Alain de Botton Presents Ten Virtues for the Modern Day
At the end of my college years, I found I needed to take one final political science course to complete my major. I chose a small summer session on the subject of virtue. Having enrolled with no idea what to expect, I finished the quarter less changed by the assigned readings and classroom discussions than by the very — and very unusual — task of having to think about virtue at all. Jokes about the distance of virtue from modern college students’ minds write themselves, but Alain de Botton, a man given to much thought and writing about such lost topics, suspects that the same condition afflicts all of us. Hence his introducing, under the banner of his institution The School of Life, the Virtues Project. It emerges into an unreceptive environment. As de Botton puts it in this introductory post, “In the modern world, the idea of trying to be a ‘good person’ conjures up all sorts of negative associations: of piety, solemnity, bloodlessness and sexual renunciation, as if goodness were something one would try to embrace only when other more difficult but more fulfilling avenues had been exhausted.”
“Throughout history,” he continues, “societies have been interested in fostering virtues, in training us to be more virtuous, but we’re one of the first generations to have zero public interest in this.” In order to bring that number up, de Botton and The School of Life have enumerated ten simple but universal virtues — resilience, empathy, patience, sacrifice, politeness, humor, self-awareness, forgiveness, hope, and confidence — and embedded them in a manifesto, of which you can download a handsome PDF version. This provides the foundational text of the Virtues Project, a component of de Botton’s larger mission, laid out in his recent book Religion for Atheists, to repurpose for modern society the elements of faith that have demonstrated practical value throughout history. Since my adult life, which effectively began as that last poli-sci course ended, has chiefly presented the challenge of winning and maintaining my own self-respect, I’ll be committing these ten virtues to memory, and no doubt watching for the Virtues Project’s lectures and public events to come.
Related content:
Alain de Botton Wants a Religion for Atheists: Introducing Atheism 2.0
Socrates on TV, Courtesy of Alain de Botton (2000)
Alain de Botton Proposes a Kinder, Gentler Philosophy of Success
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.
Read More...Mathemusician Vi Hart Explains the Space-Time Continuum With a Music Box, Bach, and a Möbius Strip
Vi Hart, the Khan Academy’s resident “Recreational Mathemusician” turns the space-time continuum into something that can be played forwards, backwards, upside down, in a circle, and on a Möbius strip.
How you ask?
Music. You know, that stuff that Shakespeare rhapsodized as the food of love?
The fast-talking Hart has way too much to prove in her less than eight minute video to waste time waxing poetic. To her, even the most elusive concepts are explainable, representable. She does manage to create some unintentionally lovely little melodies on a music box that reads holes punched through the notations on a tape printed with a musical stave.
It took several viewings for me to wrap my mind around what exactly was being demonstrated, but I think I’m beginning to grope my way toward whatever dimension she’s currently inhabiting. See if you can follow along and then weigh in as to what you think the mathematically-inclined Bach might be doing in his grave as Hart blithely feeds one of his compositions through her music box, upside down, and backwards.
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Ayun Halliday took piano lessons for years. All that remains are the opening bars to Hello Dolly. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Read More...MAKERS Tells the Story of 50 Years of Progress for Women in the U.S.
Among the many thousands of items in my newsfeed yesterday, three popped out and stuck with me: First, a conservative panel called Independent Women’s Forum convened to discuss their sense that “conservative leaders and funders… don’t take women’s issues seriously.” Panel moderator Christina Hoff Sommers joked, “I’m not sure what’s worse: conservatives ignoring women’s issues or conservatives addressing them.” The tone was light, but the sense of frustration these women feel with their male colleagues was very clear.
Secondly, a UK comedian, Michael J. Dolan published a soul-searching piece much discussed stateside in which he admits he was “a misogynist comedian.” Dolan claims that, like racist comedians of old, “Those peddling misogyny, homophobia or other varieties of hate to drunks who don’t know better are going to find themselves out of favour.” And finally, former president Jimmy Carter wrote an editorial to announce that he is severing his six-decade-long ties with the Southern Baptist Convention because of their view that women should be “subservient” to men. “It is simply self-defeating,” wrote Carter, “for any community to discriminate against half its population.”
I mention these examples because they seem to be part of a general trend of cultural reassessment, after several dismally low points in the discussion of gender equality this past year, about the continued institutionalization—in politics, religion, the workplace, and entertainment—of damaging attitudes toward half of the human species. While it sometimes seems that social change takes place at a glacial pace, with several steps back for every step forward, there are always strong undercurrents of progress that aren’t readily apparent until someone takes the time to organize them into narratives.
This is precisely what the filmmakers of MAKERS aim to do. A “multi-platform video experience” from AOL and PBS, the project showcases “hundreds of compelling stories from women of today and tomorrow… both known and unknown.” Unlike worldwide, policy-based efforts like the just-ended 2013 Global Maternal Health Conference, MAKERS restricts its focus to women in the U.S. and, it seems, relies primarily on individual women with prominent public roles—journalists, activists, writers, and celebrities, or at least that’s the sense one gets from their introductory video (above), which might open them up to charges of elitism. But there is more to the project than celebrity profiles. In their own words, the producers of MAKERS describe the project thus:
MAKERS originated from a very clear premise: over the last half century, the work of millions of women has altered virtually every aspect of American culture. MAKERS features groundbreaking women who have sparked change, been first in their fields and paved the way for those that followed. This initiative also extends to profile hundreds of stories of women who are driving social change today.
Delve into the wealth of short documentary videos on the MAKERS YouTube channel and you’ll see that there are dozens of women profiled who aren’t celebrities in the conventional sense. Sure, we’ve got stars of the screen and the power centers of government and the corporate world, e.g. Ellen DeGeneres, Hilary Clinton, and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, but there are also lesser known “makers,” like 15-year-old Tavi Gevinson, founder and editor-in-chief of webzine Rookie. Gevinson is a prodigy who has built her own online media empire, beginning at the age of 11, when her fashion blog Style Rookie became one of the most popular of its kind. Watch her (below) discuss her own approach to typical teenage insecurities in an excerpt from her longer profile.
Another maker with a deeply inspiring story that you won’t hear in the daily news cycle is Katherine Switzer, the first woman to enter the Boston Marathon in 1967. She did so by signing the form with her initials, making marathon officials think she was a man. Below, Switzer recounts the curiosity, bile, and disturbingly violent harassment she faced during the race. It wasn’t until five years later that the race was officially opened to women. By that time, Switzer was an activist for female runners.
The MAKERS project profiles dozens of other women—like civil rights lawyer and founder of Children’s Defense Fund Marian Wright Edelman—who normally fly under the mass-media radar, but whose presence in the culture has an enormous impact. Keep your eye on PBS listings—on February 26th, they will air a three-hour documentary called MAKERS: Women Who Make America, which promises to tell the “remarkable story for the first time” of the sweeping progress American women have made over the last half-century.
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness.
Read More...Richard Ford Reads Raymond Carver’s ‘The Student’s Wife’; One of 14 Podcasts of Famous Writers Reading a Favorite Story
The Guardian recently asked a group of distinguished authors to read one of their favorite short stories. The resulting podcast series began appearing on the newspaper’s Web site last Friday and will continue through the 4th of January. A few of the writers chose widely recognized masterpieces. Many selected more obscure works. So far, there are podcasts of Zadie Smith reading “Umberto Buti” by Giuseppe Pontiggia, Ruth Rendell reading “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook” by M.R. James, Simon Callow Reading “The Christmas Tree” by Charles Dickens, and Nadine Gordimer reading “The Centaur” by José Saramago.
The American writer Richard Ford (The Sportswriter, Independence Day, Rock Springs) chose to read “The Student’s Wife” by his late friend Raymond Carver. The story was first published in America in 1976, in Carver’s debut short story collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please. It exemplifies Carver’s direct, economical style. But don’t make the mistake of calling Carver a “minimalist” around Ford. He describes the story, and the richness of Carver’s writing, in The Guardian:
Its verbal resources are spare, direct, rarely polysyllabic, restrained, intense, never melodramatic, and real-sounding while being obviously literary in intent. (You always know, pleasurably, that you’re reading a made short story.) These affecting qualities led some dunderheads to call his stories “minimalist”, which they are most assuredly not, inasmuch as they’re full-to-the-brim with the stuff of human intimacy, of longing, of barely unearthable humour, of exquisite nuance, of pathos, of unlooked-for dred, and often of love–expressed in words and gestures not frequently associated with love. More than they are minimal, they are replete with the renewings and the fresh awarenesses we go to great literature to find.
You can listen to Ford’s reading of “The Student’s Wife” below, and follow the rest of the stories as they appear through Jan. 4, along with introductions by the authors who selected them, at The Guardian.
Related Content:
The New Yorker’s Fiction Podcast: Where Great Writers Read Stories by Great Writers
Read More...A Year of Grateful Dead Tunes Up in a Mashup
Eventually someone had to do it.
Michael David Murphy created Tuning ’77, a “seamless audio supercut of an entire year of the Grateful Dead tuning their instruments, live on stage.” The mix uses every publicly available recording from 1977, and it’s really all a prelude to this: 8,976 Free Grateful Dead Concert Recordings in the Internet Archive. You can listen to Tuning ’77 here or below. It runs 92 minutes.
via BoingBoing
Read More...Beatboxing Bach’s Goldberg Variations
It might not surpass Glenn Gould’s recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations from 1981. (Watch him perform it here). But this clip, featuring teenage pianist Kadar Qian and beatbox extraordinaire Kevin Olusola of Pentatonix, has a charm of its own. The clip comes from From the Top, a non-profit whose YouTube channel presents outstanding performances from the country’s best young classical musicians.
If you want your own copy of the Goldberg Variations, you can instantly download The Open Goldberg Variations, the first Kickstarter-funded, open source recording of Bach’s masterpiece. It’s available entirely for free. Also don’t miss the Complete Organ Works of J.S. Bach. They’re free too!
via BoingBoing
Read More...Pier Paolo Pasolini Talks and Reads Poetry with Ezra Pound (1967)
Here’s a collision of cultural figures you don’t see every day: Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom director Pier Paolo Pasolini sitting down with modernist poet Ezra Pound. Though only eight minutes in length and perhaps not subtitled with ideal fluency, this clip nonetheless hints at the kind of conversation, or conversations, you’d like to have been in the room for. Here Pound and Pasolini discuss the linguistically experimental Italian literary movement “neoavanguardia,” which counted among its adherents Umberto Eco, Edoardo Sanguineti, and Amelia Rosselli. Pasolini, not just a filmmaker but a poet and all-around man of letters himself, would naturally know to bring this subject up, since the group famously looked to Anglophone modernists like Pound himself (as well as T.S. Eliot) for their inspiration.
Pound came to Italy in 1924, by which point he already held expatriate status. Born in 1885 in what we now know as Idaho, he moved to London early in the 20th century. Horrified and devastated by the First World War, he moved to Paris in 1921 before landing in the small Italian town of Rapallo three years later. He there proceeded to tarnish his reputation by endorsing the fascism of Mussolini and even Hitler. Pasolini shows interest not in political questions, but artistic ones: about the avant-garde, about Pound’s beloved 14th- and 15th-century painters, and about his Pisan Cantos. Pasolini actually dons his glasses and performs a reading from that work as Pound gazes on. We then see the 82-year-old poet taking his leave, leaning on his cane, moving haltingly through the rustic Italian countryside that spreads out behind him.
via Biblioklept
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Ezra Pound’s Fiery 1939 Reading of His Early Poem, ‘Sestina: Altaforte’
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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...After a Tour of Slavoj Žižek’s Pad, You’ll Never See Interior Design in the Same Way
How to react to celebrity academic Slavoj Žižek? You could see him as a wild-eyed visionary and grow infatuated with his powerful-sounding ideas about power, violence, cinema, psychoanalysis, and perversion. Or you could see him as a Pied Piper for delusional graduate students and grow enraged at his perpetuation of fashionable nonsense. But you’d do best, I would argue, to take him simply as a source of entertainment. How could you do otherwise, watching the above clip from Astra Taylor’s documentary Žižek! (previously featured on Open Culture here)? In these three minutes, the sweating Sublime Object of Ideology author gives us a tour of his pad, spending much time and excitement on his kitchen repurposed as a closet: clothes and sheets in the cupboards, socks in the drawers. “I am a narcissist. I keep everything,” he pronounces, having moved onto the shelves and shelves of his own work, from the pamphlets of his “dissident days” to his latest books in Japanese translation.
But it’s his poster of Josef Stalin that really draws your attention — just as Žižek meant it to. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t have hung it in his entryway, making it the first sight every guest gets of his home. Here he describes it not as a proclamation of Stalinism, exactly, but as — in line with everything else he does — a provocation. “This is just for people who come to be shocked and hopefully to get out,” he explains. “My big worry is not to be ignored, but to be accepted. Of course, it’s not that I’m simply a Stalinist. That would be crazy, tasteless, and so on. But obviously there is something in it that it’s not simply a joke. When I say the only change is that the left appropriates fascism and so on, it’s not a cheap joke. The point is to avoid the trap of standard liberal oppositions: freedom versus totalitarian order, and so on, to rehabilitate notions of discipline, collective order, subordination, sacrifice, all that. I don’t think this is inherently fascist.”
via Biblioklept
Related content:
Žižek!: 2005 Documentary Reveals the “Academic Rock Star” and “Monster” of a Man
Examined Life Drops Academic Celebrities Into the Real World (2008)
Derrida: A 2002 Documentary on the Abstract Philosopher and the Everyday Man
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Noam Chomsky Spells Out the Purpose of Education
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.
Read More...Marilyn Monroe Reads Joyce’s Ulysses at the Playground (1955)
During the 1950s, the pioneering photojournalist Eve Arnold took a series of portraits of Marilyn Monroe. The now iconic photos generally present Monroe as a larger-than-life celebrity and sex symbol. Except for one. In 1955, Arnold photographed Monroe reading a worn copy of James Joyce’s modernist classic, Ulysses. It’s still debated whether this was simply an attempt to recast her image (she often played the “dumb blonde” character in her ’50s films), or whether she actually had a pensive side. (Her personal library, catalogued at the time of her death, suggests the latter.) But, either way, Arnold explained years later how this memorable photo came about:
We worked on a beach on Long Island. She was visiting Norman Rosten the poet.… I asked her what she was reading when I went to pick her up (I was trying to get an idea of how she spent her time). She said she kept Ulysses in her car and had been reading it for a long time. She said she loved the sound of it and would read it aloud to herself to try to make sense of it — but she found it hard going. She couldn’t read it consecutively. When we stopped at a local playground to photograph she got out the book and started to read while I loaded the film. So, of course, I photographed her. It was always a collaborative effort of photographer and subject where she was concerned — but almost more her input.
You can find more images of Marilyn reading Joyce over at The Retronaut. Of course, you can download your own copy of Ulysses from our Free Ebooks collection. But we’d recommend spending time with this finely-read audio version, which otherwise appears in our list of Free Audio Books.
Related Content:
The 430 Books in Marilyn Monroe’s Library: How Many Have You Read?
Stephen Fry Explains His Love for James Joyce’s Ulysses
Henri Matisse Illustrates 1935 Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses
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