He describes himself as a “peripatetic patriarch of the free press,” and so he may be. John Wilcock, a British ex-pat who helped found the Village Voice in 1955 went to work as the New York Times’ travel editor. His Europe on $5 a Day was seminal in the travel guidebook publishing world. His subsequent Mexico on $5 a Day was a trailblazer.
Wilcock, who lives in California and publishes the online Ojai Orange, was the ultimate gadfly. His 1971 Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol included interviews with Nico, Lou Reed and other associates of the enigmatic artist. Wilcock was also a founding editor, with Warhol, of Interview Magazine in 1969. He accompanied Warhol out the night that the Velvet Underground played its first gig and wrote liner notes for Nico.
Published online in graphic novel form, John Wilcock: The New York Years chronicles this period in Wilcock’s life with an extensive interview and sumptuous cartoon illustrations by artists Ethan Persoff and Scott Marshall. Chapters one and two are deliciously fun reading, as Wilcock recounts his arrival in New York City from England and his early interviews with Leonard Bernstein, Rock Hudson and Milton Berle and launching the Village Voice.
It’s an impressive site that captures the Bohemian circles Wilcock moved in. Persoff and Marshall have just released chapter three, which includes Wilcock’s time editing Norman Mailer and his interviews with actor Jean Shepherd and Marilyn Monroe. Stay tuned for more. Chapter three brings us up to 1957 so there should be plenty more to share.
Kate Rix is freelance writer. Find more of her work at
Today is the 150th anniversary of the birth of the short story writer O. Henry. He was born William Sydney Porter in Greensboro North Carolina on September 11, 1862, and his life was not easy. He chose the pen name “O. Henry” while he was in the penitentiary.
Trained as a pharmacist, Porter came down with tuberculosis in his early twenties and moved to the drier climate of Texas, where he worked as a ranch hand, a draftsman for the Texas Land Office, and a clerk at the First National Bank of Austin before striking out on his own as a writer and launching a humor magazine called The Rolling Stone. When the magazine folded the following year, Porter took a job as a reporter, columnist and cartoonist at the Houston Post. Meanwhile, though, Federal investigators were looking into shortages in Porter’s accounts from his days at the bank in Austin, and in February of 1896, when he was 33 years old and had a wife and a young daughter to support, Porter was arrested and charged with embezzlement.
While being brought to Austin for trial, Porter managed to elude his captors and hop a train to New Orleans, where he arranged passage on a freighter bound for Honduras. Despite the appearance of guilt Porter would always maintain his innocence, saying that his flight from justice was brought on by panic. He compared himself to the protagonist of one of Joseph Conrad’s classic novels, a sailor who abandoned a fully loaded passenger ship that he thought was sinking. “I am like Lord Jim,” he said, “because we both made one fateful mistake at the supreme crisis of our lives, a mistake from which we could not recover.”
When Porter got to Central America he began making plans for his family to join him there, but soon learned that his wife was dying of tuberculosis. He returned to Texas and was with his wife when she died. A few months later he was sentenced to five years in a federal penitentiary in Ohio. While behind bars, Porter began writing short stories in earnest. To disguise his identity he used a series of pen names, eventually settling on “O. Henry.”
Porter was released from prison in 1901, two years early for good behavior. He moved to New York to write stories under his new name for magazines. From there he skyrocketed to success. Between 1904 and his death in 1910, he published some 300 stories and ten books. “O. Henry worked at whirlwind speed,” writes Victoria Blake in the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Selected Stories of O. Henry, “producing more over a shorter period than any other writer of his time and cultivating a literary demand unmatched by anyone, anywhere in the history of American letters.”
Some of the very same elements that made O. Henry’s stories so popular in his lifetime–the sentimentality, the “twist” endings–have caused them to age poorly since his death. A few of his stories, like “The Gift of the Magi,” are still widely read, but his reputation has been surpassed by more modern writers like Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and Sherwood Anderson. A little of his former prestige is revived every year with the awarding of the O. Henry Prize for the best short fiction.
For his 150th birthday we bring you what is said to be a rare recording of O. Henry’s voice. Although the date and authenticity are an open question, the recording was apparently made on an Edison cylinder sometime between 1905 and the writer’s death in 1910. It was included in the vinyl record The Golden Age of Opera: Great Personalities, 1888–1940. Here is a transcript:
This is William Sydney Porter speaking, better known to you, no doubt, as O. Henry. I’m going to let you in on a few of my secrets in writing a short story. The most important thing, at least in my humble opinion, is to use characters you’ve crossed in your lifetime. Truth is indeed stranger than fiction. All of my stories are actual experiences that I have come across during my travels. My characters are facsimilies of actual people I’ve known. Most authors spend hours, I’m told even days, laboring over outlines of stories that they have in their minds. But not I. In my way of thinking that’s a waste of good time. I just sit down and let my pencil do the rest. Many people ask me how I manage to get that final little twist in my stories. I always tell them that the unusual is the ordinary rather than the unexpected. And if you people listening to me now start thinking about your own lives, I’m sure you’ll discover just as many odd experiences as I’ve had. I hope this little talk will be heard long after I’m gone. I want you all to continue reading my stories then too. Goodbye, folks.
Little known fact. My first adventure in publishing began as a 16 year old, when I teamed up with my best friend, another ardent fan of The Who, and together we published a fanzine dedicated to the British rock band. We called it Tales from The Who, a name taken from a bootleg concert album recorded in our native Philadelphia during the ’70s. To get the zine going, we borrowed an electric typewriter, cut out pictures, collaged it all together, made copies on a photocopy machine, then started marketing the publication in Rolling Stone magazine. When actual subscriptions rolled into our P.O. Box, we couldn’t believe it.
In the great green room / There was a telephone / And a dead Keith Moon.
And Towshend jumping over the moon.
And there were four little gents pissing on cement.
And two broken sticks and a pile of sick.
Find the rest here, and, don’t be the “cool” parent who actually reads this to your kids. It is, after all, “the most inappropriate bedtime story ever,” according to The New Yorker.
We have been in Beverly Hills shopping most of the late morning and early afternoon. My mother and my two sisters and me. My mother has spent most of this time probably at Neiman-Marcus, and my sisters have gone to Jerry Magnin and have used our father’s charge account to buy him and me something and then to MGA and Camp Beverly Hills and Privilege to buy themselves something. I sit at the bar at La Scala Boutique for most of this time, bored out of my mind, smoking, drinking red wine. Finally, my mother drives up in her Mercedes and parks her car in front of La Scala and waits for me.
In the last months of his life, a physically weakened Christopher Hitchens traveled to the Texas Freethought Convention to accept the Richard Dawkins Award. While there, an eight-year-old girl, Mason Crumpacker of Dallas, asked Hitchens what books she should consider reading. Intrigued, Hitchens spent 15 minutes chatting with the youngster and sketching out a reading list. And, according to the Houston Chronicle, it looks something like this:
Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths (even though it turns out the girl was already a big fan of I, Claudius).
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In the preface of The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Stephen Greenblatt recalls the day he encountered a translation of Lucretius’ 2000 year old poem, On the Nature of Things. He was a grad student back at Yale, living on modest means, when he ambled into a bookstore and found a copy marked down to ten cents. He picked it up, not having much to lose and not knowing what he’d find. Soon enough he was reading one of the most scandalous and groundbreaking texts from antiquity, a book that eventually traveled a long and winding road and changed our entire modern world. That story Greenblatt tells in The Swerve.
The ten cents Greenblatt spent in the 1960s may be roughly equivalent to the deal you can get today. Right now, The Swerve, the winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, can be downloaded as an audio book for $5.95 via iTunes. Yes, we know, $5.95 is not free, and iTunes is not open, but it’s certainly a deal worth mentioning nonetheless.
But if you’re really hankering for something free, then don’t miss our meta lists of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks, which include a copy of Lucretius’ famous work. Or definitely check out Audible.com’s Free Trial offer, which lets you download pretty much any audio book you want (classic or modern) for free. Get details here.
“I suppose you’re wondering why I’ve called you all here,” says Ray Bradbury above, in a lengthy interview with the The Big Read project sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts. Breaking the ice with this stock phrase, Bradbury–author of Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man, The Martian Chronicles, and several dozen more fantasy and sci-fi novels and short story collections (and some truly chilling horror)–begins to talk about… Love. Specifically a love of books. “Love,” he says, “is at the center of your life. The things that you do should be things that you love, and the things that you love, should be things that you do.” That’s what books teach us, he says, and it becomes his mantra.
Bradbury, who passed away in June, was certainly an early inspiration for me, and several million other bookish kids whose warmest memories involve discovering some strange, life-altering book on the shelf of a library. As he recounts his childhood experiences with books, he’s such an enthusiastic booster for public libraries that you may find yourself writing a check to your local branch in the first ten minutes of his talk. And it’s easy to see why his most famous novel sprang from what must have been a very pressing fear of the loss of books. Bradbury was largely self-taught. Unable to afford college, he pursued his fierce ambition to become a writer immediately out of high school and published his first short story, “Hollerbochen’s Dilemma,” at the age of nineteen. As he says above, he became a writer because, “I discovered that I was alive.” But I’m not doing it justice. You have to watch him tell it to really feel the thrill of this epiphany.
The Big Read’s mission is to create a “Nation of Readers,” and to do so, it posts free audio guides for classics such as Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. They also feature video interviews with other authors, like Amy Tan, Ernest J. Gaines, and Tobias Wolff. Each of the interviews is fantastic, and the readers’ guides are superb as well. Bradbury’s, for example, narrated by poet and author Dana Gioia, also features sci-fi giants Orson Scott Card and Ursula K. Le Guin, as well as several other writers who were inspired by his work.
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.
If you’re anything like me, you yearn to become a good writer, a better writer, an inspiring writer, even, by learning from the writers you admire. But you neither have the time nor the money for an MFA program or expensive retreats and workshops with famous names. So you read W.H. Auden’s essays and Paris Review interviews with your favorite authors (or at least PR’s Twitter feed); you obsessively trawl the archives of The New York Times’ “Writers on Writing” series, and you relish every Youtube clip, no matter how lo-fi or truncated, of your literary heroes, speaking from beyond the grave, or from behind a podium at the 92nd Street Y.
Well, friend, you are in luck (okay, I’m still talking about me here, but maybe about you, too). The Washington, DC-based non-profit Academy of Achievement—whose mission is to “bring students face-to-face” with leaders in the arts, business, politics, science, and sports—has archived a series of talks from an incredibly diverse pool of poets and writers. They call this collection “Creative Writing: A Master Class,” and you can subscribe to it right now on iTunes and begin downloading free video and audio podcasts from Nora Ephron, John Updike, Toni Morrison, Carlos Fuentes, Norman Mailer, Wallace Stegner, and, well, you know how the list goes.
The Academy of Achievement’s website also features lengthy profiles–with text and downloadable audio and video–of several of the same writers from their “Master Class” series. For example, an interview with former U.S. poet-laureate Rita Dove is illuminating, both for writers and for teachers of writing. Dove talks about the aversion that many people have for poetry as a kind of fear inculcated by clumsy teachers. She explains:
At some point in their life, they’ve been given a poem to interpret and told, “That was the wrong answer.” You know. I think we’ve all gone through that. I went through that. And it’s unfortunate that sometimes in schools — this need to have things quantified and graded — we end up doing this kind of multiple choice approach to something that should be as ambiguous and ever-changing as life itself. So I try to ask them, “Have you ever heard a good joke?” If you’ve ever heard someone tell a joke just right, with the right pacing, then you’re already on the way to the poetry. Because it’s really about using words in very precise ways and also using gesture as it goes through language, not the gesture of your hands, but how language creates a mood. And you know, who can resist a good joke? When they get that far, then they can realize that poetry can also be fun.
Dove’s thoughts on her own life, her work, and the craft of poetry and teaching are well worth reading/watching in full. Another particularly notable interview from the Academy is with another former laureate, poet W.S. Merwin.
Merwin, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, discusses poetry as originating with language, and its loss as tantamount to extinction:
When we talk about the extinction of species, I think the endangered species of the arts and of language and all these things are related. I don’t think there is any doubt about that. I think poetry goes back to the invention of language itself. I think one of the big differences between poetry and prose is that prose is about something, it’s got a subject… poetry is about what can’t be said. Why do people turn to poetry when all of a sudden the Twin Towers get hit, or when their marriage breaks up, or when the person they love most in the world drops dead in the same room? Because they can’t say it. They can’t say it at all, and they want something that addresses what can’t be said.
If you’re anything like me, you find these two perspectives on poetry—as akin to jokes, as saying the unsayable—fascinating. These kinds of observations (not mechanical how-to’s, but original thoughts on the process and practice of writing itself) are the reason I pore over interviews and seminars with writers I admire. I found more than enough in this archive to keep me satisfied for months.
We’ve added “Creative Writing: A Master Class” to our ever-growing collection of Free Online Courses.
Image via Angela Radulescu
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.
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