How George Washington Became President of the United States: It Was Weirder Than You Think
After serving two terms as the first President of the United States of America, George Washington refused to continue on to a third. We now see this action as beginning the tradition of peaceful relinquishment of power that has continued more or less ever since (interrupted, as in recent years, by the occasional troubled transition). At the time, not everyone expected Washington to step down, history having mostly offered examples of rulers who hung on until the bitter end. But the new republic’s creation of not just rules but customs resulted in a variety of unusual political events; even Washington’s election was “weirder than you think.”
So declares history Youtuber Premodernist in the video above, an explanation of the very first United States presidential election in 1789. “There were no official candidates. There was no campaigning for the office. There were no political parties, no nominating conventions, no primary elections. The entire election season was very short, and the major issue of this election was the Constitution itself.” It also took place after thirteen president-free years, the U.S. having been not a single country but “a collection of thirteen separate colonies,” each tied more closely to Britain than to the others; there hadn’t even been a federal government per se.
The U.S. Constitution changed that. Drafted in 1787, it proposed the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, whose names every American who’s taken a citizenship exam (and every immigrant who’s taken the citizen test) remembers. Setting up those branches in reality would prove no easy task: how, to name just one practical question, would the executive — the president — actually be chosen? Congress, the legislative branch, could theoretically do it, but that would violate the now practically sacred principle of the separation of powers. The voters could also elect the president directly, but the framers rejected that option as both impractical and unwise.
Enter “the famous electoral college,” a body of specialized voters chosen by the individual states in any manner they please. Having rejected the Constitution itself, North Carolina and Rhode Island didn’t participate in the 1789 election. Each of the other states chose their electors in its own way (exemplifying the political laboratory of American federalism as originally conceived), though it didn’t go smoothly in every case: the widespread division between federalists and anti-federalists was pronounced enough in New York to create a deadlock that prevented the state from choosing any electors at all. The electors that did make it cast two votes each, with the first-place candidate becoming President and the second-place candidate becoming Vice President.
That last proved to be a “bad system,” whose mechanics encouraged a great deal of scheming, intrigue, and strategic voting (even by the subsequently established standards of American politics). Only with the ratification of the twelfth amendment, in 1804, could electors separately designate their choice of President and Vice President. In 1789, of course, “Washington easily got all 69 electoral votes,” and went on reluctantly to prevail again in the next presidential election, which more recently became the subject of its own Premodernist video. Both of them merit a watch in this particular moment, as the run-up to the U.S. contest of 2024 gets into full swing. This election cycle certainly won’t be as short as 1789, but it may well be as weird.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Martin Luther King, Jr. Gives Life-Changing Advice to Teens: Watch His Speech, “What Is Your Life’s Blueprint?” (1967)
Six months before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to students at Barratt Junior High School in Philadelphia, and asked What Is Your Life’s Blueprint?
Addressing the students, he observed: “This is the most important and crucial period of your lives. For what you do now and what you decide now at this age may well determine which way your life shall go. Whenever a building is constructed, you usually have an architect who draws a blueprint. And that blueprint serves as the pattern, as the guide, as the model, for those who are to build the building. And a building is not well erected without a good, sound, and solid blueprint.”
So what makes for a sound blueprint? The civil rights leader had some suggestions:
Number one in your life’s blueprint should be: a deep belief in your own dignity, your own worth and your own somebodiness. Don’t allow anybody to make you feel that you are nobody. Always feel that you count. Always feel that you have worth, and always feel that your life has ultimate significance.
Now that means you should not be ashamed of your color. You know, it’s very unfortunate that in so many instances, our society has placed a stigma on the Negro’s color. You know there are some Negros who are ashamed of themselves? Don’t be ashamed of your color. Don’t be ashamed of your biological features…
Secondly, in your life’s blueprint you must have as the basic principle the determination to achieve excellence in your various fields of endeavor. You’re going to be deciding as the days and the years unfold, what you will do in life — what your life’s work will be.
And once you discover what it will be, set out to do it, and to do it well.
You can read a transcript of the speech here. As a postscript, it’s worth highlighting a remarkable comment left on YouTube, from the student who apparently recorded the speech on October 26, 1967. It reads:
I cannot believe that I found this footage. I am the student cameraman that recorded this speech. I remember this like it was yesterday. I have been telling my boys for years about this and now I can show them. I thought this was lost years ago and am so happy that it survived the years. I was 12 or 13 years old when he can to Barrett and was mesmerized by what he was saying. I can’t wait to share this with my family. Wow I am elated that I found this.
Amazing.
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Read More...Ten Magnificent Historical Libraries (That You Can Still Visit Today)
When we first travel somewhere, we see nothing quite so clearly as the usual categories of tourist destination: the monuments, the museums, the restaurants. Take one step deeper, and we find ourselves in places like cafés and bookstores, the latter especially having exploded in touristic appeal over the past few years. Take Porto’s grand Livraria Lello, which bills itself as “the most beautiful bookstore in the world” — and has arguably done so too successfully, having drawn crowds large enough to necessitate a cover charge. Perhaps we’d have a richer experience if we spent less time in the livrarias and more in the bibliotecas.
That, in any case, is the impression given by the Kings and Things video above, which presents “Ten Magnificent Historical Libraries,” two of them located in Portugal. Standing on a hilltop overlooking Coimbra, the Biblioteca Joanina “is sumptuously decorated in Baroque fashion,” and “contains intricately carved furniture and bookshelves made of exotic woods as well as ivory, and is embellished with cold and chinoiserie motif.” As for the centuries-old volumes on those shelves, they remain in excellent condition thanks to the Biblioteca Joanina’s being one of only two libraries equipped with “a colony of bats to protect the books from insects.”
The other is in Lisbon’s, Mafra Palace, which “contains what is arguably one of the world’s most beautiful libraries.” Completed in 1755, it’s decked out with bookshelves “decorated in the Rococo style.” The stretch of the aesthetic spectrum between Baroque and Rococo dominates this video, all of its libraries having been built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Unsurprisingly, most of them are in the Old World, from the Saint Gall Abbey in Switzerland to the Library of Trinity College Dublin to the National Library of France (the Richelieu site in the thirteenth arrondissement, not the modern François-Mitterrand Site decried in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz).
Instragrammable though they may have become in this day and age, these venerable libraries all — unlike many tourist-spot bookstores, where you can’t hear yourself think for all the English conversations going on around you — encourage the spending of not money but time. They welcome the traveler looking not simply to hit twenty capitals in a dozen days, but to build a long-term relationship with a place. And not just the traveler in Europe: the video also includes a destination in the United States, the “cathedral of books” that is Baltimore’s George Peabody Library. The true connoisseur will, of course, follow a visit to that august institution by taking the Silver Line north to hit up Normals Books & Records.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...For 500 Years, Every Student Who Attained a BA from Oxford Had to Swear Enmity Towards a Person Named Henry Symeonis
Image via The Bodleian Library
If you were to ask a certain kind of Englishman what sets his homeland apart from the rest of the world, he might point to the strength of its traditions. And what holds true for England itself holds even truer for its most renowned institutions, especially its most prestigious universities. Those who dream of attending Oxford dream not least of its distinctive traditions: from the relatively frequent Formal Hall, to the various ceremonial rituals on Ascension Day, to the Mallard Song sung just once per century by the elites of All Souls College, dating back to that college’s foundation in 1438— which was still long after the time of Oxford’s ultimate persona non grata, a long-mysterious figure named Henry Symeonis.
As recently as the time of Dickens (or at least the era in which he set his novels), Bachelors of Arts students turning Master of Arts students at Oxford were, according to the blog of the Archives and Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library, “required to swear that they would observe the University’s statutes, privileges, liberties and customs, as you might expect; and not to lecture elsewhere, or resume their bachelor studies after getting their MA.” But they “also had to swear that they would never agree to the reconciliation of Henry Symeonis,” whoever that was. “Nowhere in the statutes did it explain who this Henry Symeonis (or Simeonis) was, what he was supposed to have done or why those getting their MAs should never agree to be reconciled with him.”
The clause in question came up for review in the early 1650s, but “even by that time, one suspects that the oath was of such antiquity that no-one knew anything about it and it was thought best to leave it be.” Not until 1912 did Reginald Lane Poole, Keeper of the University Archives, determine that Symeonis was the son of “a very wealthy townsman of Oxford.” In 1242, “he and a number of other men of the town of Oxford were found guilty of murdering a student of the University. Henry and his accomplices were fined £80 by King Henry III in May 1242 and were made to leave Oxford as a result.” Two decades after the murder, Henry III issued Symeonis (who had, in any case, long since returned to town) an official pardon.
“The Government was aware of the volatile relationship between town and gown and was concerned, in 1264, at the prospect of the University leaving Oxford in protest if Henry was allowed to return.” What seems to have happened is that “Henry Symeonis had bought the King’s pardon and his permission to return to Oxford. The King was willing to allow his return if the University agreed to it. But the University refused and chose to ignore the King’s order” — and even “gave Henry Symeonis the unique honor of being named in its own statutes, making the University’s dislike of him official and perpetual.” There his name stayed, receiving the sworn enmity of five and a half centuries’ worth of Oxford students, until the removal of the relevant oath in 1827. “No background information nor reason for the decision is recorded,” notes the Bodleian’s blog, possibly because “nobody knew exactly what they were abolishing.”
via Archives and Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...The History of Cartography, the “Most Ambitious Overview of Map Making Ever,” Is Free Online
FYI: The University of Chicago Press has made available online — at no cost –five volumes of The History of Cartography. Or what Edward Rothstein, of The New York Times, called “the most ambitious overview of map making ever undertaken.” He continues:
People come to know the world the way they come to map it—through their perceptions of how its elements are connected and of how they should move among them. This is precisely what the series is attempting by situating the map at the heart of cultural life and revealing its relationship to society, science, and religion…. It is trying to define a new set of relationships between maps and the physical world that involve more than geometric correspondence. It is in essence a new map of human attempts to chart the world.
If you head over to this page, you will see links (in the left margin) to five volumes available in a free PDF format. The image above, appearing in Vol. 2, dates back to 1534. Created by Oronce Fine, the first chair of mathematics in the Collège Royal (aka the Collège de France), the map features the world drawn in the shape of a heart. A pretty beautiful design. Below you can find links to the individual volumes available online.
Volume 1
Volume 2: Book 1
Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies
Volume 2: Book 2
Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies
Volume 2: Part 3
Volume 3:
Cartography in the European Renaissance: Part 1
Cartography in the European Renaissance, Part 2
Volume 4:
Cartography in the European Enlightenment
Volume 5:
Cartography in the Nineteenth Century, Forthcoming
Volume 6:
Cartography in the Twentieth Century
If you buy any of the printed versions on Amazon, each edition will cost you $400-$500. As beautiful as the book probably is, you’ll likely appreciate this free digital offering.
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!
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Read More...
What Is Postmodern Architecture?: An Introduction in Three Videos
“Modern architecture died in St Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972, at 3:32pm (or thereabouts).” This oft-quoted pronouncement by cultural and architectural theorist Charles Jencks refers to the demolition of the Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and William Igoe Apartments. The fate of that short-lived public housing complex, better and more infamously known as Pruitt-Igoe, still holds rhetorical value in America in arguments against the supposed social-engineering ambitions made concrete (often literally) in large-scale postwar modernist buildings. Though the true story is more complicated, the fact remains that, whenever we pinpoint it, modern architecture was widely regarded as “dead.” What would come after it?
Why, postmodernism, of course. Jencks did more than his part to define modernism’s anything-goes successor movement with The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, in which he tells the tale of Pruitt-Igoe, which was then relatively recent history.
The first edition came out in 1977, early days indeed in the life of postmodernism, which in a video from Historic England architectural historian Elain Harwood calls “the style of the nineteen-eighties.” Its riots of deliberately incongruous shape and color, as well as its heaped-up unsubtle cultural and historical references, suited that unbridled decade as perfectly as did the elegantly garish furniture of the Memphis group.
In recent years, however, the buildings left behind by postmodernism have got more than a few of us asking questions — questions like, “Are they intentionally weird and tacky, or just designed with no taste?” That’s how Youtuber Betty Chen puts it in the ARTiculations video just above, before launching into an investigation of postmodern architecture’s origin, purpose, and place in the built environment today. In her telling, the style was born in the early nineteen-sixties, when architect Robert Venturi designed a rule-breaking house for his mother in Philadelphia, deciding “to distort the pure order of the modernist box by reintroducing disproportional arrangements of classical elements such as four-pane windows, arches, the pediment, and the decorative dado.”
An important theorist of postmodernism as well as a practitioner (usually working in both roles with his wife and collaborator Denise Scott Brown), Venturi converted arch-modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s declaration that “less is more” into what would become, in effect, postmodernism’s brief manifesto: “Less is a bore.” Venturi described himself as choosing “messy vitality over obvious unity,” and the same could be said of a range of his colleagues in the eighties and nineties: Frank Gehry, Michael Graves, and Charles Moore in America; Also Rossi, Ricardo Bofill, and Bernard Tschumi in Europe; Minoru Takeyama, Kengo Kuma, and Arata Isozaki in Japan.
Postmodern architecture flowered especially in Britain: “The irreverence came from America, the classicism from Europe,” says Harwood. “What British architects did was weave those two elements together.” As one of those architects, Sir Terry Farrell, tells Historic England, “the preceding era had been earnest and anonymous”; after international modernism, the time had come to re-introduce personality, and in a flamboyant manner. His colleague Piers Gough remembers feeling, in the mid-sixties, a certain envy for pop art — “they were doing color, they were doing popular imagery, they had prettier girlfriends” — that inspired them to “ransack popular imagery in architecture.” This project posed certain practical difficulties of its own: “You can design a building to look like a soup can, but the problem really comes when you put the windows in it.”
Renovations to many an aging postmodern building have proven difficult to justify, given that “irreverence and exaggeration are out,” as Brock Keeling writes in a recent Bloomberg piece. “Significant postmodern buildings like the Abrams House in Pittsburgh and the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego have already been demolished,” and others are endangered: “Fans of the James R. Thompson Center — Helmut Jahn’s 1985 civic building, noted for its sliced-off dome facade and 17-story atrium with blue-and-salmon trim — fear it will deboned in preparation for Google’s new Chicago headquarters.” The true architectural postmodernism enthusiast also appreciates much humbler works, such as Jeffrey Daniels’ Los Angeles Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise that unintentionally evokes of both a chicken and a chicken bucket. Long may it stand.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Renaissance Knives Had Music Engraved on the Blades & Now You Can Hear the Songs Performed by Modern Singers
Image courtesy of The Victoria and Albert Museum
On any given weekend, in any part of the state where I live, you can find yourself standing in a hall full of knives, if that’s the kind of thing you like to do. It is a very niche kind of experience. Not so in some other weapons expos—like the Arms and Armor galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where everyone, from the most warlike to the staunchest of pacifists, stands in awe at the intricate ornamentation and incredibly deft craftsmanship on display in the suits of armor, lances, shields, and lots and lots of knives.
We must acknowledge in such a space that the worlds of art and of killing for fame and profit were never very far apart during Europe’s late Medieval and Renaissance periods. Yet we encounter many similar artisanal instruments from the time, just as finely tuned, but made for far less belligerent purposes.
As Maya Corry of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge—an institution with its own impressive arms and armor collection—comments in the video above (at 2:30), one unusual kind of 16th century knife meant for the table, not the battlefield, offers “insight into that harmonious, audible aspect of family devotions,” prayer and song.
From the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum, in Cambridge. (Johan Oosterman )
These knives, which have musical scores engraved in their blades, brought a table together in singing their prayers, and may have been used to carve the lamb or beef in their “striking balance of decorative and utilitarian function.” At least historians think such “notation knives,” which date from the early 1500s, were used at banquets. “The sharp, wide steel would have been ideal for cutting and serving meat,” writes Eliza Grace Martin at the WQXR blog, “and the accentuated tip would have made for a perfect skewer.” But as Kristen Kalber, curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which houses the knives at the top of the post, tells us “diners in very grand feasts didn’t cut their own meat.” It’s unlikely they would have sung from the bloody knives held by their servants.
The knives’ true purpose “remains a mystery,” Martin remarks, like many “rituals of the Renaissance table.” Victoria and Albert Museum curator Kirstin Kennedy admits in the video above that “we are not entirely sure” what the “splendid knife” she holds was used for. But we do know that each knife had a different piece of music on each side, and that a set of them together contained different harmony parts in order to turn a roomful of diners into a chorus. One set of blades had the grace on one side, with the inscription, “the blessing of the table. May the three-in-one bless that which we are about to eat.” The other side holds the benediction, to be sung after the dinner: “The saying of grace. We give thanks to you God for your generosity.”
Common enough verbiage for any household in Renaissance Europe, but when sung, at least by a chorus from the Royal College of Music, who recreated the music and made the recordings here, the prayers are superbly graceful. Above, hear one version of the Grace and Benediction from the Victoria and Albert Museum knives; below, hear a second version. You can hear a captivating set of choral prayers from the Fitzwilliam Museum knives at WQXR’s site, recorded for the Fitzwilliam’s “Madonnas & Miracles” exhibit. We are as unlikely now to encounter singing kitchen knives as we are to run into a horse and rider bearing 100 pounds of finely-wrought wearable steel sculpture. Such strange artifacts seem to speak of a strange people who valued beauty whether carving up the main course or cutting down their enemies.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
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!
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Download 222 Belle Époque Art Posters: An Online Archive of Masterpieces from the “Golden Age of the Poster” (1880–1918)
Europe at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth: what a time and place to be alive. Or rather, what a time and place to be alive for people in the right countries and, more importantly, of the right classes, those who saw a new world taking shape around them and partook of it with all possible heartiness. The period between the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914, best known by its French name La Belle Époque, saw not just peace in Europe and empires at their zenith, but all manner of technological, social, and cultural innovations at home as well.
We here in the 21st century have few ways of tasting the life of that time as rich as its posters, more than 200 of which you can view in high resolution and download from the “Art of the Poster 1880–1918,” a Flickr collection assembled by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
“In the late nineteenth century, lithographers began to use mass-produced zinc plates rather than stones in their printing process,” says the accompanying text. “This innovation allowed them to prepare multiple plates, each with a different color ink, and to print these with close registration on the same sheet of paper. Posters in a range of colors and variety of sizes could now be produced quickly, at modest cost.”
Like other of the most fruitful technological advancements of the era, this leap forward in poster-printing drew the attention, and soon the efforts, of artists: well-regarded illustrators and graphic designers like Alphonse Mucha, Jules Chéret, Eugène Grasset, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec took to the new method, and “The ‘Golden Age of the Poster’ was the spectacular result.”
While many of the best-remembered posters of that Golden Age come from France, it touched the streets of every major city in western Europe as well as those of England and America, all places whose well-heeled populations found themselves newly and avidly interested in art, photography, motion pictures, magazines, bicycles, automobiles, absinthe, coffee, cigarettes, and world travel.
The companies behind all those exciting things had, of course, to advertise, but unlike in earlier times, they couldn’t settle for getting the word out; they had to use images, and the most vivid ones possible at that. They had to use them in such a way as to associate what they had to offer with the abundant spirit of the time, whether they called that time La Belle Époque, the Wilhelmine period, the late Victorian and Edwardian era, or the Gilded Age.
All those names, of course, were applied only in retrospect, after it became clear how bad times could get in the twentieth century. But then, none of us ever realize we’re living through a golden age before it comes to its inevitable end; until that time, best just to enjoy it. You can enter the poster archive here.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
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Read More...Meet Jason Arday, the Cambridge Professor Who Didn’t Learn to Talk Until Age 11, or to Read Until Age 18
When Jason Arday became a professor at University of Cambridge at the age of 37, he also became the youngest black person ever appointed to a professorship there. That’s impressive, but it becomes much more so when you consider that he didn’t learn to speak until he was eleven years old and read until he was eighteen. Diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder at the age of three, he had to find different ways to develop himself and his life than most of us, and also to take advantage of help from the right collaborators: his mother, for instance, who learned the value of repetition to the autistic mind, and introduced her son to the highly repetitive game of snooker to get him used to mastering tasks.
“It’s hard to say if it worked or not,” Arday says in the Great Big Story video above. “Well, in terms of snooker, it did, because I became a really good snooker player.” An interested high school teacher, Chris Trace, and later a college tutor named Sandro Sandri, encouraged Arday to use his strong focus to not just catch up with but far surpass the average student.
“I don’t consider myself to be intelligent,” Arday says in the Black in Academia video below, “but I would bet that I’m one of the hardest-working people in the world.” In the Sociology of Education department, he’s directed his own work toward improving the situation of students possessed of similar drive in similarly difficult starting conditions.
Among Arday’s projects, according to the University of Cambridge’s web site, “a book with Dr. Chantelle Lewis (University of Oxford) about the challenges and discrimination faced by neurodiverse populations and students of color,” a program “to support the mental health of young people from ethnic minority backgrounds,” research into “the role of the arts and cultural literacy in effective mental health interventions,” and “a book about Paul Simon’s 1986 album, Graceland, focusing on the ethical dilemmas the singer-songwriter confronted by breaking cultural apartheid in South Africa to involve marginalized black communities in its production.”
Here on Open Culture, we’ve previously featured work on how music has helped autistic young people. It’s certainly helped Arday, who credits certain songs with helping him along in his quest for knowledge and academic credentials. He makes reference to David Bowie’s song “Golden Years,” because “there was a period of five years where it felt like everything I touched turned to gold — and I had another period of five years where it was just really, really difficult.” Overcoming disadvantages seems to have constituted half of Arday’s battle, but no less important, in his telling, has been his subsequent decision to focus on his distinctive set of strengths. Despite the young age at which he made professor, none of this came quickly — but then, he’d been psychologically prepared for that by another of his major musical touchstones: AC/DC’s “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘N’ Roll).”
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...David Foster Wallace’s Famous Commencement Speech, “This is Water,” Gets Animated on a Whiteboard
Author David Foster Wallace titled his famous address to Kenyon College’s Class of 2005 “This is Water,” a reference to its opening joke — self-mockingly framed as a “didactic little parable-ish story” that is “a standard requirement of US commencement speeches:”
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
Mark Wooding, founder of After Skool, a YouTube channel “committed to finding the most powerful content and delivering it in the most engaging way possible” gave his whiteboard animation of the speech a different title: “Your Mind is an Excellent Servant, but a Terrible Master.”
It’s the “old cliche” Wallace invoked midway through, noting that “like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, (it) actually expresses a great and terrible truth:”
It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.
Wallace himself died by suicide a little more than three years after delivering the speech, prompting author Tom Bissell to write in an essay for the New York Times that “the terrible master eventually defeated David Foster Wallace, which makes it easy to forget that none of the cloudlessly sane and true things he had to say about life in 2005 are any less sane or true today, however tragic the truth now seems:”
This Is Water does nothing to lessen the pain of Wallace’s defeat. What it does is remind us of his strength and goodness and decency — the parts of him the terrible master could never defeat, and never will.
We braced a bit wondering how Wooding would handle this portion of the speech.
It would have been a good time for one of his more abstract flights of fancy.
In truth, sometimes Wooding’s dry erase drawings cluttered our headspace unnecessarily, distracting from Wallace’s message. Isn’t that ironic? A large part of the speech deals with choosing what to pay attention to, and how to pay attention to it.
In an attempt to follow Wallace’s advice and push back against the “basic self-centeredness …that is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth”, we’ll concede that Wooding’s animation may help the speech land with those who’d give a pass on listening to an audio recording or reading a transcript.
As Wooding told the San Francisco Chronicle, “Some people are visual learners, some learn by hearing things, some have to do it… what I’ve tried to do with After Skool is combine every style of learning to make the ideas as accessible as possible, to take ideas that are kind of complex and make it so that an eighth-grader can understand it.”
The wicket grows a bit stickier when Wooding delves into the long passages wherein Wallace unleashes a torrent of grouchy self-serving thoughts born of boredom, routine and petty frustration… as an “example of how NOT to think”, he says in an aside.
Wallace presented this unvarnished ugliness as a set up, something to throttle back from — an illustration of how our lizard brains’ snap judgments need not get the final word:
… if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness…If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options.
We wish Wooding had leaned out rather than in when Wallace’s bad mood makes him view the people suffering through traffic jams, crowded aisles, and long checkout lines with him as “repulsive”, “stupid”, “cow-like”, and “dead-eyed”.
Knowing that Wallace was winding up to reveal these knee jerk assessments as the fabrications of a testy, self-absorbed mind operating on autopilot, the illustrations might have better served the message had they been a step or two ahead of the messenger. Doodles depicting these people as far more neutral looking than the deliberately vitriolic portrait Wallace was painting could have added some dimension.
It’s important to remember that these visuals aren’t animated in the traditional sense. They’re manipulated time lapse drawings. Unless Wooding breaks out the eraser and doubles back to make modifications, they’re fixed on the whiteboard and in our minds.
This may explain in part why the fed up mom in the check out line appears to get a fairer shake in The Glossary’s live action adaptation of excerpts from the same speech, below.
If you’d rather not gild the lily with whiteboard animation, you can listen to Wallace’s speech and read the transcript here.
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– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
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