Adam Grant, a professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has been “recognized as Wharton’s top-rated teacher for five straight years, and as one of the world’s 25 most influential management thinkers.” He’s also the author of the bestselling book Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, a study that examines “what it takes to be creative and champion new ideas.”
Speaking at the 2016 Aspen Ideas Festival earlier this year, Grant asks the question: What do Nobel Prize-winning scientists do differently than their more ordinary peers? The answer: They’re twice as likely to play musical instruments. Seven times more likely to draw or paint. 12 times more likely to write fiction or poetry. And 22 times more likely to perform as dancers, actors or magicians.
For Grant, it’s never too early to cultivate creativity. So above, he outlines three things parents can do to encourage their children’s creative development.
1. Focus on values over rules.
2. Praise their character, not their behavior. Get them to see themselves as creative at heart.
3. Help them draw creative lessons from the books they read.
This all presumably gets covered in greater depth in Chapter 6 of Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World. The chapter is entitled “Rebel with a Cause: How Siblings, Parents and Mentors Nurture Originality.”
Below you can watch Grant’s TED Talk, “The surprising habits of original thinkers.” The video above was shot by The Atlantic.
Every filmmaker, no matter how mainstream or underground, has to get the inspiration to become a filmmaker somewhere. “I used to watch the programme Jonathan Ross did in the late 80s called The Incredibly Strange Film Show and they did a whole hour on Sam Raimi,” remembersShaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World director Edgar Wright, who in those days couldn’t imagine what it took to enter the impossibly distant world known as Hollywood. “I definitely hadn’t seen The Evil Dead as it was banned on video at the time – but I saw the Jonathan Ross documentary and I was staggered. I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ ”
Although the show only ran 12 episodes, The Incredibly Strange Film Show featured documentaries on not just Sam Raimi but David Lynch, John Waters, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and other directors with filmographies as distinctive as their personalities. (You’ll find other episodes on this Youtube playlist.) Ross and his team go all out, interviewing not just the auteurs behind Eraserhead, Pink Flamingos, and The Holy Mountain themselves but their friends, family members, and collaborators in various locations important to their work and their lives. (Ross even takes the step of dressing like his subjects, buttoning his shirt all the way up in the Lynch episode and so on.)
The Incredibly Strange Film Show originally aired in 1988 and 1989, but after decades of celebration in cinema culture, does the work of the likes of Lynch, Waters, and Jodorowsky still count as “incredibly strange”? Their movies certainly do endure, but not by sheer oddity alone. We’ve seen plenty of stranger or more extreme images than theirs committed to celluloid in the years since, but we’ve arguably seen far fewer equally coherent and personal visions successfully make the transition from obscurity to influence. These elder statesmen of famous fringe film, in other words, each in his own way made the zeitgeist itself a little more incredibly strange. Long may that achievement inspire.
If you’re of a certain vintage, you may at various times have grooved to The Orb’s chill-out classic “Little Fluffy Clouds,” the spaced-out soundscapes of DJ Spooky, the avant-psych of Sonic Youth, the locked grooves of Tortoise, the bubbling fugues of Björk, or the ominous rumblings of postrock godfathers Godspeed You! Black Emperor. And if so, you very likely know at least some of the work of minimalist composer Steve Reich, which these artists either sampled or drew on for musical inspiration. Like many of his avant-garde colleagues, Reich has “influenced generations of pop, jazz and classical musicians over the last half-century,” writes Tom Service at The Guardian.
While many artists mention minimalists like Terry Riley, Philip Glass, or John Cage as seminal influences, few of those composers have been as directly woven into the fabric of modern music through collaboration, sampling, and remixing as Reich. Service goes so far as to speculate, “if you were to subtract Steve Reich from the total sum of today’s musical culture, I think you’d notice more of a difference than if you took away any other single figure.” That’s debatable—Reich’s influence on popular culture is oblique. But it does describe the degree to which his musical innovations have permeated experimental, indie, and electronic music and “given the contemporary musical world a license to groove” while still getting plenty heady and pushing conceptual boundaries.
Reich’s use of phasing effects, drone notes, polyrhythmic patterns, and “process music” lend each of his compositions a trance-like atmosphere that might be most familiar from his 1976 piece “Music for 18 Musicians” (top). Here, the “percussionists, string players, clarinetists, singers and pianists” create “an ever-changing, kaleidoscopic soundworld” that expands and augments all of Reich’s previous techniques for sculpting in time. If the piece sounds familiar, though you’ve never heard it before, that’s because of the thorough incorporation of Reich into so much modern music, including perhaps several dozen soundalike film scores and Brian Eno’s pioneering first manifestations of what came to be called ambient music.
Reich conceived of music as a “perceptible process,” writing in 1968, “I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music… a musical process should happen extremely gradually.” Indeed, students of his music have found ways to take apart and duplicate those processes in their own work, something Reich, who has worked with remix artists and Radiohead, appreciates. (Just above, see Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood perform a solo version of Reich’s Electric Counterpoint in 2011.) Like many of the artists he appreciates and inspires, much of Reich’s work deals directly with sociopolitical themes, as Service notes, including “the Holocaust, Middle Eastern history and politics, and contemporary conflict” like the beheading of American journalist Daniel Pearl.
In the Spotify playlist further up, you’ll find a broad sampling of performances of Reich’s lesser-known early work—like the 1965 tape loop piece “It’s Gonna Rain”—and more famous compositions like The Cave, Different Trains, Music for 18 Musicians, Electric Counterpoint, Drumming, Clapping Music, and much more. Just as we can hear the musical processes developing within each composition, we can hear the process of Reich’s development over the course of his career as he incorporates influences from Bach to Coltrane to the songs of Kid A. As a consequence of both his grooviness and his appeal to modernists of every decade, Reich, writes Ivan Hewett at The Telegraph, is “both achingly hip and a grand old man”—and a seemingly endless source of musical inspiration since the 1960s.
If you need Spotify’s free software, download it here. Below, you can see Reich talking about his most influential works in a CBC interview recorded earlier this year.
Aleister Crowley—English magician and founder of the religion of Thelema—has been admired as a powerful theorist and practitioner of what he called “Magick,” and reviled as a spoiled, abusive buffoon. Falling somewhere between those two camps, we find the opinion of Crowley’s bitter rival, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who once passionately wrote that the study of magic was “the most important pursuit of my life….. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.”
Crowley would surely say the same, but his magic was of a much darker, more obsessive variety, and his success as a poet insignificant next to Yeats. “Crowley was jealous,” argues the blog Rune Soup, “He was never able to speak the language of poetic symbol with the confidence of a native speaker in the way Yeats definitely could.” In a 1948 Partisan Review essay, literary critic and Yeats biographer Richard Ellmann tells the story differently, drily reporting on the conflict as its participants saw it—as a genuine war between competing forms of practical magic.
Having been ejected from the occult Theosophical society for his magical experiments, writes Jamie James at Lapham’s Quarterly, Yeats joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, “an even more exotic cult, which claimed direct descent from the hermetic tradition of the Renaissance and into remote antiquity.” At various times, the order included writers Arthur Machen and Bram Stoker, Yeats’ beloved Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, and famous magicians Arthur Edward Waite and Crowley. (Just below, see a page from Yeats’ Golden Dawn journal. See several more here.)
“When Crowley showed a tendency to use his occult powers for evil rather than for good,” Ellmann writes, “the adepts of the order, Yeats among them, decided not to allow him to be initiated into the inner circle; they feared that he would profane the mysteries and unleash powerful magic forces against humanity.” Crowley’s ouster lead to a confrontation in 1900 that might make you think—depending on your frame of reference—of the warring magicians on South Park or of Susanna Clark’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, or both. “Crowley refused to accept their decision,” writes Ullmann, and after some astral attacks on Yeats,
.… in Highlander’s tartan, with a black Crusader’s cross on his breast… Crowley arrived at the Golden Dawn temple in London. Making the sign of the pentacle inverted and shouting menaces at the adepts, Crowley climbed the stairs. But Yeats and two other white magicians came resolutely forward to meet him, ready to protect the holy place at any cost. When Crowley came within range the forces of good struck out with their feet and kicked him downstairs.
This almost slapstick vanquishing became known as “the Battle of Blythe Road” and has been immortalized in a publication of that very name, with accounts from Crowley, Yeats, and Golden Dawn adepts William Westcott, Florence Farr and others. But the war was not won, Ellmann notes, and Crowley went looking for converts—or victims—in London, while Yeats attempted to stop him with “the requisite spells and exorcisms.” One such spell supposedly sent a vampire that “bit and tore at his flesh” as it lay beside Crowley all night. Despite Yeats’ supernatural interventions, one of Crowley’s targets, a young painter named Althea Gyles, was “finally forced to give way entirely to his baleful fascination.”
Ellmann’s both humorous and unsettling narrative shows us Crowley-as-predator, a characterization the wealthy Englishman had apparently earned, as “responsible governments excluded him from one country after another lest he bring to bear upon their inhabitants his hostile psychic ray.” [Brenda Maddox at The Guardian gives a slightly different account of the Battle, in which “Yeats, with a bouncer, saw him off the premises, called in the police and ended up (victorious) in court.” ] Yeats and the other members’ distaste for Crowley surely had something to do with his predatory behavior. But the rivalry was also indeed a poetic one, albeit extremely one-sided.
As Crowley biographer Lawrence Sutin writes, “the earnestness of the young Crowley could not compensate, in Yeats’ mind, for the technical difficulties and rhetorical excesses of his verse.” Yeats’ opinion “infuriated Crowley,” who indulged in the magic of projection, writing “What hurt him [Yeats] was the knowledge of his own incomparable inferiority.” Crowley’s remarks are both “ridiculous,” Sutin comments, and apply “far more convincingly to Crowley himself.” Nevertheless, Crowley’s “Magick,” continued to make Yeats uneasy, and he may have invoked Crowley in his famous line about the “rough beast” slouching toward Bethlehem in 1919’s “The Second Coming.”
While the magical battle between them might provoke more laughter than curiosity about their different brands of magic, Sutin notes a crucial difference that distinguishes the two men: “whereas Crowley placed himself in the services of the Antichrist ‘the savage God’ of the new cycle, Yeats’s fidelity was to ‘the old king,’ to ‘that unfashionable gyre.’” The gyre, so central an image in “The Second Coming,” stands for Yeats’ theory of time and history, and it belongs to an old mysticism and folklore that for him were synonymous with poetry.
Crowley viewed the occult as a source of personal power—his revelations filled books devoted to explaining the philosophy of Thelema (“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the law, love under will); ” Yeats was certainly more of an “organization man… in his occult activities,” writes Maddox, and sought to practice magic as a holistic activity, fully integrated into his social, political, and aesthetic life. His “public philosophy,” as he called it, writes James, “propounds an extraordinarily convoluted system that aims to integrate the human personality with the cosmos.”
To understand Crowley’s magical thinking, we can probably skip his poetry and attempt as best we can to the decipher his several arcane, technical books full of invented terms and symbols. To understand Yeats, as much as that’s possible, we need to read his poetry, the purest expression of his mystical system and symbolic thought.
Earlier this year, Leigh Haber, book editor ofO, The Oprah Magazine, reached out to Murray to see if he’d share some of his favorite poems in celebration of National Poetry Month. In true Murray-esque fashion, he waited until deadline to return her call, suggesting that they meet in his room at the Carlyle, where he would recite his choices in person.
At the top of the page, Murray reads the poem at a benefit for New York’s Poets House, adopting a light accent suggested by the dialect of the narrator, a mirror full of appreciation for the poet’s womanly body. Clifton said that the “germ” of the poem was visiting her husband at Harvard, and feeling out of place among all the slim young coeds. Thusly does Murray position himself as a hero to every female above the age of … you decide.
Kinnell, who sought to enliven a dreary bowl of oatmeal with such dining companions as Keats, Spenser and Milton, shared Murray’s playful sensibility. In an interview conducted as part of Michele Root-Bernstein’s Worldplay Project he remarked:
… it doesn’t seem like play at the time of doing it, but part of the whole construct of the work, and even though the work might be extremely serious and even morose, still there’s that element of play that is just an inseparable part of it.
Murray told O, which incorrectly reported the poem’s title as “I Love You Sweetheart” that he experienced this one as a vibration on the inside of his ribs “where the meat is most tender.” It would make a terrific scene in a movie, and who better to play the lover risking his life to misspell a term of endearment on a bridge than Bill Murray?
Alas, we could find no footage of Nye reading her lovely poem aloud, but you can read it in full over at The Poetry Foundation. It’s easy to see why it speaks to Murray.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Last year, fans of modernist Irish literature and impressionist art saw a must-own volume go under the hammer at Bonhams. “In 1935 the French artist, Henri Matisse, was commissioned to illustrate an edition of Ulysses for subscribers to the Limited Edition Club in America,” announced Artlyst. “Each of the 1,000 copies was signed by Matisse and 250 were also signed by James Joyce. A copy of the book signed by both men is estimated at £6,000 to £8,000.”
In the event it went for £6,250, not a bad deal considering the hands that wrote those signatures and the rarity, signed or unsigned, of this unusual book itself. (It certainly beats, say, $37,000.) Brainpickings’ Maria Popova writes that, after first spotting the Matisse-illustrated Ulysses here on Open Culture, “I gathered up my year’s worth of lunch money and was able to grab one of the last copies available online — a glorious leather-bound tome with 22-karat gold accents, gilt edges, moire fabric endpapers, and a satin page marker.” Versions signed by Matisse are apparently available–at a steep price–on Amazon.
Popova adds that “the Matisse drawings inside it, of course, are the most priceless of its offerings — doubly so because, for all their beauty, they’re a tragicomedy of quasi-collaboration.” From whence the tragicomedy? Publishing lore has it that, despite the provision of a full French translation of the Ulysses text, Matisse made his illustrative etchings — in the fashion of many an undergraduate with a paper due — without ever having got around to reading the book himself.
“I’ve never ‘read’ Joyce’s Ulysses, and it’s quite plausible that I never will,” Matisse’s countryman Pierre Bayard would write seventy years later in his bestselling How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. Yet “I feel perfectly comfortable when Ulysses comes up in conversation, because I can situate it with relative precision in relation to other books. I know, for example, that it is a retelling of the Odyssey, that its narration takes the form of a stream of consciousness, that its action unfolds in Dublin over the course of a single day, etc.” — all things that Matisse, too, probably knew about Ulysses.
He certainly knew that it supposedly retold the story of the Odyssey, and so, in a now-ingenious-looking strategy to not just talk about an unread book but to illustrate it, he went to the source. Or rather, he went to one of the countless cultural, literary, historical, and linguistic sources upon which Joyce drew to compose his masterpiece, basing his art directly on Homer’s epic poem, in its own way a work more talked about than read. Joyce himself, who once described much of the textual content of Ulysses as intended to “keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant,” may well have admired Matisse’s clarity of vision, no matter how much-non reading it took to refine.
Karyn Tripp, a homeschooling mother of four, was inspired by her eldest’s love of science to create Periodic Table Battleship. I might suggest that the game is of even greater value to those who don’t naturally gravitate toward the subject.
Rules of engagement are very similar to the original. Rather than calling out positions on a grid, players set their torpedoes for specific element names, abbreviations or coordinates. Advanced players might go for the atomic number. the lingo is the same: “hit,” “miss” and—say it with me—“you sunk my battleship!”
The winner is the player who wipes out the other’s fleet, though I might toss the loser a couple of reinforcement vessels, should he or she demonstrate passing familiarity with various metals, halogens, and noble gases.
To make your own Periodic Table Battleship set you will need:
4 copies of the Periodic Table (laminate them for reuse)
2 file folders
paper clips, tape or glue
2 markers (dry erase markers if playing with laminated tables
To Assemble and Play:
As you know, the Periodic Table is already numbered along the top. Label each of the four tables’ vertical rows alphabetically (to help younger players and those inclined to fruitless searching for the elements designated by their opponent)
Fasten two Periodic Tables to each folder, facing the same direction.
Uses markers to circle the position of your ships on the lower Table:
5 consecutive spaces: aircraft carrier
4 consecutive spaces: battleship
3 consecutive spaces: destroyer or submarine
2 consecutive spaces: patrol boat
Prop the folders up with books or some other method to prevent opponents from sneaking peeks at your maritime strategy.
Take turns calling out coordinates, element names, abbreviations or atomic numbers:
When a turn results in a miss, put an X on the corresponding spot on the upper table.
When a turn results in a hit, circle the corresponding spot on the upper table.
Continue play until the battle is won.
Repeat until the Table of Elements is mastered.
Supplement liberally with Tom Lehrer’s Elements song.
Those not inclined toward arts and crafts can purchase a pre-made Periodic Table Battleship set from Tripp’s Etsy shop.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker, secular homeschooler and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
This fall, Harvard has been rolling out videos from the 2016 edition of Computer Science 50 (CS50), the university’s introductory coding course designed for majors and non-majors alike. Taught by David Malan, a perennially popular professor (you’ll immediately see why), the one-semester course (taught mostly in C) combines courses typically known elsewhere as “CS1” and “CS2.”
Even if you’re not a Harvard student, you’re welcome to follow CS50 online by heading over to this site here. There you will find video lectures (stream them all above or access them individually here), problem sets, quizzes, and other useful course materials. Once you’ve mastered the material covered in CS50, you can start branching out into new areas of coding by perusing our big collection of Free Online Computer Science Courses, a subset of our larger collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
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