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Alice Munro, 1931-2024
Alice Munro, master of short stories, wove intense tales of human drama from small-town life is the Globe and Mail obituary [archive] for the Canadian literary giant who passed away Monday night. She received the Nobel in literature in 2013 among countless other prizes. She also cofounded Munro’s Books in Victoria, British Columbia, who posted a remembrance on Instagram. The New Yorker, where many of her stories first appeared, has a section with links to her short fiction, as well as personal essays, appraisals and an interview and an obituary [archive]. The 1978 classic Moons of Jupiter was recently featured on their fiction podcast, and it is also available as text.
"Women in philosophy have always needed a special stroke of luck."
Whenever I read claims about ‘forgotten women’, I want to ask: ‘By whom?’ Feminists? Society? The ‘culture’? And why ‘forgotten’? Forgetting presupposes something once known, but the general ‘we’ who have ‘forgotten’ these women are also the ‘we’ who were not taught them in the first place. Such generalisations risk shifting the focus, and the responsibility, away from the agents of our ignorance: the historians and philosophers who made a world in which certain texts were deemed unworthy of preservation and the history of women’s thought was kept to the margins.– A Comet that Bodes Mischief by Sophie Smith. She discussed women in philosophy on the LRB Podcast.
“spaghettification is just 12.8 seconds away”
360 Video: NASA Simulation Plunges into a Black Hole answers the question of what it would look like to fall into a black hole. If you’d rather not, NASA also released 360 Video: NASA Simulation Shows a Flight Around a Black Hole. They also released videos explaining what is going on in the visualizations for the dive into the black hole as well as the flight around it. The press release has more information.
The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Martha and the Vandellas and so many more
Motown Junkies is a blog where Steve Devereux is reviewing the entire Motown singles discography in sequential order from the beginning. You can also browse tracks by songwriter, label and artist. He’s currently up to 1966, though he’s been on hiatus for a few years. He also used to present Discovering Motown on Radio Cardiff, and the archive is on Mixcloud.
“There is an episode of Bluey that Disney does not want you to see”
Dad Baby is an episode from season two of Bluey, the Australian children’s cartoon, which Disney has refused to make available for streaming, has been uploaded in full to the official Bluey YouTube channel. If you are unfamiliar with the hijinks of the Heeler family, you can watch a selection of episodes on YouTube, either as one long compilation or individually:
‘read and censure ... but buy it first ... whatever you do, buy.’
A Series of Headaches is a video from the London Review of Books following printer Nick Hand as he prints a page from the magazine using methods as close as he can get to those used to print the First Folio of Shakespeare plays. The page selected is an old LRB article about the First Folio by Michael Dobson [archive link]. The video is made in conjunction with Folio400, a website with lots of information about the First Folio, as well as a series of articles on it.
“members of the Voyager flight team celebrate”
NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth reports NASA. After pinpointing the issue with the space probe, the mission team have devised a workaround. Previously, previouslier, many more previouslies.
Have any science fiction stories been set in humanities departments?
What science fiction stories, short form or novels, have been set in university humanities departments, excluding satires? I’ll settle for stories where some of the principal characters are scholars of the humanities.
The Lost Symphony of Jean Sibelius
A century ago saw the premiere of Jean Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony, the culmination of decades of experimentation and refinement of the form, as Alex Ross explains (with musical examples). A few years later, he started work on an eighth symphony, which he never completed to his satisfaction, and eventually he burned his manuscripts of it. In 2011, after sifting through the Sibelius manuscript archive, it was possible to record roughly two and half minutes of the thirty minute work. Despite some subsequent hints from correspondence with Sibelius’ copyist, no further fragments have been uncovered, and the Eighth Symphony remains lost.
emo ambient
Claire Rousay has gained prominence [NYT, archive link] as an experimental, ambient musician, but her most recent album, Sentiment, [Bandcamp, Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music] is closer to lo-fi indie pop. Her website has links to her whole discography.
“I still wanted to help. But I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.”
The Deaths of Effective Altruism [archive] by Leif Wenar is a critical assessment of the effective altruism movement, taking in Sam Bankman-Fried and billionaires, Peter Singer and other philosophers, and GiveWell and the wider network of charities working off effective altruistic ideas.
“Anything about us, without us, is against us.”
There are clear continuities between the two German genocides. Many of the key elements of the Nazi system – the systematic extermination of peoples seen as racially inferior, racial laws, the concept of Lebensraum, the transportation of people in cattle trucks for forced labour in concentration camps – had been employed half a century earlier in South-West Africa. Heinrich Göring, the colonial governor of South-West Africa who tried to negotiate with Hendrik Witbooi, was Hermann Göring’s father.–From the essay Three Genocides by forensic architect Eyal Weizman.
crankin' out tunes
In her article Th'infernal Drone: In Praise Of The Hurdy-Gurdy Jennifer Lucy Allan notes that in "Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights the soundtrack to hell is a giant and infernal hurdy-gurdy". She discusses, among others, Stevie Wishart, who can be seen here giving a quick introduction to the hurdy-gurdy, and performing her composition Vespers for St. Hildegard and duoing with daegeum player Hyelim Kim. Corinna de Fonseca-Wollheim profiled Matthias Loibner in the New York Times [archive link] and his performance with Nataša Mirković of Schubert's Winter's Journey. For an overview of the history of the instrument, hurdy-gurdy player Fredrik Knudsen made a half-hour video or you can read A Brief History of the Hurdy-Gurdy by Graham Whyte.
“I don’t fear your wings, man.”
Conan O’Brien Needs a Doctor While Eating Spicy Wings is the season 23 finale of Hot Ones [previously], where Sean Evans asks Conan O’Brien questions while they eat chicken wings with increasingly spicy hot sauce. It goes off the rails pretty quickly.
“I’m so willing to die in shein clothes.”
Super Cute Please Like is a long, fascinating essay by Nicole Lipman in N+1 about fast fashion giant SHEIN, examining its clothes, business practices and history, but touching on fashion blogs, Sinophobia, the origins of fast fashion and gamification.
“assault and battery by means of a dangerous weapon (bees)”
The Bees of Wrath by James D. Walsh is the story of Rorie Woods, who released a hive of bees onto sheriff’s deputies who had arrived to evict a 79-year-old friend of hers. When informed that several deputies might be allergic, she allegedly replied: “Oh you’re allergic, good”.
Whatever else Farley’s work is, it isn’t AI—even when it barely seems I
Why Did This Guy Put a Song About Me on Spotify? [NYT] by Brett Martin [archive link] is an essay about Matt Farley, who we last met ten years ago when he had released 14 thousand songs on Spotify, earning him 23 thousand dollars per year in royalties. Now he’s pulling 200 thousand dollars from 25 thousand songs. He’s also made multiple movies. Farley’s website, Motern Media, has a decent overview of his creative output.
Who’s the walking figure in the Spotify visualization?
Spotify keeps pushing me to click on a music genre when I go into the search tab. The first thing that comes up is a clip of Leonard Cohen’s It Seemed the Better Way with the hashtag #poetry. It includes a visualization of what looks like a rotoscoped Leonard Cohen walking on a heath with a cane. Here’s a screenshot. What’s the original for that walking figure? Is it a video of Leonard Cohen or someone else?
Karen Carpenter, the Drummer Who Sang
An eighteen-year-old Karen Carpenter going wild on the drums on Dancing in the Street (and the same song again). This is from back when the Carpenter siblings were two-thirds of the Dick Carpenter Trio. At fifteen she was already a fantastic drummer, as can be heard on their cover of Caravan. Here she is in 1976 on stage doing a drum solo on multiple sets that turns into a drum duet and here's a similar routine from the 1976 Carpenters TV special except she's duetting with herself. By then she rarely drummed on their songs, though here she's drumming on Help in 1974. But in 1971 she still drummed on most tracks and that version of the band was recorded for the BBC in a 40 minute concert. Finally, here's a discussion thread by fans about her as a drummer.
recorded off German radio in the mid-80s but otherwise totally unknown
The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet was the subject of a short little discussion on the BBC's Today programme this morning (1:47:10). Since it was posted to MetaFilter back in 2019 a lot has been unearthed about the track, but while a number of its fellow lostwave songs have been identified, it stubbornly refuses to give up its secrets. A week ago, Mike of All Things Lost made a video essay with a thorough recap of the evidence, theories, drama and characters and for the latest speculation and news you can dive into the subreddit r/TheMysteriousSong.
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver free on YouTube in certain countries
Good News! Last Week Tonight with John Oliver is now free on YouTube in countries where no one owns the streaming rights, with plans to upload the entire archive. This includes all of Latin America, a lot of Asia (except China, India and most Arab countries), all of Eastern Europe, plus France, Finland, Denmark and Sweden. If you want to check for sure, you can do so on this map, or you can just try watching the latest episode. And then you can join in on Fanfare discussions of the show.
Proof that the Hugo Awards were censored
The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion by Jason Sanford and Chris M. Barkley. The latter received from Diane Lacey copies of e-mails that were exchanged between her and Kat Jones and Dave McCarty, fellow volunteer administrators of the 2023 Hugo Awards at the Chengdu Worldcon, showing that the three of them made dossiers of Hugo Award nominees deemed to be potentially troubling to local business interests and authorities. Jones, the 2024 Hugo Administrator, has resigned from her position, after releasing a statement. Diane Lacey has apologized for her part. There have been many responses to these revelations, including by Cora Buhlert, Camestros Felapton and MeFi's Own John Scalzi.
Another Sleepy Dusty Delta Sweete
Singer-songwriter Bobbie Gentry shot to fame with Ode to Billie Joe and had a smattering of later hits, notably Fancy, covered by artists such as Irma Thomas, Spanky Wilson, Orville Peck and Reba McEntire. Though a flop at the time, her fantastic second album, The Delta Sweete, picked up many fans since, including Mercury Rev, whose The Delta Sweete Revisited covered eleven of twelve songs, each with a different singer: Norah Jones, Hope Sandoval, Rachel Goswell, Carice van Houten, Lætitia Sadier, Margo Price, Susanne Sundfør, Vashti Bunyan & Kaela Sinclair, Phoebe Bridgers, Marissa Nadler, Beth Orton, closing with Ode to Billie Joe as sung by Lucinda Williams. Missing track Louisiana Man was released later, sung by Erika Wennerstrom. Stuart Berman interviewed Mercury Rev about it.
Trying to find a comic strip about two inventors talking on the road
Many, many years ago I recall seeing, or being shown, a single-panel comic strip with a limousine, or possibly two limousines, on a road, and one unseen person saying to another unseen person something like: "How's the leg?" The caption was along the lines of "the inventor of Wite-Out meets the inventor of the Post-It". But I think I'm probably misremembering many of the significant details. What I remember of the context is that this cartoon was infamously hard to understand. Does any of this ring a bell?
"The earliest known author was married to the moon"
Wreckage of Ellipses by Anna Della Subin is a long essay on the Sumerian-language poet Enheduana, the world's oldest named author, and a review of Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World's First Author, a new translation by Sophus Helle. He was a guest on the podcast Poetry Off the Shelf, where he talked about Enheduana with Helena de Groot, and read some of his translations. A website accompanying the book provides background information and scholarly translations of Enheduana: Temple Hymns, a separate Hymn to Inana, and The Exaltation of Inana. The last poem was the jumping off point for the essay Poet of Impermanence, about what Enheduana can mean to modern readers. And here is the Exaltation of Inana in his literary translation.
WikiFlix and WikiVibes
WikiFlix is a tool to browse and search the films uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons. Created by Magnus Manske, and inspired by Sandra Fauconnier's project, it is a companion to WikiVibes, which is a similar tool for songs. Among the movies on offer are classics like Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon and a whole bunch of Chaplin.
Who's the drummer on the Marcels' Blue Moon?
Who is the drummer on the Marcels' original version of Blue Moon?
"8 km away from the villa where the Wannsee Conference took place"
Secret plan against Germany is an investigative report by German magazine Correctiv about a meeting near Potsdam where Neo-Nazis and members of far-right political party Alternative für Deutschland met to talk about plans for mass deportations from Germany. These plans, and and other fascistic ideas discussed, have led to calls to ban the party altogether. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has called these plans an attack on German democracy and this weekend around three hundred thousand people in Germany marched in protest.
Did the Duolingo mass layoffs of translators really happen?
A week or so ago I heard that Duolingo had laid off most of its translators at the end of last year and was going to replace them with AI. When I looked for more information, all I found was a single Reddit post and sites referencing that post, with no statements from the company. I went looking again today and couldn't find a report from a reputable news source. Did the Duolingo mass layoffs of translators really happen?
(I haven't gotten past 15 words)
20 Words // 20 Seconds is an addictive typing game by Kevin Hutchins where you have 20 seconds to type 20 words based on prompts that refresh every time you type a new word.
"an epistolary novel in the form of twelve folksongs"
Correspondence was a project where Swedish musicians Jens Lekman and Annika Norlin (a.k.a. Hello Saferide) wrote and sent each other songs in English on alternating months over the course of 2018. You can listen to the original versions on the website but the pair also rerecorded many of the songs with strings and released it as an album which is available to buy from Bandcamp or stream on various services.
"Ghosts haunt cities, seeking revenge for the disappeared past"
The Haunted City is an essay by Azania Imtiaz Khatri-Patel about the ghosts who haunt modern life, concentrating on London, Mumbai and Japan. Meanwhile Andrew Kipnis' essay The Haunting of Modern China focuses on the ghosts of urban China, and the living's changing relationships with the dead.
Björk Sings from the Icelandic Songbook
As filler material during their coverage of the 1991 Icelandic parliamentary elections, TV station Stöð 2 asked Björk to perform some jazz tunes with Tríó Guðmundar Ingólfssonar off their record Gling-gló. The trio had been asked by Icelandic public radio to record some old Icelandic standards and recruited the singer, who chose the 14 Icelandic songs, as well as a couple of foreign standards. The recording was then released as an album. Below the cut I'll include links to originals of the Icelandic songs, and here's one more TV performance from 1990 of Kata rokkar.
"Mysterious but lovable"
Unraveling One of Rock’s Deepest Mysteries: Les Rallizes Dénudés [NYT, archive link] by Ben Sisario, is a good, short introduction in English to the Japanese underground rock band, who never released a studio album. Bandleader Takashi Mizutani passed away late in 2019, and since then his former bandmate Makoto Kubota has been restoring existing recordings. Now there is an official website, with an oral history, photos and more. The latest release, of a performance at Kawasaki's Club Citta' in 1993, has been remastered in high fidelity, a process Kubota likened to, according to a Pitchfork review, "restoring an ancient Buddhist statue". A good introduction to the band, Citta' '93 is available on various streaming services, and also YouTube and Bandcamp.
"I feel that my body was colonised" - Naja Lyberth
How Denmark Destroyed Greenland: Brief History of Denmark's Colonialism in Greenland is a 25 minute video by Norwegian history YouTuber Fredda. The Danish colonial legacy has been in the news lately, as 67 Kalaallit women have sued the Danish government [NYT, archive link] for having run a program where Kalaallit women had intrauterine devices inserted without their consent in the 1960s and 70s, which possibly continued for long afterwards. About a year ago, the BBC's Elaine Jung made a 25 minute documentary about the Kalaallit women affected by the program, called Greenland's Lost Generation which focuses on psychologist and campaigner Naja Lyberth, who was one of those who had an IUD inserted as a teenager.
An Ordinary Citizen
This is Europe's JFK Mystery is a half-hour documentary by Harry Clennon and Philip Brain about the 1986 murder of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. It gives context for who Palme was, sets out the events as clearly as is possible, and presents the three leading theories for who killed him.
“to know the tremor of your flesh within my own”
On November 15, 1966, five police officers entered the Psychedelic Shop, in San Francisco, and purchased a thin volume of poetry, “The Love Book,” for a dollar. This sequence of erotic poems celebrating a woman’s sexual pleasure was by the Beat poet Lenore Kandel. As soon as the money exchanged hands, the deputy arrested the clerk for selling obscene material.–The Forgotten Poet at the Center of San Francisco’s Longest Obscenity Trial by Joy Lanzendorfer. A poem, and another, and some poems and prose. Here are videos of Kandel reading a poem and being interviewed.
Videos about Welsh and Brythonic history
Cambrian Chronicles is a YouTube page with videos focusing on the history of Wales and Celtic Britain, such as one on the missing kingdom of Rheinwg, another on a kingdom that sank into the ocean, one about the unique Welsh letter Ỽ and perhaps my favorite, the king who existed only on Wikipedia, and there are 14 more videos.
“You call this equality?”
Today Icelandic women and non-binary people will strike against gender inequality highlighting the gender pay gap [NYT, archive], gendered violence, and the status of immigrant women. This is the seventh women’s strike in Icelandic history, and the first whole-day action since the first one in 1975 [NYT, archive link]. The Guardian’s Miranda Bryant writes about the history of women’s strikes in Iceland.
Looking for a specific metaphor
A long time ago I read a science fiction book which included a metaphor that’s stuck with me. Planet Earth was imagined as being covered by the ocean, and the continents and islands were people swimming to stay afloat. I think it’s by Greg Egan, but I haven’t found it yet. Does this sound familiar to you?
"female music caught on dusty records and tapes, in the hidden archives"
Ladies on Records is the project of record collector, DJ and cultural anthropologist Kornelia Binicewicz. Her SoundCloud page is full of her mixes, for example, two volumes she made in support of feminist activists in her native Poland. Her main focus, though, is on female singers of the 60s and 70s, for example in the mixes Polish Ladies on Records, Ladies of the Arab World and Turkish Ladies. She used Turkish music to explore the lives of Turkish immigrant women in Germany in the essay Intimacy of Longing.
"Who's that? The slow comedy man."
Slow & Steady is a new hour-long stand-up comedy special where the star of Joe Pera Talks to You, Joe Pera, talks to you. He ends by attempting to put the audience to sleep, with a live edition of his sleep podcast, Drifting Off with Joe Pera. [Joe Pera previously]
The 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature goes to Jon Fosse
Norwegian author Jon Fosse is the 2023 Nobel laureate in literature. He first gained prominence as a playwright, but has also written poetry and novels. He was interviewed last year by Merve Emre in the New Yorker. For reviews of his books, and more reaction across the day, check out M. A. Orthofer's post on the Complete Review's Literary Saloon.
Only Murders in the Building: Opening Night
The show circles back to the end, and by the end I mean opening night, as the Besties attempt to solve the murder of Ben Glenroy before the curtain falls.
Love Honk
“I had a dream last night that there was a new popular form of music called Love Honk. Every song was basically just smooth jazz or soft rock instrumentals, but where the lead singer or main instrument should have been playing, there was just a loud, constant car horn.” My fellow Nordics will probably be reminded by Silverspots’ Cohost post of the Ylvis sketch Car Horn Classics (English subtitles in captions).
"I had a bag with me with my boy clothes so I was dressed in girl mode"
Eddie Izzard talks about growing up trans and coming out in the 80s at the 2022 Utah Equality Allies Gala.
An essay about errors in Ulysses by James Joyce
For students of tone, it’s interesting to see how long the editors can keep a straight face as, soberly and diligently, they write entry after entry, using a printed source for each and acknowledging the help of many named Joyceans. At times, you can almost hear a sigh or muffled laughter. In the Cyclops episode, there is a long, long list of saints, the majority only too real, that includes ‘S. Anonymous and S. Eponymous and S. Pseudonymous and S. Homonymous and S. Paronymous and S. Synonymous’. The annotation tells us: ‘Not actually saints.’–Arruginated by Colm Tóibín, with an accompanying podcast discussion.
“Digging through some of the best music ever made”
Digging the Greats is a YouTube channel by bass player and DJ Brandon Shaw, with 10-20 minute videos with musical analysis of individual songs and albums, mostly hip hop, but also soul, R&B and whatever takes his fancy, and how they fit into music history. Shaw’s explored The Roots’ Dynamite, the story of Native Tongues, the album Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, how J Dilla’s timefeel works, Daft Punk’s Discovery, Queen Latifah’s U.N.I.T.Y. and dozens more. He’s also got a separate channel for long-form interviews, which are also released in podcast form.
All across the globe people have looked at the night sky and seen myths
Figures in the Sky by Nadieh Bremer, astronomer and data visualization designer, shows how stars have been grouped into constellations by different “sky cultures”, ranging from the familiar modern ones, to those of the Sardinian, Norse, Hopi, Hawaiian, Chinese, Boorong, Arabic and 20 others. You can read a bit more on Bremer’s page for the project.
Same place, different songs, half a century apart
Asking for Love was a music video made by Egill Eðvarðsson in 1973 for a song by Jóhann G. Jóhannsson, who was filmed walking backwards around downtown Reykjavík, and then reversed to make it seem everyone else’s walking backwards. Now, fifty years later, Guðmundur Kristinn Jónsson and Ívar Kristján Ívarsson have recreated the video with singer-songwriter Árný Margrét, walking the same route backwards, for her song Waiting.