It’s National Library Week, and to celebrate Oxford University Press is making many of its online resources free for users in the U.S. and Canada this week. Access will be open until the end of Saturday, the 19th. You will be able to read Oxford’s online dictionaries, online scholarly editions, extensive reference materials, and the popular series of Very Short Introductions, which “offer concise introductions to a diverse range of subject areas from Climate to Consciousness, Game Theory to Ancient Warfare, Privacy to Islamic History, Economics to Literary Theory.” (To access the texts, type “libraryweek” as the username and password in the Subscriber Login area. It appears halfway down the page, on the left.)
The open access period excludes Oxford University Press scholarly journals. This is unfortunate. As you probably know, most of the research published by university presses resides behind prohibitive paywalls that make it difficult for independent scholars and laypeople to read current scholarship. It would be nice to see Oxford and other presses make such grace periods more frequent and inclusive in the future. But for now, OUP’s open access week is a great way to entice non-professionals into academic scholarship and temporarily ease the burden on those without regular access to their databases. Visit Oxford’s site and sign in with username and password “libraryweek” to begin reading.
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive. …” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about 100 miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”
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William Faulkner wrote his seventh novel As I Lay Dying in the last months of 1929, almost immediately after another stream-of-consciousness masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury. Like the Shakespearean title of that work, As I Lay Dying’s title, which comes from Homer’s Odyssey, indicates the literary ambitions of its author. Only thirty-two at the time of its writing, Faulkner composed the novel in eight weeks (six by his accounting) while working nights at the University of Mississippi’s power plant, deciding in advance that he would stake his entire reputation as a writer on the book: “Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first words, I knew what the last word would be… Before I began I said, I am going to write a book by which, at a pinch, I can stand or fall if I never touch ink again.” His passionate conviction is evident in the original manuscript—the first and only draft—which reveals “an ease in creation unlike his other novels.”
Perhaps the most narratively straightforward of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels—set in a fictional Mississippi region based on his own home county of Lafayette— As I Lay Dying tells the story of the Bundrens, a poor white family on a perilous journey to honor their matriarch Addie’s request for a burial in the town of Jefferson. Despite the seeming simplicity of its plot, the book’s style is incredibly complex, told from the perspective of fifteen different characters in rough-hewn country dialect and arresting lyrical fugues. It is the novel’s “coarse language and dialect,” that is “exactly Faulkner’s project,” writes Tin House editor Rob Spillman: “Faulkner, a Mississippi high school dropout, made it his mission to capture the emotional lives of the rural poor, unflinchingly writing about race, gender, sexuality, and power.” Through the power of his language and—in the words of Robert Penn Warren—the “range of effect, philosophical weight, originality of style, variety of characterization, humor, and tragic intensity,” the Southern novelist elevated his humble subjects to truly mythic status.
Thanks to HarperCollins, you can listen to Faulkner himself read from his masterpiece: .au file (4.4 Mb), .gsm file (0.9 Mb), .ra file (0.5 Mb). You’ll have to listen carefully to hear the author’s soft southern drawl, which gets lost at times in the poor quality recording. As you do, follow along with the text in Google Books. Faulkner reads from the twelfth chapter, told by Darl, Addie’s second oldest son, a sensitive, poetic thinker who narrates nineteen of the novel’s 59 chapters (and who James Franco plays in his film adaptation of the book). In this passage, Darl observes his mother’s death, and each family member’s immediate reaction, from sister Dewey Dell’s dramatic expressions of grief, to older brother Cash’s taciturn response and father Anse’s tragic-comic insensitivity: “God’s will be done…. Now I can get them teeth.”
To hear much more of Faulkner’s voice, visit Faulkner at Virginia: An Audio Archive, which catalogs and stores digital audio of the author’s lectures, readings, and question and answer sessions during his tenure as writer in residence at the University of Virginia in 1957–58. In one particular session with a group of engineering school students, Faulkner gives us a clue for how we might approach his work, which can seem so strange to those unfamiliar with the history, customs, and speech patterns of the American Deep South. Each of us, he says, “reads into the—the books, things the writer didn’t put in there, in the terms that—that his and the writer’s experience could not possibly be identical. That there are things the writer might think is in that book, which the reader doesn’t find for the same reason that—that no two experiences can be identical, but everyone reads according to—to his own—own lights, his own experience, his own observation, imagination, and experience.” For all of their provincial peculiarities, the Bundren’s epic struggle with the grief and pain of loss has universal reach and resonance.
David Brooks’ short talk at last month’s TED conference is quintessential David Brooks. If you read his column in the Times, you’ll recognize his themes and concerns right away. It’s a bit preachy, sure. But it will get you thinking, maybe for a few minutes, about which self is winning out in your life — the self who craves success, builds a great résumé, and almost invariably bruises others — family, friends and strangers — along the way. Or the self “who seeks connection, community, love — the values that make for a great eulogy.” Just a little food for thought.
Most Americans by birth, myself included, have little reason to think about the process of attaining our highly sought-after nationality. But it only takes a moment’s reflection on the millions upon millions of immigrants who came to the United States in the twentieth century alone to get us pondering not just the how but the why of American citizenship. It’s become more relevant than ever today, when we need not look far to notice how many trans-national projects, careers, couples, and families have sprung up around us. Not only do a wider variety of people come to America today, but more Americans base themselves elsewhere than ever before. For some serious thoughts on changing nations, have a listen to the radio clip above, a brief interview with German-born theoretical physicist (and internationally known icon of science and intelligence) Albert Einstein. Last year, we featured footage of Einstein’s 1933 speech in praise of individual liberty at London’s Royal Albert Hall. He gave it not long after the Nazis took power in his homeland; just four days later, he set sail for America and never looked back.
This broadcast went out in 1940, not long before the United States joined the Second World War, as part of I’m An American, a joint effort of the NBC network and the Immigration and Nationalization Service to invite “a number of naturalized citizens to talk about the American citizenship which they have recently acquired, a possession which we ourselves take for granted, but which is still new and thrilling to them.” Einstein, an articulate if still thickly accented speaker of English, calls this rare media appearance a “self-evident duty,” and praises the egalitarianism and cooperative spirit that inclines America toward “the development of the individual and his creative power.” The famed scientist’s interlocutor, Second Assistant Secretary of the Department of Labor Marshall E. Dimock, asks him about the reasons he appreciates his new citizenship, why he prefers to live in America given his “international outlook,” and whether he feels America still lives up to its grand promise of liberty. Whether you believe America has improved or gone downhill since that era, I think you’ll find in Einstein’s proud responses a reminder that it often takes a former outsider to clearly see the qualities that have given the country its place in history.
Recently, I’ve been spending time investigating copyrights, keen to find out if it’s cricket for me to impose my vision on certain authors’ long ago work. An author myself, I freely admit, I might not cotton to it were some stranger to have her way with my work, without permission, on a stage, for all to see! Either way, I’d prefer things to be settled without a lawsuit.
My head was so full of copyright implications and loopholes, I was unaware that a parallel situation was blowing up beyond all reason in the world of patents. Such ignorance is a luxury unavailable to legions of small software designers, podcasters, and small business owners, as artist and filmmaker Kirby Ferguson of “Everything is a Remix” fame makes clear in his animated primer, “Rise of the Patent Troll.”
The problem, he says, owes to a gap between centuries old patent law and a new technology that yields “inventions” whose parts can’t be attributed as easily as your average sewing machine’s or cotton gin’s.
Depicted here as hairy, pointy-eared storybook figures, the real life baddies are much more scary—newly formed corporate entities opportunistically seeking to enforce patents for digital innovations they don’t really own. Not surprisingly, they’re targeting the little guys, individuals who don’t have the resources to defend themselves when attacked. Yes, in this context, a fairly renowned comedian can be considered a little guy.
Ferguson joined forces with digital watchdogs Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, and Engine to make the film, but the problem proves too slippery to fully explore in three animated minutes. I think the cartoon is actually bait, to get viewers like me to sit still for the next three minutes, in which the artist turns the camera on himself, to enumerate what citizens can do to make a proposed patent reform bill stick. If it all feels rather urgent, I’m guessing there’s a reason.
As a young amateur painter and future art school dropout, I frequently found myself haunted by the faces of two artists, that famously odd couple from my favorite art history novelization—and Kirk Douglas role and Iggy Pop song—Lust for Life. Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, above and below respectively, the tormented Dutch fanatic and burly French bully—how, I still wonder, could such a pair have ever co-existed, however briefly? How could such beautifully skewed visions of life have existed at all?
Van Gogh and Gauguin’s several self-portraits still inspire wonder. My younger self had the luxury of seeing these particular two up close and in person at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC: Van Gogh’s gaunt and piercing visage, Gauguin’s sneering self-parody.
Now, thanks to the wonders of digital technology, my older self, and yours, can view and download high-resolution photos of both paintings, and over 50,000 more from the museum’s vast holdings, through NGA Images, “a repository of digital images of the collections of the National Gallery of Art.”
There you’ll find works by another obsessive Dutch self-portraitist, Rembrandt van Rijn, such as the lush 1659 painting below. You’ll find paintings from the heroes of the various Renaissances and French Impressionism, from movements modern and colonial, pastoral and urban. The collection is dizzying, and a lover of art could easily lose hours sorting through it, saving “open access digital images up to 3000 pixels each […] available free of charge for download and use.” The purpose of NGA Images is “to facilitate learning, enrichment, enjoyment, and exploration,” and there’s no doubt that it satisfies all of those goals and then some. You can peruse the Gallery’s most requested images here.
Browse the various collections, including one devoted to self-portraits. Conduct advanced searches, if you’ve more knowledge of the Gallery’s many treasures. Use the “lightbox arranger” to sort, store, annotate, and save your own personalized collections for future viewing. You are the curator! And the lucky beneficiary of the National Gallery’s beneficence. While I can tell you from experience that it’s nothing like standing face to face with these paintings in their in-real-life dimensions, textures, lines, and colors—despite the throngs of disinterested tourists—it’s at least a close second. And for students and educators of the visual arts, NGA Images offers an opportunity like no other to view and share great works of art often hidden away from even the museum’s visitors. Enjoy!
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Ever since Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth came out to critical accolades, Conservative scorn and a handful of Oscars, there has been no shortage of well meaning documentaries about the perils of climate change. Most feature a Hollywood celebrity or two, a liberal amount of liberal guilt, and a distinct sense of preaching to the converted.
The new Showtime series Years of Living Dangerously might have plenty of those first two elements but none of the third. In the first episode of the series –which has been released for free on YouTube (above) – Don Cheadle asks, “Is there a way to discuss climate change without politics or religion getting in the way?” Producers James Cameron, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Weintraub try valiantly to answer that question in the affirmative.
In Cheadle’s segment, he tracks down an unusual figure in the heated, tiresome climate change debate – an Evangelical climate scientist. In a fascinating scene, she talks to the devout denizens of Plainview TX, trying to convince them that the drought that caused the closing of the local meatpacking plant – the town’s biggest employer – was the result of something other than divine will.
Meanwhile, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman traces the origins of the Syrian civil war to – you guessed it – climate change. He crosses into that war torn country (briefly) to discover that the seeds of the conflict were sown by the government’s indifferent response to a long-running drought.
But the most entertaining segment is Harrison Ford exploring the causes of Indonesia’s rapid deforestation. Apparently, palm oil – that anonymous ingredient in everything from cookies to chocolate bars – is such big business that it’s turning Borneo into a burn-scared moonscape. Who knew?
Ford’s charisma and gravelly baritone can turn the most inane line — “That’s a lot of cars” – into something with almost Talmudic profundity. It makes for some riveting viewing. The show ends with Ford chomping at the bit to interview Indonesia’s utterly corrupt Forestry Minister. That meeting, which occurs in a later episode, promises to be a 60 Minutes-style smackdown. You think Mike Wallace was daunting? Try Indiana Jones.
Years of Living Dangerously premieres on Showtime on April 13.
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.
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