Neil Gaiman Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”: One Master of Dramatic Storytelling Reads Another

in Literature, Poetry | December 16th, 2016

Which liv­ing writer stands as the heir to Edgar Allan Poe? A sil­ly ques­tion, admit­ted­ly: now, more than 160 years after his death, Poe’s influ­ence has spread so far and wide through­out lit­er­a­ture that no one writer’s work could pos­si­bly count as his defin­i­tive con­tin­u­a­tion. The most pop­u­lar and pow­er­ful mod­ern sto­ry­tellers owe more than a thing or two to Poe — or rather, have built upon Poe’s achieve­ments — with­out even know­ing it, espe­cial­ly if they hail from a dif­fer­ent part of the world and work a dif­fer­ent part of the cul­tur­al map than did 19th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca’s pio­neer of new and psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly intense genre lit­er­a­ture.

Take, for instance, Neil Gaiman. “Every year, World­builders holds a giant auc­tion-char­i­ty-dona­tion thing, giv­ing peo­ple cool things and rais­ing an awful lot of mon­ey for a fan­tas­tic cause,” he says in the video above, which came out just this hol­i­day sea­son. “And every year, I seem to be read­ing a poem or book cho­sen by the peo­ple who pay mon­ey to World­builders.

This year, for rea­sons known only to them­selves, they have decid­ed I need to read Edgar Allan Poe’s ghast­ly, grue­some, dark, and famous poem ‘The Raven.’ So I’ve lit a num­ber of can­dles, fired up the fire, found a copy of the Oxford Book of Nar­ra­tive Verse, and I’m going to read it to you in a com­fort­able chair by the fire, as befits a poem told in the days of yore.”

Though many of his fans come to know him through his nov­els like Amer­i­can Gods and Star­dust, Gaiman’s writ­ing career has also includ­ed work in poet­ry, com­ic books, radio dra­ma, and movies, all of it using his sig­na­ture mix of fan­tas­ti­cal inven­tion, res­o­nant emo­tion, and pol­ished, wit­ty word­craft. When poten­tial col­lab­o­ra­tors on projects in these fields and oth­ers want to work with him, they want to tap not just his uncom­mon sto­ry­telling skill, regard­less of the medi­um in which he tells his sto­ries, but his abil­i­ty to sat­is­fy both wide audi­ences and crit­ics with those sto­ries.

Poe, too, knew how to do this, and indeed described “The Raven” in a mag­a­zine essay as a work delib­er­ate­ly com­posed to “suit at once the pop­u­lar and the crit­i­cal taste,” and since its first pub­li­ca­tion in 1845, the poem has only grown bet­ter-known and more beloved. Here, in Neil Gaiman’s ten-minute read­ing, we can see and hear one mas­ter of high-impact sto­ry­telling acknowl­edg­ing anoth­er over all those 171 years.

Gaiman’s read­ing will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Christo­pher Walken’s Won­der­ful Read­ing of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (on the Anniver­sary of Poe’s Death)

The Great Stan Lee Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”

James Earl Jones Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” and Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”

Lou Reed Rewrites Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” See Read­ings by Reed and Willem Dafoe

John Astin, From The Addams Fam­i­ly, Recites “The Raven” as Edgar Allan Poe

The Simp­sons Present Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” and Teach­ers Now Use It to Teach Kids the Joys of Lit­er­a­ture

Hear the 14-Hour “Essen­tial Edgar Allan Poe” Playlist: “The Raven,” “The Tell-Tale Heart” & Much More

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 Face­book.

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When William S. Burroughs Appeared on Saturday Night Live: His First TV Appearance (1981)

in Comedy, Literature, Television | December 14th, 2016

Though he nev­er said so direct­ly, we might expect that Sit­u­a­tion­ist Guy Debord would have includ­ed Sat­ur­day Night Live in what he called the “Spec­ta­cle”—the mass media pre­sen­ta­tion of a total­iz­ing real­i­ty, “the rul­ing order’s non­stop dis­course about itself, its nev­er-end­ing mono­logue of self-praise.” The slick­ness of TV, even live com­e­dy TV, masks care­ful­ly orches­trat­ed maneu­vers on the part of its cre­ators and adver­tis­ers. In Debor­d’s analy­sis, noth­ing is exempt­ed from the spec­ta­cle’s con­sol­i­da­tion of pow­er; it co-opts every­thing for its pur­pos­es. Even seem­ing con­tra­dic­tions with­in the spectacle—the skew­er­ing of polit­i­cal fig­ures, for exam­ple, to their seem­ing displeasure—serve the pur­pos­es of pow­er: The spec­ta­cle, wrote Debord, “is the oppo­site of dia­logue.”

So I won­der, what he might have made of the appear­ance of cult writer and Beat pio­neer William S. Bur­roughs on the com­e­dy show in 1981? Was Burroughs—a mas­ter­mind of the counterculture—co-opted by the pow­ers that be? The author of Junkie, Naked Lunch, and Cities of the Red Night also appeared in a Nike ad and sev­er­al films and music videos, becom­ing a “pres­ence in Amer­i­can pop cul­ture,” writes R.U. Sir­ius in Every­body Must Get Stoned.

David Seed notes that Bur­roughs “is remem­bered by many mem­bers of intel­li­gentsia and glit­terati as din­ner part­ner for the likes of Andy Warhol, David Bowie, and Mick Jag­ger,” though he had “been a mod­el for the polit­i­cal and social left.” Had he been neutered by the 80s, his out­ra­geous­ly anar­chist sen­ti­ments turned to rad­i­cal kitsch?

Or maybe Bur­roughs dis­rupt­ed the spec­ta­cle, his dron­ing, monot­o­nous deliv­ery giv­ing view­ers of SNL exact­ly the oppo­site of what they were trained to expect. The appear­ance was his widest expo­sure to date (imme­di­ate­ly after­ward, he moved from New York to Lawrence, Kansas). One of the show’s writ­ers con­vinced pro­duc­er Dick Eber­sol to put Bur­roughs on. In rehearsal, writes Bur­roughs’ biog­ra­ph­er Ted Mor­gan, Eber­sol “found Bur­roughs ‘bor­ing and dread­ful,’ and ordered that his time slot be cut from six to three and a half min­utes. The writ­ers, how­ev­er, con­spired to let his per­for­mance stand as it was, and on Novem­ber 7, he kicked off the show sit­ting behind a desk, the light­ing giv­ing his face a sepul­chral gaunt­ness.”

In the grainy video above, Bur­roughs reads from Naked Lunch and cut-up nov­el Nova Express, bring­ing the sadis­tic Dr. Ben­way into Amer­i­ca’s liv­ing rooms, as the audi­ence laughs ner­vous­ly. Sound effects of bombs and strains of the nation­al anthem play behind him as he reads. It stands as per­haps one of the strangest moments in live tele­vi­sion. “Bur­roughs had posi­tioned him­self as the Great Out­sider,” writes Mor­gan, “but on the night of Novem­ber 7 he had reached the posi­tion where the actress Lau­ren Hut­ton could intro­duce him to an audi­ence of 100 mil­lion view­ers as Amer­i­ca’s great­est liv­ing writer.” I’m sure Bur­roughs got a kick out of the descrip­tion. In any case, the clip shows us a SNL of bygone days that occa­sion­al­ly dis­rupt­ed the usu­al state of pro­gram­ming, as when it had punk band Fear on the show.

Per­haps Bur­roughs’ com­mer­cial appear­ances also show us how the coun­ter­cul­ture gets co-opt­ed and repack­aged for mid­dle-class tastes. Then again, one of the great ironies of Bur­roughs life is that he both began and end­ed it as “a true mem­ber of the mid­west­ern tax-pay­ing mid­dle class.” The fol­low­ing year in Lawrence, Kansas, he “caught up on his cor­re­spon­dence.” One stu­dent in Mon­tre­al wrote, imag­in­ing him in “a male whore­house in Tang­i­er.” Bur­roughs replied, “No… I live in a small house on a tree-lined street in Lawrence, Kansas, with my beloved cat Rus­ki. My hob­bies are hunt­ing, fish­ing, and pis­tol prac­tice.” Did Bur­roughs, who spent his life destroy­ing mass cul­ture with cut-ups and curs­es, sell out—as he once accused Tru­man Capote of doing—by becom­ing a celebri­ty?

Per­haps we should let him answer the charge. In answer to a fan from Eng­land who called him “God,” Bur­roughs wrote, “You got me wrong, Ray­mond, I am but a hum­ble prac­ti­tion­er of the scriven­er’s trade. God? Not me. I don’t have the qual­i­fi­ca­tions. Old Sarge told me years ago: ‘Don’t be a vol­un­teer, kid.’ God is always try­ing to foist his lousy job not some­one else. You got­ta be crazy to take it. Just a Tech Sergeant in the Shake­speare Squadron.” Bur­roughs may have used his celebri­ty sta­tus to his lit­er­ary advan­tage, and used it to pay the bills and work with artists he admired and vice-ver­sa, but he nev­er saw him­self as more than a writer and (and per­haps lay magi­cian), and he abjured the hero wor­ship that made him a cult fig­ure.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William S. Bur­roughs Teach­es a Free Course on Cre­ative Read­ing and Writ­ing (1979)

William S. Bur­roughs Sends Anti-Fan Let­ter to In Cold Blood Author Tru­man Capote: “You Have Sold Out Your Tal­ent”

William S. Bur­roughs Explains What Artists & Cre­ative Thinkers Do for Human­i­ty: From Galileo to Cézanne and James Joyce

How William S. Bur­roughs Used the Cut-Up Tech­nique to Shut Down London’s First Espres­so Bar (1972)

The Night John Belushi Booked the Punk Band Fear on Sat­ur­day Night Live, And They Got Banned from the Show

Beat Writer William S. Bur­roughs Spreads Coun­ter­cul­ture Cool on Nike Sneak­ers, 1994

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

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Truman Capote Narrates “A Christmas Memory,” a 1966 TV Adaptation of His Autobiographical Story

in Books, Life, Literature, Television | December 9th, 2016

It’s fruit­cake weath­er, so bust out your han­kies.

You’ll need them by the end of this 1966 tele­vi­sion adap­ta­tion of Tru­man Capote’s auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal 1956 sto­ry, “A Christ­mas Mem­o­ry,” above.

As hol­i­day spe­cials go, it’s bless­ed­ly free of raz­zle daz­zle. Capote’s Depres­sion-era Christ­mases in rur­al Alaba­ma were short on tin­sel and long on wind­fall pecans.

Com­bined with flour, sug­ar, dried fruit, and some hard-pur­chased whiskey, these gifts of nature yield­ed deli­cious cakes the main char­ac­ters send to a long list of recip­i­ents rang­ing from FDR to a young man whose car broke down in front of their house, who snapped the only pho­to­graph of the two of them togeth­er.

The nos­tal­gia may feel a bit thick at times. Both the sto­ry and the hour-long adap­ta­tion are a love let­ter to an eccen­tric, much old­er cousin, Nan­ny Rum­b­ley Faulk, known as Sook. She was part of the house­hold of dis­tant rela­tions where Capote’s moth­er, Lil­lie Mae, spent a por­tion of her child­hood, and on whom she lat­er dumped the 3‑year-old Tru­man.

Sook was “the only sta­ble per­son” in his life, Capote told Peo­ple mag­a­zine thir­ty years after her death.

And accord­ing to Capote’s aunt, Marie Rud­is­ill, “the only per­son that Sook ever cared any­thing about was Tru­man.”

Her inter­ests, while not in keep­ing with those of a lady of her time, place, race, and class, held enor­mous appeal for a lone­ly lit­tle boy with few play­mates his own age. Believ­ing in ghosts, tam­ing hum­ming­birds and cur­ing warts with an “old-time Indi­an cure” are just a few of Sook’s hob­bies he men­tions in the sto­ry, where­in her only name is “my friend.” She is:

small and spright­ly, like a ban­tam hen; but due to a long youth­ful ill­ness, her shoul­ders are piti­ful­ly hunched. Her face is remarkable–not unlike Lin­col­n’s, crag­gy like that, and tint­ed by sun and wind; but it is del­i­cate too, fine­ly boned, and her eyes are sher­ry-col­ored and timid.

Actress Geral­dine Page, then 43 and a favorite of Capote’s con­tem­po­rary, play­wright Ten­nessee Williams, imbued the “six­ty-some­thing” Sook with wide eyes and wild hair.

But the real star of the show is Capote him­self as nar­ra­tor. That famous nasal whine sets his “Christ­mas Mem­o­ry” apart from more gold­en-throat­ed hol­i­day voiceover work by Burl Ives, Greer Gar­son, and Fred Astaire. It also cuts through the trea­cle, as Bart Simp­son would say.

You can find “A Christ­mas Mem­o­ry” in this col­lec­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Waters Makes Hand­made Christ­mas Cards, Says the “Whole Pur­pose of Life is Christ­mas”

Bob Dylan Reads “‘Twas the Night Before Christ­mas” On His Hol­i­day Radio Show (2006)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is open­ing in New York City in March 2017. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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A Complete Reading of George Orwell’s 1984: Aired on Pacifica Radio, 1975

in Audio Books, Literature, Radio | December 8th, 2016

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were strik­ing thir­teen.” Thus, with one of the best-known open­ing sen­tences in all Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture, begins George Orwell’s 1984, the nov­el that even 67 years after its pub­li­ca­tion remains per­haps the most oft-ref­er­enced vision of total­i­tar­i­an­is­m’s takeover of the mod­ern West­ern world. Its fable-like pow­er has, in fact, only inten­si­fied over the decades, which have seen it adapt­ed into var­i­ous forms for film, tele­vi­sion, the stage (David Bowie even dreamed of putting on a 1984 musi­cal), and, most often, the radio.

In recent years we’ve fea­tured radio pro­duc­tions of 1984 from 1949, 1953, and 1965. On their pro­gram From the Vault, the Paci­fi­ca Radio net­work has just fin­ished bring­ing out of the archives their own 1975 broad­cast of the nov­el as read by morn­ing-show host Charles Mor­gan.

Nei­ther an all-out radio dra­ma nor a straight-ahead audio­book-style read­ing, Paci­fi­ca’s 1984 uses sound effects and voice act­ing (some con­tributed by June For­ay, of Rocky and Bull­win­kle fame) to tell the sto­ry of Win­ston Smith and his inner and out­er strug­gle with the repres­sive, all-see­ing, lan­guage-dis­tort­ing gov­ern­ment of the super­state of Ocea­nia (and the city of Airstrip One, for­mer­ly known as Eng­land) that sur­rounds him.

It makes sense that Paci­fi­ca would put the whole of Orwell’s dire nov­el­is­tic warn­ing on the air­waves. Found­ed just after World War II by a group of for­mer con­sci­en­tious objec­tors, its first sta­tion, KPFA in Berke­ley, Cal­i­for­nia, began broad­cast­ing in the year of 1984’s pub­li­ca­tion. As it grew over sub­se­quent decades, the lis­ten­er-fund­ed Paci­fi­ca radio net­work gained a rep­u­ta­tion for both its polit­i­cal engage­ment and its uncon­ven­tion­al uses of the medi­um. (The Fire­sign The­ater, the troupe that arguably per­fect­ed the art of the dense, mul­ti-lay­ered stu­dio com­e­dy album, got their start at Paci­fi­ca’s Los Ange­les sta­tion KPFK.) Every era, it seems, pro­duces its own 1984, and this one sounds as res­o­nant in the 21st cen­tu­ry — a time even Orwell dared not imag­ine — as it must have in the 1970s.

You can hear Part 1 of Paci­fi­ca’s 1984 at the top of the post, then fol­low these links to all ten parts on their Sound­cloud page: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Very First Adap­ta­tion of George Orwell’s 1984 in a Radio Play Star­ring David Niv­en (1949)

Hear George Orwell’s 1984 Adapt­ed as a Radio Play at the Height of McCarthy­ism & The Red Scare (1953)

Hear a Radio Dra­ma of George Orwell’s 1984, Star­ring Patrick Troughton, of Doc­tor Who Fame (1965)

George Orwell’s 1984 Staged as an Opera: Watch Scenes from the 2005 Pro­duc­tion in Lon­don

David Bowie Dreamed of Turn­ing George Orwell’s 1984 Into a Musi­cal: Hear the Songs That Sur­vived the Aban­doned Project

George Orwell Explains in a Reveal­ing 1944 Let­ter Why He’d Write 1984

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 Face­book.

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500+William S. Burroughs Book Covers from Across the Globe: 1950s Through the 2010s

in Art, Books, Literature | December 7th, 2016

burroughs-hungary

William S. Bur­roughs has shown gen­er­a­tions of read­ers that the writ­ten word can pro­vide expe­ri­ences they’d nev­er before imag­ined. But to get to Bur­roughs’ writ­ten words, most of those read­ers have entered through his covers—or rather, through the cov­ers that a host of pub­lish­ers, all over the world and for over six­ty years now—have con­sid­ered suf­fi­cient­ly appeal­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tions of Bur­roughs’ dar­ing, exper­i­men­tal, and not-espe­cial­ly-rep­re­sentable lit­er­ary work. You can see over 500 of these efforts at the Bur­roughs page of beatbookcovers.com.

burroughs-covers-2

As mild-man­nered as he could seem in per­son, Bur­roughs’ life and work, what with the drugs, the acquain­tance with the homo­sex­u­al under­world, and the reck­less gun­play, has always attract­ed an air of the sor­did and sen­sa­tion­al. Pub­lish­ers did­n’t hes­i­tate to exploit that, as we can see in the first edi­tion of Bur­roughs’ first pub­lished work Junkie just above. Not only did it come out as a 35-cent mass-mar­ket two-in-one paper­back, it promised the “con­fes­sions of an unre­deemed drug addict,” and with that lurid illus­tra­tion implied so much more besides. No mat­ter how much read­er­ly curios­i­ty it piqued, how much of an artis­tic future could some­one impulse-buy­ing it at the drug­store have imag­ined for this “William Lee” fel­low?

burroughs-covers-3

More curi­ous read­ers have prob­a­bly become Bur­roughs fans by pick­ing up The Naked Lunch, his best-known nov­el but a more con­tro­ver­sial and much less con­ven­tion­al­ly com­posed one than Junkie. This sto­ry of William Lee (now just the name of the pro­tag­o­nist, not an autho­r­i­al pseu­do­nym) and his sub­stance-fueled odyssey through Amer­i­ca, Mex­i­co, Moroc­co, the fic­tion­al Annex­ia and far beyond has had many and var­ied visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tions, all of which try to con­vey how stren­u­ous­ly the text strug­gles against the stric­tures of tra­di­tion­al forms of writ­ing. Some­times, as in the 1986 U.K. edi­tion from Pal­adin above, they resort to telling rather than just show­ing you that you hold in your hands “the book that blew ‘lit­er­a­ture’ apart.”

burroughs-covers-4

Those of us who get deep into Bur­roughs’ work often do so because it tran­scends genre. Still, that has­n’t stopped mar­ket­ing depart­ments from try­ing to place him in one genre or anoth­er, or at least to sell cer­tain of his books as if they belonged in one genre or anoth­er. The “Nova tril­o­gy” with which Bur­roughs fol­lowed up Naked Lunch, has tend­ed to appear on the sci­ence-fic­tion shelves of book­stores around the world, not com­plete­ly with­out rea­son. Still, the sen­si­bil­i­ties of the sci-fi world and Bur­roughs’ mind do clash some­what, pro­duc­ing such intrigu­ing results as the 1978 Japan­ese edi­tion of Nova Express above.

burroughs-covers-5

Ulti­mate­ly, the only image that reli­ably con­veys the work of William S. Bur­roughs is the image of William S. Bur­roughs, which appears on the cov­er of this 1982 Pic­a­dor William Bur­roughs Read­er as well as many oth­er books besides. As any­one who’s gone deep into his bib­li­og­ra­phy knows, the work and the man don’t come sep­a­rate­ly, but they’ll sure­ly always remem­ber the cov­er that led them into his world in the first place, whether it bore images sub­dued or sen­sa­tion­al­is­tic, a design grim­ly real or for­bid­ding­ly abstract, or a prop­er warn­ing about just what it was they were get­ting into.

Vis­it all 500+ William S. Bur­roughs books cov­ers here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Visu­al Art of William S. Bur­roughs: Book Cov­ers, Por­traits, Col­lage, Shot­gun Art & More

Loli­ta Book Cov­ers: 100+ Designs From 37 Coun­tries (Plus Nabokov’s Favorite Design)

Hear a Great Radio Doc­u­men­tary on William S. Bur­roughs Nar­rat­ed by Iggy Pop

83 Years of Great Gats­by Book Cov­er Designs: A Pho­to Gallery

600+ Cov­ers of Philip K. Dick Nov­els from Around the World: Greece, Japan, Poland & Beyond

Down­load 650 Sovi­et Book Cov­ers, Many Sport­ing Won­der­ful Avant-Garde Designs (1917–1942)

The Art of the Book Cov­er Explained at TED

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 Face­book.

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When Ursula K. Le Guin & Philip K. Dick Went to High School Together

in Literature, Random | December 1st, 2016

pkd-uklg-high-school

Cre­ative com­mons images are by Ras­mus Ler­dorf and Gor­thi­an , via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

When you run a site like this, you learn all kinds of unex­pect­ed things–most of it rich and reward­ing, some of it strange, triv­ial and still nonethe­less intrigu­ing. Dis­cov­er­ing that Adolf Hitler and Lud­wig Wittgen­stein went to the same Aus­tri­an mid­dle school, like­ly at the same time, fits into the lat­ter cat­e­go­ry. And so too does this:

pkd-uklg

On Twit­ter, jazz crit­ic Ted Gioia recent­ly high­light­ed a curi­ous pas­sage from Ursu­la K. Le Guin’s new book, where she men­tions attend­ing high school with anoth­er sem­i­nal fig­ure in sci-fi lit­er­a­ture, Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep?, Total Recall, Minor­i­ty Report, A Scan­ner Dark­ly etc.).

As she sep­a­rate­ly told The Paris Review, Berke­ley High had 5,300 kids dur­ing the 1940s. It was a big high school. And yet “Nobody knew Phil Dick. I have not found one per­son from Berke­ley High who knew him. He was the invis­i­ble class­mate.” Years lat­er, the two authors talked. But nev­er met. PKD always remained some­thing of a ghost.

via @TedGioia

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Hear Inven­tive Sto­ries from Ursu­la LeGuin & J.G. Bal­lard Turned Into CBC Radio Dra­mas

33 Sci-Fi Sto­ries by Philip K. Dick as Free Audio Books & Free eBooks

Hear 6 Clas­sic Philip K. Dick Sto­ries Adapt­ed as Vin­tage Radio Plays

Hear VALIS, an Opera Based on Philip K. Dick’s Meta­phys­i­cal Nov­el

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An Animated Introduction to George Orwell

in History, Literature | November 28th, 2016

When his short and (by his own account) often mis­er­able life came to an end in 1950, could the Eng­lish polit­i­cal writer Eric Arthur Blair have known that he would not just become a house­hold name, but remain one well over half a cen­tu­ry lat­er? Giv­en his adop­tion of the mem­o­rable nom de plume George Orwell, we might say he had an inkling of his lit­er­ary lega­cy’s poten­tial. Still, he claimed to choose it for no grander rea­son than that it sound­ed like “a good round Eng­lish name,” and would have loathed the pre­tense he sensed in the use of the phrase “nom de plume,” or, for that mat­ter, any oth­er of con­spic­u­ous­ly for­eign prove­nance.

The atti­tudes that shaped the author of Ani­mal Farm and 1984 come out in this ani­mat­ed intro­duc­tion to Orwell’s life and work, new­ly pub­lished by Alain de Bot­ton’s School of Life. In explain­ing the moti­va­tions of this “most famous Eng­lish lan­guage writer of the 20th cen­tu­ry,” de Bot­ton quotes from the essay “Why I Write,” where­in Orwell, with char­ac­ter­is­tic clar­i­ty, lays out his mis­sion “to make polit­i­cal writ­ing into an art. My start­ing point is always a feel­ing of par­ti­san­ship, a sense of injus­tice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to pro­duce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw atten­tion, and my ini­tial con­cern is to get a hear­ing.”

Orwell hat­ed his fel­low intel­lec­tu­als, whom he accused of “a range of sins: a lack of patri­o­tism, resent­ment of mon­ey and phys­i­cal vig­or, con­cealed sex­u­al frus­tra­tion, pre­ten­sion, and dis­hon­esty.” He loved “the ordi­nary per­son” and the lives led by those “not espe­cial­ly blessed by mate­r­i­al goods, peo­ple who work in ordi­nary jobs, who don’t have much of an edu­ca­tion, who won’t achieve great­ness, and who nev­er­the­less love, care for oth­ers, work, have fun, raise chil­dren, and have large thoughts about the deep­est ques­tions in ways Orwell thought espe­cial­ly admirable.” Though raised mid­dle-class and edu­cat­ed at Eton, Orwell eschewed uni­ver­si­ty and believed that “the aver­age pub in a coal-min­ing vil­lage con­tained more intel­li­gence and wis­dom than the British Cab­i­net or the high table of an Oxbridge col­lege.”

One might want to call such an intel­lec­tu­al a poseur or even a sort of fetishist, but Orwell backed up his pro­nounce­ments about the supe­ri­or­i­ty of the work­ing class with his years spent liv­ing and work­ing in it, and, with books like Down and Out in Paris and Lon­don and The Road to Wigan Pier, writ­ing about it. He praised news­pa­per comics, coun­try walks, danc­ing, Charles Dick­ens, and straight­for­ward lan­guage, all of which informed the attacks on ide­ol­o­gy and author­i­tar­i­an­ism that would keep his writ­ing mean­ing­ful for future gen­er­a­tions. The hol­i­day sea­son now upon us makes anoth­er work of Orwell’s espe­cial­ly rel­e­vant: his Christ­mas pud­ding recipe, one blow in his less­er-known strug­gle to, as the Lon­don-based de Bot­ton puts it, write “brave­ly in defense of Eng­lish cook­ing” — a project which would, by itself, qual­i­fy him as a cham­pi­on of the under­dog.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

George Orwell’s Five Great­est Essays (as Select­ed by Pulitzer-Prize Win­ning Colum­nist Michael Hiltzik)

George Orwell Explains in a Reveal­ing 1944 Let­ter Why He’d Write 1984

For 95 Min­utes, the BBC Brings George Orwell to Life

George Orwell’s Final Warn­ing: Don’t Let This Night­mare Sit­u­a­tion Hap­pen. It Depends on You! 

What “Orwellian” Real­ly Means: An Ani­mat­ed Les­son About the Use & Abuse of the Term

Try George Orwell’s Recipe for Christ­mas Pud­ding, from His Essay “British Cook­ery” (1945)

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 Face­book.

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Watch Animations of Two Italo Calvino Stories: “The False Grandmother” and “The Distance from the Moon”

in Animation, Literature | November 25th, 2016

There are those books we go to not to escape this world, but to expe­ri­ence the truth of a mys­te­ri­ous­ly attrib­uted quote, “There is anoth­er world, and it is this one.” That is to say that the worlds we find in cer­tain nov­els are no less filled with dread, ambi­gu­i­ty, and moral freight than our own. But these sorts of sto­ries offer new maps for real­i­ty. They may at first be those of the Protes­tant the­ol­o­gy and Vic­to­ri­an moral­i­ty of C.S. Lewis, whose Nar­nia books (avail­able in a free audio for­mat here) rather lit­er­al­ly give us anoth­er world in this one.

But we may soon find our­selves cat­a­pult­ed into the neu­rot­ic night­mares of Kaf­ka, the sci-fi para­noia of Philip K. Dick, the postin­dus­tri­al ennui of J.G. Bal­lard, the scholas­tic labyrinths of Borges, and.… Well, what are we to call the work of Invis­i­ble Cities and If on a Winter’s Night a Trav­el­er author Ita­lo Calvi­no? Jonathan Galas­si iden­ti­fies Calvi­no as a post­mod­ern folk­lorist, drawn into the mature idiom of his best-known books by his sus­tained engage­ment in “the mag­is­te­r­i­al anthol­o­gy Ital­ian Folk­tales” in 1956, a task that made him into “a mod­ern-day Grimm.”

Calvino’s facil­i­ty with the light mag­ic of folk­lore infus­es his work with a fleet-foot­ed­ness and brevi­ty that can mask its high seri­ous­ness. Two years after com­pil­ing his anthol­o­gy, he wrote that his “true direc­tion” was “the cri­sis of the bour­geois intel­lec­tu­al seen crit­i­cal­ly from the inside.” This accounts both for the the­o­ret­i­cal sophis­ti­ca­tion of his prose and the exper­i­men­tal form. Calvi­no bests even Borges as an exper­i­men­tal­ist, writ­ing large parts of If on a Winter’s Night a Trav­el­er in the impe­ri­ous sec­ond per­son, and pulling it off bril­liant­ly.

How­ev­er, Calvi­no will often break into the nov­el to remind us of the arti­fice, and at one point declare his desire “to fol­low the men­tal mod­els through which we live our human events.” Those mod­els, Calvi­no sug­gests, are not orga­nized and sys­tem­at­ic. They are as mean­der­ing and episod­ic as fairy tales, filled with irrel­e­vant detail that we pick up in fas­ci­na­tion then quick­ly for­get. It’s a dis­com­fit­ing idea for ratio­nal­ists. But for those who know that life is lived in sto­ries, it rings per­fect­ly true.

In the two ani­mat­ed videos here, we see Calvino’s genius for con­jur­ing irra­tional fables. At the top John Tur­tur­ro reads Calvino’s “The False Grand­moth­er” from his folk­lore anthol­o­gy, a ver­sion of the “Lit­tle Red Rid­ing Hood” sto­ry. And in the (sub­ti­tled) Hebrew-lan­guage ani­ma­tion above (per­fect­ly scored by Erik Satie), we see an adap­ta­tion of Calvino’s “The Dis­tance from the Moon” from Cos­mi­comics, a col­lec­tion whose fic­tions, writes Ted Gioia, “are absurd and inco­her­ent, yet the plot lines are filled with romance, dra­ma, and con­flicts that draw the read­ers deep­er and deep­er into the text.”

They are also filled with sci­en­tif­ic ideas: “Each sto­ry in Cos­mi­comics begins with a sci­en­tif­ic premise.” Like many a crit­i­cal human­ist before him, from Michel de Mon­taigne to Jonathan Swift, Calvi­no seems to won­der if our best intel­lec­tu­al efforts, even the sci­ences, fall sub­ject to “the foibles and fan­cies of humans,” and to the askew nar­ra­tive log­ic of folk­lore.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ita­lo Calvi­no Offers 14 Rea­sons We Should Read the Clas­sics

Hear Ita­lo Calvi­no Read Selec­tions From Invis­i­ble Cities, Mr. Palo­mar & Oth­er Enchant­i­ng Fic­tions

Invis­i­ble Cities Illus­trat­ed: Three Artists Paint Every City in Ita­lo Calvino’s Clas­sic Nov­el

Expe­ri­ence Invis­i­ble Cities, an Inno­v­a­tive, Ita­lo Calvi­no-Inspired Opera Staged in LA’s Union Sta­tion

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

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