Search Results for "anal"

Learn How Crayons Are Made, Courtesy of 1980s Videos by Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers

Some things are dif­fi­cult to improve upon. Take crayons. The new gen­er­a­tion may be clam­or­ing for shades like “man­go tan­go” and “jazzber­ry jam” but the actu­al tech­nol­o­gy appears unchanged since Sesame Street detailed the process in the ear­ly 80s, in the love­ly, non ver­bal doc­u­men­tary above. Not a prod­uct place­ment in sight, I might add, though few can mis­take that famil­iar green and gold box.

Those who pre­fer a bit more expla­na­tion might pre­fer Fred Rogers’ hyp­not­ic step-by-step guide, play­ing in per­pe­tu­ity on Pic­ture Pic­ture.

By the time the indus­try’s giant goril­la got around to weigh­ing in, the wood­en col­lec­tion box­es and ana­log coun­ters had been replaced, but oth­er­wise, it’s still busi­ness as usu­al on the ol’ cray­on-man­u­fac­tur­ing floor. Don’t expect to find the recipe for the “secret pro­pri­etary blend of pig­ments and oth­er ingre­di­ents” any time soon. Just know they’re capa­ble of crank­ing out 8500 crayons per minute. For those play­ing along at home, that’s enough to encir­cle the globe 6 times per cal­en­dar year, with a full third owing their exis­tence to solar ener­gy.

There’s a Home­land Secu­ri­ty-ish vibe to some of the dia­logue, but the Life of an Amer­i­can Cray­on, above, does our native assem­bly lines proud. Proud­er than the Amer­i­can slaugh­ter­house, any­way, or some oth­er fac­to­ry floors, I could name. The work­ers seem con­tent enough to stay in their posi­tions for decades, hap­pi­ly declar­ing alle­giance to this or that hue.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Philip Glass Com­pos­es for Sesame Street (1979)

Mr. Rogers Intro­duces Kids to Exper­i­men­tal Elec­tron­ic Music by Bruce Haack & Esther Nel­son (1968)

How Ani­mat­ed Car­toons Are Made: Watch a Short, Charm­ing Primer from 1919

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, home­school­er, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

 

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Watch The Reality of the Virtual: 74 Minutes of Pure Slavoj Žižek (2004)

Slavoj Žižek must make a tempt­ing doc­u­men­tary sub­ject; you have only to fire up the cam­era and let him do his thing. Or at least the Sloven­ian aca­d­e­m­ic provo­ca­teur and intel­lec­tu­al per­for­mance artist, in films like The Per­vert’s Guide to Cin­e­maThe Per­vert’s Guide to Ide­ol­o­gy, and Žižek!, has giv­en the impres­sion that he can effort­less­ly car­ry a film all by him­self. The direc­tors of those afore­men­tioned movies did a bit more than sit Žižek down before a rolling cam­era, but Ben Wright, mak­er of The Real­i­ty of the Vir­tu­al, seems to have tak­en the man’s raw ora­tor­i­cal val­ue as the very premise of his project. This 74-minute doc­u­men­tary — if even the word “doc­u­men­tary” suits such a rad­i­cal­ly sim­pli­fied form — sim­ply has Žižek sit at a table, in front of some book­shelves, and talk, osten­si­bly about “real effects pro­duced by some­thing which does not yet ful­ly exist,” as he iden­ti­fies them in the realms of psy­cho­analy­sis, pol­i­tics, soci­ol­o­gy, physics, and pop­u­lar cul­ture.

Shot by Ben Wright over the course of a sin­gle day,” writes the New York Times’ Nathan Lee, “here is the apoth­e­o­sis of the talk­ing-head movie, made up entire­ly of sev­en long, sta­t­ic takes of Mr. Žižek,” ani­mat­ed only by his own “habit­u­al reper­to­ry of twitch­es, spasms and uncon­trolled per­spi­ra­tion, an alarm­ing fren­zy of exu­ber­ance that con­tributes to his rep­u­ta­tion as a rock star of phi­los­o­phy.” The theme at hand, which cer­tain­ly has some­thing to do with belief and truth, pos­si­bil­i­ty and impos­si­bil­i­ty, the real­i­ty with­in the unre­al and the unre­al with­in real­i­ty, takes him through the widest pos­si­ble range of asso­ci­at­ed sub­jects. Those who appre­ci­ate Žižek pri­mar­i­ly as a mas­ter of focused digres­sion — and I have to imag­ine his fan base con­tains many such peo­ple — will find no pur­er expres­sion of that par­tic­u­lar skill. Then again, to tru­ly expe­ri­ence Žižek, maybe you have to take an actu­al class taught by him. If The Real­i­ty of the Vir­tu­al inspires you to do so, count your­self as braver than I.

Find many more heady films on our list of Free Doc­u­men­taries, part of our larg­er col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Žižek!: 2005 Doc­u­men­tary Reveals the “Aca­d­e­m­ic Rock Star” and “Mon­ster” of a Man

Michel Fou­cault – Beyond Good and Evil: 1993 Doc­u­men­tary Explores the Theorist’s Con­tro­ver­sial Life and Phi­los­o­phy

A Shirt­less Slavoj Žižek Explains the Pur­pose of Phi­los­o­phy from the Com­fort of His Bed

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The First Animations of Mike Judge, Creator of Beavis and Butt-head & Office Space (1991)

Mike Judge first became famous for cre­at­ing the crude and crude­ly drawn car­toon series Beav­is and Butt-head (find com­plete episodes online here). The show was about two high school burnouts whose run­ning com­men­tary on the lat­est music videos was so bone­head­ed and bald­ly vul­gar that you couldn’t help but laugh. Pris­sy cul­ture war­riors point­ed to the show as yet anoth­er symp­tom of America’s decline while legions of stoned col­lege stu­dents glee­ful­ly tuned in. In 1998, Judge made the jump to live action fea­tures with Office Space, a hilar­i­ous, if uneven, take on the banal­i­ties of Amer­i­can cor­po­rate cul­ture. It’s one of those movies that no one saw in the the­ater but, thanks to cable, every­one of a cer­tain age can quote. (“If you can come in on Sat­ur­day, that would be great.”) Cur­rent­ly, he is the cre­ator for the hit HBO series Sil­i­con Val­ley.

Judge start­ed in ani­ma­tion after work­ing for a spell as first a com­put­er pro­gram­mer and then a blues bassist. After see­ing an ani­ma­tion cel on dis­play in a local movie the­ater in 1989, he ran out and bought a Bolex 16mm cam­era and start­ed mak­ing movies. Two years lat­er, he was pro­duc­ing odd, thor­ough­ly unpol­ished ani­mat­ed shorts that made the rounds in film fes­ti­vals, even­tu­al­ly launch­ing a career in Hol­ly­wood.

Above is a short about Mil­ton, the neb­bish sta­pler-obsessed cubi­cle dweller who was the gen­e­sis for Office Space. Stephen Root played him in the movie. His boss is the same pas­sive-aggres­sive prick as in the movie though played with less unc­tu­ous zeal as Gary Cole’s per­for­mance. The short proved to be such a suc­cess that MTV’s Liq­uid Tele­vi­sion ordered more.

Next is The Honky Prob­lem, about an emo­tion­al­ly unbal­anced coun­try singer named ‘Inbred Jed.’ He wants you to know that he is real­ly, real­ly, real­ly hap­py to be play­ing at a remote trail­er park­er pop­u­lat­ed by a bunch of char­ac­ters out of a David Lynch movie. In fact, if it weren’t for the jokey voice over at the end, this short is creepy enough to almost pass for an episode of Lynch’s own ani­mat­ed series, Dum­b­land.

And there’s this short also from 1991 called sim­ply Huh?, which pits the shrill against the obliv­i­ous.

You can find more Ani­ma­tions in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dum­b­land, David Lynch’s Twist­ed Ani­mat­ed Series (NSFW)

Watch All of Ter­ry Gilliam’s Mon­ty Python Ani­ma­tions in a Row

Tim Burton’s The World of Stain­boy: Watch the Com­plete Ani­mat­ed Series

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

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The New Yorker Web Site is Entirely Free This Summer (Until It Goes Behind a Paywall This Fall)

newyorker-logo

Yes­ter­day, The New York­er mag­a­zine pub­lished “A Note to Read­ers,” announc­ing the new strat­e­gy behind its web site. The site now has a dif­fer­ent look and feel. It will also be gov­erned by a new set of eco­nom­ics, which will include putting the entire site behind a pay­wall. The edi­tors write, “in the fall, we [will] move to a sec­ond phase, imple­ment­ing an eas­i­er-to-use, log­i­cal, metered pay­wall. Sub­scribers will con­tin­ue to have access to every­thing; non-sub­scribers will be able to read a lim­it­ed num­ber of pieces—and then it’s up to them to sub­scribe. You’ve like­ly seen this sys­tem elsewhere—at the Times, for instance—and we will do all we can to make it work seam­less­ly.”

But, until then, the site won’t be half open (as it has been dur­ing recent years). It’ll be entire­ly open. Again, the edi­tors write: “Begin­ning this week, absolute­ly every­thing new that we publish—the work in the print mag­a­zine and the work pub­lished online only—will be unlocked. All of it, for every­one. Call it a sum­mer-long free-for-all. Non-sub­scribers will get a chance to explore The New York­er ful­ly and freely, just as sub­scribers always have.”

What should you read while The New York­er is open? I’d focus on the old stuff, which will pre­sum­ably get locked up too. Here are a few quick sug­ges­tions: Tru­man Capote’s In Cold Blood seri­al­ized in the pages of the mag­a­zine in 1965; J.D. Salinger’s Jan­u­ary 1948 pub­li­ca­tion of his endur­ing short sto­ry “A Per­fect Day for a Banana Fish;” and, of course, Han­nah Arendt’s orig­i­nal arti­cles on “the Banal­i­ty of Evil”?  If you have prob­lems read­ing the text (in the lat­ter two cas­es), be sure to click the pages to zoom in.

via Gal­l­ey­Cat

 

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Hunter S. Thompson’s Conspiratorial 9/11 Interview: “The Public Version of the News is Never Really What Happened”

Hav­ing read almost every­thing the pro­lif­ic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas author Hunter S. Thomp­son ever wrote, I don’t know if I would call him para­noid, per se. Nor do I know if I would call him not para­noid. He cer­tain­ly trust­ed no enti­ty with pow­er, espe­cial­ly not gov­ern­ments, and real­ly espe­cial­ly not the Unit­ed States gov­ern­ment. So by the time Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001 came around, he had lit­tle good­will to spare for any of the major play­ers involved in its after­math. “The tow­ers are gone now, reduced to bloody rub­ble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the Unit­ed States or any oth­er coun­try,” he wrote in his Sep­tem­ber 12 ESPN col­umn. “Make no mis­take about it: We are At War now — with some­body — and we will stay At War with that mys­te­ri­ous Ene­my for the rest of our lives. It will be a Reli­gious War, a sort of Chris­t­ian Jihad, fueled by reli­gious hatred and led by mer­ci­less fanat­ics on both sides.”

A year lat­er, Aus­trali­a’s ABC Radio Nation­al got Thomp­son’s assess­ment of the sit­u­a­tion. Host Mick O’Re­gan opens the now famous inter­view above by ask­ing how he thought the U.S. media had per­formed in the new post‑9/11 real­i­ty. “ ‘Shame­ful­ly’ is a word that comes to mind,” responds Thomp­son. “Amer­i­can jour­nal­ism I think has been cowed and intim­i­dat­ed by the mas­sive flag-suck­ing, this patri­ot­ic orgy that the White House keeps whip­ping up. You know if you crit­i­cise the Pres­i­dent it’s unpa­tri­ot­ic and there’s some­thing wrong with you, you may be a ter­ror­ist.” And does he think 9/11 “worked in favor of the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion?” For Thomp­son’s full answer, blog­ger Scratch­ing­dog tracked down the orig­i­nal record­ing of the inter­view, not the edit­ed ver­sion actu­al­ly aired on ABC, and heard this:

Oh, absolute­ly. Absolute­ly. And I have spent enough time on the inside of, well, in the White House and you know, cam­paigns and I’ve known enough peo­ple who do these things, think this way, to know that the pub­lic ver­sion of the news or what­ev­er event, is nev­er real­ly what hap­pened. And these peo­ple I think are will­ing to take that even fur­ther, so I don’t assume that I know the truth of what went on that day, and yeah, just look­ing around and look­ing for who had the motive, who had the oppor­tu­ni­ty, who had the equip­ment, who had the will. Yeah, these peo­ple were loot­ing the trea­sury and they knew the econ­o­my was going into a spi­ral down­ward.

9/11 con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists have made much of this response and oth­er Thomp­son­ian analy­sis found in the unedit­ed inter­view, going so far as to sug­gest that maybe — just maybe — the writer died three years lat­er of some­thing oth­er than sui­cide. Giv­en Thomp­son’s com­pul­sion to speak truth to pow­er, and some­times to wave firearms around in front of it, any fan of his work can’t help but harsh­ly scru­ti­nize, and often pre-emp­tive­ly dis­miss, any and all “offi­cial sto­ries” they hap­pen to hear. We’ll nev­er know whether Thomp­son would have approved of the “9/11 Truth” move­ment in the forms it has tak­en today, but they do share his spir­it of cre­ative dis­trust. And per­haps a touch of para­noia gave his writ­ing its dis­tinc­tive verve. Nobody moves into what they unfail­ing­ly describe as a “for­ti­fied com­pound,” after all, with­out at least a lit­tle bit of it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read 11 Free Arti­cles by Hunter S. Thomp­son That Span His Gonzo Jour­nal­ist Career (1965–2005)

Hunter S. Thompson’s Har­row­ing, Chem­i­cal-Filled Dai­ly Rou­tine

Hunter S. Thomp­son Calls Tech Sup­port, Unleash­es a Tirade Full of Fear and Loathing (NSFW)

Noam Chom­sky Schools 9/11 Truther; Explains the Sci­ence of Mak­ing Cred­i­ble Claims

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Flannery O’Connor’s Satirical Cartoons: 1942–1945

Sci-fi author B.C. Kowal­s­ki recent­ly post­ed a short essay on why the advice to write every day is, for lack of a suit­able euphemism, “bull­shit.” Not that there’s any­thing wrong with it, Kowal­s­ki main­tains. Only that it’s not the only way. It’s said Thack­er­ay wrote every morn­ing at dawn. Jack Ker­ouac wrote (and drank) in binges. Every writer finds some method in-between. The point is to “do what works for you” and to “exper­i­ment.” Kowal­s­ki might have added a third term: diver­si­fy. It’s worked for so many famous writ­ers after all. James Joyce had his music, Sylvia Plath her art, Hem­ing­way his machis­mo. Faulkn­er drew car­toons, as did his fel­low South­ern writer Flan­nery O’Connor, his equal, I’d say, in the art of the Amer­i­can grotesque. Through both writ­ers ran a deep vein of pes­simistic humor, oblique, but detectable, even in scenes of high­est pathos.

 

O’Connor’s visu­al work, writes Kel­ly Ger­ald in The Paris Review, was a “way of see­ing she described as part of the ‘habit of art’”—a way to train her fic­tion writer’s eye. Her car­toons hew close­ly to her autho­r­i­al voice: a lone sar­don­ic observ­er, supreme­ly con­fi­dent in her assess­ments of human weak­ness. Per­haps a bet­ter com­par­i­son than Faulkn­er is with British poet and doo­dler Ste­vie Smith, whose bleak vision and razor-sharp wit sim­i­lar­ly cut through moun­tains of… shall we say, bull­shit. In both pen & ink and linoleum cuts, O’Connor set dead­pan one-lin­ers against images of pre­ten­sion, con­for­mi­ty, and the banal­i­ty of col­lege life. In the car­toon at the top, she seems to mock the pur­suit of cre­den­tials as a refuge for the social­ly dis­af­fect­ed. Above, a cam­paign­er for a low-lev­el office deploys bom­bas­tic pseu­do-Lenin­ist rhetoric, and in the car­toon below, a cranky char­ac­ter escapes a horde of iden­ti­cal WAVES.

O’Connor was an intense­ly visu­al writer with, Ger­ald writes, a “nat­ur­al pro­cliv­i­ty for cap­tur­ing the humor­ous char­ac­ter of real peo­ple and con­crete sit­u­a­tions,” ful­ly cred­i­ble even at their most extreme (as in the increas­ing­ly hor­rif­ic self-lac­er­a­tions of Wise Blood’s Hazel Motes). She began draw­ing at five and pro­duced small books and sketch­es as a child, even­tu­al­ly pub­lish­ing car­toons in almost every issue of her high-school and college’s news­pa­pers and year­books. Her alma mater Geor­gia Col­lege, then known as Geor­gia State Col­lege for Women, has pub­lished a book fea­tur­ing her car­toons from her under­grad­u­ate years, 1942–45.

More recent­ly, Ger­ald edit­ed a col­lec­tion called Flan­nery O’Connor: The Car­toons for Fan­ta­graph­ics. In his intro­duc­tion, artist Bar­ry Moser describes in detail the tech­nique of her linoleum cuts, call­ing them “coarse in tech­ni­cal terms.” And yet, “her rudi­men­ta­ry han­dling of the medi­um notwith­stand­ing, O’Connor’s prints offer glimpses into the work of the writer she would become” with their “lit­tle O’Connor petards aimed at the walls of pre­ten­tious­ness, aca­d­e­mics, stu­dent pol­i­tics, and stu­dent com­mit­tees.” Had O’Connor con­tin­ued mak­ing car­toons into her pub­lish­ing years, she might have, like B.C. Kowal­s­ki, aimed one of those petards at those who dis­pense dog­mat­ic, cook­ie-cut­ter writ­ing advice as well.

via Geor­gia Col­lege/The Paris Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art of William Faulkn­er: Draw­ings from 1916–1925

The Art of Sylvia Plath: Revis­it Her Sketch­es, Self-Por­traits, Draw­ings & Illus­trat­ed Let­ters

The Art of Franz Kaf­ka: Draw­ings from 1907–1917

Rare 1959 Audio: Flan­nery O’Connor Reads ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’

Flan­nery O’Connor: Friends Don’t Let Friends Read Ayn Rand (1960)

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

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Listen to Audio Arts: The 1970s Tape Cassette Arts Magazine Featuring Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp & Many Others

audio_arts_cassette_0

As a pod­cast­er, I’ve long since grown used to the idea of peri­od­i­cal­ly issu­ing audio con­tent. But the con­ve­nient record­ing, inter­net, and com­put­er, and mobile lis­ten­ing tech­nolo­gies that made such a medi­um pos­si­ble only real­ly con­verged in the ear­ly 2000s. How would I have gone about it had I want­ed to put out a “pod­cast,” say, 40 years ear­li­er? We have one such exam­ple in Audio Arts, a British con­tem­po­rary art “sound mag­a­zine” dis­trib­uted through the mail on audio cas­settes. “The sev­en­ties were the years of con­cep­tu­al art with text adding val­ue to the actu­al works,” co-cre­ator William Fur­long once said in an inter­view. “As an artist I was more inter­est­ed in ‘dis­cus­sion,’ the idea of lan­guage and the peo­ple that already worked in con­cep­tu­al fields in Great Britain. Soon I realised there weren’t mag­a­zines capa­ble of report­ing such mate­r­i­al inspired by con­ver­sa­tion, sounds and dis­cus­sions. The evoca­tive force of a voice is lost with the writ­ten word as it will only ever be a writ­ten voice.

Fur­long, a sculp­tor, and Bar­ry Bark­er, a gal­lerist, began pub­lish­ing Audio Arts in 1973. Its run last­ed until, aston­ish­ing­ly, 2006, by which time its archives had come to 25 vol­umes of four issues each. Its list of sub­scribers includ­ed the for­mi­da­ble Tate, such fans that they actu­al­ly acquired the mag­a­zine’s mas­ter tapes, dig­i­tized them, and made them all pub­licly avail­able on their web site. No longer must you seek out nth-gen­er­a­tion dupli­cat­ed ana­log cas­settes and dig out your Walk­man; now you can sim­ply stream on your media play­er of choice every issue from Jan­u­ary 1973, “four cas­settes with con­tri­bu­tions from Car­o­line Tis­dall, Noam Chom­sky, James Joyce and W.B. Yeats,” to Jan­u­ary 2006, which caps every­thing off with con­tri­bu­tions by Gilbert & George and Jake and Dinos Chap­man. Oth­er notable artis­tic pres­ences include Mar­cel Duchamp in Vol­ume 2, Philip Glass in Vol­ume 6, and Andy Warhol in Vol­ume 8. Help­ful­ly, Tate has also put togeth­er a sec­tion with tools to explore Audio Arts’ high­lights — some­thing more than a few mod­ern-day pod­casts could no doubt use.

via @WFMU

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Andy Warhol Inter­views Alfred Hitch­cock (1974)

Lis­ten to John Cage’s 5 Hour Art Piece: Diary: How To Improve The World (You Will Only Make Mat­ters Worse) 

Library of Con­gress Releas­es Audio Archive of Inter­views with Rock ‘n’ Roll Icons

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Routledge Gives Free Access to 6,000 eBooks in June (Including Philosophy & Cultural Studies Texts)

phenomenological mind

A quick note: After dig­i­tiz­ing over 15,000 books, Rout­ledge has made 6,000 of these e‑texts free for view­ing dur­ing the month of June. You can browse the com­plete list of titles in Rout­ledge’s e‑catalog by click­ing here. Once you have select­ed a title, you can then click the blue “View Inside this Book” but­ton to start read­ing the text. The col­lec­tion includes lots of works focused on Eco­nom­ics, Finance and Busi­nessPol­i­tics and Inter­na­tion­al Rela­tions; and Phi­los­o­phy and Cul­tur­al Stud­ies.The lat­ter cat­e­go­ry will undoubt­ed­ly inter­est our many philo­soph­i­cal­ly-mind­ed read­ers. Among the texts you will find Fou­cault and Edu­ca­tionCul­tur­al Analy­sis The Work of Peter L. Berg­er, Mary Dou­glas, Michel Fou­cault, and Jür­gen Haber­mas; Hei­deg­ger and the Roman­tics: The Lit­er­ary Inven­tion of Mean­ingThe Note­books of Simone Weil; and A His­tor­i­cal Intro­duc­tion to Phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy. The image above comes from The Phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal Mind by Shaun Gal­lagher and Dan Zahavi.

via Leit­er Reports

Relat­ed Con­tent:

800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Michel Fou­cault: Free Lec­tures on Truth, Dis­course & The Self

170 Free Text­books: A Meta Col­lec­tion

Read 9 Books By Noam Chom­sky Free Online

 

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Carl Jung Writes a Review of Joyce’s Ulysses and Mails It To The Author (1932)

jung joyce 2

Feel­ings about James Joyce’s Ulysses tend to fall rough­ly into one of two camps: the reli­gious­ly rev­er­ent or the exasperated/bored/overwhelmed. As pop­u­lar exam­ples of the for­mer, we have the many thou­sand cel­e­brants of Blooms­day—June 16th, the date on which the nov­el is set in 1904. These rev­el­ries approach the lev­el of saints’ days, with re-enact­ments and pil­grim­ages to impor­tant Dublin sites. On the oth­er side, we have the reac­tions of Vir­ginia Woolf, say, or cer­tain friends of mine who left wry com­ments on Blooms­day posts about pick­ing up some­thing more “read­able” to cel­e­brate. (A third cat­e­go­ry, the scan­dal­ized, has more or less died off, as scat­ol­ogy, blas­phe­my, and cuck­oldry have become the stuff of sit­coms.) Anoth­er famous read­er, Carl Jung, seems at first to damn the nov­el with some faint praise and much scathing crit­i­cism in a 1932 essay for Europäis­che Revue, but ends up, despite him­self, writ­ing about the book in the lan­guage of a true believ­er.

A great many read­ers of Jung’s essay may per­haps nod their heads at sen­tences like “Yes, I admit I feel I have been made a fool of” and “one should nev­er rub the reader’s nose into his own stu­pid­i­ty, but that is just what Ulysses does.” To illus­trate his bore­dom with the nov­el, he quotes “an old uncle,” who says “’Do you know how the dev­il tor­tures souls in hell? […] He keeps them wait­ing.’” This remark, Jung writes, “occurred to me when I was plow­ing through Ulysses for the first time. Every sen­tence rais­es an expec­ta­tion which is not ful­filled; final­ly, out of sheer res­ig­na­tion, you come to expect noth­ing any longer.” But while Jung’s cri­tique may val­i­date cer­tain hasty read­ers’ hatred of Joyce’s near­ly unavoid­able 20th cen­tu­ry mas­ter­work, it also probes deeply into why the nov­el res­onates.

For all of his frus­tra­tion with the book—his sense that it “always gives the read­er an irri­tat­ing sense of inferiority”—Jung nonethe­less bestows upon it the high­est praise, com­par­ing Joyce to oth­er prophet­ic Euro­pean writ­ers of ear­li­er ages like Goethe and Niet­zsche. “It seems to me now,” he writes, “that all that is neg­a­tive in Joyce’s work, all that is cold-blood­ed, bizarre and banal, grotesque and dev­il­ish, is a pos­i­tive virtue for which it deserves praise.” Ulysses is “a devo­tion­al book for the object-besot­ted white man,” a “spir­i­tu­al exer­cise, an aes­thet­ic dis­ci­pline, an ago­niz­ing rit­u­al, an arcane pro­ce­dure, eigh­teen alchem­i­cal alem­bics piled on top of one anoth­er […] a world has passed away, and is made new.” He ends the essay by quot­ing the novel’s entire final para­graph. (Find longer excerpts of Jung’s essay here and here.)

Jung not only wrote what may be the most crit­i­cal­ly hon­est yet also glow­ing response to the nov­el, but he also took it upon him­self in Sep­tem­ber of 1932 to send a copy of the essay to the author along with the let­ter below. Let­ters of Note tells us that Joyce “was both annoyed and proud,” a fit­ting­ly divid­ed response to such an ambiva­lent review.

Dear Sir,

Your Ulysses has pre­sent­ed the world such an upset­ting psy­cho­log­i­cal prob­lem that repeat­ed­ly I have been called in as a sup­posed author­i­ty on psy­cho­log­i­cal mat­ters.

Ulysses proved to be an exceed­ing­ly hard nut and it has forced my mind not only to most unusu­al efforts, but also to rather extrav­a­gant pere­gri­na­tions (speak­ing from the stand­point of a sci­en­tist). Your book as a whole has giv­en me no end of trou­ble and I was brood­ing over it for about three years until I suc­ceed­ed to put myself into it. But I must tell you that I’m pro­found­ly grate­ful to your­self as well as to your gigan­tic opus, because I learned a great deal from it. I shall prob­a­bly nev­er be quite sure whether I did enjoy it, because it meant too much grind­ing of nerves and of grey mat­ter. I also don’t know whether you will enjoy what I have writ­ten about Ulysses because I could­n’t help telling the world how much I was bored, how I grum­bled, how I cursed and how I admired. The 40 pages of non stop run at the end is a string of ver­i­ta­ble psy­cho­log­i­cal peach­es. I sup­pose the dev­il’s grand­moth­er knows so much about the real psy­chol­o­gy of a woman, I did­n’t.

Well, I just try to rec­om­mend my lit­tle essay to you, as an amus­ing attempt of a per­fect stranger that went astray in the labyrinth of your Ulysses and hap­pened to get out of it again by sheer good luck. At all events you may gath­er from my arti­cle what Ulysses has done to a sup­pos­ed­ly bal­anced psy­chol­o­gist.

With the expres­sion of my deep­est appre­ci­a­tion, I remain, dear Sir,

Yours faith­ful­ly,

C. G. Jung

With this let­ter of intro­duc­tion, Jung was “a per­fect stranger” to Joyce no longer. In fact, two years lat­er, Joyce would call on the psy­chol­o­gist to treat his daugh­ter Lucia, who suf­fered from schiz­o­phre­nia, a trag­ic sto­ry told in Car­ol Loeb Schloss’s biog­ra­phy of the novelist’s famous­ly trou­bled child. For his care of Lucia and his care­ful atten­tion to Ulysses, Joyce would inscribe Jung’s copy of the book: “To Dr. C.G. Jung, with grate­ful appre­ci­a­tion of his aid and coun­sel. James Joyce. Xmas 1934, Zurich.”

via Let­ters of Note

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Every­thing You Need to Enjoy Read­ing James Joyce’s Ulysses on Blooms­day

The Very First Reviews of James Joyce’s Ulysses: “A Work of High Genius” (1922)

Vir­ginia Woolf Writes About Joyce’s Ulysses, “Nev­er Did Any Book So Bore Me,” and Quits at Page 200

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

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Hear Roger Waters’ Early, Work-in-Progress Recordings of Pink Floyd’s The Wall

My first expo­sure to Pink Floyd’s rock opera The Wall left me feel­ing noth­ing less than aston­ish­ment. And though I nev­er had the chance to see the out­ra­geous stage show, with its very lit­er­al wall and giant inflat­able pig, the film has always struck me as a suit­ably dark piece of psy­chodra­ma. Over a great many sub­se­quent lis­tens, the melo­dra­mat­ic dou­ble-album can still blow my mind, but I’ve come to feel that some of the strongest mate­r­i­al are those songs penned joint­ly by Roger Waters and David Gilmour, and those are rel­a­tive­ly few. (Mark Blake quotes Gilmour as say­ing “things like ‘Com­fort­ably Numb’ were the last embers of mine and Roger’s abil­i­ty to work col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly togeth­er.) The bulk of the album belongs to Waters, its auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal details and per­son­al themes, and the album and film can some­times feel as sti­fled and claus­tro­pho­bic as its pro­tag­o­nist does. This is either a cre­ative fail­ing or a bril­liant meld­ing of form and con­tent.

Inspired by an inci­dent in which an exas­per­at­ed Waters spat on a row­dy fan at a sta­di­um show in Mon­tre­al dur­ing the band’s 1977 “In the Flesh Tour,” The Wall doc­u­ments the painful rise and even more painful fall of a fic­tive rock star named, of course, Pink (played by Bob Geld­of in the film ver­sion), whose life close­ly par­al­lels Waters’, down to the spit­ting. It has always seemed an odd irony that Waters respond­ed to the alien­ation of tour­ing mas­sive sta­di­ums by cre­at­ing a sta­di­um show big­ger than any­thing the band had yet done, but it speaks to the bassist and singer’s grandiose per­son­al­i­ty and obses­sive desire to turn his angst into the­ater. Often­times the results were spec­tac­u­lar, oth­er times bom­bas­tic and con­fus­ing (at least to crit­ics, some of whom are eas­i­ly con­fused). The record­ing of the album, as many well know, strained the band almost to break­ing, and by many accounts, Waters’ impe­ri­ous­ness didn’t help mat­ters, to say the least.

All of the behind-the-scenes dra­ma may or may not eclipse the dra­ma of the album itself, depend­ing on your lev­el of fan­dom and inter­est in Pink Floyd biog­ra­phy. Lovers of Waters’ epic rock dra­matur­gy will find edi­fi­ca­tion at the exten­sive online crit­i­cal com­men­tary Pink Floyd The Wall: A Com­plete Analy­sis, an online work in progress that deliv­ers on its title. For a very brief account of the sto­ry behind the sto­ry, co-pro­duc­er Bob Ezrin’s inter­view with Grammy.com offers per­spec­tive from some­one involved in the project who wasn’t a mem­ber of what came to seem like The Roger Waters’ Band. Ezrin describes The Wall as “Roger’s own project and not a group effort,” and his own role as “a kind of ref­er­ee between him and the rest of the band.”

In the begin­ning we had a very long demo that Roger had writ­ten. We start­ed to sep­a­rate out the pieces, and when we looked at the sto­ry­line we real­ized what we need­ed was a through line, some­thing to get us from start to fin­ish.

Ezrin recounts that he “closed [his] eyes and wrote out the movie that would become The Wall,” hand­ed the script out to the band, and marked songs miss­ing from Waters’ demo as “’TBW’—‘to be writ­ten.’” (Among those songs was “Com­fort­ably Numb.”)

The record­ings at the top of the post—which sur­faced in 2001 with the title Under Con­struc­tion—rep­re­sent a step in The Wall’s evo­lu­tion­ary devel­op­ment between Waters’ rudi­men­ta­ry demos (short excerpts above) and the com­plet­ed album. (See the Youtube page for a com­plete track­list. Con­trary to the upload­er’s descrip­tion, Roger Waters cer­tain­ly does not play all the instru­ments.) While Under Con­struc­tion has gen­er­al­ly been referred to as a “demo,” Rick Karhu of Pink Floyd fanzine Spare Bricks express­es his doubts about the use of a term he takes to denote “a fair­ly pol­ished record­ing”: “Demos are not rough record­ings or works-in-progress […]. I doubt very much that Under Con­struc­tion is a demo of The Wall.”

It’s too rough around the edges—at times shock­ing­ly so—to be strict­ly con­sid­ered a demo record­ing. At points, things are hap­haz­ard­ly edit­ed togeth­er. Songs cut off abrupt­ly, fade unex­pect­ed­ly or drop out entire­ly for a moment as if some­one at the mix­ing desk hit the wrong but­ton at some point. Vocal tracks peak-out, often caus­ing anguish to the lis­ten­er’s ear drums. Some instru­ment lines (most­ly the bass gui­tar) mean­der through the back­ground as if the per­son play­ing is mak­ing up the part as they go. Equal­iza­tion is nonex­is­tent on most tracks. Over­all, most of it sounds like a 4‑track record­ing by a band who has only the vaguest notion of how the equip­ment works.

Lest we take this descrip­tion as dis­par­age­ment, Karhu clar­i­fies: “It is pre­cise­ly for those rea­sons […] that I love them dear­ly and con­sid­er them one of the most valu­able, unau­tho­rized Floyd record­ings to be unearthed. Ever.” Many Youtube com­menters agree, some even argu­ing that these rough sketch­es are supe­ri­or to the final pol­ished prod­uct. It’s a debate I won’t weigh in on, though I will say that like Karhu, I enjoy the lo-fi ragged­ness of this ver­sion of The Wall. It seems to con­vey the emo­tion­al­ly frayed edges of these songs in a way the slick pro­duc­tion of the stu­dio album may not at times. Either as a mere doc­u­ment of the album’s ear­ly his­to­ry or an alter­nate, fragmented—and hence more traumatized—take on The Wall, this unof­fi­cial ver­sion is haunt­ing and strange. Does it per­haps bet­ter rep­re­sent Waters’ desire to make his psy­chic unease into art? We invite you to judge for your­selves. And if, like me, you can lis­ten to “Com­fort­ably Numb” (and that incred­i­ble gui­tar solo) on repeat for hours on end, you may be inter­est­ed to hear David Gilmour dis­cuss the song’s com­po­si­tion in the inter­view below.

Hear more demo tracks on YouTube here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Gilmour & David Bowie Sing “Com­fort­ably Numb” Live (2006)

Watch Doc­u­men­taries on the Mak­ing of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here

Hear Lost Record­ing of Pink Floyd Play­ing with Jazz Vio­lin­ist Stéphane Grap­pel­li on “Wish You Were Here”

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

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