Seven New Courses Coming from the School of Open: Sign Up Today

in MOOCs, Online Courses | July 24th, 2013

The School of Open is offer­ing its sec­ond round of free, facil­i­tat­ed, online cours­es. Through August 4, you can sign up for 7 cours­es on open sci­ence, col­lab­o­ra­tive work­shop design, open edu­ca­tion­al resources, copy­right for edu­ca­tors, Wikipedia, CC licens­es, and more. Cours­es will start after the first week of August and run for 3 to 7 weeks, depend­ing on the course top­ic and orga­niz­er. All cours­es will offer badges for recog­ni­tion of skills and/or course com­ple­tion as part of P2PU’s badges pilot. Here’s a list of the upcom­ing cours­es, all of which have been added to our com­pre­hen­sive list of MOOCs.

• Open Sci­ence: An Intro­duc­tion
• Why Open?
• Copy­right 4 Edu­ca­tors (AUS)
• Copy­right 4 Edu­ca­tors (US)
• Cre­ative Com­mons for K‑12 Edu­ca­tors
• Design­ing Col­lab­o­ra­tive Work­shops
• Writ­ing Wikipedia Arti­cles: The Basics and Beyond

If you are too busy to take a course this time around, you can sign up to be noti­fied for the next round of facil­i­tat­ed cours­es, or take a stand-alone course at your own pace, at any time. All cours­es are free and open to take and re-use under the Cre­ative Com­mons Attri­bu­tion-Share­Alike license.

Walter Benjamin’s Philosophical Thought Presented by Two Experimental Films

in Film, Philosophy | July 24th, 2013

Lit­er­ary the­o­rist and schol­ar Wal­ter Ben­jamin was part of a small but incred­i­bly sig­nif­i­cant cohort of Ger­man-Jew­ish intel­lec­tu­als who fled the Nazis in the thir­ties. The group includ­ed thinkers like Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Han­nah Arendt, Her­bert Mar­cuse, and Bertolt Brecht. Of all of the names above, only Ben­jamin suc­cumbed, com­mit­ting sui­cide by mor­phine over­dose in 1940 at a Cat­alon­ian hotel, when it became clear that the Span­ish, with whom he had sought refuge, were going to turn him back over to Ger­many.

Of all of the thinkers above, most of whom are fair­ly well-known by U.S. stu­dents of the lib­er­al arts, it can (and should) be argued that Ben­jamin was the most influ­en­tial, even if he rarely appears on a syl­labus, except­ing one well-known essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechan­i­cal Repro­ducibil­i­ty,” a sta­ple of film and media the­o­ry class­es. All of the thinkers list­ed above adored Ben­jamin, and all of them fig­u­ra­tive­ly sat at his feet. And while Benjamin—often by ref­er­ence to the afore­men­tioned essay—gets pegged as a Marx­ist thinker, he was also some­thing else; he was a mys­tic and a sage, the crit­i­cal equiv­a­lent, per­haps, of Kaf­ka.

The 1993 exper­i­men­tal film above—One Way Street: Frag­ments for Wal­ter Ben­jamin—is part doc­u­men­tary, part low-bud­get cable-access edit­ing exer­cise. The film pro­vides an intro­duc­tion to Benjamin’s life and thought through inter­views with schol­ars, re-enact­ments of Benjamin’s last days, and mon­tages cen­tered around his many apho­ris­tic expres­sions. One Way Street opens with an epi­gram from Benjamin’s pupil Brecht, from the latter’s poem “On the Sui­cide of the Refugee W.B.,” in which Brecht eulo­gizes his mentor’s prophet­ic strain: “the future lies in dark­ness and the forces of right / Are weak. All this was plain to you.” Indeed, it is this mys­ti­cal aspect of Ben­jamin that defies his strict cat­e­go­riza­tion as a dog­mat­ic Marx­ist mate­ri­al­ist. Through the con­sid­er­able influ­ence of his friend Ger­shom Scholem, Ben­jamin acquired a deep inter­est in Kab­bal­is­tic thought, includ­ing a mes­sian­ic streak that col­ored so much of his writ­ing.

In ref­er­ence to this Jew­ish mys­ti­cism, Anson Rabin­bach, edi­tor of New Ger­man Cri­tique sum­ma­rizes Benjamin’s thought above:

The world is… dis­persed in frag­ments, and in these frag­ments, the frag­ments of the world that God has now turned his back on, reside cer­tain pres­ences, which attest to the for­mer exis­tence of their divine char­ac­ter. You can­not active­ly go about to dis­cov­er these divine pres­ences, but they can be revealed.

Accord­ing to Rabin­bach, Benjamin’s method was, sim­i­lar to Freud’s, an attempt to “unlock” these “ema­na­tions” by “jux­ta­pos­ing things that don’t quite nec­es­sar­i­ly appear to be relat­ed to each oth­er… And this is the Kab­bal­is­tic sense, that you can­not go direct­ly at the task, because the dis­clo­sure of the ema­na­tion is blocked.” Benjamin’s frag­men­tary “method” pro­duced prodi­gious results—hundreds upon hun­dreds of pages of essays, and a frus­trat­ing­ly unfin­ished book pub­lished as The Arcades Project.

His thought is so diverse that one com­menter in the film above—Michael Jen­nings, author of Ben­jamin study Dialec­ti­cal Images—says that “the way that Ben­jamin is used most in this coun­try, is to dip in and take a quo­ta­tion out of con­text, in sup­port of any argu­ment one could think of, and I used to take umbrage at this, until I real­ized that this was pre­cise­ly Benjamin’s own prac­tice.” In this way, Ben­jamin occu­pies a sim­i­lar place in the human­i­ties as Russ­ian lit­er­ary the­o­rist Mikhail Bakhtin. Where he is famous, he is famous for cre­at­ing whole con­cep­tu­al fields one can invoke by utter­ing a sin­gle word or phrase.

One of the most potent words in the Ben­jamin lex­i­con is the French term flâneur. The flâneur is a “stroller, idler, walk­er,” a “well-dressed man, strolling leisure­ly through the Parisian arcades of the nine­teenth century—a shop­per with no inten­tion to buy, an intel­lec­tu­al par­a­site of the arcade” (as Ben­jamin web­site “The Arcades Project Project” defines it). The flâneur is an indi­vid­ual of priv­i­lege and a prog­en­i­tor of the male gaze: “Tra­di­tion­al­ly the traits that mark the flâneur are wealth, edu­ca­tion, and idle­ness. He strolls to pass the time that his wealth affords him, treat­ing the peo­ple who pass and the objects he sees as texts for his own plea­sure.” The flâneur is not sim­ply a pas­sive observ­er; he is instead a kind of lazy urban preda­tor, and also a dandy and pro­to-hip­ster. Per­haps the most sin­is­ter rep­re­sen­ta­tion of this char­ac­ter (in a dif­fer­ent urban con­text) is the creepy Svidri­gailov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Pun­ish­ment.

In the 1998 film above, Flâneur III: Benjamin’s Shad­ow, Dan­ish direc­tor Tor­ben Skjodt Jensen and writer Urf Peter Hall­berg col­lab­o­rate on an impres­sion­is­tic black-and-white med­i­ta­tion on Paris, over­laid with Hallberg’s rumi­na­tions and quo­ta­tions from Ben­jamin. Benjamin’s fas­ci­na­tion with nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry Paris drove his mas­sive, unfin­ished Arcades Project, an exca­va­tion of the inner work­ings of moder­ni­ty. Where One Way Street is marked by a very dat­ed 90’s aes­thet­ic (which may look chic now that the decade’s back in fash­ion), the above film is both clas­si­cal and mod­ernist, a tes­ta­ment to the beau­ties and con­tra­dic­tions of Paris. I think in this respect, it is a more fit­ting trib­ute to the crit­i­cal and con­tra­dic­to­ry aes­thet­ic the­o­ry of Wal­ter Ben­jamin.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Theodor Adorno’s Avant-Garde Musi­cal Com­po­si­tions

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

Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger Talks About Lan­guage, Being, Marx & Reli­gion in Vin­tage 1960s Inter­views

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

20 Books People Pretend to Read (and Now Your Confessions?)

in Books | July 24th, 2013

The good folks at Book Riot con­duct­ed a sur­vey of 828 read­ers, hop­ing to find out what books they’ve faked read­ing. The top five books (all avail­able in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books col­lec­tions) may not come as a sur­prise:

1. Pride and Prej­u­dice by Jane Austen
2. Ulysses by James Joyce
3. Moby-Dick by Her­man Melville
4. War and Peace by Leo Tol­stoy
5. The Bible

Nor will the remain­ing 15 astound you (give or take a cou­ple). But we’ll let you head over to Book Riot for the com­plete list. Wait! Stop! Before you leave, let us know what books you’ve fudged before. It’s anony­mous and all in good fun. Look for­ward to your con­fes­sions.

Read Fanny Hill, the 18th-Century Erotic Novel That Went to the Supreme Court in the 20th Century

in Literature | July 24th, 2013

In a recent inter­view with lit­er­ary his­to­ri­an Loren Glass about the achieve­ments of taboo-bust­ing pub­lish­er Grove Press, I won­dered whether any­one grow­ing up today could con­ceive of a book caus­ing a pub­lic scan­dal, let alone a tri­al that reach­es the Supreme Court. Grove had the high­est-pro­file of its sev­er­al legal skir­mish­es after pub­lish­ing Hen­ry Miller’s Trop­ic of Can­cer in 1961. Two years lat­er, G.P. Put­nam Sons would  drop their own lit­er­ary bomb­shell in the form of Mem­oirs of a Woman of Plea­sure, bet­ter known by the name of the pro­tag­o­nist there ref­er­enced, Fan­ny Hill, who, orphaned at fif­teen, throws her­self into a career in “prof­it by pleas­ing.” Orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten in 1748 by John Cle­land, a for­mer British East India Com­pa­ny employ­ee locked up in debtors’ prison, the book broke new ground by offer­ing almost noth­ing but a string of elab­o­rate­ly craft­ed (and, tech­ni­cal­ly, “vul­gar” lan­guage-free) sex scenes.

“A par­tial list of the book’s adven­tures includes an orgy, sex between women, mas­tur­ba­tion, masochism, cross-dress­ing, and a detailed sodomy scene that is one of only two known explic­it depic­tions of male same-sex ardor in the lan­guage before the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry,” writes the Boston Globe’s Ruth Gra­ham in an arti­cle on the 50th anniver­sary of the Fan­ny Hill-vin­di­cat­ing ver­dict. “The book still has the capac­i­ty to shock. As [assis­tant attor­ney gen­er­al William I.] Cowin not­ed in front of the Supreme Court, after the first 10 pages of the nov­el, ‘all but 32 have sex­u­al themes.’ But Fan­ny Hill would not have sur­vived so long if it were mere­ly scan­dalous in 18th-cen­tu­ry terms: It remains rev­o­lu­tion­ary today because, as Eng­lish crit­ic Peter Quen­nell wrote in the intro­duc­tion to the 1963 edi­tion, “It treats of plea­sure as the aim and end of exis­tence.” You can find out just what this means by down­load­ing the book free from Project Guten­berg or iTunes, or lis­ten­ing to a free audio ver­sion here. Whether these text-only edi­tions count as work­safe all depends, of course, on the size of your screen and the lit­er­a­cy of your co-work­ers. You can see bawdy illus­tra­tions that appeared in his­tor­i­cal edi­tions here. Note that they are very defin­i­tive­ly NSFW.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

74 Free Banned Books for Banned Books Week

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

The Actual Schindler’s List Is For Sale on Ebay, Starting Bid $3,000,000

in History | July 24th, 2013

Click image above to enlarge

The sto­ry of Oskar Schindler, sav­ior of thou­sands of Pol­ish Jews, pro­duced an epic nov­el, Schindler’s Ark, which in turn pro­duced Steven Spielberg’s epic Schindler’s List. Like that of Anne Frank, Schindler’s sto­ry con­tains actions both unimag­in­ably coura­geous and relat­ably human, and so his dra­ma moves us past the stu­pe­fy­ing­ly bru­tal machin­ery of the Nazi death camps and into the lives of the real peo­ple under threat and those who helped them. But when we step out of the mem­oirs and fic­tion­al­iza­tions and back into the dry his­to­ry of doc­u­ments, mem­os, and orders, the inhu­man bureau­crat­ic cast of Nazi effi­cien­cy returns, even in the case of Oskar Schindler.

Take the actu­al list (page one above). A fea­ture­less busi­ness ledger, the list is indis­tin­guish­able from the many con­cen­tra­tion camp reg­is­ters and death records Schindler’s fel­low Nazis kept assid­u­ous­ly as they went about the busi­ness of erad­i­cat­ing a whole pop­u­la­tion. We know, of course, that Schindler played the part of a par­ty believ­er to save lives instead of take them, but it’s still quite eerie to look over this face­less list of names and con­tem­plate how close these men and women came to the hor­rors of the camps that took so many of their neigh­bors, friends, and rel­a­tives.

The list above is now on sale through an Ebay auc­tion, start­ing bid 3 mil­lion dol­lars. It is cer­ti­fied authen­tic as the actu­al list typed up by Shindler’s accoun­tant Itzhak Stern (played by Ben Kings­ley in the film). The auc­tion page pro­vides the fol­low­ing infor­ma­tion:

Itzhak Stern typed up the 14 page list on onion skin paper. Up for auc­tion is not a copy of that list, but the actu­al one. It was sold by Itzhak Stern’s nephew to the cur­rent own­er. It is dat­ed in pen­cil on the first page, April 18, 1945. The auc­tion will also include a copy of the affi­davit from Stern’s nephew, recount­ing more details and prove­nance on The List. There’s a com­plete his­to­ry of the com­po­si­tion of the list in David Crowe’s bril­liant bio, Oskar Schindler: The Untold Account of His Life, Wartime Activ­i­ties, and the True Sto­ry Behind the List.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Tri­al of Adolf Eich­mann at 50

Rare 1940 Audio: Thomas Mann Explains the Nazis’ Ulte­ri­or Motive for Spread­ing Anti-Semi­tism

Rudolf Braz­da, Last Man to Wear the Pink Tri­an­gle Dur­ing the Holo­caust, Tells His Sto­ry

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

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

Henry Rollins: Education is the Cure to “Disaster Capitalism”

in Current Affairs, Education, Politics | July 23rd, 2013

We’ve already fea­tured for­mer Black Flag front­man and cur­rent spo­ken-word artist Hen­ry Rollins explain­ing why, to his mind, only edu­ca­tion can restore democ­ra­cy. He also believes it can cure some­thing he calls “dis­as­ter cap­i­tal­ism,” and you can hear more from him about it in the Big Think video above. He address­es, in his char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly straight­for­ward man­ner, the ques­tions of what exact­ly ails the Amer­i­can econ­o­my, how that ail­ment might have come about, and how the coun­try can edu­cate itself back to health. We may indi­vid­u­al­ly get our edu­ca­tions now, he grants, but “how long will it be until Amer­i­ca fis­cal­ly turns itself around” to the point of repay­ing “the risk of the invest­ment on that stu­dent loan to get a per­son through four years of col­lege? Will that per­son get a job where pay­ing off that loan and get­ting a house and afford­ing a fam­i­ly, will that be a pos­si­bil­i­ty? In the present Amer­i­ca, it doesn’t look like it is.”

See­ing a dire nation­al sit­u­a­tion, Rollins rec­om­mends doing like Chi­na, but not in the way you might assume. He sug­gests look­ing “500 years at a time,” much far­ther up the road than we have of late. “I’d be look­ing up the road so far my eyes would fall out of my head.” He wants the coun­try to become “like Europe, where they’ll edu­cate your kid until his head explodes,” pro­duc­ing “three doc­tors per floor of every apart­ment build­ing” and doing so by mak­ing “col­lege tuition either free or real­ly low.” Gen­er­al­ly thought of as lib­er­al, Rollins sums this up in a way that might appeal to his ide­o­log­i­cal oppo­nents: “If you have a coun­try full of whip-crack smart peo­ple, you have a coun­try the rest of the world will fear. They will not invade a coun­try of edu­cat­ed peo­ple because we are so smart we’ll build a laser that will burn you, the ene­my, in your sleep before you can even mobi­lize your air force to kill us. We will kill you so fast because we are so smart and we will have for­eign pol­i­cy that will not piss you off to the point to where you have to attack us.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hen­ry Rollins Pitch­es Edu­ca­tion as the Key to Restor­ing Democ­ra­cy

Hen­ry Rollins Tells Young Peo­ple to Avoid Resent­ment and to Pur­sue Suc­cess with a “Monas­tic Obses­sion”

Hen­ry Rollins Remem­bers the Life-Chang­ing Deci­sion That Brought Him From Häa­gen-Dazs to Black Flag

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

Rare 1910 Audio: Sarah Bernhardt, ‘The Most Famous Actress the World Has Ever Known,’ in Racine’s Phèdre

in Literature, Theatre | July 23rd, 2013

The French actress Sarah Bern­hardt is often remem­bered as the first inter­na­tion­al super­star. Her hyp­not­ic pres­ence and flam­boy­ant per­son­al­i­ty are leg­endary. “She could con­trive thrill after thrill,” wrote Lyt­ton Stra­chey of Bern­hardt’s act­ing abil­i­ty, “she could seize and tear the nerves of her audi­ence, she could touch, she could ter­ri­fy, to the top of her aston­ish­ing bent.” Bern­hardt died before the age of talk­ing movies, notes her biog­ra­ph­er Robert Got­tlieb, “yet she remains the most famous actress the world has ever known.”

How good was she? Lis­ten below, and you can begin to form your own opin­ion. The record­ing was made in Feb­ru­ary of 1910, when Bern­hardt and her troupe were tour­ing Amer­i­ca. To tap into the emerg­ing phono­graph­ic record mar­ket, Bern­hardt stopped by Thomas Edis­on’s lab­o­ra­to­ry in West Orange, New Jer­sey, to cut some wax cylin­ders. For one record­ing, she chose a scene from Jean Racine’s 1677 tragedy Phè­dre, which is based on Euripi­des’ Hip­poly­tus and Seneca’s Phae­dra. Bern­hardt plays the title role oppo­site an unknown actor in the high­ly dra­mat­ic Act II Scene V, in which Phè­dre declares her love for Hypoly­te, her step­son:

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the video image moves in a dis­tract­ing way. So per­haps the best way to enjoy the audio is to for­get the image and read along with Bern­hardt. A full tran­script fol­lows the jump:

(more…)

The Atheism Tapes Presents Lengthy Interviews with Arthur Miller, Daniel Dennett & Richard Dawkins About Religion and Unbelief

in Philosophy, Religion | July 23rd, 2013

The his­to­ry of religion(s) is a fas­ci­nat­ing sub­ject, one that should be cov­ered, in my hum­ble opin­ion, as an inte­gral part of every lib­er­al arts edu­ca­tion. But the his­to­ry of atheism—of disbelief—is a sub­ject that only emerges piece­meal, in oppo­si­tion­al con­texts, espe­cial­ly in the wake of recent fun­da­men­tal­ist upris­ings in the past decade or so. We cov­ered one such his­to­ry recent­ly, the 2004 BBC series Athe­ism: A Rough His­to­ry of Dis­be­lief, made by direc­tor Jonathan Miller and fea­tur­ing such high-pro­file thinkers as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Den­nett, Arthur Miller, and physi­cist Steven Wein­berg.

Miller’s series orig­i­nal­ly includ­ed much more mate­r­i­al than he could air, and so the BBC agreed to let him pro­duce the out­take inter­views as a sep­a­rate pro­gram called The Athe­ism Tapes. It’s a series in six parts, fea­tur­ing inter­views with Eng­lish philoso­pher Col­in McGinn, Wein­berg, Miller, Dawkins, Den­nett, and British the­olo­gian Denys Turn­er. At the top, watch Miller’s intro to The Athe­ism Tapes and his inter­view with Col­in McGinn. It’s an inter­est­ing angle—Miller gets to quiz McGinn on “what it means to be a skep­ti­cal Eng­lish philoso­pher in such a seem­ing­ly reli­gious coun­try as the Unit­ed States.” Many read­ers may sym­pa­thize with McGinn’s dif­fi­cul­ty in com­mu­ni­cat­ing his unbe­lief to those who find the con­cept total­ly alien.

Direct­ly above, watch Daniel Den­nett (after the intro) dis­cuss the rela­tion­ship between athe­ism and Darwin’s rev­o­lu­tion­ary the­o­ry. Miller is a won­der­ful interviewer—sympathetic, prob­ing, informed, humor­ous, human­ist. He is the per­fect per­son to bring all these fig­ures togeth­er and get their var­i­ous takes on mod­ern unbe­lief, because despite his own pro­fes­sions, Miller real­ly cares about these big meta­phys­i­cal ques­tions, and his pas­sion and curios­i­ty are shared by all of his inter­vie­wees. In the intro­duc­tion to his inter­view with play­wright Arthur Miller (below), Jonathan Miller makes the provoca­tive claim that Chris­tian­i­ty believes “there’s some­thing pecu­liar about the Jews that makes them pecu­liar­ly sus­cep­ti­ble to pro­fane dis­be­lief.” Watch Arthur Miller’s response below.

One would hope that all man­ner of people—believers, athe­ists, and the non-committal—would come away from The Athe­ism Tapes with at least a healthy respect for the integri­ty of philo­soph­i­cal and sci­en­tif­ic inquiry and doubt. See the full series on YouTube here. Or pur­chase your copy on Ama­zon here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Athe­ism: A Rough His­to­ry of Dis­be­lief, with Jonathan Miller

Richard Dawkins Makes the Case for Evo­lu­tion in the 1987 Doc­u­men­tary, The Blind Watch­mak­er

Philoso­pher Daniel Den­nett Presents Sev­en Tools For Crit­i­cal Think­ing

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

The Feud Continues: Noam Chomsky Responds to Žižek, Describes Remarks as ‘Sheer Fantasy’

in Philosophy, Politics | July 22nd, 2013

Noam Chom­sky has issued a state­ment in reac­tion to our July 17 post, “Slavoj Žižek Responds to Noam Chom­sky: ‘I Don’t Know a Guy Who Was So Often Empir­i­cal­ly Wrong.’ In an arti­cle post­ed yes­ter­day on ZNet titled “Fan­tasies,”  Chom­sky says Žižek’s crit­i­cism of him is com­plete­ly unground­ed. “Žižek finds noth­ing, lit­er­al­ly noth­ing, that is empir­i­cal­ly wrong,” writes Chom­sky. “That’s hard­ly a sur­prise.”

The rift between the two high-pro­file intel­lec­tu­als began, as you may recall, when Chom­sky crit­i­cized Žižek and oth­er con­ti­nen­tal philoso­phers for essen­tial­ly talk­ing non­sense — for cloak­ing triv­i­al­i­ties in fan­cy lan­guage and using the sci­en­tif­ic-sound­ing term “the­o­ry” to describe propo­si­tions that could nev­er be test­ed empir­i­cal­ly. Žižek lashed back, say­ing of Chom­sky, “I don’t think I know a guy who was so often empir­i­cal­ly wrong.” He went on to crit­i­cize Chom­sky’s con­tro­ver­sial ear­ly posi­tion on Amer­i­can assess­ments of the Khmer Rouge atroc­i­ties in Cam­bo­dia. (To read Žižek’s com­ments, click here to open the ear­li­er post in a new win­dow.) In response yes­ter­day, Chom­sky said he had received numer­ous requests to com­ment on our post:

I had read it, with some inter­est, hop­ing to learn some­thing from it, and giv­en the title, to find some errors that should be cor­rect­ed — of course they exist in vir­tu­al­ly any­thing that reach­es print, even tech­ni­cal schol­ar­ly mono­graphs, as one can see by read­ing reviews in pro­fes­sion­al jour­nals. And when I find them or am informed about them I cor­rect them.

But not here. Žižek finds noth­ing, lit­er­al­ly noth­ing, that is empir­i­cal­ly wrong. That’s hard­ly a sur­prise. Any­one who claims to find empir­i­cal errors, and is min­i­mal­ly seri­ous, will at the very least pro­vide a few par­ti­cles of evi­dence — some quotes, ref­er­ences, at least some­thing. But there is noth­ing here — which, I’m afraid, does­n’t sur­prise me either. I’ve come across instances of Žižek’s con­cept of empir­i­cal fact and rea­soned argu­ment.

Chom­sky goes on to recount an instance when he says Žižek mis­at­trib­uted a “racist com­ment on Oba­ma” to Chom­sky, only to explain it away lat­er and say that he had dis­cussed the issue with Chom­sky on the tele­phone. “Of course,” writes Chom­sky, “sheer fan­ta­sy.” Chom­sky then moves on to Žižek’s com­ments report­ed by Open Cul­ture, which he says are typ­i­cal of Žižek’s meth­ods. “Accord­ing to him,” writes Chom­sky, “I claim that ‘we don’t need any cri­tique of ide­ol­o­gy’ — that is, we don’t need what I’ve devot­ed enor­mous efforts to for many years. His evi­dence? He heard that from some peo­ple who talked to me. Sheer fan­ta­sy again, but anoth­er indi­ca­tion of his con­cept of empir­i­cal fact and ratio­nal dis­cus­sion.”

Chom­sky devotes the rest of his arti­cle to defend­ing his work with Edward Her­man on the Khmer Rouge atroc­i­ties. He claims that no fac­tu­al errors have been found in their work on the sub­ject, and he draws atten­tion to a pas­sage in their book After the Cat­a­clysm, quot­ed last week by Open Cul­ture read­er Poyâ Pâkzâd, in which they write, “our pri­ma­ry con­cern here is not to estab­lish the facts with regard to post­war Indochi­na, but rather to inves­ti­gate their refrac­tion through the prism of West­ern ide­ol­o­gy, a very dif­fer­ent task.”

You can read Chom­sky’s com­plete rebut­tal to Žižek here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Noam Chom­sky Slams Žižek and Lacan: Emp­ty ‘Pos­tur­ing’

Slavoj Žižek Responds to Noam Chom­sky: ‘I Don’t Know a Guy Who Was So Often Empir­i­cal­ly Wrong’

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chom­sky & Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature & Pow­er on Dutch TV, 1971

Bill Murray Reads Great Poetry by Billy Collins, Cole Porter, and Sarah Manguso

in Poetry | July 22nd, 2013

Any­one call­ing them­selves even casu­al Bill Mur­ray fans — and we here at Open Cul­ture have tak­en it well beyond casu­al­ness — will by now have read a num­ber of arti­cles on how the actor, come­di­an, and ear­ly Sat­ur­day Night Live alum­nus has rein­vent­ed him­self in the 21st cen­tu­ry. Though he still acts and makes us laugh more than ever in so doing, he picks his projects more care­ful­ly, tends to work with cre­ators pos­sessed of par­tic­u­lar visions (Wes Ander­son comes to mind), and at times appar­ent­ly lives his life like a form of self-sat­i­riz­ing per­for­mance art, pop­ping up now and then in the least expect­ed places amongst the least expect­ed peo­ple. Fans of Mur­ray’s from his Cad­dyshack, Stripes, and Ghost­busters days cer­tain­ly would­n’t expect to see him, for instance, at a poet­ry read­ing, much less onstage, much less read­ing seri­ous­ly.

And yet here we have three exam­ples, cap­tured live, of Bill Mur­ray’s poet­ry-read­ing acu­men. Up top, you can watch him read for­mer Poet Lau­re­ate of the Unit­ed States Bil­ly Collins’ “For­get­ful­ness” at the 16th Annu­al Poets House Walk Across the Brook­lyn Bridge. Just above, at the same event, Mur­ray reads “Brush Up Your Shake­speare” by song­writer Cole Porter from the lyrics of Porter’s musi­cal Kiss Me, Kate. Below, at the Poets House Walk din­ner, he reads “What We Miss” by Sarah Man­gu­so. We’ll add those three to the list of voic­es Mur­ray’s per­for­mances have done jus­tice — a list that includes such illus­tri­ous fig­ures real and imag­ined as Wal­lace Stevens, Emi­ly Dick­in­son, and Drs. Peter Venkman and Hunter S. Thomp­son.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bill Mur­ray Reads Wal­lace Stevens Poems — “The Plan­et on The Table” and “A Rab­bit as King of the Ghosts”

Bill Mur­ray Reads Poet­ry at a Con­struc­tion Site

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