at least that’s the way it can appear from browsing the scores of books on A.A.’s 12-Steps and Buddhism, Yoga, Catholicism, Judaism, Indigenous faith traditions, shamanist practices, Stoicism, secular humanism, and, of course, psychology.
Historically, and often in practice, however, the (non)organization of worldwide fellowships has represented a much narrower tradition, inherited from the evangelical (small “e”) Christian Oxford Group, or as A.A. founder Bill Wilson called them, “the ‘O.G.’” Wilson credits the Oxford Group for the methodology of A.A.: “their large emphasis upon the principles of self-survey, confession, restitution, and the giving of oneself in service to others.”
The Oxford Group’s theology, though qualified and tempered, also made its way into many of A.A.’s basic principles. But for the recovery group’s genesis, Wilson cites a more secular authority, Carl Jung. The famous Swiss psychiatrist took a keen interest in alcoholism in the 1920s. Wilson wrote to Jung in 1961 to express his “great appreciation” for his efforts. “A certain conversation you once had with one of your patients, a Mr. Rowland H. back in the early 1930’s,” Wilson explains, “did play a critical role in the founding of our Fellowship.”
Jung may not have known his influence on the recovery movement, Wilson says, although alcoholics had accounted for “about 13 percent of all admissions” in his practice, notes Fox. One of his patients, Rowland H.—or Rowland Hazard, “investment banker and former state senator from Rhode Island”—came to Jung in desperation, saw him daily for a period of several months, stopped drinking, then relapsed. Brought back to Jung by his cousin, Hazard was told that his case was hopeless short of a religious conversion. As Wilson puts it in his letter:
[Y]ou frankly told him of his hopelessness, so far as any further medical or psychiatric treatment might be concerned. This candid and humble statement of yours was beyond doubt the first foundation stone upon which our Society has since been built.
Jung also told Hazard that conversion experiences were incredibly rare and recommended that he “place himself in a religious atmosphere and hope for the best,” as Wilson remembers. But he did not specify any particular religion. Hazard discovered the Oxford Group. He might, as far as Jung was concerned, have met God as he understood it anywhere. “His craving for alcohol was the equivalent,” wrote the psychiatrist in a reply to Wilson, “on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God.”
In his reply letter to Wilson, Jung uses religious language allegorically. AA took the idea of conversion more literally. Though it wrestled with the plight of the agnostic, the Big Book concluded that such people must eventually see the light. Jung, on the other hand, seems very careful to avoid a strictly religious interpretation of his advice to Hazard, who started the first small group that would convert Wilson to sobriety and to Oxford Group methods.
“How could one formulate such an insight that is not misunderstood in our days?” Jung asks. “The only right and legitimate way to such an experience is that it happens to you in reality and it can only happen to you when you walk on a path which leads you to a higher understanding.” Sobriety could be achieved through “a higher education of the mind beyond the confines of mere rationalism”—through an enlightenment or conversion experience, that is. It might also occur through “an act of grace or through a personal and honest contact with friends.”
Though most founding members of AA fought for the stricter interpretation of Jung’s prescription, Wilson always entertained the idea that multiple paths might bring alcoholics to the same goal, even including modern medicine. He drew on the medical opinions of Dr. William D. Silkworth, who theorized that alcoholism was in part a physical disease, “a sort of metabolism difficulty which he then called an allergy.” Even after his own conversion experience, which Silkworth, like Jung, recommended he pursue, Wilson experimented with vitamin therapies, through the influence of Aldous Huxley.
His search to understand his mystical “white light” moment in a New York detox room also led Wilson to William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience. The book “gave me the realization,” he wrote to Jung, “that most conversion experiences, whatever their variety, do have a common denominator of ego collapse at depth.” He even thought that LSD could act as such a “temporary ego-reducer” after he took the drug under supervision of British psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond. (Jung likely would have opposed what he called “short cuts” like psychedelic drugs.)
In the letters between Wilson and Jung, as Ian McCabe argues in Carl Jung and Alcoholics Anonymous, we see mutual admiration between the two, as well as mutual influence. “Bill Wilson,” writes McCabe’s publisher, “was encouraged by Jung’s writings to promote the spiritual aspect of recovery,” an aspect that took on a particularly religious character in Alcoholics Anonymous. For his part, Jung, “influenced by A.A.’s success… gave ‘complete and detailed instructions’ on how the A.A. group format could be developed further and used by ‘general neurotics.’” And so it has, though more on the Oxford Group model than the more mystical Jungian. It might well have been otherwise.
Read more about Jung’s influence on AA over atAeon.
Note: Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.
Few depictions of ancient Roman life neglect to reference all the time ancient Romans spent at the baths. One gets the impression that their civilization was obsessed with cleanliness, in contrast to most of the societies found around the world at the time, but that turns out hardly to be the case. In fact, bathing seems to have been a secondary activity at Roman baths, which were “places to meet friends, make connections, perhaps even score a dinner invitation”; “places to buy a snack, have a massage, or face the dreaded tweezers of the hair remover”; “places to escape from a harsh and status-driven world; “places to be Roman.”
So says Garrett Ryan, creator of the ancient-history Youtube channel Told in Stone, in the new video above. He might have added that Roman baths were “third places.” Popularized by the late sociologist Ray Oldenburg with the 1989 book The Great Good Place, the concept of the third place stands in contrast to our first and second places, home and work.
A bookstore could be a third place, or a café, or any “hangout” occupying that hard-to-define (and by the late twentieth century in America, hard-to-find) realm between public and private. If it makes you feel connected to the community in which you live — indeed, if it makes you feel like you live in a community at all — it may well be a third place.
Roman baths weren’t just impressive sociologically, but also technologically. Ryan explains their architecture, water supply, heating systems, and cleaning procedures, such as they were. He quotes Marcus Aurelius as describing bath water as “a repulsive blend of oil, sweat, and filth”; in all likelihood, it was “only changed when it became so cloudy that it repelled bathers.” Sanitation practices appear much improved at Hammam Essalihine in Algeria, one of the very few ancient Roman baths in continuous use since its construction. Ryan documents his trip there in the video just above from his other channel Scenic Routes to the Past. Though captivated by the sight of a real Roman bath functioning just as designed, he must have been too consumed by thoughts of antiquity to remember to pack that modern necessity, a swimsuit.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
The most widely known work by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japanese artist Hokusai, 神奈川沖浪裏, is usually translated into English as The Great Wave off Kanagawa. That version of the title reflects the iconic scene depicted in the image well enough, though I can’t help but feel that we should be talking about waves, plural. Granted, the Japanese language hardly makes a fuss about plurality and singularity in the first place, but even by the standards of ukiyo‑e woodblock prints, this is a work of art that takes many forms. It’s not just that there are a lot of parodies floating around, but that no single “original” even exists.
“There’s not just one impression of the Great Wave, as many people think. There were originally thousands of them,” says scientist Capucine Korenberg in the British Museum video above. Back in the mid-nineteenth century, “Japanese prints were very cheap, and you could buy them for the same amount of money you could buy a double helping of soup and noodles.” Demand for the Great Wave in particular was such that experts reckon that at least 8,000 prints were sold, having been made “until the woodblocks just started to be so worn out that they couldn’t be used anymore.” Again, note the plural: if the blocks used to make the image were replaced, we’d expect to see differences in the actual image over time.
We’ve discussed before how the Great Wave went through several iterations over four decades before Hokusai found the form recognized around the world still today. But if you look at a print of the final version closely enough — and know enough about Hokusai’s art — you can tell whether it came from an earlier edition or a later one. It was no less an expert than longtime Tokyo-based printmaker and Hokusai enthusiast David Bull (previously featured here on Open Culture) who noticed that “he could see small differences between the strokes” of the three Great Wave prints owned by the British Museum. Hearing this sent Korenberg on a quest to determine their exact chronological order.
Many factors complicated this task, including the amount of ink and pressure applied to the woodblock during its creation, as well as the chances of modification or partial replacement of particular blocks along the way. In the end, she found it “more certain than ever” that the British Museum’s three Great Waves came from the same key block, which would have been modeled after Hokusai’s drawing. But along the way, she did make a discovery: it was previously thought that 111 identified prints existed, but she confirmed two more, bringing the total up to 113. Determining the fate of the other 7,887 is a task best left to the even more obsessive ukiyo-e-hunters out there.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Albert Einstein developed his theory of special relativity in 1905, and then mentally mapped out his theory of general relativity between 1907 and 1915. For years to come, the rest of the world would try to catch up with Einstein, trying to understand the gist, let alone the full implications, of his groundbreaking ideas.
Above, you can watch one such attempt. Produced by Max and David Fleischer, best known for their Betty Boop and Superman cartoons, The Einstein Theory of Relativity used the power of animation to explain relativity to a broad, non-scientific audience in 1923. One of the first educational science films ever made, the silent animated film was created with the assistance of science journalist Garrett P. Serviss and other experts who had a handle on Einstein’s theories. According to a biography of Max Fleischer, the film was “an out-and-out success.” “The critics and the public applauded it. And Einstein did too, apparently deeming it an “excellent attempt to illustrate an abstract subject.”
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Go to Japan today, and the country will present you with plenty of opportunities to buy pan, tabako, and tempura. These products themselves — bread, cigarettes, and deep-fried seafood or vegetables — will be familiar enough. Even the words that refer to them may have a recognizable ring, especially if you happen to be a Portuguese-speaker. Japanese has more than its fair share of naturalized terms, used to refer to everything from the konbini on the corner to the riizanaburu prices found therein, but none of them are as deeply rooted as its terms imported from Portugal.
Relations between Japan and Portugal go back to 1543, when the first Portuguese sailors arrived in the southern Japanese archipelago. Impressions of this encounter are included in the video above, a Voices of the Past compilation of how actual sixteenth-century Japanese historians described their unexpected visitors. “A southern barbarian vessel came to our shores,” writes one of them, anonymously. From it “emerged an unnameable creature, somewhat similar in shape to a human being, but looking rather more like a long-nosed goblin, or the giant demon mikoshi-nyūdō.”
This grotesque, unintelligible creature turned to be a bateren; that is, a padre, a missionary priest come to spread the kirishitan religion in this distant land. In this primary task they faced severe, ultimately insurmountable challenges, but as the first Europeans to make contact with Japan, they also happened much more successfully to disseminate Western concepts and techniques in agriculture, science, and art (not to mention dessert culture). Their introduction of the gun, described in detail by another contemporary historian, also changed the course of Japanese history, doing its part to make possible the unification of Japan in the following century.
Kurusu in hand, these bateren argued that one should devote oneself to Deusu in order to avoid eternal condemnation to inheruno and gain admission to paraiso. There were converts, though perhaps not in numbers as large as expected. Then as now, the Japanese had their own way of going about things, but in the sixteenth century, they had rulers inclined to crack down hard on suspicious foreign influence. The last section of the video contains testimony of a showdown staged between Christianity and Buddhism, a debate in which the bateren seemed to have put on a poor show. Defeated, they were either expelled or executed, and not long thereafter, Japan closed the doa — as they now call it — for a couple more centuries.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
A little over a decade ago, a curator at the British Film Institute (BFI) discovered the oldest surviving film featuring a Charles Dickens character, “The Death of Poor Joe.” The silent film, directed by George Albert Smith in 1900, brings to life Dickens’ characterJo, the crossing sweeper from Bleak House. Prior to this find, the title of the oldest known Dickens film belonged to Scrooge, or, Marley’s Ghost, which premiered in November 1901.
Providing more context for the film, the BFI writes:
This tragic short film is based on the stage production of Poor Jo the Crossing Sweeper, which itself adapted one of the most affecting stories in Dickens’ epic novel Bleak House. This short film is very much an adaptation of the stage version, in which a follow-spot recreated the night watchman’s lamp. As Joe dies, never having been taught to pray, the light also represents the redemptive light of heaven.
The character of Joe was popularised in the 19th century by actress Jennie Lee, who toured her performance around Europe and the USA. Here Joe is played by Laura Bayley and the Night-watchman by Tom Green. Both actors were regular collaborators with the Brighton-based filmmaker GA Smith (Bayley was his wife).
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When the words London and underground come together, the first thing that comes to most of our minds, naturally, is the London Underground. But though it may enjoy the honorable distinction of the world’s first railway to run below the streets, the stalwart Tube is hardly the only thing buried below the city — and far indeed from the oldest. The video above makes a journey through various subterranean strata, starting with the paving stone and continuing through the soil, electric cables, and gas pipelines beneath. From there, things get Roman.
First comes the Billingsgate Roman House and Baths and the Roman amphitheater, two preserved places from what was once called Londinium. Below that level run several now-underground rivers, just above the depth of Winston Churchill’s private bunker, which is now maintained as a museum.
Farther down, at a depth of 66 feet, we find the remains of London’s tube system — not the Tube, but the pneumatic tube, a nineteenth-century technology that could fire encapsulated letters from one part of the city to another. More effective and longer lived was the later, more deeply installed London Post Office Railway, which was used to make deliveries until 2003.
At 79 feet underground, we finally meet with the Underground — or at least the first and shallowest of its eleven lines. The Tube has long become an essential part of the lives of most Londoners, but around the same depth exists another facility known to relatively few: the Camden catacombs, a system of underground passages once used to stable the horses who worked on the railways. Further down are the network of World War II-era “deep shelters,” one of which hosted the planning of D‑Day; below them is a still-functional facility instrumental to the defeat of different enemies, typhus and cholera. That would be London’s sewer system, for which we should spare a thought if we’ve ever walked along the Thames and appreciated the fact that it no longer stinks.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
In 2006, David Foster Wallace published a piece in the New York Times Magazine headlined “Roger Federer as Religious Experience.” Even then, he could declare Federer, “at 25, the best tennis player currently alive. Maybe the best ever.” Much had already been written about “his old-school stoicism and mental toughness and good sportsmanship and evident overall decency and thoughtfulness and charitable largess.” Less easily commented upon — because much less easily described — was the aesthetic transcendence of his performance on the court, which Wallace thought best witnessed in person.
“If you’ve watched tennis only on television, you simply have no idea how hard these pros are hitting the ball, how fast the ball is moving, how little time the players have to get to it, and how quickly they’re able to move and rotate and strike and recover,” Wallace writes. “And none are faster, or more deceptively effortless about it, than Roger Federer.” Was that one of the observations the champion had in mind this past weekend, eighteen years later — and two years after his own retirement from the game — when he took the tree-stump lectern before Dartmouth’s class of 2024 and declared that “Effortless is a myth”?
That was one of three “tennis lessons” — that is, lessons for life derived from his long and hugely successful experience in tennis — that Federer lays out in the commencement address above. The second, “It’s only a point,” is a notion of which it’s all too easy to lose sight of amid the balletic intensity of a match. The third, “Life is bigger than the court,” is one Federer himself now must learn in the daily life after his own “graduation” that stretches out before him. For a man still considered one of the greatest players ever to pick up a racket, is there life after professional tennis?
Federer acknowledges the irony of his not having gone to college, but choosing instead to leave school at sixteen in order to devote himself to his sport. “In many ways, professional athletes are our culture’s holy men,” Wallace writes in another essay. “They give themselves over to a pursuit, endure great privation and pain to actualize themselves at it, and enjoy a relationship to perfection that we admire and reward.” But when their athletic careers inevitably end, they find themselves in a greatly heightened version of the situation we all do when we come to the end of our institutionalized education, wondering what could or should come next.
Clearly, Federer doesn’t suffer from the kind of inarticulacy and unreflectiveness that Wallace diagnosed over and over in other professional athletes about whom he wrote. In profiling player Michael Joyce, for instance, Wallace saw that Joyce and his colleagues lived in “a world that, like a child’s world, is very serious and very small” — but which Federer has long displayed an uncommon ability to see beyond. Still, as he must know, that guarantees him a satisfying second act no more than even world-beating success in any given field guarantees any of us general well-being in life. Wallace, too, knew that full well — and of course, he was no mean commencement speaker himself.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
In 1849, a little over 175 years ago, Edgar Allan Poe was found dead in a Baltimore gutter under mysterious circumstances very likely related to violent election fraud. It was an ignominious end to a life marked by hardship, alcoholism, and loss. After struggling for years as the first American writer to try and make a living from his art, and failing in several publishing ventures and positions, Poe achieved few of his aims, barely getting by financially and only managing to attract a little—often negative—notice for now-famous poems like “The Raven.” Contemporaries like Ralph Waldo Emerson disparaged the poem and a later generation of writers, including William Butler Yeats, pronounced him “vulgar.”
But of course, as we know, a countercurrent of Poe appreciation took hold among writers, artists, and filmmakers interested in mystery, horror, and the supernatural—to such a degree that in the previous century, nearly every artist even passingly associated with darker themes has interpreted Poe as a rite of passage. We’ve featured a reading of “The Raven” by the often-sinister Christopher Walken.
At the top of the post, you can hear another version of the Queens-born actor reading Poe’s best-known work, a poem designed to produce what the author called a “unity of effect” with its incantatory repetitions. This recording comes from a collection of celebrity Poe readings called Closed on Account of Rabies, which also features such unique takes on the classic horror writer’s work as that above, “The Tell-Tale Heart” as read by Iggy Pop.
Just above, hear a lesser-known poem by Poe called “Ulalume” read by Jeff Buckley, with an accompanying soundtrack of low, pulsing, vaguely Western-inspired music that well suits Buckley’s formal, rhythmic recitation. The use of music on this album has divided many Poe fans, and admittedly, some tracks work better than others. On Buckley’s “Ulalume,” the music heightens tension and provides a perfect atmosphere for imagining “the misty mid region of Weir,” its “ghoul-haunted woodland,” and the “scoriac rivers” of lava pouring from the poet’s heart. On Marianne Faithful’s reading of “Annabelle Lee,” below, a score of keening synths can seem overwrought and unnecessary.
The remainder of the 1997 album, which you can purchase here, treats us to readings from 80s goth-rock stars Diamanda Galas and Gavin Friday, Bad Lieutenant director Abel Ferrara, Blondie singer Debbie Harry, and gravel-voiced New Orleans bluesman Dr. John, among others.
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