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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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. Onestudy, 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.
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.
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.
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.
Begun by user “BackForward24” and crowdsourced through Reddit, this map of the world illustrates the most beloved/popular book of each country by pasting a scan of the book cover over its space on the world map. For book lovers who want to read themselves around the world, it will prove invaluable. (And if you can’t read the map, no worries, there is a text version available.)
But let’s unpack the larger (and yes, first world) countries first. The United States is represented by To Kill a Mockingbird, which ticks off a lot of the marks that make it quintessentially American: most high schoolers have read it, and it deals with both racism and our shameful history and the faith that the law can eventually right wrongs. Canada has Anne of Green Gables. Great Britain has Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, and Ireland Ulysses (no surprise there.)
Our Australian readers might want to weigh in on Tom Winton’s Cloudstreet (a quite recent novel), and New Zealanders please tell us about The Bone People by Keri Hulme.
My takeaway and possibly yours from the map is how many titles are new to the Westerner. Europe has some familiar titles: Spain gets Cervantes’ Don Quixote (of course), Italy gets Dante’s The Divine Comedy, and France gets Les Misérables by Hugo. And while Russia is represented by Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Eastern Europe is rather unfamiliar, at least compared to South America, where Argentina has Borges’ Fictions, Chile has Isabel Allende’s The House of Spirits, and Colombia has Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, all well known from decades of prizes, book club attention, and film adaptations.
This Reddit thread contains much criticism and debate, so please check it out. Some good points are raised: if the Iliad represents Greece, why not the Mahabharata/Ramayan for India? “Honestly there is work to do (in) the Africa part,” says another (very politely). There’s also debate over countries not being represented at all, such as Tibet (under Chinese occupation), along with Western Sahara, Somaliland, Kashmir, Balochistan, and Kurdistan. Frankly, if you start trying to talk about the culture of nations, there will be debate over what constitutes a nation. (I’m not sure if Palestine is covered, but some Redditors are voting for Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin.)
Another thing to keep in mind: the novel is very much a Western genre. For many countries, that might not be the case. However, I sense that that debate (and future map) will be another Reddit thread, somewhere, sometime.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
It’s not immediately apparent that Lou Reed and Edgar Allan Poe would have that much in common. It’s true Reed inherited a gothic sensibility (though one could argue that this element in the Velvet Underground came mainly from Nico and John Cale), and he worked in a self-consciously literary vein. But in almost every other respect, he spoke a totally different idiom. Drawn to the seedy bars and street corners rather than the great houses, laboratories, and scholar’s nooks of Poe, Reed inclined his ear toward the common tongue, in contrast to Poe’s carefully composed Romantic diction.
But while it’s hard to imagine Poe thinking much of Reed’s rock and roll, the themes of sexual obsession, madness, terror, and morbid reflection that Poe brought into prominence seem to find their fruition over 100 years later in the work of the Velvets (and the thousands of post-punk bands they inspired), and in much of Reed’s subsequent solo work—up to his final album, the critically-reviled Lulu with Metallica, which his longtime partner Laurie Anderson declared full of “fear and rage and venom and terror and revenge and love,” and which David Bowie pronounced a “masterpiece.”
While we know where much of Reed’s personal angst came from, we can also hear—in the vivid shock of his imagery and the extremity of his emotions—the echo of Poe’s crazed protagonists. Leave it to Reed, then, to take on the task of interpreting Poe in the 21st century, in his 2003 album, The Raven, a collection of Poe-themed musical pieces (“This is the story of Edgar Allan Poe / Not exactly the boy next door”), with such collaborators as Anderson, Bowie, Ornette Coleman, the Blind Boys of Alabama, Antony, Elizabeth Ashley, and Willem Dafoe, who reads a Reed-adapted version of the poem at the top (track 9 in the album below), over a video tribute to B horror actress Debbie Rochon (for some reason).
What did Reed seek to accomplish with this conceptual project? As he himself writes in the liner notes, “I have reread and rewritten Poe to ask the same questions again. Who am I? Why am I drawn to do what I should not?… Why do we love what we cannot have? Why do we have a passion for exactly the wrong thing?” These are timeless philosophical questions, indeed, which transcend matters of style and genre. Again and again, both Poe and Reed pursued them into the darkest recesses of the human psyche—the places most of us fear to go. And perhaps for that reason especially, we are perenially drawn back to their work.
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