In this video we hear and see the evolution of Elton John’s voice and his often outlandish stage presence as he sings his breakthrough hit, “Your Song,” through his long career.
John wrote the love song with lyricist Bernie Taupin. He once said of their long-time collaboration, “I’m just a purveyor of Bernie’s feelings, Bernie’s thoughts.” “Your Song” was included on John’s 1970 second album, Elton John, and was released as the B‑side to the gospel-influenced “Take Me to the Pilot.” Disc jockeys preferred “Your Song,” so it was switched to the A‑side. The song eventually rose to number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 7 on the UK Singles Chart.
In addition to record sales, the well-crafted song also earned John and Taupin the respect of their peers. “I remember hearing Elton John’s ‘Your Song,’ ” said John Lennon in his 1975 Rolling Stone interview, “heard it in America, and I remember thinking, ‘Great, that’s the first new thing that’s happened since we (The Beatles) happened.’ It was a step forward.”
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Many, if not, most writers teach—whether literature, composition, or creative writing—and examining what those writers teach is an especially interesting exercise because it gives us insight not only into what they read, but also what they read closely and carefully, again and again, in order to inform their own work and demonstrate the craft as they know it to students. Let’s take two case studies: exemplars of contemporary literary fiction, both of whom teach at Columbia University. I’ll leave it to you to draw your own conclusions about what their syllabi show us about their process.
First up, we have Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth and, most recently, NW: A Novel. In 2009, Smith lent her literary sensibilities to the teaching of a weekly fiction seminar called “Sense and Sensibility,” for which we have the full booklist of 15 titles she assigned to students. See the list below and make of it what you will:
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace Catholics, Brian Moore The Complete Stories, Franz Kafka Crash, J.G. Ballard An Experiment in Love, Hilary Mantel Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, David Lodge The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis My Loose Thread, Dennis Cooper The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark The Loser, Thomas Bernhard The Book of Daniel, E.L. Doctorow A Room with a View, E.M. Forster Reader’s Block, David Markson Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov The Quiet American, Graham Greene
Smith’s list trends somewhat surprisingly white male. She includes not a few “writer’s writers”—Kafka, J.G. Ballard, and of course, Nabokov, who also turns up as a favorite for another Russian expat writer and author of Absurdistan, Gary Shteyngart. In a Barnes and Noble author profile, Shteyngart lists two of Nabokov’s books—Pnin and Lolita—among his ten all-time favorites. Also on his list are Saul Bellow’s Herzog and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. All three authors appear in a 2013 Columbia course Shteyngart teaches called “The Hysterical Male,” a class specifically designed, it seems, to examine the neurosis of the white (or Jewish) male writer. With characteristic dark humor, he describes his course thus:
The 20th Century has been a complete disaster and the 21st century will likely be even worse. In response to the hopelessness of the human condition in general, and the prospects for the North American and British male in particular, the contemporary male novelist has been howling angrily for quite some time. This course will examine some of the results, from Roth’s Portnoy and Bellow’s Herzog to Martin Amis’s John Self, taking side trips into the unreliable insanity of Nabokov’s Charles Kinbote, the muddled senility of Mordecai Richler’s Barney Panofsky and the somewhat quieter desperation of David Gates’s Jernigan. We will examine the strategies behind first-person hysteria and contrast with the alternate third- and first-person meshugas of Bruce Wagner’s I’ll Let You Go. What gives vitality to the male hysterical hero? How should humor be balanced with pathos? Why are so many protagonists (and authors) of Jewish or Anglo extraction? How have early male hysterics given rise to the “hysterical realism” as outlined by critic James Wood? Is the shouting, sweaty male the perfect representation of our disastrous times, or is a dose of sane introspection needed to make sense of the world around us? How does the change from early to late hysterical novels reflect our progress from an entirely male-dominated world to a mostly male-dominated one? Do we still need to be reading this stuff?
I would hazard to guess that Shteyngart’s answer to the last question is “yes.”
In 1951, Carl Djerassi, a chemist working in an obscure lab in Mexico City, created the first progesterone pill. Little did he know that, a decade later, 1.2 million women would be “on the Pill” in America, exercising unprecedented control over their reproductive rights. By 1967, that number would reach 12.5 million women worldwide.
It was fortuitous timing, seeing that the post-war global population was starting to surge. It took 125 years (1800–1925) for the global population to move from one billion to two billion (see historical chart), but only 35 years (1925–1960) for that number to reach three billion. Non-profits like the Population Council were founded to think through emerging population questions, and by the mid-1960s, they began publishing a peer-reviewed journal called Studies in Family Planning and also working with Walt Disney to produce a 10-minute educational cartoon. You can watch Family Planning above.
Eventually translated into 25 languages, the film avoids anything sexually explicit. The family planning advice is vague at best and, perversely but not surprisingly, only male characters get a real voice in the production. But lest you think that Disney was breaking any real ground here, let me remind you of its more daring foray into sex-ed films two decades prior. That’s when it produced The Story of Menstruation(1946), a more substantive film shown to 105 million students across the US.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — the very name bespeaks literary mastery of the widest range. Not only did this best-known of all eighteenth- and — nineteenth-century German writers reach into poetry, the novel, the memoir, autobiography, criticism, science, philosophy, and even politics, but he did a bit of interpretation of classic folktales as well. The Faust and Sorrows of Young Werther author wrote a particularly lasting rendition of the adventures of Reynard the Fox, a trickster from medieval European myth. Had Goethe himself lived into the 20th century to experience the golden age of puppet animation, I feel certain his artistic mandate would have compelled him to film a version of The Tale of the Fox. Alas, the literary legend passed away in 1832, leaving the job, nearly a century later, to Russian animator Ladislas Starevich (also spelled Wladyslaw Starewicz).
Having pioneered the form of puppet animation with his 1912 film The Beautiful Lukanida, Starevich remains well-known among animation enthusiasts for shooting his pictures with animals playing the protagonists, or bugs, or seemingly whatever he happened to have at hand. The Tale of the Fox, by contrast, presented him with a comparatively vast set of resources. Produced in Paris over eighteen months in 1929 and 1930, the 65-minute animated feature, Starevich’s first and only the sixth ever made in the world at the time, tells the story of Reynard the Fox’s attempts to live his life of tomfoolery even as the lion king of this animal kingdom struggles to bring him to justice. When, seven years after completing photography, the film still lacked music, Germany’s National Socialist government, no doubt swollen with their version of Teutonic pride at seeing an adaptation of an adaptation penned by a German icon, provided a score and arranged for a Berlin premiere. But try not to think about that. Concentrate instead on the animation style used here by Starevich which, though he shot in stop-motion and used puppets, surely resembles no stop-motion animation or puppet show you’ve ever seen.
What would you do if you crossed paths with a jingling lost thing whose oven-shaped body, crustaceous claws, and fleshy tentacles would seem right at home in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights?
Scream? Run? Release your bowels?
The anonymous narrator ofThe Lost Thing, a fifteen-minute animation born of Shaun Tan’s all-ages picture book, attempts, instead, to identify it empirically through careful observation, calibrated measurement, and controlled experimentation. When the scientific approach fails, he assumes responsibility for his strange find, leading it through a clanking, grimy landscape where sanitation crews deflate beach balls with pointy sticks after the joyless holiday crowds are dismissed—a vision of steampunk in defeat.
We’re loathe to hit you with any more spoilers. Suffice it to say that this is a fine example of innovatively adapted source material, and that eventually our stoic hero—voiced by British-born Australian comic Tim Minchin—and his charge arrive in a landscape that should cause the inhabitants of the Island of Misfit Toys to stop mooning over Santa.
Consciousness is the single most important aspect of our lives, says philosopher John Searle. Why? “It’s a necessary condition on anything being important in our lives,” he says. “If you care about science, philosophy, music, art — whatever — it’s no good if you are a zombie or in a coma.”
Searle is one of today’s preeminent philosophers of mind. Author of the famous “Chinese Room” argument against the possibility of true artificial intelligence, Searle has been a persistent thorn in the side of those who would reduce consciousness to computation, or conflate it with behavior. Despite its intrinsically subjective nature, consciousness is an irreducible biological phenomenon, he says, “as much subject to scientific analysis as any other phenomenon in biology, or for that matter the rest of science.”
Searle made his remarks at the May 3 TEDx conference at CERN — the European Organization for Nuclear Research — near Geneva, Switzerland. The video above gives a thought-provoking overview of his basic conclusions about consciousness, but to delve deeper into Searle’s philosophy of mind — and also his philosophy of language and society — see our earlier post about his online Berkeley lectures: “Philosophy with John Searle: Three Free Courses.”
It seems like a very morbid and inhuman practice to treat the suicide note as a piece of literature, even if the author of said note is a writer as famous as Virginia Woolf. And yet, why not? I can anticipate all sorts of ethical objections having to do with decency, and I share some of those sentiments. Let us not forget, however, that death has often been a literary occasion: the long tradition of recorded last words ranges from deathbed confessions to the strangely theatrical genre of the gallows speech (see Socrates, Anne Boleyn, or John Brown). Like those unforgettable figures of history, Virginia Woolf’s last scripted words are pored over by lay readers and scholars alike (see, for example, pages on Woolf’s final words from Smith College and Yale).
Woolf’s death, in March of 1941, occasioned the third of her suicide letters, and yes, it feels unseemly to linger over her last piece of prose. Perhaps it is the mode of death, suicide still being a societal taboo, thought of as tragic even when it’s undertaken calmly and rationally by someone ready to leave this world. And in many cases, especially those involving mental illness, death seems so needless, so extreme. Such was the case with Woolf, who drowned herself after a long struggle with what would probably be called today bipolar disorder. Her suicide note, written to her husband Leonard, is a haunting and beautiful document, in all its unadorned sincerity behind which much turmoil and anguish lie. See a scan of the handwritten note at the top, and read the full transcript below. Directly above, you can hear a dramatic reading of Woolf’s note, such a wrenching missive because it is not a farewell to the world at large, but rather to a trusted friend and lover.
Dearest,
I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer.
I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.
As anyone who watches the History Channel can tell you, stories about the Second World War still fascinate. Stories about Nazi Germany specifically seem to fascinate more than they ever have before. Combine that with the current American desire to gaze upon the dark side of its own once-beloved institutions, and Harvard historian Ben Urwand may have a hit on his hands when his book The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitlercomes out next month. (Read an excerpt here.) Emory University historian Deborah Lipstadt uses an even more apt term: “I think what this guy has found could be a blockbuster.” She is quoted in an article by the New York Times’ Jennifer Schuessler on Urwand, his discoveries, and his book. “On page after page,” Schuessler writes, “[Urwand] shows studio bosses, many of them Jewish immigrants, cutting films scene by scene to suit Nazi officials; producing material that could be seamlessly repurposed in Nazi propaganda films; and, according to one document, helping to finance the manufacture of German armaments.”
As if Urwand’s findings about these deals between Hollywood studios and the Third Reich won’t cause enough of a stir by themselves, his perspective on them has already fired up an academic controversy. Schuessler quotes Brandeis’ Thomas P. Doherty as calling Urwand’s use of the word “collaboration” a “slander” and mentions, by contrast, University of Southern California history professor Steven J. Ross’ forthcoming book which tells “the little-known story of an extensive anti-Nazi spy ring that began operating in Los Angeles in 1934, financed by the very studio bosses who were cutting films to satisfy Nazi officials.” You can read a fuller critique of Urwand’s arguments from Doherty at the Hollywood Reporter. At the top, you can watch that publication’s brief conversation with Urwand himself, in which he explains and defends his use of the word “collaboration” — which, he says, the Hollywood executives in question used themselves. Finally, just above, you can hear more from Urwand in Harvard University Press’ clip about The Collaboration. As with most modern research into World War II, the book no doubt raises more historical and moral questions than we can answer, though I do doubt that anyone who reads it will ever watch pictures from Hollywood’s Golden Age in quite the same way again.
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