I’ve always admired people who can successfully navigate what I refer to as "Kafka’s Castle," a term of dread for the many government and corporate agencies that have an inordinate amount of power over our permanent records, and that seem as inscrutable and chillingly absurd as the labyrinth the character K navigates in Kafka’s last allegorical novel. Even if you haven’t read The Castle, if you work for such an entity—or like all of us have regular dealings with the IRS, the healthcare and banking system, etc.—you’re well aware of the devilish incompetence that masquerades as due diligence and ties us all in knots. Why do multi-million and billion dollar agencies seem unable, or unwilling, to accomplish the simplest of tasks? Why do so many of us spend our lives in the real-life bureaucratic nightmares satirized in the The Office and Office Space? One answer comes via Laurence J. Peter’s 1969 satire The Peter Principle—which offers the theory that managers and executives get promoted to the level of their incompetence—then, David Brent-like, go on to ruin their respective departments. The Harvard Business Review summed up disturbing recent research confirming and supplementing Peter’s insights into the narcissism, overconfidence, or actual sociopathy of many a government and business leader. But in addition to human failings, there’s another possible reason for bureaucratic disorder; the conspiracy-minded among us may be forgiven for assuming that in many cases, institutional incompetence is the result of deliberate sabotage from both above and below. The ridiculous inner workings of most organizations certainly make a lot more sense when viewed in the light of one set of instructions for "purposeful stupidity," namely the once top-secret Simple Sabotage Field Manual, written in 1944 by the CIA’s precursor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Now declassified and freely available on the CIA’s website, the manual the agency describes as "surprisingly relevant" was once distributed to OSS officers abroad to assist them in training "citizen-saboteurs" in occupied countries like Norway and France. Such people, writes Rebecca Onion at Slate, "might already be sabotaging materials, machinery, or operations of their own initiative," but may have lacked the devious talent for sowing chaos that only an intelligence agency can properly master. Genuine laziness, arrogance, and mindlessness may surely be endemic. But the Field Manual asserts that "purposeful stupidity is contrary to human nature" and requires a particular set of skills. The citizen-saboteur "frequently needs pressure, stimulation or assurance, and information and suggestions regarding feasible methods of simple sabotage." You can read and download the full document here. To get a sense of just how "timeless"—according to the CIA itself—such instructions remain, see the abridged list below, courtesy of Business Insider. You will laugh ruefully, then maybe shudder a little as you recognize how much your own workplace, and many others, resemble the kind of dysfunctional mess the OSS meticulously planned during World War II. Organizations and Conferences Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions. Make "speeches." Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your "points" by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committee as large as possible — never less than five. Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible. Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions. Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision. Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on. Managers In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers. Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw. To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done. Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, pay checks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do. Employees Work slowly. Contrive as many interruptions to your work as you can. Do your work poorly and blame it on bad tools, machinery, or equipment. Complain that these things are preventing you from doing your job right. Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skillful worker. via Slate/Business Insider Related Content: The CIA’s Style Manual & Writer’s Guide: 185 Pages of Tips for Writing Like a Spook The C.I.A.’s "Bestiary of Intelligence Writing" Satirizes Spook Jargon with Maurice Sendak-Style Drawings How the CIA Secretly Funded Abstract Expressionism During the Cold War Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Read the CIA’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual: A Timeless, Kafkaesque Guide to Subverting Any Organization with "Purposeful Stupidity" (1944) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. 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I once read a book by Larry King called How to Talk to Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere. Slavoj Zizek might well consider writing a book of his own called How to Make Intellectual Pronouncements About Anything, Anytime, Anywhere. From Beethoven’s "Ode to Joy" to political correctness to the Criterion Collection to Starbucks (and those just among the topics we’ve featured here on Open Culture) the Slovenian philosopher-provocateur has for decades demonstrated a willingness to expound on the widest possible variety of subjects, to the point where his career has begun to look like one continuous, free-associative analytical monologue, which in the Big Think video above reaches the inevitable subject: your love life. Perhaps you’ve tried online dating — a practice that, given the increasingly thorough integration of the internet and daily life, we’ll probably soon just call "dating." Perhaps you’ve had positive experiences with it, perhaps you’ve had negative ones, and most probably you’ve had a mixture of both, but how often can you take your mind off the awkward fact that you have to first "meet" the other person through an electronic medium, creating a version of yourself to suit that medium? Zizek calls this online dating’s problematic "aspect of self-commodification or self-manipulation." "When you date online," he says, "you have to present yourself there in a certain way, putting forward certain qualities. You focus on your idea of how other people should perceive you. But I think that’s not how love functions, even at the very simple level. I think the English term is ‘endearing foibles’ — an elementary ingredient in love. You cannot ever fall in love with the perfect person. There must be some tiny small disturbing element, and it is only through noticing this element that you say, ‘But in spite of that imperfection, I love him or her.'" Fair enough. But what to do about it? Zizek thinks that the way forward for romantic technologies lies not in a less technological approach, but a more technological approach — or at least a stranger technological approach. He imagines a world of "ideal sexual attraction" where "I meet a lady; we are attracted to each other; we say all the usual stuff — your place, my place, whatever, we meet there. What happens then? She comes with her plastic penis, electric dildo. I come with some horrible thing — I saw it, it’s called something like stimulating training unit — it’s basically a plastic vagina, a hole." Dare we examine where this scenario goes? The outcome may surprise you. They simply insert her electric dildo into his stimulating training unit, and voilà, "the machines are doing it for us, buzzing in the background, and I’m free to do whatever I want, and she." With full tribute paid to the superego by their vulgar devices, "we have a nice talk; we have tea; we talk about movies. I talk with a lady because we really like each other. And, you know, when I’m pouring her tea, or she to me, quite by chance our hands touch. We go on touching. Maybe we even end up in bed. But it’s not the usual oppressive sex where you worry about performance. No, all that is taken care of by the stupid machines. That would be ideal sex for me today." Related Content: Slavoj Žižek Examines the Perverse Ideology of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy Slavoj Žižek Names His Favorite Films from The Criterion Collection Slavoj Žižek Calls Political Correctness a Form of "Modern Totalitarianism" Slavoj Žižek on the Feel-Good Ideology of Starbucks Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Slavoj Zizek​ Explains What’s Wrong with Online Dating & What Unconventional Technology Can Actually Improve Your Love Life is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Courtesy of Legion Magazine, you can hear Canada’s iconic singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen reading "In Flanders Fields" by Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae. The clip was recently recorded to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the poem. World War I inspired many poems. But this one, straight from the beginning, became one of the most popular ones. Poets.org recounts the origins of "In Flanders Fields" thusly: As the first shots of World War I were fired in the summer of 1914, Canada, as a member of the British Empire, became involved in the fight as well. [John] McCrae was appointed brigade-surgeon to the First Brigade of the Canadian Field Artillery. In April 1915, McCrae was stationed in the trenches near Ypres, Belgium, in an area known as Flanders, during the bloody Second Battle of Ypres. In the midst of the tragic warfare, McCrae’s friend, twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, was killed by artillery fire and buried in a makeshift grave. The following day, McCrae, after seeing the field of makeshift graves blooming with wild poppies, wrote his famous poem "In Flanders Field," which would be the second to last poem he would ever write. It was published in England’s Punch magazine in December 1915 and was later included in the posthumous collection In Flanders Fields and Other Poems (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1919). As a sad postscript, McCrae started suffering from asthma attacks and bronchitis in the summer of 1917, then died of pneumonia and meningitis in January of 1918. It’s fitting that Leonard Cohen (an accomplished poet before he became a musician) would recite "In Flanders Fields," the text of which you can read below. The second reading was recorded live in Los Angeles earlier this year. In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below. We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields. Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields. Find Cohen’s reading in our collection, 700 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts definitely appear in your Facebook newsfeed, just follow these simple steps. Related Content Young Leonard Cohen Reads His Poetry in 1966 (Before His Days as a Musician Began) Ladies and Gentlemen… Mr. Leonard Cohen: The Poet-Musician Featured in a 1965 Documentary The Poetry of Leonard Cohen Illustrated by Two Short Films Leonard Cohen Reads The Great World War I Poem, "In Flanders Fields" is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Joseph Herscher — kinetic artist extraordinaire and creator of the great "Page Turner" Rube Goldberg machine — returns with a new contraption: "The Dresser". Originally, "The Dresser" was a live performance piece that Herscher performed in Charlotte, NC. He spent a year building the contraption, then 2 months testing it, before staging it for audiences. (Watch a short documentary on the live performance here.) Now, thankfully, he brings the quirky device to the web, for the rest of us to see. Somewhere Rube Goldberg is smiling. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts definitely appear in your Facebook newsfeed, just follow these simple steps. Related Content: The Page Turner: A Fabulous Rube Goldberg Machine for Readers The Falling Water: A Rube Goldberg Machine That Makes a Fine Cocktail Students Tells the Passover Story with a Rube Goldberg Machine The Dresser: The Contraption That Makes Getting Dressed an Adventure is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Just last month, Stanford University‘s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts made its collection accessible online, digitizing and uploading over 45,000 of its works of art in forms freely viewable by all. These include, if you navigate through the collections highlighted on the browse page, works of American and European art; African, Native American, and Oceanic art; Asian art; modern and contemporary art; prints, drawings, and photographs; and Stanford family collections as well as works currently on display. But this hardly happened at a stroke. The short video above gives a look behind the scenes — or rather, museum walls, or perhaps digital museum walls — to reveal some of the effort that went into the six-year project that has culminated in the opening of the Cantor Arts Center’s online collections. The endeavor required no small amount of physical work, not just to re-photograph everything in their collections (only five percent of which goes on display at any one time), but to perform a whole new inventory, the first complete one the museum had done since 1916. (As a recent move reminded me, there’s nothing like having to move all your stuff from one place to another to give you the clearest possible sense of exactly what you have.) Here we’ve posted a few paintings from the Cantor: James McNeill Whistler’s Hurlingham (well, an etching, if you want to get technical), Théodore Caruelle d’Aligny’s View of the Bay of Naples, Nakabayashi Chikkei’s Autumn Landscape and Edward Hopper’s New York Corner. (You can also find a whole different set of scenes rendered in pen and ink at the Cantor’s dedicated digital collection of the sketchbooks of San Francisco Bay Area abstract expressionist painter Richard Diebenkorn.) But to get a sense of the full scope of the geographic, historical, aesthetic, and formal variety of the art the Cantor has made viewable anywhere and any time, you’ll want to follow the instructions provided by one of our readers, Robin L: "Go to this search gateway. If you enter in an artist (I tried Whistler), you will get a list of all of the collections’ images with small images and some basic information. Then click on the specific piece that you want. And that one will open up with a small-medium image and some description of the piece. If you click on the image again, it will enlarge."  via Stanford News Related Content: Whitney Museum Puts Online 21,000 Works of American Art, By 3,000 Artists The Metropolitan Museum of Art Puts 400,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use LA County Museum Makes 20,000 Artistic Images Available for Free Download The Rijksmuseum Puts 125,000 Dutch Masterpieces Online, and Lets You Remix Its Art The National Gallery Makes 25,000 Images of Artwork Freely Available Online The Getty Puts 4600 Art Images Into the Public Domain (and There’s More to Come) 40,000 Artworks from 250 Museums, Now Viewable for Free at the Redesigned Google Art Project Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. 45,000 Works of Art from Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center Now Freely Viewable Online is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is perhaps best known for his systematic philosophical ethics, conceived of as a post-religious framework for secular morality. His primary ethical mandate, which he called the "categorical imperative," enables us—Alain de Botton tells us in his short School of Life video above—to "shift our perspective, to get us to see our own behavior in less immediately personal terms." It’s a philosophical version, de Botton says, of the Golden Rule. "Act only according to that maxim," Kant famously wrote of the imperative in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, "by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." This guide to moral behavior seems on its face a simple one. It asks us to imagine the consequences of behavior should everyone act in the same way. However, "almost every conceivable analysis of the Groundwork has been tried out over the past two centuries," writes Harvard professor Michael Rosen, "yet all have been found wanting in some way or other." Friedrich Nietzsche alluded to a serious problem with what Rosen calls Kant’s "rule-utilitarianism." How, Nietzsche asks in On the Genealogy of Morals, are we to determine whether an action will have good or bad consequences unless we have "learned to separate necessary events from chance events, to think in terms of cause and effect, to see distant events as if they were present, to anticipate them…." Can we ever have that kind of foresight? Can we formulate rules such that everyone who acts on them will predict the same positive or negative outcomes in every situation? The questions did not seem to personally disturb Kant, who lived his life in a highly predictable, rule-bound way—even, de Botton tells us, when it came to structuring his dinner parties. But while the categorical imperative has seemed unworkably abstract and too divorced from particular circumstances and contingencies, an elaboration of the maxim has had much more appeal to contemporary ethicists. We should also, Kant wrote, "act so as to treat people always as ends in themselves, never as mere means." De Botton provides some helpful context for why Kant felt the need to create these ethical principles. Kant lived in a time when "the identifying feature of his age was its growing secularism." De Botton contends that while Kant welcomed the decline of traditional religion, he also feared the consequences; as "a pessimist about human character," Kant "believed that we are by nature intensely prone to corruption." His solution was to "replace religious authority with the authority of reason." The project occupied all of Kant’s career, from his work on political philosophy to that on aesthetics in the Critique of Pure Judgment. And though philosophers have for centuries had difficulty making Kant’s ethics work, his dense, difficult writing has nevertheless occupied a central place in Western thought. In his defense of the authority of reason, Kant provided us with one of the most comprehensive means for understanding how exactly human reason works—and for recognizing its many limitations. To read Kant’s work for yourself, download free versions of his major texts in a variety of digital formats from our archive of Free Philosophy eBooks. Kant is no easy read, and it helps to have a guide. To learn how his work has been interpreted over the past two hundred years, and how he arrived at many of his conclusions, consider taking one of many online classes on Kant we have listed in our archive of Free Philosophy Courses. Related Content: Philosophers Drinking Coffee: The Excessive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard Man Shot in Fight Over Immanuel Kant’s Philosophy in Russia Philosophers Drinking Coffee: The Excessive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Immanuel Kant’s Life & Philosophy Introduced in a Short Monty Python-Style Animation is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Briefly noted: This fall, Harvard has been rolling out videos from the 2015 edition of Computer Science 50 (CS50), the university’s introductory coding course designed for majors and non-majors alike. Taught by David Malan, a perennially popular professor (you’ll immediately see why), the one-semester course (taught mostly in C) combines courses typically known elsewhere as "CS1" and "CS2." Even if you’re not a Harvard student, you’re welcome to follow CS50 online by heading over to the This is CS50 website, or this alternative site here. There you will find video lectures (stream them all above or access them individually here), problem sets, quizzes, and other useful course materials. Once you’ve mastered the material covered in CS50, you can start branching out into new areas of coding by perusing our big collection of Free Online Computer Science Courses, a subset of our larger collection, 1150 Free Online Courses from Top Universities. Dan Colman is the founder/editor of Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and  share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. Learn to Code with Harvard’s Popular Intro to Computer Science Course: The 2015 Edition is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

I’ve been playing guitar off and on for most of my life, and I’d be the first to admit that I’m not the most spectacular musician. I do it for joy and don’t sweat my musical limitations too much. This is a good thing; otherwise I might find myself seething with mad envy—like F. Murray Abraham’s Salieri—upon realizing that in 15 lifetimes I’d never be as good as young French prodigy Tina S is at 15 years of age. Tina has sent guitar nerds everywhere fleeing to their bedrooms, working their fingers bloody in furious efforts to match her speed and accuracy. Watch her flawlessly rip through Yngwie Malmsteen’s "Arpeggios from Hell" above, ye mighty shredders, and despair. See her destroy Steve Vai’s "Paganini 5th Caprice (Crossroads)" below, ye monsters of rock, and rend your denim vests asunder with grief. The baroque speed metal of Malmsteen and Vai aren’t really my bag, but I have to say, there’s maybe a little Salieri voice cackling into the void in the back of my mind when I watch Tina’s videos. Maybe she’s a one-trick-pony, it tells me, playing arpeggios all day like a few hundred other guitarists in the audition line for a hundred metal bands in a hundred cities a day—players who couldn’t slow down and play the blues if they were heavily medicated. So says my inner Salieri. But no, there she is below, flawlessly pulling off the "Comfortably Numb" solo, her bends and slides so impeccably timed I could close my eyes and almost swear it’s David Gilmour. Sigh and alas. But can she do Van Halen, you rightly ask? Because, you know, anyone can play Malmsteen, Vai, and Gilmour, but Eddie Van Halen, c’mon…. Yet there she is below, with a searing rendition of "Eruption," a song guitarists who learn Van Halen often avoid for reasons that will likely become evident when you see Tina play it. Is she too much technique, too little soul, you say? Yeah, well, she’s 15, and better than most of us are at twice that age. Comments on her videos include the following: "I want to throw my guitar out the window" and "This makes me want to kill myself." In all seriousness, I hope anyone who genuinely feels this way seeks help. Also in all seriousness, don’t despair. Do what you do and enjoy it. And maybe after many long lifetimes you’ll be reborn as a Parisian guitar prodigy. That Tina S has obvious natural ability in no way means she hasn’t had to work hard for this level of skill. On the contrary, anyone this good gets there through endless regular practice and the guidance of a talented teacher (in this case, French guitarist Renaud Louis-Servais). Tina posted her first video in 2008 at the tender age of 8, playing a composition by guitarist Maria Linnemann. You can see her below honing the classical chops that she later put to ludicrously fast use on a metal tribute to Vivaldi. But does she do Mozart? Not so far on her Youtube channel, where you’ll find more early acoustic performances, like "Let it Be" and "Hotel California," and more recent shredfests like Jason Becker’s "Altitudes." To learn just how Tina views her own musicianship and sees her future as a guitarist, read this interview with her on the Guitar Channel. "I have not yet started my career as a guitarist," she deadpans. Many would-be Salieris have already sworn to end theirs after watching her videos. Related Content: Fourteen-Year-Old Girl’s Blistering Heavy Metal Performance of Vivaldi Great Violinists Playing as Kids: Itzhak Perlman, Anne-Sophie Mutter, & More The Guitar Prodigy from Karachi Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness 15-Year-Old French Guitar Prodigy Flawlessly Rips Through Solos by Eddie Van Halen, David Gilmour, Yngwie Malmsteen & Steve Vai is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Blank on Blank has worked their magic again, this time animating a 1968 interview with the singer-songwriter and civil rights activist, Nina Simone. As always, Blank on Blank’s visual work is a treat. But what stands out for me here is the audio recording. Taken from a 1960s radio show hosted by Lilian Terry, the audio originally aired in Italy in the 1960s. And, until now, it has never been heard in the United States. Terry is nowadays working on an audiobook project called Voices from the Jazz Dimension that "chronicles her remarkable collection of interviews with jazz legends from Nina to Duke Ellington." We can hardly wait for that project to take final shape. You can find more Blank on Blank animations, all of which revive vintage audio clips, in our archive. Related Content: Nina Simone Sings Her Breakthrough Song, ‘I Loves You Porgy,’ in 1962 Free Archive of Audio Interviews with Rock, Jazz & Folk Legends Now on iTunes Jazz on the Tube: An Archive of 2,000 Classic Jazz Videos (and Much More)     Watch a New Nina Simone Animation Based on an Interview Never Aired in the U.S. Before is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

At the epicenter of three explosive forces in 1950s America—the birth of Bebop, the spread of Buddhism through the counterculture, and Beat revolutionizing of poetry and prose—sat Jack Kerouac, though I don’t picture him ever sitting for very long. The rhythms that moved through him, through his verse and prose, are too fluid to come to rest. At the end of his life he sat… and drank, a mostly spent force. But in his prime, Kerouac was always on the move, over highways on those legendary road trips, or his fingers flying over the typewriter’s keys as he banged out the scroll manuscript of On the Road in three feverish weeks (so he said). After the publication of On the Road, Kerouac "became a celebrity," says Steve Allen in introduction to the Beat writer on a 1959 appearance above, "partly because he’d written a powerful and successful book, but partly because he seemed to be the embodiment of this new generation." After a little back-and-forth, Allen lets Kerouac do what he always did so well, whether on television or on record—embody the rhythms of his writing in his voice, his phrasing always musical, whether he read over jazz hot or cool or over meditative silence. He did a lot of both, recording with Allen and many other jazzmen, and "experimenting with a home reel-to-reel system, taping himself to see whether his spontaneous prose outbursts had the musical rhythms F. Scott Fitzgerald considered the hallmark of all great writing." So writes historian David Brinkley in the liner notes (remember those?) to the compilation album Jack Kerouac Reads On the Road, a rare collection of haunting poetry readings, playful crooning, and experiments with voice and music. Brinkley describes how Kerouac, the French Canadian from Lowell, Massachusetts, developed his "bop ear" by hanging out at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem in the 40s, watching Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie invent what he called a "goofy new sound." The sound stayed with him, as he turned his immersion into American literary and musical counterculture into On the Road, The Subterraneans, The Dharma Bums, etc, and throughout all the writing, there was the music of his reading, captured on the albums Poetry for the Beat Generation with Steve Allen, Blues and Haikus with Al Cohn and Zoot Sims—both in 1959—and, the following year, Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation. Kerouac’s reading style did not come only from his internalization of bebop rhythms, however, but also from "the discovery of the extraordinary spoken-word albums of poets Langston Hughes, Carl Sandberg, and Dylan Thomas," Brinkley tells us. The writer became "convinced that prose should be read aloud in public, as it had been in Homer’s Greece and Shakespeare’s England." The albums he recorded and released in his lifetime bear out this conviction and explore "the possibilities of combining jazz and spontaneous verse." These records became very difficult to find for many years, but you can now purchase an omnibus CD at a reasonable price (vinyl will set you back a couple hundred bucks). Alternately, you can stream all three Kerouac albums free on Spotify, above in chronological order of release. If you don’t have Spotify, you can easily download the software here. And if you’d rather hear Kerouac’s readings on CD or on the original vinyl medium, that’s cool too. However you experience these readings, you should, at some point, experience them. Like all the very best poetry, Kerouac’s work is most alive when read aloud, and most especially when read aloud by Kerouac himself. Related Content: Download 55 Free Online Literature Courses: From Dante and Milton to Kerouac and Tolkien Jack Kerouac’s 30 Beliefs and Techniques For Writing Modern Prose Jack Kerouac Lists 9 Essentials for Writing Spontaneous Prose The First Recording of Allen Ginsberg Reading "Howl" (1956) Watch Langston Hughes Read Poetry from His First Collection, The Weary Blues (1958) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness   Hear All Three of Jack Kerouac’s Spoken-World Albums: A Sublime Union of Beat Literature and 1950s Jazz is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.