David Foster Wallace Talks About Literature (and More) in an Internet Chatroom: Read the 1996 Transcript

in Books, Technology | January 28th, 2014

Reddit’s Ask Me Anything (AMA) series, where users get the chance to pose questions to the likes of Neil deGrasse Tyson, Stephen King, and Bill Nye the Science Guy, provides a surprisingly simple way to interact with celebrities. Before Reddit’s arrival in 2005, however, real-time exchanges between your garden-variety Internet user and famous personalities were occasionally conducted in Internet chatrooms. One such early case appears to be a chat between the readers of WORD Magazine and David Foster Wallace (read 30 of his essays free online), which seems to have taken place in May of 1996.

If AMAs are an orderly, if vast, Q & A session, this chat is more like a boozy group meeting with your favorite English lit professor in a smoky bar. (Read the transcript here.) Wallace, using the handle “dfw,” is on a refreshingly level field with the other chat participants, and the conversation naturally drifts from one topic to another. Things, as they often do, begin with a bit of banter:

dfw: I’ve had some unpleasant nicknaames and monikers in my time, but nobody’s ever hung “fosty” on me before.

Keats: You know, I still think it should be spelled Fostie, or Fostey.
Keats: Fosty looks too much like “Frosty” and “sty” to me.

Keats: And makes me think of eyeballs packed in ice.

dfw: “Sty” as in an impacted eyelash or a pigpen, you mean?

Keats: Yeah. Is that what a sty as in “sty in your eye” is?

Marisa: I used to think the word “sty” was pronounced “stee”.

Keats: I had no idea exactly, just an unpleasant feeling about it.

dfw: Yes. Massively painful and embarrassing, too. Like a carbuncle on the exact tip of your nose — that sort of thing.

Keats: I used to think the word “trough” was pronounced “troff.”

Keats: You know, I happen to have a carbuncle on the tip of my nose right now.

Keats: Except it’s not a carbuncle, it’s more like a welt. It’s still embarrassing.

dfw: In my very first seminar in college, I pronounced facade “fakade.” The memory’s still fresh and raw.

Soon, things take a turn for the serious, and readers begin to ask Wallace about irony:

dfw: I don’t think irony’s meant to synergize with anything as heartfelt as sadness. I think the main function of contemporary irony is to protect the speaker from being interpreted as naive or sentimental.

Marisa: Why are people afraid to be seen as naive and sentimental?

dfw: Marisa: I think that’s a very deep, very hard question. One answer is that commercial comedy’s often set up to feature an ironist making devastating sport of someone who’s naive or sentimental or pretentious or pompous.

Keats: I’m starting to see a lot of irony in Hollywood and in advertising, but its function seems to be to let them talk out of both sides of their mouths.

dfw: Keats: advertising that makes fun of itself is so powerful because it implicitly congratulates both itself and the viewer (for making the joke and getting the joke, respectively).

Wallace also drops a few mentions of some of his favorite authors:

DaleK: Mr. Wallace, I’m curious…who among current novelists do you find the most interesting?

dfw: Dalek — DeLillo, Ozick, R. Powers, AM Homes, Denis Johnson, David Markson, (old) JA Phillips and Louise Erdrich.

While we can’t conclusively confirm that this was indeed the real DFW conducting the chat, it’s hard to deny that “dfw” sounds very much like the author. Certainly, the complete exchange is as much fun to read for its mid-90s internet chatroom nostalgia as it is for Wallace’s thoughts on irony, Infinite Jest, and the sound of one hand clapping. The whole transcript is available here.

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

David Foster Wallace’s Love of Language Revealed by the Books in His Personal Library

The David Foster Wallace Audio Archive: A Little Gift For the Novelist’s 50th Birthday

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Pete Seeger Tells the Story Behind “We Shall Overcome”

in History, Music | January 28th, 2014

Like nearly all folk songs, “We Shall Overcome” has a convoluted, obscure history that traces back to no single source. The Library of Congress locates the song’s origins in “African American hymns from the early 20th century” and an article on About.com dates the melody to an antebellum song called “No More Auction Block for Me” and the lyrics to a turn-of-the-century hymn written by the Reverend Charles Tindley of Philadelphia. The original lyric was one of personal salvation—“I’ll Overcome Someday”—but at least by 1945, when the song was taken up by striking tobacco workers in Charleston, S.C., it was transmuted into a statement of solidarity as “We Will Overcome.” Needless to say, in its final form, “We Shall Overcome” became the unofficial anthem of the labor and Civil Rights movements and eventually came to be sung “in North Korea, in Beirut, Tiananmen Square and in South Africa’s Soweto Township.”

Pete Seeger—who passed away yesterday at the age of 94—has long been credited with the dissemination of “We Shall Overcome,” but he was always quick to cite his sources. Seeger heard the song in 1947 from folklorist Zilphia Horton, music director at Tennessee’s Highlander Folk Center who, Seeger said, “had a beautiful alto voice and sang it with no rhythm.” As he told NPR recently, his touches were also those of other singers:

I gave it kind of ump-chinka, ump-chinka, ump-chinka, ump-chinka, ump-chinka, ump. It was medium slow as I sang it, but the banjo kept a steady rhythm going. I remember teaching it to a gang in Carnegie Hall that year, and the following year I put it in a little music magazine called People’s Songs. Over the years, I remember singing it two different ways. I’m usually credited with changing [‘Will’] to ‘Shall,’ but there was a black woman who taught at Highlander Center, a wonderful person named Septima Clark. And she always liked shall, too, I’m told.

According to Seeger in the interview above—conducted by Josh Baron before a 2010 performance—the person most responsible for “making it the number one song back in those days” was the Music Director of the Highlander Folk Center, Guy Carawan, who “sent messages to the civil rights movement all through the South from Texas to Florida to Maryland.” Carawan “introduced this song with a new rhythm that I had never heard before.” Seeger goes on to describe the rhythm in detail, then says “it was the hit song of the weekend in February 1960…. It was not a song, it was the song all across the South. I’ve found out since then that the song started off as a union song in the 19th century.”

In this particular interview, Seeger takes full credit for changing the “will” to “shall.” Although it was “the only record [he] made which sold,” he didn’t seek to cash in on his changes (Seeger shared the copyright with Zilphia Horton, Carawan, and Frank Hamilton). As you can easily see from the numerous eulogies and tributes popping up all over (or a quick scan of the “Pete Seeger Appreciation Page”), Seeger deserves to be remembered for much more than his sixties folk singing, but he perhaps did more than anyone to make “We Shall Overcome” a song sung by a nation. And as he tells it, it was song he hoped would resonate worldwide:

I was singing for some young Lutheran church people in Sundance, Idaho, and there were some older people who were mistrustful of my lefty politics. They said: ‘Who are you intending to overcome?’ I said: ‘Well, in Selma, Alabama they’re probably thinking of Chief Pritchett.; they will overcome. And I am sure Dr. King is thinking of the system of segregation across the whole country, not just the South. For me, it means the entire world. We’ll overcome our tendencies to solve our problems with killing and learn to work together to bring this world together.

Via Blank on Blank

94-Year-Old Pete Seeger Sings “This Land is Your Land” at Farm Aid

Willie Nelson, Pete Seeger, and Arlo Guthrie at Occupy Wall Street

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

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Harold Bloom Creates a Massive List of Works in The “Western Canon”: Read Many of the Books Free Online

in Books, Education, Literature | January 28th, 2014

I have little desire to rehash the politics, but the facts are plain: by the time I arrived in college as an undergraduate English major in the mid-90s, the idea of the “Western Canon” as a container of—in the words of a famous hymn—“all that’s good, and great, and true” was seriously on the wane, to put it mildly. And in many quarters of academia, mention of the name of Yale literary critic Harold Bloom provoked, at the very least, a raised eyebrow and pointed silence. Bloom’s reputation perhaps unfairly fell victim to the so-called “Canon Wars,” likely at times because of a misidentification with political philosopher Allan Bloom. That Bloom was himself no ideologue, writes Jim Sleeper; he was a close friend of Saul Bellow and “an eccentric interpreter of Enlightenment thought who led an Epicurean, quietly gay life.” Nonetheless, his fiery attack on changing academic values, The Closing of the American Mind, became a textbook of the neoconservative right.

Though Harold Bloom wished to distance himself from culture war polemics, he has unapologetically practiced what Allan Bloom preached, teaching the Canonical “great books” of literature and religion and opposing all manner of critics on the left, whom he lumps together in the phrase “the School of Resentment.” Bloom’s 1973 The Anxiety of Influence has itself exerted a major influence on literary studies, and best-selling popular works, like 1998’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, have kept Harold Bloom’s name in circulation even when scholarly citations of his work declined. In 1994, Bloom re-affirmed his commitment to the Canon with The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, a fierce sortie against his so-called “School of Resentment” adversaries and a work University of Minnesota professor Norman Fruman called a “heroically brave, formidably learned and often unbearably sad response to the present state of the humanities.” (Hear Bloom discuss the book with Eleanor Wachtel in a 1995 CBC interview.)

The Western Canon is tightly focused on only 26 authors, but in a series of four appendices, Bloom lists the hundreds of other names he considers canonical. For all of Bloom’s ornery defensiveness, his list is surprisingly inclusive, as well as—for Fruman—surprisingly idiosyncratic. (Bloom later disavowed the list, claiming that his editor insisted on it.) Like a classical philologist, Bloom divides his Canon into four “ages” or periods: The Theocratic Age (2000 BCE-1321 CE); The Aristocratic Age (1321–1832); The Democratic Age: 1832–1900); and The Chaotic Age (20th Century). You can view the complete list here. Below, we’ve compiled a very partial, but still sizable, excerpt of texts from Bloom’s list that are available online through the University of Adelaide’s ebook library. For all of the unpopular positions he has taken over the past few decades, Bloom’s immense erudition, expansive intellect, and sincere commitment to the humanities have never been in question. As a distinguished exemplar of a fading tradition, he is an invaluable resource for students and lovers of literature.

A: “The Theocratic Age”

The Ancient Greeks

Homer (ca.800BC): Iliad; Odyssey.
Hesiod (ca.700BC): Works and Days; Theogony.
Sappho (ca.600BC)
Aeschylus (525 BC — 456 BC): Oresteia; Seven Against Thebes; Prometheus Bound; Persians; Suppliant Women.
Sophocles (c. 496‑c. 405 BC): Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus; Antigone; Electra; Ajax; Women of Trachis; Philoctetes.
Euripides (480 or 484–406 BC): Cyclops; Heracles; Alcestis; Hecuba; Bacchae; Orestes; Andromache; Medea; Ion; Hippolytus; Helen; Iphigenia at Aulis.
Aristophanes (ca. 446 BC — 385 BC): The Birds; The Clouds; The Frogs; Lysistrata; The Knights; The Wasps; The Assemblywomen.
Herodotus, 485–420BCE: The Histories.
Thucydides, ca.460 BCE: The Peloponnesian Wars.
Plato, c.427‑c.347 BCE: Dialogues.
Aristotle, 384–322 BCE: Poetics; Ethics.

Hellenistic Greeks

Menander, ca. 342–291 BC: The Girl from Samos.
Plutarch, 46–120: Lives; Moralia.
Aesop (620 — 560 BC): Fables.
Petronius, c.27–66
The Romans Terence, 195/185–159 BC The Girl from Andros; The Eunuch; The Mother-in-Law. Lucretius, 98?–55 BCE The Way Things Are. Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106–43 BCE On the Gods. Horace, 65–8 BCE Odes; Epistles; Satires. Catullus (c.84 B.C. — c.54 B.C.) Attis and Other Poems. Virgil (70–19 BC) Aeneid; Eclogues; Georgics. Ovid (43 BC — 17 AD) Metamorphoses; The Art of Love; Heroides. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, ca.4 BCE–65 CE Tragedies, particularly Medea and Hercules Furens. Petronius, c.27–66 Satyricon. Apuleius, c. 123/125‑c. 180 The Golden Ass.

The Middle Ages: Latin, Arabic, and the Vernacular Before Dante

Augustine of Hippo, 354–430: City of God; Confessions.
Wolfram von Eschenbach, 1170–1220: Parzival.
Chrétien de Troyes, 12th cent: Yvain: The Knight of the Lion.
Beowulf (ca.800)

B: “The Aristocratic Age”

Italy

Dante (1265 — 1321): The Divine Comedy; The New Life.
Petrarch, 1304–1374: Lyric Poems; Selections.
Giovanni Boccaccio, 1313–1375: The Decameron.
Matteo Maria Boiardo, 1440 or 41–1494.: Orlando Innamorato.
Lodovico Ariosto, 1474–1533: Orlando Furioso.
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1469–1527: The Prince; The Mandrake, a Comedy.
Benvenuto Cellini, 1500–1571: Autobiography.
Tommaso Campanella, 1568–1639: Poems; The City of the Sun.
Spain

Miguel de Cervantes, 1547–1616

Don Quixote; Exemplary Stories.

Pedro Calderon de la Barca, 1600–1681

Life is a Dream; The Mayor of Zalamea; The Mighty Magician; The Doctor of His Own Honor.

England and Scotland

Chaucer, Geoffrey (ca.1343–1400)

The Canterbury Tales; Troilus and Criseyde.

Thomas Malory, 1430–1471

Le Morte D’Arthur.

Thomas More, 1478–1535

Utopia.

Philip Sidney, 1554–1586.

The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia; Astrophel and Stella; An Apology for Poetry.

Edmund Spenser, 1552–1599

The Faerie Queene; The Minor Poems.

Christopher Marlowe, 1564–1593

Poems and Plays.

Thomas Nashe, 1567–1601

The Unfortunate Traveller.

William Shakespeare, 1564–1616

Plays and Poems.

John Donne, 1572–1631

Poems; Sermons.

Ben Jonson, 1573–1637

Poems, Plays, and Masques.

Francis Bacon, 1561–1626

Essays.

Robert Burton, 1577–1640

The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Thomas Browne, 1605–1682

Religio Medici; Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall; The Garden of Cyrus.

Thomas Hobbes, 1588–1679

Leviathan.

Herrick, Robert, 1591–1674

Poems.

Andrew Marvell, 1621–1678

Poems.

John Ford, 1586-ca.1640

‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore.

John Webster, c.1580‑c.1634

The White Devil; The Duchess of Malfi.

Izaak Walton, 1593–1683

The Compleat Angler.

John Milton, 1608–1674

Paradise Lost; Paradise Regained; Lycidas, Comus, and the Minor Poems; Samson Agonistes; Areopagitica.

John Aubrey, 1626–1697

Brief Lives.

Samuel Butler, 1612–1680

Hudibras.

John Dryden, 1631–1700

Poetry and Plays; Critical Essays.

Jonathan Swift, 1667–1745

A Tale of a Tub; Gulliver’s Travels; Shorter Prose Works; Poems.

Alexander Pope, 1688–1744

Poems.

John Gay, 1685–1732

The Beggar’s Opera.

James Boswell, 1740–1795

Life of Johnson; Journals.

Samuel Johnson, 1709–1784

Works.

Edward Gibbon, 1737–1794

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Edmund Burke, 1729–1797

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful; Reflections on the Revolution in France

Oliver Goldsmith, 1728–1774

The Vicar of Wakefield; She Stoops to Conquer; The Traveller; The Deserted Village.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 1751–1816

The School of Scandal; The Rivals.

William Cowper, 1731–1800

Poetical Works.

Defoe, Daniel (1661?-1731)

Moll Flanders; Robinson Crusoe; A Journal of the Plague Year.

Samuel Richardson, 1689–1761.

Clarissa; Pamela; Sir Charles Grandison.

Henry Fielding, 1707–1754

Joseph Andrews; The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling.

Tobias Smollett, 1721–1771

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker; The Adventures of Roderick Random.

Laurence Sterne, 1713–1768

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman; A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy.

Fanny Burney, 1752–1840

Evelina.

France

Michel de Montaigne, 1533–1592

Essays.

Francois Rabelais, 1494?-1553?

Gargantua and Pantagruel.

Marguerite de Navarre, 1492–1549

The Heptameron.

Jean de La Fontaine, 1621–1695

Fables.

Molière, 1622–1673

The Misanthrope; Tartuffe; The School for Wives; The Learned Ladies; Don Juan; School for Husbands; Ridiculous Precieuses; The Would-Be Gentleman; The Miser; The Imaginary Invalid.

Blaise Pascal, 1623–1662

Pensées.

Rousseau, Jean–Jacques, 1712–1778

The Confessions; Émile; La Nouvelle Héloïse.

Voltaire, 1694–1778

Zadig; Candide; Letters on England; The Lisbon Earthquake.

Germany

Erasmus of Rotterdam, 1466–1536

In Praise of Folly.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749–1832

Faust, Parts One and Two; Dichtung und Wahrheit; Egmont; Elective Affinities; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Poems; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship; Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Wandering; Italian Journey; Verse Plays; Hermann and Dorothea; Roman Elegies; Venetian Epigrams; West-Eastern Divan.

Friedrich Schiller, 1759–1805

The Robbers; Mary Stuart; Wallenstein; Don Carlos; On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature.

C: “The Democratic Age”

Italy

Giovanni Verga, 1840–1922

Little Novels of Sicily; Mastro-Don Gesualdo; The House by the Medlar Tree; The She-Wolf and Other Stories.

France

Victor Hugo, 1802–1885

The Distance, the Shadows: Selected Poems; Les Misérables; Notre-Dame of Paris; William Shakespeare; The Toilers of the Sea; The End of Satan; God.

Gautier, Théophile, 1811–1872

Mademoiselle de Maupin; Enamels and Cameos.

Balzac, Honoré de, 1799–1850

The Girl with the Golden Eyes; Louis Lambert; The Wild Ass’s Skin; Old Goriot; Cousin Bette; A Harlot High and Low; Eugénie Grandet; Ursule Mirouet.

Stendhal, 1783–1842

On Love; The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma.

Gustave Flaubert, 1821–1880

Madame Bovary; Sentimental Education; Salammbô; A Simple Soul.

George Sand, 1804–1876

The Haunted Pool.

Charles Baudelaire, 1821–1867

Flowers of Evil; Paris Spleen.

Guy de Maupassant, 1850–1893

Selected Short Stories.

Emile Zola, 1840–1902

Germinal; L’Assommoir; Nana.

Scandinavia

Henrik Ibsen, 1828–1906

Brand; Peer Gynt; Emperor and Galilean; Hedda Gabler; The Master Builder; The Lady from the Sea; When We Dead Awaken.

Great Britain

William Blake, 1757–1827

Complete Poetry and Prose.

William Wordsworth, 1770–1850

Poems; The Prelude.

Walter Scott, 1771–1832

Waverley; The Heart of Midlothian; Redgauntlet; Old Mortality.

Jane Austen, 1775–1817

Pride and Prejudice; Emma; Mansfield Park; Persuasion.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772–1834

Poems and Prose.

Hazlitt, William, 1778–1830

Essays and Criticism.

George Byron, 1788–1824

Don Juan; P oems.

Thomas de Quincey, 1785–1859

Confessions of an English Opium Eater; Selected Prose.

Maria Edgeworth, 1767–1849

Castle Rackrent.

Elizabeth Gaskell, 1810–1865

Cranford; Mary Barton; North and South.

Charles Robert Maturin, 1782–1824

Melmoth the Wanderer.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792–1822

Poems; A Defence of Poetry.

Mary Shelley, 1797–1851

Frankenstein.

John Keats, 1795–1821

Poems and Letters.

Robert Browning, 1812–1889

Poems; The Ring and the Book.

Charles Dickens, 1812–1870

The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club; David Copperfield; The Adventures of Oliver Twist; A Tale of Two Cities; Bleak House; Hard Times; Nicholas Nickleby; Dombey and Son; Great Expectations; Martin Chuzzlewit; Christmas Stories; Little Dorrit; Our Mutual Friend; The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Alfred Tennyson, 1809–1892

Poems.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1828–1882

Poems and Translations.

Matthew Arnold, 1822–1888

Poems; Essays.

Christina Georgina Rossetti, 1830–1894.

Poems.

Thomas Love Peacock, 1785–1866

Nightmare Abbey; Gryll Grange.

Thomas Carlyle, 1795–1881

Selected Prose; Sartor Resartus.

John Ruskin, 1819–1900

Modern Painters; The Stones of Venice; Unto This Last; The Queen of the Air.

John Stuart Mill, 1806–1873

On Liberty; Autobiography.

Anthony Trollope, 1815–1882

The Barsetshire Novels; The Palliser Novels; Orley Farm; The Way We Live Now.

Lewis Carroll, 1832–1898

Complete Works.

George Gissing, 1857–1903

New Grub Street.

Charlotte Bronte, 1816–1855

Jane Eyre; Villette.

Emily Bronte, 1818–1848

Poems; Wuthering Heights.

Anne Bronte, 1820–1849

William Makepeace Thackeray, 1811–1863

Vanity Fair; The History of Henry Esmond.

George Meredith, 1828–1909

Poems; The Egoist.

Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith), 1874–1936

Collected Poems; The Man Who Was Thursday.

Samuel Butler, 1835–1902

Erewhon; The Way of All Flesh.

Wilkie Collins, 1824–1889

The Moonstone; The Woman in White; No Name.

Thomson, James, 1834–1882

The City of the Dreadful Night.

Oscar Wilde, 1854–1900

Plays; The Picture of Dorian Gray; The Artist as Critic; Letters.

George Eliot, 1819–1880

Adam Bede; Silas Marner; The Mill on the Floss; Middlemarch; Daniel Deronda.

Robert Louis Stevenson, 1850–1894

Essays; Kidnapped; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Treasure Island; The New Arabian Nights; The Master of Ballantrae; Weir of Hermiston.

William Morris, 1834–1896

Early Romances; Poems; The Earthly Paradise; The Well at the World’s End; News from Nowhere.

Bram Stoker, 1847–1912

Dracula.

George MacDonald, 1824–1905

Lilith; At the Back of the North Wind.

Germany

Jakob Grimm, 1785–1863 and Grimm, Wilhelm, 1786–1859

Fairy Tales.

Hoffmann, E. T. A. (Ernst Theodor Amadeus), 1776–1822

The Devil’s Elixir; Tales.

Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844–1900

The Birth of Tragedy; Beyond Good and Evil; On the Genealogy of Morals; The Will to Power.

Russia

Aleksandr Pushkin, 1799–1837

Complete Prose Tales; Complete Poetry; Eugene Onegin; Narrative Poems; Boris Godunov.

Nikolai Gogol, 1809–1852

The Complete Tales; Dead Souls; The Government Inspector.

Mikhail Lermontov, 1814–1841

Narrative Poems; A Hero of Our Time.

Ivan Turgenev, 1818–1883

A Sportsman’s Notebook; A Month in the Country; Fathers and Sons; On the Eve; First Love.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1821–1881

Notes from the Underground; Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Possessed (The Devils); The Brothers Karamazov; Short Novels.

Leo Tolstoy, 1828–1910

The Cossacks; War and Peace; Anna Karenina; A Confession; The Power of Darkness; Short Novels.

Anton Chekhov, 1860–1904

The Tales; The Major Plays.

The United States

Washington Irving, 1783–1859

The Sketch Book.

James Fenimore Cooper, 1789–1851.

The Deerslayers.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803–1882

Nature; Essays; Representative Men; The Conduct of Life; Journals; Poems.

Emily Dickinson, 1830–1886

Complete Poems.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1804–1864

The Scarlet Letter; Tales and Sketches; The Marble Faun; Notebooks.

Herman Melville, 1819–1891

Moby-Dick; The Piazza Tales; Billy Budd; Collected Poems; Clarel.

Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849

Poetry and Tales; Essays and Reviews; The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; Eureka.

Henry David Thoreau, 1817–1862

Walden; Poems; Essays.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1807–1882

Selected Poems.

Ambrose Bierce, 1842–1913

Collected Writings.

Louisa May Alcott, 1832–1888

Little Women.

Kate Chopin, 1850–1904

The Awakening.

William Dean Howells, 1837–1920

The Rise of Silas Lapham; A Modern Instance.

Henry James, 1843–1916

The Portrait of a Lady; The Bostonians; The Princess Casamassima; The Awkward Age; Short Novels and Tales; The Ambassadors; The Wings of the Dove; The Golden Bowl

Mark Twain, 1835–1910

Complete Short Stories; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Devil’s Racetrack; Number Forty-Four: The Mysterious Stranger; Pudd’nhead Wilson; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

William James, 1842–1910

The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism.

D: “The Chaotic Age”

France

Anatole France, 1844–1924

Penguin Island; Thaïs.

Marcel Proust, 1871–1922

Remembrance of Things Past (In Search of Lost Time).

Albert Camus, 1913–1960

The Stranger; The Plague; The Fall; The Rebel.

Great Britain and Ireland.

Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865–1939

The Collected Poems; Collected Plays; A Vision; Mythologies.

George Bernard Shaw, 1856–1950

Major Critical Essays; Heartbreak House; Pygmalion; Saint Joan; Major Barbara; Back to Methuselah.

John Millington Synge, 1871–1909

Collected Plays.

George Douglas Brown, 1869–1902

The House with the Green Shutters.

Thomas Hardy, 1840–1928

The Well-Beloved; The Woodlanders; The Return of the Native; The Mayor of Casterbridge; Far From the Madding Crowd; Tess of the D’Urbervilles; Jude the Obscure; Collected Poems.

Rudyard Kipling, 1865–1936

Kim; Collected Stories; Puck of Pook’s Hill; Complete Verse.

Housman, A. E., 1859–1936

Collected Poems.

Joseph Conrad, 1857–1924

Lord Jim; The Secret Agent; Nostromo; Under Western Eyes; Victory.

Ronald Firbank, 1886–1926

Five Novels.

Ford Madox Ford, 1873–1939

Parade’s End; The Good Soldier.

Saki, 1870–1916

The Short Stories.

Wells, H. G., 1866–1946

The Science Fiction Novels.

David Lindsay, 1876–1945

A Voyage to Arcturus.

Arnold Bennett, 1867–1931.

The Old Wives’ Tale.

John Galsworthy, 1867–1933

The Forsyth Saga.

Lawrence, D. H., 1885–1930

Complete Poems; Studies in Classic American Literature; Complete Short Stories; Sons and Lovers; The Rainbow; Women in Love.

Virginia Woolf, 1882–1941

Mrs. Dalloway; To the Lighthouse; Orlando: A Biography; The Waves; Between the Acts.

James Joyce, 1882–1941

Dubliners; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses; Finnegans Wake.

George Orwell, 1903–1950

Collected Essays; 1984.

Germany.

Franz Kafka, 1883–1924

Amerika; The Complete Stories; The Blue Octavo Notebook; The Trial; Diaries; The Castle; Parables, Fragments, Aphorisms.

Russia.

Maksim Gorky, 1868–1936

Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Andreev; Autobiography.

Scandinavia.

Knut Hamsun, 1859–1952

Hunger; Pan.

Czech.

Karel Čapek, 1890–1938

War with the Newts; R.U.R.

Australia and New Zealand.

Miles Franklin, 1879–1954

My Brilliant Career.

Katherine Mansfield, 1888–1923

The Short Stories.

The United States.

Edith Wharton, 1862–1937

Collected Short Stories; The Age of Innocence; Ethan Frome; The House of Mirth; The Custom of the Country.

Willa Cather, 1873–1947

My Antonia; The Professor’s House; A Lost Lady.

Gertrude Stein, 1874–1946

Three Lives; The Geographical History of America; The Making of Americans; Tender Buttons.

Theodore Dreiser, 1871–1945

Sister Carrie; An American Tragedy.

Sinclair Lewis, 1885–1951

Babbitt; It Can’t Happen Here.

Eugene O’Neill, 1888–1953

Lazarus Laughed; The Iceman Cometh; Long Day’s Journey into Night.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 1896–1940

Babylon Revisited and Other Stories; The Great Gatsby; Tender is the Night.

Nathanael West, 1903–1940

Miss Lonelyhearts; A Cool Million; The Day of the Locust.

Of this last Appendix–which ends with Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and includes a great degree of diversity–Bloom writes: “I am not as confident about this list as the first three. Cultural prophecy is always a mug’s game. Not all of the works here can prove to be canonical . . . literary overpopulation is a hazard to many among them. But I have neither excluded nor included on the basis of cultural politics of any kind.” Again, the selections above are very limited. Before you ask, “what about x, y, or z!” see Bloom’s full list here. And if you still do not find authors you believe deserve inclusion in any version of the Western Canon, pick up a copy of Bloom’s book to learn more about his critical criteria.

Related Content:

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

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David Lynch’s Perfume Ads Based on the Works of Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald & D.H. Lawrence

in Film | January 28th, 2014

As we wrote last week, David Lynch is not only one of the great cinematic spelunkers of the unconscious, creating images and storylines that have disturbed moviegoers for almost four decades, but he’s also had a successful run as a commercial director, making ads for among other companies Alka-Seltzer, Barilla Pasta and Georgia Coffee.

In 1988, fresh off his success with Blue Velvet and just before he started production on his landmark TV series Twin Peaks, he made his first commercials — a quartet of advertisements for Calvin Klein’s perfume Obsession featuring passages from such literary titans as F. Scott Fitzgerald, D.H. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway. (Lynch’s ad featuring Gustave Flaubert is mysteriously unavailable on Youtube.)

The commercials have all the pretension, the luscious black and white photography and the vacant-eyed beautiful people that you might expect from a Calvin Klein ad. Yet they also show glimmers of Lynch’s aesthetic – a noirish, dream-like tone, an oddly framed close up, a fondness for flashing lights. Lynch dialed down the weird to serve the text. The result is far more romantic and beautiful than you might expect from the director. If you’re hoping to see a David Lynch commercial that will give nightmares, check this one out instead.

The ad for F. Scott Fitzgerald, which you can see above, uses one of the more famous passages from The Great Gatsby.

He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

Sharp-eyed viewers might have caught that the ad stars future Oscar-winning actor Benicio Del Toro and Heather Graham, who would later appear in Twin Peaks. The commercial dissolves back and forth between Del Toro and Graham until the inevitable kiss when the ad cuts, with surprisingly literalness, to a blooming flower.

The D.H. Lawrence ad uses a quotation from Women in Love:

Her fingers went over the mould of his face, over his features. How perfect and foreign he was—ah how dangerous! Her soul thrilled with complete knowledge. This was the glistening, forbidden apple … She kissed him, putting her fingers over his face, his eyes, his nostrils, over his brows and his ears, to his neck, to know him, to gather him in by touch.

Lynch shows a blonde in a brocade dress looming over her improbably beautiful paramour who is lying on a divan. She paws at his chiseled features before leaning in for a kiss.

And finally, the Ernest Hemingway ad – the spookiest and most Lynchian of the bunch — features a passage from The Sun Also Rises:

I lay awake thinking and my mind jumping around. Then I couldn’t keep away from it, and I started to think about Brett. I was thinking about Brett and my mind started to go in sort of smooth waves. Then all of a sudden I started to cry. After a while it was better and I lay in bed and listened to the heavy trams go by.. and then I went to sleep.

This ad opens with a half-naked man lying awake in a darkened room filled with grotesque shadows. He’s haunted by the specter of an androgynous woman in a tank top. There’s a flash of lightening and then the woman kisses his cheek. Lynch closes up on his eye, which is welling up with a single tear.

As a side note: the half-naked guy in the ad is James Marshall who went on to star in Twin Peaks, as did Lara Flynn Boyle who appears in the missing Flaubert commericial. Lynch has a reputation of being very loyal to his actors.

The Obsession ads proved to be such a success that he started getting requests to do commercials for other luxury perfume companies like Giorgio Armani’s Gio and Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium.

As Lynch told Chris Rodley in Lynch on Lynch, he thinks of commercials as “little bitty films, and I always learn something by doing them.”

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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Pete Seeger Dies at 94: Remember the American Folk Legend with a Priceless Film from 1947

in Life, Music | January 28th, 2014

We’ve got some sad news to report. Last night Pete Seeger, one of America’s national treasures, died at the age of 94. For nearly 70 years, Seeger embodied folk music and its ideals (“communication, entertainment, social comment, historical continuity, inclusiveness”) and became a tireless advocate for social justice and protecting the environment. In recent years, Seeger made his voice heard at Occupy Wall Street and even paid a visit to the 2013 edition of Farm Aid, where he sang “This Land is Your Land”. Above you can watch a film that brings you back to Seeger’s early days. Released in 1946, To Hear Your Banjo Play is an engaging 16-minute introduction to American folk music, written and narrated by Alan Lomax and featuring rare performances by Woody Guthrie, Baldwin Hawes, Sonny Terry, Brownee McGhee, Texas Gladden and Margot Mayo’s American Square Dance Group. In the film, Seeger is only 27 years old. We’ll miss you dearly Pete.

To Hear Your Banjo Play resides in our collection of 625 Free Online Movies.

94-Year-Old Pete Seeger Sings “This Land is Your Land” at Farm Aid

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Watch Bill Gates Lose a Chess Match in 79 Seconds to the New World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen

in Games, Sports | January 28th, 2014

Last November Magnus Carlsen, then only 22 years old, became the Chess World Champion when he soundly defeated Viswanathan Anand in a best-of-12 series match held in Chennai, India. Carlsen won three games, tied ten, and lost none. Only the second chess champion from the West since World War II (and the first since the “eccentric genius” Bobby Fischer), Carlsen suddenly found himself a celebrity of sorts, getting airtime on TV shows. Appearing on the Scandinavian talk show, Skavlan, a few days ago, Carlsen delighted viewers when he played a game of speed chess against Bill Gates, the wunderkind of a previous generation, who co-founded Microsoft when he was only 20 years old. So how did Gates hold up? Well, let’s just say that, true to its name, it was a game of speed chess. Gates lost speedily — in 79 seconds and just nine moves.

Not that he needs it, Bill got a little consolation yesterday when it was announced that he and Melinda will be the commencement speakers at Stanford’s graduation this coming June.

Chess Rivals Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky Meet in the ‘Match of the Century’

Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi Square Off in a Monstrous Game of Chess (1934)

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Watch the Complete, Crowdsourced Concert Film of Neil Young’s Great Carnegie Hall Show (1/7/14)

in Music | January 27th, 2014

On January 7th, Neil Young played an acoustic solo concert at Carnegie Hall and treated the audience to what Rolling Stone calls, “an absolutely jaw-dropping two hour and 20-minute show that focused largely on his golden period of 1966 to 1978.” “It was, without a doubt, one of the greatest Neil Young shows of the past decade, at least when he wasn’t playing with Crazy Horse.” Above, we have a crowdsourced concert film of that entire glorious show. It was stitched together and uploaded to Youtube by Reelife Documentary Productions. Find the 23-song setlist here.

via @SteveSilberman

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Neil Young Busking in Glasgow, 1976: The Story Behind the Footage

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Lewis Carroll’s 8 Still-Relevant Rules For Letter-Writing

in Letters, Literature | January 27th, 2014

My graduate school supervisor taught me all I know about professional email etiquette. Vague language? Poor form. Typos? Nothing worse. Run-on paragraphs? A big no-no. Spelling your recipient’s name wrong? No coming back from that one. Unfortunately, hastily composed emails and ambiguous phrasing are all too common, particularly with the high volume of emails many people send daily. Skimping on the courtesy and the proofreading, however, is likely to cost you points with your recipient. Thankfully, we’ve provided a list of correspondence best practices, compiled by an authority on letters: Lewis Carroll (who, incidentally, would have celebrated his 182nd birthday today). In 1890, Carroll began to sell a Wonderland Stamp Case, which helped its users to organize their various postage stamps. Paired with the case was a short essay, entitled “Eight Or Nine Wise Words About Letter-Writing.”

The initial guide, of course, refers to pen and paper correspondence. In fact, Carroll’s foremost precept, which instructs one to write legibly, is no longer a concern in the digital age. Nevertheless, the remaining eight rules provide a clear and simple crib sheet for letter-writing that has stood the test of time remarkably well:

1) Start by addressing any questions the receiver previously had - “Don’t fill more than a page and a half with apologies for not having written sooner!

The best subject, to begin with, is your friend’s last letter. Write with the letter open before you. Answer his questions, and make any remarks his letter suggests. Then go on to what you want to say yourself. This arrangement is more courteous, and pleasanter for the reader, than to fill the letter with your own invaluable remarks, and then hastily answer your friend’s questions in a postscript. Your friend is much more likely to enjoy your wit, after his own anxiety for information has been satisfied.”

2) Don’t repeat yourself - “When once you have said your say, fully and clearly, on a certain point, and have failed to convince your friend, drop that subject: to repeat your arguments, all over again, will simply lead to his doing the same…”

3) Write with a level head — “When you have written a letter that you feel may possibly irritate your friend, however necessary you may have felt it to so express yourself, put it aside till the next day. Then read it over again, and fancy it addressed to yourself. This will often lead to your writing it all over again, taking out a lot of the vinegar and pepper, and putting in honey instead, and thus making a much more palatable dish of it!”

4) When in doubt, err on the side of courtesy - “If your friend makes a severe remark, either leave it unnoticed, or make your reply distinctly less severe: and if he makes a friendly remark, tending towards ‘making up’ the little difference that has arisen between you, let your reply be distinctly more friendly. If, in picking a quarrel, each party declined to go more than three-eighths of the way, and if, in making friends, each was ready to go five-eighths of the way—why, there would be more reconciliations than quarrels! Which is like the Irishman’s remonstrance to his gad-about daughter—‘Shure, you’re always goin’ out! You go out three times, for wanst that you come in!’ ”

5) Don’t try to have the last word — “How many a controversy would be nipped in the bud, if each was anxious to let the other have the last word! Never mind how telling a rejoinder you leave unuttered: never mind your friend’s supposing that you are silent from lack of anything to say: let the thing drop, as soon as it is possible without discourtesy: remember ‘speech is silvern, but silence is golden’! (N.B.—If you are a gentleman, and your friend a lady, this Rule is superfluous: you won’t get the last word!)”

6) Humor is hard to translate to writing. Be obvious. - “If it should ever occur to you to write, jestingly, in dispraise of your friend, be sure you exaggerate enough to make the jesting obvious: a word spoken in jest, but taken as earnest, may lead to very serious consequences. I have known it to lead to the breaking-off of a friendship. Suppose, for instance, you wish to remind your friend of a sovereign you have lent him, which he has forgotten to repay—you might quite mean the words “I mention it, as you seem to have a conveniently bad memory for debts”, in jest: yet there would be nothing to wonder at if he took offence at that way of putting it. But, suppose you wrote “Long observation of your career, as a pickpocket and a burglar, has convinced me that my one lingering hope, for recovering that sovereign I lent you, is to say ‘Pay up, or I’ll summons yer!’” he would indeed be a matter-of-fact friend if he took that as seriously meant!”

7) Don’t forget that attachment! — “When you say, in your letter, “I enclose cheque for £5”, or “I enclose John’s letter for you to see”, leave off writing for a moment—go and get the document referred to—and put it into the envelope. Otherwise, you are pretty certain to find it lying about, after the Post has gone!”

8) Using a postscript? Make it short — “A Postscript is a very useful invention: but it is not meant (as so many ladies suppose) to contain the real gist of the letter: it serves rather to throw into the shade any little matter we do not wish to make a fuss about.”

Casual Victorian-era “silly women!” sexism aside, Carroll’s tips are surprisingly fresh and applicable. If you’re planning on engaging in some serious snail-mail correspondence, we suggest you check out Carroll’s complete essay over at Project Gutenberg.

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

See The Original Alice In Wonderland Manuscript, Handwritten & Illustrated By Lewis Carroll (1864)

The Real Alice in Wonderland Circa 1862

by Ilia Blinderman | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

A: “The Theocratic Age”

The Ancient Greeks

Hellenistic Greeks

The Romans

The Middle Ages: Latin, Arabic, and the Vernacular Before Dante

B: “The Aristocratic Age”

Italy

Spain

England and Scotland

France

Germany

C: “The Democratic Age”

Italy

France

Scandinavia

Great Britain

Germany

Russia

The United States

D: “The Chaotic Age”

France

Great Britain and Ireland.

Germany.

Russia.

Scandinavia.

Czech.

Australia and New Zealand.

The United States.

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