Ralph Steadman’s Surrealist Illustrations of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1995)

in Art, Books, Literature | August 16th, 2017

As a novelist, George Orwell did not traffic in subtleties, but then neither did the authors of Medieval morality plays. The allegorical Animal Farm performs a similar, if secular, function, giving us unambiguous villainy and clear didactic intent. Orwell noted in his essay “Why I Write” that he meant the book to “fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.“ Originally published with the subtitle A Fairy Story, the novel caricatures Stalinism and the Russian Revolution, and Orwell left no mystery as to his intent when he commented in the preface to a 1947 Ukrainian edition that he meant the book to “end on a loud note of discord” meant to signify what he saw as the instability of the Tehran Conference.

Leaden statements like these aside, Orwell swore he “did not wish to comment on the work,” writing, “if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.” The book does indeed speak, in two particular ways: its vividly grotesque characterizations of the humans and animals on the farm and its indelible collection of propagandistic slogans.

These are the features best captured by gonzo illustrator Ralph Steadman, famous for his collaborations with Hunter S. Thompson. Published in 1995—with the Fairy Story subtitle restored—the Steadman-illustrated 50th anniversary edition realizes another previous variation on the book’s title: Animal Farm: A Contemporary Satire.

These images draw out the exaggerated absurdities of the novel as only an artist with Steadman’s twisted, surrealist sense of visual humor could. They are profoundly effective, though there’s no telling what Orwell would have thought of them. Steadman’s caricatures universalize the book’s drama, providing the kind of stock characters we find in folklore, “fairy stories,” and religious allegory. But Orwell wrote that he wished us not to mistake his express political intent: “It was of the utmost importance to me that people in Western Europe should see the Soviet regime for what it really was…. I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement.”

Steadman, to his great credit, felt no need to literalize Orwell’s stated intentions in his illustrations, but rather took the book’s bizarre world on its own terms. You can read more quotes from Orwell’s earnest, intended preface for the book, restored in the Steadman edition, at Brain Pickings, where you’ll also find a good number of the illustrations as well. Copies of the out-of-print book can be purchased on Amazon and Abe’s books.

Steadman not only applied his skill as a caricaturist to Orwell’s fictional farm denizens, we should note, but also to the author himself. He made several sketches of Orwell, such as that below of the writer with a cage of rats around his neck. You can see several more of Steadman’s drawings of Orwell at The Guardian.

via Brain Pickings

Pink Floyd Adapts George Orwell’s Animal Farm into Their 1977 Concept Album, Animals (a Critique of Late Capitalism, Not Stalin)

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

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

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

New BBC Dramatization of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children Now Streaming Free for a Limited Time

in Audio Books, Literature | August 15th, 2017

FYI: The BBC is now streaming a dramatization of Salman Rushdie’s Booker Prize-winning novel Midnight’s Children. This free stream will only last for a limited time (the next 29 days). So dive in.

Here’s how the BBC briefly describes the production:

To mark the 70th anniversary of the Partition of India, an ambitious new dramatization of Salman Rushdie’s dazzling novel of love, history and magic. Saleem Sinai is born on the stroke of midnight on 15th August 1947, at the exact moment that India and Pakistan become separate, independent nations. From that moment on, his fate is mysteriously handcuffed to the history of his country. The story starts with Saleem’s grandfather, Aadam, in Kashmir in 1915. Dramatised by Ayeesha Menon. Starring Nikesh Patel, Abhin Galeya and Meera Syal.

You can find the seven individual episodes here. Each is about an hour long. Find more free literary delights in our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. Or follow our posts on Threads, Facebook, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

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

An Animated Look at Vladimir Nabokov’s Passion for Butterfly Collecting: “Literature & Butterflies Are the Two Sweetest Passions Known to Man”

in Literature, Museums, Science, Travel | August 14th, 2017

Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man. — Vladimir Nabokov

A 1941 family road trip along Route 66 planted the seeds for Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita.

It also enriched the American Museum of Natural History’s butterfly collection by some 300 North American specimens.

The author, an avid amateur lepidopterist, indulged his hobby along the way, depositing butterflies collected on this and other trips in glassine envelopes labeled with the name of the towns where the creatures encountered his net. Upon his return, he decided to donate most of his haul to the museum’s Lepidoptera collection, where he was as an eager volunteer.

Years later, Suzanne Rab Green, a Tiger Moth specialist and assistant curator at the museum, uncovered Nabokov’s specimens packed in a vintage White Owl cigar box.

Recognizing that this collection had literary value as well as scientific, Green decided to sort it by location rather than species, preserving the carefully hand-lettered envelopes along with the fragile wings and thoraxes.

Using Google Earth, she retraced Nabokov’s 3‑week journey for the museum’s Shelf Life series, digitally pinning his finds alongside vintage postcards of Gettysburg, Yosemite National Park, and the Grande Tourist Lodge in Dallas, Texas—all fertile collection sites, at least in 1941.

Butterflies remained a lifelong obsession for the author. He served for six years as curator of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology’s Lepidoptera wing and developed an evolutionary theory related to his study of the Polyommatus blues Green mentions in the 360° video above. (Be aware, the 360° feature will not work in Safari).

He also wooed his wife, Vera, by making charming and keenly observed drawings of butterflies for her.

An avowed enemy of symbols and allegory, Nabokov prevented butterflies from occupying too significant a role in his fictional oeuvre, though he gushed unabashedly in his memoir, Speak, Memory:

Let me also evoke the hawkmoths, the jets of my boyhood! Colors would die a long death on June evenings. The lilac shrubs in full bloom before which I stood, net in hand, displayed clusters of a fluffy gray in the dark—the ghost of purple. A moist young moon hung above the mist of a neighboring meadow. In many a garden have I stood thus in later years—in Athens, Antibes, Atlanta—but never have I waited with such a keen desire as before those darkening lilacs. And suddenly it would come, the low buzz passing from flower to flower, the vibrational halo around the streamlined body of an olive and pink Hummingbird moth poised in the air above the corolla into which it had dipped its long tongue…. Through the gusty blackness, one’s lantern would illumine the stickily glistening furrows of the bark and two or three large moths upon it imbibing the sweets, their nervous wings half open butterfly fashion, the lower ones exhibiting their incredible crimson silk from beneath the lichen-gray primaries. “Catocala adultera!” I would triumphantly shriek in the direction of the lighted windows of the house as I stumbled home to show my captures to my father.

Despite the author’s stated distaste for overt symbolism, a few butterflies did manage to flutter onto the pages of his best known work, resulting in at least one thesis papers that makes a case for Lolita as butterfly—irresistible, beautiful, easily ensnared….

Did I ever mention that her bare arm bore the 8 of vaccination? That I loved her hopelessly? That she was only fourteen? An inquisitive butterfly passed, dipping, between us.

- Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, 1955

Track Nabokov’s cross-country butterfly collecting trip, courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History, here.

Vladimir Nabokov Names the Greatest (and Most Overrated) Novels of the 20th Century

Take Vladimir Nabokov’s Quiz to See If You’re a Good Reader–The Same One He Gave to His Students

Vladimir Nabokov (Channelled by Christopher Plummer) Teaches Kafka at Cornell

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

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Introducing the New PEN America Digital Archive: 1,500 Hours of Audio & Video Featuring 2,200 Eminent Writers

in Books, Literature, Politics, Writing | July 31st, 2017

Image via Pen.Org

The recently launched PEN America Digital Archive is an Aladdin’s cave of literary treasures. An incredible amount of cultural programming has grown up around the organization’s commitment to championing writers’ civil liberties–over 1,500 hours worth of audio and visual files.

Delve into this free, searchable archive for previously inaccessible lectures, readings, and discussions featuring the leading writers, intellectuals, and artists of the last 50 years. Many of these New York City-based events were planned in response to the oppression and hardship suffered by fellow writers around the world.

Feeling overwhelmed by this all-you-can-eat buffet for the mind? The archivists have your back with featured collections–an assortment of raucous, political conversations from the 1986 PEN World Congress and a thirty year retrospective of Toni Morrison.

We are lucky that Nobel Prize-winner Morrison, a vigorous cultural observer and critic, still walks among us. Also, that the archive affords us a chance to spend quality time with so many great literary eminences who no longer do:

John Steinbeck reads excerpts of The Grapes of Wrath and his short stories, “The Snake,” “Johnny Bear,” and “We’re Holding Our Own.”

Jerzy Kosinski discusses teaching, and the autobiographical elements of his controversial 1965 novel, The Painted Bird.

Madeleine L’Engle considers myth, science, faith, and the connection between art and fear.

Saul Bellow tackles how intellectuals influence and use technology, a particularly interesting topic in light of the dystopian fiction’s current popularity.

Nadine Gordimer relives the publication, banning and swift unbanning of her political historical novel, Burger’s Daughter.

Susan Sontag uses a PEN International Congress press conference to draw attention to ways in which the host country, Korea, was falling short in regard to freedom of expression.

Gwendolyn Brooks reveals the backstory on her poems, including “The Lovers of the Poor,” and “We Real Cool.”

Begin your adventures in the PEN America Digital Archive here.

via Electric Literature

Great Writers on Free Speech and the Environment

Penn Sound: Fantastic Audio Archive of Modern & Contemporary Poets

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

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

When J.M. Coetzee Secretly Programmed Computers to Write Poetry in the 1960s

in Literature, Poetry, Technology | July 29th, 2017

Before J.M. Coetzee became perhaps the most acclaimed novelist alive, he worked as a programer. That may not sound particularly notable these days, but bear in mind that the Nobel laureate and two-time Booker-winning author of Waiting for the Barbarians, Disgrace, and Elizabeth Costello held that day job first at IBM in the early 1960s — back, in other words, when nobody had a computer on their desk. And back when IBM was IBM: that mighty American corporation had brought the kind of computing power it alone could command to branch offices in cities around the world, including London, where Coetzee landed after leaving his native South Africa after graduating from the University of Cape Town.

The years Coetzee spent “writing machine code for computers,” he once wrote in a letter to Paul Auster, saw him “getting so deeply sucked into the process that I sometimes felt I was descending into a madness in which the brain is taken over by mechanical logic.” This must have caused some distress to a literarily minded young man who heard his true calling only from poetry.

“I was very heavily under the influence, in my teens and early twenties, of, first, T.S. Eliot, but then, more substantially, Ezra Pound, and later of German poetry, of Rilke in particular,” he says to Peter Sacks in the interview above, remembering the years before he put poetry aside as a craft in favor of the novel.

“Under the shadowless glare of the neon lighting, he feels his very soul to be under attack,“Coetzee writes, in the autobiographical novel Youth, of the protagonist’s time as a programmer. “The building, a featureless block of concrete and glass, seems to give off a gas, odourless, colourless, that finds its way into his blood and numbs him. IBM, he can swear, is killing him, turning him into a zombie.” Only in the evening can he “leave his desk, wander around, relax. The machine room downstairs, dominated by the huge memory cabinets of the 7090, is more often than not empty; he can run programs on the little 1401 computer, even, surreptitiously, play games on it.”

He could also use these clunky, punchcard-operated computers to write poetry. “In the mid 1960s Coetzee was working on one of the most advanced programming projects in Britain,” writes King’s College London researcher Rebecca Roach. “During the day he helped to design the Atlas 2 supercomputer destined for the United Kingdom’s Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Aldermaston. At night he used this hugely powerful machine of the Cold War to write simple ‘computer poetry,’ that is, he wrote programs for a computer that used an algorithm to select words from a set vocabulary and create repetitive lines.”

These lines, as seen here in one page of the print-outs held at the Coetzee archive at the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center, include “INCHOATE SHARD IMAGINE THE OUBLIETTE,” “FRENETIC AMBIENCE DISHEARTEN THE ROSE,” “PASSIONATE PABULUM CARPET THE MIRROR,” and “FRENETIC TETANUS DEADEN THE DOCUMENT.” Though he never published these results, writes Roach, he “edited and included phrases from them in poetry that he did publish.” Is this a curious chapter in the early life of a prominent man of letters, or was this realm of “flat metallic surfaces” an ideal forge for the sensibilities of a writer now known, as John Lanchester so aptly put it, for his “unusual quality of passionate coldness” — a kind of brilliant austerity that hardly deadens any of his documents.

Read and Hear Famous Writers (and Armchair Sportsmen) J.M. Coetzee and Paul Auster’s Correspondence

New Jorge Luis Borges-Inspired Project Will Test Whether Robots Can Appreciate Poetry

Japanese Computer Artist Makes “Digital Mondrians” in 1964: When Giant Mainframe Computers Were First Used to Create Art

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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

People Who Swear Are More Honest Than Those Who Don’t, Finds a New University Study

in Literature, Psychology | July 27th, 2017

I’ve heard it said many times: “I don’t trust people who don’t swear.” It’s not an empirical statement. Just an intuition, that people who shy away from salty language might also shy away from certain truths—may even be, perhaps, a little delusional. Few people characterize teetotalers of swearing with more bite than Stephen Fry, who believes “the sort of twee person who thinks swearing is in any way a sign of a lack of education or of a lack of verbal interest is just a fucking lunatic.” George Carlin would approve. A comically exaggerated view. No, swearing isn’t necessarily a sign of mental illness. But it does correlate strongly with truthtelling.

It seems all the suspicious salts out there may have happened upon a measurable phenomenon. A study published last year with the cheeky title “Frankly, We Do Give a Damn: The Relationship Between Profanity and Honesty,” notes, “the consistent findings across the studies suggest that the positive relation between profanity and honesty is robust, and that relationship found at the individual level indeed translates to the society level.” It’s true, some research shows that people who swear may be likely to violate other social norms, god bless ‘em, but they are also less likely to lie during police interrogations.

After reviewing the literature, the researchers, led by Maastricht University Psychologist Gilad Feldman, describe the results of their own experiments. They asked 276 people to report on their swearing habits (or not) in detail. Those people then took a psychological test that measured their levels of honesty. Next, the team analyzed 70,000 social media interactions, and reported that “profanity and honesty were found to be significantly and positively correlated, indicating that those who used more profanity were more honest in their Facebook status updates.” They did not say whether high levels of honesty on Facebook is desirable.

Finally, Feldman and his colleagues widened their scope to 48 U.S. states, and were able to correlate social media data with measures of government accountability. States with higher levels of swearing had a higher integrity score according to a 2012 index published by the Center for Public Integrity. (Believe or not, New Jersey had some of the highest scores.) All three of their studies yielded similar results. “At both the individual and society level,” they conclude, “we found that a higher rate of profanity use was associated with more honesty.” This does not mean, as Ephrat Livni writes at Quartz, that “people who curse like sailors” won’t “commit serious ethical crimes—but they won’t pretend all’s well online.”

As to the question of whether swearing betrays a lack of education and an impoverished vocabulary, we might turn to linguist, psychologist, and neuroscientist Steven Pinker, who has made a learned defense of foul language, in drily humorous talks, books, and essays. “When used judiciously,” he writes in a 2008 Harvard Brain article, “swearing can be hilarious, poignant, and uncannily descriptive.” His is an argument that relies not only on data but on philosophical reflection and literary appreciation. “It’s a fact of life that people swear,” he says, and so, it’s a fact of art. Shakespeare invented dozens of swears and was never afraid to work blue. Perhaps that’s why we find his representations of humanity so perennially honest.

You can read “Frankly, We Do Give a Damn: The Relationship Between Profanity and Honesty” here. In addition to Gilad Feldman, the research paper was also written by Huiwen Lian (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology,) Michal Kosinski (Stanford), and David Stillwell (Cambridge).

via Cambridge University

Steven Pinker Explains the Neuroscience of Swearing (NSFW)

George Carlin Performs His “Seven Dirty Words” Routine: Historic and Completely NSFW

Free Online Psychology & Neuroscience Courses

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

2,000+ Cassettes from the Allen Ginsberg Audio Collection Now Streaming Online

in Literature, Poetry, Stanford | July 24th, 2017

Last month Colin Marshall gave you the scoop on Stanford University’s digitization of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” a project that takes you inside the making of the iconic 1955 poem. As a quick follow up, it’s worth mentioning this: Stanford has also just put online over 2,000 Ginsberg audio cassette recordings, giving you access to “a staggering amount of primary source material associated with the Beat Generation” and its most acclaimed poet.

For a quick taste of what’s in the archive, Stanford Libraries points you to an afternoon breakfast table conversation between Ginsberg and another legendary Beat figure, William S. Burroughs. But you can rummage/search through the whole collection and find your own favorite recordings here.

via Stanford Libraries and Austin Kleon’s newsletter (which you should subscribe to here)

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. Or follow our posts on Threads, Facebook, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!

The First Recording of Allen Ginsberg Reading “Howl” (1956)

Allen Ginsberg Reads His Famously Censored Beat Poem, “Howl” (1959)

James Franco Reads a Dreamily Animated Version of Allen Ginsberg’s Epic Poem ‘Howl’

Allen Ginsberg’s “Celestial Homework”: A Reading List for His Class “Literary History of the Beats”

Allen Ginsberg Recordings Brought to the Digital Age. Listen to Eight Full Tracks for Free

Allen Ginsberg’s Handwritten Poem For Bernie Sanders, “Burlington Snow” (1986)

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Russian History & Literature Come to Life in Wonderfully Colorized Portraits: See Photos of Tolstoy, Chekhov, the Romanovs & More

in History, Literature, Photography | July 21st, 2017

Colorized episodes of I Love Lucy verge on sacrilege, but Olga Shirnina, a translator and amateur colorist of considerable talent, has unquestionably noble goals when colorizing vintage portraits, such as that of the Romanovs, above.

In her view, color has the power to close the gap between the subjects of musty public domain photos and their modern viewers. The most fulfilling moment for this artist, aka Klimblim, comes when “suddenly the person looks back at you as if he’s alive.”

A before and after comparison of her digital makeover on Nadezhda Kolesnikova, one of many female Soviet snipers whose vintage likenesses she has colorized bears this out. The color version could be a fashion spread in a current magazine, except there’s nothing artificial-seeming about this 1943 pose.

“The world was never monochrome even during the war,” Shirnina reflected in the Daily Mail.

Military subjects pose a particular challenge:

When I colorize uniforms I have to search for info about the colours or ask experts. So I’m not free in choosing colors. When I colorize a dress on a 1890s photo, I look at what colors were fashionable at that time. When I have no limitations I play with colours looking for the best combination. It’s really quite arbitrary but a couple of years ago I translated a book about colours and hope that something from it is left in my head.

She also puts herself on a short leash where famous subjects are concerned. Eyewitness accounts of Vladimir Lenin’s eye color ensured that the revolutionary’s colorized irises would remain true to life.

And while there may be a market for representations of punked out Russian literary heroes, Shirnina plays it straight there too, eschewing the digital Manic Panic where Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Bulgakov are concerned.

Her hand with Photoshop CS6 may restore celebrity to those whose stars have faded with time, like Vera Komissarzhevskaya, the original ingenue in Chekhov’s much performed play The Seagull and wrestler Karl Pospischil, who showed off his physique sans culotte in a photo from 1912.