Why Maya Angelou’s Memoir I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings Became One of the Most Banned Books of All Time

Some good news: Maya Angelou’s 1969 mem­oir I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, a recount­ing of her first 17 years, includ­ing a rape at the age of 7 or 8 by her mother’s boyfriend, and her sub­se­quent emo­tion­al trau­ma, no longer leads the Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion’s Office for Intel­lec­tu­al Freedom’s list of banned and chal­lenged books.

The bad news: there will always be titles assigned to high school­ers that vivid­ly depict young people’s actu­al expe­ri­ence, that par­ents and com­mu­ni­ty groups will tar­get on sim­i­lar grounds.

New African list­ed some of the ver­ba­tim objec­tions that have been lev­eled against I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - that it encour­aged “pro­fan­i­ty”, was filled with “descrip­tions of drug abuse, sex­u­al­ly explic­it con­duct and tor­ture”, preached “bit­ter­ness and hatred against whites”, was “like­ly to cor­rupt minors” and con­tained “inap­pro­pri­ate­ly explic­it sex­u­al scenes.”

Angelou, who accused the book’s detrac­tors of not read­ing more than two words of it, bri­dled that any­one would “act as if their chil­dren are not faced with the same threats.”

Mol­lie Godfrey’s TED-Ed les­son, ani­mat­ed by Lau­ra White. above, points out how rad­i­cal Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings was for a work of its time:

Her auto­bi­og­ra­phy was one of the first to speak open­ly about child sex­u­al abuse and espe­cial­ly ground­break­ing to do so from the per­spec­tive of the abused child. For cen­turies Black women writ­ers have been lim­it­ed by stereo­types char­ac­ter­iz­ing them as hyper­sex­u­al. Afraid of rein­forc­ing these stereo­types, few were will­ing to write about their sex­u­al­i­ty at all but Angelou refused to be con­strained. She pub­licly explored her most per­son­al expe­ri­ence with­out apol­o­gy or shame.

Robert P. Doyle, vice-pres­i­dent of the Free­dom to Read Foun­da­tion, revealed that the ALA was inspired to launch Banned Books Week in 1982, when the Amer­i­can Book­sellers Asso­ci­a­tion dis­played I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and oth­er works in a cage out­side the entrance to their annu­al con­fer­ence:

The dis­play gen­er­at­ed a lot of press atten­tion. And the book com­mu­ni­ty real­ized that we have not only an oppor­tu­ni­ty, but a respon­si­bil­i­ty to engage the Amer­i­can pub­lic in a con­ver­sa­tion about the First Amend­ment as it relates to books and lit­er­a­ture. A coali­tion was formed imme­di­ate­ly with the authors, pub­lish­ers, and major dis­tri­b­u­tion cen­ters (book­stores and libraries) in the U.S. to draw atten­tion to the impor­tance of the free­dom to read, to pub­li­cize threats to that free­dom, and to pro­vide infor­ma­tion to com­bat the lack of aware­ness.

Many of the book’s high pro­file defend­ers dis­cov­ered it at a for­ma­tive age, includ­ing rap­per Com­mon, who decid­ed to become a writer after encoun­ter­ing it as a 5th grad­er, and Oprah Win­frey, who was blown away to learn that anoth­er young Black girl had also endured sex­u­al abuse:

I read those words and thought, “Some­body knows who I am.”

No less mov­ing is a com­ment on Godfrey’s TED-Ed les­son left by a teacher in Texas:

Caged Bird helped saved my life. Thank­ful for the day my 11th grade Eng­lish teacher at a con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian school hand­ed it to me and said, “read this, sweet pea”…I still encour­age my stu­dents at a con­ser­v­a­tive Chris­t­ian school in TX to read it.”

“I am glad you got the help you need­ed,” anoth­er view­er respond­ed. “I live in Flori­da, and that teacher who helped you would be charged with a felony here. I’m dead seri­ous.”

Lis­ten to Maya Angelou dis­cuss I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in this 1970  inter­view with Studs Terkel. 

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Brook­lyn Pub­lic Library Gives Every Teenag­er in the U.S. Free Access to Cen­sored Books

Texas School Board Bans Illus­trat­ed Edi­tion of The Diary of Anne Frank

Ten­nessee School Board Bans Maus, the Pulitzer-Prize Win­ning Graph­ic Nov­el on the Holo­caust; the Book Becomes #1 Best­seller on Ama­zon

The 850 Books a Texas Law­mak­er Wants to Ban Because They Could Make Stu­dents Feel Uncom­fort­able

Umber­to Eco Makes a List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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How One Man Keeps Showing Films in a Japanese Cinema That Closed 58 Years Ago: A Moving, Short Documentary

Since at least the nine­teen-fifties, when tele­vi­sion own­er­ship began spread­ing rapid­ly across the devel­oped world, movie the­aters have been labor­ing under one kind of exis­ten­tial threat or anoth­er. Yet despite their appar­ent vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty to a vari­ety of dis­rup­tive devel­op­ments — home video, stream­ing, COVID-19 — many, if not most, of them have found ways to sol­dier on. In some cas­es this owes to the ded­i­ca­tion of small groups of sup­port­ers, or even to the efforts of indi­vid­u­als like Shu­ji Tamu­ra, who oper­ates the cen­tu­ry-old Motomiya Movie The­ater in Japan’s Fukushi­ma pre­fec­ture sin­gle-hand­ed­ly.

You can see Tamu­ra in action in My The­ater, the five-minute doc­u­men­tary short above. “The Japan­ese direc­tor Kazuya Ashizawa’s charm­ing obser­va­tion­al por­trait cap­tures Tamu­ra as he screens old movies for an audi­ence of stu­dents and cinephiles, and gives behind-the-scenes tours of the cin­e­ma,” says Aeon. Those tours include an up-close look at the thor­ough­ly ana­log film pro­jec­tor of whose oper­a­tion Tamu­ra, 81 years old at the time of film­ing, has retained all the know-how. Though he offi­cial­ly closed the the­ater in the nine­teen-six­ties, it seems he keeps his thread­ing skills sharp by hold­ing screen­ings for tour groups young and old.

Though light­heart­ed, a por­trait like this could hard­ly avoid an ele­giac under­tone. Already suf­fer­ing from the depop­u­la­tion that has afflict­ed many regions of Japan, Fukushi­ma was also bad­ly afflict­ed by the 2011 Tōhoku earth­quake and tsuna­mi and their asso­ci­at­ed nuclear dis­as­ter. In 2020, the year after Ashiza­wa shot My The­ater, a typhoon “caused the Abuku­ma­gawa riv­er and its trib­u­taries to flood,” as the Asahi Shim­bun’s Shoko Riki­maru writes. “The Motomiya city cen­ter was inun­dat­ed, sev­en peo­ple died, and more than 2,000 hous­es and build­ings were dam­aged.” Both Tamu­ra’s the­ater and his home were flood­ed, and “half of the 400 film cans on shelves on the first floor of his house were drenched in mud­dy water.”

In response, help came from near and far. “A man­u­fac­tur­er in Kana­gawa Pre­fec­ture sent 10 box­es of film cans to the the­ater, while a movie the­ater in Morio­ka, Iwate Pre­fec­ture, deliv­ered a film-edit­ing machine. About 30 peo­ple affil­i­at­ed with the film indus­try in Tokyo showed up at the the­ater to help clean and dry the film. The effort led to the restora­tion of about 100 films.” Alas, Tamu­ra’s planned re-open­ing event hap­pened to coin­cide with the spread of the coro­n­avirus across Japan, result­ing in its indef­i­nite post­pone­ment. But now that Japan has re-opened for inter­na­tion­al tourism, per­haps the  Motomiya Movie The­ater can become a des­ti­na­tion for not just domes­tic vis­i­tors but for­eign ones as well. Hav­ing been charmed by My The­ater, who would­n’t want to make the trip?

via Aeon

Relat­ed con­tent:

Why Japan Has the Old­est Busi­ness­es in the World?: Hōshi, a 1300-Year-Old Hotel, Offers Clues

A Med­i­ta­tive Look at a Japan­ese Artisan’s Quest to Save the Bril­liant, For­got­ten Col­ors of Japan’s Past

Dis­cov­er the Ghost Towns of Japan: Where Scare­crows Replace Peo­ple, and a Man Lives in an Aban­doned Ele­men­tary School Gym

The Sto­ry of Akiko Takaku­ra, One of the Last Sur­vivors of the Hiroshi­ma Bomb­ing, Told in a Short Ani­mat­ed Doc­u­men­tary

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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 Art of Making Movie Trailers: A Longtime Movie Trailer Editor Breaks Down Classic Previews for Dr. Strangelove, Carrie, and Others

No art form is as sub­ject to trend and fash­ion as the Hol­ly­wood film — except, per­haps, the Hol­ly­wood trail­er. If you came of age as a movie­go­er in the nine­teen-nineties, as I did, you’ll remem­ber hear­ing hun­dreds of grav­el­ly-voiced promis­es of trans­porta­tion to “a world where the sun burns cold, and the wind blows cold­er”; to “a world where great risks can bring extra­or­di­nary rewards”; to “a world where dream­ers and believ­ers are mirac­u­lous­ly trans­formed into heav­en­ly crea­tures.” Prac­ti­cal­ly all of these  lines were deliv­ered by voice-over artist Don LaFontaine; when he died in 2008, the “in a world…” trail­er went with him.

LaFontaine gets his due in the Vox video at the top of the post, which exam­ines the art of the movie trail­er through the eyes of edi­tor Bill Neil. Neil’s own résumé includes the trail­ers for mod­ern entries in var­i­ous hor­ror fran­chis­es, like remakes of The Texas Chain­saw Mas­sacre and The Ami­tyville Hor­ror, as well as the 2018 Hal­loween.

This placed him well to cut one togeth­er for Nope by Jor­dan Peele, an auteur keen on putting old tropes of genre film to new ends. The project gave Neil a chance to exer­cise his own retro-repur­pos­ing instinct, and here he lays out a few of the sources — Car­pen­ter’s The Fog, Steven Spiel­berg’s Close Encoun­ters of the Third Kind — to which he paid homage while fill­ing the trail­er with intrigue.

With Nope, as with most every film, Neil made its trail­er with­out see­ing the fin­ished prod­uct. Rather, he had to work with raw footage as it was being shot, which results in vis­i­ble dif­fer­ences between the images in the trail­er and those in the actu­al movie. (In some cas­es, scenes excerpt­ed in a trail­er end up cut out entire­ly.) Such restric­tions have a way of inspir­ing edi­tors to come up with new tech­niques, some of which become high­ly influ­en­tial: in the video, Neil high­lights the fea­tures of clas­sic trail­ers for pic­tures like Dr. Strangelove, Car­rie, and Alien, iden­ti­fy­ing the most endur­ing ele­ments of their lega­cy in his craft.

When those movies came out in the nine­teen-six­ties, sev­en­ties, and ear­ly eight­ies, most trail­ers were seen in one place: the movie the­ater. (And in those days, as Neil notes, trail­ers were made not by spe­cial­ized pro­duc­tion hous­es, but employ­ees in the stu­dio or even the film­mak­ers them­selves.) Then came the home-video era, which chal­lenged edi­tors with defeat­ing the view­er’s instinct to hit fast-for­ward. Today, trail­ers reflect the dom­i­nance of what Neil calls the “bumper,” a flash of max­i­mum excite­ment in the first few sec­onds that sug­gests “it’s gonna get crazy by the end” — on the the­o­ry that, because you’re prob­a­bly watch­ing on Youtube, you won’t hes­i­tate to click that skip but­ton oth­er­wise.

Relat­ed con­tent:

John Lan­dis Decon­structs Trail­ers of Great 20th Cen­tu­ry Films: Cit­i­zen Kane, Sun­set Boule­vard, 2001 & More

Com­pare the Orig­i­nal Trail­ers of Clas­sic Films with Their Mod­ern Updates: Casablan­ca, Dog Day After­noon & The Exor­cist

Watch 25 Alfred Hitch­cock Trail­ers, Excit­ing Films in Their Own Right

Watch the 7 Hour Trail­er for the 720 Hour Film, Ambiancé, the Longest Movie in His­to­ry

The Creepy 13th-Cen­tu­ry Melody That Shows Up in Movies Again & Again: An Intro­duc­tion to “Dies Irae”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree: The Animated Film Narrated by Shel Silverstein Himself (1973)

Back in 1964, Shel Sil­ver­stein wrote The Giv­ing Tree, a wide­ly loved chil­dren’s book now trans­lat­ed into more than 30 lan­guages. It’s a sto­ry about the human con­di­tion, about giv­ing and receiv­ing, using and get­ting used, need­i­ness and greed­i­ness, although many fin­er points of the sto­ry are open to inter­pre­ta­tion. Today, we’re rewind­ing the video­tape to 1973, when Sil­ver­stein’s lit­tle book was turned into a 10-minute ani­mat­ed film. Sil­ver­stein nar­rates the sto­ry him­self and also plays the har­mon­i­ca.… which brings us to his musi­cal tal­ents. Don’t miss Sil­ver­stein, also a well-known song­writer, appear­ing on The John­ny Cash Show in 1970, and the two singing “A Boy Named Sue.” Sil­ver­stein wrote the song, and Cash made it famous. Thanks to Mark, co-edi­tor of the phi­los­o­phy blog/podcast The Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life for send­ing these along.

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:

Watch Ani­ma­tions of Oscar Wilde’s Children’s Sto­ries “The Hap­py Prince” and “The Self­ish Giant”

Ani­mat­ed Sto­ries Writ­ten by Tom Waits, Nick Cave & Oth­er Artists, Read by Dan­ny Devi­to, Zach Gal­i­fi­anakis & More

Mau­rice Sendak Ani­mat­ed; James Gan­dolfi­ni Reads from Sendak’s Sto­ry “In The Night Kitchen”

The Only Draw­ing from Mau­rice Sendak’s Short-Lived Attempt to Illus­trate The Hob­bit

When a UFO Came to Japan in 1803: Discover the Legend of Utsuro-bune

For the enthu­si­ast of uniden­ti­fied fly­ing objects, we live in inter­est­ing times indeed. Back in 2021, as we pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, the CIA declas­si­fied and pub­lished thou­sands of pages of UFO-relat­ed doc­u­ments. In just the past few weeks, three UFOs were shot down over North Amer­i­ca. In the span of time between those events, much else has also occurred to stim­u­late the imag­i­na­tion of those who’ve kept watch­ing the skies. Fas­ci­na­tion with UFOs may have strong cul­tur­al asso­ci­a­tions with twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca — and the sub­ject can now feel a bit passé for that rea­son — but it knows few­er cul­tur­al or tem­po­ral bound­aries than we may think: wit­ness, for exam­ple, the Japan­ese folk­tale of Utsuro-bune.

“In 1803, a round ves­sel drift­ed ashore on the Japan­ese coast and a beau­ti­ful woman emerged, wear­ing strange cloth­ing and car­ry­ing a box. She was unable to com­mu­ni­cate with the locals, and her craft was marked with mys­te­ri­ous writ­ing.” Such is the premise of the leg­end as retold at Nippon.com, which also offers an analy­sis by Gifu Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus Tana­ka Kazuo.

“Long before the Amer­i­can UFO sto­ries, the craft depict­ed in Edo-peri­od Japan­ese doc­u­ments for some rea­son looked like a fly­ing saucer,” he says. Nor have schol­ars traced Utsuro-bune (虚舟, which means “hol­low ship”) back to only one source: to date, Tana­ka “has found eleven doc­u­ments relat­ing to the Hitachi Utsuro-bune leg­end, of which the most inter­est­ing are thought to date from 1803, the same year that the craft was said to have come to shore.”

What exact­ly hap­pened in Hitachi, a small city on Japan’s east coast, in 1803? Why do near con­tem­po­rary depic­tions of the Utsuro-bune itself (espe­cial­ly in the 1835 Hyōryū kishū or “records of cast­aways,” as seen at the top of the post) so close­ly resem­ble mod­ern-day visions of fly­ing saucers? Giv­en that the inci­dent is held to have tak­en place dur­ing the coun­try’s 265-year-long sakoku peri­od of nation­al iso­la­tion, no for­eign­er is like­ly to have crossed over to Japan­ese shores with­out caus­ing a major inci­dent. Unable to com­mu­ni­cate with this mys­te­ri­ous woman, the fish­er­men of Hitachi are said sim­ply to have returned her — box and all — to the hol­low ship, which drift­ed back out to sea, nev­er to be seen again. It was her good luck, some ufol­o­gists might say, to have turned up on Earth a cen­tu­ry and a half before the open­ing of Area 51.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Japan­ese Fairy Tale Series: The Illus­trat­ed Books That Intro­duced West­ern Read­ers to Japan­ese Tales (1885–1922)

The First Muse­um Ded­i­cat­ed to Japan­ese Folk­lore Mon­sters Is Now Open

The Ghosts and Mon­sters of Hoku­sai: See the Famed Wood­block Artist’s Fear­some & Amus­ing Visions of Strange Appari­tions

The CIA Has Declas­si­fied 2,780 Pages of UFO-Relat­ed Doc­u­ments, and They’re Now Free to Down­load

What Do Aliens Look Like? Oxford Astro­bi­ol­o­gists Draw a Pic­ture, Based on Dar­win­ian The­o­ries of Evo­lu­tion

The Appeal of UFO Nar­ra­tives: Inves­tiga­tive Jour­nal­ist Paul Beban Vis­its Pret­ty Much Pop #14

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

3,000-Year-Old Olive Tree on the Greek Island of Crete Still Produces Olives Today

Image by Eric Nagle, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

On the island of Crete, in the vil­lage of Vou­ves, stands an olive tree esti­mat­ed to be 3,000 years old. Hearty and resilient, “the Olive Tree of Vou­ves” still bears fruit today. Because, yes, olives are appar­ent­ly con­sid­ered a fruit.

Archae­ol­o­gist Ticia Verveer post­ed a pic­ture of the tree on Twit­ter and not­ed: It “stood here when Rome burned in AD64, and Pom­peii was buried under a thick car­pet of vol­canic ash in AD79.” That all hap­pened dur­ing the tree’s infan­cy alone.

An esti­mat­ed 20,000 peo­ple now vis­it the tree each year. If you can’t swing a trip to Crete, you can take a clos­er look with the video below, right around the three minute mark.

Across the Mediter­ranean, you can still find six oth­er olive trees believed to be 2,000–3,000 years old–some of our last liv­ing ties to an ancient world. And beau­ti­ful ones at that.

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:

This 392-Year-Old Bon­sai Tree Sur­vived the Hiroshi­ma Atom­ic Blast & Still Flour­ish­es Today: The Pow­er of Resilience

Daisu­gi, the 600-Year-Old Japan­ese Tech­nique of Grow­ing Trees Out of Oth­er Trees, Cre­at­ing Per­fect­ly Straight Lum­ber

Vis­it Monte Tes­tac­cio, the Ancient Roman Hill Made of 50 Mil­lion Crushed Olive Oil Jugs

 

Leonardo’s Lost Sketches Suggest That He Theorized Gravity Before Galileo & Newton

It would be clichéd to describe Leonar­do da Vin­ci as a man ahead of his time. But in the case of the quin­tes­sen­tial Renais­sance poly­math, it may well be one of those clichés firm­ly root­ed in truth. In fact, that root­ing has just grown even firmer with the dis­cov­ery of a tri­an­gle that Leonar­do sketched in one of his note­books, the Codex Arun­del (cir­ca 1478–1518). That tri­an­gle, as the New York Times’ William J. Broad writes, had “an adjoin­ing pitch­er and, pour­ing from its spout, a series of cir­cles that formed the triangle’s hypotenuse.” This image sounds sim­ple, but it reveals that Leonar­do approached an under­stand­ing of the laws of grav­i­ty before Galileo, and well before New­ton.

This find­ing is the work of Morteza Gharib, a pro­fes­sor of aero­nau­tics at the Cal­i­for­nia Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy. Cap­ti­vat­ed by this sketch, he “used a com­put­er pro­gram to flip the tri­an­gle and the adja­cent areas of back­ward writ­ing,” which clar­i­fied what Leonar­do was attempt­ing to do.

His dia­gram turned out “to split the effects of grav­i­ty into two parts that revealed an aspect of nature nor­mal­ly kept hid­den.” The first part was grav­i­ty’s “nat­ur­al down­ward pull”; the sec­ond was the move­ment of the pitch­er itself along a line. That Leonar­do drew “the pitcher’s con­tents falling low­er and low­er over time” implies his under­stand­ing that “grav­i­ty was a con­stant force that result­ed in a steady accel­er­a­tion.”

Along with co-authors Chris Roh and Flavio Noca, Gharib has pub­lished a paper on “Leonar­do da Vinci’s Visu­al­iza­tion of Grav­i­ty as a Form of Accel­er­a­tion” in this mon­th’s issue of Leonar­do — an appro­pri­ate­ly named jour­nal in this case, though one ded­i­cat­ed less to the study of Leonar­do the man than to the study of the inter­sec­tion of art and sci­ence he occu­pied. As Gharib and oth­ers see it, Leonar­do “was far more than an artist and sug­gest­ed that his fame as a pio­neer­ing sci­en­tist could sky­rock­et if more tech­ni­cal­ly knowl­edge­able experts probed the Codex Arun­del and oth­er sources” — the kind of experts who can tell that, with his pitch­er and tri­an­gle, Leonar­do man­aged to deter­mine the strength of gravity’s pull to an accu­ra­cy of about 97 per­cent. Which leads us to won­der: What else about the nature of real­i­ty must he have worked out in the mar­gins of his note­books?

via Art­net

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Vision­ary Note­books Now Online: Browse 570 Dig­i­tized Pages

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Ele­gant Design for a Per­pet­u­al Motion Machine

How Leonar­do da Vin­ci Made His Mag­nif­i­cent Draw­ings Using Only a Met­al Sty­lus, Pen & Ink, and Chalk

Down­load the Sub­lime Anato­my Draw­ings of Leonar­do da Vin­ci: Avail­able Online, or in a Great iPad App

A Com­plete Dig­i­ti­za­tion of Leonar­do Da Vinci’s Codex Atlanti­cus, the Largest Exist­ing Col­lec­tion of His Draw­ings & Writ­ings

The Old­est Known Globe to Depict the New World Was Engraved on an Ostrich Egg, Maybe by Leonar­do da Vin­ci (1504)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

John Waters Takes You on a Comical Tour of His Apartment (1986)

We inter­rupt our reg­u­lar­ly sched­uled pro­gram­ming to bring you this: John Water giv­ing a tour of his 1980s apart­ment. High­lights of the tour include: his col­lec­tion of por­traits of mur­der­ess­es (prefer­ably mur­der­ess­es who have since found reli­gion), an elec­tric chair, a witch­es’ broom, fake pieces of meat found in var­i­ous rooms … well, you get the pic­ture. Enjoy!

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.

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Relat­ed Con­tent 

John Waters’ RISD Grad­u­a­tion Speech: Real Wealth Is Life With­out A*Holes

An Anti, Anti-Smok­ing Announce­ment from John Waters

John Waters Talks About His Books and Role Mod­els in a Whim­si­cal Ani­mat­ed Video

Watch 80 Minutes of Never-Released Footage Showing the Wreckage of the Titanic (1986)

Per­haps, this past Valen­tine’s Day, you caught a screen­ing of James Cameron’s Titan­ic, that nine­teen-nineties block­buster hav­ing been re-released for its 25th anniver­sary. You may have even found your­self feel­ing a renewed appre­ci­a­tion for the film’s pre­ci­sion-engi­neered mix­ture of Hol­ly­wood romance and tech­no­log­i­cal­ly robust his­tor­i­cal re-cre­ation. As Cameron him­self tells it, he and his col­lab­o­ra­tors were gal­va­nized to reach such heights by mak­ing a series of under­wa­ter expe­di­tions to see the wreck­age of the RMS Titan­ic itself first­hand in 1995 — less than a decade after that most noto­ri­ous of all ocean lin­ers was redis­cov­ered.

The Titan­ic van­ished beneath the waves of the Atlantic Ocean on April 15, 1912. For near­ly 75 years there­after, nobody saw it again, or indeed had a clear idea of where it even was. It was­n’t until 1985 that its loca­tion was deter­mined, thanks to a joint expe­di­tion by Jean-Louis Michel of French nation­al oceano­graph­ic agency IFREMER and Robert Bal­lard of the Woods Hole Oceano­graph­ic Insti­tu­tion. The job neces­si­tat­ed the use of IFRE­MER’s new high-res­o­lu­tion sonar as well as the WHOI’s remote­ly con­trolled deep-sea vehi­cle Argo and its com­pan­ion robot Jason, designed to take pic­tures and gath­er objects from the sea floor.

When Bal­lard and his crew returned to the Titan­ic the fol­low­ing year, they brought a new cast of machines with them: the deep-div­ing sub­mersible DSV Alvin, the Jason’s descen­dant Jason Jr., and the cam­era sys­tem ANGUS (Acousti­cal­ly Nav­i­gat­ed Geo­log­i­cal Under­wa­ter Sur­vey). You can see more than 80 min­utes of the footage they col­lect­ed in the video at the top of the post, new­ly uploaded to the WHOI’s Youtube chan­nel. This expe­di­tion marked “the first time humans set eyes on the ill-fat­ed ship since 1912,” and most of the footage shot on it has nev­er before been released to the pub­lic.

The video offers close-up views of the Titan­ic’s “rust-caked bow, intact rail­ings, a chief offi­cer’s cab­in and a prom­e­nade win­dow,” as NPR’s Emi­ly Olson writes. “At one point, the cam­era zeroes in on a chan­de­lier, still hang­ing, sway­ing against the cur­rent in a haunt­ing state of ele­gant decay.” What’s more, “the WHOI’s new­ly released footage shows the ship­wreck in the most com­plete state we’ll ever see.” Over the past 37 years, the hand­i­work of the world of under­sea organ­isms have tak­en their toll on the Titan­ic, whose remains could van­ish almost entire­ly in a man­ner of decades — but whose pow­er to inspire works of art will sure­ly go on and on.

Relat­ed con­tent:

See the First 8K Footage of the Titan­ic, the High­est-Qual­i­ty Video of the Ship­wreck Yet

Watch the Titan­ic Sink in This Real-Time 3D Ani­ma­tion

Titan­ic Sur­vivor Inter­views: What It Was Like to Flee the Sink­ing Lux­u­ry Lin­er

The Titan­ic: Rare Footage of the Ship Before Dis­as­ter Strikes (1911–1912)

How the Titan­ic Sank: James Cameron’s New CGI Ani­ma­tion

Titan­ic Sink­ing; No Lives Lost” and Oth­er Ter­ri­bly Inac­cu­rate News Reports from April 15, 1912

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

Turning the Pages of an Illuminated Medieval Manuscript: An ASMR Museum Experience

Page turn­ing is to ASMR as the elec­tric bass is to rock.

The Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um’s pop­u­lar Autonomous Sen­so­ry Merid­i­an Response video series (find it here) has seen episodes devot­ed to icon­ic Sec­ond Wave fem­i­nist mag­a­zines and a cou­ple of late 20th-cen­tu­ry pop up artist’s books, but the parch­ment pages of this medieval antiphonary — or choir­book — make for some tru­ly leg­endary sounds.

Audio design­er and per­for­mance-mak­er Julie Rose Bow­er deserves a por­tion of the cred­it for height­en­ing the aur­al expe­ri­ence for her use of the ambison­ics for­mat.

Kudos too to Nation­al Art Library Spe­cial Col­lec­tions cura­tor Cather­ine Yvard…if she ever wants a break from medieval man­u­script illu­mi­na­tion and Goth­ic ivory sculp­ture, she could spe­cial­ize in extreme­ly sooth­ing voiceover nar­ra­tion.

It’s rare to find such plea­sur­ably tingly ASMR sen­sa­tions paired with allu­sions to the some­what bar­barous process of mak­ing parch­ment from ani­mal skins, but that’s what illu­mi­na­tor Francesco dai Lib­ri, and his son Giro­lamo were work­ing with in 1492 Verona.

Our ears may not be able to detect much dif­fer­ence between the skin sides and flesh sides of these remark­ably well pre­served pages, but Bow­er does due dili­gence, as Yvard slow­ly drags her fin­gers across them.

No need to fear that Yvard’s bare hands could cause harm to this 530-year-old object.

Experts at the British Library have decreed that the mod­ern prac­tice of don­ning white gloves to han­dle antique man­u­scripts decreas­es man­u­al dex­ter­i­ty, while height­en­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of trans­ferred dirt or dis­lodged pig­ments.

The stur­dy parch­ment of this par­tic­u­lar antiphonary has seen far worse than the care­ful hands of a pro­fes­sion­al cura­tor.

Pages 7, 8, 9 have been singed along the bot­tom mar­gins, and else­where, the goth­ic hand let­ter­ing has been scraped away, pre­sum­ably with a knife, in prepa­ra­tion for a litur­gi­cal update that nev­er got entered.

If your brain is cry­ing out for more after spend­ing 15 and a half inti­mate min­utes with these medieval pages, we leave you with the snap crack­le and pop of oth­er items in the V&A’s col­lec­tion:

Treat your ears to Vic­to­ria and Albert’s full ASMR at the Muse­um playlist here.

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

How to Silence the Negative Chatter in Our Heads: Psychology Professor Ethan Kross Explains

A cou­ple of weeks ago, the New York Times pub­lished an arti­cle head­lined “How to Stop Rumi­nat­ing.” If your social media feeds are any­thing like mine, you’ve seen it pop up with some fre­quen­cy since then. “Per­haps you spend hours replay­ing a tense con­ver­sa­tion you had with your boss over and over in your head,” writes its author Han­nah Seo. “Maybe you can’t stop think­ing about where things went wrong with an ex dur­ing the weeks and months after a breakup.” The piece’s pop­u­lar­i­ty speaks to the com­mon­ness of these ten­den­cies.

But if “your thoughts are so exces­sive and over­whelm­ing that you can’t seem to stop them,” lead­ing to dis­trac­tion and dis­or­ga­ni­za­tion at work and at home, “you’re prob­a­bly expe­ri­enc­ing rumi­na­tion.” For this broad­er phe­nom­e­non Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor Ethan Kross has a more evoca­tive name: chat­ter.

“Your inner voice is your abil­i­ty to silent­ly use lan­guage to reflect on your life,” he explains in the Big Think video above. “Chat­ter refers to the dark side of the inner voice. When we turn our atten­tion inward to make sense of our prob­lems, we don’t end up find­ing solu­tions. We end up rumi­nat­ing, wor­ry­ing, cat­a­stro­phiz­ing.”

Despite being an invalu­able tool for plan­ning, mem­o­ry, and self-con­trol, our inner voice also has a way of turn­ing against us. “It makes it incred­i­bly hard for us to focus,” Kross says, and it can also have “severe neg­a­tive phys­i­cal health effects” when it keeps us per­pet­u­al­ly stress­ing out over long-passed events. “We expe­ri­ence a stres­sor in our life. It then ends, but in our minds, our chat­ter per­pet­u­ates it. We keep think­ing about that event over and over again.” When you’re inside them, such men­tal loops can feel infi­nite, and they could result in per­pet­u­al­ly dire con­se­quences in our per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al lives. To those in need of a way to break free, Kross empha­sizes the pow­er of rit­u­als.

“When you expe­ri­ence chat­ter, you often feel like your thoughts are in con­trol of you,” he says. But “we can com­pen­sate for this feel­ing out of con­trol by cre­at­ing order around us. Rit­u­als are one way to do that.” Per­form­ing cer­tain actions exact­ly the same way every sin­gle time gives you “a sense of order and con­trol that can feel real­ly good when you’re mired in chat­ter.” Kross goes into greater depth on the range of chat­ter-con­trol­ling tools avail­able to us (“dis­tanced-self talk,” for exam­ple, which involves per­ceiv­ing and address­ing the self as if it were some­one) in his book Chat­ter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Mat­ters, and How to Har­ness It. His inter­view with Chase Jarvis above offers a pre­view of its con­tent — and a reminder that, as means of silenc­ing chat­ter go, some­times a pod­cast works as well as any­thing.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Secret to High Per­for­mance and Ful­fil­ment: Psy­chol­o­gist Daniel Gole­man Explains the Pow­er of Focus

How Lit­er­a­ture Can Improve Men­tal Health: Take a Free Course Fea­tur­ing Stephen Fry, Ian McK­ellen, Melvyn Bragg & More

Why You Do Your Best Think­ing In The Show­er: Cre­ativ­i­ty & the “Incu­ba­tion Peri­od”

The Ther­a­peu­tic Ben­e­fits of Ambi­ent Music: Sci­ence Shows How It Eas­es Chron­ic Anx­i­ety, Phys­i­cal Pain, and ICU-Relat­ed Trau­ma

Erich Fromm’s Six Rules of Lis­ten­ing: Learn the Keys to Under­stand­ing Oth­er Peo­ple from the Famed Psy­chol­o­gist

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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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