A Crash Course on Psychology: A 30-Part Video Series from Hank Green

in Psychology | September 18th, 2014

Nov­el­ist, edu­ca­tor, and vlog­ger John Green has drawn a lot of press late­ly, includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to a New York­er pro­file by Mar­garet Tal­bot, in the wake of the film ver­sion of his pop­u­lar young-adult nov­el The Fault in Our Stars. But we here at Open Cul­ture can say we fea­tured him before that mag­a­zine of cul­tur­al record did: in 2012 we post­ed his Crash Course in World His­to­ry, and last Octo­ber, his Crash Course on Lit­er­a­ture. If you keep up with this site, you prob­a­bly know Green less as a com­ing-of-age-tragedy-writ­ing “teen whis­per­er” (in the words of the New York­er) than as the mile-a-minute, con­stant­ly wise­crack­ing, but nev­er­the­less whole­some teacher you nev­er had. You may not know that he has an equal­ly edu­ca­tion­al broth­er named Hank, who first came to inter­net promi­nence in a back-and-forth video series of John’s devis­ing called Vlog­broth­ers, which Tal­bot describes as “less a con­ver­sa­tion than an extend­ed form of par­al­lel play.”

Now you can find Hank, pos­sessed of a sim­i­lar­ly fast and fun­ny deliv­ery style, pre­pared to inform you on a whole range of oth­er sub­jects, teach­ing crash cours­es just like John does. At the top of the post, we have his 30-part Crash Course in Psy­chol­o­gy, in which he cov­ers every­thing about the study of the human mind from sen­sa­tion and per­cep­tion to the the­o­ry of the homuncu­lus to remem­ber­ing and for­get­ting to lan­guage to depres­sion. (You can watch the series from start to fin­ish above.) Psy­chol­o­gy has long ranked among the most pop­u­lar under­grad­u­ate majors in Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ties, and giv­en human­i­ty’s ever-increas­ing curios­i­ty (and grad­u­al­ly accu­mu­lat­ing knowl­edge) about the work­ings of its brains, that should­n’t come as a sur­prise. But those of us who felt com­pelled to pick a more “prac­ti­cal” course of study back in col­lege, can now turn to Hank Green, who offers us a sur­pris­ing­ly thor­ough psy­cho­log­i­cal ground­ing with only about five hours of “lec­tur­ing” — much less than the major would have tak­en us, and with many more corny jokes. Per­haps the course will help you under­stand why we laugh at them any­way.

via Devour

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy Cours­es

A Crash Course in World His­to­ry

Crash Course on Lit­er­a­ture: Watch John Green’s Fun Intro­duc­tions to Gats­by, Catch­er in the Rye & Oth­er Clas­sics

How To Think Like a Psy­chol­o­gist: A Free Online Course from Stan­ford

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

“The Civil War and Reconstruction,” a New MOOC by Pulitzer-Prize Winning Historian Eric Foner

in History, Online Courses | September 16th, 2014

It end­ed in ear­ly April 149 years ago. But it begins again on Wednes­day. Colum­bia University’s “The Civ­il War and Recon­struc­tion,” the lat­est sal­vo in the MOOC wars, opens Wednes­day, Sep­tem­ber 17, for free to the world – a 27-week series of three cours­es on the non­prof­it edX plat­form taught by Eric Fon­er, the university’s Pulitzer-Prize win­ning his­to­ry pro­fes­sor and one of the world’s lead­ing experts on 19^th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca. You can enroll for free here.

“If you want to know where the world you’re liv­ing in today comes from,” Fon­er says in the series pro­mo­tion­al trail­er,  “you need to know about the Civ­il War era.“  Head­line issues of the moment – black-white race rela­tions first among them, but also more gen­er­al issues of equal jus­tice under law, the pow­er and prop­er role of gov­ern­ment, and how law­mak­ers should deal with extrem­ism, ter­ror, and vio­lence – all find roots in this con­flict and its after­math, a four-year war that saw approx­i­mate­ly 700,000 Amer­i­cans killed, and scores more injured, at the hands of their coun­try­men.

Foner’s gen­er­al his­to­ry books on the sub­ject have sold thou­sands of copies – his new work on the under­ground rail­road pub­lish­es in Jan­u­ary – and he’s the author of the lead­ing Amer­i­can his­to­ry text­book taught in U.S. high schools.  He’s crossed over from acad­eme into main­stream media in oth­er ways – with appear­ances on The Dai­ly Show with John Stew­art, The Col­bert Report, The Char­lie Rose Show, Bill Moyers’s Jour­nal, and more.

Columbia’s effort in free his­to­ry edu­ca­tion on screen dates back decades – as Fon­er makes clear in the pro­mo video. Columbia’s his­to­ry pro­fes­sors Richard Hof­s­tadter and James Patrick Shen­ton reached thou­sands of peo­ple in their books and lec­tures, with Shen­ton even teach­ing a 76-part sur­vey course on WNET Pub­lic Tele­vi­sion called “The Rise of the Amer­i­can Nation” – which pre­miered in 1963!  But many of the great lec­tur­ers from this uni­ver­si­ty – lit­er­ary crit­ics and schol­ars Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling, art his­to­ri­an Mey­er Shapiro, and oth­ers – were nev­er filmed sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly, and Fon­er, who will for­mal­ly retire from teach­ing in a few years, was deter­mined to ensure his cours­es were record­ed, well-pro­duced, and pre­served for pos­ter­i­ty – and avail­able as edu­ca­tion­al resources to all.

The series, gen­er­ous­ly sup­port­ed by Columbia’s provost, his­to­ri­an John Coatsworth, is pro­duced by the Colum­bia Cen­ter for New Media Teach­ing and Learn­ing (CCNMTL), coin­ci­den­tal­ly cel­e­brat­ing its 15th anniver­sary this year. It’s the university’s first set of online cours­es on edX, after more than a dozen MOOCs on Cours­era – and with more to come on both.  The course promis­es some tan­ta­liz­ing new per­spec­tives on the world then and now – as the two high­lights reels show above.

Come & enlist – oops! — that is, enroll – today!

Peter B. Kauf­man works at the Colum­bia Cen­ter for New Media Teach­ing and Learn­ing and is Exec­u­tive Pro­duc­er of Intel­li­gent Tele­vi­sion and YouTube’s Intel­li­gent Chan­nel. 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of the World in 46 Lec­tures From Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty

Down­load 78 Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es: From Ancient Greece to The Mod­ern World

What Books Do Writ­ers Teach?: Zadie Smith and Gary Shteyngart’s Syl­labi from Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty

Flannery O’Connor Explains the Limited Value of MFA Programs: “Competence By Itself Is Deadly”

in Education, Writing | August 25th, 2014

Flan­nery O’Connor once wrote, “because fine writ­ing rarely pays, fine writ­ers usu­al­ly end up teach­ing, and the [MFA] degree, how­ev­er worth­less to the spir­it, can be expect­ed to add some­thing to the flesh.” That phrase “worth­less to the spir­it” con­tains a great deal of the neg­a­tive atti­tude O’Connor expressed toward the insti­tu­tion­al­iza­tion of cre­ative writ­ing in MFA pro­grams like the one she helped make famous at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa. The ver­biage comes from an essay she wrote for the alum­ni mag­a­zine of the Geor­gia Col­lege for Women after com­plet­ing her degree in 1947, quot­ed in the Chad Har­bach-edit­ed col­lec­tion of essays MFA vs. NYC. Although fresh from the pro­gram, O’Connor was already on her way to lit­er­ary suc­cess, hav­ing pub­lished her first sto­ry, “The Gera­ni­um,” the year pre­vi­ous and begun work on her first nov­el, Wise Blood. Nev­er­the­less, her insights on the MFA are not par­tic­u­lar­ly san­guine.

On the one hand, she writes with char­ac­ter­is­tic dark humor, writ­ing pro­grams can serve as alter­na­tives to “the poor house and the mad house.” In grad­u­ate school, “the writer is encour­aged or at least tol­er­at­ed in his odd ways.” An MFA pro­gram may offer some small respite from the lone­li­ness and hard­ship of the writ­ing life, and ulti­mate­ly pro­vide a cre­den­tial to be “pro­nounced upon by his future employ­ers should they chance to be of the acad­e­my.” But the time and effort (not to men­tion the expense, unless one is ful­ly fund­ed) may not be worth the cost, O’Connor sug­gests. Her own pro­gram at Iowa was “designed to cov­er the writer’s tech­ni­cal needs […], and to pro­vide him with a lit­er­ary atmos­phere which he would not be able to find else­where. The writer can expect very lit­tle else.”

Lat­er, in her col­lec­tion of essays Mys­tery and Man­ners, O’Connor expressed sim­i­lar sen­ti­ments. Con­clud­ing a lengthy dis­cus­sion on the very lim­it­ed role of the teacher of cre­ative writ­ing, she con­cludes that “the teacher’s work is large­ly neg­a­tive […] a mat­ter of say­ing ‘This doesn’t work because…’ or ‘This does work because….’” Remark­ing on the com­mon obser­va­tion that uni­ver­si­ties sti­fle writ­ers, O’Con­nor writes, “My opin­ion is that they don’t sti­fle enough of them. There’s many a best-sell­er that could have been pre­vent­ed by a good teacher.” Cre­ative writ­ing teach­ers may nod their heads in agree­ment, and shake them in frus­tra­tion. But we should return to that phrase “worth­less to the spir­it,” for while MFA pro­grams may turn out “com­pe­tent” writ­ers of fic­tion, O’Con­nor admits, they can­not pro­duce “fine writ­ing”:

In the last twen­ty years the col­leges have been empha­siz­ing cre­ative writ­ing to such an extent that you almost feel that any idiot with a nick­el’s worth of tal­ent can emerge from a writ­ing class able to write a com­pe­tent sto­ry. In fact, so many peo­ple can now write com­pe­tent sto­ries that the short sto­ry as a medi­um is in dan­ger of dying of com­pe­tence. We want com­pe­tence, but com­pe­tence by itself is dead­ly. What is need­ed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writ­ing class.

O’Connor prob­a­bly over­es­ti­mates the degree to which “any idiot” can learn to write with com­pe­tence, but her point is clear. She wrote these words in the mid-fifties, in an essay titled “The Nature and Aim of Fic­tion.” As Harbach’s new essay col­lec­tion demon­strates, the debate about the val­ue of MFA programs—which have expand­ed expo­nen­tial­ly since O’Connor’s day—has not by any means been set­tled. And while there are cer­tain­ly those writ­ers, she notes wry­ly, who can “learn to write bad­ly enough” and “make a great deal of mon­ey,” the true artist may be in the same posi­tion after the MFA as they were before it, com­pelled to “chop a path in the wilder­ness of his own soul; a dis­heart­en­ing process, life­long and lone­some.”

via Every­thing That Ris­es

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William S. Bur­roughs Teach­es a Free Course on Cre­ative Read­ing and Writ­ing (1979)

Toni Mor­ri­son, Nora Ephron, and Dozens More Offer Advice in Free Cre­ative Writ­ing “Mas­ter Class”

Flan­nery O’Connor: Friends Don’t Let Friends Read Ayn Rand (1960)

Flan­nery O’Connor Reads ‘Some Aspects of the Grotesque in South­ern Fic­tion’ (c. 1960)

Flan­nery O’Connor’s Satir­i­cal Car­toons: 1942–1945

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

Tap Into Timeless Wisdom: Download 36 Free Courses in Ancient History, Literature & Philosophy

in Education, History, Literature, Online Courses, Philosophy | August 14th, 2014

I know, it’s a dat­ed ref­er­ence now, but since I still watch the remade Bat­tlestar Galac­ti­ca series on Net­flix, the mys­ti­cal refrain—“All of this has hap­pened before and will hap­pen again”–still seems fresh to me. At any rate, it’s fresh­er than the clichéd “his­to­ry repeats itself.” How­ev­er you phrase it, the tru­ism looks more and more like a gen­uine truth the more one stud­ies ancient his­to­ry, lit­er­a­ture, and phi­los­o­phy. The con­flicts and con­cerns that feel so of the moment also occu­pied the minds and lives of peo­ple liv­ing hun­dreds, and thou­sands, of years ago, and what­ev­er you make of that, it cer­tain­ly helps put the present into per­spec­tive. Can we ben­e­fit from study­ing the wis­dom, and the fol­ly, of the ancients? To this ques­tion, I like to turn to an intro­duc­to­ry essay C.S. Lewis penned to the work of a cer­tain church father:

Every age has its own out­look. It is spe­cial­ly good at see­ing cer­tain truths and spe­cial­ly liable to make cer­tain mis­takes. We all, there­fore, need the books that will cor­rect the char­ac­ter­is­tic mis­takes of our own peri­od. And that means the old books. […] If we read only mod­ern books […] where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggra­vate the error with which we are already dan­ger­ous­ly ill. The only pal­lia­tive is to keep the clean sea breeze of the cen­turies blow­ing through our minds, and this can be done only by read­ing old books.

I may dis­agree with Lewis about many things, includ­ing that “clean sea breeze” of his­to­ry, but I take to heart his point about read­ing the ancients to mit­i­gate our mod­ern bias­es and shine light on our blind spots. To that end, we present links to sev­er­al excel­lent online cours­es on the ancients from insti­tu­tions like Yale, NYU, and Stan­ford, free to peruse or take in full. See our mas­ter list—Free Cours­es in Ancient His­to­ry, Lit­er­a­ture & Phi­los­o­phy—for 36 qual­i­ty offer­ings. As always, cer­tain cours­es pro­vide more resources than oth­ers, and a few only offer their lec­tures through iTunes. These are deci­sions course admin­is­tra­tors have made, not us! Even so, these free resources are invalu­able to those wish­ing to acquaint, or reac­quaint, them­selves with the study of ancient human­i­ties.

You can, for exam­ple, take a course on Ancient Israel from NYU’s Daniel Flem­ing (Free Online Video & Course Info — Free Online Video), study Plato’s Laws with the renowned Leo Strauss from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go (Free Online Audio) or Socrates ( Free Online Audio) with that university’s equal­ly renowned Alan Bloom. Take a course called “Ancient Wis­dom and Mod­ern Love” (Syl­labus - Free iTunes Video — Free Online Video) with Notre Dame’s David O’Connor or study Virgil’s Aeneid ( Free iTunes Audio) with Susan­na Braund, whose lec­tures were record­ed at Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies. You’ll find many more ancient his­to­ry, lit, and phi­los­o­phy classes—36 in all, includ­ing five more Leo Strauss Pla­to seminars—on our meta list: Free Cours­es in Ancient His­to­ry, Lit­er­a­ture & Phi­los­o­phy. Read, study, repeat.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 55 Free Online Lit­er­a­ture Cours­es: From Dante and Mil­ton to Ker­ouac and Tolkien

Learn 47 Lan­guages Online for Free: Span­ish, Chi­nese, Eng­lish & More

Ita­lo Calvi­no Offers 14 Rea­sons We Should Read the Clas­sics

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

Hear Roland Barthes Present His 40-Hour Course, La Préparation du roman, in French (1978–80)

in Literature, Online Courses, Philosophy | July 30th, 2014

A key fig­ure in such aca­d­e­m­ic areas as semi­ol­o­gy, struc­tural­ism, and post-struc­tural­ism, and author of such the­o­ret­i­cal clas­sics as Mytholo­gies, The Plea­sure of the Text, and S/Z, Roland Barthes is famil­iar to stu­dents across the human­i­ties. His pro­lif­ic out­put encom­passed books on lit­er­ary the­o­ry, phi­los­o­phy, lin­guis­tics, anthro­pol­o­gy, and the­o­ret­i­cal essays on pho­tog­ra­phy, music, fash­ion, sports, and love. In addi­tion to his wide-rang­ing writ­ings, Barthes lec­tured in the U.S., Switzer­land, and at the Col­lège de France, where he was elect­ed Chair of Semi­ol­o­gy in 1977.

Barthes’ 1978–1980 lec­ture course at the Col­lège de France—titled The Prepa­ra­tion of the Nov­el—has been pre­served in an Eng­lish trans­la­tion by Kate Brig­gs. Speak­ers of French, how­ev­er, can hear Barthes him­self deliv­er the lec­ture series in audio archived at Ubuweb. Lis­ten to the first ses­sion from Decem­ber, 1978 at the top of the post, and hear the fifth, with some musi­cal accom­pa­ni­ment, above.

Deliv­ered short­ly after pub­li­ca­tion of the sem­i­nal texts men­tioned above, these lec­tures, writes edi­tor Nathalie Léger in her intro­duc­tion, “form a diptych—the two parts can be accessed inde­pen­dent­ly of each oth­er, yet each one is indis­pens­able to the oth­er.” The last two lec­ture cours­es Barthes taught at the Col­lège de France, both, Léger writes, rep­re­sent not a sys­tem­at­ic the­o­ry, but “the pere­gri­na­tion of a quest,” explor­ing “one ques­tion and one ques­tion only: that of lit­er­ary utopia.” Such prob­ing inves­ti­ga­tions pro­pelled Barthes’ entire career, and opened up new crit­i­cal paths for a great many thinkers who dared to trace his wind­ing intel­lec­tu­al steps and often intense­ly per­son­al explo­rations.

La Pré­pa­ra­tion du roman will be added to our list of Free Online Lit­er­a­ture Cours­es, part of our larg­er col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Michel Fou­cault Deliv­er His Lec­ture on “Truth and Sub­jec­tiv­i­ty” at UC Berke­ley, In Eng­lish (1980)

Susan Son­tag Lec­tures On Lit­er­ary Pornog­ra­phy (1964)

Wal­ter Kaufmann’s Clas­sic Lec­tures on Niet­zsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre (1960)

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

The First Animations of Mike Judge, Creator of Beavis and Butt-head & Office Space (1991)

in Animation, Comedy | July 22nd, 2014

Mike Judge first became famous for cre­at­ing the crude and crude­ly drawn car­toon series Beav­is and Butt-head (find com­plete episodes online here). The show was about two high school burnouts whose run­ning com­men­tary on the lat­est music videos was so bone­head­ed and bald­ly vul­gar that you couldn’t help but laugh. Pris­sy cul­ture war­riors point­ed to the show as yet anoth­er symp­tom of America’s decline while legions of stoned col­lege stu­dents glee­ful­ly tuned in. In 1998, Judge made the jump to live action fea­tures with Office Space, a hilar­i­ous, if uneven, take on the banal­i­ties of Amer­i­can cor­po­rate cul­ture. It’s one of those movies that no one saw in the the­ater but, thanks to cable, every­one of a cer­tain age can quote. (“If you can come in on Sat­ur­day, that would be great.”) Cur­rent­ly, he is the cre­ator for the hit HBO series Sil­i­con Val­ley.

Judge start­ed in ani­ma­tion after work­ing for a spell as first a com­put­er pro­gram­mer and then a blues bassist. After see­ing an ani­ma­tion cel on dis­play in a local movie the­ater in 1989, he ran out and bought a Bolex 16mm cam­era and start­ed mak­ing movies. Two years lat­er, he was pro­duc­ing odd, thor­ough­ly unpol­ished ani­mat­ed shorts that made the rounds in film fes­ti­vals, even­tu­al­ly launch­ing a career in Hol­ly­wood.

Above is a short about Mil­ton, the neb­bish sta­pler-obsessed cubi­cle dweller who was the gen­e­sis for Office Space. Stephen Root played him in the movie. His boss is the same pas­sive-aggres­sive prick as in the movie though played with less unc­tu­ous zeal as Gary Cole’s per­for­mance. The short proved to be such a suc­cess that MTV’s Liq­uid Tele­vi­sion ordered more.

Next is The Honky Prob­lem, about an emo­tion­al­ly unbal­anced coun­try singer named ‘Inbred Jed.’ He wants you to know that he is real­ly, real­ly, real­ly hap­py to be play­ing at a remote trail­er park­er pop­u­lat­ed by a bunch of char­ac­ters out of a David Lynch movie. In fact, if it weren’t for the jokey voice over at the end, this short is creepy enough to almost pass for an episode of Lynch’s own ani­mat­ed series, Dum­b­land.

And there’s this short also from 1991 called sim­ply Huh?, which pits the shrill against the obliv­i­ous.

You can find more Ani­ma­tions in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dum­b­land, David Lynch’s Twist­ed Ani­mat­ed Series (NSFW)

Watch All of Ter­ry Gilliam’s Mon­ty Python Ani­ma­tions in a Row

Tim Burton’s The World of Stain­boy: Watch the Com­plete Ani­mat­ed Series

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

Sun Ra’s Full Lecture & Reading List From His 1971 UC Berkeley Course, “The Black Man in the Cosmos”

in Music, Philosophy, UC Berkeley | July 21st, 2014

A pio­neer of “Afro­fu­tur­ism,” band­leader Sun Ra emerged from a tra­di­tion­al swing scene in Alaba­ma, tour­ing the coun­try in his teens as a mem­ber of his high school biol­o­gy teacher’s big band. While attend­ing Alaba­ma Agri­cul­tur­al and Mechan­i­cal Uni­ver­si­ty, he had an out-of-body expe­ri­ence dur­ing which he was trans­port­ed into out­er space. As biog­ra­ph­er John Szwed records him say­ing, “my whole body changed into some­thing else. I land­ed on a plan­et that I iden­ti­fied as Sat­urn.” While there, aliens with “lit­tle anten­na on each ear. A lit­tle anten­na on each eye” instruct­ed him to drop out of col­lege and speak through his music. And that’s just what he did, chang­ing his name from Her­man Blount and nev­er look­ing back.

Whether you believe that sto­ry, whether Sun Ra believes it, or whether his entire per­sona is a the­atri­cal put-on should make no dif­fer­ence. Because Sun Ra would be a vision­ary either way. Com­bin­ing Afro­cen­tric sci­ence fic­tion, eso­teric and occult phi­los­o­phy, Egyp­tol­ogy, and, with his “Arkestra,” his own brand of free jazz-futur­ism that has no equal on earth, the man is tru­ly sui gener­is. In 1971, he served as artist-in-res­i­dence at UC Berke­ley and offered a spring semes­ter lec­ture, African-Amer­i­can Stud­ies 198, also known as “Sun Ra 171,” “The Black Man in the Uni­verse,” or “The Black man in the Cos­mos.” The course fea­tured read­ings from—to name just a few—theosophist Madame Blavatsky, French philoso­pher Con­stan­tin Fran­cois de Chas­se­boeuf, black Amer­i­can writer and poet Hen­ry Dumas, and “God,” whom the cos­mic jazz the­o­rist report­ed­ly list­ed as the author of The Source Book of Man’s Life and Death (oth­er­wise known as the King James Bible).

Now we have the rare oppor­tu­ni­ty to hear a full lec­ture from that class, thanks to Ubu.com. Lis­ten to Sun Ra spin his intri­cate, bizarrely oth­er­world­ly the­o­ries, drawn from his per­son­al phi­los­o­phy, pecu­liar ety­molo­gies, and idio­syn­crat­ic read­ings of reli­gious texts. Hear­ing him speak is a lit­tle like hear­ing him play, so be pre­pared for a lot of free asso­ci­a­tion and jar­ring, unex­pect­ed jux­ta­po­si­tions. Szwed describes a “typ­i­cal lec­ture” below:

Sun Ra wrote bib­li­cal quotes on the board and then ‘per­mu­tat­ed’ them—rewrote and trans­formed their let­ters and syn­tax into new equa­tions of mean­ing, while mem­bers of the Arkestra passed through the room, pre­vent­ing any­one from tap­ing the class. His lec­ture sub­jects includ­ed Neo­pla­ton­ic doc­trines; the appli­ca­tion of ancient his­to­ry and reli­gious texts to racial prob­lems; pol­lu­tion and war; and a rad­i­cal rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of the Bible in light of Egyp­tol­ogy.

Luck­i­ly for us, some sly stu­dent cap­tured one of those lec­tures on tape.

For more of Pro­fes­sor Ra’s spaced out pre­sen­ta­tion, see the Helsin­ki inter­view above, also from 1971. And if you decide you need your own edu­ca­tion in “Sun Ra 171,” see the full read­ing list from his Berke­ley course below, cour­tesy of the blog New Day.

The Egypt­ian Book of the Dead

Radix

Alexan­der His­lop: Two Baby­lons

The Theo­soph­i­cal works of Madame Blavatsky

The Book of Oah­spe

Hen­ry Dumas: Ark of Bones

Hen­ry Dumas: Poet­ry for My Peo­ple eds. Hale Charfield & Eugene Red­mond, Car­bon­dale: South­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­si­ty Press 1971

Black Fire: An Anthol­o­gy of Afro-Amer­i­can Writ­ing, eds. Leroi Jones & Lar­ry Neal, New York: William Mor­row 1968

David Liv­ingston: Mis­sion­ary Trav­els

Theodore P. Ford: God Wills the Negro

Rut­ledge: God’s Chil­dren

Sty­lus, vol. 13, no. 1 (Spring 1971), Tem­ple Uni­ver­si­ty

John S. Wil­son: Jazz. Where It Came From, Where It’s At, Unit­ed States Infor­ma­tion Agency

Yosef A. A. Ben-Jochan­nan: Black Man of the Nile and His Fam­i­ly, Alk­ibu Ian Books 1972

Con­stan­tin Fran­cois de Chas­se­boeuf, Comte de Vol­ney: The Ruins, or, Med­i­ta­tion on the Rev­o­lu­tions of Empires, and the Law of Nature, Lon­don: Pio­neer Press 1921

The Source Book of Man’s Life and Death (Ra’s descrip­tion; = The King James Bible)

Pjotr Demi­anovitch Ous­pen­sky: A New Mod­el of the Uni­verse. Prin­ci­ples of the Psy­cho­log­i­cal Method in Its Appli­ca­tion to Prob­lems of Sci­ence, Reli­gion and Art, New York: Knopf 1956

Fred­er­ick Bod­mer: The Loom of Lan­guage. An Approach to the Mas­tery of Many Lan­guages, ed. Lancelot Hog­ben, New York: Nor­ton & Co. 1944

Black­ie’s Ety­mol­o­gy

Count­less oth­er free cours­es from UC Berke­ley can be found in our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds and audio cour­tesy of Sen­si­tive Skin Mag­a­zine

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Her­bie Han­cock Presents the Pres­ti­gious Nor­ton Lec­tures at Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty: Watch Online

Son­ic Youth Gui­tarist Thurston Moore Teach­es a Poet­ry Work­shop at Naropa Uni­ver­si­ty: See His Class Notes (2011)

Space Jazz, a Son­ic Sci-Fi Opera by L. Ron Hub­bard, Fea­tur­ing Chick Corea (1983)

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

Ayn Rand Trashes C.S. Lewis in Her Marginalia: He’s an “Abysmal Bastard”

in Books, Philosophy, Religion | July 15th, 2014

Images via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

The polit­i­cal inter­sec­tion of Ayn Ran­di­an lib­er­tar­i­ans and Evan­gel­i­cal con­ser­v­a­tives is a baf­fling phe­nom­e­non for most of us out­side the Amer­i­can right. It’s hard to rec­on­cile the athe­ist arch-cap­i­tal­ist and despis­er of social wel­fare with, for exam­ple, the Ser­mon on the Mount. But hey, mixed mar­riages often work out, right? Well, as for Rand her­self, one would hard­ly find her sym­pa­thet­ic to reli­gion or its expos­i­tors at any point in her career. Take her sound lash­ing of writer, schol­ar, and lay the­olo­gian C.S. Lewis, intel­lec­tu­al hero of Protes­tant Chris­tian­i­ty. (Wheaton Col­lege hous­es his per­son­al library, and there exists not only a C.S. Lewis Insti­tute, but also a C.S. Lewis Foun­da­tion.) Lewis’ The Abo­li­tion of Man (1943), while osten­si­bly a text on edu­ca­tion, also pur­ports, like Aquinas’ Sum­ma The­o­log­i­ca, to expound the prin­ci­ples of nat­ur­al law and objec­tive moral val­ue. Rand would have none of it.

Reli­gion jour­nal First Things brings us excerpts from the edit­ed col­lec­tion, Ayn Rand’s Mar­gin­a­lia: Her crit­i­cal com­ments on the writ­ings of over 20 authors. In it, Rand gloss­es Lewis’s Abo­li­tion of Man with sav­age feroc­i­ty, call­ing the author an “abysmal bas­tard,” “cheap, dri­v­el­ling non-enti­ty” [sic], and “abysmal scum!” The screen­shot above (Lewis left, Rand’s anno­ta­tions right) from the First Things’ blog post offers a typ­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Rand’s tone through­out, and includes some par­tic­u­lar­ly elab­o­rate insults.

The C.S. Lewis Foun­da­tion com­ments that Lewis “prob­a­bly would not have approved of the lev­el of ven­om, but he prob­a­bly would not have liked Rand’s phi­los­o­phy much either.” Anoth­er Chris­t­ian aca­d­e­m­ic has suc­cess­ful­ly squared an appre­ci­a­tion for both Rand and Lewis, but writes crit­i­cal­ly of Rand, who “seems to have inter­pret­ed Lewis’s book as a Lud­dite screed against sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy,” part of her “ten­den­cy to car­i­ca­ture her oppo­nents.” Cer­tain­ly no one ever accused her of sub­tle­ty. “It’s pret­ty clear,” our pro­fes­sor con­tin­ues, “that when show­ing stu­dents how to engage in schol­ar­ly dis­course, Ayn Rand should not be the mod­el.” No, indeed, but how she would thrive on the Inter­net.

Read more at First Things, and down­load a PDF of the Rand-anno­tat­ed Lewis excerpts here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Audio: Down­load the Com­plete Chron­i­cles of Nar­nia by C.S. Lewis

The Only Known Record­ings of C.S. Lewis (1944–1948)

Watch Hand-Drawn Ani­ma­tions of 7 Sto­ries & Essays by C.S. Lewis

Flan­nery O’Connor: Friends Don’t Let Friends Read Ayn Rand (1960)

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

Flannery O’Connor’s Satirical Cartoons: 1942–1945

in Comics/Cartoons, Creativity, Literature, Writing | July 10th, 2014

Sci-fi author B.C. Kowal­s­ki recent­ly post­ed a short essay on why the advice to write every day is, for lack of a suit­able euphemism, “bull­shit.” Not that there’s any­thing wrong with it, Kowal­s­ki main­tains. Only that it’s not the only way. It’s said Thack­er­ay wrote every morn­ing at dawn. Jack Ker­ouac wrote (and drank) in binges. Every writer finds some method in-between. The point is to “do what works for you” and to “exper­i­ment.” Kowal­s­ki might have added a third term: diver­si­fy. It’s worked for so many famous writ­ers after all. James Joyce had his music, Sylvia Plath her art, Hem­ing­way his machis­mo. Faulkn­er drew car­toons, as did his fel­low South­ern writer Flan­nery O’Connor, his equal, I’d say, in the art of the Amer­i­can grotesque. Through both writ­ers ran a deep vein of pes­simistic humor, oblique, but detectable, even in scenes of high­est pathos.

O’Connor’s visu­al work, writes Kel­ly Ger­ald in The Paris Review, was a “way of see­ing she described as part of the ‘habit of art’”—a way to train her fic­tion writer’s eye. Her car­toons hew close­ly to her autho­r­i­al voice: a lone sar­don­ic observ­er, supreme­ly con­fi­dent in her assess­ments of human weak­ness. Per­haps a bet­ter com­par­i­son than Faulkn­er is with British poet and doo­dler Ste­vie Smith, whose bleak vision and razor-sharp wit sim­i­lar­ly cut through moun­tains of… shall we say, bull­shit. In both pen & ink and linoleum cuts, O’Connor set dead­pan one-lin­ers against images of pre­ten­sion, con­for­mi­ty, and the banal­i­ty of col­lege life. In the car­toon at the top, she seems to mock the pur­suit of cre­den­tials as a refuge for the social­ly dis­af­fect­ed. Above, a cam­paign­er for a low-lev­el office deploys bom­bas­tic pseu­do-Lenin­ist rhetoric, and in the car­toon below, a cranky char­ac­ter escapes a horde of iden­ti­cal WAVES.

O’Connor was an intense­ly visu­al writer with, Ger­ald writes, a “nat­ur­al pro­cliv­i­ty for cap­tur­ing the humor­ous char­ac­ter of real peo­ple and con­crete sit­u­a­tions,” ful­ly cred­i­ble even at their most extreme (as in the increas­ing­ly hor­rif­ic self-lac­er­a­tions of Wise Blood’s Hazel Motes). She began draw­ing at five and pro­duced small books and sketch­es as a child, even­tu­al­ly pub­lish­ing car­toons in almost every issue of her high-school and college’s news­pa­pers and year­books. Her alma mater Geor­gia Col­lege, then known as Geor­gia State Col­lege for Women, has pub­lished a book fea­tur­ing her car­toons from her under­grad­u­ate years, 1942–45.

More recent­ly, Ger­ald edit­ed a col­lec­tion called Flan­nery O’Connor: The Car­toons for Fan­ta­graph­ics. In his intro­duc­tion, artist Bar­ry Moser describes in detail the tech­nique of her linoleum cuts, call­ing them “coarse in tech­ni­cal terms.” And yet, “her rudi­men­ta­ry han­dling of the medi­um notwith­stand­ing, O’Connor’s prints offer glimpses into the work of the writer she would become” with their “lit­tle O’Connor petards aimed at the walls of pre­ten­tious­ness, aca­d­e­mics, stu­dent pol­i­tics, and stu­dent com­mit­tees.” Had O’Connor con­tin­ued mak­ing car­toons into her pub­lish­ing years, she might have, like B.C. Kowal­s­ki, aimed one of those petards at those who dis­pense dog­mat­ic, cook­ie-cut­ter writ­ing advice as well.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art of William Faulkn­er: Draw­ings from 1916–1925

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

The Art of Franz Kaf­ka: Draw­ings from 1907–1917

Rare 1959 Audio: Flan­nery O’Connor Reads ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’

Flan­nery O’Connor: Friends Don’t Let Friends Read Ayn Rand (1960)

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

Jack Kerouac’s On the Road Turned Into an Illustrated Scroll: One Drawing for Every Page of the Novel

in Art, Literature | June 30th, 2014

A great deal of mythol­o­gy has built up around the life of Jack Ker­ouac, and espe­cial­ly around the expe­ri­ences that went into his best-known work, the 1957 nov­el On the Road. Even the very act of its com­po­si­tion — per­haps espe­cial­ly the act of its com­po­si­tion — has, in the imag­i­na­tions of many of Ker­ouac’s read­ers, turned into an image of the man “writ­ing the book on a long scroll of tele­type paper in three cof­fee-soaked-ben­zedrine-fueled days.” With this image in mind, illus­tra­tor Paul Rogers of Pasade­na’s Art Cen­ter Col­lege of Design cre­at­ed On the Road, the illus­trat­ed scroll, fea­tur­ing “a draw­ing for every page” of the nov­el, and depict­ing the his­tor­i­cal­ly researched “cars, bus­es, road­side archi­tec­ture, and old signs” from Ker­ouac’s Amer­i­ca of the late 1940s and ear­ly 50s, one that “looked awful­ly dif­fer­ent than it does now.” You can scroll, as it were, through this work in progress at Rogers’ site.

We’ve here includ­ed only four of the over 100 draw­ings Rogers has so far made, but these exam­ples cap­ture the nov­el­’s multi­gen­er­a­tional­ly intox­i­cat­ing mix of Amer­i­cana and pure momen­tum. You’ll also notice that, under­neath each image, Rogers excerpts a pas­sage of Ker­ouac’s. “Adding Ker­ouac’s words as cap­tions to the draw­ings makes the series feel like a jour­nal and not a care­ful­ly planned out illus­trat­ed book,” he writes, “and it seems to cap­ture some of the spir­it of Ker­ouac’s ‘this-hap­pened-then-this-then-this’ writ­ing style.”

You can read the scroll part-by-part on these pages: one through three, four, five, six, sev­en. Though I nev­er took quite the lifestyle inspi­ra­tion from On the Road some have, I can’t wait to see what visu­al inspi­ra­tion Rogers draws from the bit about fab­u­lous yel­low roman can­dles explod­ing like spi­ders across the stars.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jack Kerouac’s Hand-Drawn Map of the Hitch­hik­ing Trip Nar­rat­ed in On the Road

Jack Kerouac’s On The Road Turned Into Google Dri­ving Direc­tions & Pub­lished as a Free eBook

Jack Ker­ouac Lists 9 Essen­tials for Writ­ing Spon­ta­neous Prose

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.