When Dylan Thomas was a little boy his father would read Shakespeare to him at bedtime. The boy loved the sound of the words, even if he was too young to understand the meaning. His father, David John Thomas, taught English at a grammar school in southern Wales but wanted to be a poet. He was bitterly disappointed with his station in life.
Many years later when the father lay on his deathbed, Dylan Thomas wrote a poem that captures the profound sense of empathy he felt for the dying old man. The poem, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” was written in 1951, only two years before the poet’s own untimely death at the age of 39. Despite the impossibility of escaping death, the anguished son implores his father to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
The poem is a beautiful example of the villanelle form, which features two rhymes and two alternating refrains in verse arranged into five tercets, or three-lined stanzas, and a concluding quatrain in which the two refrains are brought together as a couplet at the very end. You can hear Thomas’s famous 1952 recital of the poem above. To see the poem’s structure and read along as you listen, click here to open the text in a new window.
And to hear more of Thomas reciting his own works you can visit HarperAudio, where you will find a treasure trove of recordings from a number of writers, including these from Thomas:
Part 1: “No Sun Shines,” “The Hand that Signed the Paper,” “Should Lanterns Shine,” “And Death Shall Have No Dominion,” and the first verse of “Alterwise by Owl Light.”
Part 2: “Poem in October,” “This Side of the Truth,” Love in the Asylum,” and “The Hunchback in the Park.”
Part 3: “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” “On the Marriage of a Virgin,” “In My Craft or Sullen Art,” and “Ceremony After a Fire Raid.”
All poems have been added to our collection of Free Audio Books.
In his autobiography, Chronicles, Volume 1, Bob Dylan remembered the day, back in the early 1960s, when he first encountered the music of the Mississippi Delta bluesman Robert Johnson. His memory went something like this:
I had the thick acetate of the Robert Johnson record in my hands and I asked Van Ronk if he ever heard of him. Dave said, nope, he hadn’t, and I put it on the record player so we could listen to it. From the first note the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up. The stabbing sounds from the guitar could almost break a window. When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor. I immediately differentiated between him and anyone else I had ever heard.
Dylan wasn’t alone in this thought. Ask Eric Clapton and he’ll tell you that Johnson is “the most important blues singer that ever lived.” And one Keith Richards summed things up rather nicely, saying, “You want to know how good the blues can get? Well, this is it.” With this kind of praise, you’d think that Robert Johnson had lived a long life, recording a long list of albums. But the opposite is true. Johnson died in 1938, when he was only 27 years old (which puts him, of course, in the 27 Club). And he left for posterity a mere 29 tracks, all recorded between 1936 and 1937. The details of Johnson’s life are sketchy at best. And the visual traces of his existence have almost entirely disappeared. In the closing pages of Chronicles, Bob Dylan makes reference to a video that briefly captures the image of Johnson:
More than thirty years later, I would see Johnson for myself in eight seconds’ worth of 8‑millimeter film shot in Ruleville, Mississippi, on a brightly lit afternoon street by some Germans in the late ’30s. Some people questioned whether it was really him, but slowing the eight seconds down so it was more like eighty seconds, you can see that it really is Robert Johnson, has to be—couldn’t be anyone else.
It’s a tantalizing prospect. But, when professionals took a close look at the video, they figured out it was a fake (see below). So we’re left with this — two photographs of the musician. Two simple photos, which now thanks to Westside Media, have been manipulated to bring Johnson back to life, at least long enough to sing two songs: “Hell Hound on My Trail” and “Preaching Blues.” Watch above.
In the episode above, Wells welcomes the notoriously misogynistic and allegedly anti-Semitic Friedrich Nietzsche (James Adomian) and the notoriously racist writer of “weird tales” H.P. Lovecraft (Paul Scheer). As the podcast description has it, “if you are easily offended, you may find this one a bit challenging.” The offense is mitigated by the fact that the discussion “very rarely makes any sense AT ALL,” and that it’s damned funny.
Both “authors” spout exaggerated parodies of their philosophies, in ridiculous accents, and (as you can see from the photo above), look equally ridiculous to an audience that sometimes laughs along, sometimes doesn’t, as will happen in live comedy. The actors are game, ad-libbing with ease and confidence and clearly having a great time. The only moments that aren’t improvised are when the actors playing Nietzsche and Lovecraft read from the writers’ actual texts. In this context (and in these voices), the two both indeed make little sense. They’ll survive the takedown—these are two dead authors who tend to be taken far too seriously by their devotees. So, go ahead, listen to Nietzsche huff and puff his way through his bombastic and oracular pronouncements; hear Lovecraft hiss through his florid and paranoid prose. It’s all for a good cause. The Dead Authors podcast benefits 826LA, a non-profit writing and tutoring center for kids age 6–18.
You can find real works by Nietzsche and Lovecraft in our collection of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books.
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
Did the United States of America lose much of its will to explore outer space when the Soviet Union’s collapse shut off the engine of competition? Critical observers sometimes make that point, but I have an alternative theory: maybe the decline of progressive rock had just as much to do with it. Both that musical subgenre and American space exploration proudly possessed their distinctive aesthetics, the potential for great cultural impact, and ambition bordering on the ridiculous. Though we didn’t have mash-ups in the years when shuttle launches and four-side concept albums alike captured the public imagination, we can now use modern technology to double back and directly unite these two late-twentieth-century phenomena. Behold, above, Pink Floyd’s jam “Moonhead” lined up with footage of Apollo 17, NASA’s last moon landing.
But given the recent passing of astronaut Neil Armstrong, none of us have been thinking as much about the last moon landing as we have about the first. Pink Floyd actually laid down “Moonhead” at a BBC TV studio during the descent of Apollo 11, the mission on which Armstrong would take that one giant leap for mankind. The band’s improvisation made it to the ears of England’s moon-landing viewers: “The programming was a little looser in those days,” remembers guitarist David Gilmour, “and if a producer of a late-night programme felt like it, they would do something a bit off the wall.” British rock’s fascination with space proved fruitful. David Bowie put out the immortal “Space Oddity” mere days before Apollo 11’s landing (to say nothing of “Life on Mars?” two years later), and the BBC played it, too, in its live coverage. Even as late as the early eighties, no less a rock innovator than Brian Eno, charmed by American astronauts’ enthusiasm for country-western music, would craft the album Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks. If we want more interesting popular music, perhaps we just need to get into space more often.
In art, certain themes are evergreen. They never go out of date. Among them are love, death, and the intrinsically dehumanizing nature of corporations.
In 1983 Monty Python tapped into one of the Great Themes with their short film The Crimson Permanent Assurance. It tells the story of a group of elderly accountants, “strained under the oppressive yoke of their new corporate management,” who rise up against The Very Big Corporation of America and set sail on the high seas of international finance as a marauding band of pirates.
The film was originally conceived by director Terry Gilliam as an animated sequence for inclusion in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, but as the idea grew he talked the group into letting him develop it into a live-action film. The Crimson Permanent Assurance was eventually shown both on its own and as a prologue to The Meaning of Life. The title was inspired by the 1952 Burt Lancaster adventure film The Crimson Pirate. The cast is made up mostly of unknown actors, but if you watch closely you’ll catch a glimpse of most of the Python members. Gilliam and Michael Palin have cameo roles as window washers, and Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Graham Chapman appear very briefly at the beginning of the boardroom scene.
The Crimson Permanent Assurance is a delightful little film–and just as relevant now as ever, a reminder of the utter absurdity of the claim that “corporations are people too.”
You will find The Crimson Permanent Assurance added to our collection of 500 Free Movies Online.
Yesterday we posted about the Talking Heads’ days playing at CBGB, the Lower East Side nightclub rock historians now discuss in hushed, reverent tones. (Full name: CBGB OMFUG, or “Country, Bluegrass, Blues, and Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers.”) Though the place finally closed its doors in a rent dispute six years ago, you can still visit it on the internet through this virtual tour. You’ll have to guide yourself, but much of the fun comes in the freedom to explore. Beginning your journey in the women’s restroom, you can then proceed however you like, clicking from room to room and examining the legendarily gritty surroundings in all 360 degrees. If you once played or frequented CBGB, the experience may well take you back, albeit with much brighter lighting than you remember. Or if, like me, you once played a lot of graphic adventure games on the computer, the tour’s interface will certainly take you back to that as well.
Purists will have objections to a virtual tour of a place of such raw physicality as CBGB: you can’t feel the stickiness of the floors, you can’t smell the mixture of aggressive odors, you can’t trip over that one irregular step on the stairs, and you especially can’t hear the awe-inspiring amplification system. But you can look close and long at the club’s cultural palimpsest of stickers, graffiti, fliers, and hard-knocked cement. Conversations sprouted up on MetaFilter both when CBGB closed and when this virtual tour debuted: some commenters loved the place, while others couldn’t bear it; some commenters regretted its passing, while others thought it had long since become a shadow of itself. Some seemed to feel all of this at once. As one MeFite said, “Those bathrooms are just as disgusting as I remember them being. I miss the hell out of that place.”
If you’re anything like me, you yearn to become a good writer, a better writer, an inspiring writer, even, by learning from the writers you admire. But you neither have the time nor the money for an MFA program or expensive retreats and workshops with famous names. So you read W.H. Auden’s essays and Paris Review interviews with your favorite authors (or at least PR’s Twitter feed); you obsessively trawl the archives of The New York Times’ “Writers on Writing” series, and you relish every Youtube clip, no matter how lo-fi or truncated, of your literary heroes, speaking from beyond the grave, or from behind a podium at the 92nd Street Y.
Well, friend, you are in luck (okay, I’m still talking about me here, but maybe about you, too). The Washington, DC-based non-profit Academy of Achievement—whose mission is to “bring students face-to-face” with leaders in the arts, business, politics, science, and sports—has archived a series of talks from an incredibly diverse pool of poets and writers. They call this collection “Creative Writing: A Master Class,” and you can subscribe to it right now on iTunes and begin downloading free video and audio podcasts from Nora Ephron, John Updike, Toni Morrison, Carlos Fuentes, Norman Mailer, Wallace Stegner, and, well, you know how the list goes.
The Academy of Achievement’s website also features lengthy profiles–with text and downloadable audio and video–of several of the same writers from their “Master Class” series. For example, an interview with former U.S. poet-laureate Rita Dove is illuminating, both for writers and for teachers of writing. Dove talks about the aversion that many people have for poetry as a kind of fear inculcated by clumsy teachers. She explains:
At some point in their life, they’ve been given a poem to interpret and told, “That was the wrong answer.” You know. I think we’ve all gone through that. I went through that. And it’s unfortunate that sometimes in schools — this need to have things quantified and graded — we end up doing this kind of multiple choice approach to something that should be as ambiguous and ever-changing as life itself. So I try to ask them, “Have you ever heard a good joke?” If you’ve ever heard someone tell a joke just right, with the right pacing, then you’re already on the way to the poetry. Because it’s really about using words in very precise ways and also using gesture as it goes through language, not the gesture of your hands, but how language creates a mood. And you know, who can resist a good joke? When they get that far, then they can realize that poetry can also be fun.
Dove’s thoughts on her own life, her work, and the craft of poetry and teaching are well worth reading/watching in full. Another particularly notable interview from the Academy is with another former laureate, poet W.S. Merwin.
Merwin, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, discusses poetry as originating with language, and its loss as tantamount to extinction:
When we talk about the extinction of species, I think the endangered species of the arts and of language and all these things are related. I don’t think there is any doubt about that. I think poetry goes back to the invention of language itself. I think one of the big differences between poetry and prose is that prose is about something, it’s got a subject… poetry is about what can’t be said. Why do people turn to poetry when all of a sudden the Twin Towers get hit, or when their marriage breaks up, or when the person they love most in the world drops dead in the same room? Because they can’t say it. They can’t say it at all, and they want something that addresses what can’t be said.
If you’re anything like me, you find these two perspectives on poetry—as akin to jokes, as saying the unsayable—fascinating. These kinds of observations (not mechanical how-to’s, but original thoughts on the process and practice of writing itself) are the reason I pore over interviews and seminars with writers I admire. I found more than enough in this archive to keep me satisfied for months.
We’ve added “Creative Writing: A Master Class” to our ever-growing collection of Free Online Courses.
Image via Angela Radulescu
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
High on the list of historical periods I regret having missed, I would place Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the seventies. Despite being something less than a shining time for major cities, especially American major cities, and especially New York City, that era’s seemingly hollowed-out downtowns offered cradles to many a cultural movement. David Byrne’s band the Talking Heads count as a major one unto themselves. Generation X author Douglas Coupland memorably asked only one question to determine whether one belongs to that particular cohort: do you like the Talking Heads? In an entire book he wrote about the band’s 1979 album Fear of Music, novelist Jonatham Lethem remembers this of his own enthusiasm: “At the peak, in 1980 or 81, my identification was so complete that I might have wished to wear the album Fear of Music in place of my head so as to be more clearly seen by those around me.”
Talking about the origin of the Talking Heads, we must talk about CBGB, the Bowery nightclub that hosted formative shows for such punk, new wave, and culturally proximate but difficult to categorize acts like Television, the Cramps, Blondie, the Patti Smith Group, and the B‑52s. Byrne and company began playing there in the mid-seventies, and would eventually drop the place’s name in the track “Life During Wartime.” (“This ain’t no Mudd Club or CBGB…”) At the top of this post, you’ll see their 1975 performance of “Psycho Killer” at CBGB, along with “Tentative Decisions” and “With Our Love.” Though CBGB shut down in 2006, its essence lives on in the influential music it shaped. “It is the venue that makes the music scene happen just as much as the creativity of the musicians,” wrote Byrne himself in CBGB and OMFUG: Thirty Years from the Home of Underground Rock. “There is continually and forever a pool of talent, energy, and expression waiting to be tapped—it simply needs the right place in which to express itself.”
Brazda, who lived as an openly gay man in the thirties, was convicted under Paragraph 175 in 1937 and served a term of six months. He thought this might be the extent of his harassment by the Nazis, but ultimately, he was arrested and sent to Buchenwald in 1942, where he would spend three years. In the video above, Brazda mostly tells his own story, in German with English subtitles. It’s not the first time he has done so. Brazda’s story was prominently featured in a book by author Jean-Luc Schwab (who also appears above), Itinerary of the Pink Triangle (Itineraire d’un Triangle rose), which recounts the dehumanizing experiences of gay men during the Holocaust. Schwab’s book and the brief interview above preserve important testimony from a man who was “very likely the last victim and the last witness” of the Nazi persecution of homosexual men in the 30s and 40s. Brazda’s willingness to tell his story has been invaluable to scholars and activists seeking to document this little-known (and often denied) history.
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
Have you ever wondered how the Hubble Space Telescope and other satellites can be pointed in any direction at the will of scientists on the ground? Given the energy constraints for satellites designed to stay in space for years, the technical challenges are immense.
In this video from the “Smarter Every Day” YouTube series we learn a little about two clever methods scientists use to control the attitude, or orientation, of satellites with very little energy. The first method exploits the power of the Earth’s magnetic field by using electric current to selectively activate electromagnets and nudge the satellite in a desired direction, rather like the needle of a compass. The second and, in some ways, more fascinating method takes its inspiration from the amazingly agile cat. It has long been known that cats can fall from any initial orientation and almost always land on their feet. They can reorient themselves 180 degrees without violating the conservation of angular momentum. They do it by adjusting their shape and thus rearranging the mass, and changing the moment of inertia, within their bodies. Scientists employ a similar tactic using moving parts within satellites.
The host of the “Smarter Every Day” videos goes only by the name of “Destin,” and is reportedly a missile engineer at the U.S. Army’s Redstone Arsenal, near Huntsville Alabama. Some viewers will, like us, find the tone and sensibility of this video juvenile and annoying, with its overuse of the words “cool” and “awesome” and with the gratuitous cat-dropping scenes (note to future YouTube auteurs: consider using stock footage) but the science itself is, without a doubt, fascinating.
Bill Nye will tell you that he’s a man on a mission. He’s out there trying to “help foster a scientifically literate society, to help people everywhere understand and appreciate the science that makes our world work.” From 1993 to 1998, Nye hosted Bill Nye the Science Guy, a Disney/PBS children’s science show thatwon 18 Emmys along the way. A graduate of Cornell and a student of Carl Sagan, Nye has also presented shows on the Science Channel, the Discovery Channel and other media outlets.
If you’re familiar with Bill Nye, you’ll know that he’s not exactly an in-your-face kind of scientist. He’s no Richard Dawkins. Nye is mild-mannered, affable and wears a bow tie. But, like Dawkins, he’ll tell you that if you deny evolution, you’re not living in the world of basic facts. And if you teach creationism to kids, you’re not preparing them to compete in a world where scientific literacy means everything. That bodes ill for your kids in particular, and for America’s future more generally.
Now you might be inclined to say that America has always had creationists, and that didn’t stop the country from becoming an economic and military superpower. Perhaps that’s true. But you need to recall this. America reached its zenith when every other power had blown themselves to smithereens. We were the only game in town. And it almost didn’t matter what we thought, or how much we thought. We just needed to show up to work. Nowadays, we don’t have that luxury. We face stiff competition from ambitious nations that take science and education seriously. A country that scoffs at scientific reasoning, that dismisses it all as “elitist,” has only one way to go, and that’s down. God help us.
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