Back in 2011, Jonathan Pararajasingham, a British medical doctor specializing in Neurosurgery, created a montage of 50 renowned academics talking about their views on the existence of God. Then came Part II about a month later – Another 50 Academics Speaking About God. The videos mostly featured scientists, figures like Richard Feynman, Steven Pinker, Oliver Sacks, Stephen Hawking, and Richard Dawkins. Noticeably missing were the liberal artsy types. But then … hold the phones … came Pararajasingham’s 2012 video: 30 Renowned Writers Speaking About God. Running 25 minutes, the clip brings together comments by Nobel Laureates José Saramago and Nadine Gordimer, sci-fi legends Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, and important contemporary novelists: Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, to name a few. You can find the complete list of authors below the jump.
All of these authors question the existence of God. Some are doubtful. Others roundly reject the idea. That’s the slant of this video. To theists out there, let me just say this: If you find a montage that features thinkers of similar stature and caliber making the case for God, send it our way. We’ll happily give it a look. Speaking for myself, I don’t have much of a dog in this fight.
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
So wonders T.S. Eliot’s chorus in a pageant play he once helped write in 1934. Never one to let modernity trample gleefully over tradition, Eliot asks us to consider—long before it seemed necessary—what the sea of information we now swim in might be worth without good maps to guide us and wise navigators to chart out the course. We live in a time in which everything can be catalogued, preserved, backed up, and made open and searchable. This is a wonderful thing. But Will Prentice, Audio Engineer and Conservation Specialist at the British Library’s Sound and Vision Division, points out a special problem with archiving in the digital age. Echoing Eliot, Prentice says in the short film above, produced by British music magazine The Wire:
The 20th century was about audiovisual material, our memory of the 20th century is heavily audiovisual, but our sense of the 21st century is going to be a different kind of audiovisual… archiving is not going to be so much about what we can bring in, but about what to exclude.
As much as we moderns hate the idea of discrimination in any form, when it comes to media, past and present, it’s often a necessary good. In thoughtful interviews above, see Prentice, Popular Music Curator Andy Linehan, and Wildlife Sounds Curator Cheryl Tipp discuss their roles as archivists of vast troves of audiovisual information in their London library.
Given the length of the average haircut, it surprises me that I don’t see more short films built around them. Tamar Simon Hoffs knew the advantages of the haircut-based short film, and she put them to use in 1982, during her time in the American Film Institute’s Directing Workshops for Women program. The Haircut’s script has a busy record executive on his way to an important lunch appointment. With only fifteen minutes to spare, he drops into Russo’s barber shop for a trim. Little does he expect that, within those fifteen minutes, he’ll not only get his hair cut, but enjoy a shave, a massage, a glass of wine, several musical numbers, romance real or imagined, and something close to a psychoanalytic session. He goes through quite a few facets of the human experience right there in the chair — minus the time-consuming “hot towel treatment” — and Russo and his colorful, efficient crew still get him out of the door on time. Hoffs knew the perfect actor for the starring role: John Cassavetes. What’s more, she knew him personally.
The connection came through her friend Elizabeth Gazzara, daughter of a certain Ben Gazzara, star of the The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, my own favorite Cassavetes-directed film. After reading the script, Cassavetes agreed to perform, “his only stipulation being that his co-stars must be entirely rehearsed and ready to go, so he could just come in and perform as if he really was the customer,” writes British Film Institute DVD producer James Blackford. “Even in a little film such as this, Cassavetes was still searching for those perfect moments that come from the spontaneity of early takes.” You’ll even laugh at a few lines, spoken by Cassavetes as his character begins to enjoy himself, that must surely have come out of his beloved improvisational methods. And we can credit the film’s surprising end to an even more personal connection of Hoffs’: to her daughter Susanna, frontwoman of The Bangles, then known as The Bangs. You can watch The Haircut on the BFI’s new DVD/Blu-Ray release of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, or you can watch it above.
As daddies go, Darwin was quite evolved himself, displaying a 21st-century level of devotion to and involvement with his young. He even went so far as to let one of his kids draw on the original manuscript for On the Origin of Species.Saving paper was as good for the environment in the mid-1800s as it is today, but his willingness to let his precious pages do double duty may explain why the seminal document survives as mere piecemeal today.
Maybe Charles and Emma read some article that suggested their household would run more smoothly if it were better organized, and lacking such modern solutions as colorful Ikea storage bins and scanners, simply pitched all but the absolute best of their children’s artwork. (Or maybe their youngest was a scruncher, destroying pages by the fistful.)
Ayun Halliday remembers her grandmother was very impressed by her ability to draw Huckleberry Finn with his legs crossed. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Dutch TV journalist Wim Brands looks a bit dour to be inhabiting the role of World’s Luckiest Man, but that’s surely how bazillions of David Sedaris fans will view him, wishing they too had been invited to cozy up to their favorite author’s kitchen table. Particularly since that table is situated in the rustic, sixteenth-century West Sussex house that provided the setting for “Company Man”, one of his more delightful New Yorker stories of late.
Sedaris has made a fortune passing himself off as a self-involved fuss-pot, but in this episode of Boeken op Reis (Dutch for “Books on Tour”) he’s the perfect host.
He supplies thoughtful responses to Brands’ unsmiling questions and affably points out the home’s notable features, including off-kilter doorways and a taxidermied lapdog (“We call him Casey because he’s in a case.”)
He brings a plastic bag on a stroll through the surrounding countryside in order to collect litter — an endearing routine, even if it’s a scoop Brands must share with the BBC’s Clare Balding.
Best of all, he obliges his guest with a couple of live readings, the first from the aforementioned New Yorker piece, the other having to do with his youngest sister’s suicide this summer.
“I always figure that whatever most embarrasses you is something that everyone can relate to,” he muses, effectively summing up the secret of his success. If you ever feel like Sedaris is overdoing the craven complainer bit, this visit will set the record straight.
Watch the entire interview here. Non-Dutch speakers, please be advised that the segment switches to English once Brands sets the scene for his intended audience.
-Tip of the hat to Michael Ahn for the idea.
Ayun Halliday’s teenage daughter wrote David Sedaris a fan letter and David Sedaris sent a handwritten reply on a postcard. Classy! Follow her @AyunHalliday
In November of 1969 Thelonious Monk appeared at the Berliner Jazztage (“Berlin Jazz Days,” now known as JazzFest Berlin) and played a series of Duke Ellington pieces on solo piano. Monk brought his own quirky genius — his jagged-edged, percussive playing style and harmonic dissonance — to Ellington’s elegant melodies. The result was magic.
In the video above, Monk plays four compositions by Ellington — “Satin Doll,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “Caravan” and “Solitude” — followed by one of his own, “Crepuscule With Nellie,” before joining the Joe Turner Trio in a performance of “Blues for Duke.” The trio includes Turner on Piano, Hans Rettenbacher on bass and Stu Martin on drums. The performances are available on the DVD Monk Plays Ellington: Solo Piano in Berlin ’69.
If you’re going through Breaking Bad withdrawal, here’s a small way to fill the void. Audible.com has made available a recording of Bryan Cranston, the actor behind Walter White, reading the first chapter from The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien’s famous story collection that offers a chilling, boots-on-the-ground portrayal of soldiers’ experience during the Vietnam War. A finalist for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, the book has sold over 2 million copies worldwide and is now a staple of college and high school English classes across America. Cranston’s reading runs over 47 minutes.
Cranston actually narrates the entire book, and if you’re interested in downloading it, there’s a way to do it for free. Just head over to Audible.com and register for a 30-day free trial. You can download any audio book for free, including The Things They Carried. Then, when the trial is over, you can continue your Audible subscription, or cancel it, and still keep the audio book. The choice is yours. And, in full disclosure, let me tell you that we have a nice arrangement with Audible. Whenever someone signs up for their amazing service, it helps support Open Culture. Get more information on Audible’s free trial here.
You’ll get a charge out this picture taken long ago. It captures Mark Twain, a literary giant of the 19th century, tinkering in the laboratory of the great inventor, Nikola Tesla. According to the University of Virginia, the photo was taken in the spring of 1894, when Century Magazine published an article called “Tesla’s Oscillator and other Inventions.” Still available online, the article begins:
[Mr. Tesla] invites attention to-day, whether for profound investigations into the nature of electricity, or for beautiful inventions in which is offered a concrete embodiment of the latest means for attaining the ends most sought after in the distribution of light, heat, and power, and in the distant communication of intelligence. Any one desirous of understanding the trend and scope of modern electrical advance will find many clues in the work of this inventor. The present article discloses a few of the more important results which he has attained, some of the methods and apparatus which he employs, and one or two of the theories to which he resorts for an explanation of what is accomplished.
Below, we’ve got more vintage Twain (including Twain topless), plus some choice Tesla picks:
Graham Nash, of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, has a new book out, Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life. And that means he’s doing interviews, many interviews. A couple of weeks ago, he spent an excellent hour on The Howard Stern Show (seriously). Next, it was off to chat with the more cerebral Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air.
In the midst of the interview (listen online here), Gross asked Nash to talk about his friendship with Neil Young, a man Nash has called “the strangest of my friends.” Just what makes him strange? Nash explains:
The man is totally committed to the muse of music. And he’ll do anything for good music. And sometimes it’s very strange. I was at Neil’s ranch one day just south of San Francisco, and he has a beautiful lake with red-wing blackbirds. And he asked me if I wanted to hear his new album, “Harvest.” And I said sure, let’s go into the studio and listen.
Oh, no. That’s not what Neil had in mind. He said get into the rowboat.
I said get into the rowboat? He said, yeah, we’re going to go out into the middle of the lake. Now, I think he’s got a little cassette player with him or a little, you know, early digital format player. So I’m thinking I’m going to wear headphones and listen in the relative peace in the middle of Neil’s lake.
Oh, no. He has his entire house as the left speaker and his entire barn as the right speaker. And I heard “Harvest” coming out of these two incredibly large loud speakers louder than hell. It was unbelievable. Elliot Mazer, who produced Neil, produced “Harvest,” came down to the shore of the lake and he shouted out to Neil: How was that, Neil?
And I swear to god, Neil Young shouted back: More barn!
To that we say, more Neil Young! Find more Neil right below.
We’ve recently discussed the reactions of James Joyce’s literary contemporaries to the 1922 publication of Ulysses. T.S. Eliot was floored, and told all of his friends, including Virginia Woolf. Woolf wrestled with the book and either found it too dull or too overwhelming to finish. Whatever the reaction, Joyce’s peers took notice. But what did people who weren’t soon to be the subject of thousands of dissertations think? Of the few non-modernist masters who read Joyce, his first professional critics offer evidence. Take the review of Dr. Joseph Collins in The New York Times (above—see the full text here). Collins begins with a very prescient statement, one most readers of Joyce will likely agree with in some part:
Few intuitive, sensitive visionaries may understand and comprehend “Ulysses,” James Joyce’s new and mammoth volume, without going through a course of training or instruction, but the average intelligent reader will glean little or nothing from it- even from careful perusal, one might properly say study, of it- save bewilderment and a sense of disgust. It should be companioned with a key and a glossary like the Berlitz books. Then the attentive and diligent reader would eventually get some comprehension of Mr. Joyce’s message.
Collins then goes on to praise Joyce’s greatness in no uncertain terms:
Before proceeding with a brief analysis of “Ulysses,” and a comment on its construction and content, I wish to characterize it. “Ulysses” is the most important contribution that has been made to fictional literature in the twentieth century. It will immortalize its author with the same certainty that Gargantua and Pantagruel immortalized Rabelais, and “The Brothers Karamazof” Dostoyevsky. It is likely that there is no one writing English today that could parallel Joyce’s feat.
Such incredibly high praise it sounds like flattery, especially since Joyce’s book had not even weathered a few weeks among the reading public. For a more sober and careful assessment, see the great literary critic Edmund Wilson’s July, 1922 review in the New Republic. In Wilson’s ambivalent assessment: “The thing that makes Ulysses imposing is, in fact, not the theme but the scale upon which it is developed. It has taken Mr. Joyce seven years to write Ulysses and he has done it in seven hundred and thirty pages which are probably the most completely “written” pages to be seen in any novel since Flaubert.” If this seems like faint praise, it sets up some of Wilson’s “complaints” to come. And yet, “for all its appalling longueurs,” he writes, “Ulysses is a work of high genius. [It] has the effect at once of making everything else look brassy.”
Of course there were those who hated the book, like Harvard’s Irving Babbitt, who said it could only have been written “in an advanced stage of psychic disintegration.” And there were the puritans and philistines who found the novel’s scatological humor, frank depictions of sex, and near constant erotic charge a scandal. Yet it was the opinions, however qualified, of Joyce’s peers and most of his critics that moved U.S. Judge John Monro Woolsey eleven years later to rule that the book was not obscene and could be legally sold in America. Wrote Woolsey in his decision, “The reputation of ‘Ulysses’ in the literary world… warranted my taking such time as was necessary… In ‘Ulysses,’ in spite of its unusual frankness, I do not detect anywhere the leer of the sensualist.” Good thing Woolsey didn’t read Joyce’s letters to his wife.
Nowadays, most of us who still religiously attend screenings of films by the most respected European directors of the twentieth century have circled the wagons: even if we far prefer, say, Fellini to Truffaut, we’ll more than likely still turn up for the Truffaut, even if only out of cinephilic solidarity. But in the fifties, sixties, and seventies — or so I’ve read, anyway — discussions of such filmmakers’ relative merits could turn into serious intellectual shoving matches, and even many of the luminaries themselves would evaluate their colleagues’ work candidly. At the Ingmar Bergman fan site Bergmanorama, you can read what the maker of The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and Persona had to say about the makers of movies like L’Avventura, Breathless, Vertigo, The Exterminating Angel, The 400 Blows, and Stalker.
Regarding Jean Luc Godard: “I’ve never been able to appreciate any of his films, nor even understand them… I find his films affected, intellectual, self-obsessed and, as cinema, without interest and frankly dull… I’ve always thought that he made films for critics.”
Michelangelo Antonioni, thought Bergman, had “never properly learnt his craft. He’s an aesthete. If, for example, he needs a certain kind of road for The Red Desert, then he gets the houses repainted on the damned street. That is the attitude of an aesthete. He took great care over a single shot, but didn’t understand that a film is a rhythmic stream of images, a living, moving process; for him, on the contrary, it was such a shot, then another shot, then yet another. So, sure, there are some brilliant bits in his films… [but] I can’t understand why Antonioni is held in such high esteem.”
Alfred Hitchcock struck him as “a very good technician. And he has something in Psycho, he had some moments. Psycho is one of his most interesting pictures because he had to make the picture very fast, with very primitive means. He had little money, and this picture tells very much about him. Not very good things. He is completely infantile, and I would like to know more — no, I don’t want to know — about his behaviour with, or, rather, against women. But this picture is very interesting.”
You’ll find more quotes on F.W. Murnau, teller of image-based tales with “fantastic suppleness”; Marcel Carné and Julien Duvivier, “decisive influences in my wanting to become a filmmaker”; Federico Fellini, the sheer heat from whose creative mind “melts him”; François Truffaut, with his fascinating “way of relating with an audience”; and Andrei Tarkovsky, “the greatest of them all,” at Bergmanorama. His comments on Luis Buñuel offer especially important advice for creators in any medium, of any age. He quotes a critic who wrote that “with Autumn Sonata Bergman does Bergman” and admits the truth in it, but he adds that, at some point, “Tarkovsky began to make Tarkovsky films and that Fellini began to make Fellini films.” Buñuel, alas, “nearly always made Buñuel films.” The lesson: if you must do a pastiche, don’t do a pastiche of your own style — or, as I once heard the writer Geoff Dyer (himself a great fan of midcentury European cinema) call it, “self-karaoke.”
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