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A Look Inside Hannah Arendt’s Personal Library: Download Marginalia from 90 Books (Heidegger, Kant, Marx & More)

in Archives, Philosophy, Politics | August 14th, 2015

Hannah_Arendt

It does seem pos­si­ble, I think, to over­val­ue the sig­nif­i­cance of a writer’s library to his or her own lit­er­ary pro­duc­tions. We all hold on to books that have long since ceased to have any pull on us, and lose track of books that have great­ly influ­enced us. What we keep or don’t keep can be as much a mat­ter of hap­pen­stance or sen­ti­ment as delib­er­ate per­son­al archiv­ing. But while we may not always be con­scious cura­tors of our lives’ effects, those effects still speak for us when we are gone in ways we may nev­er have intend­ed. In the case of famous—and famous­ly controversial—thinkers like Han­nah Arendt, what is left behind will always con­sti­tute a body of evi­dence. And in some cases—such as that of Arendt’s teacher and one­time lover Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger’s glar­ing­ly anti-Semit­ic Black Note­books—the evi­dence can be irrev­o­ca­bly damn­ing.

Heidegger Early Greek

In Arendt’s case, we have no such smok­ing gun to sub­stan­ti­ate argu­ments that, despite her own back­ground, Arendt was anti-Jew­ish and blamed the vic­tims of the Holo­caust. Dur­ing the so-called “Eich­mann wars” in the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, a tor­rent of crit­i­cism bom­bard­ed Arendt’s Eich­mann in Jerusalem, the com­pi­la­tion of dis­patch­es she penned as an observ­er of the Nazi arch-bureaucrat’s tri­al. These days, writes Corey Robin in The Nation, “while the con­tro­ver­sy over Eich­mann remains, the con­tro­ver­sial­ists have moved on.” The debate now seems more cen­tered on Arendt’s book itself than on her moti­va­tions. What do Arendt’s obser­va­tions reveal to us today about the log­ic of total­i­tar­i­an­ism and geno­ci­dal state actions? One way to approach the ques­tions of mean­ing in Eich­mann, and in her mon­u­men­tal The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism, is to exam­ine the sources of her thought—and her use of those sources.

Arendt Nicomachean

Arendt’s library—much of it on view online thanks to Bard col­lege—offers us a unique oppor­tu­ni­ty to do just that, not only by giv­ing us access to the spe­cif­ic edi­tions and trans­la­tions that she her­self read and saved (for what­ev­er rea­son), but also by offer­ing insight into what Arendt con­sid­ered impor­tant enough in those texts to under­line and anno­tate. In Bard’s dig­i­tal col­lec­tion of “Arendt Mar­gin­a­lia”—selec­tions of her anno­tat­ed books in down­load­able PDFs—we see a polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy informed by Aris­to­tle (see a page from her copy of Nico­machean Ethics above), Pla­to, and Kant, but also by con­ser­v­a­tive Ger­man polit­i­cal the­o­rist Carl Schmitt, a mem­ber and active sup­port­er of Nazism, and of course, by Hei­deg­ger, whose work occu­pies a cen­tral place in her library: in Ger­man and Eng­lish (like his Ear­ly Greek Think­ing above, inscribed by the trans­la­tor), and in pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary sources.

While it may go too far to claim, as promi­nent schol­ar Bernard Wasser­stein did in 2009, that an exam­i­na­tion of Arendt’s sources shows her inter­nal­iz­ing the val­ues of Nazis and anti-Semi­tes, the pre­pon­der­ance of con­ser­v­a­tive Ger­man thinkers in her per­son­al library does give us a sense of her intel­lec­tu­al lean­ings. But we can­not draw broad con­clu­sions from a cur­so­ry sur­vey of a life­time of read­ing and re-read­ing, though we do see a par­tic­u­lar­ly Aris­totelian strain in her think­ing: that the indi­vid­ual is only as healthy as his or her polit­i­cal cul­ture. What schol­ars of Arendt will find in Bard’s dig­i­tal col­lec­tion are ample clues to the devel­op­ment and evo­lu­tion of her phi­los­o­phy over time. What lay read­ers will find is the out­line of a course on the sources of Arendt-ian thought, includ­ing not only Greeks and Ger­mans, but the Amer­i­can poet Robert Low­ell, who wrote a glow­ing pro­file of Arendt and con­tributed at least four signed books of his to her library.

I say “at least” because the Bard dig­i­tal col­lec­tion is yet incom­plete, rep­re­sent­ing only a por­tion of the phys­i­cal media in the college’s phys­i­cal archive of “approx­i­mate­ly 4,000 vol­umes, ephemera and pam­phlets that made up the library in Han­nah Arendt’s last apart­ment in New York City.” What we don’t have online are books inscribed to her by Jew­ish schol­ar and mys­tic Ger­shom Scholem, by W.H. Auden and Ran­dall Jar­rell, and many oth­ers. Nonethe­less the “Arendt Mar­gin­a­lia” gives us an oppor­tu­ni­ty to peer into a writer and scholar’s process, and see her wres­tle with the thought of her pre­de­ces­sors and con­tem­po­raries. The full Arendt col­lec­tion gives us even more to sift through, includ­ing pri­vate cor­re­spon­dence and record­ings of pub­lic speech­es. The dig­i­ti­za­tion of these sources offers many oppor­tu­ni­ties for those who can­not trav­el to New York and access the phys­i­cal archives to delve into Arendt’s intel­lec­tu­al world in ways pre­vi­ous­ly only avail­able to pro­fes­sion­al aca­d­e­mics.

Relat­ed Con­tents:

Enter the Han­nah Arendt Archives & Dis­cov­er Rare Audio Lec­tures, Man­u­scripts, Mar­gin­a­lia, Let­ters, Post­cards & More

Han­nah Arendt Dis­cuss­es Phi­los­o­phy, Pol­i­tics & Eich­mann in Rare 1964 TV Inter­view

Han­nah Arendt’s Orig­i­nal Arti­cles on “the Banal­i­ty of Evil” in the New York­er Archive

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

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Read Pablo Picasso’s Poetry: Modernist Meditations on Making Art, World War, Dogs & More

in Art, Poetry | August 6th, 2015

Picasso, annotated poem manuscript, December 24, 1935

What makes Pablo Picas­so such a rep­re­sen­ta­tive 20th-cen­tu­ry artist? Most of it has to do with his par­tic­u­lar achieve­ments, such as the visu­al ground he broke with his Cubist paint­ing, sure, but some of it also has to do with the fact that his inter­ests extend­ed so far beyond paint­ing. We think of cre­ators who could cre­ate across var­i­ous domains as “Renais­sance men,” but con­di­tions a few cen­turies on from the Renais­sance enabled such artists to exert their will across an even wider range of forms. Picas­so, for instance, worked in not just paint­ing but sculp­ture, print­mak­ing, ceram­ics, and let­ters.

That last even includes poet­ry, to which Picas­so announced his com­mit­ment in 1935, at the age of 53. At that point, writes Dan­ger­ous Minds’ Paul Gal­lagher, “he began writ­ing poems almost every day until the sum­mer of 1959,” begin­ning “by daub­ing col­ors for words in a note­book before mov­ing on to using words to sketch images,” ulti­mate­ly pro­duc­ing hun­dreds of poems com­posed pri­mar­i­ly of “stream of con­scious­ness, unpunc­tu­at­ed word asso­ci­a­tion with star­tling jux­ta­po­si­tion of images and at times an obses­sion with sex, death and excre­ment.”

If this sounds like your cup of tea, you can find plen­ty of Picas­so poet­ry over at Ubuweb, which offers A Picas­so Sam­pler: Excerpts from the Bur­ial of the Count of Orgaz & Oth­er Poems free for the view­ing. “Picas­so, like any poet of con­se­quence, is a man ful­ly into his time and into the ter­rors that his time presents,” writes the col­lec­tion’s edi­tor Jerome Rothen­berg. His words reflect “the state of things between the two world wars — the first one still fresh in mind and the rum­blings of the sec­ond start­ing up,” a time and place “where poet­ry becomes — for him as for us — the only lan­guage that makes sense.”

Before div­ing into that col­lec­tion, you can also get a sense of Picas­so’s poet­ry by hav­ing a look at some of his short­er poems col­lect­ed at the site of artist Jef Borgeau, such as “the artist & his mod­el”:

turn your back
but stay in view at the same time
(now look away,
any­thing else con­fus­es)

stand still with­out say­ing a word

you can’t see but this is how
i sep­a­rate day from night

and the star­less sky

from the emp­ty heart

“dogs”:

dogs eat at the night
buried in the yard
they chase the moon in a pack
the white of their teeth
com­pared to stars

the win­dows close against them
iron bars in trans­paren­cy

life clos­es against them

the morn­ing will crush them to dust
with only the wind left
to stir them up

And “the morn­ing of the world”:

i have a face cut from ice
a heart pierced in a thou­sand places
so to remem­ber
always the same voice
the same ges­tures
and my laugh­ter
heavy
as a wall
between you and me

the ones who are most alive
seem the most still

behind the milky way
a shad­ow dances

our gaze climbs toward the stars

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Picas­so Paint­ing on Glass

Pablo Picasso’s Two Favorite Recipes: Eel Stew & Omelette Tor­tilla Niçoise

The Post­cards That Picas­so Illus­trat­ed and Sent to Jean Cocteau, Apol­li­naire & Gertrude Stein

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Iggy Pop Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s Classic Horror Story, “The Tell-Tale Heart”

in Literature, Music | August 5th, 2015

My intro­duc­tion to the work of James Newell Oster­berg, Jr, bet­ter known as Iggy Pop, came in the form of “Risky,” a song from Ryuichi Sakamo­to’s Neo Geo album that fea­tured not just singing but spo­ken word from the Stooges’ lead vocal­ist and punk icon. On that track, Pop speaks grim­ly and evoca­tive­ly in the per­sona of a pro­tag­o­nist “born in a cor­po­rate dun­geon where peo­ple are cheat­ed of life,” repeat­ed­ly invok­ing the human com­pul­sion to “climb to this point, move on, climb to this point, move on.” Ulti­mate­ly, he pos­es the ques­tion: “Career, career, acquire, acquire — but what is life with­out a heart?”

Today, we give you Iggy Pop the sto­ry­teller ask­ing what life is with a heart — or rather, one heart too many, unceas­ing­ly remind­ing you of your guilt. He tells the sto­ry, of course, of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten by the Amer­i­can mas­ter of psy­cho­log­i­cal hor­ror Edgar Allan Poe in 1843.

This telling appears on the album Closed on Account of Rabies, which fea­tures Poe’s sto­ries as inter­pret­ed by the likes of Pop, Christo­pher Walken, Deb­bie Har­ry, Mar­i­anne Faith­full and Jeff Buck­ley. We fea­tured it here on Open Cul­ture a few years back, and more recent­ly includ­ed it in our ret­ro­spec­tive of album cov­ers by Ralph Stead­man.

Here, Pop takes on the role of anoth­er nar­ra­tor con­signed to a grim fate, though this one of his own mak­ing. As almost all of us know, if only through cul­tur­al osmo­sis, the tit­u­lar “Tell-Tale Heart,” its beat seem­ing­ly ema­nat­ing from under the floor­boards, unceas­ing­ly reminds this anx­ious char­ac­ter of the fact that he has mur­dered an old man — not out of hatred, not out of greed, but out of sim­ple need stoked, he insists, by the defense­less senior’s “vul­ture-eye.” For over 150 years, read­ers have judged the san­i­ty of the nar­ra­tor of “The Tell-Tale Heart” in any num­ber of ways, but don’t ren­der your own ver­dict until you’ve heard Iggy Pop deliv­er the tes­ti­mo­ny; nobody walks the line between san­i­ty and insan­i­ty quite like he does.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lou Reed Rewrites Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” See Read­ings by Reed and Willem Dafoe

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” Read by Christo­pher Walken, Vin­cent Price, and Christo­pher Lee

Watch the 1953 Ani­ma­tion of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Nar­rat­ed by James Mason

Hear a Great Radio Doc­u­men­tary on William S. Bur­roughs Nar­rat­ed by Iggy Pop

Edgar Allan Poe Ani­mat­ed: Watch Four Ani­ma­tions of Clas­sic Poe Sto­ries

Down­load The Com­plete Works of Edgar Allan Poe on His Birth­day

1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Why Sitting Is The New Smoking: An Animated Explanation

in Biology, Health | August 4th, 2015

Dur­ing the past year, sit­ting has become the new smok­ing. “Past stud­ies have found,” declares a 2014 arti­cle in The New York Times, “the more hours that peo­ple spend sit­ting, the more like­ly they are to devel­op dia­betes, heart dis­ease and oth­er con­di­tions, and poten­tial­ly to die pre­ma­ture­ly — even if they exer­cise reg­u­lar­ly.” What’s the sci­ence behind this alarm­ing claim? The ani­mat­ed TED-ED video (above) begins to paint the pic­ture. But it does­n’t get into the lat­est and per­haps most impor­tant research. Accord­ing to sci­ence writer Gretchen Reynolds, a recent Swedish study pub­lished in the British Jour­nal of Sports Med­i­cine sug­gests that when you sit all day, your telom­eres (the tiny caps on the ends of DNA strands) get short­er. Which is not a good thing. As telom­eres get short­er, the rate at which the body ages and decays speeds up. Con­verse­ly, the study found “that the telom­eres in [those] who were sit­ting the least had length­ened. Their cells seemed to be grow­ing phys­i­o­log­i­cal­ly younger.”

Sev­er­al months ago, KQED radio in San Fran­cis­co aired a pro­gram ded­i­cat­ed to this ques­tion, fea­tur­ing med­ical and ergonom­ics experts. To delve deep­er into it, lis­ten below. Or click here.

Mean­while, if you have advice on how to incor­po­rate move­ment into your day, please share it with your fel­low read­ers in the com­ments sec­tion below.

And if your mind imme­di­ate­ly drifts to buy­ing a stand­ing desk, then check out our relat­ed post: Who Wrote at Stand­ing Desks? Kierkegaard, Dick­ens and Ernest Hem­ing­way Too

Fol­low us on Face­book, Twit­ter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. And if you want to make sure that our posts def­i­nite­ly appear in your Face­book news­feed, just fol­low these sim­ple steps.

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800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices

in | August 4th, 2015





Down­load 800 free eBooks to your Kin­dle, iPad/iPhone, com­put­er, smart phone or eread­er. Col­lec­tion includes great works of fic­tion, non-fic­tion and poet­ry, includ­ing works by Asi­mov, Jane Austen, Philip K. Dick, F. Scott Fitzger­ald, Neil Gaiman, Tol­stoy, Dos­to­evsky, Shake­speare, Ernest Hem­ing­way, Vir­ginia Woolf & James Joyce. Also please see our col­lec­tion 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free, where you can down­load more great books to your com­put­er or mp3 play­er.

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Watch the Never-Aired Pilot for Clerks, the Sitcom Based on Kevin Smith’s 1994 Film

in Film, Television | August 3rd, 2015

Kevin Smith’s 1994 debut Clerks did much to define the low-bud­get, high-pro­file “Indiewood” boom of that era. But set a trend on Amer­i­ca’s cul­tur­al fringe, and it nev­er takes long for the main­stream to come call­ing. In this case, the main­stream want­ed to cash in on a Clerks tele­vi­sion sit­com, the only pro­duced episode of which spent the past cou­ple decades lan­guish­ing in the vast grave­yard of pilots no net­work would pick up before its redis­cov­ery just this year. You can watch it in all its san­i­tized glo­ry just above.

Even though those of us who grew up on the mid-1990s tele­vi­su­al land­scape won’t rec­og­nize the nev­er-aired Clerks itself, we’ll rec­og­nize its sen­si­bil­i­ty right away. “It gives me bad flash­backs to the pre-web mono­cul­ture,” writes one com­menter on the Metafil­ter thread about the show — a mono­cul­ture built, at that time, upon one-lin­ers and their cor­re­spond­ing laugh tracks, flop­py hair and bag­gy clothes. Iron­i­cal­ly, it was that very same dom­i­nant glossy bland­ness that made Clerks, the movie, feel so fresh when it first made its way from fes­ti­val to the­atri­cal release.

Still, this failed TV adap­ta­tion does retain a few ele­ments of its source mate­r­i­al: the con­ve­nience-store set­ting (though here called Rose Mar­ket rather than Quick Stop), the main char­ac­ters named Dante and Ran­dal. But the resem­blance more or less stops there. “Gone are the movie’s icon­ic drug deal­ers Jay and Silent Bob,” writes the A.V. Club’s Christo­pher Cur­ley, “replaced by back­up char­ac­ters includ­ing an ice cream serv­er and a tan­ning salon ditz. Some of the beats of the film are still there, like Ran­dal harass­ing his video store cus­tomers, but noth­ing lands or even remote­ly coheres.”

Kevin Smith made Clerks with $27,575. Clerks the sit­com pilot, made entire­ly with­out Smith’s involve­ment, cer­tain­ly cost much more — mon­ey that bought zero cul­tur­al impact, espe­cial­ly by com­par­i­son to the film that inspired it. The Indiewood move­ment showed us how much untapped vital­i­ty Amer­i­can cin­e­ma still had; almost every­thing on tele­vi­sion looked like life­less pro­duc­tions-by-com­mit­tee by com­par­i­son. But now that Clerks has passed its twen­ti­eth anniver­sary, the tables have turned, and we look to tele­vi­sion for the raw, real sto­ries Hol­ly­wood does­n’t tell. The tra­vails of a cou­ple of young sex- and Star Wars-obsessed dead-enders in grim sub­ur­ban New Jer­sey, shot in black-and-white 16-mil­lime­ter film — would CBS care to hear more?

via Metafil­ter/AV Club

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the Hard­core Orig­i­nal End­ing to Kevin Smith’s 1994 Cult Hit Clerks

Watch Kevin Smith’s Clever First Film, Mae Day: The Crum­bling of a Doc­u­men­tary (1992)

The Always-NSFW Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes Catch Up in Jay and Silent Bob Get Old Pod­cast

Hear Kevin Smith’s Three Tips For Aspir­ing Film­mak­ers (NSFW)

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Coffee Portraits of John Lennon, Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe & Other Icons

in Art, Creativity | August 3rd, 2015

Coffee Lennon

Paint­ings by Maria A. Aris­ti­dou

As philoso­pher Mar­shall McLuhan wrote in Under­stand­ing Media, “the medi­um is the mes­sage.”

Artist Maria A. Aris­ti­dou’s medi­um is cof­fee, and late­ly, she’s been gar­ner­ing a lot of atten­tion for java-based por­traits of such cul­tur­al lumi­nar­ies as Ein­stein, Darth Vad­er and The Bea­t­les.

The pro­lif­ic and high­ly-caf­feinat­ed artist found her niche when an acci­den­tal spill gave rise to a some­what sullen fac­sim­i­le of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Ear­ring.

Girl-with-Pearl-Earring

She has since applied her espres­so blends toward the Mona Lisa and one of Baroque era painter Juan de Arel­lano’s flo­ral still lifes, but for the most part, she draws her sub­jects from the realm of pop cul­ture.

Dorm room faves like Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe, Bob Mar­ley, and John Lennon are over­shad­owed by fic­tion­al super­stars like Frozen’s Queen Elsa, Nintendo’s Mario, and var­i­ous per­son­ages from Game of Thrones.

My favorite? Kyle MacLach­lan as Twin Peaks’ Agent Dale “Damn fine cup of cof­fee, Diane!” Coop­er. That’s not just medi­um. That’s meta!

Aris­ti­dou is not the only artist find­ing inspi­ra­tion in this non-tra­di­tion­al pig­ment. A recent NPR sto­ry on the trend cites cof­fee artists Angel Sarkela-Saur and Andy Saur and Giu­lia Bernardel­li.

Scroll back­wards to the mid-1800s and you’ll find author—and gift­ed drafts­man—Vic­tor Hugo exper­i­ment­ing with the stuff. Nor was his promis­cu­ous nib a stranger to the artis­tic pos­si­bil­i­ties of soot, coal dust, and blood.

Aris­ti­dou, who holds degrees in Fine Art Print­mak­ing and Arts Health, eschews the tra­di­tion­al artist’s web­site in favor of social media. Not only is she a mas­ter of the hash­tag, she also designs cakes. View her com­plete oeuvre—including sev­er­al car­tons of cor­po­rate logo East­er eggs and some recent fash­ion illus­tra­tions that com­bine water­col­or with java—on her Face­book or Insta­gram pages.

Above you can watch Aris­ti­dou paint por­traits of Ein­stein, the Bea­t­les and R2D2 in quick time-lapse motion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vic­tor Hugo’s Sur­pris­ing­ly Mod­ern Draw­ings Made with Coal, Dust & Cof­fee (1848–1851)

J.S. Bach’s Com­ic Opera, “The Cof­fee Can­ta­ta,” Sings the Prais­es of the Great Stim­u­lat­ing Drink (1735)

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

The Fine Art of Paint­ing Por­traits on Cof­fee Foam

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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What Beatboxing and Opera Singing Look Like Inside an MRI Machine

in Music, Science | July 31st, 2015

Beat­box­ing, the prac­tice of pro­duc­ing drum machine-like beats (espe­cial­ly TR-808-like beats) with one’s voice, has long since made the tran­si­tion from par­lor trick to acknowl­edged musi­cal art form. But we still have much to under­stand about it, as the recent­ly-emerged first gen­er­a­tion of beat­box­ing schol­ars knows full well. “A team of lin­guis­tics and engi­neer­ing stu­dents at USC want­ed to learn more about the mechan­ics behind the rhythms,” writes Los Ange­les Times music crit­ic Ran­dall Roberts. “By using MRI tech­nol­o­gy, they record­ed an unnamed local beat­box­er work­ing his mag­ic, broke down the most com­mon­ly employed sounds by exam­in­ing the move­ments of his mouth and then ana­lyzed the data.”

This result­ed in a paper called “Par­alin­guis­tic Mech­a­nisms of Pro­duc­tion in Human ‘Beat­box­ing’: A Real-Time Mag­net­ic Res­o­nance Imag­ing Study.” Roberts describes it as “pre­dictably heavy with lin­guis­tic jar­gon, but even to a civil­ian, the results are illu­mi­nat­ing,” espe­cial­ly the video the research team record­ed, “which reveals how the human mouth can so con­vinc­ing­ly cre­ate the pop of a snare drum.” At the top of the post, you can see this sort of thing for your­self: in this video “The Diva and the Emcee,” fea­tured at the Inter­na­tion­al Soci­ety for Mag­net­ic Res­o­nance in Med­i­cine (ISMRM) Sci­en­tif­ic Ses­sions in Seat­tle, we see how a beat­box­er’s tech­nique com­pares to that of an opera singer.

You can find out more at the site of the Speech Pro­duc­tion and Artic­u­la­tion Knowl­edge group (SPAN), the USC team that per­formed this pio­neer­ing research into an impor­tant com­po­nent of one of the pil­lars of hip hop. Keep their find­ings in mind next time you watch a beat­box­ing clip that goes viral (such as the Gold­berg Vari­a­tions one we fea­tured back in 2012) for a rich­er lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence. After all, it does no harm to the romance of the beat­box, to para­phrase Carl Sagan, to know a lit­tle bit about it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Beat­box­ing Bach’s Gold­berg Vari­a­tions

All Hail the Beat: How the 1980 Roland TR-808 Drum Machine Changed Pop Music

Langston Hugh­es Reveals the Rhythms in Art & Life in a Won­der­ful Illus­trat­ed Book for Kids (1954)

Do Rap­pers Have a Big­ger Vocab­u­lary Than Shake­speare?: A Data Sci­en­tist Maps Out the Answer

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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12 Classic Literary Road Trips in One Handy Interactive Map

in Literature, Maps | July 30th, 2015

on the road mapped

Fan­ta­sy fic­tion invari­ably includes a map for read­ers to under­stand the hero’s jour­ney, lit­er­al­ly. We know that Hob­bits had to walk a long way into Mor­dor, but see­ing it car­to­graph­i­cal­ly real­ly hits home. But what of the great road trip nov­els, where the coun­try is Amer­i­ca, the jour­ney is long and often cir­cu­lar, and self-actu­al­iza­tion awaits the hero, and not an army of orcs?

Atlas Obscu­ra, Joshua Foer and Dylan Thuras’ blog of dis­cov­ery and adven­ture in the mod­ern world, have come to the res­cue with an inter­ac­tive map that plots out the trav­els of road trip-filled books, some non-fic­tion, oth­ers fic­tion­al­ized real­i­ty. Where a loca­tion is men­tioned in a text, it has been pinned to the map, and by click­ing on the pin, the rel­e­vant text is revealed. Clever stuff.

For exam­ple, the map for Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (see snap­shot above) plots out the five trips con­tained in the nov­el, and one can see the main hubs of the sto­ry: NYC and San Fran­cis­co, of course, but also Den­ver and the crazed detour town to Mex­i­co City, where Sal, Dean, and Stan Shep­hard par­ty hard in a bor­del­lo and Sal winds up with dysen­tery for his trou­bles.

zen road trip
For some­thing more straight­for­ward, check out the North­west trav­els at the heart of Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motor­cy­cle Main­te­nance. Writ­ten in the first per­son, the novel’s nar­ra­tor trav­els by motor­cy­cle with his son from Min­neso­ta to North­ern Cal­i­for­nia, end­ing up in San Fran­cis­co, tak­ing 17 days. The philo­soph­i­cal jour­ney, how­ev­er, cov­ers wider ter­rain.

koolaid road trip
Anoth­er Bay Area tale, Tom Wolfe’s account of Ken Kesey and the Mer­ry Pranksters in The Elec­tric Kool-Aid Acid Test starts in La Hon­da, Cal­i­for­nia, a moun­tain get­away to the west of San Jose, and, as one can see, com­pletes a cir­cle of the States, includ­ing trips to both Cal­gary, Cana­da and Man­zanil­lo, Mex­i­co, where every­body is “uptight,” man, head­ing north­east to both Gua­na­ju­a­to and Aguas­calientes, where Acid Tests are admin­is­tered.

There’s more at the link, includ­ing maps for Wild, A Walk Across Amer­i­ca, and Trav­els with Charley. It might inspire a repeat read­ing of a favorite book. Or it might inspire you to just light out for the ter­ri­to­ries.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Acid Test Reels: Ken Kesey & The Grate­ful Dead’s Sound­track for the 1960s Famous LSD Par­ties

Jack Ker­ouac Reads from On the Road (1959)

The Books You Think Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Should Read: Crime and Pun­ish­ment, Moby-Dick & Beyond (Many Free Online)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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Orson Welles Reads From Moby-Dick: The Great American Director Takes on the Great American Novel

in Film, Literature | July 30th, 2015

If you took a poll to deter­mine in whose voice most read­ers would like to hear their audio books, I imag­ine Orson Welles would land pret­ty high on the list. And if you took a poll to deter­mine which book most read­ers would rather approach in audio form than paper form, I imag­ine Her­man Melville’s weighty but unde­ni­ably impor­tant (and still lit­er­ar­i­ly fas­ci­nat­ing) Moby-Dick would land pret­ty high on the list. Unfor­tu­nate­ly for us, Welles nev­er sat down to get the entire­ty of Moby-Dick on tape, but he did give the book a few read­ings on film, round­ed up today for your enjoy­ment.


Most famous­ly, Welles appeared in John Hus­ton’s 1956 adap­ta­tion of the nov­el as Father Map­ple, deliv­er­er of the ser­mon on Jon­ah heard by the nar­ra­tor Ish­mael and his bunk­mate Quee­queg ear­ly on in the sto­ry, just before they sign on to the Pequod. Pos­sessed of an inter­est of his own in Melville’s mas­ter­work, Welles used his pay­check from the cameo to bring Moby-Dick to the stage. But he also want­ed to do some­thing cin­e­mat­ic with the mate­r­i­al, as evi­denced by the oth­er two videos here: read­ings he shot in 1971, dur­ing pro­duc­tion of The Oth­er Side of the Wind. In them, he speaks the nov­el­’s immor­tal open­ing line, “Call me Ish­mael.”


Though he may sound even more com­pelling in Ish­mael’s role than in Father Map­ple’s, these clips do make you won­der what, or which char­ac­ter, stoked Welles’ fas­ci­na­tion with Moby-Dick in the first place. Cer­tain­ly we can draw obvi­ous par­al­lels between him and the Pequod’s Cap­tain Ahab in terms of their ten­den­cy toward grand, all-con­sum­ing, impos­si­ble-seem­ing projects. Then again, Ahab labors under the idea that man can, with suf­fi­cient will, direct­ly per­ceive all truths, while Welles made F for Fake, so per­haps he was a ques­tion­ing, skep­ti­cal Ish­mael after all. Whomev­er he iden­ti­fied with, this pil­lar of Amer­i­can cin­e­ma must have had big plans for this pil­lar of Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture — which, alas, we can now only strug­gle to per­ceive, just as Ahab and Ish­mael strug­gle to per­ceive the form of the whale deep in the water.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Ray Brad­bury Wrote the Script for John Huston’s Moby Dick (1956)

The Moby Dick Big Read: Celebri­ties and Every­day Folk Read a Chap­ter a Day from the Great Amer­i­can Nov­el

A View From the Room Where Melville Wrote Moby Dick (Plus a Free Celebri­ty Read­ing of the Nov­el)

An Illus­tra­tion of Every Page of Her­man Melville’s Moby Dick

Orson Welles Reads Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in a 1977 Exper­i­men­tal Film

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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