William Blake is a household name, or not far from it, but things get more complicated when it comes to professional description. He was a poet, a painter, and a printmaker, at least insofar as he wrote poetry, painted paintings, and made prints. But we can’t hope to attain even a basic understanding of his legacy if we regard him as one man who happened to have the energy to do three different things. In fact, the ostensibly separate artistic pursuits in which he engaged were but three aspects of a unified act of creation, resulting in the likes of Songs of Innocence and of Experience and his illuminated “prophetic books”: unclassifiable works by “the patron saint of unclassifiable artists.”

So Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, labels him in his new video above. Blake made books, “which he designed, wrote, etched, colored, and printed himself, using a technique that he invented.” They “mix and synthesize categories, and as a result, the artwork of the late seventeen- and early eighteen-hundreds didn’t really know what to make of them.”

It didn’t help that the Royal Academy of Arts, founded when Blake was in adolescence, had laid down its own strict aesthetic, generic, and formal standards. Officially an engraver and accorded the lowly status thereof, Blake devoted his labors to realizing his elaborately idiosyncratic visions using images and words together in ways that no artist had done before.

This choice “to work as maker of words, maker of images, and crossbreeder of both, amounted to a decision to live in incommensurable neighborhoods of meaning,” writes The Cambridge Companion to William Blake author Morris Eaves as quoted by Puschak. Blake swam against the current “of modern human understanding, whose bedrock is the principle of specialization.” Today, nearly two centuries after his death, that principle still obtains, and in some ways more rigidly than ever. But his work remains, from the Songs and the prophetic books to his illustrations of classics like the Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, and even the Biblical Book of Job, which he read as “the story of a man who believes, mistakenly, that salvation requires a slavish obedience to words written in a book.” With his rules, divisions, and categories, man has cut reality apart; through his art, Blake sought to make it whole again.

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Enter an Archive of William Blake’s Fantastical “Illuminated Books”: The Images Are Sublime, and in High Resolution

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books 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.

You’re gearing up to see Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, but you haven’t read the Homeric work. Or you read it so long ago that it feels like you’ve never read it at all. No worries. Above, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, the hosts of The Rest Is History podcast, take you through the major plot lines of the Odyssey, unpacking the literary and historical meaning of the epic’s different tales. It’s a good primer—just what you need to get ready for one of the bigger cinema releases this year. Enjoy!

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Despite having been composed about two and a half millennia before the invention of cinema, Homer’s Odyssey has offered tempting material to generation after generation of filmmakers. Part of the appeal is, of course, the work’s age, which obviates the need for potentially frustrating rights negotiations. But what really captures a director’s imagination about retelling the story of Odysseus’ long journey back to Ithaca must have a great deal to do with the host of monsters he encounters along the way. The giant cannibal Laestrygonians; the sirens, whose call forces Odysseus to lash himself to the mast of his ship; Scylla and Charybdis, guardians of the Strait of Messina; and perhaps most memorably of all, the towering cyclops Polyphemus.

Many or most of these fearsome characters are familiar to us even if we’ve never read the Odyssey, or indeed seen any of its adaptations. In everyday speech, we invoke the sirens’ call when describing an irresistible temptation, or Scylla and Charybdis when describing any set of equal and opposite pitfalls. And it would be a rare man, woman, or even sufficiently educated child who can’t identify the defining feature of a cyclops.

But long before all of these could enter the modern lexicon, they had to be invented in antiquity. In the new Hochelaga video above, host Tommie Trelawny investigates their origins, going over theories that suggest that some or all of these monsters had already made fairly long cultural journeys of their own before Homer put them in Odysseus’ path.

The myth of the cyclops could have been inspired by elephant skulls with large central nasal cavities, or perhaps by a brutish inversion of eyes as a signal of intelligence. It could have been a series of colossal Bronze Age stone statues on the island of Sardinia that constituted the basis for the Laestrygonians. As for the sirens, which we imagine as beautiful women, the pre-Christian ancient Greeks envisioned them as strange winged creatures making promises of knowledge. Scylla and Charybdis, representations of the destructive forces of nature, were a way of reifying the Strait of Messina’s inherent perils. Whatever their origins, all these challengers to Odysseus’ homecoming still fire up the imaginations of filmmakers, especially filmmakers inclined to high-tech spectacle: Christopher Nolan, for instance, the theatrical release of whose Odyssey begins tomorrow. We all know that the hero gets home in the end, but we’ll buy tickets for the monsters.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books 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.

Tucked in the afterward of the second, 1982 edition of Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow’s Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, we find an important, but little-known essay by Foucault himself titled “The Subject and Power.” Here, the French theorist offers what he construes as a summary of his life’s work: spanning 1961’s Madness and Civilization up to his three-volume, unfinished History of Sexuality, still in progress at the time of his death in 1984. He begins by telling us that he has not been, primarily, concerned with power, despite the word’s appearance in his essay’s title, its arguments, and in nearly everything else he has written. Instead, he has sought to discover the “modes of objectification which transform human beings into subjects.”

This distinction may seem abstruse, a needlessly wordy matter of semantics. It is not so for Foucault. In this key critical difference lies the originality of his project, in all its various stages of development. “Power,” as an abstraction, an objective relation of dominance, is static and conceptual, the image of a tyrant on a coin, of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan seated on his throne.

Subjection, subjectification, objectivizing, individualizing, on the other hand—critical terms in Foucault’s vocabulary—are active processes, disciplines, and practices, relationships between individuals and institutions that determine the character of both. These relationships can be located in history, as Foucault does in example after example, and they can also be critically studied in the present, and thus, perhaps, resisted and changed in what he terms “anarchistic struggles.”

Foucault calls for a “new economy of power relations,” and a critical theory that takes “forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point.” For example, in approaching the carceral state, we must examine the processes that divide “the criminals and the ‘good boys,’” processes that function independently of reason. How is it that a system can create classes of people who belong in cages and people who don’t, when the standard rational justification—the protection of society from violence—fails spectacularly to apply in millions of cases? From such excesses, Foucault writes, come two “‘diseases of power’—fascism and Stalinism.” Despite the “inner madness” of these “pathological forms” of state power, “they used to a large extent the ideas and the devices of our political rationality.”

People come to accept that mass incarceration, or invasive medical technologies, or economic deprivation, or mass surveillance and over-policing, is necessary and rational. They do so through the agency of what Foucault calls “pastoral power,” the secularization of religious authority as integral to the Western state.

This form of power cannot be exercised without knowing the inside of people’s minds, without exploring their souls, without making them reveal their innermost secrets. It implies a knowledge of the conscience and an ability to direct it.

In the last years of Foucault’s life, he shifted his focus from institutional discourses and mechanisms—psychiatric, carceral, medical—to disciplinary practices of self-control and the governing of others by “pastoral” means. Rather than ignoring individuality, the modern state, he writes, developed “as a very sophisticated structure, in which individuals can be integrated, under one condition: that this individuality would be shaped in a new form and submitted to a set of very specific patterns.” While writing his monumental History of Sexuality, he gave a series of lectures at Berkeley that explore the modern policing of the self.

In his lectures on “Truth and Subjectivity” (1980), Foucault looks at forms of interrogation and various “truth therapies” that function as subtle forms of coercion. Foucault returned to Berkeley in 1983 and delivered the lecture “Discourse and Truth,” which explores the concept of parrhesia, the Greek term meaning “free speech,” or as he calls it, “truth-telling as an activity.” Through analysis of the tragedies of Euripides and contemporary democratic crises, he reveals the practice of speaking truth to power as a kind of tightly controlled performance. Finally, in his lecture series “The Culture of the Self,” Foucault discusses ancient and modern practices of “self care” or “the care of the self” as technologies designed to produce certain kinds of tightly bounded subjectivities.

• Four Lectures on Truth and Subjectivity (1980)
• Six Lectures on Discourse and Truth (1983)
• Three Lectures on “The Culture of the Self” (1983)

You can hear parts of these lectures or visit our posts with full audio above. Also, over at Ubuweb, download the lectures as mp3s, and hear several earlier talks from Foucault in French, dating all the way back to 1961.

When he began his final series of talks in 1980, the philosopher was asked in an interview with the Daily Californian about the motivations for his critical examinations of power and subjectivity. His reply speaks to both his practical concern for resistance and his almost utopian belief in the limitless potential for human freedom. “No aspect of reality should be allowed to become a definitive and inhuman law for us,” Foucault says.

We have to rise up against all forms of power—but not just power in the narrow sense of the word, referring to the power of a government or of one social group over another: these are only a few particular instances of power.

Power is anything that tends to render immobile and untouchable those things that are offered to us as real, as true, as good.

Read Foucault’s statement of intent, his essay “The Subject and Power,” and learn more about his life and work in the 1993 documentary below.

Foucault’s lecture series will be added to our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

Today, if you want to know about any of the flora or fauna that surround us, you have only to look it up online. After you get your fill of knowledge, you can decide whether or not you want to venture out into the world and see your object of interest in its natural environment (or a controlled simulation thereof). In the Victorian era, things worked a bit differently. Ideally, you’d have grown up in a household, or at least had access to an institution, with the complete set of The Naturalist’s Library, a series of more than 40 volumes on everything from the birds and the bees to the quadrupeds and the marsupialia. Printed in a relatively small format and priced at six shillings each, they brought the intellectual fruits of the naturalist’s enterprise closer to the reach of the everyman than ever before.

While these books offered a good deal of informative text, including memoirs from various famous naturalists of the time, their immediate attraction had more to do with their glorious illustrations, in which colored examples of each species popped right out of its black-and-white habitat. These more than 1,300 color plates, some of the finest that could be seen in any publication of similar scale in the mid-nineteenth century, presented an attractive project to the designer Nicholas Rougeux, whose work we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture.

Having already restored and created digital versions of Euclid’s Elements, Pierre-Joseph Redouté’s Les Roses and Les Liliacées, Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants, and Daniel Berkeley Updike’s Printing Types, among other books, he’s now put online a complete reproduction of the Naturalist’s Library — with, as usual, a blog post about the painstaking restoration and digital re-creation process.

This time, Rougeux has included a section about his use of artificial intelligence, which actually did its part to bring The Naturalist’s Library to his attention in the first place. Not only did AI tools then help him unearth needed sources and fill in visual gaps, they also came in handy when he was brainstorming cover concepts for a printed version. Though Rougeux’s restoration is primarily a web site, free to all to explore, you can also buy your own handsome, large-format physical copy of Plates of the Naturalist’s Library for $295.11 USD.

Easier on the wallet is the series of posters he’s made with the same illustrations, each of which presents one of these categories of creatures great or small at a glance. The original Naturalist’s Library inspired generations to dedicate themselves to understanding the natural world; these new versions, whether in print, online, or on the wall, will no doubt encourage the enthusiasm of more than a few budding naturalists in the generations to come. Visit the reproduction of the Naturalist’s Library here.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books 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.

Many connoisseurs of architecture are enthralled by the modernist philosophy of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and I M Pei, who shared a belief that form follows function, or, as Wright had it, that form and function are one.

Others of us delight in gas stations shaped like teapots and restaurants shaped like fish or doughnuts. If there’s a philosophy behind these insistently playful visions, it likely has something to do with joy…and pulling in tourists.

Art historian John Margolies (1940–2016), responding to the beauty of such quirky visions, scrambled to preserve the evidence, transforming into a respected, self-taught photographer in the process. A Guggenheim Foundation grant and the financial support of architect Philip Johnson allowed him to log over four decades’ worth of trips on America’s blue highways, hoping to capture his quarry before it disappeared for good.

Despite Johnson’s patronage, and his own stints as an Architectural Record editor and Architectural League of New York program director, he seemed to welcome the ruffled minimalist feathers his enthusiasm for mini golf courses, theme motels, and eye-catching roadside attractions occasioned.

On the other hand, he resented when his passions were labelled as “kitsch,” a point that came across in a 1987 interview with the Canadian Globe and Mail:

People generally have thought that what’s important are the large, unique architectural monuments. They think Toronto’s City Hall is important, but not those wonderful gnome’s‑castle gas stations in Toronto, a Detroit influence that crept across the border and polluted your wonderfully conservative environment.

As Margolies foresaw, the type of commercial vernacular architecture he’d loved since boyhood–the type that screams, “Look at me! Look at me”–has become very nearly extinct.

And that is a maximal shame.

Your children may not be able to visit an orange juice stand shaped like an orange or the Leaning Tower of Pizza, but thanks to the Library of Congress, these locales can be pitstops on any virtual family vacation you might undertake.

In July 2017, the library selected the John Margolies Roadside America Photograph Archive as its “free to use and reuse” collection. So linger as long as you’d like and do with these 11,700+ images as you will–make postcards, t‑shirts, souvenir placemats.

(Or eschew your computer entirely—go on a real road trip, and continue Margolies’ work!)

Whatever you decide to do with them, the archive’s homepage has tips for how to best search the 11,710 color slides contained therein. Library staffers have supplemented Margolies’ notes on each image with subject and geographical headings.

Begin your journey through the Library of Congress’ John Margolies Roadside America Photograph Archive here.

We’d love to see your vacation snaps upon your return.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and theater maker in NYC.

This past spring, the oldest continuously operated family-owned Chinese restaurant in the United States served its last plate of chop suey. Pekin Noodle Parlor had been an institution in Butte, Montana’s Chinatown since 1911, long outlasting the town’s gold-rush boom, but according to its final, fifth-generation owner, it couldn’t survive changing attitudes toward dining out in the twenty-twenties. Whether or not COVID-influenced habits or delivery-app addiction are to blame, the Pekin’s closure constituted an occasion to reflect on the history of American Chinese food, and its rapid evolution into a distinct cuisine unto itself.

Take chop suey, which was advertised on the Pekin’s neon sign in lettering larger than the name of the restaurant itself. Often cited as an early “Chinese” dish actually invented by Chinese immigrants in the United States, it may have a certain basis in the tsap seui eaten in Guangdong province from which many of them had come.

But even there, it amounted to a technique for throwing together a hodgepodge of leftovers in a palatable manner; only with its Americanization did it acquire a distinct set of flavors and textures. A similar process seems to have produced General Tso’s chicken, broccoli beef, lo mein, and all the other dishes that the movies have convinced the world Americans eat directly from wire-handled paper boxes.

Whatever Hollywood’s tendency to exaggerate, the popularity of domestic Chinese food is real. According to the Business Insider video just above, Chinese restaurants outnumber even McDonald’s franchises in the U.S. How they reached that point owes more than a little to immigration, as anyone would expect, but also, less obviously, to restrictions on immigration. “Anti-Chinese sentiment was rampant in America in the early 20th century — and had been since the latter half of the 19th century, when as many as 300,000 Chinese miners, farmers, railroad and factory workers came to the U.S.,” writes NPR’s Maria Godoy. The negative reaction to that influx underlay the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; the Immigration Act of 1917, with its “Asiatic Barred Zone”; and the Immigration Act of 1924, which introduced a national-origin quota system.

Despite the ostensibly severe restriction on Chinese immigration per se, the law allowed that “some Chinese business owners in the U.S. could get special merchant visas that allowed them to travel to China, and bring back employees. Only a few types of businesses qualified for this status. In 1915, a federal court added restaurants to that list. Voila! A restaurant boom was born.” Ditching their traditional businesses like laundries, Chinese in the U.S. would “pool their money to start luxury ‘chop suey palaces,’ then each investor would take turns running the joint for a year or 18 months” in order to earn merchant status. What sustained it all was the increasingly insatiable American demand for the food these immigrants had perfected, from chop suey to kung pao chicken to moo goo gai pan and beyond. The story neatly arrives at an American-style moral: where there’s a will, there’s a way — or rather, yǒu zhì zhě, shì jìng chéng.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books 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 the days of popular retrofuturism—say, the first half of the twentieth century—people tended to imagine the world of tomorrow looking very much like the world of today, only with a lot more flying cars, monorails, and videophones. This is true whether those doing the imagining were titans of industry, marketing mavens, idealistic Soviets, or subjects of the Tsar, though we might think that people living under an ancient monarchical system might not expect much change. In some ways we might be right, but as we can see in the 1914 postcards here—printed as Russia entered World War I—the country did anticipate a modern, technological future, though one that still closely resembled its present.

Perhaps few but the most far-sighted of Russians predicted what the ailing empire would endure in the years to come—the disaster of the Great War, and the waves of Revolution and Civil War. Certainly, whoever painted these images foresaw no such catastrophic upheaval.

Although purporting to show us a view of Moscow in the 23rd century, they show the city very happily “still under monarchical rule,” writes A Journey Through Russian Culture, going about its daily life just as it did over three hundred years earlier, “with the addition of everything from subways to airborne public transportation, things probably seen as standard methods of transport for the future.”

Of course, there would be hot-rodded sleds on St. Petersburg Highway with headlights, fancy windshields, and what look like Christmas elves perched in them. Lubyanska Square, further up, would still host military parades of men on horseback, as children whiz by on motorbikes and subway trains rumble underneath. The Central Railway Station, above, might seem entirely unchanged, until one looks up, and sees elevated trams streaming out of the terminal like spider’s silk. Red Square, however, just below, would apparently host drag races, while people in trams and giant dirigibles look on from above.

The images have a children’s book quality about them and the festive air of holiday cards. They were apparently rediscovered only recently when a chocolate company called Eyinem reprinted them on their packaging. Like so much retrofuturism, these seem—in their bustling, yet safe, cheerful orderliness—tailor-made for nostalgic trips through Petrovsky Park, rather than imaginative leaps into the great unknown. For that, we must turn to Russian Futurism, which, both before and after World War I and the Revolution, imagined, helped bring about, but didn’t quite survive the massive technological and political disruption of the next two decades.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

It’s no small project to found a new society, especially when you’re doing it on the scale of a place like Russia. Apart from the considerable practical challenges it entails, there’s also the need for symbols bold enough to represent the underlying ideal. The avant-garde artist Vladimir Tatlin took it upon himself to create just such a symbol in the years after the Russian Revolution. The result is officially known as the Monument to the Third International, named for the organization tasked with the promotion of world communism (often abbreviated to Comintern). But it’s more commonly referred to as Tatlin’s Tower, perhaps in tribute to the artist’s particular vision — one too ambitious for its real-life construction even to begin.

“As part of a large-scale program to replace old czarist monuments with monuments to the revolution, the huge structure was both a symbolic sculpture and functional architecture,” write Smarthistory’s Charles Cramer and Kim Grant. “Designed to straddle the Neva river in St. Petersburg, the 1300 foot (400 meter) iron and glass Monument would surpass Paris’s Eiffel Tower in both scale and complexity.”

Indeed, it would stand taller than the yet-to-be-constructed Empire State Building, at least if you don’t count its antenna. Consisting of “a contracting double helix that spirals upward, supported by a huge diagonal girder,” Tatlin’s Tower would contain four sub-structures, each rotating at a different speed.

Yes, rotating, and “completing a full revolution in accordance with the importance of the institutions conducting their business on the inside,” as Tim Brinkof writes at Big Think. “The cube that contains the legislature would have completed a full rotation once per year. The pyramid above, housing the offices of party executives, would have needed a month. The information center, located at the very peak, would have rotated once a day, offering a 360-degree view of Petrograd,” as St. Petersburg was known in 1920. (It would be re-named Leningrad in 1924 before going back to St. Petersburg in 1991, after the end of the Soviet era.) You can learn more about how it all worked from the Architecture Enthusiast video at the top of the post, and the one from Sideprojects just above.

“Tatlin’s Tower was designed during a time when Communist rule was still nascent and party leaders sought to establish a new and distinctly socialist identity through art,” writes Brinkof. Idealized representations of the ruling class having been aggressively scrapped along with the ruling class itself, the Bolsheviks welcomed any style that could shore up their revolutionary cause, total abstraction included. Alas, though many party officials approved of Tatlin’s design, they commanded nothing like the resources to build it: “Russia would go bankrupt if it tried to acquire the insane amounts of steel and iron needed for the tower’s skeletal framework.” Perhaps Leon Trotsky, one of the project’s dissenters, was right when he called it “impractical and romantic” — and perhaps those are the very qualities that keep Tatlin’s Tower an object of fascination more than a century later.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books 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.

I admit, I sometimes pay a premium at a certain dinner theater chain with a lobby-slash-bar designed to look like classic indie video stores of yore. It’s not only the padded recliners and half-decent grub that keeps me coming back. Nope, it’s the rules. Printed on the menu are a list of disruptive behaviors that will get you unceremoniously tossed out—no refunds and no backsies.

I’ve never seen it happen. Given what people put down for tickets, dinner, drinks, and/or a babysitter, it’s unlikely many risk blowing the evening. But knowing that the theater takes silence seriously brings serious moviegoers peace of mind. What is a movie, after all, without the all-important dialogue, music, and sound cues?

Well, it’s silent film. And even then, when movies were sound-tracked with live accompaniment and dialogue appeared on title cards, people worried very much about distractions. It just so happens that talking and texting (obviously) were the least of early audience’s concerns.

For one thing, the cinema was a place where classes, races, sexes, and ages “mixed much more freely than had been Victorian custom,” notes Rebecca Onion at Slate. There were the usual concerns about corruption of the “delicate sensibilities” of ladies.

“But female cinema-goers were just as likely to be seen as a problem,” writes Onion, “given their supposed propensity for wearing big hats and chatting.” The melting pot demographic of the nickelodeon could be exhilarating, and audience members found they sometimes lost their inhibitions. “Somehow you enter into the spirit of the thing,” observed author W.W. Winters in 1910. “Don’t you slip away from yourself, lose your reticence, reserve, pride, and a few other things?”

These days we’re accustomed to cramming in elbow-to-elbow next to anyone and everyone, and we mostly heed the onscreen cajoling to put our phones away and keep quiet, even when we aren’t in specialty boutique chains or local arthouse theaters. Then again, if certain behaviors weren’t an issue, there wouldn’t be ads prohibiting them.

Enormous hats and applause (and applause with things other than hands) may be relics of cinema’s infancy. But swap out those admonitions for others of the smartphone variety and these lantern slides instructing viewers in 1912 about proper movie theater etiquette don’t look so different from today… sort of.

We might want for intermissions to return, especially after the two-hour mark, and wouldn’t it be nice if, instead of keeping us in our seats for post-credit scenes, big blockbuster movies just said “Good Night”? See more of these delightful public service announcements from 1912 nickelodeons at Back Story Radio.

via Slate

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

Every time the World Cup comes around, or at least since England first and last won it 60 years ago, there’s talk of whether it’ll be brought “back home.” The idea being, of course, that football (or soccer, as it’s called in a couple of the countries hosting this year’s matches) was made in England. However the showdown with Norway goes this Sunday, and indeed how the rest of the World Cup plays out during the week thereafter, something much older — and of much less debatable origins — will be returned to Blighty: the Bayeux Tapestry, which has been kept in the eponymous Normandy town since at least the fourteen-seventies, and most likely centuries earlier than that.

This sizable and intricate piece of embroidered fabric depicts the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the decisive event of the Norman Conquest of England. Legible today as a kind of “medieval comic strip,” as the narrator of this new animated video from the British Museum puts it, the Bayeux Tapestry also reveals “medieval life in amazing detail,” while at the same time “hinting at secrets in its borders.”

For all the scholarly and popular attention paid to it, the work has yet to yield the answers to anywhere near all of its mysteries, nor to lose its fascination through familiarity. It bears, after all, quite a lot of imagery to get familiar with in the first place.

It’s one thing to behold the Bayeux Tapestry through images, however high-resolution, and quite another to behold the real thing. The English have been able to get fairly close to the latter experience since the Victorian era with the aid of the full-size replica, made in 1885, now displayed at the Reading Museum in Berkshire and previously featured here on Open Culture. But this September, the original Bayeux Tapestry will begin its residence at the British Museum, coinciding with the renovation of the Bayeux Museum. (France, for its part, gets a loan of treasures from the ship buried at Sutton Hoo and the Lewis chessmen.) If you get the opportunity to have a look before it’s returned the following year, don’t turn it down; as the World Cup shows us, you can never be sure when the next homecoming will happen.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books 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.

Public and commercial spaces around the world are now lined with imagery of a vertebra-studded battle helmet and statues surrounded by flame. It’s all part of the promotional campaign for Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey, which will begin opening in theaters later this month. Much has been said and written about how the project represents the next phase of Nolan’s ever-grander cinematic ambitions, but banking on the spectacle value of Homer has a long history in filmmaking. When the Italian silent adaptation L’Odissea came out in 1911, for example, it was uncertain even whether audiences would tolerate the 44 minutes it took to depict Odysseus’ arduous journey home.

Though it was released in the fall of 1911 in Italy and the following winter in the U.S., L’Odissea now looks like a summer blockbuster avant la lettre, or ante litteram — or then again, given the material, πρὶν ὀνομασθῆναι, though most of us are still waiting to see just how ancient Nolan and his collaborators have allowed themselves to get.

By the standards of their day, the makers of L’Odissea appear to have spared no expense on sets, costumes, and even visual effects, most notably in its portrayal of the cyclops Polyphemus. Technically, none of it may measure up to what Nolan and company have in store, but the theatrical gestures, shifting color tints, and occasionally battered textures do their part to conjure up a reality of their own.

L’Odissea was actually the second major literary adaptation of that year for its directors, the trio of Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan, and Giuseppe De Liguoro, all working at the studio Milano Films. Here on Open Culture, we’ve previously featured their first, L’Inferno, which dramatizes the first and most famous part of Dante’s Divine Comedy at a length of 73 minutes. That runtime qualified it as the first feature-length film ever produced in Italy, by comparison to which L’Odissea may have actually felt like a more familiar viewing experience to contemporary viewers accustomed to shorts. Now that humanity has been re-acclimated to watching things a few minutes at a time here in the twenty-twenties, Nolan’s nearly three-hour Odyssey looks like a bold move indeed. But then, an epic poem demands an epic interpretation.

Note: If you click “cc” on the YouTube video above, English subtitles will appear.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books 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.

Albert Einstein passionately wooed his first wife Mileva Maric, against his family’s wishes, and the two had a turbulent but intellectually rich relationship that they recorded for posterity in their letters. Einstein and Maric’s love letters have inspired the short film above, My Little Witch (in Serbian, I believe, with English subtitles) and several critical re-evaluations of Einstein’s life and Maric’s influence on his early thought. Some historians have even suggested that Maric—who was also trained in physics—made contributions to Einstein’s early work, a claim hotly disputed and, it seems, poorly substantiated.

The letters—written between 1897 and 1903 and only discovered in 1987—reveal a wealth of previously unknown detail about Maric and the marriage. While the controversy over Maric’s influence on Einstein’s theories raged among academics and viewers of PBS’s controversial documentary, Einstein’s Wife, a scandalous personal item in the letters got much better press. As Einstein and Maric’s relationship deteriorated, and they attempted to scotch tape it together for the sake of their children, the avuncular pacifist wrote a chilling list of “conditions,” in outline form, that his wife must accept upon his return. Lists of Note transcribes them from Walter Isaacson’s biography Einstein: His Life and Universe:

CONDITIONS

A. You will make sure:

1. that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order;
2. that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room;
3. that my bedroom and study are kept neat, and especially that my desk is left for my use only.

B. You will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons. Specifically, You will forego:

1. my sitting at home with you;
2. my going out or travelling with you.

C. You will obey the following points in your relations with me:

1. you will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way;
2. you will stop talking to me if I request it;
3. you will leave my bedroom or study immediately without protest if I request it.

D. You will undertake not to belittle me in front of our children, either through words or behavior.

While it may be unfair to judge anyone’s total character by its most glaring defects, there’s no way to read this without shuddering. Although Einstein tried to preserve the marriage, once they separated for good, he did not lament Mileva’s loss for long. Manjit Kumar tells us in Quantum: Einstein Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality that although “Mileva agreed to his demands and Einstein returned”

[I]t could not last. At the end of July, after just three months in Berlin, Mileva and the boys went back to Zurich. As he stood on the platform waving goodbye, Einstein wept, if not for Mileva and the memories of what had been, then for his two departing sons. But within a matter of weeks he was happily enjoying living alone “in my large apartment in undiminished tranquility.”

Einstein prized his solitude greatly. Another remark shows his difficulty with personal relationships. While he eventually fell in love with his cousin Elsa and finally divorced Maric to marry her in 1919, that marriage too was troubled. Elsa died in 1936 soon after the couple moved to the U.S. Not long after her death, Einstein would write, “I have gotten used extremely well to life here. I live like a bear in my den… This bearishness has been further enhanced by the death of my woman comrade, who was better with other people than I am.”

Einstein’s personal failings might pass by without much comment if he had not, like his hero Gandhi, been elevated to the status of a “secular saint.” Yet, it is also the personal inconsistencies, the weaknesses and petty, even incredibly callous moments, that make so many famous figures’ lives compelling, if also confusing. As Einstein scholar John Stachel says, “Too much of an idol was made of Einstein. He’s not an idol—he’s a human, and that’s much more interesting.”

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.

Alfred Hitchcock was not American, as even casual viewers of his television show could tell right away. He may have exaggerated his Englishness, but like more than a few high-profile outsiders, he also used his cultural position to render the United States all the more vividly in his work. Growing up, he amassed enough second-hand knowledge of the country in which he would one day live that he already knew his way around New York when first he set foot there. But it was some years after he relocated to Hollywood that his films began to feel American — and, eventually, more American than those made by domestic directors, thanks in part to his unconventional perspective on local sources of inspiration.

Image by Diego Delso, via Wikimedia Commons

Take the architecture. Asked by François Truffaut about Norman Bates’ “ghostly house” in Psycho, he explained that “the mysterious atmosphere is, to some extent, quite accidental. For instance, the actual locale of the events is in northern Cali­fornia, where that type of house is very com­mon.” He wasn’t trying to “reconstruct an old-fashioned Universal hor­ror picture atmosphere,” but “simply wanted to be accurate.” Yet the house is reported to have been inspired by an east-coast model as well, and one found in art: Edward Hopper’s paintingHouse by the Railroad(top), from 1925, itself made with reference to a real Victorian mansion that still stands in Haverstraw, New York, between a railroad and a cemetery.

Hitchcock had already made use of Hopper, that most cinematic of American painters. Here on Open Culture, we’ve previously featured the visual influence of Hopper paintings from the nineteen-twenties and thirties like Automat, Night Windows, Hotel Room, and Room in New York on Rear Window. “Both artists explored the loneliness that results from modernization,” writes Tim Brinkhof at Artnet. “Hopper’s paintings and Hitchcock’s films explore the extent to which progress and urban modernization have made the world lonelier and, as a result, capable of acts of explosive, irrational violence,” a capability personified in the disturbed motel-keeper Norman Bates.

“The [Haverstraw] house was built in 1885, near the crest of a hill that rises steeply from the west bank of the Hudson River,” writes Paul Bochner in the Atlantic. “By the turn of the century it had been abandoned; neighborhood children called it haunted.” It was later purchased by the district attorney of Rockland County, whose eldest daughter remembered that, “when she was thirteen, she looked out her bedroom window and saw a man sitting across the road, painting.” The man was, of course, Edward Hopper. She wouldn’t have known, seventeen years before Nighthawks, that he was on his way to becoming one of the country’s most famous artists. As for what the house would one day become in the hands of Alfred Hitchcock, then just starting his career on the other side of the Atlantic, nobody could have imagined.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books 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.

It’s a good bet that your first box of crayons or watercolors was a simple affair of six or so colors… just like the palette belonging to Amenemopet, vizier to Pharaoh Amenhotep III (c.1391 — c.1354 BC), a pleasure-loving patron of the arts whose rule coincided with a period of great prosperity.

Amenemopet’s well-used artist’s palette, above, resides in the Egyptian wing of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Over 3000 years old and carved from a single piece of ivory, the palette is marked “beloved of Re,” a royal reference to the sun god dear to both Amenhotep III and Akhenaton, his son and successor, whose worship of Re resembled monotheism.

As curator Catharine H. Roehrig notes in the Metropolitan’s publication, Life along the Nile: Three Egyptians of Ancient Thebes, the palette “contains the six basic colors of the Egyptian palette, plus two extras: reddish brown, a mixture of red ocher and carbon; and orange, a mixture of orpiment (yellow) and red ocher. The painter could also vary his colors by applying a thicker or thinner layer of paint or by adding white or black to achieve a lighter or darker shade.”

(Careful when mixing that orpiment into your red ocher, kids. It’s a form of arsenic.)

Other minerals that would have been ground and combined with a natural binding agent include gypsum, carbon, iron oxides, blue and green azurite and malachite.

The colors themselves would have had strong symbolism for Amenhotep and his people, and the artist would have made very deliberate—regulated, even—choices as to which pigment to load onto his palm fiber brush when decorating tombs, temples, public buildings, and pottery.

As Jenny Hill writes in Ancient Egypt Online, iwn—color—can also be translated as “disposition,” “character,” “complexion,” or “nature.” She delves into the specifics of each of the six basic colors:

Wadj (green) also means “to flourish” or “to be healthy.” The hieroglyph represented the papyrus plant as well as the green stone malachite (wadj). The color green represented vegetation, new life and fertility. In an interesting parallel with modern terminology, actions which preserved the fertility of the land or promoted life were described as “green.”

Dshr (red) was a powerful color because of its association with blood, in particular the protective power of the blood of Isis…red could also represent anger, chaos and fire and was closely associated with Set, the unpredictable god of storms. Set had red hair, and people with red hair were thought to be connected to him. As a result, the Egyptians described a person in a fit of rage as having a “red heart” or as being “red upon” the thing that made them angry. A person was described as having “red eyes” if they were angry or violent. “To redden” was to die and “making red” was a euphemism for killing.

Irtyu (blue) was the color of the heavens and hence represented the universe. Many temples, sarcophagi and burial vaults have a deep blue roof speckled with tiny yellow stars. Blue is also the color of the Nile and the primeval waters of chaos (known as Nun).

Khenet (yellow) represented that which was eternal and indestructible, and was closely associated with gold (nebu or nebw) and the sun. Gold was thought to be the substance which formed the skin of the gods.

Hdj (white) represented purity and omnipotence. Many sacred animals (hippo, oxen and cows) were white. White clothing was worn during religious rituals and to “wear white sandals” was to be a priest…White was also seen as the opposite of red, because of the latter’s association with rage and chaos, and so the two were often paired to represent completeness.

Kem (black) represented death and the afterlife to the ancient Egyptians. Osiris was given the epithet “the black one” because he was the king of the netherworld, and both he and Anubis (the god of embalming) were portrayed with black faces. The Egyptians also associated black with fertility and resurrection because much of their agriculture was dependent on the rich dark silt deposited on the river banks by the Nile during the inundation. When used to represent resurrection, black and green were interchangeable.

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Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2021.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker in NYC.