Ian McKellen Recites Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20, Backed by Garage Rock Band, the Fleshtones, on Andy Warhol’s MTV Variety Show (1987)

in Literature, Music, Television | January 1st, 2018

80s revival­ism can be done bad­ly and it can be done well. Those old enough to remem­ber the decade seem best placed to recre­ate it, but the suc­cess of Stranger Things offers an excel­lent coun­terex­am­ple. The mil­len­ni­al Duf­fer broth­ers did a mar­velous job of con­jur­ing the look and feel of mid-80s mise-en-scène by stitch­ing togeth­er close view­ings of a dozen or so films—from the mas­sive­ly pop­u­lar E.T. to more obscure flicks like made-for-TV Mazes and Mon­sters (not to men­tion such pre­cious archival footage as this.)

When it comes to music how­ev­er, 80s retro tends to con­fine them­selves to ear­ly hip and hop and elec­tro, the syn­th­pop of Gary Numan and Duran Duran or the cheesy hair met­al of Möt­ley Crüe. But this lens miss­es the sig­nif­i­cant 60s revival­ism that emerged at the time. Garage, surf, and psych rock and the jan­g­ly sounds of The Byrds inspired R.E.M., the B52s, the Replace­ments, the House of Love, and the Flesh­tones, a much less­er-known NYC band who may nev­er have got­ten their com­mer­cial due, but who cer­tain­ly appealed to 60s art star Andy Warhol.

When Warhol remade him­self as a TV per­son­al­i­ty in the 80s with his MTV vari­ety show Andy Warhol’s 15 Min­utes he cast the Flesh­tones as the back­ing band for ris­ing the­ater and film star Ian McK­ellen, a match-up that rep­re­sents anoth­er hall­mark of 80s pop culture—the post­mod­ern jux­ta­po­si­tion of gen­res, styles, and reg­is­ters which Warhol helped pio­neer 20 years ear­li­er when he brought kitschy silk-screened soup cans, sexy street hus­tlers, and the Vel­vet Under­ground into the art scene.

Warhol’s tele­vi­sion work turned this impulse into a mul­ti­me­dia cir­cus fea­tur­ing “The high and the low. The rich and the famous. The strug­gling artists and the ris­ing stars,” as Warhol Muse­um cura­tor Ger­a­lyn Hux­ley puts it. In this par­tic­u­lar­ly fit­ting exam­ple, McK­ellen and the Flesh­tones bring Shake­speare’s racy Son­net 20 to young, hip MTV audi­ences in 1987. L.A. Week­ly lists a few of the “cool points” from the clip:

  • A young, hot, already insane­ly tal­ent­ed Ian McK­ellen
  • Wear­ing awe­some New Wave fash­ions
  • At Andy Warhol’s Fac­to­ry in 1987
  • Backed by cult group the Flesh­tones
  • Recit­ing a Shake­speare Son­net

What’s not to love? Start your 2018 with some Shake­speare-meets-garage-rock cool­ness from 31 years ago—and revis­it more of Warhol’s MTV vari­ety show at our pre­vi­ous post. For seri­ous stu­dents of the decade, this is essen­tial view­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Andy Warhol’s 15 Min­utes: Dis­cov­er the Post­mod­ern MTV Vari­ety Show That Made Warhol a Star in the Tele­vi­sion Age (1985–87)

Ian McK­ellen Reads a Pas­sion­ate Speech by William Shake­speare, Writ­ten in Defense of Immi­grants

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Sings Shakespeare’s Son­net 18

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

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The Favorite Literary Work of Every Country Visualized on a World Map

in Literature | December 28th, 2017

Begun by user “BackForward24” and crowd­sourced through Red­dit, this map of the world illus­trates the most beloved/popular book of each coun­try by past­ing a scan of the book cov­er over its space on the world map. For book lovers who want to read them­selves around the world, it will prove invalu­able. (And if you can’t read the map, no wor­ries, there is a text ver­sion avail­able.)

But let’s unpack the larg­er (and yes, first world) coun­tries first. The Unit­ed States is rep­re­sent­ed by To Kill a Mock­ing­bird, which ticks off a lot of the marks that make it quin­tes­sen­tial­ly Amer­i­can: most high school­ers have read it, and it deals with both racism and our shame­ful his­to­ry and the faith that the law can even­tu­al­ly right wrongs. Cana­da has Anne of Green Gables. Great Britain has Charles Dick­ens’ Great Expec­ta­tions, and Ire­land Ulysses (no sur­prise there.)

Our Aus­tralian read­ers might want to weigh in on Tom Winton’s Cloud­street (a quite recent nov­el), and New Zealan­ders please tell us about The Bone Peo­ple by Keri Hulme.

My take­away and pos­si­bly yours from the map is how many titles are new to the West­ern­er. Europe has some famil­iar titles: Spain gets Cer­vantes’ Don Quixote (of course), Italy gets Dante’s The Divine Com­e­dy, and France gets Les Mis­érables by Hugo. And while Rus­sia is rep­re­sent­ed by Tolstoy’s War and Peace, East­ern Europe is rather unfa­mil­iar, at least com­pared to South Amer­i­ca, where Argenti­na has Borges’ Fic­tions, Chile has Isabel Allende’s The House of Spir­its, and Colom­bia has Marquez’s One Hun­dred Years of Soli­tude, all well known from decades of prizes, book club atten­tion, and film adap­ta­tions.

This Red­dit thread con­tains much crit­i­cism and debate, so please check it out. Some good points are raised: if the Ili­ad rep­re­sents Greece, why not the Mahabharata/Ramayan for India? “Hon­est­ly there is work to do (in) the Africa part,” says anoth­er (very polite­ly). There’s also debate over coun­tries not being rep­re­sent­ed at all, such as Tibet (under Chi­nese occu­pa­tion), along with West­ern Sahara, Soma­liland, Kash­mir, Balochis­tan, and Kur­dis­tan. Frankly, if you start try­ing to talk about the cul­ture of nations, there will be debate over what con­sti­tutes a nation. (I’m not sure if Pales­tine is cov­ered, but some Red­di­tors are vot­ing for Susan Abulhawa’s Morn­ings in Jenin.)

Anoth­er thing to keep in mind: the nov­el is very much a West­ern genre. For many coun­tries, that might not be the case. How­ev­er, I sense that that debate (and future map) will be anoth­er Red­dit thread, some­where, some­time.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Map Show­ing How Much Time It Takes to Learn For­eign Lan­guages: From Eas­i­est to Hard­est

Down­load 67,000 His­toric Maps (in High Res­o­lu­tion) from the Won­der­ful David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

An Inter­ac­tive Map of Every Record Shop in the World

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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Hear Lou Reed’s The Raven, a Tribute to Edgar Allan Poe Featuring David Bowie, Ornette Coleman, Willem Dafoe & More

in Literature, Music | December 28th, 2017

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It’s not imme­di­ate­ly appar­ent that Lou Reed and Edgar Allan Poe would have that much in com­mon. It’s true Reed inher­it­ed a goth­ic sen­si­bil­i­ty (though one could argue that this ele­ment in the Vel­vet Under­ground came main­ly from Nico and John Cale), and he worked in a self-con­scious­ly lit­er­ary vein. But in almost every oth­er respect, he spoke a total­ly dif­fer­ent idiom. Drawn to the seedy bars and street cor­ners rather than the great hous­es, lab­o­ra­to­ries, and scholar’s nooks of Poe, Reed inclined his ear toward the com­mon tongue, in con­trast to Poe’s care­ful­ly com­posed Roman­tic dic­tion.

But while it’s hard to imag­ine Poe think­ing much of Reed’s rock and roll, the themes of sex­u­al obses­sion, mad­ness, ter­ror, and mor­bid reflec­tion that Poe brought into promi­nence seem to find their fruition over 100 years lat­er in the work of the Vel­vets (and the thou­sands of post-punk bands they inspired), and in much of Reed’s sub­se­quent solo work—up to his final album, the crit­i­cal­ly-reviled Lulu with Metal­li­ca, which his long­time part­ner Lau­rie Ander­son declared full of “fear and rage and ven­om and ter­ror and revenge and love,” and which David Bowie pro­nounced a “mas­ter­piece.”

While we know where much of Reed’s per­son­al angst came from, we can also hear—in the vivid shock of his imagery and the extrem­i­ty of his emotions—the echo of Poe’s crazed pro­tag­o­nists. Leave it to Reed, then, to take on the task of inter­pret­ing Poe in the 21st cen­tu­ry, in his 2003 album, The Raven, a col­lec­tion of Poe-themed musi­cal pieces (“This is the sto­ry of Edgar Allan Poe / Not exact­ly the boy next door”), with such col­lab­o­ra­tors as Ander­son, Bowie, Ornette Cole­man, the Blind Boys of Alaba­ma, Antony, Eliz­a­beth Ash­ley, and Willem Dafoe, who reads a Reed-adapt­ed ver­sion of the poem at the top (track 9 in the album below), over a video trib­ute to B hor­ror actress Deb­bie Rochon (for some rea­son).

What did Reed seek to accom­plish with this con­cep­tu­al project? As he him­self writes in the lin­er notes, “I have reread and rewrit­ten Poe to ask the same ques­tions again. Who am I? Why am I drawn to do what I should not?… Why do we love what we can­not have? Why do we have a pas­sion for exact­ly the wrong thing?” These are time­less philo­soph­i­cal ques­tions, indeed, which tran­scend mat­ters of style and genre. Again and again, both Poe and Reed pur­sued them into the dark­est recess­es of the human psyche—the places most of us fear to go. And per­haps for that rea­son espe­cial­ly, we are pere­nial­ly drawn back to their work.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Raven: a Pop-up Book Brings Edgar Allan Poe’s Clas­sic Super­nat­ur­al Poem to 3D Paper Life

Famous Edgar Allan Poe Sto­ries Read by Iggy Pop, Jeff Buck­ley, Christo­pher Walken, Mar­i­anne Faith­ful & More

Meet the Char­ac­ters Immor­tal­ized in Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”: The Stars and Gay Rights Icons from Andy Warhol’s Fac­to­ry Scene

Edgar Allan Poe’s the Raven: Watch an Award-Win­ning Short Film That Mod­ern­izes Poe’s Clas­sic Tale

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

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Why Should We Read Charles Dickens? A TED-Ed Animation Makes the Case

in Literature | December 26th, 2017

You can’t go near the lit­er­ary press late­ly with­out hear­ing men­tion of Nathan Hill’s sprawl­ing new nov­el, The Nix, wide­ly praised as a com­ic epic on par with David Fos­ter Wallace’s Infi­nite Jest. Nov­el­ist John Irv­ing, to whom Hill has drawn com­par­isons, goes so far as to com­pare the nov­el­ist to Charles Dick­ens. Such praise goes too far, if you ask Cur­rent Affairs edi­tor Bri­an­na Ren­nix. In a caus­tic review essay, Ren­nix unfa­vor­ably mea­sures not only The Nix, but also the post­mod­ern nov­els of Wal­lace, Pyn­chon, McCarthy, Franzen, and DeLil­lo, against the bag­gy Vic­to­ri­an seri­al­ized works of writ­ers like Dick­ens and George Eliot. “Books like Mid­dle­march,” she writes, “took seri­ous­ly the idea that nov­els had the pow­er to trans­form human life, not merely—as seems to be the goal of a lot of post­mod­ern novels—to riff off its foibles for the pur­pose of mak­ing the author look clever.”

It’s pos­si­ble to appre­ci­ate Rennix’s essay as a read­er of more ecu­meni­cal tastes—as some­one who hap­pens to enjoy Dick­ens and Eliot and all the authors she dis­miss­es. There’s much more to the post­mod­ern nov­el than she allows, but there are also very good rea­sons par­tic­u­lar to our age for us turn, or return, to Dick­ens.

In the TED-Ed video above, script­ed by lit­er­ary schol­ar Iseult Gille­spie (who pre­vi­ous­ly made a case for Vir­ginia Woolf), we get some of them. For all the fun he had with human foibles, Dick­ens was also a social real­ist, the great­est influ­ence on lat­er lit­er­ary nat­u­ral­ism, who “shed light on how his society’s most invis­i­ble peo­ple lived.” Unlike many nov­el­ists, in his own time and ours, Dick­ens had the per­son­al expe­ri­ence of liv­ing in such con­di­tions to draw on for his authen­tic por­tray­als.

Nonethe­less, Dick­ens’ did not allow his enor­mous pop­u­lar suc­cess to blunt his com­pas­sion and con­cern for the plight of work­ing peo­ple and the poor and social­ly mar­gin­al­ized. The engross­ing, high­ly enter­tain­ing plots and char­ac­ters in his nov­els are always pressed into ser­vice. We might call his motives polit­i­cal, but the term is too often pejo­ra­tive. The “Dick­en­sian” mode is a human­ist one. Dick­ens’ did not push spe­cif­ic ide­o­log­i­cal agen­das; he tried, as Alain de Bot­ton says in his intro­duc­to­ry video above, “to get us inter­est­ed in some pret­ty seri­ous things: the evils of an indus­tri­al­iz­ing soci­ety, the work­ing con­di­tions in fac­to­ries, child labor, vicious social snob­bery, the mad­den­ing inef­fi­cien­cies of gov­ern­ment bureau­cra­cy.” He tried, in oth­er words, to move his read­ers to care about the peo­ple around them. What they chose to do with that care was, of course, then, as now, up to them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Charles Dick­ens’ Life & Lit­er­ary Works

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

Why Should We Read Vir­ginia Woolf? A TED-Ed Ani­ma­tion Makes the Case

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

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Eudora Welty’s Handwritten Eggnog Recipe, and Charles Dickens’ Recipe for Holiday Punch

in Food & Drink, Letters, Life, Literature | December 22nd, 2017

’Tis the sea­son to break out the fam­i­ly recipes of beloved rel­a­tives, though often their prove­nance is not quite what we think.

(Imag­ine the cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance upon dis­cov­er­ing that Moth­er swiped “her” Ital­ian Zuc­chi­ni Cres­cent Pie from Pills­bury Bake-Off win­ner, Mil­li­cent Nathan of Boca Raton, Flori­da…)

When it came to cred­it­ing the eggnog she dubbed “the taste of Christ­mas Day,” above, Pulitzer Prize-win­ning author Eudo­ra Wel­ty shared it out equal­ly between her moth­er and author Charles Dick­ens:

In our house while I was grow­ing up, I don’t remem­ber that hard liquor was served at all except on one day in the year. Ear­ly on Christ­mas morn­ing, we woke up to the sound of the egg­beat­er: Moth­er in the kitchen was whip­ping up eggnog. All in our bathrobes, we began our Christ­mas before break­fast. Through­out the day Moth­er made batch­es afresh. All our callers expect­ed her eggnog.

It was ladled from the punch bowl into punch cups and sil­ver gob­lets, and had to be eat­en with a spoon. It stood up in peaks. It was rich, creamy and strong. Moth­er gave full cred­it for the recipe to Charles Dick­ens.

Nice, but per­haps Dick­ens is unde­serv­ing of this hon­or? The con­tents of his punch­bowl bore lit­tle resem­blance to Moth­er Welty’s, as evi­denced by an 1847 let­ter to his child­hood friend, Amelia Fil­loneau, in which he shared a recipe he promised would make her “a beau­ti­ful Punch­mak­er in more sens­es than one”:

Peel into a very strong com­mon basin (which may be bro­ken, in case of acci­dent, with­out dam­age to the owner’s peace or pock­et) the rinds of three lemons, cut very thin, and with as lit­tle as pos­si­ble of the white coat­ing between the peel and the fruit, attached. Add a dou­ble-hand­full of lump sug­ar (good mea­sure), a pint of good old rum, and a large wine-glass full of brandy — if it not be a large claret-glass, say two. Set this on fire, by fill­ing a warm sil­ver spoon with the spir­it, light­ing the con­tents at a wax taper, and pour­ing them gen­tly in. Let it burn for three or four min­utes at least, stir­ring it from time to Time. Then extin­guish it by cov­er­ing the basin with a tray, which will imme­di­ate­ly put out the flame. Then squeeze in the juice of the three lemons, and add a quart of boil­ing water. Stir the whole well, cov­er it up for five min­utes, and stir again.

This sounds very like the “seething bowls of punch” the jol­ly Ghost of Christ­mas Present shows Ebenez­er Scrooge in A Christ­mas Car­ol, dim­ming the cham­ber with their deli­cious steam.

It’s also veg­an, in con­trast to what you might have been served in the Wel­ty ladies’ home.

Why not serve both? In the words of Tiny Tim, “Here’s to us all!”

Eudo­ra Welty’s Mother’s Eggnog (Attrib­uted, Per­haps Erro­neous­ly, to Charles Dick­ens)

6 egg yolks, well beat­en

Add 3 tbsp. pow­dered sug­ar

Add 1 cup whiskey, added slow­ly, beat­ing all the while

Fold in 1 pint whipped cream

Whip 6 whipped egg whites and add to the mix­ture above.

 

Charles Dick­ens’ Hol­i­day Punch (adapt­ed from Punch by David Won­drich)

3/4 cup sug­ar

3 lemons

2 cups rum

1 1/4 cups cognac

5 cups black tea (or hot water)

Gar­nish: lemon and orange wheels, fresh­ly grat­ed nut­meg

In the basin of an enam­eled cast-iron pot or heat­proof bowl, add sug­ar and the peels of three lemons.

Rub lemons and sug­ar togeth­er to release cit­rus oils. For more greater infu­sion, let sit for 30 min­utes.

Add rum and cognac to the sug­ar and cit­rus.

Light a match, and, using a heat­proof spoon (stain­less steel is best), pick up a spoon­ful of the spir­it mix.

Care­ful­ly bring the match to the spoon to light.

Care­ful­ly bring the lit spoon to the spir­its in the bowl.

Let the spir­its burn for about three min­utes. The fire will melt the sug­ar and extract the oil from the lemon peels.

Extin­guish the bowl by cov­er­ing it with a heat­proof pan or tray.

Skim off the lemon peels (leav­ing them too long in may impart a bit­ter fla­vor).

Squeeze in the juice of the three peeled lemons, and add hot tea or water.

If serv­ing the punch hot, skip to the next step. If serv­ing cold, cool punch in the refrig­er­a­tor and, when cooled, add ice.

Gar­nish with cit­rus wheels and grat­ed nut­meg.

Ladle into indi­vid­ual glass­es.

Learn more about these and oth­er fes­tive hol­i­day drinks in Mas­ter of Wine Eliz­a­beth Gabay’s essay “Cel­e­brat­ing Christ­mas and New Year With Punch.”

Image above via Gar­den and Gun

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Charles Min­gus’ “Top Secret” Eggnog Recipe Con­tains “Enough Alco­hol to Put Down an Ele­phant”

Blue Christ­mas: Feed Your Sea­son­al Depres­sion with Hol­i­day Mas­ter­pieces

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Underground Cartoonist Robert Crumb Creates an Illustrated Introduction to Franz Kafka’s Life and Work

in Comics/Cartoons, Literature | December 14th, 2017

The use of an author’s name as an adjec­tive to describe some kind of gen­er­al style can seem, well, lazy, in a wink-wink, “you know what I mean,” kind of way. One must leave it to read­ers to decide whether deploy­ing a “Bald­win­ian” or a “Woolfi­an,” or an “Orwellian” or “Dick­en­sian,” is jus­ti­fied. When it comes to “Kafkaesque,” we may find rea­son to con­sid­er aban­don­ing the word alto­geth­er. Not because we don’t know what it means, but because we think it means what Kaf­ka meant, rather than what he wrote. Maybe turn­ing him into short­hand, “a clever ref­er­ence,” writes Chris Barsan­ti, pre­pares us to seri­ous­ly mis­un­der­stand his work.

The prob­lem moti­vat­ed author David Zane Mairowitz and under­ground comics leg­end Robert Crumb to cre­ate a graph­ic biog­ra­phy, first pub­lished in 1990 as Kaf­ka for Begin­ners. “The book,” writes Barsan­ti of a 2007 Fan­to­graph­ics edi­tion called Kaf­ka, “states its case rather plain: ‘No writer of our time, and prob­a­bly none since Shake­speare, has been so wide­ly over-inter­pret­ed and pigeon holed… [Kafkaesque] is an adjec­tive that takes on almost myth­ic pro­por­tions in our time, irrev­o­ca­bly tied to fan­tasies of doom and gloom, ignor­ing the intri­cate Jew­ish Joke that weaves itself through the bulk of Kafka’s work.’” Or, as Maria Popo­va puts it, “Kafka’s sto­ries, how­ev­er grim, are near­ly always also… fun­ny.”

Much of that humor derives from “the author’s cop­ing mech­a­nisms amid Prague’s anti-Semit­ic cul­tur­al cli­mate.” Mairowitz describes Kafka’s Jew­ish humor as “healthy anti-Semi­tism.… but soon­er or lat­er, even the most hate­ful of Jew­ish self-hatreds has to turn around and laugh at itself.” Crumb pro­vides graph­ic illus­tra­tions of Kafka’s espe­cial­ly mor­dant, absur­dist humor in adap­ta­tions of The Meta­mor­pho­sis, A Hunger Artist, In the Penal Colony, and The Judge­ment and brief sketch­es from The Tri­al, The Cas­tle, and Ameri­ka. These illus­tra­tions draw out the grotesque nature of Kafka’s humor from the start, Barstan­ti notes, “with a grue­some graph­ic ren­der­ing of Kafka’s night­mares of his own death.”

Kafka’s self-vio­lence leaps out at us in its incred­i­ble speci­fici­ty, which can pro­duce hor­rors, like the ghoul­ish exe­cu­tion of “In the Penal Colony,” and dark­ly fun­ny fan­tasies like a “pork butcher’s knife” send­ing thin slices of Kaf­ka fly­ing around the room, “due to the speed of the work.” Turned into cold cuts, as it were. Crumb’s illus­tra­tion (top), imag­ines this gris­ly joke with exquis­ite glee—halo of blood spurts like squig­gly excla­ma­tion marks and bowler hat tak­ing flight. Along with Mairowitz’s lit­er­ary analy­sis and bio­graph­i­cal detail, Crumb’s fine­ly ren­dered illus­tra­tions make Kaf­ka an “invalu­able book,” Barsan­ti writes, one that gives Kaf­ka “back his soul.”

One only wish­es they had paid more atten­tion to Kafka’s weird ani­mal sto­ries, some of the fun­ni­est he ever wrote. Sto­ries like “Inves­ti­ga­tions of a Dog” and “In Our Syn­a­gogue” express with more vivid imag­i­na­tion and wicked humor Kafka’s pro­found­ly ambiva­lent rela­tion­ship to Judaism and to him­self as a “tor­tured, gen­tle, cru­el, and bril­liant,” and yet very fun­ny, out­sider.

via Brain Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Does “Kafkaesque” Real­ly Mean? A Short Ani­mat­ed Video Explains

R. Crumb Shows Us How He Illus­trat­ed Gen­e­sis: A Faith­ful, Idio­syn­crat­ic Illus­tra­tion of All 50 Chap­ters

Robert Crumb Illus­trates Philip K. Dick’s Infa­mous, Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Meet­ing with God (1974)

Three Charles Bukows­ki Books Illus­trat­ed by Robert Crumb: Under­ground Com­ic Art Meets Out­sider Lit­er­a­ture

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

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New Gabriel García Márquez Digital Archive Features More Than 27,000 Digitized Letters, Manuscript Pages, Photos & More

in Archives, Literature | December 13th, 2017

Uniden­ti­fied pho­tog­ra­ph­er. Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez in Ara­cat­a­ca, March 1966.
Cour­tesy Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter.

When Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez died in 2014, it was said that only the Bible had sold more books in Span­ish than the Colom­bian writer’s work: Love in the Time of Cholera, The Autumn of the Patri­arch, Chron­i­cle of a Death Fore­told, The Gen­er­al in His Labyrinth… and yes, of course, One Hun­dred Years of Soli­tude, the 1967 nov­el William Kennedy described in a New York Times review as “the first piece of lit­er­a­ture since the Book of Gen­e­sis that should be required read­ing for the entire human race.”

Gar­cía Márquez began to hate such ele­vat­ed praise. It raised expec­ta­tions he felt he couldn’t ful­fill after the enor­mous suc­cess of that incred­i­bly bril­liant, seem­ing­ly sui gener­is sec­ond nov­el. Every­one in South Amer­i­ca read the book. To avoid the crowds, the author moved to Spain (where Mario Var­gas Llosa wrote a doc­tor­al dis­ser­ta­tion on him). He needn’t have wor­ried.

Every­thing he wrote after­ward met with near-uni­ver­sal acclaim—bringing ear­li­er work like No One Writes to the Colonel, Leaf Storm, short sto­ry col­lec­tions like A Very Old Man with Enor­mous Wings, and decades of jour­nal­ism and non-fic­tion writing—to a much wider read­er­ship than he’d ever had before.

Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez’s revised type­script of Chron­i­cle of a Death Fore­told, 1980.
Cour­tesy Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter.

After Gre­go­ry Rabassa’s 1970 trans­la­tion of One Hun­dred Years of Soli­tude, waves of “mag­i­cal real­ist” and Latin Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture from the 50s and 60s swept through the Eng­lish-speak­ing world, much of it in trans­la­tion for the first time. Gar­cía Márquez declared the Eng­lish ver­sion of his nov­el bet­ter than the orig­i­nal, and affec­tion­ate­ly called Rabas­sa, “the best Latin Amer­i­can writer in the Eng­lish lan­guage.” Upwards of 50 mil­lion peo­ple world­wide now know the sto­ry of the Buendía fam­i­ly. “Pub­lished in 44 lan­guages,” The Atlantic notes, “it remains the most trans­lat­ed lit­er­ary work in Span­ish after Don Quixote, and a sur­vey among inter­na­tion­al writ­ers ranks it as the nov­el that has most shaped world lit­er­a­ture over the past three decades.”

The sto­ry of the book’s com­po­si­tion is even more fas­ci­nat­ing. In the Democ­ra­cy Now trib­ute video below, you can hear Gar­cía Márquez him­self tell it. And at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas at Austin’s Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter, we can see arti­facts like the pho­to­graph of the author at the top, in his home­town of Ara­cat­a­ca, Colom­bia in March of 1966, dur­ing the com­po­si­tion of One Hun­dred Years of Soli­tude. We can see scanned images of type­script like the page above from Chron­i­cle of a Death Fore­told.


In all, the archive “includes man­u­script drafts of pub­lished and unpub­lished works, research mate­r­i­al, pho­tographs, scrap­books, cor­re­spon­dence, clip­pings, note­books, screen­plays, print­ed mate­r­i­al, ephemera, and an audio record­ing of Gar­cía Márquez’s accep­tance speech for the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture in 1982… approx­i­mate­ly 27,500 items from Gar­cía Márquez’s papers.” These doc­u­ments and pho­tos, like that fur­ther down of young jour­nal­ist Gar­cía Márquez with Emma Cas­tro and, just below, of the sea­soned famous nov­el­ist, with her broth­er, tell the sto­ry of a writer who lived his life steeped in the pol­i­tics and his­to­ry of Latin Amer­i­ca, and who trans­lat­ed those sto­ries faith­ful­ly for the rest of the world.

Uniden­ti­fied pho­tog­ra­ph­er. Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez with Fidel Cas­tro, undat­ed.
Cour­tesy Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter.

Enter, search, and explore the archive here. This amaz­ing resource opens up to the gen­er­al pub­lic a wealth of mate­r­i­al pre­vi­ous­ly only avail­able to schol­ars and librar­i­ans. The project fea­tures “text-search­able Eng­lish- and Span­ish-lan­guage mate­ri­als, took 18 months and involved the efforts of librar­i­ans, archivists, stu­dents, tech­nol­o­gy staff mem­bers and con­ser­va­tors.” Per­haps only coin­ci­den­tal­ly, 18 months is the time it took Gar­cía Márquez to write One Hun­dred Years of Soli­tude, bar­ri­cad­ed in his office while he ran out of mon­ey, pulled for­ward by some irre­sistible force. “I did not stop writ­ing for a sin­gle day for 18 straight months, until I fin­ished the book,” he tells us. As always, we believe him.

Uniden­ti­fied pho­tog­ra­ph­er. Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez with Emma Cas­tro, 1957.
Cour­tesy Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez’s Extra­or­di­nary Nobel Prize Accep­tance Speech, “The Soli­tude Of Latin Amer­i­ca,” in Eng­lish & Span­ish (1982)

Read 10 Short Sto­ries by Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez Free Online (Plus More Essays & Inter­views)

Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez Describes the Cul­tur­al Mer­its of Soap Operas, and Even Wrote a Script for One

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

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“Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better”: How Samuel Beckett Created the Unlikely Mantra That Inspires Entrepreneurs Today

in Life, Literature | December 7th, 2017

Image by the Bib­lio­thèque nationale de France, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

To what writer, besides Ayn Rand, do the busi­ness-mind­ed techies and tech-mind­ed busi­ness­men of 21st-cen­tu­ry Sil­i­con Val­ley look for their inspi­ra­tion? The name of Samuel Beck­ett may not, at first, strike you as an obvi­ous answer — unless, of course, you know the ori­gin of the phrase “Fail bet­ter.” It appears five times in Beck­et­t’s 1983 sto­ry “Worstward Ho,” the first of which goes like this: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No mat­ter. Try again. Fail again. Fail bet­ter.” The sen­ti­ment seems to res­onate nat­u­ral­ly with the men­tal­i­ty demand­ed by the world of tech star­tups, where near­ly every ven­ture ends in fail­ure, but fail­ure which may well con­tain the seeds of future suc­cess.

Or rather, the appar­ent sen­ti­ment res­onates. “By itself, you can prob­a­bly under­stand why this phrase has become a mantra of sorts, espe­cial­ly in the glam­or­ized world of over­worked start-up founders hop­ing against pret­ty high odds to make it,” writes Books on the Wall’s Andrea Schlottman.

“We think so, too. That is, until you read the rest of it.” The para­graph imme­di­ate­ly fol­low­ing those much-quot­ed lines runs as fol­lows:

First the body. No. First the place. No. First both. Now either. Now the oth­er. Sick of the either try the oth­er. Sick of it back sick of the either. So on. Some­how on. Till sick of both. Throw up and go. Where nei­ther. Till sick of there. Throw up and back. The body again. Where none. The place again. Where none. Try again. Fail again. Bet­ter again. Or bet­ter worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good. Go for good. Where nei­ther for good. Good and all.

“Throw up for good” — a rich image, cer­tain­ly, but per­haps not as like­ly to get you out there dis­rupt­ing com­pla­cent indus­tries as “Fail bet­ter,” which The New Inquiry’s Ned Beau­man describes as “exper­i­men­tal literature’s equiv­a­lent of that famous Che Gue­vara pho­to, flayed com­plete­ly of mean­ing and turned into a suc­cess­ful brand with no par­tic­u­lar own­er. ‘Worstward Ho’ may be a dif­fi­cult work that resists any sta­ble inter­pre­ta­tion, but we can at least be pret­ty sure that Beckett’s mes­sage was a bit dark­er than ‘Just do your best and every­thing is sure to work out ok in the end.’

But if Beck­et­t’s words don’t pro­vide quite the cause for opti­mism we thought they did, the sto­ry of his life actu­al­ly might. “Beck­ett had already expe­ri­enced plen­ty of artis­tic fail­ure by the time he devel­oped it into a poet­ics,” writes Chris Pow­er in The Guardian. “No one was will­ing to pub­lish his first nov­el, Dream of Fair to Mid­dling Women, and the book of short sto­ries he sal­vaged from it, More Pricks Than Kicks (1934), sold dis­as­trous­ly.” And yet today, even those who’ve nev­er read a page of his work — indeed, those who’ve nev­er even read the “Fail bet­ter” quote in full — acknowl­edge him as one of the 20th cen­tu­ry’s great­est lit­er­ary mas­ters. Still, we have good cause to believe that Beck­ett him­self prob­a­bly regard­ed his own work as, to one degree or anoth­er, a fail­ure. Those of us who revere it would do well to remem­ber that, and maybe even to draw some inspi­ra­tion from it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Inspi­ra­tion from Charles Bukows­ki: You Might Be Old, Your Life May Be “Crap­py,” But You Can Still Make Good Art

Start Your Day with Wern­er Her­zog Inspi­ra­tional Posters

The Muse­um of Fail­ure: A New Swedish Muse­um Show­cas­es Harley-David­son Per­fume, Col­gate Beef Lasagne, Google Glass & Oth­er Failed Prod­ucts

Why Incom­pe­tent Peo­ple Think They’re Amaz­ing: An Ani­mat­ed Les­son from David Dun­ning (of the Famous “Dun­ning-Kruger Effect”)

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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