Open Culture » Literature

Mark Twain Captured on Film by Thomas Edison (1909)

Dan Colman — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:02:55 +0000

Here’s a little nugget for you. The great inventor Thomas Edison visited the home of Mark Twain in 1909, and captured footage of “the father of American literature” (says Faulkner) walking around his estate and playing cards with his daughters, Clara and Jean. The film is silent and deteriorated. But it’s apparently the only known footage of the author who gave us Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Twain would die the next year. Quite the find by @ebertchicago

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Mark Twain Captured on Film by Thomas Edison (1909) is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

GoodReads

Dan Colman — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:48:11 +0000

A quick heads up for book lovers: Goodreads is a large social network for readers, with over 3,000,000 members who review, recommend and swap books. The site also features “book-give-aways” for its members. This month you can enter to win a free copy of If You Follow Me, a novel by Malena Watrous, a talented colleague of mine at Stanford. About the book one reviewer said: It’s “the kind of book you finish and then clutch to your heart as you run around telling everyone you know that they have to read it.” The book is hitting the bookstore shelves today, and you can sign up to win a free copy until March 16.

PS Malena will be teaching an online writing course through Stanford Continuing Studies this spring. The course, called The Creative Writing Coach, is open to all. Meanwhile, we’re also piloting our first online humanities course, a philosophy course called Envisioning the Good Life. Watch the video introduction for the course here.

GoodReads is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

Join the Facebook Committee to Support Liao Yiwu

Dan Colman — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 03:32:52 +0000

For the 13th time, Chinese authorities arrested the well-known Chinese writer Liao Yiwu (The Corpse Walker) as he boarded a plane to attend a literary festival in Cologne, Germany. He has now been placed under house arrest. You can learn more about it here. (Also read Philip Gourevitch’s blog post for The New Yorker.) Please join this newly created Facebook Group dedicated to publicizing this story and winning his release. Be among the first to join. Make a difference here.

Join the Facebook Committee to Support Liao Yiwu is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

The David Foster Wallace Audio Project

Dan Colman — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:03:55 +0000

A good soul has pulled together a series of audio recordings by David Foster Wallace, the author of Infinite Jest, the sprawling 1100 page novel that now sits on TIME Magazine’s list of the best 100 novels ever. The audio collection (find here) is broken down into the following categories:

via @dylanschenker

The David Foster Wallace Audio Project is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

Henry Miller on New York

Dan Colman — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 05:38:29 +0000

(NOTE: some strong language here...)

Back in 1975, filmmaker Tom Schiller (only 20 years old at the time) made a short documentary on the novelist Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn). In the scene above, Miller, then 81 years old, reminisces about his difficult early life in New York, and it all takes place on the set used to shoot the movie Hello, Dolly!. Schiller’s complete film, Henry Miller Asleep and Awake, can be watched for free on Snagfilms. (It’s also available at Amazon on DVD here.) The run time is 34 minutes. Excellent find by Mike.

Note: We’ve added Henry Miller Asleep and Awake to our growing film collection: Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Film Noir, Documentaries & More

Henry Miller on New York is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

Ten Rules for Writing Fiction

Dan Colman — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 04:57:19 +0000

The Guardian asked twenty nine writers to give their 10 Rules for Writing Fiction. Those given by Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections) were arguably the pithiest, and we list them below. The full lineup of writers (including Elmore Leonard, Margaret Atwood, and Richard Ford) can be found here. (The New Yorker has since followed up with some commentary on the Guardian list.)

The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.

Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.

Never use the word “then” as a conjunction – we have “and” for this purpose. Substituting “then” is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many “ands” on the page.

Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.

When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.

The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more auto biographical story than “The Metamorphosis”.

You see more sitting still than chasing after.

It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.

You have to love before you can be relentless.

via @kirstinbutler

Ten Rules for Writing Fiction is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

Jonathan Safran Foer on Eating

Dan Colman — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:22:51 +0000

Note: You should be able to download Safran Foer’s new book for free (in audio format) through Audible.com’s no strings attached offer. Details here.

Jonathan Safran Foer on Eating is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

Google Lit Trips

Wes Alwan — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 08:14:24 +0000

For three years, English teacher Jerome Burg has been using Google Earth to teach literature. Each “Lit Trip” involves mapping the movements of characters over a plot’s timeline and providing excerpts, pictures, and links at each location. I found a lit trip for one of my favorite novels, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, which involves a lot of movement across the old West. McCarthy himself is said to have spent years tracing these paths and studying locations in preparation for writing the novel. You’ll find a complete list of lit trips here, including such classics as Macbeth, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and The Odyssey. It’s difficult to get a sense of the fantastic effect of visually unpacking a plot without downloading a lit trip and trying it within Google Earth (download here). But here’s a video of a lit trip for Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey. It will give you a quick taste of the lit trip experience:

Finally, you can find a two-part video introduction to Lit Trips by Kate Reavey, a professor at Peninsula College, here and here.

Wes Alwan lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where he works as a writer and researcher and attends the Institute for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture. He also participates in The Partially Examined Life, a podcast consisting of informal discussions about philosophical texts by three philosophy graduate school dropouts.

Google Lit Trips is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

Carl Sandburg on “What’s My Line?”

Dan Colman — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 08:12:41 +0000

What’s My Line? aired on CBS from 1950 to 1967, making it the longest-running game show in American television history. During its eighteen seasons, the show featured hundreds of celebrities, including some of America’s leading cultural figures. The clip above dusts off the 1960 appearance made by Carl Sandburg, the poet, writer, and three time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. And now for a video that’s not all fun and games: a virtual movie of Sandburg reading his antiwar poem Grass. (You can also get more free audio recordings of Sandburg’s poetry over at the Internet Archive.)

Carl Sandburg on “What’s My Line?” is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com

F. Scott Fitzgerald Reads Shakespeare

Dan Colman — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 07:20:33 +0000

The University of South Carolina hosts a few gems, including F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby) reading lines from Shakespeare’s Othello. Or, more specifically, Othello’s oration to Venetian senators.

You can access the sound file in two formats here (aiff) and here (real audio).

This comes to us via Mike. Thanks to all who started sending good links our way. Whenever you see something good, please fire us a quick email. It will take one minute out of your day and make the day for many others.

F. Scott Fitzgerald Reads Shakespeare is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com