Johnny Knoxville Breaks Down Every Injury of His Career
My friend and I share most opinions on film and art, but on one topic we vehemently disagree: Jackass. He sees it as lowest-common-denominator garbage, the kind of show seen on the TV in Idiocracy. And I can see his point, especially in an America becoming more and more obviously sadistic.
But I would like to make a contrarian point: Jackass is the inheritor of silent movie slapstick. Johnny Knoxville is no Buster Keaton, but in an industry where so few actors perform their own stunts, and where action sequences are edited together from dozens of shots, Jackass and Knoxville’s other movie projects show its self-inflicted comic violence in single wide takes. It’s the only reason these films work: it really hurts to watch. These guys set up elaborate pranks, and suffer for our laughter, masochists for entertainment. And while Hollywood has nothing but invincible heroes, the Jackass crew excel in their failure.
This comes at a physical cost, as Knoxville recounts for this Vanity Fair video. Usually actors reminisce over their various roles. Here Knoxville details the various injuries he has sustained over his twenty year career.
And there have been some doozies. Broken bones? That’s nothing. How about having a motorbike land in your crotch causing you to pee blood? Or knocked out in a boxing match with Butterbean, sending you into a stroke-like seizure as your throat tries to swallow your tongue? When it’s Knoxville, even the injuries are strange.
The man himself takes us through his first (on screen) injury in 1998, where he was the guinea pig for self-defense tech, including pepper spray (“one of the most painful things I’ve endured in my life”) and a taser.
Apart from injuries, there’s also the near misses. Such as the rocket straight out of a Road Runner cartoon (another touchstone for comedy violence) which failed on the launch pad and instead sent a series of iron rods shooting out into the Jackass crew, nearly decapitating a few. There literally was a bunch of dumb luck on this show.
Knoxville’s most recent film was Action Point, based upon a real life amusement park known for its regulation-defying danger, but that film sunk without a trace. Maybe the Jackass era is done now, but stay for Knoxville’s eye injury story in this video…it’s more enjoyable than the 2018 movie.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Read More...How to Focus: Five Talks Reveal the Secrets of Concentration
Disagree though we may about what’s wrong with life in the 21st century, all of us — at least in the developed, high tech-saturated parts of the world — surely come together in lamenting our inability to focus. We keep hearing how distractions of all kinds, but especially those delivered by social media, fragment our attention into thousands of little pieces, preventing us from completing or even starting the kind of noble long-term endeavors undertaken by our ancestors. But even if that diagnosis is accurate, we might wonder, how does it all work? These five video talks offer not just insights into the nuts and bolts of attention, concentration, and focus, but suggestions about how we might tighten our own as well.
In “How to Get Your Brain to Focus,” the TED Talk at the top of the post, Hyperfocus author Chris Bailey relates how his own life devolved into a morning-noon-night “series of screens,” and what resulted when he did away with some of those screens and the distractions they unceasingly presented him — or rather, the overstimulation they inflicted on him: “We think that our brains are distracted,” he says, “but they’re overstimulated.”
Reducing his own level of stimulation further still, he deliberately engaged in such low-stimulation (more commonly known as “boring”) practices as reading iTunes’ entire terms-and-conditions document (and not in graphic-novel form), waiting on hold with Air Canada’s baggage department, counting the zeroes in pi, and finally just watching a clock.
Bailey found that, absent the frequent dopamine hits provided by his screens, his attention span grew and more ideas, plans, and thoughts about the future came to him. “We think that we need to fit more in,” he says, but in reality “we’re doing too much, so much that our mind never wanders.” When we have nothing in particular to focus on, our mind finds its way into new territories: hence, he says, the fact that we so often get our best ideas in the shower. He references data indicating that these mental wanderings take us back into the past 12 percent of the time and remain in the present 28 percent of the time, but most often fast-forward into the future, a habit also explored by neuroscientist Amishi Jha in the TED Talk just above, “How to Tame Your Wandering Mind.”
“Our mind is an exquisite time-traveling master,” says Jha, “and we land in this mental time-travel mode of the past or the future very frequently. “And when this happens, when we mind-wander without an awareness that we’re doing it, there are consequences. We make errors. We miss critical information, sometimes. And we have difficulty making decisions.” In Jha’s view, a wandering mind can be dangerous: she labels its “internal distraction” as one of the three factors, alongside external stress and distraction in the environment, that “diminishes attention’s power.” Her laboratory research has brought her to endorse the solution of “mindfulness practice,” which “has to do with paying attention to our present-moment experience with awareness. And without any kind of emotional reactivity of what’s happening,” keeping our finger on the “play” button “to experience the moment-to-moment unfolding of our lives.”
As a mindfulness practice, meditation does the trick for many, although precision shooting champion Christina Bengtsson recommends staring at leaves. “I focused on a beautiful autumn leaf playing in the wind,” she says of her decisive shot in her TED Talk above. “Suddenly I am completely calm, and the world champion title was mine.” That leaf, she says, “relieved me of distracting thoughts and made me focus,” and the experience led her to come up with a broader theory. “We need to learn to notice disturbing thoughts and to distinguish them from not-disturbing thoughts,” she says, a not-disturbing thought being one that “knocks out all the disturbing and worrying thoughts.” In this framework, the thought of a leaf can drain the distracting power from all those nagging what-ifs about our goals and the future ahead.
“Focus is not about becoming something new or something better, but simply about functioning exactly as well as we already are,” says Bengtsson, “and understanding that this is enough for both general happiness and great achievements.” Among her other, non-leaf-related recommendations is to create a “not-to-do list,” a form suited to a world “no longer about prioritizing, but about prioritizing away.” The not-to-do list also gets a strong endorsement in “How to Focus Intensely,” the Freedom in Thought animated video just above. After opening with an elaborate analogy about robots, boxes, and factory fires, it goes on to break down the key tradeoff of attention: on one side directed focus, “providing undivided attention while ignoring environmental stimuli,” and on the other generalized focus, which does the opposite.
We human beings often don’t make that tradeoff adeptly, and the reasons cited here include stress, engagement in tasks we dislike because they aren’t inherently pleasurable (even when they promise pleasures later on, since the arrival of those pleasures can be uncertain), and the habit of short-term pleasure-seeking. Along with meditation and the not-to-do list come other featured strategies like actively placing boundaries on your media consumption, structuring your day with “blocks” of work separated by short breaks, and drawing up a priority list, all while adhering to the general ratio of spending 80 percent of your time on “activities that produce long-term pleasure” and 20 percent on “activities that produce short-term pleasure.”
The Freedom in Thought video also recommends something called “deep work,” a set of techniques defined by computer scientist Cal Newport in his book of the same name. But to do deep work as Newport himself does it requires that you take a step that may sound radical at first: quit social media. That imperative provides the title of Newport’s TED Talk above, which explains the whys and hows of doing just that. He also deals with the common objections to the notion of quitting social media, framing social media itself as just another slot machine-like form of entertainment — with all the attendant psychological harms — that, because of its sheer commonness and easiness, can hardly be as vital to success in the 21st-century economy as it’s so often claimed to be.
Newport explains that “what the market dismisses, for the most part, are activities that are easy to replicate and produce a small amount of value,” i.e. what most of us spend our days doing on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. “It’s instead going to reward the deep, concentrated work required to build real skills and apply those skills to produce things, like a craftsman, that are rare and are valuable.” If you treat your attention with respect, he says, “when it comes time to work, you can actually do one thing after another, and do it with intensity, and intensity can be traded for time.” When you train your mind away from distraction, in other words, you actually end up with more time to work with — an asset that even Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, both of whom famously credit their own success to focus, can’t buy for themselves.
Related Content:
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The Neuroscience & Psychology of Procrastination, and How to Overcome It
Listen to Wake Up to Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention by Ken McLeod
How to Take Advantage of Boredom, the Secret Ingredient of Creativity
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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.
Read More...Watch the Talking Heads Play Material From Their Groundbreaking Album Remain in Light in an Incredible Concert from 1980
Does every creative use of another culture count as cultural appropriation? I mean, how can you tell, right? When does theft become art? At minimum, there are a few criteria: a deep respect for the material in question and the chops to pull it off convincingly, with a style and attitude all one’s own. That sets the bar high, and if you’re wondering who meets it, look no further than Talking Heads.
The band donned the rhythmic persona of Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat for most of their 1980 album Remain in Light. The result was a record almost universally beloved by critics then and now, praised and covered live by Beninese singer Angelique Kidjo, Phish, and many others, and plundered for decades by indie dance rock bands looking to duplicate the record’s profoundly funky jangly New Wave.
It’s usually said that David Byrne first heard Fela Kuti in 1977, when Remain in Light producer Brian Eno played him the legendary Nigerian bandleader’s mesmerizing synthesis of jazz, funk, rock, high-life, and traditional polyrhythmic syncopation. Byrne doesn’t mention Eno’s role in his discovery of Fela’s music in a 1999 interview with Arthur’s Jay Babcock. He’s also a little cagey about the extent to which the album takes from the Afrobeat template. “There are some sections,” he says, in “The Great Curve,” that are “straight Afrobeat riffs and stuff.” The same could be said for almost every track on the album, such as opener “Born Under Punches” and big hit “Once in a Lifetime.”
Did the band have the chops to pull this off? Much of the praise surrounds the album’s studio construction, the meticulous, adventurous production by Eno, Byrne’s lyrical stream-of-consciousness, the band’s increasing level of contribution. They expanded to a nine-piece and created a generous space for improvisation. And when they went on stage in the resulting tour, they more than demonstrated they were up to the task of reinterpreting West African funk for a suite of American songs built on cut-up televangelism, the Watergate testimony of John Dean, slave narratives, and enough research to warrant a bibliography in the press release. Art school nerds, the band remained.
See them at the top play much of the material from Remain in Light, as well as from previous album Fear of Music (released 40 years ago today), where the experiments with African rhythms began, at the Capitol Theatre in New Jersey in 1980, with an expanded lineup including King Crimson’s Adrian Belew. The experimental guitarist is in incredible form throughout the show, as is the entire band. Byrne was clearly enamored with Kuti’s original musical vocabulary. “The whole concept was different,” he tells Babcock, “the grooves were so great. The grooves are intense, trance-inducing,” and themselves the product of generous borrowing. Fela drew from the music of James Brown, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis, from the Black Power movement, fusion, and psychedelic rock.
Talking Heads brought those transformed borrowings back to the U.S. and transformed them again into the kind of music only these musicians could make, born of deep appreciation and study, skill, and the willingness to freely expand their own idiom while still retaining their distinctive voices.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.
Read More...Who Are the Best Drum Soloists in Rock? See Legendary Performances by Neil Peart (RIP), John Bonham, Keith Moon, Terry Bozzio & More
Drum solos, yuck, am I right? So boring. Even Keith Moon reportedly disliked them, though he played a few in his day. Can we argue with Moon’s polyrhythmic assaults? His aversion was a contrarian hot take: The Who peaked at the same time the rock drum solo did, thanks to a handful of celebrity drummers led by Moon and, of course, John Bonham, who broke up live versions of Led Zeppelin’s “Moby Dick” with 13-minute solo triplet jams.
These were times, claims Drum! magazine, “when every rock drummer worth his salt had to whip out an extended solo at a moment’s notice in order to be considered competitive.” Yet “by the mid-‘70s, rock drum solos had devolved into pointless, derivative displays of flashy chops and histrionic posing that had little in common with actual musicianship. Even worse, in concert the drum solo became little more than a noisy intermission that sent the audience running to the bathroom or bar. No wonder the art form suffered such an inauspicious death.”
No wonder so many people exhaled when punk came along and ripped out two-minute, two-chord songs that made drum solos look even more pretentiously indulgent. But the writers at Drum! aren’t rejecting the solo (a useful skill for drummers in many situations). In pointing out how the drum solo became “humiliated by its own excesses and reduced to a mere parody of itself,” they only aim to show how “creative drummers used their solos to test the limits of rock drumming.” In the right hands, and feet, the live rock drum solo is a musical experiment or a trance-inducing communal experience.
Moon makes Drum!’s list of mad scientist rock drum soloists, as do “two of the top rock drummers of the day, Ginger Baker and Mitch Mitchell.” These are three distinctive players, yet all part of the same classic cohort, and all inspired by jazz drummers like Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, Elvin Jones, and Tony Williams (destroying every other drum solo just above). Who else belongs in the fantasy Rock Drum Solo Hall of Fame? Who—that is—not in one of the great lumbering beasts of the British Invasion or backing Jimi Hendrix?
Rush’s Neil Peart (RIP) will be on the tip of many tongues, as will Terry Bozzio, Frank Zappa’s ridiculously talented drummer. Some might say the rococo antics of Peart and Bozzio sped the decline of the drum solo into parody. Some might prefer, say, the bashing of Clash drummer Topper Headon. But let us not forget that Headon started as a jazz drummer and could rip out a smart solo when he needed. (Below, Bozzio reimagines solo drum performance as a one-man drum orchestra.)
The phrase “drum solo” may have become synonymous with boring overplaying—at least to people raised on punk, hardcore, and other self-consciously minimalist forms. But great soloists remind us that rock drumming derived from jazz, where solos are syntactic structures, not bunches of excitedly busy adverbs unnecessarily crammed together. If you needed a refresher on great drum solos to remind you of how serious they can be, see some of the finest examples in the clips here, concluding with two legendary players, Phil Collins and Chester Thompson (another Zappa drummer), below.
These are two drummers among many who emerged in the early-to-mid-70s and who continued to elevate the drum solo after Moon and Bonham left the scene. Share your picks for the Drum Solo Hall of Fame in the comments.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.
Read More...How Margaret Hamilton Wrote the Computer Code That Helped Save the Apollo Moon Landing Mission
From a distance of half a century, we look back on the moon landing as a thoroughly analog affair, an old-school engineering project of the kind seldom even proposed anymore in this digital age. But the Apollo 11 mission could never have happened without computers and the people who program them, a fact that has become better-known in recent years thanks to public interest in the work of Margaret Hamilton, director of the Software Engineering Division of MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory when it developed on-board flight software for NASA’s Apollo space program. You can learn more about Hamilton, whom we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture, from the short MAKERS profile video above.
Today we consider software engineering a perfectly viable field, but back in the mid-1960s, when Hamilton first joined the Apollo project, it didn’t even have a name. “I came up with the term ‘software engineering,’ and it was considered a joke,” says Hamilton, who remembers her colleagues making remarks like, “What, software is engineering?”
But her own experience went some way toward proving that working in code had become as important as working in steel. Only by watching her young daughter play at the same controls the astronauts would later use did she realize that just one human error could potentially bring the mission into ruin — and that she could minimize the possibility by taking it into account when designing its software. Hamilton’s proposal met with resistance, NASA’s official line at the time being that “astronauts are trained never to make a mistake.”
But Hamilton persisted, prevailed, and was vindicated during the moon landing itself, when an astronaut did make a mistake, one that caused an overloading of the flight computer. The whole landing might have been aborted if not for Hamilton’s foresight in implementing an “asynchronous executive” function capable, in the event of an overload, of setting less important tasks aside and prioritizing more important ones. “The software worked just the way it should have,” Hamilton says in the Christie’s video on the incident above, describing what she felt afterward as “a combination of excitement and relief.” Engineers of software, hardware, and everything else know that feeling when they see a complicated project work — but surely few know it as well as Hamilton and her Apollo collaborators do.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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.
Read More...How Scientists Colorize Those Beautiful Space Photos Taken By the Hubble Space Telescope
When you picture the giant formations of gasses and space dust that make up a nebula, maybe you see the deliciously garish CGI of Guardians of the Galaxy. The look of the Marvel universe is, of course, inspired by eye-popping images of nebulae taken by the Hubble telescope, images that have appeared routinely for the past three decades in the pages of National Geographic, Discover, and your favorite screen savers.
Whether you’re into sci-fi superhero flicks or not, you’ve surely stared in awe and disbelief at these photographs: ghostly, glowing, resembling the illustrations of outer space by certain pulp sci-fi illustrators twenty years before the Hubble was launched into orbit in 1990. If these images seem too painterly to be real, it’s because they are, as the Vox video above explains, to a great degree, products of photographic art and imagination.
The Hubble telescope only takes images in black and white. The images are then colorized by scientists. Their work is not pure fantasy. A process called “broadband filtering” allows them to reasonably estimate a range of colors in the black and white photo. Some imaginative license must be taken “to show us portions of the image that would never have been visible to our eyes in the first place,” notes PetaPixel. “For example: turning certain gasses into visible color in a photograph.”
In an impressive few minutes, the Vox explainer digs deep into the science of optics to explain how and why we see color as combinations of three wavelengths. The science has been “the guiding principle in coloring black and white images” since the turn of the 20th century. We learn above how broadband filtering—the photographic technique bringing us full-color galactic fever dreams—originated in the earliest experiments in color photography.
In fact, the very first color photograph ever taken, by physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1861, used a very early version of the technique Hubble scientists now use to colorize images of space, combining three black and white photos of the same object, taken through three different-colored filters. Given the advances in imaging technology over the past 100+ years, why doesn’t the powerful space telescope just take color pictures?
It would compromise the Hubble’s primary purpose, to measure the intensity of light reflecting off objects in space, a measurement best taken in black and white. But the scientific instrument can still be used as cosmic paintbrush, creating jaw-dropping images that themselves serve a scientific purpose. If you were disappointed to learn that the photography fueling our our space imagination has been doctored, watch this video and see if a sense of wonder isn’t restored.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Lucy Lawless Joins Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #5 on True Crime
Lucy Lawless (Xena the Warrior Princess, currently starring in My Life Is Murder) joins Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian Hirt to think about the true crime genre, of both the documentary and dramatized variety. What’s the appeal? Why do women in particular gravitate to it?
We touch on Making of a Murderer, Serial, The Staircase, Amanda Knox, Ted Bundy Conversations with a Killer, I Love You Now Die, Mommy Dead and Dearest (dramatized as The Act), American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson, My Favorite Murder, Casefile, Crime Talk with Scott Reisch, True Murder, and American Vandal.
Sources for this episode:
- “The Bloody History of the True Crime Drama” by Pamela Burger
- “What One Researcher Discovered About America’s True Crime Obsession” by Sarah Watts
- “Bill James, True-Crime Obsessive, on the Genre’s Enduring Importance” by Evan Hughes
- “The Ethical Dilemma of Highbrow True Crime” by Alice Bolin
- “Why Do Women Love True Crime” by Kate Tuttle
Here’s an article about Lucy’s new show and her love of the true crime genre. Watch the trailer.
Get more at prettymuchpop.com. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Google Play. Maybe leave us a nice rating or review while you’re there to help the podcast grow. Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast is produced by the Partially Examined Life Podcast Network. This episode includes bonus content that you can only hear by supporting the podcast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop.
Pretty Much Pop is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts or start with the first episode.
Read More...Toni Morrison Deconstructs White Supremacy in America
Toni Morrison wrote against forgetting, against the institutionalization of denial necessary for maintaining racial hierarchies in the United States. But that denial is not sufficient, she also showed. Racism always falls back on brutality when confronted with change, no matter that the past will not return except to haunt us. This reality has driven a significant percentage of Americans (back) into the arms of white supremacist ideology, espoused equally by politicians and armed “loners” in networks on Facebook or YouTube or 8chan.
In a short essay for The New Yorker after the 2016 election, Morrison displayed little surprise at the turn of events. The language of white supremacy, she wrote, is a language of cowardice disguised as dominance. “These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble.” A fear so great, it has brought back public lynching, with high-capacity semiautomatic weapons.
What did Morrison think of the idea that racist mass shootings are the acts of random mentally ill people? She did not offer a medical opinion, nor presume to diagnose particular individuals. She did say that racism is seriously disordered thinking, and she suggested that if racist killers are “crazy,” so are the millions who tacitly approve and support racist violence, or who spur it on by repeating rhetoric that dehumanizes people.
In the clip above from a 2012 interview with Charlie Rose, Morrison says “those who practice racism are bereft. There is something distorted about the psyche…. It’s like it’s a profound neurosis that nobody examines for what it is. It feels crazy, it is crazy.” Some may reasonably take issue with this as stigmatizing, but it seems she is neither scapegoating the mentally ill, nor absolving racists of responsibility.
Morrison points out that despite (and because of) its lofty delusions, white supremacy makes things worse for everyone, white people very much included. It succeeds because the belief in “whiteness” as a category of specialness covers up deep-seated insecurity and doubt. “What are you without racism?” she asks. “Are you any good? Are you still strong? Are you still smart? Do you still like yourself?”
In her masterful way, Morrison showed us how to have empathy for people in the grip of hatred and fear without diluting the consequences of their actions. She pitied racists but never gave an inch to racism. Tragically, her 2016 essay, “Mourning for Whiteness,” is making the rounds for reasons other than in tribute to its author, one of the country’s greatest writers and one of its most unflinchingly candid.
In the days before her death yesterday at age 88, Americans were once again, “training their guns on the unarmed, the innocent, the scared, on subjects who are running away, exposing their unthreatening backs to bullets.” Morrison dares us to look away from this:
In order to limit the possibility of this untenable change, and restore whiteness to its former status as a marker of national identity, a number of white Americans are sacrificing themselves. They have begun to do things they clearly don’t really want to be doing, and, to do so, they are (1) abandoning their sense of human dignity and (2) risking the appearance of cowardice. Much as they may hate their behavior, and know full well how craven it is, they are willing to kill small children attending Sunday school and slaughter churchgoers who invite a white boy to pray.
Ending with a reference to William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, she summed up the state of the nation in one deft sentence: “Rather than lose its ‘whiteness’ (once again), the family chooses murder.”
Related Content:
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.
Read More...Joyce Carol Oates Teaches a New Online Course on the Art of the Short Story
How on Earth does Joyce Carol Oates do it? Since her debut 56 years ago she has put out 58 novels, not to mention her poetry, plays, nonfiction, diaries, and thousands — literally thousands — of short stories. (In recent years, she’s also written no small number of tweets.) But though she’s spent decades with the adjective prolific attached to her name, none of us would know her name in the first place if her work had nothing more distinctive about it than its sheer volume. No matter how much a writer writes, all is for naught if that writing doesn’t make an impact. The question of how to make that impact, in several senses of the word, lies at the heart of Oates’ new online course offered through Masterclass.
“The most powerful writing often comes from confronting taboos,” Oates says in the course’s trailer above. “As a writer, if one can face the darkest elements in oneself, and the things that are secret, you have such a feeling of power.” The truth of that comes through in any of Oates’ novels, but also in her shorter works of fiction, even the early stories that make up her very first book, 1963’s collection By the North Gate.
We might call her one of the writers whose short stories offer distillations of their sensibilities, and so it makes sense that her Masterclass focuses on “the Art of the Short Story.” Its fourteen lessons cover such aspects of short-story writing as drafting, revising, and sharing; observing the world with a journal; and of course, “exploring taboo and darkness.”
Oates draws examples from her own vast body of work, of course, including her much-reprinted short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” But she also examines the writing of such predecessors as Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, and Ernest Hemingway, as well as stories written by the two students who appear in the class videos. This is as close as most of us will ever get to being workshopped by Joyce Carol Oates, and if that appeals to you, you can take her Masterclass by signing up for a All-Access pass to every course on the site (including courses taught by novelists like Margaret Atwood, Judy Blume, and Neil Gaiman). But be warned that, however daunting the prospect of tapping into one’s own dark memories and forbidden thoughts, the question of how Oates does it has another, potentially more frightening answer: eight hours a day.
You can sign up for Oates’ course here.
FYI: If you sign up for a MasterClass course by clicking on the affiliate links in this post, Open Culture will receive a small fee that helps support our operation.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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.
Read More...Hear Toni Morrison (RIP) Present Her Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech on the Radical Power of Language (1993)
Note: We woke this morning to the news that Toni Morrison, the Nobel Prize-winning author, has died at age 88. We will pay proper tribute to her in upcoming posts. Below find a favorite from our archive, a look inside her poetic 1993 Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
Since her first novel, 1970’s The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison has dazzled readers with her commanding language—colloquial, magical, magisterial, even fanciful at times, but held firm to the earth by a commitment to history and an unsparing exploration of racism, sexual abuse, and violence. Reading Morrison can be an exhilarating experience, and a harrowing one. We never know where she is going to take us. But the journey for Morrison has never been one of escapism or art for art’s sake. In a 1981 interview, she once said, “the books I wanted to write could not be only, even merely, literary or I would defeat my purposes, defeat my audience.” As she put it then, “my work bears witness and suggests who the outlaws were, who survived under what circumstances and why.”
She has sustained such a weighty mission not only with a love of language, but also with a critical understanding of its power—to seduce, to manipulate, confound, wound, twist, and kill. Which brings us to the recorded speech above, delivered in 1993 at her acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature. After briefly thanking the Swedish Academy and her audience, she begins, “Fiction has never been entertainment for me.” Winding her speech around a parable of “an old woman, blind but wise,” Morrison illustrates the ways in which “oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.”
Another kind of language takes flight, “surges toward knowledge, not its destruction.” In the folktale at the center of her speech, language is a bird, and the blind seer to whom it is presented gives us a choice: “I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.”
Language, she suggests, is in fact our only human power, and our responsibility. The consequences of its misuse we know all too well, and Morrison does not hesitate to name them. But she ends with a challenge for her audience, and for all of us, to take our own meager literary resources and put them to use in healing the damage done. You should listen to, and read, her entire speech, with its maze-like turns and folds. Near its end, the discursiveness flowers into exhortation, and—though she has said she dislikes having her work described thus—poetry. “Make up a story,” she says, “Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.”
We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon’s hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly — once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.
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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
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