My kids used to beg their dad to help out with their impromptu puppet shows. He complied by having our daughter’s favorite baby doll deliver an interminable curtain speech, hectoring the audience (me) to become subscribers and make donations via the small envelope they’d find tucked in their programs.
Like my husband, artist Paul Klee (1879–1940) loomed large in his child’s early puppet work. To mark his son Felix’s ninth birthday, Klee fashioned eight hand puppets based on stock characters from Kasperl and Gretl — Germany’s answer to Punch and Judy. The boy took to them so enthusiastically that his dad kept going, creating something in the neighborhood of fifty puppets between 1916 and 1925. The cast soon expanded to include cartoonish political figures, a self-portrait, and less recognizable characters with a decidedly Dada-ist bent. Klee also fixed Felix up with a flea market frame that served as the proscenium for the shows he put on in a doorway of the family’s tiny apartment.
When Felix set out into the world at the age of eighteen, he packed his favorite childhood puppets, while his dad hung onto the ones born of his years on the faculty of the Bauhaus. Felix’s portion of the collection was almost entirely destroyed during the bombing of Wurzburg in World War II. Dr. Death was the only member of the original eight to escape unscathed.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
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!
The poet Charles Bukowski has appeared often on Open Culture lately, and I have no objection. Not only do I savor writing about a literary figure thoroughly representative of Los Angeles, where I live, but about one who, even nineteen years after his death, keeps producing interesting things. Or at least we keep finding them.
A case in point comes from this post by Stephen J. Gertz of Booktryst about evidence rediscovered earlier this year of Bukowski’s efforts as a cartoonist: “Nineteen long-lost original drawings by Charles Bukowski, America’s poet laureate of the depths, surfaced at the 46th California International Antiquarian Book Fair February 15–17, 2013, offered by ReadInk of Los Angeles. Sixteen of them appeared as accompaniment to Bukowski’s classic column in the Los Angeles Free Press (The Freep), ‘Notes of a Dirty Old Man’. The remaining three originally appeared in Sunset Palms Hotel, Issue #4 (1974).”
Less comics per se than drawn windows into Bukowski’s worldview, these panels show, in a shaky yet bold line, the poet’s views on drinking, smoking, staying in bed, and conducting relations with the fairer sex. “Until its termination in 1976,” Gertz continues, “Bukowski’s ‘Notes of a Dirty Old Man’ was probably the single biggest contributing factor to both the spread of his literary fame and his local notoriety as a hard-living, hard-drinking L.A. character.” The very idea of Bukowski as a regular columnist may strike some familiar with his poetry as incongruous, but you can get an idea of how the gig formed his literary persona by reading the 1969 collection Notes of a Dirty Old Man and the 2011 More Notes of a Dirty Old Man: The Uncollected Columns. Neither, however, contain Bukowski’s illustrations, but now you can appreciate them on the internet. They almost make you believe the man could have published a cartoon or two in the New Yorker, but no — wrong coast. (And wrong sensibility, certainly.)
Georgia Tech sophomore and Mechanical Engineering major Nick Selby gave a rousing welcome speech at the 2013 Freshman Convocation. It didn’t take long for the speech to go viral. Or for Gawker to realize that the speech had been borrowed from a 2008 speech given by Andy Stone, once the debate team champion at Arizona State. (Click here and then skip to the 8:40 mark to see the similar part of Stone’s speech.) But here’s perhaps the most straightforward explanation. It turns out that Selby was once coached by Stone, and on his Facebook page, Selby writes: “I had an awesome speech coach in high school by the name of Andy Stone, and was absolutely thrilled when he agreed to let me use the end of his award-winning speech as the foundation for my own.”
Just above you’ll find a sketched-out map of the paths Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom took through Dublin on June 16, 1904. If you’ve ever read James Joyce’s Ulysses (find it in our lists of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books), you may well have tried drawing one of these yourself, connecting the locations as each chapter finds one of the protagonists somewhere else in Ireland’s capital on that “ordinary” day. Maybe you wanted to test the plausibility of the common assertion that, given accuracy and detail with which Joyce wrote about the city, one could, in case of the apocalypse, build the city all over again using the novel as a plan. This particular Ulysses fan map, however, comes from the hand of a very special reader indeed: Vladimir Nabokov, author of a few much-discussed works of twentieth-century literature himself, including Lolita, Pale Fire, and Speak, Memory.
For those who teach Ulysses, Nabokov has a suggestion: “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.” A post from Raynor Ganan quotes him as saying that, adding, “Would you not have donated a litre of your own spinal fluid to audit this lecture?” Indeed, Nabokov speaks from experience, having not only produced well-respected literature but taught it, too. The fruits of his time at the front of the classroom appear in his collection Lectures on Literature, though if you want to get as close as possible to the experience of sitting in on one of Nabokov’s classes, go back into our archives and watch the WQED dramatization, starring Christopher Plummer, of his talk on Kafka at Cornell. It won’t give you any insight into Joyce’s Dublin, granted, but some Yale grad students’ more recent project to digitally, interactively map Ulysses just might.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
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!
Next week — August 27th, to be precise — Columbia Records will release Bob Dylan’s The Bootleg Series, Vol. 10 — Another Self Portrait (1969–1971), a collection of 35 tracks (unreleased recordings, demos and alternate takes) that were largley recorded during studio sessions for the 1970 albums Self Portrait and New Morning. If you’re looking for a little preview, then head over to NPR’s First Listen site where 15 tracks are streaming for free … for a limited time. Titles include “Time Passes Slowly #1”, which features Dylan playing with George Harrison; a version of “If Not for You” performed solo with only violin accompaniment; and a live version of “Highway 61 Revisited” recorded by Dylan, backed by The Band, at the Isle of Wight concert in 1969.
“Slight Rebellion Off Madison” — The first story J.D. Salinger ever published in The New Yorker was also a story that introduced readers to his most famous character, Holden Caulfield, long before the publication of The Catcher in the Rye. According to Paul Alexander’s biography of Salinger, the editors of The New Yorker accepted “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” back in 1941, but delayed publishing it when the US entered World War II. The time just didn’t feel right for a story about jaded, cynical youth. Eventually the war ended and the story appeared in the magazine on December 21, 1946. The Catcher in the Rye came out five years later, in July, 1951.
In the story, Holden Caulfield, “on vacation from Pencey Preparatory School for Boys,” meets up in New York City with Sally Hayes, also on vacation from prep school, and together they go to the movies, smoke in the lobby, drink, complain about the tedium of school, dream of leaving the big city for Vermont, and maybe getting married one day. Other characters who later appear in Salinger’s generation-defining novel — for example, Carl Luce — also make appearances too.
You can read “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” in the New Yorker archive. Clickhere to see a facsimile of how the story originally appeared in the magazine. When you click through, please click on the image/page to zoom into the text.
Note: Another story story featuring Holden Caulfield — “I’m Crazy” — appeared in the December, 22 1945 edition of Collier’s. It starts here and ends here.
In the acclaimed 1986 film Round Midnight, the great tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon plays an aging American jazzman living in Paris in the late 1950s, struggling to control his addiction to alcohol so he can keep playing every night at the Blue Note in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
The role came naturally to Gordon, whose own struggle with heroin addiction in the 1950s resulted in prison time and a loss of his New York City cabaret card. Unable to play in the clubs of New York, Gordon moved to Europe in the early 1960s and stayed there for 14 years. But while Dale Turner, his character in Round Midnight, is a worn-down man nearing death, Gordon’s European exile was a period of rebirth.
By the time the French film director and jazz enthusiast Bertrand Tavernier tracked Gordon down in 1984, though, the saxophone player had been back in America for a decade and was, after 40 years on the jazz circuit, becoming a bit worn down himself. The Dale Turner character is based partly on tenor saxophonist Lester Young, who was Gordon’s friend and mentor and a major influence in his life, and partly on pianist Bud Powell, whom Gordon knew and worked with in Paris. Tavernier was looking for authenticity and he found it in Gordon, a man with a direct link to the golden age of bebop. As the filmmaker told People in 1986, “I could not think of anyone else doing the part.”
Round Midnight was a critical success. Gordon received an Academy Award nomination for best actor in a leading role. The film was noted for “its lovely, elegiac pacing and its tremendous depth of feeling” by Janet Maslin of the New York Times. “No actor could do what the great jazz saxophonist Dexter Gordon does in ‘Round Midnight,’ ” writes Maslin, who describes Gordon’s screen presence as the very embodiment of the music itself. “It’s in his heavy-lidded eyes, in his hoarse, smoky voice, in the way his long, graceful fingers seem to be playing silent accompaniment to his conversation. It’s even in the way he habitually calls anyone or anything ‘Lady,’ as in ‘Well, Lady Sweets, are you ready for tonight?’ ”
Those are the words Turner addresses to his saxophone at the beginning of the scene above. The film then cuts to the Blue Note, where the musician’s young admirer Francis (played by François Cluzet) is transfixed as the old man gives a melancholy, world-weary performance of the Johnny Green standard “Body and Soul.” Like all of the music in the film, “Body and Soul” was recorded live on the set. Gordon is accompanied by Herbie Hancock on piano, John McLaughlin on guitar, Pierre Michelot on bass and Billy Higgins on drums.
An old friend of mine and I have a code phrase for a phenomenon that everyone knows well: One learns that an artist one admires, maybe even loves, is not only a flawed and warty mortal, but also an abusive monster or worse. The phrase is “Ezra Pound.” We’ll look at each other knowingly whenever a conversation turns to a troubling but brilliant figure and say in unison, “Ezra Pound.” Why? Because Ezra Pound was crazy.
Or at least that was Ernest Hemingway’s explanation for why one of the greatest literary benefactors and most innovative and influential poets of the early twentieth century became a raving lunatic booster for anti-Semitic fascism in a series of over one hundred broadcasts he made in Italy during WWII. Pound wasn’t simply a crank—he was a deeply enthusiastic supporter of Hitler and Mussolini, and his rantings—many available here in transcript and some in original audio here (or right below) —made no secret about whom he considered the enemies of Europe and America: the Jews.
Hemingway wrote the letter above to Archibald MacLeish expressing his shock and dismay that their mutual friend and colleague had completely run off the rails. For Hemingway, the only way to deal with the situation was to “prove [Pound] was crazy as far back as the latter Cantos.” Hemingway writes, “He deserves punishment and disgrace but what he really deserves most is ridicule”
He should not be hanged and he should not be made a martyr of…. It is impossible to believe that anyone in his right mind could utter the vile, absolutely idiotic drivel he has broadcast. His friends who knew him and who watched the warpeing and twisting and decay of his mind and his judgement should defend him and explain him on that basis. It will be a completely unpopular but an absolutely necessary thing to do. [sic]
This Pound’s many friends did do, and when he was finally captured in Italy and tried for treason, Pound was sentenced to a psych ward, where he wrote and published the award-winning The Pisan Cantos amid great uproar and outrage from many in the literary community. This is unsurprising. Although Pound publicly repudiated his stint as a fascist broadcaster, his hard-right racist views did not change. In his later life, he formed friendships with white supremacists and remained controversial, contrarian, and… well, crazy.
And yet, it is hard to dismiss Pound, even if his star has fallen below the horizon of modernist literary history. It may be possible to argue that his fascist streak was in fact several miles long, extending back into his post-WWI politics and his humorous but haranguing book-length essays on Western Culture and Its Decline throughout the 30s. As Louis Menand writes in The New Yorker, this Pound may have been ripe for misinterpretation by the more brutish and less refined, a la Nietzsche, since he “believed that bad writing destroyed civilizations and that good writing could save them, and although he was an élitist about what counted as art and who mattered as an artist, he thought that literature could enhance the appreciation of life for everyone.” Pound was also a mother hen figure for a generation of modernists who flourished under his editorial direction—as well as that of Poetry magazine founder Harriet Monroe. Menand writes:
No doubt Eliot, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Ernest Hemingway, Ford Madox Ford, and Marianne Moore would have produced interesting and innovative work whether they had known Pound or not, but Pound’s attention and interventions helped their writing and sped their careers. He edited them, reviewed them, got them published in magazines he was associated with, and included them in anthologies he complied; he introduced them to editors, to publishers, and to patrons; he gave them the benefit of his time, his learning, his money, and his old clothes.
And all of this is not even to mention, of course, Pound’s incredible poetic output, which demonstrates such a mastery of form and language (East and West) that he is well-remembered as the founder of one of the most influential modernist movements: Imagism. This side of Pound cannot be erased by his later lapse into despicable hatred and paranoia, but neither does the early Pound cancel out the latter. Both Pounds exist in history, for as long as he’s remembered, and every time I learn some new disturbing fact about an artist I admire, I shake my head and silently invoke the most extreme and bafflingly troubling case—one that can’t be resolved or forgotten—“Ezra Pound.”
How can you present scientific ideas to an audience of all ages — scientists and non-scientists alike — so that these ideas will stick in people’s minds? Since 2012, BBC Two has been trying to answer this question with its series “Dara Ó Briain’s Science Club.” Irish stand-up comedian and TV presenter Dara Ó Briain invites experts to his show to tackle the biggest concepts in science in a way that is understandable to non-experts as well. Film clips and animations are used to visualize the ideas and concepts dealt with in the show.
In 2012, Åsa Lucander, a London-based animator originally from Finland, was approached by the BBC with the task of creating an animation about the history of physics. The result is as entertaining as it is instructive. The clip deals with the discoveries of four major scientists and the impact of their findings: Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein.
Physclips — Physics animations and film clips by the University of New South Wales, Sydney
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.
Earlier this week, we featured a list of Quentin Tarantino’s 12 Favorite Films of All Time, given in response to Sight & Sound’s 2012 poll. This morning, one of our friendly followers on Twitter (@LoSceicco1976) made us aware of another list — a handwritten list that Tarantino apparently submitted in 2008, to Empire Magazine. Do the two lists have some commonalities? Yup, Taxi Driver, His Girl Friday, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, etc. But this handwritten list also includes a number of new titles — take for example, Chang-hwa Jeong’s Five Fingers of Death, Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, and Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo, starring John Wayne. (See our collection of 21 Free John Wayne Westerns here.) And, sorry to say, The Bad News Bears didn’t make the cut.
It just goes to show, if you ask directors to jot down their favorite movies, the list can change from day to day, and year to year. Speaking of, you might also want to see a video where Tarantino Lists His Favorite Films Since 1992. Yet more new films to save for a rainy day.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
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!
If you’re on the fence about the merits of Conceptual Art, you may be swayed to learn the history of the piece documented above. The year before its creation, John Baldessari incinerated his oeuvre, an act he referred to as The Cremation Project. Shortly thereafter, he responded to Nova Scotia College of Art and Design’s invitation to exhibit with a letter instructing students to be his surrogates in a punishment piece:
The piece is this, from floor to ceiling should be written by one or more people, one sentence under another, the following statement: I will not make any more bad art. At least one column of the sentence should be done floor to ceiling before the exhibit opens and the writing of the sentence should continue everyday, if possible, for the length of the exhibit. I would appreciate it if you could tell me how many times the sentence has been written after the exhibit closes. It should be hand written, clearly written with correct spelling….
Once the students had punished themselves to his specifications, the artist permitted the school to publish a fundraising lithograph, modeled on his handwriting.
It’s not a stretch to imagine that writing this sentence over and over could have changed more than a few participants’ lives, or at least rerouted the path their careers would take. What will happen if you take 13 minutes—the length of the video above—to try it yourself.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
