It’s how things go around here. You do some research on Samuel Beckett’s plays (see post from earlier today) and you discover there’s a naval ship dedicated to the Irish playwright. Launched in November 2013 and commissioned in May 2014, LÉ Samuel Beckett (P61) patrols Irish waters, allowing the Irish navy to conduct search and rescue operations, undertake vessel boardings, and also protect fisheries. According to an Irish site, the ship “represents an updated and lengthened version of the original RÓISÍN Class OPVs… She is built to the highest international standards in terms of safety, equipment fit, technological innovation and crew comfort.” The cost, 56 million euros.
Of course, the Irish haven’t forgotten their other great literary son. LÉ James Joyce (P62) will be launched in May 2015. And guess what, LÉ Seamus Heaney may soon be on the horizon.
Does anyone know of another nation that honors its artists in such a way?
“Twain believed that memorization — a common strategy of 19th-century schooling — was a worthy, if tiresome, pursuit, and looked for ways to make it more interesting for annoyed students,” writes Slate’sRebecca Onion. This line of thinking led him to create the Memory-Builder, which he described as a “game which shall fill the children’s heads with dates without study” in an 1883 letter to a friend. He explained the background of his educational philosophy in much fuller detail in a 1914 piece from Harper’s magazine:
Sixteen years ago when my children were little creatures the governess was trying to hammer some primer histories into their heads. Part of this fun — if you like to call it that — consisted in the memorizing of the accession dates of the thirty-seven personages who had ruled England from the Conqueror down. These little people found it a bitter, hard contract. It was all dates, they all looked alike, and they wouldn’t stick. Day after day of the summer vacation dribbled by, and still the kings held the fort; the children couldn’t conquer any six of them.
This experience gave rise to a couple of different learning methods, of which the Memory-Builder (patented in 1885) would prove the best-known. Though Twain worked out a way to play it on a cribbage board converted into a historical timeline, you can play a technologically much-updated but materially identical version of the game online (with the same cribbage pins and the same strangely intense focus on those royals) at the web site of the University of Oregon’s library. Alternatively, you can play an adaptation that deals with the life and times of Twain himself at the University of Virginia’s web site.
Whether or not the Memory-Builder can help you learn your history, you’ll have to find out for yourself. Not having caught on at the time, Twain’s game didn’t get far out of the prototype stage, but the idea behind it has survived in the form of one of Twain’s many so-very-quotable quotes: “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” Something tells me he’d approve of seeing his game on the internet, surely the tool that has done more to get education into the learner’s own hands than anything else in human history so far. (Um, have you seen our list of 1100 Free Online Courses?)
As Samuel Beckett’s writing progressed through the ’60s, it became even more minimal, despairing, and bleak. It was as if he was paring away as much as he could to see if theater was left standing. If a painting could be one color like Ad Reinhardt, what would be the Reinhardt of theater? Jonathan Crow mentioned yesterday how Beckett’s 1969 play Breath, for instance, “runs just a minute long and features just the sound of breathing.” There is a bit more to it than that. Not a lot more, but yes, more. Here’s the play’s script in full:
Curtain.
1. Faint light on stage littered with miscellaneous rubbish. Hold for about five seconds.
2. Faint brief cry and immediately inspiration and slow increase of light together reaching maximum together in about ten seconds. Silence and hold about five seconds.
3. Expiration and slow decrease of light together reaching minimum together (light as in I) in about ten seconds and immediately cry as before. Silence and hold for about five seconds.
Beckett adds some notes:
Rubbish. No verticals, all scattered and lying.
Cry. Instant of recorded vagitus. Important that two cries be identical, switching on and off strictly synchronized light and breath.
Breath. Amplified recording.
Maximum light. Not bright. If 0 = dark and 10 = bright, light should move from about 3 to 6 and back.
The play came about when one of the most important English theater critics of his time Kenneth Tynan asked for short skits for an erotic revue he was putting on in 1969, called Oh! Calcutta. Others invitees included Jules Feiffer, John Lennon, Edna O’Brien, Jacques Levy, Sam Shepard, and Leonard Melfi. The plan was to perform each skit but keep each writer’s name a secret. Beckett reportedly wrote the play on a postcard and sent it to Tynan, then became enraged when he heard that instead of rubbish on stage, Tynan had used naked bodies *and* in fact had explicitly credited Beckett in the program. Breath wouldn’t get a proper staging until 1999 in London’s West End, as part of an evening with Beckett’s more substantial Krapp’s Last Tape. You can read reports of how the audience reacted.
Several directors have brought Breath to life. Artist Damien Hirst had a go for the 2002 Beckett on Film project. As seen above, his version has very spectacular rubbish gathered from a hospital and, glimpsed in the final seconds, a cigarette butt swastika.
Below, check out a more “traditional” interpretation of the play from the National Theatre School of Canada’s Tech Production class. After that comes a repeat of Hirst’s version, and then one more alternative, Darren Smyth’s 2009 TV static-filled attempt. (The rest of the video is a mixed bag of the Alan Parsons Project and a Tim Burton short, don’t ask why.)
Despite Beckett’s morose reputation, there’s always a black humor underneath it all. And if you’re going to ask the man to write an “erotic skit,” this is what you get, the futility of life from womb to tomb in a minute.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills and/or watch his films here.
Samuel Beckett, Pic, 1″ by Roger Pic. Via Wikimedia Commons
Clad in a black turtleneck and with a shock of white hair, Samuel Beckett was a gaunt, gloomy high priest of modernism. After the 1955 premiere of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot (watch him stage a performance here), Kenneth Tynan quipped, ”It has no plot, no climax, no denouement; no beginning, no middle and no end.” From there, Beckett’s work only got more austere, bleak and despairing. His 1969 play Breath, for instance, runs just a minute long and features just the sound of breathing.
An intensely private man, he managed to mesmerize the public even as he turned away from the limelight. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1969, his wife Suzanne, fearing the onslaught of fame that the award would bring, decried it as a “catastrophe.”
A recently published collection of his letters from 1941–1956, the period leading up to his international success with his play Waiting for Godot, casts some light on at least one corner of the man’s private life – what books were piling up on his bed stand. Below is an annotated list of what he was reading during that time. Not surprisingly, he really dug Albert Camus’s The Stranger. “Try and read it,” he writes. “I think it is important.” He dismisses Agatha Christie’s Crooked Houseas “very tired Christie” but praises Around the World in 80 Days, “It is lively stuff.” But the book he reserves the most praise for is J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. “I liked it very much indeed, more than anything for a long time.”
You can see the full list below. It was originally published online by Cambridge University Press in 2011. Books with an asterisk next to the title can be found in our collection of 700 Free eBooks.
Andromaque* by Jean Racine: “I read Andromaque again with greater admiration than ever and I think more understanding, at least more understanding of the chances of the theatre today.”
Lautreamont and Sade by Maurice Blanchot: “Some excellent ideas, or rather starting-points for ideas, and a fair bit of verbiage, to be read quickly, not as a translator does. What emerges from it though is a truly gigantic Sade, jealous of Satan and of his eternal torments, and confronting nature more than with humankind.”
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 badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
In high school, the language I most fell in love with happened to be a dead one: Latin. Sure, it’s spoken at the Vatican, and when I first began to study the tongue of Virgil and Catullus, friends joked that I could only use it if I moved to Rome. Tempting, but church Latin barely resembles the classical written language, a highly formal grammar full of symmetries and puzzles. You don’t speak classical Latin; you solve it, labor over it, and gloat, to no one in particular, when you’ve rendered it somewhat intelligible. Given that the study of an ancient language is rarely a conversational art, it can sometimes feel a little alienating.
And so you might imagine how pleased I was to discover what looked like classical Latin in the real world: the text known to designers around the globe as “Lorem Ipsum,” also called “filler text” and (erroneously) “Greek copy.”
The idea, Priceonomics informs us, is to force people to look at the layout and font, not read the words. Also, “nobody would mistake it for their native language,” therefore Lorem Ipsum is “less likely than other filler text to be mistaken for final copy and published by accident.” If you’ve done any web design, you’ve probably seen it, looking something like this:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
When I first encountered this text, I did what any Latin geek will—set about trying to translate it. But it wasn’t long before I realized that Lorem Ipsum is mostly gibberish, a garbling of Latin that makes no real sense. The first word, “Lorem,” isn’t even a word; instead it’s a piece of the word “dolorem,” meaning pain, suffering, or sorrow. So where did this mash-up of Latin-like syntax come from, and how did it get so scrambled? First, the source of Lorem Ipsum—tracked down by Hampden-Sydney Director of Publications Richard McClintock—is Roman lawyer, statesman, and philosopher Cicero, from an essay called “On the Extremes of Good and Evil,” or De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum.
Why Cicero? Put most simply, writes Priceonomics, “for a long time, Cicero was everywhere.” His fame as the most skilled of Roman rhetoricians meant that his writing became the benchmark for prose in Latin, the standard European language of the middle ages. The passage that generated Lorem Ipsum translates in part to a sentiment Latinists will well understand:
Nor is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure.
Dolorem Ipsum, “pain in and of itself,” sums up the tortuous feeling of trying to render some of Cicero’s complex, verbose sentences into English. Doing so with tolerable proficiency is, for some of us, “great pleasure” indeed.
But how did Cicero, that master stylist, come to be so badly manhandled as to be nearly unrecognizable? Lorem Ipsum has a history that long predates online content management. It has been used as filler text since the sixteenth century when—as McClintock theorized—“some typesetter had to make a type specimen book, to demo different fonts” and decided that “the text should be insensible, so as not to distract from the page’s graphical features.” It appears that this enterprising craftsman snatched up a page of Cicero he had lying around and turned it into nonsense. The text, says McClintock, “has survived not only four centuries of letter-by-letter resetting but even the leap into electronic typesetting, essentially unchanged.”
The story of Lorem Ipsum is a fascinating one—if you’re into that kind of thing—but its longevity raises a further question: should we still be using it at all, this mangling of a dead language, in a medium as vital and dynamic as web publishing, where “content” refers to hundreds of design elements besides font. Is Lorem Ipsum a quaint piece of nostalgia that’s outlived its usefulness? In answer, you may wish to read Karen McGrane’s spirited defense of the practice. Or, if you feel it’s time to let the garbled Latin go the way of manual typesetting machines, consider perhaps as an alternative “Nietzsche Ipsum,” which generates random paragraphs of mostly verb-less, incoherent Nietzsche-like text, in English. Hey, at least it looks like a real language.
Meryl Streep, frequently hailed as one of our Greatest Living Actresses — she claims there’s no such thing — commands a near-encyclopedic mastery of accents.
Others may prepare for their roles by working with a dialect coach or listening to tapes of native speakers, but Streep pushes to the limit, as indicated in the conversation with author Andre Dubus III, below.
She not only learned Polish in order to play a troubled Holocaust survivor in Sophie’s Choice,she thought deeply about the way gender roles and period inform vocal presentation.
Her commitment to her craft is inadvertently to blame for popularizing the phrase “dingo’s got my baby.”
How refreshing that this versatile and accomplished actor is not precious about her skills. She gamely trotted them out for the comedian Ellen DeGeneres’ parlor game, above. Looks like fun, provided one’s not an introvert. Each player draws a card labelled with an accent, sticks it to the brim of a silly hat, then tried to guess the accent, based on her partner’s impromptu performance.
“Brooklyn?” Streep giggles when the Louisiana-born DeGeneres has a go at Boston.
Her stab at the Bronx shows off her improv chops far better than the most recent stunt DeGeneres roped her into.
Will humanity ever produce another mind quite like Buckminster Fuller’s? It doesn’t seem to have done so thus far. Even in Fuller’s own time, people couldn’t quite believe the intellectual idiosyncrasy of the inventor who came up with the geodesic dome, the Dymaxion Car, and much, much more. “Time and again,” he once said, “I am asked, ‘who else do you know who thinks the way you do, or does what you do?’ I find it very strange to have to answer, ‘I don’t know anybody else.’ It’s not because I think of myself as unique, but simply because I did choose a very different grand strategy.”
Fuller — or Bucky, his preferred nickname — says more about that grand strategy and the experiences that led him to develop it in the interviews, conducted by Studs Terkel in 1965 and 1970, from which that quote comes. You can hear it in the video above, which brings the material to life by visualizing the elements of Fuller’s life and ideas through the hand of animator Jennifer Yoo. The video recently debuted as part of The Experimenters, a three-episode series meant to animate the words of thinkers like Fuller, Jane Goodall, and Richard Feynman, concentrating on “the inspirations from each of their personal lives that helped influence their careers and earth-changing discoveries.”
Fuller enthusiasts have always insisted that his ideas have only grown more relevant with time, but now that the early 21st century has found us rethinking the way we live — how we do it and how we make spaces to do it in being perhaps Fuller’s most abiding obsession — his engagement with the concept of “continually doing more with less” really does sound smarter than ever. If you enjoy the patch of Bucky’s universe The Experimenters exposes, consider chasing these four minutes of “Buckminster Fuller on the Geodesic Life” with 42 hours of his video lecture series Everything I Know. The man didn’t just think differently from the rest of us, after all — he also thought a lot more.
A philosopher perhaps more widely known for his prodigious mustache than for the varieties of his thought, Friedrich Nietzsche often seems to be misread more than read. Even someone like Michel Foucault could gloss over a crucial fact about Nietzsche’s body of work: Foucault remarked in an unpublished interview that Nietzsche’s “wonderful ideas” were “used by the Nazi Party.” But that use, he neglected to mention, came about through a scheme hatched by Nietzsche’s sister, after his mental collapse and death, to edit, change, and otherwise manipulate the thinker’s work in a way The Telegraph deemed “criminal.” Foucault may not have known the full context, but Nietzsche had about as much sympathy for fascism as he did for Christianity–both reasons for his break with composer Richard Wagner.
What Nietzsche loved most was music. Even in the wake of this scandal, with Nietzsche fully rehabilitated at the scholarly level at least, the philosopher is generally read piecemeal, used to prop up some ideology or critical theory or another, a tendency his anti-systematic, aphoristic work inspires. A more holistic approach yields two important general observations: Nietzsche found the mundane work of politics and nationalist conquest, with its tribalism and moral pretensions, thoroughly distasteful. Instead, he considered the creative work of artists, writers, and musicians, as well as scientists, of paramount importance.
Nietzsche almost entered medicine and was himself an artist: “before he engaged himself fully as a philosopher, he had already created a substantial output as poet and composer,” writes Albany Records. In an 1887 letter written three years before his death, Nietzsche claimed, “There has never been a philosopher who has been in essence a musician to such an extent as I am,” though he also admitted he “might be a thoroughly unsuccessful musician.” In any case, he hoped that at least some of his compositions would become known and heard as complementary to his philosophical project.
Now serious readers of Nietzsche, or those simply curious about his musicianship, can hear most of those compositions in a Spotify playlist above. Performed by Canadian musicians Lauretta Altman, Wolfgang Bottenberg, and the Montreal Orpheus Singers, the music ranges from sprightly to pensive, romantic to mournful, and some of it seems to come right out of the Protestant hymnals he grew up with as the son of a Lutheran minister. Nietzsche composed music throughout his life—a complete chronology spans the years 1854, when he was only ten, to 1887. See The Nietzsche Channel for a thorough list of published Nietzsche recordings and sheet music. To listen to the music here, you will need to download and register for Spotify.
Marc Maron’s WTF podcast now clocks in at 585 episodes. Certainly one I remember — and so does Maron too — is Episode 400, which featured the godfather of punk, Iggy Pop. Above, an animated Marc Maron recalls the many musicians he’s interviewed in his Los Angeles garage. And especially the summer day when Pop paid a visit, tore off his shirt, and gave his own nipple a little twist. Good times in LA.
Image by Janet McMillan appeared in The Milwaukee Record
For those of us with kids, the grade school play is usually a combination of parental pride and teeth-grating nostalgic civic lesson and/or Bible study. Not so at Milwaukee, WI’s Highland Community School where super cool drama teacher Barry Weber has written and produced Judy Plays with Fire, a love letter to David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks and other Lynchophilia.
The play has all the hallmarks of the director–red curtains, strobe lights, smoke machines, a Badalamenti-esque score–along with a backwards-speaking character in a red suit, two earnest and upstanding detectives, lumberjacks, rabbits, mysterious people in white masks, a Log Lady-like character who talks to a Slinky, and a middle America town called “Centerville” that, like Laura Palmer, is “full of secrets.” One character mimes Nina Simone’s “Don’t Let Me Be Understood” into a LED wand–shades of Dean Stockwell in Blue Velvet. Character names like Mr. Frost and the MacLachlans nod to the creators and actors behind Twin Peaks. The entire cast is played by 4th, 5th, and 6th graders, and apart from Mr. Weber, the production is crewed by Highland students as well.
This isn’t Weber’s first go at pushing the boundaries of school theater. His student theater group put on 2014’s ZERO, a cyberpunk tale, and a post-apocalyptic zombie production in 2010 called Penguin Attack.
The production got the attention of the Milwaukee Record who sent reporter Matt Wild out to see the three performance run that finished last Friday. He even gave it a bit of a Variety-style review, saying that
“In the case of Judy, (Maeve) Haley is terrific as the inquisitive Cooper surrogate, though diminutive CJ Young steals the show as the scheming Mr. Frost. Whether he’s barking orders to his flunkies or lording over his animatronic house band, Young—who had to take time off from acting two years ago due to conflicts with basketball practice—imbues his character with a surprising amount of gravitas and menace.”
Matt Wild also talked to Weber, who spoke of his desire to give kids more challenging works.
“I want to make sure that when I write the scripts there are no ‘trees,’” Weber says, referencing grade school plays that often give students thankless roles as inanimate objects. “I want to write the kind of plays that as a kid I would have really wanted to do. I certainly didn’t know who David Lynch was when I was a kid, but I’m sure I would have really enjoyed it.”
No video has surfaced yet to match the intriguing production stills, but we’re on the lookout. In the meantime, how well do you know Judy?
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills and/or watch his films here.
Philip K. Dick died in 1982, but readers — more readers than ever, in all probability — still thrill to his daring, unconventional imagination, and how tightly he could weave the inventions of that imagination into mundane reality. (Sometimes they wonder, as in his meeting with God, to what extent he himself could tell the two apart.) And like many strong-visioned writers of what roughly fell into the category of science fiction, Dick got consulted now and again as something of a futurist.
In 1980, David Wallechinsky, Amy Wallace, and Irving Wallace (the Book of Lists people) rounded up visions of the future from all manner of sages past and present, prescient and incompetent, in order to create The Book of Predictions. Dick’s contributions, republished in the September 2003 issue of fanzine PKD Otaku, go like this.
1983: The Soviet Union will develop an operational particle-beam accelerator, making missile attack against that country impossible. At the same time the U.S.S.R. will deploy this weapon as a satellite killer. The U.S. will turn, then, to nerve gas.
1984: The U.S. will perfect a system by which hydrogen, stored in metal hydrides, will serve as a fuel source, eliminating a need for oil.
1985: By or before this date there will be a titanic nuclear accident either in the U.S.S.R. or in the U.S., resulting in shutting down all nuclear power plants.
1986: Such satellites as HEAO‑2 will uncover vast, unsuspected high energy phenomenon in the universe, indicating that there is sufficient mass to collapse the universe back when it has reached its expansion limit.
1989: The U.S. and the Soviet Union will agree to set up one vast metacomputer as a central source for information available to the entire world; this will be essential due to the huge amount of information coming into existence.
1993: An artificial life form will be created in a lab, probably in the U.S.S.R., thus reducing our interest in locating life forms on other planets.
1995: Computer use by ordinary citizens (already available in 1980) will transform the public from passive viewers of TV into mentally alert, highly trained, information-processing experts.
1997: The first closed-dome colonies will be successfully established on Luna and Mars. Through DNA modification, quasi-mutant humans will be created who can survive under non-Terran conditions, i.e., alien environments.
1998: The Soviet Union will test a propulsion drive that moves a starship at the velocity of light; a pilot ship will set out for Proxima Centaurus, soon to be followed by an American ship.
2000: An alien virus, brought back by an interplanetary ship, will decimate the population of Earth, but leave the colonies on Luna and Mars intact.
2012: Using tachyons (particles that move backward in time) as a carrier, the Soviet Union will attempt to alter the past with scientific information.
Cherry-pickers among us will fixate on Dick’s near-hits: the development of DNA modification, a 1985 nuclear accident in the U.S.S.R. (Chernobyl happened in 1986), and computer use by ordinary citizens (though our status as “mentally alert, highly trained, information-processing experts” admittedly remains questionable). Others might prefer to highlight the most improbable, such as the eliminated need for oil, the creation of artificial life, and not just the 21st-century existence but eventual time-traveling capabilities of the Soviet Union.
Still, even in his fiction, Dick does have his moments of prophecy, especially for those who share his paranoia that we’ve unwittingly let ourselves slip into surveillance-state conditions. But I’ve always found him best, especially in the what-if-Japan-won-the-war story The Man in the High Castle, as a teller of alternate histories, whether of the past, present, or future. These predictions, stretching from just after the writer’s death to just before our time, strike me as nothing so much as the premises for the best novel Philip K. Dick never wrote.
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