Perhaps taking a cue from Moby, the Relax Sleep ASMR YouTube channel has also assembled a “video” offering 10 hours of Arctic ambient music, featuring the sounds of the frozen ocean, ice cracking, snow falling, [an] icebreaker idling and [a] distant howling wind sound.”
Click play above and you can enjoy “white noise sounds generated by the wind and snow falling, combined with deep low frequencies with delta waves from the powerful … idling engines” of a Polar Icebreaker. Very chill.
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When I find myself in times of musical trouble, Captain Beefheart comes to me. His Marcel Duchamp-meets-James Brown shtick goes places no other experimental prog-blues-jazz artist ever has—places of absurdist virtuosity where the gap between the artist and the mask disappears, where words and music have relationships that defy physical laws. Many have tried, but few have so well succeeded in the wild ambition to make surrealist verse cohere in songs that defy all traditional arrangements. For my experimental rock dime, no one has mastered the art so well as Beefheart and his Magic Band.
In fact, every musician, I believe, should sometimes ask themselves, “what would Captain Beefheart do?” But what about Beefheart’s relationship with the other arts? We probably know that the man also named Don Van Vliet was a prolific abstract painter throughout his career, the medium he chose for the last 28 years of his life after he hung up his saxophone in 1982. But did his “strange uncle of post-punk” musical sensibilities translate into poetry, a related but quite different art than that of even the most abstract songwriting?
Well, if Bob Dylan can win a Nobel Prize—and why not?—I see no reason why we can’t consider the work of Captain Beefheart literary art. And in addition to his extraordinary Dadaist songs, Beefheart penned restrained, masterfully imagistic poems with wry humor and crystalline intelligence. His work surely belongs in Alan Kaufman’s Outlaw Bible of American Poetry right next to that of Dylan, Tom Waits, Patti Smith, Tupac Shakur, Gil Scott-Heron, Jim Morrison, the Beats, and dozens more non-musical writers. But it seems that Beefheart’s literary genius has been mostly overlooked.
That’s unfortunate. In tense, vividly observed poems like “A Tin Peened Reindeer,” he approaches the elliptical mystery of Wallace Stevens and the baroque language of John Ashbery. Late songs like “The Thousandth and Tenth Day of the Human Totem Pole” condense the grotesque imaginary of Dali into a few staggering lines. Yet we don’t get a collection of Beefheart readings until 1993, when he appeared in a short documentary by Anton Corbijn called Some Yo Yo Stuff.
You can watch that film at the top of the post, and in the videos below it, hear Van Vliet read poems and song lyrics in recordings from his time with Corbijn. Both in the film and in the readings, it is evident that the multiple sclerosis that killed Beefheart in 2010 had rendered speech difficult for him. But with patient listening, we hear that his sparkling wit and absurdist genius remained at full strength, as in another, long 1993 interview with Dutch radio host Co De Kloet.
Beefheart earned a reputation as an autocratic-yet-capricious bandleader (recording a tongue-in-cheek spoken word piece on the subject in earlier years). But in interviews, he came across as humble, sweet-tempered, and gentle, and as an artist whose work was an authentic outgrowth of his personality. These qualities shine through in even the goofiest, most out-there poems and lyrics.
Further up, hear Beefheart read the poems and songs “Fallin’ Ditch,” “The Tired Plain,” “Skeleton Makes Good,” “Safe Sex Drill,” and “Gill,” and in the playlist below, he reads all of those plus his poem, “Tulip,” a short modernist gem reminiscent of both Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams:
It could be a tremendous black upside-down tulip it could be a black fishes’ tail it could be a day, artistically crimped and buoyant in its taped together way
I first came to know the work of Cormac McCarthy through the 1973 novel Child of God, a portrait of a terrifyingly alienated loner who becomes a serial killer. The book so immerses readers in the dank, claustrophobic world of its protagonist, Lester Ballard, that one can almost smell the dirt and rotting flesh. Next, I read Blood Meridian, McCarthy’s psychedelically brutal epic about a mercenary band of scalp hunters who massacred Native Americans in the mid-nineteenth century Southwest. In McCarthy’s avalanche of prose—which lacks commas, apostrophes, quotation marks, and most every other mark of punctuation—long passages of grim death and carnage become hallucinatory trance-inducing incantations.
It’s never a good idea to identify an author too closely with their fiction; the most disturbingly effective works of horror and madness have very often been designed by writers of the highest emotional sensitivity and critical intelligence. This is certainly the case with McCarthy, whose work plumbs the deepest existential abysses. Nevertheless, I harbored certain anxious expectations of him, unsure if he was a writer I’d ever actually want to meet. So like many others, I was more than a little puzzled by McCarthy’s decision to give his first and only TV interview in 2007 on Oprah Winfrey’s wildly popular platform.
But among the many things we learned from their pleasant conversation is that McCarthy doesn’t care much for literary society. He doesn’t like writers so much as he loves writing and thinking, of all kinds. He spends most of his time with scientists, keeping—as we noted in a post last week—an office at a think tank called the Santa Fe Institute and doing most of his writing there on a noisy old typewriter. While developing relationships with physicists, McCarthy took an interest in their writing, and volunteered to copy-edit several scientific books. He overhauled the prose in physicist Lawrence Krauss’s Quantum Man, a biography of Richard Feynman, promising, says Krauss, that he “could excise all the exclamation points and semicolons, both of which he said have no place in literature.”
In 2005, McCarthy read the manuscript of the Harvard physicist Lisa Randall’s first book, Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions. He “gave it a good copy-edit,” Randall said, and “really smoothed the prose.” Later he did the same for her second book, Knocking on Heaven’s Door. During that experience, she notes, “we had some nice conversations about the material. In fact, I saw a quote where he used a physics example I had given in response to a question about truth and beauty.”
Perhaps McCarthy sees this avocation as a challenge and an opportunity to learn. Perhaps he’s also doing research for his own work. His latest project, The Passenger, includes a character who is a Los Alamos physicist. But what about another, surprisingly out-of-the-blue editorial job he took on in 1996? Before he applied his austerities to Krauss and Randall’s work, he received an article from theoretical economist and friend W. Brian Arthur. The piece, scheduled to be published in the Harvard Business Review, was titled “Increasing Returns and the New World of Business.”
After mailing McCarthy the article, Arthur called and asked him how he liked it. “There was a silence on the line,” he tells Rick Tetzeli in an interview for Fast Company, “and then he said, ‘Would you be interested in some editorial help on that?’” The two spent four hours going over the writing. “Let’s say the piece was better for all the hours Cormac and I spent poring over every sentence,” Arthur says, noting that his editor called in a “slight panic” after hearing about the collaboration. You can read the full article here. It’s “a lot punchier and more sharply worded than you might expect, given its subject matter,” writes The Onion’s A.V. Club. It also contains a lot more punctuation than we might expect, given its copy-editor’s philosophy.
“Increasing Returns and the New World of Business” became one of Harvard Business Review’s “most influential articles” Tetzeli writes. “Even now, the theory of increasing returns is as important as ever: it’s at the heart of the success of companies such as Google, Facebook, Uber, Amazon, and Airbnb.” Did McCarthy’s encounter with Arthur’s theory appear in his later fiction? Who knows. Perhaps where Arthur’s vision of economic growth predicted the massive tech giants to come, McCarthy’s keen mind saw the ever-increasing profits of business savvy drug cartels like those in No Country for Old Men and his Ridley Scott collaboration The Counselor.
The distorted sounds of helicopter blades. The drunken punch that shatters the mirror. The “Ride of the Valkyries” attack. “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” The slaughtering of the water buffalo. “The horror… the horror.” In the nearly three-hour runtime of its original cut, Apocalypse Now delivers these and many more of the most vivid cinematic moments of the 1970s, the era of “New Hollywood”—when young auteurs like its director Francis Ford Coppola swept in and demolished the boundaries of mainstream American cinema—and that of the Vietnam War the film depicts as well.
Yet for all its artistic and cultural impact, the film hasn’t received quite as much scrutiny as you might imagine. Or at least that’s how it looked to professional cinephile Lewis Bond, known for his work on Channel Criswell, when he first took stock of Apocalypse Now’s analytical video essay landscape.
Discussions of Coppola’s Vietnam masterpiece tend to focus on its legendarily arduous production and the one million feet of film famously shot during it, a precedent perhaps set by the 1991 behind-the-scenes documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.
These appraisals shy away from one seemingly important question in particular: what is the movieabout? On one level, the answer to that question comes easily: a modern adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel Heart of Darkness,Apocalypse Now transplants and transforms Conrad’s story of a journey up the Congo River to the stronghold of an ivory trader into the context of 1969 Vietnam. The river journey remains, now led by a United States Army captain charged with the “termination with extreme prejudice” of an Army Special Forces colonel gone rogue, and probably insane, in Cambodia, surrounded by ex-soldiers and natives who reportedly worship him as a “demigod.”
Bond references the standard interpretation of Apocalypse Now’s river journey as “a metaphor for descent into madness,” but in his two-part, hour-long video essay analyzing the themes of the film, he posits “a more appropriate description of the river” as “a reflection of the characters’ inner journey, showing us the indoctrination of evil.” Along the way, Coppola and his collaborators offer a singular cinematic experience about not one thing but many: “It’s about the destruction of people’s morals. It’s about the way America operated during Vietnam as well as the confused values that America pushed upon the world. It’s about war. It’s about people” — and everything else before which our interpretive instincts ultimately fall powerless.
Many thinkers enjoy science fiction, and some even create it, but Arthur C. Clarke seemed to possess a mind precision-engineered for every aspect of it. When not writing such now-classics of the tradition as Childhood’s End, Rendezvous with Rama, and 2001: a Space Odyssey, he predicted such actual elements of humanity’s future as 3D printers and the internet. He must also have possessed quite a discerning ear and eye for other works of science fiction — an ability, in other words, to separate the art and the insight from the nonsense. (A useful ability indeed, given that, in the words of sci-fi author Theodore Sturgeon, “ninety percent of everything,” his and Clarke’s field not excepted, “is crap.”)
Asked in 1984 to name his favorite science-fiction films, Clarke came up with this top-twelve:
The request came to him on the set of 2010: The Year We Make Contact, Peter Hyams’ sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which appears on Clarke’s list. This selection may at first seem self-serving, given his own involvement in the film’s genesis, but Clarke’s 2001 and Kubrick’s 2001, parallel projects derived from a collaborative idea, ended up as very different works of science fiction.
Clarke’s choices, “which include some obvious titles, classics and modern sensations, are a well-rounded group that would serve any neophyte well in studying and experiencing the best that Hollywood has to offer in that corner of cinema,” writes SyfyWire’s Jeff Spry. He adds that Clarke couldn’t quite decide whether to include Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan, the picture credited with turning Star Trek movies into much more than a one-off proposition; and, in addition to Star Wars, which had already made his list, he considered Return of the Jedi — though not, intriguingly, The Empire Strikes Back, now perhaps the most respected Star Wars movie of them all.
This top-twelve list, in any case, shows that Clarke knew a classic when he saw one, and that he must have had a fairly expansive definition of science fiction, one that encompasses even “monster movies” like Frankenstein and King Kong. (Some purists even insist that Star Wars belongs in the fantasy column.) But he also showed, as always, a certain prescience, as evidenced by his selection of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, now recognized as one of the most influential films of all time, sci-fi or otherwise, but then still a fresh victim of commercial and critical disaster. Only Philip K. Dick himself, author of the novel that provided Blade Runner its source material, could see its future more clearly. Dick and Clarke’s work may have had little in common, but great science-fictional minds, it seems, think alike.
It’s been a hallmark of the culture wars in the last few decades for politicians and opinionators to rail against academia. Professors of humanities have in particular come under scrutiny, charged with academic frivolity (sometimes at taxpayer expense), willful obscurantism, and all sorts of ideological crimes and diabolical methods of indoctrination. As an undergrad and graduate student in the humanities during much of the nineties and oughts, I’ve witnessed a few waves of such attacks and found the caricatures drawn by talk radio hosts and cabinet appointees both alarming and amusing. I’ve also learned that mistrust of academia is much older than the many virulent strains of anti-intellectualism in the U.S.
As Yale Professor of British Romantic Poetry Paul Fry points out in an interview with 3:AM Magazine, “satire about any and all professionals with a special vocabulary has been a staple of fiction and popular ridicule since the 18th century… and critic-theorists perhaps more recently have been the easy targets of upper-middle-brow anti-intellectuals continuously since [Henry] Fielding and [Tobias] Smollett.” Though the barbs of these British novelists are more entertaining than anything you’ll hear from current talking heads, the phenomenon remains the same: “Special vocabulary intimidate and are instantly considered obfuscation,” says Fry. “Reactions against them are shamelessly naïve, with no consideration of whether the recondite vocabularies may be serving some necessary and constructive purpose.”
Maybe you’re scratching your chin, shaking or nodding your head, or glazing over. But if you’ve come this far, read on. Fry, after all, acknowledges that jargon-laden scholarly vocabularies can become “self-parody in the hands of fools,” and thus have provided justifiable fodder for cutting wit since even Jonathan Swift’s day. But Fry picks this history up in the 20th century in his Yale course ENGL 300 (Introduction to Theory of Literature), an accessible series of lectures on the history and practice of literary theory, in which he proceeds in a critical spirit to cover everything from Russian Formalism and New Criticism; to Semiotics, Structuralism and Deconstruction; to the Frankfurt School, Post-Colonial Criticism and Queer Theory. Thanks to Open Yale Courses, you can watch the 26 lectures above. Or you can find them on YouTube, iTunes, or Yale’s own web site (where you can also grab a syllabus for the course). These lectures were all recorded in the Spring of 2009. The main text used in the course is David Richter’s The Critical Tradition.
Expanding with the rapid growth and democratizing of universities after World War II, literary and critical theories are often closely tied to the contentious politics of the Cold War. Their decline corresponds to these forces as well. Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent snowballing of privatization and anti-government sentiment, many sources of funding for the humanities have succumbed, often under very public assaults on their character and utility. Fry’s presentation shows how literary theory has never been a blunt political instrument at any time. Rather it provides ways of doing ethics and philosophies of language, religion, art, history, myth, race, sexuality, etc. Or, put more plainly, the language of literary theory gives us different sets of tools for talking about being human.
Fry tells Yale Daily News that “literature expresses more eloquently and subtly emotions and feelings that we all try to express one way or another.” But why apply theory? Why not simply read novels, stories, and poems and interpret them by our own critical lights? One reason is that we cannot see our own biases and inherited cultural assumptions. One ostensibly theory-free method of an earlier generation of scholars and poets who rejected literary theory often suffers from this problem. The New Critics flourished mainly during the 40s, a fraught time in history when the country’s resources were redirected toward war and economic expansion. For Fry, this “last generation of male WASP hegemony in the academy” reflected “the blindness of the whole middle class,” and the idea “that life as they knew it… was life as everyone knew it, or should if they didn’t.”
Fry admits that theory can seem superfluous and needlessly opaque, “a purely speculative undertaking” without much of an object in view. Yet applied to literature, it provides exciting means of intellectual discovery. Fry himself doesn’t shy away from satirically taking the piss, as a modern-day Swift might say. He begins not with Coleridge or Keats (though he gets there eventually), but with a story for toddlers called “Tony the Tow Truck.” He does this not to mock, but to show us that “reading anything is a complex and potentially unlimited activity”—and as “a facetious reminder,” he tells 3:AM, that “theory is taking itself seriously in the wrong way if it exhausts its reason for being….”
Should we teach philosophy to children? You’d have a hard time, I imagine, convincing many readers of this site that we shouldn’t. But why? It’s not self-evident that Kant’s ethics will help Johnny or Susie better navigate playground politics or lunchroom disputes, nor is Plato’s theory of forms likely to show up on an elementary school exam. Maybe it’s never too early for kids to learn intellectual history. But it’s less clear that they can or should wrestle with Hegel.
Perhaps the question should be put another way: should we teach children to think philosophically? As we noted in an earlier post, English educators and entrepreneurs Emma and Peter Worley have answered affirmatively with their Philosophy Foundation, which trains children in methods of argumentation, problem-solving, and generally “thinking well.” They claim that practicing philosophical inquiry “has an impact on affective skills and… cognitive skills.”
Peter Worley also argues that it makes kids less prone to propaganda and the fear-mongering of totalitarians. While one reader astutely pointed out that several philosophers have had “authoritarian tendencies,” we should note that even some of the most anti-democratic—Socrates for example—have used philosophical methods to hold power to account and question means of social control.
But while this noble civic motivation may be a hard sell to a school board, or whatever the British equivalent, the idea that philosophical thinking promotes many kinds of literacy necessary for children’s success has found wide support for decades in England and the U.S. as part of a movement aptly named “Philosophy for children” (P4C), which “began with the work of Professor Matthew Lipman, who founded the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children at Montclair State University, USA in 1974.”
Inspired by an earlier American pedagogical thinker, John Dewey, Lipman and co-authors published Philosophy in the Classroom, under “the assumption,” writes Temple University Press, “that what is taught in schools is not (and should not be) subject matter but rather ways of thinking.” Lipman and his colleagues have had significant influence on educators in the UK, prompting a huge study by the Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF) that tracked nine and ten year old students in England from January to December of 2013.
As Jenny Anderson writes at Quartz, “More than 3,000 kids in 48 schools across England participated in weekly discussions about concepts such as truth, justice, friendship, and knowledge, with time carved out for silent reflection, question making, question airing, and building on one another’s thoughts and ideas.” The results were pretty astounding. “Overall,” the study concludes, “pupils using the approach made approximately two additional months’ progress in reading and maths.” This despite the fact, notes Anderson, that “the course was not designed to improve literacy or numeracy.”
Children from disadvantaged backgrounds saw an even bigger leap in performance: reading skills increased by four months, math by three months, and writing by two months. Teachers also reported a beneficial impact on students’ confidence and ability to listen to others.
The rigorous study not only found immediate improvement but also longitudinally tracked the students’ development for two additional years and found that the beneficial effects continued through that time; “the intervention group continu[ed] to outperform the control group” from 22 of the schools “long after the classes had finished.” You can read the study for yourself here, and learn more about the Philosophy for Children movement—“inspired by a dialogical tradition of doing philosophy begun by Socrates in Athens 2,500 years ago”—at the Philosophy Foundation, the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children, and the Center for Philosophy for Children at the University of Washington.
Calling all parents with a hedge fund–or big trust fund. If you really love your kids (wink), you can let them play with the building blocks that once belonged to young Albert Einstein. According to Einstein’s own sister, Albert used these blocks to build “complicated structures” during his childhood in Germany, sowing the seeds of his creativity. Now, after having been recently auctioned off by Einstein’s descendants, they’re being sold online for $160,000–plus $3 shipping within the US). AbeBooks, the online vendor of rare books and ephemera–has a blog post with more information on this collectible.
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