In late May, The Seattle Public Library set a world record for the Longest Book Domino Chain, according to the World Record Academy. Watch as 2,131 books — all part of an upcoming book sale — fall one by one. Apparently, it took 27 volunteers seven hours — and five failed attempts — to pull off this feat for the ages. h/t Metafilter
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Today is “Bloomsday,” the traditional day for book lovers to celebrate James Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses (text — audio). To mark the occasion we bring you this rare 1924 recording of Joyce reading from the Aeolus episode of the novel. The recording was arranged and financed by the author’s friend and publisher Sylvia Beach, who brought him by taxi to the HMV (His Master’s Voice) gramophone studio in the Paris suburb of Billancourt. The first session didn’t go well. Joyce was nervous and suffering from his recurring eye troubles. He and Beach returned another day to finish the recording. In her memoir, Shakespeare & Company, Beach writes:
Joyce had chosen the speech in the Aeolus episode, the only passage that could be lifted out of Ulysses, he said, and the only one that was “declamatory” and therefore suitable for recital. He had made up his mind, he told me, that this would be his only reading from Ulysses.
I have an idea that it was not for declamatory reasons alone that he chose this passage from Aeolus. I believe that it expressed something he wanted said and preserved in his own voice. As it rings out–“he lifted his voice above it boldly”–it is more, one feels, than mere oratory.
The passage parallels the episode in Homer’s Odyssey featuring Aeolus, god of the winds. As a pun, Joyce sets it in a newspaper office where his hero Leopold Bloom stops by to place an ad, only to be stymied by the blustery noise of the printing presses and of the various “windbags” in the office.
One character tries to entertain a couple of his friends with a mocking recital of a politician’s speech printed in the day’s newspaper. Here is the passage Joyce reads:
He began:
–Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen: Great was my admiration in listening to the remarks addressed to the youth of Ireland a moment since by my learned friend. It seemed to me that I had been transported into a country far away from this country, into an age remote from this age, that I stood in ancient Egypt and that I was listening to the speech of a highpriest of that land addressed to the youthful Moses.
His listeners held their cigarettes poised to hear, their smoke ascending in frail stalks that flowered with his speech…Noble words coming. Look out. Could you try your hand at it yourself?
–And it seemed to me that I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest raised in a tone of like haughiness and like pride. I heard his words and their meaning was revealed to me.
From the Fathers It was revealed to me that those things are good which yet are corrupted which neither if they were supremely good nor unless they were good could be corrupted. Ah, curse you! That’s saint Augustine.
–Why will you jews not accept our language, our religion and our culture? You are a tribe of nomad herdsmen; we are a mighty people. You have no cities nor no wealth: our cities are hives of humanity and our galleys, trireme and quadrireme, laden with all manner merchandise furrow the waters of the known globe. You have but emerged from primitive conditions: we have a literature, a priesthood, an agelong history and a polity.
Nile.
Child, man, effigy.
By the Nilebank the babemaries kneel, cradle of bulrushes: a man supple in combat: stonehorned, stonebearded, heart of stone.
–You pray to a local and obscure idol: our temples, majestic and mysterious, are the abodes of Isis and Osiris, of Horus and Ammon Ra. Yours serfdom, awe and humbleness: ours thunder and the seas. Israel is weak and few are her children: Egypt is an host and terrible are her arms. Vagrants and daylabourers are you called: the world trembles at our name.
A dumb belch of hunger cleft his speech. he lifted his voice above it boldly:
–But, ladies and gentlemen, had the youthful Moses listened to and accepted that view of life, had he bowed his head and bowed his will and bowed his spirit before that arrogant admonition he would never have led the chosen people out of their house of bondage nor followed the pillar of the cloud by day. He would never have spoken with the Eteral amid lightnings on Sinai’s mountaintop nor even have come down with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the tables of the law, graven in the language of the outlaw.
Here’s a rare recording from 1929 of the British author A.A. Milne reading a chapter of his beloved children’s book, Winnie-the-Pooh. Milne was a prolific writer of plays, novels and essays, but he was most widely known–much to his chagrin–as the creator of a simple and good-natured little bear.
Pooh was inspired by his son Christopher Robin’s favorite teddy bear. In Milne’s imagination, the stuffed bear comes alive and enters into little adventures (or one might say misadventures) with Christopher Robin and his other stuffed animals. The name “Winnie” was borrowed from a famous resident of the London Zoo: a black bear from Canada named for the city of Winnipeg. The young Christopher Robin liked visiting Winnie at the zoo. He also liked a graceful swan he saw swimming in a pond at Kensington Gardens, who he named “Pooh.” His father combined the two names to create one of the most popular characters in children’s literature.
Winnie-the-Pooh first appeared in stories and poems in popular magazines. In 1926 Milne collected them in a book, Winnie-the-Pooh, with illustrations by E.H. Shepard. Each chapter in the book is a self-contained episode or story. In the recording below, Milne reads Chapter Three (click here to open the text in new a window) “In Which Pooh and Piglet Go Hunting and Nearly Catch a Woozle.”
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In the spring of 1934, a young man who wanted to be a writer hitchhiked to Florida to meet his idol, Ernest Hemingway.
Arnold Samuelson was an adventurous 22-year-old. He had been born in a sod house in North Dakota to Norwegian immigrant parents. He completed his coursework in journalism at the University of Minnesota, but refused to pay the $5 fee for a diploma. After college he wanted to see the country, so he packed his violin in a knapsack and thumbed rides out to California. He sold a few stories about his travels to the Sunday MinneapolisTribune.
In April of ’34 Samuelson was back in Minnesota when he read a story by Hemingway in Cosmopolitan, called “One Trip Across.” The short story would later become part of Hemingway’s fourth novel, To Have and Have Not. Samuelson was so impressed with the story that he decided to travel 2,000 miles to meet Hemingway and ask him for advice. “It seemed a damn fool thing to do,” Samuelson would later write, “but a twenty-two-year-old tramp during the Great Depression didn’t have to have much reason for what he did.”
And so, at the time of year when most hobos were traveling north, Samuelson headed south. He hitched his way to Florida and then hopped a freight train from the mainland to Key West. Riding on top of a boxcar, Samuelson could not see the railroad tracks underneath him–only miles and miles of water as the train left the mainland. “It was headed south over the long bridges between the keys and finally right out over the ocean,” writes Samuelson. “It couldn’t happen now–the tracks have been torn out–but it happened then, almost as in a dream.”
When Samuelson arrived in Key West he discovered that times were especially hard there. Most of the cigar factories had shut down and the fishing was poor. That night he went to sleep on the turtling dock, using his knapsack as a pillow. The ocean breeze kept the mosquitos away. A few hours later a cop woke him up and invited him to sleep in the bull pen of the city jail. “I was under arrest every night and released every morning to see if I could find my way out of town,” writes Samuelson. After his first night in the mosquito-infested jail, he went looking for the town’s most famous resident.
When I knocked on the front door of Ernest Hemingway’s house in Key West, he came out and stood squarely in front of me, squinty with annoyance, waiting for me to speak. I had nothing to say. I couldn’t recall a word of my prepared speech. He was a big man, tall, narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered, and he stood with his feet spread apart, his arms hanging at his sides. He was crouched forward slightly with his weight on his toes, in the instinctive poise of a fighter ready to hit.
“What do you want?” said Hemingway. After an awkward moment, Samuelson explained that he had bummed his way from Minneapolis just to see him. “I read your story ‘One Trip Across’ in Cosmopolitan. I liked it so much I came down to have a talk with you.” Hemingway seemed to relax. “Why the hell didn’t you say you just wanted to chew the fat? I thought you wanted to visit.” Hemingway told Samuelson he was busy, but invited him to come back at one-thirty the next afternoon.
After another night in jail, Samuelson returned to the house and found Hemingway sitting in the shade on the north porch, wearing khaki pants and bedroom slippers. He had a glass of whiskey and a copy of the New York Times. The two men began talking. Sitting there on the porch, Samuelson could sense that Hemingway was keeping him at a safe distance: “You were at his home but not in it. Almost like talking to a man out on a street.” They began by talking about the Cosmopolitan story, and Samuelson mentioned his failed attempts at writing fiction. Hemingway offered some advice.
“The most important thing I’ve learned about writing is never write too much at a time,” Hemingway said, tapping my arm with his finger. “Never pump yourself dry. Leave a little for the next day. The main thing is to know when to stop. Don’t wait till you’ve written yourself out. When you’re still going good and you come to an interesting place and you know what’s going to happen next, that’s the time to stop. Then leave it alone and don’t think about it; let your subconscious mind do the work. The next morning, when you’ve had a good sleep and you’re feeling fresh, rewrite what you wrote the day before. When you come to the interesting place and you know what is going to happen next, go on from there and stop at another high point of interest. That way, when you get through, your stuff is full of interesting places and when you write a novel you never get stuck and you make it interesting as you go along.”
Hemingway advised Samuelson to avoid contemporary writers and compete only with the dead ones whose works have stood the test of time. “When you pass them up you know you’re going good.” He asked Samuelson what writers he liked. Samuelson said he enjoyed Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. “Ever read War and Peace?” Hemingway asked. Samuelson said he had not. “That’s a damned good book. You ought to read it. We’ll go up to my workshop and I’ll make out a list you ought to read.”
His workshop was over the garage in back of the house. I followed him up an outside stairway into his workshop, a square room with a tile floor and shuttered windows on three sides and long shelves of books below the windows to the floor. In one corner was a big antique flat-topped desk and an antique chair with a high back. E.H. took the chair in the corner and we sat facing each other across the desk. He found a pen and began writing on a piece of paper and during the silence I was very ill at ease. I realized I was taking up his time, and I wished I could entertain him with my hobo experiences but thought they would be too dull and kept my mouth shut. I was there to take everything he would give and had nothing to return.
Hemingway wrote down a list of two short stories and 14 books and handed it to Samuelson. Most of the texts you can find in our collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices. If the texts don’t appear in our eBook collection itself, you’ll find a link to the text directly below.
Hemingway reached over to his shelf and picked up a collection of stories by Stephen Crane and gave it to Samuelson. He also handed him a copy of his own novel, A Farewell to Arms. “I wish you’d send it back when you get through with it,” Hemingway said of his own book. “It’s the only one I have of that edition.” Samuelson gratefully accepted the books and took them back to the jail that evening to read. “I did not feel like staying there another night,” he writes, “and the next afternoon I finished reading A Farewell to Arms, intending to catch the first freight out to Miami. At one o’clock, I brought the books back to Hemingway’s house.” When he got there he was astonished by what Hemingway said.
“There is something I want to talk to you about. Let’s sit down,” he said thoughtfully. “After you left yesterday, I was thinking I’ll need somebody to sleep on board my boat. What are you planning on now?”
“I haven’t any plans.”
“I’ve got a boat being shipped from New York. I’ll have to go up to Miami Tuesday and run her down and then I’ll have to have someone on board. There wouldn’t be much work. If you want the job, you could keep her cleaned up in the mornings and still have time for your writing.”
“That would be swell,” replied Samuelson. And so began a year-long adventure as Hemingway’s assistant. For a dollar a day, Samuelson slept aboard the 38-foot cabin cruiser Pilar and kept it in good condition. Whenever Hemingway went fishing or took the boat to Cuba, Samuelson went along. He wrote about his experiences–including those quoted and paraphrased here–in a remarkable memoir, With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba. During the course of that year, Samuelson and Hemingway talked at length about writing. Hemingway published an account of their discussions in a 1934 Esquire article called “Monologue to the Maestro: A High Seas Letter.” (Click here to open it as a PDF.) Hemingway’s article with his advice to Samuelson was one source for our February 19 post, “Seven Tips From Ernest Hemingway on How to Write Fiction.”
When the work arrangement had been settled, Hemingway drove the young man back to the jail to pick up his knapsack and violin. Samuelson remembered his feeling of triumph at returning with the famous author to get his things. “The cops at the jail seemed to think nothing of it that I should move from their mosquito chamber to the home of Ernest Hemingway. They saw his Model A roadster outside waiting for me. They saw me come out of it. They saw Ernest at the wheel waiting and they never said a word.”
Almost every year since 1901, the Swedish Academy has apportioned one fifth of the interest from the fortune bequeathed by dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel to honor, as Nobel said in his will, “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.”
Many of the greatest writers of the past 112 years have received the Nobel Prize in Literature, but there have been some glaring omissions right from the start. When Leo Tolstoy was passed over in 1901 (the prize went to the French poet Sully Prudhomme) he was so offended he refused later nominations. The list of great writers who were alive after 1901 but never received the prize is jaw-dropping. In addition to Tolstoy, it includes James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, Anton Chekhov, Marcel Proust, Henry James, Henrik Ibsen, Émile Zola, Robert Frost, W.H. Auden, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov.
But the Nobel committee has honored many worthy writers, and today we’ve gathered together seven speeches by seven laureates. Our choice was restricted by the limitations of what is available online in English. We have focused on the short speeches traditionally given on December 10 of every year at the Nobel banquet in Stockholm. With the exception of short excerpts from Bertrand Russell’s lecture, we have passed over the longer Nobel lectures (which typically run about 40 minutes) presented to the Swedish Academy on a different day than the banquet.
We begin above with one of the most often-quoted Nobel speeches: William Faulkner’s eloquent acceptance of the 1949 prize. There was actually no prize in literature given in 1949, but the committee decided to award that year’s medal 12 months later to Faulkner, citing his “powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel.” Faulkner gave his speech on December 10, 1950, in the same ceremony with Bertrand Russell. Unfortunately the audio cuts off just before the finish. To follow along and read the missing ending, click here to open the full text in a new window. Faulkner stumbles a few times during his delivery. You can listen to his smoother 1954 reading of a polished version of the speech here.
Bertrand Russell, 1950:
The British logician and philosopher Bertrand Russell was one of several prize-winners in literature who were primarily known for their work in other fields. (The short list includes statesman Winston Churchill and philosopher Henri Bergson.) In addition to his ground-breaking contributions to mathematics and analytic philosophy, Russell wrote many books for the general reader. In 1950 the Nobel committee cited his “varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought.” Above are two short audio clips from Russell’s December 11, 1950 Nobel lecture, “What Desires are Politically Important?” You can click here to open the full text in a new window.
Ernest Hemingway, 1954:
The American writer Ernest Hemingway was awarded the 1954 prize “for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.” Hemingway was not feeling well enough in December of 1954 to travel to Stockholm, so he asked John C. Cabot, United States Ambassador to Sweden, to deliver the speech for him. Fortunately we do have this recording from sometime that month of Hemingway reading his speech at a radio station in Havana, Cuba. You can click here to open the full text in a new window.
John Steinbeck, 1962:
The American writer John Steinbeck, author of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, was awarded the Nobel in 1962 “for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception.” To read along as you watch Steinbeck give his speech, click here to open the text in a new window.
V.S. Naipaul, 2001:
Jumping ahead from 1962 all the way to 2001, we have video of the speech given by the Trinidadian-British writer V.S. Naipaul, author of such books as In a Free State and A Bend in the River. Naipaul was cited by the Nobel committee “for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.” You can click here to open a text of Naipaul’s banquet speech in a new window.
Orhan Pamuk, 2006:
The Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, author of such books as The Museum of Innocence and Snow, received the prize in 2006. The Nobel committee praised the Istanbul-based writer, “who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.” To read Pamuk’s banquet speech, click here to open the text in a new window.
Mario Vargas Llosa, 2010:
The prolific Peruvian-Spanish writer Mario Vargas Llosa, author of such novels as Conversation in the Cathedral and Death in the Andes, was cited by the Nobel committee in 2010 “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” To read along with Vargas Llosa as he speaks, click here to open the text in a new window.
It used to be that accepting an advance on an unwritten novel was as good as admitting failure before the work is even finished. Can you imagine blue-blood novelists Edith Wharton or Henry James taking a check before finishing their books?
F. Scott Fitzgerald may have been a long-suffering wannabe when it came to high society, but he never pretended to be anything but a businessman when it came to writing. For nearly his entire professional life he kept a detailed ledger of his income from writing, in which he noted the $3,939 advance he received for his in-progress novel, The Great Gatsby. The new Gatsby film out this summer is the fifth adaptation. The first earned Fitzgerald $16,666. (See the surviving footage here.)
Recently digitized by the University of South Carolina, the lined notebook, which the writer probably packed with him on all of his travels, paints a picture of a pragmatic businessman repeatedly on and off the wagon. Sound like Gatsby? Maybe a little.
A true Jazz Age storyteller, Fitzgerald sets up the droll social scene of his own early days: Not long after his birth on September 24, 1896, the infant “was baptized and went out for the first time—to Lambert’s corner store on Laurel Avenue.”
It’s worth a stroll through Fitzgerald’s clipped account of his childhood, for the humor and the poignant references to birthday parties and childhood mischief. By 1920 the writer is married and has some professional momentum. In the margins of that year’s page, he writes “Work at the beginning but dangerous toward the end. A slow year, dominated by Zelda & on the whole happy.”
By the last entry, the state of Fitzgerald’s life is grim—“work and worry, sickness and debt.” The book reads like a whirlwind of drinking, writing, travel and jet-setting. Fitzgerald holds his gaze steady on social dynamics, noting gatherings and arguments with friends alongside the notes about his creative bursts and dry spells.
Kate Rix writes about education and digital media. Visit her website at and follow her on Twitter @mskaterix.
You don’t hear much about Guantanamo these days, unless you keep an eye on the writings of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie Savage. Last week, Savage reported on a hunger strike involving 93 prisoners that’s now in its third month. Ostensibly the protest is in response to prison guards handling the Koran in disrespectful ways. But the real cause comes down to this: “a growing sense among many prisoners, some of whom have been held without trial for more than 11 years, that they will never go home.”
As part of Savage’s reporting on Gitmo, he has also created a photo blog that gives us insight into the prison library and its odd collection of books. The library offers prisoners access to Captain America comics (that must go over well with enemy combatants); pulp romance books by Danielle Steele (another choice pick for Islamists); the complete Harry Potter series (I imagine the Prisoner of Azkaban volume hits home); some more serious works by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien and Charles Dickens; an assortment of religious books; and the occasional self help book like The Anxiety & Phobia Workbook.
According to news reports, the library currently has 3,500 volumes on pre-approved topics. Prisoners have to order books in advance. (They can’t just wonder through the stacks.) And the most popular books include Agatha Christie mysteries, the self-help manual Don’t Be Sad; the The Lord of the Rings; and, of course, Harry Potter.
We know that other prisons have given their residents access to our collections of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks. But I doubt that will be happening at Gitmo any time soon.
Professional jealousy is probably the worst reason to dismiss a new perspective, whether it comes from within one’s field, outside it, or anywhere else. Snobbery leads to inbreeding and intellectual dead-ends. So when Michael Chwe, an associate professor of political science at UCLA who specializes in game theory, has an epiphany about Jane Austen as a proto-game theorist, maybe his insights should change the way English profs—and everyone else—read the author of Pride and Prejudice.
I don’t know. I haven’t read Chwe’s book, Jane Austen: Game Theorist (read a sample chapter here), but I’ll confess, I’m skeptical of anyone who calls Austen’s literary work a “research program” that has “results” in a book of “230 diagram-heavy pages.” It seems to miss the point somehow. Austen is perhaps these days the most-adapted of British writers, and her academic cachet couldn’t be higher. But the best takes on her work—whether scholarly or popular—are fun, focused on character and language, not technocratic theory.
But maybe I’ve misjudged Chwe’s intent. He was, after all, inspired to read Austen by “watching movies and reading books with his children.” And one of the concepts Chwe ascribes to Austen is that of “cluelessness,” a term he takes from that classic nineties movie Clueless (inspired by Austen’s Emma, clip above). In Chwe’s analysis, cluelessness is not at all garden-variety stupidity; it’s the benevolent deviousness of Elizabeth Bennet or the “dumb blonde” act Alicia Silverstone’s character pulls off in convincing others that she doesn’t know what she’s doing, all the while manipulating, cajoling, and demurring to get her way.
Chwe also pursues the darker side of cluelessness, relating it to grim episodes like the 2004 killing of four private contractors in Falluja. Overall, his book identifies fifty “manipulation strategies” he finds in Austen. While his book seems to promise some entertaining observations it also might further confirm for serious Austen readers that the eighteenth-century novelist was one of the most psychologically insightful writers of the past few centuries.
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