Ernest Hemingway’s Delusional Adventures in Boxing: “My Writing is Nothing, My Boxing is Everything.”

in Letters, Life, Literature | October 7th, 2013

In a 1954 inter­view in the Paris Review, Ralph Elli­son said of one of his lit­er­ary heroes: “When [Ernest Hem­ing­way] describes some­thing in print, believe him; believe him even when he describes the process of art in terms of base­ball or box­ing; he’s been there.” I read this think­ing that Elli­son might be a bit too cred­u­lous. Hem­ing­way, after all, has pro­voked no end of eye-rolling for his leg­endary machis­mo, brava­do, and maybe sev­er­al dozen oth­er Latin descrip­tors for mas­cu­line fool­har­di­ness and blus­ter. As for his “box­ing,” we would be wise not to believe him. He may have “been there,” but the real box­ers he encoun­tered, and tried to spar with, would nev­er tes­ti­fy he knew what he was doing

Ernest Hem­ing­way wasn’t a box­er so much as he was a “box­er”… a leg­end in his own mind, a roman­tic. Hemingway’s friend and some­time spar­ring part­ner, nov­el­ist Mor­ley Callaghan tells it this way: “we were two ama­teur box­ers. The dif­fer­ence between us was that he had giv­en time and imag­i­na­tion to box­ing; I had actu­al­ly worked out a lot with good fast col­lege box­ers.” Or, as the author of an arti­cle on the Fine Books & Col­lec­tions site has it, “Hem­ing­way was lost in the romance of a sport that has no romance to those seri­ous­ly pur­su­ing it; the romance strict­ly belongs to spec­ta­tors.”

As a spec­ta­tor with pre­ten­tions to great­ness in the sport, Papa was prone to over­es­ti­mat­ing his abil­i­ties, at the expense of his actu­al skill as a writer. As he would tell Josephine Herb­st, with­out a hint of irony, “my writ­ing is noth­ing, my box­ing is every­thing.”

Click for larg­er image

How did the pros eval­u­ate his self-pro­fessed abil­i­ty? Jack Dempsey, who spent time in Paris in the ‘20s being fet­ed and fawned over, had this to say of Hemingway’s aspi­ra­tions:

There were a lot of Amer­i­cans in Paris and I sparred with a cou­ple, just to be oblig­ing…. But there was one fel­low I would­n’t mix it with. That was Ernest Hem­ing­way. He was about twen­ty-five or so and in good shape, and I was get­ting so I could read peo­ple, or any­way men, pret­ty well. I had this sense that Hem­ing­way, who real­ly thought he could box, would come out of the cor­ner like a mad­man. To stop him, I would have to hurt him bad­ly, I did­n’t want to do that to Hem­ing­way. That’s why I nev­er sparred with him.

Giv­en Hemingway’s pen­chant for self-delu­sion in this mat­ter, he may have inter­pret­ed this as Dempsey’s capit­u­la­tion to his obvi­ous prowess. An even more scathing cri­tique of Hemingway’s bul­ly­ing… I mean box­ing skill … comes to us via Book­tryst’s Stephen J. Gertz, who prof­fers an amus­ing dis­sec­tion of the let­ter above, an unpub­lished cor­re­spon­dence Hem­ing­way sent in 1943 to George Brown, the writer’s “train­er, coach, friend, and fac­to­tum.” Brown, it seems, was kind­ly, or pru­dent, enough to encour­age his employ­er in his delu­sions. How­ev­er, Gertz writes, “the real­i­ty was that any­one who had even the slight­est idea of what they were doing in the ring could take Hem­ing­way, who was noto­ri­ous for fool­ish­ly try­ing to actu­al­ly fight trained box­ers.” He’s lucky, then, that Dempsey prac­ticed such judi­cious restraint. If not, we may nev­er have seen any fic­tion from Hem­ing­way after he tried to go a round or two with the champ.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ernest Hem­ing­way to F. Scott Fitzger­ald: “Kiss My Ass”

18 (Free) Books Ernest Hem­ing­way Wished He Could Read Again for the First Time

Ernest Hemingway’s Favorite Ham­burg­er Recipe

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

Alan Lomax’s Music Archive Houses Over 17,400 Folk Recordings From 1946 to the 1990s

in Archives, Education, History, Music | October 1st, 2013

The work of folk­lorists and musi­col­o­gists like Alan Lomax, Stet­son Kennedy, and Har­ry Smith has long been revered in coun­ter­cul­tur­al com­mu­ni­ties and libraries; and it occa­sion­al­ly reach­es main­stream audi­ences in, for exam­ple, the Coen Brother’s 2000 film Oh Broth­er, Where Art Thou? and its atten­dant sound­track, or the playlists of purists on col­lege radio and NPR. But their record­ings are much more than his­tor­i­cal nov­el­ties.

Archives like Lomax’s Asso­ci­a­tion for Cul­tur­al Equi­ty—which we’ve fea­tured before—help remind us of our ori­gins as much as bot­tom-up accounts like Howard Zinn’s A People’s His­to­ry of the Unit­ed States. Lomax and his col­leagues believed that folk art and music infuse and renew “high” art and pro­vide bul­warks against the cyn­i­cal des­ti­tu­tion of mass-mar­ket com­mer­cial media that can seem so dead­en­ing and inescapable.

That is not to say that notions of authen­tic­i­ty aren’t fraught with their own prob­lems of exploita­tion. Approach­ing folk art as tourists, we can demean it and our­selves. But the prob­lem is less, I think, one of gen­tri­fi­ca­tion than of neglect: it’s sim­ply far too easy to lose touch, a much-remarked-upon irony of the age of social net­work­ing. Lomax under­stood this. He found­ed ACE “to explore and pre­serve the world’s expres­sive tra­di­tions with human­is­tic com­mit­ment and sci­en­tif­ic engage­ment.” The orga­ni­za­tion resides at NYC’s Hunter Col­lege and, since Lomax’s retire­ment in 1996, has been over­seen by his daugh­ter, Anna Lomax Wood. Through an arrange­ment with the Library of Con­gress, which hous­es the orig­i­nals, ACE has access to all of Lomax’s col­lec­tion of field record­ings and can dis­sem­i­nate them online to the pub­lic. Lomax’s asso­ci­a­tion has also long been active in repa­tri­at­ing record­ed arti­facts to libraries and archives in their places of ori­gin, giv­ing local com­mu­ni­ties access to cul­tur­al his­to­ries that may oth­er­wise be lost to them.

Lomax under­scored the sig­nif­i­cance of his organization’s name in a 1972 essay enti­tled “An Appeal for Cul­tur­al Equi­ty,” in which he lays out the impor­tance of pre­serv­ing cul­tur­al diver­si­ty against the “oppres­sive dull­ness and psy­chic dis­tress” imposed upon “those areas where cen­tral­ized music indus­tries, exploit­ing the star sys­tem and con­trol­ling the com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tem, put the local musi­cian out of work and silence folk song.” Are we any more improved forty years lat­er for the shock­ing monop­o­liza­tion of mass media in the hands of a few con­glom­er­ates? I’d answer unequiv­o­cal­ly no but for one impor­tant qual­i­fi­ca­tion: mass media in the form of open online archives allows us unprece­dent­ed access to, for exam­ple, the awe­some late-sev­en­ties film of R.L. Burn­side (top), who like many Mis­sis­sip­pi Delta blues­men before him, would only achieve recog­ni­tion much lat­er in life. Or we can see native North Car­olin­ian Cas Wallin (above) sing a ver­sion of folk song “Pret­ty Saro” in 1982, a song Bob Dylan record­ed and only recent­ly released. Then there’s one of my favorites, “Make Me A Pal­let On Your Floor,” picked and sung below by Mis­sis­sip­pi­an Sam Chatmon—a song played and record­ed by count­less black and white blues and coun­try artists like Mis­sis­sip­pi John Hurt and Gillian Welch.

These and thou­sands of oth­er exam­ples from the ACE archive bring musi­col­o­gists, his­to­ri­ans, folk­lorists, activists, edu­ca­tors, and every­one else clos­er to Lomax’s ideal—that we “learn how we can put our mag­nif­i­cent mass com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­o­gy at the ser­vice of each and every branch of the human fam­i­ly.” The ACE cat­a­log con­tains over 17,400 dig­i­tal files, begin­ning with Lomax’s first tape record­ings in 1946, to his dig­i­tal work in the 90s. The archive includes songs, sto­ries, jokes, ser­mons, inter­views and oth­er audio arti­facts from the Amer­i­can South, Appalachia, the Caribbean, and many more locales. The archive fea­tures record­ings from famous names like Woody Guthrie and Lead Bel­ly but pri­mar­i­ly con­sists of folk music from anony­mous folk, rep­re­sent­ing a vari­ety of lan­guages and eth­nic­i­ties. And the archive is ever-expand­ing as it con­tin­ues to dig­i­tize rare record­ings, and to upload vin­tage film, like the videos above, to its YouTube chan­nel.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leg­endary Folk­lorist Alan Lomax: ‘The Land Where the Blues Began’

Woody Guthrie at 100: Cel­e­brate His Amaz­ing Life with a BBC Film

Hear Zora Neale Hurston Sing the Bawdy Prison Blues Song “Uncle Bud” (1940)

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

Death of An Adjunct: A Sobering, True Story

in Business, Education, Life | September 19th, 2013

The Pitts­burgh Post-Gazette ran a sad and galling sto­ry yes­ter­day about Mary Mar­garet Vojtko who died of a heart attack at the age of 83. At the time of her death, Daniel Kova­lik writes:

She was receiv­ing radi­a­tion ther­a­py for the can­cer that had just returned to her, she was liv­ing near­ly home­less because she could not afford the upkeep on her home, which was lit­er­al­ly falling in on itself, and now, she explained, she had received anoth­er indig­ni­ty — a let­ter from Adult Pro­tec­tive Ser­vices telling her that some­one had referred her case to them say­ing that she need­ed assis­tance in tak­ing care of her­self.

Vojtko had end­ed up in pover­ty after spend­ing 25 years work­ing as an adjunct pro­fes­sor of French at Duquesne Uni­ver­si­ty, a Catholic school locat­ed in Pitts­burgh, Pa. Until she was ter­mi­nat­ed last spring, she worked “on a con­tract basis from semes­ter to semes­ter, with no job secu­ri­ty, no ben­e­fits and with a salary of between $3,000 and just over $3,500 per three-cred­it course.” When teach­ing three class­es a semes­ter and two dur­ing the sum­mer, Vojtko nev­er earned more than $25,000 a year. (A pit­tance com­pared to the pay pack­age of Duques­ne’s pres­i­dent — report­ed­ly about $700,000 per year in salary and ben­e­fits.) Mean­while, Duquesne thwart­ed attempts by adjuncts to union­ize, claim­ing that the school should have a reli­gious exemp­tion.

As Kova­lik goes on to note: “Adjuncts now make up well over 50 per­cent of the fac­ul­ty at col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties.” And that sta­tis­tic is bound to increase. You can — and should — read the full sto­ry at the Post-Gazette. Read Death of an Adjunct here.

via @stevesilberman

Edward Said Speaks Candidly about Politics, His Illness, and His Legacy in His Final Interview (2003)

in Life, Literature, Politics | September 18th, 2013

In an excerpt from her mem­oir pub­lished in Salon last month, Najla Said—daughter of lit­er­ary crit­ic and Pales­tin­ian-Amer­i­can polit­i­cal activist Edward Said—recalls her father’s lega­cy:

To very smart peo­ple who study a lot, Edward Said is the “father of post­colo­nial stud­ies” or, as he told me once when he insist­ed I was wast­ing my col­lege edu­ca­tion by tak­ing a course on post­mod­ernism and I told him he didn’t even know what it was:

“Know what it is, Najla? I invent­ed it!!!”

I still don’t know if he was jok­ing or seri­ous.

Most like­ly Said was only half seri­ous, but it’s impos­si­ble to over­state the impact of his 1978 book Ori­en­tal­ism on the gen­er­a­tions of stu­dents and activists that fol­lowed. As Najla writes, it’s “the book that every­one reads at some point in col­lege, whether in his­to­ry, pol­i­tics, Bud­dhism, or lit­er­a­ture class.” Said’s “post­mod­ernism,” unlike that of Fran­cois Lyotard or many oth­ers, avoid­ed the pejo­ra­tive bag­gage that came to attach to the term, large­ly because while he called into doubt cer­tain ossi­fied and per­ni­cious cat­e­gor­i­cal dis­tinc­tions, he nev­er stopped believ­ing in the pos­i­tive intel­lec­tu­al enter­prise that gave him the tools and the posi­tion to make his cri­tiques. He stub­born­ly called him­self a human­ist, “despite,” as he writes in the pref­ace to the 2003 edi­tion of his most famous book, “the scorn­ful dis­missal of the term by sophis­ti­cat­ed post-mod­ern crit­ics”:

It isn’t at all a mat­ter of being opti­mistic, but rather of con­tin­u­ing to have faith in the ongo­ing and lit­er­al­ly unend­ing process of eman­ci­pa­tion and enlight­en­ment that, in my opin­ion, frames and gives direc­tion to the intel­lec­tu­al voca­tion.

In that same pref­ace Said also writes of his aging, of the recent death of two men­tors, and of “the nec­es­sary diminu­tions in expec­ta­tions and ped­a­gog­ic zeal which usu­al­ly frame the road to senior­i­ty.” He does not write about the leukemia that would take his life that same year at the age of 67, ten years ago this month.

For the inter­view above, how­ev­er, Said’s last, he speaks can­did­ly about his ill­ness. Fit­ting­ly, the video opens with a quote from Roland Barthes: “The only sort of inter­view that one could, if forced to, defend would be where the author is asked to artic­u­late what he can­not write.” Said tells inter­view­er Charles Glass that his main pre­oc­cu­pa­tion in the past few months had been his ill­ness, some­thing he thought he had “mas­tered” but which had forced him to con­front the incon­tro­vert­ible fact of his mor­tal­i­ty and sapped him of his will to work.

Said, as always, is artic­u­late and engag­ing, and the con­ver­sa­tion soon turns to his oth­er pre­oc­cu­pa­tions: the sit­u­a­tion of the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple and the pol­i­tics and per­son­al toll of liv­ing “between worlds.” He also express­es his dis­ap­point­ment in friends who had become “mouth­pieces of the sta­tus quo,” bang­ing the drums for war and West­ern Impe­ri­al­ism in this, the first year of the war in Iraq. One sus­pects that he refers to Christo­pher Hitchens, among oth­ers, though he is too dis­creet to name names. Said has a tremen­dous amount to say on not only the cur­rent events of the time but on his entire career as a writer and thinker. Though he’s giv­en dozens of impas­sioned inter­views over the decades, this may be the most hon­est and unguard­ed, as he unbur­dens him­self dur­ing his final days of those things, per­haps, he could not bring him­self to write.

Thanks to Stephanos for send­ing this video our way.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen Fry & Friends Pay Trib­ute to Christo­pher Hitchens

Christo­pher Hitchens: No Deathbed Con­ver­sion for Me, Thanks, But it was Good of You to Ask

Noam Chom­sky Calls Post­mod­ern Cri­tiques of Sci­ence Over-Inflat­ed “Poly­syl­lab­ic Tru­isms”

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

Disco Saves Lives: Give CPR to the The Beat of Bee Gees “Stayin’ Alive”

in Life, Music | September 2nd, 2013

What to do if some­one one around you goes into car­diac arrest? The Amer­i­can Heart Asso­ci­a­tion has two sim­ple tips. Over at their web site, they write: “If you see a teen or adult sud­den­ly col­lapse, call 9–1‑1 and push hard and fast in the cen­ter of the chest to the beat of the clas­sic dis­co song ‘Stayin’ Alive.’ CPR can more than dou­ble a per­son­’s chances of sur­vival, and ‘Stayin’ Alive’ has the right beat for Hands-Only CPR.” The song also has the right title for the job at hand.

To help spread the word, the AHA pro­duced a series of videos avail­able on YouTube, includ­ing this one star­ring Ken Jeong, an actor and come­di­an who is also a licensed physi­cian in Cal­i­for­nia. You may well rec­og­nize him from Judd Apa­tow’s film Knocked Up, where, like here, he exhorts peo­ple to “focus, pay atten­tion.”

Behind this schtick, there’s some real sci­ence. Accord­ing to NPR:

A study by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois Col­lege of Med­i­cine has found that the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” has the utter­ly per­fect beat for per­form­ing car­diopul­monary resus­ci­ta­tion. The 1977 dis­co hit con­tains 103 beats per minute. That’s close to the rec­om­mend­ed chest com­pres­sion rate of 100 beats every 60 sec­onds.

Below, you can find a very dif­fer­ent ver­sion of the same cam­paign that aired in the UK. And thanks to this ad cam­paign, at least one life was actu­al­ly saved.

Note: Anoth­er song to keep in mind in these life or death sit­u­a­tions is Queen’s “Anoth­er One Bites the Dust.” It has the right beat. But not so much the right title.

Demos for Hands-Only CPR can be found at the AHA web site.

via Metafil­ter

Philosopher Portraits: Famous Philosophers Painted in the Style of Influential Artists

in Art, Philosophy | August 29th, 2013

Lud­wig Wittgenstein/Piet Mon­dri­an:

What do the Aus­tri­an-British philoso­pher Lud­wig Wittgen­stein and the Dutch painter Piet Mon­dri­an have in com­mon? For philoso­pher and artist Renée Jor­gensen Bolinger, the two have sim­i­lar beliefs about the log­ic of space.

“Many of Mon­dri­an’s pieces explore the rela­tion­ships between adja­cent spaces,” says Bolinger “and in par­tic­u­lar the for­ma­tive role of each on the bound­aries and pos­si­bil­i­ties of the oth­er. I based this paint­ing [see above] off of Wittgen­stein’s Trac­ta­tus, in which he devel­ops a the­o­ry of mean­ing ground­ed in the idea that propo­si­tions have mean­ing only inso­far as they con­strain the ways the world could be; a mean­ing­ful propo­si­tion is thus very like one of Mon­dri­an’s col­or squares, form­ing a bound­ary and lim­it­ing the pos­si­ble con­fig­u­ra­tions of the adja­cent spaces.”

A sec­ond-year PhD stu­dent in the phi­los­o­phy pro­gram at the Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, Bolinger stud­ied paint­ing a Bio­la Uni­ver­si­ty before mak­ing phi­los­o­phy her sec­ond major. “I actu­al­ly came to phi­los­o­phy quite late in my col­lege career,” Bolinger says, “only adding the major in my junior year. I was for­tu­nate to have two par­tic­u­lar­ly excel­lent and philo­soph­ic art teach­ers, Jonathan Puls and Jonathan Ander­son, who con­vinced me that my two pas­sions were not mutu­al­ly exclu­sive, and encour­aged me to pur­sue both as I began my grad­u­ate edu­ca­tion.”

Bolinger now works pri­mar­i­ly on the phi­los­o­phy of lan­guage, with side inter­ests in log­ic, epis­te­mol­o­gy, mind and polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy. She con­tin­ues to paint. We asked her how she rec­on­ciles her two pas­sions, which seem to occu­py oppo­site sides of the mind. “I do work in ana­lyt­ic phi­los­o­phy,” she says, “but it’s only half true that phi­los­o­phy and paint­ing engage oppo­site sides of the mind. The sort of real­ist draw­ing and paint­ing that I do is all about ana­lyz­ing the rela­tion­ships between the lines, shapes and col­or tones, and so still very left-brain. Nev­er­the­less, it engages the mind in a dif­fer­ent way than do the syl­lo­gisms of ana­lyt­ic phi­los­o­phy. I find that the two types of men­tal exer­tion com­ple­ment each oth­er well, each serv­ing as a pro­duc­tive break from the oth­er.”

Bolinger has cre­at­ed a series of philoso­pher por­traits, each one pair­ing a philoso­pher with an artist, or art style, in an intrigu­ing way. In addi­tion to Wittgen­stein, she paint­ed ten philoso­phers in her first series, many of them by request. They can all be seen on her Web site, where high qual­i­ty prints can be ordered.

G.E.M. Anscombe/Jackson Pol­lock:

Bolinger says she paired the British ana­lyt­ic philoso­pher Eliz­a­beth Anscombe with the Amer­i­can abstract painter Jack­son Pol­lock for two rea­sons: “First, the loose style of Pol­lock­’s action paint­ing fits the argu­men­ta­tive (and orga­ni­za­tion­al) style of Wittgen­stein’s Philo­soph­i­cal Inves­ti­ga­tions, which Anscombe helped to edit and was instru­men­tal in pub­lish­ing. Sec­ond, her pri­ma­ry field of work, in which she wrote a sem­i­nal text, is phi­los­o­phy of action, which has obvi­ous con­nec­tions to the themes present in any of Pol­lock­’s action paint­ings.”

Got­t­lob Frege/Vincent Van Gogh:

Bolinger paired the Ger­man logi­cian, math­e­mati­cian and philoso­pher Got­t­lob Frege with the Dutch painter Vin­cent Van Gogh as a tongue-in-cheek ref­er­ence to Van Gogh’s famous paint­ing The Star­ry Night and Frege’s puz­zle con­cern­ing iden­ti­ty state­ments such as “Hes­pe­rus is Phos­pho­rus,” or “the evening star is iden­ti­cal to the morn­ing star.”

Bertrand Russell/Art Deco:

Bolinger paint­ed the British logi­cian and philoso­pher Bertrand Rus­sell in the Art Deco style. “This pair­ing is a bit more about the gestalt, and a bit hard­er to artic­u­late,” says Bolinger. “The sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of form and reduc­tion to angled planes that takes place in the back­ground of this Art Deco piece are meant to cohere with Rus­sel­l’s locial atom­ism (the reduc­tion of com­plex log­i­cal propo­si­tions to their fun­da­men­tal log­i­cal ‘atoms’).”

Kurt Gödel/Art Nou­veau:

Bolinger paired the Aus­tri­an logi­cian Kurt Gödel with Art Nou­veau. “The Art Nou­veau move­ment devel­oped around the theme of mech­a­niza­tion and the rep­e­ti­tion of forms,” says Bolinger, “and cen­tral­ly involves a del­i­cate bal­ance between organ­ic shapes — typ­i­cal­ly a fig­ure that dom­i­nates the por­trait — and schema­tized or abstract­ed pat­terns, often derived from organ­ic shapes, but made uni­form and repet­i­tive (often seen in the flower motifs that orna­ment most Art Nou­veau por­traits). I paired this style with Kurt Gödel because his work was ded­i­cat­ed to defin­ing com­putabil­i­ty in terms of recur­sive func­tions, and using the notion to prove the Com­plete­ness and Incom­plete­ness the­o­rems.”

To see more of Renée Jor­gensen Bolinger’s philoso­pher por­traits, click here to vis­it her site. And if you like them all, the PhilPor­traits Cal­en­dar might be per­fect for you.

via Leit­er Reports

Relat­ed Con­tent:

10 Famous Philoso­phers in Words and Images

Pho­tog­ra­phy of Lud­wig Wittgen­stein Released by Archives at Cam­bridge

Phi­los­o­phy: Free Cours­es

Albert Einstein Called Racism “A Disease of White People” in His Little-Known Fight for Civil Rights

in History, Politics | August 28th, 2013

Albert Einstein’s activ­i­ties as a pas­sion­ate advo­cate for peace were well-doc­u­ment­ed dur­ing his life­time. His celebri­ty as a famous physi­cist and one of the world’s most rec­og­niz­able faces lent a great deal of weight to his paci­fism, a view oth­er­wise not giv­en much con­sid­er­a­tion in the pop­u­lar press at almost any time in his­to­ry. How­ev­er, accord­ing to a 2006 book titled Ein­stein on Race and Racism by Fred Jerome and Roger Tay­lor, the sci­en­tist was also as pas­sion­ate about com­bat­ing racism and seg­re­ga­tion as he was about com­bat­ing war. This facet of Einstein’s life was vir­tu­al­ly ignored by the media, as was a vis­it he made in 1946 to Lin­coln Uni­ver­si­ty in Penn­syl­va­nia, the first degree-grant­i­ng col­lege for African-Amer­i­cans and the alma mater of Langston Hugh­es and Thur­good Mar­shall.

Invit­ed to Lin­coln to receive an hon­orary degree, Ein­stein gave a lec­ture on physics but also blunt­ly addressed the racial ani­mus that held the coun­try in its grip, report­ed­ly call­ing racism, “a dis­ease of white peo­ple” and say­ing he “did not intend to be qui­et” about his oppo­si­tion to seg­re­ga­tion and racist pub­lic pol­i­cy. Lest any­one think the Nobel-prize-win­ning physi­cist was pan­der­ing to his audi­ence, the Har­vard Gazette offers a com­pre­hen­sive sum­ma­ry of Einstein’s sup­port of pro­gres­sive anti-racist caus­es, includ­ing his per­son­al sup­port of mem­bers of Princeton’s black com­mu­ni­ty (he paid one man’s col­lege tuition), a town Prince­ton native Paul Robe­son once called “the north­ern­most town in the south.”

Ein­stein formed rela­tion­ships with sev­er­al promi­nent black leaders—inviting opera singer Mar­i­an Ander­son to stay in his home after she was refused a room at the Nas­sau Inn and appear­ing as a char­ac­ter wit­ness for W.E.B. Dubois when the lat­ter stood accused of “fail­ing to reg­is­ter as a for­eign agent.” But it was his 20-year friend­ship with Robe­son that seems cen­tral to his involve­ment in civ­il rights caus­es. The Har­vard Gazette writes:

Ein­stein met Paul Robe­son when the famous singer and actor came to per­form at Princeton’s McCarter The­atre in 1935. The two found they had much in com­mon. Both were con­cerned about the rise of fas­cism, and both gave their sup­port to efforts to defend the demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly elect­ed gov­ern­ment of Spain against the fas­cist forces of Fran­cis­co Fran­co. Ein­stein and Robe­son also worked togeth­er on the Amer­i­can Cru­sade to End Lynch­ing, in response to an upsurge in racial mur­ders as black sol­diers returned home in the after­math of World War II.

At the time of the Gazette arti­cle, 2007, a movie about Ein­stein and Robeson’s friend­ship was appar­ent­ly in the works, with Dan­ny Glover as Robe­son and Ben Kings­ley as Ein­stein. The project is appar­ent­ly stalled, but with the upsurge in pop­u­lar inter­est in the his­to­ry of civ­il rights—with the over­turn­ing of the Vot­ing Rights Act and the wide­spread cov­er­age of the 50th anniver­sary of the March on Washington—perhaps the project will see new life soon. I cer­tain­ly hope so.

via PourMe­Cof­fee

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Albert Ein­stein Express­es His Admi­ra­tion for Mahat­ma Gand­hi, in Let­ter and Audio

Lis­ten as Albert Ein­stein Calls for Peace and Social Jus­tice in 1945

MLK’s Last Days and Final Speech

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

“Glory to the Conquerors of the Universe!”: Propaganda Posters from the Soviet Space Race (1958–1963)

in Art, Design, History | August 28th, 2013

Walk­ing around L.A. just yes­ter­day, I noticed new ban­ners embla­zoned with illus­tra­tions tout­ing sub­way sta­tions now under con­struc­tion. In bold, bright col­ors, they deliv­er clear, ambi­tious imagery of a bright future ahead: ded­i­cat­ed builders, focused stu­dents, noble work­ing com­muters, surg­ing trains. Why, I thought, those look a bit like Sovi­et pro­pa­gan­da! I had no polit­i­cal com­par­isons in mind, only aes­thet­ic ones, and this Retro­naut post shows off many per­fect exam­ples of the Cold War-era Russ­ian posters the Los Ange­les Metro’s brought to my mind. They cap­ture the imag­i­na­tion by exud­ing even more intense sci­en­tif­ic, tech­no­log­i­cal, edu­ca­tion­al, and social opti­mism — and doing so in even more visu­al detail — than I’d remem­bered.

And boy, speak­ing of ambi­tion: “From student’s mod­els to space­ships!” “To the Sun! To the stars!” “Glo­ry to the con­querors of the uni­verse!” Chil­dren inclined to accept these glo­ri­ous slo­gans and the rap­tur­ous imagery they accom­pa­ny could not pos­si­bly fail to believe that, thor­ough­ly edu­cat­ed by their coun­try, their gen­er­a­tion would go on to ush­er in a new galaxy-span­ning order of peace, pros­per­i­ty, and social­ism. Yet we in the rest of the world now know of the bore­dom, cyn­i­cism, and oppres­sion that attend­ed many Sovi­et cit­i­zens’ every­day lives. A Cold War-spe­cial­ist col­lege his­to­ry pro­fes­sor of mine liked to tell a sto­ry about a trip to Moscow he took in the six­ties, on which he kept see­ing ado­les­cents with noth­ing more pro­duc­tive to do than open­ly chug­ging vod­ka on street cor­ners.  Yet, see­ing posters like these, you sim­ply want to believe, just like I want to believe in the exten­sion of Los Ange­les’ sub­way — which, at times, seems about as plau­si­ble as the con­quer­ing of out­er space.

“From student’s mod­els to space­ships!”

“Glo­ry to the work­ers of Sovi­et sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy!”

“I am hap­py — this is my work join­ing the work of my repub­lic”

“In the 20th cen­tu­ry the rock­ets race to the stars”

Vis­it Retro­naut for many more space pro­pa­gan­da posters from the Sovi­et era.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“First Orbit”: Cel­e­brat­ing 50th Anniver­sary of Yuri Gagaran’s Space Flight

How the CIA Secret­ly Fund­ed Abstract Expres­sion­ism Dur­ing the Cold War

How to Spot a Com­mu­nist Using Lit­er­ary Crit­i­cism: A 1955 Man­u­al from the U.S. Mil­i­tary

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

Virginia Woolf’s Handwritten Suicide Note: A Painful and Poignant Farewell (1941)

in Letters, Literature | August 26th, 2013

It seems like a very mor­bid and inhu­man prac­tice to treat the sui­cide note as a piece of lit­er­a­ture, even if the author of said note is a writer as famous as Vir­ginia Woolf. And yet, why not? I can antic­i­pate all sorts of eth­i­cal objec­tions hav­ing to do with decen­cy, and I share some of those sen­ti­ments. Let us not for­get, how­ev­er, that death has often been a lit­er­ary occa­sion: the long tra­di­tion of record­ed last words ranges from deathbed con­fes­sions to the strange­ly the­atri­cal genre of the gal­lows speech (see Socrates, Anne Boleyn, or John Brown). Like those unfor­get­table fig­ures of his­to­ry, Vir­ginia Woolf’s last script­ed words are pored over by lay read­ers and schol­ars alike (see, for exam­ple, pages on Woolf’s final words from Smith Col­lege and Yale).

Woolf’s death, in March of 1941, occa­sioned the third of her sui­cide let­ters, and yes, it feels unseem­ly to linger over her last piece of prose. Per­haps it is the mode of death, sui­cide still being a soci­etal taboo, thought of as trag­ic even when it’s under­tak­en calm­ly and ratio­nal­ly by some­one ready to leave this world. And in many cas­es, espe­cial­ly those involv­ing men­tal ill­ness, death seems so need­less, so extreme. Such was the case with Woolf, who drowned her­self after a long strug­gle with what would prob­a­bly be called today bipo­lar dis­or­der. Her sui­cide note, writ­ten to her hus­band Leonard, is a haunt­ing and beau­ti­ful doc­u­ment, in all its unadorned sin­cer­i­ty behind which much tur­moil and anguish lie. See a scan of the hand­writ­ten note at the top, and read the full tran­script below. Direct­ly above, you can hear a dra­mat­ic read­ing of Woolf’s note, such a wrench­ing mis­sive because it is not a farewell to the world at large, but rather to a trust­ed friend and lover.

Dear­est,

I feel cer­tain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through anoth­er of those ter­ri­ble times. And I shan’t recov­er this time. I begin to hear voic­es, and I can’t con­cen­trate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have giv­en me the great­est pos­si­ble hap­pi­ness. You have been in every way all that any­one could be. I don’t think two peo­ple could have been hap­pi­er till this ter­ri­ble dis­ease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoil­ing your life, that with­out me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this prop­er­ly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the hap­pi­ness of my life to you. You have been entire­ly patient with me and incred­i­bly good. I want to say that — every­body knows it. If any­body could have saved me it would have been you. Every­thing has gone from me but the cer­tain­ty of your good­ness. I can’t go on spoil­ing your life any longer.

I don’t think two peo­ple could have been hap­pi­er than we have been.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vir­ginia Woolf and Friends Dress Up as “Abyssin­ian Princes” and Fool the British Roy­al Navy (1910)

Watch Pat­ti Smith Read from Vir­ginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Sur­viv­ing Record­ing of Woolf’s Voice

“A Haunt­ed House” by Vir­ginia Woolf

Find Works by Vir­ginia Woolf in Our Col­lec­tions of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.

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

10 Essential Tips for Making Great Coffee at Home

in Food & Drink | August 26th, 2013

Michael Haft and Har­ri­son Suarez went to col­lege togeth­er, served in the Marines in Afghanistan, then, after return­ing home, stum­bled upon the world of spe­cial­ty cof­fee and began “an obses­sive quest to brew the per­fect cup.” That quest result­ed in the pub­li­ca­tion of an inter­ac­tive dig­i­tal book designed for the iPad. Per­fect Cof­fee at Home ($4.99) uses illus­tra­tions, inter­ac­tive graph­ics, videos and a sound­track to make the tuto­r­i­al “an immer­sive expe­ri­ence.” But you don’t need to foot the bill or have an iPad to improve your cof­fee mak­ing skills.

Over at The Atlantic, Haft and Suarez gave some free advice last week, pub­lish­ing an arti­cle where they, among oth­er things, enu­mer­at­ed 10 essen­tial tips for mak­ing cof­fee. They boiled things down to this:

1. Buy good cof­fee beans. Prefer­ably whole beans, sus­tain­ably farmed, and roast­ed with­in the past few weeks.
   
2. Grind your cof­fee just before brew­ing. They say, “it’s the num­ber one thing you can do to improve your cof­fee at home.”
3. Store your cof­fee prop­er­ly. Keep the cof­fee in an air­tight con­tain­er, away from sun­light. Try to avoid freez­ing the beans, unless they’re going to linger for more than two weeks.
4. Use a good amount of cof­fee, and the right pro­por­tion of cof­fee to water. The ide­al is what they call “The Gold­en Ratio,” 17.42 units of water to 1 unit of cof­fee.
5. Find the right grind size for your cof­fee beans and aim for a uni­form grind.
6. Con­trol the tem­per­a­ture of your water. Keep it some­where between 195 and 202 degrees. Boil­ing water can sour the cof­fee.
7. If you get real­ly skilled, you can agi­tate the cof­fee dur­ing the brew­ing to con­trol the taste.
8. Focus on tech­nique. And once you learn the right tech­nique, make sure you’re pre­cise and con­sis­tent.
9. Use qual­i­ty tools. Buy the right bean grinder and cof­fee mak­er. Make a good invest­ment in your cof­fee drink­ing future.
10. When exper­i­ment­ing with the brew­ing process, adjust only one vari­able at a time so you can accu­rate­ly track results.

The Atlantic arti­cle offers more detail than what we’ve high­light­ed above. So we’d encour­age you to give “How to Make Per­fect Cof­fee” a read. You can also find short video primers on the Haft & Suarez YouTube Chan­nel. If you have your own great cof­fee mak­ing tips, def­i­nite­ly share them with us in the com­ments sec­tions below. We want to know!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Short, Ani­mat­ed Look at What’s Inside Your Aver­age Cup of Cof­fee

“The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink”: An Ad for London’s First Cafe Print­ed Cir­ca 1652

Black Cof­fee: Doc­u­men­tary Cov­ers the His­to­ry, Pol­i­tics & Eco­nom­ics of the “Most Wide­ly Tak­en Legal Drug”

The Physics of Cof­fee Rings Final­ly Explained

The His­to­ry of Cof­fee and How It Trans­formed Our World