Humanists believe that human beings produced the progressive advance of human society and also the ills that plague it. They believe that if the ills are to be alleviated, it is humanity that will have to do the job. They disbelieve in the influence of the supernatural on either the good or the bad of society, on either its ills or the alleviation of those ills.
There’s a widely disseminated Kurt Vonnegut quote that puts things even more succinctly:
I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishment after I’m dead.
It’s a definition Vonnegut, Asimov’s honorary successor as AHA president, a scientist’s son, and, famously, a survivor of the firebombing of Dresden, embodied, though surely not the only one he coined.
…a humanist, perhaps, was somebody who was crazy about human beings, who, like Will Rogers, had never met one he didn’t like. That certainly did not describe me. It did describe my dog, though.
As the title of Vonnegut’s speech implies (“Why My Dog is Not a Humanist”), Sandy, his undiscriminating Hungarian sheepdog, ultimately fell short of satisfying the criteria that would have labelled him a humanist. He lacked the capacity for rational thought of the highest order, and moreover, he regarded all humans — not just Vonnegut — as gods.
Ergo, your dog is probably not a humanist either.
Characteristically, Vonnegut ranged far and wide in his consideration of the matter, touching on a number of topics that remain germane, some 20 years after his remarks were made: race, excessive force, the treatment of prisoners…and Bill Cosby.
Remember when television was the big gorilla poised to put an end to all reading?
Then along came the miracle of the Internet. Blogs begat blogs, and thusly did the people start to read again!
Of course, many a great newspaper and magazine fell before its mighty engine. So it goes.
So did television in the old fashioned sense. So it goes.
Funny to think that these fast-moving developments weren’t even part of the landscape in 1991, when author Kurt Vonnegut swung by his hometown of Indianapolis to appear on the local program, Across Indiana.
Host Michael Atwood pointed out the irony of a television interviewer asking a writer if television was to blame for the decline in reading and writing. After which he listened politely while his guest answered at length, comparing reading to an acquired skill on par with “ice skating or playing the French horn.”
Gee… irony elicits a more frenetic approach in the age of BuzzFeed, Twitter, and YouTube. (Nailed it!)
Irony and humanity run neck and neck in Vonnegut’s work, but his appreciation for his Hoosier upbringing was never less than sincere:
When I was born in 1922, barely a hundred years after Indiana became the 19th state in the Union, the Middle West already boasted a constellation of cities with symphony orchestras and museums and libraries, and institutions of higher learning, and schools of music and art, reminiscent of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before the First World War. One could almost say that Chicago was our Vienna, Indianapolis our Prague, Cincinnati our Budapest and Cleveland our Bucharest.
To grow up in such a city, as I did, was to find cultural institutions as ordinary as police stations or fire houses. So it was reasonable for a young person to daydream of becoming some sort of artist or intellectual, if not a policeman or fireman. So I did. So did many like me.
Such provincial capitals, which is what they would have been called in Europe, were charmingly self-sufficient with respect to the fine arts. We sometimes had the director of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra to supper, or writers and painters, and architects like my father, of local renown.
I studied clarinet under the first chair clarinetist of our orchestra. I remember the orchestra’s performance of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, in which the cannons’ roars were supplied by a policeman firing blank cartridges into an empty garbage can. I knew the policeman. He sometimes guarded street crossings used by students on their way to or from School 43, my school, the James Whitcomb Riley School.
Vonnegut’s views were shaped at Shortridge High School, where he numbered among the many not-yet-renowned writers honing their craft on The Daily Echo. Thought he didn’t bring it up in the video above, the Echo also yielded his nickname: Snarf.
Vonnegut agreed with interviewer Atwood that the daily practice of keeping a journal is an excellent discipline for beginning writers. He also considered journalistic assignments a great training ground. He made a point of mentioning that Mark Twain and Ring Lardner got their starts as newspaper reporters. It may be harder for aspiring writers to find paying work these days, but the Internet is replete with opportunities for those who crave a daily assignment.
It’s also overflowing with bullet pointed lists on how to become a writer, but if you’re like me, you’ll prefer to receive this advice from Vonnegut, himself, on a set festooned with farming implements, quilts, and dipped candles.
The interview continues in the remaining parts:
Ayun Halliday is an author, homeschooler, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Like Vonnegut, she’s a native of Indianapolis, and her mother was the editor of the Short Ridge Daily Echo. Follow her @AyunHalliday
As we’ve noted before, the English coffeehouse has served as a staging ground for radical, sometimes revolutionary social change. Certainly this was the case during the Enlightenment, as it was with the salons in France. And yet, by the early 20th century it seems, coffee shops in London had grown scarcer and more humdrum. That is until 1953 when the Moka Bar, the UK’s first Italian espresso bar, opened in Soho. On his blog The Great Wen, Peter Watts describes its arrival as “a momentous event”:
London’s first proper coffee shop—one equipped with a Gaggia coffee machine—opened at 29 Frith Street. This was a place where teenagers too young for pubs could come and gather, and it is said by some that the introduction of this coffee bar prompted the youth culture explosion that soon changed social life in Britain forever.
“By 1972,” Watts writes, “coffee bars were everywhere and the teenage revolution was firmly established.” Places like the Moka Bar might seem like the ideal place for countercultural maven William S. Burroughs—a London resident from the late sixties to early seventies—to hobnob with young dissidents and outsiders. Burroughs, who so approvingly refers the possibly apocryphal anarchist pirate colony of Libertatia in his Cities of the Red Night, would, one might think, appreciate the budding anarchism of British youth culture, which would flower into punk soon enough.
But rather than joining the coffee bar scene, the cantankerous Burroughs had taken to frequenting “plush gentlemen’s shops of the area, not to mention the ‘Dilly Boys,’ young male prostitutes who hustled for clients outside the Regent Palace Hotel.”
And he had grown increasingly disillusioned with London, fuming, writes Ted Morgan in Burroughs biography Literary Outlaw, “at what he was paying for his hole-in-the-wall apartment with a closet for a kitchen” and at the rising price of utilities. “Burroughs,” Morgan tells us, “began to feel that he was in enemy territory.” And he thought the Moka coffee bar should pay the price for his indignities.
There, “on several occasions a snarling counterman had treated him with outrageous and unprovoked discourtesy, and served him poisonous cheesecake that made him sick.” Burroughs “decided to retaliate by putting a curse on the place.” He chose a means of attack that he’d earlier employed against the Church of Scientology, “turning up… every day,” writes Watts, “taking photographs and making sound recordings.” Then he would play them back a day or so later on the street outside the Moka. “The idea,” writes Morgan, “was to place the Moka Bar out of time. You played back a tape that had taken place two days ago and you superimposed it on what was happening now, which pulled them out of their time position.”
Burroughs also connected the method to the Watergate recordings, the Garden of Eden, and the theories of Alfred Korzybski. The trigger for the magical operation was, in his words, “playback.” In a very strange essay called “Feedback from Watergate to the Garden of Eden,” from his collection Electronic Revolution, Burroughs described his operation in detail, a disruption, he wrote, of a “control system.”
Now to apply the 3 tape recorder analogy to this simple operation. Tape recorder 1 is the Moka Bar itself it is pristine condition. Tape recorder 2 is my recordings of the Moka Bar vicinity. These recordings are access. Tape recorder 2 in the Garden of Eden was Eve made from Adam. So a recording made from the Moka Bar is a piece of the Moka Bar. The recording once made, this piece becomes autonomous and out of their control. Tape recorder 3 is playback. Adam experiences shame when his discraceful behavior is played back to him by tape recorder 3 which is God. By playing back my recordings to the Moka Bar when I want and with any changes I wish to make in the recordings, I become God for this local. I effect them. They cannot effect me.
The theory made perfect sense to Burroughs, who believed in a Magical Universe ruled by occult forces and who experimented heavily with Scientology, Crowley-an Magick, and the orgone energy of Wilhelm Reich. The attack on the Moka worked, or at least Burroughs believed it did. “They are seething in there,” he wrote, “I have them and they know it.” On October 30th, 1972 the establishment closed its doors—perhaps a consequence of those rising rents that so irked the Beat writer—and the location became the Queens Snack Bar.
The audio-visual cut-up technique Burroughs used in his attack against the Moka Bar was a method derived by Burroughs and Brion Gysin from their experiments with written “cut-ups,” and Burroughs applied it to film as well. At the top of the post, see an interpretive “meditation” based on Burroughs’ use of audio/visual “magical weapons” and incorporating his recordings. On YouTube, you can watch “The Cut Ups,” a short film Burroughs himself made in 1966 with cinematographer Antony Balch, a disorienting illustration of the cut up technique.
Not limited to attacking annoying London coffeehouse owners, Burroughs’ supposedly magical interventions in reality were in fact the fullest expression of his creativity. As Ted Morgan writes, “the single most important thing about Burroughs was his belief in the magical universe. The same impulse that lead him to put out curses was, as he saw it, the source of his writing.” Read much more about Burroughs’ theory and practice in Matthew Levi Stevens’ essay “The Magical Universe of William S. Burroughs,” and hear the author himself discourse on the paranormal, tape cut-ups, and much more in the lecture below from a writing class he gave in June, 1986.
In 2010, Patti Smith won a National Book Award for her memoir Just Kids, making her, by my count, the only Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member to land that prize. Of course, she’s also the only person I can think of who has appeared in both a movie by Jean-Luc Godard (Film Socialisme) and an episode of Law and Order. And she’s definitely the only rocker out there who has a personal invite from the Pope to play at the Vatican.
Back in the mid-‘70s, Smith fused the noise and urgency of punk rock with spoken word poetry and created something unlike anything before or since. She performed with such intensity on stage that she looked like a modern day shaman in the midst of an ecstatic revelry. Yet she had a literary sensibility that made her stand apart from most of her fellow proto-punks at CBGBs. (The Ramones are awesome but no one is going to parse the lyrics of “Beat on the Brat with a Baseball Bat.”) The B‑side track of Smith’s first single, “Piss Factory,” describes the unrelenting tedium she experienced working at a factory before she swiped a copy of Illuminations by French poet Arthur Rimbaud.
While making Film Socialisme with Godard, she conceived of her latest album, Banga, released in 2012. When she started writing songs, she was, as she said in an interview, very interested in Russian culture.
I like my travels to be akin with my studies, and so when I started being smitten with Bulgakov and started reading a lot of Russian literature and then watching a lot of Tarkovsky, being very immersed in Russian culture, I got some jobs in Russia. … But I’ve always done that. We have very idiosyncratic tours – I always make sure that the band does well financially, but a lot of our tours are based on things that I’m studying, and I’ll make choices as to where we go so that I can see something special.
The title track of the work, Banga, is taken from a minor character in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita – Pontus Pilate’s extremely loyal dog who waited centuries for his master to come to heaven. Fun fact: Johnny Depp played drums on this track.
According to the liner notes, the album’s first single, “April Fool” was inspired by novelist Nikolai Gogol. As John Freeman notes in the Moscow Times, a number of lines from the song evoke the writer.
We’ll race through alleyways in tattered coats” is a fairly clear reference to Gogol’s short story “The Overcoat,” while “we’ll burn all of our poems” begs to be considered a nod to the fact that Gogol famously burned the second volume of his great novel “Dead Souls.” That work, one of Russia’s funniest and darkest, is conjured in the lines, “We’ll tramp through the mire when our souls feel dead. With laughter we’ll inspire them back to life again.
And the track “Tarkovsky (The Second Stop Is Jupiter)”, not surprisingly, evokes images from the films of cinematic auteur Andrei Tarkovsky – specifically, his metaphysical sci-fi epic Solaris along with Ivan’s Childhood. Hear the track at the top of this post, and watch Tarkovsky’s films online here.
In case you thought that the album was just about Russians, her song “This is the Girl” is about the life and death of Amy Winehouse, “Fuji-San” is a tribute to the massive 2011 Tohoku earthquake, and “Nine” is a birthday present to Johnny Depp.
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.
Parenting is difficult. I don’t need to tell you this—those of you who face the challenge daily and hourly. Those of you who don’t have heard your friends—and your own parents—do enough complaining that you know, in theory at least, how raising humans is rough business all around. Paradoxically, there is no rulebook for parenting and there are hundreds of rulebooks for parenting, seemingly a new one published every day. In my admittedly limited experience as the parent of a young child, most such guides have diminishing returns next to the direct lessons learned in the fray, so to speak, through trial after trial and no small amount of error.
But we do benefit from the wisdom of others, especially those who record their experiments in child-rearing with the precision and thoughtfulness of Susan Sontag. In the list below, made by a 26-year-old Sontag in 1959, we see how the young mother of a then 7‑year-old David Rieff approached the job.
The son of Sontag and sociologist Philip Rieff (“pop,” below), whom Sontag married at 17 then divorced in 1958, David has written a memoir of Sontag’s painful final days. He also edited her journals and notebooks, which contained the following rules.
Be consistent.
Don’t speak about him to others (e.g. tell funny things) in his presence. (Don’t make him self-conscious.)
Don’t praise him for something I wouldn’t always accept as good.
Don’t reprimand him harshly for something he’s been allowed to do.
Don’t allow him to monopolize me when I am with other people.
Always speak well of his pop. (No faces, sighs, impatience, etc.)
Do not discourage childish fantasies.
Make him aware that there is a grown-up world that’s none of his business.
Don’t assume that what I don’t like to do (bath, hairwash) he won’t like either.
While Rieff has described his relationship with Sontag as “strained and at times very difficult,” it seems to me that a parent who adhered to these rules would create the kind of supportive structure children need to thrive. The remainder of Sontag’s journal entries show us a deeply introspective, self-conscious writer, and yet, writes Emily Greenhouse at The New Yorker, her work as a whole offers “surprisingly little of her own direct experience” and she never undertook an autobiography. Yet, this short list of parenting rules gives us a great deal of insight into the perspicacity and compassion she brought to her role as a mother, qualities most of us could use a bit more of in our daily parenting struggles.
The list above appears in the new book Lists of Note, the follow up to Shaun Usher’s Letters of Note, both compilations of his extensive online archives of personal notes and correspondence from famous and interesting people. Download a preview of the book and purchase a hardcover copy, just in time for Christmas, at Waterstones.com (if you live in the UK).
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 a galloping vignette in Tablet, writer Lee Smith manages to evoke the essences of both sentimental tough guy Lou Reed and his literary mentor and hero, “Brooklyn Jewish Troubadour” Delmore Schwartz. Although Schwartz’s “poetry is his real legacy,” Smith writes, that rich body of work is often obscured by the fact that “his most famous work is a short story,” the much-anthologized “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” (1935) It’s a story written in prose as lyrical as can be—with sentences one wants to pause and linger over, reading again and again, out loud if possible. It’s also a story in which we see “a direct line… between Schwartz and Reed,” whose song “Perfect Day” performs similar kind of magical cataloguing of urban impermanence. For Reed, onetime student of Schwartz at Syracuse University, “Delmore Schwartz is everything.”
Reed dedicated the last song, “European Son,” on the first Velvet Underground album to Schwartz, and wrote an eloquent forward to a reissue of Schwartz’s first collection of stories and poems, also titled In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. And just above, you can hear Reed himself read the story aloud, savoring those lyrical sentences in his Brooklyn deadpan. It’s easy to imagine Reed writing many of these sentences, such was Schwartz’s influence on him. They shared not only common origins, but also a common sensibility; in Reed’s songs we hear the echo of Schwartz’s voice, the satirical world-weariness and the lyricism and longing. In the biographical documentary Rock and Roll Heart, Reed says that Schwartz showed him how, “with the simplest language imaginable, and very short, you can accomplish the most astonishing heights.” Reading, and listening to Schwartz’s astonishing “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” may help you understand just what he meant.
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!
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