Ursula K. Le Guin’s Daily Routine: The Discipline That Fueled Her Imagination

in Sci Fi, Writing | January 29th, 2019

ursula k le guin writing advice

Image by Gor­thi­an, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

“Some of us are Nor­man Mail­er,” said Ursu­la K. LeGuin in a 1976 inter­view with sci­ence-fic­tion fanzine Luna Month­ly, “but oth­ers of us are mid­dle-aged Port­land house­wives.” And though Le Guin may have thought of her­self as one of the lat­ter, “mid­dle-aged Port­land house­wife” is hard­ly the way the rest of us would describe her. Over a near­ly 60-year-long career, Le Guin pro­duced an enor­mous body of lit­er­ary work, includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to the six books in which she cre­at­ed the world of Earth­sea and oth­er acclaimed sci-fi nov­els like The Left Hand of Dark­ness, The Dis­pos­sessed, and The Lathe of Heav­en. And some­how she man­aged to write all of it between 7:15 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. each day.

Or that’s what her ide­al writ­ing sched­ule dic­tates, any­way. Recent­ly tweet­ed out by writer Michael J. Sei­dlinger as “the ide­al writ­ing rou­tine,” it first appeared in an inter­view she gave in 1988 (and more recent­ly reap­peared in Ursu­la Le Guin: The Last Inter­view and Oth­er Con­ver­sa­tions).

Begin­ning at the ear­ly hour of 5:30 in the morn­ing, the time to “wake up and lie there and think,” it con­tin­ues on to break­fast — and “lots” of it — at 6:15, and the com­mence­ment of the day’s “writ­ing, writ­ing, writ­ing” an hour lat­er, which lasts until lunch at noon. After that, Le Guin con­sid­ered what we con­sid­er her main work to be done, mov­ing on to such pur­suits as read­ing, music, cor­re­spon­dence, “maybe house clean­ing,” and din­ner. Past 8:15, she said, “I tend to be very stu­pid,” a state in which nobody could write the sort of books we remem­ber her for.

But how­ev­er orig­i­nal­ly she wrote, Le Guin was hard­ly excep­tion­al in liv­ing this way while doing it. “Be reg­u­lar and order­ly in your life, so that you may be vio­lent and orig­i­nal in your work,” said Gus­tave Flaubert, a max­im true for enough writ­ers that we also worked it in when we fea­tured an info­graph­ic on the dai­ly rou­tines of famous cre­ative peo­ple. In both Flaubert and Le Guin’s case (or in the case of a writer like Haru­ki Muraka­mi, who ris­es famous­ly ear­ly and runs famous­ly hard when work­ing on a book), their domes­tic lives, well-ordered to the point that an out­side observ­er would find them bor­ing, facil­i­tat­ed the cre­ation of lit­er­a­ture like none that had ever come before. This despite the fact that, on the sur­face, few nov­els could seem more dis­sim­i­lar than Flaubert and Le Guin’s, but each writer would have seen what the oth­er had in com­mon: specif­i­cal­ly, that they knew what it took to get the imag­i­na­tion well and tru­ly fired up.

via Michael J. Sei­dlinger

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Dai­ly Habits of Famous Writ­ers: Franz Kaf­ka, Haru­ki Muraka­mi, Stephen King & More

The Dai­ly Rou­tines of Famous Cre­ative Peo­ple, Pre­sent­ed in an Inter­ac­tive Info­graph­ic

Ursu­la Le Guin Gives Insight­ful Writ­ing Advice in Her Free Online Work­shop

Cel­e­brate the Life & Writ­ing of Ursu­la K. Le Guin (R.I.P.) with Clas­sic Radio Drama­ti­za­tions of Her Sto­ries

Ursu­la K. Le Guin Names the Books She Likes and Wants You to Read

Watch the New Trail­er for Worlds of Ursu­la K Le Guin, the First Fea­ture Film on the Pio­neer­ing Sci-Fi Author

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Cleveland Museum of Art Digitizes Its Collection, Putting 30,000 Works Online and Into the Public Domain

in Art | January 29th, 2019

The lines of the descent from the plu­to­crat­ic wealth and auto­crat­ic pow­er of the late 19th cen­tu­ry to the worst atroc­i­ties of the ear­ly 20th might seem appar­ent to some peo­ple. So too can we trace from the Gild­ed Age an insti­tu­tion­al sys­tem of mon­u­ments to art, cul­ture, and high­er learn­ing unique to mod­ern times. Whether by virtue of greed, guilt, or noblesse oblige, or some of all of the above, wealthy indus­tri­al­ists sought to show—as Andrew Carnegie wrote in his “Gospel of Wealth”—that “the hous­es of some should be homes for all that is high­est and best in lit­er­a­ture and the arts, and for all the refine­ments of civ­i­liza­tion.”

The trea­sures of world cul­ture were donat­ed back to the world, but the proud benef­i­cence of their givers lived on in the insti­tu­tions. In the case of Cleve­land tele­graph mag­nate Jeptha Wade, who was him­self a daguerreo­typ­ist and por­trait painter, the mem­o­ry of the gen­er­ous gift con­tin­ues in Wade Park, home of the Fine Arts Gar­den and the Cleve­land Muse­um of Art, cre­at­ed from his bequest.

Now, over 125 years lat­er, Wade’s patron­age lives on online. “Brace your­self for some meme-wor­thy Egypt­ian cats and gif-able Renais­sance babies,” as Zachary Small jokes at Hyper­al­ler­gic.

The muse­um has just announced its dig­i­tal col­lec­tion with a poignant quote from its founder declar­ing it an eter­nal dona­tion to humankind: “The state­ment ‘for the ben­e­fit of all the peo­ple for­ev­er’ was writ­ten into Jeptha Wade’s 1892 deed of gift for the land on which the muse­um stands… reflect­ing its founders’ belief that muse­ums should be places for inspi­ra­tion and for cre­at­ing won­der and mean­ing in people’s lives.”

This may sound like osten­ta­tious rhetoric, but the announce­ment also tells us that its free dig­i­tal col­lec­tion is “using Open Access,” which means “the pub­lic now has the abil­i­ty to share, remix, and reuse images of as many as 30,000 CMA art­works—“near­ly half of the museum’s entire col­lec­tion,” notes Small—are now “in the pub­lic domain for com­mer­cial as well as schol­ar­ly and non­com­mer­cial pur­pos­es.” Take even a small sam­pling of their open col­lec­tions and you may find more than enough inspi­ra­tion, won­der, and mean­ing.

Take, for exam­ple, Van Gogh’s The Large Plane Trees, J.M.W. Turner’s The Burn­ing of the Hous­es of Lords and Com­mons, El Greco’s The Holy Fam­i­ly with Mary Mag­dalen, and Edouard Manet’s Berthe Morisot. Take work from Rem­brandt, Velázquez, Mon­et, Cezanne, Car­avag­gio, Pis­sar­ro, Degas, Rubens, Poussin, Rodin. Take mas­ter­ful works like ancient Egypt­ian New King­dom Head of Amen­hotep II Wear­ing the Blue Crown and Timurid peri­od Iran­ian Roy­al Recep­tion in a Land­scape—as well as many from cen­tral Africa, Chi­na, India, Japan and Korea.

The Open Access col­lec­tion has swelled to over 34,000 images that can be down­loaded as jpgs or high-res­o­lu­tion tiffs. These and over 60,000 more online works come with descrip­tions, cita­tions, exhi­bi­tion his­to­ries, and more. What­ev­er con­flu­ence of his­tor­i­cal and con­tem­po­rary events brought Cleve­land’s dig­i­tal col­lec­tion into being, it does indeed seem to be for the great ben­e­fit of a great num­ber of inter­net-con­nect­ed peo­ple around the world. Take full advan­tage of its new­ly pub­lic resources here.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art Insti­tute of Chica­go Puts 44,000+ Works of Art Online: View Them in High Res­o­lu­tion

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Puts 400,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

Google Puts Over 57,000 Works of Art on the Web

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

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Watch a New Virtual Reality Production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: A Modern Take on a Classic Play

in Literature, Technology, Theatre | January 29th, 2019

Often com­pared to The Tem­pest, Samuel Beck­et­t’s Endgame may have as much of Shakespeare’s Ham­let in it, though the author was unwill­ing to acknowl­edge the influ­ence to Theodor Adorno. Beck­et­t’s cen­tral char­ac­ter, the blind, aged Hamm, spends all of his time in a throne harangu­ing the oth­er three, in a gloomy place, The New York Times’ Brooks Atkin­son wrote, “some­where between life and death.” Hamm might have been the Dan­ish prince grown old and bit­ter, left with noth­ing but what Beck­ett called Shakespeare’s “fat greasy words.”

In any case, Ham­let has long been thought of as a pro­to­type of the absurd, a play where lit­tle hap­pens because its pro­tag­o­nist is too haunt­ed to have rela­tion­ships with the liv­ing or make deci­sions, a con­di­tion he com­plains about in scene after scene. Trau­ma, exis­ten­tial paral­y­sis, crip­pling doubt punc­tu­at­ed by fits of rage and violence—these are the mak­ings of the 20th cen­tu­ry anti-hero. If the play has a clas­si­cal hero, a man of action and resolve, it is, absurd­ly, a dead man, Hamlet’s father, who testi­ly declares his pur­pose in his final speech, “to whet thy almost blunt­ed pur­pose.”

Should Ham­let be turned into an immer­sive VR and aug­ment­ed real­i­ty expe­ri­ence, allow­ing view­ers to inhab­it a char­ac­ter’s point of view, they might not opt to see things as the moody, depres­sive, speechi­fy­ing prince. In Ham­let 360: Thy Father’s Spir­it, we instead get to inhab­it the ghost, who only appears in the play a hand­ful of times but still fills every scene with his glow­er­ing pres­ence. The 60-minute VR “mod­ern adap­ta­tion” is a co-pro­duc­tion of Boston’s Com­mon­wealth Shake­speare Com­pa­ny and Google.

“Both extreme­ly long by the stan­dards of vir­tu­al real­i­ty and extreme­ly short by the stan­dards of Ham­let,” writes Eliz­a­beth Har­ris at The New York Times, the film “can be watched in 3‑D using a V.R. head­set or in two dimen­sions on a desk­top or mobile device” (see it above). On a vast, dark­ened set clut­tered with fine but shab­by fur­nish­ings in heaps, glow­ing lamps, a bath­tub, and a car, actors per­form con­densed scenes while we, as ghost, freely roam about, view­ing the action in three dimen­sions, a device intend­ed to give the view­er “a sense of agency and urgency as an omni­scient observ­er, guide and par­tic­i­pant,” the pro­duc­tion notes.

The film’s cre­ators, Har­ris writes, “hope that beyond the fresh expe­ri­ence it pro­vides, it will also serve as a tool to bring great the­ater to wider audiences—and bring big­ger audi­ences to the­ater.” It may have that effect, though one might feel it priv­i­leges dig­i­tal effects over the tru­ly immer­sive, full expe­ri­ence of Shakespeare’s “fat greasy words.” It’s hard to think the “great Shake­speare­an” Beck­ett would approve, but he found lit­tle to his lik­ing.

Younger, less can­tan­ker­ous audi­ences might, how­ev­er. “Many young people’s first expe­ri­ence of Shake­speare is not all that great,” says direc­tor Steven Maler. Ham­let 360 allows the Com­mon­wealth Shake­speare Com­pa­ny to “scale up” their mis­sion to “tru­ly democ­ra­tize Shake­speare and the­ater.”  Expe­ri­ence it for your­self above or on YouTube and learn more at Boston’s WGBH, who recent­ly pre­miered the film. The actors “deliv­er pow­er­ful per­for­mances,” the PBS sta­tion writes, “that bring the play for­ward to today, mak­ing it both cur­rent and time­less.”

via The New York Times

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Shake­speare Cours­es: Primers on the Bard from Oxford, Har­vard, Berke­ley & More

Google Gives You a 360° View of the Per­form­ing Arts, From the Roy­al Shake­speare Com­pa­ny to the Paris Opera Bal­let

30 Days of Shake­speare: One Read­ing of the Bard Per Day, by The New York Pub­lic Library, on the 400th Anniver­sary of His Death

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

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Nick Cave Answers the Hotly Debated Question: Will Artificial Intelligence Ever Be Able to Write a Great Song?

in Music, Technology | January 28th, 2019

Pho­to by Bled­dyn Butch­er via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Spike Jonze’s AI love sto­ry Her offered a sort of an answer to one of the crit­i­cal ques­tions posed about Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: Can machines feel love? Maybe, and maybe deeply, in a cer­tain sense, but maybe not for just one per­son and not for very long before they take off to explore lim­it­less oth­ers, which makes them sound like very seduc­tive but also very shal­low lovers.

Maybe it helps to keep that metaphor in mind when we read Nick Cave’s answer to a ques­tion a Sloven­ian fan posed in the Birth­day Party/Bad Seeds/Grinderman singer’s bru­tal­ly ten­der newslet­ter, The Red Right Hand. “Do you think,” asks Peter from Ljubl­jana, “AI will ever be able to write a good song?” Cave begins with a con­ces­sion: AI might “pro­duce a song that makes us feel,” and maybe “more intense­ly than any human song­writer could do.”

And yet, after list­ing a num­ber of human exam­ples, from Nir­vana to Prince to Iggy Pop to Nina Simone, Cave describes what makes their abil­i­ties alien to a machine mind:

We go to songs to make us feel some­thing – hap­py, sad, sexy, home­sick, excit­ed or what­ev­er – but this is not all a song does. What a great song makes us feel is a sense of awe. There is a rea­son for this. A sense of awe is almost exclu­sive­ly pred­i­cat­ed on our lim­i­ta­tions as human beings. It is entire­ly to do with our audac­i­ty as humans to reach beyond our poten­tial.

AI can­not die, at least in the sense we under­stand it. Nor is it con­strained by painful phys­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions, nor privy to fleet­ing phys­i­cal plea­sures. “Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, for all its unlim­it­ed poten­tial, sim­ply doesn’t have this capac­i­ty. How could it? And this is the essence of tran­scen­dence.” The holy or har­row­ing knowl­edge of fini­tude and fragili­ty, love and death and grief.

Anoth­er way to state the case comes from the most mov­ing of Cave’s fan let­ter answers, in which he con­soles a bereaved fan in Ver­mont with a descrip­tion of his own grief over the death of his son.

Maybe AI could write the sen­tence, “dread grief trails bright phan­toms in its wake.” But it could not write it from the heart of a bereaved par­ent who learns that “grief and love are for­ev­er inter­twined,” or from a place where super­nat­ur­al beliefs may be untrue yet still have super­nat­ur­al pow­er. Cave’s descrip­tion of his grief is also a descrip­tion of tran­scen­dence, of going beyond what is pos­si­ble to find what is time­less.

Like ideas, these spir­its speak of pos­si­bil­i­ty. Fol­low your ideas, because on the oth­er side of the idea is change and growth and redemp­tion. Cre­ate your spir­its. Call to them. Will them alive. Speak to them. It is their impos­si­ble and ghost­ly hands that draw us back to the world from which we were jet­ti­soned; bet­ter now and unimag­in­ably changed.

In answer to Peter’s ques­tion, he con­cludes with the poet­ic author­i­ty of a writer of great songs: “AI would have the capac­i­ty to write a good song, but not a great one. It lacks the nerve.”

Read Nick Cave’s full response here. And while there, sign up for his free newslet­ter.

via Austin Kleon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to Nick Cave’s Lec­ture on the Art of Writ­ing Sub­lime Love Songs (1999)

Ani­mat­ed Sto­ries Writ­ten by Tom Waits, Nick Cave & Oth­er Artists, Read by Dan­ny Devi­to, Zach Gal­i­fi­anakis & More

Nick Cave Nar­rates an Ani­mat­ed Film about the Cat Piano, the Twist­ed 18th Cen­tu­ry Musi­cal Instru­ment Designed to Treat Men­tal Ill­ness

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

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Scenes from Bohemian Rhapsody Compared to Real Life: A 21-Minute Compilation

in Film, Music | January 28th, 2019

Bohemi­an Rhap­sody, the 2018 bio pic about the British rock band Queen, had its fair share of fac­tu­al inaccuracies–all well doc­u­ment­ed by sites like The Wrap and Screen­Crush. But, here and there, the film paid atten­tion to detail. Wit­ness the scenes from Live Aid, and com­pare them to actu­al footage from 1985. Or sim­ply start at the 9:20 mark of the lengthy com­pi­la­tion above, which duti­ful­ly jux­ta­pos­es scenes from the film with the real life events…

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Queen’s Stun­ning Live Aid Per­for­mance: 20 Min­utes Guar­an­teed to Give You Goose Bumps (July 15, 1985)

Lis­ten to Fred­die Mer­cury and David Bowie on the Iso­lat­ed Vocal Track for the Queen Hit ‘Under Pres­sure,’ 1981

Sci­en­tif­ic Study Reveals What Made Fred­die Mercury’s Voice One of a Kind; Hear It in All of Its A Cap­pel­la Splen­dor

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How Michel Legrand (RIP) Gave the French New Wave a Sound: Revisit the Influential Music He Composed for Jean-Luc Godard & Jacques Demy’s Films

in Film, Music | January 28th, 2019

When he died this past week­end, the pro­lif­ic com­pos­er Michel Legrand left behind a large and var­ied body of work, one that won him not just five Gram­my awards but, for the films he scored, three Oscars as well. Though he com­posed the music for more than 200 films and tele­vi­sion shows, many cinephiles will remem­ber him — and gen­er­a­tions of cinephiles to come will know him — as the man who gave the French New Wave a sound. Hav­ing appeared on cam­era as a pianist in Agnès Var­da’s Cleo from 5 to 7 in 1961, he went on to score The Umbrel­las of Cher­bourg, the beloved 1964 musi­cal (and a musi­cal with­out any dia­logue spo­ken at all, only sung) direct­ed by Var­da’s hus­band Jacques Demy.

Legrand also com­posed the music for Demy’s next film, the also-musi­cal The Young Girls of Rochefort, in 1967. That same decade, with­out a doubt the head­i­est for La Nou­velle Vague, he worked with no less a cin­e­mat­ic rule-break­er than Jean-Luc Godard on 1962’s Vivre sa vie and 1964’s Bande à part (also known as Band of Out­siders).

“I can’t help won­der­ing whether, since the music is dubbed in, so are the claps, foot-stamps, and fin­ger-snaps,” writes New York­er film crit­ic and Godard schol­ar Richard Brody of the well-known dance scene in the lat­ter, “or whether, for the take used in the film, there was no music play­ing at all, and the trio” — none of them trained dancers — “did their dance to the time of music play­ing in their minds.”

Brody names as “the great­est flour­ish in the sequence” the moment when “the music cuts out, and Godard speaks, in voice-over: ‘Now it’s time to open a sec­ond paren­the­sis, and to describe the emo­tions of the char­ac­ters.’ ” The way the direc­tor’s words inter­rupt the motion of the visu­als, and of Legrand’s score, “dis­tin­guish­es the scene from so many scenes in so many films where so many film­mak­ers are so con­cerned with bring­ing out their char­ac­ters’ emo­tions sole­ly by means of action,” the rea­son for the dull fact that “many movies — and many wrong­ly hailed — give a sense of being con­struct­ed as illus­tra­tions of script ele­ments, the con­nec­tions of dots plant­ed in just the right place to yield a par­tic­u­lar por­trait.”

Legrand did, of course, com­pose for a few such less artis­ti­cal­ly adven­tur­ous films as well, but that just goes to show how wide a vari­ety of cin­e­mat­ic visions his musi­cal aes­thet­ic could accom­mo­date. He scored such mem­o­rable and even influ­en­tial pic­tures as the orig­i­nal The Thomas Crown Affair and Sum­mer of ’42, as well as Orson Welles’ decades-await­ed The Oth­er Side of the Wind, which came out just last year as what Brody calls a “belat­ed mas­ter­piece” and “one of the great last dra­mat­ic fea­tures by any direc­tor.” Legrand’s music could fair­ly be called roman­tic, even sen­ti­men­tal, but like few oth­er com­posers work­ing today, he knew exact­ly what it took — and exact­ly whom to work with — to keep those qual­i­ties from turn­ing sac­cha­rine or banal.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Jean-Luc Godard Lib­er­at­ed Cin­e­ma: A Video Essay on How the Great­est Rule-Break­er in Film Made His Name

An Intro­duc­tion to Jean-Luc Godard’s Inno­v­a­tive Film­mak­ing Through Five Video Essays

How the French New Wave Changed Cin­e­ma: A Video Intro­duc­tion to the Films of Godard, Truf­faut & Their Fel­low Rule-Break­ers

Jacques Demy’s Lyri­cal Mas­ter­piece, The Umbrel­las of Cher­bourg

Watch the New Trail­er for Orson Welles’ Lost Film, The Oth­er Side of the Wind: A Glimpse of Footage from the Final­ly Com­plet­ed Film

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Hear Neil Gaiman Read a Beautiful, Profound Poem by Ursula K. Le Guin to His Cousin on Her 100th Birthday

in Life, Literature, Poetry | January 28th, 2019

It’s quite pro­found, isn’t it? — Helen Fagin, aged 100

Every time I open my lap­top to dis­cov­er a friend post­ing a vin­tage pho­to of their par­ent as a beam­ing bride or saucy sailor boy in lush black and white or gold-tinged Kodachrome, I know the deal.

Anoth­er elder has left the build­ing.

With luck, I’ll have at least two or three decades before my kids start sniff­ing around in my shoe box­es of old snap­shots.

In the mean­time, I’ll won­der how much of the emo­tion that’s packed into those memo­r­i­al post­ings gets expressed to the sub­ject in the days lead­ing up to their final exit.

Seems like most of us pussy­foot around the obvi­ous until it’s too late.

There are, of course, med­ical sit­u­a­tions that force us to acknowl­edge in a loved one’s pres­ence the abyss in their imme­di­ate future, but oth­er­wise, West­ern tra­di­tion has posi­tioned us to shy away from those sorts of dis­cus­sions.

Per­haps our loved ones pre­fer it that way.

Per­haps we do too.

It’s clear that author Neil Gaiman enjoys a spe­cial rela­tion­ship with his 100-year-old cousin, Helen Fagin, a Holo­caust sur­vivor and pro­fes­sor of lit­er­a­ture.

He has shared mem­o­ries of her with those attend­ing his pub­lic appear­ances and in hon­or of World Refugee Day.

His wife, musi­cian Aman­da Palmer, includ­ed a verse about Helen’s 98th birth­day in her song “A Mother’s Con­fes­sion,” below, flesh­ing out the lyrics with foot­notes on her blog.

In cel­e­bra­tion of Helen’s cen­te­nary, Palmer asked Brain Picking’s Maria Popo­va to rec­om­mend a poem that Gaiman could read aloud dur­ing anoth­er in-per­son birth­day vis­it.

Popo­va set­tled on “How It Seems To Me,” a late-in-life poem by sci­ence fic­tion writer Ursu­la K. Le Guin, a close friend of Gaiman’s who died in Jan­u­ary of 2018, 12 years shy of her own cen­te­nary:

HOW IT SEEMS TO ME

In the vast abyss before time, self

is not, and soul com­min­gles

with mist, and rock, and light. In time,

soul brings the misty self to be.

Then slow time hard­ens self to stone

while ever light­en­ing the soul,

till soul can loose its hold of self

and both are free and can return

to vast­ness and dis­solve in light,

the long light after time.

It’s a hell of a hun­dredth birth­day gift, though far from a one-size-fits all propo­si­tion.

Per­haps when you are a nona­ge­nar­i­an, you’d rather the young peo­ple err on the side of tra­di­tion with a com­fy new robe.

There are octo­ge­nar­i­an birth­day boys and girls who’d pick an African vio­let over the misty self, tricky to keep alive though they may be.

As filmed by Palmer, Helen seemed to receive the gift in the spir­it it was intend­ed. Life equipped her for it.

via Brain Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Neil Gaiman Presents “How Sto­ries Last,” an Insight­ful Lec­ture on How Sto­ries Change, Evolve & Endure Through the Cen­turies

18 Sto­ries & Nov­els by Neil Gaiman Online: Free Texts & Read­ings by Neil Him­self

Neil Gaiman Reads “The Man Who For­got Ray Brad­bury”

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  See her onstage in New York City in Feb­ru­ary as host of  The­ater of the Apes book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Watch Oscar-Nominated Documentary Universe, the Film that Inspired the Visual Effects of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 and Gave the HAL 9000 Computer Its Voice (1960)

in Film | January 25th, 2019

Before astro­nauts of the Apol­lo 8 mis­sion took the Earth­rise pho­to in Decem­ber 1968, the world had nev­er seen a clear col­or image of Earth from space. That is if we dis­count the stun­ning space pho­tog­ra­phy screened months ear­li­er to the tune of the “Blue Danube” in Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film “used visu­al effects and imag­i­na­tion (both to a still-impres­sive degree),” as Col­in Mar­shall wrote here in a recent post, to make audi­ences believe that what they saw was indeed our blue mar­ble of a plan­et and oth­er col­or­ful points of inter­est in the solar system—on the way to a jour­ney into unchart­ed, psy­che­del­ic ter­ri­to­ry.

Eight years ear­li­er, film­mak­ers Roman Kroitor and Col­in Low used sim­i­lar tech­nol­o­gy, “real­is­tic ani­ma­tion,” writes the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da, that takes us “into the far regions of space, beyond the reach of the strongest tele­scope, past Moon, Sun, and Milky Way into galax­ies yet unfath­omed.”

Their short doc­u­men­tary, Uni­verse, may not be much remem­bered now—and may have been far out­shone by both real and com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed footage—but in 1961, it claimed a nom­i­na­tion at the 33rd Acad­e­my Awards for Best Doc­u­men­tary Short Sub­ject. “Upon its release in 1960,” notes Liam Lacey at The Globe and Mail, “the Nation­al Aero­nau­tics and Space Admin­is­tra­tion ordered 300 copies.”

Anoth­er of the film’s admir­ers also hap­pened to be Kubrick. Biog­ra­ph­er Vin­cent Lobrut­to describes the auteur’s first encounter with Uni­verse:

Kubrick watched the screen with rapt atten­tion while a panora­ma of the galax­ies swirled by, achiev­ing the stan­dard of dynam­ic vision­ary real­ism that he was look­ing for. These images were not flawed by the shod­dy mat­te work, obvi­ous ani­ma­tion and poor minia­tures typ­i­cal­ly found in sci­ence fic­tion films. Uni­verse proved that the cam­era could be a tele­scope to the heav­ens. As the cred­its rolled, Kubrick stud­ied the names of the magi­cians who cre­at­ed the images: Col­in Low, Sid­ney Gold­smith, and Wal­ly Gen­tle­man.

The film was in black and white, not the eye-pop­ping tech­ni­col­or of Kubrick’s mas­ter­piece, but he saw in it exact­ly what he would need when he began work on 2001. “After study­ing Uni­verse for much of 1964,” writes Kubrick schol­ar Michael Ben­son, “ear­ly in the new year Kubrick decid­ed to repli­cate the film’s tech­niques.” He tried to hire Low, who declined because of his work on “his own ambi­tious project: In the Labyrinth,” Lacey writes. He did suc­ceed in hir­ing Wal­ly Gen­tle­man, the spe­cial effects artist who brought Uni­verse’s wiz­ardry to Kubrick­’s film.

Kubrick also hired Uni­verse’s nar­ra­tor, Dou­glas Rain, the Cana­di­an actor who passed away this past Novem­ber but who will live on indef­i­nite­ly into the future as the chill­ing, affect­less voice of the HAL 9000 com­put­er, ances­tor of Siri, Alexa, and the many voic­es of GPS sys­tems every­where. Hear Rain’s cool, detached nar­ra­tion in Uni­verse, above, and see why this extra­or­di­nary film—with the Richard Strauss-like pound­ing tym­pa­ni of Eldon Rathburn’s score—would have inspired Kubrick to make what may rank as the most mes­mer­iz­ing­ly cin­e­mat­ic, dra­mat­i­cal­ly com­pelling, of sci­ence fic­tion space films to this day.

Uni­verse will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1966 Film Explores the Mak­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (and Our High-Tech Future)

How Stan­ley Kubrick Made His Mas­ter­pieces: An Intro­duc­tion to His Obses­sive Approach to Film­mak­ing

Stan­ley Kubrick Explains the Mys­te­ri­ous End­ing of 2001: A Space Odyssey in a New­ly Unearthed Inter­view

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

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