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

in Film, Literature | July 24th, 2018

Every­one who’s read Jack Ker­ouac knows what it means to go vis­it the sage Old Bill Lee. And even many who haven’t read Ker­ouac know who Old Bill Lee real­ly was: inno­v­a­tive writer, Beat Gen­er­a­tion elder states­man, and sub­stance enthu­si­ast William S. Bur­roughs. Gus Van Sant, who had imbibed from the coun­ter­cul­ture ear­ly on, paid his own vis­it to Old Bill Lee a few years after grad­u­at­ing from the Rhode Island School of Design. On a recent episode of WTF, Van Sant tells Marc Maron how, hav­ing read a Bur­roughs essay called “The Dis­ci­pline of DE” back in Prov­i­dence, he looked Bur­roughs up in the New York City phone book, called him, and paid him a vis­it — not just because Ker­ouac’s char­ac­ters did it, but because he want­ed the rights to turn the sto­ry into a film.

The result­ing nine-minute short puts images to Bur­roughs’ words. “DE is a way of doing,” says its nar­ra­tor Ken Shapiro, who had direct­ed the tele­vi­sion-satriz­ing cult film The Groove Tube a few years ear­li­er. “DE sim­ply means doing what­ev­er you do in the eas­i­est most relaxed way you can man­age, which is also the quick­est and most effi­cient way, as you will find as you advance in DE.”

We then see var­i­ous cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly illus­trat­ed exam­ples of DE in action, includ­ing  “the art of ‘cast­ing’ sheets and blan­kets so they fall just so,” pick­ing up an object by drop­ping “cool pos­ses­sive fin­gers onto it like a gen­tle old cop mak­ing a soft arrest,” and even gun fight­ing in the old west as prac­ticed by Wyatt Earp, the only gun fight­er who “ever real­ly grasped the con­cept of DE.”

Van Sant com­plet­ed The Dis­ci­pline of DE, his sixth short film, in 1978. Just over a decade lat­er he would cast Bur­roughs in a high­ly Old Bill Lee-like role in his sec­ond fea­ture Drug­store Cow­boy, bring­ing him back a few years lat­er for Even Cow­girls Get the Blues. Van Sant adapt­ed both of those films from nov­els, as he’s done in much of his fil­mog­ra­phy. Trav­el­ing Europe with a film club after col­lege, he told Maron, he got the chance to vis­it famed auteurs like Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, Lina Wert­müller, and Pier Pao­lo Pasoli­ni. It was Pasoli­ni to whom he explained his own ambi­tion in film­mak­ing: “to trans­late lit­er­a­ture into film.” Paolin­i’s less-than-encour­ag­ing response: “Why would you do that? Why would you both­er?” Yet Van San­t’s dri­ve to make cin­e­ma “more mal­leable, like the nov­el,” has served him well ever since, as — if he adheres to it — has the dis­ci­pline of DE.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Mak­ing of Drug­store Cow­boy, Gus Van Sant’s First Major Film (1989)

William S. Bur­roughs’ “The Thanks­giv­ing Prayer,” Shot by Gus Van Sant

William S. Burrough’s Avant-Garde Movie ‘The Cut Ups’ (1966)

William S. Bur­roughs’ Home Movies, Fea­tur­ing Pat­ti Smith, Allen Gins­berg, Steve Busce­mi & Cats

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.

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Patti Smith Reads Oscar Wilde’s 1897 Love Letter De Profundis: See the Full Three-Hour Performance

in Literature | July 19th, 2018

In her land­mark study The Body in Pain, Elaine Scar­ry describes “the anni­hi­lat­ing pow­er of pain,” which is “vis­i­ble in the sim­ple fact of expe­ri­ence observed by Karl Marx, ‘There is only one anti­dote to men­tal suf­fer­ing, and that is phys­i­cal pain.’” Marx’s com­ment defines a class dis­tinc­tion between types of pain: that of the over­taxed body of the work­er and the mind of the bour­geois sub­ject with the lib­er­ty for mor­bid self-reflec­tion. His pro­nounce­ment, Scar­ry writes, is “only slight­ly dis­tort­ed in Oscar Wilde’s ‘God spare me phys­i­cal pain and I’ll take care of the moral pain myself,’” a some­what glib admis­sion of the rel­a­tive priv­i­lege of men­tal suf­fer­ing in com­par­i­son to tor­ture.

This dis­tinc­tion becomes even more pro­nounced in lat­er reflec­tions, such as ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive Ger­man writer and WWI war hero Ernst Jünger’s Niet­zschean 1934 essay “On Pain,” which asks, “what role does pain play in the new race we have called the work­er that is now mak­ing its appear­ance on the his­tor­i­cal stage?” Phys­i­cal pain, writes Jünger is one of “sev­er­al great and unal­ter­able dimen­sions that show a man’s stature… the most dif­fi­cult in a series of tri­als one is accus­tomed to call life…. Tell me your rela­tion to pain, and I will tell you who you are!”

This idea of the sharp­en­ing effect of phys­i­cal pain as an “anti­dote” or hero­ic tri­al dis­tinct from men­tal suf­fer­ing per­sists long into the 20th cen­tu­ry when Freudi­an trau­ma stud­ies, the diag­no­sis of PTSD in vet­er­ans, and the work of psy­chi­a­trists like Bessel Van Der Kolk begins to col­lapse the cat­e­gories and unite the suf­fer­ing of mind and body. The expe­ri­ences of sol­diers, pris­on­ers, vic­tims of abuse and assault, Holo­caust sur­vivors, enslaved peo­ple, etc. are then seen in a dif­fer­ent light, as com­posed of emo­tion­al anguish as real as their phys­i­cal suf­fer­ing, which man­i­fests somat­i­cal­ly and in extreme cas­es even, per­haps, alters DNA.

Long before the par­a­dig­mat­ic shift in the recog­ni­tion of trau­ma, Wilde, who had made light of “moral pain” in his apho­rism, explored suf­fer­ing in great depth in his De Pro­fundis. Osten­si­bly an open let­ter to his lover Lord Alfred Dou­glass, Wilde penned the piece while impris­oned in Read­ing Jail from 1895–97 for “gross inde­cen­cy.” While there, he endured both phys­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal tor­ment. As Ireland’s Raidió Teil­ifís Éire­ann writes:

Wilde was kept in total iso­la­tion, first in Pen­tonville and Wandsworth pris­ons. For the first month of his sen­tence, he was teth­ered to a tread­mill six hours a day, with five min­utes’ rest after every 20 min­utes.  At Read­ing Jail, to which he was moved in Novem­ber 1895, he slept on a plank bed with no mat­tress and he was allowed only one hour’s exer­cise a day. He would walk in sin­gle file in the yard with oth­er pris­on­ers but was for­bid­den con­tact with them. Wilde slept lit­tle, was hun­gry all of the time, and suf­fered from dysen­tery dur­ing his incar­cer­a­tion.

Dur­ing his two-year incar­cer­a­tion, his moth­er died. “I, once a lord of lan­guage,” he wrote, “have no words in which to express my anguish and shame.” Nonethe­less, he found the words, a pro­fu­sion of them, writes Max Nel­son at The Paris Review, “petu­lant, vin­dic­tive, bathet­ic, indul­gent, exces­sive, florid, mas­sive­ly arro­gant, self-pity­ing, repet­i­tive, showy, sen­ti­men­tal, and shrill,” search­ing, as he put it, to express “that mode of exis­tence in which soul and body are one and indi­vis­i­ble: in which the out­ward is expres­sive of the inward: in which Form reveals.”

They were first pub­lished in 1905 in an edit­ed ver­sion, and it is that ver­sion you can hear read—prefaced by a sung lament—above in a dolor­ous monot­o­ne by Pat­ti Smith, who con­veys with voice and body the tenor of Wilde’s prose. The let­ter, writes Wilde’s biog­ra­ph­er Richard Ell­mann, is “one of the great­est and the longest” love let­ters “ever writ­ten.” (See a scan of the orig­i­nal man­u­script at the British Library site.)

The read­ing took place in the for­mer chapel of Read­ing Jail in 2016, opened to the pub­lic for the first time “for an exhi­bi­tion of art, writ­ing and per­for­mance,” notes Artan­gel, spon­sor of the event. We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured a short excerpt of Smith’s read­ing. Above, you can see her full 3‑hour per­for­mance, com­plete with her own inter­jec­tions and inter­ac­tions with the audi­ence. De Pro­fundis begins with one of the most elo­quent descrip­tions of deep depres­sion in mod­ern lit­er­a­ture, an expe­ri­ence of paral­y­sis that traps its suf­fer­er in a men­tal prison of stuck­ness in time:

. . . Suf­fer­ing is one very long moment. We can­not divide it by sea­sons. We can only record its moods, and chron­i­cle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to cir­cle round one cen­tre of pain. The paralysing immo­bil­i­ty of a life every cir­cum­stance of which is reg­u­lat­ed after an unchange­able pat­tern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, accord­ing to the inflex­i­ble laws of an iron for­mu­la: this immo­bile qual­i­ty, that makes each dread­ful day in the very minut­est detail like its broth­er, seems to com­mu­ni­cate itself to those exter­nal forces the very essence of whose exis­tence is cease­less change. Of seed-time or har­vest, of the reapers bend­ing over the corn, or the grape gath­er­ers thread­ing through the vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with bro­ken blos­soms or strewn with fall­en fruit: of these we know noth­ing and can know noth­ing.

For us there is only one sea­son, the sea­son of sor­row. 

Read a lat­er 1913 edi­tion of Wilde’s let­ter here. The com­plete, unedit­ed text was first pub­lished in 1962.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pat­ti Smith’s List of Favorite Books: From Rim­baud to Susan Son­tag

Watch Pat­ti Smith Read from Vir­ginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Sur­viv­ing Record­ing of Woolf’s Voice

Oscar Wilde Offers Prac­ti­cal Advice on the Writ­ing Life in a New­ly-Dis­cov­ered Let­ter from 1890

900 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

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

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Stanley Kubrick’s “Lost” Script Burning Secret Surfaces, Complete Enough to Make into a Film

in Film, Literature | July 18th, 2018


We remem­ber Stan­ley Kubrick as the arche­typ­al cin­e­mat­ic auteur. Though all huge­ly col­lab­o­ra­tive efforts, could any of his films have been made with­out his pre­sid­ing autho­r­i­al intel­li­gence? Cer­tain­ly none could have been made with­out his eye for lit­er­ary mate­r­i­al. Kubrick usu­al­ly began his projects not with his own orig­i­nal ideas but with books, famous­ly adapt­ing the likes of Vladimir Nabokov’s Loli­ta and Antho­ny Burgess’ A Clock­work Orange, con­tin­u­ing the prac­tice right up until his final pic­ture Eyes Wide Shut, an adap­ta­tion of Aus­tri­an writer Arthur Schnit­zler’s 1926 novel­la Traum­nov­el­le, or Dream Sto­ry.

But Traum­nov­el­le, it turns out, was­n’t the only Aus­tri­an novel­la of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry Kubrick worked on adapt­ing for the screen. A recent­ly dis­cov­ered “lost” Kubrick screen­play, writes the Guardian’s Dalya Alberge, “is so close to com­ple­tion that it could be devel­oped by film­mak­ers. Enti­tled Burn­ing Secret, the script is an adap­ta­tion of the 1913 novel­la by the Vien­nese writer Ste­fan Zweig. In Kubrick’s adap­ta­tion of the sto­ry of adul­tery and pas­sion set in a spa resort, a suave and preda­to­ry man befriends a 10-year-old boy, using him to seduce the child’s mar­ried moth­er.” Kubrick wrote the script in 1956 in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Calder Will­ing­ham, with whom he also wrote Paths of Glo­ry, which would become his fourth fea­ture the fol­low­ing year.

The stu­dio MGM, Alberge writes, “is thought to have can­celled the com­mis­sioned project after learn­ing that Kubrick was also work­ing on Paths of Glo­ry, putting him in breach of con­tract. Anoth­er account sug­gests that MGM told Kubrick’s pro­duc­ing part­ner James B. Har­ris that it did not see the screenplay’s poten­tial as a movie.” She also quotes Nathan Abrams, the film pro­fes­sor at Wales’ Ban­gor Uni­ver­si­ty who recent­ly found the Burn­ing Secret script, as say­ing that “ ‘the adul­tery sto­ry­line’ involv­ing a child as a go-between might have been con­sid­ered too risqué” back in the 1950s. Since Kubrick could “only just” get Loli­ta through in 1961, this “inverse of Loli­ta” may not have had much chance half a decade ear­li­er.

Zweig, one of the most pop­u­lar writ­ers in the world in the 1920s and 1930s, has already inspired one film by an Amer­i­can auteur: Wes Ander­son­’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, which came out in 2014. Not only are sev­er­al of its char­ac­ters mod­eled on Zweig him­self, it has the same struc­ture of sto­ries nest­ed with­in sto­ries that Zweig used in his writ­ing. “It’s a device that maybe is a bit old-fash­ioned,” Ander­son said in a Tele­graph inter­view, “where some­body meets an inter­est­ing, mys­te­ri­ous per­son and there’s a bit of a scene that unfolds with them before they even­tu­al­ly set­tle down to tell their whole tale, which then becomes the larg­er book or sto­ry we’re read­ing.” Usu­al­ly, height­en­ing the con­fes­sion­al mood fur­ther still, the teller has nev­er told the tale to any­one else. Hence the burn­ing nature of secrets in Zweig — and hence the fas­ci­na­tion of Kubrick­’s cool, con­trolled cin­e­mat­ic sen­si­bil­i­ty inter­pret­ing them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lost Kubrick: A Short Doc­u­men­tary on Stan­ley Kubrick’s Unfin­ished Films

Napoleon: The Great­est Movie Stan­ley Kubrick Nev­er Made

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Jazz Pho­tog­ra­phy and The Film He Almost Made About Jazz Under Nazi Rule

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

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.

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Kurt Vonnegut Offers 8 Tips on How to Write Good Short Stories (and Amusingly Graphs the Shapes Those Stories Can Take)

in Literature, Writing | July 17th, 2018

You can’t talk about Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture in the sec­ond half of the 20th cen­tu­ry with­out talk­ing about Kurt Von­negut. And since so many well-known writ­ers today imbibed his influ­ence at one point or anoth­er, you’d have to men­tion him when talk­ing about 21st-cen­tu­ry lit­er­a­ture as well. Despite so ful­ly inhab­it­ing his time, not least by wicked­ly lam­poon­ing it, the author of Slaugh­ter­house-Five, Cat’s Cra­dle, and Break­fast of Cham­pi­ons also had a few ten­den­cies that put him ahead of his time. He worked won­ders with the short sto­ry, a form in whose hey­day he began his writ­ing career, but he also had a knack for what would become the most social media-friend­ly of all forms, the list.

In the video above, those abil­i­ties con­verge to pro­duce Von­negut’s eight bul­let points for good short-sto­ry writ­ing:

  1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wast­ed.
  2. Give the read­er at least one char­ac­ter he or she can root for.
  3. Every char­ac­ter should want some­thing, even if it is only a glass of water.
  4. Every sen­tence must do one of two things — reveal char­ac­ter or advance the action.
  5. Start as close to the end as pos­si­ble.
  6. Be a sadist. No mat­ter how sweet and inno­cent your lead­ing char­ac­ters, make awful things hap­pen to them — in order that the read­er may see what they are made of.
  7. Write to please just one per­son. If you open a win­dow and make love to the world, so to speak, your sto­ry will get pneu­mo­nia.
  8. Give your read­ers as much infor­ma­tion as pos­si­ble as soon as pos­si­ble. To heck with sus­pense. Read­ers should have such com­plete under­stand­ing of what is going on, where and why, that they could fin­ish the sto­ry them­selves, should cock­roach­es eat the last few pages.

In the short lec­ture above Von­negut gets more tech­ni­cal, sketch­ing out the shapes that sto­ries, short or long, can take. On his chalk­board he draws two axes, the hor­i­zon­tal rep­re­sent­ing time and the ver­ti­cal rep­re­sent­ing the pro­tag­o­nist’s hap­pi­ness. In one pos­si­ble sto­ry the pro­tag­o­nist begins slight­ly hap­pi­er than aver­age, gets into trou­ble (a down­ward plunge in the sto­ry’s curve), and then gets out of it again (return­ing the curve to a high­er point of hap­pi­ness than where it began). “Peo­ple love that sto­ry,” Von­negut says. “They nev­er get sick of it.” Anoth­er sto­ry starts on an “aver­age day” with an “aver­age per­son not expect­ing any­thing to hap­pen.” Then that aver­age per­son “finds some­thing won­der­ful” (with a con­cur­rent upward curve), then los­es it (back down), then finds it again (back up).

The third and most com­pli­cat­ed curve rep­re­sents “the most pop­u­lar sto­ry in West­ern civ­i­liza­tion.” It begins down toward the bot­tom of the hap­pi­ness axis, with a moth­er­less young girl whose father has “remar­ried a vile-tem­pered ugly women with two nasty daugh­ters.” But a fairy god­moth­er vis­its and bestows a vari­ety of gifts upon the girl, each one caus­ing a step­wise rise in her hap­pi­ness curve. That night she attends a ball where she dances with a prince, bring­ing the curve to its peak before it plunges back to the bot­tom at the stroke of mid­night, when the fairy god­moth­er’s mag­i­cal gifts expire. In order to bring the curve back up, the prince must use the glass slip­per she acci­den­tal­ly left behind at the ball to — oh, you’ve heard this one before?

Von­negut first explored the idea of sto­ry shapes in his mas­ter’s the­sis, reject­ed by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go “because it was so sim­ple and looked like too much fun.” Clear­ly that did­n’t stop him from con­tin­u­ing to think about and exper­i­ment with those shapes all through­out his career. He would also keep clar­i­fy­ing his oth­er ideas about writ­ing and lit­er­a­ture by explain­ing them in a vari­ety of set­tings. He assigned term papers that can still teach you how to read like a writer, he appeared on tele­vi­sion dis­pens­ing advice to aspi­rants to the craft, and he even pub­lished arti­cles on how to write with style (in pub­li­ca­tions like the Insti­tute of Elec­tri­cal and Elec­tron­ics Engi­neers’ jour­nal at that). Nobody could, or should try to, write just like Kurt Von­negut, but all of us who write at all could do well to give our craft the kind of thought he did.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kurt Von­negut Gives Advice to Aspir­ing Writ­ers in a 1991 TV Inter­view

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

Kurt Von­negut Explains “How to Write With Style”

Kurt Vonnegut’s Term Paper Assign­ment from the Iowa Writ­ers’ Work­shop Teach­es You to Read Fic­tion Like a Writer

Kurt Von­negut Dia­grams the Shape of All Sto­ries in a Master’s The­sis Reject­ed by U. Chica­go

Kurt Von­negut Urges Young Peo­ple to Make Art and “Make Your Soul Grow”

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.

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French Bookstore Blends Real People’s Faces with Book Cover Art

in Art, Books, Literature, Photography, Travel | July 13th, 2018

You can lead the I‑generation to a book­store, but can you make them read?

Per­haps, espe­cial­ly if the vol­ume has an eye-catch­ing cov­er image that bleeds off the edge.

If noth­ing else, they can be enlist­ed to pro­vide some stun­ning free pub­lic­i­ty for the titles that appeal to their high­ly visu­al sense of cre­ative play. (An author’s dream!)

France’s first indie book­store, Bordeaux’s Librairie Mol­lat, is reel­ing ‘em in with Book Face, an irre­sistible self­ie chal­lenge that harkens back to DJ Carl Mor­ris’ Sleeve­face project, in which one or more peo­ple are pho­tographed “obscur­ing or aug­ment­ing any part of their body or bod­ies with record sleeve(s), caus­ing an illu­sion.”

The results are pro­lif­er­at­ing on the store’s Insta­gram, as fetch­ing young things (and oth­ers) apply them­selves to find­ing the best angles and cos­tumes for their lit-based Trompe‑l’œil mas­ter­strokes.

…even the ones that don’t quite pass the forced per­spec­tive test have the capac­i­ty to charm.

…and not every shot requires intense pre-pro­duc­tion and pre­ci­sion place­ment.

Hope­ful­ly, we’ll see more kids get­ting into the act soon. In fact, if some young­sters of your acquain­tance are express­ing a bit of bore­dom with their vacances d’été, try turn­ing them loose in your local book­store to iden­ti­fy a like­ly can­di­date for a Book Face of their own.

(Remem­ber to sup­port the book­seller with a pur­chase!)

Back state­side, some librar­i­ans shared their pro tips for achiev­ing Book Face suc­cess in this 2015 New York Times arti­cle. The New York Pub­lic Library’s Mor­gan Holz­er also cites Sleeve­face as the inspi­ra­tion behind #Book­face­Fri­day, the hash­tag she coined in hopes that oth­er libraries would fol­low suit.

With over 50,000 tagged posts on Insta­gram, looks like it’s caught on!

See Librairie Mol­lat’s patrons’ gallery of Book Faces here.

Read­ers, if you’ve Book Faced any­where in the world, please share the link to your efforts in the com­ments sec­tion.

via This is Colos­sal/Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

36 Abstract Cov­ers of Vin­tage Psy­chol­o­gy, Phi­los­o­phy & Sci­ence Books Come to Life in a Mes­mer­iz­ing Ani­ma­tion

The Art of Sci-Fi Book Cov­ers: From the Fan­tas­ti­cal 1920s to the Psy­che­del­ic 1960s & Beyond

Enter the Cov­er Art Archive: A Mas­sive Col­lec­tion of 800,000 Album Cov­ers from the 1950s through 2018

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. In hon­or of her son’s 18th birth­day, she invites you to Book Face your baby using The Big Rum­pus, her first book, for which he served as cov­er mod­el. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Archaeologists Think They’ve Discovered the Oldest Greek Copy of Homer’s Odyssey: 13 Verses on a Clay Tablet

in History, Literature | July 13th, 2018

The Home­r­ic epics are thought to have been com­posed in the 8th cen­tu­ry BCE. In the case of these ancient poems, how­ev­er, “com­posed” is a very ambigu­ous term. While archae­o­log­i­cal and lin­guis­tic research dates Homer’s ver­sions of the poems to some­where between 650 and 750, BCE., a schol­ar­ly con­sen­sus agrees these tales exist­ed hun­dreds of years before, in oral form, trans­mit­ted by wan­der­ing bards and mod­i­fied often in the telling. While they are thought to have been writ­ten down in Homer’s age, “any glimpse into Homer before medieval times is rare,” notes the Smith­son­ian, “and any insight into the com­po­si­tion of the epics is pre­cious.”

Before the medieval man­u­script tra­di­tion, begin­ning in the 10th cen­tu­ry CE, the largest extant copies of the Ili­ad and Odyssey come from what is known as the “Home­r­ic papyri,” frag­ments such as the Bankes Papyrus dis­cov­ered in Egypt in the 19th cen­tu­ry. Now, it’s being report­ed in news sites all over the web that the old­est writ­ten copy of the Odyssey has been found—or rather 13 vers­es of it, carved into a clay tablet and dis­cov­ered in the ancient city of Olympia in south­ern Greece. While the dat­ing has not been ful­ly con­firmed, experts believe the arti­fact comes from the Roman era, some­time before the 3rd cen­tu­ry CE.

While the dis­cov­ery may be sig­nif­i­cant, we should be care­ful to qual­i­fy the many claims made for its sta­tus. Like the poem itself, the sto­ry of this dis­cov­ery has seemed to change in its retellings. The tablet is the old­est find in Greece, not in the world. “Find­ing a bit of Homer in home soil,” says Mal­colm Heath, pro­fes­sor of Greek lan­guage and lit­er­a­ture at Leeds Uni­ver­si­ty, “will obvi­ous­ly give the Greeks a warm glow.” But, as The Times reports, “the ear­li­est sur­viv­ing frag­ments of the Odyssey” are actu­al­ly “bits of graf­fi­ti scratched into clay by school­boys at Olbia on the Black Sea coast of what is now Ukraine.” These frag­ments are “at least 600 years old­er than the Olympia tablet.”

Fur­ther­more, the Der­veni papyrus, dis­cov­ered in Egypt, which may include a quote from the poem, has been dat­ed as far back as 340 BCE. Nonethe­less, the new dis­cov­ery is still unusu­al, not only for its place of ori­gin, but also because of the medi­um. As Cam­bridge University’s Tim Whit­marsh notes, “It’s rare to find con­tin­u­ous text of Homer writ­ten out at such length in clay.” The tablet includes a notable word sub­sti­tu­tion that will cer­tain­ly be of inter­est to schol­ars, par­tic­u­lar­ly those at work on the “Homer Mul­ti­text project.”

That project, Smith­son­ian writes, is gath­er­ing all the frag­ments togeth­er “so they can be com­pared and put in sequence to pro­vide a broad­er view of Homer’s epics.” A view that shows us, as the project explains, “that there is not one orig­i­nal text that we should try to recon­struct,” but rather an unknown num­ber of vari­a­tions, tran­scribed and altered over the course of hun­dreds of years and scat­tered all over the ancient world. All of these frag­ments are fas­ci­nat­ing exam­ples, writes Sci­ence Alert, “of the way writ­ten texts can sur­vive through the cen­turies, or even mil­len­nia,” just as the sto­ry itself shows how oral tra­di­tions can sur­vive just as long with­out any need for writ­ten lan­guage at all.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

One of the Best Pre­served Ancient Man­u­scripts of The Ili­ad Is Now Dig­i­tized: See the “Bankes Homer” Man­u­script in High Res­o­lu­tion (Cir­ca 150 C.E.)

See The Ili­ad Per­formed as a One-Woman Show in a Mon­tre­al Bar by McGill Uni­ver­si­ty Clas­sics Pro­fes­sor Lynn Kozak

Emi­ly Wil­son Is the First Woman to Trans­late Homer’s Odyssey into Eng­lish: The New Trans­la­tion Is Out Today

Hear What Homer’s Odyssey Sound­ed Like When Sung in the Orig­i­nal Ancient Greek

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

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Margaret Atwood Teaching an Online Class on Creative Writing

in Education, Literature, Writing | July 12th, 2018

FYI: If you sign up for a Mas­ter­Class course by click­ing on the affil­i­ate links in this post, Open Cul­ture will receive a small fee that helps sup­port our oper­a­tion.

The prob­lem of dystopi­an fic­tion is this: quite often the worst future cre­ative writ­ers can imag­ine is exact­ly the kind of present that has already been inflict­ed on others—by colo­nial­ism, dic­ta­tor­ship, geno­ci­dal war, slav­ery, theoc­ra­cy, abject pover­ty, envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion, etc. Mil­lions all over the world have suf­fered under these con­di­tions, but many read­ers fail to rec­og­nize dystopi­an nov­els as depict­ing exist­ing evils because they hap­pen, or have hap­pened, to peo­ple far away in space and time. Of course, Mar­garet Atwood under­stands this prin­ci­ple. The night­mares she has writ­ten about in nov­els like The Handmaid’s Tale have all already come to pass, she tells us.

In the pro­mo video above for her Mas­ter­class on Cre­ative Writ­ing start­ing this fall (it’s now open), Atwood says, “when I wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, noth­ing went into it that had not hap­pened in real life some­where at some time. The rea­son I made that rule is that I didn’t want any­body say­ing, ‘You cer­tain­ly have an evil imag­i­na­tion, you made up all these bad things.’” And yet, she says, “I didn’t make them up.” In a Swift­ian way, she implies, we did—“we” being human­i­ty writ large, or, per­haps more accu­rate­ly, the destruc­tive, greedy, pow­er-mad indi­vid­u­als who wreak hav­oc on the lives of those they deem infe­ri­ors or right­ful prop­er­ty.

“As a writer,” she says above, “your goal is to keep your read­er believ­ing, even though both of you know it’s fic­tion.” Atwood’s trick to achiev­ing this is a devi­ous one in what we might call sci-fi or dark fan­ta­sy (though she spurns these des­ig­na­tions): she writes not only what she knows to be true, in some sense, but also what we know to be true, though we would rather it not be, as in Vir­ginia Woolf’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of fic­tion as “as spider’s web, attached ever so light­ly per­haps, but still attached to life at all four cor­ners.”

Atwood says that writ­ers turn away from the blank page because they fear some­thing. She has made it her busi­ness, instead, to turn toward fear, to see dark visions like those of her Mad­dAd­dam Tril­o­gy, an extrap­o­la­tion of hor­rors already hap­pen­ing, in some form, some­where in the world (and soon to be a fun-filled TV series). What she feared in 1984, the year she began writ­ing The Handmaid’s Tale, seems just as chill­ing­ly pre­scient to many readers—and view­ers of the TV adaptation—thirty-four years lat­er, a tes­ta­ment to Atwood’s spec­u­la­tive real­ism, and to the awful, stub­born resis­tance real­i­ty puts up to improve­ment.

As she put it in an essay about the novel’s ori­gins, “Nations nev­er build appar­ent­ly rad­i­cal forms of gov­ern­ment on foun­da­tions that aren’t there already.” The same, per­haps, might be said of nov­el­ists. Do you have some truths to tell in fic­tion­al form? Maybe Atwood is the per­fect guide to help you write them.

You can take this class by sign­ing up for a Mas­ter­Class’ All Access Pass. The All Access Pass will give you instant access to this course and 85 oth­ers for a 12-month peri­od.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Mar­garet Atwood Explains How Sto­ries Change with Tech­nol­o­gy

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

100 Great Sci-Fi Sto­ries by Women Writ­ers (Read 20 for Free Online)

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

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A Big Digital Archive of Independent & Alternative Publications: Browse/Download Radical Periodicals Printed from 1951 to 2016

in Archives, History, Literature, Magazines, Politics | July 4th, 2018

The con­sol­i­da­tion of big media in print, TV, and inter­net has had some seri­ous­ly dele­te­ri­ous effects on pol­i­tics and cul­ture, not least of which has been the major depen­dence on social media as a means of mass com­mu­ni­ca­tion. While these plat­forms give space to voic­es we may not oth­er­wise hear, they also flat­ten and mon­e­tize com­mu­ni­ca­tion, spread abuse and dis­in­for­ma­tion, force the use of one-size-fits-all tools, and cre­ate the illu­sion of an open, demo­c­ra­t­ic forum that obscures the gross inequities of real life.

Today’s media land­scape stands in stark con­trast to that of the mid-to-late twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, when inde­pen­dent and alter­na­tive press­es flour­ished, dis­sem­i­nat­ing art, poet­ry, and rad­i­cal pol­i­tics, and offer­ing cus­tom plat­forms for mar­gin­al­ized com­mu­ni­ties and dis­senters. While the future of inde­pen­dent media seems, today, unclear at best, a look back at the indie press­es of decades past may show a way for­ward.

Para­dox­i­cal­ly, the same tech­nol­o­gy that threat­ens to impose a glob­al mono­cul­ture also enables us to archive and share thou­sands of unique arti­facts from more het­ero­dox ages of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. One stel­lar exam­ple of such an archive, Inde­pen­dent Voic­es—“an open access col­lec­tion of an alter­na­tive press”—stores sev­er­al hun­dred dig­i­tized copies of peri­od­i­cals “pro­duced by fem­i­nists, dis­si­dent GIs, cam­pus rad­i­cals, Native Amer­i­cans, anti-war activists, Black Pow­er advo­cates, His­pan­ics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alter­na­tive lit­er­ary mag­a­zines dur­ing the lat­ter half of the 20th cen­tu­ry.”

These pub­li­ca­tions come from the spe­cial col­lec­tions of sev­er­al dozen libraries and indi­vid­u­als and span the years 1951 to 2016. While exam­ples from recent years show that alter­na­tive print pub­li­ca­tions haven’t dis­ap­peared, the rich­est, most his­tor­i­cal­ly res­o­nant exam­ples tend to come from the 60s and 70s, when the var­i­ous strains of the coun­ter­cul­ture formed col­lec­tive move­ments and aes­thet­ics, often pow­ered by easy-to-use mimeo­graph machines.

As Geor­gia State Uni­ver­si­ty his­to­ri­an John McMil­lian says, the “hun­dreds of rad­i­cal under­ground news­pa­pers” that pro­lif­er­at­ed dur­ing the Viet­nam war “edu­cat­ed and politi­cized young peo­ple, helped to shore up activist com­mu­ni­ties, and were the movement’s pri­ma­ry means of inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tion.” These pub­li­ca­tions, notes The New York­er’s Louis Menand, rep­re­sent “one of the most spon­ta­neous and aggres­sive growths in pub­lish­ing his­to­ry.”

With pub­li­ca­tions from the era like And Ain’t I a Woman, Bread & Ros­es, Black Dia­logue, Gay Lib­er­a­tor, Grunt Free Press, Native Move­ment, and The Yip­ster Times, Inde­pen­dent Voic­es show­cas­es the height of coun­ter­cul­tur­al activist pub­lish­ing. These are only a smat­ter­ing of titles on offer. Each issue is archived in a high-res­o­lu­tion, down­load­able PDF, per­fect for brush­ing up on your gen­er­al knowl­edge of sec­ond-wave fem­i­nism or 60s Black Pow­er; sourc­ing schol­ar­ship on the devel­op­ment of rad­i­cal, alter­na­tive press over the past six­ty years; or find­ing mate­r­i­al to inspire the future of indie media, what­ev­er form it hap­pens to take. Enter the Inde­pen­dent Voic­es archive here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Down­load 834 Rad­i­cal Zines From a Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Online Archive: Glob­al­iza­tion, Punk Music, the Indus­tri­al Prison Com­plex & More

Down­load 50+ Issues of Leg­endary West Coast Punk Music Zines from the 1970–80s: Dam­age, Slash & No Mag

Enter the Pulp Mag­a­zine Archive, Fea­tur­ing Over 11,000 Dig­i­tized Issues of Clas­sic Sci-Fi, Fan­ta­sy & Detec­tive Fic­tion

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

 

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