From Alain de Botton’ School of Life comes the latest in a series of animated introductions to influential literary figures. Previous installments gave us a look at the life and work of Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf. This one takes us inside the literary world of Jane Austen. And, as always, de Botton puts an accent on how reading literature can change your life. “Jane Austen’s novels are so readable and so interesting…” notes The School of Life Youtube channel,” because she wasn’t an ordinary kind of novelist: she wanted her work to help us to be better and wiser people. Her novels [available on this list] had a philosophy of personal development at their heart.” The video above expands on that idea. Enjoy.
I admit it now, I was once an avid listener of the soothing new age music of Enya. At the time, in my musical circles, this was not cool, and at the time I cared about such things. So Enya was my guilty secret. I didn’t need to work that hard to hide my affection. I only listened to Enya at night, as I lay in bed alone and drifted off. I used my Enya cassette tapes (yes tapes), you see, to put myself to sleep.
I’ve had other sleep favorites. Beethoven, Mozart, Bach… interpretations of Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach by synthesizer wizard Wendy Carlos…. It may seem disparaging to say that a certain composer’s music lulls one to sleep, but I think it’s just the opposite. So does composer and musician Max Richter, who has created an eight-hour piece called “Sleep” that is “meant to be slept through,” says Richter. (There’s also a one hour version that’s more readily available for purchase.) Its gentle waves of strings, voice, piano, and synths are like a musical Lethe one floats on into oblivion.
Richter has performed the piece with other musicians, just recently overnight on a September 27th BBC Radio 3 broadcast, “the longest live broadcast,” writes The New Yorker, “of a single piece of music in the station’s history.” The small audience in attendance mostly stayed awake. One member reportedly hallucinated. The composition consists of thirty-one themed movements (Hear “Dream 3 (in the midst of my life)” above). Lovers of modern minimalist composers like Philip Glass and William Basinski will notice similar uses of drone notes and repetition in “Sleep.” You may even hear a touch of Enya….
Richter’s is the perfect music to accompany me into dreamland; even those movements that include a vocalist use the voice as a wordless, ethereal instrument, as so many ambient musicians do. I’ve come across more than a few favorite ambient and minimalist composers late at night, when Spotify begins recommending sleep playlists. “Sleep,” it turns out, “is one of Spotify’s most popular categories,” according to Billboard. However, the “world’s favorite choice when choosing music to unwind” may surprise you: red-headed English singer/songwriter Ed Sheeran.
I’m not personally a fan of his music, but even if I were, I can’t imagine listening to it as I settle down to sleep. Nonetheless, millions of people stream Sheeran’s songs on repeat at bedtime, along with other pop artists like Ellie Goulding, John Legend, Sam Smith, and Rihanna. To each their own, I guess. Hear a playlist of the most-streamed “sleep” music on Spotify above. (If you don’t have Spotify’s free software, download it here.) If none of these tunes do it for you, consider giving iTunes’ 27th most popular podcast, Sleep With Me, a chance. Or, let us know in the comments below what music, if any, helps calm your nerves and soothe your tired brain as you climb into bed after a long day.
If you’ve ever had any doubt, for some reason or other, that rock and roll descended directly from the blues, the video above, a history of the blues in 50 riffs, should convince you. And while you might think a blues history that ends in rock n roll would start with Robert Johnson, this guitarist reaches back to the country blues of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Black Snake Moan” from 1928 then moves through legendarily tuneful players like Skip James and Reverend Gary Davis before we get to the infamous Mr. Johnson.
Big Bill Broonzy is, as he should be, represented. Other country blues greats like soft-spoken farmer Mississippi John Hurt and hardened felon Lead Belly, “King of the 12 String Guitar,” are not. Say what you will about that. The recordings these artists made with Okeh Records and Alan Lomax, despite their commercial failure in the 30s, midwifed the blues revival of the fifties and sixties. Hear Lead Belly’s version of folk ballad “Gallows Pole” above, a song Led Zeppelin made famous. Lead Belly’s acoustic blues inspired everyone from John Fogerty to Skiffle King Lonnie Donegan, Pete Seeger to Jimmy Page, as did the rootsy country blues of Lightnin’ Hopkins, who is included in the 50 riffs. As are John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and BB King’s electric styles—all of them picked up by blues rock revivalists, including, of course, Jimi Hendrix.
Hendrix’s “Red House” riff makes the cut here, as we move slowly into rock and roll. But before we get to Hendrix, we must first check in with two other Kings, Freddie and Albert—especially Albert. Hendrix “was star struck,” says Rolling Stone, “when his hero [Albert King] opened for him at the Fillmore in 1967.” For his part, King said, “I taught [Hendrix] a lesson about the blues. I could have easily played his songs, but he couldn’t play mine.” See King play “Born Under a Bad Sign” in 1981, above, and hear why Hendrix worshipped him.
Mississippi blues moved to Memphis, Chicago, New York and to Texas, where by the 70s and 80s, ZZ Top and Stevie Ray Vaughan added their own southwest roadhouse swagger. (No Johnny Winter, alas.) Many people will be pleased to see Irish rocker Rory Gallagher in the mix, and amused that The Blues Brothers get a mention. Many more usual suspects appear, and a few unusual picks. I’m very glad to hear a brief R.L. Burnside riff. The White Stripes, Tedeschi Trucks Band, and Joe Bonamassa round things out into the 2010’s. Everyone will miss their favorite blues player. (As usual, the powerhouse gospel blues guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe gets overlooked.) I would love to see included in any history of blues such obscure but brilliant guitarists as Evan Johns (above), whose rockabilly blues guitar freakouts sound like nothing else. Or John Dee Holeman, below, whose effortless, understated rhythm playing goes unmatched in my book.
Like so many of the bluesmen who came before them, these gentlemen seem to represent a dying breed. And yet the blues lives on and evolves in artists like Gary Clark Jr., The Black Keys, and Alabama Shakes. And of course there’s the prodigy Bonamassa, whom you absolutely have to see below at age 12, jamming with experimental country speed demon Danny Gatton’s band (he gets going around 1:05).
If you’re missing your favorites, give them a shout out below. Who do you think has to be included in any history of the blues—told in riffs or otherwise—and why?
Does any couple loom larger in the world of twentieth-century American art than Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe? Not if you believe the Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. If you go there, you’ll find “thousands of letters and hundreds of photographs in addition to a collection of literary manuscripts, scrapbooks, ephemera, fine art, and realia, primarily dating between 1880 and 1980, which document the lives and careers of the photographer/publisher/gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz and the painter Georgia O’Keeffe.” But you can even view some of its material here on the internet, including photos by and of “Stieglitz and his circle of artists and writers” and “a variety of paintings and drawings, letters and ephemera, and medals and awards.”
They even enjoyed a kind of artistic togetherness during the long-distance stretches of that relationship, when O’Keeffe “discovered her love for the landscape of the American Southwest and spent increasing amounts of time living and working there.”
And while many of us already know about her favorite subjects and the ways in which she realized them on canvas, fewer of us know about the efforts Stieglitz took to make photography into not just a legitimate but respected art form. To get a sense of what that took, start with Stieglitz’s autochromes (below), some of the earliest ventures made by an American artist into the realm of color photography. Both Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, each in there own medium, made us see things differently. How many art-world power couples can say the same?
If you’re near Pasadena, California, stop by the Flower Pepper Gallery and see Facade, the new exhibition featuring the work of visual artist Randy Hage. For decades now, Hage has been fascinated by the beauty of aging structures in New York City. This led him, beginning in the late 1990s, to start photographing aging storefronts in the city, “with their hand painted signs, layers of architecture, wonderful patinas and intriguing history.” Later, he decided to preserve their memory in miniaturized, hyper-realistic sculptures (like the ones now on display in Pasadena through November 18th). In the video above, see just how perfectly Hage manages to recreate New York storefronts in miniature. Here’s another famous-but-now-defunct facade you might recognize:
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In modern times, we don’t regard female musicians as in and of themselves unusual. Our rosters of favorite rockers, pop-stars, solo singer-songwriters, and what have you might well feature as many women as men — or, depending on the subgenre, many more women than men. But those of us who listen to a great deal of classical music might feel a tad sheepish about how much more heavily male our playlists slant, at least in terms of the composers. For a variety of historical and cultural reasons, the classical canon can feel like a man’s world indeed.
But it doesn’t have to! The Spotify playlist above, “1200 Years of Women Composers: From Hildegard To Higdon,” reveals that women started shaping what we now know as classical music far longer ago than most of us realize. (If you don’t have Spotify’s free software, download it here.) The playlist, which contains over 900 pieces and will take you days to listen to, begins in medieval times with the Byzantine abbess, poet, composer, and hymnographer Kassia (shown above) and ends with female composers from around the world not only living but (especially by the standards of those who write orchestral music) still young, like Misato Mochizuki, Helena Tulve, and Lera Auerbach.
This comes arranged by Spotify Classical Playlists, whose site describes how the playlist offers not just an anthology of women composers, but also “a brief history of western classical music. It’s really fascinating to hear music constantly reinventing itself from the monophonic and deeply spiritual medieval chant of Hildegard [of Bingen] all the way into Higdon’s lush and ultra-modern percussion concerto.” And before you begin this epic listen, bear in mind the quote from Faust that appears there: “Das Ewig Weibliche Zieht ins hinan” — “The eternal feminine leads us upwards.”
Creative Commons image by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin
When one enters the world of The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest epic poem we know of, one enters a world lost to time. Though its strange gods and customs would have seemed perfectly natural to its inhabitants, the culture of Gilgamesh has so far receded from historical memory that there’s little left with which we might identify. Scholars believe Gilgamesh the demi-god mythological character may have descended from legends (such as a 126-year reign and superhuman strength) told about a historical 5th king of Uruk. Buried under the fantastic stories lies some documentary impulse. On the other hand, Gilgamesh—like all mythology—exists outside of time. Gilgamesh and Enkidu always kill the Bull of Heaven, again and again forever. That, perhaps, is the secret Gilgamesh discovers at the end of his long journey, the secret of Keats’ Grecian Urn: eternal life resides only in works of art.
And perhaps the only way to approach some common understanding of myths as both products of their age and as archetypes in realms of pure thought comes through a deep immersion in their historical languages. In the case of Gilgamesh, that means learning the extraordinarily long-lived Akkadian, a Mesopotamian language that dates from about 2,800 BCE to around 100 CE. In order to do so, archeologists and Assyriologists had to decipher fragments of cuneiform stone tablets like those on which Gilgamesh was discovered. The task proved exceptionally difficult, such that when George Smith announced his translation of the epic’s so-called “Flood Tablet” in 1872, it had lain “undisturbed in the [British] Museum for nearly 20 years,” writes The Telegraph, since “there were so few people in the world able to read ancient cuneiform.”
Cuneiform is not a language, but an alphabet. The script’s wedge-shaped letters (cuneus is Latin for wedge) are formed by impressing a cut reed into soft clay. It was used by speakers of several Near Eastern languages including Sumerian, Akkadian, Urartian and Hittite; depending on the language and date of a given script, its alphabet could consist of many hundreds of letters. If this weren’t challenging enough, cuneiform employs no punctuation (no sentences or paragraphs), it does not separate words, there aren’t any vowels and most tablets are fragmented and eroded.
Nonetheless, Smith, an entirely self-educated scholar, broke the code, and when he discovered the fragment containing a flood narrative that predated the Biblical account by at least 1,000 years, he reportedly “became so animated that, mute with excitement, he began to tear his clothes off.” That story may also be legend, but it is one that captures the passionately obsessive character of George Smith. Thanks to his efforts, those of many other 19th century academics, treasure hunters, and tomb raiders, and modern scholars toiling away at the University of London, we can now hear Gilgamesh read not only in Old Akkadian (the original language), but also later Babylonian dialects, the languages used to record the Code of Hammurabiand a later, more fragmented version of the Gilgamesh epic.
The University of London’s Department of the Languages and Cultures of the Ancient Near East hosts on its website several readings in different scholars’ voices of Gilgamesh, The Epic of Anzu, the Codex Hammurabi and other Babylonian texts. Above, you can hear Karl Hecker read the first 163 lines of Tablet XI of the Standard Akkadian Gilgamesh. These lines tell the story of Utnapishtim, the mythical and literary precursor to the Biblical Noah. So important was the discovery of this flood story that it “challenged literary and biblical scholarship and would help to redefine beliefs about the age of the Earth,” writes The Telegraph. When George Smith made his announcement in 1872, “even the Prime Minister, William Gladstone, was in attendance.” Unfortunately, things did not end well for Smith, but because of his efforts, we can come as close as possible to the sound of Gilgamesh’s world, one that may remind us of a great many modern languages, but that uniquely preserves ancient history and ageless myth.
The University of London site also includes translations and transliterations of the cuneiform writing, from Professor Andrew George’s 2003 The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts. Furthermore, there are answers to Frequently Asked Questions, many of which you may yourself be asking, such as “What are Babylonian and Assyrian?”; “Given they are dead, how can one tell how Babylonian and Assyrian were pronounced?”; “Did Babylonian and Assyrian poetry have rhyme and metre, like English poetry?”; and—for those with a desire to enter further into the ancient world of Gilgamesh and other Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian semi-mythical figures—“What if I actually want to learn Babylonian and Assyrian?”
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