FOLLOW US ON:
GET THE NEWSLETTER
CONTACT US
Cats and the meaning of life: John Gray on ‘Feline Philosophy’
11.10.2020
09:13 am
Topics:
Tags:


‘Feline Philosophy,’ out November 24 in US and Canada
 
“Epidemiology and microbiology are better guides to our future than any of our hopes or plans,” the philosopher John Gray wrote nearly 20 years ago in Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. Anyone who entered 2020 with hopes and plans has seen these words vividly illustrated.

Gray’s work makes a strong case that our species is incorrigibly irrational, and it raises questions about humanist beliefs that should be particularly important for those of us on the political left to consider. Among his books are False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths, and Seven Types of Atheism.

In his latest, Feline Philosophy, Gray pursues the deep interest in the nonhuman world that makes his critique of humanism so sharp in fang and claw. Through his reading of Montaigne, Pascal, the Stoics and Epicureans, and Spinoza, as well as literary writers from Dr. Johnson to Mary Gaitskill, Gray considers what cats have to teach us about philosophy and the good life. As I write this, the hardcover edition of the book is #15 on Amazon’s “New Releases in Philosophy” list and #1 in “New Releases in Cat Care.”

John Gray answered a few of my questions about cats by email in October.
 

John Gray (photo by Justine Stoddart)
 
While Feline Philosophy returns to questions that will be familiar to readers of your work, it seems different in some ways from anything else you have published. How did you come to write this book?

I’ve been thinking of writing a book on cats for many years. I’ve always wondered what philosophy would be like if it wasn’t so human-centred. Among all the animals that have cohabited with humans cats resemble us least, so it seemed natural to ask what a feline philosophy would be like. My book is an attempt at answering this question, and tries to imagine how a feline creature equipped with powers of abstraction would think about death, ethics, the nature of love and the meaning of life.

The book is also an ode to cats, expressing my admiration for their life-affirming capacity for happiness and their courage in living their lives without distractions or consolations.

Do you live with cats? Have you always? Can you tell us about a particular cat you have known?

My wife and I lived with four cats over the past thirty years, two Burmese sisters and two Birman brothers. For some years they all lived contentedly together, until mortality began to take its toll on them. The last of them, Julian, died on Xmas Eve 2019 in his 23rd year. He was perhaps the most tranquil of all four, and even when old and a little frail seemed to enjoy every hour of his life.

The most companionable was Sophie, who passed away at the age of 13 around seventeen years ago. She was extraordinarily intelligent and extremely subtle in her insight into the human mind, and very loving.

Why don’t cats share humans’ concern with making the world a better place?

Because they are happy. Wanting to improve the world is a displacement of the impulse to improve yourself. But cats are not inwardly divided as humans tend to be, and don’t want to be anything other than what they already are, so the idea of improving the world doesn’t occur to them. If it did, I suspect they would dismiss it as an uninteresting fantasy.

Your writing often deals with distressing truths about human beings, such as their capacity for cruelty and self-delusion. It can be upsetting. But I read Feline Philosophy with a feeling of serenity, which I attribute to cats’ total incapacity for cruelty or self-delusion. Does contemplating cats provide you relief from thinking about human affairs?

Cats are a window looking out of the human world, so I suppose that’s one reason I love being with them. I think they also help me look at the human world as if from their eyes, with tranquil detachment and a certain incredulity.

Do you know of any works of art that plausibly represent the mental experience of cats, or any other nonhuman animals?

I don’t know of any art works that capture the mental experience of cats. Whether literary or visual, they would be very difficult to produce. There are some books that try to enter into the inner world of dogs, the best of which seems to me to be Sirius (1944) by the British science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon. Perhaps the most brilliant book I know that tries to enter into a nonhuman mind is the Polish writer Andrzej Zaniewski’s Rat (1994).

You suggest that cats’ independence arouses envy and hatred in the people who torture them. Is this a culturally specific diagnosis, or do you think all cat torturers share these motives?

By no means all unhappy people hate and envy cats, but I think pretty well all of those who do are unhappy. That seems to be a universal truth.

I was surprised to learn recently that one of my closest friends, who is a committed vegan and supporter of animal rights, is a cat-hater. When I asked him why, he talked about his love of birds. Can there be meaningful ethical standards for nonhuman animals’ behavior?

I can’t speculate as to why your friend feels as he does, but it may be the innocence with which cats kill and devour other living things that offends him. Perhaps he’d like the natural world to conform to human values, which for me would be a kind of Hell.

I’m not persuaded that it is the well-being of birds that he cares about. Birds are also innocent killers, after all. The British writer J.A. Baker, who in his shamanistic masterpiece The Peregrine (1967), described ten years of his life attempting to inhabit the life of a falcon, loved the bird partly because it lived according to its nature as a predator.

The Cynics took their name from Diogenes’ epithet, “the dog.” Why haven’t any philosophers styled themselves after cats?

That’s a very good question. I don’t know a good answer, but possibly philosophers suspect that cats don’t need them.

As a reader of your work, I am very happy to have finally gotten a list of tips for living well from you. Are there any prescriptive philosophies that have helped you conduct your own life?

No, I can’t think of any prescriptive philosophies that have influenced me. In the early Seventies I met Isaiah Berlin, and talked with him regularly until his death in 1997. His value-pluralist philosophy of competing and often incommensurable values strengthened my suspicion of any strongly prescriptive ethics. In recent years I’ve been more and more influenced by Montaigne, whose scepticism about philosophy as a guide to life appeals to me greatly.

My ten feline hints for living well are of course meant playfully, as examples of feline philosophy. But they might not do much harm if taken seriously.

Feline Philosophy, already out in the UK, will be published in the US and Canada on November 24.

Posted by Oliver Hall
|
11.10.2020
09:13 am
|
‘I went straight to Hell’: Philip K. Dick did NOT like LSD
08.03.2018
08:25 am
Topics:
Tags:


‘The cross took the form of a crossbow, with Christ as the arrow…’
 
The interview with Philip K. Dick embedded below, recorded in Santa Ana on May 17, 1979, touches on many of the author’s experiences and obsessions—the combat his father saw in World War I, how he came to join the Episcopal Church (“My wife said if I didn’t, she’d bust my nose”), the dying rat who shook his faith, the coming of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point, contemporary attitudes towards homosexuality, compulsory ROTC at the University of California, the time he got pancreatitis from using “bad street dope” cut with film developer, the constant threat posed by authoritarian movements—but I’ve cued it up to this vivid description of a bad, bad trip he had in 1964:

I only know of one time where I really took acid. That was Sandoz acid, a giant horse capsule that I got from the University of California, and a friend and I split it. And I don’t know, there must’ve been a whole milligram of it there. It was a gigantic thing, you know, we bought it for five dollars and took it home and we looked at it for a while—looked at it, we were all gonna split it up—and took that, and it was the greatest thing, I’ll tell you.

I went straight to Hell, is what happened. I found myself, you know, the landscape froze over, and there were huge boulders, and there was a deep thrumming, and it was the Day of Wrath, and God was judging me as a sinner, and this lasted for thousands of years and didn’t get any better. It just got worse and worse, and I was in terrible pain, I felt terrible physical pain, and all I could talk was in Latin. Most embarrassing, ‘cause the girl I was with thought I was doing it to annoy her, and I kept saying Libera me domine in die illa. You know, and Agnus dei qui tollis peccata mundi [...] and especially, Tremens factus sum ego et timeotimeo meaning “I’m afraid”—and I said Libera me, domine! Whining like some poor dog that’s been left out in the rain all night. Finally, the girl with me said “Oh, barf” and walked out of the room in disgust.

It was a little bit like when I rolled my VW. I mean, it was all very messy and strange. The only good part of it was when I looked in the refrigerator, and I hadn’t defrosted the refrigerator for a long time, and there was nothing in the freezer compartment. I looked in, and I saw this giant cavern with stalactites and stalagmites, and I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Ashtray, with cigarette butts in it? Most horrible smell I’d ever smelled! But music sounded very beautiful.

About a month later, I got the galleys for Three Stigmata to read over, and I started reading the galleys, and I thought, “Oh dear, I can’t read these galleys. They’re too scary.” Because all the horrible things that I had written about in Three Stigmata seemed to have come true under acid. So I used to warn people then, that was ‘64, and I used to warn people against taking it. I begged people not to take it.

 

 
Dick put one of the characters in A Maze of Death through the same religious bummer, and he wrote about the ways the psychedelic experience resembled mental illness in two mid-sixties essays, “Drugs, Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality” and “Schizophrenia & The Book of Changes.” The latter includes a passing reference to the eternity he spent in Hell one night:

Yes, friends, you, too, can suffer forever; simply take 150 mg [sic] of LSD—and enjoy! If not satisfied, simply mail in—but enough. Because after two thousand years under LSD, participating in the Day of Judgment, one probably will be rather apathetic to asking for one’s five dollars back.

Biographer Lawrence Sutin reports the eyewitness account of Dick’s friend Ray Nelson, who remembers the author “sweating, feeling isolated, reliving the life of a Roman gladiator, speaking in Latin and experiencing a spear thrust through his body.” Sutin also quotes this portion of a 1967 letter Dick wrote to Rich Brown, which discloses a few more details of the acid vision of God:

I perceived Him as a pulsing, furious, throbbing mass of vengeance-seeking authority, demanding an audit (like a sort of metaphysical IRS agent). Fortunately I was able to utter the right words [the “Libera me, Domine” quoted above], and hence got through it. I also saw Christ rise to heaven from the cross, and that was very interesting, too (the cross took the form of a crossbow, with Christ as the arrow; the crossbow launched him at terrific velocity—it happened very fast, once he had been placed in position).

Listen to what the man says, after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
|
08.03.2018
08:25 am
|
Parallel Universe: Incredible pencil drawings of re-imagined cities and buildings
10.03.2017
08:31 am
Topics:
Tags:

01ShinjiOgawaStairsPrague.JPG
‘Stairs Prague.’
 
The artist Shinji Ogawa draws incredibly detailed and accurate representations of cities, buildings, landscapes, and people. His drawings may look like old photographs, they may even look like photo-shopped images, but they are in fact illustrations rendered in pencil and ink.

Ogawa’s intention is not to show how technically brilliant he is an artist but to create an alternate reality where well-known landmarks are often duplicated, replaced, or substituted with other buildings to create “a parallel universe.”

“In these works, identical objects are repeated many times, which never happens in reality,” he says. “It’s like a young person who will never meet himself when he’s older and that’s a paradox. It is forbidden for identical objects to exist and if they do the world of singularities that God created for his own game will be finished. I call this series Perfect World because such perfection duality is a paradox.”

Ogawa’s work suggests the idea that what we see is only one small aspect of reality, one “layer” of what is visible.

“One day I visited Shinshu district in Japan’s Nagano prefecture and the reality of the landscape overwhelmed me,” says Ogawa. “When I stood in a place surrounded by two mountains, I lost myself because there was too much information. The landscape consists of many layers and our perception of the landscape changes in unpredictable ways all the time. The landscape has no limit.”

Ogawa was born in Yamaguchi, Japan, in 1959. He studied art at the Mie University, graduating in 1983. Since then, he has exhibited his distinctive drawings in galleries and museums across Japan and Europe. He describes his work as “meta aesthetic” by which he hopes the viewer will “recognize that there are many tiny, mysterious matters in ordinary life and people can make themselves sublime by paying attention to them.”

See more Ogawa’s work here.
 
02ShinjiOgawaRueEaudeRobec.jpg
‘Rue Eau-de-Robec.’
 
03ShinjiOgawaColosseo.jpg
‘Colisseum.’
 
See more of Ogawa’s incredible work, after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
10.03.2017
08:31 am
|
Meat Packing: Bloody, gruesome, hyperrealistic paintings of chopped-up body parts (NSFW)
09.28.2017
09:27 am
Topics:
Tags:

01FábioMagalhães.jpg
 
So, dear readers, what’s for dinner tonight? Maybe a little chicken? Maybe a nice juicy steak with all the trimmings? Or how about a tasty leg of lamb? Or what do you say to a good ole slab of bacon? Hmmm, sounds delicious, doesn’t it? But wait, why stop there? What about a well-grilled slice of dog? Or maybe some barbecued cat? Or, what about something a bit closer to home?

If you’re willing to chow down on a juicy beef burger then why not a cat burger? Cows have as much personality as cats or dogs and quite a few humans too. Our bovine pals have their likes and dislikes, their mood swings, their affections, they can even fall in love, get stressed, and like to share a private cow joke or two. So what’s the big problem with eating meat if we’re not going to put felines, canines, chimps, and even humans on the menu too?

Oh, don’t tell me you’re suddenly squeamish about a lickle-bitty kitty? Hell, when most of you go into that supermarket you positively drool over all those tasty meaty morsels bagged, sealed, and wrapped like kinky Christmas presents on display. Let’s be honest, we rarely ever think about what the fuck we’re actually looking at before popping it in our basket. I know I don’t. I just laden up the old trolley and head back home to an artery-clogging meat-filled breakfast, lunch, dinner time, and tea. That’s right, just wipe that cow’s ass and pass me mah knife and fork.

Of course, if that’s your take on eating meat products, then you won’t be at all put off by Brazilian artist Fábio Magalhães‘s hyperrealistic paintings of human body parts diced, chopped, and gutted like some poor cow or pig or sheep and neatly bagged up for our consumption. Magalhães’s paintings are simultaneously extraordinary works of painterly beauty and gruesome depictions of bloody horror. His intention is in part to make the viewer think about the meat industry, about eating meat, and what it is we’re actually consuming.

Magalhães started his “intimate” meat portraits with the series O Grande Corpo (The Great Body) in 2008, in which he worked from photographs of his face and body tightly wrapped in polythene. The paintings present a complex visceral image of gruesome horror together with, in some images, an association of auto-eroticism. Magalhães next produced a more bloody series of Retratos Íntimos (Intimate Portraits) which show in incredible detail images of innards, body parts, and blood products all wrapped in polythene. The high quality of his painting technique together with the subject matter make it almost “impossible [for the viewer] not to react with the heart.”

By exposing the viewer to images of brutalized body parts, Magalhães is also asking the viewer to question what it means to be human. He has divested the human body from its imposed religious, psychological, historical, and personal significance to question what makes our existence different from any other animal if all we are is the same flesh and bone?

Magalhães grew up in Bahia in north-eastern Brazil. He took an ealy interest in painting and drawing and spent hours looking at and copying paintings by artists as diverse as Picasso, Caravaggio, and Jackson Pollock from the pages of his father’s encyclopedia. He went on to study at the Fine Arts School of the Federal University of Bahia. Since then, he has been exhibiting his work since 2003, with his paintings shown in group and solo shows across most of South America. You can see more of Fábio Magalhães’s work here.
 
03FábioMagalhães.jpg
 
02FábioMagalhães.jpg
 
See more of Fábio Magalhães’s bloody brilliant paintings, after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
09.28.2017
09:27 am
|
War is Over: When John Lennon and Yoko Ono met Marshall McLuhan
09.07.2017
05:11 pm
Topics:
Tags:


 
Although John Lennon and Yoko Ono were undoubtedly two of the very most famous and talked about people of 1969, Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan was no slouch in the worldwide fame department himself. And so it was an inspired pairing indeed, organized by the Canadian Broadcast Company, when the peace-promoting Beatle and his avant-garde artist wife met up with the celebrated intellectual and author of The Medium is the Massage and Understanding Media on December 19th.

Lennon and Ono were in snowy Toronto doing press to bring attention to their “War is Over” billboard and poster campaign. Huge posters and billboards had been posted in twelve countries proclaiming “War is over! If you want it. Happy Christmas from John & Yoko.” The campaign was launched in the major cities of New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Rome, Athens, Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Helsinki. There were over 30 roadside billboards put up in Toronto alone and a large billboard hung next to the US Armed Forces recruitment office located on New York’s Times Square.
 

 
McLUHAN: “Can you tell me? I just sort of wonder how the ‘War Is Over,’ the wording… the whole thinking. What happened?”

JOHN: “I think the basic idea of the poster event was Yoko’s. She used to do things like that in the avant garde circle, you know. Poster was a sort of medium, media, whatever.”

YOKO: “Medium.”

JOHN: “And then we had one idea for Christmas, which was a bit too vast, you know.”

YOKO: “We wanted to do it.”

JOHN: “We wanted to do it, but we couldn’t get it together in time.”

YOKO: “Maybe next year.”

JOHN: “And to do something specifically at Christmas. And then it got down to, well, if we can’t do that event…”

YOKO: “We did this.”

JOHN: “...what we’ll do is a poster event. And then how do you get posters stuck all around the world, you know. It’s easier said than done. So we just started ringing up and find it out. And at first we’re gonna have… we had some other wording, didn’t we, like, ‘Peace Declared.’ And it started up, there’s a place in New York, where you can have your own newspaper headline, you know. There’s a little shop somewhere in Times Square. And we were wondering how to, sort of like, get it in the newspapers as if it had happened, you know. And it developed from that. Well, we couldn’t get the front page of each newspaper to say war was over, peace declared or whatever.”
 
Much more after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
|
09.07.2017
05:11 pm
|
That time Franz Kafka visited Rudolf Steiner to talk about Theosophy


Franz Kafka c. 1911
 
So here is something I learned wallowing in London Review of Books’ digital archive: Franz Kafka had enough of an interest in Theosophy to visit Rudolf Steiner at his hotel and ask whether to devote his life to study of the occult sciences. Kafka wrote about the meeting in his diary. It’s just like one of his short stories.

In March of 1911, Steiner, who had not yet founded the Anthroposophical Society, delivered a series of lectures in Prague, later published as An Occult Physiology. The date of Kafka’s first diary entry on the lectures, March 26, puts him in the audience for the sixth talk, “The Blood as Manifestation and Instrument of the Human Ego.” Two days later, Kafka met Steiner at the Victoria Hotel on Jungmannstrasse:

In his room I try to show my humility, which I cannot feel, by seeking out a ridiculous place for my hat, I lay it down on a small wooden stand for lacing boots. Table in the middle, I sit facing the window, he on the left side of the table. On the table papers with a few drawings which recall those of the lectures dealing with occult physiology. An issue of the Annalen für Naturphilosophie topped a small pile of the books which seemed to be lying about in other places as well. However, you cannot look around because he keeps trying to hold you with his glance. But if for a moment he does not, then you must watch for the return of his glance. He begins with a few disconnected sentences. So you are Dr Kafka? Have you been interested in theosophy long?

But I push on with my prepared address: I feel that a great part of my being is striving toward theosophy, but at the same time I have the greatest fear of it. That is to say, I am afraid it will result in a new confusion which would be very bad for me, because even my present unhappiness consists only of confusion. This confusion is as follows: My happiness, my abilities, and every possibility of being useful in any way have always been in the literary field. And here I have, to be sure, experienced states (not many) which in my opinion correspond very closely to the clairvoyant states described by you, Herr Doktor, in which I completely dwelt in every idea, but also filled every idea, and in which I not only felt myself at my boundary, but at the boundary of the human in general. Only the calm of enthusiasm, which is probably characteristic of the clairvoyant, was still lacking in those states, even if not completely. I conclude this from the fact that I did not write the best of my works in those states. I cannot now devote myself completely to this literary field, as would be necessary and indeed for various reasons. Aside from my family relationships, I could not live by literature if only, to begin with, because of the slow maturing of my work and its special character; besides, I am prevented also by my health and my character from devoting myself to what is, in the most favourable case, an uncertain life. I have therefore become an official in a social insurance agency. Now these two professions can never be reconciled with one another and admit a common fortune. The smallest good fortune in one becomes a great misfortune in the other. If I have written something good one evening, I am afire the next day in the office and can bring nothing to completion. This back and forth continually becomes worse. Outwardly, I fulfil my duties satisfactorily in the office, not my inner duties, however, and every unfulfilled inner duty becomes a misfortune that never leaves. And to these two never-to-be-reconciled endeavours shall I now add theosophy as a third? Will it not disturb both the others and itself be disturbed by both? Will I, at present already so unhappy a person, be able to carry the three to completion? This is what I have come to ask you, Herr Doktor, for I have a presentiment that if you consider me capable of this, than I can really take it upon myself.

He listened very attentively without apparently looking at me at all, entirely devoted to my words. He nodded from time to time, which he seems to consider an aid to strict concentration. At first a quiet head cold disturbed him, his nose ran, he kept working his handkerchief deep into his nose, one finger at each nostril.

More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
|
08.03.2017
09:05 am
|
Your Mother Should Know: Newly unearthed 1967 Frank Zappa interview taped at a Detroit head shop
05.26.2017
09:22 am
Topics:
Tags:

Mothers ad
 
On November 13th, 1967, Frank Zappa was interviewed by two radio DJs at a head shop in Detroit. The conversation aired on the 18th and was promptly forgotten about. Recently, one of the DJs found the recording, which has been digitized and uploaded for the world to hear.

At the time, Zappa was promoting the upcoming Mothers of Invention gigs in the area. The band were scheduled to perform on December 1st at Ford Auditorium in Detroit, and on the 2nd and 3rd at the Fifth Dimension in Ann Arbor. The interviewers, Joe Doll and Dave Pierce, were involved with the University of Michigan’s student-run community radio station, WCBN. Their 30-minute chat with Zappa aired on Doll’s program, Strobe.
 
clipping
 
Topics include the holdup of the release of the next Mothers album, We’re Only In It For The Money; why rock music is the best means to express his beliefs; questioning societal conventions; and lighter fare like Frank’s thoughts on the Beatles, and his pending appearance on The Monkees. I especially enjoyed hearing FZ talk about marketing, advertising, and sales figures related to the Mothers’ output, partly due to those subjects being taboo for most ‘60s counter-culture acts. The interview does get a bit quarrelsome at times, which makes for stimulating listening, that’s for sure! Mixed Media, the bookstore/head shop where the chat took place, was located in the area of Detroit now called Midtown.

It was Joe Doll who found the tape not long ago, and the recording recently aired on WCBN once again. The audio sounds fantastic, especially when considering it’s nearly 50 years old and was previously thought to have been lost. Listen via Doll’s website, where the digital file is also available to be downloaded for free.
 
FZ
 
Audio from the Mothers of Invention’s performance in Ann Arbor on December 3rd, 1967:
 

Posted by Bart Bealmear
|
05.26.2017
09:22 am
|
The amazing Dr. Hal, Subgenius ‘Master of Church Secrets,’ will answer any question!


Submit to the superior mind of Dr. Hal!
 
One name alone could never properly designate the spellbinding polymath who calls himself Dr. Howll and Dr. Howland Owll, though he is known to hundreds of listeners around the world as the host of the Ask Dr. Hal! show.

A clergyman and theologian of the highest attainment in the Church of the Subgenius (“Master of Church Secrets”), Dr. Hal is a man of great learning, the numerosity of whose specializations is exceeded only by the perspicuity of his understanding, which in turn is outstepped only by the very testicularity of his hauteur. Why, Dr. Hal’s conversation makes Dr. Johnson sound like an analphabetic dirt farmer doing whip-its in an Andy Gump at the Gathering of the Juggalos, if you’ll pardon my French!
 

Ask Dr. Hal! via Laughing Squid
 
When did Dr. Johnson, so comfortably provisioned with nitrous tanks up in his ivory tower, ever give the American working stiff a break like this? “I refute it thus”: for $5, Dr. Hal will answer any question you can fit into an HTML form. Alternatively, “if you’re going to San Francisco,” be sure to wear some dollars in your hair, because your trip to the ¢ity by the pa¥ just got even more expensive: there is a run of Ask Dr. Hal! shows coming up in April at Chez Poulet in the Mission. If Chicken John likes your question, he will even pour you a shot of Fernet.

That’s Dr. Hal’s partner in the live show, Chicken John Rinaldi, the author of The Book of the IS, Volume I: Fail… To WIN! Essays in engineered disperfection and The Book of the Un, Volume 2: Friends of Smiley! Dissertations of dystopia. The live Ask Dr. Hal! show works like this, according to Chicken John:

You fill out the slip, you write your name, you write your question—any question about any topic, left or right, up or down: science, entomology, etymology, Greek mythology, sex, religion, jewelry, what’s the plastic thing on the end of your shoelace called. Aglet, by the way, on the end of your shoe. Aglet.

Much more after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Oliver Hall
|
03.03.2017
09:16 am
|
Science fiction in its infancy: Fantastic illustrations for ‘The War of the Worlds’ from 1906
12.13.2016
09:45 am
Topics:
Tags:

001guerremonde.jpg
 
H. G. Wells must have had a blast writing The War of the Worlds—his classic tale of a martian invasion destroying most of south-east England, for this fictional invention allowed Wells to take wicked revenge on the stifling suburbs and hick towns that had constrained him during his childhood in Kent and his youth when he worked as a draper’s assistant. Wells loathed Little England‘s suburban middle class—which is a tad ironic considering that many of his own views were the epitome of the worst kind of Little Englander.

Wells’ early inspiration for The War of the Worlds came during his time as a teacher working in the environs of grimy, industrial Stoke-on-Trent in the late 1880s. He was astonished to see the night lit red by the iron foundry furnaces—and the relentless alien clanking mechanized sound of machinery. It started an idea that was further developed by reading the works of scientist Thomas Huxley—in particular his propagation of evolutionary theories on natural selection.

Huxley had been considering theories on issues of good and evil from a Darwinian perspective. Huxley suggested goodness was not related to a divine creator but merely the result of other cultural and social developments. To make his point, he offered up the analogy of a gardener tending to his garden by removing the weeds and pests—to ensure what was best could flourish. This line of thinking he further developed with the example of colonization—in particular the English establishing settlements in Tasmania:

They clear away native vegetation, extirpate or drive out the animal population, so far as may be necessary… In their place, they introduce grain and fruit trees; English dogs, sheep, cattle, horses; and Englishmen.

Wells assimilated Huxley’s thoughts and cleverly embedded these in The War of the Worlds—but instead of Englishmen he used an invading army of ruthless Martians to destroy and crush the indigenous population.

Perhaps surprisingly, Wells didn’t think this form of colonization was necessarily a bad thing. He considered it all part of the “evolutionary process” as he later wrote in his book Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought where he revealed some of his own very troubling Little Englander views.

In Anticipations Wells detailed his speculations on the future—where cities would expand, labor-saving devices would offer more leisure time and the world would be run by a “new class of modern efficients.” Wells looked forward to a world that eradicated the physically and mentally ill, the lower classes and “those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people” that would “have to go.” The book was incredibly popular—but was later described as “strong-armed fascism.” Wells was a socialist—so it’s not always the Alt-Right who hold racist views. It was two Catholic writers—G. K. Chesterton and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—who forcefully condemned Wells’ wrong-headed and racist thinking which stemmed from his dodgy interpretation of Darwinian theory.

In spite of Wells’ many odd and often grossly intolerant pronouncements throughout his long life—his works have—as Jorge Luis Borges said—become mythic and will last long after the English language is forgotten. Which is palpably true as Wells concepts of alien invasion (The War of the Worlds) or time travel (The Time Machine) or animal hybrids (The Island of Doctor Moreau) have become embedded in universal culture—identifiable ideas to even those who have never heard of. let alone read H. G. Wells.

Wells started writing The War of the Worlds in 1895. He finished it sometime in early 1896 and revised it in 1897. The story was originally serialized in Pearson’s Magazine in 1897 and was published in book form in 1898—since when it has never been out of print. It has been adapted for the screen, television and even concept albums too many times to mention.

In 1906, Brazilian artist Henrique Alvim Corrêa produced a stunning series of some 130 illustrations for a French limited deluxe edition of The War of the Worlds. Though Corrêa tragically died from tuberculosis at the early age of 34 in 1910—and much of his work was lost during Germany’s invasion during the First World War—his illustrations for The War of the Worlds—created in consultation with Wells—are the definitive illustrations to this classic work of science fiction.
 
002guerremonde.jpg
 
003guerremonde.jpg
 
More invaders from Mars, after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
12.13.2016
09:45 am
|
Primo Levi returns to Auschwitz
12.01.2016
02:24 pm
Topics:
Tags:

00primlevausch.jpg
 
In 1982, the writer Primo Levi returned to Auschwitz concentration camp. It was forty years since he had been imprisoned there. His journey was filmed for a documentary for Italian television.

Levi had been captured as a resistance fighter in Italy. At first, he was sent to an Italian concentration camp at Fossoli. When this was taken over by the Nazis, Levi was transported by cattle truck to Monowitz—one of the three main camps at Auschwitz—on February 21st, 1944.

Levi had thought they were being transported to Austerlitz. No one had ever heard of Auschwitz. Six-hundred -and-fifty Italian Jews were transported. Forty-five people crammed into each sealed train carriage for five days without food or water.

I remember that our breath would freeze on the car bolts and we would compete in scraping off the frost, full of rust as it was, to have a few drops with which to wet our lips.

Levi was imprisoned in Auschwitz for eleven months until the camp was liberated by the Russian army in January 1945. Of the 650 Italian Jews transported to the camp only twenty survived.

In his book Survival in Auschwitz (aka If This Be A Man), Levi wrote of the way he and other prisoners attempted to “adapt”—the man who hummed Mozart; the slave laborer who juggled stones; the prisoner who said he had got the better of Hitler just by being alive.

But adapting was never easy. Even the most trivial of things made it difficult to survive. Shoes, for example. Mismatched pairs would be thrown at the prisoner—one with a heel, one without, one too small, one too big—which made walking impossible. These shoes caused infections—sores that never healed. The prisoners with swollen or infected feet were sent to the infirmary. But as “swollen feet” was not a recognized disease—these men and women were sent to the gas chamber.

In total 1.1 million humans were killed at Auschwitz—90% were Jewish.

One in six of all Jewish people killed during the Holocaust (Shoah) died at Auschwitz.

The ones who adapted to everything are the ones who survived. But the majority did not adapt and died.

Watch Primo Levi’s return to Auschwitz, after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
12.01.2016
02:24 pm
|
Page 1 of 38  1 2 3 >  Last ›