Dial-a-Poem: The Groundbreaking Phone Service That Let People Hear Poems Read by Patti Smith, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg & More (1968)

in Poetry, Technology | January 4th, 2021

Thanks for allow­ing me to be a poet. A noble effort, doomed, but the only choice. —John Giorno, Thanx for Noth­ing

Dial­ing a poem today, I’m con­nect­ed to Joe Brainard, who died of AIDS-relat­ed pneu­mo­nia in 1994, read­ing an excerpt of “I Remem­ber.” He stum­bles over some words. It’s excit­ing. There’s a feel­ing of imme­di­a­cy. When the read­ing ends in an old-fash­ioned dial tone, I imme­di­ate­ly think of a half-dozen friends I’d like to call (assum­ing they respond to some­thing that’s not a tag or text).

“Take down this num­ber,” I’d say. “641–793-8122. Don’t ask ques­tions. Just call it. You’ll love it.”

And they prob­a­bly would, though they wouldn’t hear the same record­ing I did.

As Dial-A-Poem’s founder, the late John Giorno, remarked in a 2012 inter­view:

 A per­son asked me the oth­er day: “What hap­pens if I lis­ten to a poem and I want to tell a friend to lis­ten to it?” I told him: “Well, she can’t.” [laughs] That’s the point. What hap­pens is, when things are real­ly suc­cess­ful, you cre­ate desire that is unful­fil­l­able. That’s what makes some­thing work.

Giorno estab­lished Dial-A-Poem in 1968, plac­ing ten land­lines con­nect­ed to reel-to-reel answer­ing machines in a room in New York City’s Archi­tec­tur­al League:

I sort of stum­bled on [the con­cept] by chance… I was talk­ing to some­one on the tele­phone one morn­ing, and it was so bor­ing. I prob­a­bly had a hang­over and was prob­a­bly crash­ing, and I got irri­ta­ble and said to myself at that moment, “Why can’t this be a poem?” That’s how the idea came to me. And we got a quar­ter of a page in The New York Times with the tele­phone num­ber you could dial. 

In its first four-and-a-half months of oper­a­tion, Dial-A-Poem logged 1,112,237 incom­ing calls, includ­ing some from lis­ten­ers over­seas. (The orig­i­nal phone num­ber was 212–628-0400.) The hours of heav­i­est traf­fic sug­gest­ed that a lot of bored office work­ers were sneak­ing a lit­tle poet­ry into their 9‑to‑5 day.

Dial-A-Poem recon­ceived of the tele­phone as a new media device:

Before Dial-A-Poem, the tele­phone was used one-to-one. Dial-A-Poem’s suc­cess gave rise to a Dial-A-Some­thing indus­try: from Dial-A-Joke, Dial-A-Horo­scope, Dial-A-Stock Quo­ta­tion, Dial Sports, to the 900 num­ber pay­ing for a call, to phone sex, and ever more extra­or­di­nary tech­nol­o­gy. Dial-A-Poem, by chance, ush­ered in a new era in telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions.

Fea­tured poets includ­ed such heavy hit­ters as William S. Bur­roughs, Pat­ti Smith, Allen Gins­berg, Ted Berri­g­an, Robert Cree­ley, Sylvia Plath, Charles Bukowski, and Frank O’Hara (who “only liked you if you wrote like him”).

The con­tent was risqué, polit­i­cal, a direct response to the Viet­nam War, the polit­i­cal cli­mate, and social con­ser­vatism. No one both­ered with rhymes, and inspi­ra­tion was not nec­es­sar­i­ly the goal.

Unlike Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and oth­er career-mind­ed artists who he hung out with (and bed­ded), Giorno nev­er made a secret of his homo­sex­u­al­i­ty. Sex­u­al­ly explic­it and queer con­tent had a home at Dial-a-Poem.

Mean­while, Dial-a-Poem was fea­tured in Junior Scholas­tic Mag­a­zine, and dial­ing in became a home­work assign­ment for many New York City Pub­lic School stu­dents.

Two twelve-year-old boys near­ly scup­pered the project when one of their moth­ers caught them gig­gling over the Jim Car­roll poem, above, and raised a ruckus with the Board of Ed, who in turn put pres­sure on the tele­phone com­pa­ny to dis­con­tin­ue ser­vice. The New York State Coun­cil on the Arts’ lawyers inter­vened, a win for horny mid­dle school­ers… and poet­ry!

For any­one inter­est­ed, an album called You’re A Hook: The 15 Year Anniver­sary Of Dial-A-Poem (1968–1983) was released in 1983. Vinyl copies are still float­ing around.

If you dial 641.793.8122, you can still access record­ings from an archive of poet­ry, notes SFMo­MA.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Stream Clas­sic Poet­ry Read­ings from Harvard’s Rich Audio Archive: From W.H. Auden to Dylan Thomas

Library of Con­gress Launch­es New Online Poet­ry Archive, Fea­tur­ing 75 Years of Clas­sic Poet­ry Read­ings

Car­toon­ist Lyn­da Bar­ry Reveals the Best Way to Mem­o­rize Poet­ry

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She most recent­ly appeared as a French Cana­di­an bear who trav­els to New York City in search of food and mean­ing in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

Did Beethoven Use a Broken Metronome When Composing His String Quartets? Scientists & Musicians Try to Solve the Centuries-Old Mystery

in Music | January 4th, 2021

When it comes to clas­si­cal com­posers, Beethoven was pret­ty met­al. But was he writ­ing some kind of clas­si­cal thrash? Hard­core orches­tra­tions too fast for the aver­age musi­cian to play? 66 out of 135 of Beethoven’s tem­po mark­ings made with his new metronome in the ear­ly 1800s seem “absurd­ly fast and thus pos­si­bly wrong,” researchers write in a recent Amer­i­can Math­e­mat­i­cal Soci­ety arti­cle titled “Was Some­thing Wrong with Beethoven’s Metronome?” Indeed, the authors go on, “many if not most of Beethoven’s mark­ings have been ignored by lat­ter day con­duc­tors and record­ing artists” because of their incred­i­ble speed.

Since the late 19th cen­tu­ry and into the age of record­ed music, con­duc­tors have slowed Beethoven’s quar­tets down, so that we have all inter­nal­ized them at a slow­er pace than he pre­sum­ably meant them to be played. “These pieces have through­out the years entered the sub­con­scious of pro­fes­sion­al musi­cians, ama­teurs and audi­ences, and the tra­di­tion,” writes the Beethoven Project, “hand­ed down by the great quar­tets of yes­ter­year.” Slow­er tem­pos have “become a norm against which all sub­se­quent per­for­mances are judged.”

Eybler Quar­tet vio­list Patrick Jor­dan found out just how deeply musi­cians and audi­ences have inter­nal­ized slow­er tem­pi when he became inter­est­ed in play­ing and record­ing at Beethoven’s indi­cat­ed speeds in the mid-80s. “Find­ing a group of peo­ple who were pre­pared to actu­al­ly take [Beethoven’s metronome marks] seriously—that was a 30-year wait,” he tells CBC. “A huge amount of our labour required that we un-learn those things; that we get notions of what we’ve heard record­ed and played in con­certs many times out of our heads and try to put in what Beethoven, at least at some point in his life, believed and thought high­ly enough to make a note of and pub­lish.”

But did he? The sub­ject of Beethoven’s metronome has been a source of con­tro­ver­sy for some time. A few his­to­ri­ans have the­o­rized that the inven­tor of the metronome, Johann Nepo­muk Mälzel, “some­thing of a mechan­i­cal wiz­ard,” Smith­son­ian writes, and also some­thing of a dis­rep­utable char­ac­ter, sab­o­taged the device he pre­sent­ed to the com­pos­er in 1815 as a peace offer­ing after he sued Beethoven for the rights to a com­po­si­tion. (Mälzel actu­al­ly stole the metronome’s design from a Dutch mechan­ic named Diet­rich Winkel.) But most musi­col­o­gists and his­to­ri­ans have dis­missed the the­o­ry of delib­er­ate trick­ery.

Still, the prob­lem of too-fast tem­pi per­sists. “The lit­er­a­ture on the sub­ject is enor­mous,” admit the authors of the Amer­i­can Math­e­mat­i­cal Soci­ety study. Their research sug­gests that Beethoven’s metronome was sim­ply bro­ken and he didn’t notice. Like­wise data sci­en­tists at the Uni­ver­si­dad Car­los III de Madrid have the­o­rized that the com­pos­er, one of the very first to use the device, mis­read the machine, a case of musi­cal mis­pri­sion in his reac­tion against what he called in 1817 “these non­sen­si­cal terms alle­gro, andante, ada­gio, presto….”

The­o­rists may find the tem­pi hard to believe, but the Toron­to-based Eybler Quar­tet was unde­terred by their skep­ti­cism. “I don’t think there’s any evi­dence to sug­gest that the mech­a­nism itself was [faulty],” says Jor­dan, “and we know from [Beethoven’s] cor­re­spon­dence and con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous accounts that he was very con­cerned that his metronome stay in good work­ing order and he had it recal­i­brat­ed fre­quent­ly so it was accu­rate.” Jor­dan instead cred­its the pun­ish­ing speeds to Romanticism’s pas­sion­ate indi­vid­u­al­ism, and to the fact that “Beethoven was not always so very nice.” Maybe, instead of sooth­ing his audi­ences, he want­ed to shock them and set their hearts rac­ing.

Who are we to believe? Ques­tions of tem­po can be fraught in clas­si­cal cir­cles (wit­ness the reac­tions to Glenn Gould’s absurd­ly slow ver­sions of Bach.) The metronome was sup­posed to solve prob­lems of rhyth­mic impre­ci­sion. Instead, at least in Beethoven’s case, it rein­scribed them in com­po­si­tions that bold­ly chal­lenge ideas of what a clas­si­cal quar­tet is sup­posed to sound like, which makes me think he knew exact­ly what he was doing.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch Ani­mat­ed Scores of Beethoven’s 16 String Quar­tets: An Ear­ly Cel­e­bra­tion of the 250th Anniver­sary of His Birth

How Did Beethoven Com­pose His 9th Sym­pho­ny After He Went Com­plete­ly Deaf?

Stream the Com­plete Works of Bach & Beethoven: 250 Free Hours of Music

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

Sign Up for a 30-Day Free Trial to Audible Plus, and Get Access to 11,000+ Titles

in | January 2nd, 2021

Want unlim­it­ed access to a robust cat­a­log of fresh and orig­i­nal audio entertainment–11,000+ titles in total? Then sign up for a free 30-day tri­al to Audi­ble Plus and try out the new ser­vice from Audible.com.

Audi­ble Plus fea­tures audio­books, Audi­ble Orig­i­nals, well­ness pro­grams, and pod­casts, includ­ing exclu­sive pod­cast series. This includes orig­i­nal audio con­tent from a wide range of tal­ent, includ­ing Jamie Lee Cur­tis, St. Vin­cent, Com­mon, Tom Morel­lo, and oth­er artists.

If you like the ser­vice, you can remain a sub­scriber (for only $7.95/month) after the free tri­al ends. Or, if it’s not your cup of tea, you can can­cel before the free tri­al ends.

Sign up for the 30-day free tri­al here.

What’s Entering the Public Domain in 2021: The Great Gatsby & Mrs. Dalloway, Music by Irving Berlin & Duke Ellington, Comedies by Buster Keaton, and More

in Film, Literature, Music | January 1st, 2021

“The year 1925 was a gold­en moment in lit­er­ary his­to­ry,” writes the BBC’s Jane Cia­bat­tari. “Ernest Hemingway’s first book, In Our Time, Vir­ginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dal­loway and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gats­by were all pub­lished that year. As were Gertrude Stein’s The Mak­ing of Amer­i­cans, John Dos Pas­sos’ Man­hat­tan Trans­fer, Theodore Dreiser’s An Amer­i­can Tragedy and Sin­clair Lewis’s Arrow­smith, among oth­ers.” In that year, adds Direc­tor of Duke’s Cen­ter for the Study of the Pub­lic Domain Jen­nifer Jenk­ins, “the styl­is­tic inno­va­tions pro­duced by books such as Gats­by, or The Tri­al, or Mrs. Dal­loway marked a change in both the tone and the sub­stance of our lit­er­ary cul­ture, a broad­en­ing of the range of pos­si­bil­i­ties avail­able to writ­ers.”

In the year 2021, no mat­ter what area of cul­ture we inhab­it, we now find our own range of pos­si­bil­i­ties broad­ened. Works from 1925 have entered the pub­lic domain in the Unit­ed States, and Duke Uni­ver­si­ty’s post rounds up more than a few notable exam­ples. These include, in addi­tion to the afore­men­tioned titles, books like W. Som­er­set Maugh­am’s The Paint­ed Veil and Etsu Ina­ga­ki Sug­i­mo­to’s A Daugh­ter of the Samu­rai; films like The Fresh­man and Go West, by silent-com­e­dy mas­ters Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton; and music like Irv­ing Berlin’s “Always” and sev­er­al com­po­si­tions by Duke Elling­ton, includ­ing “Jig Walk” and “With You.”

These works’ pub­lic-domain sta­tus means that, among many oth­er ben­e­fits to all of us, the Inter­net Archive can eas­i­ly add them to its online library. In addi­tion, writes Jenk­ins, “HathiTrust will make tens of thou­sands of titles from 1925 avail­able in its dig­i­tal repos­i­to­ry. Google Books will offer the full text of books from that year, instead of show­ing only snip­pet views or autho­rized pre­views. Com­mu­ni­ty the­aters can screen the films. Youth orches­tras can afford to pub­licly per­form, or rearrange, the music.” And the cre­ators of today “can legal­ly build on the past — reimag­in­ing the books, mak­ing them into films, adapt­ing the songs.”

Does any new­ly pub­lic-domained work of 2021 hold out as obvi­ous a promise in that regard as Fitzger­ald’s great Amer­i­can nov­el? Any of us can now make The Great Gats­by “into a film, or opera, or musi­cal,” retell it “from the per­spec­tive of Myr­tle or Jor­dan, or make pre­quels and sequels,” writes Jenk­ins. “In fact, nov­el­ist Michael Far­ris Smith is slat­ed to release Nick, a Gats­by pre­quel telling the sto­ry of Nick Carraway’s life before he moves to West Egg, on Jan­u­ary 5, 2021.” What­ev­er results, it will fur­ther prove what Cia­bat­tari calls the “con­tin­u­ing res­o­nance” of not just Jay Gats­by but all the oth­er major char­ac­ters cre­at­ed by the nov­el­ists of 1925, inhab­i­tants as well as embod­i­ments of a “trans­for­ma­tive time” who are “still enthralling gen­er­a­tions of new read­ers” — and writ­ers, or for that mat­ter, cre­ators of all kinds.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: The Great Gats­by & Oth­er Major Works by F. Scott Fitzger­ald

The Only Known Footage of the 1926 Film Adap­ta­tion of The Great Gats­by (Which F. Scott Fitzger­ald Hat­ed)

Duke Ellington’s Sym­pho­ny in Black, Star­ring a 19-Year-old Bil­lie Hol­i­day

Safe­ty Last, the 1923 Movie Fea­tur­ing the Most Icon­ic Scene from Silent Film Era, Just Went Into the Pub­lic Domain

31 Buster Keaton Films: “The Great­est of All Com­ic Actors,” “One of the Great­est Film­mak­ers of All Time”

18 (Free) Books Ernest Hem­ing­way Wished He Could Read Again for the First Time

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Antonio Gramsci Writes a Column, “I Hate New Year’s Day” (January 1, 1916)

in Current Affairs, History, Politics | January 1st, 2021

I want every morn­ing to be a new year’s for me. Every day I want to reck­on with myself, and every day I want to renew myself. No day set aside for rest. I choose my paus­es myself, when I feel drunk with the inten­si­ty of life and I want to plunge into ani­mal­i­ty to draw from it new vigour.

“Every­day is like Sun­day,” sang the singer of our mopey ado­les­cence, “In the sea­side town that they for­got to bomb.” Some­how I could feel the grey malaise of post-indus­tri­al Britain waft across the ocean when I heard these words… the drea­ry same­ness of the days, the desire for a con­fla­gra­tion to wipe it all away….

The call for total anni­hi­la­tion is not the sole province of supervil­lains and heads of state. It is the same desire Andrew Mar­vell wrote of cen­turies ear­li­er in “The Gar­den.” The mind, he observed, “with­draws into its hap­pi­ness” and cre­ates “Far oth­er worlds, and oth­er seas; Anni­hi­lat­ing all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade.”

Is not anni­hi­la­tion what we seek each year on New Year’s Eve? To col­lec­tive­ly wipe away the bad past by fiat, with fire­works? To wel­come a bet­ter future in the morn­ing, because an arbi­trary record keep­ing sys­tem put in place before Mar­vell was born tells us we can? The prob­lem with this, argued Ital­ian Marx­ist par­ty poop­er and the­o­rist Anto­nio Gram­sci, is the prob­lem with dates in gen­er­al. We don’t get to sched­ule our apoc­a­lypses.

On Jan­u­ary 1st, 1916, Gram­sci pub­lished a col­umn titled “I Hate New Year’s Day” in the Ital­ian Social­ist Party’s offi­cial paper Avan­ti!, which he began co-edit­ing that year.

Every morn­ing, when I wake again under the pall of the sky, I feel that for me it is New Year’s day.

That’s why I hate these New Year’s that fall like fixed matu­ri­ties, which turn life and human spir­it into a com­mer­cial con­cern with its neat final bal­ance, its out­stand­ing amounts, its bud­get for the new man­age­ment. They make us lose the con­ti­nu­ity of life and spir­it. You end up seri­ous­ly think­ing that between one year and the next there is a break, that a new his­to­ry is begin­ning; you make res­o­lu­tions, and you regret your irres­o­lu­tion, and so on, and so forth. This is gen­er­al­ly what’s wrong with dates.

The dates we keep, he says, are forms of “spir­i­tu­al time-serv­ing” imposed on us from with­out by “our sil­ly ances­tors.” They have become “inva­sive and fos­siliz­ing,” forc­ing life into repeat­ing series of “manda­to­ry col­lec­tive rhythms” and forced vaca­tions. But that is not how life should work, accord­ing to Gram­sci.

Whether or not we find mer­it in his cranky pro­nounce­ments, or in his desire for social­ism to “hurl into the trash all of these dates with have no res­o­nance in our spir­it,” we can all take one thing away from Gram­sci’s cri­tique of dates, and maybe make anoth­er res­o­lu­tion today: to make every morn­ing New Year’s, to reck­on with and renew our­selves dai­ly, no mat­ter what the cal­en­dar tells us to do. Read a full trans­la­tion of Gram­sci’s col­umn at View­point Mag­a­zine.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Woody Guthrie’s Doo­dle-Filled List of 33 New Year’s Res­o­lu­tions From 1943

Mar­i­lyn Monroe’s Go-Get­ter List of New Year’s Res­o­lu­tions (1955)

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

Studio Ghibli Makes 1,178 Images Free to Download from My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away & Other Beloved Animated Films

in Animation, Film | December 31st, 2020

Stu­dio Ghi­b­li make lush and cap­ti­vat­ing ani­mat­ed films. So, on occa­sion, do oth­er stu­dios, but of how many of their pic­tures can we say that each and every still frame con­sti­tutes a work of art in itself? As a test, try putting on a Ghi­b­li movie and paus­ing at ran­dom, then doing the same for any oth­er major ani­mat­ed fea­ture of sim­i­lar vin­tage: chances are, the for­mer will far more often pro­duce an image you’d like to cap­ture in high res­o­lu­tion and use for your desk­top back­ground, or per­haps even print out and hang on your wall.

Now, Stu­dio Ghi­b­li have pro­vid­ed such images them­selves, in an online col­lec­tion (click here and scroll down the page) that offers more than 1,100 stills from their films, all free for the down­load. This trove has grown con­sid­er­ably since we first fea­tured it this past fall here at Open Cul­ture.

In that post, Ted Mills quotes Ghi­b­li pro­duc­er Toshio Suzu­ki as instruct­ing vis­i­tors to use the images “freely with­in the scope of com­mon sense.” It was Suzu­ki, you may recall, who once taught us to draw the epony­mous feline-ursine star of My Neigh­bor Totoro, the most beloved of the stu­dio’s works — down­load­able frames from which Ghi­b­li put up only in Novem­ber.

Along with Totoro came images from the acclaimed (and high­ly suc­cess­ful) likes of Spir­it­ed Away and Por­co Rosso, as well as its less­er known roman­tic dra­ma Ocean Waves, made for tele­vi­sion by the stu­dio’s younger ani­ma­tors in the ear­ly 1990s. The most recent update, made ear­li­er this month, includes images from 1984’s Nau­si­caä of the Val­ley of the Wind, which is now con­sid­ered Ghi­b­li’s hon­orary first pic­ture, hav­ing been direct­ed by co-founder Hayao Miyaza­ki before the stu­dio’s foun­da­tion. There are also stills from 2016’s The Red Tur­tle, the stark, word­less fea­ture pro­duced by Suzu­ki but direct­ed by Dutch ani­ma­tor Michaël Dudok de Wit.

Though the site is only in Japan­ese, any­one who’s seen at least a few Ghi­b­li movies should have no prob­lem find­ing their favorites, from the afore­men­tioned res­i­dents of great­est-ani­mat­ed-films-of-all-time lists to high­ly respect­ed but low­er-pro­file works like Only Yes­ter­day by Miyaza­k­i’s Ghi­b­li-found­ing parter, the late Isao Taka­ha­ta. There’s also plen­ty to delight Ghi­b­li fans of a more die-hard per­sua­sion: take, for exam­ple, the visu­al mate­ri­als from “On Your Mark,” the futur­is­tic, non­lin­ear ani­mat­ed music video made for rock duo Chage & Aska. What­ev­er your own lev­el of invest­ment in the work of Stu­dio Ghi­b­li, you’d do well to assume that they’ve only just got start­ed putting up their archives.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hayao Miyazaki’s Stu­dio Ghi­b­li Releas­es Free Back­grounds for Vir­tu­al Meet­ings: Princess Mononoke, Spir­it­ed Away & More

Stu­dio Ghi­b­li Pro­duc­er Toshio Suzu­ki Teach­es You How to Draw Totoro in Two Min­utes

Hayao Miyazaki’s Sketch­es Show­ing How to Draw Char­ac­ters Run­ning: From 1980 Edi­tion of Ani­ma­tion Mag­a­zine

Hayao Miyazaki’s Beloved Char­ac­ters Reimag­ined in the Style of 19th-Cen­tu­ry Wood­block Prints

Build Your Own Minia­ture Sets from Hayao Miyazaki’s Beloved Films: My Neigh­bor Totoro, Kiki’s Deliv­ery Ser­vice & More

Soft­ware Used by Hayao Miyazaki’s Ani­ma­tion Stu­dio Becomes Open Source & Free to Down­load

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

The Essential Bradbury: The 25 Finest Stories by the Beloved Writer

in Literature | December 30th, 2020

The late Ray Brad­bury wrote a dizzy­ing num­ber of short sto­ries over a career that spanned nine decades. Autho­rized Brad­bury biog­ra­ph­er Sam Weller, author of the best­selling The Brad­bury Chron­i­cles: The Life of Ray Brad­bury and the indis­pens­able com­pan­ion book, Lis­ten to the Echoes: The Ray Brad­bury Inter­views makes sense of Bradbury’s volu­mi­nous short sto­ry out­put by select­ing “The Essen­tial Brad­bury,” the 25 finest tales by the beloved writer.

Brad­bury wrote defi­ant­ly across gen­res: goth­ic hor­ror, social sci­ence fic­tion, weird tales, fan­ta­sy, and con­tem­po­rary lit­er­ary fic­tion. He is, per­haps, best known for his 1953 chef d’oeuvre, Fahren­heit 451, but Weller (and Bradbury’s late wife of 56 years, Mar­guerite for that mat­ter) argue that Bradbury’s finest work came in the form of the short sto­ry.

Weller’s “Essen­tial Brad­bury” includes some cool, nev­er-before-seen ephemera, culled from the biographer’s per­son­al archives. Sam Weller worked with Ray Brad­bury for 12 years. You can read his “Essen­tial Brad­bury” here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ray Brad­bury Wrote the First Draft of Fahren­heit 451 on Coin-Oper­at­ed Type­writ­ers, for a Total of $9.80

Ray Brad­bury Reveals the True Mean­ing of Fahren­heit 451: It’s Not About Cen­sor­ship, But Peo­ple “Being Turned Into Morons by TV”

An Ani­mat­ed Ray Brad­bury Explains Why It Takes Being a “Ded­i­cat­ed Mad­man” to Be a Writer

Ray Brad­bury Gives 12 Pieces of Writ­ing Advice to Young Authors (2001)

Archaeologists Discover an Ancient Roman Snack Bar in the Ruins of Pompeii

in Food & Drink, History | December 30th, 2020

Have you ever won­dered what gen­er­a­tions hun­dreds or thou­sands of years hence will make of our strip malls, office parks, and sports are­nas? Prob­a­bly not much, since there prob­a­bly won’t be much left. How much medi­um-den­si­ty fibre­board is like­ly to remain? The col­or­ful struc­tures that make the mod­ern world seem sol­id, the gro­cery shelves, fast food coun­ters, and shiny prod­uct dis­plays, will return to the saw­dust from which they came.

Back in antiq­ui­ty, on the oth­er hand, things were built to last, even through the fires and dev­as­ta­tion of the erup­tion of Mount Vesu­vius in 79 AD. Archae­ol­o­gists will be dis­cov­er­ing for many more years every­day fea­tures of Pom­peii that sur­vived a his­toric dis­as­ter and the ordi­nary rav­ages of time. In 2019, a team ful­ly unearthed what is known as a ther­mopoli­um, a fan­cy Greek word for a snack bar that “would have served hot food and drinks to locals in the city,” the BBC reports. The find was only unveiled this past Sat­ur­day.

Images from PompeiiSites.org

You can see the exca­va­tion in a sub­ti­tled vir­tu­al tour at the top con­duct­ed by Mas­si­mo Osan­na, Pompeii’s gen­er­al direc­tor and the “mas­ter­mind,” Smith­son­ian writes, behind the Great Pom­peii Project, a “$140 mil­lion con­ser­va­tion and restora­tion pro­gram launched in 2012.”

Rich­ly dec­o­rat­ed with bright­ly-col­ored paint­ings, pre­served by ash, the Ther­mopoli­um of Regio V, as it’s known, fea­tures a scene of a nereid rid­ing a sea-horse. Sur­round­ing her on all sides of the counter are illus­tra­tions of the food for sale, includ­ing “two mal­lard ducks shown upside down, ready to be cooked and eat­en,” notes the offi­cial Pom­peii site, “a roost­er,” and “a dog on a lead, the lat­ter serv­ing as a warn­ing in the man­ner of the famed Cave Canem.”

Unde­terred and spurred on by the Romans’ famed love of graf­fi­ti, some­one scratched a “mock­ing inscrip­tion” into the frame around the dog: “NICIA CINAEDE CACATOR—literally ‘Nicias (prob­a­bly a freed­man from Greece) Shame­less Shit­ter!’” The mes­sage may have been left by a dis­grun­tled work­er, “who sought to poke fun at the own­er.” Also found at the site were bone frag­ments in con­tain­ers belong­ing to the ani­mals pic­tured, as well as human bones and “var­i­ous pantry and trans­port mate­ri­als” such as amphorae, flasks, and oth­er typ­i­cal Roman con­tain­ers.

Despite its elab­o­rate design and the excite­ment of its dis­cov­er­ers, the ther­mopoli­um was noth­ing spe­cial in its day. Such coun­ters were like Star­bucks, “wide­spread in the Roman world, where it was typ­i­cal to con­sume the prandi­um (the meal) out­side the house. In Pom­peii alone there are eighty of them.” Will future archae­ol­o­gists thrill over the dis­cov­ery of a Cinnabon in a thou­sand years’ time? We’ll nev­er know, but some­how I doubt it. Learn much more about this dis­cov­ery at the offi­cial site for Pom­peii, which hopes to reopen to vis­i­tors in the Spring of 2021. All images come via Pompeiisites.org.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch the Destruc­tion of Pom­peii by Mount Vesu­vius, Re-Cre­at­ed with Com­put­er Ani­ma­tion (79 AD)

See the Expan­sive Ruins of Pom­peii Like You’ve Nev­er Seen Them Before: Through the Eyes of a Drone

High-Res­o­lu­tion Walk­ing Tours of Italy’s Most His­toric Places: The Colos­se­um, Pom­peii, St. Peter’s Basil­i­ca & More

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

How Martin Luther King Jr. Got C’s in Public Speaking–Before Becoming a Straight‑A Student and a World Class Orator

in Education, History | December 30th, 2020

How many Amer­i­cans have nev­er heard the name of Mar­tin Luther King Jr.? And indeed, gone more than half a cen­tu­ry though he may be, how many Amer­i­cans have nev­er heard his voice, or can’t quote his words? Long though King will doubt­less stand as an exam­ple of the Eng­lish lan­guage’s great­est 20th-cen­tu­ry ora­tors, he once showed scant aca­d­e­m­ic promise in that depart­ment. Tweet­ing out an image of his tran­script from Croz­er The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary, where King earned his Bach­e­lor of Divin­i­ty, Har­vard’s Sarah Eliz­a­beth Lewis notes that King “received two Cs in pub­lic speak­ing,” and “actu­al­ly went from a C+ to a C the next term.”

Still, that beat the marks King had pre­vi­ous­ly received at More­house Col­lege. In an arti­cle for The Jour­nal of Blacks in High­er Edu­ca­tion, Stan­ford’s Clay­borne Car­son quotes reli­gion pro­fes­sor George D. Kelsey as describ­ing King’s record there as “short of what may be called ‘good,’ ” but also adding that King came “to real­ize the val­ue of schol­ar­ship late in his col­lege career.” This ear­ly under­achieve­ment may have been a con­se­quence of King’s entrance into col­lege at the young age of fif­teen, which was made pos­si­ble by More­house­’s offer­ing its entrance exam to junior high school­ers, its stu­dent body hav­ing been deplet­ed by enlist­ment in the Sec­ond World War.

But King “prob­a­bly real­ized that he would have to become more dili­gent in his stud­ies if he were to suc­ceed at the small Bap­tist insti­tu­tion in Chester, Penn­syl­va­nia, a small town south­west of Philadel­phia,” writes Car­son. “Evi­dent­ly wish­ing to break with the relaxed atti­tude he had had toward his More­house stud­ies,” he “quick­ly immersed him­self in Croz­er’s intel­lec­tu­al envi­ron­ment” and adopt­ed a mien of high seri­ous­ness. “If I were a minute late to class, I was almost mor­bid­ly con­scious of it,” King lat­er recalled. “I had a ten­den­cy to over­dress, to keep my room spot­less, my shoes per­fect­ly shined, and my clothes immac­u­late­ly pressed.”

The young King even­tu­al­ly rose to the role in which he’d cast him­self, thanks in part to the rig­or of cer­tain pro­fes­sors who knew what to expect from him. Apart from the sole minus blem­ish­ing his grade in “Chris­tian­i­ty and Soci­ety,”  his tran­script for 1950–51 shows straight As. “By the time of his grad­u­a­tion,” Car­son writes, “King’s intel­lec­tu­al con­fi­dence was rein­forced by the expe­ri­ence of hav­ing suc­cess­ful­ly com­pet­ed with white stu­dents dur­ing his Croz­er years.” Named stu­dent body pres­i­dent and class vale­dic­to­ri­an, “he was also accept­ed for doc­tor­al study at Boston Uni­ver­si­ty’s School of The­ol­o­gy, where he would be able to work direct­ly with the per­son­al­ist the­olo­gians he had come to admire.” Even then, one sus­pects, King knew the real work lay ahead of him — and well out­side the acad­e­my, at that.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. Used Niet­zsche, Hegel & Kant to Over­turn Seg­re­ga­tion in Amer­i­ca

Mar­tin Luther King, Jr.’s Hand­writ­ten Syl­labus & Final Exam for the Phi­los­o­phy Course He Taught at More­house Col­lege (1962)

Mar­tin Luther King Jr. Explains the Impor­tance of Jazz: Hear the Speech He Gave at the First Berlin Jazz Fes­ti­val (1964)

Albert Einstein’s Grades: A Fas­ci­nat­ing Look at His Report Cards

Famous Writ­ers’ Report Cards: Ernest Hem­ing­way, William Faulkn­er, Nor­man Mail­er, E.E. Cum­mings & Anne Sex­ton

John Lennon’s Report Card at Age 15: “He Has Too Many Wrong Ambi­tions and His Ener­gy Is Too Often Mis­placed”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Your 15 Favorite Posts on Open Culture This Year–and What a Year It Has Been

in Current Affairs | December 30th, 2020

So, it’s been a year. For those of us in parts of the world where the pan­dem­ic still rages uncon­tained, it’s going to be an even longer win­ter. It may be utter­ly triv­i­al­iz­ing to speak of sil­ver lin­ings when it comes to clouds this size, but there’s no rea­son not to use our time wise­ly in quar­an­tine, lock­down, cocoon­ing, or what­ev­er we’re call­ing it these days. For all of the enor­mous chal­lenges, out­rages, sor­rows, and hor­rors of 2020, nat­ur­al and man­made, we can be grate­ful for so many oppor­tu­ni­ties for per­son­al growth.

“Those of us who are not sick, are not front­line work­ers, and are not deal­ing with oth­er eco­nom­ic or hous­ing dif­fi­cul­ties” Rebec­ca Sol­nit writes, are giv­en the task “to under­stand this moment, what it might require of us, and what it might make pos­si­ble.” It is a moment, she says (echo­ing Hei­deg­ger’s rumi­na­tions on life after the drop­ping of the atom­ic bombs), in which “the impos­si­ble has already hap­pened.”

Impos­si­bles can be cat­a­stroph­ic and world chang­ing dis­as­ters that “begin sud­den­ly and nev­er real­ly end.” They can also be rad­i­cal respons­es to dis­as­ter that open up pos­si­bil­i­ties we nev­er imag­ined:

A dis­as­ter (which orig­i­nal­ly meant “ill-starred”, or “under a bad star”) changes the world and our view of it. Our focus shifts, and what mat­ters shifts. What is weak breaks under new pres­sure, what is strong holds, and what was hid­den emerges. Change is not only pos­si­ble, we are swept away by it. We our­selves change as our pri­or­i­ties shift, as inten­si­fied aware­ness of mor­tal­i­ty makes us wake up to our own lives and the pre­cious­ness of life. Even our def­i­n­i­tion of “we” might change as we are sep­a­rat­ed from school­mates or co-work­ers, shar­ing this new real­i­ty with strangers. Our sense of self gen­er­al­ly comes from the world around us, and right now, we are find­ing anoth­er ver­sion of who we are.

It is no exag­ger­a­tion to say we have col­lec­tive­ly wit­nessed the world change in a mat­ter of a few months. Since Sol­nit wrote in April, we’ve had many more oppor­tu­ni­ties to meet cir­cum­stances wild­ly beyond our con­trol. We are shaped by events, but how we respond, indi­vid­u­al­ly and togeth­er, also deter­mines the kind of peo­ple we become.

We at Open Cul­ture like to think we’ve con­tributed in some small way to our read­ers’ per­son­al growth in the time of coro­n­avirus, to their view of the world and their sense of who “we” are. Our read­ers respond­ed most to mes­sages of hope, resources for self-improve­ment and self-under­stand­ing, and cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­na that have become sources of delight and inspi­ra­tion no mat­ter what’s going on. See our 15 top posts of 2020 below.

1. Quar­an­tined Ital­ians Send a Mes­sage to Them­selves 10 Days Ago: What They Wish They Knew Then
2. Down­load Free Col­or­ing Books from 113 Muse­ums
3. Use Your Time in Iso­la­tion to Learn Every­thing You’ve Always Want­ed To: Free Online Cours­es, Audio Books, eBooks, Movies, Col­or­ing Books & More
4. Exquis­ite 2300-Year-Old Scythi­an Woman’s Boot Pre­served in the Frozen Ground of the Altai Moun­tains
5. Hayao Miyazaki’s Stu­dio Ghi­b­li Releas­es Free Back­grounds for Vir­tu­al Meet­ings: Princess Mononoke, Spir­it­ed Away & More
6. Google Intro­duces 6‑Month Career Cer­tifi­cates, Threat­en­ing to Dis­rupt High­er Edu­ca­tion with “the Equiv­a­lent of a Four-Year Degree”
7. Janis Joplin & Tom Jones Bring the House Down in an Unlike­ly Duet of “Raise Your Hand” (1969)
8. The Names of 1.8 Mil­lion Eman­ci­pat­ed Slaves Are Now Search­able in the World’s Largest Genealog­i­cal Data­base, Help­ing African Amer­i­cans Find Lost Ances­tors
9. Why “The Girl from Ipane­ma”‘ Is a Rich­er & Weird­er Song Than You Ever Real­ized
10. Watch the Rolling Stones Play “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” While Social Dis­tanc­ing in Quar­an­tine
11. Bill Mur­ray Explains How He Was Saved by John Prine
12. The Sto­ry Behind the Icon­ic Pho­to­graph of 11 Con­struc­tion Work­ers Lunch­ing 840 Feet Above New York City (1932)
13. The Grate­ful Dead’s “Rip­ple” Played By Musi­cians Around the World (with Cameos by David Cros­by, Jim­my Buf­fett & Bill Kreutz­mann)
14. Watch Joni Mitchell Sing an Immac­u­late Ver­sion of Her Song “Coy­ote,” with Bob Dylan, Roger McGuinn & Gor­don Light­foot (1975)
15. The 150 Best Pod­casts to Enrich Your Mind

Let us know in the com­ments what oth­er posts that did­n’t make the list res­onat­ed with you in this time of sweep­ing change, and why. Per­haps it’s one more cos­mic irony that the night­mar­ish year of 2020 also hap­pens to be the num­ber we use to sym­bol­ize per­fect hind­sight. But also tell us, read­ers, what did you learn this year, and how did you grow and change in ways you might have thought impos­si­ble a year ago?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 150 Best Pod­casts to Enrich Your Mind 

1,500 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties 

Sign Up for Open Culture’s Free Dai­ly Email 

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