Hear Jeremy Irons Read the Poetry of T.S. Eliot (Available for a Limited Time)
We may have come nearly to the end of January already, but we can still call 2017 a new year — at least until we’ve listened to the poetry of T.S. Eliot to properly ring it in. “There’s surely no better poet than Eliot to help us confront the problem of finding meaning in a world where old certainties are being troubled,” says Martha Kearney, host of BBC Radio 4’s New Year’s series celebrating his work.
“Our lives are so busy now that we need some help from the season to just take stock, both of where we’ve been and where we might like to go to,” says the first episode’s guest, novelist Jeanette Winterson. We need to inhabit “that inward moment that poetry’s so good at,” and that Eliot made entirely his own. The bulk of that broadcast comprises a reading of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by Jeremy Irons, surely one of the poet’s ideal living interpreters. (Note: you can stream all of the episodes in the series here.)
Irons reads more in the second, which includes a discussion with Winterson and Anthony Julius, Chair of Law and the Arts and University College London, about the opening of “Gerontion” and the “ugly references” made in Eliot’s other poems. The discussion in the third, in which Irons takes on Eliot’s immortal “The Waste Land,” looks for the source of the power of its “poetry of fragments” with former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and Scots Makar (something like a Poet Laureate of Scotland) Jackie Kay.
“The Waste Land” continues as a subject in part four, as its guest, the actress Fiona Shaw, has drawn acclaim for her own reading of the poem, but the Irons section of the broadcast offers various other selections, including “The Hollow Men,” “Ash Wednesday,” and “Journey of the Magi.” Finally, in part five, Kearney and Rory Stewart, Member of Parliament and man of letters, talk about and hear Irons deliver Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” whose language Stewart memorized on a walk through Nepal and which he later used during his political campaign.
This poetic, conversational, and performative radio feast comes to nearly four hours (listen to all of the episodes here), but you’ve got only the next six days to stream it. Otherwise you’ll have to wait until Radio 4’s next, as yet announced calendar-appropriate celebration of Eliot. They’ve used his work to refresh audiences after a troubling year; perhaps they’ll use it again to get us through the cruelest month of this one.
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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.
Read More...Watch Eero Saarinen: The Architect Who Saw the Future: Free for a Limited Time
A quick heads up. For the next few days (until January 27) you can watch Eero Saarinen: The Architect Who Saw the Future, the latest installment from the PBS American Masters series. Here’s the PBS blurb for the episode.
Best known for designing National Historic Landmarks such as St. Louis’ iconic Gateway Arch and the General Motors Technical Center, Saarinen also designed New York’s TWA Flight Center at John F. Kennedy International Airport, Yale University’s Ingalls Rink and Morse and Ezra Stiles Colleges, Virginia’s Dulles Airport, and modernist pedestal furniture like the Tulip chair.
In the film, Saarinen’s son, Eric Saarinen, “visits the sites of his father’s work on a cathartic journey, shot in 6K with the latest in drone technology that showcases the architect’s body of timeless work for the first time. The documentary also features rare archival interviews with Eero and his second wife, The New York Times art critic Aline Saarinen, as well as letters and quotations from Aline’s memoirs voiced respectively by Peter Franzén and Blythe Danner.”
You can get more background on the film here. Copies of the film can be purchased online here.
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Read More...
12 Million Declassified CIA Documents Now Free Online: Secret Tunnels, UFOs, Psychic Experiments & More
Image by Duffman, via Wikimedia Commons
“The United States Government has not yet made any official reply to the Soviet and East German allegations and protests concerning the 300-yard tunnel that American intelligence operatives are said to have built underneath the border between West and East Berlin for espionage purposes,” says a Washington Post article from 1956 headlined “The Tunnel of Love.” The Communists’ excitement about their discovery even had them conducting “special propaganda tours through the tunnel and to have exhibited the wiretapping and other recording apparatus that the Americans are supposed to have installed inside it.”
This amusing chapter of Cold War history might have seemed, to America at the time, like the kind of foiled effort — though one of an ingenuity admired on both sides of the Iron Curtain — best buried at the back of the espionage archives. But now, thanks to an executive order requiring the Central Intelligence Agency to release “nonexempt historically valuable records 25 years or older” as well as the dogged efforts of journalist Michael Best, you can read over 12 million pages of previously classified documents at CREST, the CIA Records Search Tool. In addition to the files on the “Berlin Tunnel” operation, it offers copious material on much else, such as vintage espionage techniques like writing with invisible ink and undetectably opening sealed letters and CIA research into spiritualist healing, telepathy, and other psychic powers.
For quite some time before now, you technically could have looked up all of this information yourself, provided you felt like going to the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and pulling it up on one of the four computers made available to do so — but only between the hours of 9 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. The fact that you can now do it from the comfort of your browser owes in large part to the efforts of Best, who raised $15,000 on Kickstarter to go manually print out all (or at least some) of those twelve million pages and upload them to the internet, thereby prodding the CIA to save the ink-and-paper money and just do it themselves.
Some of the project’s backers, no doubt, wanted specifically to see what the CIA’s archives have to say about space aliens, a stock of information you may recall that we featured here just last year. “The publication of the files represents a potential motherlode of background material for researchers, journalists and curious hobbyists,” write the New York Times’ Daniel Victor and Erin McCann, not long before admitting that “most of the files are pretty boring,” a result of “regular bureaucratic collation.” But then, that kind of methodical gathering and organizing of information has long constituted most of the work of national intelligence: even the short-lived “Tunnel of Love” gathered enough data to keep its processors busy for years after it became a Soviet tourist spot.
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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.
Read More...David Bowie Offers Advice for Aspiring Artists: “Go a Little Out of Your Depth,” “Never Fulfill Other People’s Expectations”
January 10th, 2017–David Bowie died one year ago today. Revisiting my own memories of him, it so often seemed impossible that he could grow old, much less pass away, even as we all watched him age over the decades. He did it much better than most, that’s for sure, and grew into the role of elder statesman with incredible poise and grace, though he also didn’t let that role be his last one.
What else should we have expected from the artist who wrote “Changes”—the definitive creative statement on facing time and mortality—at the age of 24, before he’d even achieved the international superstardom that Ziggy Stardust brought him? Bowie was always an old soul. “It’s not age itself,” he told the BBC in 2002. “Age doesn’t bother me. So many of my heroes were older guys.… I embrace that aspect of it.” And so, in his later years, he became an older guy hero to millions.
In 1997, after his drum and bass-inspired Earthling, Bowie gave an interview in which he offered the timeless wisdom to younger artists in the clip above:
Never play to the gallery.… Never work for other people in what you do. Always remember that the reason that you initially started working was that there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you co-exist with the rest of society.… I think it’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people’s expectations.
It’s advice we’ve likely heard some version of before—perhaps even from one of Bowie’s own older-guy heroes, William S. Burroughs (here by way of Patti Smith). But I’ve never heard it stated so succinctly and with so much conviction and feeling. We naturally associate David Bowie with artful inauthenticity, with a succession of masks. He encouraged that impression at every turn, even telling a graduating Berklee College of Music class in 1999, “it seemed that authenticity and the natural form of expression wasn’t going to be my forte.”
But in hindsight, and especially in the rapt, posthumous attention paid to Bowie’s final work, Blackstar, it can seem that his embrace of poses was often itself a pose. Bowie has always been candid, in various moments of self-reflection, about his missteps and excesses. But not to have taken the risks he did, not to have placed himself in uncomfortable situations, would have meant impoverishing his work. “The other thing I would say,” he goes on, “is that if you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you are capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. When you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
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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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Learn Islamic & Indian Philosophy with 107 Episodes of the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps Podcast
We post copious resources for the study of philosophy on this site, such that you can obtain a full college-level survey understanding of the subject on your own by taking the many free classes, listening to the many free lectures and podcasts, and reading the many free texts, ebooks and commentaries you’ll find here. But several of our posts have met with a similar reader objection: where is the Eastern philosophy?
The question could also be put to almost any academic department of philosophy. One answer I’ve often heard dismisses it altogether. Philosophy, some say, developed in the West, first in ancient Greece, then in Rome, the succeeding Christian empire, and the secular age that followed. It is a European pursuit and tradition. Other culturally partial critics, who wish to appear enlightened, are willing to concede that “the world’s Muslims,” as Richard Dawkins tweeted a few years back, “did great things in the Middle Ages,” at least providing a critical bridge between the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Scholasticism.
Islamic philosophers like Avicenna and Averroes kept in dialogue with the Greeks after Europe had forgotten them, and preserved the only work of Aristotle we have. But that was then. What have they done for us lately? Attitudes like this, argues philosophy professor Peter Adamson, are prejudices with little basis in fact, and part of the reason for a dearth of high-quality, accessible Eastern philosophy resources in English. Adamson, who has made significant contributions to the study of philosophy online with his podcast, History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, fills in the gap with his series on Islamic and Indian philosophy in several parts.
Formative Period—25 episodes
Philosophy in Andalusia—25 episodes
Eastern Traditions—25 episodes
Beginning with philosophy in the Islamic world in Episode 171, “Eastern Traditions,” at the top, Adamson covers “influential thinkers of the twelfth century like Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī and Suhrawardī, focusing on their legacy in the Eastern realms of central Asia and Persia, moving on to the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires, and ending with developments in twentieth century philosophy.” Against dismissive claims like Dawkins’ that these centuries were “a time of intellectual and scientific decline in Islamic civilization,” Adamson argues they were “in fact a time of remarkable achievement in fields like logic and astronomy as well as the various disciplines of philosophy.” See all three parts of the Islamic Philosophy series above.
Adamson shares the introduction to Indian philosophy, just above, with NYU’s Jonardon Ganeri, and the two lay out a case for the tradition as “primarily a way of life and search for the highest good.” As usual, Adamson brings on guest scholars and provides a list for further reading on the podcast’s site. And as usual, his historical frameworks are rigorous and very well-researched. This series breaks into two main categories (below). The second part of the series focuses on the development of a formal tradition, the “sūtra (literally ‘thread’)… a genre of writing in which ideas were set forth in brief, aphoristic form. Various sūtras were taken as authoritative and foundational for numerous schools of Indian thought, which devoted further commentaries to the sūtras.”
Origins—17 episodes
Age of Sutra—15 episodes
As he has done with many of his other series, Adamson has adapted the Islamic Philosophy podcasts in book form, Philosophy in the Islamic World: A history of philosophy without any gaps, Volume 3. His even-handedness and erudition make this series a joy to listen to, though he’d also encourage us to read the philosophers he discusses, if possible. If you’re new to reading philosophy, or to Adamson’s podcast, you’d do well to read his recently posted All 20 ‘Rules for History of Philosophy,’ which he has brought together in one place as “guidelines encapsulating what I see as good practice in studying the history of philosophy.” (Rule 8: “Read the whole text.”)
Many of these guidelines rub up against the current orthodoxies, assumptions and, frankly, snobberies of some contemporary academic philosophy. Among these, “Rule 14: Take religion seriously” and “Rule 15: Be broadminded about what counts as ‘philosophy.’” And for those who not only dismiss but also embrace entire cultures’ philosophical traditions for one defining reason—Indian thought is “spiritual” or “non-violent”; Islamic thought is “tolerant” or “intolerant”—Adamson offers Rule 18: “don’t essentialize.” As becomes clear on even a cursory listen to the podcasts in these series, what we tend to believe about “non-western” philosophy operates far in excess of what most of us actually know about it.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Why We Need to Teach Kids Philosophy & Safeguard Society from Authoritarian Control
Several friends and relatives of mine teach philosophy, writing, and critical thinking to undergraduate college students. And many of those people have confessed their dismay in recent months. Threats and McCarthyite attacks on higher educators have increased (and in places like Turkey escalated to full-on war against academics). Many educators are also filled with doubt about the meaning of their profession. How can they stand in the pulpits of higher learning, many wonder, extolling the virtues of clear expression, logic, reason and evidence, ethics, etc., when the world outside the classroom seems to be telling their students none of these things matter?
But then there are some with a more optimistic bent, who see more reason than ever to extol said virtues, with even more rigor and urgency. Philosophy improves our mental and emotional lives in every possible situation. While millions of people in supposedly democratic countries have decided to put their trust in autocratic, authoritarian leaders, millions more have determined to resist the curtailing of civil liberties, democratic rights, and social progress. Educators see the tools of language and critical thinking as integral to those of political action and civil disobedience. And not only do college students need these tools, argue the executives of UK’s Philosophy Foundation, but children do as well, and for many of the same reasons.
Created in 2007 to conduct “philosophical enquiry in schools, communities, and workplaces,” the Foundation works with both children and adults. In the Aeon Magazine video above, COO and CEO Emma and Peter Worley explain the special appeal of philosophy for kids, making the case for teaching “thinking well” at a young age. Rather than lecturing on the history of ideas or presenting a thesis, their approach involves getting children “thinking about things together, working together collaboratively, coming up with counter-examples… really doing philosophy in the true sense.” Young students see problems for themselves and apply their own philosophical solutions, using the nascent reasoning faculties most of us can access as soon as we’ve reached school age.
The Foundation has shown that the teaching of philosophy to children “has an impact on affective skills and also on cognitive skills.” In other words, kids become more emotionally intelligent as they become better thinkers, developing what Socrates called “the silent dialogue” with themselves. These benefits are goods in their own right, argues Emma Worley, and as valuable as the arts in our lives. “We need philosophy because it’s a human thing to do,” she says, “to think, to reason, to reflect.” But there is a decided social utility as well. Philosophy can “safeguard against the ways in which education might sometimes be used to control people,” says Peter Worley: “If we have something like philosophy within the system, something that steps outside that system and asks questions about it, then we have something to protect us” against authoritarian means of thought and language control.
via Aeon
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Watch Nina Simone Sing the Black Pride Anthem, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” on Sesame Street (1972)
In her brief 34 years, Lorraine Hansberry left a formidable legacy as the first African-American and the youngest playwright to win the coveted New York Critics’ Circle Award for A Raisin in the Sun. (It was also the first play by a black writer to be produced on Broadway.) What’s more, Hansberry was a committed civil rights campaigner, from a family who had fought housing segregation in the Supreme Court. She herself organized with Martin Luther King, Jr., Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, James Baldwin, and many others; wrote for Paul Robeson’s Freedom; and joined the first lesbian civil rights organization, the Daughters of Bilitis, contributing to their magazine, The Ladder.
Hansberry was indeed “Young, Gifted, and Black,” which also happens to be the title of an autobiography published after her death from pancreatic cancer in 1965, and of a posthumously produced play. But the title has maybe most famously lived on in a tribute to Hansberry by her friend, the prodigiously gifted Nina Simone. Among Simone’s many mentors, Hansberry “offered her a special bond,” writes Claudia Roth Pierpont at The New Yorker, and pushed her into activism. “We never talked about men or clothes,” Simone wrote in her memoir, I Put a Spell on You, “It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution—real girls’ talk.” After the 1963 Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Simone dedicated herself to the movement with a passion for justice and liberation.
And yet, “for every lyric about lynchings and the struggle for equality,” notes the Blanton Museum, “Simone would write another about freedom and black pride, reinforcing her belief that African American men and women should know the beauty of their blackness.” As she put it in an interview, “My job is to somehow make [black people] curious enough, or persuade them, by hook or crook, to get them more aware of themselves and where they came from and what is already there.” What was already there included the work of friends like James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, from whom Simone drew “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” one of the “most triumphant anthems of the black pride movement of the 1970s.”
At the top of the post, you can see Simone sing the song to four young kids on a 1972 episode of Sesame Street, bringing them the news: “There’s a world waiting for you.” As she announces in the song itself, “We must begin to tell our young” the importance of their culture and history. The young responded with gratitude for Simone’s advocacy. In the short Sesame Street clip, the four adorable kids look on admiringly, and one girl sings along. The inspiration for the song came not only from Hansberry’s influence on Simone’s political consciousness, but also from a photograph of Hansberry she saw in the New York Times.
The picture, “caught hold of me,” Simone says in the brief interview clip above, “I remember getting a feeling in my body.… I knew what I wanted it to say in essence.… I really think that she gave it to me.” After the short interview, you can see Simone perform the song in a 1969 session at Morehouse College, to rapturous applause from the audience. “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” has been covered by duo Bob & Marcia, Donny Hathaway, Aretha Franklin, and—most recently, Solange Knowles. Though none of these artists have had the intimate, personal connection to the lyrics and their inspiration that Nina Simone did, all of them have helped transmit her message. Even in the face of gross injustice and seemingly implacable opposition to equality and civil rights, “There’s a world waiting for you / This is a quest that’s just begun.”
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...A History of Philosophy in 81 Video Lectures: A Free Course That Explores Philosophy from Ancient Greece to Modern Times
Above, you can watch 81 video lectures tracing the history of philosophy, moving from Ancient Greece to modern times. Arthur Holmes presented this influential course at Wheaton College for decades, and now it’s online for you. The lectures are all streamable above, or available through this YouTube playlist.
Philosophers covered in the course include: Plato, Aquinas, Hobbes Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Sartre and more.
A History of Philosophy has been added to our list of Free Online Philosophy courses, a subset of our meta collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
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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Watch a 2‑Year-Old Solve Philosophy’s Famous Ethical “Trolley Problem” (It Doesn’t End Well)
“A runaway train is heading towards five workers on a railway line. There’s no way of warning, but you’re standing near a lever that operates some points. Switch the points, and the train goes down a spur. Trouble is, there’s another worker on that bit of track too, but it’s one fatality instead of five. Should you do that?” Here we have the trolley problem, which since its first articulation in 1967 by Philippa Foot has become the classic example of an ethical dilemma as well as perhaps the best known thought experiment in all of philosophy.
This explanation of the trolley problem comes from one of the Harry Shearer-narrated BBC- and Open University-made animations previously featured here on Open Culture. The short video above takes a different approach, not just using a children’s train set to illustrate it but then putting the famous question to the child himself.
“Uh oh, Nicholas,” says the two-year-old’s father from behind the camera, “this train is going to crash into these five people! Should we move the train to go this way, or should we let it go that way?” The elegance of the toddler’s solution, implemented without hesitation, must be seen to be appreciated.
The father, E. J. Masicampo of Wake Forest University, researches “the effortful mental processes that seem to separate humans from other animals: resisting temptations and impulses, reasoning and decision making, thinking about and simulating non-present events, and making plans for the future.” Among his professional goals, he lists working toward “a theory of the human consciousness” by uncovering “how conscious thought contributes to human functioning in light of its apparent limitations.” He’s taken on a problem even harder than the one with the trolleys; perhaps young Nicholas, what with his demonstrated gift of “thinking outside the box,” invaluable in the philosophical disciplines, can offer some assistance.
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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.
Read More...From Caligari to Hitler: A Look at How Cinema Laid the Foundation for Tyranny in Weimar Germany
When I first got into film criticism and was finally in a college town with a decent used bookshop, Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film was in that first huge batch of books I bought to place on my shelf. I had just watched The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (watch it online here) for the first time, and had seen the book referenced often. Alas, it also sat on my shelf unread, along with some other thick critical tomes.
But needless to say, I guess I’m okay with that now, for Kyle Kallgren’s 16 minute distillation of Kracauer’s influential 1947 book does an amazing job of explaining the critic’s main thesis–that the kinds of heroes and villains, along with the kind of stories that were successful in Weimar-era Germany, were laying the psychological groundwork for the rise of fascism and Hitler. Because films are a mass medium that take a mass of people to make and consume, they reveal the subconscious mind of its society. Kracauer wasn’t saying that the creators were anti-Semitic or Nazi sympathizers. In fact, Weimar’s best known directors fled the Nazis and made films in America. But there was something in the air, so to speak, that in retrospect made Hitler seem like an inevitable real-world outcome of these various forces.
Kracauer’s thesis was influenced by the writers and philosophers of the Frankfurt School, who posited that a “culture industry” of mass-produced art helped reinforce a stamping out of identity. Anti-Marxists may call this passé, but we still talk about these ideas whenever there’s a think piece about violence in the movies reflecting a violent culture—but usually the wrong way around, suggesting that violent movies create violent people. Or look at how each version of Batman is seen as reflecting concerns of the time in which it is made.
As Kallgren says in his brief video description, “I felt a strong need to make this one.” After he sums up Kracauer’s work he tracks the paths of those directors and stars of Weimar Germany—I forgot that the sleepwalking Cesare of Caligari was played by the same actor who plays the Nazi major in Casablanca—he turns to America, circa 2016, in particular post-election. This is not explicitly to compare a certain person to Hitler, going full Godwin. But rather, Kallgren looks to our own blockbusters, our stories, our own culture industry to see what greater narrative is going on here. The contradictions come thick and fast at the end, and will provide much to debate.
As a side note, Kallgren’s work shows the power of video essays to bring alive and resuscitate major works of cultural criticism. We hope he and others start to adapt other works in the future.
Many of the films referenced in this video essay– like Caligari, Nosferatu and Metropolis–can be found in our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
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