The Dune Encyclopedia: The Controversial, Definitive Guide to the World of Frank Herbert’s Sci-Fi Masterpiece (1984)

in Books, Literature, Sci Fi | February 22nd, 2022


When David Lynch’s Hol­ly­wood ver­sion of Dune opened in the­aters in 1984, Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios dis­trib­uted a print­ed a glos­sary to keep its audi­ences from get­ting con­fused. They got con­fused any­way, in part because of the film’s hav­ing been hol­lowed out in edit­ing, and in part because the sheer elab­o­rate­ness of Frank Her­bert’s alter­nate real­i­ty pos­es poten­tial­ly insur­mount­able chal­lenges to faith­ful adap­ta­tion. Even many of the orig­i­nal Dune nov­els’ read­ers need­ed more help than a cou­ple pages of def­i­n­i­tions could offer. Luck­i­ly for them, the same year that saw the release of Lynch’s Dune also saw the pub­li­ca­tion of The Dune Ency­clo­pe­dia, autho­rized by Her­bert him­self.

“Here is a rich back­ground (and fore­ground) for the Dune Chron­i­cles, includ­ing schol­ar­ly bypaths and amus­ing side­lights,” Her­bert writes in the book’s intro­duc­tion. “Some of the con­tri­bu­tions are sure to arouse con­tro­ver­sy, based as they are on ques­tion­able sources.” He could­n’t have known how right he was. Today The Dune Ency­clo­pe­dia stands as what Inverse’s Ryan Britt calls “the most con­tro­ver­sial Dune book ever”; long out of print, it may well also be the most expen­sive, with a cur­rent Ama­zon price of $1,300 in hard­cov­er and $833 in paper­back. (You can also find it online, at the Inter­net Archive.)

Still, The Dune Ency­clo­pe­dia has its appre­ci­a­tors, not least the direc­tor of the lat­est (and most suc­cess­ful) cin­e­mat­ic attempt to real­ize Her­bert’s vision. As Brit tells it, “an anony­mous (though pre­vi­ous­ly reli­able) source stat­ed that Denis Vil­leneuve is a big fan of The Dune Ency­clo­pe­dia. But when he tried to plant ref­er­ences to the book in the new film, his ‘hand was slapped by the estate.’ ” The rea­son seems to involve the Ency­clo­pe­dia’s con­flicts with the nov­els: not those writ­ten by Her­bert him­self but, accord­ing to the Dune Wiki, “the lat­er two pre­quel trilo­gies and sequel duol­o­gy writ­ten after Frank Her­bert’s death by Bri­an Her­bert (Frank Her­bert’s son) and Kevin J. Ander­son, which they state com­plete the orig­i­nal series.”

Though co-signed by the The Dune Ency­clo­pe­dia’s main author, lit­er­ary schol­ar Willis E. McNel­ly, Bri­an Her­bert and Kevin J. Ander­son­’s let­ter declar­ing the work’s de-can­on­iza­tion omits the fact “that the Ency­clo­pe­dia is and always was a fal­li­ble in-uni­verse doc­u­ment that open­ly mis­rep­re­sents known his­to­ry and adds his­tor­i­cal embell­ish­ments.” It is, in oth­er words, a book about Dune as well as a part of Dune. Not every book in our real­i­ty offers a per­fect­ly true account of his­to­ry, of course, and the same holds for the real­i­ty Frank Her­bert cre­at­ed. This form implies the con­tin­u­ing pos­si­bil­i­ty of expand­ing Dune’s lit­er­ary uni­verse by writ­ing the books that exist with­in it, not just ency­clo­pe­dias and scrip­ture but, say epic sci-fi nov­els as well. What fan, after all, would­n’t want to read the Dune of Dune?

Relat­ed con­tent:

Why You Should Read Dune: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Frank Herbert’s Eco­log­i­cal, Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci-Fi Epic

Rare Book Fea­tur­ing the Con­cept Art for Jodorowsky’s Dune Goes Up for Auc­tion (1975)

The Dune Graph­ic Nov­el: Expe­ri­ence Frank Herbert’s Epic Sci-fi Saga as You’ve Nev­er Seen It Before

The Glos­sary Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios Gave Out to the First Audi­ences of David Lynch’s Dune (1984)

The Dune Col­or­ing & Activ­i­ty Books: When David Lynch’s 1984 Film Cre­at­ed Count­less Hours of Pecu­liar Fun for Kids

The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Sci­ence Fic­tion: 17,500 Entries on All Things Sci-Fi Are Now Free Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Jane Austen Used Pins to Edit Her Manuscripts: Before the Word Processor & Wite-Out

in Literature | February 16th, 2022

Before the word proces­sor, before White-Out, before Post It Notes, there were straight pins. Or, at least that’s what Jane Austen used to make edits in one of her rare man­u­scripts. In 2011, Oxford’s Bodleian Library acquired the man­u­script of Austen’s aban­doned nov­el, The Wat­sons. In announc­ing the acqui­si­tion, the Bodleian wrote:

The Wat­sons is Jane Austen’s first extant draft of a nov­el in process of devel­op­ment and one of the ear­li­est exam­ples of an Eng­lish nov­el to sur­vive in its for­ma­tive state. Only sev­en man­u­scripts of fic­tion by Austen are known to sur­vive. The Wat­sons man­u­script is exten­sive­ly revised and cor­rect­ed through­out, with cross­ings out and inter­lin­ear addi­tions.

Janeausten.ac.uk (the web site where Austen’s man­u­scripts have been dig­i­tized) takes a deep­er dive into the curi­ous qual­i­ty of The Wat­sons man­u­script, not­ing:

The man­u­script is writ­ten and cor­rect­ed through­out in brown iron-gall ink. The pages are filled in a neat, even hand with signs of con­cur­rent writ­ing, era­sure, and revi­sion, inter­rupt­ed by occa­sion­al pas­sages of heavy inter­lin­ear cor­rec­tion.… The man­u­script is with­out chap­ter divi­sions, though not with­out infor­mal divi­sion by wider spac­ing and ruled lines. The full pages sug­gest that Jane Austen did not antic­i­pate a pro­tract­ed process of redraft­ing. With no cal­cu­lat­ed blank spaces and no obvi­ous way of incor­po­rat­ing large revi­sion or expan­sion she had to find oth­er strate­gies – the three patch­es, small pieces of paper, each of which was filled close­ly and neat­ly with the new mate­r­i­al, attached with straight pins to the pre­cise spot where erased mate­r­i­al was to be cov­ered or where an inser­tion was required to expand the text.

Accord­ing to Christo­pher Fletch­er, Keep­er of Spe­cial Col­lec­tions at the Bodleian Library, this prick­ly method of edit­ing was­n’t exact­ly new. Archivists at the library can trace pins being used as edit­ing tools back to 1617.

You can find The Wat­sons online here:

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in August, 2014.

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:

What Did Jane Austen Real­ly Look Like? New Wax Sculp­ture, Cre­at­ed by Foren­sic Spe­cial­ists, Shows Us

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Jane Austen’s Library

The Jane Austen Fic­tion Man­u­script Archive Is Online: Explore Hand­writ­ten Drafts of Per­sua­sion, The Wat­sons & More

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Jane Austen

Jane Austen’s Music Col­lec­tion, Now Dig­i­tized and Avail­able Online

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The First Illustrated Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses Gets Published, Featuring the Work of Spanish Artist Eduardo Arroyo

in Art, Books, Literature | February 14th, 2022

This year will see the long-delayed pub­li­ca­tion of a ver­sion of Ulysses that Joyce did­n’t want you to read — not James Joyce, mind you, but the author’s grand­son Stephen Joyce. Up until his death in 2020, Stephen Joyce opposed the pub­li­ca­tion of his grand­fa­ther’s best-known book in an illus­trat­ed edi­tion. But he only retained the pow­er actu­al­ly to pre­vent it until Ulysses’ 2012 entry into the pub­lic domain, which made the work freely usable to every­one who want­ed to. In this case, “every­one” includes such nota­bles as neo-fig­u­ra­tive artist Eduar­do Arroyo, described by the New York Times’ Raphael Min­der as “as one of the great­est Span­ish painters of his gen­er­a­tion.”

At the time of Ulysses’ copy­right expi­ra­tion, Arroyo had long since fin­ished his own set of more than 300 illus­tra­tions for Joyce’s cel­e­brat­ed and famous­ly intim­i­dat­ing nov­el. Arroyo not­ed in a 1991 essay, writes Min­der, that “imag­in­ing the illus­tra­tions kept him alive when he was hos­pi­tal­ized in the late 1980s for peri­toni­tis, an inflam­ma­tion of the abdom­i­nal lin­ing.”

The ini­tial hope was for an Arroyo-illus­trat­ed edi­tion to mark the 50th anniver­sary of Joyce’s death in 1991, but with­out the per­mis­sion of the author’s estate, the project had to be put on hold for a cou­ple of decades. When that time came, it was tak­en up again by two pub­lish­ers, Barcelon­a’s Galax­ia Guten­berg and New York’s Oth­er Press.

“Some of Arroyo’s black-and-white illus­tra­tions are print­ed in the mar­gins of the book’s pages, while oth­ers are dou­ble-page paint­ings whose vivid col­ors are rem­i­nis­cent of the Pop Art that inspired him.” His draw­ings, water­col­ors and col­lages include “eclec­tic images of shoes and hats, bulls and bats, as well as some sex­u­al­ly explic­it rep­re­sen­ta­tions of scenes that drew the wrath of cen­sors a cen­tu­ry ago.” For Ulysses’ “710 pages of inner mono­logue and dia­logue, stream of con­scious­ness, blank verse, Greek clas­sics, and the venues and byways of Dublin, 1904,” as the Los Ange­les Times’ Jor­dan Riefe puts it, are as well known for their for­mi­da­ble com­plex­i­ty as it is for the pow­er they once had to scan­dal­ize polite soci­ety.

Arroyo, who died in 2018, stayed faith­ful to Ulysses’ con­tent. (“Of course there are graph­ic nudes,” Riefe adds, “espe­cial­ly in lat­er chap­ters.”) He also suc­ceed­ed in com­plet­ing an ardu­ous project that the most notable artists of Joyce’s day refused even to attempt. “Joyce him­self had asked Picas­so and Matisse to illus­trate it,” writes Galax­ia Guten­berg’s Joan Tar­ri­da, “but nei­ther took on the task. Matisse pre­ferred to illus­trate The Odyssey,” Ulysses’ own struc­tur­al inspi­ra­tion, “which deeply offend­ed Joyce.” What Joyce would make of Arroy­o’s vital and mul­ti­far­i­ous illus­tra­tions, more of which you can sam­ple at Lit­er­ary Hub, is any schol­ar’s guess — but then, did­n’t he say some­thing about want­i­ng to keep the schol­ars guess­ing for cen­turies?

You can now pur­chase a copy of Ulysses: An Illus­trat­ed Edi­tion.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Hen­ri Matisse Illus­trates James Joyce’s Ulysses (1935)

Read Ulysses Seen, A Graph­ic Nov­el Adap­ta­tion of James Joyce’s Clas­sic

Hen­ri Matisse Illus­trates Baudelaire’s Cen­sored Poet­ry Col­lec­tion, Les Fleurs du Mal

Read the Orig­i­nal Seri­al­ized Edi­tion of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1918)

Every Word of Joyce’s Ulysses Print­ed on a Sin­gle Poster

Why Should You Read James Joyce’s Ulysses?: A New TED-ED Ani­ma­tion Makes the Case

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Code of Charles Dickens’ Shorthand Has Been Cracked by Computer Programmers, Solving a 160-Year-Old Mystery

in History, Literature, Writing | February 9th, 2022


We can describe the writ­ing of Charles Dick­ens in many ways, but nev­er as impen­e­tra­ble. The most pop­u­lar nov­el­ist of his day, he wrote for the broad­est pos­si­ble audi­ence, seri­al­iz­ing his sto­ries in news­pa­pers before putting them between cov­ers. This hard­ly pre­vent­ed him from demon­strat­ing a mas­tery of the Eng­lish lan­guage whose mark remains detectable in our own rhetoric and lit­er­ary prose more than 150 years after his death. But Dick­ens wrote both pub­licly and pri­vate­ly, and in the case of the lat­ter he could write quite pri­vate­ly indeed: in doc­u­ments for his own eyes only, he made use of a short­hand that he called it “the devil’s hand­writ­ing,” and which has long been dev­il­ish­ly impen­e­tra­ble to schol­ars.

Dick­ens “learned a dif­fi­cult short­hand sys­tem called Brachyg­ra­phy and wrote about the expe­ri­ence in his semi-auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal nov­el, David Cop­per­field, call­ing it a ‘sav­age steno­graph­ic mys­tery,’ ” says The Dick­ens Code, a web site ded­i­cat­ed to solv­ing that mys­tery.

A for­mer court reporter, “Dick­ens used short­hand through­out his life but while he was using the sys­tem, he was also chang­ing it. So the hooks, lines, cir­cles and squig­gles on the page are very hard to deci­pher.” The Dick­ens Code project thus offered up t0 any­one who could tran­scribe his short­hand a sum of 300 British pounds — which might not sound like much, but imag­ine how grand a sum it would have been in Dick­ens’ day.

Besides, the inter­net’s cryp­tog­ra­phy enthu­si­asts hard­ly require much of an incen­tive to get to work on such a long-uncracked code as this. “The win­ner of the com­pe­ti­tion, Shane Bag­gs, a com­put­er tech­ni­cal sup­port spe­cial­ist from San Jose, Calif., had nev­er read a Dick­ens nov­el before,” writes the New York Times’ Jen­ny Gross. “Mr. Bag­gs, who spent about six months work­ing on the text, most­ly after work, said that he first heard about the com­pe­ti­tion through a group on Red­dit ded­i­cat­ed to crack­ing codes and find­ing hid­den mes­sages.”

The doc­u­ment being decod­ed is a copy of a let­ter from 1859, the year Dick­ens was seri­al­iz­ing A Tale of Two Cities. Writ­ing to Times of Lon­don edi­tor John Thad­deus Delane, “Dick­ens says that a clerk at the news­pa­per was wrong to reject an adver­tise­ment he want­ed in the paper, pro­mot­ing a new lit­er­ary pub­li­ca­tion, and asks again for it to run,” report Gross. This seem­ing­ly triv­ial inci­dent inspires the kind of “strong, direct lan­guage in the 19th cen­tu­ry that showed the writer was angry.” Though 70 per­cent of this deco­rous­ly bad-tem­pered let­ter has now been deci­phered, The Dick­ens Code still has work to do and con­tin­ues to enlist help from vol­un­teers to do it, albeit with­out the prize mon­ey that is now pre­sum­ably in Bag­gs’ pos­ses­sion. Let’s hope he uses it on the hand­somest pos­si­ble set of Dick­ens’ col­lect­ed works.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Charles Dick­ens’ Life & Lit­er­ary Works

The Writ­ing Sys­tem of the Cryp­tic Voyn­ich Man­u­script Explained: British Researcher May Have Final­ly Cracked the Code

Stream a 24 Hour Playlist of Charles Dick­ens Sto­ries, Fea­tur­ing Clas­sic Record­ings by Lau­rence Olivi­er, Orson Welles & More

Why Did Leonar­do da Vin­ci Write Back­wards? A Look Into the Ulti­mate Renais­sance Man’s “Mir­ror Writ­ing”

Alice in Won­der­land, Ham­let, and A Christ­mas Car­ol Writ­ten in Short­hand (Cir­ca 1919)

Charles Dick­ens (Chan­nel­ing Jorge Luis Borges) Cre­at­ed a Fake Library, with 37 Wit­ty Invent­ed Book Titles

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 8 ) |

Read the Original Serialized Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1918)

in Literature | February 4th, 2022

In the sec­ond decade of the 20th cen­tu­ry, Amer­i­can edi­tor Mar­garet C. Ander­son pub­lished The Lit­tle Review, a month­ly lit­er­ary jour­nal of mod­ernist and exper­i­men­tal prose, poet­ry, and art. Four years into its exis­tence, at the begin­ning of 1918, Ander­son announced to her read­ers this:

“I have just received the first three instal­ments [sic] of James Joyce’s new nov­el which is to run seri­al­ly in The Lit­tle Review, begin­ning with the March num­ber.
It is called “Ulysses”.
It car­ries on the sto­ry of Stephen Dedalus, the cen­tral fig­ure in ‘A Por­trait of the Artist as a Young Man”.
It is, I believe, even bet­ter than the “Por­trait”.
So far it has been read by only one crit­ic of inter­na­tion­al rep­u­ta­tion. He says: “It is cer­tain­ly worth run­ning a mag­a­zine if one can get stuff like this to put in it. Com­pres­sion, inten­si­ty. It looks to me rather bet­ter than Flaubert”.
This announce­ment means that we are about to pub­lish a prose mas­ter­piece.”

Feb­ru­ary 2, 2022 marked the 100th anniver­sary of Ulysses, the day on which the full nov­el, first seri­al­ized in The Lit­tle Review, was pub­lished. Joyce, like many of The Lit­tle Review’s British and Euro­pean writ­ers, came to Ander­son through her fel­low edi­tor Ezra Pound. Ander­son might have sensed the great­ness that was to come and she knew the dan­ger in that great­ness. In the end, pub­lish­ing Ulysses would make her an ene­my of the state.

Over at the Mod­ernist Jour­nals Project, you can read every sin­gle issue of The Lit­tle Review (and oth­er such mag­a­zines) to place this rev­o­lu­tion­ary nov­el in con­text. The March 1918 issue which begins the jour­ney of Dedalus and Leopold Bloom also fea­tures works by Wyn­d­ham Lewis and Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, Jes­si­ca Dis­morr, and Arthur Symons; let­ters (and some hate mail) from read­ers; adver­tise­ments for oth­er lit­er­ary mag­a­zines like The Quill, The Pagan, and The Ego­ist; ads for restau­rants in Green­wich Vil­lage, and one for the Berlitz School of Lan­guages; and a final appeal for more read­ers.

The most inter­est­ing of these sec­tions is Pound’s screed against Amer­i­can obscen­i­ty laws. The Lit­tle Review had already had an issue con­fis­cat­ed by the US Post Office. In 1917, a Wyn­d­ham Lewis sto­ry about a sol­dier who gets a girl preg­nant and aban­dons her was declared obscene, both for “lewd­ness” and its anti-war stance. Pound sus­pect­ed the gov­ern­ment was tar­get­ing Ander­son and her co-edi­tor (and lover) Jane Heap for their sup­port of anar­chists Emma Gold­man and Alexan­der Berk­man, along with their anti-war stances.

The Wyn­d­ham Lewis inci­dent had made it dif­fi­cult for Ander­son and Heap to find a pub­lish­er, so they knew some of the risks in begin­ning the ser­i­al. Soon enough they ran into trou­ble. Ulysses con­sists of 18 chap­ters or “Episodes”. The US gov­ern­ment seized the issues fea­tur­ing Episode 8 (“Lestry­go­ni­ans”), Episode 9 (“Scyl­la and Charyb­dis”), and Episode 12 (“Cyclops”) and burned them. But it was Episode 13, “Nau­si­caa,” that led to charges being filed against the pub­lish­ers. The chap­ter, which fea­tures a girl expos­ing her­self and Leopold Bloom mas­tur­bat­ing to orgasm (but writ­ten in such a, well, Joycean way that most would just miss it), was too much for some.

The tri­al that fol­lowed was a trav­es­ty, includ­ing a judge rul­ing that the offen­sive sec­tions of “Nau­si­caa” not be read out loud because a woman was present. When it was point­ed out that the woman was the pub­lish­er Ander­son her­self, he declared  “she did­n’t know the sig­nif­i­cance of what she was pub­lish­ing”. Ander­son and Heap were found guilty, forced to dis­con­tin­ue pub­lish­ing “Ulysses” and fined one hun­dred dol­lars.

The Lit­tle Review print­ed a sec­tion of Episode 14 (“Oxen of the Sun”) and then stopped. Ander­son thought of giv­ing up the mag­a­zine, but turned over con­trol to Heap. The mag­a­zine con­tin­ued pub­lish­ing until 1929, but removed their mot­to: “Mak­ing No Com­pro­mise with the Pub­lic Taste.”

James Joyce did not stop, how­ev­er, and Sylvia Beach—an ex-pat liv­ing in Paris and run­ning the book­store Shake­speare and Co.—pub­lished the full nov­el in 1922. Amer­i­cans would have to wait one more year, 1923, to read this “obscene” nov­el.

Ander­son was cor­rect however—-she had a major role in pro­mot­ing this “prose mas­ter­piece.” And one hun­dred years lat­er, Puri­tan­i­cal Amer­i­cans are still ban­ning and burn­ing books, which is only result­ing, like it did for Joyce’s nov­el, in send­ing the works into the Best Sell­er lists.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Sylvia Beach Tells the Sto­ry of Found­ing Shake­speare and Com­pa­ny, Pub­lish­ing Joyce’s Ulysses, Sell­ing Copies of Hemingway’s First Book & More (1962)

James Joyce’s Ulysses: Down­load as a Free Audio Book & Free eBook

Vir­ginia Woolf on James Joyce’s Ulysses, “Nev­er Did Any Book So Bore Me.” Shen Then Quit at Page 200

James Joyce’s Cray­on Cov­ered Man­u­script Pages for Ulysses and Finnegans Wake

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Hear Benedict Cumberbatch Reading Letters by Kurt Vonnegut, Alan Turing, Sol LeWitt, and Others

in Literature | January 21st, 2022

Many know Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch as neu­ro­sur­geon-turned-Mas­ter of the Mys­tic Arts Doc­tor Strange. Orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed in the 1960s by Mar­vel Comics artist and writer Steve Ditko, the char­ac­ter has gained a new fan fol­low­ing through the films of the Mar­vel Cin­e­mat­ic Uni­verse. In 2016’s Doc­tor Strange, the upcom­ing Doc­tor Strange in the Mul­ti­verse of Mad­ness, and sev­er­al oth­er MCU pic­tures besides, he’s been played by Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch. Open Cul­ture read­ers may know Cum­ber­batch bet­ter as the 21st-cen­tu­ry detec­tive pro­tag­o­nist of the BBC series Sher­lock — or, even more like­ly, as a read­er-out-loud of his­tor­i­cal and lit­er­ary let­ters.

We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured Cum­ber­batch’s onstage ren­di­tions of every­thing from Albert Camus’ thank-you note to his ele­men­tary school teacher to Kurt Von­negut’s advice to the peo­ple of the year 2088 to Franz Kafka’s The Meta­mor­pho­sis. Now we’ve round­ed up more let­ter-read­ings in the ten-video playlist above.

Begin­ning with Sol LeWit­t’s let­ter of advice to Eva Hesse, it con­tin­ues on to Cum­ber­batch’s read­ings of oth­er such works as “the best cov­er let­ter ever writ­ten,” more than one mis­sive by the pio­neer­ing and per­se­cut­ed com­put­er sci­en­tist Alan Tur­ing, a “let­ter about crabs (not the kind you eat)” by Patrick Leigh Fer­mor, and a Richard Nixon’s William Safire-com­posed speech to be read in the event that Apol­lo 11 did­n’t return to Earth.

The mate­r­i­al in this cor­re­spon­dence, all of which Cum­ber­batch reads aloud for Let­ters of Note’s Let­ters Live project, varies con­sid­er­able in both tone and con­tent. Lit­tle of it resem­bles the com­ic-book or detec­tive-nov­el mate­r­i­al with which he has won main­stream fame. But like any good actor, Cum­ber­batch knows how to tai­lor his per­for­ma­tive per­sona to each new con­text with­out los­ing the innate sen­si­bil­i­ty that sets him apart. At the same time, he clear­ly under­stands how to inter­pret not just dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters, real­is­tic as well as fan­tas­ti­cal, but also the per­son­al­i­ties of real human beings who actu­al­ly lived. What­ev­er oth­er plea­sures it offers, hear­ing Cum­ber­batch read let­ters under­scores the fact that we could all do much worse than to be played by him in the movie of our life.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch Reads “the Best Cov­er Let­ter Ever Writ­ten”

Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch Reads Kurt Vonnegut’s Let­ter of Advice to Peo­ple Liv­ing in the Year 2088

Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch Reads a Let­ter Alan Tur­ing Wrote in “Dis­tress” Before His Con­vic­tion For “Gross Inde­cen­cy”

“Stop It and Just DO”: Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch Reads Advice on Over­com­ing Cre­ative Blocks, Writ­ten by Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse (1965)

Hear Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch Read John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightin­gale” and Oth­er Great Works by Shake­speare, Dante & Coleridge

Hear Moby-Dick Read in Its Entire­ty by Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch, Til­da Swin­ton, John Waters, Stephen Fry & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Toni Morrison Lists the 10 Steps That Lead Countries to Fascism (1995)

in History, Literature, Politics | January 12th, 2022

Image by Angela Rad­ules­cu, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

The term fas­cism gets thrown around a great deal these days, not always with high regard to con­sis­ten­cy of mean­ing. Much like Orwellian, it now seems often to func­tion pri­mar­i­ly as a label for whichev­er polit­i­cal devel­op­ments the speak­er does­n’t like. Even back in the 1940s, Orwell him­self took to the Tri­bune in an attempt to pin down what had already become a “much-abused word.” Half a cen­tu­ry lat­er, the ques­tion of what fas­cism actu­al­ly is and how exact­ly it works was addressed by anoth­er nov­el­ist, and one of a seem­ing­ly quite dif­fer­ent sen­si­bil­i­ty: Toni Mor­ri­son, author of The Bluest Eye and Beloved.

Fas­cism tends to come along with evo­ca­tion of Nazi Ger­many. In her 1995 Char­ter Day address at Howard Uni­ver­si­ty, Mor­ri­son, too, brought out the specter of Hitler and his “final solu­tion.” But “let us be remind­ed that before there is a final solu­tion, there must be a first solu­tion, a sec­ond one, even a third. The move toward a final solu­tion is not a jump. It takes one step, then anoth­er, then anoth­er.” She pro­ceed­ed to lay out a haunt­ing hypo­thet­i­cal series of such steps as fol­lows:

  1. Con­struct an inter­nal ene­my, as both focus and diver­sion.
  2. Iso­late and demo­nize that ene­my by unleash­ing and pro­tect­ing the utter­ance of overt and cod­ed name-call­ing and ver­bal abuse. Employ ad hominem attacks as legit­i­mate charges against that ene­my.
  3. Enlist and cre­ate sources and dis­trib­u­tors of infor­ma­tion who are will­ing to rein­force the demo­niz­ing process because it is prof­itable, because it grants pow­er and because it works.
  4. Pal­isade all art forms; mon­i­tor, dis­cred­it or expel those that chal­lenge or desta­bi­lize process­es of demo­niza­tion and deifi­ca­tion.
  5. Sub­vert and malign all rep­re­sen­ta­tives of and sym­pa­thiz­ers with this con­struct­ed ene­my.
  6. Solic­it, from among the ene­my, col­lab­o­ra­tors who agree with and can san­i­tize the dis­pos­ses­sion process.
  7. Pathol­o­gize the ene­my in schol­ar­ly and pop­u­lar medi­ums; recy­cle, for exam­ple, sci­en­tif­ic racism and the myths of racial supe­ri­or­i­ty in order to nat­u­ral­ize the pathol­o­gy.
  8. Crim­i­nal­ize the ene­my. Then pre­pare, bud­get for and ratio­nal­ize the build­ing of hold­ing are­nas for the ene­my-espe­cial­ly its males and absolute­ly its chil­dren.
  9. Reward mind­less­ness and apa­thy with mon­u­men­tal­ized enter­tain­ments and with lit­tle plea­sures, tiny seduc­tions, a few min­utes on tele­vi­sion, a few lines in the press, a lit­tle pseu­do-suc­cess, the illu­sion of pow­er and influ­ence, a lit­tle fun, a lit­tle style, a lit­tle con­se­quence.
  10. Main­tain, at all costs, silence.

Like any good sto­ry­teller, Mor­ri­son stokes our imag­i­na­tion while turn­ing us toward an exam­i­na­tion of our own con­di­tion. Over the past quar­ter-cen­tu­ry, many of the ten­den­cies she describes have arguably become more pro­nounced in polit­i­cal and media envi­ron­ments around the world. A 21st-cen­tu­ry read­er may be giv­en par­tic­u­lar pause by step num­ber nine. Since the 1990s, and espe­cial­ly in Mor­rison’s home­land of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca, most enter­tain­ments have only grown more mon­u­men­tal, and most plea­sures have only shrunk.

Lat­er in her speech, Mor­ri­son fore­sees a time ahead “when our fears have all been seri­al­ized, our cre­ativ­i­ty cen­sured, our ideas ‘mar­ket-placed,’ our rights sold, our intel­li­gence slo­ga­nized, our strength down­sized, our pri­va­cy auc­tioned; when the the­atri­cal­i­ty, the enter­tain­ment val­ue, the mar­ket­ing of life is com­plete.” Few of us here in 2022, what­ev­er our polit­i­cal per­sua­sion, could argue that her pre­dic­tions were entire­ly unfound­ed. Few­er still have a clear answer to the ques­tion what to do when we “find our­selves liv­ing not in a nation but in a con­sor­tium of indus­tries, and whol­ly unin­tel­li­gi­ble to our­selves except for what we see as through a screen dark­ly.”

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Umber­to Eco Makes a List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

The Sto­ry of Fas­cism: Rick Steves’ Doc­u­men­tary Helps Us Learn from the Hard Lessons of the 20th Cen­tu­ry

Yale Pro­fes­sor Jason Stan­ley Iden­ti­fies 10 Tac­tics of Fas­cism: The “Cult of the Leader,” Law & Order, Vic­tim­hood and More

Hear Toni Mor­ri­son (RIP) Present Her Nobel Prize Accep­tance Speech on the Rad­i­cal Pow­er of Lan­guage (1993)

Why Should You Read Toni Morrison’s Beloved? An Ani­mat­ed Video Makes the Case

George Orwell Tries to Iden­ti­fy Who Is Real­ly a “Fas­cist” and Define the Mean­ing of This “Much-Abused Word” (1944)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Harper Lee Gives Advice to Young Writers in One of Her Only Interviews Captured on Audio (1964)

in Books, K-12, Literature, Radio, Writing | January 3rd, 2022

You know the char­ac­ter Boo Radley? Well, if you know Boo, then you under­stand why I wouldn’t be doing an inter­view. Because I am real­ly Boo. 

– Harp­er Lee, in a pri­vate con­ver­sa­tion with Oprah Win­frey

Author Harp­er Lee loved writ­ing but resist­ed inter­views, grant­i­ng just a hand­ful in the fifty-six years that fol­lowed the pub­li­ca­tion of her Pulitzer Prize win­ning 1960 nov­el, To Kill a Mock­ing­bird. 

Go Set a Watch­man, her sec­ond, and final, nov­el began as an ear­ly draft of To Kill a Mock­ing­bird, and was pub­lished in 2015, a year before her death.

Roy Newquist, inter­view­ing Lee in 1964 for WQXR’s Coun­ter­point, above, prob­a­bly expect­ed the hot­shot young nov­el­ist had many more books in her when he solicit­ed her advice for “the tal­ent­ed young­ster who wants to carve a career as a cre­ative writer.”

Pre­sum­ably Lee did too. “I hope to good­ness that every nov­el I do gets bet­ter and bet­ter, not worse and worse,” she remarked toward the end of the inter­view.

She oblig­ed Newquist by offer­ing some advice, but stopped short of offer­ing career tips to those eager for the low­down on how to write an instant best­seller that will be adapt­ed for stage and screen, earn a peren­ni­al spot in mid­dle school cur­ricu­lums, and — just last week — be crowned the Best Book of the Past 125 Years in a New York Times read­ers’ poll, beat­ing out titles by well regard­ed, and vast­ly more pro­lif­ic authors on the order of J.R.R. Tolkien, George Orwell, Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez, and Toni Mor­ri­son.

“Peo­ple who write for reward by way of recog­ni­tion or mon­e­tary gain don’t know what they’re doing. They’re in the cat­e­go­ry of those who write; they are not writ­ers,” she drawled.

Harp­er Lee’s Advice to Young Writ­ers

  • Hope for the best and expect noth­ing in terms of recog­ni­tion
  • Write to please an audi­ence of one: your­self
  • Write to exor­cise your divine dis­con­tent
  • Gath­er mate­r­i­al from the world around you, then turn inward and reflect
  • Don’t major in writ­ing

Lis­ten­ing to the record­ing, it occurs to us that this inter­view con­tains some more advice for young writ­ers, or rather, those bring­ing up chil­dren in the dig­i­tal age.

When Newquist won­ders why it is that “such a dis­pro­por­tion­ate share of our sen­si­tive and endur­ing fic­tion springs from writ­ers born and reared in the South,” Lee, a native of Mon­roeville, Alaba­ma, makes a strong case for cul­ti­vat­ing an envi­ron­ment where­in chil­dren have no choice but to make their own fun:

I think … the absence of things to do and see and places to go means a great deal to our own pri­vate com­mu­ni­ca­tion. We can’t go to see a play; we can’t go to see a big league base­ball game when we want to. We enter­tain our­selves.

This was my child­hood: If I went to a film once a month it was pret­ty good for me, and for all chil­dren like me. We had to use our own devices in our play, for our enter­tain­ment. We did­n’t have much mon­ey. Nobody had any mon­ey. We did­n’t have toys, noth­ing was done for us, so the result was that we lived in our imag­i­na­tion most of the time. We devised things; we were read­ers, and we would trans­fer every­thing we had seen on the print­ed page to the back­yard in the form of high dra­ma.

Did you nev­er play Tarzan when you were a child? Did you nev­er tramp through the jun­gle or refight the bat­tle of Get­tys­burg in some form or fash­ion? We did. Did you nev­er live in a tree house and find the whole world in the branch­es of a chin­aber­ry tree? We did.

I think that kind of life nat­u­ral­ly pro­duces more writ­ers than, say, an envi­ron­ment like 82nd Street in New York.

Hear that, par­ents and teach­ers of young writ­ers?

  • Nur­ture the cre­ative spir­it by reg­u­lar­ly pry­ing the dig­i­tal device’s from young writ­ers’ hands (and minds.)

Bite your tongue if, thus deprived, they trot off to the the­ater, the mul­ti­plex, or the sports sta­di­um. Remem­ber that iPhones hadn’t been invent­ed when Lee was stump­ing for the ton­ic effects of her chin­aber­ry tree. These days, any unplugged real world expe­ri­ence will be to the good.

If the young writ­ers com­plain — and they sure­ly will — sub­ject your­self to the same terms.

Call it sol­i­dar­i­ty, self-care, or a way of uphold­ing your New Year’s res­o­lu­tion…

Read an account of anoth­er Harp­er Lee inter­view, dur­ing her one day vis­it to Chica­go to pro­mote the 1962 film of To Kill a Mock­ing­bird and attend a lit­er­ary tea in her hon­or, here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Harp­er Lee Gets a Request for a Pho­to; Offers Impor­tant Life Advice Instead (2006)

Harp­er Lee on the Joy of Read­ing Real Books: “Some Things Should Hap­pen On Soft Pages, Not Cold Met­al”

Writ­ing Tips by Hen­ry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Mar­garet Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast