Rare Recordings of Burroughs, Bukowski, Ginsberg & More Now Available in a Digital Archive Created by the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA)

in Art, Internet Archive, Poetry | February 22nd, 2017

Image via Chris­ti­aan Ton­nis

Amer­i­cans can be quite igno­rant of the rich­ness of our coun­try’s cul­tur­al his­to­ry. Part of this igno­rance, I sus­pect, comes down to prej­u­dice. Inno­v­a­tive Amer­i­can artists through­out his­to­ry have come from groups often demo­nized and mar­gin­al­ized by the wider soci­ety. The dom­i­nance of cor­po­rate com­merce also impov­er­ish­es the cul­tur­al land­scape. Poet­ry and exper­i­men­tal art don’t sell much, so some peo­ple think they have lit­tle val­ue.

Imag­ine if we were to invert these atti­tudes in pub­lic opin­ion: Amer­i­can poet­ry and art allow us to gain new per­spec­tives from peo­ple and parts of the coun­try we don’t know well; to enlarge and chal­lenge our reli­gious and polit­i­cal under­stand­ing; to expe­ri­ence a very dif­fer­ent kind of econ­o­my, built on aes­thet­ic inven­tion and free intel­lec­tu­al enter­prise rather than sup­ply, demand, and prof­it. Cre­ativ­i­ty and finance are not, of course, mutu­al­ly exclu­sive. But to con­sis­tent­ly favor one at the expense of the oth­er seems to me a great loss to every­one.

We find our­selves now in such a sit­u­a­tion, as pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties, the Nation­al Endow­ment for the Arts, the Nation­al Endow­ment for the Human­i­ties, and the Cor­po­ra­tion for Pub­lic Broad­cast­ing face severe cuts or pos­si­ble de-fund­ing.

Such a polit­i­cal move would dev­as­tate many of the insti­tu­tions that fos­ter and pre­serve the country’s art and cul­ture, and rel­e­gate the arts to the pri­vate sphere, where only sums of pri­vate mon­ey deter­mine whose voic­es get heard. We can, how­ev­er, be very appre­cia­tive of pri­vate insti­tu­tions who make their col­lec­tions pub­lic through open access libraries like the Inter­net Archive.

One such col­lec­tion comes from the Dig­i­tal Ini­tia­tives Unit of Deck­er Library at the Mary­land Insti­tute Col­lege of Art (MICA), one of the old­est art col­leges in the U.S., and one of the most high­ly regard­ed. They have dig­i­tal­ly donat­ed to Archive.org “a num­ber of rare and pre­vi­ous­ly unre­leased audio record­ings,” they write in a press release, “span­ning the 1960s through the late 1990s” and con­sist­ing of “over 700 audio­cas­sette tapes” doc­u­ment­ing “lit­er­a­ture and poet­ry read­ings, fine art and design lec­tures, race and cul­ture dis­cus­sions” and col­lege events.

These include (enter the archive here) a two hour poet­ry read­ing from Allen Gins­berg in 1978, at the top, with sev­er­al oth­er read­ings and talks from Gins­berg in the archive, the read­ing below it from Eileen Myles in 1992, and read­ings and talks above and below from Amiri Bara­ka, Anne Wald­man, and William S. Bur­roughs. The col­lec­tion rep­re­sents a “strong focus on lit­er­a­ture and poet­ry,” and fea­tures “a sym­po­sium on the Black Moun­tain poets.” Giv­en the school’s mis­sion, you’ll also find in the archive “a large selec­tion of talks and lec­tures by visu­al artists, such as Elaine de Koon­ing, Alice Neel, Gor­don Parks, Ad Rhine­hart and Ben Shahn.”

Col­lec­tions like this one from MICA and the Inter­net Archive allow any­one with inter­net access to expe­ri­ence in some part the breadth and range of Amer­i­can art and poet­ry, no mat­ter their lev­el of access to pri­vate insti­tu­tions and sources of wealth. But the inter­net can­not ful­ly replace or sup­plant the need for pub­licly fund­ed arts ini­tia­tives in com­mu­ni­ties nation­wide.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An 18-Hour Playlist of Read­ings by the Beats: Ker­ouac, Gins­berg & Even Bukows­ki Too

13 Lec­tures from Allen Ginsberg’s “His­to­ry of Poet­ry” Course (1975)

Hear Allen Gins­berg Teach “Lit­er­ary His­to­ry of the Beats”: Audio Lec­tures from His 1977 & 1981 Naropa Cours­es

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

“Calling Bullshit”: See the Syllabus for a College Course Designed to Identify & Combat Bullshit

in Current Affairs, Science | January 27th, 2017

Two pro­fes­sors at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton, Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West, have cre­at­ed a web­site meant to accom­pa­ny a poten­tial col­lege sem­i­nar enti­tled “Call­ing Bull­shit.” Here’s how Bergstrom and West explain the premise of their course. It’s worth quot­ing them at length.

The world is awash in bull­shit. Politi­cians are uncon­strained by facts. Sci­ence is con­duct­ed by press release. High­er edu­ca­tion rewards bull­shit over ana­lyt­ic thought. Start­up cul­ture ele­vates bull­shit to high art. Adver­tis­ers wink con­spir­a­to­ri­al­ly and invite us to join them in see­ing through all the bull­shit — and take advan­tage of our low­ered guard to bom­bard us with bull­shit of the sec­ond order. The major­i­ty of admin­is­tra­tive activ­i­ty, whether in pri­vate busi­ness or the pub­lic sphere, seems to be lit­tle more than a sophis­ti­cat­ed exer­cise in the com­bi­na­to­r­i­al reassem­bly of bull­shit.

We’re sick of it. It’s time to do some­thing, and as edu­ca­tors, one con­struc­tive thing we know how to do is to teach peo­ple. So, the aim of this course is to help stu­dents nav­i­gate the bull­shit-rich mod­ern envi­ron­ment by iden­ti­fy­ing bull­shit, see­ing through it, and com­bat­ing it with effec­tive analy­sis and argu­ment.

What do we mean, exact­ly, by the term bull­shit? As a first approx­i­ma­tion, bull­shit is lan­guage, sta­tis­ti­cal fig­ures, data graph­ics, and oth­er forms of pre­sen­ta­tion intend­ed to per­suade by impress­ing and over­whelm­ing a read­er or lis­ten­er, with a bla­tant dis­re­gard for truth and log­i­cal coher­ence.

While bull­shit may reach its apogee in the polit­i­cal domain, this is not a course on polit­i­cal bull­shit. Instead, we will focus on bull­shit that comes clad in the trap­pings of schol­ar­ly dis­course. Tra­di­tion­al­ly, such high­brow non­sense has come couched in big words and fan­cy rhetoric, but more and more we see it pre­sent­ed instead in the guise of big data and fan­cy algo­rithms — and these quan­ti­ta­tive, sta­tis­ti­cal, and com­pu­ta­tion­al forms of bull­shit are those that we will be address­ing in the present course.…

Our aim in this course is to teach you how to think crit­i­cal­ly about the data and mod­els that con­sti­tute evi­dence in the social and nat­ur­al sci­ences.

The “Call­ing Bull­shit” course would sit nice­ly along­side the work of Prince­ton philoso­pher Har­ry Frank­furt, the author of the fair­ly recent book, On Bull­shit. (In fact, On Bull­shit would be read dur­ing Week 1 of the “Call­ing Bull­shit“course. See the syl­labus here.) There’s a lot of bull­shit freely flow­ing through our world, and it may well take a cross-dis­ci­pli­nary team to help us cut through the crap.

To learn more about the envi­sioned Call­ing Bull­shit course, vis­it Bergstrom and West­’s web­site, where they have an FAQ that explains what a study of bull­shit might look like.

Update: You can now view the lec­tures for the course here.

Note: You can down­load Har­ry Frank­furt’s “On Bull­shit” as a free audio­book (or any oth­er two free audio­books) if you sign up for Audible.com’s free tri­al pro­gram. Learn more about Audible’s free tri­al pro­gram here.

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:

How to Spot Bull­shit: A Primer by Prince­ton Philoso­pher Har­ry Frank­furt

Young T.S. Eliot Writes “The Tri­umph of Bullsh*t” and Gives the Eng­lish Lan­guage a New Exple­tive (1910)

1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

Carl Sagan’s Ambitious College Reading List: Plato, Shakespeare, Gide, and Plenty of Philosophy, Math & Physics (1954)

in Books, Science | November 14th, 2016

Carl Sagan may have passed away almost twen­ty years ago, but he con­tin­ues to influ­ence minds of all gen­er­a­tions through intel­lec­tu­al heirs like Neil DeGrasse Tyson (host of the remake of Sagan’s beloved 1980 TV series Cos­mos) as well as through the books he wrote in his life­time. But what books influ­enced Sagan, launch­ing him on the jour­ney toward astron­o­my, cos­mol­o­gy, astro­physics, astro­bi­ol­o­gy, and glob­al celebri­ty? Thanks to the Library of Con­gress’ Carl Sagan Archive, we now know at least forty titles from the no doubt volu­mi­nous amount of read­ing mate­r­i­al he digest­ed dur­ing his youth and edu­ca­tion.

Sagan wrote this read­ing list (which a fan has tran­scribed with links and post­ed to Red­dit) in 1954, as an under­grad­u­ate at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go. On it he iden­ti­fies the books, as a young Charles Dar­win once wrote on his own list, to be read, whether whol­ly, par­tial­ly, or as a part of his course­work:

In Whole

• The Immoral­ist — Andre Gide
• Death, Be Not Proud — John Gun­ther
• Out­line of Abnor­mal Psy­chol­o­gy - Gard­ner Mur­phy
• Who Speaks For Man — Nor­man Cousins
• Astron­o­my — Robert Bak­er
• Obser­va­tion­al Approach to Cos­mol­o­gy — Robert Hub­ble
• Can­cer
• Quan­ti­ta­tive Aspects of Car­cino­genic Radi­a­tion — Harold Thay­er Davis
• Star Short Sci­ence Fic­tion Nov­els #1
• New Biol­o­gy #15
• Young Archimedes — Aldous Hux­ley
• Julius Cae­sar — Shake­speare
• Sym­po­sium — Pla­to
• Auto­bi­og­ra­phy of An Une­d­u­cat­ed Man — Hutchins
• Timaeus — Pla­to

In Part

• Extra­or­di­nary Pop­u­lar Delu­sions — Charles MacK­ay
• But We Were Born Free — Elmer Davis
• Read­ings In Phi­los­o­phy
• His­to­ry of West­ern Phi­los­o­phy — W.T. Jones
• The Greek Read­er — W.H. Auden
• In the Mat­ter of J. Robert Oppen­heimer
• The Berlitz Ger­man Self-Teacher
• Sig­ma Galax­ies
• The Uses of the Past — Her­bert J. Muller
• Short Sto­ries for Study
• The Repub­lic — Pla­to
• The Bible — Anony­mous
• Sev­er­al Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­cans

Course Read­ings:

• Heat and Ther­mo­dy­nam­ics - Mark Wal­do Zeman­sky
• Ther­mo­dy­nam­ics, Kinet­ic The­o­ry, Sta­tis­ti­cal The­o­ry - Fran­cis W. Sears
• Kinet­ic The­o­ry of Gas­es — E.H. Ken­nard
• Ther­mo­dy­nam­ics: An Advanced Treat­ment — E.A. Guggen­heim
• Elec­tric­i­ty and Elec­tro­mag­net­ism — Horn­well
• The­o­ry of Func­tions (5 Vol­umes) — Kon­rad Knopp
• Advanced Cal­cu­lus (in part) — Wil­fred Kaplan
• Com­plex Analy­sis — Lars Ahlfors
• Vol. II, Dif­fer­en­tial and Inte­gral Cal­cu­lus — Richard Courant (Author)
• Elec­tric Fields — Rugers 
• Elec­tro­mag­net­ics — John Daniel Kraus
• Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Cir­cuit Fun­da­men­tals — Carl Edwin Smith

Pret­ty ambi­tious mate­r­i­al for a twen­ty-year-old, but remem­ber: we’re talk­ing about some­one who, around a decade ear­li­er, had already sketched out his ideas for human­i­ty’s space­far­ing future. It makes sense that such a child would grow up to read sci­ence fic­tion — and with the pub­li­ca­tion of Con­tact thir­ty years after that, write it — and even that he would take up math­e­mat­ics and physics as a course of aca­d­e­m­ic study.

But it takes a mind like Sagan’s not to lose sight of the impor­tance of com­mu­ni­cat­ing with the non­spe­cial­ist pub­lic, as evi­denced by the pres­ence on his list of Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can and Extra­or­di­nary Pop­u­lar Delu­sions. Nor did he neglect, even before his career began, the need to con­tex­tu­al­ize sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­er­ies in the realm of human thought and feel­ing, which extends from Pla­to and the Bible to Shake­speare, André Gide, and John Gun­ther — that last writer’s work, and cer­tain oth­er vol­umes on his list, also show­ing an advanced con­scious­ness of human lim­i­ta­tions and mor­tal­i­ty. All of it placed Sagan well, despite his trun­cat­ed time on Earth, to do work that will out­last us all.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See Carl Sagan’s Child­hood Sketch­es of The Future of Space Trav­el

Carl Sagan Presents His “Baloney Detec­tion Kit”: 8 Tools for Skep­ti­cal Think­ing

Carl Sagan on the Virtues of Mar­i­jua­na (1969)

New Carl Sagan Archive Fea­tures His Dig­i­tized Home Movies, Stu­dent Jour­nal­ism, Draft of His Pale Blue Dot & More

What Did Charles Dar­win Read? See His Hand­writ­ten Read­ing List & Read Books from His Library Online

Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Should Read

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Sal Khan & the Muppets’ Grover Explain the Electoral College

in Current Affairs, K-12, Politics | November 4th, 2016

Grover, the more intel­lec­tu­al­ly-aspi­rant of Sesame Street’s two blue mon­sters, is a self-appoint­ed expert on anato­my (“the head is cov­ered with this long stringy stuff”), hygiene, and Span­ish, but the work­ings of the Unit­ed States Elec­toral Col­lege elud­ed him, until Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Acad­e­my wan­dered into the frame.

The pairing’s not as odd as you might think. The Khan Academy’s mis­sion is in many ways quite sim­i­lar to that of Sesame Street—free edu­ca­tion for the peo­ple, dis­trib­uted on a glob­al scale. Both are non-prof­it. The Khan Acad­e­my uses white­board screen­cast­ing where Sesame Street uses Mup­pets, but the goal is the same.

The ener­getic and high­ly dis­tractible Grover would be a chal­leng­ing pupil in any set­ting. Khan, whose teacher-stu­dent inter­ac­tions are rarely so face-to-face, han­dles him like a pro, wise­ly par­ing down a stan­dard issue Khan Acad­e­my les­son on the Elec­toral Col­lege to an eas­i­ly digestible three-and-a-half min­utes.

The take­away?

The Unit­ed States is an indi­rect democ­ra­cy.

Each state awards its elec­toral votes to the can­di­date who wins the pop­u­lar vote in that state.

The num­ber of elec­toral votes in any giv­en state is equal to its num­ber of con­gress­peo­ple plus its two Sen­a­tors.

There are a total of 538 elec­toral votes. In order to win the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, a can­di­date must win at least 270 of those votes.

Sim­ple enough, but this mea­sured expla­na­tion does not com­pute with Grover.

So Khan employs an edu­ca­tion­al Nin­ja tech­nique. “How can I explain it in a way that you might under­stand?” he asks.

It turns out Grover is some­thing of a visu­al learn­er, who’s not at all shy about the work­ings of his own per­son­al brain. He’s prob­a­bly not ready for 8th grade alge­bra, but the Khan Acad­e­my sub­sti­tu­tion method pro­vides a water­shed moment, when Khan replaces elec­toral votes with chick­ens.

(If your frag­ile grasp of the Elec­toral Col­lege process would be mud­dled by the intro­duc­tion of chick­ens, stop watch­ing at the two minute mark. As the pro­lif­er­at­ing com­ments on the Khan Academy’s fifth Amer­i­can Civics les­son prove, some­times the sim­ple approach cre­ates more ques­tions than it answers.)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Polit­i­cal Sci­ence Cours­es 

Mor­gan Free­man Teach­es Kids to Read in Vin­tage Elec­tric Com­pa­ny Footage from 1971

Elec­tion 2012: Your Free Tick­et to a Pop­u­lar Stan­ford Course

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is open­ing in New York City in March 2017. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Take a Free Online Course on Making Comic Books, Compliments of the California College of the Arts

in Art, Comics/Cartoons, K-12, Literature, MOOCs | January 29th, 2016

Gath­er round, chil­dren and lis­ten to Grand­ma rem­i­niscin’ ‘bout the days when study­ing comics meant chang­ing out of your paja­mas and show­ing up at the bursar’s office, check in hand.

Actu­al­ly, Grandma’s full of it. Graph­ic nov­els are enjoy­ing unprece­dent­ed pop­u­lar­i­ty and edu­ca­tors are turn­ing to comics to reach reluc­tant read­ers, but as of this writ­ing, there still aren’t that many pro­grams for those inter­est­ed in mak­ing a career of this art form.

The Cal­i­for­nia Col­lege of the Arts is a notable excep­tion. You can get your MFA in Comics there.

Even bet­ter, you need not enroll to sam­ple the 5 week course, Comics: Art in Rela­tion­ship, led by Comics MFA chair and Eis­ner Award-nom­i­nat­ed author of The Home­less Chan­nel, Matt Sila­dy.

You might write the next Scott Pil­grim.

Or ink the next Fun Home.

At the very least, you’ll learn a thing or two about lay­out, the rela­tion­ship of art to text, and using com­pres­sion to denote the pas­sage of time.

It’s the sort of nit­ty grit­ty train­ing that would ben­e­fit both vet­er­ans and new­bies alike.

Ready to sign up? The free course, which starts in Feb­ru­ary, will require approx­i­mate­ly 10 hours per week. The syl­labus is below.

Ses­sion 1: Defin­ing Comics

Iden­ti­fy key rela­tion­ships in sam­ple texts & demon­strate the use of var­i­ous cam­era angles on a comics page

Ses­sion 2: Comics Rela­tion­ships

Cre­ate Text-Image and Image-Image Pan­els

Ses­sion 3: Time And Space

One Sec­ond, One Hour, One Day Comics Chal­lenge

Ses­sion 4: Lay­out And Grid Design

Apply mul­ti­ple pan­el grids to pro­vid­ed script

Ses­sion 5: Thumb­nails

Cre­ate thumb­nail sketch­es of a mul­ti­page scene

Enroll here.

via io9

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kapow! Stan Lee Is Co-Teach­ing a Free Com­ic Book MOOC, and You Can Enroll for Free

Lyn­da Barry’s Illus­trat­ed Syl­labus & Home­work Assign­ments from Her New UW-Madi­son Course, “Mak­ing Comics”

In Ani­mat­ed Car­toon, Ali­son Bechdel Sees Her Life Go From Puli­tiz­er Prize Win­ning Com­ic to Broad­way Musi­cal

Down­load 15,000+ Free Gold­en Age Comics from the Dig­i­tal Com­ic Muse­um

1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

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

David Bowie Gives Graduation Speech At Berklee College of Music: “Music Has Been My Doorway of Perception” (1999)

in Life, Music | January 11th, 2016

I have lit­tle to add to the tidal wave of remem­brances and trib­utes in the wake of David Bowie’s death. Seems near­ly every­one has a sto­ry about how his music, his per­sis­tence, his gen­eros­i­ty, his genius, his unabashed weird­ness changed their lives. What he taught me as a young teenag­er was that the phrase “just be your­self” can just as well mean “be who­ev­er you can dream up,” and damn the pre­de­ter­mined roles and mean­ing­less stig­ma. Hard­er than it sounds, but Bowie pulled it off like no one before or since.

Bowie was, writes Sara Ben­in­casa, the “patron saint of… weirdos of all stripes, and that most dan­ger­ous crea­ture of all: the artist.” He did not shy away from pre­tense; he embraced it as his spe­cial méti­er. In 1999, Bowie deliv­ered the com­mence­ment address at Boston’s Berklee Col­lege of Music, where he received an hon­orary doc­tor­ate along with Wayne Short­er. In his speech, he says, he learned ear­ly on that “authen­tic­i­ty and the nat­ur­al form of expres­sion wasn’t going to be my forte.”

In fact, what I found that I was good at doing, and what I real­ly enjoyed the most, was the game of “what if?” What if you com­bined Brecht-Weill musi­cal dra­ma with rhythm and blues? What hap­pens if you trans­plant the French chan­son with the Philly sound? Will Schoen­berg lie com­fort­ably with Lit­tle Richard? Can you put hag­gis and snails on the same plate? Well, no, but some of the ideas did work out very well.

Thus began his exper­i­ments with iden­ti­ty that first took shape in the fan­tas­tic crea­ture, Zig­gy Star­dust, his “cru­sade,” as he calls it, “to change the kind of infor­ma­tion that rock music con­tained.” Speak­ing of Zig­gy, Bowie tells a sto­ry about play­ing “grot­ty… workingman’s clubs” in “full, bat­tle fin­ery of Tokyo-space­boy and a pair of shoes high enough that it induced nose bleeds.”

Informed by the pro­mot­er at one such bar that the only bath­room was a filthy sink at the end of the hall, Bowie balked. “Lis­ten son,” said the pro­mot­er, “If its good enough for Shirley Bassey, it’s good enough for you.” From this expe­ri­ence, he says, he learned that “mix­ing ele­ments of bad taste with good would often pro­duce the most inter­est­ing results.”

The speech is packed with wit­ty anec­dotes like this and self-dep­re­cat­ing asides. Most of the sto­ries, as you can hear in the video excerpt at the top of the post, are about Bowie’s “great­est men­tor,” John Lennon. Lennon, says Bowie, “defined for me, at any rate, how one could twist and turn the fab­ric of pop and imbue it with ele­ments from oth­er art­forms, often pro­duc­ing some­thing extreme­ly beau­ti­ful, very pow­er­ful and imbued with strange­ness.” Indulging his love for high and low cul­ture, Bowie under­cuts his ele­vat­ed talk of art-pop by describ­ing his and Lennon’s con­ver­sa­tions as “Beav­is and Butthead on ‘Cross­fire.’”

Bowie ends his speech with a heart­felt, and dare I say, authen­tic sum­ma­ry of his life in music. His only piece of advice, writes Boston.com: he urges the Berklee grad­u­ates to “pur­sue their musi­cal pas­sion as if it were a sick­ness.”

Music has giv­en me over 40 years of extra­or­di­nary expe­ri­ences. I can’t say that life’s pains or more trag­ic episodes have been dimin­ished because of it. But it’s allowed me so many moments of com­pan­ion­ship when I’ve been lone­ly and a sub­lime means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion when I want­ed to touch peo­ple. It’s been both my door­way of per­cep­tion and the house that I live in.

I only hope that it embraces you with the same lusty life force that it gra­cious­ly offered me. Thank you very much and remem­ber, if it itch­es, play it.

Read the full tran­script of the speech here, or below the jump:

(more…)

NBC University Theater Adapted Great Novels to Radio & Gives Listeners College Credit : Hear 110 Episodes from a 1940s eLearning Experiment

in Education, Literature, Radio | October 9th, 2015

Cre­ative Com­mons image by Joe Haupt

Before the inter­net became our pri­ma­ry source of infor­ma­tion and entertainment—before it became for many com­pa­nies a pri­ma­ry rev­enue stream—it promised to rev­o­lu­tion­ize edu­ca­tion. We would see a demo­c­ra­t­ic spread of knowl­edge, old hier­ar­chies would crum­ble, ancient divi­sions would cease to mat­ter in the new pri­mor­dial cyber-soup where any­one with entry-lev­el con­sumer hard­ware and the patience to learn basic HTML could cre­ate a plat­form and a com­mu­ni­ty. And even as that imag­ined utopia became just anoth­er econ­o­my, with its own win­ners and losers, large—and free—educational projects still seemed per­fect­ly fea­si­ble.

These days, that poten­tial hasn’t exact­ly evap­o­rat­ed, but we’ve had an increas­ing num­ber of reasons—the threat­ened sta­tus of net neu­tral­i­ty promi­nent among them—to curb our enthu­si­asm. Yet as we remind you dai­ly here at Open Cul­ture, free edu­ca­tion­al resources still abound online, even if the online world isn’t as rad­i­cal as some rad­i­cals had hoped. Fre­quent­ly, those resources reside in online libraries like the Inter­net Archive, who store some of the best edu­ca­tion­al mate­r­i­al from pre-inter­net times—such as the NBC Uni­ver­si­ty The­ater, a pro­gram that comes from anoth­er tran­si­tion­al time for anoth­er form of mass media: radio.

Before pay­ola and tele­vi­sion took over in the fifties, radio also showed great poten­tial for democ­ra­tiz­ing edu­ca­tion. In 1942, at the height of the Gold­en Age of Radio, NBC “rein­au­gu­rat­ed” a pre­vi­ous con­cept for what it called the NBC Uni­ver­si­ty of the Air. “Through­out the mid-1940s,” writes the Dig­i­tal Deli, an online muse­um of gold­en age radio, “NBC pro­duced some twen­ty-five pro­duc­tions specif­i­cal­ly designed to both edu­cate and enter­tain. Indeed, many of those pro­grams were incor­po­rat­ed into the cur­ric­u­la of high schools, col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties through­out the U.S. and Cana­da.”

After 1948, the pro­gram was retooled as NBC Uni­ver­si­ty The­ater, then sim­ply NBC The­ater. “Irre­spec­tive of the title change,” how­ev­er, the pro­gram “con­tin­ued to main­tain the same high stan­dards and con­tin­ued to expand the num­ber of col­leges offer­ing col­lege cred­it for lis­ten­ing to and study­ing the pro­gram­s’s offer­ings.” Dig­i­tal Deli has the full details of this pro­to-MOOC’s cur­ricu­lum. It con­sists of lis­ten­ing to adap­ta­tions of “great Amer­i­can sto­ries,” great “world” stories–from Voltaire, Swift, and others–and adap­ta­tions of mod­ern Amer­i­can and British fic­tion and “Great Works of World Lit­er­a­ture.”

In short, the NBC Uni­ver­si­ty The­ater adap­ta­tions might sub­sti­tute for a col­lege-lev­el lit­er­ary edu­ca­tion for those unable to attend a col­lege or uni­ver­si­ty. In the playlist above, you can hear every episode from the show’s final run from 1948 to 1951. We begin with an adap­ta­tion of Sin­clair Lewis’s Main Street and end with Thomas Hardy’s “The With­ered Arm.” In-between hear clas­sic radio dra­ma adap­ta­tions of every­thing from Austen to Faulkn­er and Hem­ing­way to Ibsen. There are 110 episodes in total.

Each episode fea­tures com­men­tary from dis­tin­guished authors and crit­ics, includ­ing Robert Penn War­ren, E.M. Forster, and Kather­ine Anne Porter. “Apart from the obvi­ous aca­d­e­m­ic val­ue” of the series, writes Dig­i­tal Deli, “it’s clear that con­sid­er­able thought—and dar­ing—went into the selec­tions as well.” Despite the tremen­dous increase in col­lege atten­dance through the G.I. Bill, this was a peri­od of “ris­ing hos­til­i­ty towards aca­d­e­mics, pure­ly intel­lec­tu­al pur­suits, and the free exchange of philoso­phies in gen­er­al.”

The ensu­ing decade of the fifties might be char­ac­ter­ized cul­tur­al­ly, writes Dig­i­tal Deli, as an “intel­lec­tu­al vacuum”—anti-intellectual atti­tudes swept the coun­try, fueled by Cold War polit­i­cal repres­sion. And radio became pri­mar­i­ly a means of enter­tain­ment and adver­tis­ing, com­pet­ing with tele­vi­sion for an audi­ence. Qual­i­ty radio dra­mas continued—most notably of excel­lent sci­ence fic­tion. But nev­er again would an edu­ca­tion­al pro­gram of NBC Uni­ver­si­ty The­ater’s scope, ambi­tion, and rad­i­cal poten­tial appear on U.S. radio waves.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Very First Adap­ta­tion of George Orwell’s 1984 in a Radio Play Star­ring David Niv­en (1949)

Hear Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and 84 Clas­sic Radio Dra­mas from CBS Radio Work­shop (1956–57)

Dimen­sion X: The 1950s Sci­Fi Radio Show That Dra­ma­tized Sto­ries by Asi­mov, Brad­bury, Von­negut & More

Free: Lis­ten to 298 Episodes of the Vin­tage Crime Radio Series, Drag­net

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

Sylvia Plath, Girl Detective Offers a Hilariously Cheery Take on the Poet’s College Years

in Comedy, Literature, Poetry | September 25th, 2015

Con­ven­tion­al wis­dom has it that one’s col­lege years are the best of one’s life, a max­im Sylvia Plath: Girl Detec­tive, above, seems to embrace.

The real Plath expe­ri­enced deep depres­sion and attempt­ed sui­cide while a stu­dent at Smith Col­lege. Her fic­tion­al counterpart—-played by writer-direc­tor Mike Sim­ses’ sis­ter and co-pro­duc­er, Kate—exudes a pert Nan­cy Drew spir­it.

She jug­gles mul­ti­ple admir­ers, glows with self-sat­is­fac­tion when her poem, “I Thought That I Could Not Be Hurt,” receives an A+, and cooly holds her ground against stat­uesque and seem­ing­ly bet­ter-heeled class­mate, Jane.

It does­n’t mat­ter that it’s nev­er par­tic­u­lar­ly clear what mys­tery this girl detec­tive is solv­ing… the Case of the Miss­ing Tuition Check per­haps.

(Eager to stay on the good side of her bene­fac­tress, Now, Voy­ager author Olive Hig­gins Prouty, she bright­ly acqui­esces to a shot of insulin from a giant met­al syringe.)

I love how she quotes from her own poet­ry with an inten­si­ty that should feel famil­iar to any­one who’s ever been called upon to read aloud from “Dad­dy” or “Lady Lazarus” in an under­grad­u­ate Women’s Stud­ies class.

(Speak­ing of Dad­dy, Plath’s gets a notable cameo. Shades of Hamlet’s father, but fun­ny!)

This Writ­ers Guild Asso­ci­a­tion New Media award win­ner is sup­port­ed by high pro­duc­tion val­ues that range from tony loca­tions and antique cars to Sim­ses’ shei­t­el.

Find Sylvia Plath, Girl Detec­tive added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Sylvia Plath Read Fif­teen Poems From Her Final Col­lec­tion, Ariel, in 1962 Record­ing

Sylvia Plath’s 10 Back to School Com­mand­ments (1953)

The Mir­rors of Ing­mar Bergman, Nar­rat­ed with the Poet­ry of Sylvia Plath

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Her play, Fawn­book, opens in New York City lat­er this fall. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

Teacher Calls Jacques Derrida’s College Admission Essay on Shakespeare “Quite Incomprehensible” (1951)

in Philosophy | April 13th, 2015

Click here for larg­er image, then click again to zoom in.

Back­sto­ries of famous­ly accom­plished peo­ple seem incom­plete with­out some past dif­fi­cul­ty or fail­ure to be over­come. In nar­ra­tive terms, these inci­dents pro­vide biogra­phies with their dra­mat­ic ten­sion. We see Abra­ham Lin­coln rise to the high­est office in the land despite the hum­blest of ori­gins; Albert Ein­stein rewrites the­o­ret­i­cal physics against all aca­d­e­m­ic odds, giv­en his sup­posed ear­ly child­hood hand­i­caps. In many cas­es, these sto­ries are apoc­ryphal, or exag­ger­at­ed for effect. But what­ev­er their accu­ra­cy, they always seem to reflect unde­ni­able char­ac­ter traits of the per­son in ques­tion.

In the case of influ­en­tial philoso­pher Jacques Der­ri­da, prog­en­i­tor of the both beloved and reviled crit­i­cal the­o­ry known as “Decon­struc­tion,” the sto­ries of aca­d­e­m­ic strug­gle and great men­tal suf­fer­ing are well-doc­u­ment­ed. Fur­ther­more, their details accord per­fect­ly well with the mature thinker who, remarks the site Crit­i­cal The­o­ry, “can’t answer a sim­ple god-damned ques­tion.” The good-natured snark on dis­play in this descrip­tion more or less sums up the feed­back Der­ri­da received dur­ing some for­ma­tive years of school­ing while he pre­pared for his entrance exams to France’s uni­ver­si­ty sys­tem in 1951 at the age of 20.

Der­ri­da may have “left as big a mark on human­i­ties depart­ments as any sin­gle thinker of the past forty years,” writes The New York Review of Books, but dur­ing this peri­od of his life, he failed his exams twice before final­ly gain­ing admit­tance. Once, he “choked and turned in a blank sheet of paper. The same month, he was award­ed a dis­mal 5 out of 20 on his qual­i­fy­ing exam for a license in phi­los­o­phy.” One essay he sub­mit­ted on Shake­speare, writ­ten in Eng­lish (above), received a 10 out of 20. The feed­back from Derrida’s instruc­tor will sound very famil­iar to per­plexed read­ers of his work. “Quite unin­tel­li­gi­ble,” writes the eval­u­a­tor in one mar­gin­al com­ment. The main com­ment at the top of the paper reads in part:

In this essay you seem to be con­stant­ly on the verge of some­thing inter­est­ing but, some­what, you always fail to explain it clear­ly. A few para­graphs are indeed total­ly incom­pre­hen­si­ble.

Anoth­er exam­in­er—points out the NYRB—left a com­ment on his work “that has since become a com­mon­place”:

An exer­cise in vir­tu­os­i­ty, with unde­ni­able intel­li­gence, but with no par­tic­u­lar rela­tion to the his­to­ry of phi­los­o­phy… Can come back when he is pre­pared to accept the rules and not invent where he needs to be bet­ter informed.

As it turns out, Der­ri­da was not par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in the rules, but in invent­ing a new method. Even if his “apos­ta­sy” caused him great men­tal anguish—“nausea, insom­nia, exhaus­tion, and despair” (all nor­mal fea­tures of any high­er edu­ca­tion­al experience)—it’s prob­a­bly fair to say he could not do oth­er­wise. Although his intel­lec­tu­al biog­ra­phy, like the his­to­ry of any revered fig­ure, is unlike­ly to offer a blue­print for suc­cess, there is per­haps at least one les­son we may draw: What­ev­er the dif­fi­cul­ties, you’re prob­a­bly bet­ter off just being your­self.

via Crit­i­cal The­o­ry

Relat­ed Con­tent:

130+ Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Philoso­pher Jacques Der­ri­da Inter­views Jazz Leg­end Ornette Cole­man: Talk Impro­vi­sa­tion, Lan­guage & Racism (1997)

8‑Bit Phi­los­o­phy: Pla­to, Sartre, Der­ri­da & Oth­er Thinkers Explained With Vin­tage Video Games

Jacques Der­ri­da Decon­structs Amer­i­can Atti­tudes

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

How the “Paul McCartney is Dead” Hoax Started at an American College Newspaper and Went Viral (1969)

in Music | December 26th, 2014

Next time you see the still-youth­ful and musi­cal­ly pro­lif­ic Paul McCart­ney, take a good hard look and ask your­self, “is it real­ly him?” Can you be sure? Because maybe, just maybe, the con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists are right—maybe Paul did die in a car acci­dent in 1966 and was replaced by a dou­ble who looks, sounds, acts, and writes almost exact­ly like him. Almost. It’s pos­si­ble. Entire­ly implau­si­ble, whol­ly improb­a­ble, but with­in the realm of phys­i­cal pos­si­bil­i­ty.

In fact, the rumor of Paul’s death and replace­ment by some kind of pod per­son imposter cropped up not once, but twice dur­ing the six­ties. First, in Jan­u­ary, 1967, imme­di­ate­ly after an acci­dent involv­ing McCartney’s Mini Coop­er that month. The car, dri­ven by Moroc­can stu­dent Moham­mad Had­jij, crashed on the M1 after leav­ing McCartney’s house en route to Kei­th Richard’s Sus­sex Man­sion. Had­jij was hos­pi­tal­ized, but not killed, and Paul, rid­ing in Mick Jagger’s car, arrived at the des­ti­na­tion safe­ly.

The fol­low­ing month, the Bea­t­les Book Month­ly mag­a­zine quashed rumors that Paul had been dri­ving the Mini and had died, writ­ing, “there was absolute­ly no truth in it at all, as the Bea­t­les’ Press Offi­cer found out when he tele­phoned Paul’s St. John’s Wood home and was answered by Paul him­self who had been at home all day with his black Mini Coop­er Safe­ly locked up in the garage.” “The mag­a­zine,” writes the Bea­t­les Bible, “down­played the inci­dent, and claimed the car was in McCartney’s pos­ses­sion.”

In 1969, rumors of Paul’s death and a con­spir­a­cy to cov­er it up began cir­cu­lat­ing again, this time with an impres­sive appa­ra­tus that includ­ed pub­li­ca­tions in col­lege and local news­pa­pers, dis­cus­sions on sev­er­al radio shows, a uni­ver­si­ty research team, and enough eso­teric clues to keep high­ly sus­pi­cious, stoned, and/or para­noid, minds guess­ing for decades after­ward. The form­less gos­sip first offi­cial­ly took shape in print in the arti­cle “Is Bea­t­le Paul McCart­ney Dead?” in Iowa’s Drake Uni­ver­si­ty stu­dent news­pa­per, the Times-Del­ph­ic. Cat­a­logu­ing “an amaz­ing series of pho­tos and lyrics on the group’s albums” that point­ed to “a dis­tinct pos­si­bil­i­ty that McCart­ney may indeed be insane, freaked out, even dead,” the piece dives head­first into the kind of bizarre analy­sis of dis­parate sym­bols and ten­u­ous coin­ci­dences wor­thy of the most dogged of today’s con­spir­a­cy-mon­gers.

Invoked are ephemera like “a mys­te­ri­ous hand” raised over Paul’s head on the Sgt. Pepper’s cover—“an ancient death sym­bol of either the Greeks or the Amer­i­can Indians”—and Paul’s bass, lying “on the grave at the group’s feet.” The lyric “blew his mind out in a car” from “A Day in the Life” comes up, and more pho­to­graph­ic evi­dence from the album’s back cov­er and cen­ter­fold pho­to. Evi­dence is pro­duced from Mag­i­cal Mys­tery Tour and The White Album. Of the lat­ter, you’ve sure­ly heard, or heard of, the voice seem­ing to intone, “Turn me on, dead man,” and “Cher­ish the dead,” when “Rev­o­lu­tion No. 9” is played back­wards. Only a col­lege dorm room could have nur­tured such a dis­cov­ery.

The arti­cle reads like a parody—similar to the sub­ver­sive, half-seri­ous satir­i­cal weird­ness com­mon to the mid-six­ties hip­pie scene. But whether or not its author, Tim Harp­er, meant to pull off a hoax, the Paul is dead meme went viral when it hit the air­waves the fol­low­ing month. First, a caller to Detroit radio sta­tion WKNR trans­mit­ted the the­o­ry to DJ Russ Gibb. Their hour-long con­ver­sa­tion lead to a review of Abbey Road in The Michi­gan Dai­ly titled “McCart­ney Dead; New Evi­dence Brought to Light.” With tongue in cheek, writer Fred LaBour called the death and replace­ment of Paul “the great­est hoax of our time and the sub­se­quent found­ing of a new reli­gion based upon Paul as Mes­si­ah.” In the mode of para­noid con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry so com­mon to the time—a genre mas­tered by Thomas Pyn­chon as a lit­er­ary art—LaBour invent­ed even more clues, inad­ver­tent­ly feed­ing a pub­lic hun­gry for this kind of thing. “Although clear­ly intend­ed as a joke,” writes the Bea­t­les Bible, “it had an impact far wider than the writer and his edi­tor expect­ed.”

Part of the after­math came in two more radio shows that Octo­ber of 1969. First, in two parts at the top, New York City DJ Roby Yonge makes the case for McCartney’s death on radio sta­tion WABC-AM. Recy­cling many of the “clues” from the pre­vi­ous sources, he also con­tends that a research team of 30 stu­dents at Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty has been put on the case. Yonge plain­ly states that some of the clues only emerge “if you real­ly get real­ly, real­ly high… on some, you know, like, mind-bend­ing drug,” but this pro­vi­so doesn’t seem to under­mine his con­fi­dence in the shaky web of con­nec­tions.

Was Yonge’s broad­cast just an atten­tion grab­bing act? Maybe. The next Paul is Dead radio show, just above, is most cer­tain­ly an Orson Welles-like pub­lic­i­ty stunt. Broad­cast on Hal­loween night, 1969, on Buf­fa­lo, NY’s WKBW, the show employs sev­er­al of the station’s DJs, who con­struct a detailed and dra­mat­ic nar­ra­tive of Paul’s death. The broad­cast indulges the same album-cov­er and lyric div­ina­tion of the ear­li­er Paul is Dead media, but by this time, it’s grown pret­ty hoary. But for a small con­tin­gent of die-hards, the rumor was most­ly put to rest just a few days lat­er when Life mag­a­zine pub­lished a cov­er pho­to­graph of Paul—who had been out of the pub­lic eye after the Bea­t­les’ breakup—with his wife Lin­da and their kids. Para­phras­ing Mark Twain, McCart­ney famous­ly remarked in the inter­view inside, “Rumors of my death have been great­ly exag­ger­at­ed,” and added, “If I was dead, I’m sure I’d be the last to know.”

In lat­er inter­views, the Bea­t­les denied hav­ing any­thing to do with the hoax. Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970 that the idea of them inten­tion­al­ly plant­i­ng obscure clues in their albums “was bull­shit, the whole thing was made up.” The hoax did make for some inter­est­ing publicity—even fea­tur­ing in the sto­ry­line of a Bat­man comics issue—but the band most­ly found it baf­fling and annoy­ing. Cer­tain fans, how­ev­er, refused to let it die, and there are those who still swear that Paul’s imposter, alleged­ly named Bil­ly Shears and some­times called “Faul,” still walks the earth. Paul is Dead web­sites pro­lif­er­ate on the internet—some more, some less con­vinc­ing; all of them out­landish, and all offer­ing a fas­ci­nat­ing descent into the seem­ing­ly bot­tom­less rab­bit hole of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry. If that’s your kind of trip, you can eas­i­ly get lost—as did pop cul­ture briefly in 1969—in end­less “Paul is Dead” spec­u­la­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Paul McCartney’s Con­cep­tu­al Draw­ings For the Abbey Road Cov­er and Mag­i­cal Mys­tery Tour Film

Chaos & Cre­ation at Abbey Road: Paul McCart­ney Revis­its The Bea­t­les’ Fabled Record­ing Stu­dio

Hear Iso­lat­ed Tracks From Five Great Rock Bassists: McCart­ney, Sting, Dea­con, Jones & Lee

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