Hear the Great Mixtapes Richard Linklater Created to Psych Up the Actors in Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some!!

in Film, Music | June 22nd, 2016

Richard Linklater’s films have become increas­ing­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed as the 90s indie break­out writer-direc­tor has grown into his auteur­hood. From the loose ston­er vérité of Slack­ers (watch it online) to the loose but heady ani­ma­tion of Wak­ing Life to the painstak­ing­ly metic­u­lous “mod­el of cin­e­mat­ic real­ism” of Boy­hood, Lin­klater has a unique­ly Amer­i­can vision and the unde­ni­able tal­ent to real­ize it in full.

But most­ly when I think of Lin­klater, I think—excuse my language—of cock rock.

I think of Dazed and Con­fused’s super senior Wood­er­son, lean­ing against a mus­cle car, drawl­ing “alright, alright, alright,” and crank­ing Aero­smith. I think of wild-eyed Jack Black in School of Rock, strap­ping a Gib­son Fly­ing V on an uptight, sweater-vest­ed youth and teach­ing him Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” riff. And now, I think of a gang of short shorts-wear­ing col­lege base­ball dudes in the “cam­pus bro­mance” Every­body Wants Some!!, singing along (above) to Sug­ar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”…. wait…

So, okay, it ain’t all cock rock. But Linklater’s films are often so dude-cen­tric, and so informed by pop­u­lar music of cer­tain eras, that he titled two of his most per­son­al—Dazed and Con­fused and its recent “spir­i­tu­al sequel”—after anthems from the two most arche­typ­i­cal­ly cock rock bands, Led Zep­pelin and Van Halen.

Where Dazed and Con­fused’s high school milieu more or less stayed anchored in 70s hard rock, Every­body Wants Some!!—like its com­par­a­tive­ly adven­tur­ous col­lege jocks—takes sev­er­al musi­cal detours from beer-and-babes 80s clichés. The film’s sound­track, for exam­ple, includes “deep cuts” from Bri­an Eno, obscure local Texas punk rock band The Big Boys, and L.A.-based 80s New Wave/R&B band The Bus­boys.

It’s true, then, that the songs choic­es on Every­body Wants Some!!, which you can hear almost in their entire­ly (sans a few) above, are fair­ly diverse, genre-wise, com­pared to the cock-rock-heavy list of songs from Dazed and Con­fused (fur­ther up). And when it comes to Linklater’s musi­cal inspi­ra­tions for both films, we see that dif­fer­ence as well.

As the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion blog doc­u­ments—bring­ing us the 1992 let­ter above (read it here) from Lin­klater to his cast—the direc­tor put togeth­er “a thought­ful series of mix­tapes to get his cast into the mind-set” of Dazed and Con­fused. And Cri­te­ri­on put togeth­er the Spo­ti­fy playlist below of the songs Lin­klater gave his actors. As you’ll see, it’s most­ly balls-to-the-wall hard rock, with some oblig­a­tory 70s dis­co and a few cuts from Lou Reed, David Bowie, and Elton John. In his accom­pa­ny­ing let­ter, Lin­klater admits “a few of the songs are a lit­tle cheezy,” but also notes “there are a few places for iron­ic usage.” For the most part, he says, “this music… is like the movie itself—straightforward, hon­est and fun.”

When it came time to begin shoot­ing Every­body Wants Some!! (get the offi­cial sound­track here), Lin­klater again used the same method to get his cast in the mood, cir­cu­lat­ing the songs in the playlist below (though prob­a­bly not on cas­settes). Here we get a much more diverse, com­pre­hen­sive musi­cal sum­ma­ry of the decade in ques­tion, with Michael Jack­son sit­ting next to Elvis Costel­lo, Pat Benatar and Dire Straits next to Pink Floyd, Sis­ter Sledge, Queen, and Cha­ka Khan.

It’s an inter­est­ing tran­si­tion that may—musically—signal the move from teenage fan­dom to the more curi­ous, adven­tur­ous lis­ten­ing habits of ear­ly adult­hood. Col­lege, after all, is not only where young Amer­i­cans of the mod­ern era dis­cov­er new sex­u­al and chem­i­cal plea­sures, but also where they acquire new musi­cal tastes. And in the 80s espe­cial­ly, the bound­aries of pop music expand­ed.

“That’s just how it felt to me to be a young per­son at that time. It was cool to be into every­thing,” Lin­klater com­ment­ed to Cor­nelia Rowe at Yahoo: “There was a lot of new­ness in the era. You didn’t real­ly appre­ci­ate it at the time – it’s like, there are all these new bands! There’s this new wave, punk, par­ty, R&B – there’s a thing called rap music from New York!”

The ath­lete bros in Linklater’s lat­est, very male-ori­ent­ed piece of cin­e­mat­ic nos­tal­gia “at once embody and upend the stereo­type of the shal­low, sex­u­al­ly enti­tled jock,” writes A.O. Scott in his review. Roam­ing far afield of their com­fort zones, they “have a good time wher­ev­er they are.” That’s pret­ty much guar­an­teed, I think, with the fine­ly-curat­ed 80s gems in these playlists as their sound­track.

via the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Free Online: Richard Linklater’s Slack­er, the Clas­sic Gen‑X Indie Film

Scenes from Wak­ing Life, Richard Linklater’s Philo­soph­i­cal, Fea­ture-Length Ani­mat­ed Film (2001)

A Playlist of 172 Songs from Wes Ander­son Sound­tracks: From Bot­tle Rock­et to The Grand Budapest Hotel

Scenes from Wak­ing Life, Richard Linklater’s Philo­soph­i­cal, Fea­ture-Length Ani­mat­ed Film (2001)

Watch Heavy Met­al Park­ing Lot, the Cult Clas­sic Film That Ranks as One of the “Great Rock Doc­u­men­taries” of All Time

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

Watch UC Berkeley’s Free “Edible Education 101” Lecture Course, Featuring Michael Pollan, Alice Waters and Other Sustainable Food Superstars

in Food & Drink, Health, Life, Online Courses, UC Berkeley | June 20th, 2016

Din­ner at Berkeley’s famed Chez Panisse shows up on a lot of foodie’s buck­et lists. Its founder, Alice Waters, has been pro­mot­ing the impor­tance of eat­ing organ­i­cal­ly and local­ly for near­ly half a cen­tu­ry.

With the Edi­ble School­yard Project, she found a way to share these beliefs in true hands-on fash­ion, by involv­ing thou­sands of chil­dren and teens in kitchens and gar­dens across the coun­try.

We will all ben­e­fit from this rev­o­lu­tion, though I can’t help but envy the kids at its epi­cen­ter. Back when Waters was pio­neer­ing Cal­i­for­nia cui­sine, I was suf­fer­ing under my school lunchroom’s manda­to­ry “cour­tesy bite” pol­i­cy. The remem­bered aro­ma of Sal­is­bury steak and instant mashed pota­toes still acti­vates my gag reflex.

The Uni­ver­si­ty of California’s Edi­ble Edu­ca­tion 101 course has been con­tin­u­ing the Edi­ble Schoolyard’s work at the col­le­giate lev­el since 2011. It’s a glo­ri­ous anti­dote to the culi­nary trau­mas expe­ri­enced by ear­li­er gen­er­a­tions. UC Berke­ley stu­dents can take Edi­ble Edu­ca­tion 101 for cred­it. The pub­lic is wel­come to sit in on lec­tures fea­tur­ing a pan­theon of sus­tain­able food super­stars, includ­ing Waters, author Michael Pol­lan of The Omnivore’s Dilem­ma, above, and course leader Mark Bittman (you know him from The New York Times and his new start­up The Pur­ple Car­rot).

For­tu­nate­ly for those of us whose buck­et list splurge at Chez Panisse requires such addi­tion­al expens­es as plane tick­ets and hotel rooms, many of the lec­tures are also view­able online.

The range of top­ics make clear that edi­ble edu­ca­tion is not sim­ply a mat­ter of learn­ing to choose a local­ly grown por­to­bel­lo over a Big Mac.  Trans­porta­tion, tech­nol­o­gy, mar­ket­ing, and pubic pol­i­cy all fac­tor into the goal of mak­ing healthy, equi­tably farmed food avail­able to all at an a non-Chez Panisse price.

A com­plete playlist of 2015’s Edi­ble Edu­ca­tion 101 lec­tures is here, or stream them right above. A list of 2016’s top­ics and guest lec­tur­ers is here. The Edi­ble Edu­ca­tion lec­tures will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Michael Pol­lan Presents an Edi­ble Edu­ca­tion, A Free Online Course From UC Berke­ley

Michael Pol­lan Explains How Cook­ing Can Change Your Life; Rec­om­mends Cook­ing Books, Videos & Recipes

The New York Times Makes 17,000 Tasty Recipes Avail­able Online: Japan­ese, Ital­ian, Thai & Much More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

The Life of Prince in a 24-Page Comic Book: A New Release

in Comics/Cartoons, Music | June 16th, 2016

Since Prince’s death in April, writ­ers have been try­ing to sum up a life lived that was both very pri­vate and yet also felt like it exist­ed in our DNA. Much like Bowie, the Prince we knew was the one we shared and we saw and we sang. So how to get that life into a 24 page com­ic book?

Released June 7th on Prince’s birth­day, Trib­ute: Prince is a primer on the musician’s life and pass­ing writ­ten by Michael L. Frizell and illus­trat­ed by Span­ish artist Ernesto Lovera. The com­ic actu­al­ly dates from 2013, when it was released as Fame: Prince, but Ital­ian illus­tra­tor Vin­cen­zo San­sone has con­clud­ed the sto­ry of his life with three extra pages now added to the tale, which alludes to Prince’s opi­oid use, his demand­ing sched­ule, and the pub­lic reac­tion to his pass­ing.

Frizell starts the tale from a fan’s per­spec­tive, as a teen girl in 1984, secret­ly enjoy­ing his music, hid­ing the fact from her par­ents. The sto­ry then jumps back to Prince’s child­hood, his strug­gle to get a record­ing con­tract, and his explo­sive fame. Read­ers will spot numer­ous allu­sions to Prince’s lyrics in the text, as well. Frizell has also writ­ten issues of Trib­ute about David Bowie and Mot­ley Crüe, and said in a pro­mo state­ment, “The sub­jects of [Prince’s] songs spoke to me in ways I did­n’t under­stand until I was old­er, but the dark poet­ry of them com­pelled me to keep lis­ten­ing. To this day, my iPod is full of his work and I lis­ten to it as I write.”

The sin­gle issue com­ic is avail­able online and in stores and comes with three dif­fer­ent cov­ers by David Frizell, Vin­cen­zo San­sone, and Pablo Mar­ti­ne­na. It runs $3 or $4. If you have Kin­dle Unlim­it­ed plan, you can get it for free.

Relat­ed con­tent:

See Prince (RIP) Play Mind-Blow­ing Gui­tar Solos On “While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps” and “Amer­i­can Woman”

Hear Aman­da Palmer’s Cov­er of “Pur­ple Rain,” a Gor­geous Stringfelt Send-Off to Prince

Prince (RIP) Per­forms Ear­ly Hits in a 1982 Con­cert: “Con­tro­ver­sy,” “I Wan­na Be Your Lover” & More

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

The Story Of Menstruation: Watch Walt Disney’s Sex Ed Film from 1946

in Animation, Film | June 11th, 2016

From 1945 to 1951, Dis­ney pro­duced a series of edu­ca­tion­al films to be shown in Amer­i­can schools. How to bathe an infant. How not to catch a cold. Why you shouldn’t dri­ve fast. Dis­ney cov­ered these sub­jects in its edu­ca­tion­al shorts, and then even­tu­al­ly got to the touchy sub­ject of biol­o­gy and sex­u­al­i­ty. If there was ever a com­pa­ny suit­ed to talk about “vagi­nas” in the 1940s in a copacetic way, it was Dis­ney. Hence The Sto­ry of Men­stru­a­tion.

The film runs 10 min­utes, com­bin­ing sci­en­tif­ic facts with hygiene tips, and it was actu­al­ly com­mis­sioned by the Inter­na­tion­al Cel­lo-Cot­ton Com­pa­ny, the fore­run­ner of Kim­ber­ly-Clark, the mak­er of Kotex prod­ucts. An esti­mat­ed 105 mil­lion stu­dents watched the film in sex ed class­es across the US. And, accord­ing to Tin­ker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Dis­ney Com­pa­ny from the Inside Out, the film remained a main­stay in schools until the 1960s. It’s now in the pub­lic domain. When you’re done, you’ll also want to watch Fam­i­ly Plan­ning, Walt Disney’s 1967 Sex Ed Pro­duc­tion, Star­ring Don­ald Duck.

Both films appear in the Ani­ma­tion sec­tion of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

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:

No Women Need Apply: A Dis­heart­en­ing 1938 Rejec­tion Let­ter from Dis­ney Ani­ma­tion

Your Body Dur­ing Ado­les­cence: A Naked­ly Unashamed Sex Ed Film from 1955

Watch Dat­ing Dos and Don’ts: An Old-School Instruc­tion­al Guide to Teenage Romance (1949)

Martin Scorsese Sends a Sweet Video to the Young Creator a Kubrick/Scorsese Mashup

in Film, Life | June 9th, 2016

If you’re a vet­er­an read­er of Open Cul­ture, you may remem­ber a 2010 video trib­ute called “Kubrick vs Scors­ese.” To make the video, Lean­dro Cop­per­field, a young cinephile liv­ing in Rio de Janeiro, spent 25 days re-watch­ing 35 films, select­ing more than 500 scenes, and then edit­ing them into an homage to his two favorite direc­tors. Watch it here.

No doubt, it must have come as a sur­prise when, six years lat­er, Cop­per­field received a video from Scors­ese him­self, prais­ing the mon­tage Lean­dro made so long ago. Again, if you’re an old-timer here, you’ll know that this isn’t the first time Scors­ese has shown kind­ness to younger artists. In 2014, we recount­ed the sto­ry of Col­in Levy, a teenage film­mak­er who met with Scors­ese, and came away with a list of 39 For­eign Films Essen­tial for a Young Film­mak­er. Props to Mar­ty for being a good men­tor and teacher too.

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:

Mar­tin Scors­ese Cre­ates a List of 39 Essen­tial For­eign Films for a Young Film­mak­er

Mar­tin Scors­ese Plays Vin­cent Van Gogh in a Short, Sur­re­al Film by Aki­ra Kuro­sawa

Mar­tin Scors­ese Makes a List of 85 Films Every Aspir­ing Film­mak­er Needs to See

The Books on Young Alan Turing’s Reading List: From Lewis Carroll to Modern Chromatics

in History, Math, Physics | June 8th, 2016

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

We now regard Alan Tur­ing, the trou­bled and ulti­mate­ly per­se­cut­ed crypt­an­a­lyst (and, intel­lec­tu­al­ly, much more besides)—who cracked the code of the Ger­man Enig­ma machine in World War II—as one of the great minds of his­to­ry. His life and work have drawn a good deal of seri­ous exam­i­na­tion since his ear­ly death in 1954, and recent­ly his lega­cy has even giv­en rise to pop­u­lar por­tray­als such as that by Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch in the film The Imi­ta­tion Game. So what, more and more of us have start­ed to won­der, forms a mind like Tur­ing’s in the first place?

A few years ago, math­e­mat­ics writer Alex Bel­los received, from “an old friend who teach­es at Sher­borne, the school Tur­ing attend­ed between 1928 and 1930,” some “new infor­ma­tion about the com­put­er pio­neer and codebreaker’s school years” in the form of “the list of books Tur­ing took out from the school library while he was a pupil.” Bel­los lists them as fol­lows:

• Illu­sions
• Jour­nal of the Chem­i­cal Soci­ety, vols. 95, 96, 97
• Lead
• Mod­ern Elec­tric The­o­ry
• Mon­ey
• Iso­topes by Fred­er­ick William Aston
• Math­e­mat­i­cal Recre­ations and Essays by W. W. Rouse Ball
• Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land, Game of Log­ic and Through The Look­ing Glass by Lewis Car­roll.
• The Com­mon Sense of the Exact Sci­ences by William King­don Clif­ford
• Space, Time and Grav­i­ta­tion and The Nature of the Phys­i­cal World by Sir Arthur Stan­ley Edding­ton.
• Side­lights on Rel­a­tiv­i­ty by Albert Ein­stein
• The Escap­ing Club by A. J. Evans
• Con­tri­bu­tions to Men­tal Phi­los­o­phy by Immanuel Her­mann Fichte, trans­lat­ed and edit­ed by J.D. Morell
• The New Physics by Arthur Haas
• Sup­ply and Demand by Hubert D. Hen­der­son
• The Stars in their Cours­es by Sir James Hop­wood Jeans
• Atoms and Rays and Phas­es of Mod­ern Sci­ence by Sir Oliv­er Lodge.
• Mat­ter and Motion by James Clerk Maxwell
• The The­o­ry of Heat by Thomas Pre­ston
• A Selec­tion of Pho­tographs of Stars, Star-Clus­ters & Neb­u­lae, togeth­er with infor­ma­tion con­cern­ing the instru­ments & the meth­ods employed in the pur­suit of celes­tial pho­tog­ra­phy by Isaac Roberts
• Mod­ern Chro­mat­ics, with appli­ca­tions to art and indus­try by Ogden Nicholas Rood
• Celes­tial Objects for Com­mon Tele­scopes by Thomas William Webb
• The Recent Devel­op­ment of Phys­i­cal Sci­ence by William Cecil Dampi­er Whetham
• Sci­ence and The Mod­ern World by Alfred North White­head
• Sound Waves and their Uses by Alexan­der Wood

“As you can see, and as you might expect,” writes Bel­los, “heavy on the sci­ences. The AJ Evans, a mem­oir about the author’s escape from impris­on­ment in the First World War, is the only non-sci­en­tif­ic book.” He also notes that “the physics books he took out all look very seri­ous, but the maths ones are light­heart­ed: the Lewis Car­roll and the Rouse Ball, which for decades was the clas­sic text in recre­ation­al maths prob­lems.” Sher­borne archivist Rachel Has­sall, who pro­vid­ed Bel­los with the list, also told him that “the book cho­sen by Tur­ing for his school prize was a copy of the Rouse Ball. Even teenage genius­es like to have fun.”

If you, too, would like to do a bit of the read­ing of a genius — or, depend­ing on how quan­ti­ta­tive­ly your own mind works, just have some fun — you can down­load for free most of these books the young Tur­ing checked out of the school library. Pro­gram­mer and writer John Gra­ham-Cum­ming orig­i­nal­ly found and orga­nized all the links to the texts on his blog; you can fol­low them there or from the list in this post. And if you know any young­sters in whom you see the poten­tial to achieve his­to­ry’s next Tur­ing-lev­el accom­plish­ment, send a few e‑books their way. Why read Har­ry Pot­ter, after all, when you can read A Selec­tion of Pho­tographs of Stars, Star-Clus­ters & Neb­u­lae, togeth­er with infor­ma­tion con­cern­ing the instru­ments & the meth­ods employed in the pur­suit of celes­tial pho­tog­ra­phy?

via Alex Bel­los

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Enig­ma Machine: How Alan Tur­ing Helped Break the Unbreak­able Nazi Code

Alan Tur­ing, Bril­liant Math­e­mati­cian and Code Break­er, Will Be Final­ly Par­doned by British Gov­ern­ment

Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch Reads a Let­ter Alan Tur­ing Wrote in “Dis­tress” Before His Con­vic­tion For “Gross Inde­cen­cy”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

1,000-Year-Old Manuscript of Beowulf Digitized and Now Online

in Archives, Literature | June 7th, 2016

One out­come of the upcom­ing “Brex­it” vote, we’re told, might free the UK to pur­sue its own unfet­tered des­tiny, or might plunge it into iso­la­tion­ist decline. The eco­nom­ic issues are beyond my ken, but as a read­er and stu­dent of Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture, I’ve always been struck by the fact that the old­est poem in Eng­lish, Beowulf, shows us an already inter­na­tion­al­ized Britain absorb­ing all sorts of Euro­pean influ­ences. From the Ger­man­ic roots of the poem’s Anglo-Sax­on lan­guage to the Scan­di­na­vian roots of its nar­ra­tive, the ancient epic reflects a Britain tied to the con­ti­nent. With pagan, native tra­di­tions min­gled with lat­er Chris­t­ian echoes, and local leg­ends with those of the Danes and Swedes, Beowulf pre­serves many of the island nation’s poly­glot, mul­ti-nation­al ori­gins.

Irish poet Sea­mus Heaney—whose work engaged with the ironies and com­pli­ca­tions of trib­al­ism and nationalism—had a deep respect for Beowulf; in the intro­duc­tion to his trans­la­tion of the poem, Heaney describes it as a tale “as elab­o­rate as the beau­ti­ful con­trivances of its lan­guage. Its nar­ra­tive ele­ments may belong to a pre­vi­ous age but as a work of art it lives in its own con­tin­u­ous present, equal to our knowl­edge of real­i­ty in the present time.” Though we’ve come to think of it as an essen­tial work of Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture, Beowulf might have dis­ap­peared into the mists of his­to­ry had not the only man­u­script of the poem sur­vived “more or less by chance.” The “unique copy,” writes Heaney, “(now in the British Library) bare­ly sur­vived a fire in the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry and was then tran­scribed and titled, retran­scribed and edit­ed, trans­lat­ed and adapt­ed, inter­pret­ed and taught, until it has become an acknowl­edged clas­sic.”

Now, the British Library’s dig­i­ti­za­tion of that sole man­u­script allows us to peel back the lay­ers of can­on­iza­tion and see how the poem first entered a lit­er­ary tra­di­tion. Orig­i­nal­ly “passed down oral­ly over many gen­er­a­tions, and mod­i­fied by each suc­ces­sive bard,” writes the British Library, Beowulf took this fixed form when “the exist­ing copy was made at an unknown loca­tion in Anglo-Sax­on Eng­land.” Not only is the loca­tion unknown, but the date as well: “its age has to be cal­cu­lat­ed by ana­lyz­ing the scribes’ hand­writ­ing. Some schol­ars have sug­gest­ed that the man­u­script was made at the end of the 10th cen­tu­ry, oth­ers in the ear­ly decades of the 11th, per­haps as late as the reign of King Cnut, who ruled Eng­land from 1016 until 1035.”

These schol­ar­ly debates may not inter­est the aver­age read­er much. The poem sur­vived long enough to be writ­ten down, then became known as great lit­er­a­ture these many cen­turies lat­er, because the rich poet­ic lan­guage and the com­pelling sto­ry it tells cap­ti­vate us still. Nonethe­less, though we may all know the gen­er­al out­lines of its hero’s con­test with the mon­ster Gren­del and his moth­er, many of the cul­tur­al con­cepts from the world of Beowulf strike mod­ern read­ers as total­ly alien. Like­wise the poem’s lan­guage, Old Eng­lish, resem­bles no form of Eng­lish we’ve encoun­tered before. Schol­ars like J.R.R. Tolkien and poets like Heaney have done much to shape our appre­ci­a­tion for the ancient work, and we might say that with­out their inter­ven­tions, it would not live, as Heaney writes, “in its own con­tin­u­ous present” but in a dis­tant, unrec­og­niz­able past.

You can hear Heaney read his trans­la­tion of the poem on Youtube. Read Tolkien’s famous essay on the poem here, and hear it read in its orig­i­nal lan­guage at our pre­vi­ous post. Learn more about the sin­gle man­u­script that pre­served the epic poem for pos­ter­i­ty at the British Library’s web­site, and see it for your­self in their dig­i­tal archive.

Find Beowulf list­ed in our col­lec­tion, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sea­mus Heaney Reads His Exquis­ite Trans­la­tion of Beowulf and His Mem­o­rable 1995 Nobel Lec­ture

Hear Beowulf Read In the Orig­i­nal Old Eng­lish: How Many Words Do You Rec­og­nize?

Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy Illus­trat­ed in a Remark­able Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­script (c. 1450)

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

The Opening of King Tut’s Tomb, Shown in Stunning Colorized Photos (1923–5)

in History, Photography | June 1st, 2016

Inquir­ing minds want to know, imme­di­ate­ly and with­out any egghead qual­i­fi­ca­tions: Does King Tut’s tomb have hid­den rooms or does it not have hid­den rooms? Answer? Well, it depends who you ask….

That’s unsat­is­fy­ing isn’t it? If real life were direct­ed by Spiel­berg, there would be no ques­tion: of course there are hid­den rooms, and they’re filled with inge­nious, dead­ly boo­by traps and price­less mag­i­cal objects.

CNN reports a “90% chance of hid­den cham­bers,” per­haps con­tain­ing the remains of Queen Nefer­ti­ti. But archae­ol­o­gist and for­mer real­i­ty TV star Zahi Hawass—Egypt’s own Indi­ana Jones, as he’s been called—doubts it, as do sev­er­al oth­er archae­o­log­i­cal experts. Bum­mer.

If you need some Tomb-Raider-style dra­ma, how­ev­er, you could do worse than to read the orig­i­nal accounts of Howard Carter (above, with anony­mous work­er), the Eng­lish Egyp­tol­o­gist who orig­i­nal­ly opened Tut’s tomb in 1922 after five years of fruit­less search­ing.

Slow­ly, des­per­ate­ly slow­ly it seemed to us as we watched, the remains of pas­sage debris that encum­bered the low­er part of the door­way were removed, until at last we had the whole door clear before us. The deci­sive moment had arrived. With trem­bling hands I made a tiny breach in the upper left hand cor­ner. Dark­ness and blank space… not filled like the pas­sage we had just cleared.… For the moment —an eter­ni­ty it must have seemed to the oth­ers stand­ing by—I was struck dumb with amaze­ment, and when Lord Carnar­von, unable to stand the sus­pense any longer, inquired anx­ious­ly, ‘Can you see any­thing?’ it was all I could do to get out the words, ‘Yes, won­der­ful things.’

Pair this nar­ra­tive with the pho­tographs you see here of the trea­sure horde Carter and his aris­to­crat­ic bene­fac­tors stole, er, dis­cov­ered in the tomb, and you’ve got your­self one heck of a real-life-adven­ture. Tak­en between 1923–25, the pho­tos doc­u­ment many of the 5,298 items that need­ed to be “record­ed, sketched, and in some cas­es doc­u­ment­ed pho­to­graph­i­cal­ly,” the short video below tells us, the first in a 15-part mini video series cre­at­ed for a huge New York exhi­bi­tion, The Dis­cov­ery of King Tut, which just closed on May 15th.

You may have missed the big show—with its life-sized recre­ations of the tomb’s cham­bers— but you can still expe­ri­ence much of the grandeur at its web­site. And Mash­able brings us these pho­tographs, col­orized for the event by a com­pa­ny called Dynamichrome. The pho­tos were tak­en by Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art pho­tog­ra­ph­er Har­ry Bur­ton (aka The Pharao­h’s Pho­tog­a­rpher), the exhi­bi­tion web­site informs us (“Only in Bur­ton’s pho­tographs did the young pharaoh achieve true immor­tal­i­ty”!), and the sto­ry of their cre­ation is inte­gral to the opu­lent tomb’s exca­va­tion.

Act­ing as “Carter’s eyes and mem­o­ry,” Bur­ton “trekked between the dis­cov­ery site, his lab­o­ra­to­ry (which he had set up in the tomb of King Seti II) and impro­vised dark­room in the neigh­bor­ing tomb KV 55.”

The results of Burton’s labors are 2,800 large-for­mat glass neg­a­tives, which doc­u­ment all of the finds, their loca­tion in the tomb and every sin­gle step of the exca­va­tors’ work with the utmost pre­ci­sion. Carter patient­ly and uncon­di­tion­al­ly encour­aged him like no oth­er mem­ber of his team and, thanks to his pho­tos, Bur­ton was the first and only archae­o­log­i­cal pho­tog­ra­ph­er to achieve world­wide fame.

The entire process of remov­ing the ancient trea­sures from Tut’s tomb took ten years, part­ly due to the dif­fi­cul­ty of pre­serv­ing organ­ic arti­facts like tex­tiles, frag­ile wood fur­ni­ture, and footwear.

Thank­ful­ly for us muse­um­go­ers and lovers of ancient his­to­ry, the tomb’s dis­cov­er­ers treat­ed the arti­facts with great care. This has not always been the case. Through­out the nine­teenth and twen­ti­eth cen­turies, actu­al tomb raiders, whose motives were less noble, took what­ev­er they could find from ancient bur­ial sites in order to make a quick sale, with­out regard for the care­ful cat­a­logu­ing and con­ser­va­tion efforts Carter and his team observed. Theft and traf­fick­ing of arti­facts is still ram­pant today.

In an inter­view with U.S. News & World Report, Hawass describes not only how the rav­ages of time and neglect have dam­aged some of Egyp­t’s pre­cious history—including Tut’s bur­ial mask—but also how “near­ly two thirds of Egypt­ian antiq­ui­ties were smug­gled abroad in 2011, 2012, and 2013.” Such traf­fick­ing, he says, “is ongo­ing, but to a less­er degree.” Much of it was the result of “muse­um-loot­ing” dur­ing the rev­o­lu­tion. Hawass also dis­putes the hid­den cham­bers the­o­ry, con­tend­ing that “Nefer­ti­ti could not have been buried in the Val­ley of the Kings, as she used to wor­ship King Tut. The High Priests of Amun would not have allowed it.”

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, says Hawass, the only way to know for sure is to “dig through the north­ern wall” of the tomb, caus­ing it to col­lapse. But we should not give up hope yet of Tut’s tomb yield­ing more secrets. Archae­ol­o­gist Nicholas Reeves, who pub­lished a paper in 2015 on the exis­tence of hid­den cham­bers, has fur­ther val­i­dat­ed his con­clu­sions with scans that sug­gest met­al and organ­ic mate­ri­als beyond the tomb’s north wall. Maybe Hawass is wrong, and we’ll soon be post­ing pic­tures of the trea­sures gath­ered from Nefer­ti­ti’s tomb. See many more of the col­orized Tut pho­tos at Mash­able.

via Mash­able

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Met Dig­i­tal­ly Restores the Col­ors of an Ancient Egypt­ian Tem­ple, Using Pro­jec­tion Map­ping Tech­nol­o­gy

Try the Old­est Known Recipe For Tooth­paste: From Ancient Egypt, Cir­ca the 4th Cen­tu­ry BC

The Turin Erot­ic Papyrus: The Old­est Known Depic­tion of Human Sex­u­al­i­ty (Cir­ca 1150 B.C.E.)

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

The British Library Digitizes 300 Literary Treasures from 20th Century Authors: Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce & More

in Books, Letters, Literature | May 31st, 2016

As a young col­lege stu­dent, I spent hours wan­der­ing through my university’s library, look­ing in a state of awe at the num­ber of books con­tained there­in by writ­ers whose names I knew or who seemed vague­ly famil­iar, and by hun­dreds, thou­sands, more I’d nev­er heard of. Always con­tent to immerse myself in seclud­ed cor­ners for days on end with a good book, I could­n’t have felt more at home.

The inter­net was in its infan­cy, and my online life at the time con­sist­ed of awk­ward, plain-text emails sent once or twice a week and the occa­sion­al clunky, slow-load­ing web­site, promis­ing much but deliv­er­ing lit­tle. Excitable futur­ists made extrav­a­gant pre­dic­tions about how hyper­text and inter­ac­tiv­i­ty would rev­o­lu­tion­ize the book. These seemed like intrigu­ing but unnec­es­sary solu­tions in search of a prob­lem.

To the book­ish, the book is a per­fect­ed tech­nol­o­gy that can­not be improved upon except by the pub­lish­ing of more books. While inter­ac­tive texts—with linked anno­ta­tions, biogra­phies, his­tor­i­cal pre­cis, crit­i­cal essays, and the like—have much enhanced life for stu­dents, they have not in any way improved upon the sim­ple act of read­ing for plea­sure and edification—an activ­i­ty, wrote Vir­ginia Woolf, requir­ing noth­ing more than “the rarest qual­i­ties of imag­i­na­tion, insight, and judg­ment.”

Though Woolf would like­ly have been unim­pressed with all that talk of hyper­tex­tu­al inno­va­tion, I imag­ine she would have mar­veled at the online world for offer­ing some­thing to the read­er we have nev­er had until the past cou­ple decades: free and instant access to thou­sands of books, from lit­er­ary clas­sics to biogra­phies to his­to­ries to poetry—all gen­res upon which Woolf offered advice about how to read on their own terms. With­out the anx­ious admis­sions process and cost­ly tuition, any­one with a com­put­er now has access to a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the aver­age col­lege library.

And now any­one with a com­put­er has access to a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the British Library’s rare col­lec­tions as well, thanks to the ven­er­a­ble institution’s new online col­lec­tion: “Dis­cov­er­ing Lit­er­a­ture: 20th Cen­tu­ry.”

Read­ers of our site will know of Open Culture’s affin­i­ty for 20th cen­tu­ry mod­ernist lit­er­a­ture, like that of Vir­ginia Woolf, and for the dystopi­an fic­tion of George Orwell. These authors and greats of more recent vin­tage are all well-rep­re­sent­ed in the British Library col­lec­tion. You’ll find such trea­sures as a scanned first edi­tion of James Joyce’s Ulysses, first Amer­i­can edi­tion of Antho­ny Burgess’ A Clock­work Orange, and first edi­tion of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. These are just a few of the clas­sic nov­els avail­able in the “over 300 trea­sures” of the col­lec­tion, writes the British Library.

The online library offers a par­adise for read­ers, cer­tain­ly. And also a heav­en for schol­ars. Includ­ed among the rare first edi­tions and crit­i­cal essays and inter­views on the site’s main page are “online for the first time… lit­er­ary drafts… note­books, let­ters, diaries, news­pa­pers and pho­tographs from Vir­ginia Woolf, Ted Hugh­es, Angela Carter and Hanif Kureishi among oth­ers.”

Some incred­i­ble high­lights include:

• Type­script of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land with Ezra Pound’s Hand­writ­ten anno­ta­tions
• George Orwell’s Notes for 1984
• T.S. Eliot’s Faber & Faber Let­ter Reject­ing Orwell’s Ani­mal Farm (fea­tured on Open Cul­ture pre­vi­ous­ly)
• Type­script Sec­ond Draft of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar
• Let­ters on the Print­ing of James Joyce’s A Por­trait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses
• Type­script Notes of J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise, with a Draft of the Nov­el
• Note­book Drafts of Vir­ginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dal­loway
• Note­book of Research and Ideas for Angela Carter’s Wise Chil­dren
• Ezra Pound’s 1914 Poet­ry Anthol­o­gy Des Imag­istes

And as if all this—and so many more 20th cen­tu­ry lit­er­ary treasures—weren’t enough, the col­lec­tion also tucks in some won­der­ful arti­facts from pre­vi­ous eras, such as a col­lec­tion of man­u­script poems by John Keats, includ­ing the Odes and Robert Burton’s ency­clo­pe­dic 1628 study of depres­sion, The Anato­my of Melan­choly.

“Until now,” says Anna Lobben­berg, the Library’s Dig­i­tal Pro­grammes Man­ag­er, “these trea­sures could only be viewed in the British Library Read­ing Rooms or on dis­play in exhibitions—now Dis­cov­ery Lit­er­a­ture: 20th Cen­tu­ry will bring these items to any­one in the world with an inter­net con­nec­tion.” It tru­ly is, for the lover of books, a brave new world (a book whose 1932 orig­i­nal dust jack­et you can see here).

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The British Library Puts Over 1,000,000 Images in the Pub­lic Domain: A Deep­er Dive Into the Col­lec­tion

The British Library’s “Sounds” Archive Presents 80,000 Free Audio Record­ings: World & Clas­si­cal Music, Inter­views, Nature Sounds & More

Vir­ginia Woolf Offers Gen­tle Advice on “How One Should Read a Book”

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

R. Crumb Illustrates Genesis: A Faithful, Idiosyncratic Illustration of All 50 Chapters

in Comics/Cartoons, Literature, Religion | May 27th, 2016

It is wide­ly accept­ed among schol­ars that the first few books of the Bible—including, of course, Gen­e­sis, with its cre­ation myths and flood story—are a patch­work of sev­er­al dif­fer­ent sources, pieced togeth­er by so-called redac­tors. This “doc­u­men­tary hypoth­e­sis” iden­ti­fies the lit­er­ary char­ac­ter­is­tics of each source, and attempts to recon­struct their dif­fer­ent the­o­log­i­cal and polit­i­cal con­texts. Pri­mar­i­ly refined by Ger­man schol­ars in the late nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, the the­o­ry is very per­sua­sive, but can also seem pret­ty schemat­ic and dry, rob­bing the orig­i­nal texts of much of their live­li­ness, rhetor­i­cal pow­er, and ancient strange­ness.

Anoth­er Ger­man schol­ar, Her­mann Gunkel, approached Gen­e­sis a lit­tle dif­fer­ent­ly. “Every­one knows”—write the edi­tors of a schol­ar­ly col­lec­tion on the foun­da­tion­al Bib­li­cal text—Gunkel’s “mot­to”: “Gen­e­sis ist eine Samm­lung von Sagen”—“Genesis is a col­lec­tion of pop­u­lar tales.” Rather than read­ing the var­i­ous sto­ries con­tained with­in as his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tives or the­o­log­i­cal trea­tis­es, Gunkel saw them as redact­ed leg­ends, myths, and folk tales—as ancient lit­er­a­ture. “Leg­ends are not lies,” he writes in The Leg­ends of Gen­e­sis, “on the con­trary, they are a par­tic­u­lar form of poet­ry.”

Such was the approach of car­toon­ist and illus­tra­tor Robert Crumb, who took on illus­trat­ing the entire book of Gen­e­sis, “a text so great and so strange,” he says, “that it lends itself read­i­ly to graph­ic depic­tions.” In the short video above, Crumb describes the cre­ation nar­ra­tive in the ancient Hebrew book as “an arche­typ­al sto­ry of our cul­ture, such a strong sto­ry with all kinds of metaphor­i­cal mean­ing.” He also talks about his gen­uine respect and admi­ra­tion for the sto­ries of Gen­e­sis and their ori­gins. “You study ancient Mesopotami­an writ­ings,” says Crumb, “and there’s all of these ref­er­ences in the old­est Sumer­ian leg­ends about the tree of knowl­edge” and oth­er ele­ments that appear in Gen­e­sis, mixed up and redact­ed: “That’s how folk leg­ends and all that shit evolve over cen­turies.”

The Bib­li­cal book first struck Crumb as “some­thing to sat­i­rize,” and his ini­tial approach leans on the irrev­er­ent, scat­o­log­i­cal tropes we know so well in his work. But he instead decid­ed to pro­duce a faith­ful visu­al inter­pre­ta­tion of the text just as it is, illus­trat­ing each chap­ter, all 50, word for word. The result, writes Col­in Smith at Sequart, is “idio­syn­crat­ic, ten­der-heart­ed and ulti­mate­ly inspir­ing.” It is also a crit­i­cal visu­al com­men­tary on the text’s cen­tral char­ac­ter: Crumb’s God “is reg­u­lar­ly, if not exclu­sive­ly, por­trayed as an unam­bigu­ous­ly self-obsessed and blood­thirsty despot, ter­ri­fy­ing in his demands, ter­ri­fy­ing in his bru­tal­i­ty.” Arguably, these traits emerge from the sto­ries unaid­ed, yet when we’re told, for exam­ple, that “The Lord regret­ted hav­ing made man on Earth and it griev­ed him in his heart,” Crumb “shows us noth­ing of regret and grief, but rather a furi­ous old dic­ta­tor appar­ent­ly tot­ter­ing on the edge of mad­ness.”

“It’s not the evil of men that Crumb’s con­cerned with,” writes Smith, “so much as the psy­chol­o­gy of a crea­ture who’d slaugh­ter an entire world.” In that inter­pre­ta­tion, he echoes crit­ics of the Bible’s the­ol­o­gy since the Enlight­en­ment, from Voltaire to Christo­pher Hitchens. But he doesn’t shy away from graph­ic depic­tions of human bru­tal­i­ty, either. Crumb’s move away from satire and deci­sion to “do it straight,” as he told NPR, came from his sense that the sweep­ing, vio­lent mythol­o­gy and “soap opera” rela­tion­ships already lend them­selves “to lurid illustration”—his forté. Orig­i­nal­ly intend­ing to do just the first cou­ple chap­ters “as a com­ic sto­ry,” he soon found he had a mar­ket for all 50 and “stu­pid­ly said, ‘okay, I’ll do it.’” The work—undertaken over four years—proved so exhaust­ing, he says he “earned every pen­ny.”

Does Crumb him­self iden­ti­fy with the reli­gious tra­di­tions in Gen­e­sis? Raised a Catholic, he left the church at 16: “I have my own lit­tle spir­i­tu­al quest,” Crumb says, “but I don’t asso­ciate it with any par­tic­u­lar tra­di­tion­al reli­gion. I think that the tra­di­tion­al West­ern reli­gions all are very prob­lem­at­ic in my view.” That said, like many non­re­li­gious peo­ple who read and respect reli­gious texts, he knows the Bible well—better, it turned out, than his edi­tor, a self-described expert. “I just illus­trate it as it’s writ­ten,” said Crumb, “and the con­tra­dic­tions stand.”

When I first illus­trat­ed that part, the cre­ation, where there’s basi­cal­ly two dif­fer­ent cre­ation sto­ries that do con­tra­dict each oth­er, and I sent it to the edi­tor at Nor­ton, the pub­lish­er, who told me he was a Bible schol­ar. And he read it, and he said wait a minute, this does­n’t make sense. This con­tra­dicts itself. Can we rewrite this so it makes sense? And I said that’s the way it’s writ­ten. He said, that’s the way it’s writ­ten? I said, yeah, you’re a Bible schol­ar. Check it out. 

Crumb invites us all to “check it out”—this col­lec­tion of arche­typ­al leg­ends that inform so much of our pol­i­tics and cul­ture, whether the bizarre and cost­ly cre­ation of a fun­da­men­tal­ist “Ark Park” (“dinosaurs and all”), or the Bib­li­cal epics of Cecil B. DeMille or Dar­ren Aronof­sky, or the poet­ry of John Mil­ton, or the inter­pre­tive illus­tra­tions of William Blake. Whether we think of it as his­to­ry or myth or some patch­work quilt of both, we should read Gen­e­sis. R. Crum­b’s illus­trat­ed ver­sion is as good—or better—a way to do so as any oth­er. See more of his illus­tra­tions at The Guardian and pur­chase his illus­trat­ed Gen­e­sis here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Short His­to­ry of Amer­i­ca, Accord­ing to the Irrev­er­ent Com­ic Satirist Robert Crumb

R. Crumb’s Vibrant, Over-the-Top Album Cov­ers (1968–2004)

R. Crumb Describes How He Dropped LSD in the 60s & Instant­ly Dis­cov­ered His Artis­tic Style

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