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

John Baldessari’s “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art”: A 1971 Conceptual Art Piece/DIY Art Course

in Art | August 21st, 2013

There are any num­ber of ways to take artist John Baldessar­i’si 1971 piece I Will Not Make Any More Bor­ing Art, so why not a DIY MOOC? No reg­is­tra­tion required and no course cred­it. Stu­dents who watch the entire 13-minute video above will receive cer­tifi­cates of com­ple­tion, pro­vid­ed they’re will­ing to write them out them­selves on lined note­book paper. (It’s real­ly not that far fetched in an age where thou­sands of unof­fi­cial stu­dents recent­ly took advan­tage of car­toon­ist Lyn­da Bar­ry’s will­ing­ness to tweet her assign­ments for her Unthink­able Mind course at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin.)

If you’re on the fence about the mer­its of Con­cep­tu­al Art, you may be swayed to learn the his­to­ry of the piece doc­u­ment­ed above. The year before its cre­ation, John Baldessari incin­er­at­ed his oeu­vre, an act he referred to as The Cre­ma­tion Project. Short­ly there­after, he respond­ed to Nova Sco­tia Col­lege of Art and Design’s invi­ta­tion to exhib­it with a let­ter instruct­ing stu­dents to be his sur­ro­gates in a pun­ish­ment piece:

The piece is this, from floor to ceil­ing should be writ­ten by one or more peo­ple, one sen­tence under anoth­er, the fol­low­ing state­ment: I will not make any more bad art. At least one col­umn of the sen­tence should be done floor to ceil­ing before the exhib­it opens and the writ­ing of the sen­tence should con­tin­ue every­day, if pos­si­ble, for the length of the exhib­it. I would appre­ci­ate it if you could tell me how many times the sen­tence has been writ­ten after the exhib­it clos­es. It should be hand writ­ten, clear­ly writ­ten with cor­rect spelling….

Once the stu­dents had pun­ished them­selves to his spec­i­fi­ca­tions, the artist per­mit­ted the school to pub­lish a fundrais­ing lith­o­graph, mod­eled on his hand­writ­ing.

It’s not a stretch to imag­ine that writ­ing this sen­tence over and over could have changed more than a few par­tic­i­pants’ lives, or at least rerout­ed the path their careers would take. What will hap­pen if you take 13 minutes—the length of the video above—to try it your­self.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Join Car­toon­ist Lyn­da Bar­ry for a Uni­ver­si­ty-Lev­el Course on Doo­dling and Neu­ro­science

A Brief His­to­ry of John Baldessari, Nar­rat­ed by Tom Waits

Yoko Ono’s Make-Up Tips for Men

Ayun Hal­l­i­day will wade through the bor­ing in search of the good. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

New Animation Explains Sherry Turkle’s Theories on Why Social Media Makes Us Lonely

in Psychology | August 16th, 2013

Last fall Sher­ry Turkle, an MIT psy­chol­o­gist who explores how tech­nol­o­gy shapes mod­ern rela­tion­ships, pub­lished Alone Togeth­er: Why We Expect More from Tech­nol­o­gy and Less from Each Oth­er. The third in a tril­o­gy of books, Alone Togeth­er tries to make sense of a para­dox. The more friends and acquain­tances we gath­er on social plat­forms like Face­book and Twit­ter, the more we feel alone. We’re con­nect­ed to oth­er peo­ple more than ever, and yet we feel iso­lat­ed in a new soli­tude. If you’re look­ing for a primer on Turkle’s think­ing, you can watch a new ani­ma­tion (above) cre­at­ed by Shi­mi Cohen. It was made as a final project for a course tak­en at Shenkar Col­lege of Engi­neer­ing and Design in Tel Aviv. Anoth­er way to get up to speed on Turkle’s think­ing is to watch Turkle’s own TED Talk record­ed in Feb­ru­ary, 2012. Find it right below. And, of course, you could always read her book, Alone Togeth­er, in print or dig­i­tal for­mat. A nov­el idea that.

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!

The Three Punctuation Rules of Cormac McCarthy (RIP), and How They All Go Back to James Joyce

in Literature, Writing | August 13th, 2013

Cor­mac McCarthy has been—as one 1965 review­er of his first nov­el, The Orchard Keep­er, dubbed him—a “dis­ci­ple of William Faulkn­er.” He makes admirable use of Faulkner­ian traits in his prose, and I’d always assumed he inher­it­ed his punc­tu­a­tion style from Faulkn­er as well. But in his very rare 2008 tele­vised inter­view with Oprah Win­frey, McCarthy cites two oth­er antecedents: James Joyce and for­got­ten nov­el­ist MacKin­lay Kan­tor, whose Ander­son­ville won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955. Joyce’s influ­ence dom­i­nates, and in dis­cus­sion of punc­tu­a­tion, McCarthy stress­es that his min­i­mal­ist approach works in the inter­est of max­i­mum clar­i­ty. Speak­ing of Joyce, he says,

James Joyce is a good mod­el for punc­tu­a­tion. He keeps it to an absolute min­i­mum. There’s no rea­son to blot the page up with weird lit­tle marks. I mean, if you write prop­er­ly you shouldn’t have to punc­tu­ate.

So what “weird lit­tle marks” does McCarthy allow, or not, and why? Below is a brief sum­ma­ry of his stat­ed rules for punc­tu­a­tion:

1. Quo­ta­tion Marks:

McCarthy does­n’t use ’em. In his Oprah inter­view, he says MacKin­lay Kan­tor was the first writer he read who left them out. McCarthy stress­es that this way of writ­ing dia­logue requires par­tic­u­lar delib­er­a­tion. Speak­ing of writ­ers who have imi­tat­ed him, he says, “You real­ly have to be aware that there are no quo­ta­tion marks, and write in such a way as to guide peo­ple as to who’s speak­ing.” Oth­er­wise, con­fu­sion reigns.

2. Colons and semi­colons:

Care­ful McCarthy read­er Oprah says she “saw a colon once” in McCarthy’s prose, but she nev­er encoun­tered a semi­colon. McCarthy con­firms: “No semi­colons.”

Of the colon, he says: “You can use a colon, if you’re get­ting ready to give a list of some­thing that fol­lows from what you just said. Like, these are the rea­sons.” This is a spe­cif­ic occa­sion that does not present itself often. The colon, one might say, gen­u­flects to a very spe­cif­ic log­i­cal devel­op­ment, enu­mer­a­tion. McCarthy deems most oth­er punc­tu­a­tion uses need­less.

3. All oth­er punc­tu­a­tion:

Aside from his restric­tive rationing of the colon, McCarthy declares his styl­is­tic con­vic­tions with sim­plic­i­ty: “I believe in peri­ods, in cap­i­tals, in the occa­sion­al com­ma, and that’s it.” It’s a dis­ci­pline he learned first in a col­lege Eng­lish class, where he worked to sim­pli­fy 18th cen­tu­ry essays for a text­book the pro­fes­sor was edit­ing. Ear­ly mod­ern Eng­lish is noto­ri­ous­ly clut­tered with con­found­ing punc­tu­a­tion, which did not become stan­dard­ized until com­par­a­tive­ly recent­ly.

McCarthy, enam­ored of the prose style of the Neo­clas­si­cal Eng­lish writ­ers but annoyed by their over-reliance on semi­colons, remem­bers par­ing down an essay “by Swift or some­thing” and hear­ing his pro­fes­sor say, “this is very good, this is exact­ly what’s need­ed.” Encour­aged, he con­tin­ued to sim­pli­fy, work­ing, he says to Oprah, “to make it eas­i­er, not to make it hard­er” to deci­pher his prose. For those who find McCarthy some­times mad­den­ing­ly opaque, this state­ment of intent may not help clar­i­fy things much. But lovers of his work may find renewed appre­ci­a­tion for his stream­lined syn­tax.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Wern­er Her­zog Reads From Cor­mac McCarthy’s All the Pret­ty Hors­es

Sev­en Tips From William Faulkn­er on How to Write Fic­tion

David Fos­ter Wal­lace Breaks Down Five Com­mon Word Usage Mis­takes in Eng­lish

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

The General, “Perhaps the Greatest Film Ever Made,” and 20 Other Buster Keaton Classics Free Online

in Film | July 26th, 2013

What motion pic­ture did no less an auteur than Orson Welles call “the great­est com­e­dy ever made, the great­est Civ­il War film ever made, and per­haps the great­est film ever made”? Why, Joseph Frank “Buster” Keaton’s 1926 The Gen­er­al, unsung in its day but heaped with crit­i­cal acclaim ever since. The Gen­er­al, as Roger Ebert describes it, “is an epic of silent com­e­dy, one of the most expen­sive films of its time, includ­ing an accu­rate his­tor­i­cal recre­ation of a Civ­il War episode, hun­dreds of extras, dan­ger­ous stunt sequences, and an actu­al loco­mo­tive falling from a burn­ing bridge into a gorge far below.” This and all of Keaton’s movies, Ebert adds, show­case “a grace­ful per­fec­tion, such a mesh­ing of sto­ry, char­ac­ter and episode, that they unfold like music.”

You can watch The Gen­er­al online right above. If you then find your­self moved to take in more of Keaton’s fil­mog­ra­phy, have a look at this list of his freely view­able pic­tures help­ful­ly com­piled by MUBI. Its still-active links include all of the fol­low­ing movies:

• One Week
• The Gen­er­al
• The Goat
• The Boat
• Steam­boat Bill, Jr.
• The Play­house
• Three Ages
• Con­vict 13
• Day­dreams
• The Love Nest
• The Frozen North
• The Pale­face
• Cops
• The Elec­tric House
• The Bal­loonat­ic
• The Scare­crow
• Neigh­bors
• My Wife’s Rela­tions
• Col­lege
• The Cam­era­man
• Speak Eas­i­ly
• Sher­lock, Jr.

They also pro­vide a list of avail­able films Keaton made in col­lab­o­ra­tion with his fel­low silent star and men­tor Roscoe “Fat­ty” Arbuck­le:

• Back Stage
• The Bell Boy
• The Butch­er Boy
• Coney Island
• Good Night Nurse
• His Wed­ding Night
• Out West
• The Rough House

These 21 films will give you a thor­ough primer on the joy of silent com­e­dy as per­fect­ed by Buster Keaton, in Ebert’s words “not the Great Stone Face so much as a man who kept his com­po­sure in the cen­ter of chaos. Oth­er silent actors might mug to get a point across, but Keaton remained obser­vant and col­lect­ed. That’s one rea­son his best movies have aged bet­ter than those of his rival, Char­lie Chap­lin. He seems like a mod­ern vis­i­tor to the world of the silent clowns.”

We will add a num­ber of these films to our col­lec­tion of 500+ Free Movies Online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Pow­er of Silent Movies, with The Artist Direc­tor Michel Haz­anavi­cius

Hol­ly­wood, Epic Doc­u­men­tary Chron­i­cles the Ear­ly His­to­ry of Cin­e­ma

535 Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, etc.

25 Free Char­lie Chap­lin Films Online

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.

The First Bloomsday: Watch Dublin’s Literati Celebrate James Joyce’s Ulysses in Drunken Fashion, 1954

in History, Literature | July 25th, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

via Bib­liok­lept/Antoine Malette

Relat­ed con­tent:

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

Stephen Fry Explains His Love for James Joyce’s Ulysses

Hen­ri Matisse Illus­trates 1935 Edi­tion of James Joyce’s Ulysses

Henry Rollins: Education is the Cure to “Disaster Capitalism”

in Current Affairs, Education, Politics | July 23rd, 2013

We’ve already fea­tured for­mer Black Flag front­man and cur­rent spo­ken-word artist Hen­ry Rollins explain­ing why, to his mind, only edu­ca­tion can restore democ­ra­cy. He also believes it can cure some­thing he calls “dis­as­ter cap­i­tal­ism,” and you can hear more from him about it in the Big Think video above. He address­es, in his char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly straight­for­ward man­ner, the ques­tions of what exact­ly ails the Amer­i­can econ­o­my, how that ail­ment might have come about, and how the coun­try can edu­cate itself back to health. We may indi­vid­u­al­ly get our edu­ca­tions now, he grants, but “how long will it be until Amer­i­ca fis­cal­ly turns itself around” to the point of repay­ing “the risk of the invest­ment on that stu­dent loan to get a per­son through four years of col­lege? Will that per­son get a job where pay­ing off that loan and get­ting a house and afford­ing a fam­i­ly, will that be a pos­si­bil­i­ty? In the present Amer­i­ca, it doesn’t look like it is.”

See­ing a dire nation­al sit­u­a­tion, Rollins rec­om­mends doing like Chi­na, but not in the way you might assume. He sug­gests look­ing “500 years at a time,” much far­ther up the road than we have of late. “I’d be look­ing up the road so far my eyes would fall out of my head.” He wants the coun­try to become “like Europe, where they’ll edu­cate your kid until his head explodes,” pro­duc­ing “three doc­tors per floor of every apart­ment build­ing” and doing so by mak­ing “col­lege tuition either free or real­ly low.” Gen­er­al­ly thought of as lib­er­al, Rollins sums this up in a way that might appeal to his ide­o­log­i­cal oppo­nents: “If you have a coun­try full of whip-crack smart peo­ple, you have a coun­try the rest of the world will fear. They will not invade a coun­try of edu­cat­ed peo­ple because we are so smart we’ll build a laser that will burn you, the ene­my, in your sleep before you can even mobi­lize your air force to kill us. We will kill you so fast because we are so smart and we will have for­eign pol­i­cy that will not piss you off to the point to where you have to attack us.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hen­ry Rollins Pitch­es Edu­ca­tion as the Key to Restor­ing Democ­ra­cy

Hen­ry Rollins Tells Young Peo­ple to Avoid Resent­ment and to Pur­sue Suc­cess with a “Monas­tic Obses­sion”

Hen­ry Rollins Remem­bers the Life-Chang­ing Deci­sion That Brought Him From Häa­gen-Dazs to Black Flag

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.

Watch Pitch Tar Finally Drip in One of World’s Oldest, Slowest-Moving Experiments

in Physics | July 22nd, 2013

Let’s take a lit­tle break from our fast-mov­ing world and watch one of the world’s old­est and slow­est-mov­ing exper­i­ments in action. Begun in Octo­ber 1944 at Trin­i­ty Col­lege Dublin’s School of Physics, the Tar Drop exper­i­ment has attempt­ed to mea­sure the vis­cos­i­ty of pitch tar, a poly­mer that seems sol­id at room tem­per­a­ture. The goal of the exper­i­ment? To demon­strate that pitch tar actu­al­ly flows and to cap­ture a drop falling from a fun­nel — some­thing that hap­pens about once a decade. Above, you can watch a time­lapse video of all the excit­ing action. It marks the first time a pitch drop has ever been cap­tured on film.

It’s worth not­ing that the The Uni­ver­si­ty of Queens­land has its own Pitch Drop Exper­i­ment going. It start­ed back in 1927. And it’s cur­rent­ly list­ed in the Guin­ness Book of World Records as the world’s longest-run­ning lab­o­ra­to­ry exper­i­ment.

In the seg­ment below, Radi­o­lab offers a primer on the famous exper­i­ment.

via CNET

Charles Mingus Explains in His Grammy-Winning Essay “What is a Jazz Composer?”

in Music | July 18th, 2013

I remem­ber the first time I heard Charles Min­gus. My senior year of high school, a friend who, at the time, was study­ing elec­tric bass at Boston’s Berklee Col­lege of Music, intro­duced me by putting on 1956’s Pithecan­thro­pus Erec­tus and say­ing “you have to hear this.” I knew jazz in a pass­ing way—some Elling­ton, some Miles Davis… not enough to make many dis­tinc­tions. But I knew right away Min­gus was some­thing spe­cial. His com­po­si­tions were so cool, so dynam­ic and angu­lar and thought­ful, with the push-pull of his mea­sured dou­ble bass against the occa­sion­al cacoph­o­ny of piano and sax. Entranced, I sought out more, and dis­cov­ered favorites like the bluesy “Good­bye Pork Pie Hat”—live at Mon­treux in 1975 above—from Mingus’s 1959 water­shed Min­gus Ah Um, a record that shared the spot­light with oth­er instant clas­sics that year, includ­ing Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, John Coltrane’s Giant Steps, and Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come. (On that note, don’t miss the doc­u­men­tary, 1959: The Year That Changed Jazz.)

Min­gus stood among giants, and was a giant him­self. But odd­ly enough, while all of the artists on this list won, often mul­ti­ple, Gram­my awards, Min­gus received no nods from the Record­ing Acad­e­my for any of his sev­er­al dozen orig­i­nal albums. The snubs—if that’s what they were—may have been due to his famous­ly iras­ci­ble per­son­al­i­ty, or to the fact that Min­gus elud­ed clas­si­fi­ca­tion. As his friend Nat Hentoff wrote of him in 1999, jazz crit­ics could not “find a cat­e­go­ry, a con­ve­nient term, to describe him.” Min­gus him­self told Hentoff, “I am try­ing to play the truth of what I am. The rea­son it’s dif­fi­cult is because I’m chang­ing all the time.” But while the bassist’s musi­cal com­po­si­tions were ignored, he did receive one nom­i­na­tion, in 1971, for anoth­er kind of writing—the lin­er notes to his 1971 album Let My Chil­dren Hear Music, a record he called “the best album I have ever made” (hear it in full below). Mingus’s lin­er-notes essay—a lost art these days—is titled “What is a Jazz Com­pos­er?,” and it’s an insight­ful explo­ration of the artist’s own his­to­ry and com­po­si­tion­al tech­nique.

Elo­quent, but loose, Mingus’s prose wan­ders from per­son­al anec­dotes to philo­soph­i­cal rumi­na­tions. On the role  of jazz soloists as com­posers, he writes,

Each jazz musi­cian when he takes a horn in his hand- trum­pet, bass, sax­o­phone, drums-what­ev­er instru­ment he plays—each soloist, that is, when he begins to ad lib on a giv­en com­po­si­tion with a title and impro­vise a new cre­ative melody, this man is tak­ing the place of a com­pos­er.

Lat­er, how­ev­er, Min­gus seems skep­ti­cal of this idea: “each jazz musi­cian is sup­posed to be a com­pos­er. Whether he is or not, I don’t know.” Although Min­gus strug­gled as a child to read music—and faced racial bar­ri­ers to a clas­si­cal career—he trained first on the cel­lo and incor­po­rat­ed many ele­ments of clas­si­cal music, as well as gospel and big band, into his com­po­si­tions. When the bop era of impro­vi­sa­tion came along, Min­gus rolled with it, but found him­self look­ing crit­i­cal­ly at the new wave rep­re­sent­ed by, for exam­ple, Ornette Coleman’s showy solos. The essay, even so many years after the bop rev­o­lu­tion, reflects his ambiva­lence. He writes:

Today, things are at the oth­er extreme. Every­thing is sup­posed to be invent­ed, the guys nev­er repeat any­thing at all and prob­a­bly couldn’t. They don’t even write down their own tunes, they just make them up as they sit on the band­stand. It’s all right, I don’t ques­tion it. I know and hear what they are doing. But the valid­i­ty remains to be seen—what comes, what is left, after you hear the melody and after you hear the solo. Unless you just want to hear the feel­ing, as they say.

Min­gus was an odd­i­ty in the post-bop world; he gen­er­al­ly eschewed the soloist approach. Instead, he seems to see him­self oper­at­ing in a clas­si­cal, or at least more for­mal, tra­di­tion, draw­ing as much from Stravin­sky as from Elling­ton. As one writer puts it, his music was “schiz­o­phrenic in that it both harked back to the New Orleans roots of jazz and looked for­ward to pro­gres­sive cham­ber jazz and ‘third stream’ jazz. His com­po­si­tions ranged wild­ly in mood and dynam­ics, from pun­til­lis­tic coun­ter­point to mas­sive Wag­n­er-ian explo­sions.” In his lin­er notes, he laments the lim­it­ed instru­men­ta­tion of jazz, which he finds “sti­fling.” Min­gus makes it clear that as a com­pos­er, he strives for high­brow respectabil­i­ty, while also stress­ing that he thinks the vir­tu­os­i­ty of jazz has pushed all forms for­ward, includ­ing clas­si­cal. Bequeath­ing his album to his suc­ces­sors, his musi­cal “chil­dren,” Min­gus urges future jazz com­posers to expand their range into sym­phon­ic ter­ri­to­ry:

I think it is time our chil­dren were raised to think they can play bas­soon, oboe, Eng­lish horn, French horn, lull per­cus­sion, vio­lin, cel­lo. The results would be-well the Phil­har­mon­ic would not be the only answer for us then. If we so-called jazz musi­cians who are the com­posers, the spon­ta­neous com­posers, start­ed includ­ing these instru­ments in our music, it would open every­thing up, it would get rid of prej­u­dice because the musi­cian­ship would be so high in cal­iber that the sym­pho­ny couldn’t refuse us.

Some of Min­gus’s con­tem­po­raries found his clas­si­cal aspi­ra­tions cold and off­putting. For exam­ple, Min­gus describes in an inter­view how Fats Navar­ro—who said he “always played with hate”—chided the bassist by say­ing, “Min­gus, you just played the the­o­ry. you did­n’t tell me how you felt. You did­n’t say, ‘Hel­lo, Fats, I love you.’ You did­n’t play noth­ing beau­ti­ful” (an obser­va­tion Min­gus says “woke him up”).

The lin­er notes essay is replete with oth­er rem­i­nisces of Min­gus’s musi­cal com­ing-of-age, from his love for Debussy, Stravin­sky, and Strauss, to his tute­lage under “mas­ter musi­cian” Lloyd Reese. You can read the whole thing here at the offi­cial Min­gus site, which fea­tures more of his writ­ing, such as “An Open Let­ter to Miles Davis,” orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in Down Beat Mag­a­zine in 1955.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1959: The Year that Changed Jazz

How to Pot­ty Train Your Cat: A Handy Man­u­al by Charles Min­gus

Rare Miles Davis Live Record­ings Cap­ture the Jazz Musi­cian at the Height of His Pow­ers

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