The Theater Dictionary: A Free Video Guide to Theatre Lingo

in English Language, Language Lessons, Theatre | January 27th, 2017

It’s 11 o’clock. Do you know where your show­stop­pers are? Or, more to the point, do you know why a musi­cal-com­e­dy writ­ing team seeks to ori­ent its show­stop­ping num­ber at “eleven o’clock”?

The The­ater Devel­op­ment Fund’s The­atre Dic­tio­nary is an ongo­ing attempt to define and doc­u­ment the­ater terms for both the rab­ble and any bud­ding prac­ti­tion­ers who’ve yet to mas­ter the lin­go.

Each term is accom­pa­nied by a loopy slap­dash skit. Not all of the per­form­ers exhib­it the pedi­gree Veron­i­ca J. Kuehn and Nick Kohn of Avenue Q bring to “Eleven O’Clock Num­ber,” above, but cast­ing admin­is­tra­tors and tick­et booth reps in star­ring roles lend a homey egal­i­tar­i­an­ism, such as when stu­dents from the Yale School of Drama’s Depart­ment of Dra­matur­gy and Dra­mat­ic Crit­i­cism are giv­en free license to explore the ori­gins of “vom.”

(This loosey goosey approach also allows for uncred­it­ed appear­ances by oth­er the­atri­cal tropes—the marathon rehearsals where pop­corn con­sti­tutes lunch and one actor repeat­ed­ly com­plains that his work has been insuf­fi­cient­ly acknowl­edged.)

A “What Does This Word Mean” tab for each term anchors the video silli­ness, pro­vid­ing his­tor­i­cal and anec­do­tal con­text. It’s in keep­ing with the Dictionary’s greater goal of bring­ing the­ater to the peo­ple, let­ting every­one play with the toys.

Some of the def­i­n­i­tions are prac­ti­cal short­hand…

Oth­ers are couched in long­time, pos­si­bly archa­ic the­ater lore…

I’d exer­cise cau­tion with some of this lin­go. Even though many of these terms are born of prac­ti­cal­i­ty, overus­ing them may cause oth­ers to view you as the most obnox­ious of self-declared Triple Threats, the kid in the com­e­dy-tragedy mask sweat­shirt, prone to belt­ing out the entire sound­track of CATS at the slight­est provo­ca­tion. (“Thanks, 5!!!”)

Some of these terms have unex­pect­ed crossover appeal, most recent­ly Ghost Light, above. Know­ing the mean­ing of the term will help you bet­ter appre­ci­ate the pow­er of the Ghost­light Project, a post-elec­tion com­ing togeth­er of the­ater artists and audi­ences in defense and sup­port of vul­ner­a­ble com­mu­ni­ties.

You can browse the The­ater Dic­tio­nary com­plete glos­sary here or watch the videos on TDF’s Youtube chan­nel.

The The­ater Dictionary’s FAQ con­tains infor­ma­tion on how pro­fes­sion­al the­atre com­pa­nies and orga­ni­za­tions and col­lege-lev­el the­atre pro­grams can apply to con­tribute a video.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

100,000+ Won­der­ful Pieces of The­ater Ephemera Dig­i­tized by The New York Pub­lic Library

Young Orson Welles Directs “Voodoo Mac­beth,” the First Shake­speare Pro­duc­tion With An All-Black Cast: Footage from 1936

Take a “Breath” and Watch Samuel Beckett’s One-Minute Play

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is open­ing in New York City in March 2017. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

A Free Online Course on Dante’s Divine Comedy from Yale University

in Literature, Online Courses | January 26th, 2017

Over the years, we’ve fea­tured the many draw­ings that have adorned the pages of Dan­te’s Divine Com­e­dy, from medieval times to mod­ern. Illus­tra­tions by Bot­ti­cel­li, Gus­tave Doré, William Blake and Mœbius, they’ve all got­ten their due. Less has been said here, how­ev­er, about the actu­al text itself. Per­haps the most impor­tant work in Ital­ian lit­er­a­ture, Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) wrote the Divine Com­e­dy (con­sist­ing of Infer­no, Pur­ga­to­rio, and Par­adiso) between the years 1308 and 1320. And that text is large­ly the sub­ject of Dante in Trans­la­tion, a free online course taught by Yale’s Giuseppe Maz­zot­ta. The course descrip­tion reads as fol­lows:

The course is an intro­duc­tion to Dante and his cul­tur­al milieu through a crit­i­cal read­ing of the Divine Com­e­dy and select­ed minor works (Vita nuo­va, Con­viv­io, De vul­gari elo­quen­tia, Epis­tle to Can­grande). An analy­sis of Dan­te’s auto­bi­og­ra­phy, the Vita nuo­va, estab­lish­es the poet­ic and polit­i­cal cir­cum­stances of the Com­e­dy’s com­po­si­tion. Read­ings of Infer­no, Pur­ga­to­ry and Par­adise seek to sit­u­ate Dan­te’s work with­in the intel­lec­tu­al and social con­text of the late Mid­dle Ages, with spe­cial atten­tion paid to polit­i­cal, philo­soph­i­cal and the­o­log­i­cal con­cerns. Top­ics in the Divine Com­e­dy explored over the course of the semes­ter include the rela­tion­ship between ethics and aes­thet­ics; love and knowl­edge; and exile and his­to­ry.

You can watch the 24 lec­tures from the course above, or find them on YouTube and iTunes in video and audio for­mats. To get more infor­ma­tion on the course, includ­ing the syl­labus, vis­it this Yale web­site.

Pri­ma­ry texts used in this course include:

• Dante. Divine Com­e­dy. Trans­lat­ed by John D. Sin­clair. New York: Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 1968.
• Dante. Vita Nuo­va. Trans­lat­ed by Mark Musa. Bloom­ing­ton: Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 1973.

Dante in Trans­la­tion will be added to our list of Free Online Lit­er­a­ture cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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:

Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy: A Free Course from Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty

William Blake’s Last Work: Illus­tra­tions for Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy (1827)

Botticelli’s 92 Illus­tra­tions of Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy

Alber­to Martini’s Haunt­ing Illus­tra­tions of Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy (1901–1944)

Hear Dante’s Infer­no Read Aloud by Influ­en­tial Poet & Trans­la­tor John Cia­r­di (1954)

Physics from Hell: How Dante’s Infer­no Inspired Galileo’s Physics

Watch L’Inferno (1911), Italy’s First Fea­ture Film and Per­haps the Finest Adap­ta­tion of Dante’s Clas­sic

Why Time Seems to Speed Up as We Get Older: What the Research Says

in Psychology | January 26th, 2017

No mat­ter what age we’ve attained, we can think back to child­hood and feel just how ago­niz­ing­ly long it then took for Christ­mas to come, for the school day to end, for a tray of cook­ies to come out of the oven. Mys­te­ri­ous as this appar­ent change in the speed of time may at first seem, it actu­al­ly makes a kind of intu­itive sense: one day rep­re­sents, at the age of fifty, a tenth of the pro­por­tion of the time we’ve expe­ri­enced so far than it does at the age of five. As our time­line length­ens, our per­cep­tion of cer­tain fixed units on that time­line — a minute, a year, a decade — short­ens.

But there are oth­er fac­tors in play as well. “Indi­vid­ual per­cep­tions of time are strong­ly influ­enced by our lev­el of focus, phys­i­cal state and mood,” write The Inde­pen­dent’s Muire­ann Irish and Claire O’Callaghan. “Just as ‘a watched pot nev­er boils,’ when we are con­cen­trat­ing on an event, time occa­sion­al­ly appears to pass more slow­ly than usu­al. This is also the case when we’re bored; time can seem to drag end­less­ly.” This might well con­tribute to the child­hood per­cep­tion of slow time, since kids have to spend so many of their days in the class­room, an envi­ron­ment that strikes most of them as express­ly designed to induce bore­dom.

In addi­tion, accord­ing to Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can, “our brain encodes new expe­ri­ences, but not famil­iar ones, into mem­o­ry, and our ret­ro­spec­tive judg­ment of time is based on how many new mem­o­ries we cre­ate over a cer­tain peri­od. In oth­er words, the more new mem­o­ries we build on a week­end get­away, the longer that trip will seem in hind­sight.” The rel­a­tive­ly high fre­quen­cy of dis­tinc­tive mem­o­ries cre­at­ed ear­li­er in life and low fre­quen­cy of dis­tinc­tive mem­o­ries cre­at­ed lat­er in life means that “our ear­ly years tend to be rel­a­tive­ly over­rep­re­sent­ed in our auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal mem­o­ry and, on reflec­tion, seem to have last­ed longer.”

You can see some of the ideas and the­o­ries behind this almost uni­ver­sal­ly agreed-on sense that time speeds up as we grow old­er in the video from the Nation­al Geo­graph­ic Chan­nel show Brain Games above. It also intro­duces a few new ones into the mix, con­nect­ing them all with how much ener­gy the brain uses to record which kinds of expe­ri­ences, sug­gest­ing that even a sense as fun­da­men­tal as the one we use to mark time has a great deal more com­plex­i­ty to it than we under­stand. Ulti­mate­ly, though, it all comes back to the words of no less a thinker on rel­a­tiv­i­ty than Albert Ein­stein: “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pret­ty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Clocks Changed Human­i­ty For­ev­er, Mak­ing Us Mas­ters and Slaves of Time

The Neu­ro­science & Psy­chol­o­gy of Pro­cras­ti­na­tion, and How to Over­come It

The Secret Pow­ers of Time

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy & Neu­ro­science Cours­es

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

George Orwell Explains How “Newspeak” Works, the Official Language of His Totalitarian Dystopia in 1984

in Literature | January 25th, 2017

As we not­ed yes­ter­day, and you like­ly noticed else­where, George Orwell’s clas­sic dystopi­an nov­el 1984 shot to the top of the charts—or the Ama­zon best­seller list—in the wake of “alter­na­tive facts,” the lat­est Orwellian coinage for bald-faced lying. The ridicu­lous phrase imme­di­ate­ly pro­duced a bar­rage of par­o­dies, hash­tags, and memes; healthy ways of vent­ing rage and dis­be­lief. But maybe there is a dan­ger there too, let­ting such words sink into the dis­course, lest they become what Orwell called “Newspeak.”

It’s easy to hear “Newspeak,” the “offi­cial lan­guage of Ocea­nia,” as “news speak.” This is per­fect­ly rea­son­able, but it gives us the impres­sion that it relates strict­ly to its appear­ance in mass media. Orwell obvi­ous­ly intend­ed the ambiguity—it is the lan­guage of offi­cial pro­pa­gan­da after all—but the port­man­teau actu­al­ly comes from the words “new speak”—and it has been cre­at­ed to super­sede “Old­speak,” Orwell writes, “or Stan­dard Eng­lish, as we should call it.”

In oth­er words, Newspeak isn’t just a set of buzz­words, but the delib­er­ate replace­ment of one set of words in the lan­guage for anoth­er. The tran­si­tion is still in progress in the fic­tion­al 1984, but is expect­ed to be com­plet­ed “by about the year 2050.” Stu­dents of his­to­ry and lin­guis­tics will rec­og­nize that this is a ludi­crous­ly accel­er­at­ed pace for the com­plete replace­ment of one vocab­u­lary and syn­tax by anoth­er. (We might call Orwell’s Eng­lish Social­ists “accel­er­a­tionsts.”) Newspeak appears not through his­to­ry or social change but through the will of the Par­ty.

The pur­pose of Newspeak was not only to pro­vide a medi­um of expres­sion for the world-view and men­tal habits prop­er to the devo­tees of Ing­soc, but to make all oth­er modes of thought impos­si­ble.

It’s entire­ly plau­si­ble that “alter­na­tive facts,” or “alt­facts,” would fit right into the “Ninth and Tenth Edi­tions of the Newspeak Dic­tio­nary,” though it might eas­i­ly fall out of favor and “be sup­pressed lat­er.” No telling if it would make the cut for “the final, per­fect­ed ver­sion” of Newspeak, “as embod­ied in the Eleventh Edi­tion of the Dic­tio­nary.”

These quo­ta­tions come not from the main text of 1984 but from an appen­dix called “The Prin­ci­ples of Newspeak,” which you can hear read at the top of the post. Here, Orwell dis­pas­sion­ate­ly dis­cuss­es the “per­fect­ed” form of Newspeak, includ­ing its gram­mat­i­cal “pecu­liar­i­ties,” such as “an almost com­plete inter­change­abil­i­ty between dif­fer­ent parts of speech” (an issue cur­rent trans­la­tors have encoun­tered). He then intro­duces its vocab­u­lary, divid­ed into “three dis­tinct class­es,” A, B, and C.

The A class con­tains “every­day life” words that have been mutat­ed with cum­ber­some pre­fix­es and inten­si­fiers: “uncold” for warm, “plus­cold and dou­ble­plus­cold” for “very cold” and “superla­tive­ly cold.” The B class con­tains the com­pound words: sin­is­ter dou­ble­think coinages like “joy­camp (forced-labor camp)” and “Mini­pax (Min­istry of Peace, i.e. Min­istry of War).” These, Orwell explains, are sim­i­lar to “the char­ac­ter­is­tic fea­tures of polit­i­cal lan­guage… in total­i­tar­i­an coun­tries” of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry.

The cit­i­zen of Ocea­nia, Orwell tells us, must have “an out­look sim­i­lar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, with­out know­ing much else, that all nations oth­er than his own wor­shipped ‘false gods’.… His sex­u­al life, for exam­ple, was entire­ly reg­u­lat­ed by the two Newspeak words sex­crime (sex­u­al immoral­i­ty) and good­sex (chasti­ty).” The lat­ter includ­ed only “inter­course between man and wife, for the sole pur­pose of beget­ting chil­dren, and with­out phys­i­cal plea­sure on the part of he woman: all else was sex­crime.”

The C class of words may be the most insid­i­ous of all. While it “con­sist­ed entire­ly of sci­en­tif­ic and tech­ni­cal terms” that “resem­bled the sci­en­tif­ic terms in use today,” the Par­ty took care “to define them rigid­ly and strip them of unde­sir­able mean­ings.” For exam­ple,

There was no vocab­u­lary express­ing the func­tion of Sci­ence as a habit of mind, or a method of thought irre­spec­tive of its par­tic­u­lar branch­es. There was, indeed, no word for ‘Sci­ence,’ any mean­ing that it could pos­si­bly bear being already suf­fi­cient­ly cov­ered by the word Ing­soc.

Orwell then goes on to dis­cuss the dif­fi­cul­ty of trans­lat­ing the work of the past into Newspeak. He uses as an exam­ple the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence: “All mans are equal was a pos­si­ble Newspeak sen­tence,” but only in that “it expressed a pal­pa­ble untruth—i.e. that all men are of equal size, weight, or strength.” As for the rest of Thomas Jefferson’s rous­ing pre­am­ble, “it would have been quite impos­si­ble to ren­der this into Newspeak,” writes Orwell. “The near­est one could come to doing so would be to swal­low the whole pas­sage up in the sin­gle word crime­think.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

George Orwell’s 1984 Is Now the #1 Best­selling Book on Ama­zon

Han­nah Arendt Explains How Pro­pa­gan­da Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Moral­i­ty: Insights from The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism

Hux­ley to Orwell: My Hell­ish Vision of the Future is Bet­ter Than Yours (1949)

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

81-Year-Old Man Walks into a Guitar Shop & Starts Playing a Sublime Solo: Ignore the Talents of the Elderly at Your Own Peril

in Life, Music | January 25th, 2017

Last spring, I caught a Who con­cert in Oak­land, Cal­i­for­nia, on what hap­pened to be songwriter/guitarist Pete Town­shend’s 71st birth­day. Five songs into their set, the band played “My Generation”–yes, the song best known for the line “I hope I die before I get old”–and I could­n’t help but think: Town­shend’s play­ing with more inspi­ra­tion now than when I first saw The Who play in 1982. Bio­log­i­cal­ly, he’s sup­posed to be over the hill. Musi­cal­ly, he’s still play­ing a very fine rock gui­tar.

The same thought crossed my mind at Desert Trip, the Octo­ber mega con­cert held in Indio, Cal­i­for­nia. Fea­tur­ing The Rolling Stones, The Who (again), Paul McCart­ney, Neil Young and Roger Waters–in short, musi­cians all over the age of 70–Desert Trip became more col­lo­qui­al­ly known as “Old­chel­la.”

Even, Mick Jag­ger called it “the come and see us before we die tour.” And yet. And yet. Despite the jokes, they’re all still play­ing with verve, putting on tight, rous­ing shows. (I’ll admit that Bob Dylan is the notable excep­tion.)

So what’s the take­away? We can’t stop the clock. Even­tu­al­ly, we get old. Noth­ing we can do about that. But if you’ve got your health, if you’ve got the desire, if you’ve spent decades refin­ing your craft, then there’s no rea­son you can’t still do great work. That applies to musi­cians. (Wit­ness 81-year-old Bob Wood above). It also applies to oth­er parts of life, includ­ing our pro­fes­sion­al lives. Our cul­ture hasti­ly writes off the tal­ents and accu­mu­lat­ed expe­ri­ence of an entire gen­er­a­tion of peo­ple. But stop for a sec­ond. Watch the video above and extrap­o­late it to oth­er parts of life. Then think about all that gets need­less­ly lost.

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:

How to Age Grace­ful­ly: No Mat­ter What Your Age, You Can Get Life Advice from Your Elders

This Is Your Brain on Exer­cise: Why Phys­i­cal Exer­cise (Not Men­tal Games) Might Be the Best Way to Keep Your Mind Sharp

Demen­tia Patients Find Some Eter­nal Youth in the Sounds of AC/DC

Watch Eero Saarinen: The Architect Who Saw the Future: Free for a Limited Time

in Architecture | January 24th, 2017

A quick heads up. For the next few days (until Jan­u­ary 27) you can watch Eero Saari­nen: The Archi­tect Who Saw the Future, the lat­est install­ment from the PBS Amer­i­can Mas­ters series. Here’s the PBS blurb for the episode.

Best known for design­ing Nation­al His­toric Land­marks such as St. Louis’ icon­ic Gate­way Arch and the Gen­er­al Motors Tech­ni­cal Cen­ter, Saari­nen also designed New York’s TWA Flight Cen­ter at John F. Kennedy Inter­na­tion­al Air­port, Yale University’s Ingalls Rink and Morse and Ezra Stiles Col­leges, Virginia’s Dulles Air­port, and mod­ernist pedestal fur­ni­ture like the Tulip chair.

In the film, Saarinen’s son, Eric Saari­nen, “vis­its the sites of his father’s work on a cathar­tic jour­ney, shot in 6K with the lat­est in drone tech­nol­o­gy that show­cas­es the architect’s body of time­less work for the first time. The doc­u­men­tary also fea­tures rare archival inter­views with Eero and his sec­ond wife, The New York Times art crit­ic Aline Saari­nen, as well as let­ters and quo­ta­tions from Aline’s mem­oirs voiced respec­tive­ly by Peter Franzén and Blythe Dan­ner.”

You can get more back­ground on the film here. Copies of the film can be pur­chased online here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch 50+ Doc­u­men­taries on Famous Archi­tects & Build­ings: Bauhaus, Le Cor­busier, Hadid & Many More

A is for Archi­tec­ture: 1960 Doc­u­men­tary on Why We Build, from the Ancient Greeks to Mod­ern Times

32,000+ Bauhaus Art Objects Made Avail­able Online by Har­vard Muse­um Web­site

Roman Archi­tec­ture: A Free Online Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

Hear Kurt Vonnegut Visit the Afterlife & Interview Dead Historical Figures: Isaac Newton, Adolf Hitler, Eugene Debs & More (Audio, 1998)

in History, Radio | January 24th, 2017

Image by Daniele Prati, via Flickr Com­mons

Kurt Von­negut wrote nov­els, of course, but also short sto­ries, essays, and — briefly, suit­ably late in his career — cor­re­spon­dence from the after­life. He did that last gig in 1998, com­pos­ing for broad­cast on the for­mi­da­ble WNYC, by under­go­ing a series of what he called “con­trolled near-death expe­ri­ences” orches­trat­ed, so he claimed, by “Dr. Jack Kevorkian and the facil­i­ties of a Huntsville, Texas exe­cu­tion cham­ber.” These made pos­si­ble “more than one hun­dred vis­its to Heav­en and my return­ing to life to tell the tale,” or rather, to tell the tales of the more per­ma­nent­ly deceased with whom he’d sat down for a chat.

Von­negut’s ros­ter of after­life inter­vie­wees includ­ed per­son­ages he per­son­al­ly admired such as Eugene Debs (lis­ten), Isaac New­ton (lis­ten), and Clarence Dar­row (lis­ten), as well as his­tor­i­cal vil­lains like James Earl Ray (lis­ten) and Adolf Hitler (lis­ten). Oth­er of the dead with whom he spoke, while they may not qual­i­fy as house­hold names, nev­er­the­less went to the grave with some sort of achieve­ment under their belts: Olestra inven­tor Fred H. Matt­son, for instance, or John Wes­ley Joyce, own­er of the famed Green­wich Vil­lage lit­er­ary water­ing hole The Lion’s Head. Only the Slaugh­ter­house-Five author’s coura­geous and impos­si­ble reportage has saved the names of a few, like that of retired con­struc­tion work­er Sal­va­tore Biagi­ni, from total obscu­ri­ty.

Famous or not, peo­ple inter­est­ed Von­negut, who claimed to get his ideas from “dis­gust with civ­i­liza­tion” but also served as hon­orary pres­i­dent of the Nation­al Human­ist Asso­ci­a­tion. This aspect of his per­son­al­i­ty comes up in the Bri­an Lehrer Show seg­ment just above, a lis­ten back to Von­negut’s “Reports on the After­life” seg­ments for WNY­C’s 90th anniver­sary. (You can lis­ten to all the seg­ments indi­vid­u­al­ly here.)

Pro­duc­er Mar­ty Gold­en­sohn talks about record­ing them at Von­negut’s apart­ment, where the famous writer would answer the phone every few min­utes for a brief talk with one curi­ous fan after anoth­er, none of whom he’d tak­en any pains what­so­ev­er to keep from find­ing his phone num­ber. “It was a won­der­ful thing,” says Gold­en­sohn. “He had a way of talk­ing, hear­ing what he want­ed to hear, thank­ing, and hang­ing up very nice­ly. Six­ty sec­onds.” He’d also mas­tered, adds Lehrer, the art of the one-minute trip to the after­life, and the sto­ries this unusu­al radio for­mat allowed him to tell sure­ly drew from the vast range of expe­ri­ences and emo­tions to which Von­negut had exposed his mind not just through read­ing, but also with such fre­quent and brief yet very real human con­nec­tions he’d make on a seem­ing­ly near-con­stant basis.

A lit­tle bit less than a decade after these record­ings and the sub­se­quent pub­li­ca­tion of their print col­lec­tion God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, the unceas­ing­ly smok­ing and drink­ing Von­negut would, at the age of 84, make his own final trip to the after­life. There he now pre­sum­ably awaits (pos­si­bly beside Kevorkian him­self) the next cor­re­spon­dent intre­pid enough to come up and inter­view him. Giv­en the events of the past decade, lis­ten­ers could cer­tain­ly use what­ev­er dose of his char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly clear-eyed and sar­don­ic per­spec­tive he might have to offer.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Kurt Von­negut Read Slaugh­ter­house-Five, Cat’s Cra­dle & Oth­er Nov­els

Hear Kurt Vonnegut’s Very First Pub­lic Read­ing from Break­fast of Cham­pi­ons (1970)

Hear Kurt Vonnegut’s Nov­el Cat’s Cra­dle Get Turned into Avant-Garde Music (Fea­tur­ing Kurt Him­self)

An Ani­mat­ed Kurt Von­negut Vis­its NYU, Riffs, Ram­bles, and Blows the Kids’ Minds (1970)

Kurt Vonnegut’s Term Paper Assign­ment from the Iowa Writ­ers’ Work­shop Teach­es You to Read Fic­tion Like a Writer

Kurt Von­negut Dia­grams the Shape of All Sto­ries in a Master’s The­sis Reject­ed by U. Chica­go

In 1988, Kurt Von­negut Writes a Let­ter to Peo­ple Liv­ing in 2088, Giv­ing 7 Pieces of Advice

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

An Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of History: The Road to Progress Runs First Through Dark Times

in Philosophy | January 23rd, 2017

The ques­tion of whether or not gen­uine human progress is pos­si­ble, or desir­able, lies at the heart of many a rad­i­cal post-Enlight­en­ment philo­soph­i­cal project. More pes­simistic philoso­phers have, unsur­pris­ing­ly, doubt­ed it. Arthur Schopen­hauer, cast bale­ful sus­pi­cion on the idea. Dan­ish Exis­ten­tial­ist Soren Kierkegaard thought of col­lec­tive progress toward a more enlight­ened state an unlike­ly prospect. One mod­ern crit­ic of progress, pes­simistic Eng­lish philoso­pher John Gray, writes in his book Straw Dogs that “the pur­suit of progress” is an ide­al­ist illu­sion end­ing in “mass mur­der.” (Gray has been unim­pressed by Steven Pinker’s opti­mistic argu­ments in The Bet­ter Angels of Our Nature.)

These skep­tics of progress all in some way write in response to the tow­er­ing 19th cen­tu­ry fig­ure G.W.F. Hegel, the Ger­man logi­cian and philoso­pher of his­to­ry, pol­i­tics, and phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy whose sys­tem­at­ic think­ing pro­vid­ed Karl Marx with the basis of his dialec­ti­cal mate­ri­al­ism. Hegel saw the mass mur­der brought about by mas­sive polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic change in his rev­o­lu­tion­ary and impe­r­i­al age, but in his esti­ma­tion, such man-made dis­as­ters were nec­es­sary occur­rences, the “slaugh­ter bench of his­to­ry,” as he famous­ly wrote in the Phi­los­o­phy of His­to­ry.

This sug­gests a very bru­tal view, and yet Hegel believed over­all that “Rea­son is the Sov­er­eign of the World; that the his­to­ry of the world there­fore, presents us with a ratio­nal process.” For Hegel, the indi­vid­ual per­son­al­i­ty was not impor­tant, only col­lec­tive enti­ties: peo­ples, states, empires. These moved against each oth­er accord­ing to a meta­phys­i­cal rea­son­ing process work­ing through his­to­ry which Hegel called the dialec­tic. In his ani­mat­ed School of Life video above, Alain de Bot­ton describes the dialec­tic in the terms we usu­al­ly use—thesis, antithe­sis, synthesis—though Hegel him­self did not exact­ly for­mu­late the prin­ci­ple this way.

This is the com­mon short­hand way of under­stand­ing how Hegel’s non­lin­ear expla­na­tion of his­to­ry works: “the world makes progress,” sum­ma­rizes de Bot­ton, “by lurch­ing from one extreme to the oth­er, as it seeks to over­com­pen­sate for a pre­vi­ous mis­take, and gen­er­al­ly requires three moves before the right bal­ance on any issue can be found.” One par­tic­u­lar­ly bloody exam­ple is the ter­ror of the French Rev­o­lu­tion as an extreme cor­rec­tive for the monar­chy’s oppres­sion. This gave way to the antithe­sis, the bru­tal auto­crat­ic empire of Napoleon in anoth­er extreme swing. Only decades lat­er could these be rec­on­ciled in mod­ern French civ­il soci­ety.

In our own time, we have encoun­tered the pro­gres­sive ideas of Hegel not only through Marx, but through the work of Mar­tin Luther King, Jr., who stud­ied Hegel as a grad­u­ate stu­dent at Har­vard and Boston Uni­ver­si­ty and found much inspi­ra­tion in the Phi­los­o­phy of His­to­ry. Though crit­i­cal of Hegel’s ide­al­ism, which, “tend­ed to swal­low up the many in the one,” King dis­cov­ered impor­tant first prin­ci­ples there as well: “His analy­sis of the dialec­ti­cal process, in spite of its short­com­ings, helped me to see that growth comes through strug­gle.”

We end­less­ly quote King’s state­ment, “the arc of his­to­ry is long, but it bends toward jus­tice,” but we for­get his cor­re­spond­ing empha­sis on the neces­si­ty of strug­gle to achieve the goal. As Hegel the­o­rized, says de Bot­ton above, “the dark moments aren’t the end, they are a chal­leng­ing but in some ways nec­es­sary part… immi­nent­ly com­pat­i­ble with events broad­ly mov­ing for­ward in the right direc­tion.” King found his own his­tor­i­cal syn­the­sis in the prin­ci­ple of non­vi­o­lent resis­tance, which “seeks to rec­on­cile the truths of two oppo­sites,” he wrote in 1954’s Stride Toward Free­dom, “acqui­es­cence and vio­lence.” Non­vi­o­lent resis­tance is not pas­sive com­pli­ance, but nei­ther is it inten­tion­al aggres­sion.

Hegel and his social­ly influ­en­tial stu­dents like Mar­tin Luther King and John Dewey have gen­er­al­ly oper­at­ed on the basis of some faith—in rea­son, divine jus­tice, or sec­u­lar human­ism. There are much harsh­er, more pes­simistic ways of view­ing his­to­ry than as a swing­ing pen­du­lum mov­ing toward some greater end. Pes­simistic thinkers may be more rig­or­ous­ly hon­est about the stag­ger­ing moral chal­lenge posed by increas­ing­ly effi­cient means of mass killing and the per­pet­u­a­tion of ide­olo­gies that com­mit it. Yet it is part­ly through the influ­ence of Hegel that mod­ern social move­ments have embraced the neces­si­ty of strug­gle and believed progress was pos­si­ble, even inevitable, when it seemed least like­ly to occur.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch The Half Hour Hegel: A Long, Guid­ed Tour Through Hegel’s Phe­nom­e­nol­o­gy, Pas­sage by Pas­sage

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

135 Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks 

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

Musician Lugs a Cello Up a Mountain, Then Plays Bach at 10,000 Feet, at the “Top of the World”

in Music | January 23rd, 2017

After this inspir­ing week­end, I did­n’t need any­thing par­tic­u­lar­ly ener­giz­ing to start my week. But, then again, it’s hard to refuse a shot inspi­ra­tion when it falls right into your lap. Above, watch “Andante,” which the web­site Aeon describes as fol­lows:

Andante (a musi­cal term mean­ing ‘at walk­ing pace’) fol­lows the cel­list Ruth Boden as she climbs 10,000 feet to a peak in Oregon’s Wal­lowa Moun­tains for a deeply per­son­al, yet breath­tak­ing­ly pub­lic solo per­for­mance. With her prized cel­lo strapped to her back, Boden reflects on how she wants to do some­thing with music that tran­scends the com­mon­place, and on the par­tic­u­lar joy of play­ing from Bach’s cel­lo suite at ‘the top of the world’.

Hope this helps you get to Wednes­day. And, to reach Fri­day, we’ve added some oth­er fine Bach mate­r­i­al in the Relat­eds below.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

All of Bach is Putting Bach’s Com­plete Works Online: 150 Done, 930 to Come

Down­load the Com­plete Organ Works of J.S. Bach for Free

Watch a 27-Year-Old Glenn Gould Play Bach & Put His Musi­cal Genius on Dis­play (1959)

The Genius of J.S. Bach’s “Crab Canon” Visu­al­ized on a Möbius Strip

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

Before Siri & Alexa: Hear the First Attempt to Use a Synthesizer to Recreate the Human Voice (1939)

in Technology | January 23rd, 2017

Whether from Stephen Hawk­ing, Siri, or any­one in between, we’ve all heard quite a lot of elec­tron­i­cal­ly syn­the­sized speech by now. But less than eighty years ago, the very idea of a human-sound­ing voice pro­duced in a mechan­i­cal man­ner inspired won­der and dis­tur­bance in equal mea­sure. The every­man and every­woman got their first chance to hear such a tech­nol­o­gy at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, dur­ing its hourly demon­stra­tions of the very first speech syn­the­siz­er, the “Voder.” Who, they must have imag­ined as they stood before its boom­ing square-jawed-Art-Deco-hero logo, could have invent­ed such a thing?

Homer Dud­ley, an elec­tron­ic and acoustic engi­neer at Bell Labs, had in the 1920s invent­ed the “Vocoder” (or “Voice Oper­at­ed reCorDER”), a device that could con­vert human speech into an elec­tron­ic sig­nal and then, some­where else down the like, turn that sig­nal back into speech again.

For the Voder (or “Voice Oper­a­tion DEmon­stra­toR”) he took the ini­tial voice out of the sig­nal, cre­at­ing a kind of syn­the­siz­er ded­i­cat­ed to the sounds of speech that one could oper­ate man­u­al­ly, through an inter­face some­what resem­bling that of an organ. Its con­trols (which you can see dia­grammed at 120 Years of Elec­ton­ic Music) pre­sent­ed a steep enough learn­ing curve that few­er than thir­ty peo­ple, most­ly the “girls” employed for the Voder’s demon­stra­tions, ever learned to play it.

Though impres­sive for the time (the oth­er feat of arti­fi­cial human­i­ty at that World’s Fair being Elec­tro the Smok­ing Robot), “the Voder’s speech came out a lit­tle hard to under­stand, and even a bit unset­tling,” accord­ing to Atlas Obscu­ra. “The Voder was shown again dur­ing San Francisco’s Gold­en Gate Inter­na­tion­al Expo­si­tion in late 1939, but after that, the machine dis­ap­peared almost instant­ly.” Speech syn­the­sis itself, by con­trast, had come to stay, though progress would remain rel­a­tive­ly slow for the next four or five decades. Now, in the 21st cen­tu­ry, it exists all around us, and despite con­sid­er­able improve­ments in real­ism, its voic­es still retain a bit of the unearth­ly awk­ward­ness of the Voder — and we prob­a­bly would­n’t have it any oth­er way.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load the Soft­ware That Pro­vides Stephen Hawking’s Voice

Mon­ty Python’s “Argu­ment Clin­ic” Sketch Reen­act­ed by Two Vin­tage Voice Syn­the­siz­ers (One Is Stephen Hawking’s Voice)

Sovi­et Inven­tor Léon Theremin Shows Off the Theremin, the Ear­ly Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment That Could Be Played With­out Being Touched (1954)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.