Yes. It’s a comedy about life’s tragedies, great and small.
Are cartoons inspired by Waiting for Godot funny?
…mostly not. Especially when they’re set in waiting rooms (or airport arrivals areas).
Godot’s a hard trope for a cartoonist on the prowl for something fresh. Dogs, psychiatrists, castaways on desert islands are more elastic subjects, universal, but capable of being spun any number of ways.
To wring a comic worthy ofTheNew Yorker out of Godot, you probably have to be an actual New Yorker cartoonist, like Roz Chast, whose instantly recognizable work can be seen above.
Not to imply that New Yorker cartoonists are the only source for inspired Godot-inspired comics– the late, great Hergé, creator of Tintin made one.
(Oh wait, that’s not Hergé, it’s Tom Gauld who illustrates the Guardian’s Saturday Review letters page, scoring major points by relocating the terminally upbeat boy detective so outside his comfort zone that even Snowy is a negative image.)
Cartoonist Richard Thompson summoned Godot for a strip within a strip installment of his popular syndicated Cul de Sac. (Click the image above to view it in a larger format.) Will readers get the reference? Alice, his preschool-aged heroine, seems to, astutely echoing critic Vivian Mercier’s assessment of Godot as a play where “nothing happens…twice”.
Man’s nature, man’s dignity, is that he acts, lives, loves, and finally destroys himself seeking to penetrate the mystery of existence, and unless we partake in some way, as some part of this human exploration… then we are no more than the pimps of society and the betrayers of our Self.
If, on the 100th anniversary of its publication, you want to do a radio broadcast of a novella famously appreciated for its surface weirdness and more rarely appreciated for its sharp sense of humor, it only stands to reason that you’d hire a famous reader with famously appreciated surface oddness and more rarely appreciated sharp sense of humor of his own. I can only assume BBC Radio 4 followed a similar line of thinking when, to record Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (find the text in our collection of Free eBooks), they brought in Sherlock and The Imitation Game star Benedict Cumberbatch.
They’ll air the reading in four parts. The first and second episodes, in which luckless salesman Gregor Samsa inexplicably wakes up as an insect and faces the wrath and fear of his family, have already come available online for your listening pleasure; the next two episodes, when the insectified Samsa grows accustomed to his new form only to come into mortal conflict with his father and the newly dire financial straits of his household, will appear over the next two weeks on the production’s episode guide.
And if the idea of this mundane and monstrous tale told in the voice of Benedict Cumberbatch appeals to you, don’t delay. The BBC’s site will only let you stream it until June 10th (though currently you can find it online here.)
If you still have doubts, see also “Why Benedict Cumberbatch Is the Perfect Actor to Read Kafka’s Metamorphosis” by Slate’s Rebecca Schuman. “Cumberbatch’s trademark style is a withering, perfectly enunciated deadpan whose inflections somehow betray, three-fourths of the way through any sentence, sincere doubts that everyone will be in on the joke,” she writes. “Even better, this is poker face the way Kafka wrote it: tinged with at least some amount of creepiness, thanks to Cumberbatch’s unique ability to both look and sound like a very genteel sociopath.”
For less Cumberbatch-inclined Kafka enthusiasts, we also have this free audiobook of The Metamorphosis, which should remain available indefinitely. It’s recorded by Librivox.
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Sometimes it can seem as though the more we think we know a historical figure, the less we actually do. Helen Keller? We’ve all seen (or think we’ve seen) some version of The Miracle Worker, right?—even if we haven’t actually read Keller’s autobiography. And Mark Twain? He can seem like an old family friend. But I find people are often surprised to learn that Keller was a radical socialist firebrand, in sympathy with workers’ movements worldwide. In a short article in praise of Lenin, for example, Keller once wrote, “I cry out against people who uphold the empire of gold…. I am perfectly sure that love will bring everything right in the end, but I cannot help sympathizing with the oppressed who feel driven to use force to gain the rights that belong to them.”
Twain took a more pessimistic, ironic approach, yet he thoroughly opposed religious dogma, slavery, and imperialism. “I am always on the side of the revolutionists,” he wrote, “because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.” While a great many people grow more conservative with age, Twain and Keller both grew more radical, which in part accounts for another little-known fact about these two nineteenth century American celebrities: they formed a very close and lasting friendship that, at least in Keller’s case, may have been one of the most important relationships in either figure’s life.
Twain’s importance to Keller, and hers to him, begins in 1895, when the two met at a lunch held for Keller in New York. According to the Mark Twain Library’s extensive documentary exhibit, Keller “seemed to feel more at ease with Twain than with any of the other guests.” She would later write, “He treated me not as a freak, but as a handicapped woman seeking a way to circumvent extraordinary difficulties.”Twain was taken as well, surprised by “her quickness and intelligence.” After the meeting, he wrote to his benefactor Henry H. Rogers, asking Rogers to fund Keller’s education. Rogers, the Mark Twain Library tells us, “personally took charge of Helen Keller’s fortunes, and out of his own means made it possible for her to continue her education and to achieve for herself the enduring fame which Mark Twain had foreseen.”
Twain wrote to his wealthy friend, “It won’t do for America to allow this marvelous child to retire from her studies because of poverty. If she can go on with them she will make a fame that will endure in history for centuries.” Thereafter, the two would maintain a “special friendship,” sustained not only by their political sentiments, but also by a love of animals, travel, and other personal similarities. Both writers came to live in Fairfield County, Connecticut at the end of their lives, and she visited him at his Redding home, Stormfield, in 1909, the year before his death (see them there at the top of the post, and more photos here). Twain was especially impressed by Keller’s autobiography, writing to her, “I am charmed with your book—enchanted.” (See his endorsement in a 1903 advertisement, below.)
Twain also came to Keller’s defense, ten years later, after reading in her book about a plagiarism scandal that occurred in 1892 when, at only twelve years old, she was accused of lifting her short story “The Frost King” from Margaret Canby’s “Frost Fairies.” Though a tribunal acquitted Keller of the charges, the incident still piqued Twain, who called it “unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque” in a 1903 letter in which he also declared: “The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterance—is plagiarism.” What differs from work to work, he contends is “the phrasing of a story”; Keller’s accusers, he writes protectively, were “solemn donkeys breaking a little child’s heart.” (The exquisitely-worded letter is well worth reading in full at Letters of Note).
We also have Twain—not playwright William Gibson—to thank for the “miracle worker” title given to Keller’s teacher, Anne Sullivan. (See Keller, Sullivan, Twain, and Sullivan’s husband John Macy above at Twain’s home). As a tribute to Sullivan for her tireless work with Keller, he presented her with a postcard that read, “To Mrs. John Sullivan Macy with warm regard & with limitless admiration of the wonders she has performed as a ‘miracle-worker.’” In his 1903 letter to Keller, he called Sullivan “your other half… for it took the pair of you to make complete and perfect whole.”
Twain praised Sullivan effusively for “her brilliancy, penetration, originality, wisdom, character, and the fine literary competencies of her pen.” But he reserved his highest praise for Keller herself. “You are a wonderful creature,” he wrote, “The most wonderful in the world.” Keller’s praise of her friend Twain was no less lofty. “I have been in Eden three days and I saw a King,” she wrote in his guestbook during her visit to Stormfield, “I knew he was a King the minute I touched him though I had never touched a King before.” The last words in Twain’s autobiography, the first volume anyway—which he only allowed to be published in 2010—are Keller’s; “You once told me you were a pessimist, Mr. Clemons,” he quotes her as saying, “but great men are usually mistaken about themselves. You are an optimist.”
Maurice Sendak—like some few other exceptional children’s authors—also did work for adults, and in at least one case, did adult work, in his illustrations for a controversial 1995 edition of Herman Melville’s Pierre: or, The Ambiguities. The drawings are erotic, as well as homoerotic, illustrating the gay subtext in the novel. Sendak may seem like an unlikely illustrator for the Moby Dick author’s work; he was already an unlikely American children’s literary icon—“Jewish, gay, poor,” he nonetheless became “a major cultural influence,” writes blog BLT. As Sendak declared in an interview with Bill Moyers, he learned to “find a separate peace” from his own anxiety not through religious faith but through a “total faith in art.” “My gods,” Sendak told Moyers, “are Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Mozart,” among others. The author of Pierre figured highly in that divine hierarchy.
But Melville, at the time of Pierre’s publication, was not loved as a god. Shunned by critics and the reading public after the devastating reception accorded Moby Dick, his self-professed greatest work, Melville felt further humiliated when his publisher demanded he accept 20 cents on the dollar instead of 50 for the next novel, Pierre. Crushed, he signed the new contract. Then, though he had been satisfied with Pierre, considering the novel finished at the end of 1851, he added 150 pages, much of it a scathing, sardonic indictment of the literary establishment, including a non-too-subtle chapter titled “Young Literature in America.”
Whether the expansion was, as Maria Popova suggests at Brain Pickings, an eloquent riposte to his critics, or, as Library Journal suggests, made at the behest of his publishers (unlikely) is unclear. University of Delaware professor Herschel Parker, the Melville scholar who edited the Sendak edition of Pierre,admits, “we had NOT known when the expansion started and had not known just why.” Sendak himself describes Pierre as “a great and ingenious work of art.” Of the notion that Melville’s additions were “a vindictive diatribe against all his critics” Sendak speculates, “he might have been mad and hurt—He must have been mad and hurt. But he wouldn’t have spent that much time on a book being just mad and hurt.”
Sendak, a lifelong amateur Melville scholar, knows what he’s talking about. His familiarity with the author is such that his opinion was cited approvingly in the acknowledgments of a scholarly edition of Moby Dick. Despite Sendak’s comments in defense of Melville’s later additions, his and Parker’s version of Pierre attempts to strip them out and restore the novel to its earlier form, one Melville called his “Kraken book.” Sendak apparently initiated the project in order to publish the drawings. In them, writes John Bryan in a review for College English, “Pierre is a full-blown adolescent: muscular, ecstatic, desperate, devoted, and lonely; he is the man-child invincible.” The novel’s hero spends much of his time a blue Superman outfit, “red cape and all,” so tight “that it is skin itself, concealing nothing.”
Bibliokept compares the illustrations to William Blake. They also contain references to Goya and other artists who explored the grotesque, as well as the morbid, transgressive sexuality of the Pre-Raphaelite painters. “Nowhere else in the history of Melville illustration,” writes John Bryan, “do we find such openings into the latent sexuality of Melville’s prose.” Brain Pickings describes the drawings as “the most sexually expressive of any of his work, featuring 27 discernible nipples and 11 male ‘packages’…. Bold, unapologetic, and incredibly sensual, the illustrations are also subtly subversive in their treatment of gender identity and stereotypes.”
You can experience Dostoevsky in the original. You can experience Dostoevsky in translation. Or how about an experience of Dostoevsky in animation? Today we’ve rounded up two particularly notable examples of that last, both of which take up their unconventional project of adaptation with suitably unconventional animation techniques. At the top of the post, we have the first part (and just below we have the second) of Dostoevsky’s story “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” re-imagined by Russian animator Alexander Petrov.
The animation, as Josh Jones wrote here in 2014, “uses painstakingly hand-painted cells to bring to life the alternate world the narrator finds himself navigating in his dream. From the flickering lamps against the dreary, darkened cityscape of the ridiculous man’s waking life to the shifting, sunlit sands of the dreamworld, each detail of the story is finely rendered with meticulous care.” A haunting visual style for this haunting piece of late Dostoevsky in full-on existentialist mode.
Just below, you can see a longer and more ambitious adaptation of one of Dostoevsky’s much longer, much more ambitious works: Crime and Punishment. This half-hour animated version by Polish filmmaker Piotr Dumala, Mike Springer wrote here in 2012, gets “told expressionistically, without dialogue and with an altered flow of time. The complex and multi-layered novel is pared down to a few central characters and events,” all of them portrayed with a form of labor-intensive “destructive animation” in which Dumala engraved, painted over, and then re-engraved each frame on plaster, a method where “each image exists only long enough to be photographed and then painted over to create a sense of movement.”
If you’d now like to plunge into Dostoevsky’s literary world and find out if it compels you, too, to create strikingly unconventional animations — or any other sort of project inspired by the writer’s epic grappling with life’s greatest, most troubling themes — you can do it for free with our collection of Dostoevsky eBooks and audiobooks.
A few years ago, we featured J.R.R. Tolkien’s personal cover designs for the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a series of novels that justifiably made his name as a world-builder in prose (and occasional verse), but rather overshadowed his output as an illustrator. He didn’t just do covers for his own books, either. You can get a sense of the breadth of Tolkien’s visual art at the Tolkien Gateway’s gallery of over 100 images by Tolkien, which reveal the landscapes, letters, interiors, and animals within the creator of Middle-Earth’s mind.
Many of these images come with descriptions of their provenance, which you can read if you click on their thumbnails in the gallery. At the top of the post, you’ll find Tolkien’s 1927 painting Glaurung Sets Forth to Seek Turin, first published in The Silmarillion Calendar 1978.
“The title is in Old English letters, which J. R. R. Tolkien frequently used when writing in a formal style,” says the Tolkien Gateway, noting that, “at the time of the painting the name of the Father of Dragons was Glórund, not Glaurung,” and that “the entrance to Nargothrond is here seen as a single arch, unlike the triple doors seen in other drawings.” (Leave it to a Tolkien fan site to have just this sort of information at the ready.)
We also have here Tolkien’s crayon drawing of the West Gate of the Moria, a scene described in The Fellowship of the Ring as follows: “Beyond the ominous water were reared vast cliffs, their stern faces pallid in the fading light: final and impassable.” Just above is Tolkien’s rendering of Bag-End, residence of a certain B. Baggins, Esquire, “coloured by H.E. Riddett and first published in the English De Luxe edition and in a new edition of the Dutch translation (both 1976) of The Hobbit.” Just below, you can see his 1911 sketch of the much less fantastical Lamb’s Farm, Gedling.
Beyond perusing the images in the Tolkien Gateway, you’ll also want to have a look at Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull’s book, J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator. Some Tolkien enthusiasts will, understandably, prefer to keep their personal visualizations of the Lord of the Rings universe unsullied by non-textual imagery such as this, but if all of Peter Jackson’s megabudget film adaptations didn’t sully you, then Tolkien’s mild, almost rustic but still solemnly evocative drawings and paintings can only enrich the Middle-Earth in your own mind.
In 2012, Lisa Potts found a cassette tape wedged behind a dresser. It contained an interview she did with Bradbury back in 1972 when she was a student journalist. Potts and fellow student Chadd Coates talked to the author in the back of a car while they were making their way from Bradbury’s West L.A. home to Chapman College in Orange County where he was slated to give a lecture.
In the interview, Bradbury expounds on a wide range of topics – from the importance of friends – “That’s what friends are, the people who share your crazy outlook and protect you from the world” – to his fear of driving – “The whole activity is stupid.”
But the area where he seems to get the most passionate is, not surprisingly, about the act of creating. According to Bradbury, you don’t need a fancy, overpriced MFA to write. He never went to college after all. His school was his local public library. What you really need to be a writer is an obsessive love of writing, friends who are willing to nourish your obsession and a willingness to be a little crazy.
I am a dedicated madman, and that becomes its own training. If you can’t resist, if the typewriter is like candy to you, you train yourself for a lifetime. Every single day of your life, some wild new thing to be done. You write to please yourself. You write for the joy of writing. Then your public reads you and it begins to gather around your selling a potato peeler in an alley, you know. The enthusiasm, the joy itself draws me. So that means every day of my life I’ve written. When the joy stops, I’ll stop writing.
For anyone sweating blood in a coffee shop over a stubborn screenplay or novel, lines like that are balm for the soul. The whole interview has this same infectious joy of creating. Bradbury, by the way, wrote up until he died at the age of 91.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
Jorge Luis Borges specialized in envisioning the unenvisionable: a map the same size as the land it depicts, an event whose possible outcomes all occur simultaneously, a single point in space containing all other points in space, a vast library containing all possible books. That last, the setting, subject, and title of his short story “The Library of Babel,” has given readers much to think about since its first publication in 1941, and in recent decades has done more than its part to bolster Borges’ posthumous reputation as a seer of our unprecedentedly rich but often difficult-to-navigate new media landscape.
Borges imagined the Library of Babel comprising a huge number of connected hexagonal rooms lined by bookshelves. “Each shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black in color.” Each book contains a different combination of letters, and in total they contain all possible combinations of letters, with the result that the Library as a whole contains
Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels’ autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.
This vision has inspired a fair few thinkers, including most recently Brooklyn author and programmer Jonathan Basile. “I was lying in bed one night and the idea of an online Library of Babel popped into my head,” he says in an interview with Flavorwire. “My first thought was — it must exist already. It seems like such a natural extension of the capabilities of a computer that I was sure someone would have made it. The next day I looked for it, a bit excitedly, and was disappointed. From then on, it’s kind of been a reluctant destiny for me.”
As the fruit of that destiny, we have libraryofbabel.info, a new web site that will theoretically come to contain exactly what Borges’ Library of Babel contains: the text of every possible 410-page book. You can start looking through them by searching for text, viewing a random book, or browsing by hexagonal chamber. You’ll notice that the vast, vast majority of Basile’s Library of Babel offers nothing but nonsense — the very same thing, in other words, that Borges’ does, which in his telling causes great frustration among the luckless librarians charged with maintaining the place.
But a visit to the online Library of Babel should bring you to the same question the original story does: to what extent does meaning reside in the physical world, and to what extent does it reside in our minds? And what would Borges himself make of all this? “He was never one to take the border between reality and fiction too seriously,” says Basile. “Reading his story is already, in its own way, entering the world of the library. In a sense it’s a horror story, but it feels to me more like a black comedy. Perhaps he would just laugh.”
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