Enjoy a Philosophy Brain Teaser; Play the Free Mind Boggler App from the University of Liverpool

in Philosophy | October 27th, 2013

Can you beat the Mind Bog­gler, the world’s “most fiendish philo­soph­i­cal brain-teas­er” brought to you by Phi­los­o­phy in the City, a project cre­at­ed out of the Depart­ment of Phi­los­o­phy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Liv­er­pool? Want­i­ng to bring phi­los­o­phy into “the real world,” Phi­los­o­phy in the City cre­at­ed a free app that presents a new puz­zle each week, in the form of a “jum­bled-up philo­soph­i­cal quote.” All you have to do is cor­rect­ly re-order the puz­zle to unlock fur­ther read­ing, includ­ing infor­ma­tion about the philoso­pher in the spot­light that par­tic­u­lar week, plus exclu­sive com­men­tary and analy­sis pro­vid­ed by schol­ars from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Liv­er­pool. You can play the game in “easy mode” or “hard mode,” and also against the clock, just to add a bit of pres­sure. Right now, the app is only avail­able on the Apple plat­form. Hope­ful­ly Android is around the cor­ner.

Enjoy the app, and if you find your­self want­i­ng to go deep­er, then check out the almost 100 phi­los­o­phy cours­es in our col­lec­tion of 750 Free Online Cours­es.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take First-Class Phi­los­o­phy Lec­tures Any­where with Free Oxford Pod­casts

Intro­duc­ing Wire­less Phi­los­o­phy: An Open Access Phi­los­o­phy Project Cre­at­ed by Yale and MIT

Down­load 90 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es and Start Liv­ing the Exam­ined Life

Lis­ten to the Pod­cast: The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy … With­out Any Gaps

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy, from 600 B.C.E. to 1935, Visu­al­ized in Two Mas­sive, 44-Foot High Dia­grams

Learn to Sing the Harmonies of Famous Beatles Songs with Master Harmonist Galeazzo Frudua

in Education, Music | October 25th, 2013

A recent Metafil­ter post intro­duces us to Galeaz­zo Frud­ua, a musi­cian from Bologna, Italy who, “pos­sess­es an uncan­ni­ly good ear for har­mo­ny, and has pro­duced a series of videos that painstak­ing­ly and expert­ly ana­lyze and demon­strate for you the vocal har­monies employed in var­i­ous Bea­t­les songs.” These detailed tuto­ri­als, writes the Metafil­ter poster, are made all the more watch­able by Frud­u­a’s “per­cep­tive com­men­tary, capa­ble singing voice, unas­sum­ing man­ner, impres­sive video edit­ing skills and, hey, his charm­ing Ital­ian accent.”

In his first tuto­r­i­al, for “Nowhere Man” (above), Frud­ua begins by intro­duc­ing “Lennon voice”: “Lennon voice is very sim­ple, and it goes like this.” And, hand­i­ly, flaw­less­ly, it does. Frud­ua, who seems to be record­ing in the back of a restau­rant, match­es the tone of Lennon, McCart­ney, and Harrison’s har­monies sep­a­rate­ly and togeth­er impres­sive­ly. He par­tic­u­lar­ly favors Rub­ber Soul. Hear his “In My Life” below. He calls it “one of the best per­for­mances ever of John Lennon in the Bea­t­les” as well as “a fan­tas­tic cam­pus on learn­ing how to sing.”

Anec­do­tal­ly, hav­ing worked with choir singers, opera singers, and a capel­la singers, I can say that Frudua’s abil­i­ty is not par­tic­u­lar­ly rare but is the effect of con­stant prac­tice. One Metafil­ter poster puts it well: “It’s not hard if you have a bit of an ear, and some expe­ri­ence.… Har­monies are a kind of lan­guage. Spend some time learn­ing the gram­mar and a few phras­es and it can open up quick­ly.” Frudua’s not only a mas­ter of vocal har­mo­ny, he’s also an expert luthi­er and builds cus­tom gui­tars for dozens of Ital­ian artists. In his break­down below of “You Nev­er Give Me Your Mon­ey,” the intro to the Abbey Road med­ley, Frud­ua takes on a par­tic­u­lar­ly dif­fi­cult har­mo­ny, as he explains in great detail in his care­ful intro­duc­tion to the song’s har­mon­ic gram­mar. He tells us we can use this tuto­r­i­al “as a guide for your Bea­t­les’ trib­ute band or repro­duce them in your home record­ing.” You may do those things if you wish. Or you could watch Frud­ua do them bet­ter. See his full series here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Iso­lat­ed Vocal Tracks for The Bea­t­les’ Cli­mac­tic 16-Minute Med­ley on Abbey Road

John Lennon’s Raw, Soul-Bar­ing Vocals From the Bea­t­les’ ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ (1969)

Decon­struct­ing The Mas­ter Track of The Bea­t­les’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lone­ly Hearts Club Band”

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

The Haircut: A Student Film Starring the Great John Cassavetes (1982)

in Film | October 21st, 2013

Giv­en the length of the aver­age hair­cut, it sur­pris­es me that I don’t see more short films built around them. Tamar Simon Hoffs knew the advan­tages of the hair­cut-based short film, and she put them to use in 1982, dur­ing her time in the Amer­i­can Film Institute’s Direct­ing Work­shops for Women pro­gram. The Hair­cut’s script has a busy record exec­u­tive on his way to an impor­tant lunch appoint­ment. With only fif­teen min­utes to spare, he drops into Rus­so’s bar­ber shop for a trim. Lit­tle does he expect that, with­in those fif­teen min­utes, he’ll not only get his hair cut, but enjoy a shave, a mas­sage, a glass of wine, sev­er­al musi­cal num­bers, romance real or imag­ined,  and some­thing close to a psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic ses­sion. He goes through quite a few facets of the human expe­ri­ence right there in the chair — minus the time-con­sum­ing “hot tow­el treat­ment” — and Rus­so and his col­or­ful, effi­cient crew still get him out of the door on time. Hoffs knew the per­fect actor for the star­ring role: John Cas­savetes. What’s more, she knew him per­son­al­ly.

The con­nec­tion came through her friend Eliz­a­beth Gaz­zara, daugh­ter of a cer­tain Ben Gaz­zara, star of the The Killing of a Chi­nese Book­ie, my own favorite Cas­savetes-direct­ed film. After read­ing the script, Cas­savetes agreed to per­form, “his only stip­u­la­tion being that his co-stars must be entire­ly rehearsed and ready to go, so he could just come in and per­form as if he real­ly was the cus­tomer,” writes British Film Insti­tute DVD pro­duc­er James Black­ford. “Even in a lit­tle film such as this, Cas­savetes was still search­ing for those per­fect moments that come from the spon­tane­ity of ear­ly takes.” You’ll even laugh at a few lines, spo­ken by Cas­savetes as his char­ac­ter begins to enjoy him­self, that must sure­ly have come out of his beloved impro­vi­sa­tion­al meth­ods. And we can cred­it the film’s sur­pris­ing end to an even more per­son­al con­nec­tion of Hoffs’: to her daugh­ter Susan­na, front­woman of The Ban­gles, then known as The Bangs. You can watch The Hair­cut on the BFI’s new DVD/Blu-Ray release of The Killing of a Chi­nese Book­ie, or you can watch it above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wes Anderson’s First Short Film: The Black-and-White, Jazz-Scored Bot­tle Rock­et (1992)

The Sur­re­al Short Films of Louis C.K., 1993–1999

Por­trait Wern­er Her­zog: The Director’s Auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal Short Film from 1986

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

in Literature | October 18th, 2013

We’ve recent­ly dis­cussed the reac­tions of James Joyce’s lit­er­ary con­tem­po­raries to the 1922 pub­li­ca­tion of Ulysses. T.S. Eliot was floored, and told all of his friends, includ­ing Vir­ginia Woolf. Woolf wres­tled with the book and either found it too dull or too over­whelm­ing to fin­ish. What­ev­er the reac­tion, Joyce’s peers took notice. But what did peo­ple who weren’t soon to be the sub­ject of thou­sands of dis­ser­ta­tions think? Of the few non-mod­ernist mas­ters who read Joyce, his first pro­fes­sion­al crit­ics offer evi­dence. Take the review of Dr. Joseph Collins in The New York Times (above—see the full text here). Collins begins with a very pre­scient state­ment, one most read­ers of Joyce will like­ly agree with in some part:

Few intu­itive, sen­si­tive vision­ar­ies may under­stand and com­pre­hend “Ulysses,” James Joyce’s new and mam­moth vol­ume, with­out going through a course of train­ing or instruc­tion, but the aver­age intel­li­gent read­er will glean lit­tle or noth­ing from it- even from care­ful perusal, one might prop­er­ly say study, of it- save bewil­der­ment and a sense of dis­gust. It should be com­pan­ioned with a key and a glos­sary like the Berlitz books. Then the atten­tive and dili­gent read­er would even­tu­al­ly get some com­pre­hen­sion of Mr. Joyce’s mes­sage.

Collins then goes on to praise Joyce’s great­ness in no uncer­tain terms:

Before pro­ceed­ing with a brief analy­sis of “Ulysses,” and a com­ment on its con­struc­tion and con­tent, I wish to char­ac­ter­ize it. “Ulysses” is the most impor­tant con­tri­bu­tion that has been made to fic­tion­al lit­er­a­ture in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. It will immor­tal­ize its author with the same cer­tain­ty that Gar­gan­tua and Pan­ta­gru­el immor­tal­ized Rabelais, and “The Broth­ers Kara­ma­zof” Dos­toyevsky. It is like­ly that there is no one writ­ing Eng­lish today that could par­al­lel Joyce’s feat.

Such incred­i­bly high praise it sounds like flat­tery, espe­cial­ly since Joyce’s book had not even weath­ered a few weeks among the read­ing pub­lic. For a more sober and care­ful assess­ment, see the great lit­er­ary crit­ic Edmund Wilson’s July, 1922 review in the New Repub­lic. In Wilson’s ambiva­lent assess­ment: “The thing that makes Ulysses impos­ing is, in fact, not the theme but the scale upon which it is devel­oped. It has tak­en Mr. Joyce sev­en years to write Ulysses and he has done it in sev­en hun­dred and thir­ty pages which are prob­a­bly the most com­plete­ly “writ­ten” pages to be seen in any nov­el since Flaubert.” If this seems like faint praise, it sets up some of Wilson’s “com­plaints” to come. And yet, “for all its appalling longueurs,” he writes, “Ulysses is a work of high genius. [It] has the effect at once of mak­ing every­thing else look brassy.”

Of course there were those who hat­ed the book, like Harvard’s Irv­ing Bab­bitt, who said it could only have been writ­ten “in an advanced stage of psy­chic dis­in­te­gra­tion.” And there were the puri­tans and philistines who found the novel’s scat­o­log­i­cal  humor, frank depic­tions of sex, and near con­stant erot­ic charge a scan­dal. Yet it was the opin­ions, how­ev­er qual­i­fied, of Joyce’s peers and most of his crit­ics that moved U.S. Judge John Mon­ro Woolsey eleven years lat­er to rule that the book was not obscene and could be legal­ly sold in Amer­i­ca. Wrote Woolsey in his deci­sion, “The rep­u­ta­tion of ‘Ulysses’ in the lit­er­ary world… war­rant­ed my tak­ing such time as was nec­es­sary… In ‘Ulysses,’ in spite of its unusu­al frank­ness, I do not detect any­where the leer of the sen­su­al­ist.” Good thing Woolsey did­n’t read Joyce’s let­ters to his wife.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

James Joyce Read From his Epic Ulysses, 1924

James Joyce, With His Eye­sight Fail­ing, Draws a Sketch of Leopold Bloom (1926)

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

James Joyce’s “Dirty Let­ters” to His Wife (1909)

James Joyce’s Ulysses: Down­load the Free Audio Book

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

Vice Meets Up with Superstar Communist Cultural Theorist Slavoj Žižek

in Film, Philosophy | October 16th, 2013

I can pop open a copy of Slavoj Žižek’s Inter­ro­gat­ing the Real to a ran­dom page and I am sud­den­ly ping-pong­ing from cri­tique of Kant, to a high-five for the “vul­gar sen­ti­men­tal” lit­er­ary kitsch of today, to “the tra­di­tion of amour cour­tois,” to “a com­plete­ly unread­able” nov­el called Inde­cent Obses­sion, all with­in the space of four sen­tences. I may not have any earth­ly idea what to make of this con­nect-the-dots, but I want to know what it means. I can look over at the shelf and see on it a vol­ume called The Mon­stros­i­ty of Christ, a respect­ful yet tena­cious dia­logue-slash-debate on Chris­tian­i­ty between dialec­ti­cal mate­ri­al­ist Žižek and “rad­i­cal ortho­dox” the­olo­gian John Mil­bank. Just in this casu­al, cur­so­ry glance, I might con­clude: this is no cranky vil­lage athe­ist (or Marx­ist as the case may be). This is a psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic Marx­ist the­o­rist of breadth. And I haven’t even touched on his exten­sive engage­ment with Hol­ly­wood film.

It is this mag­nan­i­mous, play­ful, and hyper-engaged side of Žižek—that and his unflag­ging sense of humor and high­ly vis­i­ble pub­lic persona—that makes him seem approach­able. Even if, as the inter­view­er in the Vice encounter with Žižek above says, “most of [his books] remain impen­e­tra­ble” to many read­ers, he is undoubt­ed­ly “the most broad­ly pop­u­lar anti-cap­i­tal­ist philoso­pher work­ing today.” The occa­sion for the inter­view: a 2012 doc­u­men­tary film star­ring Žižek called The Pervert’s Guide to Ide­ol­o­gy, which opens Novem­ber 1st in the U.S.. Direct­ed by Sophie Fiennes and a fol­low-up to 2006’s The Pervert’s Guide to Cin­e­ma, the film has Žižek deploy his rapid-fire ref­er­enc­ing abil­i­ty to “explain why the bulk of us remain enslaved to cap­i­tal­ist pow­er struc­tures.” His mate­r­i­al, as with The Pervert’s Guide to Cin­e­ma, is once again clas­sic Hol­ly­wood films like Full Met­al Jack­et, The Searchers, Taxi Dri­ver, The Sound of Music, and The Last Temp­ta­tion of Christ. Žižek even takes on such recent, less clas­sic, block­busters as I Am Leg­end and The Dark Knight. (Some­thing cov­ered in our recent post.) In the inter­view above, staged in Žižek’s cozy Sloven­ian flat, see the philoso­pher in typ­i­cal­ly ani­mat­ed style poke fun at him­self as he dis­cuss­es the newest film’s inten­tions, expands on his rev­o­lu­tion­ary analy­ses, and ges­tures mani­a­cal­ly about the apart­ment while offer­ing his guest a “f*cking fruit juice.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Slavoj Žižek’s Pervert’s Guide to Ide­ol­o­gy Decodes The Dark Knight and They Live

Philoso­pher Slavoj Zizek Inter­prets Hitchcock’s Ver­ti­go in The Pervert’s Guide to Cin­e­ma (2006)

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

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

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

Take a Free Course on the Financial Markets with Robert Shiller, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics

in Economics, Yale | October 14th, 2013

This morn­ing, the Nobel Prize in Eco­nom­ic Sci­ence went to three Amer­i­can pro­fes­sors — Eugene F. Fama (U. Chica­go), Lars Peter Hansen (U. Chica­go) and Robert J. Shiller (Yale) — “for their empir­i­cal analy­sis of asset prices.” In his own way, each econ­o­mist has demon­strat­ed that “stock and bond prices move unpre­dictably in the short term but with greater pre­dictabil­i­ty over longer peri­ods,” and that mar­kets are “moved by a mix of ratio­nal cal­cu­lus and human behav­ior,” writes The New York Times.

Of the three econ­o­mists, Robert Shiller is per­haps the most house­hold name. In March 2000, Shiller pub­lished Irra­tional Exu­ber­ance, a book that warned that the long-run­ning bull mar­ket was a bub­ble, that stock prices were being dri­ven by human psy­chol­o­gy, not real val­ues. Weeks lat­er, the mar­ket cracked and peo­ple began to pay atten­tion to what Shiller had to say. Fast for­ward a few years, and Shiller released a sec­ond edi­tion of the same book, this time argu­ing that the hous­ing mar­ket was the lat­est and great­est bub­ble. We all know how that pre­dic­tion played out.

Shiller’s think­ing about the finan­cial mar­kets isn’t a mys­tery. It’s all on dis­play in his Yale course sim­ply called Finan­cial Mar­kets. Avail­able for free on YouTube, iTunes Video, and  Yale’s web site, the 23 lec­ture-course pro­vides an intro­duc­tion to “behav­ioral finance prin­ci­ples” nec­es­sary to under­stand the func­tion­ing of the secu­ri­ties, insur­ance, and bank­ing indus­tries. Record­ed in 2011, the course is oth­er­wise list­ed in the Eco­nom­ics sec­tion of our col­lec­tion of 1200 Free Online Cours­es. You can watch all of the lec­tures above, start­ing with Lec­ture 1. By fol­low­ing these links, you can find the course syl­labus, an out­line of the week­ly ses­sions, and a book list.

Per­son­al Note: About 10 years ago, I worked with Prof. Shiller on devel­op­ing an online course. Two things I recall about him. First, he struck me as being a very down-to-earth and unas­sum­ing guy. A plea­sure to work with. Sec­ond, we had some time to kill one day, and so I asked him (cir­ca 2005) whether it was crazy to buy a house. I mean, I had the guru sit­ting in front of me, in a chat­ty mood. What did I get? Bup­kis: “You know, it just depends…”  It was­n’t a bull­ish sign. So I took it to mean “Stay on the side­lines, kid.” In 2007, it seemed like sound advice.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion Uni­ver­si­ty Launch­es, Bring­ing Free Cours­es in Eco­nom­ics to the Web

John May­nard Keynes Explains Cure to High Unem­ploy­ment in His Own Voice (1939)

Hayek vs. Keynes Rap

Žižek Blames the US Government Shutdown on Ayn Rand’s Acolytes Who Caused the 2008 Collapse

in Current Affairs, Philosophy | October 14th, 2013

Images via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

The gov­ern­ment shut­down and the rais­ing of the debt ceil­ing — such things are not usu­al­ly grist for our cul­tur­al mill. But all of that changes when a cul­tur­al the­o­rist pins the blame for Wash­ing­ton’s dys­func­tion on the acolytes of a pseu­do-philoso­pher. Writ­ing in The Guardian last Fri­day, in sim­ple, straight­for­ward prose, Slove­ni­a’s favorite the­o­rist Slavoj Žižek asks and answers a ques­tion in the title of his op-ed: “Who is respon­si­ble for the US shut­down? The same idiots respon­si­ble for the 2008 melt­down”. And who are those “idiots,” you might won­der? Let me spare you the sus­pense and jump you down to the last two para­graphs of his piece:

One of the weird con­se­quences of the 2008 finan­cial melt­down and the mea­sures tak­en to coun­ter­act it (enor­mous sums of mon­ey to help banks) was the revival of the work of Ayn Rand, the clos­est one can get to an ide­ol­o­gist of the “greed is good” rad­i­cal cap­i­tal­ism. The sales of her opus Atlas Shrugged explod­ed. Accord­ing to some reports, there are already signs that the sce­nario described in Atlas Shrugged – the cre­ative cap­i­tal­ists them­selves going on strike – is com­ing to pass in the form of a pop­ulist right. How­ev­er, this mis­reads the sit­u­a­tion: what is effec­tive­ly tak­ing place today is almost the exact oppo­site. Most of the bailout mon­ey is going pre­cise­ly to the Ran­di­an “titans”, the bankers who failed in their “cre­ative” schemes and there­by brought about the finan­cial melt­down. It is not the “cre­ative genius­es” who are now help­ing ordi­nary peo­ple, it is the ordi­nary peo­ple who are help­ing the failed “cre­ative genius­es”.

John Galt, the cen­tral char­ac­ter in Atlas Shrugged, is not named until near the end of the nov­el. Before his iden­ti­ty is revealed, the ques­tion is repeat­ed­ly asked, “Who is John Galt”. Now we know pre­cise­ly who he is: John Galt is the idiot respon­si­ble for the 2008 finan­cial melt­down, and for the ongo­ing fed­er­al gov­ern­ment shut­down in the US.

We’re not say­ing it’s the most tren­chant analy­sis, but we do like to take note of intel­lec­tu­al dus­tups. Speak­ing of, did you miss the Chom­sky-Žižek spat from the sum­mer? It went four rounds. Round 1. Round 2. Round 3. Round 4. And end­ed in a draw.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ayn Rand Adamant­ly Defends Her Athe­ism on The Phil Don­ahue Show (Cir­ca 1979)

William F. Buck­ley Flogged Him­self to Get Through Atlas Shrugged

Mike Wal­lace Inter­views Ayn Rand (1959)

Joseph Stalin, a Lifelong Editor, Wielded a Big, Blue, Dangerous Pencil

in History | October 11th, 2013

It seems only nat­ur­al that Joseph Stal­in, who presided over per­haps the most stag­ger­ing­ly vast era­sure of human beings, their prop­er­ty, their doc­u­ments and his­to­ries, should have also been a metic­u­lous edi­tor. Whether we know it or not, the invis­i­ble hand of an edi­tor intrudes between us and near­ly every­thing we read (even if it’s the writer as edi­tor), mak­ing eso­teric deci­sions, cre­at­ing alter­nate out­comes and delet­ing the past. In Stalin’s day, and still in many edi­to­r­i­al depart­ments today, the edi­tor wield­ed a col­ored pen­cil instead of a key­board, and hov­ered over man­u­scripts, not­ing adden­da, cor­rect­ing minu­tia, slash­ing through sen­tences, and scrib­bling inde­ci­pher­able com­ments in the mar­gins. Stalin’s pen­cil was blue, a col­or that was not vis­i­ble when pho­tographed.

This col­or becomes a metaphor for Stalin’s invis­i­bil­i­ty in a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle on Stal­in as edi­tor by Hol­ly Case, asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of his­to­ry at Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty. Before Stal­in was Stal­in, he was Joseph Dju­gashvili, rev­o­lu­tion­ary bol­she­vik and sem­i­nary dropout, “a ruth­less per­son, and a seri­ous edi­tor.” Stal­in reject­ed 47 of Lenin’s arti­cles to Prav­da (and sup­pressed Lenin’s warn­ings about his pro­tégée after the for­mer’s death). And once he assumed pow­er as head of the Sovi­et state in the mid-twen­ties, Stal­in con­tin­ued in this capac­i­ty, heav­i­ly rewrit­ing doc­u­ments and man­u­scripts, and scrawl­ing notes and revi­sions over  hun­dreds of offi­cial par­ty doc­u­ments. “For Stal­in,” Case writes, “edit­ing was a pas­sion that extend­ed well beyond the realm of pub­lished texts.” She com­ments on the para­dox of the dictator’s inescapable pub­lic pres­ence and his intru­sive, yet invis­i­ble, edi­to­r­i­al ten­den­cies:

Stal­in always seemed to have a blue pen­cil on hand, and many of the ways he used it stand in direct con­trast to com­mon assump­tions about his per­son and thoughts. He edit­ed ide­ol­o­gy out or played it down, cut ref­er­ences to him­self and his achieve­ments, and even exhib­it­ed flex­i­bil­i­ty of mind, revers­ing some of his own pri­or edits.

So while Stal­in’s voice rang in every ear, his por­trait hung in every office and fac­to­ry, and bobbed in every chore­o­graphed parade, the Stal­in behind the blue pen­cil remained invis­i­ble. What’s more, he allowed very few details of his pri­vate life to become pub­lic knowl­edge, lead­ing the Stal­in biog­ra­ph­er Robert Ser­vice to com­ment on the remark­able “aus­ter­i­ty” of the “Stal­in cult.”

We should not mis­take Stalin’s “self-efface­ment,” Case writes, for mod­esty. She quotes the enig­mat­ic street artist Banksy to make the point: “invis­i­bil­i­ty is a super­pow­er.” Stal­in applied the pow­er of his pen­cil to thou­sands of offi­cial doc­u­ments and pieces of pro­pa­gan­da, even com­plete­ly rewrit­ing the 1938 Sovi­et bible, The Short Course on the His­to­ry of the All-Union Com­mu­nist Par­ty (Bol­she­viks). Com­mis­sioned for a team of authors in 12 chap­ters, Stal­in found it nec­es­sary to “fun­da­men­tal­ly revise 11 of them” (see the first edi­tion title page above).

Stalin’s blue pen­cil also inter­vened in more direct, and chill­ing ways. The doc­u­ment at left shows a list of peo­ple held by the NKVD, fore­run­ners to the KGB. The blue hand­writ­ing scrawled over the list is Stalin’s. It reads “Exe­cute every­one.”

We have anoth­er exe­cu­tion order below, this time in the form of a 1940 let­ter writ­ten by Stalin’s secret police chief Beria and rec­om­mend­ing “exe­cu­tion by shoot­ing” for around 20,000 pris­on­ers, most of them Pol­ish offi­cers, at a camp in Katyn, a mas­sacre the Sovi­ets blamed on the Nazis. Beria’s let­ter (below) bears the sig­na­tures, in blue pen­cil, of Stal­in and sev­er­al Polit­buro mem­bers.

In addi­tion to heav­i­ly edit­ing pro­pa­gan­da and sign­ing mass death war­rants, Stal­in used his pen­cil to deface draw­ings by 19th cen­tu­ry Russ­ian painters, scrawl­ing “crude and omi­nous cap­tions” beneath them in red or blue. He left his mark on 19 pic­tures, all of them nudes, most of them male. He slashed through their tor­sos and oth­er body parts with the pen­cil (below) and wrote on one of the draw­ings, “Radek, you gin­ger bas­tard, if you hadn’t pissed into the wind, if you hadn’t been so bad, you’d still be alive.” Karl Radeck was a rev­o­lu­tion­ary activist in the 20s that his­to­ri­ans believe Stal­in had killed in 1939. His­to­ri­an Niki­ta Petrov—who believes Stal­in defaced the draw­ings between 1939 and 1946—says of them: “These cap­tions show Stal­in was­n’t just mali­cious and prim­i­tive, but that he was also very dan­ger­ous.” It is indeed deeply unset­tling for an edi­tor to see Stalin’s ruth­less hand move freely from the vio­lence of his slash-and-burn tex­tu­al changes to that of his mass exe­cu­tion orders and crude, “loutish” debase­ment of human forms.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

His­to­ry Declas­si­fied: New Archive Reveals Once-Secret Doc­u­ments from World Gov­ern­ments

Leon Trot­sky: Love, Death and Exile in Mex­i­co

Learn Russ­ian from our List of Free Lan­guage Lessons

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

Famous Philosophers Imagined as Action Figures: Plunderous Plato, Dangerous Descartes & More

in Creativity, Education, Philosophy | October 10th, 2013

Amer­i­cans do not live in a cul­ture that val­ues phi­los­o­phy. I could go on about the deep veins of anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism that run under the coun­try like fault lines or nat­ur­al gas deposits, but I won’t. Let’s just say that we favor more obvi­ous dis­plays of prowess: feats of strength, agili­ty, and phys­i­cal vio­lence, for exam­ple, of the super­hero vari­ety. With this fact in mind, first-year grad­u­ate stu­dent Ian Van­de­walk­er decid­ed he “want­ed to do some­thing that would bring a dis­ci­pline that is often seen as dif­fi­cult, eso­teric, and even irrel­e­vant, into new light—especially in the eyes of young peo­ple.” Remem­ber­ing a poster he once saw of “an action fig­ure of Adam Smith with Invis­i­ble Hand action,” Van­de­walk­er decid­ed he would com­bine his own love of toys and phi­los­o­phy into a philoso­pher action fig­ure series he called “Philo­soph­i­cal Pow­ers!” Here are just a few of Vandewalker’s cre­ations, designed some­what like pro­fes­sion­al wrestlers, with their var­i­ous leagues and range of epi­thets.

He begins at the tra­di­tion­al begin­ning, with fig­ures of “Plun­der­ous Pla­to” and “Arro­gant Aris­to­tle” (above), “The Angry Ancients.” Aris­to­tle, known as the “peri­patet­ic” philoso­pher, has only one pow­er: “walk­ing.” His qual­i­ty is attest­ed by a rather cir­cu­lar syl­lo­gism: “All Philo­soph­i­cal Pow­ers fig­ures are total­ly awe­some. This toy is a Philo­soph­i­cal Pow­ers fig­ure. There­fore, this toy is total­ly awe­some.” Like much of Aristotle’s deduc­tive rea­son­ing, the argu­ment is air­tight, pro­vid­ed one accept the truth of its premis­es.

In the cat­e­go­ry of “Con­tu­me­lious Con­ti­nen­tal Ratio­nal­ists,” who began the revolt against those Aris­totelian “Mer­ci­less Medievals,” we have “Dan­ger­ous Descartes.” René Decartes may have claimed to doubt everything—every prin­ci­ple that Aris­to­tle took for granted—but he fell prey to his own errors, hence his action figure’s weak­ness, the “Carte­sian cir­cle.” Decartes’ method of doubt pro­duced its own brand of dual­is­tic cer­tain­ty about his own exis­tence as a “think­ing thing,” and the exis­tence of God, hence “cer­tain­ty” is one of his action figure’s strengths.

Skip­ping ahead over a cen­tu­ry, we have the lone fig­ure in “The Abom­inable Absolute Ide­al­ist” series, “Hate­ful Hegel.” Hegel is the ulti­mate sys­tem­atiz­er whose embrace of con­tra­dic­tion can seem mad­den­ing­ly inco­her­ent, unless we believe his meta­physic of “Absolute Spir­it.” Giv­en his dialec­tic of every­thing, Hegel’s pow­er is that “he is infi­nite.” His weak­ness? “He is finite,” of course. Giv­en Hegel’s tele­o­log­i­cal the­o­ry of his­to­ry, peo­ple who pur­chase his action fig­ure “can expect them to become more and more valu­able as time pass­es.”

The most amus­ing of “The Antag­o­nis­tic Ana­lyt­ic Philoso­phers” is Lud­wig Wittgen­stein, who was him­self an amus­ing­ly eccen­tric indi­vid­ual. Known for his ter­ri­ble tem­per, which would often dri­ve him to ver­bal­ly abuse and strike those poor stu­dents who couldn’t grasp his abstruse con­cepts, “Vin­dic­tive Wittgen­stein” has the pow­er of “pok­er wield­ing abil­i­ty.” His weak­ness, nat­u­ral­ly, is his “teach­ing abil­i­ty.” I par­tic­u­lar­ly like the “notes” sec­tion of the fig­ure’s descrip­tion:

Wittgen­stein fig­ures come in two vari­a­tions: the ear­ly mod­el’s record­ed mes­sages include non­sense about lan­guage being a “pic­ture” of the world, while the lat­er mod­el’s mes­sages include non­sense about games and their “fam­i­ly resem­blances” to one anoth­er. It’s fun to com­mu­ni­cate! (Doll does not actu­al­ly com­mu­ni­cate. Chil­dren who claim that Wittgen­stein fig­ures talk to them with their own “pri­vate lan­guage” are mis­tak­en or lying and should be severe­ly beat­en by their teach­ers.)

You can see the whole set at the Philo­soph­i­cal Pow­ers site. It is prob­lem­at­ic that we only get dead white men rep­re­sent­ed, but this is not sole­ly the fault of Van­de­walk­er but also a prob­lem of his­to­ry and the tra­di­tion­al aca­d­e­m­ic his­to­ry of ideas. One would hope that the con­cept is clever enough that it might make phi­los­o­phy appeal­ing to peo­ple who find it dull or unap­proach­able. That may be too lofty a goal, but these fig­ures are sure to amuse the already philo­soph­i­cal­ly-inclined, and per­haps spur them on to learn more.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

10th Graders Draw Pic­tures Imag­in­ing Philoso­phers at Work

The Dai­ly Habits of High­ly Pro­duc­tive Philoso­phers: Niet­zsche, Marx & Immanuel Kant

What Do Most Philoso­phers Believe? A Wide-Rang­ing Sur­vey Project Gives Us Some Idea

Philoso­pher Por­traits: Famous Philoso­phers Paint­ed in the Style of Influ­en­tial Artists

Down­load 90 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es and Start Liv­ing the Exam­ined Life

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

The Curious Score for John Cage’s “Silent” Zen Composition 4′33″

in Music | October 2nd, 2013

In most of the per­for­mances of John Cage’s famous­ly silent com­po­si­tion 4’33”, the per­former sits in front of what appears to be sheet music (as in the per­for­mance below). The audi­ence, gen­er­al­ly pre­pared for what will fol­low, name­ly noth­ing, may some­times won­der what could be print­ed on those pages. Prob­a­bly also noth­ing? Now we have a chance to see what Cage envi­sioned on the page as he com­posed this piece. Start­ing on Octo­ber of this month, New York’s Muse­um of Mod­ern Art will exhib­it Cage’s 1952 score “4’33” (In Pro­por­tion­al Nota­tion).” You can see the first page above.

As you might imag­ine, sub­se­quent pages (view­able here) look noth­ing like a typ­i­cal score, but they are not blank, nor do they con­tain blank staves; instead they are tra­versed by care­ful­ly hand-drawn ver­ti­cal lines that seem to denote the units of time as units of space. In fact, this is exact­ly what Cage did (hence pro­por­tion­al nota­tion). On the fourth page of the score, Cage writes the fol­low­ing for­mu­la: “1 page=7 inches=56 sec­onds.” Artist Irwin Kre­men, to whom Cage ded­i­cat­ed the piece, has this to say about the unusu­al score:

In this score, John made exact, rather than rel­a­tive, dura­tion, the only musi­cal char­ac­ter­is­tic. In effect, real time is here the fun­da­men­tal dimen­sion of music, its very ground. And where time is pri­ma­ry, change, process itself, defines the nature of things. That apt­ly describes the silent piece — an unfixed flux of sound through time, a flux from per­for­mance to per­for­mance.

Inter­preters of Cage have fre­quent­ly tak­en his “silent” piece as a play­ful bit of con­cep­tu­al per­for­mance art. For exam­ple, philoso­pher Julian Dodd emphat­i­cal­ly declares that 4’33” is not music, a dis­tinc­tion he takes to mean that it is instead ana­lyt­i­cal, “a work about music…,” that it is “a wit­ty, pro­found work… of con­cep­tu­al art.” Think­ing of Cage’s piece as a kind of meta-analy­sis of music seems to miss the point, how­ev­er. Kre­men and many oth­ers, includ­ing Cage him­self, call this notion into ques­tion. In the inter­view below, for exam­ple, Cage does make an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion between “music” and “sound.” He favors the lat­ter for its chance, imper­son­al qual­i­ties, but also, impor­tant­ly, because it is nei­ther ana­lyt­i­cal nor emo­tion­al. Sound, says Cage, does not cri­tique, inter­pret, or elaborate—it does not “talk.” It sim­ply is. But the dis­tinc­tion between music and not-music soon col­laps­es, and Cage cites Emmanuel Kant in say­ing that music “doesn’t have to mean any­thing,” any more than the chance occur­rences of sound.

Cage’s rejec­tion of mean­ing in music may have played out in a rejec­tion of tra­di­tion­al forms, but it seems mis­tak­en to think of 4’33” as a high con­cept joke or intel­lec­tu­al exer­cise. Per­haps it makes more sense to think of the piece as a Zen exer­cise, care­ful­ly designed to awak­en what Suzu­ki Roshi called “the true drag­on.” In a 1968 lec­ture, the Zen mas­ter tells the fol­low­ing sto­ry:

In Chi­na there was a man named Seko, who loved drag­ons. All his scrolls were drag­ons, he designed his house like a drag­on-house, and he had many pic­tures of drag­ons. So the real drag­on thought, “If I appear in his house, he will be very pleased.” So one day the real drag­on appeared in his room and Seko was very scared of it. He almost drew his sword and killed the real drag­on. The drag­on cried, “Oh my!” and hur­ried­ly escaped from Seko’s room. Dogen Zen­ji says, “Don’t be like that.”

The sub­ject of Suzuki’s lec­ture is zazen, or Zen med­i­ta­tion, a prac­tice that very much influ­enced Cage through his study of anoth­er Zen inter­preter, D.T. Suzu­ki. Instead of prac­tic­ing zazen, how­ev­er, Cage prac­ticed what he called his “prop­er dis­ci­pline.” He describes this him­self in a quo­ta­tion from a biog­ra­phy by Kay Larsen:

[R]ather than tak­ing the path that is pre­scribed in the for­mal prac­tice of Zen Bud­dhism itself, name­ly, sit­ting cross-legged and breath­ing and such things, I decid­ed that my prop­er dis­ci­pline was the one to which I was already com­mit­ted, name­ly, the mak­ing of music. And that I would do it with a means that was as strict as sit­ting cross-legged, name­ly, the use of chance oper­a­tions, and the shift­ing of my respon­si­bil­i­ty from the mak­ing of choic­es to that of ask­ing ques­tions.

Cage, who loved Zen para­bles and was him­self a sto­ry­teller, would appre­ci­ate Suzu­ki Roshi’s telling of Zen­ji’s true drag­on sto­ry. While much of his com­po­si­tion­al work seems to skirt the edges of music, focus­ing on the neg­a­tive space around it, for Cage, this space is no less impor­tant that what we think of as music. As Suzu­ki inter­prets the sto­ry: “For peo­ple who can­not be sat­is­fied with some form or col­or, the true drag­on is an imag­i­nary ani­mal which does not exist. For them some­thing which does not take some par­tic­u­lar form or col­or is not a true being. But for Bud­dhists, real­i­ty can be under­stood in two ways: with form and col­or, and with­out form and col­or.” Read against this back­drop, Cage’s “silent” piece is as much a way of under­stand­ing reality—as much a true being—as a musi­cal com­po­si­tion express­ly designed pro­duce spe­cif­ic for­mal effects. And while his pub­lished col­lec­tion of lec­tures and writ­ings is titled Silence, as Cage him­self said of 4’33”, in a remark that pro­vides the title for the MoMA’s exhib­it, “there will nev­er be silence.” In the absence of for­mal­ized music, 4′33″ asks us to hear the true drag­on of sound.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Joey Ramone Sing a Piece by John Cage Adapt­ed from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

Watch a Sur­pris­ing­ly Mov­ing Per­for­mance of John Cage’s 1948 “Suite for Toy Piano”

Woody Guthrie’s Fan Let­ter To John Cage and Alan Hov­haness (1947)

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