Hallelujah!: You Can Stream Every Leonard Cohen Album in a 22-Hour Chronological Playlist (1967–2016)

in Music | October 18th, 2017

Every­body knows the war is over. Every­body knows the good guys lost.

Per­haps no one since Thomas Hardy has matched Leonard Cohen in the dogged per­sis­tence of lit­er­ary bleak­ness. Cohen’s entry into a Zen monastery in 1996 was a “response to a sense of despair that I’ve always had,” he said in an inter­view that year. Ten years lat­er, Cohen told Ter­ry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, “I had a great sense of dis­or­der in my life of chaos, of depres­sion, of dis­tress. And I had no idea where this came from. And the pre­vail­ing psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic expla­na­tions at the time didn’t seem to address the things I felt.”

Only a hand­ful of peo­ple on the plan­et have expe­ri­enced the “life of chaos” Leonard Cohen lived as an acclaimed poet, nov­el­ist, singer, and one of the most beloved song­writ­ers of the last sev­er­al decades. But mil­lions iden­ti­fy with his emo­tion­al tur­moil. Cohen’s expres­sions of despair—and of rev­er­ence, defi­ance, love, hatred, and lust—speak across gen­er­a­tions, telling truths few of us con­fess but, just maybe, every­body knows. Cohen’s death last year brought his career back into focus. And despite the mourn­ful occa­sion for revis­it­ing his work, he may be just the song­writer many of us need right now.

The great themes in Cohen’s work come togeth­er in his most famous song, “Hal­lelu­jah,” which has, since he first record­ed it in 1984 to lit­tle notice, become “everybody’s ‘Hal­lelu­jah,’” writes Ash­ley Fet­ters at The Atlantic, in a suc­ces­sion of cov­ers and inter­pre­ta­tions from Jeff Buck­ley and Rufus Wain­wright to Shrek and The X Fac­tor. It is here that the depths of despair and heights of tran­scen­dence meet, the sex­u­al and the spir­i­tu­al reach an accord: “This world is full of con­flicts and full of things that can­not be rec­on­ciled,” Cohen has said of the song. “But there are moments when we can… rec­on­cile and embrace the whole mess, and that’s what I mean by ‘Hal­lelu­jah.’”

Every­body knows it’s a mess. But it often takes a Leonard Cohen to con­vince us that—at least sometimes—it’s a beau­ti­ful one. If you feel you need more Leonard Cohen in your life, we bring you the playlist above, a com­plete chrono­log­i­cal discog­ra­phy avail­able on Spo­ti­fy—from the sparse, haunt­ing folk melodies of Cohen’s first album, 1967’s The Songs of Leonard Cohen to last year’s grip­ping swan song, You Want It Dark­er. In-between the leg­endary debut and mas­ter­ful sum­ma­tion are sev­er­al live albums, the clas­sics Songs from a Room, Songs of Love and Hate, and oth­ers, as well as that odd 1988 album I’m Your Man, in which Cohen set his grim ironies and uni­ver­sal truths to the sounds of eight­ies synth-pop, inton­ing over slap bass and drum machine the indeli­ble, gen­tly mock­ing lyrics he co-wrote with fre­quent col­lab­o­ra­tor Sharon Robin­son:

Every­body knows that the boat is leak­ing
Every­body knows that the cap­tain lied
Every­body got this bro­ken feel­ing
Like their father or their dog just died
Every­body talk­ing to their pock­ets
Every­body wants a box of choco­lates
And a long-stem rose
Every­body knows

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Say Good­bye to Leonard Cohen Through Some of His Best-Loved Songs: “Hal­lelu­jah,” “Suzanne” and 235 Oth­er Tracks

Hear Leonard Cohen’s Final Inter­view: Record­ed by David Rem­nick of The New York­er

A 17-Hour, Chrono­log­i­cal Jour­ney Through Tom Petty’s Music: Stream the Songs That Became the Sound­tracks of Our Lives

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

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The Art of Hand-Drawn Japanese Anime: A Deep Study of How Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira Uses Light

in Animation, Film | October 18th, 2017

Ani­ma­tion before the days of mod­ern com­put­er graph­ics tech­nol­o­gy may impress today for the very rea­son that it had no mod­ern com­put­er graph­ics tech­nol­o­gy, or CGI, at its dis­pos­al. But if we real­ly think about it — and we real­ly watch the ani­mat­ed mas­ter­pieces of those days — we’ll real­ize that much of it should impress us on many more lev­els than it already does. Take, for instance, Kat­suhi­ro Oto­mo’s 1988 cyber­punk vision Aki­ra, one of the most beloved Japan­ese ani­mat­ed films of all time and the sub­ject of the Nerd­writer video essay above, “How to Ani­mate Light.”

Aki­ra, says Nerd­writer Evan Puschak, “is well known for its painstak­ing ani­ma­tion. Every frame of the film was com­posed with the clos­est atten­tion to detail, and that gives it an unmatched rich­ness and soul.”

But he points up one qual­i­ty of the pro­duc­tion in par­tic­u­lar: “I see the film’s many lights, their dif­fer­ent qual­i­ties and tex­tures, as a pow­er­ful motif and sym­bol, and a vital ele­ment of its genius.” But ani­ma­tors, espe­cial­ly ani­ma­tors using tra­di­tion­al hand-paint­ed cels, can’t just tell their direc­tors of pho­tog­ra­phy to set up a scene’s light­ing in a cer­tain way; they’ve got to ren­der all the dif­fer­ent types of light in the world they cre­ate by hand, man­u­al­ly cre­at­ing its play on every face, every object, every sur­face.

“The lines between shad­ow and light are dis­tinct and evoca­tive in the same way that film noir light­ing is,” Puschak elab­o­rates, “and like in film noir, light in Aki­ra is inti­mate­ly con­nect­ed to the city at night.” In the dystopi­an “Neo-Tokyo” of 2019, elab­o­rate­ly craft­ed by Oto­mo and his col­lab­o­ra­tors, “author­i­ty is as much a blind­ing spot­light as it is a gun or a badge” and neon “is the bit­ter but beau­ti­ful light that sig­ni­fies both the col­or­ful radi­ance and the gaudy con­sumerism of moder­ni­ty.” And then we have Tet­suo, “at once the pro­tag­o­nist and the antag­o­nist of the film, a boy who gains extra­or­di­nary psy­chic pow­er” that “so often pro­duces a dis­rup­tion in the light around him.” When the end comes, it comes in the form of “a giant ball of light, one sin­gle uni­form white light that eras­es the count­less arti­fi­cial lights of the city,” and Aki­ra makes us believe in it. Could even the most cut­ting-edge, spec­tac­u­lar­ly big-bud­get­ed CGI-age pic­ture do the same?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Phi­los­o­phy, Sto­ry­telling & Visu­al Cre­ativ­i­ty of Ghost in the Shell, the Acclaimed Ani­me Film, Explained in Video Essays

The Exis­ten­tial Phi­los­o­phy of Cow­boy Bebop, the Cult Japan­ese Ani­me Series, Explored in a Thought­ful Video Essay

How the Films of Hayao Miyaza­ki Work Their Ani­mat­ed Mag­ic, Explained in 4 Video Essays

The Ori­gins of Ani­me: Watch Free Online 64 Ani­ma­tions That Launched the Japan­ese Ani­me Tra­di­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Power of Introverts: Author Susan Cain Explains Why We Need to Appreciate the Talents & Abilities of the Quiet Ones

in Psychology, TED Talks | October 18th, 2017

Ours is a loud cul­ture of non­stop per­son­al shar­ing, end­less chat­ter, and 24-hour news, opin­ion, and enter­tain­ment. Even those peo­ple who pre­fer read­ing alone to the over­stim­u­lat­ing car­ni­val of social media feel pres­sured to par­tic­i­pate. How else can you keep up with your family—whose Face­book posts you’d rather see die than have to read? How else to build a pro­file for employers—whom you des­per­ate­ly hope won’t check your Twit­ter feed?

For the intro­vert, main­tain­ing an always-on façade can be pro­found­ly enervating—and the prob­lem goes far beyond the per­son­al, argues author Susan Cain, reach­ing into every area of our lives.

“If you take a group of peo­ple and put them into a meet­ing,” says Cain in the short RSA video above, “the opin­ions of the loud­est per­son, or the most charis­mat­ic per­son, or the most assertive person—those are the opin­ions that the group tends to fol­low.” This despite the fact that research shows “zero cor­re­la­tion” between being the loud­est voice in the room and hav­ing the best ideas. Don’t we know this all too well.

Cain is the author of Qui­et: The Pow­er of Intro­verts in a World That Can’t Stop Talk­ing, a book about lead­er­ship for intro­verts, the group least like­ly to want the social demands lead­er­ship requires. And yet, she argues, we nonethe­less need intro­verts as lead­ers. “We’re liv­ing in a soci­ety now that is so over­ly extro­vert­ed,” she says. Cain iden­ti­fies the phe­nom­e­non as a symp­tom of cor­po­rate cap­i­tal­ism over­com­ing pre­dom­i­nant­ly agri­cul­tur­al ways of life. Aside from the sig­nif­i­cant ques­tion of whether we can change the cul­ture with­out chang­ing the econ­o­my, Cain makes a time­ly and com­pelling argu­ment for a soci­ety that val­ues dif­fer­ent per­son­al­i­ty types equal­ly.

But can there be a “world where it’s yin and yang” between intro­verts and extro­verts? That depends, per­haps on how much cre­dence we lend these well-worn Jun­gian cat­e­gories, or whether we think of them as exist­ing in bina­ry oppo­si­tion rather than on a spec­trum, a cir­cle, a hexa­gram, or what­ev­er. Cain is not a psy­chol­o­gist but a for­mer cor­po­rate lawyer who at least seems to believe the bal­anc­ing act between extro­vert­ed and intro­vert­ed can be achieved in the cor­po­rate world. She has giv­en talks on “Net­work­ing for Intro­verts,” addressed the engi­neers at Google, and tak­en to the TED stage, the thought leader are­na that accom­mo­dates all kinds of per­son­al­i­ties, for bet­ter or worse.

Cain’s TED talk above may be one of the bet­ter ones. Open­ing with a mov­ing and fun­ny per­son­al nar­ra­tive, she walks us through the bar­rage of mes­sages intro­verts receive con­demn­ing their desire for qui­etude as some­how per­verse and self­ish. Nat­u­ral­ly soli­tary peo­ple are taught to think of their intro­ver­sion as “a sec­ond-class per­son­al­i­ty trait,” Cain writes in her book, “some­where between a dis­ap­point­ment and a pathol­o­gy.” Intro­verts must swim against the tide to be them­selves. “Our most impor­tant insti­tu­tions,” she says above, “our schools and our work­places, they are designed most­ly for extro­verts, and for extro­verts’ need for stim­u­la­tion.”

The bias is deep, reach­ing into the class­rooms of young chil­dren, who are now forced to do most of their work by com­mit­tee. But when intro­verts give in to the social pres­sure that forces them into awk­ward extro­vert­ed roles, the loss affects every­one. “At the risk of sound­ing grandiose,” Cain says, “when it comes to cre­ativ­i­ty and to lead­er­ship, we need intro­verts doing what they do best.” Para­dox­i­cal­ly, that can look like intro­verts tak­ing the helm, but out of a gen­uine sense of duty rather than a desire for the spot­light.

Intro­vert­ed lead­ers are more like­ly to share pow­er and give oth­ers space to express ideas, Cain argues. Gand­hi, Eleanor Roo­sevelt, and Rosa Parks exem­pli­fy such intro­vert­ed lead­er­ship, and a qui­eter, more bal­anced and thought­ful cul­ture would pro­duce more lead­ers like them. Maybe this is a propo­si­tion any­one can endorse, whether they pre­fer Fri­day nights with hot tea and a nov­el or in the crush and bus­tle of the crowds.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Jung Explains His Ground­break­ing The­o­ries About Psy­chol­o­gy in a Rare Inter­view (1957)

The Neu­ro­science & Psy­chol­o­gy of Pro­cras­ti­na­tion, and How to Over­come It

Dai­ly Med­i­ta­tion Boosts & Revi­tal­izes the Brain and Reduces Stress, Har­vard Study Finds

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

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Criterion Collection Films 50% Off for the Next 13 Hours: Get Great Films at Half Price

in Deals, Film | October 17th, 2017

FYI. For the next 13 hours, the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion is run­ning a flash sale (click here), giv­ing you a chance to pur­chase “all in-stock Blu-rays & DVDs at 50% off.” Just use the pro­mo code COOP and get clas­sic films by Hitch­cock, Lynch, Welles, Kubrick, the Coen Broth­ers, and many oth­ers.

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A‑ha Performs a Beautiful Acoustic Version of Their 1980s Hit, “Take on Me”: Recorded Live in Norway

in Music | October 17th, 2017

When the Nor­we­gian syn­th­pop band A‑ha record­ed “Take on Me” in 1984, the song did­n’t meet instant suc­cess. It took record­ing two dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the track, and releas­ing it three sep­a­rate times, before the song man­aged to climb the charts, peak­ing at #1 on the US Bill­board Hot 100 and #2 on the UK Sin­gles Chart.

Since then, the song has enjoyed a pret­ty fine after­life. It has clocked near­ly 500 mil­lion plays on YouTube. You’ll find it on count­less 1980s antholo­gies and playlists. And now you can watch an entire­ly new per­for­mance of the song, which has already gone viral on YouTube. Record­ed this past June in Nor­way, as part of an unplugged con­cert for MTV, this ver­sion is more sub­tle and melan­choly than the orig­i­nal. And, as many Youtube com­menters read­i­ly note, it’s rather beau­ti­ful.

Find more details about the per­for­mance on A‑ha’s web­site.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book and BlueSky.

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:

New Order’s “Blue Mon­day” Played with Obso­lete 1930s Instru­ments

1980s Met­al­head Kids Are All Right: New Study Sug­gests They Became Well-Adjust­ed Adults

All Hail the Beat: How the 1980 Roland TR-808 Drum Machine Changed Pop Music

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An Animated Introduction to Michel de Montaigne

in Philosophy | October 17th, 2017

Con­sid­ered the first great human­ist essay­ist, Michel de Mon­taigne was also the first to use the word “essay” for the casu­al, often mean­der­ing, fre­quent­ly first-per­son explo­rations that now con­sti­tute the most preva­lent lit­er­ary form of our day. “Any­one who sets out to write an essay,” notes Antho­ny Got­tlieb in The New York Times, “for a school or col­lege class,” a mag­a­zine, news­pa­per, Tum­blr, or oth­er­wise, “owes some­thing” to Mon­taigne, the French “mag­is­trate and landown­er near Bor­deaux who retired tem­porar­i­ly from pub­lic life in 1570 to spend more time with his library and to make a mod­est memen­to of his mind.”

Mon­taigne’s result­ing book, called the Essais—“tri­als” or “attempts”—exemplifies the clas­si­cal and Chris­t­ian pre­oc­cu­pa­tions of the Renais­sance; he dwelt intent­ly on ques­tions of char­ac­ter and virtue, both indi­vid­ual and civic, and he con­stant­ly refers to ancient author­i­ties, the com­pan­ions of his book-lined fortress of soli­tude. “Some­what like a link-infest­ed blog post,” writes Got­tlieb, “Montaigne’s writ­ing is drip­ping with quo­ta­tions.” But he was also a dis­tinct­ly mod­ern writer, who skew­ered the over­con­fi­dence and blind ide­al­ism of ancients and con­tem­po­raries alike, and looked with amuse­ment on faith in rea­son and progress.

For all his con­sid­er­able eru­di­tion, Mon­taigne was “keen to debunk the pre­ten­sions of learn­ing,” says Alain de Bot­ton in his intro­duc­to­ry School of Life video above. An “extreme­ly fun­ny” writer, he shares with coun­try­man François Rabelais a satirist’s delight in the vul­gar and taboo and an hon­est appraisal of humanity’s check­ered rela­tion­ship with the good life. Though we may call Mon­taigne a moral­ist, the descrip­tion should not imply that he was strict­ly ortho­dox in any way—quite the con­trary.

Montaigne’s ethics often defy the dog­ma of both the Romans and the Chris­tians. He stren­u­ous­ly opposed col­o­niza­tion, for exam­ple, and made a sen­si­ble case for can­ni­bal­ism as no more bar­barous a prac­tice than those engaged in by 16th cen­tu­ry Euro­peans.

In a con­trar­i­an essay, “That to Study Phi­los­o­phy is to Learn to Die”—its title a quo­ta­tion from Cicero’s Tus­cu­lan Dis­pu­ta­tions—Mon­taigne threads the nee­dle between memen­to mori high seri­ous­ness and off­hand wit­ti­cism, writ­ing, “Let the philoso­phers say what they will, the main thing at which we all aim, even in virtue itself, is plea­sure. It amus­es me to rat­tle in their ears this word, which they so nau­se­ate to hear.” But in the next sen­tence, he avows that we derive plea­sure “more due to the assis­tance of virtue than to any oth­er assis­tance what­ev­er.”

The great­est ben­e­fit of prac­tic­ing virtue, as Cicero rec­om­mends, is “the con­tempt of death,” which frees us to live ful­ly. Mon­taigne attacks the mod­ern fear and denial of death as a par­a­lyz­ing atti­tude. Instead, “we should always, as near as we can, be boot­ed and spurred, and ready to go,” he breezi­ly sug­gests. “The dead­est deaths are the best.… I want death to find me plant­i­ng cab­bages.” The irrev­er­ence he brought to the gravest of subjects—making, for exam­ple, a list of sud­den and ridicu­lous deaths of famous people—serves not only to enter­tain but to edi­fy, as de Bot­ton argues above in an episode of his series “Phi­los­o­phy: A Guide to Hap­pi­ness.”

Mon­taigne “seemed to under­stand what makes us feel bad about our­selves, and in his book tries to make us feel bet­ter.” He endeav­ors to show, as he wrote in his first essay, “that men by var­i­ous means arrive at the same end.” Like lat­er first-per­son philo­soph­i­cal essay­ists Kierkegaard and Niet­zsche, Mon­taigne address­es our feel­ings of inad­e­qua­cy by remind­ing his read­ers how thor­ough­ly we are gov­erned by the same irra­tional pas­sions, and sub­ject to the same fears, con­ceits, and ail­ments. There is much wis­dom and com­fort to be found in Montaigne’s essays. Yet he is beloved not only for what he says, but for how he says it—with a style that makes him seem like an elo­quent, bril­liant, prac­ti­cal, and self-dep­re­cat­ing­ly sym­pa­thet­ic friend.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Goethe, Germany’s “Renais­sance Man”

Watch Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tions to 25 Philoso­phers by The School of Life: From Pla­to to Kant and Fou­cault

6 Polit­i­cal The­o­rists Intro­duced in Ani­mat­ed “School of Life” Videos: Marx, Smith, Rawls & More

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

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200,000+ Vintage Records Being Digitized & Put Online by the Boston Public Library

in Archives, History, Internet Archive, Music | October 17th, 2017

It may be a great irony that our age of cul­tur­al destruc­tion and—many would argue—decline also hap­pens to be a gold­en age of preser­va­tion, thanks to the very new media and big data forces cred­it­ed with dumb­ing things down. We spend ample time con­tem­plat­ing the loss­es; archival ini­tia­tives like The Great 78 Project, like so many oth­ers we reg­u­lar­ly fea­ture here, should give us rea­sons to cel­e­brate.

In a post this past August, we out­lined the goals and meth­ods of the project. Cen­tral­ized at the Inter­net Archive—that mag­nan­i­mous cit­i­zens’ repos­i­to­ry of dig­i­tized texts, record­ings, films, etc.—the project con­tains sev­er­al thou­sand care­ful­ly pre­served 78rpm record­ings, which doc­u­ment the dis­tinc­tive sounds of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry from 1898 to the late-1950s.

Thanks to part­ners like preser­va­tion com­pa­ny George Blood, L.P. and the ARChive of Con­tem­po­rary Music, we can hear many thou­sands of records from artists both famous and obscure in the orig­i­nal sound of the first mass-pro­duced con­sumer audio for­mat.

Just a few days ago, the Inter­net Archive announced that they would be joined in the endeav­or by the Boston Pub­lic Library, who, writes Wendy Hana­mu­ra, “will dig­i­tize, pre­serve” and make avail­able to the pub­lic “hun­dreds of thou­sands of audio record­ings in a vari­ety of his­tor­i­cal for­mats,” includ­ing not only 78s, but also LP’s and Thomas Edison’s first record­ing medi­um, the wax cylin­der. “These record­ings have nev­er been cir­cu­lat­ed and were in stor­age for sev­er­al decades, uncat­a­logued and inac­ces­si­ble to the pub­lic.”

The process, notes WBUR, “could take a few years,” giv­en the siz­able bulk of the col­lec­tion and the metic­u­lous meth­ods of the Inter­net Archive’s tech­ni­cians, who labor to pre­serve the con­di­tion of the often frag­ile mate­ri­als, and to pro­duce a num­ber of dif­fer­ent ver­sions, “from remas­tered to raw.” The object, says Boston Pub­lic Library pres­i­dent David Leonard, is to “pro­duce record­ings in a way that’s inter­est­ing to the casu­al lis­ten­er as well as to the hard-core music lis­ten­er in the research busi­ness.”

Thus far, only two record­ings from BPL’s exten­sive col­lec­tions have become avail­able—a 1938 record­ing called “Please Pass the Bis­cuits, Pap­py (I Like Moun­tain Music)” by W. Lee O’Daniel and His Hill­bil­ly Boys and Edvard Grieg’s only piano con­cer­to, record­ed by Fred­dy Mar­tin and His Orches­tra in 1947. Even in this tiny sam­pling, you can see the range of mate­r­i­al the archive will fea­ture, con­sis­tent with the tremen­dous vari­ety the Great 78 Project already con­tains.

While we can count it as a great gain to have free and open access to this his­toric vault of record­ed audio, it is also the case that dig­i­tal archiv­ing has become an urgent bul­wark against total loss. Cur­rent record­ing for­mats instant­ly spawn innu­mer­able copies of them­selves. The phys­i­cal media of the past exist­ed in finite num­bers and are sub­ject to total era­sure with time. “The sim­ple fact of the mat­ter,” archivist George Blood tells the BPL, “is most audio­vi­su­al record­ings will be lost. These 78s are dis­ap­pear­ing left and right. It is impor­tant that we do a good job pre­serv­ing what we can get to, because there won’t be a sec­ond chance.”

via WBUR

Relat­ed Con­tent:

25,000+ 78RPM Records Now Pro­fes­sion­al­ly Dig­i­tized & Stream­ing Online: A Trea­sure Trove of Ear­ly 20th Cen­tu­ry Music

The British Library’s “Sounds” Archive Presents 80,000 Free Audio Record­ings: World & Clas­si­cal Music, Inter­views, Nature Sounds & More

BBC Launch­es World Music Archive

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

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Why Should We Read Virginia Woolf? A TED-Ed Animation Makes the Case

in Literature | October 16th, 2017

Vir­ginia Woolf dis­suad­ed read­ers from play­ing the crit­ic in her essay “How Should One Read a Book?” But in addi­tion to her nov­els, she is best known for her lit­er­ary crit­i­cism and became a foun­da­tion­al fig­ure in fem­i­nist lit­er­ary the­o­ry for her imag­i­na­tive polemic “A Room of One’s Own,” an essay that takes tra­di­tion­al crit­i­cism to task for its pre­sump­tions of male lit­er­ary supe­ri­or­i­ty.

Women writ­ers like her­self, she argues, had always been a priv­i­leged few with the means and the free­dom to pur­sue writ­ing in ways most women couldn’t. These con­di­tions were so rare for women through­out lit­er­ary his­to­ry that innu­mer­able artists may have gone unno­ticed and unher­ald­ed for their lack of oppor­tu­ni­ty. Her obser­va­tion would have put her read­ers in mind of Thomas Gray’s revered “Ele­gy Writ­ten in a Coun­try Church­yard,” with its famous line about a pau­per’s grave: “Some mute inglo­ri­ous Mil­ton here may rest.”

Woolf alludes to the poem, writ­ing of “some mute and inglo­ri­ous Jane Austen,” and makes a case that would-have-been women writ­ers were excep­tion­al­ly mar­gin­al­ized by gender—by its inter­sec­tions with pow­er and priv­i­lege and their lack. She famous­ly con­struct­ed a scenario—brought into pop cul­ture by The Smiths and Bana­nara­ma singer Siob­han Fahey—involv­ing Shakespeare’s fic­tion­al sis­ter Judith, whose tal­ent and ambi­tion are squashed for the sake of her brother’s edu­ca­tion. It is hard­ly a far-fetched idea. We might remem­ber Mozart’s sis­ter Nan­nerl, who was also a child prodi­gy, whose career end­ed with her child­hood, and who dis­ap­peared in her brother’s shad­ow.

In the TED-Ed video at the top, Woolf schol­ar and doc­tor­al can­di­date at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin Iseult Gille­spie describes the import of Woolf’s thought exper­i­ment. Shakespeare’s sis­ter stands in for every woman who is pushed into domes­tic labor and mar­riage while the men in her fam­i­ly pur­sue their goals unhin­dered. “Woolf demon­strates the tragedy of genius restrict­ed,” just as Langston Hugh­es would do a cou­ple decades lat­er. Her par­tic­u­lar genius, says Gille­spie, lies in her abil­i­ty to por­tray “the inter­nal expe­ri­ence of alien­ation…. Her char­ac­ters fre­quent­ly live inner lives that are deeply at odds with their exter­nal exis­tence.”

The video out­lines Woolf’s own biog­ra­phy: her inclu­sion in the “Blooms­bury Group”—a social cir­cle includ­ing E.M. Forster and Vir­gini­a’s soon-to-be hus­band Leonard Woolf. And it sketch­es out the inno­v­a­tive  lit­er­ary tech­niques of her nov­els. Woolf thought of her­self, as Alain de Bot­ton says in his short intro­duc­tion above, as a “dis­tinc­tive­ly mod­ernist writer at odds with a raft of the staid and com­pla­cent assump­tions of 19th cen­tu­ry Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture.” One such assump­tion, as she writes in “A Room of One’s Own,” includes an opin­ion that “the best woman was intel­lec­tu­al­ly the infe­ri­or of the worst man.”

Woolf’s own mod­ernist break­throughs rival those of her con­tem­po­raries James Joyce and Ezra Pound. Her favorite women writ­ers rank as high­ly as men in the same canon in any seri­ous study; but this is of course beside the point. It wasn’t the truth or false­hood of claims about women’s infe­ri­or­i­ty that deter­mined their pow­er, but rather the social pow­er of those who made such claims.

Dom­i­neer­ing fathers, spot­light-steal­ing broth­ers, mor­al­iz­ing cler­gy­men, the gate­keep­ing intel­lec­tu­als of “Oxbridge”—Woolf’s port­man­teau for the snob­bery and chau­vin­ism of Oxford and Cam­bridge dons: it was such men who deter­mined not only whether or not a woman might pur­sue her writ­ing, but whether she lived or died in penury, mute and inglo­ri­ous. Woolf knew much of what she wrote, hav­ing grown up sur­round­ed by the cream of 19th-cen­tu­ry lit­er­ary soci­ety, and hav­ing had to “steal an edu­ca­tion from her father’s study,” as de Bot­ton notes, while her broth­ers went off to Cam­bridge. She was nonethe­less well aware of her priv­i­lege and used it not only to cre­ate new forms of writ­ing, but to open new lit­er­ary spaces for women writ­ers to come.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Vir­ginia Woolf

The Steamy Love Let­ters of Vir­ginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West (1925–1929)

Watch Pat­ti Smith Read from Vir­ginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Sur­viv­ing Record­ing of Woolf’s Voice

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

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