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.
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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 atSlate, 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.”
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 bookOrientalism 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.
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.”
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.
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.)
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 Worldsadaptation). 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.
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 TheRay 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.
Haruki Murakami has a special way of inspiring his fans. I write these very words, in fact, from a coffee shop in Seoul not just stocked with his books and the music referenced in them but named after the jazz bar he ran in Tokyo in the 1970s before becoming a writer. But each fan builds their own kind of monument to the author of Norwegian Wood, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and other novels with a sensibility all their own. The Murakami-heads (or perhaps Harukists) at Vancouver-based studio Bit Byterz have chosen to pay elaborate tribute to Murakami by recreating his uncanny world with an adventure game called Memoranda.
You may remember this project from when we featured its Kickstarter drive back in 2015. Bit Byterz ended up raising about $20,000, enabling them to release Memoranda this year. You can buy it on Steam, or first view the launch trailer above and get a sense of what The Verge’s Andrew Webster describes as a game “inspired in large part by Murakami’s stories” which “centers on a young woman in a vaguely European town who has lost her memory — she doesn’t even remember her name. (The title, Memoranda, refers to the sticky notes she uses to remind herself of important things.)” While not a direct adaptation of any one work of Murakami’s in particular, its locations, its characters, and above all its atmosphere come drawn from the same — to use a highly appropriate metaphor — well.
“I started with one of his short stories, and gradually added characters from other short stories,” lead developer Sahand Saedi told Waypoint’s John Robertson. “I tried to bring over the surreal atmosphere, as well as the lonely and strange characters from the stories, and hope that the gamer will feel like they are living in one of these stories while playing.” Robertson describes Memoranda as “an adventure game in the most traditional sense, in terms of interaction and pacing. While it might be taking an enlightened path to adapting one medium into another, it follows well-trodden game design routes, and sticks to established rules. You click on items or pick them up, observe them or interact with them, saving key examples to your inventory for later use in puzzles that are often abstract in their construction.”
And so Memoranda at once pays homage to the distinctive reality — or rather unreality — of Murakami’s fiction and to the distinctive gaming experience of point-and-click adventure games, the genre that first took shape on home computers in the 1980s and produced the likes of Maniac Mansion, the King’s Quest series (not to mention all of Sierra On-Line’s other Quests), the Monkey Island series, and Myst. More recently it has undergone something of a renaissance thanks to crowdfunding services like Kickstarter, ever since respected point-and-click adventure game designer Tim Schafer raised $3.45 million to fund 2015’s Broken Age. Bit Byterz may have had only a small fraction of that budget to work with, but they know, as every avid Murakami reader knows, that mere money can’t buy uncanniness.
The filmmakers we most respect tend not to stop working until the very end, and so almost always leave pieces of incomplete projects behind. Stanley Kubrick did, giving Steven Spielberg the chance to pick up where his elder colleague left off on the sci-fi drama A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. That film began in the late 1970s as an adaptation of Brian Aldiss’ short story “Supertoys Last All Summer Long,” but over the decades became something more technically complex, and — given Spielberg’s involvement — more emotional. What, now, will emerge from the resurrection of Akira Kurosawa’s The Mask of the Black Death, a similarly unmade adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”?
“Chinese studios Huayi Brothers and CKF Pictures will produce the film based on the late Japanese filmmaker’s screenplay,” reported Indiewire’s Yoselin Acevedo last week. “He started penning the film right after his 1975’s Dersu Uzala.
Originally, the project was supposed to be filmed in 1998, but was shelved after Kurosawa suffered a stroke, and later died that same year.” Kurosawa intended to set his version of “The Masque of the Red Death” in Russia, where he’d made Dersu Uzala, and in an early twentieth century when, according to a Cinephilia & Beyond post featuring an English translation of the screenplay, “humanity is faced with a deadly contagion, and people’s characters, resilience and survival are being tested as the society is pushed well into the brinks of despair and possible annihilation.”
“The ‘Red Death,’ ” wrote Poe, “had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous.” A prince of this unnamed land summoned “a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys,” lavishly supplied behind its tightly barred doors. “With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think.” But months later, at the stroke of midnight during one of the prince’s masquerade balls, a “masked figure which had arrested the attention of no single individual before” makes itself seen, provoking “a buzz, or murmur, expressive of disapprobation and surprise — then, finally, of terror, of horror, and of disgust.”
One imagines that such a milieu, as anyone who’s seen the ominous revelry on display in Eyes Wide Shut, might have appealed to Kubrick as well. It certainly appealed to prolific “B‑movie” producer Roger Corman, the man responsible for a 1964 adaptation starring Vincent Price and another 25 years later starring Adrian Paul from Highlander. But Kurosawa, a filmmaker who showed a strong thematic interest in the upper classes’ disregard for the rest of society in everything from katana-and-topknots period pieces like Seven Samurai to modern-day crime stories like High and Low, could have done Poe’s chilling Gothic tale special justice. As for whether Huayi Brothers and CKF Pictures can do justice to Kurosawa’s vision, his fans will find out in 2020 — perhaps walled tightly up in their home theaters with his classic pictures until then.
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