Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa Now Appears on Japanese Banknotes

in Art, Current Affairs, Economics | July 4th, 2024

If you’ve lived or trav­eled in Japan, you know full well how much of dai­ly life in that cash-inten­sive soci­ety involves the use of thou­sand-yen bills. Once con­sid­ered the equiv­a­lent of the Amer­i­can ten-spot, the yen’s late­ly hav­ing fall­en to its low­est val­ue in decades means that it’s now worth clos­er to six U.S. dol­lars. This is good news for tourists, and espe­cial­ly so for tourists who appre­ci­ate the wood­block-print art of Hoku­sai, whose famous Great Wave off Kana­gawa adorns the brand new ¥1000 ban­knote. Issued just yes­ter­day by the Bank of Japan, it also bears the image of bac­te­ri­ol­o­gist Kitasato Shibasaburō, who co-dis­cov­ered the infec­tious agent of a bubon­ic plague out­break in 1894.

The last revi­sion of the ¥1000, twen­ty years ago, also fea­tured a bac­te­ri­ol­o­gist: Noguchi Hideyo, who iden­ti­fied syphilis as the cause of pro­gres­sive par­a­lyt­ic dis­ease. Before Noguchi, it bore the image of Nat­sume Sōse­ki, one of the most cel­e­brat­ed writ­ers in the his­to­ry of Japan­ese let­ters.

The Bank of Japan tends to roll out ban­knote designs for each offi­cial era, which begins when­ev­er a new emper­or ascends to the throne; the cur­rent one began in May of 2019, after Emper­or Aki­hi­to stepped down and his son Naruhi­to stepped up. Oth­er his­tor­i­cal fig­ures pic­tured on the cur­ren­cy of this Rei­wa era, as it’s called, include Tsu­da Uni­ver­si­ty founder Tsu­da Umeko and “father of Japan­ese cap­i­tal­ism” Shibu­sawa Eiichi.”

A not just respect­ed but pop­u­lar and com­mer­cial­ly suc­cess­ful artist, Hoku­sai knew a thing or two about cap­i­tal­ism him­self. Yet he also had an uncom­mon eye for the beau­ty of Japan, his dis­tinc­tive per­cep­tions of which have been high­ly influ­en­tial in both East­ern and West­ern art for near­ly two cen­turies now. Japan­ese ban­knotes have pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured images of Mount Fuji, Oga­ta Kōrin’s six-pan­el paint­ing of iris­es, and a scene from the Tale of Gen­ji. But this is the first time any has drawn from ukiyo‑e, the “pic­tures of the float­ing world” of which Hoku­sai was one of sev­er­al mas­ters who worked from the sev­en­teenth through the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry. A Great Wave bill is some­thing to cel­e­brate, but giv­en that today hap­pens to be the Fourth of July, let it be said that the pyra­mid with the eye is also pret­ty cool.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to Hokusai’s Great Wave, One of the Most Rec­og­niz­able Art­works in the World

The Evo­lu­tion of Hokusai’s Great Wave: A Study of 113 Known Copies of the Icon­ic Wood­block Print

Watch Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kana­gawa Get Entire­ly Recre­at­ed with 50,000 LEGO Bricks

Hokusai’s Action-Packed Illus­tra­tions of Japan­ese & Chi­nese War­riors (1836)

Alan Tur­ing Will Be Fea­tured on England’s New £50 Ban­knote

‘Pride and Prej­u­dice’ Author Jane Austen Will Appear on the £10 Note

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

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How a Steady Supply of Coffee Helped the Union Win the U.S. Civil War

in Food & Drink, History | July 3rd, 2024

Amer­i­cans doing “e‑mail jobs” and work­ing in the “lap­top class” tend to make much of the quan­ti­ty of cof­fee they require to keep going, or even to get start­ed. In that sense alone, they have some­thing in com­mon with Civ­il War sol­diers. “Union sol­diers were giv­en 36 pounds of cof­fee a year by the gov­ern­ment, and they made their dai­ly brew every­where and with every­thing: with water from can­teens and pud­dles, brack­ish bays and Mis­sis­sip­pi mud,” write NPR’s Kitchen Sis­ters. “The Con­fed­er­a­cy, on the oth­er hand, was decid­ed­ly less caf­feinat­ed. As soon as the war began, the Union block­ad­ed South­ern ports and cut off the South’s access to cof­fee.”

Smith­son­ian Nation­al Muse­um of Amer­i­can His­to­ry cura­tor Jon Grinspan tells of how “des­per­ate Con­fed­er­ate sol­diers would invent makeshift cof­fees,” roast­ing “rye, rice, sweet pota­toes or beets until they were dark, choco­laty and caramelized. The result­ing brew con­tained no caf­feine, but at least it was some­thing warm and brown and con­sol­ing.” (See video at bot­tom of the post.) The stark caf­feina­tion dif­fer­en­tial that result­ed must count as one of many fac­tors that led to the Union’s ulti­mate vic­to­ry. Part of what kept their cof­fee sup­plies robust was imports from Liberia, the African repub­lic that had been estab­lished ear­li­er in the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry by freed Amer­i­can slaves.

“The Union’s abil­i­ty to pur­chase and dis­trib­ute cof­fee from Liberia, along­side oth­er sources, was help­ing the army’s morale,” writes Bron­wen Ever­ill at Smithsonian.com. “In Decem­ber 1862, one sol­dier wrote that ‘what keeps me alive must be the cof­fee.’ ” Mean­while, a north­ern gen­er­al famous­ly gave this advice to oth­er gen­er­als: “If your men get their cof­fee ear­ly in the morn­ing, you can hold.” Many har­row­ing bat­tles lat­er, “at the Con­fed­er­ate sur­ren­der at Appo­mat­tox in April 1865, Michi­gan sol­dier William Smith not­ed that the Con­fed­er­ate sol­diers present were lick­ing their lips hope­ful­ly, with ‘a keen rel­ish for a cup of Yan­kee cof­fee.’ ” (John­ny Reb had pre­sum­ably acquired this taste between those bat­tles, when sol­diers from both sides would meet and exchange goods.)

The Civ­il War in Four Min­utes video above explains the cof­fee-drink­ing Yan­kee’s habits in more detail. “If there was an ear­ly morn­ing march, the first order of busi­ness was to boil water and make cof­fee,” says actor-his­to­ri­an Dou­glas Ull­man Jr. “If there was a halt along the march, the first order of busi­ness when the march stopped was to get that hot water going to drink more cof­fee.” Sol­diers would keep their cof­fee and mea­ger sug­ar rations in the same bag in order to ensure “the tini­est hint of sug­ar in every drop. Think about that the next time you order your caramel soy mac­chi­a­to.” But such bev­er­ages were still a long way off after the Civ­il War, which gave way to the era of what we now call the Wild West — and with it, the hey­day of cow­boy cof­fee.

via Smith­son­ian Mag­a­zine

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Human­i­ty Got Hooked on Cof­fee: An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry

Watch an Exquis­ite 19th Cen­tu­ry Cof­fee Mak­er in Action

The His­to­ry of Cof­fee and How It Trans­formed Our World

Philoso­phers Drink­ing Cof­fee: The Exces­sive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard

The His­to­ry of the U.S. Civ­il War Visu­al­ized Month by Month and State by State, in an Info­graph­ic from 1897

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

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Ernest Hemingway’s Favorite Hamburger Recipe

in Food & Drink, Literature | July 3rd, 2024

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In 2013, the food writer Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan stum­bled across an arti­cle in the Boston Globe describ­ing a trove of dig­i­tized doc­u­ments from Ernest Hem­ing­way’s home in Cuba that had been recent­ly donat­ed to the John F. Kennedy Pres­i­den­tial Library and Muse­um, home of Hem­ing­way’s per­son­al archives. One line in the arti­cle caught her eye: “And the more mun­dane, like his instruc­tions to the house­hold staff, includ­ing how to pre­pare his ham­burg­ers: ground beef, onions, gar­lic, India rel­ish, and capers, cooked so the edges were crispy but the cen­ter red and juicy.”

Tan, a Hem­ing­way fan and the author of A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Mem­oir of Food and Fam­i­ly, set out to find the recipe and try it. She report­ed her expe­ri­ences on the Paris Review Dai­ly blog. “I had made burg­ers before, count­less times on count­less evenings,” Tan writes. “This one was dif­fer­ent; I was­n’t mak­ing just any burg­er — I was attempt­ing to recre­ate Hem­ing­way’s ham­burg­er. And it had to be just right.”

Here is Papa’s favorite recipe for pan-fried ham­burg­ers, as report­ed by Tan:

Ingre­di­ents–

1 lb. ground lean beef

2 cloves, minced gar­lic

2 lit­tle green onions, fine­ly chopped

1 heap­ing tea­spoon, India rel­ish

2 table­spoons, capers

1 heap­ing tea­spoon, Spice Islands sage

Spice Islands Beau Monde Sea­son­ing — 1/2 tea­spoon

Spice Islands Mei Yen Pow­der — 1/2 tea­spoon

1 egg, beat­en in a cup with a fork

About 1/3 cup dry red or white wine

1 table­spoon cook­ing oil

What to do–

Break up the meat with a fork and scat­ter the gar­lic, onion and dry sea­son­ings over it, then mix them into the meat with a fork or your fin­gers. Let the bowl of meat sit out of the ice­box for ten or fif­teen min­utes while you set the table and make the sal­ad. Add the rel­ish, capers, every­thing else includ­ing wine and let the meat sit, qui­et­ly mar­i­nat­ing, for anoth­er ten min­utes if pos­si­ble. Now make your fat, juicy pat­ties with your hands. The pat­ties should be an inch thick, and soft in tex­ture but not run­ny. Have the oil in your fry­ing pan hot but not smok­ing when you drop in the pat­ties and then turn the heat down and fry the burg­ers about four min­utes. Take the pan off the burn­er and turn the heat high again. Flip the burg­ers over, put the pan back on the hot fire, then after one minute, turn the heat down again and cook anoth­er three min­utes. Both sides of the burg­ers should be crispy brown and the mid­dle pink and juicy.

Spice Islands stopped mak­ing Mei Yen Pow­der sev­er­al years ago, accord­ing to Tan. You can recre­ate it, she says, by mix­ing nine parts salt, nine parts sug­ar and two parts MSG. “If a recipe calls for 1 tea­spoon of Mei Yen Pow­der,” she writes, “use 2/3 tsp of the dry recipe (above) mixed with 1/8 tsp of soy sauce.”

Hem­ing­way’s wid­ow, Mary, pub­lished the same basic recipe in 1966 in the sixth vol­ume of the Wom­an’s Day Ency­clo­pe­dia of Cook­ery. The one-pound of beef was intend­ed for only two serv­ings. For more on Hem­ing­way’s ham­burg­er recipe and his culi­nary tastes, includ­ing a fas­ci­nat­ing list of gourmet foods he had shipped from New York to his home in Cuba, be sure to read Tan’s arti­cle at the Paris Review.

Update: You can also now enjoy Ernest Hemingway’s Sum­mer Camp­ing Recipes.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Recipes of Icon­ic Authors: Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath, Roald Dahl, the Mar­quis de Sade & More

MoMA’s Artists’ Cook­book (1978) Reveals the Meals of Sal­vador Dalí, Willem de Koon­ing, Andy Warhol, Louise Bour­geois & More

David Lynch Teach­es You to Cook His Quinoa Recipe in a Strange, Sur­re­al­ist Video

How to Actu­al­ly Cook Sal­vador Dali’s Sur­re­al­ist Recipes: Cray­fish, Prawns, and Spit­ted Eggs

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The Story of Lee Miller: From the Cover of Vogue to Hitler’s Bathtub

in History, Photography | July 2nd, 2024

In late-twen­ties Man­hat­tan, a nine­teen-year-old woman named Eliz­a­beth “Lee” Miller stepped off the curb and into the path of a car. She was pulled back to safe­ty by none oth­er than the mag­nate Condé Nast, founder of the epony­mous pub­lish­ing com­pa­ny. Not long there­after, Miller, who’d been study­ing at the Art Stu­dents League of New York, appeared on the cov­er of Vogue. It’s tempt­ing to call this the first major episode of a charmed life, though that descrip­tor fits uneasi­ly with the arc of her sev­en­ty years, dur­ing the last few decades of which she could nev­er quite recov­er from hav­ing wit­nessed first-hand the lib­er­a­tion of the con­cen­tra­tion camps at Buchen­wald and Dachau — sights she shared with the Amer­i­can pub­lic as a war pho­tog­ra­ph­er.

Miller took pic­tures of not just the con­cen­tra­tion camps, but also events like the Lon­don Blitz and the lib­er­a­tion of Paris. At the end of the war, she posed for an even more famous pic­ture, bathing in Hitler’s tub on the very same day that the Führer lat­er shot him­self in his bunker.

Behind the cam­era in that instance was Life cor­re­spon­dent David E. Scher­man, one of the notable men in Miller’s life. Oth­ers includ­ed the artist-writer Roland Pen­rose, the busi­ness­man Aziz Eloui Bey, and, before all of them, the sur­re­al­ist pho­tog­ra­ph­er Man Ray, each of whom cor­re­spond­ed to a phase of the pro­fes­sion­al jour­ney that took her from fash­ion mod­el to fear­less pho­to­jour­nal­ist.

You can see and hear that jour­ney recount­ed by gal­lerist-Youtu­ber James Payne in the new Great Art Explained video at the top of the post. Just above is a British Pathé news­reel that shows Miller at home with Pen­rose in 1946, the year between the end of the war and the birth of their son Antony Pen­rose, who re-dis­cov­ered and re-pub­li­cized his moth­er’s pho­tog­ra­phy after her death in 1977. How­ev­er belat­ed her pub­lic recog­ni­tion, it’s still sur­pris­ing that a life like Miller’s, the events of which stretch even Hol­ly­wood plau­si­bil­i­ty, only became a movie last year. Lee still awaits wide release, but much has been writ­ten about the pas­sion of star Kate Winslet that got it made. She’ll undoubt­ed­ly impress as Miller — but nei­ther, rumor has it, is Sat­ur­day Night Live alum­nus Andy Sam­berg’s David E. Scher­man a per­for­mance to be missed.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The For­got­ten Women of Sur­re­al­ism: A Mag­i­cal, Short Ani­mat­ed Film

Man Ray’s Por­traits of Ernest Hem­ing­way, Ezra Pound, Mar­cel Duchamp & Many Oth­er 1920s Icons

Why the U.S. Pho­tographed Its Own World War II Con­cen­tra­tion Camps (and Com­mis­sioned Pho­tographs by Dorothea Lange)

Meet Tsuneko Sasamo­to, Japan’s First Female Pho­to­jour­nal­ist and Now, at 107, Japan’s Old­est Liv­ing Pho­to­jour­nal­ist

Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Intro­duc­tions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picas­so & More

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

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The Original Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland Manuscript, Handwritten & Illustrated By Lewis Carroll (1864)

in Art, Literature | July 2nd, 2024

On a sum­mer day in 1862, a tall, stam­mer­ing Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty math­e­mati­cian named Charles Lutwidge Dodg­son took a boat trip up the Riv­er Thames, accom­pa­nied by a col­league and the three young daugh­ters of uni­ver­si­ty chan­cel­lor Hen­ry Lid­dell. To stave off tedi­um dur­ing the five-mile jour­ney, Dodg­son regaled the group with a sto­ry of a bored girl named Alice who finds adven­ture in the most unex­pect­ed places. By the day’s end, Liddell’s mid­dle daugh­ter, also named Alice, was so enthralled by this account that she implored the math­e­mati­cian to write the sto­ry down. Some three years lat­er, Dodg­son would pub­lish Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land under the nom de plume of Lewis Car­roll (the pen name is an Angli­cized ver­sion of “Car­o­lus Ludovi­cus,” the Latinized form of Charles Lud­widge). The peren­ni­al children’s read was imme­di­ate­ly pop­u­lar, count­ing Oscar Wilde and Queen Vic­to­ria among its ardent fans, and has nev­er been out of print since its ini­tial pub­li­ca­tion in 1865.

Alice’s Adven­tures Under Ground, the orig­i­nal ver­sion of the book that Car­roll pre­sent­ed to Alice Lid­dell in 1864, is present­ly housed in the British Library, which has gra­cious­ly made it freely avail­able online. You can view it here. The hand­writ­ten vol­ume includes 37 crisp ink illus­tra­tions, all per­son­al­ly drawn by Dodg­son. Dis­cern­ing Alice read­ers will notice that these illus­tra­tions dif­fer from the icon­ic images (and, to my eyes, very much supe­ri­or) cre­at­ed by famed Punch mag­a­zine polit­i­cal car­toon­ist John Ten­niel.

Title and illus­tra­tions aside, the orig­i­nal man­u­script is con­sid­er­ably slim­mer than the final ver­sion, con­tain­ing rough­ly 12,000 few­er words.

Those wish­ing to revis­it Alice’s adven­tures can do so at the British Library’s site.

Ilia Blin­d­er­man is a Mon­tre­al-based cul­ture and sci­ence writer. Fol­low him at @iliablinderman.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See Sal­vador Dali’s Illus­tra­tions for the 1969 Edi­tion of Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land

Meryl Streep Shrooms Her Way Through Mod­ern Alice in Won­der­land

The Real Alice in Won­der­land Cir­ca 1862, and Our Favorite Cul­ture Links on the Web

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Martin Mull (RIP) Satirically Interviews a Young Tom Waits on Fernwood 2 Night (1977)

in Music, Television | July 1st, 2024

These days, ref­er­ences to sev­en­ties tele­vi­sion increas­ing­ly require prefa­to­ry expla­na­tion. Who under the age of 60 recalls, for exam­ple, the cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non that was Mary Hart­man, Mary Hart­man, an absur­dist satire so faith­ful to the soap-opera form it par­o­died that it aired every week­night, putting out 325 episodes between ear­ly 1976 and mid-1977? And even for those who do remem­ber the show, it would sure­ly require a stretch of the mem­o­ry to sum­mon to mind its minor char­ac­ter Garth Gim­ble, an abu­sive hus­band who meets his gris­ly fate on the sharp end of an alu­minum Christ­mas tree. (We’ll set the ques­tion of how many remem­ber alu­minum Christ­mas trees aside for the hol­i­day sea­son.)

Garth Gim­ble was the break­out role for a musi­cal come­di­an turned actor called Mar­tin Mull, who died last week at the age of 80. Trib­utes have men­tioned the char­ac­ters he played on shows from Roseanne and Sab­ri­na the Teenage Witch to Arrest­ed Devel­op­ment and Veep.

But to those who were watch­ing TV in the sum­mer of 1977, Mull has always been — and will always be — not Garth Gim­ble but his twin broth­er Barth, host of a low-bud­get late-night talk show in the small town of Fer­n­wood, Ohio, the set­ting of Mary Hart­man, Mary Hart­man. Fer­n­wood-2-Night pre­miered as a tem­po­rary replace­ment for that show (and thus as yet anoth­er expan­sion of the tele­vi­su­al uni­verse cre­at­ed by mega-pro­duc­er Nor­man Lear), but it soon took on a coun­ter­cul­tur­al life of its own.

The fic­tion­al talk-show form of Fer­n­wood-2-Night was ahead of its time; more dar­ing still was its occa­sion­al arrange­ment of real-life guests. That ros­ter includ­ed a young Tom Waits, him­self a liv­ing embod­i­ment of the blurred line between real­i­ty and fic­tion. As the show’s announc­er Jer­ry Hub­bard, Fred Willard puts all of his dis­tinc­tive deliv­ery into declar­ing Waits “very famous for Fer­n­wood.” Mull plays Gim­ble as the kind of man on which the appeal of Waits’ art is whol­ly lost: “I know he sells a lot of albums, and he makes about half a mil­lion big ones in one year,” he says by way of intro­duc­tion. “In my book, that spells tal­ent.”

Nat­u­ral­ly, Gim­ble is game to set the liquor-swig­ging singer up for an old groan­er by remark­ing on the strange­ness of talk­ing to a guest with a bot­tle in front of him. “Well, I’d rather have a bot­tle in front of me than a frontal lobot­o­my,” Waits growls in com­pli­ance. This comes after his per­for­mance of the song “The Piano Has Been Drink­ing (Not Me) (An Evening with Pete King)” from his then-most recent album Small Change. It’s safe to say that many view­ers on Fer­n­wood-2-Night’s wave­length became fans of Waits as soon as they heard it. Near­ly half a cen­tu­ry lat­er, they no doubt still remem­ber his appear­ance fond­ly — at least as fond­ly as they remem­ber the Won­derblender.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch Tom Waits’ Clas­sic Appear­ance on Aus­tralian TV, 1979

Watch Tom Waits For No One, the Pio­neer­ing Ani­mat­ed Music Video from 1979

Tom Waits Shows Us How Not to Get a Date on Valentine’s Day

Tom Waits’ Many Appear­ances on David Let­ter­man, From 1983 to 2015

RIP Nor­man Lear: Watch Full Episodes of His Dar­ing 70s Sit­coms, Includ­ing All in the Fam­i­ly, Maude, The Jef­fer­sons, and More

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

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

in Creativity, Psychology | July 1st, 2024

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

“The great Tao fades away.”

So begins one trans­la­tion of the Tao Te Ching’s 18th Chap­ter. The sen­tence cap­tures the frus­tra­tion that comes with a lost epiphany. Whether it’s a pro­found real­iza­tion when you just wake up, or moment of clar­i­ty in the show­er, by the time your mind’s gears start turn­ing and you grope for pen and paper, the enlight­en­ment has evap­o­rat­ed, replaced by mud­dle-head­ed, fum­bling “what was that, again?”

“Intel­li­gence comes forth. There is great decep­tion.”

The sud­den flash­es of insight we have in states of med­i­ta­tive distraction—showering, pulling weeds in the gar­den, dri­ving home from work—often elude our con­scious mind pre­cise­ly because they require its dis­en­gage­ment. When we’re too active­ly engaged in con­scious thought—exercising our intel­li­gence, so to speak—our cre­ativ­i­ty and inspi­ra­tion suf­fer. “The great Tao fades away.”

The intu­itive rev­e­la­tions we have while show­er­ing or per­form­ing oth­er mind­less tasks are what psy­chol­o­gists call “incu­ba­tion.” As Men­tal Floss describes the phe­nom­e­non: “Since these rou­tines don’t require much thought, you flip to autopi­lot. This frees up your uncon­scious to work on some­thing else. Your mind goes wan­der­ing, leav­ing your brain to qui­et­ly play a no-holds-barred game of free asso­ci­a­tion.”

Are we always doomed to lose the thread when we get self-con­scious about what we’re doing? Not at all. In fact, some researchers, like Allen Braun and Siyuan Liu, have observed incu­ba­tion at work in very cre­ative­ly engaged indi­vid­u­als, like freestyle rap­pers. Theirs is a skill that must be honed and prac­ticed exhaus­tive­ly, but one that nonethe­less relies on extem­po­ra­ne­ous inspi­ra­tion.

Renowned neu­ro­sci­en­tist Alice Fla­her­ty the­o­rizes that the key bio­log­i­cal ingre­di­ent in incu­ba­tion is dopamine, the neu­ro­trans­mit­ter released when we’re relaxed and com­fort­able. “Peo­ple vary in terms of their lev­el of cre­ative dri­ve,” writes Fla­her­ty, “accord­ing to the activ­i­ty of the dopamine path­ways of the lim­bic sys­tem.” More relax­ation, more dopamine. More dopamine, more cre­ativ­i­ty.

Oth­er researchers, like Ut Na Sio and Thomas C. Ormerod at Lan­cast­er Uni­ver­si­ty, have under­tak­en analy­sis of a more qual­i­ta­tive kind—of “anec­do­tal reports of the intel­lec­tu­al dis­cov­ery process­es of indi­vid­u­als hailed as genius­es.” Here we might think of Samuel Tay­lor Coleridge, whose poem “Kublai Khan”—“a vision in a dream”—he sup­pos­ed­ly com­posed in the midst of a spon­ta­neous rev­e­la­tion (or an opi­um haze)—before that annoy­ing “per­son from Por­lock” broke the spell.

Sio and Ormerod sur­vey the lit­er­a­ture of “incu­ba­tion peri­ods,” hop­ing to “allow us to make use of them effec­tive­ly to pro­mote cre­ativ­i­ty in areas such as indi­vid­ual prob­lem solv­ing, class­room learn­ing, and work envi­ron­ments.” Their dense research sug­gests that we can exer­cise some degree of con­trol over incu­ba­tion, build­ing uncon­scious work into our rou­tines. But why is this nec­es­sary?

Psy­chol­o­gist John Kounios of Drex­el Uni­ver­si­ty offers a straight­for­ward expla­na­tion of the uncon­scious process­es he refers to as “the default mode net­work.” Nick Stock­ton in Wired sums up Kounios’ the­o­ry:

Our brains typ­i­cal­ly cat­a­log things by their con­text: Win­dows are parts of build­ings, and the stars belong in the night sky. Ideas will always min­gle to some degree, but when we’re focused on a spe­cif­ic task our think­ing tends to be lin­ear.

The task of showering—or bathing, in the case of Archimedes (above)—gives the mind a break, lets it mix things up and make the odd, ran­dom jux­ta­po­si­tions that are the essen­tial basis of cre­ativ­i­ty. I’m tempt­ed to think Wal­lace Stevens spent a good deal of time in the show­er. Or maybe, like Stock­ton, he kept a “Poop Jour­nal” (exact­ly what it sounds like).

Famous exam­ples aside, what all of this research sug­gests is that peak cre­ativ­i­ty hap­pens when we’re pleas­ant­ly absent-mind­ed. Or, as psy­chol­o­gist Allen Braun writes, “We think what we see is a relax­ation of ‘exec­u­tive func­tions’ to allow more nat­ur­al de-focused atten­tion and uncen­sored process­es to occur that might be the hall­mark of cre­ativ­i­ty.”

None of this means that you’ll always be able to cap­ture those bril­liant ideas before they fade away. There’s no fool­proof method involved in mak­ing use of cre­ative dis­trac­tion. But as Leo Widrich writes at Buffer, there are some tricks that may help. To increase your cre­ative out­put and max­i­mize the insights in incu­ba­tion peri­ods, he rec­om­mends that you:

  1. “Keep a note­book with you at all times, even in the show­er.” (Widrich points us toward a water­proof notepad for that pur­pose.)
  1. “Plan dis­en­gage­ment and dis­trac­tion.” Widrich calls this “the out­er-inner tech­nique.” John Cleese artic­u­lates anoth­er ver­sion of planned inspi­ra­tion.
  1. “Over­whelm your brain: Make the task real­ly hard.” This seems counterintuitive—the oppo­site of relax­ation. But as Widrich explains, when you strain your brain with real­ly dif­fi­cult prob­lems, oth­ers seem much eas­i­er by com­par­i­son.

It may seem like a lot of work get­ting your mind to relax, pro­duce more dopamine, and get weird, cir­cu­lar, and inspired. But the work lies in mak­ing effec­tive use of what’s already hap­pen­ing in your uncon­scious mind. Rather than grop­ing blind­ly for that flash of bril­liance you just had a moment ago, you can learn, writes Men­tal Floss, to “mind your mind­less tasks.”

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy Cours­es

Where Do Ideas Come From? David Lynch, Robert Krul­wich, Susan Orlean, Chuck Close & Oth­ers Reveal Their Cre­ative Sources

How Walk­ing Fos­ters Cre­ativ­i­ty: Stan­ford Researchers Con­firm What Philoso­phers & Writ­ers Have Always Known

How To Be Cre­ative: PBS’ Off Book Series Explores the Secret Sauce of Great Ideas

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

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A Close Look at Beowulf-Era Helmets & Swords, Courtesy of the British Museum

in History | June 28th, 2024

Even if a stu­dent assigned Beowulf is, at first, dis­mayed by its lan­guage, that same stu­dent may well be cap­ti­vat­ed by its set­ting. While that myth­i­cal but some­how both glo­ri­ous­ly and dankly real­is­tic realm of kings and drag­ons, mead halls and bog mon­sters may feel famil­iar to fan­ta­sy enthu­si­asts, it’s also strange on a deep­er lev­el; this sto­ry, any mod­ern read­er will feel, is in no sense a prod­uct of our own time. In order to con­crete­ly envi­sion both the action of that epic and the cul­ture that gave rise to it, it helps to exam­ine arti­facts from around the same place and time in his­to­ry. To find such things, we need look no fur­ther than Sut­ton Hoo.

Beowulf is set in the fifth and sixth cen­turies; Sut­ton Hoo is an archae­o­log­i­cal site whose con­tents date from the sixth to sev­enth cen­turies. Locat­ed “in the east­ern part of Eng­land, in a coun­ty called Suf­folk, which at that time was part of the East Anglian king­dom in Anglo-Sax­on Eng­land,” it con­sists of “a grave made in the mid­dle of a 27-meter-long ship that was buried beneath a gigan­tic earth mound, and inside a bur­ial cham­ber that was placed in the mid­dle of the ship were laid out some amaz­ing trea­sures drawn from all over the known world at that time.” So says Sue Brun­ning, cura­tor of the Euro­pean ear­ly medieval col­lec­tions at the British Muse­um, in one Cura­tor’s Cor­ner videos that pro­vide close-up views and expla­na­tions of a cou­ple of par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant Sut­ton Hoo arti­facts.

This hel­met and sword (with oth­er Anglo-Sax­on swords also brought out for com­par­i­son) are asso­ci­at­ed with King Ræd­wald of East Anglia. Beowulf, you’ll remem­ber, opens with the funer­al of the Dan­ish king Scyld Scef­ing, and takes place entire­ly in Scan­di­navia. But the sim­i­lar­i­ty between the elab­o­rate orna­men­ta­tion on the Sut­ton Hoo arti­facts and that on com­pa­ra­ble objects unearthed in east­ern Swe­den sug­gests a con­nec­tion between those regions in that era, and Beowulf itself may have been com­posed in East Anglia. It takes some imag­i­na­tion to pic­ture this sev­en­teen-cen­tu­ry-old hel­met and sword intact and in their prime, but how­ev­er they looked, one sure­ly would­n’t have turned down the extra con­fi­dence they’d have pro­vid­ed in a show­down with Gren­del.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Vin­tage Short Film about the Samu­rai Sword, Nar­rat­ed by George Takei (1969)

Archae­ol­o­gists Dis­cov­er a 2,000-Year-Old Roman Glass Bowl in Per­fect Con­di­tion

An Artist Vis­its Stone­henge in 1573 and Paints a Charm­ing Water­col­or Paint­ing of the Ancient Ruins

Bronze Age Britons Turned Bones of Dead Rel­a­tives into Musi­cal Instru­ments & Orna­ments

Hear Beowulf and Gawain and the Green Knight Read in Their Orig­i­nal Old and Mid­dle Eng­lish by an MIT Medieval­ist

The British Muse­um Puts 1.9 Mil­lion Works of Art Online

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

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Thousands of Pablo Picasso’s Works Now Available in a New Digital Archive

in Art, Museums, Online Courses | June 27th, 2024

If you want to immerse your­self in the world of Pablo Picas­so, you might start at the Museo Picas­so Mála­ga, locat­ed in the artist’s Span­ish birth­place. But to under­stand how his work devel­oped through­out his life, you’ll have to get out of Spain — which is just what Picas­so did to accel­er­ate that devel­op­ment in the first place. At the turn of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, an ambi­tious young Euro­pean painter had to go to Paris, the con­ti­nen­t’s art cap­i­tal. Picas­so end­ed up spend­ing much of his life there, mak­ing it the most suit­able loca­tion for the Musée Picas­so, home to the sin­gle largest col­lec­tion of his art­works, from paint­ings and sculp­tures to draw­ings and engrav­ings, as well as an even larg­er archive of pho­tographs, papers, and cor­re­spon­dence.

Now, you don’t actu­al­ly have to make the trip to Paris to see these col­lec­tions, or at least an increas­ing­ly large por­tion of their hold­ings. As Sarah Kuta reports at Smithsonian.com, thou­sands of Picas­so’s art­works are “now acces­si­ble from any­where with an inter­net con­nec­tion, thanks to a new online archive cre­at­ed by the Picas­so Muse­um. The muse­um has dig­i­tized thou­sands of Picasso’s art­works, essays, poems, inter­views and oth­er mem­o­ra­bil­ia, includ­ing items that have nev­er been seen by the pub­lic before.” The project began last year, with the dig­i­ti­za­tion of “around 19,000 pho­tos”; if all goes accord­ing to plan, the muse­um will even­tu­al­ly make “an addi­tion­al 200,000 doc­u­ments” avail­able online.

Browse the Musée Picas­so’s online archive and you’ll find many works that, assum­ing you haven’t yet achieved full Picas­so immer­sion, you won’t have seen before: Femme couchée lisant from 1953, seen at the top of the post, for instance, or the ear­li­er Mas­sacre en Corée just above. (Despite liv­ing in Korea myself, I had no idea that Picas­so paint­ed a Kore­an War-themed pic­ture, much less an episode of his­to­ry that took place in the very neigh­bor­hood where I used to live.) Not every­thing is by Picas­so, a good deal hav­ing been made by artists with whom he was asso­ci­at­ed, like Man Ray, who took this 1937 pho­to­graph of Picas­so and his His­pano-Suiza car. You can find much more of inter­est in the archive’s themed sec­tions, like “Féminin / Mas­culin” and “Picas­so iconophage,” which are nav­i­ga­ble only in French — a lan­guage that, in any case, every Picas­sophile should learn. Enter the dig­i­tal archive here.

via Smith­son­ian

Relat­ed con­tent:

Pablo Picasso’s Mas­ter­ful Child­hood Paint­ings: Pre­co­cious Works Paint­ed Between the Ages of 8 and 15

14 Self-Por­traits by Pablo Picas­so Show the Evo­lu­tion of His Style: See Self-Por­traits Mov­ing from Ages 15 to 90

The Mys­tery of Picas­so: Land­mark Film of a Leg­endary Artist at Work, by Hen­ri-Georges Clouzot

A 3D Tour of Picasso’s Guer­ni­ca

Watch Picas­so Cre­ate a Mas­ter­piece in Just Five Min­utes (1955)

The Louvre’s Entire Col­lec­tion Goes Online: View and Down­load 480,00 Works of Art

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

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See Albert Camus’ Historic Lecture, “The Human Crisis,” Performed by Actor Viggo Mortensen

in Philosophy | June 26th, 2024

Back in 2016, New York City staged a month-long fes­ti­val cel­e­brat­ing Albert Camus’ his­toric vis­it to NYC in 1946. One event in the fes­ti­val fea­tured actor Vig­go Mortensen giv­ing a read­ing of Camus’ lec­ture,“La Crise de l’homme” (“The Human Cri­sis”) at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty–the very same place where Camus deliv­ered the lec­ture 70 years earlier–down to the very day (March 28, 1946). The read­ing was ini­tial­ly cap­tured on a cell phone, and broad­cast live using Face­book live video. But then came a more pol­ished record­ing, cour­tesy of Columbi­a’s Mai­son Française. Note that Mortensen takes the stage around the 11:45 mark. You can read a tran­script of “The Human Cri­sis” here.

“The Human Cri­sis” will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free. 

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in April, 2016.

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:

Albert Camus on the Respon­si­bil­i­ty of the Artist: To “Cre­ate Dan­ger­ous­ly” (1957)

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Albert Camus’ Exis­ten­tial­ism, a Phi­los­o­phy Mak­ing a Come­back in Our Dys­func­tion­al Times

What is Albert Camus’ The Plague About? An Intro­duc­tion

Hear Albert Camus Read the Famous Open­ing Pas­sage of The Stranger (1947)

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

in Archives, Sci Fi | June 26th, 2024

If you haven’t heard of Hugo Gerns­back, you’ve sure­ly heard of the Hugo Award. Next to the Neb­u­la, it’s the most pres­ti­gious of sci­ence fic­tion prizes, bring­ing togeth­er in its ranks of win­ners such ven­er­a­ble authors as Ursu­la K. Le Guin, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Hein­lein, Neil Gaiman, Isaac Asi­mov, and just about every oth­er sci-fi and fan­ta­sy lumi­nary you could think of. It is indeed fit­ting that such an hon­or should be named for Gerns­back, the Lux­em­bour­gian-Amer­i­can inven­tor who, in April of 1926, began pub­lish­ing “the first and longest-run­ning Eng­lish-lan­guage mag­a­zine ded­i­cat­ed to what was then not quite yet called ‘sci­ence fic­tion,’” notes Uni­ver­si­ty of Virginia’s Andrew Fer­gu­son at The Pulp Mag­a­zines Project. Amaz­ing Sto­ries pro­vid­ed an “exclu­sive out­let” for what Gerns­back first called “sci­en­tific­tion,” a genre he would “for bet­ter and for worse, define for the mod­ern era.” You can read and down­load hun­dreds of Amaz­ing Sto­ries issues, from the first year of its pub­li­ca­tion to the last, at the Inter­net Archive.

Like the exten­sive list of Hugo Award win­ners, the back cat­a­log of Amaz­ing Sto­ries encom­pass­es a host of genius­es: Le Guin, Asi­mov, H.G. Wells, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Bal­lard, and many hun­dreds of less­er-known writ­ers. But the mag­a­zine “was slow to devel­op,” writes Scott Van Wyns­berghe. Its lurid cov­ers lured some read­ers in, but its “first two years were dom­i­nat­ed by preprint­ed mate­r­i­al,” and Gerns­back devel­oped a rep­u­ta­tion for finan­cial dodgi­ness and for not pay­ing his writ­ers well or at all.

By 1929, he sold the mag­a­zine and moved on to oth­er ven­tures, none of them par­tic­u­lar­ly suc­cess­ful. Amaz­ing Sto­ries sol­diered on, under a series of edi­tors and with wide­ly vary­ing read­er­ships until it final­ly suc­cumbed in 2005, after almost eighty years of pub­li­ca­tion. But that is no small feat in such an often unpop­u­lar field, with a pub­li­ca­tion, writes Fer­gu­son, that was very often per­ceived as “gar­ish and non­lit­er­ary.”

In hind­sight, how­ev­er, we can see Amaz­ing Sto­ries as a sci-fi time cap­sule and almost essen­tial fea­ture of the genre’s his­to­ry, even if some of its con­tent tend­ed more toward the young adult adven­ture sto­ry than seri­ous adult fic­tion. Its flashy cov­ers set the bar for pulp mag­a­zines and com­ic books, espe­cial­ly in its run up to the fifties. After 1955, the year of the first Hugo Award, the mag­a­zine reached its peak under the edi­tor­ship of Cele Gold­smith, who took over in 1959. Gone was much of the eye­pop­ping B‑movie imagery of the ear­li­er cov­ers. Amaz­ing Sto­ries acquired a new lev­el of rel­a­tive pol­ish and sophis­ti­ca­tion, and pub­lished many more “lit­er­ary” writ­ers, as in the 1959 issue above, which fea­tured a “Book-Length Nov­el by Robert Bloch.”

This trend con­tin­ued into the sev­en­ties, as you can see in the issue above, with a “com­plete short nov­el by Gor­don Eklund” (and ear­ly fic­tion by George R.R. Mar­tin). In 1982, Fer­gu­son writes, Amaz­ing Sto­ries was sold “to Gary Gygax of D&D fame, and would nev­er again regain the promi­nence it had before.” The mag­a­zine large­ly returned to its pulp roots, with cov­ers that resem­bled those of super­mar­ket paper­backs. Great writ­ers con­tin­ued to appear, how­ev­er. And the mag­a­zine remained an impor­tant source for new sci­ence fiction—though much of it only in hind­sight. As for Gerns­back, his rep­u­ta­tion waned con­sid­er­ably after his death in 1967.

“With­in a decade,” writes Van Wyns­berghe, “sci­ence fic­tion pun­dits were debat­ing whether or not he had cre­at­ed a ‘ghet­to’ for hack writ­ers.” In 1986, nov­el­ist Bri­an Ald­iss called Gerns­back “one of the worst dis­as­ters ever to hit the sci­ence fic­tion field.” His 1911 nov­el, the ludi­crous­ly named Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 is con­sid­ered “one of the worst sci­ence fic­tion nov­els in his­to­ry,” writes Matthew Lasar. It may seem odd that the Oscar of the sci-fi world should be named for such a reviled fig­ure. And yet, despite his pro­nounced lack of lit­er­ary abil­i­ty, Gerns­back was a vision­ary. As a futur­ist, he made some star­tling­ly accu­rate pre­dic­tions, along with some not-so-accu­rate ones. As for his sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to a new form of writ­ing, writes Lasar, “It was in Amaz­ing Sto­ries that Gerns­back first tried to nail down the sci­ence fic­tion idea.” As Ray Brad­bury sup­pos­ed­ly said, “Gerns­back made us fall in love with the future.” Enter the Amaz­ing Sto­ries Inter­net Archive here.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Down­load Issues of “Weird Tales” (1923–1954): The Pio­neer­ing Pulp Hor­ror Mag­a­zine Fea­tures Orig­i­nal Sto­ries by Love­craft, Brad­bury & Many More

Dis­cov­er the First Hor­ror & Fan­ta­sy Mag­a­zine, Der Orchideen­garten, and Its Bizarre Art­work (1919–1921)

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

 

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