The Fall of the House of Usher: Poe’s Classic Tale Turned Into 1928 Avant Garde Film, Scripted by e.e. cummings

in Film, Literature | October 28th, 2014

Last week, in def­er­ence to the approach of Hal­loween, we fea­tured the com­plete works of Edgar Allan Poe as Free eBooks and Free Audio Books. If you give them a read, a lis­ten, or both, you’ll dis­cov­er that few cre­ators, using noth­ing more than the writ­ten word, can dis­turb quite so effec­tive­ly as Poe. But his writ­ten words have also pro­vid­ed inspi­ra­tion to fright­en­ing works in oth­er media, includ­ing the pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured 1953 British ani­ma­tion of “The Tell-Tale Heart” and, today, the short-film ver­sion of “The Fall of the House of Ush­er.” That 1839 sto­ry per­haps most per­fect­ly (and most vis­cer­al­ly) real­izes such pet themes of Poe’s as ill­ness, dread, and live bur­ial, and as such has served as mate­r­i­al to a great many film­mak­ers as defi­ant­ly low­brow as Roger Cor­man and as uncom­pro­mis­ing­ly idio­syn­crat­ic as Jan Švankma­jer. But here we offer you one of the most inter­est­ing cin­e­mat­ic “Usher“s ever made: James Sib­ley Wat­son and Melville Web­ber’s 13-minute avant-garde adap­ta­tion, script­ed in part by poet e.e. cum­mings.

“Despite their impor­tance as lead­ing fig­ures in the film world,” writes Tara Trav­isano, “Wat­son and Web­ber’s work is often over­looked and not giv­en suf­fi­cient cred­it.” Though they got their shoot­ing script from the mod­ernist-influ­enced cum­mings, the film­mak­ers, “not fans of mod­ernism,” “pre­ferred to have their films described as ama­teur.” Their Fall of the House of Ush­er, the best-known work they ever pro­duced, “hard­ly fol­lows a nar­ra­tive, but is val­ued for its cre­ative use of rep­e­ti­tion and vari­a­tion and for the film’s dra­mat­ic light­ing.” And don’t wor­ry if you haven’t read the orig­i­nal sto­ry in a while; accord­ing to Trav­isano, Wat­son and Web­ber chose to film it because they them­selves had­n’t read it in a while, and thus “would be free of its influ­ence.” But after expe­ri­enc­ing the brief but unset­tling cin­e­mat­ic dream they man­aged to make out of this half-remem­bered Poean mate­r­i­al, you may want to seek out its influ­ence by going back and read­ing it again — or lis­ten­ing to it, or try­ing to sleep and re-dream it for your­self.

You can find Fall of the House of Ush­er in our col­lec­tion, 285 Free Doc­u­men­taries Online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load The Com­plete Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Macabre Sto­ries as Free eBooks & Audio Books

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

James Earl Jones Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” and Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”

Christo­pher Walken, Iggy Pop, Deb­bie Har­ry & Oth­er Celebs Read Tales by Edgar Allan Poe

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

A Quick Introduction to Literary Theory: Watch Animated Videos from the Open University

in Education, Literature | October 28th, 2014

Just what is an author? It might seem like a sil­ly ques­tion, and an aca­d­e­m­ic dis­sec­tion of the term may seem like a need­less­ly pedan­tic exer­cise. But the very vari­abil­i­ty of the con­cept means it isn’t a sta­ble, fixed idea at all, but a shift­ing set of asso­ci­a­tions we have with notions about cre­ativ­i­ty, the social role of art, and that elu­sive qual­i­ty known as “genius.” Ques­tions raised in the Open Uni­ver­si­ty video above—part of a series of very short ani­mat­ed entrées into lit­er­ary crit­i­cism called “Out­side the Book”—make it hard to ignore the prob­lems we encounter when we try to define author­ship in sim­ple, straight­for­ward ways. Most of the ques­tions relate to the work of French post­struc­tural­ist Michel Fou­cault, whose crit­i­cal essay “What is an Author?”—along with struc­tural­ist thinker Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author”—dis­turbed many a lit­er­ary critic’s com­fort­able assump­tions about the cre­ative locus behind any giv­en work.

In the 18th cen­tu­ry, at least in Europe, the author was a high­ly cel­e­brat­ed cul­tur­al fig­ure, a sta­tus epit­o­mized by Samuel Johnson’s rev­er­en­tial biog­ra­phy of John Dry­den and edi­tion of Shake­speare—and in turn Johnson’s own biog­ra­phy by his amanu­en­sis Boswell. The 19th cen­tu­ry began to see the author as a celebri­ty, with the hype and some­times tawdry spec­u­la­tion that accom­pa­nies that des­ig­na­tion. In the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, even as the idea of the film direc­tor as auteur—a sin­gu­lar cre­ative genius—gained ascen­dance, the inflat­ed role of the lit­er­ary author came in for a bruis­ing. With Fou­cault, Barthes, and oth­ers like W.K. Wim­satt and Mon­roe Beardsley—whose essay “The Inten­tion­al Fal­la­cy” more or less ruled out biog­ra­phy as a tool of the critic—the author reced­ed and the “text” gained pri­ma­cy as, in Foucault’s words, a “dis­cur­sive unit.”

This means that ques­tions of author­ship became insep­a­ra­ble from ques­tions of read­er­ship, inter­pre­ta­tion, and influ­ence; from ques­tions of his­tor­i­cal clas­si­fi­ca­tion and social con­struc­tion (i.e. how do we know any­thing about “Byron” except through biogra­phies, doc­u­men­taries, etc., them­selves cul­tur­al pro­duc­tions?); from ques­tions of trans­la­tion, pseude­pig­ra­phy, and pen names. Put in much plain­er terms, we once came to think of the author not sim­ply as the writer—a role pre­vi­ous­ly del­e­gat­ed to low­ly, usu­al­ly anony­mous “scribes” who sim­ply copied the words of gods, heroes, and prophets. Instead, the author became a god, a hero, and a prophet, a god­like cre­ator with a “lit­er­ary stamp of approval” that grants his or her every utter­ance on the page a spe­cial sta­tus; “that makes even the note on Shakespeare’s fridge a work of pro­found genius.” But that idea is any­thing but sim­ple, and the crit­i­cal dis­cus­sion around it any­thing but triv­ial.

Dit­to much of the above when it comes to that oth­er seem­ing­ly indi­vis­i­ble unit of lit­er­a­ture, the book. In the even short­er video guide above, Open Uni­ver­si­ty rapid­ly chal­lenges our com­mon­place ideas about book-hood and rais­es the now-com­mon­place ques­tion about the future of this “read­ing giz­mo.” For more “Out­side the Book,” see the remain­ing videos in the series: “Com­e­dy,” “Tragedy,” and “Two Styles of Love.” And for a much more sus­tained and seri­ous study of the art of lit­er­ary crit­i­cism, delve into Pro­fes­sor Paul Fry’s Yale course below. It’s part of Open Cul­ture’s col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Intro­duc­tion to The­o­ry of Lit­er­a­ture – Free Online Video – Free iTunes Audio – Free iTunes Video – Course Mate­ri­als – Paul H. Fry, Yale

h/t Cather­ine

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 55 Free Online Lit­er­a­ture Cours­es: From Dante and Mil­ton to Ker­ouac and Tolkien

Crash Course on Lit­er­a­ture: Watch John Green’s Fun Intro­duc­tions to Gats­by, Catch­er in the Rye & Oth­er Clas­sics

An Intro­duc­tion to World Lit­er­a­ture by a Cast Of Lit­er­ary & Aca­d­e­m­ic Stars (Free Course)

Michel Fou­cault: Free Lec­tures on Truth, Dis­course & The Self

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

Behold the Blistering Bass Solos of Cream Bassist and Singer, Jack Bruce (1943–2014)

in Music | October 28th, 2014

I’ve writ­ten before that every band Eric Clapton’s been involved with could right­ful­ly be called a super­group. But for my mon­ey, there’s only one wor­thy of the name, and that’s Cream. Since form­ing a deep attach­ment to the psy­che­del­ic pow­er trio from a young age, I’ve found it espe­cial­ly irk­some to see them some­times billed as “Eric Clap­ton and Cream.” Drum­mer Gin­ger Bak­er and bassist/singer Jack Bruce are at least as—if not more—talented and inter­est­ing as musi­cians. But though Bak­er has long been cel­e­brat­ed, though most­ly from a safe dis­tance, Bruce, in my opin­ion, is almost crim­i­nal­ly under­rat­ed. That may change as trib­utes and reap­praisals pour in after his pass­ing of liv­er dis­ease this past Sat­ur­day at age 71.

We’re like­ly to hear more Cream than usu­al, at least, which is nev­er a bad thing. What you may not hear casu­al­ly is Bruce’s play­ing in his lat­er years. Like many rock stars of his era, includ­ing his Cream band­mates, he nev­er real­ly stopped. But unlike some musi­cians from the 60s, he only got bet­ter with age, adapt­ing his jazz and blues chops to mod­ern takes on the psych rock he helped invent. Not a flashy play­er, Bruce’s style is char­ac­ter­ized by emo­tive pow­er and a near per­fect syn­the­sis of the rhyth­mic and the melod­ic. Key to his style is the walk­ing bassline like that on “White Room,” from Cream’s third record, 1968’s dou­ble album Wheels of Fire. He plays ‘em lit­er­al­ly walk­ing around, or rather strut­ting. In the video above, see Bruce pull out an amaz­ing solo dur­ing a per­for­mance of “White Room” at an event called Hip­pie Fest in 2008.

The fes­ti­val also fea­tured leg­ends Eric Bur­don and the Ani­mals and the Tur­tles but I can only imag­ine Bruce left the strongest impres­sion on audi­ence mem­bers who’d seen him in his prime and those who hadn’t. Watch him rip through anoth­er intense solo above in “Sun­shine of Your Love,” fol­lowed by a blues num­ber record­ed ear­li­er in the day at the same con­cert. Although most of Cream’s lyrics were writ­ten by poet and “unof­fi­cial fourth mem­ber” Pete Brown, the music was most­ly Bruce. His range of influ­ences was wide, and his will­ing­ness to fol­low them wher­ev­er they led, adven­tur­ous. David Fricke at Rolling Stone has a playlist of Bruce’s top ten “Deep Tracks,” includ­ing one from ear­ly 60s out­fit The Gra­ham Bond Organization—which also fea­tured Gin­ger Bak­er and vir­tu­oso jazz gui­tarist John McLaughlin—and sev­er­al of Bruce’s solo tunes. “If you only know Cream,” writes Fricke in appre­ci­a­tion of Bruce’s ver­sa­til­i­ty,” then stray far, every way you can—as he did.” It’s good advice.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Paul McCart­ney Offers a Short Tuto­r­i­al on How to Play the Bass Gui­tar

The Sto­ry of the Bass: New Video Gives Us 500 Years of Music His­to­ry in 8 Min­utes

100 Great Bass Riffs Played in One Epic Take: Cov­ers 60 Years of Rock, Jazz and R&B

Jazz Leg­end Jaco Pas­to­rius Gives a 90 Minute Bass Les­son and Plays Live in Mon­tre­al (1982)

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

David Bowie and Lou Reed Perform Live Together for the First and Last Time: 1972 and 1997

in Music | October 27th, 2014

I dis­cov­ered one of my favorite pieces of rock ‘n’ roll memorabilia—a full page ad for the 1983 album from David Bowie’s Zig­gy Star­dust con­cert film—at a flea mar­ket. It’s a nice lit­tle piece of his­to­ry, but a lit­tle bit mis­lead­ing to con­sumers at the time, since it says, “fea­tur­ing the sin­gle ‘White Light/White Heat.’” As every­one knows, “White Light/White Heat” is not a Bowie sin­gle, but a Lou Reed song, one of his many odes to hero­in as lead singer of the Vel­vet Under­ground.

But what­ev­er the admen had in mind in pro­mot­ing this track over Bowie’s many orig­i­nal hits, the star him­self has nev­er been shy about acknowl­edg­ing his debts. When it comes to Zig­gy, “the song­writer who most influ­enced” the glam rock alien is cer­tain­ly Reed, as Bowie him­self says in this 1977 inter­view.

Today, on the one-year anniver­sary of Reed’s death, we revis­it their cre­ative and per­son­al rela­tion­ship, a mutu­al admi­ra­tion that spanned more than four decades. Not only did Bowie cov­er Reed’s songs and pro­duce his 1972 solo album Trans­former, but he wrote 1971’s “Queen Bitch” as a trib­ute to Reed and the Vel­vets. In 1997, Bowie and Reed took the stage togeth­er to per­form the song. The occa­sion was Bowie’s 50th birth­day cel­e­bra­tion at Madi­son Square Gar­den, and the all-star line­up that night includ­ed Frank Black, Dave Grohl, Son­ic Youth, Robert Smith, and Bil­ly Cor­gan (see the full setlist here). But Reed’s appear­ance was the most excit­ing, and in hind­sight, most poignant. At the top of the post, see the two old friends play “Queen Bitch,” just above, they do “White Light/White Heat,” and below, Reed’s clas­sic “Wait­ing for the Man” (they also played Reed’s 1989 “Dirty Boule­vard” togeth­er).

At the time, Bowie was at “some­what of a low point” in his career, writes Rolling Stone, though poised for a come­back with the upcom­ing sin­gle (and Trent Reznor-star­ring video) “I’m Afraid of Amer­i­cans,” which he played with Son­ic Youth that night. But the first time he and Reed shared the stage, in 1972, Bowie was rid­ing high in all his Zig­gy Star­dust glo­ry and reg­u­lar­ly cov­er­ing Vel­vet Under­ground songs on tour. That year, he brought Reed on stage in Lon­don for his “very, very first appear­ance on any stage in Eng­land.” Hear them do “White Light/White Heat” in some­what muf­fled live audio below. They also played “Wait­ing for the Man” and “Sweet Jane” togeth­er, which you can hear at the bot­tom of the post.

While Bowie seems to have tak­en every oppor­tu­ni­ty to lav­ish praise on his idol, Reed was a bit more under­stat­ed, though no less sin­cere, in his appre­ci­a­tion. In 2004, he told Rolling Stone, “We’re still friends after all these years. We go to the occa­sion­al art show and muse­um togeth­er, and I always like work­ing with him […] I saw him play here in New York on his last tour, and it was one of the great­est rock shows I’ve ever seen. At least as far as white peo­ple go. Seri­ous­ly.” Seri­ous­ly, Lou Reed, you are sore­ly missed.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rock and Roll Heart, 1998 Doc­u­men­tary Retraces the Remark­able Career of Lou Reed

Teenage Lou Reed Sings Doo-Wop Music (1958–1962)

David Bowie Recalls the Strange Expe­ri­ence of Invent­ing the Char­ac­ter Zig­gy Star­dust (1977)

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

Stephen Colbert Reads Ray Bradbury Classic Sci-Fi Story “The Veldt”

in Literature, Sci Fi | October 27th, 2014

I rarely think back to mem­o­ries from that busy­work-inten­sive con­tain­ment unit known as Amer­i­can ele­men­tary school, but when I do, I usu­al­ly arrive at lis­ten­ing to a Ray Brad­bury sto­ry — some­thing about a far­away plan­et, some­thing about mon­soons, I can nev­er remem­ber which one — dur­ing read-aloud time. Even then, on some lev­el, I under­stood that the author of Fahren­heit 451 and The Mar­t­ian Chron­i­cles (not that I yet had any idea at the time about books like Fahren­heit 451 and The Mar­t­ian Chron­i­cles) wrote with the human voice in mind. Not nec­es­sar­i­ly the momen­tar­i­ly defa­mil­iar­ized voice of a teacher read­ing to a post-lunch class­room of ten-year-olds, and not nec­es­sar­i­ly the flaw­less­ly pro­nounc­ing and paus­ing, many-takes-record­ed-per-sen­tence voice of the pro­fes­sion­al audio­book nar­ra­tor (though Brad­bury’s work did pro­vide mate­r­i­al for a few pro­to-audio­books), but, per­haps, the voice of the mind. Of all Brad­bury’s tales we love to read aloud, few seem quite so effec­tive in this way as “The Veldt.”

The sto­ry first appeared, accord­ing to the web site of pub­lic radio sta­tion WNYC, in a 1950 Sat­ur­day Evening Post “with the title ‘The World the Chil­dren Made,’ which is a good descrip­tion of what goes on in this eerie tale.  It imag­ines the ‘mod­el home’ of the future, includ­ing a pro­gram­ma­ble nurs­ery that becomes the site of a pow­er strug­gle. [Fel­low spec­u­la­tive writer Neil] Gaiman says that Bradbury’s tale rais­es com­plex ques­tions: ‘Are our chil­dren our own?,’ and ‘What does tech­nol­o­gy do to them?’ ” Pub­lic Radio Inter­na­tion­al com­mis­sioned no less a speak­er than Col­bert Report and future Late Show host Stephen Col­bert — a satirist high­ly attuned to the ironies inher­ent in mankind’s visions of its own future — to read it for their “Select­ed Shorts” series, and you can hear the whole thing above.

Giv­en how much progress our pur­suit of total automa­tion and vir­tu­al stim­u­la­tion (and our par­al­lel desire to escape those con­di­tions) has made in the past 64 years, “The Veldt” has grown only more rel­e­vant. Pair it with “There Will Come Soft Rains,” Brad­bury’s oth­er famous­ly read-aloud­able sto­ry of the home of the 1950 future, for a rich­ly fun­ny and trou­bling dou­ble-fea­ture of the mind.

For anoth­er son­ic angle on the mate­r­i­al, see also our pre­vi­ous­ly-fea­tured radio adap­ta­tions of “There Will Come Soft Rains” on Dimen­son X and “The Veldt” on X Minus One — or you can hear Leonard Nimoy read both of them in the 1970s.)

Some of the read­ings list­ed above appear in our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leonard Nimoy Reads Ray Brad­bury Sto­ries From The Mar­t­ian Chron­i­cles & The Illus­trat­ed Man (1975–76)

Dimen­sion X: The 1950s Sci­Fi Radio Show That Dra­ma­tized Sto­ries by Asi­mov, Brad­bury, Von­negut & More

X Minus One: More Clas­sic 1950s Sci-Fi Radio from Asi­mov, Hein­lein, Brad­bury & Dick

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Stephen Hawking Starts Posting on Facebook: Join His Quest to Explain What Makes the Universe Exist

in Astronomy, Physics | October 26th, 2014

I have no idea whether there’s intel­li­gent life out there in the uni­verse. But we can at least con­firm that there’s a lit­tle intel­li­gent life on Face­book, see­ing that Stephen Hawk­ing, the world’s best known the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist, began post­ing there yes­ter­day. His first sta­tus update reads:

I have always won­dered what makes the uni­verse exist. Time and space may for­ev­er be a mys­tery, but that has not stopped my pur­suit. Our con­nec­tions to one anoth­er have grown infi­nite­ly and now that I have the chance, I’m eager to share this jour­ney with you. Be curi­ous, I know I will for­ev­er be.

Wel­come, and thank you for vis­it­ing my Face­book Page. ‑SH

Join his offi­cial Face­book page here. And find/like the offi­cial Open Cul­ture page here, where we make it easy to share our dai­ly cul­tur­al posts with your fam­i­ly and friends.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawk­ing & Arthur C. Clarke Dis­cuss God, the Uni­verse, and Every­thing Else

A Brief His­to­ry of Time: Errol Morris’s Film of Stephen Hawk­ing

Stephen Hawking’s Uni­verse: A Visu­al­iza­tion in Stars and Sound

Free Online Physics Cours­es

Free Online Astron­o­my Cours­es

Get the New 7‑Minute Workout on Your Mobile Device: A Free App from The New York Times

in Sports | October 26th, 2014

The New York Times writes: “Ever since [we] pub­lished the Sci­en­tif­ic 7‑Minute Work­out in May last year, read­ers have been writ­ing and tweet­ing their requests for an updat­ed, more advanced ver­sion. For them, the work­out became too easy or hum­drum, as tends to hap­pen when exer­cis­es are repeat­ed with­out vari­a­tion. So here it is: a new, more tech­ni­cal­ly demand­ing reg­i­men, one that requires a cou­ple of dumb­bells but still takes only sev­en min­utes.”

Accord­ing to the Times, these short, intense, effi­cient work­outs strength­en mus­cle groups through­out the upper body, low­er body and tor­so. And they may well “pro­duce greater gains than an hour or more of gen­tler exer­cise.” So if you don’t have a lot of free time.…

The Times has notably made the work­out avail­able as a free web app that you can access on your phone, tablet or oth­er mobile devices. The app “offers a step-by-step guide to both 7‑minute work­outs [the old and new ones], offer­ing ani­mat­ed illus­tra­tions of the exer­cis­es, as well as a timer and audio cues to help you get the most out of your sev­en min­utes.” Click here to access it.

Fol­low us on Face­book, Twit­ter and Google Plus and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. Or bet­ter yet, sign up for our dai­ly email and get a dai­ly dose of Open Cul­ture in your inbox.

Young Stanley Kubrick’s Noirish Pictures of Chicago, 1949

in Film, History, Photography | October 25th, 2014

When Stan­ley Kubrick was a mere high school stu­dent in April 1945, just after FDR died, he snapped a pic­ture of a news ven­dor framed on either side by posters announc­ing the president’s death. He was so excit­ed by the pic­ture that he skipped school to devel­op it and then marched right into the office of Look mag­a­zine. Pho­to edi­tor Helen O’Brian offered to buy the pho­to for $25. Dis­play­ing his trade­mark cock­i­ness, Kubrick told her that he want­ed to see what price he could get from The New York Dai­ly News. They only offered $10, so Kubrick went with Look. With­in a few months, at the age of 17, Kubrick became a staff pho­tog­ra­ph­er for the pub­li­ca­tion.

Below you can see some pho­tographs that Kubrick took in 1949 while on assign­ment in Chica­go. Using the same noirish high-con­trast, low-light look that marked his first three movies, he doc­u­ment­ed all dif­fer­ent stra­ta of soci­ety from floor traders, to lin­gerie mod­els, to meat pack­ers to impov­er­ished African-Amer­i­can fam­i­lies. Click  on the images to view them in a larg­er for­mat. Find a more exten­sive gallery of images here. To take a clos­er look at Kubrick­’s pho­tog­ra­phy, see the 2018 Taschen book Stan­ley Kubrick Pho­tographs: Through a Dif­fer­ent Lens and also Stan­ley Kubrick: Dra­ma & Shad­ows.

Men work­ing the floor at the Chica­go Board of Trade

Lin­gerie mod­el, wear­ing a gir­dle and strap­less bra, smok­ing in an office; in the back­ground a woman sits at a desk

Butch­er hold­ing slab of beef in a meat lock­er

African Amer­i­can moth­er and her four chil­dren in their ten­e­ment apart­ment

Over­head view of the “L” ele­vat­ed rail­way

via Mash­able

Relat­ed Con­tent

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Very First Films: Three Short Doc­u­men­taries

The Mak­ing of Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange

James Cameron Revis­its the Mak­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Ter­ry Gilliam: The Dif­fer­ence Between Kubrick (Great Film­mak­er) and Spiel­berg (Less So)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

Hear Beowulf Read In the Original Old English: How Many Words Do You Recognize?

in English Language, Literature | October 24th, 2014

I was as sur­prised as most peo­ple are when I first heard the ancient lan­guage known as Old Eng­lish. It’s noth­ing like Shake­speare, nor even Chaucer, who wrote in a late Mid­dle Eng­lish that sounds strange enough to mod­ern ears. Old Eng­lish, the Eng­lish of Beowulf, is almost a for­eign tongue; close kin to Ger­man, with Latin, Norse, and Celtic influ­ence.

As you can hear in the Beowulf read­ing above from The Tele­graph, it’s a thick, con­so­nant-rich lan­guage that may put you in mind of J.R.R. Tolkien’s elvish. The lan­guage arrived in Briton—previously inhab­it­ed by Celtic speakers—sometime in the fifth cen­tu­ry, though whether the Anglo-Sax­on inva­sion was a hos­tile takeover by Ger­man­ic mer­ce­nar­ies or a slow pop­u­la­tion drift that intro­duced a new eth­nic­i­ty is a mat­ter of some dis­pute. Nev­er­the­less it’s obvi­ous from the read­ing above—and from texts in the lan­guage like this online edi­tion of Beowulf in its orig­i­nal tongue—that we would no more be able to speak to the Anglo-Sax­ons than we would to the Picts and Scots they con­quered.

So how is it that both the lan­guage we speak and its dis­tant ances­tor can both be called “Eng­lish”? Well, that is what its speak­ers called it. As the author of this excel­lent Old Eng­lish intro­duc­to­ry text­book writes, speak­ers of “Old Eng­lish,” “Mid­dle Eng­lish,” and “Mod­ern Eng­lish” are “them­selves mod­ern”; They “would have said, if asked, that the lan­guage they spoke was Eng­lish.” The changes in the lan­guage “took place grad­u­al­ly, over the cen­turies, and there nev­er was a time when peo­ple per­ceived their lan­guage as hav­ing bro­ken rad­i­cal­ly with the lan­guage spo­ken a gen­er­a­tion before.” And while “rel­a­tive­ly few Mod­ern Eng­lish words come from Old Eng­lish […] the words that do sur­vive are some of the most com­mon in the lan­guage, includ­ing almost all the ‘gram­mar words’ (arti­cles, pro­nouns, prepo­si­tions) and a great many words for every­day con­cepts.” You may notice a few of those dis­tant lin­guis­tic ances­tors in the Beowulf pas­sage accom­pa­ny­ing the read­ing above.

Beowulf is, of course, the old­est epic poem in Eng­lish, writ­ten some­time between the 8th and ear­ly 11th cen­tu­ry. It draws, how­ev­er, not from British sources but from Dan­ish myth, and is in fact set in Scan­di­navia. The title char­ac­ter, a hero of the Geats—or ancient Swedes—travels to Den­mark to offer his ser­vices to the king and defeat the mon­ster Gren­del (and his moth­er). The prod­uct of a war­rior cul­ture, the poem shares much in com­mon with the epics of Homer with its code of hon­or and praise of fight­ing prowess. And here see vocal­ist, harpist, and medieval schol­ar Ben­jamin Bag­by per­form the open­ing lines of the poem as its con­tem­po­rary audi­ence would have expe­ri­enced it—intoned by a bard with an Anglo-Sax­on harp. The mod­ern Eng­lish sub­ti­tles are a boon, but close your eyes for a moment and just lis­ten to the speech—see if you can pick out any words you rec­og­nize. Then, per­haps, you may wish to turn to Ford­ham University’s online trans­la­tion and find out what all that big talk in the pro­logue is about.

And for a very short course on the his­to­ry of Eng­lish, see this con­cise page and this ten-minute ani­mat­ed video from Open Uni­ver­si­ty.

The image above comes from the sole sur­viv­ing medieval man­u­script of Beowulf, which now resides at the British Library.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Homer’s Ili­ad Read in the Orig­i­nal Ancient Greek

What Ancient Greek Music Sound­ed Like: Hear a Recon­struc­tion That is ‘100% Accu­rate’

Sea­mus Heaney Reads His Exquis­ite Trans­la­tion of Beowulf

Read an Excerpt of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1926 Trans­la­tion of Beowulf Before It’s Final­ly Pub­lished Next Month

What Shake­speare Sound­ed Like to Shake­speare: Recon­struct­ing the Bard’s Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion

Hear The Epic of Gil­gamesh Read in the Orig­i­nal Akka­di­an, the Lan­guage of Mesopotamia

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

Isaac Asimov Explains the Origins of Good Ideas & Creativity in Never-Before-Published Essay

in Creativity, Sci Fi | October 24th, 2014

Rochester Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Where do ideas come from? The ques­tion has always had the poten­tial to plague any­one try­ing to do any­thing worth­while at any time in human his­to­ry. But Isaac Asi­mov, the mas­sive­ly pro­lif­ic and even more mas­sive­ly influ­en­tial writer of sci­ence fic­tion and sci­ence fact, had an answer. He even, in one 1959 essay, laid out a method, though we, the gen­er­al pub­lic, haven’t had the chance to read it until now. The MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review has just pub­lished his essay on cre­ativ­i­ty in full, while pro­vid­ing a few con­tex­tu­al­iz­ing remarks from the author’s friend Arthur Ober­may­er, a sci­en­tist who invit­ed Asi­mov on board an “out of the box” mis­sile-defense research project at an MIT spin­off called Allied Research Asso­ciates.

“He expressed his will­ing­ness and came to a few meet­ings,” remem­bers Ober­may­er, but “he even­tu­al­ly decid­ed not to con­tin­ue, because he did not want to have access to any secret clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion; it would lim­it his free­dom of expres­sion. Before he left, how­ev­er, he wrote this essay on cre­ativ­i­ty as his sin­gle for­mal input.” When Ober­may­er found it among his old files, he “rec­og­nized that its con­tents are as broad­ly rel­e­vant today as when [Asi­mov] wrote it” in 1959, describ­ing as they do “not only the cre­ative process and the nature of cre­ative peo­ple but also the kind of envi­ron­ment that pro­motes cre­ativ­i­ty.” Whether you write sci-fi nov­els or do mil­i­tary research, make a web series, or work on cur­ing Ebo­la, you can put Asi­mov’s meth­ods to use.

Asi­mov first inves­ti­gates the ori­gin of ideas by look­ing to The Ori­gin of Species. Or rather, he looks to what you find with­in it, “the the­o­ry of evo­lu­tion by nat­ur­al selec­tion, inde­pen­dent­ly cre­at­ed by Charles Dar­win and Alfred Wal­lace,” two men who “both trav­eled to far places, observ­ing strange species of plants and ani­mals and the man­ner in which they var­ied from place to place,” both “keen­ly inter­est­ed in find­ing an expla­na­tion for this,” and both of whom “failed until each hap­pened to read Malthus’s ‘Essay on Pop­u­la­tion.’ ” He finds that “what is need­ed is not only peo­ple with a good back­ground in a par­tic­u­lar field, but also peo­ple capa­ble of mak­ing a con­nec­tion between item 1 and item 2 which might not ordi­nar­i­ly seem con­nect­ed.” Evo­lu­tion­ary the­o­ry seems obvi­ous only in ret­ro­spect, he con­tin­ues, as

The his­to­ry of human thought would make it seem that there is dif­fi­cul­ty in think­ing of an idea even when all the facts are on the table. Mak­ing the cross-con­nec­tion requires a cer­tain dar­ing. It must, for any cross-con­nec­tion that does not require dar­ing is per­formed at once by many and devel­ops not as a “new idea,” but as a mere “corol­lary of an old idea.”

It is only after­ward that a new idea seems rea­son­able. To begin with, it usu­al­ly seems unrea­son­able. It seems the height of unrea­son to sup­pose the earth was round instead of flat, or that it moved instead of the sun, or that objects required a force to stop them when in motion, instead of a force to keep them mov­ing, and so on.

A per­son will­ing to fly in the face of rea­son, author­i­ty, and com­mon sense must be a per­son of con­sid­er­able self-assur­ance. Since he occurs only rarely, he must seem eccen­tric (in at least that respect) to the rest of us. A per­son eccen­tric in one respect is often eccen­tric in oth­ers.

Con­se­quent­ly, the per­son who is most like­ly to get new ideas is a per­son of good back­ground in the field of inter­est and one who is uncon­ven­tion­al in his habits. (To be a crack­pot is not, how­ev­er, enough in itself.)

Once you have the peo­ple you want, the next ques­tion is: Do you want to bring them togeth­er so that they may dis­cuss the prob­lem mutu­al­ly, or should you inform each of the prob­lem and allow them to work in iso­la­tion?

The essay puts forth an argu­ment for iso­la­tion (“Cre­ation is embar­rass­ing. For every new good idea you have, there are a hun­dred, ten thou­sand fool­ish ones, which you nat­u­ral­ly do not care to dis­play”) and a set of best prac­tices for group idea gen­er­a­tion, as imple­mentable in the Allied Research Asso­ciates of the 1950s as in any orga­ni­za­tion today. If you can’t trust Asi­mov on this sub­ject, I don’t know who you can trust, but con­sid­er sup­ple­ment­ing this new­found essay with Ze Frank’s the­mat­i­cal­ly relat­ed video “Brain Crack” (lin­guis­ti­cal­ly NSFW, though you can watch the PG ver­sion instead), which deals, in an entire­ly dif­fer­ent sen­si­bil­i­ty, with the ques­tion of where ideas come from:

via io9

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Lynch Explains How Med­i­ta­tion Enhances Our Cre­ativ­i­ty

Mal­colm McLaren: The Quest for Authen­tic Cre­ativ­i­ty

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like Today — in 2014

John Cleese’s Phi­los­o­phy of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Cre­at­ing Oases for Child­like Play

Free: Isaac Asimov’s Epic Foun­da­tion Tril­o­gy Dra­ma­tized in Clas­sic Audio

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.