This is part one of our conversation w/Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired, the guy behind Cool Tools, The "1000 True Fans" theory and much more.
In this conversation, we talk mainly about how the future will change due to technology, whether things like AI (Artificial Intelligence) will be dangerous and much more.
You can find out more about Kevin Kelly at www.kk.org
You can find the NextMarket Podcast at www.technology.fm/nextmarketpodcast/
Tagged with fiction drama science fiction
William S. Burroughs is one of the most mythologized American authors of the 20th century. When you recall the details of his life, they read like the biography of a fictional character. He was an unabashed heroin addict yet he dressed like a dapper insurance salesman. He was openly, militantly gay at a time when homosexuality wasn’t even mentioned in polite society. He shot his wife, Joan Vollmer, in Mexico City while playing an ill-conceived game of William Tell and then spent years in Tangiers indulging in every possible vice while writing Naked Lunch, which happened to be one of the most controversial books of the century. And his writing influenced just about everyone you consider cool.
This week is the 101st birthday of Burroughs. To mark the occasion, This American Life aired a BBC documentary on Burroughs’s life. The show is narrated by Iggy Pop whose voice, in announcer mode, bears an uncanny resemblance to Sam Elliot. Pop relates how Burroughs influenced Kurt Cobain, punk rock and Bob Dylan, and how he himself lifted lyrics from Burroughs for his most popular song, and unlikely Carnival Cruise jingle, “Lust for Life.”
As Ira Glass notes, the documentary paints a clear picture of why he is such a revered figure – going into detail about his writing, his hugely influential “Cut Up” method, his obsession with cats – while never buying into his mystique. In fact, one of the most interesting parts of the doc is a damning appraisal of Burroughs’s cool junkie persona by author Will Self, who was himself an addict for a couple of decades. You can listen to the whole episode above.
Related Content:
William S. Burroughs Reads His First Novel, Junky
William S. Burroughs on the Art of Cut-up Writing
William S. Burroughs Explains What Artists & Creative Thinkers Do for Humanity
550 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free
William S. Burroughs on Saturday Night Live, 1981
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
http://www.openculture.com/2015/02/william-s-burroughs-audio-documentary-narrated-by-iggy-pop.html
Depression, Inside-Out
Depression—characterized by persistent feelings of sadness, hopelessness, or alienation—afflicts one of every 10 US adults. Our guest George Scialabba, a writer and public intellectual based in Cambridge, is speaking about his decades-long bout with the illness on the occasion of an article he wrote for The Baffler magazine, called “The Endlessly Examined Life.”
George found and published the various clinical notes that his doctors wrote about him and his condition over nearly 40 years. It’s the first publication of its kind—part personal journey, part modern medical history of depression therapy, drugs, and electro-shock treatments. We’re talking, now, about what the doctors tend not to write down: namely, what depression has to do with the deep philosophical and religious search about life.
One of the things George found in his own search was the humanism of D.H. Lawrence. As George reads from his essay collection, The Modern Predicament:
Lawrence believed that the universe and the individual soul were pulsing with mysteries, from which men and women were perennially distracted by want or greed or dogma. He thought that beauty, graceful physical movement, unselfconscious emotional directness, and a sense, even an inarticulate sense, of connection to the cosmos, however defined – to the sun, to the wilderness, to the rhythms of a craft or the rites of a tribe – were organic necessities of a sane human life. “Man has little needs and deeper needs,” he wrote. “We have fallen into the mistake of living from our little needs till we have almost lost our deeper needs in a sort of madness.”
Prof. David McNutt, adjunct professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at Wheaton College, led noontime and evening sessions exploring detective fiction works by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, G.K. Chesterton, and Dorothy L. Sayers that feature their respective detective characters: Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown, and Lord Peter Wimsey. Classes were held March-April 2011 (syllabus). To download, right-click on a file and select "Save As" to save the file to your computer.
http://www.wheaton.edu/wadecenter/News-and-Events/Audio-Downloads
Tagged with agatha-christie
Tagged with agatha-christie
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