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Wednesday, June 28th, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 8:00a | An Animated Introduction to Stoicism, the Ancient Greek Philosophy That Lets You Lead a Happy, Fulfilling Life
Forever known, it seems, as keeping a “stiff upper lip,” Stoicism—like its predecessor, Cynicism—is an ancient school of Greek philosophy that has been reduced into an attitude, a pose rather than a way of life. “We do this to our philosophies,” writes Lary Wallace at Aeon, “We redraft their contours based on projected shadows, or give them a cartoonish shape like a caricaturist emphasizing all the wrong features.” We do this especially to schools as obscure to most people as Stoicism and Cynicism. “In reality,” however, writes Massimo Pigliucci at The Stone, “practicing Stoicism is not really that different from, say, practicing Buddhism (or even certain forms of modern Christianity): it is a mix of reflecting on theoretical precepts, reading inspirational texts, and engaging in meditation, mindfulness, and the like.” Would the ancient Stoics have agreed with this assessment? In the short TED-Ed lesson above, written by Pigliucci and animated by Compote Collective, we learn about Zeno of Cyprus, “stranded miles from home, with no money or possessions.” Destitute and “shipwrecked in Athens around 300 BCE,” the once-wealthy merchant discovered Socrates, and decided to “seek out and study with the city’s noted philosophers.” Zeno then taught his own students the principles of “virtue, tolerance, and self-control” that underlie Stoic philosophy (called so for “the porch (stoa poikilê) in the Agora at Athens” where the group congregated). Although the ability to remain calm and composed in a crisis—the quality most associated with Stoicism—occupies a prominent place in Stoic thought, it is centrally concerned with two questions. As the site 99u puts it, Stoics ask: “1. How can we lead a fulfilling, happy life?” and “2. How can we become better human beings?” In brief, we do so not by obeying or submitting to some kind of capricious divine will, but by attending to the rational structure of the universe, the Logos, an intricate web of cause and effect that determines the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. The Stoic cultivates four virtues—Wisdom, Temperance, Justice, and Courage—and the character recommended by Stoic philosophy makes it plain why Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, as Pigliucci notes, was “actually modeled after [Gene Roddenberry’s]—mistaken—understanding of Stoicism.”
Given Stoicism’s concern with happiness and virtue, we might expect Alain de Botton’s School of Life to be an advocate, and we would be right. In the animated introduction to Stoicism above, de Botton assures viewers “you need more of it in your life.” Why? Because “life is difficult,” and Stoicism is “helpful,” for commoners and aristocrats alike. Indeed the most famous of Stoic philosophers, Marcus Aurelius, was Emperor of Rome from 161 to 180 CE. Considered one of the greatest works of ancient thought, Aurelius’ Meditations is also perhaps one of the most accessible of philosophical texts. In plain, straightforward language, the emperor-philosopher recommends a series of Greco-Roman virtues, and gives credit to his many teachers. In book two, he writes, “Why should any of these things that happen externally, so much distract thee? Give thyself leisure to learn some good thing, and cease roving and wandering to and fro. Thou must also take heed of another kind of wandering, for they are idle in their actions, who toil and labour in this life, and have no certain scope to which to direct all their motions, and desires.” In other words, rather than suffering in courageous silence—the caricature of Stoicism—Aurelius distills much of its essence to this: “Don’t worry about what you can't control, find good work to do, and do it well and wisely.” Related Content: Free Online Philosophy Courses Alain de Botton’s School of Life Presents Animated Introductions to Heidegger, The Stoics & Epicurus A Guide to Happiness: Alain de Botton Shows How Six Great Philosophers Can Change Your Life Free Courses in Ancient History, Literature & Philosophy Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness. An Animated Introduction to Stoicism, the Ancient Greek Philosophy That Lets You Lead a Happy, Fulfilling Life 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.  |
| 11:00a | The Metropolitan Museum of Art Makes 140,000+ Artistic Images from Its Collections Available on Archive.org
As an Open Culture reader, you might already know the Internet Archive, often simply called "Archive.org," as an ever expanding trove of wonders, freely offering everything from political TV ads to vintage cookbooks to Grateful Dead concert recordings to the history of the internet itself. You might also know the Metropolitan Museum of Art as not just a building on Fifth Avenue, but a leading digital cultural institution, one willing and able to make hundreds of art books available to download and hundreds of thousands of fine-art images usable and remixable under a Creative Commons license.
Now, the Internet Archive and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have teamed up to bring you a collection of over 140,000 art images gathered by the latter and organized and hosted by the former. Most every digital vault in the Internet Archive offers a cultural and historical journey within, but the collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art offers an especially deep one, ranging historically from early 19th-century India (The Pleasures of the Hunt at the top of the post) to midcentury New York (the photo of the mighty locomotive before the entrance to the 1939 World's Fair above) and, in either direction, well beyond.
Culturally speaking, you can also find in the Met's collection in the Internet Archive everything from from Japanese interpretations of French photography (the woodblock print French Photographer above) to the Belgian interpretation of Anglo-American cinema (the poster design for Charlie Chaplin's Play Day below). You can dial in on your zone of interest by using the "Topics & Subjects," whose hundreds of filterable options include, to name just a few, such categories as Asia, wood, fragments, London, folios, and underwear.
The collection also contains works of the masters, such as Vincent van Gogh's 1887 Self-Portrait with Straw Hat (as well as its obverse, 1885's The Potato Peeler), and some of the world's great vistas, including Francesco Guardi's 1765 rendering of Venice from the Bacino di San Marco. If you'd like to see what in the collection has drawn the attention of most of its browsers so far, sort it by view count: those at work should beware that nudes and other erotically charged artworks predictably dominate the rankings, but they do it alongside Naruto Whirlpool, the Philosopher's Stone, and Albert Einstein. Human interest, like human creativity, always has a surprise or two in store.
Related Content: Download 464 Free Art Books from The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1.8 Million Free Works of Art from World-Class Museums: A Meta List of Great Art Available Online Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Makes 140,000+ Artistic Images from Its Collections Available on Archive.org 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. |
| 2:30p | George Orwell Reviews We, the Russian Dystopian Novel That Noam Chomsky Considers “More Perceptive” Than Brave New World & 1984
We know George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, at least by reputation, and we’ve heard both references tossed around with alarming frequency this past year. Before these watershed dystopian novels, published over a decade apart (1949 and 1932, respectively), came an earlier book, one truly “most relevant to our time,” writes Michael Brendan Dougherty: Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, written in 1923 and set “1,000 years after a revolution that brought the One State into power.” The novel had a significant influence on Orwell’s more famous political dystopia. And we have a good sense of Orwell’s indebtedness to the Russian writer. Three years before the publication of 1984, Orwell published a review of Zamyatin’s book, having “at last got my hands on a copy… several years after hearing of its existence.” Orwell describes the novel as “one of the literary curiosities of this book-burning age" and spends a good part of his brief commentary comparing We to Huxley’s novel. “[T]he resemblance with Brave New World is striking,” he writes. “But though Zamyatin’s book is less well put together—it has a rather weak and episodic plot which is too complex to summarise—it has a political point which the other lacks.” The earlier Russian novel, writes Orwell, in 1946, “is on the whole more relevant to our own situation.” Part of what Orwell found convincing in Zamyatin’s “less well put together” book was the fact that underneath the technocratic totalitarian state he depicts, “many of the ancient human instincts are still there” rather than having been eradicated by eugenics and medication. (Although citizens in We are lobotomized, more or less, if they rebel.) “It may well be,” Orwell goes on to say, “that Zamyatin did not intend the Soviet regime to be the special target of his satire.” He did write the book many years before the Stalinist dictatorship that inspired Orwell’s dystopias. “What Zamyatin seems to be aiming at is not any particular country but the implied aims of industrial civilization.” In the interview at the top of the post (with clumsy subtitles), Noam Chomsky makes some similar observations, and declares We the superior book to both Brave New World and 1984 (which he pronounces “obvious and wooden”). Zamyatin was “more perceptive” than Orwell or Huxley, says Chomsky. He “was talking about the real world…. I think he sensed what a totalitarian system is like,” projecting an overwhelmingly controlling surveillance state in We before such a thing existed in the form it would in Orwell's time. The novel will remind us of the many dystopian scenarios that have populated fiction and film in the almost 100 years since its publication. As Dougherty concisely summarizes it, in We:
Zamyatin surely drew from earlier dystopias, as well as the classical utopia of Plato’s Republic. But an even more immediate influence, curiously, was his time spent in England just before the Revolution. Like his main character, Zamyatin began his career as an engineer—a shipbuilder, in fact, the craft he studied at St. Petersburg Polytechnical University. He was sent to Newcastle in 1916, writes Yolanda Delgado, “to supervise the construction of icebreakers for the Russian government. However, by the time the ships actually reached Russia, they belonged to the new authorities—the Bolsheviks…. [I]n an ironic twist, Zamyatin, one of the most outspoken early critics of the Soviet regime, actually designed the first Soviet icebreakers.”
While Zamyatin wrote We in response to the Soviet takeover, his style and sci-fi setting was greatly inspired by his immersion in English culture. His two years abroad “greatly influenced him,” from his dress to his speech, earning him the nickname “the Englishman.” He became so fluent in English that he found work as an “editor and translator of foreign authors such as H.G. Wells, Jack London, and Sheridan.” (During his sojourn in England, writes Orwell, Zamyatin “had written some blistering satires on English life.”) Upon returning to Russia, Zamyatin quickly became one of the “very first dissidents.” We was banned by the Soviet censors in 1921, and that year the author published an essay called “I Fear,” in which he described the struggles of Russian artists under the new regime, writing, “the conditions under which we live are tearing us to pieces.” Eventually smuggling the manuscript of We to New York, Zamyatin was able to get the novel published in 1923, incurring the wrath of the Soviet authorities. He was “ostracized… demonized in the press, blacklisted from publishing and kicked out of the Union of Soviet Writers.” Zamyatin was unapologetic, writing Stalin to ask that he be allowed to leave the country. Stalin not only granted the request, allowing Zamyatin to settle in Paris, but allowed him back into the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934, an unusual turn of events indeed. Just above, you can see a German film adaptation of We (turn on closed captions to watch it with English subtitles). And you can read Orwell’s full review of We here. Related Content: Huxley to Orwell: My Hellish Vision of the Future is Better Than Yours (1949) Hear the Very First Adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 in a Radio Play Starring David Niven (1949) George Orwell’s 1984 Is Now the #1 Bestselling Book on Amazon Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness George Orwell Reviews We, the Russian Dystopian Novel That Noam Chomsky Considers “More Perceptive” Than Brave New World & 1984 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. |
| 5:43p | Edvard Munch’s Famous Painting “The Scream” Animated to the Sound of Pink Floyd’s Primal Music
In this short video, Romanian animator Sebastian Cosor brings together two haunting works from different times and different media: The Scream, by Norwegian Expressionist painter Edvard Munch (1863-1944), and "The Great Gig in the Sky," by the British rock band Pink Floyd. Munch painted the first of four versions of The Scream in 1893. He later wrote a poem describing the apocalyptic vision behind it: I was walking along the road with two Friends Munch's horrific Great Scream in Nature is combined in the video with Floyd's otherworldly "The Great Gig in the Sky," one of the signature pieces from the band's 1973 masterpiece, Dark Side of the Moon. The vocals on "The Great Gig" were performed by an unknown young songwriter and session singer named Clare Torry. Torry had been invited by producer Alan Parsons to come to Abbey Road Studios and improvise over a haunting piano chord progression by Richard Wright, on a track that was tentatively called "The Mortality Sequence." The 25-year-old singer was given very little direction from the band. "Clare came into the studio one day," said bassist Roger Waters in a 2003 Rolling Stone interview, "and we said, 'There's no lyrics. It's about dying -- have a bit of a sing on that, girl.'" Forty-two years later, that "bit of a sing" can still send a shiver down anyone's spine. For more on the making of "The Great Gig in the Sky," and Torry's amazing contribution, see the clip below to hear Torry's story in her own words.
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