Why Should We Read Sylvia Plath? An Animated Video Makes the Case

In “Morn­ing Song,” from Sylvia Plath’s posthu­mous 1965 col­lec­tion Ariel, pub­lished two years after her sui­cide, a new­born infant is a “fat gold watch.” Among the inces­sant lists of adjec­tives in both her work, “fat” is one that stands out, appear­ing often, in sev­er­al syn­onyms, as a cel­e­bra­tion of abun­dance and real anx­i­ety over weight gain and a gen­er­al too-much­ness. In the same poem, the baby is a work of art, a “new stat­ue.” Its moth­er, on the oth­er hand, is in one stan­za a cloud effaced by the wind in a mir­ror, and a clum­sy ani­mal, “cow-heavy and flo­ral / In my Vic­to­ri­an night­gown. / Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s.”

Plath’s images are brac­ing and unex­pect­ed, awed and strick­en, usu­al­ly at once. She deploys them so quick­ly and adroit­ly that even when one fails to land, the oth­ers imme­di­ate­ly take up the slack, mak­ing even her less-great poems impres­sive for a line or stan­za that takes hold in the mind for days. This abil­i­ty was not the result of either divine inspi­ra­tion or men­tal ill­ness, but tal­ent honed through hard work and com­mit­ment. Plath “chose the artist’s way. Poet­ry was her call­ing,” the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed video by Iseult Gille­spie tells us above. As such, she per­se­vered even through severe bouts with depres­sion and many sui­cide attempts before she final­ly suc­cumbed at age 30.

Plath’s semi-auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal nov­el, The Bell Jar, which dra­ma­tizes these themes, as well as a hand­ful of her dark­est poems, have come to pop­u­lar­ly sym­bol­ize her lega­cy. You’ve heard of them even if you’ve nev­er read them. Yet she com­posed a “large bulk of poet­ry,” her hus­band, poet Ted Hugh­es, wrote in the intro­duc­tion to her Col­lect­ed Works, pub­lished and unpub­lished, nev­er throw­ing any­thing out. “She brought every piece she worked on to some final form accept­able to her, reject­ing at most the odd verse…. Her atti­tude to her verse was arti­san-like: if she couldn’t get a table out of the mate­r­i­al, she was quite hap­py to get a chair, or even a toy.”

His char­ac­ter­i­za­tion may not sound like the most char­i­ta­ble, and as her lit­er­ary execu­tor, Hugh­es was accused of refus­ing to pub­lish some of her work. But he was also a fel­low poet who watched her tire­less­ly write and revise. Quot­ing from her jour­nals, Hugh­es shows how her first col­lec­tion, 1960’s The Colos­sus and Oth­er Poems, came togeth­er over a peri­od of many years, its title chang­ing every few months, new poems appear­ing and old ones falling away. The result is a debut whose “breath­tak­ing per­spec­tives on emo­tion, nature, and art con­tin­ue to cap­ti­vate and res­onate,” notes the video’s nar­ra­tor.

Despite her major pres­ence in the lit­er­ary mag­a­zines and the respect she won espe­cial­ly in the UK, The Colos­sus and Oth­er Poems would be Plath’s only pub­lished col­lec­tion in her life­time. It made her a well-respect­ed poet, but did not make her the celebri­ty she became after the pub­li­ca­tion of The Bell Jar three years lat­er and her sui­cide the fol­low­ing month. “With­in a week of her death,” writes Time mag­a­zine in its review of Ariel in 1966, “intel­lec­tu­al Lon­don was hunched over copies of a strange and ter­ri­ble poem she had writ­ten dur­ing her last sick slide toward sui­cide. ‘Dad­dy’ was its title.”

After the pub­li­ca­tion of Ariel, read­ers fixed on “Dad­dy” and “Lady Lazarus,” sen­sa­tion­al poems in which “fear, hate, love, death and the poet’s own iden­ti­ty become fused at bleak heat with the fig­ure of her father, and through him, with the guilt of the Ger­man exter­mi­na­tors and the suf­fer­ing of their Jew­ish vic­tims.” These are poems, wrote Robert Low­ell in his pref­ace, that “play Russ­ian roulette with six car­tridges in the cylin­der.” As fem­i­nist schol­ars embraced her work in the 1970s, a mor­bid fas­ci­na­tion with her image only grew. This is the Plath many peo­ple know by word of mouth. But those who haven’t read more of her will miss out.

Plath doesn’t shy away from star­ing at sui­cide, abuse, and mass mur­der. She helped to “break the silence sur­round­ing issues of trau­ma, frus­tra­tion, and sex­u­al­i­ty.” Ariel and her dozens of uncol­lect­ed poems are also “filled with mov­ing med­i­ta­tions on heart­break and cre­ativ­i­ty,” includ­ing the heart­break and cre­ativ­i­ty of moth­er­hood, a theme always fraught with fears of love and death. Plath’s work can be dark, and it can be at once lumi­nous in its imag­i­na­tive can­dor. In writ­ing about life with depres­sion and the domes­tic mis­ery vis­it­ed on her in her mar­riage to Hugh­es, she cel­e­brates life’s sub­lime plea­sures and mourns its depths of suf­fer­ing, in poem ofter poem, with near-con­stant inge­nu­ity, wit, and courage.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Sylvia Plath Read 50+ of Her Dark, Com­pelling Poems

Sylvia Plath, Ted Hugh­es & Peter Porter Read Their Poet­ry: Free Audio 

Sylvia Plath, Girl Detec­tive Offers a Hilar­i­ous­ly Cheery Take on the Poet’s Col­lege Years

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

The Roman Roads of Spain & Portugal Visualized as a Subway Map: Ancient History Meets Modern Graphic Design

Between the first cen­tu­ry BC and the fourth cen­tu­ry AD, Rome dis­played what we might call an impres­sive ambi­tion. In his project illus­trat­ing those chap­ters of his­to­ry in a way no one has before, sta­tis­tics stu­dent Sasha Tru­bet­skoy has shown increas­ing­ly Roman-grade ambi­tions him­self, at least in the realm of his­tor­i­cal graph­ic design. We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured his mod­ern sub­way-style maps of the roads of the Roman Empire as well as the Roman roads of Britain here on Open Cul­ture. Today, we have his map of the Roman Roads of Iberia, the region today occu­pied main­ly by Spain and Por­tu­gal.

“This map was a blast to make,” writes Tru­bet­skoy. “I chose to fol­low the Anto­nine Itin­er­ary more strict­ly, which meant that I had to deal with many par­al­lel lines.” Also known as the itin­er­ary of the Emper­or Anton­i­nus or “Itin­er­ar­i­um Provin­cia­rum Antoni(ni) Augusti,” accord­ing to the Roman Roads Research Asso­ci­a­tion, the Anto­nine Itin­er­ary is “a col­lec­tion of 225 lists of stop­ping places along var­i­ous Roman roads across the Roman Empire.” Its val­ue “comes from it being one of a very few doc­u­ments to have sur­vived to mod­ern times which pro­vide detail of names and clues to the loca­tion of Roman sites and the routes of roads.”

Each list, or iter, that makes up the Anto­nine Itin­er­ary “gives the start and end of each route, with the total mileage of that route, fol­lowed by a list of inter­me­di­ate points with the dis­tances in between.” In cre­at­ing his Roman Roads of Iberia sub­way map, Tru­bet­skoy made each iter into its own “line,” though for some of them he had to draw from oth­er sources: “A cou­ple of Anto­nine routes were ambigu­ous and not eas­i­ly placed on a map, while a few impor­tant routes were miss­ing for which there is archae­o­log­i­cal evi­dence.”

It takes no small amount of work to con­vert this kind of often patchy and scat­tered knowl­edge from ancient his­to­ry into graph­ics as clean­ly and leg­i­bly designed as Tru­bet­skoy’s Roman-road sub­way maps. But the result, apart from offer­ing a nifty jux­ta­po­si­tion of past and present, reminds us of what the roads of the Romain Empire actu­al­ly meant: a degree of con­nect­ed­ness between dis­tant lands nev­er before achieved in human his­to­ry. You can sup­port Tru­bet­skoy’s efforts to show this to us in ever greater detail by mak­ing the US$9 sug­gest­ed dona­tion to down­load a high-res­o­lu­tion ver­sion of the Roman Roads of Iberia map. Rome was­n’t built in a day, much less its empire: the com­plete sub­way-map­ping of Rome’s roads will also require more time and labor — but then, would the builders of the Roman Empire have described their task as a “blast”?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ancient Rome’s Sys­tem of Roads Visu­al­ized in the Style of Mod­ern Sub­way Maps

The Roman Roads of Britain Visu­al­ized as a Sub­way Map

Rome Reborn: Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Ancient Rome, Cir­ca 320 C.E.

How Did the Romans Make Con­crete That Lasts Longer Than Mod­ern Con­crete? The Mys­tery Final­ly Solved

The Rise & Fall of the Romans: Every Year Shown in a Time­lapse Map Ani­ma­tion (753 BC ‑1479 AD)

A Won­der­ful Archive of His­toric Tran­sit Maps: Expres­sive Art Meets Pre­cise Graph­ic Design

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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.

The Amazing Franz Kafka Workout!: Discover the 15-Minute Exercise Routine That Swept the World in 1904

Does your spare tire show no signs of deflat­ing as biki­ni sea­son looms?

Is the fear of bul­lies kick­ing sand in your face begin­ning to out­strip the hor­ror of trans­form­ing into a giant bug overnight?

Do you long to expe­ri­ence last­ing health ben­e­fits along with an impres­sive­ly fit appear­ance?

Friends, we make you this promise: The Amaz­ing Franz Kaf­ka Work­out will trans­form your life along with your physique in just 15 min­utes a day.

That’s right, just 15 min­utes of dai­ly cal­is­then­ics (and some com­mon sense prac­tices with regard to diet, sleep, and hygiene) is all it takes. Even pen­cil-necked authors walk­ing around with their backs bowed, their shoul­ders droop­ing, their hands and arms all over the place, afraid of mir­rors because they show an inescapable ugli­ness, can dis­cov­er the con­fi­dence that eludes them, through improved pos­ture, breath­ing, and mus­cle tone.

(Note: the Amaz­ing Franz Kaf­ka Work­out will not pro­tect you from the per­ni­cious, even­tu­al­ly fatal effects of tuber­cu­lo­sis.)

The Amaz­ing Franz Kaf­ka Work­out is more cor­rect­ly attrib­uted to fit­ness guru Jør­gen Peter Müller, above, the author of sev­er­al exer­cise reg­i­men pam­phlets, includ­ing the best­selling My Sys­tem: 15 Min­utes’ Exer­cise a Day for Health’s Sake, which was pub­lished in 1904 and then trans­lat­ed into 25 lan­guages.

Kaf­ka was def­i­nite­ly the best known of Müller’s devo­tees, scrupu­lous­ly run­ning through the pre­scribed exer­cis­es morn­ing and evening, wear­ing noth­ing more than the skin he was born in—another prac­tice Müller hearti­ly endorsed.

The chis­eled Mr. Müller was a pro­po­nent of reg­u­lar den­tal check ups, sen­si­ble footwear, and vig­or­ous  tow­el­ing (or “rub­bing”), and an ene­my of con­stric­tive woolen under­wear, closed win­dows, and seden­tary lifestyles. My Sys­tem includes some obser­va­tions that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Kaf­ka nov­el:

The town office type is often a sad phe­nom­e­non pre­ma­ture­ly bent, with shoul­ders and hips awry from his dis­lo­cat­ing posi­tion on the office stool, pale, with pim­ply face and poma­tumed head, thin neck pro­trud­ing from a col­lar that an ordi­nary man could use as a cuff, and swag­ger­ing dress in the lat­est fash­ion flap­ping round the sticks that take the place of arms and legs! At a more advanced age the spec­ta­cle is still more pitiable… the eyes are dull, and the gen­er­al appear­ance is either still more sunken and shriv­eled or else fat, flab­by, and pal­lid, and enveloped in an odour of old paper, putri­fied skin grease, and bad breath.

In an essay on Slate, Sarah Wild­man, the descen­dent of two lean Müller fans, delves into the Müller System’s pop­u­lar­i­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly amongst 20th-cen­tu­ry Euro­pean Jews.

Just as best-sell­ing fit­ness experts do today, Müller beefed up his fran­chise with relat­ed titles: My Sys­tem for Ladies, My Sys­tem for Chil­dren, and My Sun­bathing and Fresh Air Sys­tem.

The orig­i­nal book is in the pub­lic domain and can be down­loaded for free from the Inter­net Archive, where one com­menter who has been fol­low­ing the sys­tem for near­ly sev­en­ty years gives it a hearty thumbs-up for its sta­mi­na restor­ing pow­ers.

Oth­ers seek­ing to make a buck by charg­ing for Kin­dle down­loads have the decen­cy to offer free instruc­tions for each of the indi­vid­ual exer­cis­es, includ­ing Quick Side­ways Bend­ing of Trunk (with Rub­bing) and the plank‑y Bend­ing and Stretch­ing of the Arms, part­ly Loaded with the Weight of the Body.

Even those unlike­ly to per­form so much as a sin­gle deep knee bend should get a bang out of the orig­i­nal pho­to illus­tra­tions, which, back in 1904, were as ripe for erot­ic dou­ble duty as the whole­some men’s physique mags of the 50s and 60s.

Insert spec­u­la­tion as to Kafka’s sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion here, if you must.

via Men­tal Floss

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Walt Whitman’s Unearthed Health Man­u­al, “Man­ly Health & Train­ing,” Urges Read­ers to Stand (Don’t Sit!) and Eat Plen­ty of Meat (1858)

77 Exer­cis­es: A Work­out Video For Fans of the Talk­ing Heads

What’s a Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly-Proven Way to Improve Your Abil­i­ty to Learn? Get Out and Exer­cise

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in New York City tonight, March 11, for the next install­ment of her ongo­ing book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Alan Watts Presents a 15-Minute Guided Meditation: A Time-Tested Way to Stop Thinking About Thinking

The con­cept of empti­nessshūny­atā—in Mahayana Bud­dhism is per­haps a sub­ject best avoid­ed in casu­al con­ver­sa­tion. It so vex­es every­one not least because of issues of trans­la­tion: “empti­ness,” many schol­ars think, hard­ly suf­fices as a sub­sti­tute. In Eng­lish it has a more dis­tinct­ly nihilist fla­vor than was intend­ed. Yet empti­ness is so indis­pens­able that it can hard­ly go unmen­tioned when the prac­tice and pur­pose of med­i­ta­tion come up in Bud­dhist thought.

Leave it to Zen to put things in such suc­cinct and down-to-earth ways: the prac­tice of med­i­ta­tion is to devel­op “’no mind,’” says Suzu­ki Roshi. It is to have “no gain­ing idea.” The rea­son is to have no rea­son. But from the same point of view, there is a point: “the point we should make clear in our prac­tice,” the Zen mas­ter tells us: we should “put more empha­sis on big mind rather than small mind.”

If you need more clar­i­fi­ca­tion, you might turn to anoth­er Zen pop­u­lar­iz­er who also began to draw audi­ences in Cal­i­for­nia in the 50s: Alan Watts. Watts came to San Fran­cis­co not with a life­time of monas­tic train­ing in Japan, but through his train­ing as an aca­d­e­m­ic, Epis­co­pal priest, and Zen enthu­si­ast in Britain. He is wordier, less poet­ic, and more essay­is­tic in his deliv­ery, but in dis­cussing the pur­pose of med­i­ta­tion, you will find him say­ing the very same things as the Zen mas­ters:

Med­i­ta­tion is the dis­cov­ery that the point of life is always arrived at in the imme­di­ate moment. And there­fore, if you med­i­tate for an ulte­ri­or motive — that is to say, to improve your mind, to improve your char­ac­ter, to be more effi­cient in life — you’ve got your eye on the future and you are not med­i­tat­ing!

As for Suzuk­i’s “big mind,” Watts has his own ver­sion: “The art of med­i­ta­tion is a way of get­ting into touch with real­i­ty… our basic insep­a­ra­bil­i­ty from the whole uni­verse.” These are not nec­es­sar­i­ly syn­onyms for “empti­ness,” but the idea of hav­ing no idea maybe comes close to sum­ma­riz­ing the con­cept. “Not know­ing,” as the koan says, “is most inti­mate.”

Maybe it’s hair-split­ting and belabors the com­par­i­son, but Suzu­ki Roshi did not talk about med­i­ta­tion as a way to stop all think­ing. This is futile, he would argue. Watts seems to sug­gest oth­er­wise when he says that “we become inte­ri­o­ral­ly silent and cease from the inter­minable chat­ter that goes on inside our skulls. Because you see, most of us think com­pul­sive­ly all the time.” Most hon­est peo­ple will tell you they think com­pul­sive­ly dur­ing med­i­ta­tion as well. But in his guid­ed med­i­ta­tion above, Watts acknowl­edges just this fact.

Indeed, his mat­ter-of-fact way of rec­og­niz­ing the ever-pres­ence of thought is what makes the instruc­tions he gives so use­ful, even if they are also, ulti­mate­ly, point­less. Hear the orig­i­nal fif­teen minute guid­ed med­i­ta­tion at the top of the post and an edit, with some, maybe dis­tract­ing, back­ground music, just above. To let think­ing recede into the back­ground, we must engage our oth­er sens­es, let­ting every sound and sen­sa­tion come and go and the autonomous ner­vous sys­tem take over.

How to let go of think­ing about think­ing? Let Watts guide you in an exer­cise and see what hap­pens. Then lis­ten to Suzu­ki Roshi describe the Bud­dhist phi­los­o­phy of empti­ness. As far as med­i­ta­tion, or “zazen prac­tice,” goes, he says, our zazen prac­tice is based on… the teach­ing of shūny­atā or empti­ness,” which is not an idea but an expe­ri­ence of “let­ting go of fixed ideas,” writes anoth­er Zen mas­ter who brought his prac­tice to the U.S., “in order to go beyond them.”

via Big Think

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Alan Watts Dis­pens­es Wit & Wis­dom on the Mean­ing of Life in Three Ani­mat­ed Videos

How Med­i­ta­tion Can Change Your Brain: The Neu­ro­science of Bud­dhist Prac­tice

Stream 18 Hours of Free Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tions

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

Bill Murray Explains How a 19th-Century Painting Saved His Life

You don’t under­stand pre­war 20th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca unless you under­stand a par­tic­u­lar 19th-cen­tu­ry French paint­ing: Jules Bre­ton’s The Song of the Lark. “In this evoca­tive work, a young peas­ant woman stands silent­ly in the flat fields of the artist’s native Nor­mandy as the sun ris­es, lis­ten­ing to the song of a dis­tant lark,” says a post from the Art Insti­tute of Chica­go. Apart from being select­ed as Amer­i­ca’s favorite paint­ing in 1934, it was also Eleanor Roo­sevelt’s favorite work of art, it pro­vid­ed the title for Willa Cather’s third nov­el, and it “inspired Bill Mur­ray while he was strug­gling as an actor in Chica­go.”

In the video above, a clip from a press con­fer­ence on the Mur­ray-fea­tur­ing his­tor­i­cal art-heist film The Mon­u­ments Men, he tells the sto­ry of how The Song of the Lark saved him. “This may be a lit­tle bit not-com­plete­ly-true,” Mur­ray says, “but it’s pret­ty true.”

When he first start­ed act­ing on the stage in his home­town of Chica­go, he did­n’t quite have the skills that have made him such a com­pelling pres­ence for more than forty years on the screen. After what sounds like one par­tic­u­lar­ly poor ear­ly per­for­mance — poor enough to make him con­sid­er his life prac­ti­cal­ly over — he took a despair­ing walk toward Lake Michi­gan, think­ing, “If I’m going to die where I am, I may as well go over to the lake and float for a while after I’m dead.”

But then a sud­den, impul­sive turn up Michi­gan Avenue took Mur­ray to the Art Insti­tute of Chica­go, and there he found him­self in front of The Song of the Lark, which has now hung there for over a cen­tu­ryThe sight of it got him think­ing: “ ‘Well, there’s a girl who does­n’t have a whole lot of prospects, but the sun’s com­ing up any­way and she’s got anoth­er chance at it.’ So I think that gave me some sort of feel­ing that I, too, am a per­son, and I get anoth­er chance every day the sun comes up.” Many of the Great Depres­sion-era Amer­i­cans who admired Bre­ton’s paint­ing must have drawn sim­i­lar feel­ings from it, just as sure­ly as many of Mur­ray’s fans have found inspi­ra­tion in all his char­ac­ters, art­ful­ly craft­ed between the comedic and the dra­mat­ic — char­ac­ters that, with­out The Song of the Lark, he may nev­er have lived to per­form.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art Insti­tute of Chica­go Puts 44,000+ Works of Art Online: View Them in High Res­o­lu­tion

Bill Mur­ray Explains How He Pulled Him­self Out of a Deep, Last­ing Funk: He Took Hunter S. Thompson’s Advice & Lis­tened to the Music of John Prine

The Phi­los­o­phy of Bill Mur­ray: The Intel­lec­tu­al Foun­da­tions of His Comedic Per­sona

Bill Mur­ray Reads the Poet­ry of Lawrence Fer­linghet­ti, Wal­lace Stevens, Emi­ly Dick­in­son, Bil­ly Collins, Lorine Niedeck­er, Lucille Clifton & More

Lis­ten to Bill Mur­ray Lead a Guid­ed Medi­a­tion on How It Feels to Be Bill Mur­ray

Art Exhib­it on Bill Mur­ray Opens in the UK

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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.

The Big Pond: Stream 50 Audio Stories from the Goethe-Institut, Available Free Online

 

Who doesn’t love a good pod­cast? Don’t tell me you’ve nev­er binged Ser­i­al or laughed out loud with Marc Maron. Over the last few years, pod­casts have become a cul­tur­al phenomenon–they help us endure our dai­ly com­mutes and then lull us back to sleep at night. Lis­ten­ing cul­ture isn’t new, though–talk radio has been fill­ing the silence with anec­dotes, news, and dra­ma since the ear­ly 1900s. The Goethe-Insti­tut’s new radio and pod­cast series THE BIG POND. A US-Ger­man Lis­ten­ing Series is a per­fect mar­riage of these two audi­ble sto­ry­telling for­mats.

The Goethe-Insti­tut, a Ger­man cul­tur­al cen­ter with its North Amer­i­can head­quar­ters in Wash­ing­ton, has part­nered with the Pub­lic Radio Exchange (PRX), the RIAS Berlin Kom­mis­sion, KCRW Berlin, and oth­er pub­lic radio sta­tions and pro­duc­ers in Ger­many and the US to bring you THE BIG POND, a col­lec­tion of 50 unique audio pieces released on a week­ly basis. From pret­zels and beer to the Berlin Wall, from motor­cy­cles to recy­cling, THE BIG POND offers a fresh per­spec­tive on just how much these two coun­tries share while cel­e­brat­ing pod­cast­ing, broad­cast­ing, and “Wun­der­bar Togeth­er” – the Ger­man-Amer­i­can Year of Friend­ship.

Don’t wor­ry, the radio fea­tures are all in Eng­lish! Episodes are avail­able for free via PRX, iTunes, Spo­ti­fy, and THE BIG POND’s web­site as pod­casts and for broad­cast by pub­lic radio sta­tions in the Unit­ed States. This care­ful­ly curat­ed library of audio pro­duc­tions cov­ers all things Ger­man-Amer­i­can: Ger­man motor­cy­cle tourists in Utah, a young Ger­man journalist’s myth­i­cal day with John Lennon, Ger­man-style appren­tice­ships in the US, an Amer­i­can opera singer’s life in Berlin, New York City beer gar­dens, and much more. THE BIG POND is home to fea­tures from up-and-com­ing pro­duc­ers as well as indus­try greats like Katie Davis, a con­trib­u­tor to NPR’s “All Things Con­sid­ered” and “This Amer­i­can Life”, and the Kitchen Sis­ters (Davia Nel­son and Nik­ki Sil­va), pro­duc­ers of the award-win­ning NPR series “Hid­den Kitchens”.

“When an edi­tor asks me to do a radio sto­ry, it usu­al­ly comes with lots of direc­tions,” said radio pro­duc­er Katie Davis. “When the team at THE BIG POND talked to me about a sto­ry for this series, every­thing was wide open. No rules, require­ments; just a wide open can­vas with space for orig­i­nal sto­ries.”

Pro­vid­ed with the nec­es­sary free­dom to tell their transat­lantic tales, THE BIG POND pro­duc­ers have devel­oped pieces that res­onate with audi­ences of all back­grounds on both sides of the big pond, con­vey­ing a bal­anced and mod­ern image of Ger­many and the US. THE BIG POND isn’t a col­lec­tion of puff pieces about Germany–it’s a well-researched nar­ra­tive of Ger­man and Amer­i­can life and cul­ture. Close coop­er­a­tion with Ger­man and Amer­i­can jour­nal­ists gives an authen­tic voice to Ger­many, the US, and their many sub­cul­tures while build­ing up the transat­lantic radio net­work.

Any­one inter­est­ed in the series can down­load episodes free of charge for indi­vid­ual use or broad­cast­ing at PRX, iTunes, Spo­ti­fy, or by vis­it­ing THE BIG POND’s web­site. Check www.goethe.de/bigpond and the Goethe-Insti­tut Wash­ing­ton’s social media chan­nels for tran­scripts and behind-the-scenes con­tent.

For the project’s press release and oth­er press mate­ri­als, please vis­it:

www.goethe.de/bigpond/press

Savan­nah Beck is the Online Edi­tor at the Goethe-Insti­tut Wash­ing­ton.

Artificial Intelligence Identifies the Six Main Arcs in Storytelling: Welcome to the Brave New World of Literary Criticism

Is the sin­gu­lar­i­ty upon us? AI seems poised to replace every­one, even artists whose work can seem like an invi­o­lably human indus­try. Or maybe not. Nick Cave’s poignant answer to a fan ques­tion might per­suade you a machine will nev­er write a great song, though it might mas­ter all the moves to write a good one. An AI-writ­ten nov­el did almost win a Japan­ese lit­er­ary award. A suit­ably impres­sive feat, even if much of the author­ship should be attrib­uted to the program’s human design­ers.

But what about lit­er­ary crit­i­cism? Is this an art that a machine can do con­vinc­ing­ly? The answer may depend on whether you con­sid­er it an art at all. For those who do, no arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence will ever prop­er­ly devel­op the the­o­ry of mind need­ed for sub­tle, even mov­ing, inter­pre­ta­tions. On the oth­er hand, one group of researchers has suc­ceed­ed in using “sophis­ti­cat­ed com­put­ing pow­er, nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing, and reams of dig­i­tized text,” writes Atlantic edi­tor Adri­enne LaFrance, “to map the nar­ra­tive pat­terns in a huge cor­pus of lit­er­a­ture.” The name of their lit­er­ary crit­i­cism machine? The Hedo­nome­ter.

We can treat this as an exer­cise in com­pil­ing data, but it’s arguable that the results are on par with work from the com­par­a­tive mythol­o­gy school of James Fra­zier and Joseph Camp­bell. A more imme­di­ate com­par­i­son might be to the very deft, if not par­tic­u­lar­ly sub­tle, Kurt Von­negut, who—before he wrote nov­els like Slaugh­ter­house Five and Cat’s Cra­dlesub­mit­ted a master’s the­sis in anthro­pol­o­gy to the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go. His project did the same thing as the machine, 35 years ear­li­er, though he may not have had the where­with­al to read “1,737 Eng­lish-lan­guage works of fic­tion between 10,000 and 200,000 words long” while strug­gling to fin­ish his grad­u­ate pro­gram. (His the­sis, by the way, was reject­ed.)

Those num­bers describe the dataset from Project Guten­berg fed into the The Hedo­nome­ter by the com­put­er sci­en­tists at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ver­mont and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ade­laide. After the com­put­er fin­ished “read­ing,” it then plot­ted “the emo­tion­al tra­jec­to­ry” of all of the sto­ries using a “sen­ti­ment analy­sis to gen­er­ate an emo­tion­al arc for each work.” What it found were six broad cat­e­gories of sto­ry, list­ed below:

  1. Rags to Rich­es (rise)
  2. Rich­es to Rags (fall)
  3. Man in a Hole (fall then rise)
  4. Icarus (rise then fall)
  5. Cin­derel­la (rise then fall then rise)
  6. Oedi­pus (fall then rise then fall)

How does this endeav­or com­pare with Vonnegut’s project? (See him present the the­o­ry below.) The nov­el­ist used more or less the same method­ol­o­gy, in human form, to come up with eight uni­ver­sal sto­ry arcs or “shapes of sto­ries.” Von­negut him­self left out the Rags to Rich­es cat­e­go­ry; he called it an anom­aly, though he did have a head­ing for the same ris­ing-only sto­ry arc—the Cre­ation Story—which he deemed an uncom­mon shape for West­ern fic­tion. He did include the Cin­derel­la arc, and was pleased by his dis­cov­ery that its shape mir­rored the New Tes­ta­ment arc, which he also includ­ed in his schema, an act the AI sure­ly would have judged redun­dant.

Con­tra Von­negut, the AI found that one-fifth of all the works it ana­lyzed were Rags-to-Rich­es sto­ries. It deter­mined that this arc was far less pop­u­lar with read­ers than “Oedi­pus,” “Man in a Hole,” and “Cin­derel­la.” Its analy­sis does get much more gran­u­lar, and to allay our sus­pi­cions, the researchers promise they did not con­trol the out­come of the exper­i­ment. “We’re not impos­ing a set of shapes,” says lead author Andy Rea­gan, Ph.D. can­di­date in math­e­mat­ics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ver­mont. “Rather: the math and machine learn­ing have iden­ti­fied them.”

But the authors do pro­vide a lot of their own inter­pre­ta­tion of the data, from choos­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tive texts—like Har­ry Pot­ter and the Death­ly Hal­lows—to illus­trate “nest­ed and com­pli­cat­ed” plot arcs, to pro­vid­ing the guid­ing assump­tions of the exer­cise. One of those assump­tions, unsur­pris­ing­ly giv­en the authors’ fields of inter­est, is that math and lan­guage are inter­change­able. “Sto­ries are encod­ed in art, lan­guage, and even in the math­e­mat­ics of physics,” they write in the intro­duc­tion to their paper, pub­lished on Arxiv.org.

“We use equa­tions,” they go on, “to rep­re­sent both sim­ple and com­pli­cat­ed func­tions that describe our obser­va­tions of the real world.” If we accept the premise that sen­tences and inte­gers and lines of code are telling the same sto­ries, then maybe there isn’t as much dif­fer­ence between humans and machines as we would like to think.

via The Atlantic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Nick Cave Answers the Hot­ly Debat­ed Ques­tion: Will Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Ever Be Able to Write a Great Song?

Kurt Von­negut Dia­grams the Shape of All Sto­ries in a Master’s The­sis Reject­ed by U. Chica­go

Kurt Von­negut Maps Out the Uni­ver­sal Shapes of Our Favorite Sto­ries

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

Here’s John Steinbeck Asking Marilyn Monroe for Her Autograph (1955)

When ask­ing a celebri­ty for a spe­cial favor, it helps to be a bit of a celebri­ty your­self.

As Kei­th Fer­rell details in his biog­ra­phy, John Stein­beck: The Voice of the Land, the Nobel lau­re­ate had lit­tle patience for auto­graph seek­ers, pushy young writ­ers seek­ing help get­ting pub­lished, and “peo­ple who nev­er read books but enjoyed meet­ing authors.”

The shoe went on the oth­er foot when Mrs. Stein­beck let slip to her nephew that Uncle John had met the boy’s movie star crush, Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe.

Sud­den­ly, an auto­graphed pho­to seemed in order.

And not just some stan­dard issue pub­lic­i­ty shot, but ide­al­ly one show­ing the star of The Sev­en Year Itch and Gen­tle­men Pre­fer Blondes in a “pen­sive girl­ish mood.”

Also, could she please inscribe it by name to nephew Jon, a young man with, his uncle con­fid­ed, “one foot in the door of puber­ty”?

The star-to-star tone Stein­beck adopts for the above let­ter seems designed to ward off sus­pi­cion that this nephew could be a con­ve­nient inven­tion on the part of some­one desir­ing such a prize for him­self.

Six­ty years after a sec­re­tary typed it up, Stein­beck­’s mes­sage fetched $3,520 at Julien’s Auc­tions, one of a wide range of items culled from hard­core Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe col­lec­tor, David Gains­bor­ough-Roberts as well as the estate of Mon­roe’s act­ing teacher, Lee Stras­berg.

In addi­tion to oth­er cor­re­spon­dence, the Mar­i­lyn auc­tion includ­ed anno­tat­ed scripts, an emp­ty pre­scrip­tion bot­tle, a bal­le­ri­na paper­weight, stock­ings and gowns, some pin­up-type mem­o­ra­bil­ia, and a pro­gram from John F Kennedy’s 1962 birth­day cel­e­bra­tion at Madi­son Square Gar­den.

One lot that is con­spic­u­ous for its absence is Steinbeck’s promised “guest key to the ladies’ entrance of Fort Knox.”

Could it be that the boy nev­er got his cus­tomized auto­graph?

We’d like to think that he did. Per­haps he’s still savor­ing it in pri­vate.

H/T Alan Gold­wass­er/Let­ters of Note/Flash­bak

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“Noth­ing Good Gets Away”: John Stein­beck Offers Love Advice in a Let­ter to His Son (1958)

The 430 Books in Mar­i­lyn Monroe’s Library: How Many Have You Read?

Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe & Elvis Pres­ley Star in an Action-Packed Pop Art Japan­ese Mon­ster Movie

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in New York City for the next install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain, this Mon­day, March 11. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

« Go BackMore in this category... »
Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.