No one is surprised when authors mine their personal experiences. If they’re lucky enough to strike gold, other miners may be brought on to bring the stories to the silver screen. Here’s where things get tricky (if lucrative). No one wants to see his or her important life details getting royally botched, especially when the results are blown up 70 feet across.
Cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s path to letting others take the reins as her story is immortalized in front of a live audience is not the usual model. The family history she shared in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic has been turned into a Broadway musical.
Now that would be a nail biter, especially if the non-fictional source material includes a graphically awkward first sexual encounter and your closeted father’s suicide.
In the wrong hands, it could have been an excruciating evening, but Fun Home, the musical, has had excellent pedigree from the get go.
It’s also worth noting that this show passes the infamous Bechdel Test (below) both onstage and off, with a book and lyrics by Lisa Kron and music by Jeanine Tesori.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy has had an enormously wide, cross-cultural appeal. This despite the fact that its creator was a university professor of a long-dead language, Anglo-Saxon, who set his story in a world of customs and mores—supernatural elements aside—that bear a fairly close resemblance to ancient and medieval England. But such similarly provincial settings have raised no barriers to the global reach of the Iliad, say, or Shakespeare. Western epics, ancient and modern, may on the one hand have traveled the globe on waves of cultural imperialism (and Hollywood film), and, on the other, they have their own built-in global reach because they tap into archetypal story-types and human characteristics—because their use of myth and folklore reads as universal, though the particulars change from place to place and age to age.
The multilingual among us have the opportunity to see how well, or not, great stories translate into different cultural contexts. Readers, for example, of both Chinese and English will be able to compare Tolkien’s originals with forthcoming editions of the books from WenJing Publishing. The rest of us provincial monolinguals can still make comparisons of visual interpretations of the text, like these possible book covers drawn by artist Jian Guo. Part of a competition held by the publisher of the new Chinese text, the beautiful, monochromatic illustrations draw on many of the design elements of Tolkien’s original paintings for the trilogy’s covers, elaborating on the iconic ring and towers with intricate Asian lines and flourishes. At the top, see The Fellowship of the Ring, above The Two Towers, and below, The Return of the King.
The artist, an architectural student, describes his style as “glass painting style,” which he uses for its “sense of religious magnificence.” Interestingly, before seeing Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings adaptation in 2002, he had never heard of the books. (Previous Chinese translations of the books feature rather unimaginative covers with images from Jackson’s movies.) The films converted him into an avid reader of Tolkien—see a Hobbit illustration at the bottom of the post. Jian is also a lover of J.K. Rowling’s popular fantasy series and has designed some wonderfully stylized illustrations for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
Ralph Steadman is best known as the artist who realized the gonzo vision of Hunter S. Thompson in illustrations for the latter’s books and articles (and more recently, perhaps, for the labels on Colorado’s Flying Dog brew). His work has famously appeared over the past several decades in Punch, Private Eye, The New York Times, and Rolling Stone, and he produced a brilliantly illustrated edition of Alice in Wonderland. Like his friend Gerald Scarfe, another wickedly satirical cartoonist who created the look of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Steadman has made significant contributions to the look of the counterculture.
But while Steadman’s work with Hunter Thompson may largely define his career, another notable collaboration with a literary figure, William S. Burroughs, also proved fruitful many years later. In 1995, Steadman brought together his own illustrations with Burroughs love of guns, asking the octogenarian writer to blast holes in original Steadman creations.
Some of these paintings feature the Polaroid portraits of Burroughs above and at the top of the post (see a resulting Steadman/Burroughs silkscreen print, with gunshot holes, here). Just above, you can see Steadman taking the photos. First, he makes some test shots with an assistant, then, at 2:50, we see him with Burroughs and an entourage. As The Independent described the meeting at Burroughs’ house in Lawrence, Kansas, it was something of a “contrived event,” with “swarms of assistants” and “acolytes” in attendance, “taping the whole thing on video.”
Luckily for us, I’d say. Unfortunately, we don’t seem to have video from later in the day, when the group drove “out to Burrough’s friends place outside town, where he does his shooting.” Once there, “Burroughs, Steadman and his wife Anna and Burroughs’ entourage take turns blazing away with .33s, .45s, pump-action shotguns and Saturday-night specials at a variety of targets,” including Steadman’s art. That would be something to see. We’ll have to settle for the art itself, and Steadman’s fascinating demonstration below of his approach to portraiture.
This past summer I had occasion to visit Oxford Mississippi for a conference on William Faulkner, hosted by the university he briefly attended, Ole Miss. Owner of Faulkner’s estate, Rowan Oak, since 1972, the university often stages events on the novelist’s former grounds—particularly to celebrate meetings devoted to his work. While I had wandered around the property a few times during my stay on campus, I thought I’d wait until the capstone barbecue at the conference’s close to enter the house itself. More fool me. A rainstorm forced the festivities into a college hall, and I had to depart early the following morning.
And so, sadly, I missed out on walking Faulkner’s floorboards, peering out through his windows, and, especially, seeing firsthand the notes he scrawled on the walls of his study to outline the plot of his 1954 novel A Fable. The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning book, which—depending on your tolerance for Faulkner’s excesses is either a “crowning achievement or self-indulgent mess”—occupied the author for over a decade. He began A Fable—set in France during World War 1—just after the end of the Second World War, and did much of the writing in the small office he added to the house in 1950, the year after he won the Nobel Prize. (Hear him read his Nobel Prize Speech here.)
Plotting the chronology on the walls helped him become fully immersed in the novel’s density, but, writes education blog Enotes, “not everybody was so pleased with the method”: “Faulkner’s wife, disappointed with the decision, had the walls repainted. In return, Faulkner rewrote the outline and then shellacked the wall to ensure a permanent record.”
There are much worse ways to antagonize one’s spouse, I suppose, but I’m sure that wasn’t his primary intent. Faulkner considered the novel his masterpiece—Pulitzer and National Book Award committees agreed—but critics have not been so kind. It’s now one of his lesser-known works, one of the few not set in the fictional Yoknopatawpha, a stand-in for his own Lafayette county, which he mined for stories all of his mature career after some brief adventuring abroad.
Perhaps his defiant preservation of the plan for A Fable represents his deep desire to leave behind the “postage stamp” of Oxford and its surrounds—to venture into other imaginative territories. If so, his plan failed. Faulkner will be forever associated with the South—with Mississippi, and with Rowan Oak. And like so many devotees, I’ll likely make my pilgrimage to his well-preserved home a yearly event. The next time I’m down there, however, I’ll actually make it inside to see the writing on the walls.
Photo by John Lawrence, from Faulkner’s Rowan Oak , by John Lawrence and Dan Hise
How does 109-year-old Alfred “Alfie” Date keep himself busy? Apparently by knitting sweaters for endangered penguins. The oldest man in Australia, Alfie began knitting these little sweaters at the request of The Penguin Foundation in 2013, after hundreds of Little Penguins were injured by a big oil spill. He makes the sweaters in different styles. But you can’t beat a penguin wearing a Penguin Books logo. We dare you to try.
News of the new, long-awaited but hardly expected Harper Lee novel, Go Set a Watchman—a sequel to the 1960’s To Kill a Mockingbird—has been met with varying degrees of skepticism, surely warranted given her late sister Alice and others’ characterization of Lee’s physical and mental decline. On the other hand, the novelist, it’s been reported, is “extremely hurt” by allegations that she has been pressured to publish. It would be a shame if the controversy over the publication of the novel eclipsed the novel itself. While it had become something of a truism that Harper Lee would only publish the one, great novel and never another, I for one greet this latest news with joy.
For one thing, circumstances aside, the new Harper Lee novel has the mass media doing something it rarely does anymore—talking about literary fiction. And for the thousands of school kids required to read To Kill a Mockingbird and wondering why they should bother, the conversation hopefully communicates that books still matter, and not just dystopian YA sci-fi and mass-market trade books about BDSM fantasies, but books about ordinary people in ordinary times and places. It’s a lesson Lee learned early. In a 2006 letter to Oprah Winfrey, published in O magazine, Lee wrote about her childhood experiences with reading, and being read to. She recalls arriving “in the first grade, literate,” because of her upbringing. She also acknowledges that “books were scarce”; her and her siblings early literacy meant they were “privileged” compared to other children, “mostly from rural areas,” and the “children of our African-American servants.”
While we may dismiss Lee’s contention that in “an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones” and “iPods” they also have “minds like empty rooms” as the kvetching of a senior citizen, I doubt most people who respect Lee’s wisdom and good humor would do so lightly. Her poetic evocation of the tactile differences between books and gadgets alone should give us pause: “some things should only happen on soft pages, not cold metal.”
Read the full letter below.
May 7, 2006
Dear Oprah,
Do you remember when you learned to read, or like me, can you not even remember a time when you didn’t know how? I must have learned from having been read to by my family. My sisters and brother, much older, read aloud to keep me from pestering them; my mother read me a story every day, usually a children’s classic, and my father read from the four newspapers he got through every evening. Then, of course, it was Uncle Wiggily at bedtime.
So I arrived in the first grade, literate, with a curious cultural assimilation of American history, romance, the Rover Boys, Rapunzel, and The Mobile Press. Early signs of genius? Far from it. Reading was an accomplishment I shared with several local contemporaries. Why this endemic precocity? Because in my hometown, a remote village in the early 1930s, youngsters had little to do but read. A movie? Not often — movies weren’t for small children. A park for games? Not a hope. We’re talking unpaved streets here, and the Depression.
Books were scarce. There was nothing you could call a public library, we were a hundred miles away from a department store’s books section, so we children began to circulate reading material among ourselves until each child had read another’s entire stock. There were long dry spells broken by the new Christmas books, which started the rounds again.
As we grew older, we began to realize what our books were worth: Anne of Green Gables was worth two Bobbsey Twins; two Rover Boys were an even swap for two Tom Swifts. Aesthetic frissons ran a poor second to the thrills of acquisition. The goal, a full set of a series, was attained only once by an individual of exceptional greed — he swapped his sister’s doll buggy.
We were privileged. There were children, mostly from rural areas, who had never looked into a book until they went to school. They had to be taught to read in the first grade, and we were impatient with them for having to catch up. We ignored them.
And it wasn’t until we were grown, some of us, that we discovered what had befallen the children of our African-American servants. In some of their schools, pupils learned to read three-to-one — three children to one book, which was more than likely a cast-off primer from a white grammar school. We seldom saw them until, older, they came to work for us.
Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books. Instant information is not for me. I prefer to search library stacks because when I work to learn something, I remember it.
And, Oprah, can you imagine curling up in bed to read a computer? Weeping for Anna Karenina and being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up — some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal.
The village of my childhood is gone, with it most of the book collectors, including the dodgy one who swapped his complete set of Seckatary Hawkinses for a shotgun and kept it until it was retrieved by an irate parent.
Now we are three in number and live hundreds of miles away from each other. We still keep in touch by telephone conversations of recurrent theme: “What is your name again?” followed by “What are you reading?” We don’t always remember.
Agnès Varda claimed to have seen fewer than ten movies before she made her first film at age 25. At the time, she had some pretty naïve ideas about film. “I thought if I added sound to photographs, that would be cinema,” she recalled. She learned the essence of filmmaking and, by all accounts, learned it well. The resulting film, La Pointe-Courte (1954), a self-financed documentary-fiction hybrid, is considered one of the forerunners of the French New Wave.
Fast forward a few years. Varda is shooting her follow up feature Cleo from 5 to 7. The film would prove to be her breakout hit and a classic of the New Wave alongside the likes of 400 Blows and Breathless.
The film, which unspools almost in real time, is about a beautiful young singer who waits anxiously for the results of a medical test. We watch her as she talks with well-meaning friends, finds comfort with a stranger, and even takes some time to watch a movie. In the wrong hands, the story has the potential for being an unleavened exercise in existential angst. But, as she later proved in subsequent movies, she was never one to let things get too dark. The movie that the heroine watches is a silent comedy – one that Varda shot herself.
Les Fiancés Du Pont Macdonaldcenters on a Buster Keatonsque dandy in a flat straw hat who waves good-bye to his doll-like girlfriend. Yet when he dons a pair of sunglasses, everything goes wrong. He witnesses his beloved getting injured in an accident only to be hauled off by a hearse. When he takes off the glasses to wipe away the tears, he realizes that he saw it all wrong. The glasses make everything seem metaphorically dark. No wonder the movie’s subtitle is “Beware of Dark Glasses.” You can watch it above.
Les Fiancés is interesting not just because of Varda’s spot on pastiche of silent movies but also because of its cast. None other than Jean-Luc Godard plays the dandy. His wife Anna Karina plays the girl, of course. Generally, Godard’s onscreen appearances run the gamut from being sober and aloof to being hectoring and indignant. It’s fun to watch him ham it up.
Jean-Luc Godard Gives a Dramatic Reading of Hannah Arendt’s “On the Nature of Totalitarianism”
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
A century later, on another continent, Hegel’s thought influenced the course of a very different struggle. And while the historical conditions of mid-nineteenth century Europe and mid-twentieth century America present entirely different sets of specific concerns, the same general observation applies: the time and place of such radical thinkers as Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Huey Newton and a host of other activists presented “peculiarly auspicious” circumstances for revolutionary social philosophy.
But while these figures appear today as the vanguard of radical black thought, Martin Luther King, Jr., the most widely celebrated of Civil Rights leaders, “is often conflated with neoliberal multiculturalism,” writes Critical Theory, his program associated with “the failure of the civil rights movement to dismantle the ongoing systemic white supremacy of the status quo.” And yet, King’s movement not only succeeded in ending legal segregation and hastening the passing of the Civil Rights Act; it also provided direction for nearly every nonviolent social movement from his day to ours. King’s legacy is not only that of an inspiring organizer and orator, but also of a radical thinker who engaged critically with philosophy and social theory and brought it to bear on his activism.
We are generally well aware of King’s debt to Gandhi and the Satyagraha movement that won Indian independence in 1947, yet we know little of his debt to the same thinker who inspired Marx and his contemporaries—G.W.F. Hegel. As philosopher and “Ethicist for Hire” Nolen Gertz has recently demonstrated on his blog, King was highly influenced by Hegelianism, as much as, or perhaps even more so, than he was by Gandhi’s movement. Marx may have turned Hegel’s system on its head, but King, writes Gertz, “fought White America… by turning the ideas of dead white men against the oppressive practices of living white men.”
King read and wrote on Hegel as a graduate student at Boston University and Harvard in the mid-50s, where he studied theology and the history of philosophy and religion. He took a yearlong seminar on Hegel with his advisor at BU, Edgar Brightman (see King’s diagram notes of Hegel’s system above), and found a great deal to admire in the “dead white” philosopher’s logical system, as well as a good deal to critique. The two-semester class, King wrote in his autobiography, was “both rewarding and stimulating”:
Although the course was mainly a study of Hegel’s monumental work, Phenomenology of Mind, I spent my spare time reading his Philosophy of History and Philosophy of Right. There were points in Hegel’s philosophy that I strongly disagreed with. For instance, his absolute idealism was rationally unsound to me because it tended to swallow up the many in the one. But there were other aspects of his thinking that I found stimulating. His contention that “truth is the whole” led me to a philosophical method of rational coherence. His analysis of the dialectical process, in spite of its shortcomings, helped me to see that growth comes through struggle.
While King may have disagreed with Hegel’s idealism, he found support for his own philosophy of nonviolence in Hegel’s dialectical method, a mode of analysis that seems particularly well suited to socially revolutionary thought. In Stride Toward Freedom, King wrote,
The third way open to oppressed people in their quest for freedom is the way of nonviolent resistance. Like the synthesis in Hegelian philosophy, the principle of nonviolent resistance seeks to reconcile the truths of two opposites—acquiescence and violence—while avoiding the extremes and immoralities of both.
King’s critical appraisal of Hegel extended to other radical philosophical thinkers as well, including Kant, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche. Gertz offers many samples of the budding civil rights leader’s notes on various thinkers and philosophies, including the first paragraph of an essay entitled “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” (below), in which King confesses that his encounter with Existentialism often “shocked” him, especially since he had “been raised in a rather strict fundamentalist tradition.” And yet, he writes—in an allusion to Kant’s reaction to David Hume—he acquired “a new appreciation for objective appraisal and critical analysis” that “knocked me out of my dogmatic slumber.”
In the essay, King writes, “I became convinced that existentialism, in spite of the fact that it had become all too fashionable, had grasped certain basic truths about man.” He seems particularly drawn to Kierkegaard (see his notes on the philosopher below). Yet it is Hegel who seems most responsible for awakening his philosophical curiosity. As King scholar John Ansbro discovered, King “stated in a January 19, 1956 interview with The Montgomery Adviser that Hegel was his favorite philosopher.” Later that year, King gave an address to the First Annual Institute on Nonviolence and Social Change in which he used Hegelian terms to characterize the Civil Rights struggle: “Long ago, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus argued that justice emerges from the strife of opposites, and Hegel, in modern philosophy, preached a doctrine of growth through struggle.”
Independent scholar Ralph Dumain has further catalogued King’s many approving references to Hegel, including a paper he wrote entitled “An Exposition of the First Triad of Categories of the Hegelian Logic—Being, Non-Being, Becoming,” the “last of six essays that King wrote” for his two-semester course on the philosopher. King also approached Hegel by way of an earlier Civil Rights leader—W.E.B. Dubois, who read the German philosopher while studying with prominent social scientists in Berlin, and who applied Hegelian logic to his own analysis of racial consciousness and struggle in America.
Interestingly, what neither King nor Dubois remarked on is the fact that Hegel was likely himself inspired by black revolutionaries. The Haitian Revolution, argues scholar Susan Buck-Morss, gave Hegel the impetus for his analysis of power and his “metaphor of the ‘struggle to death’ between the master and slave, which for Hegel provided the key to the unfolding of freedom in world history.” While Hegel’s thought is a philosophical thread that winds through the work of radical thinkers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, his own philosophy may not have taken the direction it did without the revolutionary struggles against oppression waged by former slaves in the New World centuries before King led his nonviolent war on the oppressive system of segregation in the United States.
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