I was lucky enough to be living in Chicago when Marc Smith’sPoetry Slam movement became a thing. What fun it was to hit the Green Mill on Sunday nights to hear such innovators as Lisa Buscani or Patricia Smith tearing into their latest entries in front of packed-to-capacity crowds. Those early slam poets inspired a lot of other wordsmiths to brave the mic, a glorious revolution whose gleam was inevitably tarnished for me once it caught on for real.
I remember thinking something like, “If I never hear another poem about someone’s relationship troubles, it’ll be too soon.”
To further illustrate my waning enthusiasm, here’s the above thought, rendered in Standard Spoken Word Venacular:
If
I never heeeear
Another Po
Em About Someone’s
Re-la-tion-ship…
Troubles, it’ll be
Too
Soon.
Some two-and-a-half decades further along, Leslie Wu, a doctoral student in Computer Science at Stanford University, has been crowned the winner of the inaugural Code Poetry Slam, and I’m mourning the loss of those long-ago relationship troubles.
To create her winning entry, “Say 23,” Wu donned a Google Glass headset, as she recited and typed 16 lines of computer code, which were projected onto a screen. When Wu ran the script, three different computerized voices took over performance duties, sampling the 23rd Psalm along with an uncredited snippet of In the Hall of the Mountain King.
I may be too hot-blooded to appreciate the artistry here.
Melissa Kagen, who organized the competition with fellow graduate student Kurt James Werner, stated on the university’s website that in order “to really get into the intricacies you really need to know that language.”
I guess that goes double for the competitors. According to Werner, Wu’s poem wove together a number of different concepts, tools, and languages, including Japanese, English, and Ruby. Philistine that I am, I had always thought of the latter as an uncapitalized gemstone and nothing more.
Pablo Picasso had a long and complex relationship with book illustration. The modern painter hated to work on spec and resisted taking commissions. Nonetheless, when it came to literature, he made well over 50 exceptions, illustrating the work of scores of authors he admired. As John Golding writes in The Independent, Picasso had always gravitated toward the literary; he wrote prolifically, was “attracted to art that had a literary flavor,” and “preferred the company of writers, particularly poets, to that of other painters and sculptors.” Golding writes of the artist’s particular love for the Spanish Baroque poet Luis de Gongora, whose work he illustrated in a 1948 edition, and who was to “affect the future development of Picasso’s art in a way that his other literary collaborations did not.” But this may be a hasty judgment. As it turned out, Picasso’s 1931 illustration of a short story by Honoré de Balzac, “The Hidden Masterpiece” (Le Chef‑d’oeuvre inconnu), would affect him greatly, and indirectly contributed to the creation of his most famous work, the enormous anti-war canvas Guernica.
Picasso accepted the Balzac commission from art dealer Ambroise Vollard (see the title page and frontispiece at top, Picasso’s portraits of Balzac above) and completed the thirteen etchings in 1931 for a centennial edition (see ten of the illustrations here). Many have considered these etchings “landmarks in the history of engraving.” Balzac’s story, admired by other painters like Cézanne and Matisse, is among other things a tale of an artist ahead of his time. Set in the 17th century, “The Hidden Masterpiece” tells of an aging painter named Frenhofer, who obsessively labors over a work he has kept secret for years. When two younger admirers, painters Poussin and Porbus, finally manage to see Frenhofer’s secret canvas, they are appalled—it appears to them nothing more than an indistinct mess of lines, colors and shapes—and they mock the older artist and assume their celebrated friend has gone insane. The next day, Frenhofer destroys all his work and kills himself.
Picasso, writes Thomas Ganzevoort, “had faced something of the same dumbfounded reaction from fellow artists upon showing them his groundbreaking proto-Cubist masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” He later claimed that the ghost of Balzac haunted him, and he found himself so compelled by the story that in 1937, he chose for his new studio a 17th century townhouse located at 7 Rue des Grands-Augustin, the very house many believed to be the setting of the opening scene in “The Hidden Masterpiece.” In April of that year, German warplanes bombed the Spanish Basque city of Guernica, and Picasso abandoned all other projects and set to work on his famous large canvas, which he completed in June of that same year (below, see him in his Grands-Augustin studio, at work on Guernica). Like his earlier, cubist work, Guernica divided critics and perplexed some of his peers. At its unveiling in the 1937 Paris Exhibition, the painting “garnered little attention.” Unlike the tragic Frenhofer of Balzac’s story, however, Picasso did not succumb to self-doubt and lived to see his work vindicated. See this site to learn more about Balzac and Picasso, including discussion of a disputed 1934 drawing some believe to be Picasso’s own “hidden masterpiece.”
Worth a quick mention: Dr. Pardis Sabeti, a media-savvy computational geneticist at Harvard, has teamed up with the Annenberg Foundation, to create a new introduction to statistics. In 32 nicely-produced videos, Against All Odds: Inside Statistics guides “viewers through the wide range of statistical applications used by scientists, business owners, and even Shakespeare scholars, in their work and daily lives.” It’s all about “real people working on real problems.”
The series starts with What Is Statistics?. And then, along the way, the course covers topics like Standard Deviation, Correlation, Samples and Surveys, and more. The clip above comes from the unit called Checking Assumption of Normality. And do note that each video module is complemented by a Student Guide and Faculty Guide specific to the unit.
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Last year, Stanford opened a glorious new concert hall. Somewhere during its construction, Steven Sano, a professor in the Music Department, found some extra scraps of Alaskan yellow cedar, the wood used to build the stage floor. He took the wood known “for its resonance and fine grain” to a luthier and came home with two blond-top tenor ukes. They’re on display above. Stanford News has more on the story.
Most of the twentieth century’s notable men of letters — i.e., writers of books, of essays, of reportage — seem also to have, literally, written a great deal of letters. Sometimes their correspondence reflects and shapes their “real” written work; sometimes it appears collected in book form itself. Both hold true in the case of George Orwell, a volume of whose letters, edited by Peter Davison, came out last year. In it we find this missive, also published in full at The Daily Beast, sent in 1944 to one Noel Willmett, who had asked “whether totalitarianism, leader-worship etc. are really on the up-grade” given “that they are not apparently growing in [England] and the USA”:
As to the comparative immunity of Britain and the USA. Whatever the pacifists etc. may say, we have not gone totalitarian yet and this is a very hopeful symptom. I believe very deeply, as I explained in my book The Lion and the Unicorn, in the English people and in their capacity to centralise their economy without destroying freedom in doing so. But one must remember that Britain and the USA haven’t been really tried, they haven’t known defeat or severe suffering, and there are some bad symptoms to balance the good ones. To begin with there is the general indifference to the decay of democracy. Do you realise, for instance, that no one in England under 26 now has a vote and that so far as one can see the great mass of people of that age don’t give a damn for this? Secondly there is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side. Indeed the statement that we haven’t a Fascist movement in England largely means that the young, at this moment, look for their fuhrer elsewhere. One can’t be sure that that won’t change, nor can one be sure that the common people won’t think ten years hence as the intellectuals do now. I hope they won’t, I even trust they won’t, but if so it will be at the cost of a struggle. If one simply proclaims that all is for the best and doesn’t point to the sinister symptoms, one is merely helping to bring totalitarianism nearer.
You also ask, if I think the world tendency is towards Fascism, why do I support the war. It is a choice of evils—I fancy nearly every war is that. I know enough of British imperialism not to like it, but I would support it against Nazism or Japanese imperialism, as the lesser evil. Similarly I would support the USSR against Germany because I think the USSR cannot altogether escape its past and retains enough of the original ideas of the Revolution to make it a more hopeful phenomenon than Nazi Germany. I think, and have thought ever since the war began, in 1936 or thereabouts, that our cause is the better, but we have to keep on making it the better, which involves constant criticism.
Yours sincerely,
Geo. Orwell
Three years later, Orwell would write 1984. Two years after that, it would see publication and go on to generations of attention as perhaps the most eloquent fictional statement against a world reduced to superstates, saturated with “emotional nationalism,” acquiescent to “dictatorial methods, secret police,” and the systematic falsification of history,” and shot through by the willingness to “disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer.” Now that you feel like reading the novel again, or even for the first time, do browse our collection of 1984-related resources, which includes the eBook, the audio book, reviews, and even radio drama and comic book adaptations of Orwell’s work.
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In one time-lapse minute, you can watch Bigfoot Barleywine Style Ale, made by Sierra Nevada, turbulently sloshing around, rising and falling, over the course of six days. The clip is set to the music of Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, Op. 46. Now if you want to put this visual display into a bit of a larger educational context, then we recommend you spend another two minutes watching a short animated video explaining the beer-making process, from start to finish. For the impatient, the fermenting comes at the 1:20 mark.
Isaiah Berlin casts a long shadow over modern political philosophy. Rising to prominence as a British public intellectual in the 1950s alongside thinkers like A.J. Ayer and Hugh Trevor-Roper, Berlin (writes Joshua Chemiss in The Oxonian Review of Books) was at one time a “cold warrior,” his opposition to Soviet Communism the “lynchpin” of his thought. But his longevity and intellectual vitality meant he was much more besides, and he has remained a popular reference, though, as Chemiss points out, Berlin’s reputation took a beating from critics on the left and right after his death in 1997. Born into a prominent Russian-Jewish family, Berlin grew up in middle class stability until the Russian Revolution dismantled the Czarist Russia of his youth and his family relocated to Britain in 1921.
Berlin’s childhood experience of the Bolsheviks was never far from his mind and precipitated his aversion to violence and coercion, he confesses above in a 1992 interview with his biographer Michael Ignatieff (who spent ten years in conversation with Berlin). Originally broadcast on BBC 2, Ignatieff’s interview serves as an introduction to both the man himself and to his past—in lengthy segments that detail Berlin’s history through photographs and narration. Referring to Berlin’s hugely influential categorization of intellectual history, The Hedgehog and the Fox, Ignatieff tells us: “He once wrote, ‘A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one, big thing.’ He was a hedgehog, all his work was a defense of liberty.… All of his writing can be read as a defense of the individual against the violence of the crowd and the dogma of the party line.”
Berlin was enormously prolific, in print as well as in recorded media, and we have access to several of his lectures online. One radio lecture series, Freedom and its Betrayal, examined six thinkers Berlin identified as “anti-liberal.” Perhaps foremost among these was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his lecture on Rousseau above (continued here in Parts 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6), Berlin elaborates on his important distinction between types of liberty, a theme he returned to again and again, most famously in a lecture, eventually published as a 57-page pamphlet, called “Two Concepts of Liberty.” Berlin adapted much of the ideas in these lectures from his Political Ideas in the Romantic Age—written between 1950 and 1952 and published posthumously—a text that Berlin called his “torso.”
Oxford University hosts an extensive “Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library” that details the composition of “Two Concepts of Liberty,” from its earliest draft stages (above) to its publication history. You can read the full text of the published lecture here and listen to Berlin’s recorded dictation of an early draft below.
In the published version of “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Berlin succinctly sums up his major premise: “To coerce a man is to deprive him of freedom.” Then he goes on:
freedom from what? Almost every moralist in human history has praised freedom. Like happiness and goodness, like nature and reality, the meaning of this term is so porous that there little interpretation that it seems able to resist….[There are] more than two hundred senses.… of this protean word….
Berlin reduces the more than two hundred to two: negative liberty—dealing with the areas of life in which one is free from any interference; and positive liberty—his term for that which interferes in people’s lives for their supposed benefit and protection. Berlin’s conceptions of these two types is anchored in specific geopolitical arrangements and philosophical traditions, as Dwight MacDonald explained in a 1959 review of the published text. He saw Communism as an abuse of positive liberty and wished to enhance so-called negative liberty as much as possible. As such, Berlin is often cited approvingly by politicians and philosophers with more classical, limited understandings of state power, although these may include libertarians as well as liberals, finding common ground in values of ethical pluralism and robust civil liberties, both of which Berlin defended strenuously.
Berlin draws his account of negative liberty from the work of classical liberal political philosophers like John Locke, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill. Most of his critique of positive liberty focused on Romanticism and German Idealism, in which he saw the beginnings of totalitarianism (above, hear Berlin’s final 1965 lecture on the “Roots of Romanticism,” continued in Parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, & 7). Despite his preoccupation with kinds of freedom, his thought was extraordinarily idiosyncratic, wide-ranging, and diverse. Oxford hopes to soon add the text of much of Berlin’s published work to its Virtual Library. Now, in addition to “Two Concepts of Liberty,” it also houses online text of the essay collection Concepts and Categories. While we await the posting of more Berlin texts, we might attend again to Berlin’s conception of types of freedom, and hear them defined by the philosopher himself in a 1962 interview:
As in the case of words which everyone is in favour of, ‘freedom’ has a very great many senses – some of the world’s worst tyrannies have been undertaken in the name of freedom. Nevertheless, I should say that the word probably has two central senses, at any rate in the West. One is the familiar liberal sense in which freedom means that every man has a life to live and should be given the fullest opportunity of doing so, and that there are only two adequate reasons for controlling men. The first is that there are other goodsbesides freedom, such as, for example, security or peace or culture, or other things which human beings need, which must be given them, apart from the question of whether they want them or not. Secondly, if one man obtains too much, he will deprive other people of their freedom – freedom for the pike means death to the carp – and this is a perfectly adequate reason for curtailing freedom. Still, curtailing freedom isn’t the same as freedom.
The second sense of the word is not so much a matter of allowing people to do what they want as the idea that I want to be governed by myself and not pushed around by other people; and this idea leads one to the supposition that to be free means to be self-governing. To be self-governing means that the source of authority must lie in me – or in us, if we’re talking about a community. And if the source of freedom lies in me, then it’s comparatively unimportant how much control there is, provided the control is exercised bymyself, or my representatives, or my nation, my people, my tribe, my Church, and so forth. Provided that I am governed by people who are sympathetic to me, or understand my interests, I don’t mind how much of my life is pried into, or whether there is a private province which is divided from the public province; and in some modern States – for example the Soviet Union and other States with totalitarian governments – this second view seems to be taken.
Between these two views, I see no possibility of reconciliation.
A true fact about the thesis stage of an advanced degree: Whatever the academic field, whether writing a fifty page bachelor’s or master’s thesis or 250 plus page doctoral dissertation, at some point, you will need to winnow your argument down to an abstract summary of a couple succinct paragraphs. Then, one inevitably finds—when riding elevators with colleagues and mentors, talking to relatives over holiday dinners, justifying one’s existence to friends and acquaintances—that the whole damned thing needs to somehow reduce to one intelligible sentence or two. It’s all anyone has the patience for, honestly, and it saves you the trouble of trying to reconstruct complex arguments for people who won’t understand or care about them and who generally only asked out of politeness anyway.
But how, how, to cram years of research, agony, turmoil, crushing failure and soaring epiphany into bite-sized conversational nuggets without gross oversimplification to the point of tautological absurdity? Can it even be done?! The blog “lol my thesis,” started last year by a Harvard senior studying Human Developmental and Regenerative Biology, suggests that it can, but not without hilarious results. Part of an exploding genre of academic parody (and procrastination) sites, lol my thesis proudly ventures forth in its mission of “summing up years of work in one sentence” with open submissions from current students. Many of the submissions are from the sciences, and many from undergraduate theses, but a fair number also come from humanities and post-graduate studies. Take, for example, the following submission from an MFA Creative Nonfiction student at Emerson College, which directly addresses the intended audience:
“A collection of nonfiction essays, which means they’re written about real people and events, mom. Remember all those times you accused me of not listening to the things you said?”
A passive aggressive example that most of us who’ve been through the process can relate to at some level. Another one that hits home is this, from a Vassar Political Science major, who discovers too late that the argument doesn’t work: “Oops: Turns out self-published poetry didn’t actually affect Indian politics but I’m 60 pages in, so.”
The submissions from the sciences do not disappoint. For example, from a University of Maryland student of Biological Sciences: “We spent thousands of government dollars to create a mouse model for a disease only 32 people in the world have.” And a Science Writing student at M.I.T. gives us this particularly impressive example of brevity: “Wolves + humans, the ultimate frenemies.” Not to be outdone, a Stem Cell Biology student at Harvard offers a grimly terse confessional: “I have killed so many fish.”
The submissions are anonymous, but some good sports have chosen to include links to their theses, endearingly hoping that someone besides their advisor will actually want to read them. Most of the submissions, however, simply combine two qualities every advanced student knows all too well: a well-earned feeling of futility and the mordant wit required to keep going anyway.
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