This year, readers worldwide celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. (Click to see the original manuscript, handwritten & illustrated by Lewis Carroll.) Carroll’s fantastical, unexpectedly psychological and intellectual children’s tale has inspired writers, artists, and other creators of all ages since it first came out in 1865. New editions and adaptations have kept appearing, each reflecting the spirit of their own time through the askew prism of Alice‘s sensibility. And which living illustrator could provide more askew imagery than Ralph Steadman? We all know that Alice’s dreamlike journey begins in earnest when she drinks from a bottle labeled "DRINK ME" and eats a cake labeled "EAT ME." See what metaphors you will, but to my mind, this alone makes the story obvious Steadman material: many of us discover his art through its appearance in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a collaboration that qualifies Steadman as no stranger at all to visualizing unreal circumstances heightened, or induced, by one ingested substance or another. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas appeared in book form in 1972; Alice in Wonderland Illustrated by Ralph Steadman appeared the next year, and went on to win the Francis Williams Book Illustration Award. His version, writes io9’s Cyriaque Lamar, "has gone through various print runs throughout the decades, and he modeled several of the characters on decidedly modern personalities. For example, the Cheshire Cat is a television talking head, the Caterpillar is a grass-smoking pedant, the Mad Hatter is a barking quizmaster, and the King and Queen of Hearts are a melting mass of political authority." See more of Steadman’s pieces by picking up your own copy of the book, or visit Brain Pickings, where Maria Popova describes them as bringing "to Carroll’s classic the perfect kind of semi-sensical visual genius, blending the irreverent with the sublime." Though by all available evidence thoroughly sane himself, Steadman’s illustrations have, over his fifty-year career, lent just the right notes of English insanity to a variety of subjects, from wine to dogs to psychogeography. Only natural, then, to see them accompany the insanity — which, sentence by sentence and page by page, comes to seem like sanity by other means — of a classic English tale like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Related Content: See the Original Alice In Wonderland Manuscript, Handwritten & Illustrated By Lewis Carroll (1864) See Salvador Dali’s Illustrations for the 1969 Edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll’s Photographs of Alice Liddell, the Inspiration for Alice in Wonderland When Aldous Huxley Wrote a Script for Disney’s Alice in Wonderland Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. See Ralph Steadman’s Twisted Illustrations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on the Story’s 150th Anniversary 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. The post See Ralph Steadman’s Twisted Illustrations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on the Story’s 150th Anniversary appeared first on Open Culture.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LviGTHud5w In 1971, Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo undertook a study to determine whether situations determine behavior or whether a person’s disposition leads to behavior regardless of their situation. As seen in the above trailer for the Stanford Prison Experiment, a new film adaptation of Zimbardo’s controversial study, it was explained thusly: people acted like prisoners-lashing out at authority, angry, maladjusted-purely by dint of being put in prisons. And people abused their authority when put in the position of authority. The hypothesis had its basis in the past: the action of Nazi guards at the concentration camps. The results have ramifications through to the present: witness the confessions of the guards who tortured inmates in Abu Ghraib. The trailer plays like a psychological thriller, but so far it looks true to the record. Prof. Zimbardo-having just earned tenure at Stanford (and played in the film by Billy Crudup)-chose 24 healthy student subjects and randomly assigned them either the role of guard or of prisoner. The Psychology Department’s basement was turned into a mock prison, with holding cells, guard rooms, solitary confinement, and an exercise yard. Cameras recorded all that went on, observed by Zimbardo and his crew. The "guards" could come and go according to shifts, but the "prisoners" could not. While the "guards" could not use physical force on the "prisoners," they could use as many psychological tactics as possible to break the will of their fellow students. However, the "prisoners" were not told exactly what would happen to them. When, on the first day, the "prisoners" were "arrested" in the morning, stripped, searched, shaved and deloused, they were already in a state of shock. An early documentary exists on the experiment and its results here: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Py3JJZ2ZrI Suffice it to say (and you may have seen this coming) the student guards really got into their roles, and the "prisoners" rebelled. All the while Prof. Zimbardo wanted to keep going for the planned one to two weeks. Only because of the objections of Christina Maslach, a graduate student and Prof. Zimbardo’s girlfriend, did the group abandon the study after six increasingly frightening days. (Proving as well that Prof. Zimbardo was affected by the experiment in ways similar to his subjects, as he was unable to initially stop something out of control.) The study was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research to "study antisocial behavior." The student subjects were paid $15 a day for their help and half quit the experiment before it was finished. All of the guards stayed on. As detailed in the official FAQ on the study, none of the students showed any lasting trauma, though Prof. Zimbardo said: "I was guilty of the sin of omission — the evil of inaction — of not providing adequate oversight and surveillance when it was required… the findings came at the expense of human suffering. I am sorry for that and to this day apologize for contributing to this inhumanity." The experiment is now used in psychology textbooks as an example of the "psychology of imprisonment." Prof. Zimbardo turned his science to helping people, looking at promoting heroism in daily life, helping veterans normalize into social life, working with shy people, and, coming full circle, testifying during the court martial of Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick, who was charged with crimes during his time at Abu Ghraib. Zimbardo has since retired and recently advised on the upcoming film. Christina Maslach later married Prof. Zimbardo and is currently Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at the University of California, Berkeley. And if Prof. Zimbardo’s experiment sounds a bit like Stanley Milgram’s 1961 experiment in obedience to authority, well, it’s no coincidence. Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo were high school friends. However, there’s some interesting differences. For one, the "victims" of Milgram’s experiment were acting the electric shocks they supposedly received. Despite that level of fakery, Milgram was denied tenure at Harvard. The City University of New York Graduate Center, on the other hand, knew a psychology superstar when they saw one and gave him tenure. Related content: Watch Footage from the Psychology Experiment That Shocked the World: Milgram’s Obedience Study (1961) The Little Albert Experiment: The Perverse 1920 Study That Made a Baby Afraid of Santa Claus & Bunnies Free Online Psychology Courses How To Think Like a Psychologist: A Free Online Course from Stanford Hermann Rorschach’s Original Rorschach Test: What Do You See? (1921)   Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the 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.

Recently deceased artist Chris Burden had a long history of working with automobiles in his art. In his early days he crucified himself to the top of a VW Beetle (a piece called Trans Fixed). He set about designing and building a 100 mph and 100 mpg automobile based on intuition called the B-Car. In Big Wheel he used a motorcycle to power…a big wheel. And in Porsche with Meteorite he suspended the two objects above the museum floor on each end of a gigantic scale. But his massive kinetic sculpture Metropolis II is something else: a child’s fever dream of a Hot Wheels-scale city, with 1,100 cars driving endlessly on 18 roadways, with two ramps that are 12 feet high and three conveyor systems that feed the cars back into the loop. The metal and the electricity needed to run the sculpture means that the thing is not just a sight to behold, but it’s staggeringly loud. The title of the kinetic sculpture gives away its reference, that of Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis (watch it online) and its imaginary city scapes of elevated freeways and train tracks and people movers and planes that fly in between: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PAdQ5anhZE Burden’s work has its own structures too, some of which are made from building blocks, Lego, and Lincoln Logs, turned into houses and skyscrapers. Don’t expect sensible urban planning in this city: seen from above, Metropolis II is a chaos of roads, and closed systems from which there is no escape. There was a trial run of the sculpture called Metropolis I, a smaller version that was soon sold to a Japanese collector and taken out of the public view. For the sequel, Burden went bigger, enlisting eight people full time for five and a half years to build the piece. Said the artist: "We wanted to expand it and make it truly overwhelming — the noise and level of activity are both mesmerizing and anxiety provoking." But instead of a nightmare commentary, Burden wanted the piece to be utopian. The cars are moving at 240 mph, according to scale, and there’s no gridlock. He was looking ahead to a future of driverless cars, as he shared a hatred like many Angelenos of endless traffic jams. The 30 foot wide sculpture was bought for an undisclosed sum by billionaire businessman Nicholas Berggreun, who also sits on LACMA’s board. He’s loaned it to the museum until 2022 and it is currently now situated in a special wing where visitors can see it both at ground level and from above. It takes one assistant to keep it free of hiccups and it only runs for a few hours at a time, and only on weekends. However, LACMA’s entryway is also home to a Burden piece one can see 24/7, the iconic Urban Light. via Coudal Related Content: Watch Chris Burden Get Shot for the Sake of Art (1971) LA County Museum Makes 20,000 Artistic Images Available for Free Download Chris Burden (R.I.P.) Turns Late-Night TV Commercials Into Conceptual Art Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the 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.

Image via Mario Casciano Music is dangerous and powerful, and can be, without intending to, a political weapon. All authoritarian regimes have understood this, including repressive elements in the U.S. throughout the Cold War. I remember having books handed to me before the Berlin Wall came down, by family friends fearful of the evils of popular music—especially punk rock and metal, but also pretty much everything else. The descriptions in these paranoid tracts of the bands I knew and loved sounded so ludicrous and hyperbolic that I couldn’t help suspect each was in fact a work of satire. They were at the very least anachronistic, yet ideal, types of Poe’s Law. Such may be your reaction to a list published in 1985 by the Komsomol, the Soviet youth organization formed as the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League in 1918. (Find it below.) Consisting of thirty-eight punk, rock, metal, disco, and New Wave bands, the list is not at all unlike the materials printed around the same time by certain youth organizations I came into contact with. The mechanisms of state repression in the Soviet Union on the eve of perestroika overmatched comparatively mild attempts at music censorship made by the U.S. government, but the propaganda mechanisms were similar. As in the alarmed pamphlets and books handed to me in churches and summer camps, the Komsomol list describes each band in obtuse and absurd terms, each one a category of the "type of propaganda" on offer. Black Sabbath, a legitimately scary—and politically astute—band gets pegged along with Iron Maiden for "violence" and "religious obscurantism." (Nazareth is similarly guilty of "violence" and "religious mysticism.") A great many artists are charged with only "violence" or with "sex," which in some cases was kind of their whole métier. A handful of punk bands—the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Stranglers—are cited for violence, and also simply charged with "punk," a crime given as the Ramones’ only offense. There are a few oddly specific charges: Pink Floyd is guilty of a "distortion of Soviet foreign policy (‘Soviet aggression in Afghanistan’)" and Talking Heads endorse the "myth of the Soviet military threat." A couple hilariously incongruous tags offer LOLs: Yazoo and Depeche Mode, two of the gentlest bands of the period, get called out for "punk, violence." Kiss and the Village People (above), two of the silliest bands on the list, are said to propagate, "neofascism" and "violence." Sex Pistols: punk, violence B-52s: punk, violence Madness: punk, violence Clash: punk, violence Stranglers: punk, violence Kiss: neofascism, punk, violence Crocus: violence, cult of strong personality Styx: violence, vandalism Iron Maiden: violence, religious obscuritanism Judas Priest: anticommunism, racism AC/DC: neofascism, violence Sparks: neofascism, racism Black Sabbath: violence, religious obscuritanism Alice Cooper: violence, vandalism Nazareth: violence, religious mysticism Scorpions: violence Gengis Khan: anticommunism, nationalism UFO: violence Pink Floyd (1983): distortion of Soviet foreign policy ("Soviet agression in Afghanistan")*** Talking Heads: myth of the Soviet military threat Perron: eroticism Bohannon: eroticism Originals: sex Donna Summer: eroticism Tina Turner: sex Junior English: sex Canned Heat: homosexuality Munich Machine: eroticism Ramones: punk Van Halen: anti-soviet propaganda Julio Iglesias: neofascism Yazoo: punk, violence Depeche Mode: punk, violence Village People: violence Ten CC: neofascism Stooges: violence Boys: punk, violence Blondie: punk, violence The list circulated for "the purpose of intensifying control over the activities of discoteques." It comes to us from Alexei Yurchak’s Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, which cites it as an example, writes one reader, of "the contradictory nature of Soviet life, where as citizens participated in the ritualized, pro forma ideological discourse, this very discourse allowed them to carve out what they called ‘normal meaningful life’ that went beyond the state’s ideology." A large part of that "normal" life involved circulating bootlegs of ideologically suspect music on improvised materials like discarded and stolen X-Rays. The Komsomol eventually wised up. As Yurchak documents in his book, they co-opted local amateur rock bands and promoted their own events as a counter-attack on the influence of bourgeois culture. You can probably guess how much success they had with this strategy. See the full list of thirty-eight bands and their "type of propaganda" above. Related Content: Soviet Hipsters Bootlegged Western Pop Music on Discarded X-Rays: Hear Original Audio Samples Bruce Springsteen Plays East Berlin in 1988: I’m Not Here For Any Government. I’ve Come to Play Rock Yakov Smirnoff Remembers "The Soviet Department of Jokes" & Other Staples of Communist Comedy Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Soviet Union Creates a List of 38 Dangerous Rock Bands: Kiss, Pink Floyd, Talking Heads, Village People & More (1985) 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. The post Soviet Union Creates a List of 38 Dangerous Rock Bands: Kiss, Pink Floyd, Talking Heads, Village People & More (1985) appeared first on Open Culture.

Image courtesy of Jonty Wilde  Most of us come to Michael Palin through his work as a comic actor (in the role of dead parrot salesman or otherwise), but at this point almost as many know him second as a founding member of Monty Python, and first as an affable globetrotter. That part of his career began in 1988, when he hosted the Earth-circumnavigating BBC travel series Around the World in 80 Days. (See an episode here.) Its success has led him, over the subsequent 27 years, onto further (and farther-flung) televised journeys: from the North Pole to the South, around the Pacific Rim, in the adventurous footsteps of Ernest Hemingway, across the Sahara, up the Himalayas, across the "new" central and eastern Europe, around the world again, and most recently through Brazil. Not content to set a high watermark for travel television, Palin has also written a companion book for each series, lavishly collecting maps, pictures, and his own travel diaries. Those last reveal a more nuanced side of "the nicest chap in Britain," whose famously easygoing, deferential, and unsurprisingly good-humored persona place him so well to deal with the world’s staggering variety of people, places, and inconveniences. "I can summon up nothing but resignation at the thought of cooking with the locals all morning, then having to listen to music and songs I don’t understand for the rest of the afternoon," he writes after waking up on yet another island, in an entry excerpted in last year’s Travelling to Work, the latest published volume of his life’s diaries. "And, worst of all, having to look as if I’m enjoying it." But these books also reveal that most of the time, Palin really is enjoying it. His insatiable curiosity (not to mention his inexorable production schedule) drives him continuously ahead, a curiosity in which you, too can share now that he’s made all these books free to read online at palinstravels.co.uk. Click on the links/titles below, and then look for the prompts that say "Discover the Series Here" and, below that, "Start Reading the Book." Around the World in 80 Days Pole to Pole Full Circle Hemingway Adventure Sahara Himalaya New Europe 80 Days Revisited Brazil And if you make a free account at the site, it will even allow you to you keep virtual "bookmarks" in as many of the books as you like, guaranteeing that you won’t get lost amidst this wealth of travel content. But if you choose to follow Palin’s example and actually get out there into every corner of the world, well, no such anti-lostness guarantees exist — but as every fan of Palin’s Travels knows, those very complications make it worthwhile. As least you won’t have a five-man crew trailing behind. Related Content: Trains and the Brits Who Love Them: Monty Python’s Michael Palin on Great Railway Journeys Michael Palin’s Tour of the Best Loved Monty Python Sketch Locations Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Free: Read 9 Travel Books Online by Monty Python’s Michael Palin 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. The post Free: Read 9 Travel Books Online by Monty Python’s Michael Palin appeared first on Open Culture.

Umberto Eco, now 83 years old, has some advice to pass along to the young. In March, the Italian semiotician, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist — and, of course, author of Foucault’s Pendulum - published How to Write a Thesis. It’s a witty, irreverent and practical guide for the student laboring over a thesis or dissertation. Josh Jones has more on that here. Now, in a newly-released video from The Louisiana Channel (a media outlet based in Denmark), Eco turns his attention toward aspiring writers. And his wise counsel comes down to this: Keep your ego in check, make sure your ambitions are realistic, put in the time and the hard work, and don’t shoot for the Nobel Prize in Literature straight out of the gate. That, Eco says, kills every literary career. He’ll also tell you that writing is "10% inspiration and 90% perspiration." They’re truisms — you discover when you’re an octogenarian — that turn out to be true. Find more tips for aspiring writers below. Dan Colman is the founder/editor of Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and  share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. Related Content: Ernest Hemingway Creates a Reading List for a Young Writer, 1934 Ray Bradbury Gives 12 Pieces of Writing Advice to Young Authors (2001) Toni Morrison Dispenses Writing Wisdom in 1993 Paris Review Interview John Steinbeck’s Six Tips for the Aspiring Writer and His Nobel Prize Speech Stephen King Creates a List of 96 Books for Aspiring Writers to Read Kurt Vonnegut Gives Advice to Aspiring Writers in a 1991 TV Interview Umberto Eco’s Advice to Aspiring Writers 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. The post Umberto Eco’s Advice to Aspiring Writers appeared first on Open Culture.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBQVvEMc-VQ We’ve shown our fair share of Star Wars mashups and fan films over the years. I cite for example: Hardware Wars: The Mother of All Star Wars Fan Films (and the Most Profitable Short Film Ever Made) A 2 Hour Annotated Star Wars Film That Reveals the Cinematic Influences Behind George Lucas’ Classic Film Fans Reconstruct the Authentic Version of Star Wars, As It Was Shown in Theaters in 1977. Star Wars Recut as Silent Film The latest and maybe not greatest fan reworking of Star Wars (now available on YouTube) lets you watch all six Star Wars films online. At once. With one film layered upon the other. Is there some cultural value to this layering of films? Maybe only insofar as it gives the keen observer the chance to find some meta trends running through the films. One YouTuber commented, "The really interesting part is that they’re similarly paced. If you skip around you’ll almost always find all talking scenes lined up and all action scenes lined up. Just shows how formulaic movies are (or at least how formulaic George Lucas is)." Feel free to drop your own observations in the comments section below. And, by the way, the person who created this mashup has also made available a full gallery of HD still frames on imgur here. via Twitter Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and  share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. Meta Star Wars: All Six Films in One 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. The post Meta Star Wars: All Six Films in One appeared first on Open Culture.

You may have come into contact at some point with Tracey Emin’s My Bed, an art installation that reproduces her private space during a time when she spent four days as a shut-in in 1998, "heartbroken": the bed’s unmade, the bedside strewn with cigarettes, moccasins, a bottle of booze, food, and "what appears to be a sixteen year old condom"…. If you were savvy enough to be Tracey Emin in 1998—and none of us were—you would have sold that messy room for over four million dollars last year at a Christie’s auction. I doubt another buyer of that caliber will come along for a knock-off, but this doesn’t mean the messes we make while slobbing around our own homes are without their own, intangible, value. Those messes, in fact, may be seedbeds of creativity, confirming a cliché as persistent as the one about doctors’ handwriting, and perhaps as accurate. It seems a messy desk, room, or studio may genuinely be a mark of genius at work. Albert Einstein for example, writes Elite Daily, had a desk that "looked like a spiteful ex-girlfriend had a mission to destroy his workspace." Einstein responded to criticism of his work habits by asking, "If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, then what are we to think of an empty desk?" Mark Twain also had a messy desk, "perhaps even more cluttered than that of Albert Einstein." To find out whether the messiness trait’s relation to creativity is simply an "urban legend" or not, Kathleen Vohs (a researcher at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management) and her colleagues conducted a series of experiments in both tidy and unruly spaces with 188 adults given tasks to choose from. //www.youtube.com/watch?v=t043bPqCKUY Vohs describes her findings in the New York Times, concluding that messiness and creativity are at least very strongly correlated, and that "while cleaning up certainly has its benefits, clean spaces might be too conventional to let inspiration flow." But there are trade-offs. Read about them in Vohs’ paper—"Physical Order Produces Healthy Choices, Generosity, and Conventionality, Whereas Disorder Produces Creativity." And just above, see Vohs’ co-author Joe Redden, Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, discuss the team’s fascinating results. If conducting such an experiment on yourself, it might be best to do so in a space that’s all your own, though, like the rest of us, you’re too late to creatively turn the mess you make into lucrative conceptual art. Related Content: Albert Einstein Tells His Son The Key to Learning & Happiness is Losing Yourself in Creativity (or "Finding Flow") Why You Do Your Best Thinking In The Shower: Creativity & the "Incubation Period" John Cleese’s Philosophy of Creativity: Creating Oases for Childlike Play Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFIE-ISqNoU Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises came out in 2013 to a great deal of acclaim and attention—as, I suppose, do all the movies his Studio Ghibli puts out, so painstakingly have they built up their reputation for medium-transcending depth, artistry, craftsmanship, and attention to detail. But that fictionalized biographical story of Japanese World War II airplane designer Jiro Horikoski received even more notice than most due not just to the controversial nature of its material, but to its place as Miyazaki’s supposed swan song, the last feature film he would ever direct. Then again, Hayao Miyazaki has spoken of many possible retirements over the years, and no longer animating feature films hardly means the end of his all-consuming impulse to create, which drives him to continue working on Tokyo’s Ghibli Museum and drawing the art for comic books, among other projects. Certain Miyazaki associates have publicly told us not to be surprised if the master one day emerges from this particular "retirement," but since the man himself seems quite serious about putting full-length pictures behind him, we can assume for now that the clip above shows him at work on the last bit of film animation in his career: The Wind Rises‘ final shot. The footage comes from last year’s The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, a documentary on a moment in the life of Studio Ghibli—and possibly one of the last moments in the life of Studio Ghibli, given their announcement of a "brief pause" production as a result of Miyazaki’s retirement. On the subject of the studio’s future Miyazaki speaks bluntly in the documentary: "The future is clear: it’s going to fall apart. I can already see it. What’s the use worrying? It’s inevitable." But all things do, a fact which the finest works of Japanese art—Miyazaki’s films included—have always accepted. But they also take notice of what small things we can appreciate along the way to dissolution, as does Miyazaki himself: "Isn’t animation fascinating?" he asks, seemingly to himself, as he walks away from the drawing board. Related Content: Hayao Miyazaki’s Magical Animated Music Video for the Japanese Pop Song, "On Your Mark" Watch Sherlock Hound: Hayao Miyazaki’s Animated, Steampunk Take on Sherlock Holmes How to Make Instant Ramen Compliments of Japanese Animation Director Hayao Miyazaki Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Watch Hayao Miyazaki Animate the Final Shot of His Final Feature Film, The Wind Rises 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. The post Watch Hayao Miyazaki Animate the Final Shot of His Final Feature Film, The Wind Rises appeared first on Open Culture.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3I9o6OwDNI There are strong people quietly willing to do "what needs to be done" for the public good, and then there are those who enjoy insinuating that they are that sort of person, usually as justification for their self-serving, frequently racist or xenophobic actions. When the latter reaches for the Bible as back up, look out! No one ever had more fun with this monstrous type than the writer Flannery O’Connor, a devout Catholic with a knack for wrapping her characters’ foul purposes in the "stinking mad shadow of Jesus." In her longest story "The Displaced Person," the boorish, Bible-thumping Mrs. Shortley is not the only baddie. The refined Mrs. McIntyre, widowed mistress of the dairy operation that employs the Shortleys and a couple of African-American farmhands, is just as quick to indict those with whom she imagines herself at cross-purposes. Transfer them to the small screen, and every actress over 40 would be clamoring for the chance to sink her teeth into one or the other. In 1977, PBS hired playwright Horton Foote to adapt "The Displaced Person" for "The American Short Story," and the roles of Shortley and McIntyre went to Shirley Stoler and Irene Worth, both excellent. (See above…it’s always so much more amusing to play one of the villains than the hardworking, uncomplaining, titular character, here a Polish refugee from WWII.) The audio quality is not the greatest, but stick with it to see Samuel L. Jackson, not quite 30, as the younger of the two farmhands. O’Connor buffs will be interested to know that Andalusia, the writer’s own Georgia farm, served as the location for this hour-long project. (No need to rent a peacock!) Despite the stately production values that were de rigeur for quality viewing of the period, the story retains the unmistakable tang of O’Connor—it’s a bitter, comic brew. via Biblioklept Related Content Flannery O’Connor Reads ‘Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction’ (c. 1960) Rare 1959 Audio: Flannery O’Connor Reads ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ Flannery O’Connor’s Satirical Cartoons: 1942-1945 Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday See Flannery O’Connor’s Story "The Displaced Person" Adapted to a Film Starring a Young Samuel L. Jackson (1977) 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. The post See Flannery O’Connor’s Story "The Displaced Person" Adapted to a Film Starring a Young Samuel L. Jackson (1977) appeared first on Open Culture.

In 1929, the book publisher George Macy founded The Limited Editions Club (LEC), an imprint tasked with publishing finely illustrated limited editions of classic books. In the years to come, Macy worked with artists like Matisse and Picasso, and photographers like Edward Weston, to produce books with beautiful illustrations on their inner pages. And sometimes The Limited Editions Club even turned its design focus to other parts of the book. Take for example this 1946 edition of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and its pretty amazing spine design. Created by Clarence P. Hornung, the design captures the essence of Gibbon’s classic, showing Roman pillars progressively crumbling as your eyes move from Volume 1 to Volume 7. George Macy later called the collection, which also features illustrations by the great 18th-century printmaker Giovanni Battista Piranesi, "the most herculean labor of our career." Find more information about this 1946 edition here, or even buy a copy here. Also feel free to download a different edition of Gibbon’s classic from our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books collections. Dan Colman is the founder/editor of Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and  share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. via @Pickover Related Content: 700 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices 630 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free The History of Rome in 179 Podcasts Free Courses in Ancient History, Literature & Philosophy Rome Reborn: Take a Virtual Tour Through Ancient Rome, 320 C.E. The Splendid Book Design of the 1946 Edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 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. The post The Splendid Book Design of the 1946 Edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire appeared first on Open Culture.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ8pQVDyaLo While it now bears embarrassing marks of the 1960s here and there, the future envisioned by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey remains, on many levels, chillingly plausible. True, Pan Am Airlines went under in the 1990s instead of launching a space station like they’ve got in the movie, but in the smaller details, 2001 gets a lot right, at least insofar as its reality resembles the one in which we find ourselves in the actual 21st century. No less an aggregation of brainpower than Samsung thinks so too: in fact, they’ve gone so far as to cite Kubrick’s sci-fi masterwork before a judge as proof that the director invented tablet computing. "In 2011, an unusual piece of evidence was presented in court in a dispute between technology giants Apple and Samsung over the latter’s range of handheld tablets, which Apple claimed infringed upon the patented design and user interface of the iPad," writes the British Film Institute’s Samuel Wigley. "As part of Samsung’s defence, the company’s lawyers showed the court a still image and clip showing the astronauts played by Gary Lockwood and Keir Dullea eating while watching a TV show on their own personal, mini-sized, flat-screen computers." Apple and Samsung have not, in recent memory, played nice. Apple accused Samsung of "slavishly" copying the design of the iPad for their own Galaxy tablet, a charge that in some ways aligns with Samsung and other major Korean manufacturing companies’ reputation for rapidly adapting and even improving upon products developed in other countries. Samsung’s defense? Watch 2001‘s footage of its "Newspads" (above), and you can see that Kubrick invented the tablet before either company — or, in the words of their attorneys, he invented a computer with "an overall rectangular shape with a dominant display screen, narrow borders, a predominately flat front surface, a flat back surface, and a thin form factor." Even in their lifetimes, 2001 gave Kubrick and his collaborator Arthur C. Clarke, sci-fi eminence and author of 2001 the book, reputations as something like seers. "I’m sure we’ll have sophisticated 3-D holographic television and films," Kubrick speculated in a Playboy magazine interview we featured last year, "and it’s possible that completely new forms of entertainment and education will be devised." Certainly the opening up of the realm of tablets has made new forms of entertainment and education possible, but I wonder: could he ever have imagined we would one day use our Newspads to watch 2001 itself? Related Content: In 1968, Stanley Kubrick Makes Predictions for 2001: Humanity Will Conquer Old Age, Watch 3D TV & Learn German in 20 Minutes 1966 Film Explores the Making of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (and Our High-Tech Future) James Cameron Revisits the Making of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey Howard Johnson’s Presents a Children’s Menu Featuring Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Did Stanley Kubrick Invent the iPad in 2001: A Space Odyssey? 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. The post Did Stanley Kubrick Invent the iPad in 2001: A Space Odyssey? appeared first on Open Culture.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhM-Dm2PHHo Opportunities to meet one’s heroes can go any number of ways. They can be underwhelming and disappointing, embarrassing and awkward, or—as Tom Waits found out in meeting Keith Richards and Charles Bukowski—completely overwhelming. Both encounters became too much for Waits for the same reason: when you "try to match them drink for drink," he says in an interview, "you’re a novice, you’re a child. You’re drinking with a roaring pirate." Waits "wasn’t able to hang in there" with these veteran imbibers—"They’re made out of different stock. They’re like dockworkers." But of course it wasn’t just their legendary drinking that impressed the sandpaper-voiced L.A. troubadour. //www.youtube.com/watch?v=gArkJVq7IMo Waits calls both Richards and Bukowski artistic "father figures"—two of many stand-ins for his own absent father—but it’s Bukowski who had the most profound effect on the singer and songwriter. Both Southern California natives, both keen observers of America’s seedier side, as writers they share a number of common themes and obsessions. When he discovered Bukowski through the poet’s "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" column in the LA Free Press, Waits observed that he "seemed to be a writer of the common people and street people, looking in the dark corners where no one seems to want to go." Waits has gone there, and always—like his literary hero—returned with a hell of a story. His songwriting voice can channel "Hank," as Bukowski’s friends knew him, and his speaking voice can too—with sharp glints of dry, sardonic humor and surprising vulnerability, though much more ragged and pitched several octaves lower. //www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5hhqvNDak8 Waits’ artistic kinship with Bukowski makes him better-suited than perhaps anyone else to read the down-and-out, Dostoevsky-loving, alcoholic’s work. At the top of the post, hear him read Bukowski’s "The Laughing Heart," a poem of weary, almost resigned exhortation to "be on the watch / There are ways out / There is light somewhere," in the midst of life’s darkness. Below it, Waits reads "Nirvana," a poem we’ve featured before in several renditions. Here, the poet tells a story—of loneliness, impermanence, and a brief moment of solace. For comparison, hear Bukowski himself, in his high, nasally voice, read "The Secret of My Endurance" above. Waits almost became more than just a Bukowski lover and reader; he was once up for the role of Bukowski’s alter-ego Henry Chinaski in Barbet Schroeder’s 1987 Bukowski adaptation, Barfly. "I was offered a lot of money," says Waits, "but I just couldn’t do it." Mickey Rourke could, and did, but as I hear Waits read these poems, I like to imagine the film that would have been had he taken that part. Related Content: Four Charles Bukowski Poems Animated Hear 130 Minutes of Charles Bukowski’s First-Ever Recorded Readings (1968) Charles Bukowski Rails Against 9-to-5 Jobs in a Brutally Honest Letter (1986) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Tom Waits Reads Two Charles Bukowski’s Poems, "The Laughing Heart" and "Nirvana" 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. The post Tom Waits Reads Two Charles Bukowski’s Poems, "The Laughing Heart" and "Nirvana" appeared first on Open Culture.

Close your eyes for a moment and picture the artist Vincent Van Gogh. What do you see? Probably one of the prolific post-Impressionist’s self-portraits. That’s all well and good, but who else did you see? Kirk Douglas? Indie darling (and Incredible Hulk adversary) Tim Roth? Director Martin Scorsese? Thanks to the recently discovered photograph at the top of this article, we may soon have the option of picturing the actual Vincent Van Gogh as an adult artist. As Petapixel tells us, he sat for portraits at age 13, and again as a 19-year-old gallery apprentice (below), but beyond that no photographic evidence of the camera-shy artist was known to exist. Exciting! That’s Paul Gauguin on the far right. Others at the table include Emile Bernard and Arnold Koning, politician Felix Duval and actor-director André Antoine. But who is the bearded man smoking the pipe? Van Gogh? So thought the two collectors who purchased the small 1887 photo at a house sale a couple of years ago. Serge Plantureux, an antiquarian bookseller and photography expert who examined their find was optimistic enough to help them with further research, as he noted in the French magazine, L’Oeil de la Photographie: I didn’t want to start doing what Americans call "wishful thinking," that trap into which collectors and researchers fall, where their reasoning is governed only by what they want to see. Don’t ditch Douglas, Roth, and Scorsese just yet, however. Experts at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum say the bearded fellow cannot be the artist. According to them, there’s not even much of a resemblance. He wasn’t so much camera shy, as deadly opposed to the photographic medium. His refusal to be photographed was an act of resistance. That kind of puts a damper on things… So.. no go Van Gogh? Oh well…vive la photo nouvellement découverte de Paul Gauguin (and friends)!   Related Content: The Unexpected Math Behind Van Gogh’s "Starry Night" Simon Schama Presents Van Gogh and the Beginning of Modern Art Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ Re-Created by Astronomer with 100 Hubble Space Telescope Images Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday Discovered: The Only Known Picture of Vincent Van Gogh as an Adult Artist? (Maybe, Maybe Not) 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. The post Discovered: The Only Known Picture of Vincent Van Gogh as an Adult Artist? (Maybe, Maybe Not) appeared first on Open Culture.

A quick heads up: Neil Young’s 36th studio album, The Monsanto Years, is now streaming for free online thanks to NPR’s First Listen web site: The album can also be pre-ordered as a CD on Amazon, or bought in digital format from the Pono music store (which pre-supposes that you have one of Neil’s Pono music players.) About the new album, NPR has this to say: Here, we have a series of taut and stone-simple Neil Young songs that fit together under a catchall concept (about companies wielding extraordinary influence over many aspects of our quality of life), each powered by its own supply of righteous fury. Enjoyment of it probably depends less on whether you agree with Young’s positions than on how much tolerance you have for a mantra, repeated frequently, using the three syllables that make up the trade name Monsanto. It also helps to like your harangues set to three-chord rock and expressed through triadic melodies. This is not subtle, Harvest Moon Neil, brooding at the piano. This is ornery, snarly Neil. Meanwhile, if you actually do side with Neil’s political positions, you’ll probably find some amusement in today’s news that Young, having blasted Donald Trump for using his 1989 song "Rockin’ in the Free World," turned around and gave Bernie Sanders free license to use the song. And that he did. Related Content: Neil Young Busking in Glasgow, 1976: The Story Behind the Footage Great Story: How Neil Young Introduced His Classic 1972 AlbumHarvest to Graham Nash Miles Davis Opens for Neil Young and "That Sorry-Ass Cat" Steve Miller at The Fillmore East (1970) Neil Young’s New Album, The Monsanto Years, Now Streaming Free Online (For a Limited Time) 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. The post Neil Young’s New Album, The Monsanto Years, Now Streaming Free Online (For a Limited Time) appeared first on Open Culture.

Cinema Sem Lei has made a nice supercut video essay that explores the influence of German Expressionism on the films of Tim Burton. There’s undeniably some direct quotes: The first shot comparing the cityscapes of Metropolis and Batman Returns, the shadows on the wall of both The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Corpse Bride, and the similarities in the haircuts of Metropolis’ Rotwang and Christopher Walken’s Max Shreck (the name a tribute to the title actor in Nosferatu) again in Batman Returns. (Beetlejuice is notoriously absent.) But there’s also a sense that Cinema Sem Lei’s video is cutting off a crab’s legs to make it fit in a box. Not everything in Burton’s films has a direct link to German Expressionism, and to do so is to pretend that this silent movie style lie dormant between the 1920s and 1982, when Burton created his first animated short, Vincent. (Watch it here.) It’s to ignore that Burton most likely got his Expressionism, like many other ’80s filmmakers, second and third hand. German Expressionism didn’t result in that many films, but the ones that did have become famous for their visionary aesthetic, standing out visually and intellectually against the other films of the day. When many of its directors fled the Nazis and moved to Hollywood, the style began to influence horror movies and film noir. One other place where Expressionism popped up was in the animated films of Warner Brothers, Disney, and MGM, something Burton definitely grew up watching. The comic exaggerations in Tex Avery are nothing but expressionist, and the design of both the desert vistas of Chuck Jones’ Road Runner films, and his wild sci-fi designs bear the distortions of Caligari‘s sets. So while we can see the angled rooftops and spindly stairs of Caligari in the shot of Burton’s Vincent sulkily climbing the stairs to his room, a more direct influence was the art of Dr. Seuss, and while a skeleton might play a bone as a flute in Murnau’s Faust, it’s Burton’s childhood love of Ray Harryhausen that you can see in the skeleton band from Corpse Bride. Also, it’s not known when Burton may have seen these classic silent films. Growing up in the ‘70s he would have had to seek out prints, or look at stills in books about the history of horror. Once he got to CalArts to study, his access to films would have expanded beyond what was on television. But it’s interesting that in most interviews, Burton quickly diverts the discussion if and rarely when asked about German Expressionism, but indulges when asked about what he watched as a child. Once working in the film industry, no doubt those Burton brought on for his art directors and costume designers came with their own knowledge of history, while music videos in the early ‘80s were also awash with Expressionist influence mixed with modernist design. Not to say that Burton isn’t a singular visionary with a stack of influences, but one who had grown up lonely, he soon found himself among many who shared his particular tastes, the film production as a second family. via Slate Related content: Six Early Short Films By Tim Burton Watch 10 Classic German Expressionist Films: From Fritz Lang’s M to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari Vincent: Tim Burton’s Early Animated Film Tim Burton’s The World of Stainboy: Watch the Complete Animated Series Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the 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. How German Expressionism Influenced Tim Burton: A Video Essay 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. The post How German Expressionism Influenced Tim Burton: A Video Essay appeared first on Open Culture.

My circle of friends includes more than a few grad students, but few of them seem very happy, especially those who’ve already put every part of the process behind them except their dissertation. As they struggle to wrestle that daunting beast to the ground, I — as a non-academic — try to provide whatever perspective I can. To my mind, a dissertation, just like any other major task, demands that you break it down into small pieces and frame each piece in your mind just right, so I naturally think Nick Sousanis made the right choice by writing his dissertation, panel by panel, frame by frame, as a graphic novel. Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow recently wrote about Unflattening, Sousanis’ "graphic novel about the relationship between words and pictures in literature" that doubled as Sousanis’ dissertation in education at Columbia University. Doctorow quotes Comics Grid‘s Matt Finch, who describes the work as one that "defies conventional forms of scholarly discourse to offer readers both a stunning work of graphic art and a serious inquiry into the ways humans construct knowledge." Uniting the perspectives of "science, philosophy, art, literature, and mythology, it uses the collage-like capacity of comics to show that perception is always an active process of incorporating and reevaluating different vantage points." //www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5SicXrnOYU A bold claim indeed, but one you can evaluate for yourself by reading the fifteen-page excerpt of Unflattening now available for free, or purchasing your own copy of this groundbreaking dissertation online. It will give you an idea, making reference along the way to astronomy, ancient Alexandria, modern Manhattan, Gilles Deleuze, Sousanis’ dog, Ulysses, Buddhism, and the medium of the comic book — or the graphic novel, or sequential art — itself. You can find out more about this impressive work of art, scholarship, or however you prefer to regard it at the Harvard University Press site or Sousanis’ own. The video just above, on an exhibit of work from Unflattening, features Sousanis talking about his experience in this "amphibious medium." via Boing Boing Related Content: The History of Economics & Economic Theory Explained with Comics, Starting with Adam Smith Read John Nash’s Super Short PhD Thesis with 26 Pages & 2 Citations: The Beauty of Inventing a Field The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D. How to Dance Your Dissertation: See the Winning Video in the 2014 "Dance Your PhD" Contest Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Doctoral Dissertation as a Graphic Novel: Read a Free Excerpt of Nick Sousanis’ Unflattening 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. The post Doctoral Dissertation as a Graphic Novel: Read a Free Excerpt of Nick Sousanis’ Unflattening appeared first on Open Culture.

Every period of literary history has its share of bawdy, satirical poetry, from Mesopotamia, to Rome, to the age of Jonathan Swift. Every period, it often seems, but one: The late Victorian era in England and America often appears to us like a dry, humorless time for English poetry. Two of the most renowned poets, Alfred Tennyson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are, fairly or unfairly, viewed as wordy, sentimental, and didactic. At the dawn of the new century, tough-minded modernists like William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot remedied these failings, the story goes. And yet, despite their symbolist influences, these would-be radicals can seem themselves pretty conservative, turning Tennyson and Wadsworth’s affirmations of an ordered world into maudlin, and reactionary, laments over its loss. Eliot’s work is especially characteristic of this high church disdain for social change. Eliot, writes Mental Floss, was "stodgy." Adam Kirsch in Harvard Magazine writes of Eliot’s "almost papal authority in the world of literature" and his "magisterial criticism"—hardly descriptions of a revolutionary. "Looking at the severe, bespectacled face of the elderly poet on the cover of his Complete Poems and Plays," writes Kirsch, "it is hard to imagine that he was ever young." But young he was, and while always pedantic in the most fascinating way, Eliot was also once a writer of very bawdy verse. He was also, unfortunately, a composer of racist verse, a fact which many readers of Eliot will not find overly surprising. Mental Floss quotes from one of those ugly early works, featuring "the racist caricature of a well-endowed ruler named ‘King Bolo.’" But it also quotes from an early poem said to contain the first use of a word that aptly describes the language in that first distasteful poem. According to Language Log, a site maintained by University of Pennsylvania professor Mark Liberman, who source their etymology from the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "bullsh*t" originated with Eliot’s poem "The Triumph of Bullsh*t." Wyndham Lewis first mentions the poem, which he calls a bit of "scholarly ribaldry," in 1915, but it was probably written in 1910. With its first three stanzas addressed to "Ladies," and all four ending with "For Christ’s sake stick it up your ass," the poem piles up line after rhyming line of archaic, Latinate words, undercutting their obscurantism with lowbrow crudeness. The third stanza becomes more direct, less laden with clever diction, as Eliot lays out the conflict: Ladies who think me unduly vociferousAmiable cabotin making a noiseThat people may cry out "this stuff is too stiff for us" -Ingenuous child with a box of new toysToy lions carnivorous, cannons fumiferousEngines vaporous - all this will pass;Quite innocent - "he only wants to make shiver us."For Christ’s sake stick it up your ass. "The Triumph of Bullsh*t" functions as a bratty riposte to Eliot’s critics. (It was, in fact, originally addressed to "Critics," then changed to "Ladies" in 1916.) Language Log questions whether Eliot "really invented bullsh*t in 1910," since he "could hardly have aimed to shock the ‘ladies’ by naming his little poem ‘The Triumph of Bullsh*t’ if the term had not already been a commonplace vulgarity." Perhaps. But according to Wyndham Lewis and the OED, he was the first to use the word on record. Harvard Magazine’s Kirsch calls these early poems (collected here)—and others such as the profane "Inventions of the March Hare"—the last manifestations of the "American Eliot" before he went off and became the "British Eliot" who would not deign to utter such vulgarities so freely. The word in question never appears in the poem itself, only the title, and given the speaker’s literary chest-thumping, we might even speculate that "Bullsh*t" is a proper name, or a personification, and his triumph consists of a gleeful middle finger to Victorian decorum. It’s language only slightly more exaggerated than some of Mark Twain’s or Herman Melville’s characterizations, marking Eliot’s kinship with a particularly American sense of humor. The poet, writes Kirsch, later "buried his Americanness deep enough that it takes some digging to recognize it." In these poems, we see it—juvenile insults, grotesque, sexualized racial caricatures, a crude defiance of tradition—and women’s opinions…. And yes, whether he invented the word or just did us the honor of popularizing it, a snide elevation of what he rightly called "bullsh*t." via The Paris Review Related Content: T.S. Eliot Reads His Modernist Masterpieces "The Waste Land" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" T.S. Eliot, as Faber & Faber Editor, Rejects George Orwell’s "Trotskyite" Novel Animal Farm (1944) Listen to T.S. Eliot Recite His Late Masterpiece, the Four Quartets Groucho Marx and T.S. Eliot Become Unexpected Pen Pals, Exchanging Portraits & Compliments (1961) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=R94Q6NhuS3A When the TV series The Simpsons first premiered on December 17, 1989, the Berlin Wall had just fallen, the internet wasn’t really a thing yet, and Taylor Swift was just four days old. While the show might not have the bite or the currency it had in the mid-90s, the series still manages to deliver some absolutely wonderful moments. Last Halloween, for instance, they did a hilarious extended riff on the works of Stanley Kubrick. But perhaps the best thing they’ve done recently is a tribute to legendary Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. You can see the clip above. The references come thick and fast. There’s Otto, the perpetually stoned bus driver, as the Cat Bus from My Neighbor Totoro. There’s Ralph Wiggum as the sentient fish Ponyo. There’s Patty and Selma as Kiki the Witch from Kiki’s Delivery Service. And, at the end of the segment, the Kwik-E-Mart sprouts legs and walks off like the titular building in Howl’s Moving Castle. A distressed Abu exclaims, "I’m ruined by whimsy!" The segment even departs from the show’s usual manic irreverence and takes on the melancholy wonder of Miyazaki’s movies. Unless you have an unusually quick eye and a thorough understanding of the worlds of Miyazaki, you will probably need to watch this more than a couple of times. Fortunately, the folks over at Slate have unpacked and annotated the segment for you. You can watch it below. Related Content: How to Make Instant Ramen Compliments of Japanese Animation Director Hayao Miyazaki French Student Sets Internet on Fire with Animation Inspired by Moebius, Syd Mead & Hayao Miyazaki Before The Simpsons, Matt Groening Illustrated a "Student’s Guide" for Apple Computers (1989) Watch The Simpsons’ Halloween Parody of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and The Shining 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. The Simpsons Pay Wonderful Tribute to the Anime of Hayao Miyazaki 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. The post The Simpsons Pay Wonderful Tribute to the Anime of Hayao Miyazaki appeared first on Open Culture.

Image by Julochka/Flickr Commons So it turns out that my two-year old son might be qualified for a professorship at an elite university. No, he’s not some Doogie Howser-style savant. He just really likes Legos. And Cambridge University - the school of Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking - has announced that it’s getting ready to create a Lego professorship this fall. The position, which is slated to start in October 2015, came about following a £4 million donation from the Lego Foundation. The Denmark-based organization, which owns 25% of the Lego toy company, states that their mission is to "make children’s lives better - and communities stronger - by making sure the fundamental value of play is understood, embraced and acted upon." The Foundation already has ties with MIT and Tsinghua University in China, among others. //www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiGQalbgtX0 Who ever lands the professorship will also head the Research Centre on Play in Education, Development and Learning and will explore the connection between learning and play. The qualifications for the job seem remarkably broad. As the university says: "The candidature should be open to all those whose work falls within the general field of the title of the office." They don’t, however, specifically mention that candidates have to be potty trained. I’m getting my son’s resume ready. You can read Cambridge’s background documentation here. Related Content: "Professor Risk" at Cambridge University Says "One of the Biggest Risks is Being Too Cautious" J.K. Rowling Tells Harvard Grads Why Success Begins with Failure Find Courses from Cambridge in our Collection of Free Courses Online 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. Cambridge University to Create a Lego Professorship 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. The post Cambridge University to Create a Lego Professorship appeared first on Open Culture.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9W0GQvONKc Is sociology an art or a science? Is it philosophy? Social psychology? Economics and political theory? Surveying the great sociologists since the mid-19th century, one would have to answer "yes" to all of these questions. Sociologists like Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Theodor Adorno conducted serious scholarly and social-scientific analyses, and wrote highly speculative theory. Though it may seem like we’re all sociologists now, making critical judgments about large groups of people, the sociologists who created and carried on the discipline generally did so with sound evidence and well-reasoned argument. Unlike so much current knee-jerk commentary, even when they’re wrong they’re still well worth reading. //www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICppFQ6Tabw Having already surveyed Marx in his series on Euro-American political philosophers, School of Life founder Alain de Botton now tackles the other three illustrious names on the list above, starting with Durkheim at the top, then Weber above, and Adorno below. The first two figures were contemporaries of Marx, the third a later interpreter. Like that bearded German scourge of capitalism, these three—in more measured or pessimistic ways—levied critiques against the dominant economic system. Durkheim took on the problem of suicide, Weber the anxious religious underpinnings of capitalist ideology, and Adorno the consumer culture of instant gratification. //www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YGnPgtWhsw That’s so far, at least, as de Botton’s very cursory introductions get us. As with his other series, this one more or less ropes the thinkers represented here into the School of Life’s program of promoting a very particular, middle class view of happiness. And, as with the other series, the thinkers surveyed here all seem to more or less agree with de Botton’s own views. Perhaps others who most certainly could have been included, like W.E.B. Dubois, Jane Addams, or Hannah Arendt, would offer some very different perspectives. De Botton again makes his points with pithy generalizations, numbered lists, and quirky, cut-out animations, breezily reducing lifetimes of work to a few observations and moral lessons. I doubt Adorno would approach these less-than-rigorous methods charitably, but those new to the field of sociology or the work of its practitioners will find here some tantalizing ideas that will hopefully inspire them to dig deeper, and to perhaps improve their own sociological diagnoses. Note: For those interested, Yale has a free open course on Sociology called "Foundations of Modern Social Theory," which covers most of the figures listed above. You can always find it in our collection, 1100 Free Online Courses from Top Universities. Related Content: 6 Political Theorists Introduced in Animated "School of Life" Videos: Marx, Smith, Rawls & More Nietzsche, Wittgenstein & Sartre Explained with Monty Python-Style Animations by The School of Life Theodor Adorno’s Radical Critique of Joan Baez and the Music of the Vietnam War Protest Movement Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Animated Introductions to Three Sociologists: Durkheim, Weber & Adorno 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. The post Animated Introductions to Three Sociologists: Durkheim, Weber & Adorno appeared first on Open Culture.

Briefly noted: Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Everything Is Illuminated) has a new short story, "Love Is Blind and Deaf," in the Summer Fiction Issue of The New Yorker. And, by short, I mean short. His quirky Adam and Eve story runs 592 words. You can read the story free online here (if you haven’t exceeded the monthly quota of The New Yorker’s paywall). Or, if you’re more visual, you can watch an animated adaptation of the story above. Directed by Gur Bentwich and animated by Ofra Kobliner, the video was produced by Storyvid, a nonprofit production company that aspires to create "the literary equivalent of a music video." For more Foer, listen to him read Amos Oz’s story, "The King of Oz," which otherwise appears in our collection of 630 Free Audio Books. Dan Colman is the founder/editor of Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and  share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. Related Content 700 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices Jonathan Safran Foer, Toni Morrison & Steven Pinker Cultivate Thought on Chipotle’s Cups and Bags The New Yorker’s Fiction Podcast: Where Great Writers Read Stories by Great Writers Watch an Animation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s New Story, "Love Is Blind and Deaf" 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. The post Watch an Animation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s New Story, "Love Is Blind and Deaf" appeared first on Open Culture.

Click the image above to start playing video. "There is nothing intrinsically imaginative about the idea of ‘gold,’ nor the idea of ‘mountain,’" writes Will Self, citing an idea of the philosopher David Hume, "but join them together and you have a fantastically gleaming ‘gold mountain.’ And might not that gold mountain be the Laurenziberg in Prague? After all, it looms over contemporary Prague just as it loomed in the consciousness of Franz Kafka, whose earliest surviving narrative fragment, ‘Description of a Struggle,’ is in part an account of a phantasmagorical ascent of its slopes." This association comes from "Kafka’s Wound," Will Self’s new essay in the London Review of Books — or rather, a new "digital essay" from the LRB on the BBC and Arts Council England’s new site The Space, one which takes full advantage of the multimedia future, much enthused over back in the 1990s, in which we now find ourselves. For some readers, myself included, the association of the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial with Hume, the author of so many volumes fictional, nonfictional, and psychogeographical (find some in our collection of Free Philosophy eBooks), constitutes reason enough to minimize all other windows and get reading. But Self has taken on an even more ambitious project than that: the mind-mappish interface of "Kafka’s Wound" offers a wealth of audio, video, and other textual material to supplement the experience of the main text, all of which connects in some way to the essay’s subject: Will Self’s "personal relationship to Kafka’s work through the lens of the short story ‘A Country Doctor‘ (1919), and in particular through the aperture of the wound described in that story." Self’s own site describes the essay as "‘through composed’ with Will’s own thoughts, as he works, being responded to by digital-content providers," with more of that content to come through July. The environment internet, which facilitates our natural tendency to drift from subject to at least semi-related subject with an addictive vengeance, encourages associational thinking. But so do cities, as a psychogeographer like Will Self knows full well. And so part of this rich literary investigation takes the form of an hourlong documentary (click here or the image above to view), in which Self takes a walking tour of Kafka’s Prague, seeking out the writer’s "genius loci," the sites that gave settings to the milestones of his life and shape to his artistic and intellectual sensibilities. He also takes the opportunity to do a Kafka reading right there in Kafka’s hometown. It’s one thing to read Kafka with the Laurenziberg in mind, but still quite another to do it with the Laurenziberg in sight. Related Content: Kafka’s Nightmare Tale, ‘A Country Doctor,’ Told in Award-Winning Japanese Animation Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque Love Letters Vladimir Nabokov Makes Editorial Tweaks to Franz Kafka’s Novella The Metamorphosis The Art of Franz Kafka: Drawings from 1907-1917 Four Franz Kafka Animations: Enjoy Creative Animated Shorts from Poland, Japan, Russia & Canada Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Take a Visual Walking Tour of Franz Kafka’s Prague with Will Self, Then Read His Digital Essay, "Kafka’s Wound" 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. The post Take a Visual Walking Tour of Franz Kafka’s Prague with Will Self, Then Read His Digital Essay, "Kafka’s Wound" appeared first on Open Culture.

The Freedmen’s Bureau Project — a new initiative spearheaded by the Smithsonian, the National Archives, the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints — will make available online 1.5 million historical documents, finally allowing descendants of former African-American slaves to learn more about their family roots. Near the end of the US Civil War, The Freedmen’s Bureau was created to help newly-freed slaves find their footing in postbellum America. The Bureau "opened schools to educate the illiterate, managed hospitals, rationed food and clothing for the destitute, and even solemnized marriages." And, along the way, the Bureau gathered handwritten records on roughly 4 million African Americans. Now, those documents are being digitized with the help of volunteers, and, by the end of 2016, they will be made available in a searchable database at discoverfreedmen.org. According to Hollis Gentry, a Smithsonian genealogist, this archive "will give African Americans the ability to explore some of the earliest records detailing people who were formerly enslaved," finally giving us a sense "of their voice, their dreams." You can learn more about the project by watching the video below, and you can volunteer your own services here. via The Guardian Related Content: Visualizing Slavery: The Map Abraham Lincoln Spent Hours Studying During the Civil War The Civil War and Reconstruction: A Free Course Twelve Years a Slave: Free eBook and Audio Book of the Memoir Behind the Film (1853) "Ask a Slave" by Azie Dungey Sets the Historical Record Straight in a New Web Series Free Online History Courses