Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: The Film

Due to its stylistic and linguistic complexity, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake ranks among the most difficult works of fiction. And that is why virtually no filmmaker has ever tried to adapt Joyce’s final work for the screen. But after Mary Manning Howe adapted passages from the book for the stage (listen to her reading from Finnegans Wake here), American animator Mary Ellen Bute accepted the challenge and turned Manning’s play into a film.

Sadly, Mary Ellen Bute’s short films are almost forgotten today, but from the 1930s to 1950s her abstract musical shorts were known to a wide audience. Don’t miss her first color film from 1938.

Between 1965 and 1967, Bute created her last film, and only feature film, Passages from Finnegans Wake. The movie was screened at the Cannes Film Festival and named Best Debut of the Year (1965). The video above shows only the opening sequence, but the whole film can be enjoyed online courtesy of UbuWeb.

Bonus: You can read Roger Ebert’s 1968 review of Bute’s film here. He admits that he didn’t enjoy it too much, but concedes this may have been because he hadn’t actually read the book.

By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.

Steve Martin Writes Song for Hymn-Deprived Atheists

Brilliant comedian. Playwright. Contributor to The New Yorker. And now songwriter for hymn-deprived atheists. Steve Martin – who comes into focus within 10 seconds – performs here with the Steep Canyon Rangers at Merlefest 2010…

You can find an alternate/more polished version recorded on the David Letterman Show here

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Related Content:

The Atheism Tapes Presents Lengthy Interviews with Arthur Miller, Daniel Dennett & Richard Dawkins About Religion and Unbelief

Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief, with Jonathan Miller

Free Online Religion Courses

 

Biology That Makes Us Tick: Free Stanford Course by Robert Sapolsky

First thing you need to know: Before doing anything else, you should simply click “play” and start watching the video above. It doesn’t take long for Robert Sapolsky, one of Stanford’s finest teachers, to pull you right into his course. Better to watch him than listen to me.

Second thing to know: Sapolsky is a MacArthur Fellow, a world renowned neurobiologist, and an adept science writer best known for his book, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Much of his research focuses on the interplay between the mind and body (how biology affects the mind, and the mind, the body), and that relationship lies at the heart of this course called “Human Behavioral Biology.”

Now the third: Human Behavioral Biology is available on YouTube and iTunes for free. The course, consisting of 25 videos spanning 36 hours (watch them all below), is otherwise listed in the Biology section of our big list of Free Online courses (now 1,700 courses in total).

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here.

If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, Venmo (@openculture) and Crypto. Thanks!

Related Content:

Atheist Stanford Biologist Robert Sapolsky Explains How Religious Beliefs Reduce Stress

Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky Demystifies Depression, Which, Like Diabetes, Is Rooted in Biology

Robert Sapolsky Explains the Biological Basis of Religiosity, and What It Shares in Common with OCD, Schizophrenia & Epilepsy

How Buddhism & Neuroscience Can Help You Change How Your Mind Works: A New Course by Bestselling Author Robert Wright

Free Grateful Dead Concert Archive

“One More Saturday Night” for your Saturday night.

If this vintage clip filmed in Copenhagen in 1972 reawakens your inner Dead Head, then you can always wade your way into the Internet Archive’s Grateful Dead collection, which hosts dozens of Dead shows from the 1970s through the 1990s. Some concerts (usually recorded by members of the audience) can be downloaded. Other audio (usually taken from the soundboard) can be streamed. All together, you will find hundreds of hours of free concert recordings.

A few items worth sampling include: Live at the Boston Garden (May 7, 1977); Live at the RFK Stadium (June 10, 1973); or Live at Madison Square Garden (September 4, 1979).

David Lynch “Directs” Duran Duran Concert in L.A.

This past Wednesday, YouTube streamed a webcast of the latest installment of the Unstaged concert series. Arcade Fire kicked off the series last August in New York City. Now we cut to the Mayan Theater in Los Angeles, where Duran Duran took the stage. The 80s band is still around, still making music. And they’re smartly collaborating with David Lynch, who created visuals that were double-exposed over the live performance. HuffPo interviewed Lynch about the collaboration (and more) here, and you can always head to YouTube to find videos of individual songs played during the show.

Blinky™: A Touching Short Film About A Killer Robot

That’s right, touching.

From Blade Runner to Terminator to at least 30 percent of what made Battlestar Galactica great, violent robot revolt is nothing new. But 27-year old Irish filmmaker Ruairi Robinson, who was nominated for an Oscar for his animated short Fifty Percent Grey, tweaks the formula by shrinking the arena: This battlefield isn’t a galaxy, a solar system or even a planet; it’s just the lonely suburban home of a boy whose parents fight all day.

Max Record (Where the Wild Things Are) is fine as the angry son who hopes a new toy will solve all of his problems, but this movie belongs to the robot: More WALL-E than cylon, more R2-D2 than ED-209, and priced at just $999.99, Blinky is a machine the whole family can love. He catches, he cleans, he plays hide and seek, he’ll wait for you in the rain, and he just wants to be your friend….Until he doesn’t.

A warning here: Even though at its best Blinky speaks directly to the bloody-minded fifth-grader in all of us, we suggest watching the whole thing before showing it to children, or even squeamish adults.

(Visit the always excellent io9 for more free science fiction film recommendations.)

Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.

The Wire as Great Victorian Novel

A while back, W. Daniel Hillis made the case that The Wire may rise to the level of – if not surpass – Tolstoy’s War & Peace. Writing for the Edge.org, Hillis went so far as to say:

As much as I liked War and Peace, I probably got more out of The Wire. And why should that be surprising? More human effort can be put into a television series than a novel and more time is spent consuming it. If both are executed to their highest standards, with equal care, skill and insight, we might well expect less from the book.

If we can mention The Wire in the same breath as Tolstoy, then why not another giant of nineteenth century literature, Charles Dickens? Yes, The Wire has been called “Dickensian” too, and this week the Hooded Utilitarian has re-imagined The Wire as a serialized Victorian novel. The premise? Imagine The Wire written in 60 installments over the course of six years, starting in 1846, by Horatio Bucklesby Ogden, a Dickens contemporary who wrote with a “nuance and attention to detail that Dickens never achieved.” Each installment ran 30 pages and sold for one shilling apiece.

The Hooded Utilitarian hasn’t actually printed these 60 installments (because they don’t actually exist). But they have produced a few wonderful mock pages, and written a faux piece of literary criticism to accompany them. A great job by Joy Delyria and Sean Michael Robinson.

via BoingBoing

Hunter S. Thompson Interviews Keith Richards

Rewind the videotape to 1993. Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson finally gets to interview Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards. The conversation is utterly and predictably incomprehensible. But it’s amusing nonetheless.

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