Kurt Vonnegut Writes an Offbeat Contract Outlining His Chores Around the House, 1947
Kurt Vonnegut never did things the conventional way. He didn’t write particularly conventional novels. He certainly didn’t make very conventional speeches at universities. But he did make semi-conventional domestic agreements. Take, for example, this contract written on January 26, 1947. Posted on the Harper’s website in full, this odd little document, dubbed “The Chore List of Champions,” finds Vonnegut outlining all of the tasks he promised to do around the house — this while his young wife, Jane, prepared to give birth to their first child. The contract (the content is conventional, the form is not) will be published in Kurt Vonnegut: Letters next month. And it begins:
I, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., that is, do hereby swear that I will be faithful to the commitments hereunder listed:
I. With the agreement that my wife will not nag, heckle, or otherwise disturb me on the subject, I promise to scrub the bathroom and kitchen floors once a week, on a day and hour of my own choosing. Not only that, but I will do a good and thorough job, and by that she means that I will get under the bathtub, behind the toilet, under the sink, under the icebox, into the corners; and I will pick up and put in some other location whatever movable objects happen to be on said floors at the time so as to get under them too, and not just around them. Furthermore, while I am undertaking these tasks I will refrain from indulging in such remarks as “Shit,” “Goddamn sonofabitch,” and similar vulgarities, as such language is nerve-wracking to have around the house when nothing more drastic is taking place than the facing of Necessity. If I do not live up to this agreement, my wife is to feel free to nag, heckle, and otherwise disturb me until I am driven to scrub the floors anyway—no matter how busy I am.
And then later continues:
g. When smoking I will make every effort to keep the ashtray I am using at the time upon a surface that does not slant, sag, slope, dip, wrinkle, or give way upon the slightest provocation; such surfaces may be understood to include stacks of books precariously mounted on the edge of a chair, the arms of the chair that has arms, and my own knees;
h. I will not put out cigarettes upon the sides of, or throw ashes into, either the red leather wastebasket or the stamp wastebasket that my loving wife made me for Christmas, 1945, as such practice noticeably impairs the beauty and ultimate practicability of said wastebaskets;
j. An exception to the above three-day time limit is the taking out of the garbage, which, as any fool knows, had better not wait that long; I will take out the garbage within three hours after the need for disposal has been pointed out to me by my wife. It would be nice, however, if, upon observing the need for disposal with my own two eyes, I should perform this particular task upon my own initiative, and thus not make it necessary for my wife to bring up a subject that is moderately distasteful to her;
l. The terms of this contract are understood to be binding up until that time after the arrival of our child (to be specified by the doctor) when my wife will once again be in full possession of all her faculties, and able to undertake more arduous pursuits than are now advisable.
You can read the complete “Chore List of Champions” at Harper’s.
via Metafilter
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Read More...Michio Kaku Explains the Physics Behind Absolutely Everything
“It’s turtles all the way down,” a possibly apocryphal old lady once said as a way of fully explaining her concept of the world supported on the back of a giant tortoise. But according to City University of New York’s Michio Kaku, it’s physics all the way down. He shares this highly educated assumption with, presumably, everyone in his field of theoretical physics, and if you’ve got 42 minutes, he’ll tell you why the subject’s explanatory power has compelled him and so many others to dedicate their lives to it. In “The Universe in a Nutshell,” the lecture embedded above, Kaku tells of the origins of modern physics, breaks down how it has clarified to humanity so many of the mechanisms of existence, and reminds us of both the countless technological advances it has already made possible and the infinitude of them it will in the future. To our fellow humans just a few generations back, he says, we, with our advanced communication devices and our ability to watch slickly produced, high-resolution lectures on demand, would look like wizards; our grandchildren, enjoying yet more benefits from physics, would look like gods.
This video comes to you free from Big Think, though as a production it originates from the associated venture Floating University, which sells access to lectures on a variety of subjects, from physics to demography to linguistics to aesthetics. Given all the useful information technology now so widely available — thanks in part to discoveries in, yes, physics — a particularly fruitful time has come for projects meant to reinvent education. Floating University considers itself to be “democratizing education,” and the demand certainly seems fervent. “Why can’t school be like this?” writes one YouTube commenter. “I don’t want homework, I don’t want a binder with dividers, I don’t want to be bored to death with worksheets. I just want to LEARN.” This, of course, started arguments. But that’s democracy for you.
Please note, oodles of Free Physics Courses — including ones by Richard Feynman, Leonard Susskind, Sean Carroll, and Walter Lewin — can be found in our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...“Do Scientists Pray?”: A Young Girl Asks Albert Einstein in 1936. Einstein Then Responds.
Albert Einstein endeavored to express his view of God as forthrightly as possible to a public eager to know where he stood in the popular conflict between science and religion. In 1936, a sixth-grade girl named Phyllis wrote him a letter on behalf of her Sunday School class. “We have brought up the question,” she wrote, “Do scientists pray? It began by asking whether we could believe in both science and religion.” Einstein’s reply is somewhat equivocal. He is clear enough in stating that a scientific fidelity to the “laws of nature” means that “a scientist cannot be inclined to believe that the course of events can be influenced by prayer, that is, by a supernaturally manifested wish.” This would seem to settle the question. However, he goes on to invoke the philosopher Spinoza’s god and distinguish between intellectual humility and wonder, on the one hand, and a more popular, supernatural faith on the other.
However, we must concede that our actual knowledge of these forces is imperfect, so that in the end the belief in the existence of a final, ultimate spirit rests on a kind of faith. Such belief remains widespread even with the current achievements in science.
But also, everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is surely quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive.
This is probably not the response that Phyllis and her class had hoped for, and they (or their teacher) may have taken offense at the description of their faith as “naïve.” But Einstein’s careful reply also expresses a kind of scientific awe that acknowledges the limits of reason and leads to a kind of sublime feeling that can legitimately be called “religious” (much as Carl Sagan would do decades later). This, I believe, is not a casual or callous dismissal of Phyllis’s faith, something that so-called “New Atheists” are often accused of (justly or not). Instead it’s a considered response in which the great physicist shares his own version of “faith”–his faith in Nature, or the “laws of the universe,” which he concedes are “vastly superior to man.” I think it’s a moving exchange between two people who couldn’t be further apart in their understanding of the world, but who just may have found some small common ground in considering each other’s positions for a moment.
Einstein’s correspondence comes to us via the always illuminating Letters of Note
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...The Legendary Bluesman Robert Johnson Brought to Life in (Somewhat Creepy) Animated Image
In his autobiography, Chronicles, Volume 1, Bob Dylan remembered the day, back in the early 1960s, when he first encountered the music of the Mississippi Delta bluesman Robert Johnson. His memory went something like this:
I had the thick acetate of the Robert Johnson record in my hands and I asked Van Ronk if he ever heard of him. Dave said, nope, he hadn’t, and I put it on the record player so we could listen to it. From the first note the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up. The stabbing sounds from the guitar could almost break a window. When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor. I immediately differentiated between him and anyone else I had ever heard.
Dylan wasn’t alone in this thought. Ask Eric Clapton and he’ll tell you that Johnson is “the most important blues singer that ever lived.” And one Keith Richards summed things up rather nicely, saying, “You want to know how good the blues can get? Well, this is it.” With this kind of praise, you’d think that Robert Johnson had lived a long life, recording a long list of albums. But the opposite is true. Johnson died in 1938, when he was only 27 years old (which puts him, of course, in the 27 Club). And he left for posterity a mere 29 tracks, all recorded between 1936 and 1937. The details of Johnson’s life are sketchy at best. And the visual traces of his existence have almost entirely disappeared. In the closing pages of Chronicles, Bob Dylan makes reference to a video that briefly captures the image of Johnson:
More than thirty years later, I would see Johnson for myself in eight seconds’ worth of 8‑millimeter film shot in Ruleville, Mississippi, on a brightly lit afternoon street by some Germans in the late ’30s. Some people questioned whether it was really him, but slowing the eight seconds down so it was more like eighty seconds, you can see that it really is Robert Johnson, has to be—couldn’t be anyone else.
It’s a tantalizing prospect. But, when professionals took a close look at the video, they figured out it was a fake (see below). So we’re left with this — two photographs of the musician. Two simple photos, which now thanks to Westside Media, have been manipulated to bring Johnson back to life, at least long enough to sing two songs: “Hell Hound on My Trail” and “Preaching Blues.” Watch above.
The Dead Authors Podcast: H.G. Wells Comically Revives Literary Greats with His Time Machine
Recorded live in front of an audience at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in Los Angeles, The Dead Authors Podcast—“Unscripted, barely researched, all fun!”—showcases raucous conversations between “time-traveler” H.G. Wells (Paul F. Tompkins) and various “dead authors.” Some of Wells’ guests have included Aesop, Dorothy Parker, Gertrude Stein, Carl Sagan, and Jorge Luis Borges, all played by comedians like Andy Richter (as Emily Dickinson) and Brian Stack (as P.G. Wodehouse).
In the episode above, Wells welcomes the notoriously misogynistic and allegedly anti-Semitic Friedrich Nietzsche (James Adomian) and the notoriously racist writer of “weird tales” H.P. Lovecraft (Paul Scheer). As the podcast description has it, “if you are easily offended, you may find this one a bit challenging.” The offense is mitigated by the fact that the discussion “very rarely makes any sense AT ALL,” and that it’s damned funny.
Both “authors” spout exaggerated parodies of their philosophies, in ridiculous accents, and (as you can see from the photo above), look equally ridiculous to an audience that sometimes laughs along, sometimes doesn’t, as will happen in live comedy. The actors are game, ad-libbing with ease and confidence and clearly having a great time. The only moments that aren’t improvised are when the actors playing Nietzsche and Lovecraft read from the writers’ actual texts. In this context (and in these voices), the two both indeed make little sense. They’ll survive the takedown—these are two dead authors who tend to be taken far too seriously by their devotees. So, go ahead, listen to Nietzsche huff and puff his way through his bombastic and oracular pronouncements; hear Lovecraft hiss through his florid and paranoid prose. It’s all for a good cause. The Dead Authors podcast benefits 826LA, a non-profit writing and tutoring center for kids age 6–18.
You can find real works by Nietzsche and Lovecraft in our collection of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books.
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...Pink Floyd Provides the Soundtrack for the BBC’s Broadcast of the 1969 Moon Landing
Did the United States of America lose much of its will to explore outer space when the Soviet Union’s collapse shut off the engine of competition? Critical observers sometimes make that point, but I have an alternative theory: maybe the decline of progressive rock had just as much to do with it. Both that musical subgenre and American space exploration proudly possessed their distinctive aesthetics, the potential for great cultural impact, and ambition bordering on the ridiculous. Though we didn’t have mash-ups in the years when shuttle launches and four-side concept albums alike captured the public imagination, we can now use modern technology to double back and directly unite these two late-twentieth-century phenomena. Behold, above, Pink Floyd’s jam “Moonhead” lined up with footage of Apollo 17, NASA’s last moon landing.
But given the recent passing of astronaut Neil Armstrong, none of us have been thinking as much about the last moon landing as we have about the first. Pink Floyd actually laid down “Moonhead” at a BBC TV studio during the descent of Apollo 11, the mission on which Armstrong would take that one giant leap for mankind. The band’s improvisation made it to the ears of England’s moon-landing viewers: “The programming was a little looser in those days,” remembers guitarist David Gilmour, “and if a producer of a late-night programme felt like it, they would do something a bit off the wall.” British rock’s fascination with space proved fruitful. David Bowie put out the immortal “Space Oddity” mere days before Apollo 11’s landing (to say nothing of “Life on Mars?” two years later), and the BBC played it, too, in its live coverage. Even as late as the early eighties, no less a rock innovator than Brian Eno, charmed by American astronauts’ enthusiasm for country-western music, would craft the album Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks. If we want more interesting popular music, perhaps we just need to get into space more often.
via NYTimes and BoingBoing
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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...The Crimson Permanent Assurance: Monty Python’s Comic Fantasy of Revolt Against the Corporations
In art, certain themes are evergreen. They never go out of date. Among them are love, death, and the intrinsically dehumanizing nature of corporations.
In 1983 Monty Python tapped into one of the Great Themes with their short film The Crimson Permanent Assurance. It tells the story of a group of elderly accountants, “strained under the oppressive yoke of their new corporate management,” who rise up against The Very Big Corporation of America and set sail on the high seas of international finance as a marauding band of pirates.
The film was originally conceived by director Terry Gilliam as an animated sequence for inclusion in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, but as the idea grew he talked the group into letting him develop it into a live-action film. The Crimson Permanent Assurance was eventually shown both on its own and as a prologue to The Meaning of Life. The title was inspired by the 1952 Burt Lancaster adventure film The Crimson Pirate. The cast is made up mostly of unknown actors, but if you watch closely you’ll catch a glimpse of most of the Python members. Gilliam and Michael Palin have cameo roles as window washers, and Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Graham Chapman appear very briefly at the beginning of the boardroom scene.
The Crimson Permanent Assurance is a delightful little film–and just as relevant now as ever, a reminder of the utter absurdity of the claim that “corporations are people too.”
You will find The Crimson Permanent Assurance added to our collection of 500 Free Movies Online.
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Read More...Take a Virtual Tour of CBGB, the Early Home of Punk and New Wave
Yesterday we posted about the Talking Heads’ days playing at CBGB, the Lower East Side nightclub rock historians now discuss in hushed, reverent tones. (Full name: CBGB OMFUG, or “Country, Bluegrass, Blues, and Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers.”) Though the place finally closed its doors in a rent dispute six years ago, you can still visit it on the internet through this virtual tour. You’ll have to guide yourself, but much of the fun comes in the freedom to explore. Beginning your journey in the women’s restroom, you can then proceed however you like, clicking from room to room and examining the legendarily gritty surroundings in all 360 degrees. If you once played or frequented CBGB, the experience may well take you back, albeit with much brighter lighting than you remember. Or if, like me, you once played a lot of graphic adventure games on the computer, the tour’s interface will certainly take you back to that as well.
Purists will have objections to a virtual tour of a place of such raw physicality as CBGB: you can’t feel the stickiness of the floors, you can’t smell the mixture of aggressive odors, you can’t trip over that one irregular step on the stairs, and you especially can’t hear the awe-inspiring amplification system. But you can look close and long at the club’s cultural palimpsest of stickers, graffiti, fliers, and hard-knocked cement. Conversations sprouted up on MetaFilter both when CBGB closed and when this virtual tour debuted: some commenters loved the place, while others couldn’t bear it; some commenters regretted its passing, while others thought it had long since become a shadow of itself. Some seemed to feel all of this at once. As one MeFite said, “Those bathrooms are just as disgusting as I remember them being. I miss the hell out of that place.”
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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...The Talking Heads Play CBGB, the New York Club That Shaped Their Sound (1975)
High on the list of historical periods I regret having missed, I would place Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the seventies. Despite being something less than a shining time for major cities, especially American major cities, and especially New York City, that era’s seemingly hollowed-out downtowns offered cradles to many a cultural movement. David Byrne’s band the Talking Heads count as a major one unto themselves. Generation X author Douglas Coupland memorably asked only one question to determine whether one belongs to that particular cohort: do you like the Talking Heads? In an entire book he wrote about the band’s 1979 album Fear of Music, novelist Jonatham Lethem remembers this of his own enthusiasm: “At the peak, in 1980 or 81, my identification was so complete that I might have wished to wear the album Fear of Music in place of my head so as to be more clearly seen by those around me.”
Talking about the origin of the Talking Heads, we must talk about CBGB, the Bowery nightclub that hosted formative shows for such punk, new wave, and culturally proximate but difficult to categorize acts like Television, the Cramps, Blondie, the Patti Smith Group, and the B‑52s. Byrne and company began playing there in the mid-seventies, and would eventually drop the place’s name in the track “Life During Wartime.” (“This ain’t no Mudd Club or CBGB…”) At the top of this post, you’ll see their 1975 performance of “Psycho Killer” at CBGB, along with “Tentative Decisions” and “With Our Love.” Though CBGB shut down in 2006, its essence lives on in the influential music it shaped. “It is the venue that makes the music scene happen just as much as the creativity of the musicians,” wrote Byrne himself in CBGB and OMFUG: Thirty Years from the Home of Underground Rock. “There is continually and forever a pool of talent, energy, and expression waiting to be tapped—it simply needs the right place in which to express itself.”
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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Rudolf Brazda, Last Man to Wear the Pink Triangle During the Holocaust, Tells His Story
According to estimates by the United States Holocaust Museum, anywhere from 5,000 to 15,000 gay men were imprisoned in concentration camps under the Third Reich, where they were sometimes the subjects of gruesome experiments. Prior to this mass persecution, homosexuality was criminalized under the so-called Paragraph 175 of the criminal code, and the Gestapo was charged with “registering” gays, who could be sentenced to prison terms of up to ten years for violations–in addition to permanent loss of many civil rights–and even worse penalties, like castration. Gay men convicted under these laws had to wear a pink triangle to identify themselves. The short documentary above tells the story of Rudolf Brazda, the last camp survivor to have worn the pink triangle. Brazda died last year at the age of 98.
Brazda, who lived as an openly gay man in the thirties, was convicted under Paragraph 175 in 1937 and served a term of six months. He thought this might be the extent of his harassment by the Nazis, but ultimately, he was arrested and sent to Buchenwald in 1942, where he would spend three years. In the video above, Brazda mostly tells his own story, in German with English subtitles. It’s not the first time he has done so. Brazda’s story was prominently featured in a book by author Jean-Luc Schwab (who also appears above), Itinerary of the Pink Triangle (Itineraire d’un Triangle rose), which recounts the dehumanizing experiences of gay men during the Holocaust. Schwab’s book and the brief interview above preserve important testimony from a man who was “very likely the last victim and the last witness” of the Nazi persecution of homosexual men in the 30s and 40s. Brazda’s willingness to tell his story has been invaluable to scholars and activists seeking to document this little-known (and often denied) history.
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.
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