Friday, July 26th, 2019

Time	Event
8:00a	Watch an Animated Documentary About the Pioneering Journalist & Feminist Icon Nellie Bly While no longer a household name, the trailblazing journalist Nellie Bly (1864-1922) is definitely an enduring American icon. Her likeness has graced a postage stamp and a finger puppet. Her life has been the subject of numerous books and a made-for-TV movie. Some hundred years after its completion, her record-breaking, 72-day round-the-world trip inspired an episode of The American Experience, a puzzle-cum-boardgame, and a rollicking song by history fans the Deedle Deedle Dees. And now? Meet Nellie Bly, cartoon action hero. (Heroine? Hard to say which honorific the opinionated and forward-thinking Bly, born in 1864, would prefer...) Filmmaker Penny Lane's "Nellie Bly Makes the News," above, is not the first to recognize this sort of potential in the pioneering journalist, whose 151st birthday was celebrated with an animated Google Doodle and accompanying song by Karen O, but Lane (no relation to Lois, the fictional reporter modeled on you-know-who) wisely lets Bly speak for herself. Not only that, she brings her into the studio for a 21st-century interview, in which an eye-rolling Bly describes the resistance she encountered from the male elite, who felt it was not just unseemly but impossible that a young woman should pursue the sort of journalistic career she envisioned for herself. She also touches on some of her most famous journalistic stunts, such as the undercover stints in a New York City “insane asylum”and box-making factory that led to exposés and eventually, social reform. Biographer Brooke Kroeger and brief glimpses of archival materials touch on some of the other highlights in Bly’s audacious, self-directed career. The cartoon Bly’s hairdo and attire are period appropriate, but her vocal inflections, courtesy of broadcast reporter and voiceover artist Sammi Jo Francis, are closer in spirit to that of Broad City’s Ilana Glazer. (Interesting to note, given Bly’s complaints about how prominently the one dress she took on her round the world trip featured in outside stories about that adventure, that dress is a preoccupation of The Appreciation of Booted Newswomen blog. Respectful as that site is, the focus there is definitely not on journalistic achievement.) via Aeon Related Content: New Augmented Reality App Celebrates Stories of Women Typically Omitted from U.S. History Textbooks 74 Essential Books for Your Personal Library: A List Curated by Female Creatives New Web Project Immortalizes the Overlooked Women Who Helped Create Rock and Roll in the 1950s Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inkyzine.  Join her in NYC on Monday, September 9 for another season of her book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. Follow her @AyunHalliday. Watch an Animated Documentary About the Pioneering Journalist & Feminist Icon Nellie Bly 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. (Comment on this)
2:00p	How Kurt Cobain Confronted Violence Against Women in His “Darkest Song”: Nevermind‘s “Polly” In 1991, Nirvana changed pop music with Nevermind. We know this, and we know—or can confirm with a few clicks—that “Polly,” the 6th track on that album, sits at its very center. We can call to mind, or pull up in seconds, the lullaby chorus melody and the sound of Cobain’s five-string, pawn shop Stella acoustic guitar. And we may even remember the lyrics, or some of them, elliptical, deeply disturbing descriptions of a girl named “Polly,” from the point of view of someone doing horrifying things to her. "Polly," as Evan Puschak, better known as video-essayist Nerdwriter, explains above, in fact describes an actual occurrence near Cobain's hometown of Aberdeen, WA: the abduction, rape, and torture of a 14-year-old girl, written from the perspective of her abductor, rapist, and torturer. “Of all the dark songs” Cobain wrote, says Puschak, “and there are a lot to choose from, the most disturbing to me is ‘Polly.’” The incident happened in 1987; Cobain first wrote “Polly,” then called “Hitchhiker,” in '88. “It’s a hard song to talk about,” Puschak admits, but an impossible song to ignore, given its place in one of the biggest-selling albums from one of the biggest bands in the world. And coming from Cobain, whose outspoken activism defined his public persona, it’s a song we must hear in the larger context of a writer perpetually horrified by sexual violence and misogyny, and unable to look away and ignore it. “Disgusted,” writes Juliet Macy at Go Mag, after “some of his fans spread anti-gay messages in tune to his music,” Cobain left a message for them in the liner notes to Incesticide: “If any of you, in any way, hate homosexuals, people of color or women, please do this one favor for us—leave us the fuck alone. Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.” He meant it, and left an even more furious message for in the notes for In Utero. “On rape culture," Macy writes, "Cobain asserted, ‘The problem with groups who deal with rape is that they try to educate women how to defend themselves. What really needs to be done is teaching men not to rape. Go to the source and start there.” “Polly” represents such an attempt to go to the source, Puschak argues, to get closer than we'd ever want to get. Its spare arrangement helps create its sense of intimacy. “’Polly’ is basically Cobain and his guitar.” Musically, this was not the kind of vulnerability Cobain was at all comfortable putting on display. Two years later, when Nirvana went on MTV’s Unplugged, he “worried the band didn’t have the grace to pull off something so subtle,” as Mike Powell notes at Pitchfork. Notably, one of the songs Cobain chose to play in that exposed, uncomfortable setting venue was Leadbelly’s “In the Pines,” a song written from the point of view of a man interrogating a woman; a man who may be a father, jealous lover, or something much more sinister. In every version of this old, vaguely tragic American folk-blues, from its first, 1929 recording as “Black Girl” by Peg Leg Howell to “In the Pines” to wordier, and whitewashed, versions by country pickers and crooners, a sense of menace hovers, near or far, fraught with intimations of rape and murder, the klaxons the Rolling Stones rang to announce the end of the flowery, folky '60s. Bands in the '90s culled from a much darker strain of the country's earliest popular music than Pete Seeger, or even Dylan, and "Polly," in its old-timey instrumentation and blues simplicity, touches into this undercurrent. In “Polly,” Cobain “forces an emotional identification with evil, to stop us from suppressing this brutality,” Puschak says, searchingly, or “to stop us from evading it.” Perhaps. Maybe he's asking us to empathize with a monster, but he also pushes us to look at a disturbing American tradition—one evoked by “In the Pines” as well: murder ballads, songs, books, and films about stalking, possession, manipulation, and rape (see the Stones’ “Brown Sugar”): a near-constant aestheticization of violence against women. This kind of excavation was lost on many of the fans who bought Nevermind—those same fans whom Cobain came to loathe. His evocations of dark Americana were part of a general trend of the time. In 1994, when the Unplugged episode aired, many Nirvana listeners of the band were also howling, “Do you want to die!” to the The Toadies hit “Possum Kingdom,” another song that reached into southern U.S. folklore to tell what seems to be a story of rape and torture in the woods from the perspective of the rapist and torturer. (The song's video explicitly plays with serial-killer film tropes.) "Polly" is neither mournful nor playful, and it decidedly does not rock like “Possum Kingdom.” Almost totally acoustic, drumless, delivered in a mumbled monotone in the verses, and an off-key dead-eyed sing-song in the jarringly catchy choruses, it lulls and repulses at the same time. Like every other artist, Cobain had no control over what listeners did with his music. After Nevermind’s success, reports emerged of two men committing a rape while singing the song. Cobain replied, “I have a hard time carrying on knowing there are plankton like that in our audience.” But he could not have made his own intentions clearer, or the burden he felt to confront a culture that would not listen to women. "A man using himself as an example toward other men," he once said ruefully, "can probably make more impact than a woman can." Ironically, given how much he came to resent Nevermind's massive success, one of its effects was to show cynical male record label executives that rock stars could be edgy and also outspoken about sexism and rape culture and also sell millions of albums: which helped open doors for an explosion of female artists and bands throughout the decade who issued searing punk manifestos and righteously angsty alt-rock against the patriarchy. Related Content: Nirvana Plays an Angry Set & Refuses to Play ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ After the Crowd Hurls Sexist Insults at the Opening Act (Buenos Aires, 1992) Nirvana Refuses to Fake It on Top of the Pops, Gives a Big “Middle Finger” to the Tradition of Bands Miming on TV (1991) 33 Songs That Document the History of Feminist Punk (1975-2015): A Playlist Curated by Pitchfork Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness How Kurt Cobain Confronted Violence Against Women in His “Darkest Song”: Nevermind‘s “Polly” 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. (Comment on this)
2:25p	Bryan Magee (RIP) Presents In-Depth, Uncut TV Conversations With Famous Philosophers Note: We woke this morning to the news that Bryan Magee, academic and popularizer of philosophy, has passed away. He was 89. Below, we bring you a post from our archive that highlights Magee's many televised interviews with influential philosophers. You can watch them online. Bryan Magee comes from a tradition that produced some of the twentieth century's most impressive media personalities: that of the scholarship-educated, Oxbridge-refined, intellectually omnivorous, occasionally office-holding, radio- and television-savvy man of letters. Students and professors of philosophy probably know him from his large print oeuvre, which includes volumes on Popper and Schopenhauer as well as several guides to western philosophy and the autobiographical Confessions of a Philosopher. He also wrote another memoir called The Television Interviewer, and philosophically inclined laymen may fondly remember him as just that. When Magee played to both these strengths at once, he came up with two philosophical television shows in the span of a decade: Men of Ideas, which began in 1978, and The Great Philosophers, which ran in 1987. Both series brought BBC viewers in-depth, uncut conversations with many of the day's most famous philosophers. You can watch select interviews of Men of Ideas and The Great Philosophers on YouTube, including: Herbert Marcuse on the Frankfurt School Bernard Williams on the Spell of Linguistic Philosophy Bernard Williams on Descartes Miles Burnyeat on Plato Martha Nussbaum on Aristotle Anthony Kenny on Medieval Philosophy Iris Murdoch on Philosophy and Literature Geoffrey Warnock on Kant J.P. Stern on Nietzsche Hubert Dreyfus on Husserl and Heidegger Anthony Quinton on Spinoza and Leibniz Peter Singer on Hegel and Marx Michael Ayers on Locke and Berkeley John Passmore on Hume Sidney Morgenbesser on the Pragmatists A.J. Ayer on logical Positivism A.J. Ayer on Frege and Russell Anthony Quinton on Wittgenstein Hilary Putnam on the Philosophy of Science Frederick Copelston on Schopenhauer At the top of the post, you'll find Magee talking with A.J. Ayer, a well-known specialist in "logical positivism," about the development of, and challenges to, that philosophical sub-field. Two philosophers, relaxed on a couch, sometimes smoking, enthusiastically engaged in a commercial-free back-and-forth about the most important thinkers and thoughts in the field — watch something like that, and you can't possibly think of now as a golden age of television. Oodles of free philosophy courses, many thought by famous philosophers, can be found in the Philosophy section of our list of 1,300 Free Online Courses from Top Universities. Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall. Related Content: Free Online Philosophy Courses 105 Animated Philosophy Videos from Wireless Philosophy: A Project Sponsored by Yale, MIT, Duke & More 44 Essential Movies for the Student of Philosophy Bryan Magee (RIP) Presents In-Depth, Uncut TV Conversations With Famous Philosophers 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. (Comment on this)
7:00p	Martin Amis Explains How to Use a Thesaurus to Actually Improve Your Writing Among all novelists currently working in the English language, how many pay the attention to style Martin Amis does? And among all novelists who have ever worked in the English language, how many pay the attention to style Vladimir Nabokov did? No wonder that the former yields to none in his appreciation for the latter. "Amis has always wanted to see Nabokov as someone resembling his own critical self — essentially, a 'celebrator,' a man whose darkness and severities have been overstated," write The New Yorker's Thomas Mallon. Amis has explicitly taken note of "Nabokov’s disdain for sympathetic identification with fictional characters, and also of his belief that artistic effect was everything, the descriptor more important than the described." Nabokov’s declaration that “for me, ‘style’ is matter,” Mallon writes, "remains almost fearfully thrilling to Amis." And it is with one of Nabokov's principles on style that Amis begins in the Big Think video above. "There is only one school of writing," he quotes Nabokov as writing. "That of talent." You can't teach talent, of course, "but what you can do is instill certain principles," one of them being "the importance of ugly repetition." But then, "repetition has its uses, and anything is better than trying to avoid repetition through what they call 'elegant variation'" — the use, which Amis dismisses as pointless, of "using a different word when there's no change in meaning." Most of us commit elegant variation with thesaurus in hand; hence, it would seem, that particular reference book's reputation as the tool of second-class writers and worse. But Amis himself uses the thesaurus, and heavily, as a means of "avoiding repetition of prefixes and suffixes" — he cites Nabokov's changing the title of Invitation to an Execution to Invitation to a Beheading — "as well as rhymes and half-rhymes, unintentional alliteration, et cetera." People assume "thesauruses are there so you can look up a fancy word for 'big,'" when in fact they serve their true purpose when you come to a point in a sentence "where you're unhappy with the word you've chosen not because of its meaning, but because of its rhythm. You may want a monosyllable for this concept, or you may want a trisyllable." A writer like Amis, or indeed Nabokov (who learned English after his native Russian), will also "make sure they're not visiting an indecorum on the word's derivation." This requires nothing more than the humble dictionary, to check, for example, whether dilapidated can describe a hedge as well as a building. (It can't, and Amis explains why.) "When you look up a word in the dictionary, you own it in a way you didn't before," says Amis, who estimates that he does it himself a dozen times a day. "It's very labor-intensive. It takes a long time, sometimes, to get your sentence right rhythmically, and to clear the main words in it from misuse. And all you're winning is the respect of other serious writers. But I think any amount of effort is worth it for that." Related Content: When Vladimir Nabokov Taught Ruth Bader Ginsburg, His Most Famous Student, To Care Deeply About Writing Vladimir Nabokov Names the Greatest (and Most Overrated) Novels of the 20th Century Norman Mailer & Martin Amis, No Strangers to Controversy, Talk in 1991 Writing Tips by Henry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell V.S. Naipaul Creates a List of 7 Rules for Beginning Writers Nietzsche’s 10 Rules for Writing with Style (1882) Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram. Martin Amis Explains How to Use a Thesaurus to Actually Improve Your Writing 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. (Comment on this)

<< Previous Day

2019/07/26 [Calendar]

Next Day >>