Why the Flood of Musician Memoirs? An Exploration by Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #84

in Books, Music, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | March 3rd, 2021

There’s been an explo­sion of rock and roll auto­bi­ogra­phies in recent years, with pret­ty much every music leg­end (and many oth­ers) being invit­ed by some pub­lish­er or oth­er to write or dic­tate their sto­ry. What’s the par­tic­u­lar appeal of this kind of recount­ing, what’s the con­nec­tion between writ­ing and read­ing these books on the one hand and pro­duc­ing and lis­ten­ing to the actu­al music on the oth­er? Do we get a rough­ly equiv­a­lent ben­e­fit from a biog­ra­phy, doc­u­men­tary, or film depic­tion of the per­son­’s life?

Your hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt along with guest Lau­ra Davis-Chanin, author of her own music mem­oir, each picked a book, cov­er­ing Elvis Costel­lo, Car­rie Brown­stein, Ozzy Osbourne, and Deb­bie Har­ry respec­tive­ly. Reflect­ing on these read­ing expe­ri­ences we com­pare the author’s pur­pos­es in writ­ing the book, how con­fes­sion­al or drug-addled or twist­ed the sto­ry is, what is empha­sized and what’s not, and what res­onat­ed in the sto­ry beyond the idio­syn­crat­ic recount­ing of that per­son­’s life.

Check out Lau­ra’s two books, hear her talk about her musi­cal adven­tures on Naked­ly Exam­ined Music, and hear her dis­cuss clas­sic lit­er­a­ture on Phi Fic.

Some of the NEM episodes where Mark talked with guests about their auto-biogra­phies fea­tured Chris Frantz of Talk­ing Heads, Jim Peterik of Sur­vivor, Andy Pow­ell of Wish­bone Ash, Dan­ny Seraphine of Chica­go and John Andrew Fredrick of The Black Watch.

We did­n’t use much research for this episode, but you can read lists of par­tic­u­lar­ly good music mem­oirs from Rolling Stone and The Guardian. The Oak­land Press has an arti­cle about music biogra­phies and auto­bi­ogra­phies emerg­ing at the end of 2020.

Hear more of this pod­cast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

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A List of 132 Radical, Mind-Expanding Books from Rage Against the Machine

in Books, Music, Politics | March 2nd, 2021

If you like Rage Against the Machine, but don’t like their “polit­i­cal bs,” you haven’t actu­al­ly lis­tened to Rage Against the Machine, whose entire rai­son d’être is con­tained with­in the name. What is “the Machine”? Let’s hear it from the band them­selves. Singer Zack de la Rocha point­ed out that the title of their sec­ond album, 1996’s Evil Empire, came from “Ronald Reagan’s slan­der of the Sovi­et Union in the eight­ies, which the band feels could just as eas­i­ly apply to the Unit­ed States.”

The Machine is cap­i­tal­ism and mil­i­tarism, what Dwight D. Eisen­how­er once famous­ly called the “mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al com­plex” but which has fold­ed in oth­er oppres­sive mech­a­nisms since the coin­ing of that phrase, includ­ing the prison-indus­tri­al com­plex and immi­gra­tion-indus­tri­al com­plex. The Machine is a mega-com­plex with a lot of mov­ing parts, and the mem­bers of RATM have done the work to crit­i­cal­ly exam­ine them, inform­ing their music and activism with read­ing and study.

Evil Empire, for exam­ple, fea­tured in its lin­er notes a pho­to of “a pile of rad­i­cal books,” “and the group post­ed a lengthy read­ing list to com­ple­ment it on their site,” declares the site Rad­i­cal Reads. Debates often rage on social media over whether activists should read the­o­ry. One answer to the ques­tion might be the com­mit­ment of RATM, who have stead­fast­ly lived out their con­vic­tions over the decades while also, osten­si­bly, read­ing Marx, Mar­cuse, and Fanon.

There are more acces­si­ble the­o­rists on the list: fierce essay­ists like for­mer death row inmate and Black Pan­ther Mumia Abu-Jamal and Hen­ry David Thore­au, whose Walden and “Civ­il Dis­obe­di­ence” both appear. The Anar­chist Cook­book shows up, but so too does Dr. Suess’ The Lorax, biogra­phies of Miles Davis and Bob Mar­ley, Taschen’s Dali: The Paint­ings, James Joyce’s A Por­trait of the Artist of a Young Man, and Hen­ry Miller’s Trop­ic of Can­cer. This is not a list of strict­ly “polit­i­cal” books so much as a list of books that open us up to oth­er ways of see­ing.

These are also, in many cas­es, books we do not encounter unless we seek them out. “I cer­tain­ly didn’t find any of those books at my Uni­ver­si­ty High School library,” de la Rocha told MTV in 1996, “Many of those books may give peo­ple new insight into some of the fear and some of the pain they might be expe­ri­enc­ing as a result of some of the very ugly poli­cies the gov­ern­ment is impos­ing upon us right now.” Doubt­less, he would still endorse the sen­ti­ment. The work­ings of the Machine, after all, don’t seem to change much for the peo­ple on the bot­tom when it gets new man­age­ment at the top.

Read the full list of Evil Empire book rec­om­men­da­tions on Good Reads. And as a bonus, hear a Spo­ti­fy playlist of rad­i­cal music just above, com­piled by RATM gui­tarist Tom Morel­lo. The 241 song list runs

via Rad­i­cal Reads

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Tom Morel­lo Responds to Angry Fans Who Sud­den­ly Real­ize That Rage Against the Machine’s Music Is Polit­i­cal: “What Music of Mine DIDN’T Con­tain Polit­i­cal BS?”

Hear a 4 Hour Playlist of Great Protest Songs: Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Bob Mar­ley, Pub­lic Ene­my, Bil­ly Bragg & More

The Entire Archives of Rad­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy Go Online: Read Essays by Michel Fou­cault, Alain Badiou, Judith But­ler & More (1972–2018)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Anthony Bourdain Talks About the Big Break That Changed His Life–at Age 44

in Books, Food & Drink, Television | February 23rd, 2021

In 1999, Antho­ny Bourdain’s career seemed to have stalled. While his “prin­ci­pal voca­tion remained his posi­tion as exec­u­tive chef” at New York’s Les Halles, rest­less intel­li­gence and wan­der­lust kept him look­ing for oth­er oppor­tu­ni­ties. “He was 43 years old, rode hard and put up wet,” writes Eliz­a­beth Nel­son at The Ringer, “a recov­er­ing addict with a num­ber of debts and a pen­chant for find­ing trou­ble in fail­ing restau­rants across the city.” He had fought for and won an unde­ni­able mea­sure of suc­cess, but he hard­ly seemed on the thresh­old of the major celebri­ty chef­dom he would main­tain until his death twen­ty years lat­er in 2018.

Then, “in the spring of 2000, his sub­li­mat­ed lit­er­ary ambi­tions sud­den­ly caught up with and then quick­ly sur­passed his cook­ing.” Bourdain’s mem­oir Kitchen Con­fi­den­tial “became an imme­di­ate sen­sa­tion,” intro­duc­ing his icon­o­clasm, acer­bic wit, and out­ra­geous con­fes­sion­al style to mil­lions of read­ers, who would soon become view­ers of his try-any­thing trav­el­ogue series, A Cook’s Tour, No Reser­va­tions, The Lay­over, and Parts Unknown, as well as loy­al read­ers of his sub­se­quent books, and even fic­tion like as Gone Bam­boo, a crime nov­el soon to become a TV series.

How did Bour­dain first get his win­ning per­son­al­i­ty before the mass­es? It all start­ed with a 1999 New York­er arti­cle called “Don’t Eat Before Read­ing This,” the pre­de­ces­sor to Kitchen Con­fi­den­tial and an essay that begins with what we might now rec­og­nize as a pro­to­typ­i­cal­ly Bour­dain­ian sen­tence: “Good food, good eat­ing, is all about blood and organs, cru­el­ty and decay.” In the inter­view clip above, from Bourdain’s final, 2017 inter­view with Fast Com­pa­ny, he talks about how the sto­ry led to his “huge break” just a cou­ple days after it ran, when a Blooms­bury edi­tor called with an offer of “the stag­ger­ing­ly high price of fifty thou­sand dol­lars to write a book.”

Every­one who loves Bourdain’s writing—and who loved his gen­er­ous, ecu­meni­cal culi­nary spirit—knows why Kitchen Con­fi­den­tial changed his life overnight, as he says. Yes, “food is pain,” as he writes in the book’s “First Course,” but also, “food is sex”—”the delights of Por­tuguese squid stew, of Well­fleet oys­ters on the half­shell, New Eng­land clam chow­der, of greasy, won­der­ful, fire-red chori­zo sausages, kale soup, and a night when the striped bass jumped right out of the water and onto Cape Cod’s din­ner tables.” Bourdain’s prose lingers over every delight, prepar­ing us for the escapades to come.

In Kitchen Con­fi­den­tial, the exhaus­tion, “sheer weird­ness,” and con­stant “threat of dis­as­ter,” that attend New York kitchen life (and life “inside the CIA”—the Culi­nary Insti­tute of Amer­i­ca, that is), becomes fleshed out with scenes of culi­nary deca­dence the likes of which most read­ers had nev­er seen, smelled, or tast­ed. Fans craved more and more from the chef who wrote, in 1999, just before he would become a best­selling house­hold name, “my career has tak­en an eeri­ly appro­pri­ate turn: these days, I’m the chef de cui­sine of a much loved, old-school French brasserie/bistro where… every part of the animal—hooves, snout, cheeks, skin, and organs—is avid­ly and appre­cia­tive­ly pre­pared and con­sumed.”

Read Bourdain’s New York­er essay here and see his full 2017 inter­view with Fast Com­pa­ny just above.

via @Yoh31

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Life Lessons from Antho­ny Bour­dain: How He Devel­oped His Iron Pro­fes­sion­al­ism, Achieved Cre­ative Free­dom & Learned from Fail­ure

Watch Antho­ny Bourdain’s Free Show, Raw Craft Where He Vis­its Crafts­men Mak­ing Gui­tars, Tat­toos, Motor­cy­cles & More (RIP)

Michael Pol­lan Explains How Cook­ing Can Change Your Life; Rec­om­mends Cook­ing Books, Videos & Recipes

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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How the Internet Archive Digitizes 3,500 Books a Day–the Hard Way, One Page at a Time

in Archives, Books, Libraries | February 22nd, 2021

Does turn­ing the pages of an old book excite you? How about 3 mil­lion pages? That’s how many pages Eliza Zhang has scanned over her ten years with the Inter­net Archive, using Scribe, a spe­cial­ized scan­ning machine invent­ed by Archive engi­neers over 15 years ago. “Lis­ten­ing to 70s and 80s R&B while she works,” Wendy Hana­mu­ra writes at the Inter­net Archive blog, “Eliza spends a lit­tle time each day read­ing the dozens of books she han­dles. The most chal­leng­ing part of her job? ‘Work­ing with very old, frag­ile books.”

The frag­ile state and wide vari­ety of the mil­lions of books scanned by Zhang and the sev­en­ty-or-so oth­er Scribe oper­a­tors explains why this work has not been auto­mat­ed. “Clean, dry human hands are the best way to turn pages,” says Andrea Mills, one of the lead­ers of the dig­i­ti­za­tion team. “Our goal is to han­dle the book once and to care for the orig­i­nal as we work with it.”

Rais­ing the glass with a foot ped­al, adjust­ing the two cam­eras, and shoot­ing the page images are just the begin­ning of Eliza’s work. Some books, like the Bureau of Land Man­age­ment pub­li­ca­tion fea­tured in the video, have myr­i­ad fold-outs. Eliza must insert a slip of paper to remind her to go back and shoot each fold-out page, while at the same time inputting the page num­bers into the item record. The job requires keen con­cen­tra­tion.

If this expe­ri­enced dig­i­tiz­er acci­den­tal­ly skips a page, or if an image is blur­ry, the pub­lish­ing soft­ware cre­at­ed by our engi­neers will send her a mes­sage to return to the Scribe and scan it again.

It’s not a job for the eas­i­ly bored; “It takes con­cen­tra­tion and a love of books,” says Inter­net Archive founder Brew­ster Kahle. The painstak­ing process allows dig­i­tiz­ers to pre­serve valu­able books online while main­tain­ing the integri­ty of phys­i­cal copies. “We do not dis­bind the books,” says Kahle, a method that has allowed them to part­ner with hun­dreds of insti­tu­tions around the world, dig­i­tiz­ing 28 mil­lion texts over two decades. Many of those books are rare and valu­able, and many have been deemed of lit­tle or no val­ue. “Increas­ing­ly,” writes the Archive’s Chris Free­land, “the Archive is pre­serv­ing many books that would oth­er­wise be lost to his­to­ry or the trash bin.”

In one exam­ple, Free­land cites The dic­tio­nary of cos­tume, “one of the mil­lions of titles that reached the end of its pub­lish­ing life­cy­cle in the 20th cen­tu­ry.” It is also a work cit­ed in Wikipedia, a key source for “stu­dents of all ages… in our con­nect­ed world.” The Inter­net Archive has pre­served the only copy of the book avail­able online, mak­ing sure Wikipedia edi­tors can ver­i­fy the cita­tion and researchers can use the book in per­pe­tu­ity. If look­ing up the def­i­n­i­tion of “pet­ti­coat” in an out-of-print ref­er­ence work seems triv­ial, con­sid­er that the Archive dig­i­tizes about 3,500 books every day in its 18 dig­i­ti­za­tion cen­ters. (The dic­tio­nary of cos­tume was iden­ti­fied as the Archive’s 2 mil­lionth “mod­ern book.”)

Libraries “have been vital in times of cri­sis,” writes Alis­tair Black, emer­i­tus pro­fes­sor of Infor­ma­tion Sci­ences at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois, and “the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic may prove to be a chal­lenge that dwarfs the many episodes of anx­i­ety and cri­sis through which the pub­lic library has lived in the past.” A huge part of our com­bined glob­al crises involves access to reli­able infor­ma­tion, and book scan­ners at the Inter­net Archive are key agents in pre­serv­ing knowl­edge. The col­lec­tions they dig­i­tize “are crit­i­cal to edu­cat­ing an informed pop­u­lace at a time of mas­sive dis­in­for­ma­tion and mis­in­for­ma­tion,” says Kahle. When asked what she liked best about her job, Zhang replied, “Every­thing! I find every­thing inter­est­ing…. Every col­lec­tion is impor­tant to me.”

The Inter­net Archive offers over 20,000,000 freely down­load­able books and texts. Enter the col­lec­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Libraries & Archivists Are Dig­i­tiz­ing 480,000 Books Pub­lished in 20th Cen­tu­ry That Are Secret­ly in the Pub­lic Domain

10,000 Vin­tage Recipe Books Are Now Dig­i­tized in The Inter­net Archive’s Cook­book & Home Eco­nom­ics Col­lec­tion

Clas­sic Children’s Books Now Dig­i­tized and Put Online: Revis­it Vin­tage Works from the 19th & 20th Cen­turies

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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4,000 Priceless Scrolls, Texts & Papers From the University of Tokyo Have Been Digitized & Put Online

in Archives, Art, Books, History, Libraries, Literature | February 18th, 2021

The phrase “open­ing of Japan” is a euphemism that has out­lived its pur­pose, serv­ing to cloud rather than explain how a coun­try closed to out­siders sud­den­ly, in the mid-19th cen­tu­ry, became a major influ­ence in art and design world­wide. Nego­ti­a­tions were car­ried out at gun­point. In 1853, Com­modore Matthew Per­ry pre­sent­ed the Japan­ese with two white flags to raise when they were ready to sur­ren­der. (The Japan­ese called Perry’s fleet the “black ships of evil men.”) In one of innu­mer­able his­tor­i­cal ironies, we have this ugli­ness to thank for the explo­sion of Impres­sion­ist art (van Gogh was obsessed with Japan­ese prints and owned a large col­lec­tion) as well as much of the beau­ty of Art Nou­veau and mod­ernist archi­tec­ture at the turn of the cen­tu­ry.

We may know ver­sions of this already, but we prob­a­bly don’t know it from a Japan­ese point of view. “As our glob­al soci­ety grows ever more con­nect­ed,” writes Katie Bar­rett at the Inter­net Archive blog, “it can be easy to assume that all of human his­to­ry is just one click away. Yet lan­guage bar­ri­ers and phys­i­cal access still present major obsta­cles to deep­er knowl­edge and under­stand­ing of oth­er cul­tures.”

Unless we can read Japan­ese, our under­stand­ing of its his­to­ry will always be informed by spe­cial­ist schol­ars and trans­la­tors. Now, at least, thanks to coop­er­a­tion between the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tokyo Gen­er­al Library and the Inter­net Archive, we can access thou­sands more pri­ma­ry sources pre­vi­ous­ly unavail­able to “out­siders.”

“Since June 2020,” notes Bar­rett, “our Col­lec­tions team has worked in tan­dem with library staff to ingest thou­sands of dig­i­tal files from the Gen­er­al Library’s servers, map­ping the meta­da­ta for over 4,000 price­less scrolls, texts, and papers.” This mate­r­i­al has been dig­i­tized over decades by Japan­ese schol­ars and “show­cas­es hun­dreds of years of rich Japan­ese his­to­ry expressed through prose, poet­ry, and art­work.” It will be pri­mar­i­ly the art­work that con­cerns non-Japan­ese speak­ers, as it pri­mar­i­ly con­cerned 19th-cen­tu­ry Euro­peans and Amer­i­cans who first encoun­tered the country’s cul­tur­al prod­ucts. Art­work like the humor­ous print above. Bar­rett pro­vides con­text: 

In one satir­i­cal illus­tra­tion, thought to date from short­ly after the 1855 Edo earth­quake, cour­te­sans and oth­ers from the demi­monde, who suf­fered great­ly in the dis­as­ter, are shown beat­ing the giant cat­fish that was believed to cause earth­quakes. The men in the upper left-hand cor­ner rep­re­sent the con­struc­tion trades; they are try­ing to stop the attack on the fish, as rebuild­ing from earth­quakes was a prof­itable busi­ness for them.

There are many such depic­tions of “seis­mic destruc­tion” in ukiyo‑e prints dat­ing from the same peri­od and the lat­er Mino-Owari earth­quake of 1891: “They are a sober­ing reminder of the role that nat­ur­al dis­as­ters have played in Japan­ese life.” 

You can see many more dig­i­tized arti­facts, such as the charm­ing book of Japan­ese ephemera above, at the Inter­net Archive’s Uni­ver­si­ty of Tokyo col­lec­tion. Among the 4180 items cur­rent­ly avail­able, you’ll also find many Euro­pean prints and engrav­ings held in the library’s 25 col­lec­tions. All of this mate­r­i­al “can be used freely with­out pri­or per­mis­sion,” writes the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tokyo Library. “Among the high­lights,” Bar­rett writes, “are man­u­scripts and anno­tat­ed books from the per­son­al col­lec­tion of the nov­el­ist Mori Ōgai (1862–1922), an ear­ly man­u­script of the Tale of Gen­ji, [below] and a unique col­lec­tion of Chi­nese legal records from the Ming Dynasty.” Enter the col­lec­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch the Mak­ing of Japan­ese Wood­block Prints, from Start to Fin­ish, by a Long­time Tokyo Print­mak­er

Watch Vin­tage Footage of Tokyo, Cir­ca 1910, Get Brought to Life with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Down­load Clas­sic Japan­ese Wave and Rip­ple Designs: A Go-to Guide for Japan­ese Artists from 1903

Down­load Vin­cent van Gogh’s Col­lec­tion of 500 Japan­ese Prints, Which Inspired Him to Cre­ate “the Art of the Future”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Great Gatsby Is Now in the Public Domain and There’s a New Graphic Novel

in Books | January 29th, 2021

If you’ve ever dreamed about mount­ing that “Great Gats­by” musi­cal, or writ­ing that sci-fi adap­ta­tion based on Gats­by but they’re all androids, there’s some good news: as of Jan­u­ary 1, 2021, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s clas­sic nov­el final­ly entered the pub­lic domain. (Read a pub­lic domain copy here.) Cre­atives can now do what they want with the work: reprint or adapt it any way they like, with­out hav­ing to nego­ti­ate the rights.

Or you could, just like Min­neapo­lis-based artist K. Wood­man-May­nard adapt the work into a beau­ti­ful graph­ic nov­el, pages of which you can glimpse here. Her ver­sion is all light and pas­tel water­col­ors, with a lib­er­al use of the orig­i­nal text along­side more fan­tas­tic sur­re­al imagery, mak­ing visu­al some of Fitzgerald’s word play. At 240 pages, there’s a lot of work here and, as if it needs repeat­ing, no graph­ic nov­el is a sub­sti­tute for the orig­i­nal, just…a jazz riff, if you were.

But Wood­man-May­nard was one of many wait­ing for Gats­by to enter the pub­lic domain, which apart from Dis­ney prop­er­ty, will hap­pen to most record­ed and writ­ten works over time. Many authors have been wait­ing for the chance to riff on the nov­el and its char­ac­ters with­out wor­ry­ing about a cease and desist let­ter. Already you can find The Gay Gats­by, B.A. Baker’s slash fic­tion rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of all the sup­pressed long­ing in the orig­i­nal nov­el; The Great Gats­by Undead, a zom­bie ver­sion; and Michael Far­ris Smith’s Nick, a pre­quel that fol­lows Nick Car­raway through World War I and out the oth­er side. And there are plen­ty more to come.

Copy­right law stip­u­lates that any work after 95 years will enter the pub­lic domain. (Up until 1998, this used to be 75 years, but some lawyers talked to some con­gress­crit­ters).

As of 2021, along with The Great Gats­by, the pub­lic domain gained:

Mrs. Dal­loway — Vir­ginia Woolf

In Our Time — Ernest Hem­ing­way

The New Negro — Alain Locke (the first major com­pendi­um of Harlem Renais­sance writ­ers)

An Amer­i­can Tragedy — Theodore Dreis­er (adapt­ed into the 1951 film A Place in the Sun)

The Secret of Chim­neys — Agatha Christie

Arrow­smith — Sin­clair Lewis

Those Bar­ren Leaves — Aldous Hux­ley

The Paint­ed Veil — W. Som­er­set Maugh­am

Now, the thing about The Great Gats­by is that it is both loved by read­ers and hard to adapt into oth­er medi­ums by its fans. It has been adapt­ed five times for the screen (the Baz Luhrmann-Leonar­do DiCaprio ver­sion is the most recent from 2013) and they have all dealt with the cen­tral para­dox: Fitzger­ald gives us so lit­tle about Gats­by. The author is inten­tion­al­ly hop­ing the read­er to cre­ate this “great man” in our heads, and there he must stay. The nov­el is very much about the “idea” of a man, much like the idea of the “Amer­i­can Dream.” But film must cast some­body and Hol­ly­wood absolute­ly has to cast a star like Leonar­do DiCaprio or Robert Red­ford. A graph­ic nov­el, how­ev­er, does not have those con­ces­sions to the mar­ket. Woodman-Maynard’s ver­sion is not even the first graph­ic nov­el based on Fitzgerald’s book—-Scribner pub­lished a ver­sion adapt­ed by Fred Ford­ham and illus­trat­ed by Aya Mor­ton last year—-and it cer­tain­ly will not be the last. Get ready for a bumper decade celebrating/critiquing the Roar­ing ‘20s, while we still fig­ure out what to call our own era.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What’s Enter­ing the Pub­lic Domain in 2021: The Great Gats­by & Mrs. Dal­loway, Music by Irv­ing Berlin & Duke Elling­ton, Come­dies by Buster Keaton, and More

The Great Gats­by and Wait­ing for Godot: The Video Game Edi­tions

The Wire Breaks Down The Great Gats­by, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Clas­sic Crit­i­cism of Amer­i­ca (NSFW)

The Only Known Footage of the 1926 Film Adap­ta­tion of The Great Gats­by (Which F. Scott Fitzger­ald Hat­ed)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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Why Should You Read Toni Morrison’s Beloved? An Animated Video Makes the Case

in Books, Literature | January 14th, 2021

“Tell me,” said Beloved, smil­ing a wide hap­py smile. “Tell me your dia­monds.”

The unfor­get­table por­tray­al of Beloved, the mys­te­ri­ous, 20-year-old woman (Thandie Newton)—who appears in Sethe’s (Oprah Win­frey) home mys­te­ri­ous­ly just as the infant ghost haunt­ing the fam­i­ly disappears—leaves an indeli­ble image in the mind’s eye in Jonathan Demme’s 1998 film. We may learn about the his­to­ry of slav­ery in the U.S. through a wealth of recov­ered data and his­tor­i­cal sources. But to under­stand its psy­cho­log­i­cal hor­rors, and the lin­ger­ing trau­ma of its sur­vivors, we must turn to works of the imag­i­na­tion like Beloved.

So why not just watch the movie? It’s excel­lent, grant­ed, but noth­ing can take the place of Toni Morrison’s prose. Her “ver­sa­til­i­ty and tech­ni­cal and emo­tion­al range appear to know no bounds,” wrote Mar­garet Atwood in her 1987 review of the nov­el. “If there were any doubts about her stature as a pre-emi­nent Amer­i­can nov­el­ist, of her own or any oth­er gen­er­a­tion, Beloved will put them to rest.” The nov­el’s Amer­i­can goth­ic nar­ra­tive recalls the “mag­nif­i­cent prac­ti­cal­i­ty” of haunt­ing in Wuther­ing Heights. “All the main char­ac­ters in the book believe in ghosts, so it’s mere­ly nat­ur­al for this one to be there.”

“Every­one at 124 Blue­stone Road,” the Ted-Ed video les­son by Yen Pham begins, “knows their house is haunt­ed. But there’s no mys­tery about the spir­it tor­ment­ing them. This ghost is the prod­uct of an unspeak­able trau­ma.” Demme’s film dra­ma­tizes the hor­rors Sethe endured, and com­mit­ted, and tells the sto­ry of the Sweet Home plan­ta­tion and its after­math upon her fam­i­ly. What it can­not con­vey is the novel’s treat­ment of “a bar­bar­ic his­to­ry that hangs over much more than this home­stead.”

For this greater res­o­nance, we must turn to Morrison’s book, writ­ten, Atwood says, “in an anti­min­i­mal­ist prose that is by turns rich, grace­ful, eccen­tric, rough, lyri­cal, sin­u­ous, col­lo­qui­al and very much to the point.” The nov­el brings us into con­tact with the human expe­ri­ence of enslave­ment:

Through the dif­fer­ent voic­es and mem­o­ries of the book, includ­ing that of Sethe’s moth­er, a sur­vivor of the infa­mous slave-ship cross­ing, we expe­ri­ence Amer­i­can slav­ery as it was lived by those who were its objects of exchange, both at its best—which wasn’t very good—and at its worst, which was as bad as can be imag­ined. Above all, it is seen as one of the most vicious­ly antifam­i­ly insti­tu­tions humans ever devised…. It is a world in which peo­ple sud­den­ly van­ish and are nev­er seen again, not through acci­dent or covert oper­a­tion or ter­ror­ism, but as a mat­ter of every­day legal pol­i­cy.”

Morrison’s fic­tion­al­iz­ing of the true sto­ry of Mar­garet Gar­ner, an enslaved moth­er who killed her child rather than let the infant become enslaved to such a future, “points to his­to­ry on the largest scale, to the glob­al and world-his­tor­i­cal,” Pela­gia Gouli­mari writes in a mono­graph on Mor­ri­son. Mor­ri­son uses “Garner’s 1856 infanticide—a cause célèbre—as point of access to the ‘Six­ty Mil­lion and more’: the vic­tims of the Mid­dle Pas­sage and of slav­ery.”

Per­haps only the nov­el, and espe­cial­ly the nov­els of Toni Mor­ri­son, can tell world-his­tor­i­cal sto­ries through the actions of a few char­ac­ters: Sethe, Den­ver, Baby Sug­gs, Paul D., and Beloved, the angry ghost of a mur­dered daugh­ter and a des­per­ate mother’s trau­ma and the trau­mat­ic psy­chic wounds of slav­ery, returned. Learn more about why you should read Beloved in the ani­mat­ed les­son above, direct­ed by Héloïse Dor­san Rachet, and dis­cov­er more at the TED-Ed lesson’s addi­tion­al resources page.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Hear Toni Mor­ri­son (RIP) Present Her Nobel Prize Accep­tance Speech on the Rad­i­cal Pow­er of Lan­guage (1993)

Toni Morrison’s 1,200 Vol­ume Per­son­al Library is Going on Sale: Get a Glimpse of the Books on Her Tribeca Con­do Shelves

Toni Mor­ri­son Decon­structs White Suprema­cy in Amer­i­ca

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

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A 16th-Century Astronomy Book Featured “Analog Computers” to Calculate the Shape of the Moon, the Position of the Sun, and More

in Astronomy, Books, History | January 13th, 2021

If you want to learn how the plan­ets move, you’ll almost cer­tain­ly go to one place first: Youtube. Yes, there have been plen­ty of worth­while books writ­ten on the sub­ject, and read­ing them will prove essen­tial to fur­ther deep­en­ing your under­stand­ing. But videos have the capac­i­ty of motion, an unde­ni­able ben­e­fit when motion itself is the con­cept under dis­cus­sion. Less than twen­ty years into the Youtube age, we’ve already seen a good deal of inno­va­tion in the art of audio­vi­su­al expla­na­tion. But we’re also well over half a mil­len­ni­um into the age of the book as we know it, a time that even in its ear­ly phas­es saw impres­sive attempts to go beyond text on a page.

Take, for exam­ple, Peter Api­an’s Cos­mo­graphia, first pub­lished in 1524. A 16th-cen­tu­ry Ger­man poly­math, Api­an (also known as Petrus Api­anus, and born Peter Bienewitz) had a pro­fes­sion­al inter­est in math­e­mat­ics, astron­o­my and car­tog­ra­phy. At their inter­sec­tion stood the sub­ject of “cos­mog­ra­phy” from which this impres­sive book takes its name, and its project of map­ping the then-known uni­verse.

“The trea­tise pro­vid­ed instruc­tion in astron­o­my, geog­ra­phy, car­tog­ra­phy, nav­i­ga­tion, and instru­ment-mak­ing,” writes Frank Swetz at the Math­e­mat­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­i­ca. “It was one of the first Euro­pean books to depict and dis­cuss North Amer­i­ca and includ­ed mov­able volvelles allow­ing the read­ers to inter­act with and use some of the charts and instru­ment lay­outs pre­sent­ed.”

Pop-up book enthu­si­asts like Ellen Rubin will know what volvelles are; you and I may not, but if you’ve ever moved a paper wheel or slid­er on a page, you’ve used one. The volvelle first emerged in the medieval era, not as an amuse­ment to liv­en up chil­dren’s books but as a kind of “ana­log com­put­er” embed­ded in seri­ous sci­en­tif­ic works. “The volvelles make the prac­ti­cal nature of cos­mog­ra­phy clear,” writes Katie Tay­lor at Cam­bridge’s Whip­ple Library, which holds a copy of Cos­mo­graphia. “Read­ers could manip­u­late these devices to solve prob­lems: find­ing the time at dif­fer­ent places and or one’s lat­i­tude, giv­en the height of the Sun above the hori­zon.”

Api­an orig­i­nal­ly includ­ed three such volvelles in Cos­mo­graphia. Lat­er, his dis­ci­ple Gem­ma Fri­sius, a Dutch physi­cian, instru­ment mak­er and math­e­mati­cian, pro­duced expand­ed edi­tions that includ­ed anoth­er. “In all its forms,” writes Swetz, “the book was extreme­ly pop­u­lar in the 16th cen­tu­ry, going through 30 print­ings in 14 lan­guages.” Despite the book’s suc­cess, it’s not so easy to come by a copy in good (indeed work­ing) con­di­tion near­ly 500 years lat­er. If these descrip­tions of its pages and their volvelles have piqued your curios­i­ty, you can see these inge­nious paper devices in action in these videos tweet­ed out by Atlas Obscu­ra. As with plan­ets them­selves, you can’t ful­ly appre­ci­ate them until you see them move for your­self.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Atlas of Space: Behold Bril­liant Maps of Con­stel­la­tions, Aster­oids, Plan­ets & “Every­thing in the Solar Sys­tem Big­ger Than 10km”

An Illus­trat­ed Map of Every Known Object in Space: Aster­oids, Dwarf Plan­ets, Black Holes & Much More

When Astronomer Johannes Kepler Wrote the First Work of Sci­ence Fic­tion, The Dream (1609)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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