F. Scott Fitzgerald Creates a List of 22 Essential Books (1936)

in Books, Literature | October 24th, 2019

In 1936 — perhaps the darkest year of his life — F. Scott Fitzgerald was convalescing in a hotel in Asheville, North Carolina, when he offered his nurse a list of 22 books he thought were essential reading. The list, above, is written in the nurse’s hand.

Fitzgerald had moved into Asheville’s Grove Park Inn that April after transferring his wife Zelda, a psychiatric patient, to nearby Highland Hospital. It was the same month that Esquire published his essay “The Crack Up”, in which he confessed to a growing awareness that “my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt.”

Fitzgerald’s financial and drinking problems had reached a critical stage. That summer he fractured his shoulder while diving into the hotel swimming pool, and sometime later, according to Michael Cody at the University of South Carolina’s Fitzgerald Web site, “he fired a revolver in a suicide threat, after which the hotel refused to let him stay without a nurse. He was attended thereafter by Dorothy Richardson, whose chief duties were to provide him company and try to keep him from drinking too much. In typical Fitzgerald fashion, he developed a friendship with Miss Richardson and attempted to educate her by providing her with a reading list.”

It’s a curious list. Shakespeare is omitted. So is James Joyce. But Norman Douglas and Arnold Bennett make the cut. Fitzgerald appears to have restricted his selections to books that were available at that time in Modern Library editions. At the top of the page, Richardson writes “These are books that Scott thought should be required reading.”

Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dreiser
The Life of Jesus, by Ernest Renan
A Doll’s House, by Henrik Ibsen
Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson
The Old Wives’ Tale, by Arnold Bennett
The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiel Hammett
The Red and the Black, by Stendhal
The Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant, translated by Michael Monahan
An Outline of Abnormal Psychology, edited by Gardner Murphy
The Stories of Anton Chekhov, edited by Robert N. Linscott
The Best American Humorous Short Stories, edited by Alexander Jessup
Victory, by Joseph Conrad
The Revolt of the Angels, by Anatole France
The Plays of Oscar Wilde
Sanctuary, by William Faulkner
Within a Budding Grove, by Marcel Proust
The Guermantes Way, by Marcel Proust
Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust
South Wind, by Norman Douglas
The Garden Party, by Katherine Mansfield
War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley: Complete Poetical Works

via The University of South Carolina

Seven Tips From F. Scott Fitzgerald on How to Write Fiction

Rare Footage of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald From the 1920s

by Mike Springer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Found: A Long Lost Chapter from the World’s Oldest Novel, the 11th-Century Japanese Classic, The Tale of Genji

in Literature | October 22nd, 2019

Henry James’ disparagement of Victorian novels has always struck me as odd. “What do such large loose baggy monsters,” as he called them, “with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean?” The question might be asked of what has often been considered the first modern novel, Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, a tragic-comic adventure whose first volume ranges over 52 loose, episodic chapters and whose second appeared ten years later to comment explicitly on the first’s success.

And then, six-hundred years earlier, there appeared what many consider to be the first novel ever written, The Tale of Genji, which “covers almost three quarters of a century,” notes translator Edward Seidensticker in an introduction to his 1976 edition. “The first forty-one chapters have to do with the life and loves of the nobleman known as ‘the shining Genji,’” the son of an emperor. We follow Genji from birth to his 52nd year, then the final ten chapters relate the tale of Kaoru, “who passes in the world as Genji’s son but is really the grandson of his best friend.” (See a 12th-century illustration from the tale above.)

Written by a noblewoman and lady of the court in 11th century Heian Japan, the book’s author is called Murasaki Shikibu, but her real name is unknown. Shikibu “designates an office held by her father”; Murasaki probably derives from the name of a main character in the novel. There is no “conclusive evidence that the Genji was either finished or unfinished at the time, nor is there conclusive evidence that it is finished or unfinished today.” Some chapters have been thought spurious, some deemed missing. No original manuscript exists, and only four of the novel’s 54 chapters have been authenticated as transcriptions from the original text.

That is, until this month, when a “lost”—or previously unknown—chapter surfaced, and “is now the fifth confirmed transcription of the historical novel,” as Hakim Bishara writes at Hyperallergic. “The newly discovered chapter, titled ‘Wakamurasaki,’ depicts Genji’s encounter with Murasaki-no-ue, the young woman who later becomes his wife.” It was discovered by Motofuyu Okochi, The Japan Times reports, “a descendent of the former feudal lord of the Mikawa-Yoshida Domain in Aichi Prefecture.”

The new Genji material appears “in one chapter of a five-chapter work called ‘Aobyoshibon’ (blue cover book), compiled by poet Fujiwara Teika,” who is believed to have transcribed the oldest documented versions of the novel during the Kamakura Period (1185–1333). There is as yet no critical discussion of how this find might change the way scholars read the book, but as a loose baggy monster, it can expand and contract, change its shape and composition, without losing its essential character.

As Seidensticker writes, “Murasaki Shikibu was no Aristotelian, planning her beginning, middle, and end before she set brush to paper. The Genji is full of hesitations and wrong turns and retreats.” Full, in other words, of the meanderings of the mind. (You can read Seidensticker’s translation of the Genji online here.) Another Western admirer of the novel, Jorge Luis Borges, writing of an earlier translation, put it another way: “What interests us is not the exoticism—the horrible word—but rather the human passions… Murasaki’s work is what one would quite precisely call a psychological novel.”

via Hyperallergic

The Oldest Book Printed with Movable Type is Not The Gutenberg Bible: Jikji, a Collection of Korean Buddhist Teachings, Predated It By 78 Years and It’s Now Digitized Online

Hand-Colored Photographs of 19th Century Japan

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Why Should We Read Dante’s Divine Comedy? An Animated Video Makes the Case

in Literature | October 14th, 2019

Dante Alighieri’s 14th-century Divine Comedy is revered for the force of its imagery, its innovative terza rima and bold use of the vernacular, its creative interpretation of medieval Catholic doctrine, its ferocious political satire…

And the poignant autobiography the poet weaves throughout the story. The epic is animated by Dante’s own romantic longing and his bitter disillusionment with life. He paints himself in the first stanza as overcome by middle-aged bewilderment. Robert Durling’s translation renders the first lines thus:

In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to
myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.

He is already adrift when Virgil turns up to guide him to the famously inscribed gates of hell—“Abandon all hope ye who enter here.”

The grim descent “sets into motion what is perhaps the greatest love story ever told,” says the TED-Ed video above, scripted by Sheila Marie Orfano and animated by Tomás Pichardo-Espaillat. Dante takes this epic journey with two muses, Virgil, then Beatrice, who guides him through Paradise, a figure drawn from an unrequited obsession the poet harbored for a woman named Beatrice Portinari.

Dante turned his crush into a muse, and transformed desire into chaste religious allegory. He turned his hatred of church and state corruption, however, into gleeful revenge fantasy, torturing a number of people still very much alive at the time of his writing. A member of the White Guelphs, a Florentine faction that pushed back against Roman influence, Dante fought fiercely opposed the Black Guelphs, a group loyal to the Pope. He was eventually exiled from Florence, but not silenced.

“Dishonored and with little hope of return,” he “freely aired his grievances” in the Divine Comedy, writing in Italian, rather than Latin, to ensure “the widest possible audience.” His readers at the time would have picked up on the references. Now, we need hundreds of notes to explain the full context. We should also know some salient facts about the poet: a life of political battle and religious devotion, an imaginative literary love affair with a woman he supposedly met twice; a thwarted desire for justice and vengeance and an obsession with integrity.

We do not need extensive notes and critical essays to feel the force of Dante’s language, just as we do not need to believe in the Divine Comedy’s religion. Like all great epic poetry, its metaphysical themes amplify profoundly human emotional journeys.

Visualizing Dante’s Hell: See Maps & Drawings of Dante’s Inferno from the Renaissance Through Today

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Gustave Doré’s Haunting Illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

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

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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

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?

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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

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

<span data-mce-type="bookmark" style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;" class="mce_SELRES_start"></span><a href="http://davesoldier.bandcamp.com/album/dave-soldier-with-kurt-vonnegut">Dave Soldier with Kurt Vonnegut by Dave Soldier, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Auldon Clark</a>

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.

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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.

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

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.

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

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.

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

F. Scott Fitzgerald Creates a List of 22 Essential Books (1936)

Found: A Long Lost Chapter from the World’s Oldest Novel, the 11th-Century Japanese Classic, The Tale of Genji

Why Should We Read Dante’s Divine Comedy? An Animated Video Makes the Case

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

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

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

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

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

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