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.”
Hôtel de Lauzun, the meeting place of the Club des Hachichins
It may be cliché to say so, but there does seem to be a strong correlation between experiments with mind-altering chemicals and some of the most intriguing experiments in literary style. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Arthur Rimbaud, William S. Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson…. Of course, it is necessary to point out that these talented writers were already that—talented writers—substances or no. As one of Rimbaud’s modern children, Patti Smith, declares, drugs are “not really how one accesses the imagination. It can be a tool, but when that tool starts to master you, you’ll lose touch with your craft.”
This seems to have happened to Smith’s literary idol. One of Rimbaud’s literary heroes, Charles Baudelaire, also eventually succumbed to his excessive use of laudanum, alcohol, and opium. But at one time, Baudelaire dabbled with a much less destructive drug, hashish, along with a coterie of other artists, including Alexandre Dumas, Gérard de Nerval, Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, and painter Eugène Delacroix. The French greats gathered in a gothic house, from 1844–1849, under the moniker Club des Hachichins and partook of the drug, introduced to it by medical doctor Jacques-Joseph Moreau and writer and journalist Théophile Gautier. Writes The Guardian:
…ritualistically garbed in Arab clothing, they drank strong coffee, liberally laced with hashish, which Moreau called dawamesk, in the Arabic manner. It looked, reported the members, like a greenish preserve, its ingredients a mixture of hashish, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, pistachio, sugar, orange juice, butter and cantharides. Some of them would write of their “stoned” experiences, although not all. Balzac attended the club but preferred not to indulge, though some time in 1845 the great man cracked and ate some. He told fellow members he had heard celestial voices and seen visions of divine paintings.
Baudelaire declared the hash admixture “the playground of the seraphim” and “a little green sweetmeat.” And yet, like Balzac, he “rarely, if indeed ever, indulged.” Gautier would write of the poet, “It is possible and even probable that Baudelaire did try hascheesh once or twice by way of physiological experiment, but he never made continuous use of it. Besides, he felt much repugnance for that sort of happiness, bought at the chemist’s and taken away in the vest-pocket.”
This “repugnance” did not keep Baudelaire from other drugs. And it did not keep him from writing a short book in 1860 on hash and opium, Artificial Paradises(Les Paradis Artificiels). The Paris Reviewreprints an excerpt of one section, “The Poem of Hashish”—not in fact a poem, but a descriptive essay. Translated by Aleister Crowley—another writer whose experiments with chemical excess contributed to some of the strangest books written in English—Baudelaire’s prose is almost medical in its precision. In part a response to Thomas de Quincy’s 1821 drug memoir Confession’s of an English Opium Eater, the symbolist poet’s treatise does not draw the conclusions one might expect.
Though he writes stunningly vivid, almost seductive, descriptions of hash intoxication, instead of praising the creative effects of drugs, Baudelaire disparages their use and warns of addiction, especially for the artist. At one point, he writes, “He who would resort to a poison in order to think would soon be incapable of thinking without the poison. Can you imagine this awful sort of man whose paralyzed imagination can no longer function without the benefit of hashish or opium?” Baudelaire recognized these stifling effects even as he lapsed into addiction himself, describing in withering terms the search “in pharmacy” for an escape from “his habitaculum of mire.”
You can read an excerpt of the Crowley-translated “The Poem of Hashish” at The Paris Review’s site and the full translation here. Those who have indulged in their own cannabis experiments—legally or otherwise—will surely recognize the poetic accuracy of his hash portrait, so perfect that it’s hard to believe he didn’t partake at least once or twice at the all-star Club des Hachichins:
Hashish often brings about a voracious hunger, nearly always an excessive thirst … Such a state would not be supportable if it lasted too long, and if it did not soon give place to another phase of intoxication, which in the case above cited interprets itself by splendid visions, tenderly terrifying, and at the same time full of consolations. This new state is what the Easterns call Kaif. It is no longer the whirlwind or the tempest; it is a calm and motionless bliss, a glorious resignèdness. Since long you have not been your own master; but you trouble yourself no longer about that. Pain, and the sense of time, have disappeared; or if sometimes they dare to show their heads, it is only as transfigured by the master feeling, and they are then, as compared with their ordinary form, what poetic melancholy is to prosaic grief.
If someone asks whether you like Tales of Mystery and Imagination, you’d better clarify which Tales of Mystery and Imagination they mean: the first complete collection of horror and suspense stories by master of psychological unease Edgar Allan Poe, or the first album by progressive rock band The Alan Parsons Project? But if you like one, you might well like the other, given that Parsons based his group’s debut, which contains such tracks as “The Raven,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” directly on Poe’s work.
Not only do Parsons’ compositions use Poe’s themes, they use Poe’s words. “How important the Poe concept is is questionable,” declared the contemporary Billboard review, “but the LP as a whole holds up well as a viable musical work.” It having been 1976, the writer does note its “strong FM potential,” but time has much increased Tales of Mystery and Imagination’s status in rock, progressive or otherwise. All Music Guide’s Mike DeGagne more recently called the album “an extremely mesmerizing aural journey” and “a vivid picture of one of the most alluring literary figures in history.”
Of course, those two reviews don’t evaluate quite the same production, since, in 1987, Parsons, a born studio tinkerer, went back and remixed Tales of Mystery and Imagination. He added a good deal of not just 1980s-style reverb, but new guitar bits and pieces of Poe recital, this time performed by no less an ideal reader than Orson Welles, who’d sent Parsons a tape of his Poe performance shortly after the original album appeared. You can hear his contribution on the tracks “A Dream Within a Dream” and “Fall of the House of Usher.” Both above. The complete album is available below on Spotify.
You might wonder what work of Poe’s, exactly, you hear Welles reading from, since none of it sounds like the writer’s best-known passages. The words spoken in “A Dream Within a Dream” come from a reflection Poe wrote in his Marginalia, and those in “The Fall of the House of Usher” perform something of a remix themselves, combining more nonfiction from the Marginalia with the introduction to his Poems of Youth. Only a dedicated Poe enthusiast indeed would recognize all these passages, but surely such a person would love both Tales of Mystery and Imagination and Tales of Mystery and Imagination. If you, personally, don’t go in for Poe in the prog-rock treatment, might I suggest Parsons’ take on Asimov?
Image by Fred Palumbo, made available by the Library of Congress.
Put THIS in your pocket. The Library of Congress is celebrating National Poetry Month by launching its new Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature. It debuts with 50 choice poetry recordings, spanning 75 years of time. In the past, you’d have had to visit the library in person to listen to these goodies on reel-to-reel tape. Now you can take them to the gym, plug in as you wash dishes, post online links for your minions to enjoy.
Newly ensconced Consultant in Poetry Gwendolyn Brooks (was there ever a more recognizable voice?) prefaces her reading by pledging her intention to register “on the public consciousness and conscience the generally neglected richness of ‘minority poetry.’”
Robert Frost tells Randall Jarrell of his desire to identify American antiquity — to feature in his poetry a woodchopper’s hut that looks “as old as Babylon.”
Paul Muldoon shares the story of how he came to own the eelskin bag that is the star of “The Briefcase.”
As part of its ongoing commitment to the form, the Library will be adding to the online archive on a monthly basis. Let every month be Poetry Month! You can stream the complete collection here.
No profile of Haruki Murakami, the most globally popular novelist alive, fails to refer to the high number of languages (as of this writing, the count has reached 50) in which his 14 Japanese-language novels have appeared in translation. But outside Japan, monoglot Murakamists (especially readers of only English) have a problem: they still can’t read a wealth of Murakami’s other, non-novelistic writing, including the full-length, two-volume version of Underground, his study of the 1995 Tokyo sarin gas attack; his Portrait in Jazz books on his favorite music; and most of his many essays and movie reviews.
Even some of Murakami’s fiction has remained more or less off-limits to global readers. I discovered this when I came across a collection of his I’d never even heard of while book-shopping in Seoul. Realizing that of course more Murakami material would find its way into Korean, a grammatically similar language to Japanese, than English, I set about checking every bookstore in the city I knew for other unknown volumes. One book of short stories, titled in Korean 밤의 원숭이 (Spider Monkey of the Night), particularly delighted me with its strange and extremely brief tales, each accompanied by charming illustrations.
But where did these stories, with their titles like “Hotel Lobby Oysters,” “Julio Iglesias,” and “Takayama Noriko and My Libido,” come from? They came, as Neojaponisme’s post on them explains, from the world of advertising, and specifically from a company called “Onward,” which marketed the American Ivy League fashion label J. Press in Japan:
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Onward spent massive sums on advertising J. Press in the print media. The classic ad format, often seen on the back cover of lifestyle magazine Popeye, showed a Japanese or American man telling a colorful story about their favorite trad clothing item. In 1985, as Japanese pop culture went in more avant-garde directions, Onward came up with a new idea — asking up-and-coming novelist Murakami Haruki to write a very short story inside each month’s advertisement for magazines Popeye, Box, and Men’s Club.
“So once a month from April 1985 to February 1987, Murakami wrote a ‘short short’ (短い短編), which was set on its own page with an illustration by famed artist Anzai Mizumaru at the top and a small J. Press logo in the lower left corner.” During that time, out came Murakami’s hit novel Norwegian Wood, which rocketed him to a level of fame that effectively put him in exile from his homeland. But the advertorial short-short form still appealed to him, and in 1993 he got famous penmaker Parker to sponsor 24 new ones.
At the time I was sitting on the hotel lobby sofa and vaguely thinking about oysters. Not lemon soufflé, not pencil sharpeners – oysters. I don’t know why. I just suddenly realized that I was thinking about oysters.
The oysters I was thinking about on the hotel lobby sofa were different from oysters thought about anywhere else. They were shaped differently, they smelled differently, and their color was different, too. They weren’t oysters harvested in some cove. They were pure oysters harvested in a hotel lobby.
After thinking about oysters for a while, I went to the sink to wash my face, then retied my tie and returned to the sofa. When I got back, the oysters had already disappeared from inside my head. Again, I don’t know why. Maybe it was because I washed my faced or because I retied my tie. Or maybe the hotel oyster season is extremely short.
When the girl came 17 minutes after our appointed time, I told her about the hotel lobby oysters. The image was so distinct I felt like I had to tell someone about them.
“You want to eat oysters?” she asked.
“No, these oysters, they were purely oysters as a concept, unrelated to my appetite,” I explained. “The oysters came into being as the very essence of oys—“
“But you do want to eat some, right?” she said.
When she mentioned it and I settled down to think about it, I certainly had developed an incredible desire to eat oysters. We went to the hotel restaurant and ate 25 oysters while drinking wine. Sometimes I think my appetite originates from a really strange place.
I was sitting at my desk at 2:00 in the morning and writing. I pushed my window open and a spider monkey came in.
“Oh, hey, who are you?” I asked.
“Oh, hey, who are you,” the spider monkey said.
“Don’t copy me,” I said.
“Don’t copy me,” the monkey said.
“Don’t copy me,” I copied him.
“Don’t copy me,” he copied me in italics.
Man, this is really annoying, I thought. If I get caught up with this copycat-crazed night monkey, who knows when this will end. I’ll just have to trip him up somewhere. I had a job that I had to finish by morning, and I couldn’t very well keep doing this all night.
“Heppoku rakurashi manga totemuya, kurini kamasu tokimi wakoru, pacopaco,” I said quickly.
Since I had said something completely random, I couldn’t actually tell if the monkey had copied me correctly or not. Well, that was pointless.
“Leave me alone,” I said.
“Leave me alone,” the monkey said.
“You got it wrong, I didn’t say it in italics that time.”
“You got it wrong, I didn’t say it in ītalics that time.”
“I didn’t put a macron over the i.”
“I didn’t put a macron over the eye.”
I sighed. No matter what I said, the spider monkey wouldn’t understand. I decided to not say anything and just keep doing my work. Still, when I pressed a key on my word processor, the monkey silently pressed the copy key. Click. Still, when I pressed a key on my word processor, the monkey silently pressed the copy key. Click. Leave me alone. Leave me alone.
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