Today is the birthday of the writer Joseph Conrad. He was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzniowski on December 3, 1857 in Berdichev, in the Polish Ukraine. As a young man he traveled the world as a merchant sailer, an experience that furnished material and inspiration for his English-language books, which include such classics as Nostromo, Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness.
To mark the occasion we bring you a recording of Orson Welles reading (listen to it here) Conrad’s short story “The Secret Sharer” in 1985 as one of his selections for The Orson Welles Library. “I think I’m made for Conrad,” Welles once said. “I think every Conrad story is a movie.” Conrad wrote “The Secret Sharer” in 1909. The story is told by the captain of a ship. One night, while on watch in waters near the Gulf of Siam, the captain discovers a naked swimmer clinging desperately to the side of the ship. He helps the mysterious man aboard and learns his story. The captain is then faced with a dilemma: Should he help the man, or turn him over to the people who are looking for him?
If books figure into your holiday gift-giving plans, then we’ve got a little something for you — a meta list of the best books of 2012. It’s now December, the final month of the year, which means that newspapers and magazines can start taking stock of 2012 and declare their favorites.
You can find more good reads with “Best of” lists created by NPR, Publishers Weekly, Esquire, HuffPo and The Guardian. And if you’re looking for a deal, don’t miss this: Amazon.com is now offering 40% off books appearing on its list of 2012 Editors’ Picks. Meanwhile Audible.com has produced its own list of favorites, and it’s worth highlighting if only because, when you sign up for a Free Trial, you can download one of their selections (or pretty much any other audiobook you want) for free. Learn more and initiate the free download here.
Now my dear fellow readers, it’s your turn. We want to hear what books (published in 2012) left the strongest impression on you. Give us your thoughts in the comments section below and we’ll publish the Open Culture Best of 2012 list later this week. We look forward to hearing your picks!
While Scottish physician and author Arthur Conan Doyle died in 1930, he seems almost wholly of the nineteenth century: a trained scientist who fervently believed in “spiritualism” and fairies, and an accomplished and prolific writer whose most famous character—that most logical of detectives—had a cocaine addiction and more personal quirks than the average neurotic. Like Joseph Conrad, Doyle sailed–as a ship’s doctor–to European colonies in West Africa and found himself deeply affected by the brutal exploitation he encountered. And like Conrad, he seems to embody a turn-of-the-century Britishness poised between old and new worlds, when Victoria gave way to Edward and modernity limned the Empire. Although the age of film and of television have always embraced Sherlock Holmes, his creator belongs to the age of the novel. Nevertheless, he agreed to the 1927 interview above, possibly his only appearance on film. In the brief monologue, he discusses the two questions that he most received from curious fans and journalists: how he came to write the Sherlock Holmes stories and how he came to believe in “psychic matters.”
Doyle attributes the creation of Holmes to his scientific training, and to a keen irritation when reading detective stories whose protagonists stumbled on solutions by chance or narrative non sequitur. He also describes his admiration for a colleague’s impressive “deductive” abilities. What if, Conan Doyle reasoned, the detectives had the powers of a doctor? Oh, had he lived to see his premise flipped in House (and sue for royalties). Doyle also expresses his amusement at the credulity of his reading public, many of whom believed in the reality of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson and who sent them regards and advice. At this point in the interview, Doyle turns to a subject upon which many thought him credulous: psychic and supernatural experience. He goes to some lengths to establish his bona fides, saying that he studied spiritualism for forty-one years and did not arrive at his ideas in haste. But Doyle was easily taken in by several hoaxes and insisted throughout his life that Harry Houdini possessed psychic powers, despite Houdini’s protests to the contrary. It seems this was one area in which Doyle’s reason failed him—in which he resembles the mystical Yeats more than the skeptical Watson and Holmes.
You can download free copies of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes from our collections of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks. You can also find four adaptations of Sherlock Holmes in our collection of Free Movies Online.
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
We thought that Brazenhead Books might qualify as the quirkiest bookstore we’ve encountered. After all, it’s run out of Michael Seidenberg’s apartment in New York City. But get a load of this: The Monkey’s Paw, which calls itself “Toronto’s most idiosyncratic second-hand bookshop,” has installed the Biblio-mat, a vending machine that dispenses random books for a very nominal fee — $2 per book. (If you’re looking for $0, see our lists below.) In a recent interview with QuillandQuire.com, Stephen Fowler, the bookstore’s owner, explained the story behind the Biblio-mat:
I went fishing this past summer with Craig Small, co-founder of The Juggernaut, an animation studio in Toronto. I had this idea that I would love to have a vending machine that gave out random books. I pictured it as a painted refrigerator box with one of my assistants inside; people would put in a coin and he would drop a book out. But Craig is more pragmatic and visionary then I am. He said, “You need to have an actual mechanical vending machine.” That was beyond my wildest imaginings, but not Craig’s, so he just built it for me.
Thanks to Small, you can now watch the Biblio-mat in action above. It whirrs. It vibrates. And it finally delivers a book with a satisfying clunk.
After half a century and 31 books, Philip Roth casually announced last month in an interview with a French magazine that he was calling it quits. He actually made the decision back in 2010, after the publication of his Booker Prize-winning novel Nemesis. “I didn’t say anything about it because I wanted to be sure it was true,” the 79-year-old Roth told New York Times reporter Charles McGrath last week in what he said would be his last interview. “I thought, ‘Wait a minute, don’t announce your retirement and then come out of it.’ I’m not Frank Sinatra. So I didn’t say anything to anyone, just to see if it was so.”
Although Roth had been privately telling friends about his retirement for two years, according to David Remnick in The New Yorker, the public announcement came as a shock for many. From his 1959 National Book Award-winning debut Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Storiesand his outrageously funny 1969 classic Portnoy’s Complaint through his remarkably prolific late period, with its steady stream of beautifully crafted novels like Operation Shylock, Sabbath’s Theaterand The Human Stain, it seemed as though Roth had the creative energy to keep writing until he took his last breath.
But perhaps if we’d paid closer attention we wouldn’t be so surprised. In this 2011 video, for example, which shows Roth reading a few pages from Nemesis after it won the Man Booker International Prize, he basically says it: “Coming where they do, they’re the pages I like best in Nemesis. They constitute the last pages of the last work of fiction I’ve published–the end of the line after 31 books.”
Writing is hard. It’s hard to begin, hard to continue, hard to finish. To write successfully and consistently requires an alchemical combination of discipline and inspiration so personal that reading advice on the subject amounts to watching someone else die to learn how it’s done. And while it often feels enlightening to read about the habits of, say, Steinbeck or Austen, their methods are non-transferable. You’ve got to find your own way. So it is with writing to music. It’s always there in the background, goading you on quietly. Not everyone writes to music; not everyone can. But a good many do, including Wired contributor Steve Silberman who calls the practice one of many rituals writers use “to evoke that elusive flow of inspiration.”
Silberman just wrote a piece for NeuroTribes in which he surveyed ten authors on their favorite music to write by. One of Silberman’s own choices, Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way (above), is one I’m stealing. With its brilliant assemblage of musicians and haunting moodiness it sets the perfect tone for my process. Also, there’s no singing. Like Silberman, I can’t compete with a wise, witty lyricist (he mentions Elvis Costello, I prefer Morrissey). In Silberman’s piece, John Schwartz, a New York Times reporter, listens to nothing. Jane Hirschfield, a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, likes David Byrne, Dylan’s Modern Times, and Gillians Welch’s The Harrow and the Harvest. Wired contributing editor David Wolman makes a playlist of mostly indie-pop songs entitled “Write the Book!” His main criterion for the songs he chooses: DO NOT BE BORING! My default writing music is exemplified by Australian three-piece instrumental rock band Dirty Three (below).
So now it’s your turn, readers. Do you write to music? If so, what is it? What artists/composers/albums help you find your rhythm and why? Can you stand lyrics in the music you write by or no? Leave your selections in the comments. On Monday, we’ll compile them in an article and leave you with a great Open Culture playlist. Whether you find something you can steal or not, it should be a fun exercise.
*See our follow-up post with a list of your favorites here
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
Robert Atwan’s favorite literary genre is the essay. As editor and founder of The Best American Essays series, Atwan has read thousands of examples of the remarkably flexible form.
“Essays can be lots of things, maybe too many things,” writes Atwan in his foreward to the 2012 installment in the Best American series, “but at the core of the genre is an unmistakable receptivity to the ever-shifting processes of our minds and moods. If there is any essential characteristic we can attribute to the essay, it may be this: that the truest examples of the form enact that ever-shifting process, and in that enactment we can find the basis for the essay’s qualification to be regarded seriously as imaginative literature and the essayist’s claim to be taken seriously as a creative writer.”
In 2001 Atwan and Joyce Carol Oates took on the daunting task of tracing that ever-shifting process through the previous 100 years for The Best American Essays of the Century. Recently Atwan returned with a more focused selection for Publishers Weekly: “The Top 10 Essays Since 1950.” To pare it all down to such a small number, Atwan decided to reserve the “New Journalism” category, with its many memorable works by Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Michael Herr and others, for some future list. He also made a point of selecting the best essays, as opposed to examples from the best essayists. “A list of the top ten essayists since 1950 would feature some different writers.”
We were interested to see that six of the ten best essays are available for free reading online. Here is Atwan’s list, along with links to those essays that are on the Web:
James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son,” 1955 (Read it here.)
Norman Mailer, “The White Negro,” 1957 (Read it here.)
Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” 1964 (Read it here.)
John McPhee, “The Search for Marvin Gardens,” 1972 (Read it here with a subscription.)
Joan Didion, “The White Album,” 1979
Annie Dillard, “Total Eclipse,” 1982
Phillip Lopate, “Against Joie de Vivre,” 1986 (Read it here.)
Edward Hoagland, “Heaven and Nature,” 1988
Jo Ann Beard, “The Fourth State of Matter,” 1996 (Read it here.)
David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Lobster,” 2004 (Read it here in a version different from the one published in his 2005 book of the same name.)
“To my mind,” writes Atwan in his article, “the best essays are deeply personal (that doesn’t necessarily mean autobiographical) and deeply engaged with issues and ideas. And the best essays show that the name of the genre is also a verb, so they demonstrate a mind in process–reflecting, trying-out, essaying.”
The writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and his flamboyant wife Zelda are often remembered as the embodiment of the boom and bust that convulsed America in the period between the two world wars.
Like characters in The Great Gatsby, Scott and Zelda lived lives of wild abandon in the Roaring Twenties, riding on top of taxi cabs and splashing in the Plaza Hotel fountain. Scott was inspired and prodded along in his dissipation by the notoriously eccentric Zelda. As Ring Lardner once put it, “Mr. Fitzgerald is a novelist and Mrs. Fitzgerald is a novelty.”
But by the time the stock market crashed in 1929, so too had the Fitzgeralds. Scott’s drinking caught up with him, and Zelda’s eccentricity evolved into schizophrenia. Their sad downfall is captured in Fitzgerald’s 1930 story, “Babylon Revisited.” Zelda would live the rest of her life in mental institutions while Scott spent his final years in Hollywood, struggling to pay for her treatment and trying to recapture his lost glory. Their daughter, Scottie, was raised by other people.
In this video we catch a few glimpses of the Fitzgeralds in their heyday, before the party came to an end. The film clips are fun to watch but the YouTube video on which they are collected should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt. We’re not sure, for example, that the clip purporting to show Zelda being “very lively in a street” is actually of her. It appears to show someone else. And one of the captions claims that Fitzgerald is pictured writing The Great Gatsby, but according to the University of South Carolina’s Fitzgerald Web site, the sentence he is writing on paper is: “Everybody has been predicting a bad end for the flapper, but I don’t think there is anything to worry about.”
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