When the young Neil Gaiman was learning Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” by heart, he surely had no inkling that years later he’d be called upon to recite it for legions of adoring fans…particularly on the Internet, a phenomenon the budding author may well have imagined, if not technically implemented.
Worldbuilders, a fundraising portal that rewards donors not with tote bags or umbrellas, but rather with celebrity challenges of a non-ice bucket variety, scored big when Gaiman agreed to participate.
The videography may be casual, but his off-book performance in an undisclosed tulgey wood is the stuff of high drama.
Callooh!
Callay!
Is that a memory lapse at the one minute mark? Another interpreter might have called for a retake, but Gaiman rides out a four second pause cooly, his eyes the only indicator that something may be amiss. Perhaps he’s just taking precautions, listening for telltale whiffling and burbling.
If you’re on the prowl to make some year end charitable donations, recreational mathemusician Vi Hart and author John Green are among those Worldbuilders has in the pipeline to perform stunts for successfully funded campaigns.
In the pantheon of Great Russian Writers, two heads appear to tower above all others—at least for us English-language readers. Leo Tolstoy, aristocrat-turned-mystic, whose detailed realism feels like a fictionalized documentary of 19th century Russian life; and Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, the once-condemned-to-death, epileptic former gambler, whose fever-dream novels read like psychological case studies of people barely clinging to the jagged edges of that same society. Both novelists are read with similar reverence and devotion by their fans, and they are often pitted against each other, writes Kevin Hartnett at The Millions, like “Williams vs. DiMaggio and Bird vs. Magic,” even as people who have these kinds arguments acknowledge them both as “irreducibly great.”
I’ve had the Tolstoy vs. Dostoevsky back and forth a time or two, and I have to say I usually give the edge to Dostoevsky. It’s the high-stakes desperation of his characters, the tragic irony of their un-self-awareness, or the gnawing obsession of those who know a little bit too much, about themselves and everyone else. Dostoyevsky has long been described as a psychological novelist. Nietzsche famously called him “the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn.” Henry Miller’s praise of the writer of particularly Russian forms of misery and trespass is a little more colorful: “Dostoevsky,” he wrote, “is chaos and fecundity. Humanity, with him, is but a vortex in the bubbling maelstrom.”
Perhaps the most succinct statement on the Russian novelist’s work comes from Scottish poet and novelist Edwin Muir, who said, “Dostoyevsky wrote of the unconscious as if it were conscious; that is in reality the reason why his characters seem ‘pathological,’ while they are only visualized more clearly than any other figures in imaginative literature.” Joseph Conrad may have found him “too Russian,” but even with the cultural gulf that separates him from us, and the well over one hundred years of social, political, and technological change, we still read Dostoevsky and see our own inner darkness reflected back at us—our hypocrisies, neuroses, obsessions, terrors, doubts, and even the paranoia and narcissism we think unique to our internet age.
This kind of thing can be unsettling. Although, like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky embraced a fiercely uncompromising Christianity—one more wracked with painful doubt, perhaps, but no less sincere—his willingness to descend into the lowest depths of the human psyche made him seem to Turgenev like “the nastiest Christian I’ve ever met.” I’m not sure if that was meant as a compliment, but it’s perhaps a fitting description of the creator of such expressly vicious characters as Crime and Punishment’s sociopathic Arkady Svidrigailov, Demons’ cruel rapist Nikolai Stavrogin, and The Brothers Karamazov’s psychopathic creep Pavel Smerdyakov (a character so nasty he inspired a Marvel comics villain).
Next to these devils, Dostoevsky places saints: Crime and Punishment’s Sonya, Karamazov brother Alyosha the monk, and holy fool Prince Myshkin in The Idiot. His characters frequently murder and redeem each other, but they also work out existential crises, have lengthy theological arguments, and illustrate the author’s philosophical ideas about faith and its lack. The genius of Dostoevsky lies in his ability to explore such heady abstractions while rarely becoming didactic or turning his characters into puppets. On the contrary—no figures in modern literature seem so alive and three-dimensional as his anguished collection of unforgettable anarchists, aristocrats, poor folks, criminals, flaneurs, and underground men.
Should you have missed out on the pleasure, if it can so be called, of fully immersing yourself in Dostoevsky’s world of fear, belief, and madness—or should you desire to refresh your knowledge of his dense and multifaceted work—you can find all of his major novels and novellas online in a variety of formats. We’ve done you the favor of compiling them below in ebook format. Where possible, we’ve also included audio books too. (Note: they all permanently reside in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books collections.)
Find more of Dostoevsky’s work—including his sketches of prison life in Siberia and many of his short stories—at Project Gutenberg. Like his contemporary Charles Dickens, Dostoevsky’s novels were serialized in periodicals, and their plots (and character names) can be winding, convoluted, and difficult to follow. For a comprehensive guide through the life and work of the Russian psychological realist, see Christiaan Stange’s “Dostoevsky Research Station,” an online database with full text of the author’s work and links to artwork, critical essays, bibliographies, quotations, study guides and outlines, and museums and “historically important places.” And for even more resources, see FyodorDostoevsky.com, a huge archive of texts, essays, links, pictures and more. Enjoy!
Gentle reader, if you feel your knee jerking at Thug Notes, may I suggest taking a moment to gaze beyond the gold bling and du-rag favored by its fictitious host, literature lover Sparky Sweets, PhD.
A poor choice of metaphor, given the fictitious Dr. Sweets’ soft spot for baby felines. It’s not something he talks about on the show, but he frequently tweets photos of himself in their oh-so-cuddly company, tagging them #kittentherapy.
He (or perhaps head writer / producer Jared Bauer) also turns to Twitter to disseminate quotes by the likes of Cervantes (“Diligence is the mother of good fortune”) and Orwell (“Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does”).
Thug Notes’ tagline “classic literature, original gangsta” may be its punchline, but the humor of incongruity is not its sole aim.
Comedian Greg Edwards, who plays Sparky Sweets, told The New York Times that the project is “trivializing academia’s attempt at making literature exclusionary by showing that even highbrow academic concepts can be communicated in a clear and open fashion.”
Amen. As Sparky Sweets observes following Simon’s murder in the Lord of the Flies above, “Whoo, this $hit (is) gettin’ real!”
Is there an equal or greater danger that a reluctant student might be prodded in a positive direction by Sparky’s zesty, insightful take on their assigned reading?
Resoundingly, yes.
Thug Notes’ discussion of racism as portrayed in To Kill a Mockingbird is not the longest I’ve ever heard, but it is the most straightforward and bracing. It got my blood going! I’m inspired to drag my dog eared paperback copy out and give it another read! (Maybe I’ll have a Scotch and play some classical music. Sparky does that too.)
I’m hoping the kids at the high school a couple of blocks away — who, for the record, look and sound far more like Sparky than they do me — will be encouraged to supplement their reading of this book, and others, with Thug Notes.
As an out-of-character Greg Edwards, bearing as much resemblance to Sparky Sweets as Stephen Colbert does to his most famous creation, told interviewer Tavis Smiley:
We don’t want to stop kids from reading the book. We just want to open up doors. Maybe teachers can use it. It’s hard being a teacher nowadays. You’re underpaid, you’re overworked, the classrooms are full, the kids are crazy, so throw this on and maybe it’ll spark one kid’s attention.
As of this writing, Thug Notes has tackled dozens of titles (you can watch them all here, or right below), a heaping helping of banned books, and four of Shakespeare’s plays (above).
New titles will be added every other Tuesday. I can’t wait.
More than 60 years after his death and the closely preceding publication of his best-known novel 1984, we look to George Orwell as a kind of prophet of the ills of corporatism, socialism, authoritarianism, totalitarianism — any powerful ‑ism, essentially, in which we can find nasty, freedom-destroying implications. The BBC documentary Orwell: A Life in Pictures, which we featured a few years back, makes a point of highlighting Orwell’s “warning” to what he saw as a fast corporatizing/socializing/authoriatarianizing/totalitarianizing world. In the film’s final dramatized scene above (watch the complete film here), the re-created Orwell himself makes the following ominous prediction:
Allowing for the book, after all, being a parody, something like 1984 could actually happen. This is the direction the world is going in at the present time. In our world, there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. The sex instinct will be eradicated. We shall abolish the orgasm. There will be no loyalty except loyalty to the Party. But always there will be the intoxication of power. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who’s helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever. The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: don’t let it happen. It depends on you.
This fictionalized Orwell — much like the real Orwell — doesn’t mince words. But as with most unminced words, these mask a more complicated reality. Though Orwell fans may find each individual piece of this speech recognizable, especially the bit about the boot and the face, the man himself never spoke it — not in this form, anyway.
It mixes documented statements of Orwell’s with words from the text of 1984, and its dramatic closer [“Don’t let it happen. It depends on you!”] comes, as writes Barnes and Noble’s Steve King, from a post-publication press release directed by publisher Fredric Warburg toward readers who “had misinterpreted [Orwell’s] aim, taking the novel as a criticism of the current British Labour Party, or of contemporary socialism in general.” The quotation from the press release was “soon given the status of a last statement or deathbed appeal, given that Orwell was hospitalized at the time and dead six months later.”
You can read more at georgeorwellnovels.com, which provides a great deal of context on this press release, which runs, in full, as follows:
It has been suggested by some of the reviewers of Nineteen Eighty-Four that it is the author’s view that this, or something like this, is what will happen inside the next forty years in the Western world. This is not correct. I think that, allowing for the book being after all a parody, something like Nineteen Eighty-Four could happen. This is the direction in which the world is going at the present time, and the trend lies deep in the political, social and economic foundations of the contemporary world situation.
Specifically the danger lies in the structure imposed on Socialist and on Liberal capitalist communities by the necessity to prepare for total war with the U.S.S.R. and the new weapons, of which of course the atomic bomb is the most powerful and the most publicized. But danger lies also in the acceptance of a totalitarian outlook by intellectuals of all colours.
The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don’t let it happen. It depends on you.
George Orwell assumes that if such societies as he describes in Nineteen Eighty-Four come into being there will be several super states. This is fully dealt with in the relevant chapters of Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is also discussed from a different angle by James Burnham in The Managerial Revolution. These super states will naturally be in opposition to each other or (a novel point) will pretend to be much more in opposition than in fact they are. Two of the principal super states will obviously be the Anglo-American world and Eurasia. If these two great blocks line up as mortal enemies it is obvious that the Anglo-Americans will not take the name of their opponents and will not dramatize themselves on the scene of history as Communists. Thus they will have to find a new name for themselves. The name suggested in Nineteen Eighty-Four is of course Ingsoc, but in practice a wide range of choices is open. In the U.S.A. the phrase “Americanism” or “hundred per cent Americanism” is suitable and the qualifying adjective is as totalitarian as anyone could wish.
If there is a failure of nerve and the Labour party breaks down in its attempt to deal with the hard problems with which it will be faced, tougher types than the present Labour leaders will inevitably take over, drawn probably from the ranks of the Left, but not sharing the Liberal aspirations of those now in power. Members of the present British government, from Mr. Attlee and Sir Stafford Cripps down to Aneurin Bevan will never willingly sell the pass to the enemy, and in general the older men, nurtured in a Liberal tradition, are safe, but the younger generation is suspect and the seeds of totalitarian thought are probably widespread among them. It is invidious to mention names, but everyone could without difficulty think for himself of prominent English and American personalities whom the cap would fit.
Readers can still find plenty to quibble with in Orwell, but surely that counts as a point toward his status as an enduringly fascinating writer. The lesson, however much we may misinterpret its delivery — and indeed, how much Orwell himself may sometimes seem to misdeliver it — holds steady: don’t let it happen. How not to let it happen, of course, remains a matter of active inquiry.
Many of the regulars to the glorious pages of Open Culture might be familiar with The Public Domain Review project, having been featured on OC a fair few times. From sixteenth-century woodcuts on how to swim to hand-colored photographs of nineteenth-century Japan, you will have seen links to all sorts of historical oddities and delights that we’ve gathered from various archives and highlighted on The Public Domain Review. In addition to these shorter collection posts, since we started in 2011, we’ve also published a steady stream of long-form essays on similar wonders from the historical record. It is with great pleasure this week to announce that The Public Domain Review has compiled a selection of these essays into a brand-new beautiful book!
Spread across six themed chapters – Animals, Bodies, Words, Worlds, Encounters and Networks – the collection includes a total of thirty-four essays from a stellar line up of contributors, including Jack Zipes, Frank Delaney, Colin Dickey, George Prochnik, Noga Arikha, and Julian Barnes.
There’s a whole host of weird and wonderful topics explored: from the case of Mary Toft, the woman who claimed to give birth to rabbits, to William Warren’s search for the coordinates of Eden; from Thomas Browne’s odd litany of imagined artefacts, to the phrasebooks of the invented language Volapük; from the strange literary fruits of the “it-narrative” fad, to epic verse in praise of a cat named Jeoffry; from a history of the painted smile, to the bizarre world of medieval animals trials.
The collection is not all obscurities and unknown tales. We have some big hitters in there too. Great essays on figures you will no doubt have heard of — the Brothers Grimm, Proust , Flaubert, Joyce — but all approached from new angles and illuminated by unfamiliar lights.
With 146 illustrations, more than half of which have been newly sourced especially for the book, this is very far from simply the website in print form. It is a beautiful object in and of itself, lovingly designed by writer and designer Nicholas Jeeves.
Anyhow, I hope I’ve enticed you all sufficiently to check out the page on the site for more details, and perhaps even to place an order or two! If you would like to grab yourself a copy then do make sure to put your order in before midnight on November 26th as up until then we’ll be offering the book for a special discounted rate and also ensuring delivery by Christmas.
Perhaps you’ve held off on listening to Re:Joyce, Frank Delaney’s line-by-line, episode-by-episode podcast exegesis of James Joyce’s Ulysses, because you want to listen not just to a breakdown of the novel, but to the novel itself. If so, then boy, have we got another ongoing project for you to follow: The Complete Ulysses, which has a mandate to record every word of Ulysses as “the first American production” of the book “using mostly American and Irish-American actors like Alec Baldwin, John Lithgow, Jerry Stiller, Garrison Keillor, Anne Meara, Wallace Shawn, Bob Dishy, Anne Enright, Bob Odenkirk, Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, and Caraid O’Brien as Molly Bloom.” The producers have planned to make available recordings of each chapter as soon as they finish them, “on almost all current and future audio media.” You can browse the so-far completed material here.
“The project began more than 30 years ago,” says The Complete Ulysses’ site, “when [radio station] WBAI broadcast a marathon reading of Ulysses from the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore at 81st and Broadway in New York.” Bookstore owner Larry Josephson “took the idea of a long-form radio reading of Ulysses to Isaiah Sheffer, then Artistic Director of Symphony Space.” This resulted in Bloomsday on Broadway, an 18-hour “live, staged reading of excerpts from Ulysses and other Irish literature and song.” Having then created Radio Bloomsday, a WBAI reading series “featuring live and pre-recorded readings from Ulysses and lots of other things Irish,” Josephson “got the ‘insane’ idea of recording the entire book, which will run about 30 hours.”
Ambitious, yes, but then the same applies to Re:Joyce, and indeed to Ulysses itself, which you can find in our collection of Free eBooks. Joyce has long had a way of inspiring creators to execute their own “insane” ideas, and this one in particular gives his own work a whole new means of expression. Tuning into Radio Bloomsday has, for a few years now, appeared as a mainstay on various press outlets’ “what to do on Bloomsday” lists, but with The Complete Ulysses, you certainly don’t need to wait until June 16 for a Joycean experience; these days, a properly equipped iPod can turn every day into Bloomsday.
If you can’t wait for The Complete Ulysses to be completed, you can always download a reading of Ulysses in its entirety here (in audio format).
Note: The drawing above is none other than Leopold Bloom, drawn by Joyce himself in 1926, when his eyesight was failing. We have more on that story here.
I still remember the thrill I felt when I happened upon a set of the complete Sherlock Holmes stories at an antique store. For a mere ten dollars, I acquired handsomely bound, suitably patina-of-age-bearing editions of each and every one of the sleuth of 221B Baker Street’s adventures that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ever wrote. In addition to this thrill, I also got a few surprises: first that all of those stories combined — the stories that made Holmes and his assistant Dr. John Watson into household names of nearly 130 years’ standing — fit into two not-especially-large books; second, that Holmes solved his mysteries not just in 56 short stories but four novels as well; and third, that many of those short stories and novels differed intriguingly in tone and content from my expectations. So many modern adaptations — all those television series up to the BBC’s new and expensive-looking Sherlock, the early CD-ROM computer game, Hayao Miyazaki’s steampunk animation Sherlock Hound, Guy Ritchie’s Robert Downey Jr.-showcasing Hollywood films — have convinced us we “know” Sherlock Holmes, which makes it all the more fascinating to investigate, as it were, the original literature.
These days, especially given the recent ruling (just re-affirmed by the Supreme Court) that Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories “are no longer covered by United States copyright law and can be freely used by creators without paying any licensing fee to the Conan Doyle estate,” you can download the complete Sherlock Holmes canon in a variety of ebook formats, from PDF to ePub to ASCII to MOBI for Kindle. If you prefer listening to reading, Librivox has made available threedifferentversions of Sherlock Holmes in audiobook form. However you choose technologically to experience the Sherlock Holmes canon, I recommend taking it on chronologically, beginning with the 1887 novel A Study in Scarlet — less a mystery, to my mind, than the scary tale of a murderous Mormon sect — to 1927’s “The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place,” Holmes’ final Conan Doyle-penned adventure. Somewhere in the middle — in 1893’s “The Final Problem,” to be precise — Holmes’ creator tried to kill the beloved detective off, but the reading public would have none of it. What about Sherlock Holmes stories had got them so hooked that they could successfully demand a resurrection? Now you, too, can find out, without even having to spend the ten dollars, let alone go to the antique store.
Bonus: Below, you can listen to The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, an old-time radio show that aired in the US from October 2, 1939 to July 7, 1947.
The web site Demasiado Aire recently asked “some of the world’s most important philosophers which three books influenced them the most while undergraduate students.” And, from what we can tell, they got a good response. 28 influential philosophers dutifully jotted their lists, and, for at least the past day, Demasiado Aire has been offline, seemingly overwhelmed by traffic. Thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, we can recover these lists and provide you with a few highlights. We have added links to the texts cited by the philosophers. The free texts have an asterisk (*) next to them.
“Also, I should point out that Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality* had a huge effect on me when I was a graduate student and had a formative influence on my philosophical development”.
You can view lists by other philosophers, including Alain de Botton, Wendy Brown, Peter Millican, and more here. The image above comes viaby MjYj.
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