Looking for proof of evolution? Perhaps you don’t need to look much beyond your own body. Created by Vox, the video above highlights the vestigial body parts and traits we’ve retained from earlier points in our evolutionary history. Writes Vox’s Joss Fong:
Vestigial structures are evolution’s leftovers — body parts that, through inheritance, have outlived the context in which they arose. Some of the most delightful reminders of the common ancestry we share with other animals, they show that the building blocks of the human body predate our species by hundreds of millions of years.
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After his radical conversion to Christian anarchism, Leo Tolstoy adopted a deeply contrarian attitude. The vehemence of his attacks on the class and traditions that produced him were so vigorous that certain critics, now mostly obsolete, might call his struggle Oedipal. Tolstoy thoroughly opposed the patriarchal institutions he saw oppressing working people and constraining the spiritual life he embraced. He championed revolution, “a change of a people’s relation towards Power,” as he wrote in a 1907 pamphlet, “The Meaning of the Russian Revolution”: “Such a change is now taking place in Russia, and we, the whole Russian people, are accomplishing it.”
In that “we,” Tolstoy aligns himself with the Russian peasantry, as he does in other pamphlets like the 1909-10 journal, “Three Days in the Village.” These essays and others of the period rough out a political philosophy and cultural criticism, often aimed at affirming the ruddy moral health of the peasantry and pointing up the decadence of the aristocracy and its institutions. In keeping with the theme, one of Tolstoy’s pamphlets, a 1906 essay on Shakespeare, takes on that most hallowed of literary forefathers and expresses “my own long-established opinion about the works of Shakespeare, in direct opposition, as it is, to that established in all the whole European world.”
After a lengthy analysis of King Lear, Tolstoy concludes that the English playwright’s “works do not satisfy the demands of all art, and, besides this, their tendency is of the lowest and most immoral.” But how had all of the Western world been lead to universally admire Shakespeare, a writer who “might have been whatever you like, but he was not an artist”? Through what Tolstoy calls an “epidemic suggestion” spread primarily by German professors in the late 18th century. In 21st-century parlance, we might say the Shakespeare-as-genius meme went viral.
Tolstoy also characterizes Shakespeare-veneration as a harmful cultural vaccination administered to everyone without their consent: “free-minded individuals, not inoculated with Shakespeare-worship, are no longer to be found in our Christian society,” he writes, “Every man of our society and time, from the first period of his conscious life, has been inoculated with the idea that Shakespeare is a genius, a poet, and a dramatist, and that all his writings are the height of perfection.”
In truth, Tolstoy proclaims, the venerated Bard is “an insignificant, inartistic writer…. The sooner people free themselves from the false glorification of Shakespeare, the better it will be.”
I have felt with… firm, indubitable conviction that the unquestionable glory of a great genius which Shakespeare enjoys, and which compels writers of our time to imitate him and readers and spectators to discover in him non-existent merits — thereby distorting their aesthetic and ethical understanding — is a great evil, as is every untruth.
What could have possessed the writer of such celebrated classics as War and Peace and Anna Karenina (find them in our collection of Free eBooks) to so forcefully repudiate the author of King Lear? Forty years later, George Orwell responded to Tolstoy’s attack in an essay titled “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool” (1947). His answer? Tolstoy’s objections “to the raggedness of Shakespeare’s plays, the irrelevancies, the incredible plots, the exaggerated language,” are at bottom an objection to Shakespeare’s earthy humanism, his “exuberance,” or—to use another psychoanalytic term—his juissance. “Tolstoy,” writes Orwell, “is not simply trying to rob others of a pleasure he does not share. He is doing that, but his quarrel with Shakespeare goes further. It is the quarrel between the religious and the humanist attitudes towards life.”
Orwell grants that “much rubbish has been written about Shakespeare as a philosopher, as a psychologist, as a ‘great moral teacher’, and what-not.” In reality, he says, the playwright, was not “a systematic thinker,” nor do we even know “how much of the work attributed to him was actually written by him.” Nonetheless, he goes on to show the ways in which Tolstoy’s critical summary of Lear relies on highly biased language and misleading methods. Furthermore, Tolstoy “hardly deals with Shakespeare as a poet.”
But why, Orwell asks, does Tolstoy pick on Lear, specifically? Because of the character’s strong resemblance to Tolstoy himself. “Lear renounces his throne,” he writes, “but expects everyone to continue treating him as a king.”
But is it not also curiously similar to the history of Tolstoy himself? There is a general resemblance which one can hardly avoid seeing, because the most impressive event in Tolstoy’s life, as in Lear’s, was a huge and gratuitous act of renunciation. In his old age, he renounced his estate, his title and his copyrights, and made an attempt — a sincere attempt, though it was not successful — to escape from his privileged position and live the life of a peasant. But the deeper resemblance lies in the fact that Tolstoy, like Lear, acted on mistaken motives and failed to get the results he had hoped for. According to Tolstoy, the aim of every human being is happiness, and happiness can only be attained by doing the will of God. But doing the will of God means casting off all earthly pleasures and ambitions, and living only for others. Ultimately, therefore, Tolstoy renounced the world under the expectation that this would make him happier. But if there is one thing certain about his later years, it is that he was NOT happy.
Though Orwell doubts the Russian novelist was aware of it—or would have admitted it had anyone said so—his essay on Shakespeare seems to take the lessons of Lear quite personally. “Tolstoy was not a saint,” Orwell writes, “but he tried very hard to make himself into a saint, and the standards he applied to literature were other-worldly ones.” Thus, he could not stomach Shakespeare’s “considerable streak of worldliness” and “ordinary, belly-to-earth selfishness,” in part because he could not stomach these qualities in himself. It’s a common, sweeping, charge, that a critic’s judgment reflects much of their personal preoccupations and little of the work itself. Such psychologizing of a writer’s motives is often uncalled-for. But in this case, Orwell seems to have laid bare a genuinely personal psychological struggle in Tolstoy’s essay on Shakespeare, and perhaps put his finger on a source of Tolstoy’s violent reaction to King Lear in particular, which “points out the results of practicing self-denial for selfish reasons.”
Orwell draws an even larger point from the philosophical differences Tolstoy has with Shakespeare: “Ultimately it is the Christian attitude which is self-interested and hedonistic,” he writes, “since the aim is always to get away from the painful struggle of earthly life and find eternal peace in some kind of Heaven or Nirvana…. Often there is a seeming truce between the humanist and the religious believer, but in fact their attitudes cannot be reconciled: one must choose between this world and the next.” On this last point, no doubt, Tolstoy and Orwell would agree. In Orwell’s analysis, Tolstoy’s polemic against Shakespeare’s humanism further “sharpens the contradictions,” we might say, between the two attitudes, and between his own former humanism and the fervent, if unhappy, religiosity of his later years.
Is there any subject that can’t be covered in a TED Talk?
Apparently not. You can make a TED Talk about anything, even nothing, as veteran improviser and rookie Saturday Night Live writer, Will Stephen, demonstrated at a recent TEDx event in New York City.
What you shouldn’t do is deviate from TED’s established presentation tropes. Stephen may be punking us with his How to Sound Smart in Your TEDx Talk, above, but aspirant TED speakers should take notes. One can’t practice observational humor without being a keen observer. Stephen’s insights are as good a playbook as any for that unmistakeable TED-style delivery:
Use your hands.
Engage the audience by asking them a question that will result in a show of hands…
By show of hands, how many of you have been asked a question before?
Hit ‘em with an endearing, personal anecdote.
Projections will enhance your credibility.
Replay the clip with the sound down, as Stephen suggests, and it’s still obvious what he’s doing — giving a TED Talk. (The familiar camera work and editing don’t hurt either.)
Even if you’re not planning on nominating yourself to become a TED speaker in the near future, Stephen’s lesson should prove handy next time you’re called upon to do some public speaking, whether running for President or delivering the toast at your best friend’s wedding.
And nothing is certainly not the only topic of substance upon which Stephen can discourse. Witness his Tinder Strategy Powerpoint.
Hmm, maybe there are some TED-proof subjects after all…
Painting, as any Art History 101 lecturer will tell you, found the motivation to turn abstract when photography trumped it in the game of lifelike representation. But what pushes photography, and even motion pictures, to give abstraction a try? The vast majority of films made today still represent reality in some basically direct fashion, but almost since the first appearance of the medium, certain artists have tried to push it in other directions. If you know the work of only one abstract filmmaker, you probably know the work of Stan Brakhage, craftsman of such vivid and distressed cinematic experiences as Cat’s Cradle and Dog Star Man. But who preceded him?
The title of the very first abstract filmmaker has been disputed, but we at least know who made several early abstract masterpieces. Today we present two of them, Hans Richter’s Rhythmus21, made in 1921, and from three years later, Viking Eggeling’s Symphonie Diagonale. “Clocking in at just over three minutes, it’s a significant departure from the newsreels, romances, cliff-hangers, and penny-dreadfuls that made up the bulk of film production in the early 20s,” writes the Getty’s Jannon Stein of Richter’s hypnotically geometric picture, “the first decade in which the film industry began to play a major economic and cultural role around the world.”
But Richter, Stein continues, “credited his friend Viking Eggeling with the idea of exploring the possibilities for abstract animation. In fact, they’d worked together on a series of paintings on scrolls that preceded both of Richter’s first films, as well as Symphonie Diagonale,” which you can watch just above. This version opens with an endorsement from no less daring a mind than architect-artist-theoretician Frederick John Kiesler, who describes it as “the best abstract film yet conceived” and “an experiment to discover the basic principles of the organization of time intervals in the film medium.” I, personally, would call it something like a pure shot of the art-deco aesthetic which we now know, of course, not from the film it produced in the 20s, but the architecture.
That may excite you or it may not, but words have never quite suited the abstract. If Richter, Eggeling, Brakhage, or any who came between them or have come after them share a mission, that mission involves making movies that no words can really describe. Eggeling would pass on the year after Symphonie Diagonale, but Richter would go on to a long life and career that included other projects meant to take film beyond its conventional uses, such as 1947’s “story of dreams mixed with reality,” Dreams that Money Can Buy. Even now, in the 21st century, it seems that the medium has a long way to go before it makes use of all the creative space available to it — which should only encourage the next Richters and Eggelings of the world.
Last week, Ted Mills told you how Plymouth University orchestrated a wonderful project called Moby-Dick The Big Read, which resulted in celebrities–like Benedict Cumberbatch, John Waters, Mary Oliver, Stephen Fry, and Tilda Swinton–reading the entirety of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and making the recording free to download.
This weekend, we happily discovered another unabridged reading of Melville’s great American novel, this one coming out of the 2015 London Literature Festival, held at the Southbank Centre in London. Over four days, Moby-Dick was read by writers, actors, comedians, members of the public and even Melville’s great-great-great-granddaughter. You can stream a recording of the epic reading on Soundcloud right below. You might want to make a good strong pot of coffee because it runs 24 hours.
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Back in the late 1950s, George Martin (may he rest in peace) began his career as a producer recording two albums with the comedian Peter Sellers–The Best Of Sellers and Songs for Swinging Sellers. When he joined forces with the Beatles a few years later, Martin put the comedian in touch with the lads from Liverpool, and they became fast friends. This relationship paved the way for some good comedy. As you might recall, Sellers made a cameo appearance on “The Music of Lennon and McCartney” in 1964, and read “A Hard Day’s Night” in a way that comically recalls Laurence Olivier’s 1955 performance inRichard III. (Watch the spoof here.) And then, also during the mid 60s, Sellers recorded a comic reading of “She Loves You” — once in the voice of Dr. Strangelove (above), again with cockney and upper-crusty accents (both right below), and finally with an Irish twist (the last item). The recordings were all released posthumously between 1981 and 1983 on albums no longer in circulation. Sellers clearly had a thing for accents. Here you can also explore his Complete Guide to the Accents of the British Isles.
Cockney
Upper Crust
Irish
A version of this post first appeared on Open Culture in February, 2012.
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“The first thing to notice about movies made in the classic Hollywood studio era,” writes New Yorker film critic Richard Brody, “from the twenties through the fifties, is the stillness of the actors — not a static, microphone-bound stand-and-deliver theatricality but a lack of fidgetiness even while in motion, a self-mastery that precludes uncontrolled or incidental gestures,” an acting style reflective of the fact, Brody suspects, that “American people of the era really were more tightly controlled, more repressed by the general expectation of public decorum and expressive restraint.”
This has made it tough for filmmakers (in the case of Brody’s piece, Paul Thomas Anderson making TheMaster, who pulled it off more convincingly than anyone else in recent memory) who want to do proper period pieces set in those days: “even if stylists manage to get the clothing right, actors today — people today — have been raised by and large to let their emotions govern their behavior,” and current actors “can hardly represent the past without investing it with the attitudes of our own day, which is why most new period pieces seem either thin or unintentionally ironic.”
They’d have an especially formidable task set out for them in speaking, without any apparent irony, in the mid-atlantic accent, just as much a fixture of classic Hollywood acting as that physical self-mastery. Even if you haven’t heard its name, you’ve heard the accent, which gets examined in the HowStuffWorks video at the top of the post “Why Do People in Old Movies Talk Weird?” The “old-timey voice” you hear in newsreels from movies like His Girl Friday (watch it online here) and figures like Katharine Hepburn, Franklin D. Roosevelt, George Plimpton, and William F. Buckley, historically “the hallmark of aristocratic America,” acquired, usually in New England boarding schools, as “an international norm for communication.”
The video points out its signal qualities, from its “quasi-British elements” like a softening of Rs to its “emphasis on clipped, sharped Ts,” resulting in a speech pattern that “isn’t completely British, not completely American” — one we can only place, in other words, somewhere in the mid-Atlantic ocean. The accent emerged as an optimal manner of speaking in “the early days of radio” when speakers couldn’t reproduce bass vary well, and it vanished not long after the Second World War, when teachers stopped passing it along to their students. Has the time has come for the true ironists among us to bring it back?
The writers who most stay with me are those who tend to write about reading: its pleasures, difficulties, and at times impossibility. Wallace Stevens, Franz Kafka, and Vladimir Nabokov belong in this category. Stevens’ essays in The Necessary Angelattempt to reconcile Plato and the Poets; reading for him is akin to a mystical union with ideas. For Kafka, reading is an act of ascetic self-harm: we should read only books that “wound and stab us… wake us up with a blow on the head… affect us like a disaster… grieve us deeply.” And for Nabokov reading can be a form of disciplined edification… and dissection. He wields his critical mind like a scalpel in his collected Lectures on Literature, in which we find a “little quiz” he devised for his students to test their thinking about what makes a “good reader.” One such quality, he suggests is the possession of an “artistic sense.”
Good readers, Nabokov suggests, should already have acquired this sense before they even approach a book. This doubtless leaves a great many people out, though he also implies in his criteria that learned qualities as well as innate ones play a role in the activity of reading, and that “artistic sense” can be learned. But Nabokov did not simply make a list—that would give it away too easily and we wouldn’t learn anything (about, perhaps, the qualities of bad readers). The professorial novelist never missed a chance to educate, and occasionally condescend to, his readers. In this case, he made a quiz with “ten definitions of a reader, and from these ten,” he had students choose the “four definitions that would combine to make a good reader.”
Take his good reader quiz, below, and see if you can quickly identify the other three qualities Nabokov requires. I doubt you’ll have much trouble. He provides his answers further down.
Select four answers to the question what should a reader be to be a good reader:
1. The reader should belong to a book club.
2. The reader should identify himself or herself with the hero or heroine.
3. The reader should concentrate on the social-economic angle.
4. The reader should prefer a story with action and dialogue to one with none.
5. The reader should have seen the book in a movie.
6. The reader should be a budding author.
7. The reader should have imagination.
8. The reader should have memory.
9. The reader should have a dictionary.
10. The reader should have some artistic sense.
The students leaned heavily on emotional identification, action, and the social-economic or historical angle. Of course, as you have guessed, the good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense–which sense I propose to develop in myself and in others whenever I have the chance.
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