Kurt Vonnegut Writes an Offbeat Contract Outlining His Chores Around the House, 1947

in Life, Literature | August 30th, 2012

Kurt Vonnegut never did things the conventional way. He didn’t write particularly conventional novels. He certainly didn’t make very conventional speeches at universities. But he did make semi-conventional domestic agreements. Take, for example, this contract written on January 26, 1947. Posted on the Harper’s website in full, this odd little document, dubbed “The Chore List of Champions,” finds Vonnegut outlining all of the tasks he promised to do around the house — this while his young wife, Jane, prepared to give birth to their first child. The contract (the content is conventional, the form is not) will be published in Kurt Vonnegut: Letters next month. And it begins:

I, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., that is, do hereby swear that I will be faithful to the commitments hereunder listed:

I. With the agreement that my wife will not nag, heckle, or otherwise disturb me on the subject, I promise to scrub the bathroom and kitchen floors once a week, on a day and hour of my own choosing. Not only that, but I will do a good and thorough job, and by that she means that I will get under the bathtub, behind the toilet, under the sink, under the icebox, into the corners; and I will pick up and put in some other location whatever movable objects happen to be on said floors at the time so as to get under them too, and not just around them. Furthermore, while I am undertaking these tasks I will refrain from indulging in such remarks as “Shit,” “Goddamn sonofabitch,” and similar vulgarities, as such language is nerve-wracking to have around the house when nothing more drastic is taking place than the facing of Necessity. If I do not live up to this agreement, my wife is to feel free to nag, heckle, and otherwise disturb me until I am driven to scrub the floors anyway—no matter how busy I am.

And then later continues:

g. When smoking I will make every effort to keep the ashtray I am using at the time upon a surface that does not slant, sag, slope, dip, wrinkle, or give way upon the slightest provocation; such surfaces may be understood to include stacks of books precariously mounted on the edge of a chair, the arms of the chair that has arms, and my own knees;

h. I will not put out cigarettes upon the sides of, or throw ashes into, either the red leather wastebasket or the stamp wastebasket that my loving wife made me for Christmas, 1945, as such practice noticeably impairs the beauty and ultimate practicability of said wastebaskets;

j. An exception to the above three-day time limit is the taking out of the garbage, which, as any fool knows, had better not wait that long; I will take out the garbage within three hours after the need for disposal has been pointed out to me by my wife. It would be nice, however, if, upon observing the need for disposal with my own two eyes, I should perform this particular task upon my own initiative, and thus not make it necessary for my wife to bring up a subject that is moderately distasteful to her;

l. The terms of this contract are understood to be binding up until that time after the arrival of our child (to be specified by the doctor) when my wife will once again be in full possession of all her faculties, and able to undertake more arduous pursuits than are now advisable.

You can read the complete “Chore List of Champions” at Harper’s.

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Peter Sellers: His Life in Home Movies

in Comedy, Film | August 30th, 2012

Peter Sellers was a compulsive home movie maker. His house was cluttered with cameras, cables and tape recorders, according to his first wife Anne Howe, and he liked to bring a camera along with him wherever he went, sometimes handing it to a companion and clowning around in front of the lens.

In 1995, fifteen years after Sellers’s death, producers from BBC Arena sorted through his extensive archive and assembled some of the best footage for a film called The Peter Sellers Story. In 2002 they shortened it into The Peter Sellers Story: As He Filmed It (above), which tells the story of the comedian’s life almost exclusively with footage from his own camera.

There are glimpses of some notable people from the actor’s circle, including Stanley Kubrick, Sophia Loren, Lord Snowdon, Princess Margaret, Britt Ekland, Blake Edwards, Spike Milligan and Orson Welles. The audio is pieced together from vintage performances and interviews, along with commentary by Sellers’s friends, family and colleagues. It’s a unique film, offering a personal look at the enigmatic and emotionally troubled genius who was able to slip confidently into an amazing range of personas–often in the same film–but was never sure of his own. As Sellers once told an interviewer:

I have no personality of my own, you see. I could never be a star because of this. I’m a character actor. I couldn’t play Peter Sellers the way Cary Grant plays Cary Grant, say–because I have no concrete image of myself. I look in the mirror and what I see is someone who has never grown up–a crashing sentimentalist who alternates between great heights and black depths. You know, it’s a funny thing, but when I’m doing a role I feel it’s the role doing the role, if you know what I mean. When someone tells me “You were great as so-and-so,” I feel they should be telling this to so-and-so, and when I finish a picture I feel a horrible sudden loss of identity.

The Peter Sellers Story: As He Filmed It will be added to our collection of 500 Free Movies Online.

Peter Sellers Reads The Beatles’ ‘She Loves You’ in Four Voices

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Hollywood by Helicopter, 1958

in Film, History | August 30th, 2012

“This movie is going to be pretty obvious.” That’s not the best way to get the viewer’s attention. And the rest of the script, read by Bob Crane, is not much better: “Hey Kitty, look … Kitty, you didn’t look hard enough … See the thing that looks like a building? That’s a building!” Nor is the premise of the film very good: Kitty is a novice actress, and, before appearing in her first movie, she gets an aerial tour of Hollywood and its landmarks.

But from a historical perspective, this 1950s footage of the Los Angeles movie industry has its intriguing moments. It’s particularly interesting to see how much space there still was around some of the studios and movie theaters. Just compare the image of Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard taken from the film with a Google Earth shot from today:

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.

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Michio Kaku Explains the Physics Behind Absolutely Everything

in Physics | August 30th, 2012

“It’s turtles all the way down,” a possibly apocryphal old lady once said as a way of fully explaining her concept of the world supported on the back of a giant tortoise. But according to City University of New York’s Michio Kaku, it’s physics all the way down. He shares this highly educated assumption with, presumably, everyone in his field of theoretical physics, and if you’ve got 42 minutes, he’ll tell you why the subject’s explanatory power has compelled him and so many others to dedicate their lives to it. In “The Universe in a Nutshell,” the lecture embedded above, Kaku tells of the origins of modern physics, breaks down how it has clarified to humanity so many of the mechanisms of existence, and reminds us of both the countless technological advances it has already made possible and the infinitude of them it will in the future. To our fellow humans just a few generations back, he says, we, with our advanced communication devices and our ability to watch slickly produced, high-resolution lectures on demand, would look like wizards; our grandchildren, enjoying yet more benefits from physics, would look like gods.

This video comes to you free from Big Think, though as a production it originates from the associated venture Floating University, which sells access to lectures on a variety of subjects, from physics to demography to linguistics to aesthetics. Given all the useful information technology now so widely available — thanks in part to discoveries in, yes, physics — a particularly fruitful time has come for projects meant to reinvent education. Floating University considers itself to be “democratizing education,” and the demand certainly seems fervent. “Why can’t school be like this?” writes one YouTube commenter. “I don’t want homework, I don’t want a binder with dividers, I don’t want to be bored to death with worksheets. I just want to LEARN.” This, of course, started arguments. But that’s democracy for you.

Please note, oodles of Free Physics Courses — including ones by Richard Feynman, Leonard Susskind, Sean Carroll, and Walter Lewin — can be found in our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

Related content:

Learning Physics Through Free Courses

Modern Physics: A Complete Introduction

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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“Do Scientists Pray?”: A Young Girl Asks Albert Einstein in 1936. Einstein Then Responds.

in Religion, Science | August 30th, 2012

Albert Einstein endeavored to express his view of God as forthrightly as possible to a public eager to know where he stood in the popular conflict between science and religion. In 1936, a sixth-grade girl named Phyllis wrote him a letter on behalf of her Sunday School class. “We have brought up the question,” she wrote, “Do scientists pray? It began by asking whether we could believe in both science and religion.” Einstein’s reply is somewhat equivocal. He is clear enough in stating that a scientific fidelity to the “laws of nature” means that “a scientist cannot be inclined to believe that the course of events can be influenced by prayer, that is, by a supernaturally manifested wish.” This would seem to settle the question. However, he goes on to invoke the philosopher Spinoza’s god and distinguish between intellectual humility and wonder, on the one hand, and a more popular, supernatural faith on the other.

However, we must concede that our actual knowledge of these forces is imperfect, so that in the end the belief in the existence of a final, ultimate spirit rests on a kind of faith. Such belief remains widespread even with the current achievements in science.

But also, everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is surely quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive.

This is probably not the response that Phyllis and her class had hoped for, and they (or their teacher) may have taken offense at the description of their faith as “naïve.” But Einstein’s careful reply also expresses a kind of scientific awe that acknowledges the limits of reason and leads to a kind of sublime feeling that can legitimately be called “religious” (much as Carl Sagan would do decades later). This, I believe, is not a casual or callous dismissal of Phyllis’s faith, something that so-called “New Atheists” are often accused of (justly or not). Instead it’s a considered response in which the great physicist shares his own version of “faith”–his faith in Nature, or the “laws of the universe,” which he concedes are “vastly superior to man.” I think it’s a moving exchange between two people who couldn’t be further apart in their understanding of the world, but who just may have found some small common ground in considering each other’s positions for a moment.

Einstein’s correspondence comes to us via the always illuminating Letters of Note

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.

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Dylan Thomas Recites ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’ and Other Poems

in Poetry | August 29th, 2012

When Dylan Thomas was a little boy his father would read Shakespeare to him at bedtime. The boy loved the sound of the words, even if he was too young to understand the meaning. His father, David John Thomas, taught English at a grammar school in southern Wales but wanted to be a poet. He was bitterly disappointed with his station in life.

Many years later when the father lay on his deathbed, Dylan Thomas wrote a poem that captures the profound sense of empathy he felt for the dying old man. The poem, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” was written in 1951, only two years before the poet’s own untimely death at the age of 39. Despite the impossibility of escaping death, the anguished son implores his father to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

The poem is a beautiful example of the villanelle form, which features two rhymes and two alternating refrains in verse arranged into five tercets, or three-lined stanzas, and a concluding quatrain in which the two refrains are brought together as a couplet at the very end. You can hear Thomas’s famous 1952 recital of the poem above. To see the poem’s structure and read along as you listen, click here to open the text in a new window.

And to hear more of Thomas reciting his own works you can visit HarperAudio, where you will find a treasure trove of recordings from a number of writers, including these from Thomas:

Part 1: “No Sun Shines,” “The Hand that Signed the Paper,” “Should Lanterns Shine,” “And Death Shall Have No Dominion,” and the first verse of “Alterwise by Owl Light.”
Part 2: “Poem in October,” “This Side of the Truth,” Love in the Asylum,” and “The Hunchback in the Park.”
Part 3: “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” “On the Marriage of a Virgin,” “In My Craft or Sullen Art,” and “Ceremony After a Fire Raid.”

All poems have been added to our collection of Free Audio Books.

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The Legendary Bluesman Robert Johnson Brought to Life in (Somewhat Creepy) Animated Image

in Music | August 29th, 2012

In his autobiography, Chronicles, Volume 1, Bob Dylan remembered the day, back in the early 1960s, when he first encountered the music of the Mississippi Delta bluesman Robert Johnson. His memory went something like this:

I had the thick acetate of the Robert Johnson record in my hands and I asked Van Ronk if he ever heard of him. Dave said, nope, he hadn’t, and I put it on the record player so we could listen to it. From the first note the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up. The stabbing sounds from the guitar could almost break a window. When Johnson started singing, he seemed like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor. I immediately differentiated between him and anyone else I had ever heard.

Dylan wasn’t alone in this thought. Ask Eric Clapton and he’ll tell you that Johnson is “the most important blues singer that ever lived.” And one Keith Richards summed things up rather nicely, saying, “You want to know how good the blues can get? Well, this is it.” With this kind of praise, you’d think that Robert Johnson had lived a long life, recording a long list of albums. But the opposite is true. Johnson died in 1938, when he was only 27 years old (which puts him, of course, in the 27 Club). And he left for posterity a mere 29 tracks, all recorded between 1936 and 1937. The details of Johnson’s life are sketchy at best. And the visual traces of his existence have almost entirely disappeared. In the closing pages of Chronicles, Bob Dylan makes reference to a video that briefly captures the image of Johnson:

More than thirty years later, I would see Johnson for myself in eight seconds’ worth of 8‑millimeter film shot in Ruleville, Mississippi, on a brightly lit afternoon street by some Germans in the late ’30s. Some people questioned whether it was really him, but slowing the eight seconds down so it was more like eighty seconds, you can see that it really is Robert Johnson, has to be—couldn’t be anyone else.

It’s a tantalizing prospect. But, when professionals took a close look at the video, they figured out it was a fake (see below). So we’re left with this — two photographs of the musician. Two simple photos, which now thanks to Westside Media, have been manipulated to bring Johnson back to life, at least long enough to sing two songs: “Hell Hound on My Trail” and “Preaching Blues.” Watch above.

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Dead Authors Podcast: H.G. Wells Comically Revives Literary Greats with His Time Machine

in Comedy, Literature, Podcasts | August 29th, 2012

Recorded live in front of an audience at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in Los Angeles, The Dead Authors Podcast—“Unscripted, barely researched, all fun!”—showcases raucous conversations between “time-traveler” H.G. Wells (Paul F. Tompkins) and various “dead authors.” Some of Wells’ guests have included Aesop, Dorothy Parker, Gertrude Stein, Carl Sagan, and Jorge Luis Borges, all played by comedians like Andy Richter (as Emily Dickinson) and Brian Stack (as P.G. Wodehouse).

In the episode above, Wells welcomes the notoriously misogynistic and allegedly anti-Semitic Friedrich Nietzsche (James Adomian) and the notoriously racist writer of “weird tales” H.P. Lovecraft (Paul Scheer). As the podcast description has it, “if you are easily offended, you may find this one a bit challenging.” The offense is mitigated by the fact that the discussion “very rarely makes any sense AT ALL,” and that it’s damned funny.

Both “authors” spout exaggerated parodies of their philosophies, in ridiculous accents, and (as you can see from the photo above), look equally ridiculous to an audience that sometimes laughs along, sometimes doesn’t, as will happen in live comedy. The actors are game, ad-libbing with ease and confidence and clearly having a great time. The only moments that aren’t improvised are when the actors playing Nietzsche and Lovecraft read from the writers’ actual texts. In this context (and in these voices), the two both indeed make little sense. They’ll survive the takedown—these are two dead authors who tend to be taken far too seriously by their devotees. So, go ahead, listen to Nietzsche huff and puff his way through his bombastic and oracular pronouncements; hear Lovecraft hiss through his florid and paranoid prose. It’s all for a good cause. The Dead Authors podcast benefits 826LA, a non-profit writing and tutoring center for kids age 6–18.

You can find real works by Nietzsche and Lovecraft in our collection of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books.

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.

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Kurt Vonnegut Writes an Offbeat Contract Outlining His Chores Around the House, 1947

Peter Sellers: His Life in Home Movies

Hollywood by Helicopter, 1958

Michio Kaku Explains the Physics Behind Absolutely Everything

“Do Scientists Pray?”: A Young Girl Asks Albert Einstein in 1936. Einstein Then Responds.

Dylan Thomas Recites ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’ and Other Poems

The Legendary Bluesman Robert Johnson Brought to Life in (Somewhat Creepy) Animated Image

The Dead Authors Podcast: H.G. Wells Comically Revives Literary Greats with His Time Machine

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