The University of Pennsylvania hosts an extensive and pretty remarkable audio collection of modern and contemporary poetry, with a generous helping of prose writers thrown in. Directed by Al Filreis and Charles Bernstein (whose U. Penn experimental poetry courses are themselves works of art), the collection includes hundreds of names you’ll recognize immediately, and others who are not household names, but ought to be.
For more poetry, don’t miss the readings in our collection of Free Audio Books.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Variety, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
What did the U.S. capital look like 200 years ago? Finding a satisfactory answer to this question is very difficult since there are very few reliable images, maps and written accounts from Washington’s early days. This is why Dan Bailey, director of the Imaging Research Center (IRC) at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, has approached architectural historians, cartographers, engineers, and ecologists to “recreate a ‘best guess’ glimpse of the early city.” The video above is the result of the IRC’s work, showing a city that was, they say, “a rough work in progress.”
Nothing was polished. The scale of the federal city was that of a person, not of immense marble bureaucracy. There were cabins and barns on the Capital Lawn. The first fence around the Capitol was to keep the cows out. Congressmen came to town for the legislative sessions, many times sleeping 3 to a room in a boarding house, and working in unfinished buildings.
An in-depth article about the ongoing project was published in The Washington Post.
By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.
A few years ago, we posted about an ambitious project out of the University of Nottingham called The Periodic Table of Videos. The project is pretty much exactly what it sounds like – an online periodic table in which each and every element gets its own brief introductory video, “starring” the researchers and faculty of the university’s chemistry department. Video journalist Brady Haran has kept each episode loose and unscripted, and the scientists’ enthusiasm for their subject is infectious, even — or perhaps especially — when their experiments go awry (Keep an eye out especially for the wonderfully wooly Professor Poliakoff, whose hair alone should earn him first billing).
We were delighted to learn that the PTOV has just been awarded a very well-deserved Science Prize for Online Resources by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In fact, the project has proven so successful overall that Haran has embarked on a similar collaboration with the university’s physics department, and he’s also brought the chemists back for a new series about molecules. The most popular video from that series, which we’ve posted above, addresses a question that has kept us all up till dawn at least once in our lives: What happens when a cheeseburger is dunked in hydrochloric acid?
Don’t miss the free chemistry courses listed in our collection of 380 Free Online Courses.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly
“Solitude,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden, “is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervish in the desert.” If you’re searching for solitude these days, even in Times Square, you won’t need much diligence–just an iPod and a pair of earbuds. But watch out! Your solitude might be shattered by Tyler Cullen, a student filmmaker at the School of Visual Arts, who recently had the audacity to say to his fellow New Yorkers: Hey You! What Song Are You Listening To?
Tucked away in the crowded southern Indian city of Chennai, in the shadow of the Wallajah Mosque, is an unflattering building. But what happens inside the building is remarkable. Every day since 1927, a dedicated team has worked tirelessly to create a handwritten newspaper, The Musalman (in Urdu: مسلمان). Today, there’s a team of six workers who work on the newspaper daily. Four of the workers are known as katibs, writers dedicated to the ancient art of Urdu calligraphy. They have the most modest of facilities: two wall fans, three light bulbs, and one tube light in an 800-square-foot building. But watching the video, you learn how this newspaper has survived for three generations — everyone who works there is absolutely devoted to the task. In fact, they are prepared to work on The Musalman until their “last breath,” an undeniable passion.
In the modern era where almost every published work is created digitally, it is refreshing to see the tradition of calligraphy endure with The Musalman. We can only hope the rest of us can appreciate The Musalman’s history and its efforts to survive as much as its dedicated readers do.
Eugene Buchko is a blogger and photographer living in Atlanta, GA. He maintains a photoblog, Erudite Expressions, and writes about what he reads on his reading blog.
Usman Riaz began playing classical piano at 6, then took up the guitar at 16. Fast forward four years, and you have this — the 20-year old Riaz playing his song “Firefly” in a music video that’s more like a mini indie arts film than anything else. At times, Riaz plays his Martin XC1t like a piano keyboard, but, all along, you can hear his acknowledged influences — Kaki King, Michael Hedges, Don Ross and, of course, Jimmy Page. (Don’t miss these related videos.) You can learn more about the Karachi musician in this two-part interview here and here, and also find his short album, Flashes and Sparks, on Amazon here.
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Anyone know what law these dancers were violating, since the arresting officer apparently doesn’t know (or won’t say)?
Update: This article/post gives you the backstory. It explains that the dancers were “there protesting a … court decision [handed down] earlier this month that upheld a ban on dancing within the memorial.” The members of the “civil danceobedience” were charged with demonstrating without a permit, and then released a short time after. That’s the answer to the question, in short…
Gil Scott-Heron, sometimes called the “Godfather of Rap,” passed away in New York today. He was 62 years old.
Scott-Heron started setting poetry to rhythmic jazz during the late 60s and and gained fame when he recorded The Revolution Will Not Be Televised in 1971. Almost 40 years later, he released his final album, I’m New Here, which included a track called Where Did the Night Go that’s featured above. That same year, the New Yorker published a profile – New York Is Killing Me:The unlikely survival of Gil Scott-Heron – that takes you through a life that knew hardship from beginning to end, but which brimmed with creativity in between.
The Franz Kafka Society announced yesterday that it was awarding the prestigious Franz Kafka Prize for 2011 to the Irish writer John Banville, who has built a reputation for being one of the finest prose stylists working in English–and for being a bit difficult.
First, there are the books themselves. “In their architecture and their style,” wrote Belinda McKeon in the introduction to Banville’s 2009 Paris Review interview, “his books are like baroque cathedrals, filled with elaborate passages and sometimes overwhelming to the casual tourist.” And then there is the personality. When Banville won the 2005 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sea, he proclaimed, “it is nice to see a work of art win the Booker Prize.” As he explained later to The Village Voice, “the Booker Prize and literary prizes in general are for middle-ground, middlebrow work, which is as it should be. The Booker Prize is a prize to keep people interested in fiction, in buying fiction. If they gave it to my kind of book every year, it would rapidly die.”
Art may not be for everyone, but for those who have read his books–16 novels published under his own name, four crime novels under the pen name Benjamin Black, and one collection of short stories–there is no doubt that Banville is an artist. “It all starts with rhythm for me,” Banville told the Paris Review. “I love Nabokov’s work, and I love his style. But I always thought there was something odd about it that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Then I read an interview in which he admitted he was tone deaf. And I thought, that’s it–there’s no music in Nabokov, it’s all pictorial, it’s all image-based. It’s not any worse for that, but the prose doesn’t sing. For me, a line has to sing before it does anything else. The great thrill is when a sentence that starts out being completely plain suddenly begins to sing, rising far above any expectation I might have had for it. That’s what keeps me going on those dark December days when I think about how I could be living instead of writing.”
For an example of Banville’s singing prose, we leave off where The Sea begins:
They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide. All morning under a milky sky the waters in the bay had swelled and swelled, rising to unheard-of heights, the small waves creeping over parched sand that for years had known no wetting save for rain and lapping the very bases of the dunes. The rusted hulk of the freighter that had run aground at the far end of the bay longer ago than any of us could remember must have thought it was being granted a relaunch. I would not swim again, after that day. The seabirds mewled and swooped, unnerved, it seemed, by the spectacle of that vast bowl of water bulging like a blister, lead-blue and malignantly agleam. They looked unnaturally white, that day, those birds. The waves were depositing a fringe of soiled yellow foam along the waterline. No sail marred the high horizon. I would not swim, no, not ever again.
Watch to the end. As you might expect, the master upstages his co-star, flapping wings and all.
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The great actor Sir Anthony Hopkins is well versed in the work of fellow Welshman Dylan Thomas — so much so he even directed the critically lauded film Dylan Thomas: The Return Journey in 2006. Here, he is reading one of Thomas’ best-known poems, “Do not go gentle into that good night.” (If anyone knows when this video was made, please drop us a line.)
There is, of course, no reader of Thomas’ poetry equal to Thomas himself. Just listen to this BBC recording from 1951, the year the beloved villanelle was first published. But if dulcet tones and minimalist recordings aren’t your thing, then you might want to check out this John Cale version.
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!
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly
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