The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Art, Books, Literature | ≅ 2 Comments
In his 1955 classic, Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov described the facial features of his scandalous protagonist, Humbert Humbert, in small bits. When taken together, here’s what you get: Gloomy good looks… Clean-cut jaw, muscular hand, deep sonorous voice… broad shoulders … I was, and still am, despite mes malheurs, an exceptionally handsome male; slow-moving, tall, with soft dark [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Books, e-books, Film, Literature | ≅ 1 Comment
Today is the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens. He was born in Portsmouth, England on February 7, 1812, the second of eight children. When he was 12 years old his father was sent to debtors’ prison, along with most of his family, and Charles went to live with a friend of the family, an impoverished [...]
≡ Category: Literature, Poetry | ≅ Leave a Comment
Literary critic Harold Bloom once called Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) “the best and most representative American poet of our time.” In this video from Boston College’s Guestbook Project, Bloom recites a poem from Stevens’s first book, Harmonium, which was published in 1923: Tea at the Palaz of Hoon Not less because in purple I descended The western day [...]
≡ Category: Books, Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
Today is the birthday of James Joyce, born in Dublin 130 years ago, who wrote in his autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience [...]
≡ Category: Comedy, Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
Last summer, actor Jim Meskimen produced a viral video where he impersonated 25 famous figures reciting Clarence’s monologue from Shakespeare’s great history play, Richard III. Woody Allen, Jack Nicholson, Jimmy Stewart – they all made an appearance. Now, Meskimen returns with a new cast of characters, and this time he’s reading lines from Marc Antony’s famous speech in Julius Caesar. If [...]
≡ Category: Literature, Math, Philosophy | ≅ Leave a Comment
“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life,” wrote Bertrand Russell in the prologue to his autobiography: “the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.” This five minute video, a preview of a three-part series produced in 2005 for Ontario public television called “The Three [...]
≡ Category: Books, Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
Today is the birthday of Richard Brautigan, whose funny and imaginative books were a touchstone for the 1960s counterculture and have remained an inspiration to free spirits ever since. He would have been 77. In this video, uploaded to the Internet exactly a year ago, Ianthe Brautigan Swensen reads her father’s story, “One Afternoon in 1939,” [...]
≡ Category: Books, Literature, Religion | ≅ 10 Comments
This past summer, Jonathan Pararajasingham, a neurosurgeon in London, created a montage of 100 renowned academics, mostly all scientists, talking about their thoughts on the existence of God. (Find it in two parts here and here.) Now’s he back with a new video, 30 Renowned Writers Speaking About God. It runs 25 minutes, and it offers as much [...]
≡ Category: Literature, Technology | ≅ Leave a Comment
On February 18, 1994, Charles Bukowski had a fax machine installed in his home and immediately sent his first Fax poem to his publisher: oh, forgive me For Whom the Bell Tolls, oh, forgive me Man who walked on water, oh, forgive me little old woman who lived in a shoe, oh, forgive me the [...]
≡ Category: Film, Literature | ≅ 2 Comments
“We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth,” says the narrator Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive [...]
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