Matthew Might, a computer science professor at the University of Utah, writes: “Every fall, I explain to a fresh batch of Ph.D. students what a Ph.D. is. It’s hard to describe it in words. So, I use pictures.” It’s September 26. That means fall is here again, and it’s time to bring you an encore presentation of Matt’s Illustrated Guide to the PhD. Have a look, and you’ll see the whole undertaking in a less hubristic way:
Imagine a circle that contains all of human knowledge:
By the time you finish elementary school, you know a little:
By the time you finish high school, you know a bit more:
With a bachelor’s degree, you gain a specialty:
A master’s degree deepens that specialty:
Reading research papers takes you to the edge of human knowledge:
Once you’re at the boundary, you focus:
You push at the boundary for a few years:
Until one day, the boundary gives way:
And, that dent you’ve made is called a Ph.D.:
Of course, the world looks different to you now:
Today, if you want an introduction to a filmmaker like Federico Fellini, you’ll most likely just look him up on Wikipedia. In 1969, you wouldn’t have had quite so convenient an option, though were you an NBC-watching American, you might have caught a broadcast of Fellini: A Director’s Notebook. Directed by Fellini himself at the behest of NBC producer Peter Goldfarb, the fifty-minute documentary (now added to our collection of 500 Free Movies Online) follows the Italian auteur as he peripatetically seeks out inspiration for his current and future projects. Among these, we hear about Satyricon, one of his immortal works, and about The Voyage of G. Mastoma, which stalled before it even reached mortality. Consorting with hippies in a field, taking a spirit medium down into the “catacombs” of the Rome Metro, dropping in on favorite actor/counterpart Marcello Mastroianni, and receiving a stream of visiting eccentrics in his office, Fellini narrates his own thoughts about his directorial process. It seems to come down to searching for the right atmospheres — the obscure, the foreign, the desperate, the bizarre — and taking them in.
Fellini: A Director’s Notebook provides what Fellini called a “semihumorous introduction” to the director, his work, and the environment of frowning absurdism that seemed to encircle him wherever he went. But with its frequent language-shifting, its often dark and vaguely troubling imagery, its air of simultaneous asexuality and indiscriminate louchness, and its obviously deliberate craft, the film would seem to fall into the territory between forms. But if it feels too elaborate, artificial, and studded with half-glimpsed grotesques to count as a straightforward portrait of an artist, Fellini’s films set themselves apart to this day with their thorough possession of those same qualities. Cultural history has not recorded in much detail how the average American home viewer of 1969 handled this plunge into the viscous essence of Fellini. But I’ll bet every single one who enjoyed it immediately marked their calendars, if surreptitiously, to go check out the man’s interpretation of Petronius.
If you’ve ever seen D.A. Pennebaker’s classic 1967 documentary Don’t Look Back(or even if you haven’t), you know the famous scene — Bob Dylan fliping through cue cards as the dizzying lyrics of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” flow by, all while poet Allen Ginsberg and singer Bob Neuwirth make cameo appearances in the background. (Watch it below.) This innovative clip has since inspired countless tribute videos by the likes of Steve Earle, the rapper Evidence, “Weird Al” Yankovic, Google, and the 1992 film Bob Roberts. Now comes the latest riff on the iconic footage by designer/illustrator Leandro Senna. He gives us “Bob Dylan’s Hand Lettering Experience,” a video that stitches together 66 hand-designed cards, each made with only pencil, black tint pens and brushes. No technological enhancements or retouching were allowed. On Senna’s web site, you can see each and every card in a larger format.
We associate Ernest Hemingway with foreign locales: Spain, Italy, Paris, Africa and Cuba. He may be the definitive peripatetic writer, famously hauling his manuscripts-in-progress around the world while soaking in enough material for the next book.
Lucky for us Hemingway may also be one of the most photographed writers of his generation. The photographs in the Ernest Hemingway Collection take us into a mid-century world where writers, actors, political leaders and beautiful jet-setters mingled on patios and yachts at ease before the camera. These were the days before paparazzi started hiding in bushes.
The collection is available to us with a typical Hermingway-esque story attached. When he died in 1961 in Idaho, most of his personal effects were still in Cuba. Heminway lived for 20 years in the Finca Vigia, a home he bought with the royalties from For Whom the Bell Tolls. It was at Finca Vigia that he wrote The Old Man and the Sea. Rather than writing in the workshop that his wife Mary had built for him there, he used the bedroom, leaving the new room for his numerous pet cats to use.
Hemingway was in Paris when he sat for this portrait in March, 1928. The photographer, Helen Pierce Breaker, was a friend and had been a bridesmaid in Hemingway’s wedding to his first wife, Hadley.
By the early 1950s, Hemingway was living in Cuba. The painting behind him here at Finca Vigia is a portrait of himself by Waldo Peirce titled Kid Balzac.
Kate Rix is an Oakland-based freelance writer. Find more of her work at .
Today marks the release of the final volume in the Allen Ginsberg box set Holy Soul Jelly Roll: Poems & Songs 1949–1993, a collection of previously released and unreleased recordings. For whatever reason, Ginsberg Recordings decided to stagger the digital release of the set over the month of September, beginning with Volume Four (Ashes & Blues), followed by Three (Ah!), Two (Caw! Caw!), and finally, today, Volume One (Moloch!). The last volume “contains the stunning 1956 Berkeley Town Hall reading of Ginsberg’s seminal poem ‘Howl,’ as well as other important historic early poems.” You can preview and buy all four volumes on iTunes, but you needn’t pay to hear some full tracks: Ginsberg Recordings made the “8 song sampler” available on Soundcloud for us. Here is the track listing:
1. A Supermarket In California
2. Green Valentine Blues
3. Kral Majales (King Of May)
4. CIA Dope Calypso
5. Laughing Song
6. First Party at Ken Kesey’s With Hell’s Angels
7. Vomit Express
Listening to these poems brings a couple things to mind. One, the realization, too often lost, that “There was a time when not every moment of our lives was recorded, photographed, tweeted, facebooked, or otherwise made instantly available to the global billions of the connected,” in the words of Ginsberg friend and archivist Stephen Taylor. In those ancient days, recordings mattered and the things people chose to put on tape or film or whatever medium they chose were precious because of their rarity and their fragile physicality. Two, these recordings underscore the perfect pitch of the collection’s title, which takes in all at once the complementary natures of Ginsberg the holy fool—mystic, trickster, and sensual “white Negro” (to take Norman Mailer’s snide 50s term for hipster bohemians). Ginsberg was all these things, usually in the same poem. His voice can slide in subtle or startling turns from bathos to pathos, from the fantastic imaginary to keenly-observed social critique.
In the first recorded poem above, “A Supermarket in California,” Ginsberg imagines himself shopping for groceries at night with Walt Whitman, an elaborate extended excursion into the poet’s process. In an intro, he calls this a “coming down” poem after writing “a lot of great poetry.” Reminiscent of Wallace Stevens’ “The Man on the Dump,” Ginsberg describes “shopping for images” in a “hungry fatigue… dreaming of your enumerations.” The “you” here is Whitman, and in the poem the two stroll down store aisles, sampling the “neon fruit” without paying. In a funny image, Ginsberg asks his muse, “which way are we going? Which way does your beard point tonight?” Maybe Ginsberg thought it a minor poem, but I’d call it a tiny delicacy next to the sprawling monster “Howl.”
Another short autobiographical poem above—well-stocked with images as precise, but not so neon, as “Supermarket”—is “First Party at Ken Kesey’s with Hell’s Angels.” I can only imagine this is an accurate account of events not much embellished but perceptively edited to give us an elliptical succession of loosely connected vignettes. None of the images surprise so much as confirm exactly what one expects to find at Ken Kesey’s (with Hell’s Angels): “Cool black night through the red woods,” “a few tired souls hunched over in black leather jackets,” “a yellow chandelier at three a.m.,” “twenty youths dancing through the vibration in the floor,” “a little marijuana in the bathroom,” and, of course, “four police cars parked outside the painted gate.” It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s a little showcase of Ginsberg’s talent for compression and, to use the word he applies to his hero Walt Whitman, “enumerations” of jazz-inflected lines that pop into focus with pleasing immediacy.
“CIA Dope Calypso” is also true to its title, an upbeat island-style ditty with congas, guitar and maracas–a song about the Southeast Asian heroin trade (allegedly!), Ginsberg sings, “supported by the C‑I-A.” Never afraid to hurl verbal Molotovs at his imperialist foes, Ginsberg does so here with strained and silly rhymes and a good deal of tongue-in-cheek in-joking. It’s a “jelly roll” performance—wickedly subversive.
All of these recordings are great fun, but Ginsberg seems best known for the “Holy Soul” part of his persona, the thundering prophet mystic warrior of “Howl,” and that’s here in the box set too, with “Howl” and other poems. We’ve previously featured Ginsberg’s riveting 1955 reading of the epic “Howl” at San Francisco’s Six Gallery, dramatized in Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s semi-biopic Howl, with James Franco as Ginsberg. Below, see the poem’s apocalyptic “Moloch” section set to some terrifying animated images from the 2010 film:
If Holy Soul Jelly Roll doesn’t fully sate your taste for Ginsberg’s voice, never fear: there is much more to come from Ginsberg Recordings.
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.
When his telephone rang on February 14, 1989, Christopher Hitchens was thunderstruck. A newspaper reporter was on the line, asking for his reaction to a radio speech from Tehran earlier that day in which the theocratic ruler of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Komeini, called on Muslims around the world to murder his friend the novelist Salman Rushdie because of something Rushdie had written in his book The Satanic Verses. As Hitchens later wrote in his memoir, Hitch-22:
I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship–though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn’t known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined.
Rushdie went into hiding, but his Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was murdered, and attempts were made against the lives of several other translators and a publisher. Bookstores in England and California were firebombed, and many more received threats of violence. The public reaction to all of this was a bitter disappointment to Hitchens. In his book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, he wrote:
One might have thought that such arrogant state-sponsored homicide, directed at a lonely and peaceful individual who pursued a life devoted to language, would have called forth a general condemnation. But such was not the case. In considered statements, the Vatican, the archbishop of Canterbury, the chief sephardic rabbi of Israel all took a stand in sympathy with–the ayatollah. So did the cardinal archbishop of New York and many other lesser religious figures. While they usually managed a few words in which to deplore the resort to violence, all these men stated that the main problem raised by the publication of The Satanic Verses was not murder by mercenaries, but blasphemy. Some public figures not in holy orders, such as the Marxist writer John Berger, the Tory historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, and the doyen of espionage authors John Le Carré, also pronounced that Rushdie was the author of his own troubles, and had brought them on himself by “offending” a great monotheistic religion. There seemed nothing fantastic, to these people, in the British police having to defend an Indian-born ex-Muslim citizen from a concerted campaign to take his life in the name of god.
This month Rushdie published Joseph Anton: A Memoir, describing his nine-years of life in hiding under the Ayotollah’s death order. The new book’s relevance could not be more obvious, given the Anti-American rioting that broke out in much of the Muslim world this month in reaction to a YouTube video called Innocence of Muslims. Hitchens died last December, and his voice in the matter is sorely missed. But it isn’t hard to imagine what he might have said. In a 2009 Vanity Fair essay, “Assassins of the Mind,” Hitchens wrote: “For our time and generation, the great conflict between the ironic mind and the literal mind, the experimental and the dogmatic, the tolerant and the fanatical, is the argument that was kindled by The Satanic Verses.”
For a recent discussion with Rushdie, listen to his September 21 interview with Studio360:
On September 19, 1981, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel got up in front of 500,000 people in New York City and played a show. That in itself sounds perhaps not terribly unusual, but bear in mind that they put on the concert in Central Park. Even that might not strike you as notable these days, but the early eighties found major American cities on the ropes. Their public spaces had reached an especially advanced state of deterioration, and commentators often singled out New York as a dreary bellwether of just this sort of aggressive urban decay. Looking back, to name just one example, we think of subway cars covered, every exposed surface both interior and exterior, with a palimpsest of graffiti. But Manhattan’s Central Park had only fared a shade better, and the city found itself lacking the three million dollars needed to repair and maintain the now-beloved vast green space. Parks Commissioner Gordon Davis recruited the Queens-raised and New York-rooted Simon and Garfunkel to perform the free benefit show that would become the album and movie The Concert in Central Park, dedicating the revenue from merchandising and licensing to renovation.
You can watch the ninety-minute concert film above. Originally broadcast on HBO, it comes directed by New York native Michael Lindsey-Hogg, director of many clips for the Beatles and the Rolling Stones (not to mention the son of Orson Welles). Simon and Garfunkel’s performance, which runs two songs and twelve minutes longer than The Concert in Central Park the album, includes much of what you’d expect — “Mrs. Robinson,” “Scarborough Fair,” “Still Crazy After All These Years,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” “The Sounds of Silence” — and a bit of what you wouldn’t. It also offers a look back to a time when nobody quite knew whether New York City would get out of its slump, a time when Simon’s lyric about “Central Park, where they say you should not wander after dark” made more sense. Despite false starts since, it now seems safe to say that the recovery has happened. By the same token, the concert itself, despite its success, proved a false start for an expected long-term Simon and Garfunkel reunion. But they would come together again to tour in the early 2000s, and rumors of possible future live shows continue to swirl.
Vladimir Nabokov admired Franz Kafka’s novella, The Metamorphosis. Hence the lecture that Nabokov dedicated to the work here. But he also saw some small ways to wordsmith the story, or at least the English translation of it. Above, we have some edits — the nips and tucks — that Nabokov scribbled on his personal copy of Kafka’s most famous work.
In 1989, Nabokov’s lecture on The Metamorphosis was actually turned into a television production starring Christopher Plummer. You can watch The Metamorphosis — A Study: Nabokov on Kafka online. It runs 30 minutes. Of course, you can also download your own copy of Kafka’s near perfect work of poetic imagination, to borrow a phrase from Elias Canetti. Visit our collections of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books.
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