From Alain de Botton’ School of Life comes the latest in a series of animated introductions to influential literary figures. Previous installments gave us a look at the life and work of Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf. This one takes us inside the literary world of Jane Austen. And, as always, de Botton puts an accent on how reading literature can change your life. “Jane Austen’s novels are so readable and so interesting…” notes The School of Life Youtube channel,” because she wasn’t an ordinary kind of novelist: she wanted her work to help us to be better and wiser people. Her novels [available on this list] had a philosophy of personal development at their heart.” The video above expands on that idea. Enjoy.
I admit it now, I was once an avid listener of the soothing new age music of Enya. At the time, in my musical circles, this was not cool, and at the time I cared about such things. So Enya was my guilty secret. I didn’t need to work that hard to hide my affection. I only listened to Enya at night, as I lay in bed alone and drifted off. I used my Enya cassette tapes (yes tapes), you see, to put myself to sleep.
I’ve had other sleep favorites. Beethoven, Mozart, Bach… interpretations of Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach by synthesizer wizard Wendy Carlos…. It may seem disparaging to say that a certain composer’s music lulls one to sleep, but I think it’s just the opposite. So does composer and musician Max Richter, who has created an eight-hour piece called “Sleep” that is “meant to be slept through,” says Richter. (There’s also a one hour version that’s more readily available for purchase.) Its gentle waves of strings, voice, piano, and synths are like a musical Lethe one floats on into oblivion.
Richter has performed the piece with other musicians, just recently overnight on a September 27th BBC Radio 3 broadcast, “the longest live broadcast,” writes The New Yorker, “of a single piece of music in the station’s history.” The small audience in attendance mostly stayed awake. One member reportedly hallucinated. The composition consists of thirty-one themed movements (Hear “Dream 3 (in the midst of my life)” above). Lovers of modern minimalist composers like Philip Glass and William Basinski will notice similar uses of drone notes and repetition in “Sleep.” You may even hear a touch of Enya….
Richter’s is the perfect music to accompany me into dreamland; even those movements that include a vocalist use the voice as a wordless, ethereal instrument, as so many ambient musicians do. I’ve come across more than a few favorite ambient and minimalist composers late at night, when Spotify begins recommending sleep playlists. “Sleep,” it turns out, “is one of Spotify’s most popular categories,” according to Billboard. However, the “world’s favorite choice when choosing music to unwind” may surprise you: red-headed English singer/songwriter Ed Sheeran.
I’m not personally a fan of his music, but even if I were, I can’t imagine listening to it as I settle down to sleep. Nonetheless, millions of people stream Sheeran’s songs on repeat at bedtime, along with other pop artists like Ellie Goulding, John Legend, Sam Smith, and Rihanna. To each their own, I guess. Hear a playlist of the most-streamed “sleep” music on Spotify above. (If you don’t have Spotify’s free software, download it here.) If none of these tunes do it for you, consider giving iTunes’ 27th most popular podcast, Sleep With Me, a chance. Or, let us know in the comments below what music, if any, helps calm your nerves and soothe your tired brain as you climb into bed after a long day.
Why must we all work long hours to earn the right to live? Why must only the wealthy have access to leisure, aesthetic pleasure, self-actualization…? Everyone seems to have an answer, according to their political or theological bent. One economic bogeyman, so-called “trickle-down” economics, or “Reaganomics,” actually predates our 40th president by a few hundred years at least. The notion that we must better ourselves—or simply survive—by toiling to increase the wealth and property of already wealthy men was perhaps first comprehensively articulated in the 18th-century doctrine of “improvement.” In order to justify privatizing common land and forcing the peasantry into jobbing for them, English landlords attempted to show in treatise after treatise that 1) the peasants were lazy, immoral, and unproductive, and 2) they were better off working for others. As a corollary, most argued that landowners should be given the utmost social and political privilege so that their largesse could benefit everyone.
This scheme necessitated a complete redefinition of what it meant to work. In his study, The English Village Community and the Enclosure Movements, historian W.E. Tate quotes from several of the “improvement” treatises, many written by Puritans who argued that “the poor are of two classes, the industrious poor who are content to work for their betters, and the idle poor who prefer to work for themselves.” Tate’s summation perfectly articulates the early modern redefinition of “work” as the creation of profit for owners. Such work is virtuous, “industrious,” and leads to contentment. Other kinds of work, leisurely, domestic, pleasurable, subsistence, or otherwise, qualifies—in an Orwellian turn of phrase—as “idleness.” (We hear echoes of this rhetoric in the language of “deserving” and “undeserving” poor.) It was this language, and its legal and social repercussions, that Max Weber later documented in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Karl Marx reacted to in Das Capital, and feminists have shown to be a consolidation of patriarchal power and further exclusion of women from economic participation.
Along with Marx, various others have raised significant objections to Protestant, capitalist definitions of work, including Thomas Paine, the Fabians, agrarians, and anarchists. In the twentieth century, we can add two significant names to an already distinguished list of dissenters: Buckminster Fuller and Bertrand Russell. Both challenged the notion that we must have wage-earning jobs in order to live, and that we are not entitled to indulge our passions and interests unless we do so for monetary profit or have independent wealth. In a New York Times column on Russell’s 1932 essay “In Praise of Idleness,” Gary Gutting writes, “For most of us, a paying job is still utterly essential — as masses of unemployed people know all too well. But in our economic system, most of us inevitably see our work as a means to something else: it makes a living, but it doesn’t make a life.”
In far too many cases in fact, the work we must do to survive robs us of the ability to live by ruining our health, consuming all our precious time, and degrading our environment. In his essay, Russell argued that “there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what has always been preached.” His “arguments for laziness,” as he called them, begin with definitions of what we mean by “work,” which might be characterized as the difference between labor and management:
What is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.
Russell further divides the second category into “those who give orders” and “those who give advice as to what orders should be given.” This latter kind of work, he says, “is called politics,” and requires no real “knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given,” but only the ability to manipulate: “the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising.” Russell then discusses a “third class of men” at the top, “more respected than either of the classes of the workers”—the landowners, who “are able to make others pay for the privilege of being allowed to exist and to work.” The idleness of landowners, he writes, “is only rendered possible by the industry of others. Indeed their desire for comfortable idleness is historically the source of the whole gospel of work. The last thing they have ever wished is that others should follow their example.”
The “gospel of work” Russell outlines is, he writes, “the morality of the Slave State,” and the kinds of murderous toil that developed under its rule—actual chattel slavery, fifteen hour workdays in abominable conditions, child labor—has been “disastrous.” Work looks very different today than it did even in Russell’s time, but even in modernity, when labor movements have managed to gather some increasingly precarious amount of social security and leisure time for working people, the amount of work forced upon the majority of us is unnecessary for human thriving and in fact counter to it—the result of a still-successful capitalist propaganda campaign: if we aren’t laboring for wages to increase the profits of others, the logic still dictates, we will fall to sloth and vice and fail to earn our keep. “Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do,” goes the Protestant proverb Russell quotes at the beginning of his essay. On the contrary, he concludes,
…in a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and capacity.
The less we are forced to labor, the more we can do good work in our idleness, and we can all labor less, Russell argues, because “modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all” instead of “overwork for some and starvation for others.”
A few decades later, visionary architect, inventor, and theorist Buckminster Fuller would make exactly the same argument, in similar terms, against the “specious notion that everybody has to earn a living.” Fuller articulated his ideas on work and non-work throughout his long career. He put them most succinctly in a 1970 New York magazine “Environmental Teach-In”:
It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest…. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist.
Many people are paid very little to do backbreaking labor; many others paid quite a lot to do very little. The creation of surplus jobs leads to redundancy, inefficiency, and the bureaucratic waste we hear so many politicians rail against: “we have inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors”—all to satisfy a dubious moral imperative and to make a small number of rich people even richer.
What should we do instead? We should continue our education, and do what we please, Fuller argues: “The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” We should all, in other words, work for ourselves, performing the kind of labor we deem necessary for our quality of life and our social arrangements, rather than the kinds of labor dictated to us by governments, landowners, and corporate executives. And we can all do so, Fuller thought, and all flourish similarly. Fuller called the technological and evolutionary advancement that enables us to do more with less “euphemeralization.” InCritical Path, a visionary work on human development, he claimed “It is now possible to give every man, woman and child on Earth a standard of living comparable to that of a modern-day billionaire.”
Sound utopian? Perhaps. But Fuller’s far-reaching path out of reliance on fossil fuels and into a sustainable future has never been tried, for some depressingly obvious reasons and some less obvious. Neither Russell nor Fuller argued for the abolition—or inevitable self-destruction—of capitalism and the rise of a workers’ paradise. (Russell gave up his early enthusiasm for communism.) Neither does Gary Gutting, a philosophy professor at the University of Notre Dame, who in his New York Times commentary on Russell asserts that “Capitalism, with its devotion to profit, is not in itself evil.” Most Marxists on the other hand would argue that devotion to profit can never be benign. But there are many middle ways between state communism and our current religious devotion to supply-side capitalism, such as robust democratic socialism or a basic income guarantee. In any case, what most dissenters against modern notions of work share in common is the conviction that education should produce critical thinkers and self-directed individuals, and not, as Gutting puts it, “be primarily for training workers or consumers”—and that doing work we love for the sake of our own personal fulfillment should not be the exclusive preserve of a propertied leisure class.
If you’ve ever had any doubt, for some reason or other, that rock and roll descended directly from the blues, the video above, a history of the blues in 50 riffs, should convince you. And while you might think a blues history that ends in rock n roll would start with Robert Johnson, this guitarist reaches back to the country blues of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Black Snake Moan” from 1928 then moves through legendarily tuneful players like Skip James and Reverend Gary Davis before we get to the infamous Mr. Johnson.
Big Bill Broonzy is, as he should be, represented. Other country blues greats like soft-spoken farmer Mississippi John Hurt and hardened felon Lead Belly, “King of the 12 String Guitar,” are not. Say what you will about that. The recordings these artists made with Okeh Records and Alan Lomax, despite their commercial failure in the 30s, midwifed the blues revival of the fifties and sixties. Hear Lead Belly’s version of folk ballad “Gallows Pole” above, a song Led Zeppelin made famous. Lead Belly’s acoustic blues inspired everyone from John Fogerty to Skiffle King Lonnie Donegan, Pete Seeger to Jimmy Page, as did the rootsy country blues of Lightnin’ Hopkins, who is included in the 50 riffs. As are John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and BB King’s electric styles—all of them picked up by blues rock revivalists, including, of course, Jimi Hendrix.
Hendrix’s “Red House” riff makes the cut here, as we move slowly into rock and roll. But before we get to Hendrix, we must first check in with two other Kings, Freddie and Albert—especially Albert. Hendrix “was star struck,” says Rolling Stone, “when his hero [Albert King] opened for him at the Fillmore in 1967.” For his part, King said, “I taught [Hendrix] a lesson about the blues. I could have easily played his songs, but he couldn’t play mine.” See King play “Born Under a Bad Sign” in 1981, above, and hear why Hendrix worshipped him.
Mississippi blues moved to Memphis, Chicago, New York and to Texas, where by the 70s and 80s, ZZ Top and Stevie Ray Vaughan added their own southwest roadhouse swagger. (No Johnny Winter, alas.) Many people will be pleased to see Irish rocker Rory Gallagher in the mix, and amused that The Blues Brothers get a mention. Many more usual suspects appear, and a few unusual picks. I’m very glad to hear a brief R.L. Burnside riff. The White Stripes, Tedeschi Trucks Band, and Joe Bonamassa round things out into the 2010’s. Everyone will miss their favorite blues player. (As usual, the powerhouse gospel blues guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe gets overlooked.) I would love to see included in any history of blues such obscure but brilliant guitarists as Evan Johns (above), whose rockabilly blues guitar freakouts sound like nothing else. Or John Dee Holeman, below, whose effortless, understated rhythm playing goes unmatched in my book.
Like so many of the bluesmen who came before them, these gentlemen seem to represent a dying breed. And yet the blues lives on and evolves in artists like Gary Clark Jr., The Black Keys, and Alabama Shakes. And of course there’s the prodigy Bonamassa, whom you absolutely have to see below at age 12, jamming with experimental country speed demon Danny Gatton’s band (he gets going around 1:05).
If you’re missing your favorites, give them a shout out below. Who do you think has to be included in any history of the blues—told in riffs or otherwise—and why?
Does any couple loom larger in the world of twentieth-century American art than Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe? Not if you believe the Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. If you go there, you’ll find “thousands of letters and hundreds of photographs in addition to a collection of literary manuscripts, scrapbooks, ephemera, fine art, and realia, primarily dating between 1880 and 1980, which document the lives and careers of the photographer/publisher/gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz and the painter Georgia O’Keeffe.” But you can even view some of its material here on the internet, including photos by and of “Stieglitz and his circle of artists and writers” and “a variety of paintings and drawings, letters and ephemera, and medals and awards.”
They even enjoyed a kind of artistic togetherness during the long-distance stretches of that relationship, when O’Keeffe “discovered her love for the landscape of the American Southwest and spent increasing amounts of time living and working there.”
And while many of us already know about her favorite subjects and the ways in which she realized them on canvas, fewer of us know about the efforts Stieglitz took to make photography into not just a legitimate but respected art form. To get a sense of what that took, start with Stieglitz’s autochromes (below), some of the earliest ventures made by an American artist into the realm of color photography. Both Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, each in there own medium, made us see things differently. How many art-world power couples can say the same?
If you’re near Pasadena, California, stop by the Flower Pepper Gallery and see Facade, the new exhibition featuring the work of visual artist Randy Hage. For decades now, Hage has been fascinated by the beauty of aging structures in New York City. This led him, beginning in the late 1990s, to start photographing aging storefronts in the city, “with their hand painted signs, layers of architecture, wonderful patinas and intriguing history.” Later, he decided to preserve their memory in miniaturized, hyper-realistic sculptures (like the ones now on display in Pasadena through November 18th). In the video above, see just how perfectly Hage manages to recreate New York storefronts in miniature. Here’s another famous-but-now-defunct facade you might recognize:
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In modern times, we don’t regard female musicians as in and of themselves unusual. Our rosters of favorite rockers, pop-stars, solo singer-songwriters, and what have you might well feature as many women as men — or, depending on the subgenre, many more women than men. But those of us who listen to a great deal of classical music might feel a tad sheepish about how much more heavily male our playlists slant, at least in terms of the composers. For a variety of historical and cultural reasons, the classical canon can feel like a man’s world indeed.
But it doesn’t have to! The Spotify playlist above, “1200 Years of Women Composers: From Hildegard To Higdon,” reveals that women started shaping what we now know as classical music far longer ago than most of us realize. (If you don’t have Spotify’s free software, download it here.) The playlist, which contains over 900 pieces and will take you days to listen to, begins in medieval times with the Byzantine abbess, poet, composer, and hymnographer Kassia (shown above) and ends with female composers from around the world not only living but (especially by the standards of those who write orchestral music) still young, like Misato Mochizuki, Helena Tulve, and Lera Auerbach.
This comes arranged by Spotify Classical Playlists, whose site describes how the playlist offers not just an anthology of women composers, but also “a brief history of western classical music. It’s really fascinating to hear music constantly reinventing itself from the monophonic and deeply spiritual medieval chant of Hildegard [of Bingen] all the way into Higdon’s lush and ultra-modern percussion concerto.” And before you begin this epic listen, bear in mind the quote from Faust that appears there: “Das Ewig Weibliche Zieht ins hinan” — “The eternal feminine leads us upwards.”
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