“Now is the winter of our discontent….” If you know nothing else of Shakespeare’s Richard III, you’ll know this famous opening line, and it’s likely many of us know it through Laurence Olivier’s performance of Richard as a “melodramatic baddie” in the famous 1955 film. If not, take a look at the clip below to familiarize yourself with Olivier’s distinctive mannerisms and speech. The reference may largely be lost these days, but in 1965, at the very height of The Beatles’ fame, Olivier’s performance was still fresh in the minds of the TV viewing public. And the mercurial English comedian Peter Sellers put it to good use in a Beatles-tribute variety program called The Music of Lennon and McCartney that aired in the UK. In the clip above, Sellers recites the lyrics to “A Hard Day’s Night” in character as Olivier’s dandyish Richard.
Unsurprisingly, Sellers and the Beatles had hit it off right away when they were introduced by George Martin, and as we showed you in a recent post, the comedian milked their lyrics for more material, reading “She Loves You,” in a variety of accents. Sellers’ rendition of “A Hard Day’s Night” was hardly the first Shakespearean turn for the band.
The previous year, they appeared in another variety television special called Around the Beatles, “produced concurrently,” writes Dangerous Minds, “while A Hard Day’s Night was being shot.” (Around the Beatles was directed by producer and manager Jack Good, a “Shakespeare fan,” who also, it turns out, convinced rockabilly star Gene Vincent to dress up like Richard III.) In this earlier program, the band—always good sports about this kind of thing—dressed up in Shakespearean garb and staged a raucous performance of a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
As you’ve probably noticed if you’re a regular reader of this site, we’re big fans of book illustration, particularly that from the form’s golden age—the late 18th and 19th century—before photography took over as the dominant visual medium. But while photographs largely supplanted illustrations in textbooks, magazines, and newspapers over the course of the 20th century, works of fiction, which had been routinely published in lavishly illustrated editions, suddenly became the featureless banks of words we know today. Though image-heavy graphic novels and comic books have thrived in recent decades, the illustrated literary text is a rarity indeed.
Why did this change come about? “I really don’t know,” writes Christopher Howse at The Telegraph, but he points out that the era of illustrated fiction for grown-ups ended “after the death of the big Victorian novelists,” like Dickens and Trollope. Before adult picture-books went out of style, several now-famous artists made careers as book illustrators. When we think of the big names from the period, we think of Aubrey Beardsley and Gustave Doré, both of whom we’ve covered heavily here. We tend not to think of Irish artist Harry Clarke—a relative latecomer—but we should. Of the many incredible illustrations from famous works of literature we’ve featured here, my favorite might be Clarke’s 1926 illustrations of Goethe’s Faust.
So out-there are some of his illustrations, so delightfully nightmarish and weird, one is tempted to fall back on that rather sophomoric explanation for art we find disturbing: maybe he was on drugs! Not that he’d need them to conjure up many of the images he did. His source material is bizarre enough (maybe Goethe was on drugs!). In any case, we can definitely call Clarke’s work hallucinatory, and that goes for his earlier, 1923 illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination as well, of which you can see a few choice examples here.
Dublin-born Clarke worked as a stained-glass artist as well as an illustrator, and drew his inspiration from the earlier art nouveau aesthetic of Beardsley and others, adding his own rococo flourishes to the elongated forms and decorative patterns favored by those artists. His glowering figures—including one who looks quite a bit like Poe himself, at the top—suit the feverish intensity of Poe’s world to perfection. And like Poe, Clarke’s art generally thrived in a seductively dark underworld filled with ghouls and fiends. Both of these proto-goths died young, Poe under mysterious circumstances at age 40, Clarke of tuberculoses at 42.
Clarke’s illustrated edition of Poe contained 8 full-color plates and 24 black and white illustrations. The Irish artist also notably illustrated editions of the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Perrault, with images that—as you might imagine—are likely to terrify some sensitive children. (See a few of them here.) You can purchase your own edition of the Clarke-illustrated Poe here, re-released in 2008 by Calla Press. And to see all 24 of Clarke’s black and white plates, head over to 50 Watts.
If I had my way, more academics would care about teaching beyond the walls of the academy. They’d teach to a broader public and consider ways to make their material more engaging, if not inspiring, to new audiences. You can find examples out there of teachers who are doing it right. The heirs of Carl Sagan–Brian Greene, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Bill Nye–know how to light a spark and make their material come alive on TV and YouTube. How they do this is not exactly a mystery, not after M.I.T. posted online a course called “Becoming the Next Bill Nye: Writing and Hosting the Educational Show.”
Taught at M.I.T. over a month-long period, Becoming the Next Bill Nye was designed to teach students video production techniques that would help them “to engagingly convey [their] passions for science, technology, engineering, and/or math.” By the end of the course, they’d know how to script and host a 5‑minute YouTube show.
After the cult success of HBO’s gritty Baltimore crime drama, The Wire, the obsessiveness of the show’s fanbase became a running joke. Devoted Wire-lovers browbeat friends, family, and coworkers with the show’s many virtues. Wire fans became emotionally attached not only to the show’s characters, but also to the actors who played them. Though I managed to shun Wire evangelists for a time, I too finally became a convert after its six-year run ended in 2008. Like many a fan I was thrilled to see actors Michael K. Williams and Michael B. Jordan land juicy post-Wire roles (and saddened to see some of the show’s other fine actors seem to disappear from view).
And, like many a fan, I also wanted to know these actors’ backstories. What had they been up to before The Wire? We get one answer to that question above, in the adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s 1933 short story “The Gilded Six-Bits.” In the starring role, you’ll recognize The Wire’s (eventually) reformed ex-con Dennis “Cutty” Wise, or Chad Coleman, in his first starring role. Playing opposite him you’ll be happy to see your favorite wiseass, philandering, cigar-chomping detective, Bunk Moreland, or Wendell Pierce, who has landed many juicy roles of his own, both pre- and post-Wire. (Here, playing a wiseass, cigar-chomping womanizer.) Adapted and directed by author and filmmaker Booker T. Mattison, the short film debuted on Showtime in 2001.
The story is an early example of Hurston’s genius, written four years before the publication of her breakout novel Their Eyes Were Watching God and two years before her groundbreaking study of African-American folklore, Mules and Men. Published in the influential literary magazine Story—which also served as an important venue for writers like J.D. Salinger and Richard Wright—“The Gilded Six-Bits” so impressed the magazine’s editor that he asked Hurston if she had a novel in progress. She didn’t, but told him she did, and immediately began work on Jonah’s Gourd Vine, published the following year. A story of infidelity and reconciliation, “The Gilded Six-Bits” features characters and a setting familiar to Hurston readers—ordinary African-Americans caught up in the travails of rural life in the Jim Crow South. But as in all of her work, the seeming simplicity of her characters and language slowly reveal complicated truths about the nature of language, marriage, sexuality, and money. And few could bring her characters to life better than your favorite Wire actors.
By now we all know the name of Studio Ghibli, the operation responsible for such animated-feature-film-redefining productions as Grave of the Fireflies and Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away. But unless we’ve paid a visit to the Ghibli Museum, seen the documentary The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, or taken part in the close scrutiny to which Ghibli fans subject the studio’s every public move, we won’t know much about their methods for crafting such visually and emotionally captivating stories. Soon, though, we’ll be able to use their tools ourselves. On March 26, you will be able to download OpenToonz, an open source version of the Toonz software used by Studio Ghibli.
“Included in the OpenToonz are many of Ghibli’s custom tools, specially designed to capture trees waving in the breeze, food that looks too delicious to eat, and the constant running Miyazaki’s films are known for,” writes The Creators Project’s Beckett , who quotes Ghibli’s Executive Imaging Director Atsushi Okui on why they started using the Italian-developed package in the first place: “We needed a software enabling us to create a certain section of the animation digitally. Our requirement was that in order to continue producing theatre-quality animation without additional stress, the software must have the ability to combine the hand-drawn animation with the digitally painted ones seamlessly.” Toonz, evidently, could pull it off.
Ghibli began using the software in 1995, during the production of Princess Mononoke, and has kept using it since. In fact, reports Amid Amidi at Cartoon Brew, “the new OpenToonz is dubbed ‘Toonz Ghibli Edition’ because of all the custom-features that Toonz has developed over the years for the legendary Japanese studio.” With Miyazaki retired, at least from feature-film animation, and nobody quite sure whether 2014’s When Marnie Was There will be the studio’s last picture, as good a time as any has come for successors to the Ghibli tradition. If you’d like to throw your own hat into that enormous ring, you can download OpenToonz for free on March 26, 2016 (or, for a price, buy Toonz Premium) from the official Toonz web site.
On the 100th anniversary of Édith Piaf’s birth last December, writes Jeremy Allen at The Guardian, “celebrations… were low key…. Piaf is a little out of fashion with today’s jeunesse dorée.” That’s a little hard to believe, but if Piaf has fallen out of favor with wealthy French youth, her star has continued to shine, year after year, for much of the music- and film-loving world.
Her story has been told in numerous documentaries and biopics, including the multiple-award-winning La Vie en rose in 2007, whose lead actress, Marion Cotillard, received the first Oscar given for a French-speaking role.
Celebrated in song, in print, in photographs, and in many a stage tribute—such as Lady Gaga’s performance of her signature song, “La Vie en rose,” at last year’s Grammy awards—Piaf has “influenced everyone from Marianne Faithfull to Anna Calvi, and Elton John,” not all of whom are themselves in fashion these days.
And yet, writes Allen, “to paraphrase an old footballing cliché, fashion is temporary, class is permanent.” If there’s anything Piaf’s voice and presence have exemplified over many decades, it is that indefinable quality of “class,” which transcends economic divisions and the ramblings of tacky would-be politicians and encompasses rather a mix of graceful self-possession, artistic integrity, and timeless elegance.
She certainly would not have been mistaken, in her youth, for one of those fashionable jeunesse dorée. The daughter of a street singer who abandoned her, Piaf learned her craft by also singing on the streets, “in a Bellevilloise argot apparently not dissimilar to a Parisian version of old cockney,” Allen writes. The dramatic circumstances of her life were “a punk opera decades before the genre exploded….. From growing up in a bordello, to spending four years blinded by keratitis in her infancy, to joining her acrobat father on the road in her teens, to shooting up morphine, cortisone and falling into alcoholism to alleviate a dodgy back sustained in a car crash as an adult (precipitating what she described as her ‘years of hell’).”
Through it all, writes Open Culture’s Mike Springer, “Piaf managed to hold onto a basically optimistic view of life.” Such a view, always tinged with rueful sadness, comes through in her performances of, for example, “La Vie en rose” (which roughly translates to “life through rose-colored glasses”). See her perform the song at the top of the post on French TV in 1954. “She was 38 years old,” writes Springer, “but looked much older” due to her alcoholism and various treatments for her drinking and arthritis. Below this video, in a filmed performance of “Non, je regrette rien” (“I regret nothing”), Piaf’s hard life seems etched on her expressively sorrowful face, but her voice did not suffer for it, nor her willingness to perform until the end of her short life (she died in 1963 at age 47).
Piaf dedicated “Non, je regrette rien”—composed for her in 1956 by Charles Dumont and Michel Vaucaire—to the French Foreign Legion, who adopted it as their anthem. Its title becomes particularly poignant in light of Piaf’s storied life, especially given the accusations after the Nazi occupation that she had collaborated with the Germans. Instead, it was revealed, writes a New York Times profile, that while she performed for German troops, she “was instrumental in helping a number of prisoners escape,” rendering “aid that later saved her from any charges of collaboration.” Piaf became an emblem of Parisian culture, and appeared in several films, such as 1951’s Paris Chante Toujours (“Paris still sings,” above—she sings “Hymne à l’amour.”)
She also became—after surviving a first, disastrous 1947 appearance in New York—a star in the U.S. in the 50s. In 1959, she appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and sang “Milord” (above), partly in English, a song that briefly reached the Billboard top 100. Piaf would appear a few times on Sullivan’s program throughout the decade. In 1952, she held her own with American audiences in a lineup that included the hugely popular Bobby Darin and the fiery Ike and Tina Turner. Despite her diminutive stature (she stood just 4′8″) and often frail physical condition, Piaf’s world-weary demeanor and smoldering voice stood out in any company. She was a true original and there has never been another performer quite like her.
Looking for proof of evolution? Perhaps you don’t need to look much beyond your own body. Created by Vox, the video above highlights the vestigial body parts and traits we’ve retained from earlier points in our evolutionary history. Writes Vox’s Joss Fong:
Vestigial structures are evolution’s leftovers — body parts that, through inheritance, have outlived the context in which they arose. Some of the most delightful reminders of the common ancestry we share with other animals, they show that the building blocks of the human body predate our species by hundreds of millions of years.
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After his radical conversion to Christian anarchism, Leo Tolstoy adopted a deeply contrarian attitude. The vehemence of his attacks on the class and traditions that produced him were so vigorous that certain critics, now mostly obsolete, might call his struggle Oedipal. Tolstoy thoroughly opposed the patriarchal institutions he saw oppressing working people and constraining the spiritual life he embraced. He championed revolution, “a change of a people’s relation towards Power,” as he wrote in a 1907 pamphlet, “The Meaning of the Russian Revolution”: “Such a change is now taking place in Russia, and we, the whole Russian people, are accomplishing it.”
In that “we,” Tolstoy aligns himself with the Russian peasantry, as he does in other pamphlets like the 1909-10 journal, “Three Days in the Village.” These essays and others of the period rough out a political philosophy and cultural criticism, often aimed at affirming the ruddy moral health of the peasantry and pointing up the decadence of the aristocracy and its institutions. In keeping with the theme, one of Tolstoy’s pamphlets, a 1906 essay on Shakespeare, takes on that most hallowed of literary forefathers and expresses “my own long-established opinion about the works of Shakespeare, in direct opposition, as it is, to that established in all the whole European world.”
After a lengthy analysis of King Lear, Tolstoy concludes that the English playwright’s “works do not satisfy the demands of all art, and, besides this, their tendency is of the lowest and most immoral.” But how had all of the Western world been lead to universally admire Shakespeare, a writer who “might have been whatever you like, but he was not an artist”? Through what Tolstoy calls an “epidemic suggestion” spread primarily by German professors in the late 18th century. In 21st-century parlance, we might say the Shakespeare-as-genius meme went viral.
Tolstoy also characterizes Shakespeare-veneration as a harmful cultural vaccination administered to everyone without their consent: “free-minded individuals, not inoculated with Shakespeare-worship, are no longer to be found in our Christian society,” he writes, “Every man of our society and time, from the first period of his conscious life, has been inoculated with the idea that Shakespeare is a genius, a poet, and a dramatist, and that all his writings are the height of perfection.”
In truth, Tolstoy proclaims, the venerated Bard is “an insignificant, inartistic writer…. The sooner people free themselves from the false glorification of Shakespeare, the better it will be.”
I have felt with… firm, indubitable conviction that the unquestionable glory of a great genius which Shakespeare enjoys, and which compels writers of our time to imitate him and readers and spectators to discover in him non-existent merits — thereby distorting their aesthetic and ethical understanding — is a great evil, as is every untruth.
What could have possessed the writer of such celebrated classics as War and Peace and Anna Karenina (find them in our collection of Free eBooks) to so forcefully repudiate the author of King Lear? Forty years later, George Orwell responded to Tolstoy’s attack in an essay titled “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool” (1947). His answer? Tolstoy’s objections “to the raggedness of Shakespeare’s plays, the irrelevancies, the incredible plots, the exaggerated language,” are at bottom an objection to Shakespeare’s earthy humanism, his “exuberance,” or—to use another psychoanalytic term—his juissance. “Tolstoy,” writes Orwell, “is not simply trying to rob others of a pleasure he does not share. He is doing that, but his quarrel with Shakespeare goes further. It is the quarrel between the religious and the humanist attitudes towards life.”
Orwell grants that “much rubbish has been written about Shakespeare as a philosopher, as a psychologist, as a ‘great moral teacher’, and what-not.” In reality, he says, the playwright, was not “a systematic thinker,” nor do we even know “how much of the work attributed to him was actually written by him.” Nonetheless, he goes on to show the ways in which Tolstoy’s critical summary of Lear relies on highly biased language and misleading methods. Furthermore, Tolstoy “hardly deals with Shakespeare as a poet.”
But why, Orwell asks, does Tolstoy pick on Lear, specifically? Because of the character’s strong resemblance to Tolstoy himself. “Lear renounces his throne,” he writes, “but expects everyone to continue treating him as a king.”
But is it not also curiously similar to the history of Tolstoy himself? There is a general resemblance which one can hardly avoid seeing, because the most impressive event in Tolstoy’s life, as in Lear’s, was a huge and gratuitous act of renunciation. In his old age, he renounced his estate, his title and his copyrights, and made an attempt — a sincere attempt, though it was not successful — to escape from his privileged position and live the life of a peasant. But the deeper resemblance lies in the fact that Tolstoy, like Lear, acted on mistaken motives and failed to get the results he had hoped for. According to Tolstoy, the aim of every human being is happiness, and happiness can only be attained by doing the will of God. But doing the will of God means casting off all earthly pleasures and ambitions, and living only for others. Ultimately, therefore, Tolstoy renounced the world under the expectation that this would make him happier. But if there is one thing certain about his later years, it is that he was NOT happy.
Though Orwell doubts the Russian novelist was aware of it—or would have admitted it had anyone said so—his essay on Shakespeare seems to take the lessons of Lear quite personally. “Tolstoy was not a saint,” Orwell writes, “but he tried very hard to make himself into a saint, and the standards he applied to literature were other-worldly ones.” Thus, he could not stomach Shakespeare’s “considerable streak of worldliness” and “ordinary, belly-to-earth selfishness,” in part because he could not stomach these qualities in himself. It’s a common, sweeping, charge, that a critic’s judgment reflects much of their personal preoccupations and little of the work itself. Such psychologizing of a writer’s motives is often uncalled-for. But in this case, Orwell seems to have laid bare a genuinely personal psychological struggle in Tolstoy’s essay on Shakespeare, and perhaps put his finger on a source of Tolstoy’s violent reaction to King Lear in particular, which “points out the results of practicing self-denial for selfish reasons.”
Orwell draws an even larger point from the philosophical differences Tolstoy has with Shakespeare: “Ultimately it is the Christian attitude which is self-interested and hedonistic,” he writes, “since the aim is always to get away from the painful struggle of earthly life and find eternal peace in some kind of Heaven or Nirvana…. Often there is a seeming truce between the humanist and the religious believer, but in fact their attitudes cannot be reconciled: one must choose between this world and the next.” On this last point, no doubt, Tolstoy and Orwell would agree. In Orwell’s analysis, Tolstoy’s polemic against Shakespeare’s humanism further “sharpens the contradictions,” we might say, between the two attitudes, and between his own former humanism and the fervent, if unhappy, religiosity of his later years.
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