The Art of William Faulkner: Drawings from 1916–1925

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Before William Faulkn­er more or less defined the genre of South­ern lit­er­a­ture with his folksy short sto­ries, tragi­com­ic epic nov­els, and stud­ies in the stream of dam­aged con­scious­ness, he made a very sin­cere effort as a poet with a 1924 col­lec­tion called The Mar­ble Faun. Pub­lished in 500 copies with the assis­tance of his friend Phil Stone, who paid $400 dol­lars to get the work in print, Faulkner’s poet­ry did not go over well. Although lat­er judg­ments have been kinder, the pub­lish­er called it “not real­ly a very good book of poet­ry” and most of the print run was remain­dered. The young Faulkn­er fared much bet­ter how­ev­er with anoth­er of his ear­ly cre­ative endeav­ors: art.

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Between 1916 and 1925, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mississippi—which Faulkn­er attend­ed for three semes­ters before drop­ping out in 1920—paid him for draw­ings pub­lished in the uni­ver­si­ty news­pa­per Ole Miss and its humor mag­a­zine The Scream. The draw­ings, like that of a danc­ing cou­ple at the top, show the influ­ence of jazz-age art-deco graph­ic illus­tra­tion as well as that of Eng­lish illus­tra­tor and aes­thete Aubrey Beard­s­ley (who gets a name-check in Faulkner’s 1936 nov­el Absa­lom, Absa­lom!). Beardsley’s influ­ence seems espe­cial­ly evi­dent in the draw­ing above, from a 1917–18 edi­tion of Ole Miss.

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Many of Faulkner’s illus­tra­tions are much sim­pler car­toons, par­tic­u­lar­ly those he did for The Scream, such as the 1925 draw­ing above of two men and a car. Even sim­pler, the line draw­ing of an air­plane below recalls the author’s fas­ci­na­tion with avi­a­tion, man­i­fest­ed in his failed attempt to join the U.S. Air Force, his suc­cess­ful accep­tance into the R.A.F., and his non-Mis­sis­sip­pi 1935 nov­el Pylon, about a row­dy crew of barn­storm­ers in a fic­tion­al­ized New Orleans called “New Val­ois.” You can see more of Faulkner’s draw­ings here and read his ear­ly prose and poet­ry in an out-of-print col­lec­tion housed online at the Inter­net Archive, which has been now added to our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

William Faulkner’s New­ly-Dis­cov­ered Short Sto­ry and Draw­ings

William Faulkn­er Tells His Post Office Boss to Stick It (1924)

Rare 1952 Film: William Faulkn­er on His Native Soil in Oxford, Mis­sis­sip­pi

William Faulkn­er Audio Archive Goes Online at Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Albert Einstein Called Racism “A Disease of White People” in His Little-Known Fight for Civil Rights

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Albert Einstein’s activ­i­ties as a pas­sion­ate advo­cate for peace were well-doc­u­ment­ed dur­ing his life­time. His celebri­ty as a famous physi­cist and one of the world’s most rec­og­niz­able faces lent a great deal of weight to his paci­fism, a view oth­er­wise not giv­en much con­sid­er­a­tion in the pop­u­lar press at almost any time in his­to­ry. How­ev­er, accord­ing to a 2006 book titled Ein­stein on Race and Racism by Fred Jerome and Roger Tay­lor, the sci­en­tist was also as pas­sion­ate about com­bat­ing racism and seg­re­ga­tion as he was about com­bat­ing war. This facet of Einstein’s life was vir­tu­al­ly ignored by the media, as was a vis­it he made in 1946 to Lin­coln Uni­ver­si­ty in Penn­syl­va­nia, the first degree-grant­i­ng col­lege for African-Amer­i­cans and the alma mater of Langston Hugh­es and Thur­good Mar­shall.

Invit­ed to Lin­coln to receive an hon­orary degree, Ein­stein gave a lec­ture on physics but also blunt­ly addressed the racial ani­mus that held the coun­try in its grip, report­ed­ly call­ing racism, “a dis­ease of white peo­ple” and say­ing he “did not intend to be qui­et” about his oppo­si­tion to seg­re­ga­tion and racist pub­lic pol­i­cy. Lest any­one think the Nobel-prize-win­ning physi­cist was pan­der­ing to his audi­ence, the Har­vard Gazette offers a com­pre­hen­sive sum­ma­ry of Einstein’s sup­port of pro­gres­sive anti-racist caus­es, includ­ing his per­son­al sup­port of mem­bers of Princeton’s black com­mu­ni­ty (he paid one man’s col­lege tuition), a town Prince­ton native Paul Robe­son once called “the north­ern­most town in the south.”

Ein­stein formed rela­tion­ships with sev­er­al promi­nent black leaders—inviting opera singer Mar­i­an Ander­son to stay in his home after she was refused a room at the Nas­sau Inn and appear­ing as a char­ac­ter wit­ness for W.E.B. Dubois when the lat­ter stood accused of “fail­ing to reg­is­ter as a for­eign agent.” But it was his 20-year friend­ship with Robe­son that seems cen­tral to his involve­ment in civ­il rights caus­es. The Har­vard Gazette writes:

Ein­stein met Paul Robe­son when the famous singer and actor came to per­form at Princeton’s McCarter The­atre in 1935. The two found they had much in com­mon. Both were con­cerned about the rise of fas­cism, and both gave their sup­port to efforts to defend the demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly elect­ed gov­ern­ment of Spain against the fas­cist forces of Fran­cis­co Fran­co. Ein­stein and Robe­son also worked togeth­er on the Amer­i­can Cru­sade to End Lynch­ing, in response to an upsurge in racial mur­ders as black sol­diers returned home in the after­math of World War II.

At the time of the Gazette arti­cle, 2007, a movie about Ein­stein and Robeson’s friend­ship was appar­ent­ly in the works, with Dan­ny Glover as Robe­son and Ben Kings­ley as Ein­stein. The project is appar­ent­ly stalled, but with the upsurge in pop­u­lar inter­est in the his­to­ry of civ­il rights—with the over­turn­ing of the Vot­ing Rights Act and the wide­spread cov­er­age of the 50th anniver­sary of the March on Washington—perhaps the project will see new life soon. I cer­tain­ly hope so.

via PourMe­Cof­fee

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Albert Ein­stein Express­es His Admi­ra­tion for Mahat­ma Gand­hi, in Let­ter and Audio

Lis­ten as Albert Ein­stein Calls for Peace and Social Jus­tice in 1945

MLK’s Last Days and Final Speech

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Watch The March, the Masterful, Digitally Restored Documentary on The Great March on Washington

The March on Wash­ing­ton for Jobs and Free­dom, one of the largest human rights ral­lies in Amer­i­can his­to­ry, took place 50 years ago today in Wash­ing­ton, D.C.. Mar­tin Luther King Jr. spoke that day, deliv­er­ing his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Joan Baez sang “We Shall Over­come,” the anthem of the civ­il rights move­ment, while Bob Dylan per­formed “When the Ship Comes In” and Odet­ta sang “I’m On My Way.”

In 1964, the direc­tor James Blue released a doc­u­men­tary called The March. Pro­duced under the aus­pices of the Unit­ed States Infor­ma­tion Agency, the film proved to be a “visu­al­ly stun­ning, mov­ing, and arrest­ing doc­u­men­tary of the hope, deter­mi­na­tion, and cama­raderie embod­ied by the demon­stra­tion.” And while the film ini­tial­ly sparked some con­tro­ver­sy (read the account here), it has had a big impact on audi­ences inside and out­side the US through­out the decades.

In 2008, The March was select­ed for preser­va­tion in the Unit­ed States Nation­al Film Reg­istry by the Library of Con­gress. To cel­e­brate the 50th anniver­sary of the The March for Jobs and Free­dom, the US Nation­al Archives has com­plet­ed a full dig­i­tal restora­tion of the film. You can watch it free above, or find it in the Free Doc­u­men­taries sec­tion of our col­lec­tion of 550 Free Movies Online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Nichelle Nichols Tells Neil deGrasse Tyson How Mar­tin Luther King Con­vinced Her to Stay on Star Trek

Mal­colm X at Oxford, 1964

James Bald­win Bests William F. Buck­ley in 1965 Debate at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty

Robert Penn War­ren Archive Brings Ear­ly Civ­il Rights to Life

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“Glory to the Conquerors of the Universe!”: Propaganda Posters from the Soviet Space Race (1958–1963)

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Walk­ing around L.A. just yes­ter­day, I noticed new ban­ners embla­zoned with illus­tra­tions tout­ing sub­way sta­tions now under con­struc­tion. In bold, bright col­ors, they deliv­er clear, ambi­tious imagery of a bright future ahead: ded­i­cat­ed builders, focused stu­dents, noble work­ing com­muters, surg­ing trains. Why, I thought, those look a bit like Sovi­et pro­pa­gan­da! I had no polit­i­cal com­par­isons in mind, only aes­thet­ic ones, and this Retro­naut post shows off many per­fect exam­ples of the Cold War-era Russ­ian posters the Los Ange­les Metro’s brought to my mind. They cap­ture the imag­i­na­tion by exud­ing even more intense sci­en­tif­ic, tech­no­log­i­cal, edu­ca­tion­al, and social opti­mism — and doing so in even more visu­al detail — than I’d remem­bered.

And boy, speak­ing of ambi­tion: “From student’s mod­els to space­ships!” “To the Sun! To the stars!” “Glo­ry to the con­querors of the uni­verse!” Chil­dren inclined to accept these glo­ri­ous slo­gans and the rap­tur­ous imagery they accom­pa­ny could not pos­si­bly fail to believe that, thor­ough­ly edu­cat­ed by their coun­try, their gen­er­a­tion would go on to ush­er in a new galaxy-span­ning order of peace, pros­per­i­ty, and social­ism. Yet we in the rest of the world now know of the bore­dom, cyn­i­cism, and oppres­sion that attend­ed many Sovi­et cit­i­zens’ every­day lives. A Cold War-spe­cial­ist col­lege his­to­ry pro­fes­sor of mine liked to tell a sto­ry about a trip to Moscow he took in the six­ties, on which he kept see­ing ado­les­cents with noth­ing more pro­duc­tive to do than open­ly chug­ging vod­ka on street cor­ners.  Yet, see­ing posters like these, you sim­ply want to believe, just like I want to believe in the exten­sion of Los Ange­les’ sub­way — which, at times, seems about as plau­si­ble as the con­quer­ing of out­er space.

“From student’s mod­els to space­ships!”

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“Glo­ry to the work­ers of Sovi­et sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy!”

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“I am hap­py — this is my work join­ing the work of my repub­lic”

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“In the 20th cen­tu­ry the rock­ets race to the stars”

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Vis­it Retro­naut for many more space pro­pa­gan­da posters from the Sovi­et era.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“First Orbit”: Cel­e­brat­ing 50th Anniver­sary of Yuri Gagaran’s Space Flight

How the CIA Secret­ly Fund­ed Abstract Expres­sion­ism Dur­ing the Cold War

How to Spot a Com­mu­nist Using Lit­er­ary Crit­i­cism: A 1955 Man­u­al from the U.S. Mil­i­tary

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­lesA Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

John Lennon’s Raw, Soul-Baring Vocals From the Beatles’ ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ (1969)

“When you’re drown­ing,” John Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970, “you don’t say, ‘I would be incred­i­bly pleased if some­one would have the fore­sight to notice me drown­ing and come and help me.’  You just scream.”

“Don’t Let Me Down” is Lennon’s anguished scream to his lover, Yoko Ono. When he and the Bea­t­les record­ed the song dur­ing the Let It Be ses­sions in late Jan­u­ary of 1969, Lennon asked Ringo Starr to hit the cym­bal very hard at the begin­ning, to “give me the courage to come scream­ing in.”

The Bea­t­les were in the process of break­ing apart when Lennon wrote the song. It was a dark time in my ways, and he was becom­ing more and more depen­dent upon Ono for per­son­al and cre­ative sup­port. As Paul McCart­ney told writer Bar­ry Miles in Many Years From Now:

It was a very tense peri­od: John was with Yoko and had esca­lat­ed to hero­in and all the accom­pa­ny­ing para­noias and he was putting him­self out on a limb. I think that as much as it excit­ed and amused him, at the same time it secret­ly ter­ri­fied him. So ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ was a gen­uine plea, ‘Don’t let me down, please, what­ev­er you do. I’m out on this limb, I know I’m doing all this stuff, just don’t let me down.’ It was say­ing to Yoko, ‘I’m real­ly step­ping out of line on this one. I’m real­ly let­ting my vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty be seen, so you must not let me down.’ I think it was a gen­uine cry for help.

You can get a strong sense of Lennon’s anguish and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty when you lis­ten to the iso­lat­ed vocal track above. And for the full arrange­ment, includ­ing Star­r’s cym­bal-crash near the begin­ning and Bil­ly Pre­ston’s bril­liant elec­tric piano play­ing, see below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mick Jag­ger Tells the Sto­ry Behind ‘Gimme Shel­ter’ and Mer­ry Clayton’s Haunt­ing Back­ground Vocals

Lis­ten to Fred­die Mer­cury and David Bowie on the Iso­lat­ed Vocal Track for the Queen Hit ‘Under Pres­sure,’ 1981

Kurt Cobain’s Iso­lat­ed Vocal Track From ‘Smells Like Teen Spir­it,’ 1991

The Bea­t­les’ Rooftop Con­cert: The Last Gig Filmed in Jan­u­ary 1969

T.S. Eliot’s Radical Poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Read by Anthony Hopkins and Eliot Himself

T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” con­tains some of the most unfor­get­table images in mod­ern poet­ry: the “pair of ragged claws / Scut­tling across the floors of silent seas”; the yel­low fog that “rubs its back upon the win­dow panes”; the evening “spread out against the sky / Like a patient ether­ized upon a table.” The poem’s sud­den jux­ta­po­si­tions dis­rupt­ed and dis­man­tled the staid poet­ic con­ven­tions of its time. Like his beloved meta­phys­i­cal mod­el John Donne, Eliot pushed the resources of lit­er­ary lan­guage to their out­er extremes, while still main­tain­ing a respect­ful rela­tion­ship with tra­di­tion­al form, deploy­ing Shake­speare­an pen­tame­ter lines whose music is decep­tive, since they are the vehi­cles of such strange, neu­rot­ic con­tent.

“Prufrock,” first pub­lished in 1915 in Poet­ry magazine—at the insti­ga­tion of lit­er­ary impre­sario Ezra Pound—caused a shock at its first appear­ance. Stu­dents today are apt to remem­ber it as a bewil­der­ing swirl of references—to Dante, the Bible, Shakespeare—and as sar­don­ic com­men­tary on what Eliot saw as the pro­found­ly ener­vat­ed and impo­tent con­di­tion of mod­ern man (and of him­self). It is a daunt­ing study, to be sure, but the poem’s first read­ers and crit­ics tend­ed to dis­miss it as either shock­ing­ly anar­chic or triv­ial and mean­der­ing.

By 1947, “Prufrock” was rec­og­nized as a mod­ernist clas­sic, and Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty record­ed Eliot read­ing the poem (above). His thin voice may not car­ry the weight of the poem’s dense allu­sive grandeur, so we have Antho­ny Hop­kins at the top of the post read­ing “Prufrock” as well. Hop­kins seems to rush through the poem a bit, cap­tur­ing, per­haps, the ner­vous ener­gy of its title character’s psy­chic anguish.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

T.S. Eliot Reads His Mod­ernist Mas­ter­pieces “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Ezra Pound’s Fiery 1939 Read­ing of His Ear­ly Poem, ‘Ses­ti­na: Altaforte’

Lis­ten to T.S. Eliot Recite His Late Mas­ter­piece, the Four Quar­tets

Find works by Eliot in our col­lec­tions of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon Turned Into a Radio Play

We told you all about it last Fri­day. The BBC planned to air a radio play writ­ten by Sir Tom Stop­pard based on The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floy­d’s clas­sic album released 40 years ago. The play aired Mon­day night, and if you missed it, you have a few scant days to stream the pro­duc­tion for free online. Don’t dil­ly-dal­ly. You can start lis­ten­ing to Dark­side now and be sure not to miss the trip­py ani­mat­ed visu­als that accom­pa­ny the audio. It’s also avail­able on Spo­ti­fy for free.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load Brave New World for Free: Dra­ma­tized Ver­sion Read by Aldous Hux­ley

Isaac Asimov’s Sci­ence Fic­tion Clas­sic, The Foun­da­tion Tril­o­gy, Dra­ma­tized for Radio (1973)

A Radio Play Based on Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Com­ing Mon­day. Watch the Trail­er

New Archive Makes Available 800,000 Pages Documenting the History of Film, Television & Radio

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Click images for larg­er ver­sions

Film buffs and schol­ars have a new cache at their fin­ger­tips. The Media His­to­ry Dig­i­tal Library has made hun­dreds of thou­sands of pages of film and broad­cast­ing his­to­ry avail­able in a search­able dig­i­tal archive they’ve called Lantern, an open access, inter­ac­tive library.

With help from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin, Madi­son Depart­ment of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Arts, MHDL made their entire col­lec­tion of Busi­ness Screen, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, Pho­to­play and Vari­ety—among oth­er magazines—available for text search­es for the first time.

In 2011 a group of film schol­ars devel­oped MHDL, an updat­ed resource for his­to­ri­ans used to read­ing through micro­film archives of cin­e­ma and broad­cast jour­nals. At the time, their archive was a gold­mine, pulling togeth­er the boun­ty of print­ed mate­r­i­al chron­i­cling the film indus­try. Now they’ve made it bet­ter, with more refined search, fil­ter­ing and sort­ing tools. Plus you can down­load images and texts.

It may have been a rite of pas­sage for film stu­dents to sequester them­selves in a dark library car­rel and scroll through micro­fiche reels of Mov­ing Pic­ture World, an influ­en­tial trade jour­nal until 1927, but Lantern brings ven­er­a­ble movie mag­a­zines dat­ing up to the ear­ly ’70s into the light of day where any­one can access the images and arti­cles of major trade and fan mag­a­zines, free of charge.

An ear­ly on-set chat rag, Film Fun, a mag­a­zine about “the hap­py side of the movies,” brought read­ers “inti­mate gos­sip of the pro­fes­sion told by the actors and actress­es ‘between the reels.’” The images are gor­geous.

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In the twen­ties a new ama­teur movie mak­ing indus­try thrived, with equip­ment and even tour pack­ages avail­able for buffs who want­ed to tour exot­ic locales like Cuba with cam­eras and learn to shoot and pre­serve 16 mm motion pic­tures. A boom in DIY film mag­a­zines like Ama­teur Movie Mak­ers tar­get­ed the ear­ly adopters.

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And lest we think that pulp celebri­ty mags like Peo­ple and Us are low­er brow than those of yes­ter­year, we should think again. I’m not sure about you, but I’m not sure four-times-mar­ried Bette Davis makes the best love advice colum­nist. But appar­ent­ly Pho­to­play mag­a­zine did.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Three Great Films Star­ring Char­lie Chap­lin, the True Icon of Silent Com­e­dy

How Brew­ster Kahle and the Inter­net Archive Will Pre­serve the Infi­nite Infor­ma­tion on the Web

Kate Rix writes about edu­ca­tion and dig­i­tal media. Vis­it her web­site and fol­low her on Twit­ter.

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