View post on imgur.com In an alternate universe version of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, Eddie Murphy, not Samuel L. Jackson, might have played Jules, the bible-spouting hit man. His partner-in-crime, Vincent Vega, might have been played by Gary Oldman, not John Travolta. And the role of Mia, played memorably by Uma Thurman in black bangs, could have been played by Debra Winger or perhaps Phoebe Cates. Documents about the movie recently surfaced on Reddit, offering a fascinating glimpse into the early creative discussions for the hugely influential movie. In Tarantino’s wish list, which you can see above, he states that he wrote the roles of Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, the would-be Bonnie and Clyde of the family dining restaurant circuit, with Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer in mind. They, of course, were ultimately cast but Tarantino was willing to entertain Johnny Depp and Patricia Arquette. One wonders how Depp’s otherworldly weirdness would have translated as a low level street tough. On the other hand, Tarantino’s first choice for Lance, Vincent Vega’s bathrobe-sporting drug dealer, was none other than John Cusack. That would have been amazing. Many of the studio’s approved casting choices for the movie, seen here in a fax also appearing in the same Reddit post, are much stranger. Eddie Murphy was tapped as a possible Jules. Miramax liked Nicolas Cage or Johnny Depp (really?) for Butch, the samurai-sword wielding boxer. Bruce Willis, who played the role, wasn’t even on the original list. And mob clean-up man The Wolf, played with an off-kilter decorousness by Harvey Keitel, could have gone to Warren Beatty or Danny DeVito. Strangely, the studio didn’t think Johnny Depp would have been right for the role. Related Content: Quentin Tarantino’s Top 20 Grindhouse/Exploitation Flicks: Night of the Living Dead, Halloween & More Quentin Tarantino Lists the 12 Greatest Films of All Time: From Taxi Driver to The Bad News Bears Quentin Tarantino’s Handwritten List of the 11 "Greatest Movies" Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads.  The Veeptopus store is here. Quentin Tarantino’s Original Wish List for the Cast of Pulp Fiction is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

I’ve spent the past week on a road trip across America, and, during it, experienced perhaps my most intense case of déjà vu ever. Rolling into Memphis for the first time in my life, I walked into the lobby of the hotel at which I’d reserved a room for the night and immediately felt, in every fiber of my being, that I’d walked into that lobby before. But I then realized exactly why: it followed the same floor plan, to the last detail — the same front desk, the same business center computers, the same café with the same chalkboard asking me to "Try Our Classic Oatmeal" — of the one I’d visited the previous day in Oklahoma City. Should we chalk this up to generic American placemaking at its most efficient, or can we find a more interesting psychological phenomenon at work? Michio Kaku, though best known for his work with physics, has some ideas of his own about what we experience when we experience déjà vu. "There is a theory," says Kaku in the Big Think video above,"that déjà vu simply elicits fragments of memories that we have stored in our brain, memories that can be elicited by moving into an environment that resembles something that we’ve already experienced." But wait! "Is it ever possible on any scale," he then tantalizingly asks, "to perhaps flip between different universes?" And does déjà vu tell us anything about our position in those universes, giving us signs of the others even as we reside in just one? Kaku quotes an analogy first made by physicist Steven Weinberg which frames the notion of a "multiverse" in terms of our vibrating atoms and the frequency of a radio’s signal: "If you’re inside your living room listening to BBC radio, that radio is tuned to one frequency. But in your living room there are all frequencies: radio Cuba, radio Moscow, the Top 40 rock stations. All these radio frequencies are vibrating inside your living room, but your radio is only tuned to one frequency." And sometimes, for whatever reason, we hear two signals on our radio at once. Given that, then, maybe we feel déjà vu when the atoms of which we consist "no longer vibrate in unison with these other universes," when "we have decoupled from them, we have decohered from them." It may relieve you to know there won’t be an exam on all this. While Kaku ultimately grants that "déjà vu is probably simply a fragment of our brain eliciting memories and fragments of previous situations," you may get a kick out of putting his multiverse idea in context with some more traditional explanations, such as the ones written about in venues no less dependable than Scientific American and Smithsonian. But in any case, I beg you, Marriott Courtyard hotels: change up your designs once in a while. Related Content: Philip K. Dick Theorizes The Matrix in 1977, Declares That We Live in "A Computer-Programmed Reality" Free Online Physics Courses Michio Kaku Explains the Physics Behind Absolutely Everything Michio Kaku: We’re Born Scientists But Switch to Investment Banking (and More Culture Around the Web) Michio Kaku Schools a Moon Landing-Conspiracy Believer on His Science Fantastic Podcast Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. What Is Déjà Vu? Michio Kaku Wonders If It’s Triggered by Parallel Universes is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Do you consider yourself well-educated? Cultured, even? By whose standards? We may superficially assume these terms name immutable qualities, but they are in any analysis dependent on where and when we happen to be situated in history. The most sophisticated of Medieval doctors—a title then closer to the European "docent" than our general use of Dr.—would appear profoundly ignorant to us; and we, with our painfully inadequate grasp of church Latin, Aristotelianism, and arcane theological arguments, would appear profoundly ignorant to him. What does it mean to be cultured? Is it the acquisition of mostly useless cultural capital for its own sake, or of a set of codes that helps us navigate the world successfully? In an attempt to address these fraught questions, Ashley Montagu, a student of hugely influential German-born anthropologist Franz Boas, wrote The Cultured Man in 1958. Rebecca Onion at Slate describes the book as containing "quizzes for 50 categories of knowledge in the arts and sciences, with 30 questions each." In the page above, we have the first 22 questions of Montagu’s "Art" quiz (with the answers here). You’ll probably notice right away that while most of the questions have definite, unambiguous answers, others like "Define art," seem patently unanswerable in all but the most general and unsatisfactory ways. Montagu defines art in one succinct sentence: "Art is the making or doing of things that have form and beauty"—which strikes me as anemic, though functional enough. Montagu intended his book to test not only knowledge of cultural facts, but also of "attitudes": a person "considered ‘cultured,’" writes Onion, "would not just be able to readily summon facts, but also to access humane feelings, which would necessarily come about after contact with culture." Many administrators of "culture"—curators, art historians, literature professors, etc—would agree with the premise: ideally, the more cultural knowledge we acquire, the more empathy and understanding of other peoples and cultures we should manifest. Whether this routinely occurs in practice is another matter. For Montagu, Onion remarks, a "cultured man" is "curious, unprejudiced, rational, and ethical." Given Montagu’s enlightened philosophical bent, we can charitably ascribe language in his book that itself seems prejudiced to our viewing this artifact from a distance of almost seventy years in the future. We might also find that many of his questions push us to examine our 21st century biases more carefully. His approach may remind us of frivolous internet diversions or the standardized tests we’ve grown to think of as the precise opposite of lively, critically-engaged educational tools. Yet Montagu intended his quizzes to be "both dynamic and constructive," to alert readers to areas of ignorance and encourage them to fill gaps in their cultural knowledge. Many of his answers offer references for further study. "No one grows who stands still," he wrote. To see more of Montagu’s quiz questions—such as those above from the "Culture History" category (get the answers here)—and find out how you stack up against the cultured elite of the 50s, head over to Rebecca Onion’s post at Slate. Related Content:   Watch Harvard Students Fail the Literacy Test Louisiana Used to Suppress the Black Vote in 1964 Hermann Rorschach’s Original Rorschach Test: What Do You See? (1921) Take the 146-Question Knowledge Test Thomas Edison Gave to Prospective Employees (1921) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness How Cultured Are You? Test Your Knowledge With Cultural Quizzes from 1958 is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

You may remember that we featured Wireless Philosophy, an open access philosophy project created by Yale and MIT, back in 2013 when it first got started. Wi-Phi, for short, has kept on keeping in with its mission of producing free, informative and entertaining animated videos meant to introduce a host of philosophical issues. Our own Josh Jones called it "a necessary service to those just beginning to wade out into the sea of The Big Questions" in 2013, and now, in 2015, you can wade in from a wider expanse of the Big Question coastline than ever before. There are currently 105 Wiphi videos in total. At the top of the post, you can watch a whole playlist of Wi-Phi’s videos on cognitive biases, which add up to a surprisingly thorough half-hour primer on the forces that knock our thinking askew, from the "alief" (an automatic or habitual mental attitude, as opposed to a deliberate belief) to reference dependence and loss aversion to what we might perhaps describe as a meta-bias amusingly called the GI Joe fallacy (the tendency for our biases to stick around even when we should know better). Just above, we have Wi-Phi’s three-part guide to the good life, as examined by Plato, Aristotle, and Kant. Both of those playlists do come with a certain practicality, at least by philosophical standards: who, after all doesn’t want to think more correctly (or at least less incorrectly), and who doesn’t want to live the good life (or at least a better life than they live now)? But the harder core of casual philosophy enthusiasts — always a demanding group — should rest assured that Wiphi also offers video series on more abstract or historical philosophical topics, such as the seven-part playlist on classical theism above. Dig deeper into their Youtube channel and you’ll find more simple but not simplistic lessons on the philosophy of mathematics, language, ancient China, and much more. The list of university stakeholders in Wireless Philosophy nowadays includes, we should note, Duke, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and U. Toronto, in addition to Yale and MIT. Plus, you’ll find that profs from other universities have contributed to the video collection. For example, Chris Surprenant (University of New Orleans) created the videos on Plato, Aristotle, and Kant. Also find complete courses taught by Surprenant on our list of Free Online Philosophy Courses, a subset of our list, 1150 Free Online Courses from Top Universities. Related Content: Introducing Wireless Philosophy: An Open Access Philosophy Project Created by Yale and MIT The Partially Examined Life: A Philosophy Podcast Philosophy Bites: Podcasting Ideas From Plato to Singularity Since 2007 Philosophize This!: The Popular, Entertaining Philosophy Podcast from an Unconventional Teacher Download 90 Free Philosophy Courses and Start Living the Examined Life Take First-Class Philosophy Lectures Anywhere with Free Oxford Podcasts Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. 105 Animated Philosophy Videos from Wireless Philosophy: A Project Sponsored by Yale, MIT, Duke & More is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Image via Wikimedia Commons Everyone in the spotlight has at least one damning incident to live down, and sometimes a whole damning period. There’s David Bowie’s brief fascism controversy, for example, or Eric Clapton’s more substantive, and much more disturbing, far-right political views, which he broadcast from the stage in 1976, then repeated to the magazines shortly after. Clapton’s racist invective and support for Enoch Powell and the National Front was particularly appalling given that he rode in on the shoulders of blues artists and scored a huge hit just two years earlier with his version of Bob Marley’s "I Shot the Sheriff." As photographer Red Saunders would write in a published letter to Clapton after the guitar god’s bizarre onstage rant: "Half your music is black. You’re rock music’s biggest colonist." At least for a time, Clapton fell decidedly on the wrong side of a dichotomy Eric Lott called "Love and Theft."  One might make similar accusations against punk troubadour Elvis Costello, who took his look from Buddy Holly, his name from The King, and has also drawn heavily from black music for the better part of thirty years. And Costello once had his own brief racist outburst in 1979 during a tour stop in Columbus, Ohio, dropping a couple n-bombs in reference to James Brown and Ray Charles, and getting a beating from one of Stephen Stills’ backing singers. Costello maintained the outrage was a deliberately nasty way to troll the hated old guard Stills represented, but he thereafter received death threats and continued his tour under armed guard. Ironically, the previous year he had appeared with The Clash and reggae bands Misty in Roots and Aswad at a festival concert in London sponsored by Rock Against Racism, who formed in response to Enoch Powell, the National Front, and Clapton—and whose American chapter picketed Costello after the Ohio brawl. Costello addresses the incident in his new memoir Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, writing "whatever I did, I did it to provoke a bar fight. Surely this was all understood. Didn’t they know the love I had for James Brown and Ray Charles, whose record of ‘The Danger Zone’ I preferred to watching men walk on the moon?" (He’s made several other comments over the years, and even Ray Charles weighed in afterwards with something of a forgiving statement.) Stephen Deusner at Vulture writes, "you somehow never doubt the sincerity of that love, just as you don’t doubt that Costello could be a raving bastard when he’s drunk." Unlike so many other examples of the genre, Unfaithful Music doesn’t peddle contrition or controversy for their own sake. On the contrary, The Quietus calls the book "without doubt, one of the greatest self-penned appraisals of a popular entertainer’s life and work." That greatness, Deusner argues, comes in large part from Costello’s "nerdishly prodigious" knowledge of, and love for—mostly American—music: "There are nearly 400 songs Costello name-checks as influences within the pages of Unfaithful Music, and hundreds more he refers to in passing." These include songs from James Brown and Ray Charles, and also Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, David Bowie, Doc Watson, The Drifters, his namesake Elvis Presley, Fleetwood Mac, huge helpings of The Beatles, Burt Bacharach… even CSNY’s "Ohio." Based on Costello’s encyclopedic devotion to country, pop, R&B, punk, reggae, and nearly every other genre under the sun, Vulture compiled the 300-song Spotify playlist above, "by no means complete," writes Deusner, "due in large part to Spotify’s scarcity of Beatles, Bacharach, and Neil Young albums." (If you need Spotify’s software, download it for free here.) The playlist serves as an audio accompaniment to Costello’s almost 700-page reminiscence; taken together, both explain how "the angry young man of the late 70s," with a "reputation as one of the smartest and bristliest figures in the London punk scene" became "a revered troubadour craftsman playing the White House, jamming with various Beatles, and composing ballet scores." Just above, you can hear Costello himself read a brief excerpt from the book, a story about hanging out with David Bowie. The Quietus has another exclusive extract from Unfaithful Music. (Note that you can download the entire book, narrated by Costello himself, for free if you join Audible.com’s Free Trial program.) And if you need to hear more about what he now calls that "f***** stupid" fracas in ’79, see him talk about his angry young man persona and tell other "war stories" of his life in music in an interview with ?uestlove. Of his fierce devotion to so much of the music above, Costello tells The Roots’ drummer, "English musicians have such this weird outside love for American music, particularly rhythm and blues as we grew up to know it, that we sort of felt we had possession of it in some weird way." via Vulture Related Content: Elvis Costello Sings "Penny Lane" for Sir Paul Radio David Byrne: Stream Free Music Playlists Created Every Month by the Frontman of Talking Heads A 56-Song Playlist of Music in Haruki Murakami’s Novels: Ray Charles, Glenn Gould, the Beach Boys & More Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Hear a Playlist of 300 Songs That Influenced Elvis Costello, Drawn From His New Memoir, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Image by amoebafinger on Flickr Commons. When the American Film Institute set up its conservatory for Advanced Film Studies in 1969, its first round of students included Terrence Malick, Caleb Deschanel, Paul Schrader, and the Master of Absurd himself, David Lynch. (Now that’s a class reunion worth going to!) Now some 40 years on, the Maharishi University of Management, in Fairfield, Iowa, is accepting applications for its David Lynch MA in Film program. Lynch has been practicing Transcendental Meditation for as long as he’s been a filmmaker, and in interviews and in books like Catching the Big Fish, he espouses the wonders of meditation for creativity. (See him talk more about that here.) Students enrolled in the David Lynch Film program will follow Lynch’s example by combining meditation with filmmaking. You might not create the next Eraserhead (Lynch’s AFI project that turned into his career-defining debut), but, according to Lynch, students are promised to discover the ability to dive within—to transcend and experience that unbounded ocean of pure consciousness which is unbounded intelligence, creativity, happiness, love, energy, power, and peace. Before one gets too excited and thinks that the director himself will be teaching every class and that you’ll get to hang out with him during office hours, that’s not the way the program works. Classes are taught by director/cinematographer Michael W. Barnard (and once the head of the Maharishi’s film department), screenwriter Dorothy Rompalske, and David Lynch Foundation Television founder Amine Kouider. Guest speakers have included Jim Carrey, Peter Farrelly, script doctor Dara Marks, Twin Peaks alum Duwayne Dunham, and many other Hollywood insiders. However, students do get a field trip to Los Angeles to meet Lynch and spend time with the filmmaker. The aspiring filmmakers should consider themselves lucky, seeing that the director is busy working on Twin Peaks’ new season and apparently writing an autobiography. There are two scholarships up for grabs for applicants who have a film or script to submit, but the deadline is fast approaching on Nov. 1. via Criterion Related Content: David Lynch Explains Where His Ideas Come From Patti Smith and David Lynch Talk About the Source of Their Ideas & Creative Inspiration David Lynch Explains How Meditation Enhances Our Creativity David Lynch Creates a Very Surreal Plug for Transcendental Meditation David Lynch Talks Meditation with Paul McCartney 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. Apply to the New David Lynch Masters in Film Program, Where You’ll Meditate & Create is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Those who watch and dislike Chantal Akerman’s best-known film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, often complain that "nothing happens" in it. But in my experience of introducing it — nay, evangelizing for it — to friends, it usually only takes a solid viewing or two of that 1975 three-hour-and-twenty-minute tale of a Belgian single mother’s days and nights spent cooking (a short clip of which you can see above), cleaning, and possibly engaging in prostitution to feel — or at least in the immediate aftermath of viewing, feel — that in no movie but Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles does anything truly happen. Every other movie plays, by comparison, as if on fast-forward, or like a set of filmed Cliff’s Notes. Clearly, Akerman saw, and realized, a wider storytelling potential in cinema than do most filmmakers. So much worse the loss, then, when she died earlier this month, leaving behind a filmography consisting of not just her early masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, which she directed at just 25 years of age, but a variety of feature films and shorts made between 1968 and this year. As a tribute, the cinephile-beloved home video company The Criterion Collection has, for a very limited time, made all of their Akerman films free to view on Hulu (unfortunately, for viewers in certain territories only), including 1978’s Les rendezvous d’Anna, embedded just above, 1972’s Hotel Monterey and La chambre, 1975’s Je tu il elle, 1976’s News from Home… http://media.blubrry.com/criterioncast/p/criterioncast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/CC_Episode_107_Jeanne_Dielman.mp3 … and of course, Jeanne Dielman. If you plan to enjoy a free Akerman marathon on Hulu thanks to Criteron, you’d better do it soon, since they’ll only remain free to view through the next day. And do invite all your most cinematically adventurous friends to join your side, as with most auteur films, the interest that doesn’t lie in watching them lies in arguing about their merits afterward. You can hear one such fun conversation on a 2011 episode of The Criterioncast, a podcast dedicated to films released by the Criterion Collection, just above. It actually features yours truly as the special guest, discussing Jeanne Dielman with the regular panelists. Do you side with the likes of an Akerman partisan like me, or does your opinion most closely resemble one of the others who doesn’t take quite such a rich experience from their every viewing? Today, you can find out where you stand on this and other of Akerman’s fascinating works for free. And you can always find many more free films in our collection, 725 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Related Content: An Ambitious List of 1400 Films Made by Female Filmmakers 120 Artists Pick Their Top 10 Films in the Criterion Collection Slavoj Žižek Names His Favorite Films from The Criterion Collection What Films Should Get Into The Criterion Collection? Video Series "Three Reasons" Makes the Case Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Free Today: Watch Online the Pioneering Films of the Late Chantal Akerman is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

We’ve all been to a museum with that friend or family member who just doesn’t "get" modern art and suggests it’s all a con. Conceptual art? Abstract expressionism? What is that?! Impressionism? Who wants blurry, poorly drawn paintings?! Arrgh! Hey, maybe some of us are that friend or family member. Maybe our complaints are even more specific—maybe some of us are members of a "cultural justice" movement called "Renoir Sucks at Painting." Maybe we show up at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts with signs parodying the cartoonishly terrible Westboro Baptist Church ("God Hates Renoir") and demanding, with as much force as one can with a parody sign, that the Renoirs be removed from the company of worthier objets d’art. One critical difference between the typical art hater and the Renoir Sucks crew: the latter do not object to Pierre-Auguste Renoir because his work is too hard to "get," but because it’s too easy. Renoir, they say, painted "treacle" and "deformed pink fuzzy women." As art critic Peter Schjeldahl writes in The New Yorker, "Renoir’s winsome subjects and effulgent hues jump in your lap like a friendly puppy." Renoir is so far from avant-garde that Schjeldahl can peg his "exaggerated blush and sweetness" as an example of the "popular appeal" that "advanced the bourgeois cultural revolution that was Impressionism." Ouch. This kind of assessment gets no help from the painter’s great-great granddaughter, Genevieve, who responds to critics by quoting sales figures: "It is safe to say," she writes, "that the free market has spoken and Renoir did NOT suck at painting." By this measure, Thomas Kinkade and Sister Maria Innocentia Hummel were also artistic geniuses. The charges of "aesthetic terrorism" against Renoir come right out of the iconoclasm that functions in the art world as both meaningful dissent and successful gimmick (cf. Marcel Duchamp, or Ai Weiwei’s controversial, gallery-filling attacks on revered cultural artifacts.) But perhaps the honest question remains: does Renoir Suck at Painting? Let us reserve judgment and take a look at another side of Renoir, a rarely seen excursion into book illustration—specifically the four illustrations he made for an 1878 edition of Emile Zola’s novel L’Assommoir ("The Dram Shop"). Described by the Art Institute of Chicago as "grittily realistic," Zola’s naturalist depiction of what he called "the inevitable downfall of a working-class family in the polluted atmosphere of our urban areas" provoked many of its readers, who regarded the book as "an unforgivable lapse of taste on the part of its author." It showed Parisians "an aspect of current life that most found frightening and repulsive." Nonetheless, the novel became a popular success. The four black-and-white engravings here—made from Renoir’s original drawings—are the impressionist’s contribution to Zola’s illlustrated novel. The choice of Renoir as one of several artists for this edition seems an odd one. (Zola, a friend of the painter’s, approached him personally.) Then, as now, Renoir had a reputation for sunny optimism: "he always looks on the bright side," remarked one contemporary. Renoir’s "preference for creating images of beauty," writes The Art Institute of Chicago, "made the illustration of the particularly seedy passages of the novel problematic, and some of the resulting drawings lack conviction." Instead of succumbing to the novel’s grim tone, Renoir’s original renderings, like the "loose wash drawing" in "warm, brown ink" at the top of the post, "gently subverted the dark undertones of Zola’s text." Below the original drawing, see the engraving that appeared in the book. Book blog Adventures in the Print Trade concedes the plates "are of varying quality" and singles out the illustration just above as the most successful one, since "the subject-matter is perfect for Renoir, and the whole scene is brimming with life." As you can see from the two images at the top of the post, the translation from Renoir’s drawings to the final book engravings leave many of his figures blurred and obscured, and introduce a dark heaviness to work undertaken with a much softer, lighter touch. Do these illustrations add anything to our understanding of whether Renoir Sucks at Painting? Who can say. It’s true that here, as in many of his well-known paintings, "the compositions tend to be slack," as Schjeldahl writes. Nonetheless, the Art Institute of Chicago audaciously judges the brown ink wash drawing at the top of the post "one of the most important drawings the artist produced during the years of high Impressionism." They only add to my appreciation of Renoir, who does not, I think, suck. Even if his work can be, as Schjeldahl says, "high glucose," I would argue that his sweetness and light provide just the right approach to Zola, whose novels, like those of other naturalists such as Theodore Dreiser or Thomas Hardy, contain much more than a hint of sentimentality. Related Content: Astonishing Film of Arthritic Impressionist Painter, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1915) Henri Matisse Illustrates 1935 Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses The Postcards That Picasso Illustrated and Sent to Jean Cocteau, Apollinaire & Gertrude Stein Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness The Maligned Impressionist Painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir Illustrates Emile Zola’s Gritty Novel L’Assommoir (1878) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

If you’ve read Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis in English, it’s likely that your translation referred to the transformed Gregor Samsa as a "cockroach," "beetle," or, more generally, a "gigantic insect." These renderings of the author’s original German don’t necessarily miss the mark—Gregor scuttles, waves multiple legs about, and has some kind of an exoskeleton. His charwoman calls him a "dung beetle"… the evidence abounds. But the German words used in the first sentence of the story to describe Gregor’s new incarnation are much more mysterious, and perhaps strangely laden with metaphysical significance. Translator Susan Bernofsky writes, "both the adjective ungeheuer (meaning "monstrous" or "huge") and the noun Ungeziefer are negations—virtual nonentities—prefixed by un." Ungeziefer, a term from Middle High German, describes something like "an unclean animal unfit for sacrifice," belonging to "the class of nasty creepy-crawly things." It suggests many types of vermin—insects, yes, but also rodents. "Kafka," writes Bernofsky, "wanted us to see Gregor’s new body and condition with the same hazy focus with which Gregor himself discovers them." It’s likely for that very reason that Kafka prohibited images of Gregor. In a 1915 letter to his publisher, he stipulated, "the insect is not to be drawn. It is not even to be seen from a distance." The slim book’s original cover, above, instead features a perfectly normal-looking man, distraught as though he might be imagining a terrible transformation, but not actually physically experiencing one. Yet it seems obvious that Kafka meant Gregor to have become some kind of insect. Kafka’s letter uses the German Insekt, and when casually referring to the story-in-progress, Kafka used the word Wanze, or "bug." Making this too clear in the prose dilutes the grotesque body horror Gregor suffers, and the story is told from his point of view—one that "mutates as the story proceeds." So writes Dutch reader Freddie Oomkins, who further observes, "at the physical level Gregor, at different points in the story, starts to talk with a squeaking, animal-like voice, loses control of his legs, hangs from the ceiling, starts to lose his eyesight, and wants to bite his sister—not really helpful in determining his taxonomy." Difficulties of translation and classification aside, Russian literary mastermind and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov decided that he knew exactly what Gregor Samsa had turned into. And, against the author’s wishes, Nabokov even drew a picture in his teaching copy of the novella. Nabokov also heavily edited his edition, as you can see in the many corrections and revisions above. In a lecture on The Metamorphosis, he concludes that Gregor is "merely a big beetle" (notice he strikes the word "gigantic" from the text above and writes at the top "just over 3 feet long"), and furthermore one who is capable of flight, which would explain how he ends up on the ceiling. All of this may seem highly disrespectful of The Metamorphosis’ author. Certainly Nabokov has never been a respecter of literary persons, referring to Faulkner’s work, for example, as "corncobby chronicles," and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as a "petrified superpun." Yet in his lecture Nabokov calls Kafka "the greatest German writer of our time. Such poets as Rilke or such novelists as Thomas Mann are dwarfs or plastic saints in comparison with him." Though a saint he may be, Kafka is "first of all an artist," and Nabokov does not believe that "any religious implications can be read into Kafka’s genius." ("I am interested here in bugs, not humbugs," he says dismissively.) Rejecting Kafka’s tendencies toward mysticism runs against most interpretations of his fiction. One might suspect Nabokov of seeing too much of himself in the author when he compares Kafka to Flaubert and asserts, "Kafka liked to draw his terms from the language of law and science, giving them a kind of ironic precision, with no intrusion of the author’s private sentiments." Ungeheueres Ungeziefer, however, is not a scientific term, and its Middle German literary origins—which Kafka would have been familiar with from his studies—clearly connote religious ideas of impurity and sacrifice. With due respect to Nabokov’s formidable erudition, it seems in this instance at least that Kafka fully intended imprecision, what Bernofsky calls "blurred perceptions of bewilderment," in language "carefully chosen to avoid specificity." Kafka’s art consists of this ability to exploit the ancient stratifications of language. His almost Kabbalistic treatment of signs and his aversion to graven images may consternate and bedevil translators and certain novelists, but it is also the great source of his uncanny genius. The Metamorphosis was published 100 years ago this month. You can find copies of the text in our collections of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books. Related Content: The Art of Franz Kafka: Drawings from 1907-1917 The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa: A Wonderful Sand Animation of the Classic Kafka Story (1977) Vladimir Nabokov (Channelled by Christopher Plummer) Teaches Kafka at Cornell Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Franz Kafka Says the Insect in The Metamorphosis Should Never Be Drawn; Vladimir Nabokov Draws It Anyway is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. 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If you visited The Tate Modern in recent years, perhaps you saw the large, 130-foot art installation covering a concourse wall. Created by illustrator Sara Fanelli, the "Tate Artist Timeline" provided museumgoers with a sprawling roadmap showing the major artistic movements and important artists of the 20th century, moving from Art Nouveau to more contemporary Graffiti Art. Nowadays, you can revisit Fanelli’s educational timeline by purchasing a copy in a handsome book format. You can also watch the timeline play out in the video above. To see other unique ways of visualizing the history of culture (and history itself), don’t miss the items in the "Relateds" below. via Hyperallergic Related Content: The History of Philosophy, from 600 B.C.E. to 1935, Visualized in Two Massive, 44-Foot High Diagrams The History of Philosophy Visualized 6,000 Years of History Visualized in a 23-Foot-Long Timeline of World History, Created in 1871 5-Minute Animation Maps 2,600 Years of Western Cultural History 10 Million Years of Evolution Visualized in an Elegant, 5-Foot Long Infographic from 1931 4000 Years of History Displayed in a 5-Foot-Long "Histomap" (Early Infographic) From 1931 The History of Modern Art Visualized in a Massive 130-Foot Timeline is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.