Did Bram Stoker’s world-famous Dracula character—perhaps the most culturally unkillable of all horror monsters—derive from Irish folklore? Search the Gaelic "Droch-Fhoula" (pronounced droc’ola) and, in addition to the requisite metal bands, you’ll find references to the "Castle of the Blood Visage," to a blood-drinking chieftain named Abhartach, and to other possible native sources of Irish writer Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel. These Celtic legends, the BBC writes, "may have shaped the story as much as European myths and Gothic literature." Despite all this intriguing speculation about Dracula’s Irish origins, the actors playing him have come from a variety of places. One recent incarnation, TV series Dracula, did cast an Irish actor, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, in the role. Hungarian Bela Lugosi comes closest to the fictional character’s nationality, as well as that of another, perhaps dubious source, Romanian warlord Vlad the Impaler. Protean Brit Gary Oldman played up the character as Slavic aristocrat in Francis Ford Coppola’s somewhat more faithful take. But one too-oft-overlooked portrayal by another English actor, Christopher Lee, deserves much more attention than it receives. In ten low-budget films made by British exploitation studio Hammer, Lee portrayed the monstrous-yet-seductive blood-sucking nobleman as a very proper Englishman with "a certain lascivious sex appeal"—beginning with 1958’s Horror of Dracula (see a trailer above) and ending with 1973’s The Satanic Rites of Dracula. I find Lee’s Dracula so memorable that I was delighted to hear the audio above of him reading an adaptation of the novel, in ten parts. The video begins with titles and an establishing shot from the Hammer films, then segues to images from a 1966 Dracula graphic novel, the source of the "pretty faithful" adaptation by Otto Binder and Craig Tennis, for which Lee wrote an introduction. The audio here was also recorded in 1966 by the book’s editor Russ Jones. Comics blogger Steven Thompson remarks that "since Dracula is made up of a series of letters, journal and diary entries, the writers here logically take a more straightforward route of telling the tale while maintaining the episodic feel quite well." Rather than the voice of Count Dracula, Lee reads as the novel’s epistolary narrator Jonathan Harker, and the Dracula in the artwork, drawn by artist Al McWilliams, "bears more than a passing resemblance here to actor John Carradine," a notable American actor who played the character in Universal’s House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula. Nonetheless, Lee’s voice is enough to conjure his many exceptional performances as the prototypical vampire, a character and concept that will likely never die. Scholar and writer Bob Curran, a proponent of the Irish origins of Dracula, argues in his book Vampires that legends of undead, blood-drinking ghouls are found all over the world, which goes a long way toward explaining the enduring popularity of Dracula in particular and vampires in general. We’ll probably see another actor inherit the role of Stoker’s seductively creepy count in the near future. Whoever it is will have to measure himself against not only the performances of Lugosi, Carradine, Oldman, and Meyers, but also against the debonair Christopher Lee. He would do well, wherever he comes from, to study Lee’s Dracula films closely, and listen to him read the story in the adaptation above. Related Content: Christopher Lee (R.I.P.) Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Raven," and From "The Fall of the House of Usher" Christopher Lee Narrates a Beautiful Animation of Tim Burton’s Poem, Nightmare Before Christmas Watch Nosferatu, the Seminal Vampire Film, Free Online (1922) Hear Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Tell Tale Heart" Read by the Great Bela Lugosi (1946) 700 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices. Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Horror Legend Christopher Lee Reads Bram Stoker’s Dracula 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.

In a perfect world, I could write this post for free. Alas, the rigors of the modern economy demand that I pay regular and sometimes high prices for food, shelter, books, and the other necessities of life. And so if I spend time working on something — and in my case, that usually means writing something — I’d better ask for money in exchange, or I’ll find myself out on the street before long. Nobody understands this better than Harlan Ellison, the hugely prolific author of novels, stories, essays screenplays, comic books, usually in, or dealing with, the genre of science fiction. Ellison also starred in Dreams with Sharp Teeth, a documentary about his colorful life and all the work he’s written during it, a clip of which you can see at the top of the post. In it, he describes receiving a call just the day before from "a little film company" seeking permission to include an interview clip with him previously shot about the making of Babylon 5, a series on which he worked as creative consultant. "Absolutely," Ellison said to the company’s representative. "All you’ve got to do is pay me." This simple request seemed to take the representative—who went on to insist that "everyone else is just doing it for nothing" and that "it would be good publicity"—quite by surprise. "Do you get a paycheck?" Ellison then asked. "Does your boss get a paycheck? Do you pay the telecine guy? Do you pay the cameraman? Do you pay the cutters? Do you pay the Teamsters when they schlep your stuff on the trucks? Would you go to the gas station and ask them to give you free gas? Would you go to the doctor and have them take out our spleen for nothing?" This line of questioning has come up again and again since Ellison told this story, as when the journalist Nate Thayer, or more recently Wil Wheaton, spoke out against the expectation that writers would hand out the rights to their work "for exposure." The pragmatic Ellison frames the matter as follows: "Cross my palm with silver, and you can use my interview." But do financially-oriented attitudes such as his ("I don’t take a piss without getting paid for it") taint the art and craft of writing? He doesn’t think so: "I sell my soul," he admits, "but at the highest rates." Related Content: William Faulkner Explains Why Writing is Best Left to Scoundrels … Preferably Living in Brothels (1956) Stephen King’s Top 20 Rules for Writers Ray Bradbury on Zen and the Art of Writing (1973) Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. 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. Harlan Ellison’s Wonderful Rant on Why Writers Should Always Get Paid 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 a few miles down the highway from Open Culture’s gleaming headquarters you will find Los Gatos High School, where Dan Burns, an AP Physics Teacher, has figured out a simple but clever way to visualize gravity, as it was explained by Einstein’s 1915 General Theory of Relativity. Get $20 of spandex, some marbles, a couple of weights, and you’re all good to go. Using these readily-available objects, you can demonstrate how matter warps space-time, how objects gravitate towards one another, and why objects orbit in the way they do. My favorite part comes at the 2:15 mark, where Burns demonstrates the answer to a question you’ve maybe pondered before: why do all planets happen to orbit the sun moving in a clockwise (rather than counter-clockwise) fashion? Now you can find out why. via Coudal Related Content Free Online Physics Courses The Feynman Lectures on Physics, The Most Popular Physics Book Ever Written, Now Completely Online Bertrand Russell’s ABC of Relativity: The Classic Introduction to Einstein (Free Audio) Free Physics Textbooks Gravity Visualized by High School Teacher in an Amazingly Elegant & Simple Way 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.

1949’s Death of a Salesman is one of the most enduring plays in the American canon, a staple of both community and professional theater. Playwright Arthur Miller recalled that when the curtain fell on the first performance, there were "men in the audience sitting there with handkerchiefs over their faces. It was like a funeral." Robert Falls, Artistic Director of Chicago’s Goodman Theater, brings the experience of dozens of productions to bear when he describes it as the only play that "sends men weeping into the Men’s room." Small wonder that the titular part has become a grail of sorts for aging leading men eager to be taken seriously. Dustin Hoffman, George C. Scott, and Philip Seymour Hoffman have all had a go at Willy Loman, a role still associated with the towering Lee J. Cobb, who originated it. (Willy’s wife, Linda, with her famous graveside admonition that "attention must be paid," is considered no less of a plum part.) On February 2, 1955, Arthur Miller joined Salesman’s first Mrs. Loman, Mildred Dunnock, to read selections from the script before a live audience at Manhattan’s 92nd Street YMCA. In addition to reading the role of Willy Loman, Miller supplied stage directions and explained his rationale for picking the featured scenes. The Pulitzer Prize winner’s New York accent and brusque manner make him a natural, and of course, who better to understand the nuances, motivations, and historical context of this tragically flawed character? Miller told The New Yorker that he based Loman on his family friend, Manny Newman: Manny lived in his own mind all the time. He never got out of it. Everything he said was totally unexpected. People regarded him as a kind of strange, completely untruthful personality. Very charming. I thought of him as a kind of wonderful inventor. For example, at will, he would suddenly say, "That’s a lovely suit you have on." And for no reason at all, he’d say, "Three hundred dollars." Now, everybody knew he never paid three hundred dollars for a suit in those days. At a party, he would lie down on his wife’s lap and pretend to be sucking her breast. He’d curl up on her lap—she was an immense woman. It was crazy. At the same time, there was something in him which was terribly moving. It was very moving, because his suffering was right on his skin, you see. If Miller and Dunnock’s performance leaves you hungry for more, you can see her and Lee J. Cobb reprise their roles on television in a 1966 CBS production. See Act 1 above, and Act 2 here. Related Content: Albert Camus Talks About Adapting Dostoyevsky for the Theatre, 1959 Hear Antonin Artaud’s Censored, Never-Aired Radio Play: To Have Done With The Judgment of God (1947) Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade Pushed the Boundaries of Theater, and Still Does Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, is now playing in New York City . Follow her @AyunHalliday Hear Arthur Miller Read From Death of a Salesman, His Great American Play (1955) 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.

Click on images to view them in a larger format. Last week we featured Julian Peters’ comic-book adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." That might seem like an ambitious enough classic-literature-to-comics adaptation for any artist’s career, but the Montreal-based art history grad student Peters has put himself on a larger mission. If you take a look at his site, you’ll find that he’s also adapted poems by "Italy’s foremost poet of the First World War" Giuseppe Ungaretti, Seamus Heaney’s 1969 poem "The Given Note," and John Philip Johnson’s "Stairs Appear in a Hole Outside of Town." You see here the versatile Peters’ visual interpretation of W.B. Yeats’ "When You Are Old," a natural choice given his apparent poetic interests, but one drawn in the style of Japanese manga. In adapting Yeats’ words to a lady in the twilight of life, Peters has paid specific tribute to the work of Clamp, Japan’s famous all-female comic-artist collective known for series like RG Veda, Tokyo Babylon, and X/1999. Clamp fans will find that, in three brief pages, Peters touches on quite a few of the aesthetic tropes that have long characterized the collective’s work. (You’ll want to click through to Peters’ own "When You Are Old" page to see an extra illustration that also fits well into the Clamp sensibility.) Yeats fans will no doubt appreciate the chance to see the poet’s work in an entirely new way. I, for one, had never before pictured a cat on the lap of the woman "old and grey and full of sleep" reflecting on the "moments of glad grace" of her youth and the one man who loved her "pilgrim soul," but now I always will — and I imagine both Yeats and Clamp would approve of that. You can read and hear Yeats’ 1892 poem here. If you click on the images on this page, you can view them in a larger format. Related Content: Read the Entire Comic Book Adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" Rare 1930s Audio: W.B. Yeats Reads Four of His Poems Japanese Cartoons from the 1920s and 30s Reveal the Stylistic Roots of Anime Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. 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. W.B. Yeats’ Poem "When You Are Old" Adapted into a Japanese Manga Comic 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.

Three minutes with the minstrels / Arthur Collins, S. H. Dudley & Ancient City. Edison Record. 1899. Long before vinyl records, cassette tapes, CDs and MP3s came along, people first experienced audio recordings through another medium — through cylinders made of tin foil, wax and plastic. In recent years, we’ve featured cylinder recordings from the 19th century that allow you to hear the voices of Leo Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, Walt Whitman, Otto von Bismarck and other towering figures. Those recordings were originally recorded and played on a cylinder phonograph invented by Thomas Edison in 1877. But those were obviously just a handful of the cylinder recordings produced at the beginning of the recorded sound era. Thanks to the University of California-Santa Barbara Cylinder Audio Archive, you can now download or stream a digital collection of more than 10,000 cylinder recordings. "This searchable database," says UCSB, "features all types of recordings made from the late 1800s to early 1900s, including popular songs, vaudeville acts, classical and operatic music, comedic monologues, ethnic and foreign recordings, speeches and readings." You can also find in the archive a number of "personal recordings," or "home wax recordings," made by everyday people at home (as opposed to by record companies). If you go to this page, the recordings are neatly categorized by genre, instrument, subject/theme and ethnicity/nation of origin. You can listen, for example, to recordings of Jazz, Hawaiian Music, Operas, and Fiddle Tunes. Or hear recordings featuring the Mandolin, Guitar, Bagpipes and Banjo. Plus there are thematically-arranged playlists here. Hosted by UCSB, the archive is supported by funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Grammy Foundation, and other donors. Above, hear a recording called "Three minutes with the minstrels," by Arthur Collins, released in 1899. Below that is "Alexander’s ragtime band medley," featuring the banjo playing of Fred Van Eps, released in 1913. via Metafilter Related Content: A Beer Bottle Gets Turned Into a 19th Century Edison Cylinder and Plays Fine Music Voices from the 19th Century: Tennyson, Gladstone, Whitman & Tchaikovsky Thomas Edison’s Recordings of Leo Tolstoy: Hear the Voice of Russia’s Greatest Novelist Tchaikovsky’s Voice Captured on an Edison Cylinder (1890) Download 10,000 of the First Recordings of Music Ever Made, Courtesy of the UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive 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.

In the late 50s, a fearful, racist backlash against rock and roll, coupled with money-grubbing corporate payola, pushed out the blues and R&B that drove rock’s sound. In its place came easy listening orchestration more palatable to conservative white audiences. As sexy electric guitars gave way to string and horn sections, the comparatively aggressive sound of rock and roll seemed so much a passing fad that Decca’s senior A&R man rejected the Beatles’ demo in 1962, telling Brian Epstein, "guitar groups are on their way out." But it wasn’t only the blues, R&B, and doo wop revivalism of British Invasion bands that saved the American art form. It was also the often unintentional influence of audio engineers who—with their incessant tinkering and a number of happy accidents—created new sounds that defined the countercultural rock and roll of the 60s and 70s. Ironically, the two technical developments that most characterized those decades’ rock guitar sounds—the wah-wah and fuzz pedals—were originally marketed as ways to imitate strings, horns, and other non-rock and roll instruments. As you’ll learn in the documentary above, Cry Baby: The Pedal that Rocks the World, the wah-wah pedal, with its "waka-waka" sound so familiar from "Shaft" and 70s porn soundtracks, officially came into being in 1967, when the Thomas Organ company released the first incarnation of the effect. But before it acquired the brand name "Cry Baby" (still the name of the wah-wah pedal manufactured by Jim Dunlop), it went by the name "Clyde McCoy," a backward-looking bit of branding that attempted to market the effect through nostalgia for pre-rock and roll music. Clyde McCoy was a jazz trumpet player known for his "wah-wah" muting technique on songs like "Sugar Blues" in the 20s, and the pedal was thought to mimic McCoy’s jazz-age effects. (McCoy himself had nothing to do with the marketing.) Nonetheless the development of the wah-wah pedal came right out of the most current sixties’ technology made for the most current of acts, the Beatles. Increasingly drowned out by screaming crowds in larger and larger venues, the band required louder and louder amplifiers, and British amp company Vox obliged, creating the 100-watt "Super Beatle" amp in 1964 for their first U.S. tour. As Priceonomics details, when Thomas Organ scored a contract to manufacture the amps stateside, a young engineer named Brad Plunkett was given the task of learning how to make them for less. While experimenting with the smooth dial of a rotary potentiometer in place of an expensive switch, he discovered the wah-wah effect, then had the bright idea to combine the dial—which swept a resonant peak across the upper mid-range frequency—with the foot pedal of an organ. The rest, as the cliché goes, is history—a fascinating history at that, one that leads from Elvis Presley studio guitarist Del Casher, to Frank Zappa, Clapton and Hendrix, and to dozens of 70s funk guitarists and beyond. Art Thompson, editor of Guitar Player Magazine, notes in the star-studded Cry Baby documentary that prior to the invention of the wah-wah pedal, guitarists had a limited range of effects—tape delay, tremolo, spring reverb, and fuzz. Only one of these effects, however, was then available in pedal form, and that pedal, Gibson’s Maestro Fuzz-Tone, would also revolutionize the sound of sixties rock. But as you can hear in the short 1962 demonstration record above for the Maestro Fuzz-Tone, the fuzz effect was also marketed as a way of simulating other instruments: "Organ-like tones, mellow woodwinds, and whispering reeds," says the announcer, "booming brass, and bell-clear horns." In fact, Keith Richards, in the Stones’ "(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction"—the song credited with introducing the Maestro’s sound to rock and roll in 1965—originally recorded his fuzzed-out guitar part as a placeholder for a horn section. "But we didn’t have any horns," he wrote in his autobiography, Life; "the fuzz tone had never been heard before anywhere, and that’s the sound that caught everybody’s attention." The assertion isn’t strictly true. While "Satisfaction" brought fuzz to the forefront, the effect first appeared, by accident, in 1961, with "a faulty connection in a mixing board," writes William Weir in a history of fuzz for The Atlantic. Fuzz, "a term of art… came to define the sound of rock guitar," but it first appeared in "the bass solo of country singer Marty Robbins on ‘Don’t Worry,’" an "otherwise sweet and mostly acoustic tune." At the time, engineers argued over whether to leave the mistaken distortion in the mix. Luckily, they opted to keep it, and listeners loved it. When Nancy Sinatra asked engineer Glen Snoddy to replicate the sound, he recreated it in the form of the Maestro. Guitarists had experimented deliberately with similar distortion effects since the very beginnings of rock and roll, cutting through their amp’s speakers—like Link Wray in his menacing classic instrumental "Rumble"—or pushing small, tube-powered amplifiers past their limits. But none of these experiments, nor the pedals that later emulated them, sound like the fuzz pedal, which achieves its buzzing effect by severely clipping the guitar’s signal. Later iterations from other manufacturers—the Tone Bender, Big Muff, and Fuzz Face—have acquired their own cache, in large part because of Jimi Hendrix’s heavy use of various fuzz pedals throughout his career. "Like the shop talk of wine enthusiasts," writes Weir, "discussions among distortion cognoscenti on nuances of tone can baffle outsiders." Indeed. Those early experiments with effects pedals now fetch upwards of several thousand dollars on the vintage market. And a recent boom in boutique pedals has sent prices for handcrafted replicas of those original models—along with several innovative new designs—into the hundreds of dollars for a single pedal. (One handmade overdrive, the Klon Centaur, has become the most imitated of modern pedals; originals can go for up to two thousand dollars.) The specialization of effects pedal technology, and the hefty pricing for vintage and contemporary effects alike, can be daunting for beginning guitarists who want to sound like their favorite players. But what early players and engineers figured out still holds true—musical innovation is all about creating original sounds by experimenting with whatever you have at hand. Cry Baby: The Pedal that Rocks the World has been added to our list of Free Documentaries, a subset of our collection 725 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc. via Priceonomics Related Content: Rick Wakeman Tells the Story of the Mellotron, the Oddball Proto-Synthesizer Pioneered by the Beatles The "Amen Break": The Most Famous 6-Second Drum Loop & How It Spawned a Sampling Revolution All Hail the Beat: How the 1980 Roland TR-808 Drum Machine Changed Pop Music A Brief History of Sampling: From the Beatles to the Beastie Boys Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Two Guitar Effects That Revolutionized Rock: The Invention of the Wah-Wah & Fuzz Pedals 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.

Creative Commons image via NASA Ah to be possessed of a highly distinctive voice. Actress Katherine Hepburn had one. As did FDR… And noted Hollywood Square Paul Lynde… Physicist Stephen Hawking may trump them all, though his famously recognizable voice is not organic. The one we all associate with him has been computer generated since worsening Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, aka Lou Gehrig’s disease, led to a tracheotomy in 1985. Without the use of his hands, Hawking controls the Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit software with a  sensor attached to one of his cheek muscles. Recently, Intel has made the software and its user guide available for free download on the code sharing site, Github. It requires a computer running Windows XP or above to use, and also a webcam that will track the visual cues of the user’s facial expressions. The multi-user program allows users to type in MS Word and browse the Internet, in addition to assisting them to "speak" aloud in English. The software release is intended to help researchers aiding sufferers of motor neuron diseases, not pranksters seeking to borrow the famed physicist’s voice for their doorbells and cookie jar lids. To that end, the free version comes with a default voice, not Professor Hawking’s. Download the Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit (ACAT) here. Related Content: Stephen Hawking’s Big Ideas Explained with Simple Animation Stephen Hawking Starts Posting on Facebook: Join His Quest to Explain What Makes the Universe Exist Stephen Hawking’s Universe: A Visualization of His Lectures with Stars & Sound Free Online Physics Courses Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, is currently playing in New York City. Follow her @AyunHalliday Download the Software That Provides Stephen Hawking’s Voice 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.

Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes… to my freshman ears, the names of these French theorists sounded like passwords to an occult world of strange and forbidding ideas. I started college in the mid-90s, when English departments gleefully claimed poststructuralism as their birthright. Academic campaigns against the fuzzy logic of these thinkers had not yet gathered much steam, though conservative culture warriors were already on the warpath against postmodernism. Very shortly after my introduction to French poststructuralist thought, analytical positivists launched formidable campaigns to banish critical theory to the margins. https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Goldsmith/Theory/Kenneth-Goldsmith-Sings-Derrida.mp3 The backlash against obscurantist theory made a good case, with public shamings like the "Sokal Hoax" and Philosophy and Literature’s Bad Writing Contest. Such displays made the work of many European philosophers and their adherents seem indeed—as Noam Chomsky said of Derrida, Slavoj Žižek, and Jacques Lacan—like so much vacuous "posturing." But as potent as these critiques may be, I’ve never cared much for them; they seem to miss the point of more creative kinds of theory, which is not, I think (as philosophy professor Eric Schwitzgebel alleges) "intellectual authoritarianism and cowardice," but instead an exploratory attempt to expand the rigid boundaries of language and cognition, and to enact the meanderings of discursive thought in prose that captures its "errantry" (to take a term from Martiniquan poet, novelist, and academic Edouard Glissant.) https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Goldsmith/Theory/Kenneth-Goldsmith-Sings-Baudrillard.mp3 In any case, the debate was not new at all, but only a later iteration of the old Continental/Analytic divide that has long pitted exponents of Anglophone clarity against the sometimes awkward prose of thinkers like Kant and Hegel. And I happen to think that Kant, Hegel, and, yes, even later Continentals like Derrida—despite the deliberate obscurity of their writing—are interesting thinkers who deserve to be read. They even deserve to be sung, badly, by poets—namely by conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith, who is also founding editor of Ubuweb, senior editor of PennSound, and onetime host of a radio show on gloriously weird, free-form radio station WFMU. https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Goldsmith/Theory/Kenneth-Goldsmith-Sings-Barthes.mp3 With his natty sense of style and serious appreciation for absurdity, Goldsmith has sung to listeners the work of Walter Benjamin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Sigmund Freud; he has given us an avant-garde musical rendition of Harry Potter; and he has turned selections of Theodor Adorno’s grim Minima Moralia into 80s hardcore punk. Now, we bring you more of Goldsmith’s musical interventions: his goofball singing of Derrida over an icy minimalist composition by Anton Webern (top); of Baudrillard over a lounge-pop instrumental by Francis Lai (middle); and of Roland Barthes over the Allman Brothers (above). https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Goldsmith/Theory/Kenneth-Goldsmith-Sings-Jameson.mp3 As an added bonus, if you can call it that, hear Goldsmith warble Marxist theorist Frederic Jameson over Coltrane, just above. Do these ridiculous musical exercises make these thinkers any easier to digest? I doubt it. But they do seem to say to the many haters of critical theory and postmodern French philosophy, "hey, lighten up, will ya?" Related Content: Noam Chomsky Slams Žižek and Lacan: Empty ‘Posturing’ John Searle on Foucault and the Obscurantism in French Philosophy The Theory of Walter Benjamin, Ludwig Wittgenstein & Sigmund Freud Sung by Kenneth Goldsmith 30 Minutes of Harry Potter Sung in an Avant-Garde Fashion by UbuWeb’s Kenneth Goldsmith Theodor Adorno’s Critical Theory Text Minima Moralia Sung as Hardcore Punk Songs Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Hear the Writing of French Theorists Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard & Roland Barthes Sung by Poet Kenneth Goldsmith 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.

Like many of us, Russian literary great Fyodor Dostoevsky liked to doodle when he was distracted. He left his handiwork in several manuscripts—finely shaded drawings of expressive faces and elaborate architectural features. But Dostoevsky’s doodles were more than just a way to occupy his mind and hands; they were an integral part of his literary method. His novelistic imagination, with all of its grand excesses, was profoundly visual, and architectural. "Indeed," writes Dostoevsky scholar Konstantin Barsht, "Dostoevsky was not content to ‘write’ and ‘take notes’ in the process of creative thinking." Instead, in his work "the meaning and significance of words interact reciprocally with other meanings expressed through visual images." Barsht calls it "a method of work specific to the writer." We’ve shared a few of those manuscript pages before, including one with a doodle of Shakespeare. Now we bring you a few more pages of doodles from the author of Crime and Punishment, a novel that, perhaps more so than any of his others, offers such vivid descriptions of its characters that I can still clearly remember the pictures I had of them in my mind the first time I read it in high school. My visualizations of the angry, desperate student Raskolnikov and the sleazy sociopathic Svidrigailov do not exactly resemble the faces doodled at the the top of the post, but that is how their author saw them, at least in this early, manuscript stage of the novel. The other faces here may be those of Sonya, police investigator Porfiry Petrovich, recidivist alcoholic father Semyon Marmelodov, and other characters in the novel, though it’s not clear exactly who’s who. Dostoevsky had much in common with his novel’s protagonist when he began the novel in 1865. Reduced to near-destitution after gambling away his fortune, the writer was also in desperate straits. The story, writes literary critic Joseph Franks, was "originally conceived as a long short story or novella to be written in the first person," like the feverish novella Notes From the Underground. In Dostoevsky’s manuscript notebooks, "extensive fragments of this original work are to be found here intact." Franks quotes scholar Edward Wasiolek, who published a translation of the notebooks in 1967: "They contain drawings, jottings about practical matters, doodling of various sorts, calculations about pressing expenses, sketches, and random remarks." In short, "Dostoevsky simply flipped his notebooks open any time he wished to write," or to practice his calligraphy, as he does on many pages. The pages of the Crime and Punishment notebooks resemble all of the manuscript pages of his novels in their ornamental haphazardness. You can see many more examples from novels like The Idiot, The Possessed, and A Raw Youth at the Russian site Culture, including the sketchy self portrait below, next to a few sums that indicate the author’s perpetual preoccupation with his troubled economic affairs. Related Content: Fyodor Dostoevsky Draws Elaborate Doodles In His Manuscripts Dostoevsky Draws a Picture of Shakespeare: A New Discovery in an Old Manuscript The Digital Dostoevsky: Download Free eBooks & Audio Books of the Russian Novelist’s Major Works Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Dostoevsky Draws Doodles of Raskolnikov and Other Characters in the Manuscript of Crime and Punishment 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.

We’ve all seen the Hindenburg. Specifically, we’ve all seen it exploding, an incident captured on film on that fateful day of May 6, 1937 — fateful for those aboard, of course, but also fateful for the passenger airship industry, which never recovered from this worst of all possible press. The contemporary rise of Pan American Airlines didn’t help, either, so now, when we want to go to a faraway land, we’ve usually got to take a jet. I happen to be moving to Korea tomorrow, and to get there I simply don’t have the choice of an airship (Hindenburg- class or otherwise) nor have I ever had that choice. I’ve thus never seen the inside of an airship — until today. These color images reveal the interior of not just any old 1930s airship but the Hindenburg itself, looking as genteel and well-appointed as you might expect, with accommodations up to and including, somewhere below its hydrogen-filled balloon, a smoking room. It brings to mind Sideshow Bob’s offhand comment on one Simpsons episode lamenting the passage of "the days when aviation was a gentleman’s pursuit, back before every Joe Sweatsock could wedge himself behind a lunch tray and jet off to Raleigh-Durham." But then, it also brings to mind another episode in which Bart gets a checkbook printed with flipbook-style images of the famous Hindenburg disaster newsreel footage. That clip, often dubbed with Herbert Morrison’s "Oh, the humanity!" reportorial narration, has familiarized us with the last large passenger airship’s exterior, but these images of its interior have had less exposure. For more, have a look at Airships.net: a Dirigible and Zeppelin History Site, which offers a wealth of detail on the Hindenburg‘s passenger decks, control car, flight instrument, flight controls, crew areas, and keel. The more you learn about airships, the more intriguing a form of travel they seem — until you learn about all the other disasters that preceded the Hindenburg, anyway. And that aside, given its top speed of 84 miles per hour, it would take a similarly retro airship at least seven times longer to get me to Korea than a jet, so I guess I’ll have to stick with the airlines for now. Related Content: Oh the Humanity An Animated History Of Aviation: From da Vinci’s Sketches to Apollo 11 The Miracle of Flight, the Classic Early Animation by Terry Gilliam Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. 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. The Interior of the Hindenburg Revealed in 1930s Color Photos: Inside the Ill-Fated Airship 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.

Creative commons image by Tim Green on Flickr Commons In the town of Bradford, near Leeds in the UK, they’ve imported more than 30 tons of sand to build nine sand sculptures across the city, as part of what’s called the Discovering Bradford project. Above, you can see one that caught our eye, thanks to the Vintage Anchor twitter stream. It’s a life-size sand sculpture of Emily Brontë, created by Jamie Wardley, an artist who belongs to the collective, Sand in Your Eye. Brontë was born in Thornton, a short hop, skip and a jump away from Bradford. For more culturally-inspired sand creations, see the Relateds below. via Vintage Anchor/Keighley News Related Content The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa: A Wonderful Sand Animation of the Classic Kafka Story (1977) Lewis Carroll’s Classic Story, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Told in Sand Animation The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa: A Wonderful Sand Animation of the Classic Kafka Story (1977) 13-Year-Old Charlotte Brontë & Her Brother Wrote Teeny Tiny Adventure Books, Measuring 1 x 2 Inches The Emily Bronte Sand Sculpture 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.

Kurt Vonnegut never graduated from college, but that didn’t stop him from visiting college classrooms, or from giving commencement speeches (nine of which were published last year in a volume called If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?: Advice to the Young). If you’ve experienced a Vonnegut speech, you know he had a tendency to riff and ramble. But he also entertained and educated. Above, the latest video from Blank on Blank captures the essence of a Vonnegut classroom visit, animating a talk the author gave to a class at NYU on November 8, 1970. Topics include: the paranoia that goes into writing and the exhaustion it brings about, his childhood in Indiana, the death of his parents, and his odd concept for a new short story called "The Big Space Fuc%," which features a warhead filled with sperm. It leaves the kids a little stunned. The full talk originally aired on WBAI 99.5 FM New York and now resides in the Pacifica Radio Archives. You can listen to the full, unedited tape below. Looking for free, professionally-read audio books from Audible.com? For example, John Malkovich reading Breakfast of Champions? Or James Franco reading Slaughterhouse-Five? Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free trial with Audible.com, you can download two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here. Related Content: Kurt Vonnegut Diagrams the Shape of All Stories in a Master’s Thesis Rejected by U. Chicago Hear Kurt Vonnegut Read Slaughterhouse-Five,Cat’s Cradle & Other Novels Kurt Vonnegut Creates a Report Card for His Novels, Ranking Them From A+ to D An Animated Kurt Vonnegut Visits NYU, Riffs, Rambles, and Blows the Kids’ Minds (1970) 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.

Back in the spring, we featured Romanian animator Sebastian Cosor‘s animation of Edvard Munch’s The Scream set to Pink Floyd’s "The Great Gig in the Sky." But the wintertime has almost come, which necessitates not just a change in the clothes we wear, but a change in the animations of The Scream we watch. Fortunately, Cosor has already put together a seasonally appropriate version of his earlier video, which you can see above. The setting of Munch’s original Scream painting can, with its depopulated landscape under a hot orange sky, look pretty hellish, even before you notice the agonized fellow writhing in the middle of it. Wouldn’t it feel altogether more pleasant under a snowfall? And the screamer himself — surely he’d give off a jollier vibe if he wore a Santa hat? Cosor has answered these questions and others in this humorous two-minute CGI film, which once again unites 1970s psychedelic rock with late-19th/early-2oth-century Norwegian painting. Some may consider this a kind of desecration of an important work of art (whether they mean the Norwegian painting or the psychedelic rock), but even those who don’t might harbor one serious objection: isn’t the middle of November a bit early to haul out the Christmas stuff? Fair enough, as the holiday decorations in stores and public places do seem to appear a little earlier each year. But if we can’t make an exception for the case of a festive production as strange as this, for what can we make an exception? Related Content: Edvard Munch’s Famous Painting The Scream Animated to the Sound of Pink Floyd’s Primal Music 30,000 Works of Art by Edvard Munch & Other Artists Put Online by Norway’s National Museum of Art Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. 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. Edvard Munch’s The Scream Animated to the Psychedelic Sounds of Pink Floyd: The Winter Version 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.

No matter how long I live, the dehumanizing insanity of racism will never fail to astonish and amaze me. Not only does it visit great physical and psychological violence upon its victims, but it leaves those who embrace it unable to feel or reason properly. Contemporary examples abound in excess, but many of the most egregious come from the period in U.S. history when an entire class of people was deemed property, and allowed to be treated any way their owners liked. In such a situation, oddly, many slave masters thought of themselves as humane and benevolent, and thought their slaves well-treated, though they would never have traded places with them for anything. One such example of this bewildering logic comes from a letter written—or dictated, rather—by a man named Jordan Anderson (or sometimes Jourdan Anderson), pictured above: a man enslaved to one Colonel Patrick Henry Anderson in Big Spring, Tennessee. When he was freed from subjection in 1864, Jordan moved to Ohio, found work—was paid for it—and settled down for the next 40 years to raise his children with his wife Amanda. As Allen G. Breed and Hillel Italie write, "he lived quietly and would likely have been forgotten, if not for a remarkable letter to his former master published in a Cincinnati newspaper shortly after the Civil War." As did many former slave owners, Colonel Anderson found that he could not keep up his holdings after losing his captive labor force. Desperate to save his property, he had the temerity to write to Jordan and ask him to return and help bring in the harvest. We do not, it seems, have the Colonel’s letter, but we can surmise from Jordan’s response what it contained—promises, as the former slave writes, "to do better for me than anybody else can." We can also surmise, given Jordan’s sardonic references, that the former master may have shot at him—and that someone named "Henry" intended to shoot him still. We can surmise that the Colonel’s sons may have raped Jordan’s daughters, Matilda and Catherine, given the harrowing description of them "brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters." And, of course, we know for certain that Jordan received no recompense for his many years of hard work: "there was never any pay-day for the negroes," he writes, "any more than for the horses and cows." Despite all this—and it is beyond my comprehension why—Colonel Anderson expected that his former slave would return to help prop up the failing plantation. On this score, Jordan proposes a test of the Colonel’s "sincerity." Tallying up all the wages he and his wife were owed for their combined 52 years of work, less "what you paid for our clothing" and doctor’s visits, he presents his former owner with a bill for "eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars" and an address to which he can mail the payment. "If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future," he writes. You can read the full letter—which appeared at Letters of Note—below. Dayton, Ohio, August 7, 1865 To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance. I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, "Them colored people were slaves" down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again. As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire. In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits. Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me. From your old servant, Jourdon Anderson. Several historians have researched the authenticity of Jordan’s dictated letter and the historical details of his life in Tennessee and Ohio. As Kottke reported, a man named David Galbraith found information about Jordan’s life after the letter’s publication, including references to him and his wife and family in the 1900 Ohio census. Kottke provides many additional details about Jordan’s post-slavery life and that of his many children and grandchildren, and the Daily Mail has photographs of the former Anderson plantation and Jordan Anderson’s modern-day descendants. They also quote historian Raymond Winbush, who tracked down some of the Colonel’s descendants still living in Big Spring. Colonel Anderson, it seems, was forced to sell the land after his plea to Jordan failed, and he died not long after at age 44. (Jordan Anderson died in 1907 at age 81.) "What’s amazing," says Winbush, "is that the current living relatives of Colonel Anderson are still angry at Jordan for not coming back." Yet another example of how the ignominy of the past, no matter how much we’d prefer to forget it, never seems very far behind us at all. via Letters of Note Related Content: 1.5 Million Slavery Era Documents Will Be Digitized, Helping African Americans to Learn About Their Lost Ancestors Visualizing Slavery: The Map Abraham Lincoln Spent Hours Studying During the Civil War Watch Veterans of The US Civil War Demonstrate the Dreaded Rebel Yell (1930) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Freed Slave Writes Letter to Former Master: You Owe Us $11,680 for 52 Years of Unpaid Labor (1865) 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.

A few years ago, String Theory seemed the prime candidate for the "long-sought Theory of Everything," the holy grail of physics that will reveal, writes Jim Holt in The New Yorker, "how the universe began and how it will end… in a few elegant equations, perhaps concise enough to be emblazoned on a T-shirt." Popular physicist and science communicator Brian Greene has touted the theory everywhere—in his book The Elegant Universe and PBS series of the same name; in interview after interview, a World Science Festival forum and TED talk….  Given such evangelism, you’d think he’d have his elevator pitch for string theory down pat. And you’d be right. In an io9 Q&A, he defined it in just 14 words: "It’s an attempt to unify all matter and all forces into one mathematical tapestry." All of this might make string theory sound simple to understand, even for a lay person like myself. But is it? Well, you will find no shortage of primers online in addition to Greene’s exhaustive explanations. There’s even a "String Theory for Dummies." If you’d prefer to avoid being insulted by the title of that instructional series, you can also watch the video above of another excellent popular physics communicator, Michio Kaku, explaining string theory, with helpful visual aids, in four minutes flat. He quickly lays out such essential components as the multiverse, the big bang, wormholes, and the cheerful inevitability of the death of the universe. The short talk is excerpted from Kaku’s Floating University presentation "The Universe in a Nutshell," which you can watch in full here. For all of Kaku’s references to Einstein and the equations of string theory, however, he doesn’t quite explain to us what those equations are or how and why physicists arrived at them, perhaps because they’re written in a mathematical language that might as well come from an alien dimension as far as non-specialists are concerned. But we can still learn much more about the theory as lay people. Above, watch Greene’s short TED talk on string theory from 2005 for more straight talk on the concepts involved. And as for whether the possibly unfalsifiable theory is still, ten years later, a candidate for the grandly unifying "Theory of Everything," see his article from this past January in the Smithsonian magazine. Related Content: Free Online Physics Courses, a subset of our collection, 1150 Free Online Courses from Top Universities. Michio Kaku Explains the Physics Behind Absolutely Everything What Is Déjà Vu? Michio Kaku Wonders If It’s Triggered by Parallel Universes The Feynman Lectures on Physics, The Most Popular Physics Book Ever Written, Now Completely Online Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Michio Kaku & Brian Green Explain String Theory in a Nutshell: Elegant Explanations of an Elegant Theory 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.

This past weekend, the Chilean government acknowledged what many had long suspected — that, writes NPR, "the Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda might have been killed [or, to be more precise, murdered] during the aftermath of the 1973 coup that brought Gen. Augusto Pinochet to power." Previously the government had maintained that prostate cancer was the cause of death. If you’re looking for a happier revelation, then I can tell you this: Last year, Chilean archivists "discovered a cache of previously unseen and unpublished poems written by Neruda. The collection—written in notebooks and on scraps of paper in the poet’s own hand—includes a sampling of the ardent love poems for which Neruda is famous." That’s according to Copper Canyon Press, which has been entrusted by Pablo Neruda’s estate "to bring these lost poems to a North American audience for the first time." And it will only happen with your help. Right now, Copper Canyon Press has a Kickstarter campaign underway to raise a total of $50,000. Funds will go towards  the production of a beautiful book translated by the award-winning translator and poet Forrest Gander. With 23 days to go, they have so far $32,2215 raised. But there’s still $18,000+ to go, and it would be great if Open Culture readers could help move the needle. Those who support this project will be among the first to read these lost poems in English. And speaking of firsts, don’t miss these related items in our archive: Hear Pablo Neruda Read His Poetry In English For the First Time, Days Before His Nobel Prize Acceptance (1971) and Pablo Neruda’s Historic First Reading in the US (1966) in our archive. Related Content: "The Me Bird" by Pablo Neruda: An Animated Interpretation Poems as Short Films: Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda and More Read 10 Short Stories by Gabriel García Márquez Free Online (Plus More Essays & Interviews) The Lost Poems of Pablo Neruda: Help Bring Them to the English Speaking World for the First Time 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.

The image above is a version of Sebastian Münster’s 16th-century chart of sea monsters, starring all kinds of fantastical denizens of the deep: from ship-eating serpents and giant lobsters to some kind of seal-octopus hybrid. Featured in the opening essay on the history of sea serpents, the image is one of ninety-nine illustrations to adorn the pages of The Public Domain Review’s wonderful new book of selected essays. That the collection should begin with this most elusive of snakes is perhaps particularly appropriate. Representing as it does the very idea of terra incognita, the sea serpent is a figure which echoes on in so many of the essays which follow, if we see these "lands unknown" to be not merely geographical but to refer also to the lesser known realms of knowledge. All manner of oft-overlooked histories are explored in the book. We learn of the strange skeletal tableaux of Frederik Ruysch, pay a visit to Humphry Davy high on laughing gas, and peruse the pages of the first ever picture book for children (which includes a wonderful table of Latin animal sounds). There’s also fireworks in art, petty pirates on trial, brainwashing machines, truth-revealing diseases, synesthetic auras, Byronic vampires, and Charles Darwin’s photograph collection of asylum patients. Together the fifteen essays chart a wonderfully curious course through the last five hundred years of history, taking us on a journey through some of the darker, stranger, and altogether more intriguing corners of the past. You can find out more about the book through The Public Domain Review’s website. If you want it before Christmas (and we think it’d make an excellent present for that history-loving relative!), then make sure to order by midnight on Wednesday 18th November. Orders before this date will also benefit from a special reduced price. -Adam Green is the co-founder and editor of The Public Domain Review. Sea-Serpents, Vampires, Pirates & More: The Public Domain Review’s Second Book of Essays 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.

Last year, a Slate essay called "Against YA" by Ruth Graham irked thousands of readers who took offense at her argument that although grown-ups "brandish their copies of teen novels with pride…. [a]dults should feel embarrassed about reading literature written for children." Whether we label her article an instance of shaming, trolling, or just the expression of a not-especially consequential, "fuddy-duddy opinion," what it also served to highlight—as so many other thoughtful and not-so-thoughtful online essays have done—is the huge sales numbers of so-called YA, a literary boom that shows no signs of slowing. Young adult fiction, along with children’s books in general, saw double digit growth in 2014, a phenomenon in part driven by those supposedly self-infantilizing adults Graham faults. The grown-ups reading teen books do so, Graham writes, because "today’s YA, we are constantly reminded, is worldly and adult-worthy." Maybe, maybe not, but there is another question to ask here as well, wholly apart from whether the age 30-44 cohort who account for 28 percent of YA sales "should" be buying and reading YA books. And that question is: should young adults read Young Adult fiction? And what counts as Young Adult fiction anyway? A 2012 NPR list of the "100 Best-Ever Teen Novels" includes the expected Harry Potter and Hunger Games series (at numbers one and two, respectively), as well as more "literary," but still obvious, choices like John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars and S.E. Hinton’s classic The Outsiders. It also includes Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Frank Herbert’s Dune, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series, and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. It what sense do all of these very different kinds of books—some very complex and challenging, some very much less so—qualify as "teen novels"? Perhaps some of the fuzziness about quality and appropriateness comes from the fact that many "Top-whatever" lists like NPR’s are compiled by readers, of all ages. And enjoyment, not edification, usually tops a general readership’s list of criterion for "top"-ness. However, what would such a list look like if strictly compiled by educators? You can find out in another top 100 list: the 100 Fiction Books All Children Should Read Before Leaving Secondary School - According to 500 English Teachers (created at the request of Britain’s National Association for the Teaching of English and TES magazine). There’s a good bit of crossover with the reader-chosen NPR list; the Harry Potter books come in at sixth place. Both lists feature classics like Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. But the teacher-chosen list also includes more "adult" writers like Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, and Toni Morrison. One teacher quoted in an Express article describes his own criteria: "It’s always a balancing act in the books that teachers select. Do you go for something that students will enjoy and lap up and read, or do you go for something that will help them cut their teeth?" There seems to be a good balance of both here. You can see the first ten titles below, with links to free online versions where available. The complete list of 100 books for teenagers is here. 1 Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell (free eBook, Audiobook & study resources) 2 To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee (free eBook) 3 Animal Farm, by George Orwell (free eBook) 4 Lord Of The Flies, by William Golding (Amazon) 5 Of Mice And Men, by John Steinbeck (Amazon) 6 The Harry Potter series, by J K Rowling (Amazon) 7 A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens (free eBook) 8 The Catcher In The Rye, by J D Salinger (Amazon) 9 Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens (free eBook) 10 Pride And Prejudice, by Jane Austen (free eBook) Related Content: Download 20 Popular High School Books Available as Free eBooks & Audio Books The Best Books of 2012: Lists by The New York Times, NPR, The Guardian and More 74 Essential Books for Your Personal Library: A List Curated by Female Creatives Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness 100 Novels All Kids Should Read Before Leaving High School 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.

If you enjoy film in an even slightly serious way, you’ve surely heard the name Andrei Tarkovsky brought up dozens and dozens of times, sometimes — or, if you run in cinephilic circles, invariably — in the context of vertiginously high praise. Film-lovers worship Tarkovsky, as do many other filmmakers: no less an auteur than Ingmar Bergman called him "the best of them all" (after dismissing Godard as "affected" and Hitchcock as "infantile"), "the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream." Other artists, too, have paid Tarkovsky tribute: Geoff Dyer devoted an entire book not to the director’s career, but to just one of his movies, Stalker (see its original trailer above). As we told you five years ago, and it deserves repeating again, you can watch Stalker (Part 1 - Part 2) free online, along with other major Tarkovsky films. Stalker alone can give you a powerful sense of just why the seven feature films Tarkovsky left behind when he died in 1986 have only drawn more accolades over time. And it will perhaps whet your appetite to start watching four other Tarkovsky films free online on this page, including his 15th-century Russian icon-painter biopic (to only partially describe it) Andrei Rublev and his Stanislaw Lem adaptation (and "answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey") Solaris.  You can also watch 1975’s Mirror, which some Tarkovsky enthusiasts consider his greatest work. If you do watch it, bear in mind the Bergman quote above: if the best of all filmmakers won that title by rendering life as a dream, then it only stands to reason that Mirror, the most dreamlike of all his work, would rise to the top of his filmography. It will make you understand why, despite the hundreds and thousands of pages on Tarkovsky’s work written by critics, academics, and pure fans, you can only appreciate these films through direct experience. As with the difficulty of describing a dream compellingly in words, text can’t do justice to Tarkovsky, but when you watch one of his cinematic dreams, you dream it along with him — and like the most vivid dreams, fragments of them will stick with you forever. Note: The Tarkovsky films listed above were put online by the official Youtube channel of Mosfilm, the studio for which Tarkovsky made the films. Related Content: Tarkovsky Films Now Free Online Watch Solaris (1972), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Haunting Vision of the Future Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Shot by Shot: A 22-Minute Breakdown of the Director’s Filmmaking "Auteur in Space": A Video Essay on How Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Transcends Science Fiction Andrei Tarkovsky’s Masterpiece Stalker Gets Adapted into a Video Game Watch Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mind-Bending Masterpiece Free Online A Poet in Cinema: Andrei Tarkovsky Reveals the Director’s Deep Thoughts on Filmmaking and Life Andrei Tarkovsky Creates a List of His 10 Favorite Films (1972) Andrei Tarkovsky’s Very First Films: Three Student Films, 1956-1960 Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. 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. Free Online: Watch the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Arguably the Most Respected Filmmaker of All Time 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.

In an age when The Walking Dead provides a weekly dose of head-exploding gore, it’s easy to forget how shocking the violence of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) felt to viewers at the time. Anthony Burgess’ novel was about crime and punishment, the differences and/or similarities between street-level thugs and state-sanctioned violence, and the importance of violence in a free society. Kubrick, having blown up the world a decade earlier at the end of Dr. Strangelove, took on all these issues and made them into pure cinema. It elicits a response even now—I have friends who resolutely refuse to watch the film—despite its years spent on the compost pile of post-modern culture. For an example of how strongly people felt, check this quote from Peter Sellers, being interviewed by Gene Siskel in the Chicago Sun-Times in 1972, five months after the film premiered in the States. Peter Sellers: I hated A Clockwork Orange. I thought it was the biggest load of crap I’ve ever seen for years. Amoral. I think because of the violence around today it’s lamentable that a director of Stanley Kubrick’s distinction and ability should lend himself to such a subject. I’m not saying that you can’t pick up that book [the Anthony Burgess novel upon which the film is based], read it, and put it down. But to make it as a film, with all the violence we have in the world today - to add to it, to put it on show - I just don’t understand where Stanley is at. Gene Siskel: Are you saying that it will influence people to commit violence that they would otherwise not commit? Peter Sellers: I think it adds to it. Sellers had worked with Kubrick on both Dr. Strangelove and Lolita, so for a star to talk so ill of a former director was quite shocking. He continues in the interview to also denounce the violence in Hitchcock’s Frenzy, which had just been released. When Siskel presses him on the portrayal of violence and its necessity in a world that wanted more truth and realism in its films, Sellers falls back on his recent involvement in yoga: I must tell you first of all that I’m a yogi. I am against violence completely. Hare ommm. So you now know why. So there’s really no point in asking any more questions about it. During the original promotion for the film, Kubrick considered criticisms of its violence absurd: No one is corrupted watching A Clockwork Orange any more than they are by watching Richard III… The film has been accepted as a work of art, and no work of art has ever done social harm, though a great deal of social harm has been done by those who have sought to protect society against works of art which they regarded as dangerous. Yet as copycat crimes—or crimes that the UK’s press like to suggest were so—increased in the months after its release, Kubrick removed his film from circulation in Britain. Despite Kubrick being behind the decision, it was generally thought that the UK had "banned" the film. It remained so until Kubrick’s death in 1999. Britain finally got to see an uncut version of the film in…you guessed it…2001. via Dangerous Minds/ Stanley Kubrick Tumblr Related Content: Peter Sellers Covers the Beatles’ "A Hard Day’s Night," "She Loves You" & "Help!" Inside Dr. Strangelove: Documentary Reveals How a Cold War Story Became a Kubrick Classic Stanley Kubrick’s Rare 1965 Interview with The New Yorker Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here. Peter Sellers Calls Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange "Violent," "The Biggest Load of Crap I’ve Seen" (1972) 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.

These days, you don’t really hear many people making the case for pessimism. Quite the contrary, positive psychology is now en vogue. And its founder, University of Pennsylvania psychology professor Martin Seligman, has written bestsellers with titles like Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life. But maybe, as Alain de Botton suggests above, there’s an argument to be made for pessimism — for having a sober, if not negative, outlook on life. And maybe there’s science that validates that point of view. This second video, created by New York Magazine, summarizes the research of NYU professor Gabriele Oettingen, attributing to her the belief that "pessimism can be a better motivator for achieving goals than optimism," seeing that optimism tends to lull us into complacency and slacken our desire to achieve important personal goals, like losing weight. Couple that with this: a 2013 study released in Psychology and Aging, a journal published by the American Psychological Association (APA), concluded that "Older people who have low expectations for a satisfying future may be more likely to live longer, healthier lives than those who see brighter days ahead." The lead author of the study Frieder R. Lang, PhD, added: "Our findings revealed that being overly optimistic in predicting a better future was associated with a greater risk of disability and death within the following decade." "Pessimism about the future," it seems, "may encourage people to live more carefully, taking health and safety precautions" that sunny optimists might not otherwise take. I should add this caveat: scientists don’t necessarily find virtue in pure, unadulterated pessimism. Rather, they find benefits in what they call "defensive pessimism." This is a strategy, as summarized by The Wall Street Journal, where people "lower their expectations and think through all the possible negatives that could happen in order to avoid them." Frieder R. Lang, author of the Psychology & Aging study mentioned above, told WSJ, "Those who are defensively pessimistic about their future may be more likely to invest in preparatory or precautionary measures, whereas we expect that optimists will not be thinking about those things." Similar virtues might be attributed to "defensive optimism," but we’ll have to wait and see what the inevitable scientific studies have to say about that. 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: Free Online Psychology & Neuroscience Courses The Psychology of Messiness & Creativity: Research Shows How a Messy Desk and Creative Work Go Hand in Hand John Cleese Explores the Health Benefits of Laughter The Power of Pessimism: Science Reveals the Hidden Virtues in Negative Thinking 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.

A quick note: Thanks to NPR’s First Listen site, you can now stream for free (but only for a limited time) The Best Of Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years Of The Grateful Dead. This new double record, featuring 16 tracks recorded during the Dead’s farewell shows in Chicago this summer, will be officially released on November 20th. But you can get a sneak peek right here, right now by clicking the play button on the audio player below. Tracks includes "Box Of Rain," "Shakedown Street," "Truckin’," "Scarlet Begonias," "Fire On The Mountain," "Not Fade Away," "Touch of Grey" and other fan favorites. As with all Dead shows, you can also find raw recordings of the entire three Chicago concerts on the web. Just revisit our July 7th post to stream those too. 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 Grateful Dead’s Final Farewell Concerts Now Streaming Online Bob Dylan & The Grateful Dead Rehearse Together in Summer 1987: Hear 74 Tracks Every Grateful Dead Song Annotated in Hypertext: Web Project Reveals the Deep Literary Foundations of the Dead’s Lyrics       The Grateful Dead’s "Ripple" Played by Musicians Around the World 10,173 Free Grateful Dead Concert Recordings in the Internet Archive Now Streaming Free: The Best of The Grateful Dead’s "Fare Thee Well" Concerts in Chicago 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.

The Harlem Renaissance lives in the form of Alice Barker, a soft spoken lady who just last week received a belated Happy 103rd Birthday card from the Obamas. That’s her on the right in the first clip, below. She’s in the back right at the 2:07 mark. Perched on a lunch counter stool, showing off her shapely stems at 9:32. Barker’s newfound celebrity is an unexpected reward for one who was never a marquee name. She was a member of the chorus—a pretty, talented, hardworking young lady, whose name was misspelled on one of the occasions when she was credited. She danced throughout the 1930s and 40s in legendary Harlem venues like the Apollo, the Cotton Club, and the Zanzibar Club. Shared the stage with Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. Racked up a number of film, commercial and TV credits, getting paid to do something she later confided from a nursing home bed she would have gladly done for free. Barker’s chorus girl days had been mothballed for decades when she crossed paths with video editor David Shuff, a volunteer visitor to the nursing home where she lives. Shuff seems to be a kindred spirit to the writer David Greenberger, whose Duplex Planet zines—and later books, comics, and performances—captured the stories (and personalities) of the elderly residents of a Boston nursing home where he served as activities director. Intrigued by glimmers of Barker’s glamorous past, Shuff joined forces with recreational therapist Gail Campbell, to see if they could truffle up any evidence. Barker herself had lost all of the photos and memorabilia that would have backed up her claims. Eventually, their search led them to historians Alicia Thompson and Mark Cantor, who were able to identify Barker strutting her stuff in a handful of extant 1940s jukebox shorts, aka "soundies." Though Barker had caught herself in a couple of commercials, she had never seen any of her soundie performances. A friend of Shuff’s serendipitously decided to record her reaction to her first private screening on Shuff’s iPad. The video went viral as soon as it hit the Internet, and suddenly, Barker was a star. The loveliest aspect of her late-in-life celebrity is an abundance of old fashioned fan mail, flowers and artwork. She also received a Jimmie Lunceford Legacy Award for excellence in music and music education. Fame is heady, but seems not to have gone to Barker’s, as evidenced by a remark she made to Shuff a couple of months after she blew up the Internet, "I got jobs because I had great legs, but also, I knew how to wink." Shuff maintains a website for fans who want to stay abreast of Alice Barker. You can also write her at the address below: Alice Barker c/o Brooklyn Gardens 835 Herkimer Street Brooklyn, NY11233 Related Content: The Greatest Jazz Films Ever Features Classic Performances by Miles, Dizzy, Bird, Billie & More Cab Calloway’s "Hepster Dictionary," A 1939 Glossary of the Lingo (the "Jive") of the Harlem Renaissance A 1932 Illustrated Map of Harlem’s Night Clubs: From the Cotton Club to the Savoy Ballroom Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, is running through November 20 in New York City. Follow her @AyunHalliday A 103-Year-Old Harlem Renaissance Dancer Sees Herself on Film for the First Time & Becomes an Internet Star 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.