William S. Burroughs Reads His First Novel, Junky

in Audio Books, Books, Literature | September 8th, 2011

burroughsjunkypaperbacks

Six years before he pub­lished his break­through nov­el, Naked Lunch (1959), William S. Bur­roughs broke into the lit­er­ary scene with Junky (some­times also called Junkie), a can­did, semi-auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal account of an “unre­deemed drug addict.” It’s safe to say that the book would­n’t have seen the light of day if Allen Gins­berg had­n’t tak­en Bur­roughs under his wing and edit­ed the man­u­script. The book, orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished under the pseu­do­nym “William Lee,” was dis­trib­uted by Ace Books, a pub­lish­ing house that tar­get­ed New York City sub­way rid­ers. You can lis­ten to Bur­roughs, the famous beat writer, read­ing a three-hour abridged ver­sion of the text over at UBUWeb. Also see the playlist on YouTube.

H/T @maudnewton

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The Great Gatsby and Waiting for Godot: The Video Game Editions

in Books, Literature, Video Games | September 7th, 2011

Some genius­es have tak­en two lit­er­ary clas­sics and reworked them as retro video games. The Great Gats­by Game, obvi­ous­ly based on the clas­sic by F. Scott Fitzger­ald, reworks the game in vin­tage Nin­ten­do Style. The clip above gives you a lit­tle pre­view, but you can always play the game right here. Then, for a lit­tle more absur­dist fun, the Wait­ing for Godot Game awaits you. The game, sport­ing a throw­back 70s look, requires you to down­load a plu­g­in — one we can’t vouch for. So may just want to watch this YouTube clip. You’ll get the schtick pret­ty quick.

By the way, you can read both clas­sics online — Find The Great Gats­by here, and Wait­ing for Godot here. Both are list­ed in our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks.

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, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

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Jack Kerouac Reads from On the Road (1959)

in Books, Literature | September 7th, 2011


Jack Ker­ouac wrote On the Road in three very short weeks in 1951. But then it took six years for the book, famous­ly writ­ten on a long scroll, to reach the read­ing pub­lic in 1957. Short­ly after its pub­li­ca­tion, crit­ics were at least quick to rec­og­nize what the book meant. One New York Times review­er called it “the most beau­ti­ful­ly exe­cut­ed, the clear­est and the most impor­tant utter­ance yet made by the gen­er­a­tion Ker­ouac him­self named years ago as beat.” Anoth­er saw in the nov­el “a descrip­tive excite­ment unmatched since the days of Thomas Wolfe.” 54 years lat­er, those ear­ly reviews have with­stood the prover­bial test of time. These days, Mod­ern Library and TIME place the nov­el on their lists of the 100 great­est nov­els.

And now onto our vin­tage clip of the day — Jack Ker­ouac, the man him­self, appear­ing on The Steve Allen Show in 1959, first field­ing some ques­tions, then read­ing from his beat clas­sic.

Bonus: Yale’s course, The Amer­i­can Nov­el Since 1945, fea­tures two lec­tures ded­i­cat­ed to On the Road. More on that 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, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jack Kerouac’s On The Road Turned Into Google Dri­ving Direc­tions & Pub­lished as a Free eBook

William S. Bur­roughs on the Art of Cut-up Writ­ing

Jack Kerouac’s On the Road Turned Into an Illus­trat­ed Scroll: One Draw­ing for Every Page of the Nov­el

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Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize Winner, Talks Writing @Google

in Books, Google, Literature, Writing | August 30th, 2011

Ear­li­er this month Jen­nifer Egan, the new­ly-mint­ed Pulitzer Prize win­ner, paid a vis­it to Google to talk about A Vis­it from the Goon Squad, her exper­i­men­tal nov­el that won the Pulitzer, among many oth­er awards. That’s the osten­si­ble focus. But the con­ver­sa­tion moves quick­ly into oth­er areas that will inter­est writ­ers and read­ers alike — how Egan first devel­ops ideas for her nov­els, why she writes her first drafts in illeg­i­ble hand­writ­ing on legal pads, why she wrote a chap­ter of her new nov­el in Pow­er­Point (with­out ever hav­ing used the soft­ware before), what her nov­el has in com­mon with The Who’s Quadrophe­nia (I’m hooked), and how tech­nol­o­gy might change the nov­el as we know it.

The Egan video went live yes­ter­day, and runs about 54 min­utes. Oth­er videos appear­ing in the Authors@Google series fea­ture con­ver­sa­tions with Salman Rushdie, Neil Gaiman, Eliz­a­beth Gilbert, Michael Pol­lan, Slavoj Zizek and Junot Diaz. H/T @webacion

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The Decemberists’ New Video Inspired by Scenes from Infinite Jest

in Books, Literature, Music | August 26th, 2011

Michael Schur, the co-cre­ator of NBC’s Parks and Recre­ation, has had a long-run­ning fas­ci­na­tion with David Fos­ter Wal­lace’s sprawl­ing mag­num opus, Infi­nite Jest.  So when his favorite band, The Decem­berists, asked him to shoot a video for their new track “Calami­ty Song,” he knew the cre­ative direc­tion he want­ed to take. And so here it is — the new­ly-pre­miered video that makes “Escha­ton” its cre­ative focus. Fans of DWF’s nov­el will remem­ber that Escha­ton — “basi­cal­ly, a glob­al ther­monu­clear cri­sis recre­at­ed on a ten­nis court” — appears on/around page 325. The New York Times has more, and you can also find anoth­er ver­sion of the video if you’re hav­ing prob­lems view­ing it here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The David Fos­ter Wal­lace Audio Project

The Best Mag­a­zine Arti­cles Ever, Curat­ed by Kevin Kel­ly

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Biblioburro: Library on a Donkey

in Books, Education | August 25th, 2011

For more than a decade, Luis Sori­ano, a pri­ma­ry school teacher, has trav­eled the rugged ter­rain of Colom­bia by don­key, deliv­er­ing books to chil­dren in hun­dreds of rur­al vil­lages. The project, pow­ered by his two don­keys Alfa and Beto, goes by the name “Bib­liobur­ro.” And it seeks to pro­mote lit­er­a­cy in areas where access to books is not always a giv­en. You can find more infor­ma­tion and pic­tures on the home­page of the Bib­liobur­ro project and also make a small dona­tion. A video update shows what these dona­tions are actu­al­ly used for.

Bonus mate­r­i­al: The clip above is part of a 60-minute PBS doc­u­men­tary avail­able in full here. If you are a teacher and want to work with the film in class, you will appre­ci­ate this relat­ed les­son plan. Bib­liobur­ro has even been cov­ered by The New York Times, and there is now a sim­i­lar project under­way in Ethiopia.

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.

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Richard Feynman: The New Graphic Novel

in Art, Books, Physics | August 24th, 2011


Last week, we high­light­ed The Last Jour­ney Of A Genius, a doc­u­men­tary that record­ed the final days of the great physi­cist Richard Feyn­man and his obses­sion with trav­el­ing to Tan­nu Tuva, a state out­side of out­er Mon­go­lia.

Now here is what next week will bring — a new “sub­stan­tial graph­ic nov­el biog­ra­phy” that “presents the larg­er-than-life exploits of the Nobel-win­ning quan­tum physi­cist, adven­tur­er, musi­cian and world-class racon­teur.” The book writ­ten by Jim Otta­viani and illus­trat­ed by Leland Myrick runs a fair­ly hefty 272 pages. The video clip on Youtube will give you a good feel for the art­work that tells Feyn­man’s per­son­al tale.

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, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Richard Feynman’s Physics Lec­tures Online

The Plea­sure of Find­ing Things Out

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William S. Burroughs Tells the Story of How He Started Writing with the Cut-Up Technique

in Art, Books, Literature, Writing | August 16th, 2011

In late 1920, the Dadaist writer Tris­tan Tzara wrote “dada man­i­festo on fee­ble love and bit­ter love,” which includ­ed a sec­tion called “To Make a Dadaist Poem,” and it gave these instruc­tions:

Take a news­pa­per.
Take some scis­sors.
Choose from this paper an arti­cle of the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the arti­cle.
Next care­ful­ly cut out each of the words that makes up this arti­cle and put them all in a bag.
Shake gen­tly.
Next take out each cut­ting one after the oth­er.
Copy con­sci­en­tious­ly in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resem­ble you.
And there you are — an infi­nite­ly orig­i­nal author of charm­ing sen­si­bil­i­ty, even though unap­pre­ci­at­ed by the vul­gar herd.

Decades lat­er, the Beat writer William S. Bur­roughs took this basic con­cept and put his own twist on it. Between 1961 and 1964, Bur­roughs pub­lished The Nova Tril­o­gy, a series of three exper­i­men­tal nov­els fash­ioned with his own cut-up method. Often con­sid­ered his defin­i­tive work of cut-up writ­ing, The Soft Machine, the first nov­el in the tril­o­gy, stitched togeth­er pages from a series of man­u­scripts that Bur­roughs him­self wrote between 1953 and 1958.

You can watch Bur­roughs demon­strat­ing his cut-up tech­nique above, and for­ev­er find this clip in our col­lec­tion of Cul­tur­al Icons, which lets you see great writ­ers, film­mak­ers, and thinkers talk­ing in their own words.

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, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gus Van Sant Adapts William S. Bur­roughs: An Ear­ly 16mm Short

William S. Bur­roughs Shoots Shake­speare

William S. Bur­roughs’ Clay­ma­tion Christ­mas Film

 

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