A quick fyi: this video is a little not safe for work.
You know you want to create something, but how on Earth to get it out of your mind and into reality? Sometimes you simply can’t see the way forward, a situation in which every creator finds themselves sooner or later. When the sculptor Eva Hesse hit a creative block in 1965, she wrote of her problem to a close friend, the conceptual artist Sol Lewitt. He emphatically suggested that she “just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder,” and furthermore that she stop
wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, grasping, confusing, itching, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, numbling, rambling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning, horse-shitting, hair-splitting, nit-picking, piss-trickling, nose sticking, ass-gouging, eyeball-poking, finger-pointing, alleyway-sneaking, long waiting, small stepping, evil-eyeing, back-scratching, searching, perching, besmirching, grinding, grinding, grinding away at yourself. Stop it and just
DO
You can read Lewitt’s reply in full, which offers much more colorful advice and supporting verbiage besides (as well as a far bolder “DO” than HTML can render), at Letters of Note. Though personally tailored to Hesse and her distinctive sensibilities, Lewitt’s suggestions also show the potential for wider application: “Try and tickle something inside you, your ‘weird humor.’ ” “Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool.” “If you fear, make it work for you — draw & paint your fear & anxiety.” “Practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty.” “Try to do some BAD work — the worst you can think of and see what happens but mainly relax and let everything go to hell — you are not responsible for the world — you are only responsible for your work — so DO IT.”
Though all this has plenty of impact on the page, it has an entirely different kind when performed by actor (and champion letter-reader) Benedict Cumberbatch, as seen and heard in the Letters Live video above. Putting on a not-overdone New York accent, the English star of Sherlock and The Imitation Game delivers with all necessary force Lewitt’s advice to “leave the ‘world’ and ‘ART’ alone and also quit fondling your ego,” to “empty your mind and concentrate on what you are doing,” to know “that you don’t have to justify your work — not even to yourself.” Be warned that this creative coaching session does gets a little NSFW at times, but then, so do some of the finest works of art — and so do the truths we need to hear to make them.
The event was organized in part by the National Yiddish Theatre—fitting given that Night was originally written in Yiddish, though first published in French. The theater’s artistic director and several actors from past productions claimed several of the reading slots, but left more than sixty to be filled by participants from an intentionally broad pool.
There were rabbis and Broadway performers, a New Yorker writer, the Consul General of Germany, and the Hungarian Ambassador to the UN…
At a time when this country is feeling so divided, when so much negativity is circulating about those who are different from ourselves — those who have different ethnicities, religions or even different political leanings — my father’s words are an important reminder of the dangers of the ‘us versus them’ mentality.
It took the volunteer readers a little over four hours to get through the slim volume, which shows up on many American high schools’ required reading lists.
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.
One of the most heartfelt student-to-teacher tributes is that of Nobel Prize-winning author and philosopher Albert Camus to Louis Germain, a father substitute whose classroom was a welcome reprieve from the extreme poverty Camus experienced at home. Germain persuaded Camus’ widowed mother to allow Camus to compete for the scholarship that enabled him to attend high school.
As read aloud by actor Benedict Cumberbatch, above, at Letters Live, a “celebration of the enduring power of literary correspondence,” Camus’ 1957 message to Germain is an exercise in humility and simply stated gratitude:
Dear Monsieur Germain,
I let the commotion around me these days subside a bit before speaking to you from the bottom of my heart. I have just been given far too great an honour, one I neither sought nor solicited.
But when I heard the news, my first thought, after my mother, was of you. Without you, without the affectionate hand you extended to the small poor child that I was, without your teaching and example, none of all this would have happened.
I don’t make too much of this sort of honour. But at least it gives me the opportunity to tell you what you have been and still are for me, and to assure you that your efforts, your work, and the generous heart you put into it still live in one of your little schoolboys who, despite the years, has never stopped being your grateful pupil. I embrace you with all my heart.
If it were possible, I would squeeze the great boy whom you have become, and who will always remain for me “my little Camus.”
He complimented his little Camus on not letting fame go to his head, and urged him to continue making his family priority. He shared some fond memories of Camus as a gentle, optimistic, intellectually curious little fellow, and praised his mother for doing her best in difficult circumstances.
Readers, please use the comments section to share with us the teachers deserving of your thanks.
You can find this letter, and many more, in the great Letters of Note book.
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.
Media vita in morte sumus, goes the medieval line of poetry that lent the English Book of Common Prayer its most memorable expression: “In the midst of life we are in death.” The remainder of the poem extrapolates a theology from this observation, something one can only take on faith. But whatever way we dress up the mystery of death, it remains ever-present and inevitable. Yet we might think of the motto as a palindrome: In the midst of death, we are in life. The dead remain with us, for as long as we live and remember them. This is also a mystery.
Even theoretical physicists must confront the presence of the departed, and few scientists—few writers—have done so with as much poignancy, directness, eloquence, and humor as Richard Feynman, in a letter to his wife Arline written over a year after she died of tuberculosis at age 25. Feynman, himself only 28 years old at the time, sealed the letter, written in 1946, until his own death in 1988. “Please excuse my not mailing this,” he wrote with bitter humor in the postscript, “but I don’t know your new address.” Even in the midst of his profound grief, Feynman’s wit sparkles. It is not a performance for us, his posthumous readers. It is simply the way he had always written—in letter after letter—to Arline.
In the video above, Oscar Isaac, who has embodied many a wisecracking romantic, gives voice to the longing and pain of Feynman’s letter, in which the physicist confesses, “I thought there was no sense to writing.” Somehow, he could not help but do so, ending with starkly ambivalent truths he was unable to reconcile with what he colloquially calls his “realistic” nature: “You only are left to me. You are real.… I love my wife. My wife is dead.” Read the full letter below, via Letters of Note. For more from their Letters Live series, see Benedict Cumberbatch read Kurt Vonnegut’s letter to the school that banned his novel Slaughterhouse Five.
October 17, 1946
D’Arline,
I adore you, sweetheart.
I know how much you like to hear that — but I don’t only write it because you like it — I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write it to you.
It is such a terribly long time since I last wrote to you — almost two years but I know you’ll excuse me because you understand how I am, stubborn and realistic; and I thought there was no sense to writing.
But now I know my darling wife that it is right to do what I have delayed in doing, and that I have done so much in the past. I want to tell you I love you. I want to love you. I always will love you.
I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead — but I still want to comfort and take care of you — and I want you to love me and care for me. I want to have problems to discuss with you — I want to do little projects with you. I never thought until just now that we can do that. What should we do. We started to learn to make clothes together — or learn Chinese — or getting a movie projector. Can’t I do something now? No. I am alone without you and you were the “idea-woman” and general instigator of all our wild adventures.
When you were sick you worried because you could not give me something that you wanted to and thought I needed. You needn’t have worried. Just as I told you then there was no real need because I loved you in so many ways so much. And now it is clearly even more true — you can give me nothing now yet I love you so that you stand in my way of loving anyone else — but I want you to stand there. You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.
I know you will assure me that I am foolish and that you want me to have full happiness and don’t want to be in my way. I’ll bet you are surprised that I don’t even have a girlfriend (except you, sweetheart) after two years. But you can’t help it, darling, nor can I — I don’t understand it, for I have met many girls and very nice ones and I don’t want to remain alone — but in two or three meetings they all seem ashes.
You only are left to me. You are real.
My darling wife, I do adore you.
I love my wife. My wife is dead.
Rich.
PS Please excuse my not mailing this — but I don’t know your new address
If you’ve kept up with Open Culture for a while, you know that Kurt Vonnegut could write a good letter, whether home from World War II, to high school students, to other writers, to John F. Kennedy, or to the future. You also know that Benedict Cumberbatch can give a good reading, whether of literature like The Metamorphosisand Moby Dickor more directly personal words from Alan Turing or a Guantánamo prisoner. It must have seemed like only a matter of time, then, before this master reader of letters (in the broad sense) took on the work of a master letter-writer, and here we have a clip of Cumberbatch at the Hay Festival 2014 reading a Vonnegut letter — and a particularly impassioned Vonnegut letter at that.
“I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school,” Vonnegut writes to Charles McCarthy, head of the school board at North Dakota’s Drake High School, who in 1973 ordered its copies of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and other novels burned for their “obscene language.” “Certain members of your community have suggested that my work is evil. This is extraordinarily insulting to me. The news from Drake indicates to me that books and writers are very unreal to you people. I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am.”
After assuring McCarthy that “my publisher and I have done absolutely nothing to exploit the disgusting news,” Vonnegut goes on to describe himself not as one of the “ratlike people who enjoy making money from poisoning the minds of young people” that McCarthy may imagine, but as a “large, strong person, fifty-one years old, who did a lot of farm work as a boy, who is good with tools. I have raised six children, three my own and three adopted. They have all turned out well. Two of them are farmers. I am a combat infantry veteran from World War II, and hold a Purple Heart. I have earned whatever I own by hard work.”
And as for the products of that labor, “if you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life.” Vonnegut acknowledges the school’s right to decide what books its students should read, “but it is also true that if you exercise that right and fulfill that responsibility in an ignorant, harsh, un-American manner, then people are entitled to call you bad citizens and fools. Even your own children are entitled to call you that.”
More that forty years have passed, and hardly anywhere does Slaughterhouse-Five now count as controversial reading material. But Vonnegut’s words to McCarthy, which you can read in full at Letters of Note web site (or in the Letters of Note book), still bear not just repeating but breathing new life into by a performer like Cumberbatch, one of the most respected of his generation. At the Letters Live Youtube channel, you can see his interpretation of more letters originally written by Sol LeWitt, William Safire, and other people known primarily for their work, but the reading of whose letters make them, in Vonnegut’s words, “very real.”
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.
I first heard the phrase “terminal aesthetic” in a class on T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, who collaborated on the final version of Eliot’s post World War I edifice, The Waste Land. That poem, went the argument, traveled so far out on the edge, with its fragmented language and incongruous literary and historical references, that it couldn’t possibly serve as a basis for new forms of writing. Instead, Eliot had walked to the end of a promontory, and planted a flag to mark a creative and, perhaps, spiritual dead end.
I’m not sure I agree, but the idea has always fascinated me, that a work of art could be so rarified, so ahead of its readers, so idiosyncratic, inaccessible, and strange, that it might escape all attempts at imitation and domestication. There may be no greater example of such a project than James Joyce’s final work, Finnegans Wake. For all the admiration and obsession it has inspired, for the many artists who have learned from this strange book (including, notably, A Clockwork Orange’s Anthony Burgess), it remains for nearly all of us, in the words of H.G. Wells, a repository of “vast riddles.”
Wells wrote to Joyce in 1928, regarding what was then simply known as the Irish author’s “Work in Progress.” Excerpts were just then appearing piecemeal in journals and being “passed around in literary circles,” writes Letters of Note,” to a largely baffled audience.” It seems that Wells had been asked—perhaps by Joyce himself—to offer public comment or a blurb of some sort. He declined. “I’ve been studying you and thinking over you a lot,” he begins. “The outcome is that I don’t think I can do anything for the propaganda of your work.”
Wells professes a “great personal liking” for Joyce, but then details the “absolutely different courses” their lives and thought had taken: “Your mental existence is obsessed by a monstrous system of contradictions,” Wells writes, and elaborates with some distaste on Joyce’s scatological and theological obsessions. Then he turns to the work at hand, which would become Finnegans Wake:
Now with regard to this literary experiment of yours. It’s a considerable thing because you are a very considerable man and you have in your crowded composition a mighty genius for expression which has escaped discipline. But I don’t think it gets anywhere. You have turned your back on common men — on their elementary needs and their restricted time and intelligence… What is the result? Vast riddles. Your last two works have been more amusing and exciting to write than they will ever be to read. Take me as a typical common reader. Do I get much pleasure from this work? … No. So I ask: Who the hell is this Joyce who demands so many waking hours of the few thousand I have still to live for a proper appreciation of his quirks and fancies and flashes of rendering?
A fair enough question, I suppose, and fair enough critique—one we might expect from the self-described “scientific, constructive” mind of Wells. “To me,” he writes, “it is a dead end.”
Finnegans Wake continues to baffle and frustrate contemporary readers, and writers like Michael Chabon, who once described it as “hulking, chimerical, gibbering to itself in an outlandish tongue, a frightening beast out of legend.” Does Finnegans Wake speak to us common readers, or does it “gibber” only to itself, leaving the rest of us behind? Like Ulysses, it’s best to traverse the book with a guide. Burgess has written a few (and has even audaciously abridged the novel). We must also remember that Finnegans Wake is as much about sound as sense, and should be heard as well as read. (Hear Joyce himself read from the novel here.)
Then there are the “fractal” explications of the novel, like Terrence McKenna’s and that of a recent scientific study of its “multifractality.” I doubt any of this would have moved Wells, who demanded a clarity of thought and expression that was anathema to the later Joyce, immersed as he was in a project to disassemble the roots and branches of language and history and repurpose them for his own means. For all his puzzlement over Joyce’s “experiment,” however, Wells does seem to have found exactly the right word to capture Joyce’s radical literary aims, describing the writer of Ulysses and the inscrutable Finnegans Wake as “insurrectionary.”
Read Wells’ full letter at Letters of Note, who also bring us a letter from a “Vladimir Dixon,” written in imitation of Finnegans Wake, and possibly penned by Joyce himself.
Image by Flickr, courtesy of Perkins School for the Blind
The inspirational blind and deaf activist and educator Helen Keller learned to speak aloud, but, to her great regret, never clearly.
Her careful penmanship, above, is another matter. Her impeccably rendered upright hand puts that of a great many sighted people—not all of them physicians—to shame.
Keller learned to write—and read—with the help of embossed books as a student at Perkins School for the Blind. The United States didn’t adopt Standard Braille as its official system for blind readers and writers until 1918, when Keller was in her late 30’s. Prior to that blind readers and writers were subjected to a number of competing systems, a situation she decried as “absurd.”
Some of these systems had their basis in the Roman alphabet, including Boston Line Type, the brainchild of Perkins’ Founding Director, Samuel Gridley Howe, an opponent of Braille. Students may have preferred dot-based systems for taking notes and writing letters, but Boston Line Type remained Perkins’ approved printing system until 1908.
There’s more than an echo of Boston Line Type in Keller’s blocky characters, as well as her spacing. Deviating from penmanship forms learned at school is a luxury exclusive to the sighted. Until formation became instinctual, Keller relied on a grooved board to help her size her characters correctly, an exhausting process. Small wonder that she ended many of her early letters with “I am too tired to write more.”
Perkins has published a Flickr album of letters Keller wrote between the ages of 8 and 11 to then-director Michael Anagnos, including 3 pages in French. Leafing through them, I marveled less at her ability and determination than my (sighted) 16-year-old son’s lack of interest in developing a respectable-looking hand.
Keller’s handwriting is so above reproach that it quickly fades to the background, upstaged by her charming manners and girlish preoccupations. A sample:
If you go to Roumania, please ask the good queen Elizabeth about her little invalid brother and tell her that I am very sorry that her darling little girl died. I should like to send a kiss to Vittorio, the little prince of Naples, but teacher says she is afraid you will not remember so many messages.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and winemaker who played Annie Sullivan in her high school’s production of The Miracle Worker. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
