In times past, we’ve seen Arthur C. Clarke, the great sci-fi writer, gaze into the future and foresee our reality in a most uncanny way. Just watch him predict our digitally-connected world in 1964, and then PC computers, e-banking and telecommuting in 1974.

Today is the 106th anniversary of the birth of Samuel Beckett, whose pared-down prose and plays are among the greatest achievements of late modernism.
At a young man Beckett moved to Paris, where he befriended another Irish exile, James Joyce.

A couple weeks back, we mentioned that you can download a finely-read audio version of James Joyce’s Ulysses for free. What that version doesn’t include — and couldn’t include — are etchings by Henri Matisse.

Ernest Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea in an inspired eight weeks in 1951. It wasn’t a long novel, running just a little more than 100 pages. But it carried more than its weight. The novel, Hemingway’s last major work, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953.

This is a novel that needs no introduction, but we will give it a short one anyway. Published in serial format between 1918 and 1920, James Joyce’s Ulysses was initially reviled by many and banned in the US and UK until the 1930s.

Today is the birthday of Robert Frost, who once said that a poem cannot be worried into being, but rather, “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.” Those words are from Frost’s 1939 essay, “The Figure a Poem Makes,” which includes the famous passage:
The figure a poem makes.

No surprise, you might think, that a documentary about the man who wrote Tropic of Cancer would merit an NSFW label.

I feel your pain, brother, I feel your pain….
Now a semi serious question: How long until someone buys the url newyorkertyranny.com? We’ll keep an eye on it.
More Culture Around the Web (all previously aired on our Twitter Stream):
Here’s Your Brain on Fiction
Steven Spielberg Talks About the Influence of Stanley Kubrick.

Today is the 90th birthday of the Beat writer Jack Kerouac. He was born March 12, 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts to French-Canadian immigrants. He grew up speaking the Quebec French dialect Joual, and didn’t learn English until he was six years old.

If you heard our interview on The John Batchelor Show tonight (catch it at the 29:50 mark), and if you want to check out the marvelous clip of Vladimir Nabokov reading Lolita, here it is. Don’t forget to find us on Twitter and Facebook:
Originally aired on 1950s French television, this clip gives you some vintage Vladimir Nabokov.