Joan Didion Reads From New Memoir, Blue Nights, in Short Film Directed by Griffin Dunne

in Books, Life, Literature | November 2nd, 2011

A mere twen­ty months after Joan Did­ion’s hus­band, John Gre­go­ry Dunne, died of a heart attack, Did­ion’s only child, Quin­tana Roo Dunne, con­tract­ed pneu­mo­nia, lapsed into sep­tic shock and passed away. She was only 39 years old. Did­ion grap­pled with the first death in her 2005 best­seller, The Year of Mag­i­cal Think­ing. Now, with her new mem­oir Blue Nights, she turns to her child’s pass­ing, to a par­en­t’s worst fear real­ized. In this short film shot by her nephew, direc­tor Grif­fin Dunne, Did­ion reads from Blue Nights. The scene opens with mem­o­ries from her daugh­ter’s wed­ding and ends with some big exis­ten­tial ques­tions and the refrain, “When we talk about mor­tal­i­ty we are talk­ing about our chil­dren.”

This “audio­book for the eyes,” as Grif­fin Dunne calls it, runs six plus min­utes. The actu­al Blue Nights audio book is now avail­able on Audi­ble.

A big thanks goes to @opedr for send­ing the Did­ion clip our way…

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Monty Python’s Best Philosophy Sketches

in Comedy, Philosophy | November 1st, 2011

From dead par­rots to The Mean­ing of Life, Mon­ty Python cov­ered a lot of ter­ri­to­ry. Edu­cat­ed at Oxford and Cam­bridge, the Pythons made a habit of weav­ing arcane intel­lec­tu­al ref­er­ences into the sil­li­est of sketch­es. A clas­sic exam­ple is “Mrs. Premise and Mrs. Con­clu­sion Vis­it Jean-Paul Sartre,” (above) from episode 27 of Mon­ty Python’s Fly­ing Cir­cus.

The sketch fea­tures writ­ing part­ners John Cleese as Mrs. Premise and Gra­ham Chap­man as Mrs. Con­clu­sion, gab­bing away in a laun­derette about how best to put down a budgie. Mrs. Premise sug­gests flush­ing it down the loo. “Ooh! No!” protests Mrs. Con­clu­sion. “You should­n’t do that. No that’s dan­ger­ous. Yes, they breed in the sew­ers, and even­tu­al­ly you get evil-smelling flocks of huge soiled bud­gies fly­ing out of peo­ple’s lava­to­ries infring­ing their per­son­al free­dom.”

From there the con­ver­sa­tion veers straight into Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Roads to Free­dom. It’s a clas­sic sketch–vintage Python–and you can read a tran­script here while watch­ing it above.

Anoth­er clas­sic is the “Philoso­pher’s Drink­ing Song,” shown above in a scene from Mon­ty Python Live at the Hol­ly­wood Bowl. The song was writ­ten and sung by Eric Idle. In the sketch, mem­bers of the phi­los­o­phy depart­ment at the “Uni­ver­si­ty of Wool­loomooloo” lead the audi­ence in singing, “Immanuel Kant was a real pis­sant who was very rarely sta­ble; Hei­deg­ger, Hei­deg­ger was a boozy beg­gar who could think you under the table…”

And one of our favorites: “The Philoso­phers’ Foot­ball Match” (above), a filmed sequence from Mon­ty Python Live at the Hol­ly­wood Bowl, pit­ting the Ancient Greeks against the Ger­mans, with Con­fu­cius as ref­er­ee. The sketch was orig­i­nal­ly broad­cast in 1972 in a two-part West Ger­man tele­vi­sion spe­cial, Mon­ty Python’s Fliegen­der Zirkus.

When you’re done laugh­ing, you can dive deep into phi­los­o­phy here with our col­lec­tion of 55 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es online.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen Hawk­ing Sings Mon­ty Python’s “Galaxy Song”: Hear the New­ly-Released Sin­gle

John Cleese’s Phi­los­o­phy of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Cre­at­ing Oases for Child­like Play

John Cleese on How “Stu­pid Peo­ple Have No Idea How Stu­pid They Are” (a.k.a. the Dun­ning-Kruger Effect)

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Noam Chomsky at Occupy Boston

in Current Affairs, Politics | November 1st, 2011

Noam Chom­sky joined the fac­ul­ty of MIT in 1955, and, soon enough estab­lished him­self as “the father of mod­ern lin­guis­tics.” (Watch him debate Michel Fou­cault in 1971.) Dur­ing the 60s, he also firm­ly posi­tioned him­self as a lead­ing pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al tak­ing aim at Amer­i­can for­eign pol­i­cy and glob­al cap­i­tal­ism, and we reg­u­lar­ly saw him engag­ing with fig­ures like William F. Buck­ley.

All of these years lat­er, it’s quite fit­ting that Chom­sky, now 82 years old, would pay a vis­it to Occu­py Boston and deliv­er a talk in the Howard Zinn Memo­r­i­al Lec­ture Series. Why has our polit­i­cal sys­tem become more respon­sive to cor­po­ra­tions than cit­i­zens? How has wealth become increas­ing­ly con­cen­trat­ed in the hands of an ever small­er elite — a plu­toc­ra­cy, to put it sim­ply? And why do bil­lion­aire hedge fund man­agers enjoy a low­er tax rate than maligned school teach­ers and pret­ty much every­one else? Chom­sky explains how we got to this point, and what’s to be done about it. Find his talk in three parts: Part 1 (above), Part 2 and Part 3.  via Dan­ger­ous Minds.

More Occu­py Videos:

Willie Nel­son, Pete Seeger, and Arlo Guthrie at Occu­py Wall Street

Slavoj Zizek Takes the Stage at Occu­py Wall Street

Joseph Stiglitz and Lawrence Lessig at Occu­py Wall Street

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Hans Rosling Uses Ikea Props to Explain World of 7 Billion People

in Current Affairs | November 1st, 2011

Accord­ing to Unit­ed Nations demog­ra­phers, the world’s pop­u­la­tion like­ly topped 7 bil­lion on Mon­day, and we’ll now steam for­ward, hit­ting 9.3 bil­lion by 2050. 7 bil­lion is a news­wor­thy mile­stone, to be sure. But what does this num­ber real­ly mean? To put things in per­spec­tive, we’re fea­tur­ing a recent TED Talk by Hans Rosling, a pro­fes­sor of glob­al health who presents data in imag­i­na­tive ways. His pre­sen­ta­tions can get wild­ly dig­i­tal. (Just watch 200 Coun­tries & 200 Years in 4 Min­utes). But not so in this case. The props are sim­ple goods bought at IKEA, and they do more than an ade­quate job explain­ing the past, present and future of glob­al pop­u­la­tion growth.

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