It makes sense that Superman would take a tolerant view of immigrants and other minorities, given that he himself arrived on Earth as a refugee from the planet Krypton.
“…and remember, boys and girls, your school – like our country – is made up of Americans of many different races, religions and national origins, so … If YOU hear anybody talk against a schoolmate or anyone else because of his religion, race or national origin – don’t wait: tell him THAT KIND OF TALK IS UN-AMERICAN. HELP KEEP YOUR SCHOOL ALL-AMERICAN!”
In other words, citizens must steel themselves to take action, because you can’t always count on a superhero to show up and make things right.
(Perhaps President Elect was too young to receive a copy. The back of the cover includes a grid for filling in one’s class schedule and he was but four years old at the time.)
Superman could not survive Doomsday, but the Anti-Defamation League, planet Krptyon to the illustration’s original distributer, continues to uphold the values he promotes above.
Already there have been troubling signs of a spike in hate crimes in the days after the election. As we look ahead, ADL will be vigilant against extremism and relentlessly hold the new administration accountable. You can expect ADL to be unwavering in its commitment to fighting anti-Semitism, racism and bigotry. We will monitor developments and speak out.
And wherever and whenever Jews, minority groups, immigrants, and others are marginalized or our civil liberties are threatened, ADL vigorously will defend those rights … We will not shrink from the fight ahead regardless of where it takes us.
Meanwhile, a full color version of the 66-year-old illustration has been making the rounds on social media. Let us consider it a placeholder. Eventually someone will surely take it back to the drawing board to add more girls, children with disabilities, and children of color.
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.
How does censorship come about in advanced, ostensibly democratic societies? In some cases, through institutions colluding in ways that go unnoticed by the general public. As Noam Chomsky has argued for decades, state agencies often collude with the press to spread certain narratives and suppress others. And as we see during Banned Books Week, legislatures, courts, and educational institutions often collude with publishers, teachers, and parents to suppress literature they view as threatening. One such case remains particularly ironic given the book in question: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the story of a dystopian society in which all books are banned, and fire departments burn contraband copies.
Between the years 1967 and 1979, Ballantine published an expurgated version of the novel for use in high schools, removing content deemed objectionable. Bradbury was completely unaware. For six of those years, the bowdlerized version was the only one sold by the publisher. We can remember this case when we read the response of writer Daniel Radosh to a permission slip his son Milo brought home from his 8th grade teacher for a book club reading of Fahrenheit 451. Written in Milo’s own hand, the initial note, at the top, informs Mr. Radosh that the novel “was challenged because of it’s [sic] theme of the illegality and censorship of books. One book people got most angry about was the burning of the bible. Secondly, there is a large amount of cursing and profanity in the book.”
After this confession, Milo’s note asks for a parental signature in a postscript. Addressing the letter’s true writer, Milo’s teacher, Daniel Radosh responded thus, in the typed note attached to his son’s letter.
I love this letter! What a wonderful way to introduce students to the theme of Fahrenheit 451 that books are so dangerous that the institutions of society – schools and parents – might be willing to team up against children to prevent them from reading one.
It’s easy enough to read the book and say, ‘This is crazy. It could never really happen,’ but pretending to present students at the start with what seems like a totally reasonable ‘first step’ is a really immersive way to teach them how insidious censorship can be.
I’m sure that when the book club is over and the students realise the true intent of this letter they’ll be shocked at how many of them accepted it as an actual permission slip.
In addition, Milo’s concern that allowing me to add to this note will make him stand out as a troublemaker really brings home why most of the characters find it easier to accept the world they live in rather than challenge it.
I assured him that his teacher would have his back.
Radosh’s insinuation that the letter his son was induced to write is not an “actual permission slip” underscores his claim that the exercise is really a means of controlling children by means of collusion, even though, he jests, such a thing must be part of the lesson itself. Should he be allowed to read the novel, the signing and delivery of the permission slip, Radosh devastatingly suggests, completes Milo’s humiliation, bringing home to him “why most of the characters” in the book remain passive, and “find it easier to accept the world they live in rather than challenge it.”
In short, Radosh’s response, for all its pithy irony, digs deeply into the mechanisms that suppress speech deemed so “dangerous that the institutions of society—schools and parents—might be willing to team up against children to prevent them” from reading it.
Vonnegut fans long for this level of access, which is why we are doubly grateful to writer Suzanne McConnell, who took Vonnegut’s “Form of Fiction” (aka “Surface Criticism” aka “How to Talk out of the Corner of Your Mouth Like a Real Tough Pro”) course at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the mid-60s.
The goal was to examine fiction from a writer’s perspective and McConnell (who is soon to publish a book about Vonnegut’s advice to writers) preserved one of her old teacher’s term paper assignments—again in letter form. She later had an epiphany that his assignments were “designed to teach something much more than whatever I thought then… He was teaching us to do our own thinking, to find out who we were, what we loved, abhorred, what set off our tripwires, what tripped up our hearts.”
(A decade and a half later, Vonnegut would subject his own novels to the same treatment.)
A noted humanist, Vonnegut instructed the class to read these stories not in an overly analytical mindset, but rather as if they had just consumed “two ounces of very good booze.”
The ensuing letter grades were meant to be “childishly selfish and impudent measures” of how much—or little—joy the stories inspired in the reader.
Next, students were instructed to choose their three favorite and three least favorite stories, then disguise themselves as “minor but useful” lit mag editors in order to advise their “wise, respected, witty and world-weary superior” as to whether or not the selected stories merited publication.
Here’s the full assignment, which was published in Kurt Vonnegut: Letters(Delacorte Press, 2012). And also again in Slate.
Beloved:
This course began as Form and Theory of Fiction, became Form of Fiction, then Form and Texture of Fiction, then Surface Criticism, or How to Talk out of the Corner of Your Mouth Like a Real Tough Pro. It will probably be Animal Husbandry 108 by the time Black February rolls around. As was said to me years ago by a dear, dear friend, “Keep your hat on. We may end up miles from here.”
As for your term papers, I should like them to be both cynical and religious. I want you to adore the Universe, to be easily delighted, but to be prompt as well with impatience with those artists who offend your own deep notions of what the Universe is or should be. “This above all …”
I invite you to read the fifteen tales in Masters of the Modern Short Story (W. Havighurst, editor, 1955, Harcourt, Brace, $14.95 in paperback). Read them for pleasure and satisfaction, beginning each as though, only seven minutes before, you had swallowed two ounces of very good booze. “Except ye be as little children …”
Then reproduce on a single sheet of clean, white paper the table of contents of the book, omitting the page numbers, and substituting for each number a grade from A to F. The grades should be childishly selfish and impudent measures of your own joy or lack of it. I don’t care what grades you give. I do insist that you like some stories better than others.
Proceed next to the hallucination that you are a minor but useful editor on a good literary magazine not connected with a university. Take three stories that please you most and three that please you least, six in all, and pretend that they have been offered for publication. Write a report on each to be submitted to a wise, respected, witty and world-weary superior.
Do not do so as an academic critic, nor as a person drunk on art, nor as a barbarian in the literary market place. Do so as a sensitive person who has a few practical hunches about how stories can succeed or fail. Praise or damn as you please, but do so rather flatly, pragmatically, with cunning attention to annoying or gratifying details. Be yourself. Be unique. Be a good editor. The Universe needs more good editors, God knows.
Since there are eighty of you, and since I do not wish to go blind or kill somebody, about twenty pages from each of you should do neatly. Do not bubble. Do not spin your wheels. Use words I know.
poloniøus
McConnell supplied further details on the extraordinary experience of being Vonnegut’s student in an essay forthe Brooklyn Rail:
Kurt taught a Chekhov story. I can’t remember the name of it. I didn’t quite understand the point, since nothing much happened. An adolescent girl is in love with this boy and that boy and another; she points at a little dog, as I recall, or maybe something else, and laughs. That’s all. There’s no conflict, no dramatic turning point or change. Kurt pointed out that she has no words for the sheer joy of being young, ripe with life, her own juiciness, and the promise of romance. Her inarticulate feelings spill into laughter at something innocuous. That’s what happened in the story. His absolute delight in that girl’s joy of feeling herself so alive was so encouraging of delight. Kurt’s enchantment taught me that such moments are nothing to sneeze at. They’re worth a story.
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.
Knowing the transformative effect an inspired teacher can have on an “unreachable” student, one can only hope that geography and luck will conspire to bring the two together at an early point in the child’s development.
Helen Keller, author, activist, and poster girl for surmounting near-impossible odds, certainly lucked out in the teacher department. Rendered deaf and blind by a fever contracted at 19 months, Keller earned a reputation as a holy terror in a family ill-equipped to understand what her wild rages might signify.
Within a few short months of her arrival at the Keller family home, Sullivan led the nearly-seven-year-old Keller to her famous breakthrough at the water pump.
In a more conventional arrangement, the student would eventually leave her teacher for further educational pursuits, but Keller depended on Sullivan to translate other teachers’ lectures and classroom interactions. Sullivan accompanied her to Perkins School for the Blind, the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf, the Cambridge School for Young Ladies, and finally Radcliffe College, where Keller earned her BA.
The unusual boundaries of their teacher-student bond meant Keller lived with Sullivan and her husband in their Forest Hills home, a move that hastened the marriage’s unofficial but permanent end, according to Sullivan’s biographer, Kim Nielsen. It likely thwarted Keller’s single attempt at romance, with her temporary secretary, writer Peter Fagan, too.
For better and worse, their lives were forever entwined, each made more extraordinary by the presence of the other.
Their appearance in the 1930 Vitaphone newsreel, above, highlights the mandatory physical closeness they shared, as they demonstrate the process by which Keller learned to speak. Having learned to communicate via letters Sullivan finger spelled into her palm, Keller placed her fingers against Sullivan’s lips, throat and nose, to feeling the vibrations made when these familiar letters were spoken aloud.
Sullivan died six years after the newsreel was filmed, at which point, Polly Thomson, originally engaged as the ladies’ housekeeper, took over, serving as Keller’s interpreter and traveling companion for the next twenty years.
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.
In 1980, scientist and writer Isaac Asimov argued in an essay that “there is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been.” That year, the Republican Party stood at the dawn of the Reagan Revolution, which initiated a decades-long conservative groundswell that many pundits say may finally come to an end in November. GOP strategist Steve Schmidt (who has been regretful about choosing Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate in 2008) recently pointed to what he called “intellectual rot” as a primary culprit, and a cult-like devotion to irrationality among a certain segment of the electorate.
It’s a familiar contention. There have been critiques of American anti-intellectualism since the country’s founding, though whether or not that phenomenon has intensified, as Susan Jacoby alleged inThe Age of American Unreason, may be a subject of debate. Not all of the unreason is partisan, as the anti-vaccination movement has shown. But “the strain of anti-intellectualism” writes Asimov, “has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”
Asimov’s primary examples happen to come from the political world. However, he doesn’t name contemporary names but reaches back to take a swipe at Eisenhower (“who invented a version of the English language that was all his own”) and George Wallace. Particularly interesting is Asimov’s take on the “slogan on the part of the obscurantists: ‘Don’t trust the experts!’” This language, along with charges of “elitism,” Asimov wryly notes, is so often used by people who are themselves experts and elites, “feeling guilty about having gone to school.” So many of the American political class’s wounds are self-inflicted, he suggests, but that’s because they are beholden to a largely ignorant electorate:
To be sure, the average American can sign his name more or less legibly, and can make out the sports headlines—but how many nonelitist Americans can, without undue difficulty, read as many as a thousand consecutive words of small print, some of which may be trisyllabic?
Asimov’s examples are less than convincing: road signs “steadily being replaced by little pictures to make them internationally legible” has more to do with linguistic diversity than illiteracy, and accusing television commercials of speaking their messages out loud instead of using printed text on the screen seems to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the medium. Jacoby in her book-length study of the problem looks at educational policy in the United States, and the resistance to national standards that virtually ensures widespread pockets of ignorance all over the country. Asimov’s very short, pithy essay has neither the space nor the inclination to conduct such analysis.
Instead he is concerned with attitudes. Not only are many Americans badly educated, he writes, but the broad ignorance of the population in matters of “science… mathematics… economics… foreign languages…” has as much to do with Americans’ unwillingness to read as their inability.
There are 200 million Americans who have inhabited schoolrooms at some time in their lives and who will admit that they know how to read… but most decent periodicals believe they are doing amazingly well if they have circulation of half a million. It may be that only 1 per cent—or less—of Americans make a stab at exercising their right to know. And if they try to do anything on that basis they are quite likely to be accused of being elitists.
One might in some respects charge Asimov himself of elitism when he concludes, “We can all be members of the intellectual elite.” Such a blithely optimistic statement ignores the ways in which economic elites actively manipulate education policy to suit their interests, cripple education funding, and oppose efforts at free or low cost higher education. Many efforts at spreading knowledge—like the Chatauquas of the early 20th century, the educational radio programs of the 40s and 50s, and the public television revolution of the 70s and 80s—have been ad hoc and nearly always imperiled by funding crises and the designs of profiteers.
Nonetheless, the widespread (though hardly universal) availability of free resources on the internet has made self-education a reality for many people, and certainly for most Americans. But perhaps not even Isaac Asimov could have foreseen the bitter polarization and disinformation campaigns that technology has also enabled. Needless to say, “A Cult of Ignorance” was not one of Asimov’s most popular pieces of writing. First published on January 21, 1980 in Newsweek, the short essay has never been reprinted in any of Asimov’s collections. You can read the essay as a PDF here. There’s also, one of our readers reminds us, a transcript on Github.
Never meet your idols, they say. It can put a cramp in your appreciation of their work. There are always exceptions, but maybe Bill Murray proves the rule. On the other hand, you should always learn from your idols. There’s a reason you admire them, after all. Find out what it is and what they have to teach you. In the series we feature here, Advice to the Young, many an idol of many an aspiring artist and musician offers some broad, existential advice—ways to absorb a little of their process.
Laurie Anderson, above, tells us to “be loose.” Widen our boundaries, “make it vague,” because “there are so many forces that are trying to push us in certain directions, and they’re traps…. Don’t be caught in that trap of definition. It’s a corporate trap…. Be flexible.” Good advice, if you’re as eclectic and loose as Laurie Anderson, or if you seek artistic liberation ahead of sales. “I became an artist because I want to be free,” she says.
Just above, Daniel Lanois, superstar slide guitarist and producer of Bob Dylan, Neil Young, U2, Peter Gabriel, and Emmylou Harris, tells us what he learned from working with Brian Eno. His advice is impressionistic, alluding to the importance of atmosphere and environment, as one might expect. It’s about appreciating the process, he suggests. He does get concrete about a difficulty nearly every artist faces: “if you have a financial limitation, that might be okay. You don’t have to have everything that the other people have. I think a financial limitation or a technological limitation may free up the imagination.” In an age of home studios, that’s always welcome news.
David Byrne has always told it straight, in his cultural criticism and songwriting, and in his segment, above, he steers hopeful musicians and artists away from the dream of Jay Z‑level fame. “Often the artists who are very successful that way” he says, “they don’t have much flexibility. In achieving success, they lose a little bit of their creative freedom. They have to keep making the same thing over and over again.” Byrne’s advice solidly underlines Anderson’s. If you want creative freedom, be prepared to fly under the radar and make much less money than the stars. Ending on a starkly realist note, Byrne admits that in any case, you’ll probably need a day job: “it’s very, very hard to make money in the music business.”
Novelist Umberto Eco also brings us down to earth in his interview, saying “not to think you are inspired,” then slyly dropping a cliché: “genius is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.” The old wisdom is truest, I suppose. He also urges writers to take their time with a book. “I cannot understand those novelists who publish a book every year. They lose this pleasure of spending six, seven, eight years to tell a story.” Eco’s advice: rise through the ranks, “go step by step, don’t pretend immediately to receive the Nobel prize, because that kills a literary career.”
Patti Smith, comfortably addressing an audience from an outdoor stage, urges them to “just keep doing your work” whether anyone’s listening, reading, etc. To those people who criticize her success as selling out her punk rock roots, Smith says, to laughs, “fuck you.” She then transmits some advice she received from William S. Burroughs: “build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t’ make compromises, don’t worry about making a lot of money or being successful; be concerned with doing good work.”
Easy perhaps for Burroughs the adding machine-heir to say, but good advice nonetheless, and consistent with what each artist above tells us: do it your way, don’t get pigeonholed, work with what you have, don’t worry about success or money, keep your expectations realistic.
You can watch more interviews with Marina Abramović, Wim Wenders, Jonas Mekas, and many more on this Advice to the Young playlist assembled by The Louisiana Channel. All 21 talks in the series can be viewed below:
The chicken-and-egg, forest/trees question for those who produce educational and public service media is really who are we producing our content for. MIT’s Director of Digital Learning Sanjay Sarma has said that “we” – universities in particular (but also museums, libraries, and other educational and cultural institutions) – “are all sort of Disney, and Sony, and MGM – we produce movies.” But who are we producing our movies for?
The answer is – perhaps obviously – that we are producing for multiple stakeholders, but that many of us are really producing these productions for the world. At a time when so much crap is happening around the globe, it is ever more clear that our real responsibility is to improve the planet while we are on it, and if we can help effect that by sharing our knowledge, so much the better.
Much as U.S. and other national industries of research and scholarly publishing have begun to mandate some form of open or free licensing for the output of grant-funded written work, so now the question arises should video and educational video in particular find its way, too, into the commons. Here, too, the answer is: of course.
The Handbook situates educational video production in the context of more than 100 years of moving-image work at universities and beyond. Indeed, the booklet draws on the work of educational producers from the early 1900s – works such as Charles Urban, The Cinematograph in Science, Education, and Matters of State and the 1920s journal Visual Education.
The impulse to share knowledge in a free environment also is not new. In many ways MOOCs and Open Courseware and Wikipedia and Creative Commons and Google/YouTube are all part of the same project – envisioned by visionaries such as Richard Stallman, media producers behind the start of public broadcasting here and abroad, much earlier, even, by publishers active centuries ago in the Enlightenment, and even earlier, in ancient Alexandria under the Ptolemaic kings. The vision? A giant rich resource: a gigantic global encyclopedia, or Encyclopédie, or library or museum, contributing to universal access to human knowledge. With the Internet upon us now, we can help realize it.
Does the rest of the world have any right to the knowledge that we produce at universities and other cultural and educational institutions? And do we have any obligation to share it? We live once, but our problems live on. And if the work of Richard Hofstadter (an expert on “anti-intellectualism” and what he called “the paranoid style in American politics”) and Edward Said (so wise on the collapse of colonialism and media bias), just to pick two Columbia University examples, could have been recorded and shared – and shared openly – we’d be the richer for it. Disseminating knowledge now through the world’s most powerful medium could be our highest calling.
Maybe you’re an eBooks holdout, a late adopter, a disdainer of the book as a branded “device”? I get it. Is there anything more ridiculous than putting down a book because its batteries have run out? No amount of crowing about the supremacy of tech will make me love the smell and feel of paper less…
And yet…
Within the charming heft of printed books reside their limitation. Traveling students, researchers, or avid readers must lug several pounds of bound paper along with them on long journeys, or to work sessions at the local coffee shop. An eReader or smartphone can hold an entire library—which one can expand ad infinitum, it seems, on the fly.
This feature—along with the ease of copying quotes and passages and sending them across platforms—eventually sold me on the eBook as a robust supplement to print. And if it sounds like I’m making a sales pitch, I am: for hundreds of free books, available to read on the device of your choosing. Entry-level Kindle, budget smartphone, or latest, fanciest iPad—most all will accommodate the range of formats available in our collection of 800 Free eBooks.
Can you freely download the latest New York Times bestsellers? Not here, and I’d hope—for the sake of those hard-working writers—that you’d pay to read new releases. Can you carry along with you on your next business trip or vacation the works of Aristotle and Freud, several novels by Jane Austen and Joseph Conrad, the masterworks of Hegel, Hume, and Kant, the complete Shakespeare, and Proust’s multi-volume À la recherche du temps perdu? Quite easily. Here’s a small sample of what’s on our list:
See the full list of 800 offerings here. They may lack the sensory pleasure of print, but the ability to carry an entire library of classic literature in your pocket has its advantages, to say the least. And if your travels include long drives, you’ll also want to check out our master list of Free Audio Books.
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