Most of our conception of Stoicism, an ancient school of thought much featured here on Open Culture, derives from the writings of just three figures: Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca the Younger. But there were other Stoics, and despite their antiquity, we may yet learn more about them. Take Chrysippus of Soli, who was officially known as the Second Founder of Stoicism due to his influence on its spread throughout the Greek and Roman world. What we know of his demanding work, we know because of references written on scrolls inadvertently preserved in a villa in Herculaneum when nearby Mount Vesuvius erupted in the year 79. To date, most of those “Herculaneum papyri” have been unreadable, but soon, thanks to technologies like X‑ray microtomography and artificial intelligence, that may change.
In 2023, we posted about the decoding of the first word of one such scroll, an achievement made with the incentive of prizes offered by a contest called the Vesuvius Challenge. Now, says its website, “we have completely virtually unwrapped and read PHerc. 1667 — the scroll the Vesuvius Challenge community knows as Scroll 4 — without ever touching its pages.”
What appears to be little more than a big hunk of charcoal, further damaged by several physical unrolling attempts in less technologically advanced times, turns out to be “a philosophical treatise on ethics, and the evidence points to a Stoic work: it turns on human nature, impulse, and the moral progress of human beings.” The scroll’s last preserved column even drops the name of Aristocreon, “nephew and disciple of the great Stoic Chrysippus,” suggesting it dates to the second century BC.
These collaborative efforts, both technological and intellectual, have made PHerc. 1667 “the first Herculaneum papyrus to be digitally unrolled and read in full, end to end, and made available for sustained scholarly study.” But there are also other texts still being deciphered, including PHerc. 139, which has been identified as “Philodemus, On Gods, Book 8 — a treatise by the Epicurean philosopher whose works fill so much of this library.” In their day, Stoicism and Epicureanism stood as similar but rival philosophies, and it seems that the owner of the so-called Villa of the Papyri (possibly Julius Caesar’s father-in-law) had an interest in both of them. Ancient Stoics and Epicureans carried on a lively debate about how to live, some of whose arguments were written down. If the necessary technologies continue to advance, perhaps we’ll one day be able to read them all and pick that conversation up right where they left it off. Learn more about the decoding of the papyrus here and here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
When Eichmann in Jerusalem—Hannah Arendt’s book about Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann’s trial—came out in 1963, it contributed one of the most famous of post-war ideas to the discourse, the “banality of evil.” And the concept at first caused a critical furor. “Enormous controversy centered on what Arendt had written about the conduct of the trial, her depiction of Eichmann, and her discussion of the role of the Jewish Councils,” writes Michael Ezra at Dissent magazine, “Eichmann, she claimed, was not a ‘monster’; instead, she suspected, he was a ‘clown.’”
Arendt blamed victims who were forced to collaborate, critics charged, and made the Nazi officer seem ordinary and unremarkable, relieving him of the extreme moral weight of his responsibility. She answered these charges in an essay titled “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” published in 1964. Here, she aims to clarify the question in her title by arguing that if Eichmann were allowed to represent a monstrous and inhuman system, rather than shockingly ordinary human beings, his conviction would make him a scapegoat and let others off the hook. Instead, she believes that everyone who worked for the regime, whatever their motives, is complicit and morally culpable.
But although most people are culpable of great moral crimes, those who collaborated were not, in fact, criminals. On the contrary, they chose to follow the rules in a demonstrably criminal regime. It’s a nuance that becomes a stark moral challenge. Arendt points out that everyone who served the regime agreed to degrees of violence when they had other options, even if those might be fatal. Quoting Mary McCarthy, she writes, “If somebody points a gun at you and says, ‘Kill your friend or I will kill you,’ he is tempting you, that is all.”
While this circumstance may provide a “legal excuse,” for killing, Arendt seeks to define a “moral issue,” a Socratic principle she had “taken for granted” that we all believed: “It is better to suffer than do wrong,” even when doing wrong is the law. People like Eichmann were not criminals and psychopaths, Arendt argued, but rule-followers protected by social privilege. “It was precisely the members of respectable society,” she writes, “who had not been touched by the intellectual and moral upheaval in the early stages of the Nazi period, who were the first to yield. They simply exchanged one system of values against another,” without reflecting on the morality of the entire new system.
Those who refused, on the other hand, who even “chose to die,” rather than kill, did not have “highly developed intelligence or sophistication in moral matters.” But they were critical thinkers practicing what Socrates called a “silent dialogue between me and myself,” and they refused to face a future where they would have to live with themselves after committing or enabling atrocities. We must remember, Arendt writes, that “whatever else happens, as long as we live we shall have to live together with ourselves.”
Such refusals to participate might be small and private and seemingly ineffectual, but in large enough numbers, they would matter. “All governments,” Arendt writes, quoting James Madison, “rest on consent,” rather than abject obedience. Without the consent of government and corporate employees, the “leader… would be helpless.” Arendt admits the unlikely effectiveness of active opposition to a one-party authoritarian state. And yet when people feel most powerless, most under duress, she writes, an honest “admission of one’s own impotence” can give us “a last remnant of strength” to refuse.
We have only for a moment to imagine what would happen to any of these forms of government if enough people would act “irresponsibly” and refuse support, even without active resistance and rebellion, to see how effective a weapon this could be. It is in fact one of the many variations of nonviolent action and resistance—for instance the power that is potential in civil disobedience.
We have example after example of these kinds of refusals to participate in a murderous system or further its aims. Arendt was aware these actions can come at great cost. The alternatives, she argues, may be far worse.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
Ask anyone, of most any age and in most any society, how we get wood, and you’ll hear one answer: by cutting down trees. It’s therefore natural that any method of lumber production that leaves trees standing will get a lot of attention. Such has been the case with daisugi, the 600-year-old Japanese technique we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture. The Leaf of Life video above explains just what it involves: “Specially planted cedar trees are pruned heavily. Think of it as a giant bonsai.” While these operations take place biennially, “harvesting takes 20 years, and old tree stock grows up to 100 shoots at a time,” producing a stronger and more flexible wood to boot.
Such an unusual method of cultivation, you may imagine, must have arisen in unusual circumstances. As the video explains, daisugi was originally invented in the western Japanese region of Kitayama, well south of the Osaka-Kyoto-Nara conurbation.
Working under a shortage of seedlings and flat terrain, the arborists of Kitayama developed this method of foresting that made it possible to “reduce the number of plantations, make the harvest cycle faster, and produce denser wood as well.” More than a little of the demand for it owed to the fourteenth-century elite vogue for sukiya-zukuri, an elegant form of residential architecture much expanded from the traditional Japanese tea house.
For a more nuts-and-bolts — or rather, trunks-and-branches — explanation of how daisugi is done, have a look at the video just above from Roji Gardening. You first need a sugi tree, also known as a Cryptomeria japonica or Japanese redwood, whose fast growth makes it all work. When it reaches six or seven meters, which takes about as many years, “you do something Western gardeners would never dream of”: cut the trunk at the height of half a meter, prune back the remaining branches, and cultivate the buds that appear on the remaining “platform seeder.” Continue regularly pruning the series of “perfectly vertical” new trunks into which they grow, eventually removing everything but the top 30 centimeters on each. Within a decade, you’ll end up with a good source of wood, if you need it, but also an “ever-changing, interesting statement tree” — that, as a bonus, will also look like something out of a Ghibli movie.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
In summer of 1984, American popular culture was dominated by Ghostbusters, a blockbuster that combined sharp comedy and spectacular visual effects on a scale — and in an unlikely harmony — moviegoers had never seen before. Its great success advanced the careers of everyone involved, not least that of Bill Murray. Having already been an early (if not immediately beloved) Saturday Night Live cast member and given much-praised performances in comedies like Caddyshack, Stripes, and Tootsie, he brought his famously detached sensibility to the role of the ghost-busting Dr. Peter Venkman and thereby became the most in-demand comic actor in Hollywood. When, less than six months later, The Razor’s Edge opened with Murray in the starring role, fans bought tickets in hopes of more laughs.
It’s not as if they hadn’t been warned. The Razor’s Edge was adapted from a novel by W. Somerset Maugham, a popular writer in his day, but hardly a straightforward humorist. On the promotional circuit, Murray stressed that this was “a serious movie,” not a comedy but a drama. Nevertheless, both critics and audiences at the time had trouble accepting him in the role of Larry Darrell, a once-lighthearted young man who comes back from World War I overwhelmed by the need to venture back out into the world in search of the ultimate truths of existence. Murray was driven to make the film (for which he took pay only as co-screenwriter) out of the deep identification he felt with the character, which can only have intensified the sting of its failure.
That Larry was a fellow Chicagoan only explains part of the appeal. Murray’s thirtieth birthday, the birth of his first child, and the death of friends like Doug Kenney and John Belushi (who’s indirectly eulogized in the film) had put him in a reflective state of mind, while his growing wealth and fame brought personal and psychological challenges of their own. The prospect of exotic location shoots in Paris and the Himalayas, where Larry’s peripatetic seeking takes him, may have sweetened the deal. Revisited today, the result has plenty of memorable moments, some of them possessed of genuine beauty and grandeur. Alas, the story Maugham tells in the novel, rich with the subtleties of memory, perception, and deception, doesn’t survive the Hollywood tendencies toward over-compression and literal-mindedness.
It must be said that some of the blame lies with Murray himself, whose goofball instincts clash against the nineteen-twenties setting; as he later admitted, he and director John Byrum were wrong to insist on a period piece. (Just imagine the possibilities of Murray playing a returned Vietnam veteran instead.) Regardless, he continued to follow his inner Larry in the aftermath, decamping to Paris with his young family in order to live and learn far from the American scene he knew. It was there that he encountered the teachings of the mystic G. I. Gurdjieff, whose influence on Murray’s persona we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture. That marked another step along the path of experience that would lead him to play wiser, sadder, yet never entirely unfunny characters in pictures like Wes Anderson’s Rushmore and Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation — and, in so doing, win dramatic respectability after all.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
We’ve previously featured a series of remarkable little films of French artists Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet and Edgar Degas. Here we wrap things up with just one more: a rare glimpse of the great sculptor Auguste Rodin.
The footage was taken in 1915, two years before Rodin’s death. There are several sequences. The first shows the artist at the columned entrance to an unidentified structure, followed by a brief shot of him posing in a garden somewhere. The rest of the film, beginning at the 53-second mark, was clearly shot at the palatial, but dilapidated, Hôtel Biron, which Rodin was using as a studio and second home.
The mansion was built as a private residence in the early 18th century, and served as a Catholic school for girls from 1820 until about 1904, when it became illegal for public money to be used for religious education. When the last of the nuns cleared out, the rooms of the Hôtel Biron were rented out to a diverse group of people that included some notable artists: Jean Cocteau, Isadora Duncan, Henri Matisse and Rainer Maria Rilke, who served for a time as Rodin’s secretary. It was Rilke’s wife, the sculptor Clara Westhoff Rilke, who first told Rodin about the place in 1909.
Rodin first rented four rooms on the main floor, but was alarmed when he learned of plans to sell the property off in pieces to developers. So he made a deal with the government: In exchange for bequeathing all his works to the French state, the sculptor was allowed to occupy the mansion for the rest of his life, and after he died, the estate would become the Musée Rodin.
By the time actor Sacha Guitry and his cameraman arrived to film this scene from Ceux de Chez Nous, or “Those of Our Land,” Rodin was the sole occupant of the Hôtel Biron. The film shows the 74-year-old artist walking down the weed-covered steps of the mansion and working inside, chipping away at a marble statue with a hammer and chisel. When Rodin was asked once about how he created his statues, he said, “I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don’t need.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2012.
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Thinking back to the many childhood grocery-store trips made with their parents, Americans of a certain age will remember nothing so vividly as the Weekly World News. It always stood out on the checkout stand’s impulse-buy rack, in part because of its adherence to stark yet jumbled black-and-white cover designs even as all the other magazines grew slicker and simpler. But what really caught our young and impressionable eyes had even more to do with the contrast between the surrounding publications’ mundane coverage of home, family, and celebrity and the WWN’s unfailingly, screamingly outlandish headlines: “I WAS BIGFOOT’S LOVE SLAVE!” “WILD WEST TOWN ON VENUS!” “BAT BOY LEADS COPS ON 3 STATE CHASE!”
For many of us, the temptation to buy (or at least flip through) an issue of the WWN lay in keeping up with the exploits of Bat Boy, the most prominent of many fictional characters to which its extravagantly lurid yet oddly sober stories returned again and again. Though introduced only in 1992, he has notable ancestors in his industry: take the “Vespertilio-homo,” or “man-bat,” a race found to have made its home on the moon in 1835.
Or at least that’s what the readers of New York newspaper the Sun were told in a series of illustrated articles, later collected in book form, that credited the discovery to the astronomer Sir John Herschel. Herschel was real, but as the Sun admitted the following month, the Vespertilio-homo wasn’t — nor were the unicorn-goats, miniature zebras, and beavers walking on their hind legs reportedly also seen through his telescope.
The “Great Moon Hoax,” as it’s now known, and about which you can learn more from the BBC video at the top of the post, wasn’t Herschel’s doing. A reporter called Richard Adams Locke admitted to the fabrication, seemingly motivated by a desire to boost the circulation of the Sun, one of the many “penny paper” tabloids of the day that lived and died by sensation and scandal, and also to make light of the extravagant astronomical claims then in the air. Much like the writers of the Weekly World News — or later, the Onion — Locke wanted less to fool readers than to entertain them by satirizing an over-credulous popular culture. Yet what he pioneered was, quite literally, “fake news,” though that label by now refers to media created with clear intent to deceive. The world has changed since the eighteen-thirties, and indeed, even since Bat Boy’s late twentieth-century heyday, when the WWN predicted his election as President of the United States in 2028. Stranger things have certainly happened.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
We may be conditioned to offering an opinion at the push of a button, but before venturing on the question of whether we can, or should, separate the art from the artist, it seems ever prudent to ask, “Which art and which artist?” There are the usual case studies, in addition to the crop of disgraced celebrities: Ezra Pound, P.G. Wodehouse, and, in philosophy, Martin Heidegger. One case of a very troubling artist, Salvador Dalí, gets less attention, but offers us much material for consideration, especially alongside an essay by George Orwell, who ruminated on the question and called Dalí both “a disgusting human being” and an artist of undeniably “exceptional gifts.”
Like these other figures, Dalí has long been alleged to have had fascist sympathies, a charge that goes back to the 1930s and perhaps originated with his fellow Surrealists, especially André Breton, who put Dalí on “trial” in 1934 for “the glorification of Hitlerian fascism” and expelled him from the movement. The Surrealists, most of whom were communists, were provoked by Dalí’s disdain for their politics, expressed in the likeness of Lenin in The Enigma of William Tell. It’s also true that Dalí seemed to publicly profess an admiration for Hitler. But as with everything he did, it’s impossible to tell how seriously we can take any of his pronouncements.
Another painting, 1939’s The Enigma of Hitler is even more ambiguous than The Enigma of William Tell, a collection of dream images, with the recurring melting objects, crutches, mollusk shells, and food images, set around a tiny portrait of the German dictator. Kamila Kocialkowska suggests that psychoanalytic motifs in the painting, some rather obvious, reflect Hitler’s “fear of impotence, and certain commentators have noted that Hitler’s enthusiastic promotion of nationalistic breeding can further explain the innuendo present in this image.”
The Hitler obsession began years earlier. “I often dreamed of Hitler as a woman,” Dalí supposedly said,
His flesh, which I imagined as whiter than white, ravished me. I painted a Hitlerian wet nurse sitting kneeling in a puddle of water….
There was no reason for me to stop telling one and all that to me Hitler embodied the perfect image of the great masochist who would unleash a world war solely for the pleasure of losing and burying himself beneath the rubble.
The painting Dalí alludes to, The Weaning of Furniture-Nutrition, is the work that first raised Breton’s ire, since “Dalí had originally painted a swastika on the nurse’s armband,” notes art historian Robin Adèle Greeley, “which the Surrealists later forced him to paint out.” Dalí later claimed that his Hitler paintings “subvert fascist ideologies,” Greeley writes: “Breton and company appear not to have appreciated a fellow Surrealist suggesting that there were connections to be made between bourgeois childhoods such as their own and the family life of the Nazi dictator.” Likewise, his creepy dream-language above is hardly more straightforward than the paintings, though he did write in The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí, “Hitler turned me on in the highest.”
Other pieces of evidence for Dalí’s politics are also compelling but still circumstantial, such as his friendship with the proudly professed Nazi-sympathizer, Wallis Simpson, the American Duchess of Windsor, and his admiration for Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, whom he called, as Lauren Oyler points out at Vice, “the greatest hero of Spain.” (Dalí painted a portrait of Franco’s daughter). Oyler points out that Dalí’s “wickedness,” as Orwell put it in his scathing review of the artist’s “autobiography” (a spurious category in the case of serial fabricator Dalí), matters even if it were pure provocation rather than genuine commitment.
The claim carries more weight when applied to the artist’s attested sadism in general. Dalí spends a good part of his Confessions delighting in stories of brutal physical and sexual assault and cruelty to animals. (The famous Dalí Atomicus photo, his collaboration with Philippe Halsman, required 28 attempts, Oyler notes, and “each of those attempts involved throwing three cats in the air and flinging buckets of water at them.”) Whether or not Dalí was a genuine Nazi sympathizer or an amoral right-wing troll, Orwell is completely unwilling to give him a pass for generally cruel, abusive behavior.
“In his outlook,” writes Orwell, “his character, the bedrock decency of a human being does not exist. He is as anti-social as a flea. Clearly, such people are undesirable, and a society in which they can flourish has something wrong with it.” But perhaps Dalí means to say exactly that. Allowing for the possibility, Orwell is also unwilling to toss aside Dalí’s work. The artist, he writes “has fifty times more talent than most of the people who would denounce his morals and jeer at his paintings.”
When it comes to the question of Dalí as fascist, some less-than-nuanced views of his work (“Marxist criticism has a short way with such phenomena as Surrealism,” writes Orwell) might miss the mark. The Weaning of Furniture-Nutrition, writes Greeley, seems to reveal “a secret about his own middle-class background” as a nursery for fascism, especially given the “disturbing” fact that “the nurse is a portrait of Dalí’s own, and that she droops hollowly on the shore near the painter’s Catalan childhood home, suggesting that Dalí himself might have had a ‘hitlerian’ upbringing.”
Greeley’s further elaboration on Dalí’s conflict with Breton further weakens the charges against him. “Ten days before the February meeting, he had defended himself to Breton,” she writes, “claiming, ‘I am hitlerian neither in fact nor in intention.’ ” He pointed out that the Nazis would likely burn his work, and chastised leftists for “their lack of insight into fascism.”
The question of Dalí’s fascist sympathies is incoherent without the biography, and the biographical evidence against Dalí seems fairly thin. Nonetheless, he has emerged from history as a violent, vicious, opportunistic person. How much this should matter to our appreciation of his art is a matter you’ll have to decide for yourself.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.
Leonardo da Vinci was a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect, to provide only his most widely agreed-upon list of occupations. It is he, more than any other single figure, who comes to mind when we think of the ideal of the “Renaissance man.” Though considered rather less practical today than it was in fifteenth-century Italy, the relentless questing for both scientific knowledge and artistic perfection implied by that title has never entirely ceased to appeal. For aspiring modern Renaissance men, one of the most enduring sources of inspiration remains Leonardo’s own notebooks, full of backwards-written explorations of ideas both realized and unrealized that move unpredictably from one intellectual domain to another.
That last quality seems to have displeased the sculptor Pompeo Leoni, who eventually came into possession of Leonardo’s notebooks after they were inherited by his last student Francesco Melzi. Leoni “dismounted and cut the folios, separating the materials into two albums according
to his own judgement,” notes the Italian Embassy in London, “the larger portion for technical and scientific topics,” and the smaller for “Leonardo’s artistic and figurative workings.”
In the early seventeenth century, Leoni’s son-in-law sold the former album, now known as the Codex Atlanticus, to a count who in turn donated it to the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana; the latter ended up in England’s Royal Collection by 1670 or so. Only now have they been reunited, thanks to a project called Leonardotheka.
The culmination of a decade’s work involving the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana as well as the Biblioteca Leonardiana and the Royal Collection Trust, Leonardotheka digitally reunites those albums after four centuries apart. Such a task also entailed the reconstruction of 50 long-sundered individual pages and their replacement into their original context. The notebooks combined “decades of anatomical studies, flying machines, landscapes, and grocery-list-adjacent musings, all tangled together the way Leonardo’s mind may have worked,” writes Anastasia Scott at Discover. Yet he’d “likely never intended to separate art from science in the first place. A single page might hold a machine, a horse, and a poem, and Leoni severed connections the artist had made on purpose.” With those connections restored, we here in the twenty-twenties — a time plagued by its own doubts about the relationship between what we now call “humanities” and “STEM” — can see once again how a real Renaissance mind worked. Enter the Leonardothekahere.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
They do, just not often or well. Their meals rarely rate recipes, let alone cookbooks.
Those cookbooks do exist though.…
The mostly conceptual Starving Artist Cookbook put together by EIDIA (aka artists Paul Lamarre and Melissa Wolf) comes close to the spirit of sustaining life through meager ingredients… like spaghetti or 4 pages of shredded Pravda.
Not so this other title, which approaches cute overload with an abundance of Instagram-worthy illustrated fare—mojitos, an unstructured berry tart, a “manly” burger.…
Do “starving” artists no longer fear being outed as posers?
Successful artists may not worry about that, as they eat whatever and however they want.
So seriously, their culinary efforts led to cookbooks, which the Art Assignment’s host, curator Sarah Urist Green, tried out on camera.
O’Keeffe, who grew up in Wisconsin on homemade yogurt, homemade cheese, and plentiful homegrown produce, ground her own flour in order to bake daily loaves of whole wheat bread.
Green treats viewers to a brief overview of O’Keeffe’s life and work as she struggles with the grinder. (You might get the same, or better, results if you take a $5 bill to a good bakery right at opening.)
She also tackles the wheat germ Tiger’s Milk smoothie advocated by Adelle Davis, a nutritionist whom O’Keeffe admired, and Green Chiles with Garlic and Oil and Fried Eggs, using recipes from the cookbooks A Painter’s Kitchen and Dinner with Georgia O’Keeffe.
Before attempting the same, you might want to watch the Kahlo-centric episode, above, in which Green discovers a much better method for roasting the poblano peppers she haplessly substituted for New Mexico chiles in O’Keeffe’s egg dish.
Here, they’re used for Chiles Rellenos, a dish whose pronunciation the self-effacing Green butchers, along with a multitude of other Spanish phrases, a fact not lost on the video’s Youtube commenters. They also take issue with the presence of plantains, her preparation of the Nopales Salad, and her cooking skills in general. No wonder Green—a self-proclaimed wussy where serranos are concerned—seems so eager to reach for a shot of tequila as dinner is finally served.
Kahlo herself learned to cook from her mother’s copy of El Nuevo Cocinero Mejicano, and from husband Diego Rivera’s first wife, Guadalupe (leading one to wonder if some of that cookbook’s recipes aren’t misattributed to the more famous cook).
As with the O’Keeffe video and the cookbooks cited herein, there’s a wealth of vintage photos and reproduced artwork on display.
Even though Green alludes to Kahlo’s dark side, sensitive stomachs might have trouble with the inclusion of the graphically violent Unos Quantos Piquetitos. Another painting, My Nurse and I is at least related to eating, if not cooking and recipes.
At one time or another, we all feel twinges of anxiety about what will constitute the legacy we leave behind. Jerry Gretzinger may well be subject to just the same discomfort, but at least he can point to the Map: an enormous representation, made of thousands and thousands of individually created and continually modified panels, of an entirely fictional land called Ukrania. You can see Jerry’s Map painstakingly laid out in its most up-to-date state in the new People Make Games video above. As interesting as the product is so far, the work that goes into it is just as compelling, which Gretzinger performs every day according to a complex and strictly defined set of procedures dictated by a deck of heavily modified playing cards.
It would take an astute listener to grasp the rules of the project the first time through, but they’re also available for supplementary study at the official site of Gretzinger’s map. They may bring to mind Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, the deck of cards printed with suggestions meant to dislodge creative jams in the music studio or elsewhere.
The map itself may look more reminiscent of the work of Henry Darger, another “outsider artist” who produced riots of color and haphazard-looking materials with an obsessive underlying order of their own. But unlike Darger, who died in obscurity only for his askew epics to be discovered among his belongings, Gretzinger has become famous for his creation in his lifetime, so much so that there exists an active subreddit of amateurs following his example.
Still, the Map did first have to be rediscovered. What Gretzinger began as the expansion of idle doodles in urban form made during breaks at the ball bearing factory in 1963 had to be shelved in the eighties, when a clothing business he’d started with his wife took off. A couple of decades thereafter, his son’s discovery of the Map in the attic inspired Gretzinger to resume work on it, which has continued apace ever since. When interviewed, he sounds less like a creator than an observer, helplessly watching as the city of Ukrania becomes more abstract as it grows — and as great swathes are inexorably consumed by a white space, made of scraps of his own correspondence and other life artifacts, that he portentously calls “the Void.” Now that he’s in his mid-eighties, Gretzinger appears to find it all more freighted with meaning than ever. Sooner or later, alas the Void comes for us all; what’s left to us is how we prepare for it.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
The history of moral philosophy in the West hinges principally on a handful of questions: Is there a God of some sort? An afterlife? Free will? And, perhaps most pressingly for humanists, what exactly is the nature of our obligations to others? The latter question has long occupied philosophers like Immanuel Kant, whose extreme formulation—the “categorical imperative”—flatly rules out making ethical decisions dependent upon particular situations. Kant’s famous example, one that generally gets repeated with a nod to Godwin, involves an axe murderer showing up at your door and asking for the whereabouts of a visiting friend. In Kant’s estimation, telling a lie in this case justifies telling a lie at any time, for any reason. Therefore, it is unethical.
In the video at the top of the post, Harry Shearer narrates a script about Kant’s maxim written by philosopher Nigel Warburton, with whimsical illustrations provided by Cognitive. Part of the BBC and Open University’s “A History of Ideas” series, the video—one of four dealing with moral philosophy—also explains how Kant’s approach to ethics differs from those of utilitarianism.
In the video above, Shearer describes the most utilitarian of thought experiments, the “Trolley Problem.” As described by philosopher Philippa Foot, this scenario imagines having to sacrifice the life of one for those of many. But there is a twist—the second version involves the added crime of physically murdering one person, up close and personal, to save several. An analogous but converse theory is that of philosopher Peter Singer (below) who proposes that our obligations to people in peril right in front of us equal our obligations to those on the other side of the world.
Finally, the last video surveys one of the thorniest issues in moral philosophical history—the “is/ought” divide, as problematic as the ancient Euthyphro dilemma. How, asked David Hume, are we to deduce moral principles from facts about the world that have no moral dimension? Particularly when those facts are never conclusive, are subject to revision, and when new ones get uncovered all the time? The question introduces a seemingly unbridgeable chasm between facts and values. Moral judgments founded on what is or isn’t “natural” flounder before our terror of much of what nature does, and the very partial and fallible nature of our knowledge of it.
The problem is as startling as Hume’s critique of causality, and in part caused Kant to remark that Hume had awakened him from a “dogmatic slumber.” What may strike viewers of the series is just how abstract these questions and examples are—how divorced from the messiness of real world politics, with the exception, perhaps, of Peter Singer. It may be instructive that political philosophy forms a separate branch in the West. While these problems are certainly difficult enough to trouble the sleep of just about any thoughtful person, in our day-to-day lives, our decision making process seems to be much messier, and much more situational, than we’re probably ever aware of.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
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