“Moby-Dick is the great American novel. But it is also the great unread American novel. Sprawling, magnificent, deliriously digressive, it stands over and above all other works of fiction, since it is barely a work of fiction itself. Rather, it is an explosive exposition of one man’s investigation into the world of the whale, and the way humans have related to it. Yet it is so much more than that.”
That’s how Plymouth University introduces Herman Melville’s classic tale from 1851. And it’s what sets the stage for their web project launched earlier this week. It’s called The Moby Dick Big Read, and it features celebrities and lesser known figures reading all 135 chapters from Moby Dick — chapters that you can start downloading (as free audio files) on a rolling, daily basis. Find them on iTunes, Soundcloud, RSS Feed, or the Big Read web site itself.
The project started with the first chapters being read by Tilda Swinton (Chapter 1), Captain R.N. Hone (Chapter 2), Nigel Williams (Chapter 3), Caleb Crain (Chapter 4), Musa Okwonga (Chapter 5), and Mary Norris (Chapter 6). John Waters, Stephen Fry, Simon Callow and even Prime Minister David Cameron will read future chapters, which often find themselves accompanied by contemporary artwork inspired by the novel.
If you want to read the novel as you go along, find the text in our collection of Free eBooks. We also have versions read by one narrator in our Free Audio Books collection. Tilda Swinton’s narration of Chapter 1 appears right below:
In the spring of 1963 Studs Terkel introduced Chicago radio listeners to an up-and-coming musician, not yet 22 years old, “a young folk poet who you might say looks like Huckleberry Finn, if he lived in the 20th century. His name is Bob Dylan.” (Listen to the interview below.)
Dylan had just finished recording the songs for his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, when he traveled from New York to Chicago to play a gig at a little place partly owned by his manager, Albert Grossman, called The Bear Club. The next day he went to the WFMT studios for the hour-long appearance on The Studs Terkel Program. Most sources give the date of the interview as April 26, 1963, though Dylan scholar Michael Krogsgaard has given it as May 3.
Things were moving fast in Dylan’s life at that time. He was just emerging as a major songwriter. His debut album from the year before, Bob Dylan, was made up mostly of other people’s songs. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which was finished but hadn’t yet been released, contained almost all original material, including several songs that would become classics, like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall.” Within a few months Dylan would make his debut at the Newport Folk Festival and perform at the historic March on Washington. But when Dylan visited WFMT, it’s likely that many of Terkel’s listeners had never heard of him. In the recorded broadcast he plays the following songs:
Farewell
A Hard Rain’s a‑Gonna Fall
Bob Dylan’s Dream
Boots of Spanish Leather
John Brown
Who Killed Davey Moore?
Blowin’ In The Wind
Dylan tells Terkel that “A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall” is not about atomic fallout, even though he wrote the song in a state of anxiety during the Cuban missile crisis. “No, it’s not atomic rain,” Dylan says, “it’s just a hard rain. It isn’t the fallout rain. I mean some sort of end that’s just gotta happen.… In the last verse, when I say, ‘the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,’ that means all the lies that people get told on their radios and in their newspapers.”
But as the conversation progresses it becomes clear that the motivation behind Dylan’s comments isn’t to dispel myths or to clear up any of the “lies that people get told on their radios.” Rather, he’s driven by his life-long dread of being pigeonholed by others. Dylan is happy to spread his own myths. At one point he tells Terkel a “stretcher” that would have made Huckleberry Finn proud: He claims that when he was about ten years old he saw Woody Guthrie perform in Burbank, California. Regardless of its factuality, the Dylan-Terkel interview is an entertaining hour, a fascinating window on the young artist as he was entering his prime. You can stream it here.
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“I had an extremely slow-dawning insight about creation,” writes eclectically minded musician David Byrne in the opening chapter of his new book How Music Works. “That insight is that context largely determines what is written, painted, sculpted, sung, or performed.” This comes as only the first in a series of illuminating ideas Byrne lays out in the text, a far-reaching meditation on artistic creation through the field that happens to be his specialty. Approaching music — you know, the stuff he made at the front of the Talking Heads and continues to make in solo albums and collaborations with the likes of Brian Eno and St. Vincent — from as many angles as he can, he writes about its technology, the business of it, its social elements, its role in his life, and what science and nature have to teach us about its mechanics. For more on that last bit, watch the above conversation from Seed magazine, which sits Byrne down with Dan Levitin, neuroscientist, musician, and author of This is Your Brain on Music. Though it precedes the publication of How Music Works by about five years, the chat covers great stretches of highly relevant ground.
Watching this back-and-forth, I could swear to seeing some of the concepts developed in How Music Works taking early shape in Byrne’s head. He and Levitin discuss the widespread suspicion of deliberate craft in an ostensibly emotional form like rock and roll; the way music generates pleasure by taking detours and disrupting patterns; the relationship between understanding songs and acquiring languages; the sensory similarities between listening to music and drinking wine; the nature of trance states; and the long-standing yet seemingly now changing social function of music. Byrne admits that music actually helped him change his own behavior: “I used music as a real tool to find my way into engaging socially,” he says, and this ties in with everything the two have spent the past hour talking about. Intellectual though their musicophilia may seem, they never forget about the pre-rational elements of the musical experience. The guiding notion of their conversation might have been summed up by Carl Sagan: “It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic,” he wrote in another context, “but is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.”
Two years before the 1937 publication of her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston published a collection of African-American folklore called Of Mules and Men. She did so as an authority on the subject and a trained anthropologist who had studied under the most well-regarded figure in the discipline at the time, Franz Boas. Her study was both a personal and a professional undertaking for her; although Hurston had grown up in the Deep South—in Eatonville, Florida—she credited her academic training with giving her the critical distance to really see the culture on its own terms. As she puts it in the Introduction to Of Mules and Men, she had known black Southern culture “from the earliest rocking of my cradle… but it was fitting me like a tight chemise. I couldn’t see it for wearing it…. I had to have the spy-glass of Anthropology to look through at that.”
After receiving her B.A. from Barnard, Hurston traveled extensively in the South and the Caribbean in the 1930s to document local cultures and conduct field research. Her work was partly sponsored by a Guggenheim fellowship and partly by Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, whose Federal Writers Project sponsored several other black writers like Ralph Ellison, Claude McKay, and Richard Wright. Working at times with celebrated folklorists Stetson Kennedy and Alan Lomax, Hurston collected recordings of Southern and Caribbean stories and folk songs, often telling or singing them herself. In the clip above, from June 18, 1939, Hurston sings a song she calls “Mule on the Mount.” In the first minute and a half of the recording, you can hear Hurston describe the song’s origins and many variations to someone (possibly Lomax) in the background. She explains how she came to know the song, first hearing it in her hometown of Eatonville. Then she begins to sing, in a high, sweet voice, with all the intonation of a true blues singer, punctuating the verses with snorts and grunts, as many folk songs—often work songs—would be, though in this case, the snorts may be mule snorts. The recording reveals Hurston as a talented interpreter of her material, to say the least.
The songs and stories Hurston collected, in addition to her childhood experiences, provided her with much of the material for her novels, stories, and plays. Several more of her WPA recordings, also sung by her, are online as mp3s at the Florida Department of State’s “Florida Memory” project. The originals are housed at the Library of Congress’s “Florida Folklife” collection. Hurston’s critical and creative work brought her renown in her lifetime not only as a writer, but as a public intellectual and folklorist as well—hear her talk, somewhat reluctantly, about Haitian zombies in a 1943 radio interview on the popular Mary Margaret McBride show. Sadly, Hurston passed her final years in obscurity and her work was neglected for a couple decades until a revival in the 70s lead by Alice Walker. She’s never been known as a singer, but after listening to the above recording, you might agree she should be.
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
While you were sunning yourself on the beach this summer — or just taking a nice staycation at home — we were busy tracking down new courses to add to our list of 530 Free Online Courses. Available via YouTube, iTunes or the web, these courses were taped on the campuses of top universities like Stanford, Yale, MIT, Oxford, Harvard and UC Berkeley. They range across diverse disciplines — Philosophy, History, Computer Science, and Physics, to name a few — and you can access them all for free. Below we’re highlighting some of the most recent additions to the big master list, and also throwing in a few interesting bonus picks. Hope you enjoy:
Aesthetics & Philosophy of Art – iTunes – Web — James Grant, Oxford University
Contemporary Literature – YouTube – Aysha Iqbal Viswamohan, IIT Madras
Long before Technicolor came along, the British photographer and inventor Edward Turner developed a three-color motion picture system in 1899. It was based on the mid-19th century discovery that all colors could be produced through combinations of the three primary colors — red, green and blue. And Turner’s genius was finding a way to bring this notion to moving pictures. Working with the financier Frederick Marshall Lee, Turner managed to shoot color films of children playing with sunflowers (above), a macaw perched in a cage, and goldfish swimming in a bowl. But then his films and projectors were lost … for a good century … and only recently did the National Media Museum in the UK recover the footage and then build a special projector capable of bringing the films back to the screen. To learn how they pulled it off, watch the video below. It’s pretty interesting:
With the announcement this summer that scientists at CERN believe they’ve found the long-sought-after subatomic particle called the Higgs boson, the question arises: What’s next for the Large Hadron Collider? In this new animated discussion from Jorge Cham at PhD Comics, physicists Daniel Whiteson and Jonathan Feng of the University of California, Irvine, explain how the work at the LHC isn’t even remotely finished yet. Some of the most interesting experiments will involve the search for evidence of extra dimensions, a concept that may hold the key to a number of mysteries. As Whiteson and Feng explain, a particle moving in another dimension would have a greater mass than otherwise expected, as a consequence of Einstein’s special theory of relativity. The LHC might be used to find evidence of these heavier versions of particles. “So what we’re looking for,” says Whiteson, “is normal matter, but heavier versions of it.” For more animated physics from PhD Comics you can see our earlier posts on the Higgs boson and dark matter. And to learn more about physics, see our long list of Free Physics Courses in our collection of over 500 Free Courses Online.
Literary journal Electric Literaturehas a mission, to “use new media and innovative distribution to return the short story to a place of prominence in popular culture.” In so doing, they promise to deliver their quarterly, 5‑story anthology “in every viable medium”: paperback, enhanced pdf, Kindle, and ePub. One clever way they promote short fiction is with a free, weekly single-story feature called “Recommended Reading.” And with the help of an animator and a musician, Electric Journal produces what it calls a “Single Sentence Animation” of each week’s recommended story.
As the journal describes these short videos, “Single Sentence Animations are creative collaborations. The writer selects a favorite sentence from his or her work and the animator creates a short film in response.” The Single Sentence Animation above draws from from A.M. Homes’ “Hello Everybody,” as imagined by artist Gretta Johnson and with music by Michael Asif. The animation captures something of Homes’ “particular blend of logic and unreality” as well as her strange and often unnerving twists of language. Homes chose the serpentine sentence:
They are making their bodies their own—renovating, redecorating, the body not just as corpus but as object of self-expression, a symbiotic relation between imagination and reality.
Johnson’s animation imagines the body as Play-doh, a malleable substance, unrestricted by fixed forms.
We speak of having one foot in the grave, but we do not speak of having both feet and both legs and then one’s entire torso, arms, and head in the grave, inside a coffin, which is covered in dirt, upon which is planted a pretty little stone.
As Marcus’s sentence drills through clichéd euphemism into the morbid and mundane, Rostron’s animation peels back layers of dead metaphor to encounter the prosaic.
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
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