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Background, context, and transcript: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/07/09/sylvia-plath-spoken-word-tulips-bbc/

Sylvia Plath reads "Tulips": A Rare BBC Recording

On this episode of Design Matters, Debbie Millman talks to Brenda Danilowitz, Chief Curator at the <a href="http://www.albersfoundation.org/" target="_blank">Josef and Anni Albers Foundation</a>, and Philip Tiongson, a principal at <a href="http://www.potiondesign.com/" target="_blank">Potion</a>, a design and technology firm specialzing in interactive expereinces, about Josef Alber's book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Interaction-Color-50th-Anniversary-Edition/dp/0300179359" target="_blank">Interaction of Color</a>. To mark the 50th anniversary of this groundbreaking book, Yale University is realeasing an <a href="http://yupnet.org/interactionofcolor/" target="_blank">iPad app</a> of the book. The Interaction of Color mobile app for iPad helps the user understand the book&rsquo;s ideas, view the plates, experiment, and create and share designs. This interactive edition of one of the most influential books on color ever written offers users an entirely new way to experience Josef Albers&rsquo;s original masterwork.

Design Matters With Debbie Millman: Brenda Danilowitz & Philip Tiongson

Background, poem text, and context: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/08/09/charles-bukowski-reads-friendly-advice-to-a-lot-of-young-men/

Charles Bukowski reads his "Friendly Advice To A Lot Of Young Men"

On June 22, 2013, at Wadham College, Oxford, The New York Review of Books held a free conference, “Philosophy as a Humanist Discipline,” to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary and to honor the lives, work, and legacy of Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire and Bernard Williams.

This session, chaired by Robert Silvers, features remarks by Avishai Margalit, Timothy Garton Ash, and Marc Stears.

Ethics and Power: The Long Shadow of Machiavelli

"Easy to know that diamonds are precious. Good to learn that rubies have depth. But more to see that pebbles are miraculous." Excerpt from https://soundcloud.com/designmatters/interactionofcolor

Background, context, and discussion <a href="http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/08/16/interaction-of-color-josef-albers-50th-anniversary/">here</a>.

Josef Albers as an educator

Excerpt from https://soundcloud.com/designmatters/interactionofcolor

Background, context, and discussion <a href="http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/08/16/interaction-of-color-josef-albers-50th-anniversary/">here</a>.

Josef Albers and the art of seeing

Josef Albers on education as discovery

Josef Albers and unlocking the magic of color

Bach, out of his mind with grief after the sudden death of his wife (not to mention his siblings, parents and half of his 21 kids), wrote this piece for solo violin. Busoni later arranged it for piano.
Recorded live and unedited.
(Performed by James Rhodes)

J S Bach Arr. F Busoni Chaconne In D Minor

Sfilata Plissè Milano 30 01 11

Busoni's transcription of Bach's organ (stop smirking at the back) adagio from the Toccata, Adagio & Fugue in C. Offensively crunchy & modern chords towards the end...
Heartbroken bastard.

Bach-Busoni Adagio From BWV 564

Errored Seconds - Dirt Immunity

Claudio di rocco dsquaredparty live@at the base 2001

when i get low i get high

Crystal Castles - Doe Deer (Milano Rmx)

Narration: Virginia Woolf, from BBC radio broadcast (“Craftmanship”), 29 April 1937

Duration: 9:50

Instrumentation: chamber orchestra (1-1-1-1, horn, harp,
piano, 2-2-2-2-1), tape, and electronics

Written for Royal Academy of Music Performers
Michael Alexander Young, Conductor

A Eulogy to Words is a multi-media composition for chamber orchestra, pre-recorded electronics, and tape, featuring the audio document of Virginia Woolf’s BBC Broadcast from 29 April 1937 (“Craftmanship” from a part of series called “Words Fail Me”). The Society of Authors in London, who hold rights and ownership of this document, had granted permission for me to use this recording in my composition. A Eulogy to Words was premiered at the Royal Academy of Music’s Composers Platform concert on 21 November, 2012. Below is the transcript from the surviving audio file:

…Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today – that they are stored with other meanings, with other memories, and they have contracted so many famous marriages in the past. The splendid word “incarnadine,” for example – who can use that without remembering “multitudinous seas”? In the old days, of course, when English was a new language, writers could invent new words and use them. Nowadays it is easy enough to invent new words – they spring to the lips whenever we see a new sight or feel a new sensation – but we cannot use them because the English language is old.

You cannot use a brand new word in an old language because of the very obvious yet always mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate entity, but part of other words. Indeed it is not a word until it is part of a sentence. Words belong to each other, although, of course, only a great poet knows that the word “incarnadine” belongs to “multitudinous seas.” To combine new words with old words is fatal to the constitution of the sentence. In order to use new words properly you would have to invent a whole new language; and that, though no doubt we shall come to it, is not at the moment our business. Our business is to see what we can do with the old English language as it is. How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth? That is the question.

And the person who could answer that question would deserve whatever crown of glory the world has to offer. Think what it would mean if you could teach, or if you could learn the art of writing. Why, every book, every newspaper you’d pick up, would tell the truth, or create beauty. But there is, it would appear, some obstacle in the way, some hindrance to the teaching of words. For though at this moment at least a hundred professors are lecturing on the literature of the past, at least a thousand critics are reviewing the literature of the present, and hundreds upon hundreds of young men and women are passing examinations in English literature with the utmost credit, still – do we write better, do we read better than we read and wrote four hundred years ago when we were un-‐lectured, un-‐criticized, untaught? Is our modern Georgian literature a patch on the Elizabethan? Well, where then are we to lay the blame? Not on our professors; not on our reviewers; not on our writers; but on words. It is words that are to blame. They are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most un-‐teachable of all things. Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind.

If you want proof of this, consider how often in moments of emotion when we most need words we find none. Yet there is the dictionary; there at our disposal are some half-‐a-‐million words all in alphabetical order. But can we use them? No, because words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind. Look once more at the dictionary. There beyond a doubt lie plays more splendid than Antony and Cleopatra; poems lovelier than the Ode to a Nightingale; novels beside which Pride
and Prejudice or David Copperfield are the crude bunglings of amateurs. It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order. But we cannot do it because they do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, ranging hither and thither, falling in love, and mating together. It is true that they are much less bound by ceremony and convention than we are. Royal words mate with commoners. English words marry French words, German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy. Indeed, the less we enquire into the past of our dear Mother English the better it will be for that lady’s reputation. For she has gone a-‐roving, a-‐roving fair maid.

Thus to lay down any laws for such irreclaimable vagabonds is worse than useless. A few trifling rules of grammar and spelling is all the constraint we can put on them. All we can say about them, as we peer at them over the edge of that deep, dark and only fitfully illuminated cavern in which they live – the mind – all we can say about them is that they seem to like people to think before they use them, and to feel before they use them, but to think and feel not about them, but about something different. They are highly sensitive, easily made self-‐conscious. They do not like to have their purity or their impurity discussed. If you start a Society for Pure English, they will show their resentment by starting another for impure English – hence the unnatural violence of much modern speech; it is a protest against the puritans.

They are highly democratic, too; they believe that one word is as good as another; uneducated words are as good as educated words, uncultivated words as good as cultivated words, there are no ranks or titles in their society. Nor do they like being lifted out on the point of a pen and examined separately. They hang together, in sentences, paragraphs, sometimes for whole pages at a time. They hate being useful; they hate making money; they hate being lectured about in public. In short, they hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change.

Perhaps that is their most striking peculiarity – their need of change. It is because the truth they try to catch is many-‐sided, and they convey it by being many-‐sided, flashing first this way, then that. Thus they mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person; they are unintelligible to one generation, plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this complexity, this power to mean different things to different people, that they survive.   Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning, the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination…

A Eulogy to Words

Read more: www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/01/10/massimo-vignelli-debbie-millman/

Excerpt from Debbie Millman's Design Matters interview: https://soundcloud.com/designmatters/massimo-vignelli

Graphic designer Massimo Vignelli on intellectual refinement

Maria Popova is the editor of Brain Pickings (http://www.brainpickings.org), an inventory of cross-disciplinary interestingness and curiosity, bringing you things you didn’t know you were interested in — until you are. She has also written for Wired UK, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Nieman Journalism Lab, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. 

In this audio interview with Debbie Millman, Maria discusses curation, creativity as pattern-recognition, growing up in Bulgaria, and her grandmother following her Google Alerts.

Subscribe to Design Matters on iTunes for more great interviews with celebrated designers and creative minds: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/design-matters-debbie-millman/id328074695

Design Matters with Debbie Millman: Maria Popova

Background and context: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/03/18/tolstoy-reading-rare-1909-recording/

The fascinating story of A Calendar of Wisdom, with selected highlights: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/03/15/a-calendar-of-wisdom-tolstoy/

Leo Tolstoy reads from "A Calendar of Wisdom," 1909

music for the installation "organic asphalts" (2013)
by colectivo 013

http://colectivo013.blogspot.com
https://www.facebook.com/colectivo013

organic asphalts

James Joyce reads from the Aeolus episode of Ulysses, the only passage he found to be “declamatory” and thus suitable for recital.

Background and context: http://exp.lore.com/post/53132569188/as-open-culture-explains-this-rare-1924-recording

James Joyce reads from Ulysses

The late Sopranos star reads the late Maurice Sendak's most controversial book.

Background and context: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/06/21/james-gandolfini-reads-maurice-sendak/

James Gandolfini reads Maurice Sendak's In The Night Kitchen

Background and poem text <a href="http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/09/02/f-scott-fitzgerald-keats-ode-to-a-nightingale/">here</a>.

Josef Albers and the art of seeing

brainpicker