Frank Herbert Explains the Origins of Dune (1969)

in Books, Literature, Sci Fi | March 6th, 2024

Dune: Part Two has been playing in theaters for less than a week, but that’s more than enough time for its viewers to joke about the aptness of its title. For while it comes, of course, as the second half of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s influential sci-fi novel, it also contains a great many heaps of sand. Such visuals honor not just the story’s setting, but also the form of Herbert’s inspiration to write Dune and its sequels in the first place. The idea for the whole saga came about, he says in the 1969 interview above, because he’d wanted to write an article “about the control of sand dunes.”

“I’m always fascinated by the idea of something that is either seen in miniature and that can be expanded to the macrocosm or which, but for the difference in time, in the flow rate, and the entropy rate, is similar to other features which we wouldn’t think were similar,” he goes on to explain. When viewed the right way, sand dunes turn out to behave “like waves in a large body of water; they just are slower. And the people treating them as fluid learn to control them.” After enough research on this subject, “I had something enormously interesting going for me about the ecology of deserts, and it was — for a science fiction writer, anyway — it was an easy step from that to think: What if I had an entire planet that was a desert?”

That may have turned out to be one of the defining ideas of Dune, but there are plenty of others in there with it. “We all know that many religions began in a desert atmosphere,” Herbert says, “so I decided to put the two together because I don’t think that any one story should have any one thread. I build on a layer technique, and of course putting in religion and religious ideas you can play one against the other.” And “of course, in studying sand dunes, you immediately get into not just the Arabian mystique but the Navajo mystique and the mystique of the Kalahari primitives and all.” From his technical curiosity about sand, the story’s host of ecological, religious, linguistic, political, and indeed civilizational themes emerged.

Conducted in Herbert’s Fairfax, California home in 1969 by literature professor and science-fiction enthusiast Willis E. McNelly (who would later compile The Dune Encyclopedia), the interview goes down a number of intellectual byways that will be fascinating to curious fans. In its eighty minutes, Herbert reflects on everything from corporations to hippies, the tarot to Zen, and Lawrence of Arabia to John F. Kennedy. The late president’s then-just-beginning sanctification in America gets him talking about one of Dune’s threads in particular, about the “way a messiah is created in our society.” The elevation of a messiah is an act of myth-making, after all, and “man must recognize the myth he is living in.”

The Dune Graphic Novel: Experience Frank Herbert’s Epic Sci-fi Saga as You’ve Never Seen It Before

The Dune Encyclopedia: The Controversial, Definitive Guide to the World of Frank Herbert’s Sci-Fi Masterpiece (1984)

The 14-Hour Epic Film, Dune, That Alejandro Jodorowsky, Pink Floyd, Salvador Dalí, Moebius, Orson Welles & Mick Jagger Never Made

The Dune Franchise Tries Again — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #110

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

How Jane Austen Changed Fiction Forever

in Books, Literature, Writing | March 1st, 2024

Though Jane Austen hasn’t published a novel since 1817 — with her death that same year being a reasonable excuse — her appeal as a literary brand remains practically unparalleled in its class. This century has offered its own film and television versions of all her major novels from Sense and Sensibility to Persuasion, and even minor ones like Sandition and Lady Susan. As for the looser adaptations and Austen-inspired works in other media, it would be difficult even to count them. But to understand why Austen endures, we must go back to Austen herself: to novels, that is, and to the entertainingly innovative manner in which she wrote them.

At the beginning of her very first book says Evan Puschak, Austen “did something that changed fiction forever.” Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, has in his latest video chosen Sense and Sensibility as an example with which to explain the key technique that set its author’s work apart. When, in the scene in question, the dying Henry Dashwood makes his son John promise to take care of his three half-sisters, the younger man inwardly resolves to himself to give them a thousand pounds each. “Yes, he would give them three thousand pounds,” Austen writes. “It would be liberal and handsome! It would be enough to make them completely easy. Three thousand pounds! He could spare so little a sum with a little inconvenience.”

What, exactly, is going on here? Before this passage, Puschak explains, “the narrator is describing the thoughts and feelings of John Dashwood.” But then, “something changes: it’s suddenly as if we’re inside John’s mind. And yet, the point of view doesn’t change: we’re still in the third person.” This is a notable early example of what’s called “free indirect style,” which literary critic D. A. Miller describes as a “technique of close writing that Austen more or less invented for the English novel.” When she employs it, “the narration’s way of saying is constantly both mimicking, and distancing itself from, the character’s way of seeing.”

In his book Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style, Miller pays a good deal of attention to the later Emma, with its “unprecedented prominence of free indirect style.” When, in Austen’s hand, that style “mimics Emma’s thoughts and feelings, it simultaneously inflects them into keener observations of its own; for our benefit, if never for hers, it identifies, ridicules, corrects all the secret vanities and self-deceptions of which Emma, pleased as Punch, remains comically unconscious. And this is generally what being a character in Austen means: to be slapped silly by a narration whose constant battering; however satisfying — or terrifying — to readers, its recipient is kept from even noticing.” Austen may have been a novelist of great technical proficiency and social acuity, but she also understood the eternal human pleasure of sharing a laugh at the delusional behind their back.

Related content:

An Animated Introduction to Jane Austen

Download the Major Works of Jane Austen as Free eBooks & Audio Books

15-Year-Old Jane Austen Writes a Satirical History Of England: Read the Handwritten Manuscript Online (1791)

This Is Your Brain on Jane Austen: The Neuroscience of Reading Great Literature

Jane Austen Writes a Letter to Her Sister While Hung Over: “I Believe I Drank Too Much Wine Last Night”

The Jane Austen Fiction Manuscript Archive Is Online: Explore Handwritten Drafts of Persuasion, The Watsons & More

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch a 1915 Film Adaptation of Alice in Wonderland Enhanced in 4K, with Costumes Based on Original Illustrations by Sir John Tenniel

in Film, Literature | February 20th, 2024

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland predates the invention of cinema by a couple of decades. Nevertheless, much like the “Drink me” bottle and “Eat me” presented to its young protagonist, Lewis Carroll’s fantastical tale has called out the same message to generations of filmmakers around the world: “Adapt me.” This century, though not even a quarter of the way over, has already brought us full-length Alice movies (to say nothing of television productions) from Europe, South America, and of course the United States. Those last include separate adaptations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Alice Through the Looking Glass by no less an auteur than Tim Burton.

Both of those books were also taken on by a writer-director named W. W. Young more than a century ago, though he simply combined portions of both novels into a single feature. You can watch this silent Alice in Wonderland from 1915 above, in a version its uploader calls “by far the highest quality version of this film on the internet,” assembled “primarily from two prints scanned by the Library of Congress, along with a few other sources.

Enhanced with “scene-by-scene image stabilization,” it also excises “many title cards which were not part of the original film” added to subsequent versions, “and which slowed down the film considerably.”

Running just under an hour, this reconstruction includes scenes with such widely known characters as the Caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat, the Mock Turtle and the Queen of Hearts. Young’s footage of such figures as Tweedledee and Tweedledum and Humpty Dumpty has, alas, been lost to time. Still, unusually for a film adaptation, this version includes much of Carroll’s parodic poem “You Are Old, Father William” — more, even, than made it into Disney’s beloved animated feature of 1951. With its stiff costumes (based on the original illustrations by Sir John Tenniel) and Long Island backdrops, Alice in Wonderland may not boast quite the same production value, but watching it now, long after the silent era, one can’t help but feel transported to another reality altogether.

The Original Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Manuscript, Handwritten & Illustrated By Lewis Carroll (1864)

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Read by Sir John Gielgud

When Aldous Huxley Wrote a Script for Disney’s Alice in Wonderland

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Illustrated by Salvador Dalí in 1969, Finally Gets Reissued

Curious Alice — The 1971 Anti-Drug Movie Based on Alice in Wonderland That Made Drugs Look Like Fun

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Russian Animators Who Have Spent 40 Years Animating Gogol’s “The Overcoat”

in Animation, Film, Literature | February 6th, 2024

“Steady Pushkin, matter-of-fact Tolstoy, restrained Chekhov have all had their moments of irrational insight which simultaneously blurred the sentence and disclosed a secret meaning worth the sudden focal shift,” writes Vladimir Nabokov in his Lectures on Russian Literature. “But with Gogol this shifting is the very basis of his art.” When, “as in the immortal ‘The Overcoat,’ he really let himself go and pottered on the brink of his private abyss, he became the greatest artist that Russia has yet produced.” Tough though that act is to follow, generations of filmmakers around the world have attempted to adapt for the screen that masterwork of a short story about the outerwear-related struggles of an impoverished bureaucrat.

One particular pair of Russian filmmakers has actually spent a generation or two making their own version of “The Overcoat”: the married couple Yuri Norstein and Francheska Yarbusova, who began the project back in 1981.

Their nineteen-seventies short films Hedgehog in the Fog and Tale of Tales had already received international acclaim from both fans and fellow creators of animation (their champions include no less an auteur than Hayao Miyazaki), with distinctively captivating effects achieved through a distinctively painstaking process. Wholly analog, it has grown only more labor-intensive as digital technology has advanced so rapidly over the past few decades — decades that have also brought about great social, political, and economic changes in their homeland.

The Atrocity Guide video above offers a glimpse into Norstein and Yarbusova’s lives and work on the “The Overcoat” — to the extent that the two can even be separated at this point. Once, they were victims of Soviet censorship and suspicion, given the ambiguous morals of their visually lavish productions. Now, in their eighties and with this 65-minute-film nowhere near completion (but five minutes of which you can see in the video above), the problem seems to have more to do with their own artistically commendable but wholly impractical creative ethos. They work to “sadistically high” standards on a film that, as Norstein believes, “should be constantly changing” — while also properly expressing the Gogolian themes of struggle, privation, and futility that can “only be created amid feelings of discomfort and uncertainty” — hence their insistence on staying in Russia.

Three Animated Shorts by the Groundbreaking Russian Animator Fyodor Khitruk

Watch The Amazing 1912 Animation of Stop-Motion Pioneer Ladislas Starevich, Starring Dead Bugs

Watch the Surrealist Glass Harmonica, the Only Animated Film Ever Banned by Soviet Censors (1968)

A Soviet Animation of Stephen King’s Short Story “Battleground” (1986)

Enjoy 15+ Hours of the Weird and Wonderful World of Post Soviet Russian Animation

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Read Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World: The First Sci-Fi Novel Written By a Woman (1666)

in Books, History, Literature, Sci Fi | January 24th, 2024

For a variety of reasons, science fiction has long been regarded as a mostly male-oriented realm of literature. This is evidenced, in part, by the eagerness to celebrate particular works of sci-fi written by women, like Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea saga, Octavia Butler’s Parable novels, Joanna Russ’ The Female Man, or Margaret Attwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (uneasily though it fits within the boundaries of the genre). But those who prefer the early stuff can go all the way back to the mid-seventeenth century, where they’ll find Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, readable and downloadable in all its strange glory free online.

“The Blazing World was first published in 1666 and is often considered a forerunner to both science fiction and the utopian novel genres,” writes book blogger Eric Karl Anderson. “It’s a totally bonkers story of a woman who is stolen away to the North Pole only to find herself in a strange bejeweled kingdom of which she becomes the supreme Empress. Here she consults with many different animal/insect people about philosophical, religious and scientific ideas. The second half of the book pulls off a meta-fictional trick where Cavendish (as the Duchess of Newcastle) enters the story herself to become the Empress’ scribe and close companion.”

In the video just below, Youtuber Great Books Prof frames this as not just a work of proto-science fiction, but also a pioneering use of the “multiverse” concept that has undergirded any number of twenty-first-century blockbusters.

The Blazing World continues to inspire: actor-director Carlson Young put out a loose cinematic adaptation just a few years ago. Cavendish herself described the book as a “hermaphroditic text,” possibly in reference to its engagement with topics then addressed almost exclusively by men. But it also occupied two categories at once in that she originally published it as a fictional section of her book Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, one of six philosophical volumes she wrote. In fact, her work qualified her as not just philosopher and novelist, but also scientist, poet, playwright, and even biographer. That last she accomplished by writing The Life of the Thrice Noble, High and Puissant Prince William Cavendish, who happened to be her husband. Let her life be a lesson to those young girls who simultaneously dream of becoming a princess and a writer whose books are read for centuries: sometimes, you can have it all.

The First Work of Science Fiction: Read Lucian’s 2nd-Century Space Travelogue A True Story

When Astronomer Johannes Kepler Wrote the First Work of Science Fiction, The Dream (1609)

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: 17,500 Entries on All Things Sci-Fi Are Now Free Online

Every Possible Kind of Science Fiction Story: An Exhaustive List Created by Pioneering 1920s SciFi Writer Clare Winger Harris (1931)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

The Great Gatsby Explained: How F. Scott Fitzgerald Indicted & Endorsed the American Dream (1925)

in Books, Literature | January 2nd, 2024

When The Great Gatsby was first published, it flopped; nearly a century later, its place at the pinnacle of American literature is almost universally agreed upon. Of the objectors, many no doubt remember too vividly having to answer essay questions about the meaning of the green light on the Buchanans’ dock. Perhaps “the most debated symbol in the history of American literature,” it tends to be interpreted simultaneously as “Gatsby’s love for Daisy, money, and the American dream,” as James Payne puts it in his new Great Books Explained video above. Examined more closely, “what it may suggest is that the American dream’s most un-discussed quality is its inaccessibility.”

“Fitzgerald felt that the American dream has lost its way,” Payne says. “Baseball, America’s pastime and the purest of games, had been corrupted by the Black Sox game fixing of 1919, a real-life scandal mentioned in The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald used it as an allegory of America: if baseball is corrupt, then we are really in trouble.”

Hence Gatsby’s ultimate discovery that Daisy, the woman for whom he had wholly reinvented himself (in that quintessentially American way), falls so far short of what he’d imagined; hence how Gatsby’s own “classic rags-to-riches story” is “complicated by the fact that he made his money in bootlegging.” In the end, “the American dream only belongs to establishment figures,” those “who were born into it. Everyone’s class is fixed, just like the World Series.”

Though not well-received in its day, The Great Gatsby offered a premonition of disaster ahead that subsequently came true in both the American economy and Fitzgerald’s personal life. But even in the book, “despite his fear that America is lost, he still offers hope.” Hence the vivid quasi-optimism of the closing lines about how “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us,” which frames Americans as “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” — a passage whose interpretation teachers are always liable to demand. If you happen to be a student yourself, saving Payne’s video in hopes of a quick and easy A on your English lit exam, know that there are few more time-honored techniques in pursuit of the American dream than looking for shortcuts.

T. S. Eliot, Edith Wharton & Gertrude Stein Tell F. Scott Fitzgerald That Gatsby is Great, While Critics Called It a Dud (1925)

The Great Gatsby Is Now in the Public Domain and There’s a New Graphic Novel

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

Haruki Murakami Translates The Great Gatsby, the Novel That Influenced Him Most

The Wire Breaks Down The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Classic Criticism of America (NSFW)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Hunter S. Thompson Sets His Christmas Tree on Fire, Nearly Burning His House Down (1990)

in Literature, Random | December 15th, 2023

It was something of a Christmas ritual at Hunter S. Thompson’s Colorado cabin, Owl Farm. Every year, his secretary Deborah Fuller would take down the Christmas tree and leave it on the front porch rather than dispose of it entirely. That’s because Hunter, more often than not, wanted to set it on fire. In 1990, Sam Allis, a writer for then formidable TIME magazine, visited Thompson’s home and watched the fiery tradition unfold. He wrote:

I gave up on the interview and started worrying about my life when Hunter Thompson squirted two cans of fire starter on the Christmas tree he was going to burn in his living-room fireplace, a few feet away from an unopened wooden crate of 9‑mm bullets. That the tree was far too large to fit into the fireplace mattered not a whit to Hunter, who was sporting a dime-store wig at the time and resembled Tony Perkins in Psycho. Minutes earlier, he had smashed a Polaroid camera on the floor.

Hunter had decided to videotape the Christmas tree burning, and we later heard on the replay the terrified voices of Deborah Fuller, his longtime secretary-baby sitter, and me off-camera pleading with him, “NO, HUNTER, NO! PLEASE, HUNTER, DON’T DO IT!” The original manuscript of Hell’s Angels was on the table, and there were the bullets. Nothing doing. Thompson was a man possessed by now, full of the Chivas Regal he had been slurping straight from the bottle and the gin he had been mixing with pink lemonade for hours.

The wooden mantle above the fireplace apparently still has burn marks on it today.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

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Hunter S. Thompson Chillingly Predicts the Future, Telling Studs Terkel About the Coming Revenge of the Economically & Technologically “Obsolete” (1967)

Hear the 10 Best Albums of the 1960s as Selected by Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson, Existentialist Life Coach, Gives Tips for Finding Meaning in Life

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Entire Manuscript Collection of Geoffrey Chaucer Gets Digitized: A New Archive Features 25,000 Images of The Canterbury Tales & Other Illustrated Medieval Manuscripts

in Archives, Books, Literature | November 20th, 2023

Earlier this year, Oxford professor of English literature Marion Turner published The Wife of Bath: A Biography. Even if you don’t know anything about that book’s subject, you’ve almost certainly heard of her, and perhaps also of her traveling companions like the Knight, the Summoner, the Nun’s Priest, and the Canon’s Yeoman. These are just a few of the pilgrims whose storytelling contest structures Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth-century magnum opus The Canterbury Tales, whose influence continues to reverberate through English literature, even all these centuries after the author’s death. In commemoration of the 623rd anniversary of that work, the British Library has opened a vast online Chaucer archive.

This archive comes as a culmination of what the Guardian’s Caroline Davies describes as “a two and a half year project to upload 25,000 images of the often elaborately illustrated medieval manuscripts.” Among these artifacts are “complete copies of Chaucer’s poems but also unique survivals, including fragmentary texts found in Middle English anthologies or inscribed in printed editions and incunabula (books printed before 1501).”

If you’re looking for The Canterbury Tales, you’ll find no fewer than 23 versions of it, the earliest of which “was written only a few years after Chaucer’s death in roughly 1400.” Also digitized are “rare copies of the 1476 and 1483 editions of the text made by William Caxton,” now considered “the first significant text to be printed in England.”

Four centuries later, designer-writer-social reformer William Morris collaborated with celebrated painter Edward Burne-Jones to create an edition W. B. Yeats once called “the most beautiful of all printed books”: the Kelmscott Chaucer, previously featured here on Open Culture, which you can also explore in the British Library’s new archive (as least as soon as its ongoing cyber attack-related issues are resolved). As its wider contents reveal, Chaucer was the author of not just The Canterbury Tales but also a variety of other poems, the classical-dream-vision story collection The Legend of Good Women, an instruction manual for an astrolabe, and translations of The Romance of the Rose and The Consolation of Philosophy. And his Trojan epic Troilus and Criseyde may sound familiar, thanks to the inspiration it gave, more than 200 years later, to a countryman by the name of William Shakespeare.

Terry Jones, the Late Monty Python Actor, Helped Turn Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales Into a Free App: Explore It Online

Discover the First Illustrated Book Printed in English, William Caxton’s Mirror of the World (1481)

40,000 Early Modern Maps Are Now Freely Available Online (Courtesy of the British Library)

The British Library Puts Over 1,000,000 Images in the Public Domain: A Deeper Dive Into the Collection

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Frank Herbert Explains the Origins of Dune (1969)

How Jane Austen Changed Fiction Forever

Watch a 1915 Film Adaptation of Alice in Wonderland Enhanced in 4K, with Costumes Based on Original Illustrations by Sir John Tenniel

The Russian Animators Who Have Spent 40 Years Animating Gogol’s “The Overcoat”

Read Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World: The First Sci-Fi Novel Written By a Woman (1666)

The Great Gatsby Explained: How F. Scott Fitzgerald Indicted & Endorsed the American Dream (1925)

Hunter S. Thompson Sets His Christmas Tree on Fire, Nearly Burning His House Down (1990)

The Entire Manuscript Collection of Geoffrey Chaucer Gets Digitized: A New Archive Features 25,000 Images of The Canterbury Tales & Other Illustrated Medieval Manuscripts

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