How Richard Linklater (Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Boyhood) Tells Stories with Time: Six Video Essays

in Film | July 11th, 2017

The ever more crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed, ever more res­olute­ly Austin-based auteur Richard Lin­klater grounds each of his movies in a par­tic­u­lar place, but even more so in a par­tic­u­lar time. His sec­ond fea­ture Slack­er, which broke him into the world of Amer­i­can inde­pen­dent film in 1991, takes place not just in Austin, but in a sin­gle day in Austin. Its much big­ger-bud­get but also Austin-set fol­low-up Dazed and Con­fused takes place on May 28, 1976, the last day before grad­u­a­tion for its high-school-age char­ac­ters. 1995’s Before Sun­rise began a tril­o­gy of films released every nine years, each of which con­tin­ues the sto­ry of the cen­tral cou­ple by fol­low­ing them in near-real time around a dif­fer­ent place: first in Vien­na, then in Paris, then in Greece.

Lin­klater has main­tained his pen­chant for tem­po­ral speci­fici­ty, set­ting last year’s Every­body Wants Some!! in south­east Texas in 1980, specif­i­cal­ly on the day before the begin­ning of col­lege for its char­ac­ters. Before that, his low-key epic Boy­hood made cin­e­ma his­to­ry by hav­ing been shot over a peri­od of twelve years, demon­strat­ing defin­i­tive­ly that the direc­tor’s inter­est in time goes well beyond sim­ply evok­ing peri­ods or repli­cat­ing the real flow of events.

“It’s a big ele­ment, isn’t it, of our medi­um?” he asks in “On Cin­e­ma & Time,” the video essay made by “kog­o­na­da” for the British Film Insti­tute at the top of the post. “The manip­u­la­tion of time, the per­cep­tion of time, the con­trol of time — kind of the build­ing blocks of cin­e­ma.”

“What I’ll say is, like, ‘Carve out some­thing of real time,’ you know?” says Lin­klater, with his char­ac­ter­is­tic deliv­ery of artis­tic insight in a high­ly casu­al, Texas-inflect­ed locu­tion, in the Film Radar video essay “Richard Lin­klater and Time” (not view­able in all regions). “Some kind of hyper­re­al­i­ty, you know? Try­ing to make sense of the world in a movie way, of just how peo­ple live or think or inter­act.” But would his time-carv­ing, expert­ly though he does it, strike us as pow­er­ful­ly with­out he and his col­lab­o­ra­tors’ equal­ly high skill at craft­ing images (whether live-action or, occa­sion­al­ly, in ani­ma­tion, as in the roto­scop­ing of the philo­soph­i­cal dia­logue-dri­ven Wak­ing Life, or his Philip K. Dick adap­ta­tion A Scan­ner Dark­ly, exam­ined in Siob­han Cavanagh’s “Form and Func­tion”)?

You can see that skill on dis­play in the video essays “Cin­e­matog­ra­phy in the films of Richard Lin­klater” and “Silent Con­nec­tions” just above. In the lat­ter, fre­quent Lin­klater col­lab­o­ra­tor Ethan Hawke quotes the direc­tor: “I’ve nev­er been in a gun­fight. I’ve nev­er been involved in espi­onage. I’ve nev­er been involved in a heli­copter crash. And yet I feel like my life has been full of dra­ma, and the most dra­mat­ic thing that’s ever hap­pened to me is, real­ly, con­nect­ing with anoth­er human being. When you real­ly con­nect, you feel like your life is dif­fer­ent, and I want to make a movie about that con­nec­tion.” In a sense, Lin­klater has spent most of his career tak­ing dif­fer­ent approach­es to mak­ing that movie, always draw­ing on his vast breadth of film knowl­edge; the video essay “Real Time and New Wave Her­itage” just above looks at just a few of the par­al­lels between his work and that of his pre­de­ces­sors in cin­e­ma.

“It’s fun­ny, the way mem­o­ry works,” Lin­klater says in a ten-minute Inde­pen­dent Film Chan­nel fea­turette on the mak­ing of Boy­hood. “I’m kind of obsessed with that.” You can see a younger Lin­klater speak about his life as a film­mak­er, then only just begin­ning, in the 1991 Austin pub­lic-access tele­vi­sion clip just above. “I don’t get work,” he says. “For me, film­mak­ing’s not even a job, it’s not a career, it’s just some­thing I’m doing. For the first time it looks like I should be mak­ing mon­ey at it, but we’ll see.” Now we’ve seen what Lin­klater can do, though he’ll sure­ly sur­prise and impress us for decades to come with the ways he can dig, cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly, into his obses­sions — and the obses­sions his films have let us share. To quote a 23-year-old Hawke in Before Sun­rise, quot­ing Dylan Thomas read­ing W.H. Auden: “ ‘All the clocks in the city began to whirr and chime. Oh, let not time deceive you; you can­not con­quer time. In headaches and in wor­ry, vague­ly life leaks away, and time will have its fan­cy tomor­row or today.’ Some­thin’ like that.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Great Mix­tapes Richard Lin­klater Cre­at­ed to Psych Up the Actors in Dazed and Con­fused and Every­body Wants Some!!

Scenes from Wak­ing Life, Richard Linklater’s Philo­soph­i­cal, Fea­ture-Length Ani­mat­ed Film (2001)

Watch Matthew McConaughey’s Audi­tion Tape for Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Con­fused, the Indie Com­e­dy That Made Him a Star

In Dark PSA, Direc­tor Richard Lin­klater Sug­gests Rad­i­cal Steps for Deal­ing with Tex­ters in Cin­e­mas

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, 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.

Behold Lewis Carroll’s Original Handwritten & Illustrated Manuscript for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1864)

in Art, Books | July 6th, 2017

Almost exact­ly 155 years ago, Lewis Car­roll told three young sis­ters a sto­ry. He’d come up with it to enliv­en a long boat trip up the Riv­er Thames, and one of the chil­dren aboard, a cer­tain Alice Lid­dell, enjoyed it so much that she insist­ed that Car­roll com­mit it to paper. Thus, so the leg­end has it, was Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land born, although Lewis Car­roll, then best known as Oxford math­e­mat­ics tutor Charles Lutwidge Dodg­son, had­n’t tak­en up his famous pen name yet, and when he did write down Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land, it took its first form as Alice’s Adven­tures Under Ground. You can read that hand­writ­ten man­u­script, com­plete with illus­tra­tions.

Car­roll pre­sent­ed the fic­tion­al Alice’s name­sake with the man­u­script, accord­ing to the British Library, as an ear­ly Christ­mas present in 1864. When his friends encour­aged him to pub­lish it, he per­formed a few revi­sions, “remov­ing some of the fam­i­ly ref­er­ences includ­ed for the amuse­ment of the Lid­dell chil­dren,” adding a cou­ple of chap­ters (the beloved Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter’s tea par­ty being among their new mate­r­i­al), and enlist­ing John Ten­niel, a Punch mag­a­zine car­toon­ist known for his illus­tra­tions of Aesop’s Fables, to cre­ate pro­fes­sion­al art to accom­pa­ny it. The result, reti­tled Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land, came out in 1865 and has nev­er gone out of print.

Though Ten­niel’s vivid ren­der­ings of Alice and the eccen­tric char­ac­ters she encoun­ters have remained defin­i­tive, plen­ty of oth­er artists, includ­ing Sal­vador Dalí and Ralph Stead­man, have attempt­ed the sure­ly almost irre­sistible chal­lenge of illus­trat­ing Car­rol­l’s high­ly imag­i­na­tive sto­ry. But today, says Skid­more Col­lege pro­fes­sor Cather­ine J. Gold­en at The Vic­to­ri­an Web, “crit­ics have reeval­u­at­ed Carroll’s car­i­ca­ture-style illus­tra­tion. Car­roll expert­ly inter­twines his hand­writ­ten text with his pic­tures to advance the growth motif. His con­cep­tion of the mouse’s ‘tale’ shaped like an actu­al mouse’s ‘tail’ is an excel­lent exam­ple of emblem­at­ic verse.”

Ten­niel, Gold­en argues, “essen­tial­ly refash­ioned with real­ism and improved upon many of Carroll’s sketchy or anatom­i­cal­ly incor­rect illus­tra­tions, adding domes­tic inte­ri­ors and land­scapes that appealed to mid­dle-class con­sumers of the 1860s.” Even “late twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry graph­ic nov­el adap­ta­tions of Alice in Won­der­land recall many of Carroll’s inven­tive designs as well as those of Ten­niel,” which gives Car­rol­l’s orig­i­nal man­u­script more claim to hav­ing pro­vid­ed the visu­al basis, not just the tex­tu­al one, for the fol­low­ing cen­tu­ry and a half of sequels offi­cial and unof­fi­cial, as well as adap­ta­tions, reen­vi­sion­ings, and reimag­in­ings of this “Christ­mas gift to a dear child in mem­o­ry of a sum­mer day.”

You can view Carroll’s orig­i­nal man­u­script, com­plete with illus­tra­tions, here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land Read by Sir John Giel­gud: A Great Way to Cel­e­brate the Novel’s 150th Anniver­sary

Lewis Carroll’s Pho­tographs of Alice Lid­dell, the Inspi­ra­tion for Alice in Won­der­land

Pho­to of the Real Alice in Won­der­land Cir­ca 1862

See Ralph Steadman’s Twist­ed Illus­tra­tions of Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land on the Story’s 150th Anniver­sary

The First Film Adap­ta­tion of Alice in Won­der­land (1903)

Lewis Carroll’s Clas­sic Sto­ry, Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land, Told in Sand Ani­ma­tion

When Aldous Hux­ley Wrote a Script for Disney’s Alice in Won­der­land

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, 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.

Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes & Peter Porter Read Their Poetry: Free Audio

in | July 2nd, 2017

Sylvia Plath, Ted Hugh­es & Peter Porter Read Their Poet­ry was released Decem­ber 04, 2013 on the Sound­mark label. All 21 tracks can be heard free on Spo­ti­fy. Stream the tracks below. If you need Spo­ti­fy’s free soft­ware, down­load it here.

Sylvia Plath, Ted Hugh­es & Peter Porter Read Their Poet­ry will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

Hear Sylvia Plath’s Bare­ly-Known Radio Play, Three Women

Hear Sylvia Plath Read 50+ of Her Dark, Com­pelling Poems

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

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

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

David Sedaris Breaks Down His Writing Process: Keep a Diary, Carry a Notebook, Read Out Loud, Abandon Hope

in Writing | June 27th, 2017

When did you first hear David Sedaris? Nor­mal­ly in the case of a writer, let alone one of the most famous and suc­cess­ful writ­ers alive, the ques­tion would be when you first read him, but Sedaris’ writ­ing voice has nev­er real­ly exist­ed apart from his actu­al voice. He first became famous in 1992 when Nation­al Pub­lic Radio aired his read­ing of the “San­ta­land Diaries,” a piece lit­er­al­ly con­struct­ed from diaries kept while he worked in San­ta­land, the Christ­mas vil­lage at Macy’s, as an elf. Though that break illus­trates the impor­tance of what we might call two pil­lars of Sedaris’ writ­ing process, nobody in his enor­mous fan­base-to-be gave it much thought at the time — they just want­ed to hear more of his hilar­i­ous sto­ry­telling.

A quar­ter-cen­tu­ry lat­er, Sedaris has released more diaries — many more diaries — to his ador­ing pub­lic in the form of Theft by Find­ing, a hefty vol­ume of select­ed entries writ­ten between 1977 and 2002. They give addi­tion­al insight into not just the events and char­ac­ters involved in the per­son­al essays com­piled in best­selling books like Naked, Me Talk Pret­ty One Day, and Dress Your Fam­i­ly in Cor­duroy and Den­im, but also into his writ­ing process itself. “A woman on All Things Con­sid­ered wrote a book of advice called If You Want to Write and men­tioned the impor­tance of keep­ing a diary,” a 26-year-old Sedaris writes in an entry from 1983. “After a while you’d stop being forced and pre­ten­tious and become hon­est and unafraid of your thoughts.”

Obvi­ous­ly he did­n’t need that advice at the time, since even then keep­ing a diary had already become the first pil­lar of the David Sedaris writ­ing process. “I start­ed writ­ing one after­noon when I was twen­ty, and ever since then I have writ­ten every day,” he once told the New York­er, also a pub­lish­er of his sto­ries. “At first I had to force myself. Then it became part of my iden­ti­ty, and I did it with­out think­ing.” Most of what he writes in his diary each and every morn­ing he describes as “just whin­ing,” but “every so often there’ll be some­thing I can use lat­er: a joke, a descrip­tion, a quote.”

The entries lat­er cohere, along with oth­er ideas and expe­ri­ences, into his wide­ly read sto­ries. One such piece began, Sedaris told Fast Com­pa­ny’s Kristin Hohenadel, as “a diary entry from a trip to Ams­ter­dam. He met a col­lege kid who told him he’d learned that the first per­son to reach the age of 200 had already been born.” Then, Sedaris said, “I spec­u­lat­ed that the first per­son to reach the age of 200 would be my father. And then I attached it to some­thing else that had been in my diary, that all my dad talks about is me get­ting a colonoscopy. So I con­nect­ed the 200-year-old man to my father want­i­ng me to get a colonoscopy, and that became the sto­ry.”

Only con­nect, as E.M. Forster said, but you do need mate­r­i­al to con­nect in the first place. Hence the sec­ond pil­lar of the process: car­ry­ing a note­book. To the Mis­souri Review Sedaris described him­self as less fun­ny than obser­vant, adding that “everybody’s got an eye for some­thing. The only dif­fer­ence is that I car­ry around a note­book in my front pock­et. I write every­thing down, and it helps me recall things,” espe­cial­ly for lat­er inclu­sion in his diary. When he pub­licly opened his note­book at the request of a red­di­tor while doing an AMA a few years ago, he found the words, “Ille­gal met­al sharks… white skin classy… dri­ver’s name is free Time… rats eat coconuts… beau­ti­ful place city, not beau­ti­ful…”

These cryp­tic lines, he explained, were “notes I wrote in the Mekong delta a few weeks ago. A Viet­namese woman was giv­ing me a lit­tle tour, and this is what I jot­ted down in my note­book.” For instance, “I was ask­ing about all the women whom I saw on motor scoot­ers wear­ing opera gloves, and masks that cov­ered every­thing but their eyes. And the dri­ver told me they were try­ing to keep their skin white, because it’s just classier. Tan skin means you’re a farmer. So that’s some­thing I remem­bered from our con­ver­sa­tion, so when I tran­scribe my note­book into my diary, I added all of that.” And one day his read­ers may well see this frag­ment of life that caught his atten­tion appear again, but as part of a coher­ent, pol­ished nar­ra­tive whole.

The bet­ter part of that pol­ish­ing hap­pens through the prac­tice of read­ing, and revis­ing, in front of an audi­ence. “Dur­ing his bian­nu­al mul­ti­c­i­ty lec­ture tours, Sedaris says he rou­tine­ly notices imper­fec­tions in the text sim­ply through the act of read­ing aloud to oth­er peo­ple,” writes Hohenadel. “He cir­cles acci­den­tal rhymes or close­ly repeat­ed words, or words that sound alike — like night and nightlife — in the same sen­tence, rewrit­ing after each read­ing and try­ing out revi­sions dur­ing the next stop on his tour.” When a pas­sage gets laughs from the audi­ence, he pen­cils in a check mark beside it; when one gets coughs (which he likens to “a ham­mer dri­ving a nail into your cof­fin”), he draws a skull. “On the page it seems like I’m try­ing too hard, and that’s one of the things I can usu­al­ly catch when I’m read­ing out loud,” he says, whether his writ­ing “sounds a lit­tle too obvi­ous” or “like some­body who’s just strain­ing for a laugh.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

20 Free Essays & Sto­ries by David Sedaris: A Sam­pling of His Inim­itable Humor

Be His Guest: David Sedaris at Home in Rur­al West Sus­sex, Eng­land

Ray Brad­bury on Zen and the Art of Writ­ing (1973)

Stephen King’s Top 20 Rules for Writ­ers

Sev­en Tips From Ernest Hem­ing­way on How to Write Fic­tion

John Updike’s Advice to Young Writ­ers: ‘Reserve an Hour a Day’

The Dai­ly Habits of Famous Writ­ers: Franz Kaf­ka, Haru­ki Muraka­mi, Stephen King & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, 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.

The First Bloomsday: See Dublin’s Literati Celebrate James Joyce’s Ulysses in Drunken Fashion (1954)

in History, Literature | June 16th, 2017

Here’s a fas­ci­nat­ing glimpse of the very first Blooms­day cel­e­bra­tion, filmed in Dublin in 1954.

The footage shows the great Irish comedic writer Bri­an O’Nolan, bet­ter known by his pen name Flann O’Brien, appear­ing very drunk as he sets off with two oth­er renowned post-war Irish writ­ers, Patrick Kavanagh and Antho­ny Cronin, and a cousin of James Joyce, a den­tist named Tom Joyce, on a pil­grim­age to vis­it the sites in James Joyce’s epic nov­el Ulysses.

The footage was tak­en by John Ryan, an artist, pub­lish­er and pub own­er who orga­nized the event. The idea was to retrace the steps of Leopold Bloom and oth­er char­ac­ters from the nov­el, but as Peter Costel­lo and Peter van de Kamp explain in this humor­ous pas­sage from their book, Flann O’Brien: An Illus­trat­ed Biog­ra­phy, things began to go awry right from the start:

The date was 16 June, 1954, and though it was only mid-morn­ing, Bri­an O’Nolan was already drunk.

This day was the fifti­eth anniver­sary of Mr. Leopold Bloom’s wan­der­ings through Dublin, which James Joyce had immor­talised in Ulysses.

To mark this occa­sion a small group of Dublin literati had gath­ered at the Sandy­cove home of Michael Scott, a well-known archi­tect, just below the Martel­lo tow­er in which the open­ing scene of Joyce’s nov­el is set. They planned to trav­el round the city through the day, vis­it­ing in turn the scenes of the nov­el, end­ing at night in what had once been the broth­el quar­ter of the city, the area which Joyce had called Night­town.

Sad­ly, no-one expect­ed O’Nolan to be sober. By rep­u­ta­tion, if not by sight, every­one in Dublin knew Bri­an O’Nolan, oth­er­wise Myles na Gopaleen, the writer of the Cruiskeen Lawn col­umn in the Irish Times. A few knew that under the name of Flann O’Brien, he had writ­ten in his youth a now near­ly for­got­ten nov­el, At Swim-Two-Birds. See­ing him about the city, many must have won­dered how a man with such extreme drink­ing habits, even for the city of Dublin, could have sus­tained a career as a writer.

As was his cus­tom, he had been drink­ing that morn­ing in the pubs around the Cat­tle Mar­ket, where cus­tomers, sup­pos­ed­ly about their law­ful busi­ness, would be served from 7:30 in the morn­ing. Now retired from the Civ­il Ser­vice, on grounds of “ill-health”, he was earn­ing his liv­ing as a free-lance jour­nal­ist, writ­ing not only for the Irish Times, but for oth­er papers and mag­a­zines under sev­er­al pen-names. He need­ed to write for mon­ey as his pen­sion was a tiny one. But this left lit­tle time for more cre­ative work. In fact, O’Nolan no longer felt the urge to write oth­er nov­els.

The rest of the par­ty, that first Blooms­day, was made up of the poet Patrick Kavanagh, the young crit­ic Antho­ny Cronin, a den­tist named Tom Joyce, who as Joyce’s cousin rep­re­sent­ed the fam­i­ly inter­est, and John Ryan, the painter and busi­ness­man who owned and edit­ed the lit­er­ary mag­a­zine Envoy. The idea of the Blooms­day cel­e­bra­tion had been Ryan’s, grow­ing nat­u­ral­ly out of a spe­cial Joyce issue of his mag­a­zine, for which O’Nolan had been guest edi­tor.

Ryan had engaged two horse drawn cabs, of the old fash­ioned kind, which in Ulysses Mr. Bloom and his friends dri­ve to poor Pad­dy Dig­nam’s funer­al. The par­ty were assigned roles from the nov­el. Cronin stood in for Stephen Dedalus, O’Nolan for his father, Simon Dedalus, John Ryan for the jour­nal­ist Mar­tin Cun­ning­ham, and A.J. Lev­en­thal, the Reg­is­trar of Trin­i­ty Col­lege, being Jew­ish, was recruit­ed to fill (unkown to him­self accord­ing to John Ryan) the role of Leopold Bloom.

Kavanagh and O’Nolan began the day by decid­ing they must climb up to the Martel­lo tow­er itself, which stood on a gran­ite shoul­der behind the house. As Cronin recalls, Kavanagh hoist­ed him­self up the steep slope above O’Nolan, who snarled in anger and laid hold of his ankle. Kavanagh roared, and lashed out with his foot. Fear­ful that O’Nolan would be kicked in the face by the poet­’s enor­mous farmer’s boot, the oth­ers has­tened to res­cue and restrain the rivals.

With some dif­fi­cul­ty O’Nolan was stuffed into one of the cabs by Cronin and the oth­ers. Then they were off, along the seafront of Dublin Bay, and into the city.

In pubs along the way an enor­mous amount of alco­hol was con­sumed, so much so that on Sandy­mount Strand they had to relieve them­selves as Stephen Dedalus does in Ulysses. Tom Joyce and Cronin sang the sen­ti­men­tal songs of Tom Moore which Joyce had loved, such as Silent, O Moyle. They stopped in Irish­town to lis­ten to the run­ning of the Ascot Gold Cup on a radio in a bet­ting shop, but even­tu­al­ly they arrived in Duke Street in the city cen­tre, and the Bai­ley, which John Ryan then ran as a lit­er­ary pub.

They went no fur­ther. Once there, anoth­er drink seemed more attrac­tive than a long tour of Joycean slums, and the siren call of the long van­ished plea­sures of Night­town.

Cel­e­brants of the first Blooms­day pause for a pho­to in Sandy­mount, Dublin on the morn­ing of June 16, 1954. From left are John Ryan, Antho­ny Cronin, Bri­an O’Nolan (a.k.a. Flann O’Brien), Patrick Kavanagh and Tom Joyce, cousin of James Joyce.

Note: This post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in 2013–likely before many of you start­ed to fre­quent our site. So it’s time to bring it back.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Vladimir Nabokov Cre­ates a Hand-Drawn Map of James Joyce’s Ulysses

On Blooms­day, Hear James Joyce Read From his Epic Ulysses, 1924

Stephen Fry Explains His Love for James Joyce’s Ulysses

Hen­ri Matisse Illus­trates 1935 Edi­tion of James Joyce’s Ulysses

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

Take Free Philosophy Courses from The Institute of Art and Ideas: From “The Meaning of Life” to “Heidegger Meets Van Gogh”

in Online Courses, Philosophy | June 14th, 2017

Back in 2014, we told you about how The Insti­tute of Art and Ideas (IAI) launched IAI Acad­e­my — an online edu­ca­tion­al plat­form that fea­tures free cours­es from world-lead­ing schol­ars “on the ideas that mat­ter.” They have since put online a num­ber of phi­los­o­phy cours­es, many striv­ing to address ques­tions that affect our lives today. We’ve list­ed a num­ber of them below, and added them to our list of 150+ Free Online Phi­los­o­phy cours­es. For a com­plete list of IAI Acad­e­my cours­es, vis­it this page.

• Hei­deg­ger Meets Van Gogh: Art, Free­dom and Tech­nol­o­gy — Web video — Simon Glendin­ning, Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics
• Dark Mat­ter of the Mind — Web video — Daniel Everett, Bent­ley Uni­ver­si­ty
• Fear and Trem­bling in the 21st Cen­tu­ry — Web video — Clare Carlisle, King’s Col­lege Lon­don
• Knowl­edge and Ratio­nal­i­ty — Web Video — Corine Besson, Uni­ver­si­ty of Sus­sex
• Life, Mean­ing and Moral­i­ty — Web video — Christo­pher Hamil­ton, King’s Col­lege, Lon­don
• Minds, Moral­i­ty and Agency — Web video — Mark Row­lands, Uni­ver­si­ty of Mia­mi
• On Roman­tic Love — Web video — Berit Bro­gaard, Uni­ver­si­ty of Mia­mi
• The Human Com­pass — Web video — Janne Teller
• The Mean­ing of Life — Web video — Steve Fuller, Uni­ver­si­ty of War­wick
• The Uni­verse As We Find It — Web video — John Heil, Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty in St Louis
• Unveil­ing Real­i­ty — Web video — Bryan Roberts, Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics
• Why the World Does Not Exist — Web video — Markus Gabriel, Freiburg Insti­tute of Advanced Study.

Note: The cours­es are all free. How­ev­er, to take a course you will need to cre­ate a user account.

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:

Take First-Class Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es Any­where with Free Oxford Pod­casts

The Great War and Mod­ern Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Online Course

Søren Kierkegaard: A Free Online Course on the “Father of Exis­ten­tial­ism”

Intro­duc­tion to Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Yale Course

Allen Ginsberg’s Howl Manuscripts Now Digitized & Put Online, Revealing the Beat Poet’s Creative Process

in Poetry | June 7th, 2017

Some­how you have to imag­ine that, from its very open­ing — “I saw the best minds of my gen­er­a­tion destroyed by mad­ness, starv­ing hys­ter­i­cal naked, drag­ging them­selves through the negro streets at dawn look­ing for an angry fix” — Allen Gins­berg’s poem “Howl” sim­ply emerged ful­ly formed and launched itself per­ma­nent­ly into Amer­i­can cul­ture. But deep down we all know that no work, poet­ic or oth­er­wise, actu­al­ly does that, no mat­ter how wide­ly read it becomes, no mat­ter how vivid­ly it cap­tures a time and a place, no mat­ter how many gen­er­a­tions look to it as an exam­ple. Gins­berg had to work on “Howl,” and now, thanks to Stan­ford Libraries, we have an up-close way to see some of that work in progress.

“From its first pub­lic read­ing at the Six Gallery in San Fran­cis­co in Octo­ber 1955 to the noto­ri­ous obscen­i­ty tri­al that fol­lowed in the wake of its first pub­li­ca­tion in 1956,” writes Stan­ford Cura­tor for Amer­i­can and British Lit­er­a­ture Rebec­ca Wing­field, “the poem is indeli­bly tied to the Beat Gen­er­a­tion and their cri­tique of the staid morals and cus­toms of Eisen­how­er-era Amer­i­ca.”

Before all that, it began with a sev­en-page first draft writ­ten in Gins­berg’s North Beach apart­ment, gained a sec­ond sec­tion before that now-leg­endary Six Gallery read­ing, and final­ly, after Gins­berg tried out dif­fer­ent com­po­si­tion­al tech­niques and fol­lowed dif­fer­ent sug­ges­tions in search of a way to cap­ture Amer­i­ca as he saw it, evolved into a long poem com­pris­ing three sec­tions and a foot­note, pub­lished along­side oth­er works by City Lights Books as the paper­back that made him famous.

“The ‘Howl’ man­u­scripts and type­scripts in the Allen Gins­berg Papers,” which you can view online at Stan­ford Libraries, “doc­u­ment the for­mal devel­op­ment of the poem, trac­ing Ginsberg’s exper­i­ments with dif­fer­ent struc­tures and word­ing in each of the poem’s sec­tions.” These pre-“Howl” “Howl“s, man­u­scripts and type­scripts both, retain the cor­rec­tions and anno­ta­tions that reveal details about Gins­berg’s dis­tinc­tive cre­ative process. But giv­en the most well-known aspect of the poem’s con­struc­tion, that each line lasts as long as exact­ly one breath, a full under­stand­ing can only come from hear­ing it as well as read­ing it. You can hear Gins­berg’s ear­li­est record­ed per­for­mance of the poem, at Port­land’s Reed Col­lege (alma mater of Gins­berg’s Beat col­league Gary Sny­der) in 1956, at the top of the post, and a lat­er read­ing on record here. (The text of the com­plet­ed poem can be viewed here.) Look and lis­ten close­ly, and you’ll find that a cri de coeur, espe­cial­ly as Gins­berg cried it, demands delib­er­ate crafts­man­ship.

See the Howl man­u­scripts online here.

via Stan­ford News/Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First Record­ing of Allen Gins­berg Read­ing “Howl” (1956)

Allen Gins­berg Reads His Famous­ly Cen­sored Beat Poem, “Howl” (1959)

James Fran­co Reads a Dream­i­ly Ani­mat­ed Ver­sion of Allen Ginsberg’s Epic Poem ‘Howl’

Allen Ginsberg’s “Celes­tial Home­work”: A Read­ing List for His Class “Lit­er­ary His­to­ry of the Beats”

Allen Gins­berg Record­ings Brought to the Dig­i­tal Age. Lis­ten to Eight Full Tracks for Free

Allen Ginsberg’s Hand­writ­ten Poem For Bernie Sanders, “Burling­ton Snow” (1986)

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.

Lou Reed Creates a List of the 10 Best Records of All Time

in Music | May 22nd, 2017

If you want to write, most every writer will tell you, you’ve got to read, read, read, and read. “Read more than you write,” advis­es Teju Cole. Even great film­mak­ers like Wern­er Her­zog and Aki­ra Kura­sawa cite copi­ous read­ing as a pre­req­ui­site for their pri­mar­i­ly visu­al medi­um. But what about music? What advice might we hope to receive about the art of writ­ing mem­o­rable, cul­tur­al­ly sig­nif­i­cant songs? Lis­ten, lis­ten, lis­ten, and lis­ten, per­haps.

One of the great­est of rock and roll greats, Lou Reed, had overt lit­er­ary ambi­tions, formed dur­ing his years as an Eng­lish major at Syra­cuse Uni­ver­si­ty, where he stud­ied under poet Del­more Schwartz. “Hubert Sel­by, William Bur­roughs, Allen Gins­berg and Del­more Schwartz,” he once told Spin, “To be able to achieve what they did, in such lit­tle space, using such sim­ple words. I thought if you could do what those writ­ers did and put it to drums and gui­tar, you’d have the great­est thing on earth.”

The­mat­i­cal­ly, Reed accom­plished this, bring­ing the same vio­lence, ten­der­ness, and street­wise deca­dence to his work as his lit­er­ary heroes did to theirs. But for­mal­ly, he drew on anoth­er bat­tery of influ­ences: clas­sic soul, doo wop, rhythm and blues, folk, jazz, and ear­ly rock and roll. Crib­bing from all these gen­res dur­ing his long career, Reed dis­played a seem­ing­ly effort­less mas­tery of arche­typ­al Amer­i­can pop music.

Unlike Leonard Cohen—another lit­er­ary song­writer drawn to life’s dark­er themes—Reed did not leave col­lege and start pub­lish­ing poet­ry. In 1964, he moved to New York to begin work as an in-house song­writer for Pick­wick Records, soak­ing up the music around him through his pores, trans­mut­ing it into his own warped take on ear­ly hits like his dance craze, “The Ostrich,” which includ­ed the line “put your head on the floor and have some­body step on it.”

As weird as Reed was even then, he wrote immense­ly catchy tunes and even­tu­al­ly inspired sev­er­al thou­sand punk, post-punk, alter­na­tive, and indie song­writ­ers with the nov­el idea that one could make dan­ger­ous, shock­ing music with sim­ple, catchy—even bubblegum—melodies. Per­haps no one had as great an effect on post-60s rock, but Reed’s own influ­ences drew solid­ly from the fifties and before, as par­tial­ly evi­denced in his own hand, in a scrawled list of “best albums of all time,” which he sub­mit­ted for a 1999 mag­a­zine inter­view.

1. Change of the Cen­tu­ry—Ornette Cole­man
2. Tilt—Scott Walk­er / Belle—Al Green / Any­thing by Jim­my Scott
3. Blood on the Tracks—Bob Dylan
4. Lit­tle Richard’s Spe­cial­ty Series
5. Hank Williams’ Sin­gles
6. Har­ry Smith Anthol­o­gy
7. Does Your House Have Lions—Roland Kirk
8. “Stay with Me Baby”—Lor­raine Elli­son
9. “Moth­er”—John Lennon
10.“Oh Super­man”—Lau­rie Ander­son & Unit­ed States

The list, tran­scribed above, includes the three-vol­ume Spe­cial­ty Ses­sions at num­ber 4, a com­pre­hen­sive omnibus of Lit­tle Richard hits. Below it is Hank Williams’ 3‑disc sin­gles col­lec­tion, and fur­ther down, at twice the size, Har­ry Smith’s enor­mous Anthol­o­gy of Amer­i­can Folk Music. By far, the bulk of Reed’s sug­ges­tions saw release before he ever put pen to paper and came up with “The Ostrich.” We’re just peek­ing into the six­ties with Ornette Cole­mans’ Change of the Cen­tu­ry, at num­ber one.

But you’ll also note that, tied at num­ber two with Al Green’s Belle and “Any­thing by Jim­my Scott” (mak­ing his list of ten come out to 13), we have Scott Walker’s bizarre, exper­i­men­tal 1995 mas­ter­piece Tilt (hear “Farmer in the City” fur­ther up), a return from obliv­ion for the reclu­sive six­ties croon­er and an album, writes All­mu­sic, “on a plateau some­where between Nico’s Mar­ble Index and Lou Reed’s Met­al Machine Music.” Ever mod­est (he once claimed, “my bull­shit is worth more than oth­er people’s dia­monds”), Reed was acute­ly aware of his own piv­otal place in 20th cen­tu­ry music, though he does refrain from list­ing one of his own records. He ends instead with the puls­ing, trance-like sin­gle “Oh Super­man,” by his roman­tic and musi­cal part­ner, Lau­rie Ander­son.

Who knows how seri­ous­ly Reed took this assign­ment, giv­en how much he could be “cir­cum­spect about the mate­ri­als and meth­ods of his art” in his often con­fronta­tion­al pub­lic state­ments. That same year, VH1 polled sev­er­al jour­nal­ists and “esteemed musi­cians,” writes the music chan­nel, on their choice of the 100 great­est songs of rock and roll. “Nat­u­ral­ly we approached Reed, who sent his choic­es back via fax. In true icon­o­clast form, instead of list­ing out his 100 favorite songs, he picked just eight.” Only two of the artists from his top ten appear here: Lor­raine Elli­son and Al Green. See his hand-writ­ten bal­lot above, and the eight songs list­ed below.

1. “Stay With Me” by Lor­raine Elli­son
2.“Out­cast” by Eddie and Ernie
3. “Lovin’ You Too Long” by Otis Red­ding
4. “Riv­er Deep Moun­tain High” by Ike & Tina Turn­er
5. + 6. “Geor­gia Boy” and “Belle” by Al Green
7. “That’s Alright Mama” by Elvis Pres­ley
8. “I Can’t Stand the Rain” by Ann Pee­bles

via @LouReed

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Ornette Cole­man Col­lab­o­rate with Lou Reed, Which Lou Called “One of My Great­est Moments”

Lou Reed and Lau­rie Anderson’s Three Rules for Liv­ing Well: A Short and Suc­cinct Life Phi­los­o­phy

Lou Reed Reads Del­more Schwartz’s Famous Sto­ry “In Dreams Begin Respon­si­bil­i­ties”

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

Hear 2,000 Recordings of the Most Essential Jazz Songs: A Huge Playlist for Your Jazz Education

in Music | May 17th, 2017

If you were to ask me “What is jazz?” I wouldn’t pre­sume to know the answer, and I’m not sure any sin­gle com­po­si­tion exists to which one could point to as an ide­al type. Maybe the only thing I’m cer­tain of when it comes to jazz is—to quote Wal­lace Stevens—“it must change.”

Of course, there’s an incred­i­bly rich his­to­ry of jazz, broad­ly known, espe­cial­ly to those who have seen Ken Burns’ expan­sive doc­u­men­tary. I’d also rec­om­mend the excel­lent jazz writ­ing of Amiri Bara­ka, Stan­ley Crouch, or Philip Larkin. For the young, we might con­sult Langston Hugh­es’ illus­trat­ed jazz his­to­ry. And maybe every­one should read Charles Min­gus’ Gram­my-nom­i­nat­ed essay “What is a Jazz Com­pos­er?” in which the con­trar­i­an genius writes, “each jazz musi­cian is sup­posed to be a com­pos­er. Whether he is or not, I don’t know.”

Min­gus the icon­o­clast argued for tear­ing up the text even as he sought a clas­si­cal pedi­gree for jazz. His wish was part­ly grant­ed by the influ­ence of jazz on com­posers like Leonard Bern­stein, who sought to answer the ques­tion “What is Jazz?” in a 1956 spo­ken-word LP. The ten­sion between jazz as a com­po­si­tion­al or whol­ly impro­vi­sa­tion­al art seems to resound through­out the form, in all of its many guis­es and vari­a­tions. But one thing I think every jazz musi­cian knows is this: Stan­dards, a com­mon com­pendi­um of songs in the tra­di­tion.

You’ve got to know the rule­book (or the fake­book, at the least), before you can throw it out the win­dow. Even some of the most inno­v­a­tive jazz artists who more or less invent­ed their own scales, modes, and harmonies—like Cecil Tay­lor and Ornette Cole­man—either stud­ied at con­ser­va­to­ry or paid their dues as side­men play­ing oth­er people’s songs. Jazz—Coleman once told Jacques Der­ri­da—is “a con­ver­sa­tion with sounds.” Its under­ly­ing gram­mar comes from the Stan­dards.

Until fair­ly recent­ly, the only way one could get a prop­er edu­ca­tion in the stan­dards was on the job. Crit­ic, jazz his­to­ri­an, and pianist Ted Gioia writes as much in his com­pre­hen­sive 2012 ref­er­ence, The Jazz Stan­dards: A Guide to the Reper­toire. Gioia’s “edu­ca­tion in this music was hap­pen­stance and hard earned.” He writes, “aspir­ing musi­cians today can hard­ly imag­ine how opaque the art form was just a few decades ago—no school I attend­ed had a jazz pro­gram or even offered a sin­gle course on jazz.”

How times have changed. These days, if you can get in, you can take grad­u­ate-lev­el class­es taught by the greats, such as Her­bie Han­cock and Wayne Short­er at UCLA. Hun­dreds more less-famous jazz musi­cian pro­fes­sors stand at the ready in music depart­ments world­wide or at the renowned Berklee Col­lege of Music.

But for those auto­di­dacts out there, Gioia—who has served on the fac­ul­ty at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty and been called “one of the out­stand­ing music his­to­ri­ans in America”—offers an excep­tion­al guide to the Stan­dards, one we can not only read, but also, thanks to Jim Hig­gins of the Jour­nal Sen­tinel, lis­ten to, in the Spo­ti­fy playlist above. (If you need Spo­ti­fy’s free soft­ware, down­load it here.) In a com­pan­ion essay, Hig­gins describes the process of com­pil­ing “as many of the per­for­mances [Gioia] rec­om­mend­ed” in his com­men­tary on 250 jazz stan­dards.

Gioia names over 2,000 dif­fer­ent per­for­mances of those 250 stan­dards, and the playlist con­tains near­ly all of them. You’ll find, for exam­ple, “sev­er­al dif­fer­ent record­ings of ‘In a Sen­ti­men­tal Mood’ by the com­pos­er (includ­ing one with John Coltrane), as well as ver­sions by Son­ny Rollins, Art Tatum, McCoy Tyn­er, Abdul­lah Ibrahim and Bud­dy Tate, and Chris Pot­ter.” While the playlist is “not a com­plete reflec­tion of Gioia’s rec­om­men­da­tions,” giv­en that cer­tain artists’ work can­not be streamed, “there’s a lot of music here”—a whole lot—“spanning a cen­tu­ry.”

The expe­ri­ence of lis­ten­ing to this incred­i­ble library will not be com­plete with­out some con­text. Gioia’s book con­tains a “short his­tor­i­cal and musi­cal essay” on each of the 250 songs and he isn’t shy about offer­ing inci­sive crit­i­cal com­men­tary. Oth­er than going to music school or join­ing a tour­ing band, I can’t think of a bet­ter way to learn the Stan­dards.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear What is Jazz?: Leonard Bernstein’s Intro­duc­tion to the Great Amer­i­can Art Form (1956)

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

Langston Hugh­es Presents the His­to­ry of Jazz in an Illus­trat­ed Children’s Book (1955)

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

Japanese Computer Artist Makes “Digital Mondrians” in 1964: When Giant Mainframe Computers Were First Used to Create Art

in Art, Technology | May 12th, 2017

In the 21st cen­tu­ry, most of us have tried our hand at mak­ing some kind of dig­i­tal art or anoth­er — even if only touch­ing up cell­phone pho­tos of our­selves — but imag­ine the task of pro­duc­ing it 50 years ago. To make dig­i­tal art before the world had bare­ly heard the term “dig­i­tal” required access to a main­frame com­put­er, those huge­ly expen­sive hulks that filled rooms and print­ed out reams and reams of paper data, and the con­sid­er­able tech­ni­cal know-how to oper­ate it.

But the achieve­ment also, to go by the very ear­ly exam­ple of Hiroshi Kawano, required a back­ground in phi­los­o­phy. A grad­u­ate of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tokyo major­ing in aes­thet­ics and the phi­los­o­phy of sci­ence before becom­ing a research assis­tant at that school and then a lec­tur­er at the Tokyo Met­ro­pol­i­tan Col­lege of Air-Tech­nol­o­gy, Kawano mar­shaled his knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence to cre­ate these “dig­i­tal Mon­dri­ans,” so described because of their com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed resem­blance to that Dutch painter’s most rig­or­ous­ly angu­lar, solid­ly col­ored work.

Kawano had drawn inspi­ra­tion, accord­ing to a Deutsche Welle arti­cle on his dona­tion of his archives to Ger­many’s Cen­ter for Media Art, from “the writ­ings of the Ger­man philoso­pher Max Bense, who pro­posed (among oth­er things) the idea of mea­sur­ing beau­ty using sci­en­tif­ic rules. At the same time, Kawano heard that sci­en­tists were using com­put­ers to cre­ate music. Putting the two togeth­er, he decid­ed to explore the pos­si­bil­i­ty of using a com­put­er to pro­gram beau­ty.”

Doing so required “writ­ing pro­grams in com­plex com­put­er lan­guages, then labo­ri­ous­ly punch­ing these pro­grams into hun­dreds of cards before feed­ing them into the machine.” And “while the design of his works pro­duced dur­ing the 1960s might look sim­ple — they’re not. They are the result of com­plex math­e­mat­i­cal algo­rithms pro­grammed so that, although Kawano sets the rules for how the pic­ture could look, he can’t deter­mine exact­ly what will appear on the print­er.”

Just before Kawano passed away in 2012, the ZKM (or Cen­ter for Art and Media Karl­sruhe), cel­e­brat­ed his pio­neer­ing dig­i­tal art with the exhi­bi­tion “The Philoso­pher at the Com­put­er,” some of which you can see in this Ger­man-lan­guage video clip. “The ret­ro­spec­tive empha­sizes Kawano’s spe­cial role in the cir­cle of pio­neers in ‘com­put­er art,’ ” says its intro­duc­tion. “He was nei­ther artist, who dis­cov­ered the com­put­er as a new pro­duc­tion medi­um and theme, nor engi­neer who came to art via the new machine, but a philoso­pher, who left his desk for the com­put­er cen­ter to exper­i­ment with the­o­ret­i­cal mod­els.”

Can com­put­ers cre­ate art? Can they even be used to cre­ate art? These ques­tions now have prac­ti­cal­ly obvi­ous answers in the affir­ma­tive, but back in 1964 when Kawano pro­duced the first of these pieces, work­ing through tri­al and error with the advice of the curi­ous staff of his uni­ver­si­ty’s com­put­er cen­ter, the ques­tions must have sound­ed impos­si­bly philo­soph­i­cal. Today, writes Over­head Com­part­men­t’s Clau­dio Rivera, Kawano’s dig­i­tal Mon­dri­ans “sug­gest them­selves as an odd­ly ephemer­al tran­si­tion in the nexus of tech­nol­o­gy and art. The famil­iar col­ors and forms are flash-frozen in crys­talline pix­e­la­tion, almost as if seized up in the final, over­heat­ed throes of a sud­den­ly-too-old com­put­er.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Andy Warhol’s Lost Com­put­er Art Found on 30-Year-Old Flop­py Disks

Watch the Dutch Paint “the Largest Mon­dri­an Paint­ing in the World”

Arti­fi­cial Neur­al Net­work Reveals What It Would Look Like to Watch Bob Ross’ The Joy of Paint­ing on LSD

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.