Ian McKellen Chokes Up While Reading a Poignant Coming-Out Letter

in History, Letters, Literature, Uncategorized | January 19th, 2018

“In 1977, Armis­tead Maupin wrote a let­ter to his par­ents that he had been com­pos­ing for half his life,” writes the Guardian’s Tim Adams. “He addressed it direct­ly to his moth­er, but rather than send it to her, he pub­lished it in the San Fran­cis­co Chron­i­cle, the paper in which he had made his name with his loose­ly fic­tion­alised Tales of the City, the dai­ly ser­i­al writ­ten from the alter­na­tive, gay world in which he lived.” The late 1970s saw a final flow­er­ing of news­pa­per-seri­al­ized nov­els, the same form in which Charles Dick­ens had grown famous near­ly a cen­tu­ry and a half before. But of all the zeit­geisty sto­ries then told a day at a time in urban cen­ters across Amer­i­ca, none has had any­thing like the last­ing impact of San Fran­cis­co as envi­sioned by Maupin.

Much of Tales of the City’s now-acknowl­edged impor­tance comes from the man­ner in which Maupin pop­u­lat­ed that San Fran­cis­co with a sex­u­al­ly diverse cast of char­ac­ters — gay, straight, and every­thing in between — and pre­sent­ed their lives with­out moral judg­ment.

He saved his con­dem­na­tion for the likes of Ani­ta Bryant, the singer and Flori­da Cit­rus Com­mis­sion spokes­woman who inspired Maupin to write that veiled let­ter to his own par­ents when she head­ed up the anti-homo­sex­u­al “Save Our Chil­dren” polit­i­cal cam­paign. When Michael Tol­liv­er, one of the series’ main gay char­ac­ters, dis­cov­ers that his folks back in Flori­da have thrown in their lot with Bryant, he responds with an elo­quent and long-delayed com­ing-out that begins thus:

Dear Mama,

I’m sor­ry it’s tak­en me so long to write. Every time I try to write you and Papa I real­ize I’m not say­ing the things that are in my heart. That would be OK, if I loved you any less than I do, but you are still my par­ents and I am still your child.

I have friends who think I’m fool­ish to write this let­ter. I hope they’re wrong. I hope their doubts are based on par­ents who love and trust them less than mine do. I hope espe­cial­ly that you’ll see this as an act of love on my part, a sign of my con­tin­u­ing need to share my life with you. I would­n’t have writ­ten, I guess, if you had­n’t told me about your involve­ment in the Save Our Chil­dren cam­paign. That, more than any­thing, made it clear that my respon­si­bil­i­ty was to tell you the truth, that your own child is homo­sex­u­al, and that I nev­er need­ed sav­ing from any­thing except the cru­el and igno­rant piety of peo­ple like Ani­ta Bryant.

I’m sor­ry, Mama. Not for what I am, but for how you must feel at this moment. I know what that feel­ing is, for I felt it for most of my life. Revul­sion, shame, dis­be­lief — rejec­tion through fear of some­thing I knew, even as a child, was as basic to my nature as the col­or of my eyes.

You can hear Michael’s, and Maupin’s, full let­ter read aloud by Sir Ian McK­ellen in the Let­ters Live video above. In response to its ini­tial pub­li­ca­tion, Adams writes, “Maupin had received hun­dreds of oth­er let­ters, near­ly all of them from read­ers who had cut out the col­umn, sub­sti­tut­ed their own names for Michael’s and sent it ver­ba­tim to their own par­ents. Maupin’s Let­ter to Mama has since been set to music three times and become ‘a stan­dard for gay men’s cho­rus­es around the world.’ ”

Those words come from a piece on Maupin’s auto­bi­og­ra­phy Log­i­cal Fam­i­ly, pub­lished just last year, in which the Tales of the City author tells of his own com­ing out as well as his friend­ships with oth­er non-straight cul­tur­al icons, one such icon being McK­ellen him­self. “I have many regrets about not hav­ing come out ear­li­er,” McK­ellen told BOMB mag­a­zine in 1998, “but one of them might be that I did­n’t engage myself in the pol­i­tick­ing.” He’d come out ten years before, as a stand in oppo­si­tion to Sec­tion 28 of the Local Gov­ern­ment Bill, then under con­sid­er­a­tion in the British Par­lia­ment, which pro­hib­it­ed local author­i­ties from depict­ing homo­sex­u­al­i­ty “as a kind of pre­tend­ed fam­i­ly rela­tion­ship.”

McK­ellen entered the realm of activism in earnest after choos­ing that moment to reveal his sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion on the BBC, which he did on the advice of Maupin and oth­er friends. A few years lat­er he appeared in the tele­vi­sion minis­eries adap­ta­tion of Tales of the City as Archibald Anson-Gid­de, a wealthy real-estate and cul­tur­al impre­sario (one, as Maupin puts it, of the city’s “A‑gays”). In the nov­els, Archibald Anson-Gid­de dies clos­et­ed, of AIDS, pro­vok­ing the ire of cer­tain oth­er char­ac­ters for not hav­ing done enough for the cause in life — a charge, thanks in part to the words of Michael Tol­liv­er, that nei­ther Maupin nor McK­ellen will sure­ly nev­er face.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch Reads a Let­ter Alan Tur­ing Wrote in “Dis­tress” Before His Con­vic­tion For “Gross Inde­cen­cy”

Allen Gins­berg Talks About Com­ing Out to His Fam­i­ly & Fel­low Poets on 1978 Radio Show (NSFW)

Ian McK­ellen Reads a Pas­sion­ate Speech by William Shake­speare, Writ­ten in Defense of Immi­grants

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 Psychological & Neurological Disorders Experienced by Characters in Alice in Wonderland: A Neuroscience Reading of Lewis Carroll’s Classic Tale

in Literature, Neuroscience, Psychology | January 17th, 2018

Most rep­utable doc­tors tend to refrain from diag­nos­ing peo­ple they’ve nev­er met or exam­ined. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, this cir­cum­spec­tion does­n’t obtain as often among lay folk. When we lob unin­formed diag­noses at oth­er peo­ple, we may do those with gen­uine men­tal health issues a seri­ous dis­ser­vice. But what about fic­tion­al char­ac­ters? Can we ascribe men­tal ill­ness­es to the sur­re­al menagerie, say, in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land? It’s almost impos­si­ble not to, giv­en the overt themes of mad­ness in the sto­ry.

Car­roll him­self, it seems, drew many of his depic­tions direct­ly from the treat­ment of men­tal dis­or­ders in 19th cen­tu­ry Eng­land, many of which were linked to “extreme­ly poor work­ing con­di­tions,” notes Franziska Kohlt at The Con­ver­sa­tion. Dur­ing the indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion, “pop­u­la­tions in so-called ‘pau­per lunatic asy­lums’ for the work­ing class sky­rock­et­ed.” Carroll’s uncle, Robert Wil­fred Skeff­in­g­ton Lutwidge, hap­pened to be an offi­cer of the Luna­cy Com­mis­sion, which super­vised such insti­tu­tions, and his work offers “stun­ning insights into the mad­ness in Alice.”

Yet we should be care­ful. Like the sup­posed drug ref­er­ences in Alice, some of the lay diag­noses now applied to Alice’s char­ac­ters may be a lit­tle far-fetched. Do we real­ly see diag­nos­able PTSD or Tourette’s? Anx­i­ety Dis­or­der and Nar­cis­sis­tic Per­son­al­i­ty Dis­or­der? These con­di­tions hadn’t been cat­e­go­rized in Carroll’s day, though their symp­toms are noth­ing new. And yet, experts have long looked to his non­sense fable for its depic­tions of abnor­mal psy­chol­o­gy. One British psy­chi­a­trist didn’t just diag­nose Alice, he named a con­di­tion after her.

In 1955, Dr. John Todd coined the term Alice in Won­der­land Syn­drome (AIWS) to describe a rare con­di­tion in which—write researchers in the Jour­nal of Pedi­atric Neu­ro­sciences—“the sizes of body parts or sizes of exter­nal objects are per­ceived incor­rect­ly.” Among oth­er ill­ness­es, Alice in Won­der­land Syn­drome may be linked to migraines, which Car­roll him­self report­ed­ly suf­fered.

We might jus­ti­fi­ably assume the Mad Hat­ter has mer­cury poi­son­ing, but what oth­er dis­or­ders might the text plau­si­bly present? Hol­ly Bark­er, doc­tor­al can­di­date in clin­i­cal neu­ro­science at King’s Col­lege Lon­don, has used her schol­ar­ly exper­tise to iden­ti­fy and describe in detail two oth­er con­di­tions she thinks are evi­dent in Alice.

Deper­son­al­iza­tion:

“At sev­er­al points in the sto­ry,” writes Bark­er, “Alice ques­tions her own iden­ti­ty and feels ‘dif­fer­ent’ in some way from when she first awoke.” See­ing in these descrip­tions the symp­toms of Deper­son­al­iza­tion Dis­or­der (DPD), Bark­er describes the con­di­tion and its loca­tion in the brain.

This dis­or­der encom­pass­es a wide range of symp­toms, includ­ing feel­ings of not belong­ing in one’s own body, a lack of own­er­ship of thoughts and mem­o­ries, that move­ments are ini­ti­at­ed with­out con­scious inten­tion and a numb­ing of emo­tions. Patients often com­ment that they feel as though they are not real­ly there in the present moment, liken­ing the expe­ri­ence to dream­ing or watch­ing a movie. These symp­toms occur in the absence of psy­chosis, and patients are usu­al­ly aware of the absur­di­ty of their sit­u­a­tion. DPD is often a fea­ture of migraine or epilep­tic auras and is some­times expe­ri­enced momen­tar­i­ly by healthy indi­vid­u­als, in response to stress, tired­ness or drug use.

Also high­ly asso­ci­at­ed with child­hood abuse and trau­ma, the con­di­tion “acts as a sort of defense mech­a­nism, allow­ing an indi­vid­ual to become dis­con­nect­ed from adverse life events.” Per­haps there is PTSD in Carroll’s text after all, since an esti­mat­ed 51% of DPD patients also meet those cri­te­ria.

Prosopag­nosia:

This con­di­tion is char­ac­ter­ized by “the selec­tive inabil­i­ty to rec­og­nize faces.” Though it can be hered­i­tary, prosopag­nosia can also result from stroke or head trau­ma. Fit­ting­ly, the char­ac­ter sup­pos­ed­ly affect­ed by it is none oth­er than Hump­ty-Dump­ty, who tells Alice “I shouldn’t know you again if we did meet.”

“Your face is the same as every­body else has – the two eyes, so-” (mark­ing their places in the air with his thumb) “nose in the mid­dle, mouth under. It’s always the same. Now if you had two eyes on the same side of the nose, for instance – or the mouth at the top – that would be some help.”

This “pre­cise descrip­tion” of prosopag­nosia shows how indi­vid­u­als with the con­di­tion rely on par­tic­u­lar­ly “dis­crim­i­nat­ing fea­tures to tell peo­ple apart,” since they are unable to dis­tin­guish fam­i­ly mem­bers and close friends from total strangers.

Schol­ars know that Carroll’s text con­tains with­in it sev­er­al abstract and seem­ing­ly absurd math­e­mat­i­cal con­cepts, such as imag­i­nary num­bers and pro­jec­tive geom­e­try. The work of researchers like Kohit and Bark­er shows that Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land might also present a com­plex 19th cen­tu­ry under­stand­ing of men­tal ill­ness and neu­ro­log­i­cal dis­or­ders, con­veyed in a super­fi­cial­ly sil­ly way, but pos­si­bly informed by seri­ous research and obser­va­tion. Read Barker’s arti­cle in full here to learn more about the con­di­tions she diag­noses.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lewis Carroll’s Pho­tographs of Alice Lid­dell, the Inspi­ra­tion for Alice in Won­der­land

See The Orig­i­nal Alice In Won­der­land Man­u­script, Hand­writ­ten & Illus­trat­ed By Lewis Car­roll (1864)

See Sal­vador Dali’s Illus­tra­tions for the 1969 Edi­tion of Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land

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

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What Shakespeare’s English Sounded Like, and How We Know It

in English Language, Language, Literature | January 17th, 2018

A com­mon joke has Amer­i­cans over­awed by peo­ple with British accents. It’s fun­ny because it’s part­ly true; Yanks can grant undue author­i­ty to peo­ple who sound like Sir David Atten­bor­ough or Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch. But in these cas­es, what we gener­i­cal­ly call a British accent should more accu­rate­ly be referred to as “Received Pro­nun­ci­a­tion” (or RP), the speech of BBC pre­sen­ters and edu­cat­ed Brits from cer­tain mid­dle- and upper-class areas in South­ern Eng­land. (If you like Received Pro­nun­ci­a­tion, you’re going to love “posh” Upper RP.) Received Pro­nun­ci­a­tion is only one of many British accents, as come­di­an Siob­han Thomp­son shows, most of which we’re unlike­ly to hear nar­rat­ing nature doc­u­men­taries.

RP is also some­times called “the Shake­speare accent,” for its asso­ci­a­tion with famous thes­pi­ans like John Giel­gud and Lau­rence Olivi­er, or Ian McK­ellen and Patrick Stew­art. But as we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly not­ed in a post on the work of lin­guist David Crys­tal and his son, actor Ben Crys­tal, the Eng­lish of Shakespeare’s day sound­ed noth­ing like what we typ­i­cal­ly hear on stage and screen.

What lin­guists call “Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion” (OP), the actu­al Shake­speare accent, had a fla­vor all its own, like­ly com­bin­ing, to our mod­ern ears, “flecks of near­ly every region­al U.K. Eng­lish accent,” as Ben Crys­tal tells NPR, “and indeed Amer­i­can and in fact Aus­tralian, too.”

You can see the Crys­tals explain and demon­strate the accent in the video above, and make sense of many Shake­speare­an puns that only work in OP. And in the ani­mat­ed video at the top of the post, get a whirl­wind tour from Chaucer’s Mid­dle Eng­lish to Shakespeare’s Ear­ly Mod­ern vari­ety. Along the way, you’ll learn why the spelling of Eng­lish words—both Amer­i­can and British—is so con­fus­ing and irreg­u­lar. (“Knight,” for exam­ple, which makes no sense when pro­nounced as nite, was once pro­nounced much more pho­net­i­cal­ly.) The range of region­al accents pro­duced a bed­lam of vari­ant spellings, which took a few hun­dred years to stan­dard­ize dur­ing some intense spelling debates.

You’ll get an intro­duc­tion to the first Eng­lish print­er, William Cax­ton, and the “Great Vow­el Shift” which changed the language’s sound dra­mat­i­cal­ly over the course of a cou­ple hun­dred years. Once we get to Shake­speare and his “Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion,” we can see how rhymes that don’t scan for us sound­ed just right to Eliz­a­bethan ears. These lost rhymes pro­vide a sig­nif­i­cant clue for lin­guists who recon­struct OP, as does meter and the sur­vival of old­er pro­nun­ci­a­tions in cer­tain dialects.

When the Crys­tals brought their recon­struc­tion of Shakespeare’s Eng­lish to the stage in huge­ly pop­u­lar pro­duc­tions at the Globe The­atre, mem­bers of the audi­ence all heard some­thing slight­ly different—their many dif­fer­ent dialects reflect­ed back at them. Lis­ten for all the var­i­ous kinds of Eng­lish above in Ben Crys­tal’s recita­tion of Hamlet’s “to be, or not to be” speech in Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear What Shake­speare Sound­ed Like in the Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion

A 68 Hour Playlist of Shakespeare’s Plays Being Per­formed by Great Actors: Giel­gud, McK­ellen & More

Hear What Ham­let, Richard III & King Lear Sound­ed Like in Shakespeare’s Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion

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

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Stream Big Playlists of Music from Haruki Murakami’s Personal Vinyl Collection and His Strange Literary Worlds

in Books, Literature, Music | January 12th, 2018

Haru­ki Muraka­mi read­ers, or even those of us who’ve just read about his nov­els, know to expect cer­tain things from his books: cats, ears, wells, strange par­al­lel real­i­ties, and above all music. And not just any music, but high­ly delib­er­ate selec­tions from the West­ern clas­si­cal, pop, and jazz canons, all no doubt pulled straight from the shelves of the writer’s vast per­son­al record library. That per­son­al library may well have grown a few records vaster today, giv­en that it’s Murakami’s 69th birth­day. To mark the occa­sion, we’ve round­ed up a few hit playlists of music from the Nor­we­gian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chron­i­cle, and 1Q84 author’s work as well as his life.

At the top of the post we have a Youtube playlist of songs from the artists fea­tured in Murakami’s non-fic­tion Por­trait in Jazz books, still, like most of his essay­is­tic writ­ing, untrans­lat­ed into Eng­lish. We orig­i­nal­ly high­light­ed it in a post on his for­mi­da­ble love of that most Amer­i­can of all musi­cal tra­di­tions, which got him run­ning a jazz bar in Tokyo years before he became a nov­el­ist. Just above, you’ll find a 96-song Spo­ti­fy playlist of the songs fea­tured in his nov­els, fea­tur­ing jazz record­ings by the likes of Miles Davis, Duke Elling­ton, and Thelo­nious Monk, the clas­si­cal com­po­si­tions of Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and Haydn, and pop num­bers from the Beach Boys, Elvis Pres­ley, Hall and Oates, and Michael Jack­son.

Final­ly, you can close out this musi­cal Muraka­mi birth­day with the Spo­ti­fy playlist above of music from his own vinyl col­lec­tion — though at 3,350 songs in total, it will prob­a­bly extend the cel­e­bra­tion beyond a day. Even that lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence sure­ly rep­re­sents only a frac­tion of what Muraka­mi keeps on his shelves, all of it offer­ing poten­tial mate­r­i­al for his next inex­plic­a­bly grip­ping sto­ry. And though the Eng­lish-speak­ing world still awaits its trans­la­tion of Murakami’s lat­est nov­el Killing Com­menda­tore, which came out in Japan last year, you can hear the music it name-checks in the Youtube playlist below. Some­thing about the mix — Richard Strauss, Sheryl Crow, the Mod­ern Jazz Quar­tet, Duran Duran — sug­gests we’re in for anoth­er Murakami­an read­ing expe­ri­ence indeed:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to the World of Haru­ki Muraka­mi Through Doc­u­men­taries, Sto­ries, Ani­ma­tion, Music Playlists & More

A 3,350-Song Playlist of Music from Haru­ki Murakami’s Per­son­al Record Col­lec­tion

Haru­ki Murakami’s Pas­sion for Jazz: Dis­cov­er the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar

A Pho­to­graph­ic Tour of Haru­ki Murakami’s Tokyo, Where Dream, Mem­o­ry, and Real­i­ty Meet

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Lists the Three Essen­tial Qual­i­ties For All Seri­ous Nov­el­ists (And Run­ners)

Read Online Haru­ki Murakami’s New Essay on How a Base­ball Game Launched His Writ­ing Career

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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A Brief History of Making Deals with the Devil: Niccolò Paganini, Robert Johnson, Jimmy Page & More

in Literature, Music, Religion | January 11th, 2018

When the term “witch hunt” gets thrown around in cas­es of pow­er­ful men accused of harass­ment and abuse, his­to­ri­ans every­where bang their heads against their desks. The his­to­ry of per­se­cut­ing witches—as every school­boy and girl knows from the famous Salem Trials—involves accu­sa­tions mov­ing decid­ed­ly in the oth­er direc­tion.

But we’re very famil­iar with men sup­pos­ed­ly sell­ing out to Satan, dealing—or just dueling—with the dev­il. They weren’t called witch­es for doing so, or burned at the stake. They were blues pio­neers, vir­tu­oso fid­dlers, and gui­tar gods. From the dev­il­ish­ly dash­ing Nic­colò Pagani­ni, to Robert John­son at the Cross­roads, to Jim­my Page’s black mag­ic, to “The Dev­il Went Down to Geor­gia,” to the omnipres­ence of Satan in met­al…. The dev­il “seems to have quite the inter­est in music,” notes the Poly­phon­ic video above.

Before musi­cians came to terms with the dark lord, pow­er-hun­gry schol­ars used demonolo­gy to sum­mon Lucifer­ian emis­saries like Mephistophe­les. The leg­end of Faust dates back to the late 16th cen­tu­ry and a his­tor­i­cal alchemist named Johann Georg Faust, who inspired many dra­mat­ic works, like Christo­pher Marlowe’s The Trag­i­cal His­to­ry of Doc­tor Faus­tus, Johann Goethe’s Faust, Thomas Mann’s Doc­tor Faus­tus, Mikhail Bugakov’s The Mas­ter and Mar­gari­ta, and F.W. Murnau’s 1926 silent film.

The Faust leg­end may be the stur­di­est of such sto­ries, but it is not by any means the ori­gin of the idea. Medieval Catholic saints feared the dev­il’s entice­ments con­stant­ly. Medieval occultists often saw things dif­fer­ent­ly. If we can trace the notion of women con­sort­ing with the dev­il to the Bib­li­cal Eve in the Gar­den, we find male ana­logues in the New Testament—Christ’s temp­ta­tions in the desert, Judas’s thir­ty pieces of sil­ver, the pos­sessed vagrant who sends his demons into a herd of pigs. But we might even say that God made the first deal with the dev­il, in the open­ing wager of the book of Job.

In most examples—Charlie Daniels’ tri­umphal folk tale aside—the deal usu­al­ly goes down bad­ly for the mor­tal par­ty involved, as it did for Robert John­son when the dev­il came for his due, and con­vened the mor­bid­ly fas­ci­nat­ing 27 Club. Goethe impos­es a redemp­tive hap­py end­ing onto Faust that seems to wild­ly over­com­pen­sate for the typ­i­cal fate of souls in hell’s pawn shop. Kierkegaard took the idea seri­ous­ly as a cul­tur­al myth, and wrote in Either/Or that “every notable his­tor­i­cal era will have its own Faust.”

Mod­ern-day Fausts in the pop­u­lar genre of the day, the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry, are famous enter­tain­ers, as you can see in the unin­ten­tion­al­ly humor­ous super­cut above from a YouTube chan­nel called “End­TimeChris­t­ian.” As it hap­pens in these kinds of nar­ra­tives, the cul­tur­al trope gets tak­en far too lit­er­al­ly as a real event. The Faust leg­end shows us that mak­ing deals with the dev­il has been a lit­er­ary device for hun­dreds of years, pass­ing into pop­u­lar cul­ture, then the blues—a genre haunt­ed by hell hounds and infer­nal crossroads—and its prog­e­ny in rock and roll and hip hop.

Those who talk of sell­ing their souls might real­ly believe it, but they inher­it­ed the lan­guage from cen­turies of West­ern cul­tur­al and reli­gious tra­di­tion. Sell­ing one’s soul is a com­mon metaphor for liv­ing a car­nal life, or get­ting into bed with shady char­ac­ters for world­ly suc­cess. But it’s also a play­ful notion. (A mis­un­der­stood aspect of so much met­al is its com­ic Satan­ic overkill.) John­son him­self turned the sto­ry of sell­ing his soul into an icon­ic boast, in “Cross­roads” and “Me and the Dev­il Blues.” “Hel­lo Satan,” he says in the lat­ter tune, “I believe it’s time to go.”

Chill­ing in hind­sight, the line is the bluesman’s grim­ly casu­al acknowl­edg­ment of how life on the edge would catch up to him. But it was worth it, he also sug­gests, to become a leg­end in his own time. In the short, ani­mat­ed video above from Music Mat­ters, John­son meets the horned one, a slick oper­a­tor in a suit: “Sud­den­ly, no one could touch him.” Often when we talk these days about peo­ple sell­ing their souls, they might even­tu­al­ly end up singing, but they don’t make beau­ti­ful music. In any case, the moral of almost every ver­sion of the sto­ry is per­fect­ly clear: no mat­ter how good the deal seems, the dev­il nev­er fails to col­lect on a debt.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of Blues­man Robert Johnson’s Famous Deal With the Dev­il Retold in Three Ani­ma­tions

Watch Häx­an, the Clas­sic Cin­e­mat­ic Study of Witch­craft Nar­rat­ed by William S. Bur­roughs (1922)

Aleis­ter Crow­ley: The Wickedest Man in the World Doc­u­ments the Life of the Bizarre Occultist, Poet & Moun­taineer

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

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How Reading Increases Your Emotional Intelligence & Brain Function: The Findings of Recent Scientific Studies

in Literature, Neuroscience | January 11th, 2018

Image by Sheila Sund, via Flickr Com­mons

Read­ing “availeth much,” to bor­row an old phrase from the King James Bible. To read is to expe­ri­ence more of the world than we can in per­son, to enter into the lives of oth­ers, to orga­nize knowl­edge accord­ing to use­ful schemes and cat­e­gories…. Or, at least it can be. Much recent research strong­ly sug­gests that read­ing improves emo­tion­al and cog­ni­tive intel­li­gence, by chang­ing and acti­vat­ing areas of the brain respon­si­ble for these qual­i­ties.

Is read­ing essen­tial for the sur­vival of the species? Per­haps not. “Humans have been read­ing and writ­ing for only about 5000 years—too short for major evo­lu­tion­ary changes,” writes Greg Miller in Sci­ence. We got by well enough for tens of thou­sands of years before writ­ten lan­guage. But neu­ro­sci­en­tists the­o­rize that read­ing “rewires” areas of the brain respon­si­ble for both vision and spo­ken lan­guage. Even adults who learn to read late in life can expe­ri­ence these effects, increas­ing “func­tion­al con­nec­tiv­i­ty with the visu­al cor­tex,” some researchers have found, which may be “the brain’s way of fil­ter­ing and fine-tun­ing the flood of visu­al infor­ma­tion that calls for our atten­tion” in the mod­ern world.

This improved com­mu­ni­ca­tion between areas of the brain might also rep­re­sent an impor­tant inter­ven­tion into devel­op­men­tal dis­or­ders. One Carnegie Mel­lon study, for exam­ple, found that “100 hours of inten­sive read­ing instruc­tion improved chil­dren’s read­ing skills and also increased the qual­i­ty of… com­pro­mised white mat­ter to nor­mal lev­els.” The find­ings, says Thomas Insel, direc­tor of the Nation­al Insti­tute of Men­tal Health, sug­gest “an excit­ing approach to be test­ed in the treat­ment of men­tal dis­or­ders, which increas­ing­ly appear to be due to prob­lems in spe­cif­ic brain cir­cuits.”

Read­ing can not only improve cog­ni­tion, but it can also lead to a refined “the­o­ry of mind,” a term used by cog­ni­tive sci­en­tists to describe how “we ascribe men­tal states to oth­er persons”—as the Inter­net Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy notes—and “how we use the states to explain and pre­dict the actions of those oth­er per­sons.” Improved the­o­ry of mind, or “intu­itive psy­chol­o­gy,” as it’s also called, can result in greater lev­els of empa­thy and per­haps even expand­ed exec­u­tive func­tion, allow­ing us to bet­ter “hold mul­ti­ple per­spec­tives in mind at once,” writes Brit­tany Thomp­son, “and switch between those per­spec­tives.”

Improved the­o­ry of mind comes pri­mar­i­ly from read­ing nar­ra­tives, research sug­gests. One meta-analy­sis pub­lished by Ray­mond A. Mar of Toronto’s York Uni­ver­si­ty reviews many of the stud­ies demon­strat­ing the effect of sto­ry com­pre­hen­sion on the­o­ry of mind, and con­cludes that the bet­ter we under­stand the events in a nar­ra­tive, the bet­ter we are able to under­stand the actions and inten­tions of those around us. The kinds of nar­ra­tives we read, more­over, might also make a dif­fer­ence. One study, con­duct­ed by psy­chol­o­gists David Com­er Kidd and Emanuele Cas­tano of the New School for Social Research, test­ed the effect of dif­fer­ences in writ­ing qual­i­ty on empa­thy respons­es, ran­dom­ly assign­ing 1,000 par­tic­i­pants excerpts from both pop­u­lar best­sellers and lit­er­ary fic­tion.

To define the dif­fer­ence between the two, the researchers referred to crit­ic Roland Barthes’ The Plea­sure of the Text. As Kidd explains:

Some writ­ing is what you call ‘writer­ly’, you fill in the gaps and par­tic­i­pate, and some is ‘read­er­ly’, and you’re enter­tained. We tend to see ‘read­er­ly’ more in genre fic­tion like adven­ture, romance and thrillers, where the author dic­tates your expe­ri­ence as a read­er. Lit­er­ary [writer­ly] fic­tion lets you go into a new envi­ron­ment and you have to find your own way.

The researchers used two the­o­ry of mind tests to mea­sure degrees of empa­thy and found that “scores were con­sis­tent­ly high­er for those who had read lit­er­ary fic­tion than for those with pop­u­lar fic­tion or non-fic­tion texts,” notes Liz Bury at The Guardian. Oth­er research has found that descrip­tive lan­guage stim­u­lates regions of our brains not clas­si­cal­ly asso­ci­at­ed with read­ing. “Words like ‘laven­der,’ ‘cin­na­mon’ and ‘soap,’ for exam­ple,” writes Annie Mur­phy Paul at The New York Times, cit­ing a 2006 study pub­lished in Neu­roIm­age, “elic­it a response not only from the lan­guage-pro­cess­ing areas of our brains, but also those devot­ed to deal­ing with smells.”

Read­ing, in oth­er words, can effec­tive­ly sim­u­late real­i­ty in the brain and pro­duce authen­tic emo­tion­al respons­es: “The brain, it seems, does not make much of a dis­tinc­tion between read­ing about an expe­ri­ence and encoun­ter­ing it in real life”—that is, if the expe­ri­ence is writ­ten about in sen­so­ry lan­guage. The emo­tion­al brain also does not seem to make a tremen­dous dis­tinc­tion between read­ing the writ­ten word and hear­ing it recit­ed or read. When study par­tic­i­pants in a joint Ger­man and Nor­we­gian exper­i­ment, for exam­ple, heard poet­ry read aloud, they expe­ri­enced phys­i­cal sen­sa­tions and “about 40 per­cent showed vis­i­ble goose bumps.”

But dif­fer­ent kinds of texts elic­it dif­fer­ent kinds of respons­es. We can read or lis­ten to a nov­el, for exam­ple, and, instead of only expe­ri­enc­ing sen­sa­tions, can “live sev­er­al lives while read­ing,” as William Sty­ron once wrote. The authors of a 2013 Emory Uni­ver­si­ty study pub­lished in Brain Con­nec­tiv­i­ty con­clude that read­ing nov­els can rewire areas of the brain, caus­ing “tran­sient changes in func­tion­al con­nec­tiv­i­ty.” These bio­log­i­cal changes were found to last up to five days after study par­tic­i­pants read Robert Har­ris’ 2003 nov­el Pom­peii. The height­ened con­nec­tiv­i­ty in cer­tain regions “cor­re­spond­ed to regions pre­vi­ous­ly asso­ci­at­ed with per­spec­tive tak­ing and sto­ry com­pre­hen­sion.”

So what? asks a skep­ti­cal Ian Stead­man at New States­man. Read­ing may cre­ate changes in the brain, but so does every­thing else, a phe­nom­e­non well-known by now as “neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty.” Much of the report­ing on the neu­ro­science of read­ing, Stead­man argues, over­in­ter­prets the research to sup­port an “[x] ‘rewires’ the brain” myth both com­mon and “mis­tak­en.” Steadman’s cri­tiques of the Brain Con­nec­tiv­i­ty study are per­haps well-placed. The small sam­ple size, lack of a con­trol group, and neglect of ques­tions about dif­fer­ent kinds of writ­ing make its already ten­ta­tive con­clu­sions even less impres­sive. How­ev­er, more sub­stan­tive research, tak­en togeth­er, does show that the “rewiring” that hap­pens when we read—though per­haps tem­po­rary and in need of fre­quent refreshing—really does make us more cog­ni­tive­ly and social­ly adept. And that the kind of reading—or even lis­ten­ing—that we do real­ly does mat­ter.

via Big­Think/The Guardian/Har­vard

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

This Is Your Brain on Jane Austen: The Neu­ro­science of Read­ing Great Lit­er­a­ture

900 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free 

7 Tips for Read­ing More Books in a Year

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

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A Map of George Orwell’s 1984

in Literature, Maps | January 9th, 2018

Many fic­tion­al loca­tions resist map­ping. Our imag­i­na­tions may thrill, but our men­tal geolo­ca­tion soft­ware recoils at the impos­si­bil­i­ties in Ita­lo Calvino’s Invis­i­ble Cities—a series of geo­graph­i­cal­ly whim­si­cal tales told by Mar­co Polo to Genghis Khan; or Chi­na Miéville’s The City and the City, in which two metropolises—Besźel and Ul Qoma—occupy much of the same phys­i­cal space, and a secre­tive police pow­er com­pels cit­i­zens to will­ful­ly “unsee” one city or the oth­er.

That’s not to say such maps can­not be made. Calvino’s strange cities have been illus­trat­ed, if not at street lev­el, in as fan­ci­ful a fash­ion as the nar­ra­tor describes them. Miéville’s weird cities have received sev­er­al lit­er­al-mind­ed map­ping treat­ments, which per­haps mis­take the novel’s care­ful con­struc­tion of metaphor for a kind of cre­ative urban plan­ning.

Miéville him­self might dis­avow such attempts, as he dis­avows one-to-one alle­gor­i­cal read­ings of his fan­tas­tic detec­tive novel—those, for exam­ple, that reduce the phe­nom­e­non of “unsee­ing” to an Orwellian means of thought con­trol. “Orwell is a much more overt­ly alle­gor­i­cal writer,” he tells There­sa DeLuc­ci at Tor, “although it’s always sort of unsta­ble, there’s a cer­tain kind of map­ping where­by x means y, a means b.”

Orwell’s spec­u­la­tive worlds are eas­i­ly decod­ed, in oth­er words, an opin­ion shared by many read­ers of Orwell. But Miéville’s com­ments aside, there’s an argu­ment to be made that The City and the City’s “unsee­ing” is the most vivid­ly Orwellian device in recent fic­tion. And that the fic­tion­al world of 1984 does not, per­haps, yield to such sim­ple map­ping as we imag­ine.

Of course it’s easy to draw a map (see above, or in a larg­er for­mat here) of the three impe­r­i­al pow­ers the nov­el tells us rule the world. Frank Jacobs at Big Think tidi­ly sums them up:

Ocea­nia cov­ers the entire con­ti­nents of Amer­i­ca and Ocea­nia and the British Isles, the main loca­tion for the nov­el, in which they are referred to as ‘Airstrip One’.
Eura­sia cov­ers Europe and (more or less) the entire Sovi­et Union.
Eas­t­a­sia cov­ers Japan, Korea, Chi­na and north­ern India.

These three super­states are per­pet­u­al­ly at war with each oth­er, though who’s at war with whom is unclear. “And yet… the war might just not even be real at all”—for all we know it might be a fab­ri­ca­tion of the Min­istry of Truth, to man­u­fac­ture con­sent for aus­ter­i­ty, mass sur­veil­lance, forced nation­al­ism, etc. It’s also pos­si­ble that the entire­ty of the novel’s geo-pol­i­tics have been invent­ed out of whole cloth, that “Airstrip One is not an out­post of a greater empire,” Jacobs writes, “but the sole ter­ri­to­ry under the com­mand of Ing­soc.”

One com­menter on the map—which was post­ed to Red­dit last year—points out that “there isn’t any evi­dence in the book that this is actu­al­ly how the world is struc­tured.” We must look at the map as dou­bly fic­tion­al, an illus­tra­tion, Lau­ren Davis notes at io9, of “how the cred­u­lous inhab­i­tant of Airstrip One, armed with only maps dis­trib­uted by the Min­istry of Truth, might view the world, how vast the realm of Ocea­nia seems and how close the sup­posed ene­mies in Eura­sia.” It is the world as the minds of the nov­el­’s char­ac­ters con­ceive it.

All maps, we know, are dis­tor­tions, shaped by ide­ol­o­gy, belief, per­spec­ti­val bias. 1984’s lim­it­ed third-per­son nar­ra­tion enacts the lim­it­ed views of cit­i­zens in a total­i­tar­i­an state. Such a state nec­es­sar­i­ly uses force to pre­vent the peo­ple from inde­pen­dent­ly ver­i­fy­ing con­stant­ly shift­ing, con­tra­dic­to­ry pieces of infor­ma­tion. But the nov­el itself states that force is large­ly irrel­e­vant. “The patrols did not mat­ter… Only the Thought Police mat­tered.”

In Orwell’s fic­tion “sim­i­lar out­comes” as those in total­i­tar­i­an states, as Noam Chom­sky remarks, “can be achieved in free soci­eties like Eng­land” through edu­ca­tion and mass media con­trol. The most unset­tling thing about the seem­ing sim­plic­i­ty of 1984’s map of the world is that it might look like almost any­thing else for all the aver­age per­son knows. Its ele­men­tary-school rudi­ments metaphor­i­cal­ly point to fright­en­ing­ly vast areas of igno­rance, and pos­si­bil­i­ties we can only imag­ine, since Win­ston Smith and his com­pa­tri­ots no longer have the abil­i­ty, even if they had the means.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

George Orwell Explains in a Reveal­ing 1944 Let­ter Why He’d Write 1984

A Com­plete Read­ing of George Orwell’s 1984: Aired on Paci­fi­ca Radio, 1975

A Map Shows What Every Coun­try in the World Calls Itself in its Own Lan­guage: Explore the “Endonyms of the World” Map

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

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Ian McKellen Recites Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20, Backed by Garage Rock Band, the Fleshtones, on Andy Warhol’s MTV Variety Show (1987)

in Literature, Music, Television | January 1st, 2018

80s revival­ism can be done bad­ly and it can be done well. Those old enough to remem­ber the decade seem best placed to recre­ate it, but the suc­cess of Stranger Things offers an excel­lent coun­terex­am­ple. The mil­len­ni­al Duf­fer broth­ers did a mar­velous job of con­jur­ing the look and feel of mid-80s mise-en-scène by stitch­ing togeth­er close view­ings of a dozen or so films—from the mas­sive­ly pop­u­lar E.T. to more obscure flicks like made-for-TV Mazes and Mon­sters (not to men­tion such pre­cious archival footage as this.)

When it comes to music how­ev­er, 80s retro tends to con­fine them­selves to ear­ly hip and hop and elec­tro, the syn­th­pop of Gary Numan and Duran Duran or the cheesy hair met­al of Möt­ley Crüe. But this lens miss­es the sig­nif­i­cant 60s revival­ism that emerged at the time. Garage, surf, and psych rock and the jan­g­ly sounds of The Byrds inspired R.E.M., the B52s, the Replace­ments, the House of Love, and the Flesh­tones, a much less­er-known NYC band who may nev­er have got­ten their com­mer­cial due, but who cer­tain­ly appealed to 60s art star Andy Warhol.

When Warhol remade him­self as a TV per­son­al­i­ty in the 80s with his MTV vari­ety show Andy Warhol’s 15 Min­utes he cast the Flesh­tones as the back­ing band for ris­ing the­ater and film star Ian McK­ellen, a match-up that rep­re­sents anoth­er hall­mark of 80s pop culture—the post­mod­ern jux­ta­po­si­tion of gen­res, styles, and reg­is­ters which Warhol helped pio­neer 20 years ear­li­er when he brought kitschy silk-screened soup cans, sexy street hus­tlers, and the Vel­vet Under­ground into the art scene.

Warhol’s tele­vi­sion work turned this impulse into a mul­ti­me­dia cir­cus fea­tur­ing “The high and the low. The rich and the famous. The strug­gling artists and the ris­ing stars,” as Warhol Muse­um cura­tor Ger­a­lyn Hux­ley puts it. In this par­tic­u­lar­ly fit­ting exam­ple, McK­ellen and the Flesh­tones bring Shake­speare’s racy Son­net 20 to young, hip MTV audi­ences in 1987. L.A. Week­ly lists a few of the “cool points” from the clip:

  • A young, hot, already insane­ly tal­ent­ed Ian McK­ellen
  • Wear­ing awe­some New Wave fash­ions
  • At Andy Warhol’s Fac­to­ry in 1987
  • Backed by cult group the Flesh­tones
  • Recit­ing a Shake­speare Son­net

What’s not to love? Start your 2018 with some Shake­speare-meets-garage-rock cool­ness from 31 years ago—and revis­it more of Warhol’s MTV vari­ety show at our pre­vi­ous post. For seri­ous stu­dents of the decade, this is essen­tial view­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Andy Warhol’s 15 Min­utes: Dis­cov­er the Post­mod­ern MTV Vari­ety Show That Made Warhol a Star in the Tele­vi­sion Age (1985–87)

Ian McK­ellen Reads a Pas­sion­ate Speech by William Shake­speare, Writ­ten in Defense of Immi­grants

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Sings Shakespeare’s Son­net 18

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

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