David Foster Wallace’s Surprising List of His 10 Favorite Books, from C.S. Lewis to Tom Clancy

in Books, Literature | February 18th, 2014

Image by Steve Rhodes, via Wikimedia Commons

Like many David Foster Wallace fans, I bought a copy of J. Peder Zane’s The Top Ten (previously featured here), a compilation of various famous writers’ top-ten-books lists, expressly for DFW’s contribution. Like most of those David Foster Wallace fans, I felt more than a little surprised when I turned to his page and found out which ten books he’d chosen. Here, as quoted in the Christian Science Monitor, we have the Infinite Jest author and widely recognized (if reluctant) “high-brow” literary figure’s top ten list:

1. The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis

2. The Stand, by Stephen King

3. Red Dragon, by Thomas Harris

4. The Thin Red Line, by James Jones

5. Fear of Flying, by Erica Jong

6. The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris

7. Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert A. Heinlein

8. Fuzz, by Ed McBain

9. Alligator, by Shelley Katz

10. The Sum of All Fears, by Tom Clancy

Thrillers, killers, and a dose of Christianity to top it off; I didn’t blame Zane when he asked, “Is he serious? Beats me. To be honest, I don’t know what Wallace was thinking. But I do think there’s a certain integrity to his list.” Wallace himself seemed to read assiduously all over the map — or, more to the point, all up and down the scale of critical respectability. Rattling off “the stuff that’s sort of rung my cherries” to Salon’s Laura Miller in 1996, for a contrast, he named, among other worthy reads, Socrates’ funeral oration, John Donne, “Keats’ shorter stuff,” Schopenhauer, William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Hemingway’s In Our Time, Don DeLillo, A.S. Byatt, Cynthia Ozick, Donald Barthelme, Moby-Dick, and The Great Gatsby. (You can find many of these texts in our Free eBooks collection.)

That, some Wallace readers may think, sounds more like it. But those who’ve paid close attention to Wallace’s language — that often breathlessly but hopelessly imitated mixture of high-caliber vocabulary, casually spoken rhythm, deceptively sharp-edged perception, shrugging presentation, and deliberate solecism — know how fully he simultaneously embodied both “high” and “low” English writing. Just look at the Literary Analysis syllabus from his days teaching at Illinois State University, which demands students read not just The Silence of the Lambs but another Thomas Harris novel, Black Sunday, as well as more C.S. Lewis (in this case The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) and Stephen King (Carrie). Lest you doubt his commitment to the serious reading of popular fiction, note the presence of Jackie Collins’ Rock Star. In the classroom and in life, Wallace must truly have believed that there exists no low fiction; just low ways of reading fiction.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, literature, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Facebook page.

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Free: F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise, the 1927 Masterpiece Voted the 5th Best Movie of All Time

in Film | February 17th, 2014

German director F .W. Murnau’s silent masterpiece Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) is a rare example of a foreign auteur who managed to keep his vision in the face of the Hollywood machine.

Prior to this movie, F. W. Murnau was arguably the most important film director of his time. He directed a string of German Expressionist works that were as bleak and brooding as they were technically brilliant. Murnau’s eerily, hallucinatory Nosferatu (1922) redefined the horror movie. The spectacularly depressing Der Letzte Mann (1924) featured a roving camera, double-exposure and forced perspective to brilliantly evoke the shame, humiliation and (in one tour-de-force sequence) drunkenness of a proud doorman demoted to a washroom attendant. And his adaptation of Faust (1926) was the most lavish, expensive movie Germany had ever produced at the time.

Enter William Fox, a Jewish-Hungarian immigrant who founded the Fox Film Corporation. Though his studio was moderately successful producing Tom Mix serials, he aspired to something greater; he aspired to art. Fox convinced Murnau to make the jump to Hollywood, in part by agreeing to build a $200,000 set for the movie — an astronomical sum in those days.

Sunrise opens with a series of title cards that announce just what this movie is about:

This song of the man and his wife is of no place and every place; you might hear it anywhere at any time. For wherever the sun rises and sets in the city’s turmoil or under the open sky on the farm, life is much the same; sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet.

Murnau and his screenwriter Carl Meyer (who also wrote Der Letzte Mann) made the plotline so simple, so universal that the characters don’t even have names.

A struggling farmer is smitten with a femme fatale from the city. She inveigles him to drown his young wife and run off to the city with her. But when it comes time to do the deed, he realizes that he can’t do it. When the wife flees from him, he follows her into the city, apologizing profusely. Eventually, he and his remarkably forgiving wife reconcile and rekindle their love for one other. The story is so elemental that it could be a fairy tale.

Yet Murnau’s ability to spin absolutely dazzling images — using technology perfected in Germany – is what makes Sunrise so memorable. At one point in the movie, the camera seemingly floats over a crowd in an amusement park; at another the lovers walk down a city street that, without a cut, transforms into a flowering meadow. Compared to his Hollywood contemporaries – D.W. Griffith for example – Murnau’s movie seems vital, modern, and surprisingly poignant.

Though the movie earned a few Oscars – including one for Best Unique and Artistic Production and one for Best Actress for Janet Gaynor — Sunrise suffered the fate of many cinematic masterpieces: It flopped. Yet over the years, its critical reputation has only grown. In 2012, it was named the 5th best movie of all time by Sight and Sound magazine just ahead of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Unlike Kubrick’s sci-fi saga, however, you can watch Sunrise for free on Archive.org. Check it out. Also find the classic on our list of Great Silent Films, part of our larger collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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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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15 Minute History: Quick History Lessons from a New, Chart-Topping Podcast

in History | February 17th, 2014

I’ve always been jealous of friends who studied history in college. They’ve got a working knowledge of the causes of wars, economic crises, political upheavals, and any other trivia question-worthy events. Thankfully, whatever I’d like to learn is merely a click away: we’ve got over 800 free online courses (including 67 free history courses) listed on Open Culture at the time of writing, and educational institutions continue to upload new lectures every week. Most of the lectures, however, last from 30 minutes to an hour, requiring users to cordon off a block of time for study. Want something shorter? Enter the 15 Minute History podcast, currently the fourth most popular podcast on iTunesU.

The result of the University of Texas at Austin’s Hemispheres and Not Even Past public outreach efforts, the 15 Minute History podcast focuses on key subjects in world history and U.S. history. Although the podcast is tailored to Texas teachers and students, emphasizing the state’s K‑12 curriculum, it also happens to be a treasure trove of free content for anyone interested in history. The short podcasts, which last some 15 minutes on average, cover everything from Russia’s October 1917 Revolution, to the Ottoman Empire, to the global context of the American Revolution. Each episode is led by one of three UT Austin academics, who discuss the topic at hand with another university professor or graduate student. Conveniently, on the 15 Minute History web site, the podcasts are accompanied by a carefully formatted transcript, plus additional reading materials for those who find themselves curious about a particular topic.

Interested readers can find the whole podcast series on iTunes, or on the web.

Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.

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Animated Video: Dock Ellis Throws a No-Hitter Against the Padres While Tripping on LSD (1970)

in Film, Sports | February 17th, 2014

For a sport obsessed with statistical averages, baseball seems to thrive like no other on outrageous anecdotes and singular characters. One of those characters, pitcher Dock Ellis, had a drug-fueled run in the 70s with the Pittsburgh Pirates, claiming that he almost never pitched a game sober, including several National League East Championships and a 1971 World Series win. The drugs eventually became too much and he got help, but they gave Ellis his career best anecdote, the story he tells in the short film above, “Dock Ellis and the LSD No-No.” It’s animated by James Blagdon from an interview Ellis gave to Donnell Alexander and Neille Ilel that aired on NPR in March of 2008.

In June 1970, Ellis took a day off, dropped acid at the airport and, “high as a Georgia pine,” checked into a friend’s girlfriend’s house to enjoy the rest of his trip. He woke up two days later, still tripping, went to the stadium, took some stimulants—which “over 90% of the league was using,” he says—and got to work, pitching a no-hitter against the San Diego Padres. “I didn’t see the hitters,” Ellis says, “all I could tell was whether they were on the right side or left side.” Above, his colorful narration gets a full compliment of sound effects and day-glo exclamations. (We also see allusions to Ellis’ other storied antics, like appearing on the mound in curlers and beaning opposing players with fastballs.) “It was easier,” he says, “to pitch with the LSD because I was used to medicating myself.” In this instance at least, the meds were magic.

The short film premiered at Sundance and film festivals worldwide in 2010, and the Dock Ellis legend has only grown since. The same interview become part of Beyond Ellis D, a “multimedia book” for iPads developed in 2012 by Donnell Alexander and animated by Heidi Perry. (See Part 1, “Superfly Spitball,” above.) In an essay for Deadspin, Alexander laments that Ellis—an outspoken critic of racism in baseball—has been largely reduced to the LSD no-hitter, which he calls “a short take on a big life.” While it’s a hell of a good story, Alexander also sees Ellis “on a continuum with Jackie Robinson” (who advised him to tone it down), “a black ballplayer straddling the reserve-clause era and the arrival of free agency, a man who brought many of the old ways with him into baseball’s new, Day-Glo epoch.” Ellis—who died in 2008 of liver failure at age 63 after years as a drug counselor—certainly lived up to the hype. His wild life and career get a full treatment in the documentary No No, which just screened at Sundance this past month. Watch the film’s trailer below.

via The Paris Review

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Jorge Luis Borges Chats with William F. Buckley on Firing Line (1977)

in Literature, Television | February 17th, 2014

Despite his respected facility with the English language, Argentine master craftsman of short fiction Jorge Luis Borges did his best work in his native Spanish. Though we remember prolific interviewer and even more prolific writer William F. Buckley for his formidable command of English above all else, he didn’t even learn it as his first language, starting in on his English education at age seven, having already learned Spanish (not to mention French).

This must have placed him well to appreciate Borges’ writing, and indeed, in his introduction to their Firing Line conversation above, Buckley cites Borges’ reputation as the greatest, most influential writer then alive. “We met in Buenos Aires, in 1977, during the military junta days,” Buckley recalls of the taping in a Paris Review interview. “He seemed astonishingly frail, but he spoke without a pause.”

Buckley goes on to provide many choice quotes from Borges’ answers to questions about his sight (“When you are blind, time flows in a different way. It flows, let’s say, on an easy slope”), his love of American writers like Emerson and Melville, his languages (“Of course, my Latin is very rusty. But still, as I once wrote, to have forgotten Latin is already, in itself, a gift”), and where he finds beauty and art (“A man may say a very fine thing, not being aware of it. I am hearing fine sentences all the time from the man in the street, for example. From anybody”), and how he taught (“I tried to teach my students not literature—that can’t be taught—but the love of literature”). For more on that last, see also “The Daggers of Jorge Luis Borges,” a piece on the new book Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature, by Michael Greenberg in the New York Review of Books.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, literature, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Facebook page.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Salvador Dalí’s Melting Clocks Painted on a Latte

in Art, Food & Drink | February 16th, 2014

In 1931, Salvador Dalí painted The Persistence of Memory, a landmark piece of surrealist art that used melting pocket watches to symbolize the relativity of space and time in dreamscapes. (More on that below.)

If you haven’t seen the painting at the MoMA in NYC, you’ve almost certainly seen those melting watches on posters and all sorts of kitschy products. Those poor watches have been abused over the years. But somehow I don’t mind seeing them on my favorite ephemeral canvas — the frothy milk surface of a latte. The latte above was decorated by Kazuki Yamamoto, a Japanese artist who uses nothing but a toothpick for a paint brush. You can find an online gallery of his work here, which includes some 3D creations. Or follow pictures of his latest works on Twitter.

The 6‑minute introduction to Dalí’s 1931 painting (below) comes courtesy of Smart History.

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Browse The Magical Worlds of Harry Houdini’s Scrapbooks

in History, Religion, Science, Theatre | February 16th, 2014

Between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, men and women alike made scrapbooks as a way of processing the news. As Ellen Gruber Garvey shows in her book Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance, the practice crossed lines of class and gender. Everyone from Mark Twain and Susan B. Anthony to Joseph W.H. Cathcart, an African-American janitor living in Philadelphia who amassed more than a hundred volumes in the second half of the nineteenth century, selected and pasted articles and ephemera into big books, often annotating and commenting upon the material.

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin has recently digitized ten scrapbooks belonging to Harry Houdini. The books are divided into three groups: volumes compiled by other magicians about their careers; scrapbooks holding Houdini’s clippings on the practice of magic in general; and books that chart Houdini’s investigations of fakes, frauds, and conjurers. (Later in his life, Houdini became fascinated with the post-WWI fad for spiritualism—mediums, séances, and psychics—and took on a role as skeptical debunker of spiritualist performers.)

The scrapbooks are fun to look at on a number of levels. First, it’s cool to think of Houdini and his magician colleagues selecting the articles and images and arranging them on the page. Second, the material that’s covered is colorful and bizarre (an article in one of Houdini’s books: “Trial By Combat Between A Dog And His Master’s Murderer”). Third, Houdini and his cohort clipped and saved from a wide array of periodicals; while it’s sometimes annoying that many of the articles have lost their metadata (date and place of publication), it’s still interesting to see the range of types of coverage that prevailed at the time.

The book put together by the performer S.S. Baldwin, mailed to Houdini by Baldwin’s daughter Shadow after Baldwin’s death, is particularly interesting. The Ransom Center’s introduction to the collection notes that some items in the Baldwin scrapbook “depict graphic subject matter”—a sure enticement for this researcher, at least, to make sure to check it out. The warning may refer to this amazing image of the Indian goddess Kali draped in severed heads and limbs, or an engraving of an execution by elephant. Alongside many articles about his performances, fliers, and other ephemera, Baldwin also collected images of people living in the places where he performed—an approach that adds yet another level of interest to his scrapbook.

H/T Not Even Past

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Rebecca Onion is a writer and academic living in Philadelphia. She runs Slate.com’s history blog, The Vault. Follow her on Twitter: @rebeccaonion.

by Rebecca Onion | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

New “Hemingway” App Promises to Make Your Writing “Strong and Clear”

in English Language, Literature, Writing | February 15th, 2014

I confess, I prefer Faulkner to Hemingway and see nothing wrong with long, complex sentences when they are well-constructed. But in most non-Faulkner writing, they are not. Stream of consciousness is a deliberate effect of carefully edited prose, not the unrevised slop of a first draft. In my days as a writing teacher, I’ve read my share of the latter. The English teacher’s guide for paring down unruly writing resembles a new online app called “Hemingway,” which examines writing and grades it on a color-coded difficulty scale. “Hemingway” suggests using simpler diction, editing out adverbs in favor of stronger verbs, and eliminating passive voice. It promises to make your writing like that of the famous American minimalist, “strong and clear.”

Of course I couldn’t resist running the above paragraph through Hemingway. It received a score of 11—merely “O.K.” It suggested that I change the passive in sentence one and remove “carefully” from the fourth sentence (I declined), and it identified “unruly” as an adverb (it is not). Like all forms of advice, it pays to use your own judgment before applying wholesale. Nevertheless, the suggestion to streamline and simplify for clarity’s sake is a general rule worth heeding more often than not. Brothers Adam and Ben Long, creators of the app, realized that their “sentences often grow long to the point that they became difficult to read.” It happens to everyone, amateur and professional alike. The app suggests writing that scores a Grade 10 or below is “bold and clear.” Writing above this measure is “hard” or “very hard” to read. Which prompts the inevitable question: How does Hemingway himself score in the Hemingway app?

In a blog post yesterday for The New Yorker, Ian Crouch ran a few of the master’s passages through the online editing tool (a concept akin to John Malkovich entering John Malkovich’s head). The opening paragraph of “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” received a score of 15. Hemingway’s description of Romero the bullfighter from The Sun Also Rises also “breaks several of the Hemingway rules” with its use of passive voice and extraneous adverbs. Does this mean even Hemingway falls short of the ideal? Or only that writing rules exist to be broken? Both, perhaps, and neither. Style is as elusive as grammar is constricting, and both are mastered only through endless practice. Will “Hemingway” turn you into Hemingway? No. Will it make you a better writer? Maybe. But only, I’d suggest, inasmuch as you learn when to accept and when to ignore its advice.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 9 ) |

David Foster Wallace’s Surprising List of His 10 Favorite Books, from C.S. Lewis to Tom Clancy

Free: F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise, the 1927 Masterpiece Voted the 5th Best Movie of All Time

15 Minute History: Quick History Lessons from a New, Chart-Topping Podcast

Animated Video: Dock Ellis Throws a No-Hitter Against the Padres While Tripping on LSD (1970)

Jorge Luis Borges Chats with William F. Buckley on Firing Line (1977)

Salvador Dalí’s Melting Clocks Painted on a Latte

Browse The Magical Worlds of Harry Houdini’s Scrapbooks

New “Hemingway” App Promises to Make Your Writing “Strong and Clear”

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