The Best Music to Write By: Give Us Your Recommendations

in Books, Literature, Music, Writing | November 16th, 2012

Writ­ing is hard. It’s hard to begin, hard to con­tin­ue, hard to fin­ish. To write suc­cess­ful­ly and con­sis­tent­ly requires an alchem­i­cal com­bi­na­tion of dis­ci­pline and inspi­ra­tion so per­son­al that read­ing advice on the sub­ject amounts to watch­ing some­one else die to learn how it’s done. And while it often feels enlight­en­ing to read about the habits of, say, Stein­beck or Austen, their meth­ods are non-trans­fer­able. You’ve got to find your own way. So it is with writ­ing to music. It’s always there in the back­ground, goad­ing you on qui­et­ly. Not every­one writes to music; not every­one can. But a good many do, includ­ing Wired con­trib­u­tor Steve Sil­ber­man who calls the prac­tice one of many rit­u­als writ­ers use “to evoke that elu­sive flow of inspi­ra­tion.”

Sil­ber­man just wrote a piece for Neu­roTribes in which he sur­veyed ten authors on their favorite music to write by. One of Silberman’s own choic­es, Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way (above), is one I’m steal­ing. With its bril­liant assem­blage of musi­cians and haunt­ing mood­i­ness it sets the per­fect tone for my process. Also, there’s no singing. Like Sil­ber­man, I can’t com­pete with a wise, wit­ty lyri­cist (he men­tions Elvis Costel­lo, I pre­fer Mor­ris­sey). In Sil­ber­man’s piece, John Schwartz, a New York Times reporter, lis­tens to noth­ing. Jane Hirschfield, a chan­cel­lor of the Acad­e­my of Amer­i­can Poets, likes David Byrne, Dylan’s Mod­ern Times, and Gillians Welch’s The Har­row and the Har­vest. Wired con­tribut­ing edi­tor David Wol­man makes a playlist of most­ly indie-pop songs enti­tled “Write the Book!” His main cri­te­ri­on for the songs he choos­es: DO NOT BE BORING! My default writ­ing music is exem­pli­fied by Aus­tralian three-piece instru­men­tal rock band Dirty Three (below).

So now it’s your turn, read­ers. Do you write to music? If so, what is it? What artists/composers/albums help you find your rhythm and why? Can you stand lyrics in the music you write by or no? Leave your selec­tions in the com­ments. On Mon­day, we’ll com­pile them in an arti­cle and leave you with a great Open Cul­ture playlist. Whether you find some­thing you can steal or not, it should be a fun exer­cise.

*See our fol­low-up post with a list of your favorites here

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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The Ten Best American Essays Since 1950, According to Robert Atwan

in Books, Literature | November 15th, 2012

Robert Atwan’s favorite lit­er­ary genre is the essay. As edi­tor and founder of The Best Amer­i­can Essays series, Atwan has read thou­sands of exam­ples of the remark­ably flex­i­ble form.

“Essays can be lots of things, maybe too many things,” writes Atwan in his fore­ward to the 2012 install­ment in the Best Amer­i­can series, “but at the core of the genre is an unmis­tak­able recep­tiv­i­ty to the ever-shift­ing process­es of our minds and moods. If there is any essen­tial char­ac­ter­is­tic we can attribute to the essay, it may be this: that the truest exam­ples of the form enact that ever-shift­ing process, and in that enact­ment we can find the basis for the essay’s qual­i­fi­ca­tion to be regard­ed seri­ous­ly as imag­i­na­tive lit­er­a­ture and the essay­ist’s claim to be tak­en seri­ous­ly as a cre­ative writer.”

In 2001 Atwan and Joyce Car­ol Oates took on the daunt­ing task of trac­ing that ever-shift­ing process through the pre­vi­ous 100 years for The Best Amer­i­can Essays of the Cen­tu­ry. Recent­ly Atwan returned with a more focused selec­tion for Pub­lish­ers Week­ly: “The Top 10 Essays Since 1950.” To pare it all down to such a small num­ber, Atwan decid­ed to reserve the “New Jour­nal­ism” cat­e­go­ry, with its many mem­o­rable works by Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Michael Herr and oth­ers, for some future list. He also made a point of select­ing the best essays, as opposed to exam­ples from the best essay­ists. “A list of the top ten essay­ists since 1950 would fea­ture some dif­fer­ent writ­ers.”

We were inter­est­ed to see that six of the ten best essays are avail­able for free read­ing online. Here is Atwan’s list, along with links to those essays that are on the Web:

  • James Bald­win, “Notes of a Native Son,” 1955 (Read it here.)
  • Nor­man Mail­er, “The White Negro,” 1957 (Read it here.)
  • Susan Son­tag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” 1964 (Read it here.)
  • John McPhee, “The Search for Mar­vin Gar­dens,” 1972 (Read it here with a sub­scrip­tion.)
  • Joan Did­ion, “The White Album,” 1979
  • Annie Dil­lard, “Total Eclipse,” 1982
  • Phillip Lopate, “Against Joie de Vivre,” 1986 (Read it here.)
  • Edward Hoagland, “Heav­en and Nature,” 1988
  • Jo Ann Beard, “The Fourth State of Mat­ter,” 1996 (Read it here.)
  • David Fos­ter Wal­lace, “Con­sid­er the Lob­ster,” 2004 (Read it here in a ver­sion dif­fer­ent from the one pub­lished in his 2005 book of the same name.)

“To my mind,” writes Atwan in his arti­cle, “the best essays are deeply per­son­al (that does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly mean auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal) and deeply engaged with issues and ideas. And the best essays show that the name of the genre is also a verb, so they demon­strate a mind in process–reflecting, try­ing-out, essay­ing.”

To read more of Atwan’s com­men­tary, see his arti­cle in Pub­lish­ers Week­ly.

The pho­to above of Susan Son­tag was tak­en by Peter Hujar in 1966.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

30 Free Essays & Sto­ries by David Fos­ter Wal­lace on the Web

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Rare Footage of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald From the 1920s

in Books, Literature | November 7th, 2012

The writer F. Scott Fitzger­ald and his flam­boy­ant wife Zel­da are often remem­bered as the embod­i­ment of the boom and bust that con­vulsed Amer­i­ca in the peri­od between the two world wars.

Like char­ac­ters in The Great Gats­by, Scott and Zel­da lived lives of wild aban­don in the Roar­ing Twen­ties, rid­ing on top of taxi cabs and splash­ing in the Plaza Hotel foun­tain. Scott was inspired and prod­ded along in his dis­si­pa­tion by the noto­ri­ous­ly eccen­tric Zel­da. As Ring Lard­ner once put it, “Mr. Fitzger­ald is a nov­el­ist and Mrs. Fitzger­ald is a nov­el­ty.”

But by the time the stock mar­ket crashed in 1929, so too had the Fitzger­alds. Scot­t’s drink­ing caught up with him, and Zel­da’s eccen­tric­i­ty evolved into schiz­o­phre­nia. Their sad down­fall is cap­tured in Fitzger­ald’s 1930 sto­ry, “Baby­lon Revis­it­ed.” Zel­da would live the rest of her life in men­tal insti­tu­tions while Scott spent his final years in Hol­ly­wood, strug­gling to pay for her treat­ment and try­ing to recap­ture his lost glo­ry. Their daugh­ter, Scot­tie, was raised by oth­er peo­ple.

In this video we catch a few glimpses of the Fitzger­alds in their hey­day, before the par­ty came to an end. The film clips are fun to watch but the YouTube video on which they are col­lect­ed should per­haps be tak­en with a grain of salt. We’re not sure, for exam­ple, that the clip pur­port­ing to show Zel­da being “very live­ly in a street” is actu­al­ly of her. It appears to show some­one else. And one of the cap­tions claims that Fitzger­ald is pic­tured writ­ing The Great Gats­by, but accord­ing to the Uni­ver­si­ty of South Car­oli­na’s Fitzger­ald Web site, the sen­tence he is writ­ing on paper is: “Every­body has been pre­dict­ing a bad end for the flap­per, but I don’t think there is any­thing to wor­ry about.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Win­ter Dreams: F. Scott Fitzger­ald’s Life Remem­bered in a Fine Film

F. Scott Fitzger­ald Recites From Shake­speare’s Oth­el­lo and John Mase­field­’s ‘On Grow­ing Old’

Find F. Scott Fitzger­ald’s works in our col­lec­tions of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books

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Archive of Handwritten Recipes (1600 — 1960) Will Teach You How to Stew a Calf’s Head and More

in Books, History | October 31st, 2012

If you’ve ever tried to fol­low a recipe from your grandmother’s col­lec­tion, squint­ing at her spi­dery writ­ing on a stained 3x5 card, you might be a can­di­date for the Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa Libraries’ lat­est DIY His­to­ry project.

The University’s spe­cial col­lec­tions man­ages the Sza­th­mary Culi­nary Man­u­s­cipts and Cook­books, a hand­writ­ten col­lec­tion of Amer­i­can and Euro­pean recipes from the 1600s to the 1960s.

Help­ful food­ies, his­to­ry buffs and hand­writ­ing sleuths are invit­ed to par­tic­i­pate in UI’s crowd­sourc­ing his­to­ry project by tran­scrib­ing dig­i­tized images of recipes.

It’s not the first time the uni­ver­si­ty has out­sourced a por­tion of its archival hand­work. Last year the Civ­il War Diaries and Let­ters Tran­scrip­tion Project was pow­ered by vol­un­teers, who tran­scribed more than 15,000 pages of mate­r­i­al. All you need to do is select a page from with­in the col­lec­tion and get start­ed. So far more than 17,000 pages have been tran­scribed and vol­un­teers chat and post ques­tions on a dis­cus­sion forum.

An exam­ple of the his­tor­i­cal nuggets uncov­ered while tran­scrib­ing: a pos­net is an 18th cen­tu­ry term for a small met­al pot, a spi­der is a skil­let, and to scearce is to sift. Of course no cook­book his­to­ri­an has com­plet­ed their task until they have actu­al­ly tried the recipes them­selves. This could be inter­est­ing for the lucky tran­scriber of a recipe from Abi­gail Welling­ton Townsend’s cook­book, cir­ca 1840:

To stew a calf­shead, let the calf­shead be split and open and cleaned put it in the stew pan with water to cov­er it stew it quite ten­der take it and cut it to pieces put them on again in the stew pan with the water it was first boiled in  put with it six large onions half a pint of claret a lit­tle catch up a lit­tle mace & pep­per & salt to your taste when it is stewed ten­der thick­en the gravy with yolks of six eggs boiled hard & braid in a lit­tle of the gravy put in six yolks of eggs boiled hard & fry’d forced meat.

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Find more of her work at  and thenifty.blogspot.com.

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Isaac Asimov Explains His Three Laws of Robots

in Books, Sci Fi | October 31st, 2012

A hand­ful of futur­ists, philoso­phers, and technophiles believe we are approach­ing what they call the “sin­gu­lar­i­ty”: a point in time when smart machines became much smarter, stronger, and faster than their cre­ators, and then become self-con­scious. If there’s any chance of this occur­ring, it’s worth­while to pon­der the con­se­quences. But we do already, all the time—in exis­ten­tial­ly bleak sce­nar­ios like Blade Run­ner, the Ter­mi­na­tor series, the reboot­ed Bat­tlestar Galac­ti­ca (and its failed pre­quel Capri­ca).

The prospects are nev­er pleas­ant. Robot­ic engi­neers in these worlds hard­ly seem to both­er teach­ing their machines the kind of moral code that would keep them from turn­ing and destroy­ing us (that is, when they aren’t explic­it­ly designed to do so).

I won­der about this con­cep­tu­al gap—convenient as it may be in nar­ra­tive terms—given that Isaac Asi­mov, one of the fore­fa­thers of robot fic­tion invent­ed just such a moral code. In the video above, he out­lines it (with his odd pro­nun­ci­a­tion of “robot”). The code con­sists of three laws; in his fic­tion these are hard­wired into each robot’s “positron­ic brain,” a fic­tion­al com­put­er that gives robots some­thing of a human-like con­scious­ness.

First Law: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inac­tion, allow a human being to come to harm.
Sec­ond Law: A robot must obey the orders giv­en it by human beings except where such orders would con­flict with the First Law.
Third Law: A robot must pro­tect its own exis­tence as long as such pro­tec­tion does not con­flict with the First or Sec­ond Law.

Isaac Asi­mov devot­ed a good deal of his writ­ing career to the sub­ject of robots, so it’s safe to say, he’d done quite bit of think­ing about how they would fit into the worlds he invent­ed. In doing so, Asi­mov had to solve the prob­lem of how robots would inter­act with humans once they had some degree of free will. But are his three laws suf­fi­cient? Many of Asimov’s sto­ries–I, Robot, for example–turn on some fail­ure or con­fu­sion between them. And even for their chase scenes, explo­sions, and melo­dra­ma, the three screen explo­rations of arti­fi­cial life men­tioned above thought­ful­ly exploit philo­soph­i­cal ambi­gu­i­ties and insuf­fi­cien­cies in Asimov’s sim­ple sys­tem.

For one thing, while Asimov’s robots were hunks of met­al, tak­ing only vague­ly humanoid form, the robots of our cur­rent imag­in­ings emerge from an uncan­ny val­ley with real­is­tic skin and hair or even a genet­ic code and cir­cu­la­to­ry sys­tem. They are pos­si­ble sex­u­al part­ners, friends and lovers, co-work­ers and supe­ri­ors. They can deceive us as to their nature (a fourth law by Bul­gar­i­an nov­el­ist Lyuben Dilov states that a robot “must estab­lish its iden­ti­ty as a robot in all cas­es”); they can con­ceive chil­dren or desires their cre­ators nev­er intend­ed. These dif­fer­ences beg impor­tant ques­tions: how eth­i­cal are these laws? How fea­si­ble? When the sin­gu­lar­i­ty occurs, will Skynet become aware of itself and destroy us?

Unlike Asi­mov, we now live in a time where the ques­tions have direct applic­a­bil­i­ty to robots liv­ing among us, out­side the pages of sci-fi. As Japan­ese and South Kore­an roboti­cists have found, the three laws can­not address what they call “open tex­ture risk”— unpre­dictable inter­ac­tions in unstruc­tured envi­ron­ments. Humans rely on nuanced and often pre­con­scious read­ings of com­plex social codes and the fine shades of mean­ing embed­ded in nat­ur­al lan­guage; machines have no such sub­tle­ty… yet. Whether or not they can devel­op it is an open ques­tion, mak­ing humanoid robots with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence an “open tex­ture risk.” But as you can see from the video below, we’re per­haps much clos­er to Blade Run­ner or AI than to the clunky, inter­stel­lar min­ing machines in Asi­mov’s fic­tion.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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Stephen King Turns Short Story into a Free Webcomic

in Books, Deals | October 26th, 2012

Pri­or to becom­ing a house­hold name, Stephen King did time as a high school Eng­lish teacher and a labor­er in an indus­tri­al laun­dry. These days, he could insu­late his love­ly Vic­to­ri­an home with crisp hun­dreds if such were his whim. Yet it seems he has­n’t for­got­ten what it’s like to watch every pen­ny, wish­ing there was enough fat in the bud­get for the pur­chase of one measly com­ic book based on an insane­ly famous author’s obscure short sto­ry…

Are gen­eros­i­ty and the remem­brance of past strug­gles moti­vat­ing King to dole out artist Den­nis “X‑Men Noir” Calero’s graph­ic adap­ta­tion of his short sto­ry, “The Lit­tle Green God of Agony,”  for the next sev­en weeks?

Or is he research­ing what it feels like to be an undis­cov­ered writer in the dig­i­tal age, anx­ious­ly dan­gling free con­tent on his web­site in an attempt to build read­er­ship?

Bro­ken into thrice week­ly install­ments to be deliv­ered over a peri­od of eight weeks, King’s sto­ry con­cerns one Andrew New­some, the sixth rich­est man in the world, and Kat Mac­Don­ald, the expo­nen­tial­ly less well-to-do RN car­ing for him in the wake of a debil­i­tat­ing acci­dent, anoth­er sub­ject to which King is no stranger. As of this writ­ing, the com­ic is only avail­able on the author’s web­site, though the King jug­ger­naut is so unstop­pable, the next move may well be a film, a tv minis­eries or a Broad­way musi­cal. Maine win­ters are long and cold. Per­haps even the mas­ter of sus­pense warms to the prospect of some extra insu­la­tion.

You can start fol­low­ing the “The Lit­tle Green God of Agony” here.

via Gal­l­ey­Cat

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Ray Bradbury Appears with Groucho Marx on You Bet Your Life (1955)

in Books, Literature, Television | October 23rd, 2012

In 1955, Ray Brad­bury paid a vis­it to Grou­cho Marx’s icon­ic game show You Bet Your Life. Brad­bury, then 35 years old, had already pub­lished some of his now clas­sic works. But appar­ent­ly Fahren­heit 451 and The Mar­t­ian Chron­i­cles had­n’t made their way onto Grou­cho’s read­ing list. When Marx asked Brad­bury what he did for a liv­ing, Brad­bury had to clar­i­fy things. “I’m a writer. W‑r-i-t-e‑r.” Not a “rid­er” of motor­cy­cles or ponies. Per­haps it was a seri­ous exchange. Per­haps it was all part of a script­ed joke. Either way, it’s a great clip from the increas­ing­ly dis­tant past. You can watch the com­plete episode here.

For more Brad­bury clas­sic, spend time with:

Ray Brad­bury Gives 12 Pieces of Writ­ing Advice to Young Authors (2001)

Ray Brad­bury: Lit­er­a­ture is the Safe­ty Valve of Civ­i­liza­tion

Ray Brad­bury Reads Mov­ing Poem on the Eve of NASA’s 1971 Mars Mis­sion

via i09

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Download 397 Free Art Catalogs from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

in Art, Books, e-books, Museums | October 22nd, 2012

Ear­li­er this year, the Guggen­heim Muse­um put online 65 mod­ern art books, giv­ing you free access to books intro­duc­ing the work of Alexan­der Calder, Edvard Munch, Fran­cis Bacon, Gus­tav Klimt & Egon Schiele, and Kandin­sky. Now, just a few short months lat­er, the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art has launched Met­Pub­li­ca­tions, a por­tal that will “even­tu­al­ly offer access to near­ly all books, Bul­letins, and Jour­nals” pub­lished by the Met since 1870.

Of the many resources you can explore, here’s one obvi­ous high­light: Met­Pub­li­ca­tions now makes avail­able 397 out-of-print titles, includ­ing lots of infor­ma­tive and visu­al­ly-packed art cat­a­logs from the muse­um’s past exhi­bi­tions. You can read the books online or down­load them in PDF for­mat (although I should warn you that the PDF down­loads take some time, so be patient). When you rum­mage around, you’ll come across works like these and more:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

MoMA Puts Pol­lock, Rothko & de Koon­ing on Your iPad

Google “Art Project” Brings Great Paint­ings & Muse­ums to You

The His­to­ry of West­ern Archi­tec­ture: From Ancient Greece to Roco­co (A Free Online Course)

Down­load 375 Free eBooks

 

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