Watch Animated Introductions to 13 Classic Authors: Kafka, Austen, Dostoevsky, Dickens & Many More

in Animation, Literature | April 12th, 2017

Popular independent philosopher Alain de Botton has been providing mini-introductions to academic subjects for several years now through his School of Life. These take the form of animated précis of the life and work of a handful of prominent authors who might be considered representative, if not essential, to the discipline. In philosophy, we have such indispensable figures as Plato, Rene Descartes, and Immanuel Kant. In political theory, we have Adam Smith, John Rawls, Karl Marx. Wherever we land—conservative, liberal, or radical—we end up interacting with such thinkers. When it comes to the general category of “Literature,” however, it seems to me it should be a bit more difficult to choose only a few figureheads.

For a good part of European history, most people couldn’t read the languages they spoke, but even those who could were hardly considered literate. This distinction was reserved for elites with classical educations who read Latin and usually Greek. Literature meant Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Homer…. Even after the Reformation and the spread of literacy in “vulgar” tongues, the disdain for common tongues remained. The radicalism of Dante and later Cervantes was to write great literature in their national languages. During the 18th century, the novel was often considered primarily middle class women’s entertainment, and in much of the 19th, a popular diversion rarely worthy of the highest critical appraisal.

The 20th century brought not only modernist revolutions but social revolutions that opened doors for women voices and writers previously relegated to the margins. In our current age, a diversity of writers now firmly occupy the center of culture. The oughts were dominated by Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, for example. This year’s Pulitzer winners include Colson Whitehead and poet Tyehimba Jess. Nobel and Pulitzer winner Toni Morrison just swept up another award from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. This is not to mention multiple-award-winning international writers like Derek Walcott, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.… Venerable western literary traditions have become global in composition.

But in every period of literary history, international writers interacted, corresponded, influenced, and plagiarized each other. There is no single line of descent through the history of literature, no singular imperial story that dominates its production and reception. Its location varies from age to age, its families are massive and sprawling, loosely connected at the edges, but sometimes only very loosely. Perhaps it is a testament to the patrician conservatism of philosophy that it remains a field dominated by responses to dead great men. Literature has proven much more dynamic. De Botton’s choices in his introductory video series on literature do not quite reflect this dynamism. Why Voltaire and not, well, Cervantes, generally considered for centuries the father of the modern novel form? Why no Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, Haruki Murakami, or Toni Morrison? No Allen Ginsberg, Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin?

These authors and many others may surely be to come. And we should bear in mind the source: not only is de Botton a pop philosopher first and critic secondarily, but he is also promoting a scholarly approach to self-help. The authors he chooses, therefore, all have life lessons to impart of the kind de Botton believes can help us be happier, nicer people who have better relationships. Charles Dickens, at the top, for example, teaches us to sympathize with others and to care about “serious things.” Jane Austen wanted us to be “better and wiser,” and her novels offer readers a course in personal development. From the existential bleakness of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, we can draw life lessons about hope and redemption in the midst of human failure. Even the claustrophobic nightmares of Franz Kafka have their utility as “redemptive, consoling art.” De Botton largely relies on biographical criticism and strays quite a ways from received interpretations.

His casual approach to literature as a didactic tool of personal betterment has the hallmarks of a very Victorian outlook, with both the drawbacks and the benefits such a view entails. While the School of Life series may have a narrow view of who produces art, culture, and philosophy, it also has a compelling argument to make that such things matter and matter greatly. The humanities need all the help they can get, and de Botton seems to argue that we need them more than ever as well. Most readers of Open Culture, I imagine, would surely agree. See de Botton’s full series, including such practical writers as James Joyce, Marcel Proust, George Orwell, and Leo Tolstoy, at the School of Life YouTube playlist.

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

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Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Very First Film, La Cravate, Based on a Novella by Thomas Mann (1957)

in Film, Literature | April 10th, 2017

Alejandro Jodorowsky may have redefined the film-viewing experience for a couple generations of art-house thrillseekers, but he didn’t start his creative journey in cinema. Decades before he sent his audiences on the mind-altering feature-length trips (whether or not they came prepared for them with their own mind-altering substances) like El Topo and The Holy Mountain, he wrote poetry, worked as a clown, founded and directed a theater troupe, and after relocating from his native Chile to France, studied mime and performed with Marcel Marceau. Only then had life prepared him to make his first film, 1957’s La Cravate.

Telling its story in vivid color but without words, the short (which also goes under such titles as Les têtes interverties, The Transposed Heads, and most sensationalistically The Severed Heads) draws on Jodorowsky and his collaborators’ skills developed in the performing arts to convert into cinematic mime Thomas Mann’s 1950 novella The Transposed Heads: A Legend of India. Novelist Rayo Casablanca quotes Jodorowsky describing the tale as one of “a woman who has an intellectual husband, who is very weak physically. She also has a muscular but idiotic lover. She cuts the heads off of the two men and interchanges them. She remains with the muscular body and the head of the intellectual. However, after a certain time, the body of the athlete is softened and the body of the intellectual becomes vigorous and muscular.”

Mann, in Jodorowsky’s reading, “wanted to thus say that it is the intellect which makes the body,” but for nearly fifty years, his own visual interpretation went unseen. Not long after its premiere at Rome’s Cinema Auteur Festival in 1957 it went missing, presumed lost, until the sole print’s rediscovery in a German attic in 2006. Finally, Jodorowsky’s fans could see not just his directorial debut but his first starring role onscreen, with a supporting cast that included the Belgian surreal humorist Raymond Devos. The film’s moral, writes Dangerous Minds’ Paul Gallagher, “is never to lose your head over unrequited love, but find someone who loves you as you are,” but as with all of Jodorowsky’s works, feel free to take from it whatever message finds its way into your head.

Alejandro Jodorowsky Explains How Tarot Cards Can Give You Creative Inspiration

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Watch Marcel Marceau Mime The Mask Maker, a Story Created for Him by Alejandro Jodorowsky (1959)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, 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.

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An Epic Retelling of the Great Chinese Novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms: 110 Free Episodes and Counting

in Literature, Podcasts | April 8th, 2017

Romance of the Three Kingdoms is considered one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature, and its literary influence in East Asia rivals that of Shakespeare in the English speaking world. “Written 600 years ago,” writes the BBC, “it is an historical novel that tells the story of a tumultuous period in Chinese history, the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. Partly historical and partly legend, it recounts the fighting and scheming of the feudal lords and the three states which came to power as the Han Dynasty collapsed.”

And now the ancient meets the modern…

If you listen to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms podcast, you can hear John Zhu’s attempt to retell this epic tale and make it accessible to a Western audience. The first 110 episodes are available on YouTube, the web, and iTunes–with at least another 10 to come. Quite a feat. Have a listen.

To learn more about Romance of the Three Kingdoms, listen to this episode of the BBC’s In Our Time.

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via metafilter

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Edgar Allan Poe Published a “CliffsNotes” Version of a Science Textbook & It Became His Only Bestseller (1839)

in Literature, Science | April 6th, 2017

A fascinating 20th century literary strain, “documentary poetics,” melds journalistic accounts, photography, official texts and memos, politics, and scientific and technical writing with lyrical and literary language. Perhaps best exemplified by Muriel Rukeyser, the category also includes, at certain times, James Agee, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and—currently—Claudia Rankine and “powerhouse” new poet Solmaz Sharif. It does not include Edgar Allan Poe, famously alcoholic 19th century master of the macabre and “father of the detective story.”

But you’ll forgive me for thinking, excitedly, that it just might, when I learned Poe had published a text called The Conchologist’s First Book (1839), a condensation, rearrangement, and “remixing,” as Rebecca Onion writes at Slate, of “an existing… beautiful and expensive” science textbook, Thomas Wyatt’s Manual of Conchology, including the original plates and a “new preface and introduction.”

My mind reeled: what wondrous horrors might the morose, romantic Poe have contributed to such an enterprise, his best-selling work, it turns out, in his lifetime. (For which Poe was paid $50 and, typically, received no royalties). What kind of experimental madness might these covers contain?

As I might have assumed from the book’s total obscurity, Poe’s writerly contributions to the project were meager. For all his genius as a storyteller, he could be a long-winded bore as an essayist. It seems he thought this aspect of his voice was best suited to the original writing he did for Conchologist’s First. His biographers, notes University of Houston professor emeritus John H. Lienhard, all “mutter an embarrassed apology for Poe’s shady side-track—then hurry back to talk about The Raven.” Onion quotes one biographer Jeffrey Meyers, who writes, “Poe’s boring pedantic and hair-splitting Preface was absolutely guaranteed to torment and discourage even the most passionately interested schoolboy.”

As for its “shadiness,” the book also elicits embarrassment from Poe devotees because, as esteemed biologist and historian of science Stephen J. Gould wrote in his exculpatory essay “Poe’s Greatest Hit,” it was “basically a scam,” though “not so badly done” as most allege. The naturalist Wyatt, a friend of Poe’s, had begged his publisher to release an abridged student edition of his original lavish and pricey $8 textbook, which had not sold well. When the publisher balked, Wyatt contracted Poe to lend his name and considerable editorial skill to a more-or-less bootleg “CliffsNotes” version to be sold for $1.50. To make matters worse, Poe and Wyatt were both accused of plagiarism, having “lifted chunks of their book from an English naturalist, Thomas Brown,” Lienhard points out.

Gould defended Poe as a rewriter of others’ work. “Yes, Poe plagiarized,” as Lienhard summarizes the argument. He presented Brown’s, and Wyatt’s, work as his own, but, “fluent in French, [he] went back to read Georges Cuvier, the great French naturalist” and made his own translations. He wrote his own introductory material, and he reorganized Wyatt’s book in such a way as to provide “genuinely useful insight into biological taxonomy.” Poe’s edition—with its “formidable subtitle,” A System of Testaceous Malacology, arranged Expressly for the Use of Schools—actually proved a hit with students, and likely not only because it sold cheap. It was the only publication in Poe’s lifetime to make it to a second edition.

Maybe humanist readers approach the work with biases firmly in place, expecting a genre that’s dry by its very nature to contain all the literary brilliance and entertaining intrigue of “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Lienhard suggests as much, describing irritation at how his “literary friends” ignore the scientific work of writers like Thoreau, Thomas Paine, Goethe, and poet Oliver Goldsmith. “Poe’s excursion into natural philosophy,” he writes, “was an embarrassment to people who are embarrassed by science in the first place.” Maybe.

Both Gould and Lienhard shrug off the less-than-scrupulous circumstances of the book’s creation, the latter citing a “cynical remark” by playwright Wilson Mizner: “If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism. If you steal from many, it’s research.” At least he doesn’t go as far as Mark Twain, who once wrote in defense of Helen Keller, after she was charged with literary borrowing, “the kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterance—is plagiarism.”

Read the first, 1839 edition of The Conchologist’s First Book, published under Edgar A. Poe, at the Internet Archive, and the revised second, 1840 edition at Google Books.

via Slate

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Walt Whitman’s Unearthed Health Manual, “Manly Health & Training,” Urges Readers to Stand (Don’t Sit!) and Eat Plenty of Meat (1858)

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

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

Animated Introductions to Edward Said’s Groundbreaking Book Orientalism

in Current Affairs, Literature, Philosophy, Politics | March 31st, 2017

For a few years, many people—those who might these days be called a “self-satisfied liberal elite” (or something like that)—believed that the arguments in Edward Said’s 1978 book Orientalism were becoming generally accepted. Put broadly, Said argued that our conceptions of cultural and historical differences between “the West” and “the East” are produced by European intellectual and literary traditions that have exaggerated and distorted such differences, creating a narrative in which “the West” is civilized, disciplined, industrious, and enlightened and “the East” is exotic, backward, sensualist, lazy, passive, dangerous, irrational.…

The tradition of Orientalism—which stretches back into the middle ages—came to justify colonialism, land and resource theft, slavery, and imperial aggression in the name of civilization and salvation, Even where European Orientalist scholars and writers had a nuanced understanding of other cultures, such nuance was lost in the popularizing and instrumental use of their ideas.

Said’s theoretical intervention into Orientalist discourse showed us how the “clash of civilizations” trope that pervades hundreds of years of interactions between “the west and the rest” of the world itself has a history—as a rationalization for dominance and exploitation. The short animated Al Jazeera video above neatly summarizes Said’s major arguments in the book, and asks us to “unlearn the myth.”

Casting West and East as two distinct civilizations makes little common sense on its face. Christianity, one key supposed bedrock of Western Civilization, is an Eastern religion. Aristotle, a foundation of Western thought, was preserved for many years by Islamic scholars, who were in frequent dialogue with Greek thinkers, who were themselves in frequent dialogue with North Africans…. the interrelationships and correspondences between continents and cultures are innumerable, the boundaries between the categories highly permeable. But with the rise of what we’re calling “populism” in the past decade or so, the nuances of intellectual history have been lost. Old false dichotomies, always haunting the margins, have once again moved firmly to the center.

In the realm of cable news punditry, corporate security conferences, and congressional committees not only do we rarely see actual scholars represented, but we almost never see scholars like Edward Said, a Palestinian intellectual who spoke and wrote critically as a person from the Middle East with expertise in Western literature and history. This fact is itself central to the construction of Orientalist discourse, as Said wrote in 1978:

The Orient and Islam have a kind of extrareal, phenomenologically reduced status that puts them out of reach of everyone except the Western expert. From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the Orient could not do was to represent itself.

We can accept nothing about “the East,” in other words, unless it is first filtered through the lenses of Euro-American administrative “experts,” who often have extremist views, very little scholarly expertise, and whose ideas often still come directly from Orientalist novels and philosophies.

Said’s theories in Orientalism have received ample criticism from across the political spectrum. He’s been cast by the right as a kind of reverse racist against “Caucasians,” an anti-intellectual accusation that distorts his views and makes ad hominem attacks. Said traced Euro-American colonial history with a level of depth that demonstrated the remarkable continuity in the way major European colonial powers and the U.S.—their successor by the late 20th century—constructed ideologies of exceptionalism and superiority through very similar rhetoric.

For a slightly drier overview of Said’s Orientalism, watch the short video above from educational company Macat, a self-described “global leader in critical thinking.” Neither of these explainers can substitute for actually engaging with the arguments in Said’s book. His history of Orientalist fables is itself an adventurous tale. As a literary product, “the Orient was almost a European invention,” he writes in his Introduction, yet as a region, it “is an integral part of European material civilization and culture.” There is no one without the other.

Edward Said Speaks Candidly about Politics, His Illness, and His Legacy in His Final Interview (2003)

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chomsky & Michel Foucault Debate Human Nature & Power on Dutch TV, 1971

Middle Eastern History: Free Courses

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Kurt Vonnegut on Bob Dylan: He “Is the Worst Poet Alive”

in Life, Literature, Music | March 31st, 2017

Image by Daniele Pratitand Ben Northern via Flckr Commons

As if life weren’t fraught enough, we’re barreling toward the 10th anniversary of author Kurt Vonnegut’s death.

So it goes.

Several years before he died, Vonnegut penned an essay called “Knowing What’s Nice,” in which he stated:

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: ‘The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.’

“If I should ever…God forbid…”

Bless his cranky humanist heart, if that isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.

Those outside the inner circle can only speculate as to whether his remains rest eternally beneath his preferred epitaph. Their whereabouts are not a matter of public record. As one Internet wag surmised, he “probably didn’t want some vandal sonofabitch writing Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt on it.”

The widely circulated Armistice Day passage from Vonnegut’s novel Breakfast of Champions supports the notion of music as something he revered universally:

What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance. And all music is.

In reality, the amateur clarinet player’s ear was a bit more discerning:

I hate rap. The Beatles have made a substantial contribution. Bob Dylan, however, is the worst poet alive. He can maybe get one good line in a song, and the rest is gibberish.

So he told Hustler in 1991, in response to a question about his musical tastes. Never did get around to telling the interviewer what he actually liked. According to his daughter, Nannette, the list would’ve included Dave Brubeck, the Statler Brothers, and The Music Man soundtrack.

Vonnegut didn’t live to see Dylan win the Nobel Prize for Literature last year, but several commentators exhumed his dismissive quote to underscore that not everyone was happy to see a singer-songwriter awarded such a prestigious literary prize.

Meanwhile, Dylan’s fans are not waiting for him to die to talk about the ways in which his music has helped them navigate through life, much as the jazzmen Vonnegut saw playing live in Depression-era Indianapolis transported him to a better place:

…what music is, I don’t know. But it helps me so.

Fans have created eleven playlists inspired by Vonnegut on the music sharing site 8tracks, including one that features Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s A‑Gonna Fall. (“Perfect for capturing Vonnegut’s vibe” enthused one innocent young commenter.)

In 1988, Kurt Vonnegut Writes a Letter to People Living in 2088, Giving 7 Pieces of Advice

Discover Ray Bradbury & Kurt Vonnegut’s 1990s TV Shows: The Ray Bradbury Theater and Welcome to the Monkey House

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 ( 7 ) |

Hear the Prog-Rock Adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds: The 1978 Rock Opera That Sold 15 Million Copies Worldwide

in Literature, Music, Sci Fi | March 30th, 2017

Since the 1950s at least, Americans have embraced science fiction of all kinds—from the high concepts of 2001 to the high kitsch of Barbarella—even if sometimes only among devoted cult fans. The Queen-scored Flash Gordon, for example, did not do well in U.S. theaters on its release in 1980, though it was a hit in the UK. But not long after, its iconic, pulsing theme song, with its operatic blasts, became an unmistakable callback to the final days of 70s rock opera’s glorious excesses.

And yet somehow, another equally bombastic sci-fi rock opera produced in 1978, Jeff Wayne’s musical adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, has been denied proper cult status in the States. At the time of its release, U.S. audiences, primed by the previous year’s colossal hit, Star Wars, perhaps sought more swashbuckling fare, not prog-rock double concept albums based on classic novels. American indifference, however, in no way hindered the album’s popularity abroad.

According to its clunky website, Wayne’s adaptation, “is one of the best known and best-selling musical works of all time.” This is no empty boast; it had “sold approximately 15 million records around the world” by 2013 and in 2009 was named the 40th best-selling album ever. And for good reason! While you may never have heard of Wayne—he wrote music for TV commercials for much of his career, and once struck it big by producing David Essex’s 1973 hit “Rock On”—you know the “cast” of his War of the Worlds.

Richard Burton narrates, lending the proceedings the gravitas Orson Welles gave The Alan Parsons Project’s adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe (and, many years earlier, brought to his own infamous War of the Worlds adaptation). The songs prominently feature Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott and The Moody Blues’ Justin Hayward, both huge stars at the time, as well as David Essex, “musical theater vet Julie Covington,” writes Dangerous Minds’ Ron Kretsch, and “guitar ace and Sex Pistols demo producer Chris Spedding.”

Supplementing the album’s musical charms, and they are many, the original LP also came “packaged in a gatefold with a book containing the complete script and some awesome paintings, mostly by noted Lord of the Rings cover artist Geoff Taylor.” For many of us, Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds will seem like a lost masterpiece, a brilliantly kitschy sci-fi, prog-disco classic that never got its due. For fans, however, in “no less than 22 countries,” as the album’s site proclaims, where it charted, reaching number one in half of them, the strangely inspired rock opera may well be very familiar.

You can hear the complete double LP at the playlist above (or click here), along with two more “sides” of alternates, outtakes, and demos. (If you need Spotify, download it here.) One of the songs, Hayward’s “Forever Autumn,” above, was originally written for a “late-‘60s LEGO commercial,” but warranted inclusion because “Wayne simply wanted a ballad to be included.” The move is typical of his more is more production approach to War of the Worlds, and yet, somehow, it all comes together into an engrossing experience. For some reason, in 2012, Wayne decided to remake the album, with Liam Neeson taking on the narration duties. Judging by its Amazon reviews, the new version is just as beloved by many fans as the old.

via Dangerous Minds

The Very First Illustrations of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1897)

The Great Leonard Nimoy Reads H.G. Wells’ Seminal Sci-Fi Novel The War of the Worlds

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

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

Discover Ray Bradbury & Kurt Vonnegut’s 1990s TV Shows: The Ray Bradbury Theater and Welcome to the Monkey House

in Literature, Sci Fi, Television | March 29th, 2017

There has always been good television. Even Kurt Vonnegut, wittiest of curmudgeons, had to agree in 1991 when he was interviewed in The Cable Guide for his own contribution to the medium, an adaptation of his book of stories, Welcome to the Monkey House on Showtime. Vonnegut did not like television, and compared it to thalidomide. “We don’t know what the side effects are until it’s too late.” He could only go up from there, and did, praising, Cheers, M*A*S*H, and Hill Street Blues, and then saying, “I’d rather have written Cheers than anything I’ve written.”

I never know exactly when to take Vonnegut seriously. He also calls TV everybody’s “rotten teacher” and says “I’m sorry television exists,” but he had long been a TV writer in its “so-called golden days,” as John Goudas put it in a Los Angeles Times interview with Vonnegut in 1993, when his seven-episode run of Kurt Vonnegut’s Monkey House, hosted by himself, would soon come to a close. Vonnegut found himself very pleased by the results, remarking of his stories that “TV can do them very well,” and especially praising “More Stately Mansions,” above, starring an irrepressible Madeline Kahn, whom he called “a superb actress.”

Another very direct, witty speculative writer in the same year’s issue of The Cable Guide, Ray Bradbury, appeared with Vonnegut as part of two “dueling, short features,” notes Nick Greene at Mental Floss,
“under the auspices of promoting the authors’ upcoming cable specials,” Monkey House and The Ray Bradbury Theater. Bradbury was also an old media hand, having written for radio in the 50s, and seeing adaptations of his stories made since that decade, including one on Alfred Hitchcock’s Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Like Hitchcock, when it came time for his own show, The Ray Bradbury Theater in 1985, Bradbury introduced the episodes and became a public face for thousands of viewers.

He also wrote each episode, all 65 of them, from 1985–86 on HBO and 1988–92 on USA. In his Cable Guide interview, Bradbury calls television, “mostly trash,” then adds, “I’m full of trash… I’ve watched thousands of hours of TV. I’ve seen every movie ever made… everything’s the same.” What did he like to watch? Nova, unsurprisingly, and CNN, which he called “the most revolutionary thing in years.” In his interview (which you can read in a high resolution scan at Mental Floss), Bradbury credits television for “a lot of what happened in Europe”—referring to the fall of Communism, as well as Tiananmen Square, and the Gulf War. “Finally, the message got through,” he says, “and people revolted… CNN,” he concluded, “is very powerful television.” If he could see us now. See Bradbury’s very first episode of The Ray Bradbury Theater, “Marionettes” from 1985, just above. And purchase the complete TV series online.

Hear Kurt Vonnegut Visit the Afterlife & Interview Dead Historical Figures: Isaac Newton, Adolf Hitler, Eugene Debs & More (Audio, 1998)

Ray Bradbury Gives 12 Pieces of Writing Advice to Young Authors (2001)

How Ray Bradbury Wrote the Script for John Huston’s Moby Dick (1956)

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

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

Watch Animated Introductions to 13 Classic Authors: Kafka, Austen, Dostoevsky, Dickens & Many More

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Very First Film, La Cravate, Based on a Novella by Thomas Mann (1957)

An Epic Retelling of the Great Chinese Novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms: 110 Free Episodes and Counting

Edgar Allan Poe Published a “CliffsNotes” Version of a Science Textbook & It Became His Only Bestseller (1839)

Animated Introductions to Edward Said’s Groundbreaking Book Orientalism

Kurt Vonnegut on Bob Dylan: He “Is the Worst Poet Alive”

Hear the Prog-Rock Adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds: The 1978 Rock Opera That Sold 15 Million Copies Worldwide

Discover Ray Bradbury & Kurt Vonnegut’s 1990s TV Shows: The Ray Bradbury Theater and Welcome to the Monkey House

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