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Tuesday, March 12th, 2019
- Where and how the manuscript was made
- The social context from which the manuscript emerged, including early medieval faith and politics
- The artistic context of the manuscript, reflecting local and international styles
- The theology and interpretations of the text
- How and why the manuscript survived
- The Book of Kells and contemporary culture
| Time | Event |
| 8:00a | The Roman Roads of Spain & Portugal Visualized as a Subway Map: Ancient History Meets Modern Graphic Design
Between the first century BC and the fourth century AD, Rome displayed what we might call an impressive ambition. In his project illustrating those chapters of history in a way no one has before, statistics student Sasha Trubetskoy has shown increasingly Roman-grade ambitions himself, at least in the realm of historical graphic design. We've previously featured his modern subway-style maps of the roads of the Roman Empire as well as the Roman roads of Britain here on Open Culture. Today, we have his map of the Roman Roads of Iberia, the region today occupied mainly by Spain and Portugal. "This map was a blast to make," writes Trubetskoy. "I chose to follow the Antonine Itinerary more strictly, which meant that I had to deal with many parallel lines." Also known as the itinerary of the Emperor Antoninus or “Itinerarium Provinciarum Antoni(ni) Augusti,” according to the Roman Roads Research Association, the Antonine Itinerary is "a collection of 225 lists of stopping places along various Roman roads across the Roman Empire." Its value "comes from it being one of a very few documents to have survived to modern times which provide detail of names and clues to the location of Roman sites and the routes of roads." Each list, or iter, that makes up the Antonine Itinerary "gives the start and end of each route, with the total mileage of that route, followed by a list of intermediate points with the distances in between." In creating his Roman Roads of Iberia subway map, Trubetskoy made each iter into its own "line," though for some of them he had to draw from other sources: "A couple of Antonine routes were ambiguous and not easily placed on a map, while a few important routes were missing for which there is archaeological evidence." It takes no small amount of work to convert this kind of often patchy and scattered knowledge from ancient history into graphics as cleanly and legibly designed as Trubetskoy's Roman-road subway maps. But the result, apart from offering a nifty juxtaposition of past and present, reminds us of what the roads of the Romain Empire actually meant: a degree of connectedness between distant lands never before achieved in human history. You can support Trubetskoy's efforts to show this to us in ever greater detail by making the US$9 suggested donation to download a high-resolution version of the Roman Roads of Iberia map. Rome wasn't built in a day, much less its empire: the complete subway-mapping of Rome's roads will also require more time and labor — but then, would the builders of the Roman Empire have described their task as a "blast"? Related Content: Ancient Rome’s System of Roads Visualized in the Style of Modern Subway Maps The Roman Roads of Britain Visualized as a Subway Map Rome Reborn: Take a Virtual Tour of Ancient Rome, Circa 320 C.E. How Did the Romans Make Concrete That Lasts Longer Than Modern Concrete? The Mystery Finally Solved The Rise & Fall of the Romans: Every Year Shown in a Timelapse Map Animation (753 BC -1479 AD) A Wonderful Archive of Historic Transit Maps: Expressive Art Meets Precise Graphic Design Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. The Roman Roads of Spain & Portugal Visualized as a Subway Map: Ancient History Meets Modern Graphic Design 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.  |
| 2:00p | Why Should We Read Sylvia Plath? An Animated Video Makes the Case
In “Morning Song,” from Sylvia Plath’s posthumous 1965 collection Ariel, published two years after her suicide, a newborn infant is a “fat gold watch.” Among the incessant lists of adjectives in both her work, “fat” is one that stands out, appearing often, in several synonyms, as a celebration of abundance and real anxiety over weight gain and a general too-muchness. In the same poem, the baby is a work of art, a “new statue.” Its mother, on the other hand, is in one stanza a cloud effaced by the wind in a mirror, and a clumsy animal, “cow-heavy and floral / In my Victorian nightgown. / Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s.” Plath’s images are bracing and unexpected, awed and stricken, usually at once. She deploys them so quickly and adroitly that even when one fails to land, the others immediately take up the slack, making even her less-great poems impressive for a line or stanza that takes hold in the mind for days. This ability was not the result of either divine inspiration or mental illness, but talent honed through hard work and commitment. Plath “chose the artist’s way. Poetry was her calling,” the animated TED-Ed video by Iseult Gillespie tells us above. As such, she persevered even through severe bouts with depression and many suicide attempts before she finally succumbed at age 30. Plath's semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, which dramatizes these themes, as well as a handful of her darkest poems, have come to popularly symbolize her legacy. You've heard of them even if you've never read them. Yet she composed a “large bulk of poetry,” her husband, poet Ted Hughes, wrote in the introduction to her Collected Works, published and unpublished, never throwing anything out. “She brought every piece she worked on to some final form acceptable to her, rejecting at most the odd verse…. Her attitude to her verse was artisan-like: if she couldn’t get a table out of the material, she was quite happy to get a chair, or even a toy.” His characterization may not sound like the most charitable, and as her literary executor, Hughes was accused of refusing to publish some of her work. But he was also a fellow poet who watched her tirelessly write and revise. Quoting from her journals, Hughes shows how her first collection, 1960’s The Colossus and Other Poems, came together over a period of many years, its title changing every few months, new poems appearing and old ones falling away. The result is a debut whose “breathtaking perspectives on emotion, nature, and art continue to captivate and resonate,” notes the video's narrator. Despite her major presence in the literary magazines and the respect she won especially in the UK, The Colossus and Other Poems would be Plath’s only published collection in her lifetime. It made her a well-respected poet, but did not make her the celebrity she became after the publication of The Bell Jar three years later and her suicide the following month. “Within a week of her death,” writes Time magazine in its review of Ariel in 1966, “intellectual London was hunched over copies of a strange and terrible poem she had written during her last sick slide toward suicide. ‘Daddy’ was its title.” After the publication of Ariel, readers fixed on “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” sensational poems in which “fear, hate, love, death and the poet’s own identity become fused at bleak heat with the figure of her father, and through him, with the guilt of the German exterminators and the suffering of their Jewish victims.” These are poems, wrote Robert Lowell in his preface, that “play Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder.” As feminist scholars embraced her work in the 1970s, a morbid fascination with her image only grew. This is the Plath many people know by word of mouth. But those who haven’t read more of her will miss out. Plath doesn’t shy away from staring at suicide, abuse, and mass murder. She helped to “break the silence surrounding issues of trauma, frustration, and sexuality.” Ariel and her dozens of uncollected poems are also “filled with moving meditations on heartbreak and creativity," including the heartbreak and creativity of motherhood, a theme always fraught with fears of love and death. Plath’s work can be dark, and it can be at once luminous in its imaginative candor. In writing about life with depression and the domestic misery visited on her in her marriage to Hughes, she celebrates life’s sublime pleasures and mourns its depths of suffering, in poem ofter poem, with near-constant ingenuity, wit, and courage. Related Content: Hear Sylvia Plath Read 50+ of Her Dark, Compelling Poems Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes & Peter Porter Read Their Poetry: Free Audio Sylvia Plath, Girl Detective Offers a Hilariously Cheery Take on the Poet’s College Years Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Why Should We Read Sylvia Plath? An Animated Video Makes the Case 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. |
| 5:20p | Discover the Great Medieval Manuscript, the Book of Kells, in a Free Online Course
Last week, we called your attention to the digitization of the Book of Kells, one of the great manuscripts from the medieval period. The digitized manuscript, we should note, comes accompanied by another great resource--a free online course on the Book of Kells. Both digital initiatives are made possible by Trinity College Dublin. The six-week course covers the following topics: The course "is for anyone with an interest in Ireland, medieval studies, history, art, religion and/or popular culture." Sign up for the free course today. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter 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. If you'd like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. It's hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us provide the best free cultural and educational materials. Related Content 80 Free Online History Courses from Great Universities, a subset of our larger collection, 1,300 Free Online Courses from Top Universities The Medieval Masterpiece, the Book of Kells, Is Now Digitized & Put Online Discover the Great Medieval Manuscript, the Book of Kells, in a Free Online Course 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. |
| 6:00p | A Stunning Live Concert Film of Queen Performing in Montreal, Digitally Restored to Perfection (1981)
The legend of Queen is immortal. It needs no further burnishing, not even, some might argue, by the most recent Oscar-winning biopic. The film may gamely recreate the stagecraft of Britain’s most operatic export. But once you’ve seen the real thing, what need of a substitute? For the millions who loved them before Wayne’s World brought them back to global consciousness, and the millions who came to love them afterward, the only thing that could be better than watching live Queen is watching more live Queen.
If you’re one of those millions, you’ll thrill at this concert film of Queen live in Montreal in 1981, “at their near peak,” writes Twisted Sifter. The footage you see here has been lovingly restored from an original release that chopped two different nights' performances together in a hash the band hated. The restoration, as Brian May himself explained in 2007, is now “much much more true to what actually happened at any given moment…. And I do find that once I’m five minutes into the film, I’m caught up in it as a real live show.” It is, he says, “a great piece of work.”
Directed by Saul Swimmer, the documentarian who made George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh, the film was plagued by misunderstanding and hostility, as May describes it. Freddie Mercury hated the experience and the director. “What you will see,” says the guitarist, “is a very edgy, angry band, carving out a performance in a rather uncomfortable situation.” But what performances they are. “High energy, real, and raw.”
Yet no justice was done to the electric rage they brought to the stage those two nights. The film was shot on very high-quality 35mm, then very badly edited with poor attempts at matching sound and video from different performances. In 1984, an even worse VHS version titled We Will Rock You appeared, then it went to DVD in 2001. The band protested but could only remedy the situation when they bought the rights to the film.
In describing the restoration process, May, the irrepressible scientist, gets most excited:
From the original 24-track audio, all the songs, which had been edited, were restored to their full length, and what footage wasn’t cut and discarded was rejoined “with modern digital artistry” into full performances.
Given that the outtakes had disappeared, the result “is a document which concentrates on Freddie,” says May, but no one in the band “is upset” about that. I doubt any Queen fans will be overly upset either. See and hear the gloriously restored film and live audio from Montreal in 1981 here: a fast version of “We Will Rock You,” “Somebody to Love,” “Killer Queen,” “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Another One Bites the Dust,” the slow version of “We Will Rock You,” and “We Are the Champions,” below.
via Twisted Sifter Related Content: Scenes from Bohemian Rhapsody Compared to Real Life: A 21-Minute Compilation Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness A Stunning Live Concert Film of Queen Performing in Montreal, Digitally Restored to Perfection (1981) 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. |
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