“I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.” So begins Vladimir Nabokov in the foreword to his 1973 book of interviews and articles, Strong Opinions.
To avoid speaking like a child in public, Nabokov took great pains to prepare his every word. “Throughout my academic ascent in America from lean lecturer to Full Professor, I have never delivered to my audience one scrap of information not prepared in typescript beforehand and not held under my eyes on the bright-lit lectern.”
When it came to giving interviews, Nabokov was horrified by the notion of sitting back and having a casual chat with a reporter. “It has been tried at least twice in the old days,” he writes, “and once a recording machine was present, and when the tape was rerun and I had finished laughing, I knew that never in my life would I repeat that sort of performance. Nowadays I take every precaution to ensure a dignified beat of the mandarin’s fan. The interviewer’s questions have to be sent to me in writing, answered by me in writing, and reproduced verbatim. Such are the three absolute conditions.”
So the excerpt above from a 1969 interview with the British journalist James Mossman should be understood as a carefully prepared performance. As Nabokov says in his own introduction to the full text version of the interview in Strong Opinions, Mossman submitted 58 questions on September 8, 1969, and “some 40 were answered and recorded by me from written cards in Montreaux.” In a conversation ranging from the pleasure and agony of composing fiction to Dostoyevsky’s “ghastly Crime and Punishment rigmarole,” the mandarin’s fan keeps a dignified beat.
Did Orson Welles ever make an non-notable movie? Sure, the sheer cinematic importance of Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil, The Lady from Shanghai, and even the famously incomplete The Magnificent Ambersons, tend to draw all the attention most people have for his filmography. Make sure you watch those — no self-respecting lover of American film could do without them — but then look beyond them.
Personally, I yield to no one in my endorsement of Welles’ formally unique multi-genre quasi-documentary F for Fake. But first, I suggest you look to the top of this post and watch 1946’s The Stranger, a far more mainstream picture (for one can hardly travel farther from the mainstream than F for Fake), and in fact the only Welles film to meet with immediate box office success. Considering what it shows, that may come as a surprise.
The picture pits a United Nations Nazi hunter, played by Hollywood Golden Age legend Edward G. Robinson, against a Third Reich war criminal played by Welles himself. The hunter tracks down the hunted, who has taken on a new, nearly anonymous identity in small-town Connecticut. The U.N. man becomes desperate to bring the Nazi to justice, the Nazi’s becomes desperate to live his new life in peace, and his unsuspecting wife becomes desperate to deny the truth about her husband’s past. In order to convince the lady, Robinson’s character screens her actual footage of Nazi concentration camps. The shock on actress Loretta Young’s face was the shock on the faces of American audiences; neither previously had much of a chance to see what had really happened in wartime Europe. Leave it to Welles, whose fascination with and hatred of fascism led him to write a series of columns on the subject for the New York Post, to smuggle this depth of real human horror into what looks at first glance like a plain old 1940s noir thriller.
Albert Einstein is the patron saint of slackers redeemed. We’ve all heard some version of his late-bloomer story: “You know, Albert Einstein did terribly in high school” (says every high school guidance counselor at some point). Most of us normals like to see him this way—it bucks us up—even if he was anything but your average low achiever. The above 2006 profile of Einstein by PBS’s “American Masters” documentary series, Albert Einstein: How I See the World, takes the opposite tack, surrounding him with the aura of a hero in a Hermann Hesse novel. The film begins with William Hurt’s narration of Einstein’s solo trek through the Alps at twenty-two, during which he “longed to grasp the hidden design, the underlying principles of nature.” Over the intrigue conjured by Michael Galasso’s haunting, minimalist score and a montage of black-and-white nature films, narrator Hurt intones:
Every once in a while there comes a man who is able to see the universe in a totally new way, whose vision upsets the very foundations of the world as we know it. Throughout his life, Albert Einstein would look for this harmony, not only in his science, but in the world of men. The world wanted to know Albert Einstein, yet he remained a mystery to those who only saw his public face and perhaps to himself as well. “What does a fish know of the water in which he swims?” he asked himself.
After this sententious beginning, with its strangely outdated pronoun use, Hurt tells us that those who knew Einstein best saw a little of him, and the film goes on to document those impressions in interviews: colleague Abraham Pais comments on Einstein’s love of Jewish humor (and that his laughter sounded like “the bark of a contented seal”). Hanna Loewy, a family friend, describes his ability to look at “many, many dimensions, whether they be proven or not,” and to see the whole. Intercut between these statements is archival footage of Einstein himself and commentary from Hurt, some of it questionable (for example, the idea that Einstein was a “scientist who believed in God” is tendentious, at best, but a subject best left for the endless bickering of YouTube commenters).
It’s a bit of an Olympian treatment, fitting to the subject in some respects. But in another sense, the documentary performs the function of a hagiography, a genre well-suited for encomium and reverence, but not for “getting to know” its subject personally. The film places a great deal of emphasis, rightly perhaps, on Einstein’s public persona: his vocal pacifism—in which he joined with Mahatma Gandhi—and statements against German militarism, even as the rising fascist order dismissed his work and denounced the man.
But while Albert Einstein: How I See the World provides a compelling portrait and offers a wealth of historical context for understanding Einstein’s world, it leaves out the voices of those who perhaps knew him best: his children, wife Elsa, or his first wife, Mileva. (Their divorce gets a brief mention at 15:20, along with his subsequent marriage to first cousin Elsa.) Einstein’s troubled personal life, revealed through private correspondence like an angry post-divorce letter to Mileva and an appalling list of demands written to her during the deterioration of their marriage, has received more scrutiny of late. These personal details have perhaps prompted PBS to reevaluate Mileva’s influence; rather than “little more than a footnote” in his biography, Mileva may have played a role in his success for which she never received credit, giving Hurt’s gendered narration something of a bitter personal twist.
None of this is to say that a documentary treatment of any public figure needs to dredge the family secrets and display the dirty laundry, but as far as learning how Einstein, or anyone else of his stature, saw the world, the personal seems to me as relevant as the professional. PBS’s documentary is very well-made, however, and worth watching for its production values, interviews with Einstein’s friends and colleagues, and archival newsreel footage, even if it sometimes fails to truly illuminate its subject. But as Hurt’s narration disclaims at the outset, maybe Einstein was a mystery, even to himself.
The film will be added to the Documentary section of our collection of Free Movies Online.
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
Led Zeppelin — they started off making a mess of bourgeois households; now, like many of their 60s counterparts, they’re getting honored by the powers that be. This weekend, the band’s three surviving members — Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page — were honored for their cultural achievements at a festive ceremony in Washington D.C.. Looking very at ease with things, President Obama reminded us that, 30 years after the band’s last album, the “Led Zeppelin legacy lives on.” Somewhere Paul Ryan is eating his heart out.
Below we have footage of Led Zep during their heyday — a full concert recorded Live at the Royal Albert Hall in 1970.
Ah, 20th-century philosophy: even a great many philosophers of the 20th century wouldn’t touch it. When you want to approach a thorny, complex, contradictory field like this, you especially value a teacher like Rick Roderick (1949–2002). Called “the Bill Hicks of Philosophy” by his fan sites, Roderick recorded a series of lectures for The Teaching Company, in the early nineties. (Though the Great Courses have grown far more slickly produced since then, the intellectual content of their older efforts, like this one, remains solid.) Above, you’ll find “The Masters of Suspicion,” the introductory lecture to “The Self Under Seige,” his video course on 20th-century philosophers. In eight segments (available in a playlist below), Roderick covers the likes of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jürgen Habermas. Perhaps he can make sense of them for you; if not, he’ll make them into hours of entertainment.
Not having come up steeped in 20th-century philosophy during his own education, Roderick has his own opinions about how these luminaries throw into question all forms of human knowledge and identity. But he does take their ideas seriously, connecting them as he considers them to real issues and then-current events.
This reveals that he also has his own opinions, more than willingly given, about — bear in mind, the year was 1993 — Bill Clinton, Jesse Helms, political correctness, Pat Buchanan, Billy Graham, network television, Jerry Falwell, and The Big Chill. “When we do philosophy my way,” Roderick announces in his distinctive West Texas accent, “we just talk about what’s goin’ on and try to find our way about.” If that’s how you like philosophy done, visit rickroderick.org to hear much more of it.
You can find more recent philosophy courses produced by The Great Courses here.
The news the world receives from the continent of Africa is almost uniformly bad, and this is certainly an unjust situation. A recent parody ad campaign by Norwegian Erik Schreiner Evans attempts to say as much; Evans’ Africa for Norway spoof intends to send the message to “stop treating Africans like passive recipients of aid, and recognize that the continent is more than the sum of its problems.” This message may have some effect on the tendency of major news and aid organizations to capitalize on the suffering of African people, but recent stories highlighting the ingenuity and self-sufficiency of African teenagers may do more to change perceptions. First, there is the story of four Nigerian teenagers who debuted their “urine-powered generator” at the 2012 “Maker Faire Africa” in Lagos, a story that made headlines in international news. Another prodigy, from Sierra Leone, has made a splash with his ability to turn garbage into useable technology. Fifteen-year-old Kelvin Doe—a.k.a. D.J. Focus—has wowed engineers by building his own batteries, generators, and transmitters with scrounged-up spare parts and youthful resourcefulness.
The above THINKR video profiles Kelvin, with interviews from engineers like MIT doctoral student David Sengeh, also from Sierra Leone, who has used his connections to help young people like Kelvin develop their talents for the benefit of their war-torn and impoverished country. Kelvin’s a pretty amazing young guy. He explains his alter-ego “D.J. Focus” as part of his personal ethos: “I believe if you focus, you can do an invention perfectly.” Kelvin hosts his own radio show, which provided the impetus for his tech innovations. Kelvin’s story struck a chord: the short video garnered over three-million views in just ten days.
A more recent episode of THINKR’s “Prodigies” series profiles Kelvin’s mentor, David Sengah, whose research focuses on designing comfortable prosthetic limbs, an interest he developed through his own experience of the ten-year Sierra Leone Civil War, during which rebel forces amputated limbs to intimidate their opposition.
Kelvin Doe and David Sengah are extraordinary inventors, but they are only two examples of a steady stream of African tech innovators, artists, writers, and entrepreneurs dedicated to changing their countries’ fates and thereby changing the official narrative of Africans as helpless victims.
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
Maybe the biggest winner of the 2012 presidential election, other than Barack Obama, was Nate Silver, the young statistician who runs the 538 blog at the New York Times. As you may recall (it was only a few weeks ago), Silver gave President Obama roughly an 80% — 90% chance of winning during the final days of October. The talking heads railed against Silver, calling him an “ideologue” and a “joke.” But, just as Silver accurately predicted the outcome of every Senate race during the 2008 election cycle, so did he pretty much nail the big race of 2012. He estimated Obama would receive 313 electoral votes, a touch below the 332 the president actually received. Silver was vindicated. It was time to take a victory lap … and sell a few books.
In late September, Silver shrewdly published a new book, The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail but Some Don’t. The book tour eventually, if not inevitably, brought him to Google, where the celebrity statistician fielded questions from data-loving Googlers for an hour. A grand old time was had by all.
Today is the birthday of the writer Joseph Conrad. He was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzniowski on December 3, 1857 in Berdichev, in the Polish Ukraine. As a young man he traveled the world as a merchant sailer, an experience that furnished material and inspiration for his English-language books, which include such classics as Nostromo, Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness.
To mark the occasion we bring you a recording of Orson Welles reading (listen to it here) Conrad’s short story “The Secret Sharer” in 1985 as one of his selections for The Orson Welles Library. “I think I’m made for Conrad,” Welles once said. “I think every Conrad story is a movie.” Conrad wrote “The Secret Sharer” in 1909. The story is told by the captain of a ship. One night, while on watch in waters near the Gulf of Siam, the captain discovers a naked swimmer clinging desperately to the side of the ship. He helps the mysterious man aboard and learns his story. The captain is then faced with a dilemma: Should he help the man, or turn him over to the people who are looking for him?
Hey, hoarders, think you’re the only ones who see potential in a single crutch, an empty Scotch bottle, the jagged remains of a skateboard? Not so. Musician, artist, and all-around visionary Ken Butler has been turning such trash into treasure since 1978, when he fitted an ax with a tail piece, fingerboard and contact mic and snuggled it inside a 3/4 size violin case. Chop a cherry tree with it, or play it just like Buddy Guy plays his ax. Like most of the hybrids Butler creates in his Brooklyn studio, it’s a functioning musical instrument, though he’s quick to point out that for him, the sound is immaterial. What really counts is the poetic coupling of unlikely materials.
Things really get cookin’ at the 4:20 mark, when Butler plays a few licks on a three-stringed shovel before moving on to a bowable, electrified tennis racket. The results are far lovelier than the master would lead you to believe.
- Ayun Halliday can stumble her way through the Entertainer if there’s a piano handy.
If books figure into your holiday gift-giving plans, then we’ve got a little something for you — a meta list of the best books of 2012. It’s now December, the final month of the year, which means that newspapers and magazines can start taking stock of 2012 and declare their favorites.
You can find more good reads with “Best of” lists created by NPR, Publishers Weekly, Esquire, HuffPo and The Guardian. And if you’re looking for a deal, don’t miss this: Amazon.com is now offering 40% off books appearing on its list of 2012 Editors’ Picks. Meanwhile Audible.com has produced its own list of favorites, and it’s worth highlighting if only because, when you sign up for a Free Trial, you can download one of their selections (or pretty much any other audiobook you want) for free. Learn more and initiate the free download here.
Now my dear fellow readers, it’s your turn. We want to hear what books (published in 2012) left the strongest impression on you. Give us your thoughts in the comments section below and we’ll publish the Open Culture Best of 2012 list later this week. We look forward to hearing your picks!
But the collection also lets you sort ads thematically. So, for example, you can jump into the U.S. Get a Mac campaign, where you’ll get plenty of John Hodgman. Also find versions of the same campaign from the UK and Japan. Finally, Apple ads featuring celebrities — from Bob Dylan to Zooey Deschanel to Spike Lee — are all neatly packaged together too. H/T @coudal
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