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 hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanor. Exceptional virility often reflects in the subject’s displayable features a sullen and congested something that pertains to what he has to conceal. And this was my case… But instead I am lanky, big-boned, wooly-chested Humbert Humbert, with thick black eyebrows… A cesspoolful of rotting monsters behind his slow boyish smile… aging ape eyes… Humbert’s face might twitch with neuralgia.

In a rather brilliant move, Brian Joseph Davis has run these descriptions through law enforcement composite sketch software and brought Humbert Humbert almost to life. (See above.) And he has done the same for a cast of other literary characters on his Tumblr, called The Composites. Other characters getting the perp treatment include Emma Bovary (Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary), Edward Rochester (Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre), and Keith Talent (Martin Amis’ London Fields), among others. Find them all here. h/t Metafilter

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Famous Literary Characters Visualized with Police Composite Sketch Software is a post from: Open Culture

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 old lady. He was forced to quit school and work in a blacking factory, where he pasted labels on jars of shoe polish.

Dickens never forgot those early traumas. He incorporated his experiences and observations of social injustice into his works, including David Copperfield, Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol. (Find free novels below.) He was the most popular writer of Victorian England, a virtual rock star in the days before recorded music and movies. His stories, published serially in magazines, were eagerly awaited by the public. Most have remained in print ever since.

The Dickens bicentenary is being celebrated with special events around the world, including a wreath-laying ceremony this morning at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, where actor and filmmaker Ralph Fiennes, author Claire Tomalin, and two of Dickens’s descendants are scheduled to give readings. For a listing of events today and throughout the year, go to Dickens2012.org. Also take a look at the short retrospective of Dickens-inspired movies (above) from the British Film Institute.

To help celebrate, we have gathered together some of the best Dickens material from across the Web:

Films (see our complete list of Free Movies):

• Great Expectations: The classic 1946 version directed by David Lean and starring John Mills, Bernard Miles, Finlay Currie, Jean Simmons, Martita Hunt and Alec Guinness. The film won Academy Awards for Best Art Direction and Best Cinematography.
• Oliver Twist: Another classic by David Lean, this 1948 film stars John Howard Davies as Oliver and Alec Guinness as Fagin. In 1999 it was ranked 46th on the BFI’s list of the top 100 British films of all time.
• A Tale of Two Cities: The 1958 film by Ralph Thomas, starring Dirk Bogarde as Sydney Carton and Dorothy Tutin as Lucie Manette. The film was shot in France’s Loire Valley, with several thousand U.S. soldiers, posted in nearby Orleans, cast as extras.
• A Christmas Carol: George C. Scott gives an excellent performance as Ebenezer Scrooge in this critically acclaimed 1984 film directed by Clive Donner. It premiered in America on CBS television, and was released theatrically in Great Britain.
• David Copperfield: A 2000 U.S.-Irish television adaptation starring Hugh Dancy as David Copperfield, Michael Richards as Wilkins Micawber and Sally Field as Betsey Trotwood.
• The Pickwick Papers: A 1952 film, adapted and directed by Noel Langley and starring James Hayter as Samuel Pickwick.

eBooks (see our complete list of Free eBooks)

• A Christmas Carol – Read Online – Download Multiple Formats - Kindle
• A Tale of Two Cities – Read Online – Download Multiple Formats
• Bleak House – Read Online – Download Multiple Formats – Kindle
• David Copperfield – Read Online – Download Multiple Formats
• Great Expectations – Read Online – Download Multiple Formats –Kindle
• Hard Times – Read Online – Download Multiple Formats
• Mystery of Edwin Drood – Read Online – Download Multiple Formats
• Oliver Twist – Read Online – Download Multiple Formats - Kindle

Audio Books (see our complete list of Free Audio Books)

• A Christmas Carol – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File
• A Tale of Two Cities – Free iTunes - Free MP3 Zip File
• A Collection of Christmas Stories - Free iTunes
• Bleak House – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File
• David Copperfield – Free iTunes – Free MP3
• Great Expectations – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File
• Hard Times – Free iTunes – Free MP3 Zip File
• Oliver Twist – Free iTunes – Free MP3

NOTE: If we’re missing a good Dickens novel, don’t forget Audible.com’s 14 day trial. It will let you download an audio book for free, pretty much any one you want, and they’re all narrated and produced in a professional format. Get details here.

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Celebrate the 200th Birthday of Charles Dickens with Free Movies, eBooks and Audio Books is a post from: Open Culture

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 through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

“The palaz of Hoon is sky and space seen as a gaudy and ornate dwelling,” writes Bloom in Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate; “to have tea at the palaz is to watch the twilight while conversing with the setting sun, who is hardly lonely since all the air is his and since all directions are at home in him. He is himself when most imperial, in purple and gold, and his setting is a coronation.”

The video concludes with Bloom reciting the opening stanza from a later poem by Stevens that echoes the earlier one, a poem regrettably titled “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery”:

In the far South the sun of autumn is passing
Like Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore.
He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him,
The worlds that were and will be, death and day.
Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end.
His beard is of fire and his staff is a leaping flame.

“Whitman, like Hoon,” writes Bloom, “both contains everything else and is an idea of the sun, not as a god but as a god might be. Hoon is himself the compass of the sea whose tides sweep through him; Walt encompasses worlds but himself is not to be encompassed.”

Harold Bloom Recites ‘Tea at the Palaz of Hoon’ by Wallace Stevens is a post from: Open Culture

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 of my race.”

To celebrate his life, we present an August 1929 recording of Joyce reading a melodious passage from the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” chapter of his Work in Progress, which would be published ten years later as Finnegans Wake. The recording was made in Cambridge, England, at the arrangement of Joyce’s friend and publisher Sylvia Beach. “How beautiful the ‘Anna Livia’ recording is,” wrote Beach in her memoir, Shakespeare and Company, “and how amusing Joyce’s rendering of an Irish washerwoman’s brogue!”

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James Joyce Reads ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ from Finnegans Wake is a post from: Open Culture

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 you live in LA, you can see the impressionist perform live at The Acting Center on February 17 & 18 at 8 p.m. Enjoy.

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Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar Read in Celebrity Voices is a post from: Open Culture

“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 Passions of Bertrand Russell,” features a recording of Russell reading passages from the prologue, entitled “What I Have Lived For.” You can read the original text at the Bertrand Russell Society, an excellent online resource, that also makes available free books by Russell, including:

• An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry (1897)
• The Principles of Mathematics (1903)
• Our Knowledge of the External World (1914)
• Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919)
• Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1919)
• The Analysis of Mind (1921)
• The Conquest of Happiness (1930)

You can also download the first edition of Russell’s landmark 1910-13 collaboration with Alfred North Whitehead, Principia Mathematica, as well as many of Russell’s essays, including:

• “A Free Man’s Worship” (1903)
• “On Denoting” (1905)
• “The Elements of Ethics” (1910)
• “The Ethics of War” (1915)
• “On Propositions” (1919)
• “Theory of Knowledge” (1926)
• “Why I am Not a Christian” (1927)

To explore the full list of available resources, and to learn how you can support the society’s activities, visit the Bertrand Russell Society website.

Also don’t miss some great Russell material in our own archives, including all six of his 1948 BBC Reith Lectures, a clip from a Canadian television interview featuring his views on God, and his eloquent 1959 message to the future.

Three Passions of Bertrand Russell (and a Collection of Free Texts) is a post from: Open Culture

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,” from his collection Revenge of the Lawn. Ianthe was one year old in 1961 when her father sat down with a portable typewriter on a family camping trip to write his most famous work, Trout Fishing in America, and she was 24 when he took his own life in 1984. Now she’s a writer and a teacher.

In 2001 Brautigan Swensen published You Can’t Catch Death: A Daughter’s Memoir about her life with a difficult but loving father who liked to take her with him to his favorite San Francisco haunts during the 60s. “When I’m here,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle on a visit to the city in 2000, “I still feel my father walking the streets, I still feel my hand in his. And that’s a very happy feeling.”

Richard Brautigan’s Story, ‘One Afternoon in 1939,’ Read From a Wooden Spool is a post from: Open Culture

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 a critique of orthodox religious belief as it does a literary tribute to humanism and rationalism. Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Salman Rushdie (who kindly tweeted us this weekend), Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth — they all make an appearance. The full list of writers appears below the jump.

And, before we close, let me say this. Whenever we post videos like these, we get the question. Why the occasional focus on atheism/rationalism/humanism? And the simple answer comes down to this: If you cover writers, academics and scientists, the thinking skews in that direction. Yes, there are exceptions, but they are in shorter supply. But if someone pulls them together and makes a montage, we’ll likely feature it too. H/T RichardDawkins.net

Note: As you may have noticed, we have been experiencing intermittent outages over the past couple of days. Our host, Dreamhost, has been stumbling more than we’d like. So we’re figuring out alternatives and hopefully making a move soon. Our apologies for the inconvenience!

1. Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Science Fiction Writer
2. Nadine Gordimer, Nobel Laureate in Literature
3. Professor Isaac Asimov, Author and Biochemist
4. Arthur Miller, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Playwright
5. Wole Soyinka, Nobel Laureate in Literature
6. Gore Vidal, Award-Winning Novelist and Political Activist
7. Douglas Adams, Best-Selling Science Fiction Writer
8. Professor Germaine Greer, Writer and Feminist
9. Iain Banks, Best-Selling Fiction Writer
10. José Saramago, Nobel Laureate in Literature
11. Sir Terry Pratchett, NYT Best-Selling Novelist
12. Ken Follett, NYT Best-Selling Author
13. Ian McEwan, Man Booker Prize-Winning Novelist
14. Andrew Motion, Poet Laureate (1999-2009)
15. Professor Martin Amis, Award-Winning Novelist
16. Michel Houellebecq, Goncourt Prize-Winning French Novelist
17. Philip Roth, Man Booker Prize-Winning Novelist
18. Margaret Atwood, Booker Prize-Winning Author and Poet
19. Sir Salman Rushdie, Booker Prize-Winning Novelist
20. Norman MacCaig, Renowned Scottish Poet
21. Phillip Pullman, Best-Selling British Author
22. Dr Matt Ridley, Award-Winning Science Writer
23. Harold Pinter, Nobel Laureate in Literature
24. Howard Brenton, Award-Winning English Playwright
25. Tariq Ali, Award-Winning Writer and Filmmaker
26. Theodore Dalrymple, English Writer and Psychiatrist
27. Roddy Doyle, Booker Prize-Winning Novelist
28. Redmond O’Hanlon FRSL, British Writer and Scholar
29. Diana Athill, Award-Winning Author and Literary Editor
30. Christopher Hitchens, Best-Selling Author, Award-Winning Columnist

30 Renowned Writers Speaking About God & Reason is a post from: Open Culture

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 mountain that roared at midnight,
oh, forgive me the dumb sounds of night and day and death,
oh, forgive me the death of the last beautiful panther,
oh, forgive me all the sunken ships and defeated armies,
this is my first FAX POEM.
It’s too late:
I have been
smitten.

Alas this was also Bukowski’s last poem. Just 18 days after Bukowski embraced technology, the poet (once famously called the “laureate of American lowlife” by Pico Iyer) died of leukemia in California. He was 73 years old. According to John Martin at Black Sparrow Press, the Fax poem has never been published or collected in a book. Booktryst has a whole lot more on the story, and we have the singer/songwriter Tom Waits reading Charles Bukowski’s poem, The Laughing Heart. You can also listen to three other Bukowski poems (in audio) here on YouTube:

• Bluebird
• Something For The Touts, The Nuns, The Grocery Clerks, And You
• The Secret to My Endurance (read by Bukowski himself)

Find more great reads in our collection of Free Audio Books.

via Poetry Foundation

The Last (Faxed) Poem of Charles Bukowski is a post from: Open Culture

“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 toil.”

The palpable menace that permeates Conrad’s classic novella has been edited out of the narration in this short film, made for Tourism Malaysia by British filmmaker James W. Griffiths. What remains is a poetic sense of wonder for a natural world that is no longer frightening, no longer in need of being subdued. In the original, the twisting and turning sentences are like a microcosm of a journey up the winding Congo River, into the metaphorical darkness that lies at the heart of all men. Out of the stillness of the page, Conrad’s imagination washes over us in a rolling wave of words:

The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence. And it moved not.

Griffiths can be forgiven for defanging Conrad. We Were Wanderers on a Prehistoric Earth is a beautiful film, a quiet meditation on the unspoiled rainforest of West Malaysia shot in November by cinematographer Christopher Moon, who also collaborated with Griffiths on last year’s award-winning Nokia cellphone film Splitscreen. The music is by Lennert Busch, the sound design is by Mauricio d’Orey, and Conrad’s words are spoken by Terry Burns.

We Were Wanderers on a Prehistoric Earth: A Short Film Inspired by Joseph Conrad is a post from: Open Culture