Your senses do deceive you, my friends. This is not the latest, greatest video from RSA Animate. No, this video comes to us via Pablo Morales de los Rios, a Spanish artist, who has artistically narrated the history of music — or the Historia de la Música – in a shade less than seven minutes. 6:59, to be precise. You don’t need much Spanish under your belt to realize that the story starts 50,000 years ago, then moves quickly from the Ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians, to the troubadours of the Middle Ages. The video gives disproportionate attention to classical music during the following periods — Renacimiento, Barroco, Classicismo and Romanticismo. But before wrapping up, we tack over to America and witness the birth of jazz and the blues, before heading back across the pond for the Invasión británica. Artistically speaking, it all culminates in a pretty interesting way. But we’ll let you see how things play out.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
eBay prices for the album Gertrude Stein Reads Her Own Work range from $20 to $200. Vinyl purists, and Stein purists, may long for one of the still-sealed copies at the upper end of that range. The rest of us can enjoy hearing its recordings as mp3s, free on the internet courtesy of PennSound. These clips, recorded between 1934 and 1935 (which came out in album form in 1956) let you put yourself in the presence of the poet. Much of the work she reads aloud here comes inspired by observing other creative luminaries. The record’s producers included these homages along with a piece of an interview, variants of well-known poems such as “How She Bowed to Her Brother” (which often appears under the name “She Bowed to Her Brother”), and an excerpt from her novel The Making of Americans.
But to get straight into the textual substance, listen to “The Fifteenth of November… T.S. Eliot,” her portrait of her colleague in letters. Then hear her capturing a certain well-known painter in “If I Told Him: a Completed Portrait of Picasso.” And on painter Henri Matisse, she begins her remarks as follows: “One was quite certain that for a long part of his being one being living he had been trying to be certain that he was wrong in doing what he was doing and then when he could not come to be certain that he had been wrong in doing what he had been doing, when he had completely convinced himself that he would not come to be certain that he had been wrong in doing what he had been doing he was really certain then that he was a great one and he certainly was a great one.” If you feel proud of reading that whole sentence in one go, wait until you hear Stein speak it.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Before he was a big game hunter, before he was a deep-sea fisherman, Ernest Hemingway was a craftsman who would rise very early in the morning and write. His best stories are masterpieces of the modern era, and his prose style is one of the most influential of the 20th century.
Hemingway never wrote a treatise on the art of writing fiction. He did, however, leave behind a great many passages in letters, articles and books with opinions and advice on writing. Some of the best of those were assembled in 1984 by Larry W. Phillips into a book, Ernest Hemingway on Writing. We’ve selected seven of our favorite quotations from the book and placed them, along with our own commentary, on this page. We hope you will all–writers and readers alike–find them fascinating.
1: To get started, write one true sentence.
Hemingway had a simple trick for overcoming writer’s block. In a memorable passage in A Moveable Feast, he writes:
Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.
2: Always stop for the day while you still know what will happen next.
There is a difference between stopping and foundering. To make steady progress, having a daily word-count quota was far less important to Hemingway than making sure he never emptied the well of his imagination. In an October 1935 article in Esquire ( “Monologue to the Maestro: A High Seas Letter”) Hemingway offers this advice to a young writer:
The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.
3: Never think about the story when you’re not working.
Building on his previous advice, Hemingway says never to think about a story you are working on before you begin again the next day. “That way your subconscious will work on it all the time,” he writes in the Esquire piece. “But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.” He goes into more detail in A Moveable Feast:
When I was writing, it was necessary for me to read after I had written. If you kept thinking about it, you would lose the thing you were writing before you could go on with it the next day. It was necessary to get exercise, to be tired in the body, and it was very good to make love with whom you loved. That was better than anything. But afterwards, when you were empty, it was necessary to read in order not to think or worry about your work until you could do it again. I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.
4: When it’s time to work again, always start by reading what you’ve written so far.
T0 maintain continuity, Hemingway made a habit of reading over what he had already written before going further. In the 1935 Esquire article, he writes:
The best way is to read it all every day from the start, correcting as you go along, then go on from where you stopped the day before. When it gets so long that you can’t do this every day read back two or three chapters each day; then each week read it all from the start. That’s how you make it all of one piece.
5: Don’t describe an emotion–make it.
Close observation of life is critical to good writing, said Hemingway. The key is to not only watch and listen closely to external events, but to also notice any emotion stirred in you by the events and then trace back and identify precisely what it was that caused the emotion. If you can identify the concrete action or sensation that caused the emotion and present it accurately and fully rounded in your story, your readers should feel the same emotion. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway writes about his early struggle to master this:
I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced. In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another, you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to get it.
6: Use a pencil.
Hemingway often used a typewriter when composing letters or magazine pieces, but for serious work he preferred a pencil. In the Esquire article (which shows signs of having been written on a typewriter) Hemingway says:
When you start to write you get all the kick and the reader gets none. So you might as well use a typewriter because it is that much easier and you enjoy it that much more. After you learn to write your whole object is to convey everything, every sensation, sight, feeling, place and emotion to the reader. To do this you have to work over what you write. If you write with a pencil you get three different sights at it to see if the reader is getting what you want him to. First when you read it over; then when it is typed you get another chance to improve it, and again in the proof. Writing it first in pencil gives you one-third more chance to improve it. That is .333 which is a damned good average for a hitter. It also keeps it fluid longer so you can better it easier.
7: Be Brief.
Hemingway was contemptuous of writers who, as he put it, “never learned how to say no to a typewriter.” In a 1945 letter to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, Hemingway writes:
It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
The so-called New (or “Gnu”) Atheism arrived at a time when fear, anger, and confusion over extremist religion had hit a fever pitch. Suddenly, people who didn’t pay much attention to religion—their own or anyone else’s—became intensely interested in religious criticism and debate; it was the perfect climate for a publishing storm, and that’s essentially how the movement began. It was also, of course, predated by thousands of years of philosophical atheism of some variety or another, but “new” atheism had something different to offer: while its proponents largely hailed from the same worlds as their intellectual predecessors—the arts, political journalism and activism, the sciences and academic philosophy—after September 11, these same people took the discussion to the popular press and a proliferation of internet outlets and well-organized conferences, debates, and meetings. And their expressions were uncompromising and polemical (though not “militant”—no shots were fired nor bombs detonated).
In the wake of over a decade of controversy unleashed by “new atheism,” a new film The Unbelievers (trailer above) follows two prominent scientists and stars of the movement–evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss—as they trek across the globe and explain their views. Dawkins and Krauss receive support from a cast of celebrity interviewees including Ricky Gervais, Werner Herzog, Woody Allen, Cormac McCarthy, Sarah Silverman, Ayaan Hirsi-Ali, and several more. The film’s website has no official release date (other than “2013”), but it does feature links to online buzz, both glib—Krankiesnarks that the trailer makes it look like Dawkins and Krauss have packed in the science and started a band—and subdued; the evangelical Christian Postdoes little but quote from the press package.
These champions of reason-over-religion have always had powerful critics, even among those who might otherwise seem sympathetic (take Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton’s charge that new atheism is nothing but counter-fundamentalism). Then there is the host of religious detractors, many of them respected scientists and philosophers themselves. One notable name in this camp is famed geneticist Francis Collins, who headed the Human Genome Project. Obviously no denier of the explanatory power of science, Collins nonetheless argues for faith as a distinct kind of knowledge, as he does in the interview excerpt below from an appearance on The Charlie Rose Show.
The debates seem like they could rage on interminably, and probably will. I, for one, am grateful they can happen openly and in relative peace in so many places. But as the same sets of issues arise, some of the questions become just a bit more nuanced. British presenter Nicky Campbell, for example, recently presided over a large debate among several prominent scientists and clergy about whether or not all religions should accept evolution (below). While Dawkins and Krauss ultimately advocate a world without religion, the participants of this debate try to shift the terms to how scientific discovery and religious identity can coexist with minimal friction.
On January 24 1965, Sir Winston Churchill, the man who led Britain through the dark hours of the Second World War, died aged 90 at his London home. By decree of Queen Elizabeth II, his body lay in state for three days in the Palace of Westminster and a state funeral was held at St Paul’s Cathedral on January 30. Churchill was the first statesman to be given a state funeral in the 2oth century — a funeral that saw the largest assemblage of statesmen in the world until the funeral of Pope John Paul II in 2005. That day, the BBC reported that “silent crowds lined the streets to watch the gun carriage bearing Sir Winston’s coffin leave Westminster Hall as Big Ben struck 09:45. The procession travelled slowly through central London to St. Paul’s Cathedral for the funeral service.” After the service, his coffin was taken by boat to Waterloo Station, where a specially prepared railway carriage took Churchill to his final resting place at Bladon near Woodstock, close to his birthplace at Blenheim Palace.
This color footage of Churchill’s funeral is narrated by Walter Thompson, Churchill’s former bodyguard.
Bonus material:
A draft script for Winston Churchill’s obituary to be broadcast by the BBC World Service, prepared in 1962
By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.
Last year, Edwin Turner, the mastermind behind the Biblioklept blog, assembled a fine photo gallery that captured Ernest Hemingway posing shirtless. Big, burly and barrel-chested, Papa projects the masculine image that he carefully cultivated for himself and for the world to see.
Hemingway’s photos seem right in keeping with his public persona (we’ll have more on him later today). But this 1883 portrait of Mark Twain will perhaps give you pause. To be sure, Twain cared deeply about his public image. The writer carefully crafted his public identity, giving more than 300 interviews to journalists where he reinforced the traits he wanted to be known for — his wit, irreverent sense of humor, and thoughtfulness. Twain also loved having his picture taken, posing for photographers whenever he had a chance. The camera offered yet another way to fashion his own personal myth.
Of course, the author is best remembered for one set of iconic images — the one where he dons a white suit in 1906, upon traveling to Washington D.C. to lobby for the protection of authors’ copyrights. But, as The Routledge Encyclopedia of Mark Twainexplains, the novelist also let his image be used in countless advertisements — in ads for restaurants, pharmacies, dry goods and cigars too. The encyclopedia gives the impression that the shirtless photo was perhaps taken within this commercial context. It’s not clear what product the portrait helped market (care to take a guess?), or precisely how Twain saw it contributing to his public image. The details are murky. But one thing is for certain: The 1880s image is authentic. It’s the real shirtless Mark Twain.
Update: One of our readers suggests that the shirtless photo was a byproduct of a bust that was sculpted by Karl Gerhardt for the frontispiece of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Seems quite plausible. See it here.
This vintage pic comes to us via Wired writer Steve Silberman. Follow him on Twitter at @stevesilberman.
Certain readers may turn, for general solace, to the novels of John Steinbeck. But how many, in particular need of romantic advice, open up Of Mice and Men, East of Eden, or The Grapes of Wrath? Yet on matters of the heart, Steinbeck knew of what he spoke, as his son Thom found out after mentioning a new school sweetheart in a note home. In what must surely count as the most eloquent, relevant piece of unsolicited parental love advice ever given—not, admittedly, a high bar to cross—the formidable man of American letters explained how best to navigate this richest of all experiences:
First—if you are in love—that’s a good thing—that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.
Second—There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you—of kindness and consideration and respect—not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
The British comedian Graham Chapman delighted in offending people. As a writer and actor with the legendary Monty Python troupe, he pushed against the boundaries of propriety and good taste. When his writing partner John Cleese proposed doing a sketch on a disgruntled man returning a defective toaster to a shop, Chapman thought: Broken toaster? Why not a dead parrot? And in one particularly outrageous sketch written by Chapman and Cleese in 1970, Chapman plays an undertaker and Cleese plays a customer who has just rung a bell at the front desk:
“What can I do for you, squire?” says Chapman.
“Um, well, I wonder if you can help me,” says Cleese. “You see, my mother has just died.”
“Ah, well, we can ‘elp you. We deal with stiffs,” says Chapman. “There are three things we can do with your mother. We can burn her, bury her, or dump her.”
“Dump her?”
“Dump her in the Thames.”
“What?”
“Oh, did you like her?”
“Yes!”
“Oh well, we won’t dump her, then,” says Chapman. “Well, what do you think? We can bury her or burn her.”
“Which would you recommend?”
“Well, they’re both nasty.”
From there, Chapman goes on to explain in the most graphic detail the unpleasant aspects of either choice before offering another option: cannibalism. At that point (in keeping with the script) outraged members of the studio audience rush onto the stage and put a stop to the sketch.
Chapman and Cleese had been close friends since their student days at Cambridge University, and when Chapman died of cancer at the age of 48 on October 4, 1989, Cleese was at his bedside. Out of respect for Chapman’s family, the members of Monty Python decided to stay away from his private funeral and avoid a media circus. Instead, they gathered for a memorial service on October 6, 1989 in the Great Hall at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. When Cleese delivered his eulogy for Chapman, he recalled his friend’s irreverence: “Anything for him, but mindless good taste.” So Cleese did his best to make his old friend proud. His off-color but heartfelt eulogy that evening has become a part of Monty Python lore, and you can watch it above. To see a longer clip, with moving words from Michael Palin and a sing-along of “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” led by Eric Idle, watch below:
They shared a compulsion to create—some might say document—but were so intensely private, the revelations of their respective lives’ work threw everyone for a loop.
Employers and neighbors found it hard to believe they’d had it in them. (View an online gallery of her work here.)
Curators, marveling at the quantity of their output and quality of the vision, piled on superlatives.
Something tells me the prickly Ms. Maier would not have appreciated any comparisons to a man whose work featured so many representations of naked, hermaphroditic girl-warriors being bayonetted, but death makes it difficult to keep hold of the reins gripped so tightly in life.
For the foreseeable future, Maier’s legacy rests in the hands of John Maloof, the young Chicagoan who bought her negatives from an unpaid storage unit for less than $400, hoping he might find something of relevance for a neighborhood history project. He got more than he bargained for, obviously, but the years spent scanning the unknown artist’s work is beginning to pay off in exhibitions, gallery representation, and a book. Now he is nearing completion of Finding Vivian Maier, a documentary film that promises to shed more light on this fascinating tale.
Last spring, Ken Auletta wrote a profile of Stanford University in the pages of The New Yorker, which started with the question: “There are no walls between Stanford and Silicon Valley. Should there be?” It’s perhaps an unavoidable question when you consider a startling fact cited by the article. According the university itself, five thousand companies “trace their origins to Stanford ideas or to Stanford faculty and students.” The list includes tech giants like Google, Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, eBay, Netflix, Electronic Arts, Intuit, Silicon Graphics, LinkedIn, and E*Trade. And stay tuned, there’s more to come.
Stanford is one of America’s leading incubators, and the rearing of young entrepreneurs doesn’t take place by mere osmosis. No, Stanford students can take courses focused on entrepreneurship, which give them access to seasoned entrepreneurs and financiers. If you head over to eCorner, short for Entrepreneurship Corner (Web — iTunes — YouTube), you can watch “2000 free videos and podcasts featuring entrepreneurship and innovation thought leaders” who have paid visits to Stanford. Perhaps you’ll recognize a few of the names: Mark Zuckerberg? Larry Page? Marissa Mayer? Reid Hoffman (above)?
Or, if you go to YouTube and iTunes, you’ll gain access to entire courses dedicated to teaching students the modern art of starting startups. Two courses (both housed in our collection of 650 Free Online Courses and our collection of 150 Free Online Business Courses) warrant your attention. First, Chuck Eesley’s course, Technology Entrepreneurship (YouTube — iTunes Video) introduces students to “the process used by technology entrepreneurs to start companies. It involves taking a technology idea and finding a high-potential commercial opportunity, gathering resources such as talent and capital, figuring out how to sell and market the idea, and managing rapid growth.” The course features 28 video lectures in total.
Once you have a broad overview, you can dial into an important part of getting a new venture going — raising capital. Hence the course Entrepreneurship Through the Lens of Venture Capital (iTunes Video — YouTube), a course currently taking place at Stanford that “explores how successful startups navigate funding, managing, and scaling their new enterprise.” It features guest speakers from the VC world that fuels Silicon Valley.
It goes without saying that Stanford offers many world-class courses across other disciplines, from philosophy and physics to history and literature. You can find 68 courses from Stanford in our ever-growing collection of Free Courses Online.
Hans Rosling knows how to make a concise, powerful point. His mastery of statistics and visual aids doesn’t hurt. Behold, for instance, the Karolinska Institute Professor of International Health visualizing the health of 200 countries over 200 years with 120,000 data points. His ability to condense vast amounts of information into short bursts while providing the widest possible context for his points naturally endears him to the TED audience, which values counterintuitive intellectual impact delivered with the utmost succinctness. We previously featured a TED Talk from wherein the excitable professor explains world population growth and prosperity with props bought at IKEA. (The man comes from Sweden, after all. One must represent.) Now, on Bill Gates’ Youtube channel, you can watch Rosling’s shortest and slickest video yet: “The River of Myths.”
Opening with a visualization of 1960’s world child mortality numbers graphed against the number of children born per woman, Rosling uses his signature method of statistical-animation showmanship to explode myths about the potential of developing nations. We see that, as a country’s wealth rises, its health rises; as its health rises, its child mortality drops; and as its child mortality drops, so does its number of children born per woman, which leads to a sustainable overall population size. He then examines the separate regions of Ethiopia, formerly a developmental laggard, showing that the capital Addis Ababa ranks reproductively among the developed nations, while only remote regions lag behind. “Most people think the problems in Africa are unsolvable, but if the poorest countries can just follow the path of Ethiopia, it’s fully possible that the world will look like this by 2030.” We then see a projection of all the world’s nations clustered in the small-family, low-mortality corner of the graph. “But to ensure this happens, we must measure the progress of countries. It’s only by measuring we can cross the river of myths.” Have you heard a more powerful argument for the usefulness of statistics lately?
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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.
