If you still subscribe to old-fashioned print newspapers, chances are it’s because you like doing crossword puzzles and putting pen(cil) to paper. If you fall into this camp, we give you this: Will Shortz, the crossword puzzle editor for The New York Times (and the only known person to hold a college degree in enigmatology) presenting a quick, behind-the-scenes look at how the NYT puzzle gets made. Off we go.
Writing is hard. It’s hard to begin, hard to continue, hard to finish. To write successfully and consistently requires an alchemical combination of discipline and inspiration so personal that reading advice on the subject amounts to watching someone else die to learn how it’s done. And while it often feels enlightening to read about the habits of, say, Steinbeck or Austen, their methods are non-transferable. You’ve got to find your own way. So it is with writing to music. It’s always there in the background, goading you on quietly. Not everyone writes to music; not everyone can. But a good many do, including Wired contributor Steve Silberman who calls the practice one of many rituals writers use “to evoke that elusive flow of inspiration.”
Silberman just wrote a piece for NeuroTribes in which he surveyed ten authors on their favorite music to write by. One of Silberman’s own choices, Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way (above), is one I’m stealing. With its brilliant assemblage of musicians and haunting moodiness it sets the perfect tone for my process. Also, there’s no singing. Like Silberman, I can’t compete with a wise, witty lyricist (he mentions Elvis Costello, I prefer Morrissey). In Silberman’s piece, John Schwartz, a New York Times reporter, listens to nothing. Jane Hirschfield, a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, likes David Byrne, Dylan’s Modern Times, and Gillians Welch’s The Harrow and the Harvest. Wired contributing editor David Wolman makes a playlist of mostly indie-pop songs entitled “Write the Book!” His main criterion for the songs he chooses: DO NOT BE BORING! My default writing music is exemplified by Australian three-piece instrumental rock band Dirty Three (below).
So now it’s your turn, readers. Do you write to music? If so, what is it? What artists/composers/albums help you find your rhythm and why? Can you stand lyrics in the music you write by or no? Leave your selections in the comments. On Monday, we’ll compile them in an article and leave you with a great Open Culture playlist. Whether you find something you can steal or not, it should be a fun exercise.
*See our follow-up post with a list of your favorites here
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
First we have a film, the 1960 piece — some would say pinnacle — of psychological horror, Psycho. Then we have a man, Alfred Hitchcock, Psycho’s director, the famously mannered but seemingly troubled master craftsman of midcentury cinematic suspense. Then we have a book, Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, which Anthony Perkins, who played the psycho, called “required reading not only for Psycho-files, but for anyone interested in the backstage world of movie-creation.” And, next week, we’ll have a new period drama, set during the production of the film, based on the book, and centered on the man. It’s impossible to imagine the aficionado of twentieth-century motion pictures who wouldn’t want to watch Anthony Hopkins take on Hitchcock’s title role. Behold the brief clip above, wherein Hopkins-as-Hitchcock explains to young Janet Leigh how, exactly, he plans to shoot the shower scene, as his wife Alma looks nervously on.
You’ll notice, in the roles of Janet Leigh and Alma Reville, two more well-respected performers, Scarlett Johansson and Helen Mirren. Indeed, the list of actors involved in Hitchock and that of characters they play look equally interesting: A Serious Man star Michael Stuhlbarg as talent agent Lew Wasserman, Karate Kid Ralph Macchio as screenwriter Joseph Stefano, Wallace Langham as graphic artist and title designer Saul Bass, and Michael Wincott as real-life serial killer Ed Gein. In the clip just above, watch Hitchcock explain to Alma his insistence upon self-financing Psycho’s production after getting turned down by Paramount: “Do you remember the fun we had when we started out, all those years ago?” he asks. “We didn’t have any money then, did we? We didn’t have any time, either, but we took risks, do you remember? We experimented. We invented new ways of making pictures, because we had to. I just want to feel that kind of freedom again.” Before seeing exactly how he enjoyed that freedom again when Hitchcock comes out on November 23rd, be sure to revisit our posts featuring Psycho’s tantalizing original trailer, and the filmmaker’s own rules for watching the movie.
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François Truffaut’s Big Interview with Alfred Hitchcock (Free Audio)
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Speaking at the Human Be-In in January 1967, Timothy Leary uttered the famous phrase borrowed from Marshall McLuhan, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” It was shorthand for saying experiment with psychedelics and achieve new levels of consciousness.
Almost 30 years later, Leary hadn’t lost his missionary zeal. In 1993 (and only a few years before his death), the former Harvard psychology professor recorded “a public service video” called How to Operate Your Brain. Here, Leary narrates an almost epileptic seizure-inducing video, providing what some consider “a guided meditation” of sorts. I’d prefer to call it an unorthodox “user manual” that tries to impart Leary’s unique sense of enlightenment:
The aim of human life is to know thyself. Think for yourself. Question authority. Think with your friends. Create, create new realities. Philosophy is a team sport. Philosophy is the ultimate, the ultimate aphrodisiac pleasure. Learning how to operate your brain, learning how to operate your mind, learning how to redesign chaos.
As you get deeper into the meditation, you’ll realize one thing. Three decades may have passed since Leary popularized the catchphrase of the counterculture. But he’s still getting his ideas from McLuhan. If you follow the video (or transcript) to the end, you’ll discover that ones and zeros have basically taken the place of LSD. Leary says:
Now we have digital communication. We can create our fantasies. We can create our rhythms, design on screen.… Anyone in any culture watching this screen will get the general picture. It’s one global village. It’s one global human spirit, one global human race. As we link up through screens, linked by electrons and photons, we will create for the first time a global humanity, not separated by words or minds or nationalities or religious biases.
You can find McLuhan meditating on the concept of an Electronic Global Village in another vintage clip.
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McLuhan Said “The Medium Is The Message”; Two Pieces Of Media Decode the Famous Phrase
Abraham Lincoln fretted over the timing of emancipation, General George McClellan’s reluctance to take decisive action, North-South reunification, and his wife’s mental instability.
Louis CK worries about sex, his kids, and the decline of his flabby, middle-aged body.
The tendency to dwell on weighty matters makes CK a fitting choice to embody our 16th president on the small screen. (A distinction shared by such luminaries as Lance Henriksen and Sam Waterston, though not at the behest of Saturday Night Live). Movie star Daniel Day-Lewis’ currently running portrayal may net him a Best Actor Triple Crown come awards season, but CK’s the one who takes Abe to another dimension, tailoring the Great Empancipator to fit the established template of his own critically acclaimed sitcom.
History comes alive in a whole new way as the stovepipe-hatted, pudgier-than-normal Lincoln trudges up from the subway, choking down an anonymous West Village slice to get him through a set at the Comedy Cellar. Abe’s routine on slave ownership has definite echoes of Louis’ Season One musings on bestiality, a there-but-for-the-grace-of-god-go‑I flirtation rescued by profanity-laced moral outrage.
No disrespect to Day-Lewis’ First Lady Sally Field, but there’s similar freshness to be found in Saturday Night Live regular Aidy Bryant’s interpretation of Mary Todd Lincoln. Particularly when one factors in a Director’s Cut that restores the petticoat peeling material cut from the late night broadcast.
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Robert Atwan’s favorite literary genre is the essay. As editor and founder of The Best American Essays series, Atwan has read thousands of examples of the remarkably flexible form.
“Essays can be lots of things, maybe too many things,” writes Atwan in his foreward to the 2012 installment in the Best American series, “but at the core of the genre is an unmistakable receptivity to the ever-shifting processes of our minds and moods. If there is any essential characteristic we can attribute to the essay, it may be this: that the truest examples of the form enact that ever-shifting process, and in that enactment we can find the basis for the essay’s qualification to be regarded seriously as imaginative literature and the essayist’s claim to be taken seriously as a creative writer.”
In 2001 Atwan and Joyce Carol Oates took on the daunting task of tracing that ever-shifting process through the previous 100 years for The Best American Essays of the Century. Recently Atwan returned with a more focused selection for Publishers Weekly: “The Top 10 Essays Since 1950.” To pare it all down to such a small number, Atwan decided to reserve the “New Journalism” category, with its many memorable works by Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Michael Herr and others, for some future list. He also made a point of selecting the best essays, as opposed to examples from the best essayists. “A list of the top ten essayists since 1950 would feature some different writers.”
We were interested to see that six of the ten best essays are available for free reading online. Here is Atwan’s list, along with links to those essays that are on the Web:
“To my mind,” writes Atwan in his article, “the best essays are deeply personal (that doesn’t necessarily mean autobiographical) and deeply engaged with issues and ideas. And the best essays show that the name of the genre is also a verb, so they demonstrate a mind in process–reflecting, trying-out, essaying.”
To read more of Atwan’s commentary, see his article in Publishers Weekly.
The photo above of Susan Sontag was taken by Peter Hujar in 1966.
Related Content:
30 Free Essays & Stories by David Foster Wallace on the Web
Hats off to Larry Gormley, who spent the better part of five years creating a zoomable graphic that “chronicles the history of feature films from the origins in the 1910s until the present day.” 2000 films, across 20 genres and 100 years, all presented in one artful display. Nicely done.
You can purchase a print copy, or simply enjoy the visual display online. Enjoy.
via @coudal
How to react to celebrity academic Slavoj Žižek? You could see him as a wild-eyed visionary and grow infatuated with his powerful-sounding ideas about power, violence, cinema, psychoanalysis, and perversion. Or you could see him as a Pied Piper for delusional graduate students and grow enraged at his perpetuation of fashionable nonsense. But you’d do best, I would argue, to take him simply as a source of entertainment. How could you do otherwise, watching the above clip from Astra Taylor’s documentary Žižek! (previously featured on Open Culture here)? In these three minutes, the sweating Sublime Object of Ideology author gives us a tour of his pad, spending much time and excitement on his kitchen repurposed as a closet: clothes and sheets in the cupboards, socks in the drawers. “I am a narcissist. I keep everything,” he pronounces, having moved onto the shelves and shelves of his own work, from the pamphlets of his “dissident days” to his latest books in Japanese translation.
But it’s his poster of Josef Stalin that really draws your attention — just as Žižek meant it to. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t have hung it in his entryway, making it the first sight every guest gets of his home. Here he describes it not as a proclamation of Stalinism, exactly, but as — in line with everything else he does — a provocation. “This is just for people who come to be shocked and hopefully to get out,” he explains. “My big worry is not to be ignored, but to be accepted. Of course, it’s not that I’m simply a Stalinist. That would be crazy, tasteless, and so on. But obviously there is something in it that it’s not simply a joke. When I say the only change is that the left appropriates fascism and so on, it’s not a cheap joke. The point is to avoid the trap of standard liberal oppositions: freedom versus totalitarian order, and so on, to rehabilitate notions of discipline, collective order, subordination, sacrifice, all that. I don’t think this is inherently fascist.”
via Biblioklept
Related content:
Žižek!: 2005 Documentary Reveals the “Academic Rock Star” and “Monster” of a Man
Examined Life Drops Academic Celebrities Into the Real World (2008)
Derrida: A 2002 Documentary on the Abstract Philosopher and the Everyday Man
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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