How a Crossword Puzzle is Made: Behind the Scenes with The New York Times

in Media | November 17th, 2012

If you still sub­scribe to old-fash­ioned print news­pa­pers, chances are it’s because you like doing cross­word puz­zles and putting pen(cil) to paper. If you fall into this camp, we give you this: Will Shortz, the cross­word puz­zle edi­tor for The New York Times (and the only known per­son to hold a col­lege degree in enig­ma­tol­ogy) pre­sent­ing a quick, behind-the-scenes look at how the NYT puz­zle gets made. Off we go.

Great Big Ideas: Free Course Features Top Thinkers Tackling the World’s Most Important Ideas in 12 Lectures

in Online Courses | November 14th, 2012

Begun in 2011 by Big Think and the Jack Park­er Cor­po­ra­tion, The Float­ing Uni­ver­si­ty is an online edu­ca­tion­al ini­tia­tive that debuted at Har­vard, Yale, and Bard Col­lege. The pur­pose of The Float­ing Uni­ver­si­ty, accord­ing to its site, is to “democ­ra­tize access to the world’s best thinkers” by pro­vid­ing free, approx­i­mate­ly one hour-long cours­es on a wide range of top­ics, taught at a uni­ver­si­ty lev­el by experts and pro­fes­sors in the var­i­ous fields. The inau­gur­al course, the most favored at the three uni­ver­si­ties, is Great Big Ideas, and it more or less does what it says: tack­les some of the largest, most per­plex­ing ques­tions in digestible intro­duc­tions that also man­age to be rig­or­ous, infor­ma­tive, and thought-pro­vok­ing.

In the lec­ture above, for exam­ple, Har­vard cog­ni­tive psy­chol­o­gist and lin­guist Steven Pinker presents an “eSem­i­nar” in lin­guis­tics, address­ing dogged ques­tions in the field over whether or not humans have an innate, uni­ver­sal gram­mar (as Noam Chom­sky has famous­ly argued); why lan­guage is so fun­da­men­tal to our social rela­tion­ships; and how lan­guage evolved.

Pinker, who describes human lan­guage in broad terms as a “mir­a­cle” and a “win­dow into the human mind,” also gets into the spe­cif­ic sub­fields of lin­guis­tics, dis­cussing them in terms that any layper­son can under­stand with­out much dilut­ing the fas­ci­nat­ing philo­soph­i­cal and sci­en­tif­ic debates around what Dar­win called our “instinc­tive ten­den­cy to speak” to one anoth­er, from infan­cy onward, all over the world, in some 6000 dif­fer­ent lan­guages.

The Great Big Ideas (now added to our list of 1200 Free Online Cours­es) lec­ture series con­sists of twelve lec­tures total, includ­ing Pinker’s. The oth­er eleven are:

• Malthus Miffed: Are Peo­ple the Prob­lem, the Solu­tion, or Both? An Intro­duc­tion to Demog­ra­phy and Pop­u­la­tions Study Through an Exam­i­na­tion of the World’s Pop­u­la­tion. by Joel Cohen (Colum­bia).

• The Uni­verse in a Nut­shell: The Physics of Every­thing. by Michio Kaku (CUNY).

• Of the Peo­ple, by the Peo­ple, for the Peo­ple? The Rawls-Noz­ick Debates as an Intro­duc­tion to the Phi­los­o­phy of Pol­i­tics and Eco­nom­ics. by Tamar Gendler (Yale)

• Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Col­lect $200: Monop­o­lies as an Intro­duc­tion to Eco­nom­ics. by Saul Lev­more (U Chica­go)

• The Psy­chol­o­gy of Every­thing: What Com­pas­sion, Racism, and Sex tell us about Human Nature. by Paul Bloom (Yale)

• If You’re So Free, Why Do You Fol­low Oth­ers? The Soci­o­log­i­cal Sci­ence Behind Social Net­works and Social Influ­ence. by Nicholas Chris­takis (Har­vard)

• Who Wants to Be a Bil­lion­aire? Every­thing You Need to Know About Finance and Invest­ing in Under an Hour. by William Ack­man

• What’s Up, Doc? Is Bio­med­ical Research Real­ly Close to Cur­ing Any­thing? by Dou­glas Melton (Har­vard)

• Art Now: Aes­thet­ics Across Music, Paint­ing, Archi­tec­ture, Movies, and More. by Leon Bost­stein (Har­vard)

• Stand­ing on the Shoul­ders of Giants: The Essen­tial Val­ue of a Clas­sic Edu­ca­tion. by Jef­frey Bren­zel (Yale)

• The Author­i­ty of Ideas: Decod­ing the DNA of Edu­ca­tion in Search of Actu­al Knowl­edge. by Lawrence Sum­mers (Har­vard)

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

Reefer Madness, 1936’s Most Unintentionally Hilarious “Anti-Drug” Exploitation Film, Free Online

in Film | November 13th, 2012

The motion pic­ture you are about to wit­ness may star­tle you. It would not have been pos­si­ble, oth­er­wise, to suf­fi­cient­ly empha­size the fright­ful toll of the new drug men­ace which is destroy­ing the youth of Amer­i­ca in alarm­ing­ly increas­ing num­bers. Mar­i­hua­na is that drug — a vio­lent nar­cot­ic — an unspeak­able scourge — The Real Pub­lic Ene­my Num­ber One! Or at least that’s how the open­ing crawl of Reefer Mad­ness tells it.

Also known, in oth­er forms, as Tell Your Chil­dren, The Burn­ing Ques­tion, Dope Addict, Doped Youth and Love Mad­ness, the film has spent the past forty years accru­ing cult cred­i­bil­i­ty on the (high­ly over­lap­ping) mid­night-movie and cannabis-cul­ture cir­cuits. That pecu­liar spelling of what we know as mar­i­jua­na reveals only a whiff of its dis­tinc­tive blend of hand-wring­ing sala­cious­ness, aggres­sive square­ness, and sheer igno­rance. Kei­th Stroup, founder of the Nation­al Orga­ni­za­tion for the Reform of Mar­i­jua­na Laws, spot­ted the movie’s unin­tend­ed comedic poten­tial back in 1971, when he bought a print and began col­lege-cam­pus screen­ings. It today draws more pro­longed, dis­be­liev­ing guf­faws and chor­tles than ever before.

Since Reefer Mad­ness has fall­en into the pub­lic domain, you can hold your own mid­night screen­ing near­ly with­out effort by watch­ing it online. Behold the deeply askew motion pic­ture that began as a church-fund­ed moral­i­ty play, got into the hands of ear­ly exploita­tion-film icon Dwain Esper (he of 1934’s Mani­ac, 1937’s How to Undress in Front of Your Hus­band, and 1938’s Sex Mad­ness), and wound up as an uproar­i­ous main­stay of hazy uni­ver­si­ty audi­to­ria. While the film clear­ly knows noth­ing of mar­i­jua­na or its real effects — or, seem­ing­ly, of the real effects of any nar­cot­ic — that does­n’t stop its script from yield­ing a host of res­o­nant lines. These run from the “straight­for­ward ques­tion” of whether “you have, per­haps unwill­ing­ly, acquired a cer­tain habit through asso­ci­a­tion with cer­tain unde­sir­able peo­ple” to the rec­ol­lec­tion of hav­ing been “high enough to take over the marines and the navy” to that immor­tal imper­a­tive, “Bring me some reefers!” Laugh if you must, but bear in mind the final words from the solemn Dr. Car­roll: “The next tragedy may be that of your daugh­ter’s… or your son’s… or yours… or yours… or yours!”

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

Relat­ed con­tent:

This is What Oliv­er Sacks Learned on LSD and Amphet­a­mines

Bela Lugosi Dis­cuss­es His Drug Habit as He Leaves the Hos­pi­tal in 1955

Beyond Tim­o­thy Leary: 2002 Film Revis­its His­to­ry of LSD

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Noam Chomsky Spells Out the Purpose of Education

in Education | November 8th, 2012

E + duc­ere: “To lead or draw out.” The ety­mo­log­i­cal Latin roots of “edu­ca­tion.” Accord­ing to a for­mer Jesuit pro­fes­sor of mine, the fun­da­men­tal sense of the word is to draw oth­ers out of “dark­ness,” into a “more mag­nan­i­mous view” (he’d say, his arms spread wide). As inspi­ra­tional as this speech was to a sem­i­nar group of bud­ding high­er edu­ca­tors, it failed to spec­i­fy the means by which this might be done, or the rea­son. Lack­ing a Jesuit sense of mis­sion, I had to fig­ure out for myself what the “dark­ness” was, what to lead peo­ple towards, and why. It turned out to be sim­pler than I thought, in some respects, since I con­clud­ed that it was­n’t my job to decide these things, but rather to present points of view, a col­lec­tion of methods—an intel­lec­tu­al toolk­it, so to speak—and an enthu­si­as­tic mod­el. Then get out of the way. That’s all an edu­ca­tor can, and should do, in my hum­ble opin­ion. Any­thing more is not edu­ca­tion, it’s indoc­tri­na­tion. Seemed sim­ple enough to me at first. If only it were so. Few things, in fact, are more con­tentious (Google the term “assault on edu­ca­tion,” for exam­ple).

What is the dif­fer­ence between edu­ca­tion and indoc­tri­na­tion? This debate rages back hun­dreds, thou­sands, of years, and will rage thou­sands more into the future. Every major philoso­pher has had one answer or anoth­er, from Pla­to to Locke, Hegel and Rousseau to Dewey. Con­tin­u­ing in that ven­er­a­ble tra­di­tion, lin­guist, polit­i­cal activist, and aca­d­e­m­ic gen­er­al­ist extra­or­di­naire Noam Chom­sky, one of our most con­sis­tent­ly com­pelling pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als, has a lot to say in the video above and else­where about edu­ca­tion.

First, Chom­sky defines his view of edu­ca­tion in an Enlight­en­ment sense, in which the “high­est goal in life is to inquire and cre­ate. The pur­pose of edu­ca­tion from that point of view is just to help peo­ple to learn on their own. It’s you the learn­er who is going to achieve in the course of edu­ca­tion and it’s real­ly up to you to deter­mine how you’re going to mas­ter and use it.” An essen­tial part of this kind of edu­ca­tion is fos­ter­ing the impulse to chal­lenge author­i­ty, think crit­i­cal­ly, and cre­ate alter­na­tives to well-worn mod­els. This is the ped­a­gogy I end­ed up adopt­ing, and as a col­lege instruc­tor in the human­i­ties, it’s one I rarely have to jus­ti­fy.

Chom­sky defines the oppos­ing con­cept of edu­ca­tion as indoc­tri­na­tion, under which he sub­sumes voca­tion­al train­ing, per­haps the most benign form. Under this mod­el, “Peo­ple have the idea that, from child­hood, young peo­ple have to be placed into a frame­work where they’re going to fol­low orders. This is often quite explic­it.” (One of the entries in the Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary defines edu­ca­tion as “the train­ing of an ani­mal,” a sense per­haps not too dis­tinct from what Chom­sky means). For Chom­sky, this mod­el of edu­ca­tion impos­es “a debt which traps stu­dents, young peo­ple, into a life of con­for­mi­ty. That’s the exact oppo­site of what tra­di­tion­al­ly comes out of the Enlight­en­ment.” In the con­test between these two definitions—Athens vs. Spar­ta, one might say—is the ques­tion that plagues edu­ca­tion­al reform­ers at the pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary lev­els: “Do you train for pass­ing tests or do you train for cre­ative inquiry?”

Chom­sky goes on to dis­cuss the tech­no­log­i­cal changes in edu­ca­tion occur­ring now, the focus of innu­mer­able dis­cus­sions and debates about not only the pur­pose of edu­ca­tion, but also the prop­er meth­ods (a sub­ject this site is deeply invest­ed in), includ­ing the cur­rent unease over the shift to online over tra­di­tion­al class­room ed or the val­ue of a tra­di­tion­al degree ver­sus a cer­tifi­cate. Chomsky’s view is that tech­nol­o­gy is “basi­cal­ly neu­tral,” like a ham­mer that can build a house or “crush someone’s skull.” The dif­fer­ence is the frame of ref­er­ence under which one uses the tool. Again, mas­sive­ly con­tentious sub­ject, and too much to cov­er here, but I’ll let Chom­sky explain. What­ev­er you think of his pol­i­tics, his eru­di­tion and expe­ri­ence as a researcher and edu­ca­tor make his views on the sub­ject well worth con­sid­er­ing.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

The Drinking Party, 1965 Film Adapts Plato’s Symposium to Modern Times

in Film, Philosophy | November 7th, 2012

The word “sym­po­sium” tends to con­jure images of a for­mal, aca­d­e­m­ic gath­er­ing, which it most often is these days. It’s kind of a stuffy word, but it shouldn’t be. In Plato’s day, it was sim­ply a drink­ing par­ty, the kind you might have with a group of brainy acquain­tances when the last course is cleared, there’s no short­age of wine, and no one has to work the next day. (This being ancient Greece, these were all-male affairs). Plutarch defined a sym­po­sium as “a pass­ing of time over wine, which, guid­ed by gra­cious behav­ior, ends in friend­ship.” Plato’s Sym­po­sium, the best-known of his dia­logues, is much more in the lat­ter vein—a cel­e­bra­tion among accom­plished friends to mark the tri­umph of the poet Agathon’s first tragedy. The dia­logue con­tains sev­en speech­es on love, includ­ing of course, one from Plato’s pri­ma­ry mouth­piece Socrates. But the main draw is com­ic play­wright Aristo­phanes; no under­grad­u­ate who takes a phi­los­o­phy course for­gets his roman­tic ori­gin myth, in which love actu­al­ly is a yearn­ing for one’s miss­ing oth­er half.

When writer and direc­tor Jonathan Miller decid­ed to adapt Plato’s clas­sic text into a film in 1965, he evi­dent­ly decid­ed to com­bine both the mod­ern, aca­d­e­m­ic def­i­n­i­tion of “sym­po­sium” and its clas­si­cal prece­dent. His film is called The Drink­ing Par­ty, and involves its share of that in mod­er­a­tion (as in the orig­i­nal), but it also trans­pos­es Plato’s casu­al gath­er­ing to a group of stu­dents in for­mal attire din­ing on a neo-Clas­si­cal ter­race with an Oxford don, their clas­sics mas­ter. Each char­ac­ter adopts the role of one of Plato’s Sym­po­sium speak­ers. A few things to note here: the excerpt above is of rel­a­tive­ly high qual­i­ty, but the com­plete film itself (below) did not fare near­ly as well: trans­ferred from a well-worn 16mm print from a uni­ver­si­ty archive, the film is mud­dy, scratched and quite dim. This is too bad. Miller’s film, which was shown to col­lege phi­los­o­phy stu­dents in the 60s and 70s, sunk into cul­tur­al obliv­ion for a cou­ple decades, and copies of it are very rare. Nonethe­less, this is well worth watch­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly for stu­dents of phi­los­o­phy. The Drink­ing Par­ty was pro­duced as part of a mid-60s arts doc­u­men­tary series called “Sun­day Night,” which ran from 1965–1968.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Find The Sym­po­sium and oth­er great works in our col­lec­tion of 375 Free eBooks.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

Filmmaker Errol Morris Gives Us “11 Excellent Reasons Not to Vote?”

in Current Affairs, Politics | November 1st, 2012

All through­out this inter­minably long pres­i­den­tial elec­tion cycle, which has been going on since at least 2010, I’ve had a laser-like focus on polit­i­cal news. You might even call it a death grip. Because I’m a pol­i­tics junkie. It’s a dis­ease, I know, I rec­og­nize I need help, and I’ll get it—after Novem­ber 6th. As a pol­i­tics junkie, I am sub­ject to a cer­tain severe irri­ta­tion: pro­found exas­per­a­tion with those myth­i­cal beasts called “unde­cid­ed vot­ers,” who are even more galling than third par­ty vot­ers are to hyper-par­ti­sans. “What?” I shout at the radio, when one of these cryp­to-zoo­log­i­cal crea­tures calls in. “You dream­ers, you obliv­i­ous block­head­ed dream­ers!” I shout, and oth­er things. Yes, in my mania, I’ve shout­ed these things at the radio, because how can peo­ple not have made up their minds months ago, been glued to inter­net news and opin­ion for hours, pored over minis­cule pol­i­cy details, destroyed their eye­sight, col­lapsed their spine under the weight of civic duty? How, indeed. But per­haps (and every pol­i­tics junkie fears this pos­si­bil­i­ty), the unde­cid­ed vot­ers aren’t idiots—perhaps they’re thought­ful, kind, trust­ing, tru­ly… dare I say it, inde­pen­dent….

Now with all of our weird vit­ri­ol direct­ed at the “unde­cid­eds,” preter­nat­u­ral­ly myopic junkies lose sight of a bloc with the pow­er to bend, break, or shat­ter the scales altogether—non-voters. In a nation that has expend­ed tril­lions of dol­lars, thou­sands of lives, and quite a lot of inter­na­tion­al good will to give oth­ers the right to vote in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, we make a pret­ty poor show­ing at the polls every four years, with rough­ly half of us declin­ing to exer­cise our fun­da­men­tal right to vote for our lead­ers. Think about that: half. Fifty per­cent of Amer­i­cans: when women only won the right in 1920 and after amend­ing the Con­sti­tu­tion. When African Amer­i­cans fought for a hun­dred years and only ful­ly won the right in 1965 with the Vot­ing Rights Act. These are significant–if sig­nif­i­cant­ly belated—achievements, and, to be sure, they’re the rea­son so many peo­ple trea­sure their vote as a pre­cious token of polit­i­cal auton­o­my. But non-vot­ers are an invis­i­ble enig­ma: no one talks much about the appalling­ly low turnout in this coun­try, except to men­tion it in pass­ing. So doc­u­men­tary film­mak­er Errol Mor­ris (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War), provo­ca­teur and social crit­ic, decid­ed to dis­cuss the issue with over 50 peo­ple under the age of 40. The result is the short film above, teas­ing­ly titled “11 Rea­sons Not to Vote?”

What Mor­ris found con­founds the faithful—the junkies scowl­ing into their micro­fiche read­ers. Non-vot­ers, and the unde­cid­ed, can take a larg­er view; as Mor­ris points out in his accom­pa­ny­ing New York Times essay, non-vot­ers not only com­ment on the fact that no major par­ty can­di­date has dis­cussed issues so many peo­ple care about—poverty, cli­mate change, the drug war, the dys­func­tion­al prison system—but non-vot­ers real­ize that if no one’s talk­ing, noth­ing will be done. Some of them may be cyn­i­cal, but many more may just­ly say they’re real­ists. Per­haps it’s us, the vot­ers, who are dream­ers.

The 11 rea­sons Mor­ris gives, with tongue lodged in cheek, are as fol­lows (with my explana­to­ry gloss­es in paren­the­ses):

1. You can’t depend on demigods (Hint: politi­cians aren’t demigods, even when they seem so)
2. Like jazz, apa­thy is an Amer­i­can art form (slack, an appro­pri­ate response to polit­i­cal fun­da­men­tal­ism?)
3. Flori­da (deba­cle, year 2000)
4. The Elec­toral Col­lege (does any­one under­stand this thing?)
5. Missed entre­pre­neur­ial oppor­tu­ni­ties (one vote, one price)
6. Poten­tial extra­di­tion (absen­tee bal­lot if under ren­di­tion?)
7. Awk­ward fam­i­ly din­ners (vot­ing out of spite for fam­i­ly mem­bers)
8. Traf­fic (acci­dents on the way to polls can­celed out by dat­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties at the polls)
9. Forced analo­gies (warn­ing: involves foot­ball)
10. Overzeal­ous advo­cates (car­rots and sticks)
11. Mas­culin­i­ty is under­ap­pre­ci­at­ed (The Man: stick it to him)

I come away from Morris’s exer­cise sub­dued, not cured, but per­haps ready to wean myself away enough to look at why we make elec­tions mat­ter so much, when they seem to do so lit­tle for so many. That said, how­ev­er, I’m still going to vote. The com­ment that struck me more than any oth­er was this: “If you don’t vote, you can­cel your own vote.” Mor­ris replies, “that’d be stu­pid.” And it would be, I think, damn it all.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

Helen Keller Pays a Visit to Martha Graham’s Dance Studio Circa 1954

in History | October 24th, 2012

Helen Keller’s sto­ry is remark­able. With the help of Anne Sul­li­van, Keller (1880–1968) escaped from a “dou­ble dun­geon of dark­ness and silence” and achieved great things. In 1904, she grad­u­at­ed from Rad­cliffe Col­lege (now Har­vard), becom­ing the first deaf blind per­son to earn a B.A. in the U.S..  She went on to write 14 books (a few more than the rest of us) and cham­pi­oned impor­tant polit­i­cal caus­es. A rad­i­cal at heart, she backed wom­en’s suf­frage and birth con­trol move­ments, helped found the ACLU, urged paci­fism, and railed against cap­i­tal­ism. She count­ed many world lead­ers and cul­tur­al lumi­nar­ies as friends, palling around with fig­ures like Char­lie Chap­lin and Mark Twain. And then there’s the time she paid a vis­it to the dance stu­dio of Martha Gra­ham and gained a tac­tile intro­duc­tion to mod­ern dance. The nar­ra­tor describes the mem­o­rable scene fair­ly well. But, if you want more back­sto­ry and pho­tos, you should head over to Brain­Pick­ings to get the big­ger pic­ture.

Relat­ed Must-See Video: Helen Keller and Anne Sul­li­van Togeth­er in 1930

Richard Linklater’s Slacker, the Classic Gen‑X Indie Film

in Film | October 23rd, 2012

Think back to the Amer­i­can inde­pen­dent film boom (some­times known as “indiewood”) of the nineties. Which of that time’s fresh-faced auteurs strike you as impor­tant? Which of their first fea­tures retain their impact? Quentin Taran­ti­no’s Reser­voir Dogs, cer­tain­ly; Kevin Smith’s Clerks, which sum­moned a vast fan cul­ture out of nowhere; Robert Rodriguez’s much-dis­cussed “$7,000 movie” El Mari­achi; Steven Soder­bergh’s con­cept-prov­ing Sex, Lies, and Video­tape, per­haps the bell­wether of the entire move­ment. But you may under­es­ti­mate Richard Lin­klater’s low-key debut Slack­er at your per­il.

He con­struct­ed the 1991 film (avail­able to view on YouTube) as a series of set pieces — some irrev­er­ent, some mean­der­ing, and some bizarre, but most all of them with stealth­ily uni­ver­sal res­o­nance — tak­ing place across the col­lege town of Austin, Texas. Dou­glas Cou­p­land hav­ing coined the term “Gen­er­a­tion X” with his epony­mous nov­el less than four months before, the North Amer­i­can zeit­geist had come to take seri­ous, if smirk­ing, notice of all these slouchy twen­tysome­things who seemed to turn up with­out warn­ing, spout­ing end­less streams of ideas, the­o­ries, wise­cracks, and elab­o­rate plans, yet drained of any­thing rec­og­niz­able as ambi­tion. These slack­ers, as we now call them with­out hes­i­ta­tion, make up the drama­tis per­sonæ of Slack­er. You can see them in their own pecu­liar type of action by watch­ing the pic­ture free online.

The first slack­er to appear, a deeply con­flict­ed motor­mouth in the back seat of a taxi, comes played by Lin­klater him­self. He seems nor­mal enough, essen­tial­ly an aim­less late-twen­tysome­thing you still meet in cof­fee shops today. But as the cam­era drifts from block to block, from neigh­bor­hood to Austin neigh­bor­hood, pick­ing up on any low-momen­tum sto­ry it can, behav­iors turn stranger. A book­store clerk who lives for JFK con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries log­or­rhe­ical­ly describes his own book-in-progress on the sub­ject to a help­less acquain­tance. A skin­ny stu­dent type liv­ing in a room crammed with tele­vi­sions and even wear­ing one on back claims des­per­a­tion to own yet anoth­er set. Two fel­lows egg a third on to throw a type­writer off a bridge and thus sym­bol­i­cal­ly final­ize a breakup. And let us nev­er for­get the immor­tal seg­ment where­in But­t­hole Surfers drum­mer Tere­sa Tay­lor attempts to sell what she describes as a “Madon­na pap smear.” Like the ear­ly films of Taran­ti­no, Smith, and Rodriguez, Slack­er remains thrilling­ly fun to watch, espe­cial­ly for the enthu­si­ast of micro-bud­get cin­e­ma. But some­where around its final pas­sage, which begins when a slack­er picks up the Pix­elvi­sion cam­era through which we our­selves see the next few min­utes, you real­ize you’ve been watch­ing some­thing on a high­er plane. Forced to bet which of the films of this move­ment schol­ars will rel­ish enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly a cen­tu­ry from now, I’d bet on Slack­er, which has now beed added to our ever-expand­ing list, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

My Best Friend’s Birth­day, Quentin Tarantino’s 1987 Debut Film

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Ezra Pound’s Fiery 1939 Reading of His Early Poem, ‘Sestina: Altaforte’

in Literature, Poetry | October 22nd, 2012

In this rare record­ing from 1939, Ezra Pound gives a pas­sion­ate read­ing of his ear­ly work about a war­mon­ger­ing 12th cen­tu­ry trou­ba­dour, a poem called “Ses­ti­na: Altaforte.”

The poem was writ­ten in ear­ly 1909, when Pound was an ambi­tious 23-year-old Amer­i­can liv­ing in Lon­don. At that time Pound was in the habit of spend­ing hours every day por­ing over books in the British Muse­um read­ing room.

“I resolved that at thir­ty I would know more about poet­ry than any man liv­ing,” wrote Pound, “that I would know the dynam­ic con­tent from the shell, that I would know what was account­ed poet­ry every­where, what part of poet­ry was ‘inde­struc­tible,’ what part could not be lost by trans­la­tion, and–scarcely less impor­tant what effects were obtain­able in one lan­guage only and were utter­ly inca­pable of being trans­lat­ed.”

In pur­suit of this goal, Pound “learned more or less of nine for­eign lan­guages.” Among those was Occ­i­tan, or Langue d’oc, the lan­guage of the medieval trou­ba­dours. Pound had become fas­ci­nat­ed with the trou­ba­dours while studing romance lit­er­a­ture at Hamil­ton Col­lege and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia. One fig­ure who espe­cial­ly intrigued him was Bertran de Born, the late-12th cen­tu­ry noble­man, war­rior and trou­ba­dour who was immor­tal­ized by Dante Alighieri in Can­to XXVIII of the Infer­no as one of the sow­ers of dis­cord in Cir­cle Eight, con­demned to be hacked to pieces over and over again for his role in foment­ing a quar­rel between King Hen­ry II of Eng­land and his sons Richard II (the “Lion­heart”) and Prince Hen­ry. In John Cia­rdi’s trans­la­tion of the Infer­no, Dante describes the hideous fig­ure of Bertran, his head cut off for the sin of sow­ing dis­cord between kins­men:

I saw it there; I seem to see it still–
a body with­out a head, that moved along
like all the oth­ers in that spew and spill.

It held the sev­ered head by its own hair,
swing­ing it like a lantern in its hand;
and the head looked at us and wept in its despair.

It made itself a lamp of its own head,
and they were two in one and one in two;
how this can be, He knows who so com­mand­ed. 

Pound would even­tu­al­ly trans­late sev­er­al of Bertran’s sur­viv­ing poems, but he found it dif­fi­cult. He decid­ed first to write his own poem in the voice of Bertran, incor­po­rat­ing blood­thirsty images from the medieval poet­’s own verse and set­ting the new poem in the 12th cen­tu­ry Ses­ti­na form, which orig­i­nat­ed with the trou­ba­dours of south­ern France. In his essay “How I Began,” Pound recalls the com­po­si­tion of “Ses­ti­na: Altaforte”:

I had De Born on my mind. I had found him untrans­lat­able. Then it occurred to me that I might present him in this man­ner. I want­ed the curi­ous invo­lu­tion and recur­rence of the Ses­ti­na. I knew more or less of the arrange­ment. I wrote the first stro­phe and then went to the Muse­um to make sure of the right order of per­mu­ta­tions, for I was then liv­ing in Lang­ham Street, next to the “pub,” and had hard­ly any books with me. I did the rest of the poem at a sit­ting. Tech­ni­cal­ly it is one of my best, though a poem of such a theme could nev­er be very impor­tant.

The Ses­ti­na is a com­plex form with 39 lines (six stan­zas of six lines each fol­lowed by an envoi of three lines) all end­ing with one of six words that are grouped togeth­er in each stan­za. For “Ses­ti­na: Altaforte,” Pound chose the words “clash,” “crim­son,” “oppos­ing,” “rejoic­ing,” “music” and “peace.” The images of clash­ing swords and crim­son blood earned Pound’s poem the nick­name “Bloody Ses­ti­na.” It was the first of his poems to make it into Ford Mad­dox Huef­fer­’s pres­ti­gious Eng­lish Review. When Pound recit­ed the poem in 1909 at a gath­er­ing of poets at a Lon­don restau­rant, he report­ed­ly put so much pas­sion into his per­for­mance that “the table shook and cut­lery vibrat­ed in res­o­nance with his voice.”

That same pas­sion can be heard in the record­ing above, made thir­ty years lat­er when Pound was vis­it­ing Amer­i­ca for the first time in 28 years. It was record­ed on May 17, 1939 in the Wood­ber­ry Poet­ry Room at Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty. For dra­mat­ic effect, Pound accom­pa­nied him­self on a ket­tle­drum. To read the words of “Ses­ti­na: Altaforte” as you lis­ten to Pound’s voice, click here to open the text in a new win­dow. And to hear all of Pound’s 1939 record­ings, go to PennSound, where you can hear those record­ings and many more by Pound.

Metamorphose: 1999 Documentary Reveals the Life & Work of Artist M.C. Escher

in Art, Film | October 2nd, 2012

Made in 1999 by Dutch direc­tor Jan Bos­driesz, the doc­u­men­tary Meta­mor­phose: M.C. Esch­er, 1898–1972 takes its title from one of Escher’s more well-known prints in which the word “meta­mor­phose” trans­forms itself into pat­terns of abstract shapes and ani­mals. It’s one of those col­lege-dorm prints one thinks of when one thinks of M.C. Esch­er, and it’s won­der­ful in its own way. But the doc­u­men­tary reveals oth­er sides of the artist—his art-school days, his sojourn in Italy—that pro­duced a very dif­fer­ent kind of work. Esch­er began as a stu­dent of archi­tec­ture, enrolled in the School for Archi­tec­ture and Dec­o­ra­tive arts in Haar­lem by his par­ents, who strug­gled to help him find his way after he failed his high school exams.

Once in Haar­lem, the lone­ly and some­what morose Esch­er finds him­self drawn to graph­ic art instead. One of his teach­ers, accom­plished Dutch artist Samuel Jes­su­run de Mesqui­ta, whose influ­ence is evi­dent in Escher’s work and life, sees some of Escher’s linocuts and likes them. In archival footage of an inter­view with Esch­er, the artist says that Jes­su­run de Mesqui­ta asked him, “Wouldn’t you rather be a graph­ic artist instead of an archi­tect?”

Esch­er admits, “I wasn’t all that inter­est­ed in archi­tec­ture.” It’s a lit­tle bit of a sur­pris­ing admis­sion giv­en Escher’s wild archi­tec­tur­al imag­i­na­tion, but per­haps what he meant was that he wasn’t inter­est­ed in the con­ven­tion­al, but rather in the archi­tec­ture of the fan­tas­tic, the impos­si­ble spaces he imag­ined in much of his work.

We learn oth­er things about Esch­er: One of his wood­cuts from this peri­od is titled “Nev­er Think before You Begin,” show­ing a lone­ly fig­ure on a dark and treach­er­ous path with only a tiny light to guide him, a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Escher’s deci­sion to pur­sue graph­ic art. The nar­ra­tor informs us that “it took more than thir­ty years for him to earn enough from his work to live on.” Luck­i­ly, as with many artists who strug­gle for years, Esch­er had rich par­ents. We can thank them for their patron­age.  To give you some idea of Escher’s mor­bid char­ac­ter, we learn that he chose the top­ic “Dance of Death” for a three-hour lec­ture to his fel­low art stu­dents in Haar­lem. Esch­er told them, “The dance of death and life are two expres­sions with the same mean­ing. What else do we do oth­er than dance death into our souls?”

Meta­mor­phose is an impres­sive doc­u­men­tary, beau­ti­ful­ly shot and edit­ed, with a bal­ance of stock footage of the peri­od, inter­views with the artist him­self, and long, lin­ger­ing shots of his work. The film cov­ers Escher’s entire artis­tic life, end­ing with footage of the artist at work. These “last images” of Esch­er, the nar­ra­tor says, “are not gloomy. We see an artist in his stu­dio, doing the things he enjoys,” a man “proud of his suc­cess.” At the end of his life, he still hon­ored his teacher, de Mesqui­ta, and the South Ital­ian coast that shel­tered him dur­ing his for­ma­tive years.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Math­e­mat­ics Made Vis­i­ble: The Extra­or­di­nary Art of M.C. Esch­er

Inspi­ra­tions: A Short Film Cel­e­brat­ing the Math­e­mat­i­cal Art of M.C. Esch­er

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.