Robert Reich met Bill Clinton when they were both Rhodes Scholars during the 1960s. In the 70s, Reich attended Yale Law School with Hill and Bill. And then, decades later, he served in the Clinton administration as Secretary of Labor. Somewhere along the line, the political economist picked up some drawing skills (putting him in good company with Winston Churchill and George Bush) that work nicely in our age of whiteboard animated videos. Now a professor at UC Berkeley, Reich visually debunks three economic mythologies in two minutes. This clip follows a rapidfire 2012 video, again featuring his cartooning skills, called The Truth About the Economy.
It’s easy to think we know all there is to know about Sigmund Freud. His name, after all, has become an adjective, a sure sign that someone’s legacy has embedded itself in the cultural consciousness. But did you know that the German neurologist we credit with the invention of psychoanalysis, the diagnoses of hysteria, dream interpretation, and the death drive began his career patiently dissecting eels in search of… eel testicles? Perhaps you did know that. Perhaps you only suspected it. There are few things about Freud—who also pioneered both the medical and recreational use of cocaine, joined the august British Royal Society, and unwittingly re-engineered philosophy and literary criticism—that surprise me anymore. Freud was a peculiarly talented individual.
One area in which he excelled may seem modest next to his roster of publications and celebrity acquaintances, and yet, the doctor’s skill as a medical draughtsman and maker of diagrams to illustrate his theories surely deserves some appreciation. Freud’s drawing received a book length treatment in 2006’s From Neurology to Psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud’s Neurological Drawings and Diagrams of the Mind by Lynn Gamwell and Mark Solms. These are but a small sampling of the many works of medical art found within its covers, taken from a 2006 exhibit at the New York Academy of Medicine of the largest collection of Freud’s drawings ever assembled, in commemoration of his 150th birthday.
As the title of the book indicates, the drawings literally illustrate the radical shift Freud made from the hard science of neurology to a practice of his own invention. Curator Gamwell writes, “as Freud focused on increasingly complex mental functions such as disorders of language and memory, he put aside any attempt to diagram the underlying physiological structure, such as neurological pathways, and he began making schematic images of hypothetical psychological structures,” i.e. the Ego, Superego, and Id, as represented at the top in a 1933 diagram. Below it, from 1921, see “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” a schematic that “attempts to represent relations between the major mental systems (or agencies) in a group of human minds.” And just above, see Freud’s diagram for “The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness” from 1898, depicting “associative links between various conscious, preconscious and unconscious word presentations.”
It is in these late nineteenth-century diagrams that we see Freud make the definitive move from empirically observed illustrations of physical structures—like the 1878 “Spinal Ganglia and Spinal Chord of Petromyzom” above—to relations between ideas and “conceptual entities that have no tangible existence in the physical world.” That shift, generally marked by the publication of Studies in Hysteria in 1895, caused Freud some unease. “Looking back over his career 30 years later,” writes Mark Solms, “ his longing for the comfortable respectability of his earlier career is still evident.” Even at the time, Freud would write in Studies in Hysteria that his case histories “lack the serious stamp of science.” Though his studies of eel, lamprey, and human brains involved tangible, observable phenomena, he approached the new discipline of psychoanalysis with no less rigor, stating only that the “the nature of the subject” had changed, not his method.
The drawings, writes Benedict Carey in the New York Times, “tell a story in three acts, from biology to psychology, from the microscope to the couch.” As Freud makes the transition, his meticulously detailed medical work, copied from glass slides, gives way to loose outlines. One drawing of the brain’s auditory system from 1886 (above) “is as spare and geometric as a Calder sculpture.” Just a few years later, Freud sketched out the diagram below in 1894, a schematic, writes Solms, of “the relationship between various normal and pathological mood states and sexual physiology.” It’s his first purely psychoanalytic drawing, sketched in a letter to a colleague, Dr. Wilhelm Fleiss.
In the later diagrams, as we see above, his tentative freehand gave way to typescript and a technical draughtsman’s precision, with some drawings resembling, in Carey’s words, “the schematic for an air-conditioning system.” Freud seems to comment on the architectural nature of these diagrams when he writes in The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, “We are justified, in my view, in giving free reign to our speculations so long as we retain the coolness of our judgment, and do not mistake the scaffolding for the building.” It’s a warning many of Freud’s disciples may not have heeded carefully enough.
It’s how things go around here. You do some research on Samuel Beckett’s plays (see post from earlier today) and you discover there’s a naval ship dedicated to the Irish playwright. Launched in November 2013 and commissioned in May 2014, LÉ Samuel Beckett (P61) patrols Irish waters, allowing the Irish navy to conduct search and rescue operations, undertake vessel boardings, and also protect fisheries. According to an Irish site, the ship “represents an updated and lengthened version of the original RÓISÍN Class OPVs… She is built to the highest international standards in terms of safety, equipment fit, technological innovation and crew comfort.” The cost, 56 million euros.
Of course, the Irish haven’t forgotten their other great literary son. LÉ James Joyce (P62) will be launched in May 2015. And guess what, LÉ Seamus Heaney may soon be on the horizon.
Does anyone know of another nation that honors its artists in such a way?
“Twain believed that memorization — a common strategy of 19th-century schooling — was a worthy, if tiresome, pursuit, and looked for ways to make it more interesting for annoyed students,” writes Slate’sRebecca Onion. This line of thinking led him to create the Memory-Builder, which he described as a “game which shall fill the children’s heads with dates without study” in an 1883 letter to a friend. He explained the background of his educational philosophy in much fuller detail in a 1914 piece from Harper’s magazine:
Sixteen years ago when my children were little creatures the governess was trying to hammer some primer histories into their heads. Part of this fun — if you like to call it that — consisted in the memorizing of the accession dates of the thirty-seven personages who had ruled England from the Conqueror down. These little people found it a bitter, hard contract. It was all dates, they all looked alike, and they wouldn’t stick. Day after day of the summer vacation dribbled by, and still the kings held the fort; the children couldn’t conquer any six of them.
This experience gave rise to a couple of different learning methods, of which the Memory-Builder (patented in 1885) would prove the best-known. Though Twain worked out a way to play it on a cribbage board converted into a historical timeline, you can play a technologically much-updated but materially identical version of the game online (with the same cribbage pins and the same strangely intense focus on those royals) at the web site of the University of Oregon’s library. Alternatively, you can play an adaptation that deals with the life and times of Twain himself at the University of Virginia’s web site.
Whether or not the Memory-Builder can help you learn your history, you’ll have to find out for yourself. Not having caught on at the time, Twain’s game didn’t get far out of the prototype stage, but the idea behind it has survived in the form of one of Twain’s many so-very-quotable quotes: “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” Something tells me he’d approve of seeing his game on the internet, surely the tool that has done more to get education into the learner’s own hands than anything else in human history so far. (Um, have you seen our list of 1100 Free Online Courses?)
As Samuel Beckett’s writing progressed through the ’60s, it became even more minimal, despairing, and bleak. It was as if he was paring away as much as he could to see if theater was left standing. If a painting could be one color like Ad Reinhardt, what would be the Reinhardt of theater? Jonathan Crow mentioned yesterday how Beckett’s 1969 play Breath, for instance, “runs just a minute long and features just the sound of breathing.” There is a bit more to it than that. Not a lot more, but yes, more. Here’s the play’s script in full:
Curtain.
1. Faint light on stage littered with miscellaneous rubbish. Hold for about five seconds.
2. Faint brief cry and immediately inspiration and slow increase of light together reaching maximum together in about ten seconds. Silence and hold about five seconds.
3. Expiration and slow decrease of light together reaching minimum together (light as in I) in about ten seconds and immediately cry as before. Silence and hold for about five seconds.
Beckett adds some notes:
Rubbish. No verticals, all scattered and lying.
Cry. Instant of recorded vagitus. Important that two cries be identical, switching on and off strictly synchronized light and breath.
Breath. Amplified recording.
Maximum light. Not bright. If 0 = dark and 10 = bright, light should move from about 3 to 6 and back.
The play came about when one of the most important English theater critics of his time Kenneth Tynan asked for short skits for an erotic revue he was putting on in 1969, called Oh! Calcutta. Others invitees included Jules Feiffer, John Lennon, Edna O’Brien, Jacques Levy, Sam Shepard, and Leonard Melfi. The plan was to perform each skit but keep each writer’s name a secret. Beckett reportedly wrote the play on a postcard and sent it to Tynan, then became enraged when he heard that instead of rubbish on stage, Tynan had used naked bodies *and* in fact had explicitly credited Beckett in the program. Breath wouldn’t get a proper staging until 1999 in London’s West End, as part of an evening with Beckett’s more substantial Krapp’s Last Tape. You can read reports of how the audience reacted.
Several directors have brought Breath to life. Artist Damien Hirst had a go for the 2002 Beckett on Film project. As seen above, his version has very spectacular rubbish gathered from a hospital and, glimpsed in the final seconds, a cigarette butt swastika.
Below, check out a more “traditional” interpretation of the play from the National Theatre School of Canada’s Tech Production class. After that comes a repeat of Hirst’s version, and then one more alternative, Darren Smyth’s 2009 TV static-filled attempt. (The rest of the video is a mixed bag of the Alan Parsons Project and a Tim Burton short, don’t ask why.)
Despite Beckett’s morose reputation, there’s always a black humor underneath it all. And if you’re going to ask the man to write an “erotic skit,” this is what you get, the futility of life from womb to tomb in a minute.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills and/or watch his films here.
Samuel Beckett, Pic, 1″ by Roger Pic. Via Wikimedia Commons
Clad in a black turtleneck and with a shock of white hair, Samuel Beckett was a gaunt, gloomy high priest of modernism. After the 1955 premiere of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot (watch him stage a performance here), Kenneth Tynan quipped, ”It has no plot, no climax, no denouement; no beginning, no middle and no end.” From there, Beckett’s work only got more austere, bleak and despairing. His 1969 play Breath, for instance, runs just a minute long and features just the sound of breathing.
An intensely private man, he managed to mesmerize the public even as he turned away from the limelight. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1969, his wife Suzanne, fearing the onslaught of fame that the award would bring, decried it as a “catastrophe.”
A recently published collection of his letters from 1941–1956, the period leading up to his international success with his play Waiting for Godot, casts some light on at least one corner of the man’s private life – what books were piling up on his bed stand. Below is an annotated list of what he was reading during that time. Not surprisingly, he really dug Albert Camus’s The Stranger. “Try and read it,” he writes. “I think it is important.” He dismisses Agatha Christie’s Crooked Houseas “very tired Christie” but praises Around the World in 80 Days, “It is lively stuff.” But the book he reserves the most praise for is J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. “I liked it very much indeed, more than anything for a long time.”
You can see the full list below. It was originally published online by Cambridge University Press in 2011. Books with an asterisk next to the title can be found in our collection of 700 Free eBooks.
Andromaque* by Jean Racine: “I read Andromaque again with greater admiration than ever and I think more understanding, at least more understanding of the chances of the theatre today.”
Lautreamont and Sade by Maurice Blanchot: “Some excellent ideas, or rather starting-points for ideas, and a fair bit of verbiage, to be read quickly, not as a translator does. What emerges from it though is a truly gigantic Sade, jealous of Satan and of his eternal torments, and confronting nature more than with humankind.”
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
In high school, the language I most fell in love with happened to be a dead one: Latin. Sure, it’s spoken at the Vatican, and when I first began to study the tongue of Virgil and Catullus, friends joked that I could only use it if I moved to Rome. Tempting, but church Latin barely resembles the classical written language, a highly formal grammar full of symmetries and puzzles. You don’t speak classical Latin; you solve it, labor over it, and gloat, to no one in particular, when you’ve rendered it somewhat intelligible. Given that the study of an ancient language is rarely a conversational art, it can sometimes feel a little alienating.
And so you might imagine how pleased I was to discover what looked like classical Latin in the real world: the text known to designers around the globe as “Lorem Ipsum,” also called “filler text” and (erroneously) “Greek copy.”
The idea, Priceonomics informs us, is to force people to look at the layout and font, not read the words. Also, “nobody would mistake it for their native language,” therefore Lorem Ipsum is “less likely than other filler text to be mistaken for final copy and published by accident.” If you’ve done any web design, you’ve probably seen it, looking something like this:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
When I first encountered this text, I did what any Latin geek will—set about trying to translate it. But it wasn’t long before I realized that Lorem Ipsum is mostly gibberish, a garbling of Latin that makes no real sense. The first word, “Lorem,” isn’t even a word; instead it’s a piece of the word “dolorem,” meaning pain, suffering, or sorrow. So where did this mash-up of Latin-like syntax come from, and how did it get so scrambled? First, the source of Lorem Ipsum—tracked down by Hampden-Sydney Director of Publications Richard McClintock—is Roman lawyer, statesman, and philosopher Cicero, from an essay called “On the Extremes of Good and Evil,” or De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum.
Why Cicero? Put most simply, writes Priceonomics, “for a long time, Cicero was everywhere.” His fame as the most skilled of Roman rhetoricians meant that his writing became the benchmark for prose in Latin, the standard European language of the middle ages. The passage that generated Lorem Ipsum translates in part to a sentiment Latinists will well understand:
Nor is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure.
Dolorem Ipsum, “pain in and of itself,” sums up the tortuous feeling of trying to render some of Cicero’s complex, verbose sentences into English. Doing so with tolerable proficiency is, for some of us, “great pleasure” indeed.
But how did Cicero, that master stylist, come to be so badly manhandled as to be nearly unrecognizable? Lorem Ipsum has a history that long predates online content management. It has been used as filler text since the sixteenth century when—as McClintock theorized—“some typesetter had to make a type specimen book, to demo different fonts” and decided that “the text should be insensible, so as not to distract from the page’s graphical features.” It appears that this enterprising craftsman snatched up a page of Cicero he had lying around and turned it into nonsense. The text, says McClintock, “has survived not only four centuries of letter-by-letter resetting but even the leap into electronic typesetting, essentially unchanged.”
The story of Lorem Ipsum is a fascinating one—if you’re into that kind of thing—but its longevity raises a further question: should we still be using it at all, this mangling of a dead language, in a medium as vital and dynamic as web publishing, where “content” refers to hundreds of design elements besides font. Is Lorem Ipsum a quaint piece of nostalgia that’s outlived its usefulness? In answer, you may wish to read Karen McGrane’s spirited defense of the practice. Or, if you feel it’s time to let the garbled Latin go the way of manual typesetting machines, consider perhaps as an alternative “Nietzsche Ipsum,” which generates random paragraphs of mostly verb-less, incoherent Nietzsche-like text, in English. Hey, at least it looks like a real language.
Meryl Streep, frequently hailed as one of our Greatest Living Actresses — she claims there’s no such thing — commands a near-encyclopedic mastery of accents.
Others may prepare for their roles by working with a dialect coach or listening to tapes of native speakers, but Streep pushes to the limit, as indicated in the conversation with author Andre Dubus III, below.
She not only learned Polish in order to play a troubled Holocaust survivor in Sophie’s Choice,she thought deeply about the way gender roles and period inform vocal presentation.
Her commitment to her craft is inadvertently to blame for popularizing the phrase “dingo’s got my baby.”
How refreshing that this versatile and accomplished actor is not precious about her skills. She gamely trotted them out for the comedian Ellen DeGeneres’ parlor game, above. Looks like fun, provided one’s not an introvert. Each player draws a card labelled with an accent, sticks it to the brim of a silly hat, then tried to guess the accent, based on her partner’s impromptu performance.
“Brooklyn?” Streep giggles when the Louisiana-born DeGeneres has a go at Boston.
Her stab at the Bronx shows off her improv chops far better than the most recent stunt DeGeneres roped her into.
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