William Burroughs Meets Francis Bacon: See Never-Broadcast Footage (1982)

in Art, Literature, Television | October 14th, 2019

The writ­ing of William S. Bur­roughs and the paint­ings of Fran­cis Bacon take us into often trou­bling but nev­er­the­less com­pelling real­i­ties we could­n’t pos­si­bly glimpse any oth­er way. Some of that effect has to do with the inim­itable (if often unsuc­cess­ful­ly imi­tat­ed) styles they devel­oped for them­selves, and some with what was going on in their unusu­al lives as well as the even wilder realms of their minds. And though no schol­ars have yet turned up a Bur­roughs mono­graph on Bacon’s art, or Bacon-paint­ed illus­tra­tions for a Bur­roughs nov­el — just imag­ine Naked Lunch giv­en that treat­ment — those minds did meet now and again in life, start­ing in Moroc­co six decades ago.

“The two men first met in Tang­iers in the 1950s when Bur­roughs was tech­ni­cal­ly on the run for mur­der­ing his wife after a ‘shoot­ing acci­dent’ dur­ing a drunk­en game of William Tell,” writes Dan­ger­ous Minds’ Paul Gal­lagher. “Bacon was then in a bru­tal and near fatal rela­tion­ship with a vio­lent sadist called Peter Lacey who used to beat him with a leather stud­ded belt.” None oth­er than Allen Gins­berg made the intro­duc­tion between the two men, “as he thought Bacon paint­ed the way Bur­roughs wrote.” But Bur­roughs saw more dif­fer­ences than sim­i­lar­i­ties: “Bacon and I are at oppo­site ends of the spec­trum,” he once said. “He likes mid­dle-aged truck dri­vers and I like young boys. He sneers at immor­tal­i­ty and I think it’s the one thing of impor­tance. Of course we’re asso­ci­at­ed because of our mor­bid sub­ject mat­ter.”

Bacon and Bur­roughs rem­i­nisce about their first meet­ing — what they can remem­ber of it, any­way — in an encounter filmed by the BBC for a 1982 doc­u­men­tary on the writer. “Are­na fol­lowed him to the home and stu­dio of old friend Fran­cis Bacon, where he drops in for a cup of tea and a catch up,” says the BBC’s site. “This meet­ing has nev­er been broad­cast.” But you can see their con­ver­sa­tion pre­sent­ed in a ten-minute edit in the video above. Gal­lagher notes that the cam­era-shy Bur­roughs gets into the spir­it of things only when the talk turns to his favorite sub­jects at the time: “Jajou­ka” — a Moroc­can vil­lage with a dis­tinct musi­cal tra­di­tion — “Mayans, and immor­tal­i­ty.” Bacon, “waspish, bitchy, glee­ful like a naughty school­boy,” throws out barbs left and right about his fel­low artists and Bur­roughs’ fel­low writ­ers.

Bacon also recalls his and Bur­roughs’ “mutu­al friend­ship with Jane and Paul Bowles,” the famous­ly bohemi­an mar­ried cou­ple known for their writ­ing as well as their expat life in Moroc­co, “going on to dis­cuss Jane Bowles’ men­tal decline and the tragedy of her last years being tend­ed to by nuns, a sit­u­a­tion which Bacon thought ghast­ly. Iron­i­cal­ly, Bacon died just over a decade lat­er being tend­ed to by nuns after becom­ing ill in Spain (an asth­ma attack).” Even the most knowl­edgable fans of Bur­roughs, Bacon, and all the illus­tri­ous fig­ures in their world­wide cir­cles sure­ly don’t know the half of what hap­pened when they got togeth­er. And though this ten-minute chat adds lit­tle con­crete infor­ma­tion to the record, it still gets us imag­in­ing what all these artis­tic asso­ci­a­tions might have been like — fir­ing up our imag­i­na­tions being the strong suit of cre­ators like Bacon and Bur­roughs, even decades after they’ve left us to our own real­i­ty.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Visu­al Art of William S. Bur­roughs: Book Cov­ers, Por­traits, Col­lage, Shot­gun Art & More

Gun Nut William S. Bur­roughs & Gonzo Illus­tra­tor Ralph Stead­man Make Polaroid Por­traits Togeth­er

When William S. Bur­roughs Appeared on Sat­ur­day Night Live: His First TV Appear­ance (1981)

The Dis­ci­pline of D.E.: Gus Van Sant Adapts a Sto­ry by William S. Bur­roughs (1978)

Who Was Joan Vollmer, the Wife William Bur­roughs Alleged­ly Shot While Play­ing William Tell?

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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H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds Becomes a New BBC Miniseries Set in Edwardian England

in Literature, Sci Fi, Television | October 14th, 2019

H.G. Wells began writ­ing the nov­el that would become The War of the Worlds in the Eng­land of the mid-1890s. As a set­ting for this tale of inva­sion from out­er space, he chose the place he knew best: Eng­land of the mid-1890s. Stag­ing spec­ta­cles of unfath­omable mal­ice and fan­tas­ti­cal destruc­tion against such an ordi­nary back­drop made The War of the Worlds, first as a mag­a­zine ser­i­al and then as a stand­alone book, a chill­ing­ly com­pelling expe­ri­ence for its read­ers. Orson Welles under­stood the effec­tive­ness of that choice, as evi­denced by the fact that in his famous­ly con­vinc­ing 1938 radio adap­ta­tion of Wells’ nov­el, the hos­tile aliens land in mod­ern-day New Jer­sey.

Sub­se­quent adap­ta­tions have fol­lowed the same prin­ci­ple: in 1953, the first War of the Worlds Hol­ly­wood film set the action in 1950s Los Ange­les; the lat­est, a Steven Spiel­berg-direct­ed Tom Cruise vehi­cle that came out in 2005, set it in the New York and Boston of the 2000s. But now, set to pre­miere lat­er this year on BBC One, we have a three-part minis­eries that returns the sto­ry to the place and time in which Wells orig­i­nal­ly envi­sioned it — or rather, the place and very near­ly the time. Shot in Liv­er­pool, the pro­duc­tion recre­ates not the Vic­to­ri­an Eng­land in which The War of the Worlds was first pub­lished but the brief Edwar­dian peri­od, last­ing rough­ly the first decade of the 20th cen­tu­ry, that fol­lowed it.

In a way, a peri­od War of the Worlds reflects our time as clear­ly as the pre­vi­ous War of the Worlds adap­ta­tions reflect theirs: tele­vi­sion view­ers of the 2010s have shown a sur­pris­ing­ly hearty appetite for his­tor­i­cal dra­ma, and often British his­tor­i­cal dra­ma at that. Think of the suc­cess ear­li­er this decade of Down­ton Abbey, whose upstairs-down­stairs dynam­ics proved grip­ping even for those not steeped in the British class sys­tem. This lat­est War of the Worlds, whose trail­er you can watch at the top of the post, uses sim­i­lar themes, telling the sto­ry of a man and woman who dare to be togeth­er despite their class dif­fer­ences — and, of course, amid an alien inva­sion that threat­ens to destroy the Earth. It remains to be seen whether the minis­eries will rise to the cen­tral chal­lenge of adapt­ing The War of the Worlds: will the emo­tions at the cen­ter of the sto­ry be as con­vinc­ing as the may­hem sur­round­ing them?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Orson Welles’ Icon­ic War of the Worlds Broad­cast (1938)

Hor­ri­fy­ing 1906 Illus­tra­tions of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds: Dis­cov­er the Art of Hen­rique Alvim Cor­rêa

Ray Harryhausen’s Creepy War of the Worlds Sketch­es and Stop-Motion Test Footage

Edward Gorey Illus­trates H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds in His Inim­itable Goth­ic Style (1960)

Things to Come, the 1936 Sci-Fi Film Writ­ten by H.G. Wells, Accu­rate­ly Pre­dicts the World’s Very Dark Future

Stream Mar­cel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, a BBC Pro­duc­tion Fea­tur­ing Derek Jaco­bi (Free for a Lim­it­ed Time)

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 a Radio Opera Narrated by Kurt Vonnegut, Based on His Adaptation of Igor Stravinsky’s 1918 L’Histoire du Soldat

in Literature, Music | October 8th, 2019

In the leg­end of Robert John­son, Amer­i­can blues­man, a deal with the dev­il brings instant musi­cal genius, and a brief and trou­bled life in near obscu­ri­ty. A two-hun­dred-year-old Russ­ian folk­tale has sim­i­lar events in the oppo­site order: a sol­dier hands over his vio­lin, and his musi­cal tal­ent, to the dev­il in exchange for wealth, and sev­er­al more adven­tures and rever­sals before the final, inevitable path to perdi­tion.

This sto­ry struck a chord with Igor Stravin­sky, who was maybe ahead of his time in see­ing a musi­cal deal with the dev­il as an arche­typ­al sub­ject for pop­u­lar song. In the first act of his the­ater piece, “The Soldier’s Sto­ry” (L’Histoire du Sol­dat)—whose libret­to by Charles Fer­di­nand Ramuz adapts the Russ­ian folktale—the sol­dier trag­i­cal­ly relin­quish­es his abil­i­ty to turn sor­row into beau­ty in the first act, per­haps a poignant state­ment in 1918, when, as Kurt Von­negut says, “to be a sol­dier was real­ly some­thing.”

To have served in a war “in which 65 mil­lion per­sons had been mobi­lized and 35 mil­lion were becom­ing casu­al­ties,” to have wit­nessed the scar­i­fy­ing begin­ning of mod­ern war­fare, meant bear­ing the stamp of too much real­i­ty. In the folk­tales, we may see the dev­il as hard­ship, loss, or greed per­son­i­fied. These are meta­phys­i­cal moral­i­ty plays, far removed from cur­rent events. But war was poten­tial­ly upon us all by 1918, Von­negut sug­gests, in a ter­ri­fy­ing force that dev­as­tat­ed sol­diers, mowed down civil­ians by the thou­sands, and lev­eled whole cities.

Asked to nar­rate the Stravin­sky piece, Von­negut declined. He found Ramuz’s treat­ment of a soldier’s life “pre­pos­ter­ous” and unac­cept­able. So, George Plimp­ton chal­lenged him to write his own ver­sion. He did, in 1993, but rather than make his sol­dier a musi­cian (“you know, sol­diers get rained on, and a vio­lin wouldn’t have a chance”) or a name­less stock char­ac­ter, he plucked a fig­ure out of history—and out of his own non­fic­tion book The Exe­cu­tion of Pri­vate Slovik, pub­lished in 1954.

Eddie Slovik was one of at least 30,000 desert­ers at the Bat­tle of the Bulge. 49 were tried, and only Slovik was exe­cut­ed, at the express order of Gen­er­al Eisen­how­er. “He was the only per­son to be exe­cut­ed for cow­ardice in the face of the ene­my since the Civ­il War,” Von­negut told New York mag­a­zine. “Ike signed his death cer­tifi­cate. They stood him up in front of his com­rades, and they shot him.” Von­negut saw par­tic­u­lar mal­ice in the act. “Slovik deserves to be kept alive. If his name had been McCoy or John­son, I don’t think he would have been shot.”

Instead of The Dev­il, in Vonnegut’s A Soldier’s Sto­ry, we have the char­ac­ter of The Gen­er­al. The nov­el­ist’s replace­ment of the orig­i­nal text both­ered some when his libret­to pre­miered, with Stravinsky’s music, at Lin­coln Center’s Alice Tul­ly Hall in 1993. Respond­ing to the New York Times’ crit­ic, Von­negut said, “Well, it was a des­e­cra­tion. It was a sacred text, and I dared to fool with it. And some peo­ple just find that unbear­able. That critic—I spoiled his evening.” In oth­er words, he couldn’t have cared less.

Vonnegut’s libret­to with Stravinsky’s music was not record­ed for inter­na­tion­al copy­right rea­sons until 2009, but he did record a version—playing The Gen­er­al himself—with music by Dave Sol­dier (hear it at the top). This record­ing of “A Soldier’s Sto­ry” appeared on the album Ice‑9 Bal­lads, a com­pi­la­tion of lyrics adapt­ed, and nar­rat­ed, by Von­negut from his nov­el Cat’s Cra­dle, with music by Sol­dier. Hear that full album here. And pur­chase a copy An Amer­i­can Soldier’s Tale: His­toire Du Sol­dat, with text by Kurt Von­negut, with music by Igor Stravin­sky, per­formed by the Amer­i­can Cham­ber Winds, and con­duct­ed by David A. Way­bright. You can hear sam­ples in this playlist.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Roger Waters Adapts and Nar­rates Igor Stravinsky’s The­atri­cal Piece, The Soldier’s Sto­ry

A New Kurt Von­negut Muse­um Opens in Indi­anapo­lis … Right in Time for Banned Books Week

The Night When Char­lie Park­er Played for Igor Stravin­sky (1951)

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

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Hear a Full-Cast Reading of Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, the Sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale

in Audio Books, Literature | October 7th, 2019

A good heads up from Metafil­ter. They write:

Avail­able for a lim­it­ed time, BBC Radio 4 has a full-cast abridged read­ing of Mar­garet Atwood’s new nov­el, The Tes­ta­ments. This sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale picks up 15 years after the events in the pre­vi­ous book (very mild­ly reveal­ing review of The Tes­ta­ments by Anne Enright). All 14-minute episodes have now been released: The first episode is avail­able until Oct. 15, 2019; the fif­teenth and final episode is avail­able until Oct. 30.

Stream it all here. And find more audio books in our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

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:

Mar­garet Atwood Offers a New Online Class on Cre­ative Writ­ing

Pret­ty Much Pop #10 Exam­ines Mar­garet Atwood’s Night­mare Vision: The Handmaid’s Tale

Hear Mar­garet Atwood’s Sto­ry “Stone Mat­tress,” Read by Author A. M. Homes

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Novelist Cormac McCarthy Gives Writing Advice to Scientists … and Anyone Who Wants to Write Clear, Compelling Prose

in Literature, Science, Writing | October 3rd, 2019

As we point­ed out back in 2017, Cor­mac McCarthy, author of such grit­ty, blood-drenched nov­els as Blood Merid­i­an, Child of God, The Road, and No Coun­try for Old Men, prefers the com­pa­ny of sci­en­tists to fel­low writ­ers. Since the mid-nineties, he has main­tained a desk at the San­ta Fe Insti­tute, an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary sci­en­tif­ic think tank, and has served as a vol­un­teer copy-edi­tor for sev­er­al sci­en­tists, includ­ing Lisa Ran­dall, Harvard’s first female tenured the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist, and physi­cist Geof­frey West, author of the pop­u­lar sci­ence book Scale.

One of McCarthy’s first such aca­d­e­m­ic col­lab­o­ra­tions came after a friend, econ­o­mist W. Bri­an Arthur, mailed him an arti­cle in 1996. McCarthy helped Arthur com­plete­ly revise it, which sent the edi­tor of the Har­vard Busi­ness Review into a “slight pan­ic,” the econ­o­mist remem­bers. I can’t imag­ine why, but then I’d rather read any of McCarthy’s nov­els than most aca­d­e­m­ic papers. Not that I don’t love to be exposed to new ideas, but it’s all about the qual­i­ty of the writ­ing.

Schol­ar­ly writ­ing has, after all, a rep­u­ta­tion for obscu­ri­ty, and obfus­ca­tion for a rea­son, and not only in post­mod­ern phi­los­o­phy. Sci­en­tif­ic papers also rely heav­i­ly on jar­gon, over­ly long, incom­pre­hen­si­ble sen­tences, and dis­ci­pli­nary for­mal­i­ties that can feel cold and alien­at­ing to the non-spe­cial­ist. McCarthy iden­ti­fied these prob­lems in the work of asso­ciates like biol­o­gist and ecol­o­gist Van Sav­age, who has “received invalu­able edit­ing advice from McCarthy,” notes Nature, “on sev­er­al sci­ence papers pub­lished over the past 20 years.”

Dur­ing “live­ly week­ly lunch­es” with the author dur­ing the win­ter of 2018, Sav­age dis­cussed the fin­er points of McCarthy’s edit­ing advice. Then Sav­age and evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gist Pamela Yeh present­ed the con­densed ver­sion at Nature for a wider audi­ence. Below, we’ve excerpt­ed some of the most strik­ing of “McCarthy’s words of wis­dom.” Find the com­plete com­pi­la­tion of McCarthy’s advice over at Nature.

  • Use min­i­mal­ism to achieve clar­i­ty…. Remove extra words or com­mas when­ev­er you can.
  • Decide on your paper’s theme and two or three points you want every read­er to remem­ber…. If some­thing isn’t need­ed to help the read­er to under­stand the main theme, omit it.
  • Lim­it each para­graph to a sin­gle mes­sage.
  • Keep sen­tences short, sim­ply con­struct­ed and direct.
  • Try to avoid jar­gon, buzz­words or over­ly tech­ni­cal lan­guage. And don’t use the same word repeatedly—it’s bor­ing.
  • Don’t over-elab­o­rate. Only use an adjec­tive if it’s rel­e­vant…. Don’t say the same thing in three dif­fer­ent ways in any sin­gle sec­tion.
  • Choose con­crete lan­guage and exam­ples.
  • When you think you’re done, read your work aloud to your­self or a friend. Find a good edi­tor you can trust and who will spend real time and thought on your work.
  • Final­ly, try to write the best ver­sion of your paper—the one that you like. You can’t please an anony­mous read­er, but you should be able to please your­self.
  • When you make your writ­ing more live­ly and eas­i­er to under­stand, peo­ple will want to invest their time in read­ing your work.

As Kot­tke points out, “most of this is good advice for writ­ing in gen­er­al.” This is hard­ly a sur­prise giv­en the source, though, as McCarthy’s pri­ma­ry body of work demon­strates, lit­er­ary writ­ers are free to tread all over these guide­lines as long as they can get away with it. Still, his straight­for­ward advice is an invi­ta­tion for writ­ers of all kinds—academic, pop­u­lar, aspir­ing, and professional—to remind them­selves of the fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples of clear, com­pelling com­mu­nica­tive prose.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Cor­mac McCarthy Became a Copy-Edi­tor for Sci­en­tif­ic Books and One of the Most Influ­en­tial Arti­cles in Eco­nom­ics

Cor­mac McCarthy’s Three Punc­tu­a­tion Rules, and How They All Go Back to James Joyce

Cor­mac McCarthy Explains Why He Worked Hard at Not Work­ing: How 9‑to‑5 Jobs Lim­it Your Cre­ative Poten­tial

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

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A New Kurt Vonnegut Museum Opens in Indianapolis … Right in Time for Banned Books Week

in Literature, Museums | September 26th, 2019

“All my jokes are Indi­anapo­lis,” Kurt Von­negut once said. “All my atti­tudes are Indi­anapo­lis. My ade­noids are Indi­anapo­lis. If I ever sev­ered myself from Indi­anapo­lis, I would be out of busi­ness. What peo­ple like about me is Indi­anapo­lis.” He deliv­ered those words to a high-school audi­ence in his home­town of Indi­anapo­lis in 1986, and a decade lat­er he made his feel­ings even clear­er in a com­mence­ment speech at But­ler Uni­ver­si­ty: “If I had to do it all over, I would choose to be born again in a hos­pi­tal in Indi­anapo­lis. I would choose to spend my child­hood again at 4365 North Illi­nois Street, about 10 blocks from here, and to again be a prod­uct of that city’s pub­lic schools.” Now, at 543 Indi­ana Avenue, we can expe­ri­ence the lega­cy of the man who wrote Slaugh­ter­house-Five, Cat’s Cra­dle, and Break­fast of Cham­pi­ons at the new­ly per­ma­nent Kurt Von­negut Muse­um and Library.

The muse­um’s founder and CEO Julia White­head “con­ceived the idea for a Von­negut muse­um in Novem­ber of 2008, a year and a half after the author’s death, writes Atlas Obscu­ra’s Susan Salaz. “The phys­i­cal muse­um opened in a donat­ed store­front in 2011, dis­play­ing items donat­ed by friends or on loan from the Von­negut fam­i­ly” — his Pall Malls, his draw­ings, a repli­ca of his type­writer, his Pur­ple Heart.

But the col­lec­tion “has been home­less since Jan­u­ary 2019.” A fundrais­ing cam­paign this past spring raised $1.5 mil­lion in dona­tions, putting the muse­um in a posi­tion to pur­chase the Indi­ana Avenue build­ing, one capa­cious enough for vis­i­tors to, accord­ing to the muse­um’s about page, “view pho­tos from fam­i­ly, friends, and fans that reveal Von­negut as he lived; “pon­der rejec­tion let­ters Von­negut received from edi­tors”; and “rest a spell and lis­ten to what friends and col­leagues have to say about Von­negut and his work.”

The new­ly re-opened Kurt Von­negut Muse­um and Library will also pay trib­ute to the jazz-lov­ing, cen­sor­ship-loathing vet­er­an of the Sec­ond World War with an out­door tun­nel play­ing the music of Wes Mont­gomery and oth­er Indi­anapo­lis jazz greats, a “free­dom of expres­sion exhi­bi­tion” that Salaz describes as fea­tur­ing “the 100 books most fre­quent­ly banned in libraries and schools across the nation,” and vet­er­an-ori­ent­ed book clubs, writ­ing work­shops, and art exhi­bi­tions. In the muse­um’s peri­od of absence, Von­negut pil­grims in Indi­anapo­lis had no place to go (apart from the town land­marks designed by the writer’s archi­tect father and grand­fa­ther), but the 38-foot-tall mur­al on Mass­a­chu­setts Avenue by artist Pamela Bliss. Hav­ing known noth­ing of Von­negut’s work before, she fell in love with it after first vis­it­ing the muse­um her­self, she’ll soon use its Indi­ana Avenue build­ing as a can­vas on which to triple the city’s num­ber of Von­negut murals.

You can see more of the new Kurt Von­negut Muse­um and Library, which opened its doors for a sneak pre­view this past Banned Books Week, in the video at the top of the post, as well as in this four-part local news report. Though Von­negut expressed appre­ci­a­tion for Indi­anapo­lis all through­out his life, he also left the place for­ev­er when he head­ed east to Cor­nell. He also satir­i­cal­ly repur­posed it as Mid­land City, the sur­re­al­ly flat and pro­sa­ic Mid­west­ern set­ting of Break­fast of Cham­pi­ons whose cit­i­zens only speak seri­ous­ly of “mon­ey or struc­tures or trav­el or machin­ery,” their imag­i­na­tions “fly­wheels on the ram­shackle machin­ery of awful truth.” I hap­pen to be plan­ning a great Amer­i­can road trip that will take me through Indi­anapo­lis, and what with the pres­ence of an insti­tu­tion like the Kurt Von­negut Muse­um and Library — as well as all the cul­tur­al spots revealed by the Indi­anapo­lis-based The Art Assign­ment — it has become one of the cities I’m most excit­ed to vis­it. Von­negut, of all Indi­anapoli­tans, would sure­ly appre­ci­ate the irony.

via Smithsonian.com

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why Should We Read Kurt Von­negut? An Ani­mat­ed Video Makes the Case

Kurt Von­negut Cre­ates a Report Card for His Nov­els, Rank­ing Them From A+ to D

Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch Reads Kurt Vonnegut’s Incensed Let­ter to the High School That Burned Slaugh­ter­house-Five

Kurt Von­negut: Where Do I Get My Ideas From? My Dis­gust with Civ­i­liza­tion

Behold Kurt Vonnegut’s Draw­ings: Writ­ing is Hard. Art is Pure Plea­sure

22-Year-Old P.O.W. Kurt Von­negut Writes Home from World War II: “I’ll Be Damned If It Was Worth It”

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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John Milton’s Hand Annotated Copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio: A New Discovery by a Cambridge Scholar

in Literature | September 16th, 2019

Per­haps the most well-read writer of his time, Eng­lish poet John Mil­ton “knew the bib­li­cal lan­guages, along with Homer’s Greek and Vergil’s Latin,” notes the NYPL. He like­ly had Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy in mind when he wrote Par­adise Lost. His own Protes­tant epic, if not a the­o­log­i­cal response to the Divine Com­e­dy, had as much lit­er­ary impact on the Eng­lish lan­guage as Dante’s poem did on Ital­ian. Mil­ton would also have as much influ­ence on Eng­lish as Shake­speare, his near con­tem­po­rary, who died eight years after the Par­adise Lost author was born.

In some sense, Mil­ton can be called a direct lit­er­ary heir of Shake­speare, though he wrote in a dif­fer­ent medi­um and idiom (almost a dif­fer­ent lan­guage), and with a very dif­fer­ent set of con­cerns.

Milton’s father was a trustee of the Blackfriar’s The­atre, where Shakespeare’s com­pa­ny of actors, the King’s Men, began per­form­ing in 1609, the year after Milton’s birth. And Milton’s first pub­lished poem appeared anony­mous­ly in the 1632 sec­ond folio of Shakespeare’s plays under the title “An Epi­taph on the admirable Dra­mat­icke Poet, W. Shake­speare.”

Now known as “On Shake­speare,” the poem laments the sor­ry state of Shakespeare’s legacy—his mon­u­ment a “weak wit­ness,” his work an “unval­ued book.” It may be dif­fi­cult to imag­ine a time when Shake­speare wasn’t revered, but his rep­u­ta­tion only began to spread beyond the the­ater in the ear­ly 17th cen­tu­ry. Milton’s poem was one of the first to pro­claim Shakespeare’s great­ness, as a poet who should lie “in such pomp” that “kings for such a tomb would wish to die.”

Now, it seems that sig­nif­i­cant fur­ther evi­dence of Milton’s admi­ra­tion, and crit­i­cal appre­ci­a­tion, of Shake­speare has emerged: in the form of Milton’s own, per­son­al copy of the 1623 First Folio edi­tion of Shake­speare’s plays, with anno­ta­tions in Milton’s own hand. More­over, it seems this evi­dence has been sit­ting under scholar’s noses for decades, housed in the pub­lic Free Library of Philadelphia’s Rare Book Depart­ment, one of over 230 extant copies of the First Folio.

In a blog post at the Cen­tre for Mate­r­i­al Texts, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cambridge’s Jason Scott-War­ren makes his case that the anno­tat­ed First Folio is Milton’s own, pri­mar­i­ly, he writes, on the basis of pale­og­ra­phy, or hand­writ­ing analy­sis. “This just looks like Milton’s hand,” he says, then walks through sev­er­al com­par­isons with oth­er known Mil­ton man­u­scripts, such as his com­mon­place book and anno­tat­ed Bible.

There is also the copi­ous evi­dence for dat­ing the book to the time Mil­ton would have owned it, from the many mar­gin­al ref­er­ences to con­tem­po­rary works like Samuel Pur­chas’ 1625 Pil­grimes and John Fletcher’s The Bloody Broth­er. Mil­ton “added mar­gin­al mark­ings to all of the plays except for Hen­ry VI 1–3 and Titus Andron­i­cus,” notes Scott-War­ren. His corrections—from the Quarto—emendations, and “smart cross-ref­er­ences” are “intel­li­gent and assid­u­ous.”

Antic­i­pat­ing blow­back for his Mil­ton the­o­ry, Scott-War­ren asks, “wouldn’t his copy be bristling with cross-ref­er­ences, packed with smart obser­va­tions and angri­ly cen­so­ri­ous com­ments?” It would indeed, and “sev­er­al dis­tin­guished Mil­ton­ists” have agreed with Scott-Warren’s analy­sis, many con­tact­ing him, he writes in a post­script, to say they’re “con­fi­dent that this iden­ti­fi­ca­tion is cor­rect.” He adds that he has “been round­ly rebuked for under­stat­ing the sig­nif­i­cance of the dis­cov­ery.”

This kind of self-report­ed val­i­da­tion isn’t exact­ly peer review, but we don’t have to take his word for it. Said schol­ars have made their approval pub­licly, enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly, known on Twit­ter. And Penn State Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish Claire M.L. Bourne has writ­ten a con­grat­u­la­to­ry essay on her blog. It was Bourne who spurred on Scott-Warren’s inves­ti­ga­tion with her own essay “Vide Sup­ple­men­tum: Ear­ly Mod­ern Col­la­tion as Play-Read­ing in the First Folio,” pub­lished just months ear­li­er this year.

Bourne was one of the first few schol­ars to thor­ough­ly exam­ine the Free Library of Philadelphia’s copy of the First Folio. But, she admits, she com­plete­ly missed the Mil­ton con­nec­tion. “You can work for a decade,” she writes rue­ful­ly, “as I did, on a sin­gle book… and still be left with gap­ing holes in the nar­ra­tive.” This new schol­ar­ship may not only have filled in the mys­tery of the book’s first own­er and anno­ta­tor; it may also show the full degree to which Mil­ton engaged with Shake­speare, and give Mil­ton schol­ars “a new and sig­nif­i­cant field of ref­er­ence” for read­ing his work.

via MetaFil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William Blake’s Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Illus­tra­tions of John Milton’s Par­adise Lost

3,000 Illus­tra­tions of Shakespeare’s Com­plete Works from Vic­to­ri­an Eng­land, Neat­ly Pre­sent­ed in a New Dig­i­tal Archive

Spenser and Mil­ton (Free Course) 

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

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Pretty Much Pop #10 Examines Margaret Atwood’s Nightmare Vision: The Handmaid’s Tale

in Literature, Pretty Much Pop, Television | September 11th, 2019

Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt take on both Mar­garet Atwood’s 1985 nov­el plus the Bruce Miller/Hulu TV series through sea­son 3. There’s also a graph­ic nov­el and the 1990 film.

We get into what’s need­ed to move a nov­el to the screen like that: The char­ac­ter can’t just remain pas­sive as in the nov­el in order to keep us suf­fer­ing with her past the first sea­son as sto­ry­telling beyond the book begins. We talk about Atwood’s fun­ny neol­o­gisms (like “pray­va­gan­za”) that didn’t make it into the show.

How does race play into the sto­ry, and how should it? Is the sto­ry pri­mar­i­ly a polit­i­cal state­ment or a self-con­tained work of art? Giv­en the bleak­ness of the sit­u­a­tion depict­ed, can there be com­ic relief? How can we have a nom­i­nal­ly fun­ny pod­cast about this work?

Some of the arti­cles we drew on or bring up include:

Plus Eri­ca brings up this video of Bill Moy­ers inter­view­ing Atwood about reli­gion. We also touch on Shindler’s List, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nau­sea, David Brin diss­ing Star Wars as anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic sto­ry­telling, and the many con­ser­v­a­tive dis­missals of the show as hys­ter­i­cal pro­pa­gan­da.

Buy the book, the graph­ic nov­el, or its new sequel The Tes­ta­ments.

You may be inter­est­ed in these relat­ed Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life episodes (Mark’s long-run­ning phi­los­o­phy pod­cast): #181 on Han­nah Arendt and the banal­i­ty of evil, #139 on bell hooks  and her his­tor­i­cal account of con­di­tions for black women not ter­ri­bly dis­sim­i­lar to the ones described by Atwood, #90 inter­view­ing David Brin about the con­nec­tions between spec­u­la­tive fic­tion, phi­los­o­phy, and polit­i­cal speech. PEL has also record­ed sev­er­al episodes on Sartreand Mark ran a sup­port­er-only  ses­sion that you could lis­ten to on Nau­sea in par­tic­u­lar. Also check out Brian’s Con­tel­lary Tales pod­cast #2 talk­ing about anoth­er breed­ing-relat­ed sci-fi sto­ry by Octavia But­ler.

This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts or start with the first episode.

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