If you’re in Berlin, stop by the Galerie Max Hetzler, which is currently staging an exhibition where the Jewish mystic philosopher Walter Benjamin plays a prominent role. Here’s how the gallery sets the scene:
[British artist British artist Edmund] De Waal first came to know the city of Berlin through the writings of Walter Benjamin, particularly his autobiographical fragments in A Berlin Childhood around 1900. The exhibition title, Irrkunst, has been taken from Benjamin’s concept of the art of getting lost, the art of noticing what has been disregarded.
In the Bleibtreustrasse gallery, offering a room with a view on Walter Benjamin’s former school, [De Waal] will show works that reflect Benjamin’s childhood, his passion for gathering objects and the idea of collecting as memory work. Here, amongst others, de Waal will present a major new series of vitrines. Furthermore, a selection of original notes and manuscripts from the Walter Benjamin archive in Berlin will be on view at Bleibtreustrasse and illustrate Benjamin’s own way of working as well as de Waal’s deep fascination with the œuvre of this thinker.
One such item on display, we discovered through Julia Michalska’s Twitter stream, is “Walter Benjamin’s notebook in which he noted all the books he read since he was 18”–a picture of which you can find above. When I zoomed into the image, I couldn’t make out the books on the list. But I did get this detail: By 1931/32, the 40-year-old Benjamin had amassed 1200 books on his list, which means he was reading, on average, 54 books per year. No doubt, they weren’t light ones. If anyone stops by Galerie Max Hetzler and identifies actual titles in the notebook, we’d love it if you could note some in the comments section below.
Update: Some titles were added to the comments below–books by Cocteau, Hemingway, Malraux and more. Check them out.
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No need to scramble to the fallout shelter, friends.
That massive boom you just heard is merely the sound of thousands of crafters’ minds being blown en masse by the University of Southhampton’s Knitting Reference Library, an extensive resource of books, catalogues, patterns, journals and magazines—over seventeen decades worth.
Viva la Handmade Revolution!
The basics of the form—knitting, purling, increasing, decreasing, casting on and off—have remained remarkably consistent throughout the generations. No wonder there’s an enduring tradition of learning to knit at grandma’s knee…
What has evolved is the nature of the finished products.
Miss Lambert’s “Baby Quilt in Stripes of Alternate Colors” from her 1847 Knitting Book could still hold its own against any other handcrafted shower gift, but even the most hardcore modern crafter would find it challenging to find takers for her “Carriage Sock,” which is meant to be worn over the shoe.
Ditto the “Woolen Helmets” in Helping the Trawlers, a 32-page pamphlet published by the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen. The hope was that civic-minded knitters might be moved to donate handmade socks, mittens, and other items to combat the chill faced by poor working men facing the elements on freezing decks.
Not surprisingly, the eager volunteer knitting force gravitated toward the pamphlet’s most baroque item, putting the publisher in a delicate position:
Owing, perhaps, to their novelty, a great many friends commence working for the Society by making these articles and the Uhlan caps, and we are apt, on this account, to get rather more of them than we require for our North Sea work. The Labrador fishermen value the helmets equally with their North Sea breathren, and thus there is an ample output for them, but we shall be glad if friends will bear the hint in mind, and make some of the other things in preference to the helmets and Uhlan caps.
Even without step-by-step instructions, the pattern envelopes’ cover images can still provide inspiration…and no small degree of amusement. Some enterprising librarian should get cracking on a sub-collection, Fashion Crimes Against Male Knitwear Models, 1960–1980:
How to market a book like Lolita, which, upon its publication in 1955, promptly found itself banned in France, Britain, New Zealand, Argentina and other countries? Carefully. At least at first.
By the 1960s, publishers got a little less gun shy, and the covers, more risqué. See this 1964 Turkish version as an example. Or the second image above, a Danish cover from 1963.
This just a small sampling of what you will find in the Covering Lolita Archive, a gallery that currently contains 210 book and media covers from 40 countries, spanning 58 years.
The archive brings you right up to 2014. (2015 and 2016 will likely be accounted for pretty soon.) If you have a favorite design, please let us know in the comments section below.
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Oh to be eulogized by Patti Smith, Godmother of Punk, poet, best-selling author.
Her memoir, Just Kids, was born of a sacred deathbed vow to her first boyfriend, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
Its follow up, M Train, started out as an exercise in writing about “nothing at all,” only to wind up as an elegy to her late husband, guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith. (Their daughter suggested that her dad “was probably annoyed that Robert got so much attention in the other book.”)
She and husband Smith celebrated their first anniversary by collecting stones from the French Guiana penal colony, Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, in an effort to feel closer to Jean Genet, one of her most revered authors.
She believes in the transmutation of objects, unabashedly lobbying to liberate the walking stick that accompanied Virginia Woolf to her death from the NYPL’s collection in order to commune with it further. She may turn into a gibbering fangirl in face to face meetings with the authors she admires, but interacting with relics of those who have gone before has a centering effect.
Needless to say, her fame grants her access to items the rest of us are lucky to view though the walls of a vitrine.
She has paged through Sylvia Plath’s childhood notebooks and gripped Charles Dickens’ surprisingly modest pen. She has ““perpetuated remembrance” by coming into close contact with Bobby Fischer’s chess table, Frida Kahlo’s leg braces, and a hotel room favored by Maria Callas. Her recollection of these events is both reverential and impish, the stuff of a dozen anecdotes.
Where tangible souvenirs prove elusive, Smith takes photographs.
Interviewer Holdengräber is uniquely equipped to share in Smith’s literary passions, egging her on with quotes recited from memory, including this beauty by Rainer Maria Rilke:
Now loss, however cruel, is powerless against possession, which it completes, or even, affirms: loss is, in fact, nothing else than a second acquisition–but now completely interiorized–and just as intense.
(The sentiment is so lovely, who can blame him for invoking it in previous conversation with NYPL guests, artist Edmund de Waal and pianist Van Cliburn.)
The topic can get heavy, but Smith is a consummate entertainer whose clownish brinkmanship leads her to cite Jimi Hendrix: “Hooray, I wake from yesterday.”
The great horror actors of the genre’s golden age—the time of Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, and yet more Dracula—succeeded on the strength of their highly unconventional looks. Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Christopher Lee were not faces you would pass on the street without a second look. But they succeeded equally because all three, including Karloff, made use of some very well trained voices—voices honed for the theatrical.
They have elevated even the campiest material through the use of their voices, and further elevated many already great stories by reading them aloud. Bela Lugosi contributed his Hungarian-accented baritone to a reading of Poe’s “The Telltale Heart,” sounding in every line like he might break into “I vant to suck your blood.” Karloff, the more versatile voice actor, narrated Aesop’s Fables, Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, and too many other books to list.
Lee read Dracula once before, in an adaptation made for a graphic novel in 1966. Here, he reads Bram Stoker’s novel unabridged, unlike some of the other books. You can purchase these in a compilation CD. Or you can hear them on Spotify for free, either in your browser or using their software. (Hear Phantom of the Opera here and The Hunchback of Notre Dame here). However you hear his readings, like all of Lee’s voicework—even his heavy metal Christmas album—these narrations practically vibrate with ominous tension and suspense.
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Recently, a Metafilter user asked the question: which books do you reread again and again, and why— whether for “comfort, difficulty, humour, identification, whatever”? It got me thinking about a few of the ways I’ve discovered such books.
Writing an essay or book about a novel is one good way to find out how well it holds up under multiple readings. You stare at plot holes, implausible character development, inconsistent chronologies, and other literary flaws (or maybe features) for weeks, months, sometimes even years. And you also live with the language that first seduced you, the characters who drew you in, the images, places, atmospheres you can’t forget….
But reading alone can mean that blind spots never get addressed. We hold to our biases, positive and negative, despite ourselves. Another great way to test the durability of work of fiction is to teach it for years, or otherwise read it in a group of engaged people, who will see what you don’t, can’t, or won’t, and help better your appreciation (or deepen your dislike).
Having spent many years doing both of these things as a student and teacher, there are a few books that survived semester after semester, and still sit prominently on my shelves, where at any time I can pull them down, open them up, and be immediately absorbed. Then there are books I read when younger, and which seemed so mysterious, so possessed of an almost religious significance, I returned to them again and again—looking for the most enchanted sentences.
If I had to narrow down to a short list the books I consistently reread, those books would come out of all three experiences above, and they would include, in no necessary order—
Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner: I’ve written several essays on this novel, over the course of several years, and I love it as much or more as when I first picked it up. It’s a book that becomes both more grim and more darkly humorous as time goes on; its vertiginous narrative strategy creates an inexhaustible number of ways to see the story.
Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte: I read this novel as a child and understood almost nothing about it but the ghostly setting of “wiley, windy moors” (as Kate Bush described it) and the furious emotional intensity of Heathcliff and Catherine. These elements kept me coming back to discover just how much Bronte—like Faulkner—encircles her reader in a cyclone of possibility; multiple stories, told from multiple characters, times, and places, swirl around, never settling on what we most want in real life but never get there either—simple answers.
Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison: Morrison’s novel extracts from the 20th century African American experience a tale of profound individual struggle, as characters in her fictional family fight to define themselves against social inequities and to transcend oppressive identities. Their failures to do so are just as poignant as their successes, and characters like Pilate and Milkman achieve an almost archetypal significance through the course of the novel. Morrison creates modern myth.
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, by Michael Chabon. I taught this novel for years because it seemed like, and was, a great way to introduce students to the complications of plot, the joys of speculative fiction, and the empathetic imagining of other people and cultures that the novel can enable. I can think of many ways some critics might find Chabon’s book politically “problematic,” but my consistent enjoyment of its wild-eyed story has never diminished since I first picked up the book and read it straight through in a couple of days, fully convinced by its fictional world.
Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges. The Argentinian writer’s best-known collection of stories and essays requires patient rereading. My first encounter with the book early in college provoked amazement, but little comprehension. I still can’t say that I understand Borges, but every time I reread him, I seem to discover some new alcove, and sometimes a whole other room, filled with inscrutable, mysterious treasures.
This list is not in any way comprehensive, but it covers a few of the books that have stayed with me, each of them for well over a decade, and a few of the reasons why. What books do you reread, and why? What is it about them that keeps you returning, and how did you discover these books? While I stuck with fiction above, I could also make a list of philosophical books, as well as poetry. Feel free to include such books in the comments section below as well.
Audience members who had no familiarity with the source material must’ve been very, very confused. There’s a lot of bang for the buck, but title cards aside, not much in the way of context.
No matter. There are plenty of special effects and a crowd-pleasing chorus of gratuitous beauties in tights and bloomers, just as in Georges Méliès’ seminal A Trip to the Moon.
It’s conceivable that Jack Haley and Burt Lahr, the MGM version’s Tin Woodsman and Cowardly Lion, might have been taken to see the 13 minute short as children. (Scarecrow Ray Bolger was a mere babe at the time of its release.)
Despite the presence of all the well-known characters, including two Totos, for my money, the project’s true star is Hank, the scene stealing mule.
It’s unclear to me if the Wizard’s dark makeup is meant to be blackface. According to Robin Bernstein’s Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, the stage play that inspired the film featured minstrel songs and popular blackface actors Fred A. Stone and David Montgomery as the Scarecrow and Tin Woodsman.
The film cast’s identities have been lost to history, though a rumor persists that the young actress playing Dorothy is frequent Harold Lloyd co-star, Bebe Daniels. The original piano score is unknown, but likely hewed closely to Paul Tietjens’ music from the play, which is what we hear in the online version.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She was shocked to find out how much her childhood Oz books are worth, but has thus far resisted parting with them. Follow her @AyunHalliday
I am privileged to have grown up in a house filled with books. I don’t remember learning to read; I simply recall books—those that felt beneath me, those that seemed forever beyond comprehension. No one taught me how to read—by which I mean no one told me what to attend to in books, what to ignore; what to love, what to scorn. The shelves in my home, school, and local library were a wilderness, and I was left to carve my own paths through their thickets.
That all changed when I got to college, then graduate school, where I found various critical movements, literary theories, and philosophical schools, and was compelled to choose between their methods, politics, and prohibitions. Reading became a strenuous activity, a heavy intellectual exercise in which I felt those critics and theorists always looking over my shoulder. Those who have done intensive study in the humanities may sympathize: Afterward, I had to relearn how to read without an agenda.
Such is the kind of unfettered reading Virginia Woolf recommends in an essay titled “How Should One Read a Book?”, published in a series called The Common Reader—a title, in fact, of two collections, the first published in 1925, the second in 1932. Woolf wrote these essays for lay readers, not scholars, and many were previously published in venues like The Nation, Vogue, and The Yale Review. In them, Woolf’s informal investigations of writers like Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Christina Rossetti, and Thomas Hardy—writes a 1925 New York Times review—do not “put the author in the attitude of a defender or an expositor of certain trends in literature.”
“How Should One Read a Book?” appears at the end of the second series of The Common Reader. The essay “cautions,” writes Maria Popova, “against bringing baggage and pre-conceived notions to your reading” and abjures a formal, critical approach:
After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions — there we have none.
Though herself a more than able scholar and critic, Woolf does not recommend that her readers become so. “The only advice,” she writes, “that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.” That said, however, she feels “at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions” that we are free to take or leave. She offers her guidelines to aid enjoyment, not stifle it, and to help us sort and sift the “multitudinous chaos” we encounter when confronted with genres, periods, and styles of every type.
“Where,” Woolf asks, “are we to begin?” Below, in brief, find a few of her “ideas and suggestions,” offered with all of the careful caveats above:
“Since books have classes—fiction, biography, poetry—we should separate them and take from each what it is right that each should give us.”
Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticise at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read.
“Perhaps the quickest way to understand the elements of what a novelist is doing is not to read, but to write; to make your own experiment with the dangers and difficulties of words.”
Recall, then, some event that has left a distinct impression on you — how at the corner of the street, perhaps, you passed two people talking. A tree shook; an electric light danced; the tone of the talk was comic, but also tragic; a whole vision, an entire conception, seemed contained in that moment…. When you attempt to reconstruct it in words, you will find that it breaks into a thousand conflicting impressions…. Then turn from your blurred and littered pages to the opening pages of some great novelist — Defoe, Jane Austen, Hardy. Now you will be better able to appreciate their mastery.
“We can read [biographies and memoirs] with another aim, not to throw light on literature, not to become familiar with famous people, but to refresh and exercise our own creative powers.”
The greater part of any library is nothing but the record of… fleeting moments in the lives of men, women, and donkeys. Every literature, as it grows old, has its rubbish-heap, its record of vanished moments and forgotten lives told in faltering and feeble accents that have perished. But if you give yourself up to the delight of rubbish-reading you will be surprised, indeed you will be overcome, by the relics of human life that have been cast out to moulder. It may be one letter — but what a vision it gives! It may be a few sentences — but what vistas they suggest!
Read the entirety of Woolf’s essay here to learn her nuanced view of reading. She concludes her essay with another gentle swipe at literary criticism and recommends humility in the company of literature:
If to read a book as it should be read calls for the rarest qualities of imagination, insight, and judgment, you may perhaps conclude that literature is a very complex art and that it is unlikely that we shall be able, even after a lifetime of reading, to make any valuable contribution to its criticism. We must remain readers.
Clearly Woolf did not think of reading as a passive activity, but rather one in which we engage our own imaginations and literary abilities, such as they are. But if we are not to criticize, not draw firm conclusions, morals, life lessons, or philosophies from the books we read, of what use is reading to us?
Woolf answers the question with some questions of her own: “Are there not some pursuits that we practice because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them?”
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