Behold Pablo Picasso’s Illustrations of Balzac’s Short Story “The Hidden Masterpiece” (1931)

BalzacFrontis

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.

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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.

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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.”

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

See Pablo Picasso’s Spare, Ten­der Illus­tra­tions For a Lim­it­ed Edi­tion of Aristo­phanes’ Lysis­tra­ta (1934)

Watch Picas­so Cre­ate Entire Paint­ings in Mag­nif­i­cent Time-Lapse Film (1956)

A 3D Tour of Picasso’s Guer­ni­ca

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Against All Odds: A Gentle Introduction to Statistics Hosted by Harvard Geneticist Pardis Sabeti (Free Online Course)

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 videosAgainst 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.

Against All Odds: Inside Sta­tis­tics has been added to our col­lec­tion of Free Math Cours­es, a sub­set of our larg­er col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sta­tis­tics Explained Through Mod­ern Dance: A New Way of Teach­ing a Tough Sub­ject

Cal­cu­lus Life­saver: A Free Online Course from Prince­ton

The Math of Rock Climb­ing

Math: Free Cours­es Online

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Stanford Prof Makes Ukuleles from Wood Floor of New Concert Hall

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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jake Shimabukuro plays “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody” on the Uke

Musi­cians Re-Imag­ine the Com­plete Song­book of the Bea­t­les on the Ukulele

Amaz­ing Fact: Spaghet­ti and Ukulele Strings Actu­al­ly Grow on Trees

George Orwell Explains in a Revealing 1944 Letter Why He’d Write 1984

via Wikimedia Commons

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

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”:

I must say I believe, or fear, that tak­ing the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon dis­ap­pear, but only at the expense of strength­en­ing (a) Stal­in, (b) the Anglo-Amer­i­can mil­lion­aires and © all sorts of pet­ty fuhrers of the type of de Gaulle. All the nation­al move­ments every­where, even those that orig­i­nate in resis­tance to Ger­man dom­i­na­tion, seem to take non-demo­c­ra­t­ic forms, to group them­selves round some super­hu­man fuhrer (Hitler, Stal­in, Salazar, Fran­co, Gand­hi, De Valera are all vary­ing exam­ples) and to adopt the the­o­ry that the end jus­ti­fies the means. Every­where the world move­ment seems to be in the direc­tion of cen­tralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an eco­nom­ic sense but which are not demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly organ­ised and which tend to estab­lish a caste sys­tem. With this go the hor­rors of emo­tion­al nation­al­ism and a ten­den­cy 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. Already his­to­ry has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a his­to­ry of our own times which could be uni­ver­sal­ly accept­ed, and the exact sci­ences are endan­gered as soon as mil­i­tary neces­si­ty ceas­es to keep peo­ple up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews start­ed the war, and if he sur­vives that will become offi­cial his­to­ry. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the pur­pos­es of, say, bal­lis­tics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great super­states which are unable to con­quer one anoth­er, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direc­tion in which we are actu­al­ly mov­ing, though, of course, the process is reversible.

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.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to George Orwell

The Only Known Footage of George Orwell (Cir­ca 1921)

George Orwell and Dou­glas Adams Explain How to Make a Prop­er Cup of Tea

George Orwell’s Polit­i­cal Views, Explained in His Own Words

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, lit­er­a­ture, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Face­book page.

Watch Beer Ferment in Time-Lapse Motion, and Then Learn How to Make Beer with an Animated Video

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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Physics of Guin­ness Beer Demys­ti­fied

A Beer Bot­tle Gets Turned Into a 19th Cen­tu­ry Edi­son Cylin­der and Plays Fine Music

Wim Wen­ders Cre­ates Ads to Sell Beer (Stel­la Artois), Pas­ta (Bar­il­la), and More Beer (Car­ling)

An Introduction to the Political Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin Through His Free Writings & Audio Lectures


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.”

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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 goods besides 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 by myself, 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.  

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leo Strauss: 15 Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es Online

Intro­duc­tion to Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Yale Course

Alain de Bot­ton Tweets Short Course in Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

“Lol My Thesis” Showcases Painfully Hilarious Attempts to Sum up Years of Academic Work in One Sentence

ThesisOrigin

Image from Ph.D. Comics

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.

More wit­ty sum­maries can be found at lol my the­sis.

Relat­ed Con­tents:

The Illus­trat­ed Guide to a Ph.D.

Grad­u­ate School Bar­bie: A New Gift Idea for The Demor­al­ized Grad Stu­dent in Your Life

The Ph.D. Grind: Philip J. Guo’s Free Mem­oir Offers An Insider’s Look at Doc­tor­al Study

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Four Female Punk Bands That Changed Women’s Role in Rock

Today I am pleased to bring you sam­plings of a hand­ful of my favorite bands. It so hap­pens they are all most­ly-female or female-front­ed punk bands. This fact to me seems almost inci­den­tal to my enjoyment—these are all fan­tas­tic musi­cians, song­writ­ers, and/or per­son­al­i­ties. And yet their com­mon­al­i­ties are high­ly remark­able all the same. Punk intro­duced aggres­sive, all-female bands like The Slits and front­women like Sioux­ie Sioux who nev­er had to play vul­ner­a­ble objects, des­per­ate seduc­tress­es, jilt­ed lovers, femme fatales, etc. and yet still man­i­fest­ed their pow­er in their sex­u­al­i­ty as well as in their fierce intel­li­gence and fury. In the late ’70s, women strode out in front as lead­ers in punk scenes in the UK and US, and helped to change the gen­der pol­i­tics of rock and roll.

First up, the Run­aways, a band best known today for the lat­er careers of gui­tarists Joan Jett and Lita Ford. The Run­aways tend to get unfair­ly pegged as lit­tle more than wards and projects of man­ag­er Kim Fow­ley, but the L.A. band formed organ­i­cal­ly around Jett and drum­mer Sandy West in 1975 and suc­ceed­ed in their own right after split­ting with Fow­ley in 1977. While they did not tech­ni­cal­ly begin as a punk band, they briefly became asso­ci­at­ed with sev­er­al New York and Lon­don punks, espe­cial­ly due to Jett’s ori­en­ta­tion toward glam, garage, and punk. Ford, known for her flashy gui­tar solos, want­ed to go met­al (and lat­er did), and the band pulled apart in 1978. The Run­aways were so rock n’ roll that they were biggest in Japan, espe­cial­ly their song “Cher­ry Bomb” from their first, self-titled 1976 album. Watch them play the song above on Japan­ese TV in ’77.

Next (and my order­ing here means noth­ing, by the way), The Slits. When Ger­man-born front­woman Ari Up (step­daugh­ter of John Lydon, as it hap­pens) passed away from can­cer in 2010, many, many peo­ple mourned her death. And many more sent “Slits” trend­ing on all the social net­works. It was long past time then for a more pub­lic pro­file of the band, which reformed in 2005 but most­ly absent much crit­i­cal notice. Aris­ing in 1976 from mem­bers of a band called Flow­ers of Romance (lat­er the name of an album and song by Lydon’s Pub­lic Image Ltd.), the most­ly all-female Slits made a very dif­fer­ent sound from the Run­aways some­what for­mu­la­ic hard rock. Like the Clash, with whom they often played, the Slits evolved from raw street punk to tak­ing reg­gae ideas and mak­ing some­thing new, in their case some­thing weird­er, wob­bli­er, and more angu­lar than most any­one else at the time (though lat­er male post-punk bands like Swell Maps and Lydon’s PIL took much from them). See them do “Typ­i­cal Girls” above in a rare music video, and check out their cov­er of “Heard it Through the Grapevine.”

Siouxsie Sioux, of Siouxsie and the Ban­shees, and lat­er the Crea­tures, began her career in London’s punk scene as a fol­low­er of the Sex Pis­tols. In a scene thronged with inven­tive kids com­pet­ing for atten­tion, she stood out. Once she decid­ed to take the stage her­self (after an impromp­tu jam of “The Lord’s Prayer” with gui­tarist Steve Sev­erin and Sid Vicious on drums) and form her own band, she seemed to Slits gui­tarist Viv Alber­tine to have arrived “ful­ly made, ful­ly in con­trol, utter­ly con­fi­dent.” Siouxsie was “unlike any female singer before or since,” wrote rock jour­nal­ist Jon Sav­age, “com­mand­ing yet aloof, entire­ly mod­ern.” She was also a phe­nom­e­nal song­writer and, along with The Cure, Bauhaus, and The Damned, gets credit—for bet­ter or worse—for the ori­gins of goth rock. See Siouxsie com­mand the stage in 1978 above, doing “Hong Kong Gar­den.”

I feel I would be most remiss if I did not include Wendy O. Williams. As we seem to end­less­ly debate the social val­ue of cer­tain female pop stars clum­sy attempts to shock us, Williams spent most of the ‘70s onstage top­less, saw­ing gui­tars in half with chain­saws, and set­ting cars on fire. Was her band, the Plas­mat­ics, any good? It’s hard to say. They were… uneven. Not much of a singer, Williams and the Plas­mat­ics embraced a more rau­cous ver­sion of the Runaway’s hard rock and even­tu­al­ly moved toward met­al. This is not nec­es­sar­i­ly music you lis­ten to, it’s music you expe­ri­ence, in the sheer amount of bare­ly-con­trolled chaos Williams and the band con­jured onstage. Some of the stunts might look sil­ly in hind­sight, but bear in mind, she pushed the bound­aries of deco­rum over thir­ty years ago with the kind of sex­u­al frank­ness and pow­er that still makes our cul­ture very ner­vous. Williams’ antics made her a prime fig­ure for tele­vi­sion (like gross-out punk provo­ca­teur G.G. Allin, she became some­thing of a nov­el­ty act on the talk-show cir­cuit). See her above with the Plas­mat­ics on Sol­id Gold in 1981, with the added bonus of an inter­view with the “Madame” pup­pet (of Way­land Flow­ers and Madame) after the per­for­mance.

I can­not begin to do jus­tice here to the groundswell of excel­lent female punk bands from the ‘70s and ‘80s (not even to men­tion the ‘90s), and I can’t over­state their impor­tance. Dr. Helen Red­ding­ton, for­mer bassist and singer for ’70s punk band The Chefs, approv­ing­ly quotes jour­nal­ist Car­o­line Coon, one­time man­ag­er of both The Clash and The Slits as say­ing: “it would be pos­si­ble to tell the whole sto­ry of British punk sole­ly through its female bands and artists” (this is much less the case in U.S. punk his­to­ry). You might wish to check out the rather crude­ly made, but inter­est­ing doc­u­men­tary She’s a Punk Rock­er and the data­base on punk77.com for more. I haven’t men­tioned Pat­ti Smith, but we cov­er her body of work fre­quent­ly enough here. Yes, I’ve left off Blondie, and of course X‑Ray Spex, and two more favorites of mine—the sad­ly under­rat­ed but tru­ly awe­some Bush Tetras and the obscure, Devo-like Mo-Dettes. The list, as always, could go on, but per­haps some of you have your own favorite female or female-front­ed punk bands. If so, add them to the com­ments, prefer­ably with a link to audio or video.

via Net­work Awe­some

Relat­ed Con­tent:

CBGB’s: The Roots of Punk Lets You Watch Vin­tage Footage from the Hey­day of NYC’s Great Music Scene

The Art of Punk Presents a New Doc­u­men­tary on The Dead Kennedys and Their Grit­ty Aes­thet­ics

New Doc­u­men­tary Brings You Inside Africa’s Lit­tle-Known Punk Rock Scene

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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