Kurt Vonnegut Gives Advice to Aspiring Writers in a 1991 TV Interview

in Education, Literature, Television, Writing | December 22nd, 2014

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:

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kurt Von­negut Reads Slaugh­ter­house-Five

Kurt Von­negut: Where Do I Get My Ideas From? My Dis­gust with Civ­i­liza­tion

Kurt Von­negut Explains “How to Write With Style”

Kurt Von­negut Dia­grams the Shape of All Sto­ries in a Master’s The­sis Reject­ed by U. Chica­go

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

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How William S. Burroughs Used the Cut-Up Technique to Shut Down London’s First Espresso Bar (1972)

in Creativity, Film, Literature | December 19th, 2014

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.

Moka-Bar-Frith-Street

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.

via The Great Wen

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When William S. Bur­roughs Joined Sci­en­tol­ogy (and His 1971 Book Denounc­ing It)

William S. Bur­roughs on the Art of Cut-up Writ­ing

William S. Bur­roughs Explains What Artists & Cre­ative Thinkers Do for Human­i­ty: From Galileo to Cézanne and James Joyce

William S. Bur­roughs’ Short Class on Cre­ative Read­ing

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Patti Smith’s Musical Tributes to the Russian Greats: Tarkovsky, Gogol & Bulgakov

in Literature, Music, Poetry | December 17th, 2014

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.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch Pat­ti Smith Read from Vir­ginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Sur­viv­ing Record­ing of Woolf’s Voice

See Pat­ti Smith Give Two Dra­mat­ic Read­ings of Allen Ginsberg’s “Foot­note to Howl”

Pat­ti Smith Plays Songs by The Ramones, Rolling Stones, Lou Reed & More on CBGB’s Clos­ing Night (2006)

Pat­ti Smith Doc­u­men­tary Dream of Life Beau­ti­ful­ly Cap­tures the Author’s Life and Long Career (2008)

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.

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Susan Sontag’s List of 10 Parenting Rules

in Life, Literature | December 16th, 2014

Image by Juan Fer­nan­do Bas­tos, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

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.

  1. Be con­sis­tent.
  2. Don’t speak about him to oth­ers (e.g. tell fun­ny things) in his pres­ence. (Don’t make him self-con­scious.)
  3. Don’t praise him for some­thing I wouldn’t always accept as good.
  4. Don’t rep­ri­mand him harsh­ly for some­thing he’s been allowed to do.
  5. Dai­ly rou­tine: eat­ing, home­work, bath, teeth, room, sto­ry, bed.
  6. Don’t allow him to monop­o­lize me when I am with oth­er peo­ple.
  7. Always speak well of his pop. (No faces, sighs, impa­tience, etc.)
  8. Do not dis­cour­age child­ish fan­tasies.
  9. Make him aware that there is a grown-up world that’s none of his busi­ness.
  10. 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).

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See Films Made by Susan Son­tag and a List of Her 50 Favorite Films (1977)

F. Scott Fitzger­ald Tells His 11-Year-Old Daugh­ter What to Wor­ry About (and Not Wor­ry About) in Life, 1933

“Noth­ing Good Gets Away”: John Stein­beck Offers Love Advice in a Let­ter to His Son (1958)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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O Frabjous Day! Neil Gaiman Recites Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” from Memory

in Books, K-12, Literature, Poetry | December 15th, 2014

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.

Ear­li­er this year, a rum­pled look­ing Gaiman read Dr. Seuss’s “rather won­der­ful” Green Eggs and Ham into his web­cam.

This month, with dona­tions to Heifer Inter­na­tion­al exceed­ing $600,000, he found him­self on the hook to read anoth­er piece of the donors’ choos­ing. Carroll’s non­sen­si­cal poem won out over Good­night Moon, Fox in Socks, and Where the Wild Things Are. 

Like fel­low author, Lyn­da Bar­ry, Gaiman is not one to under­es­ti­mate the val­ue of mem­o­riza­tion.

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.

Jab­ber­wocky is a poem that appears in Car­rol­l’s Through the Look­ing-Glass, the 1871 sequel to Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land (1865). You can find both in our col­lec­tion, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Neil Gaiman Reads The Grave­yard Book, His Award-Win­ning Kids Fan­ta­sy Nov­el, Chap­ter by Chap­ter

Neil Gaiman Gives Grad­u­ates 10 Essen­tial Tips for Work­ing in the Arts

Where Do Great Ideas Come From? Neil Gaiman Explains

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, home­school­er, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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Lou Reed Reads Delmore Schwartz’s Famous Story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”

in Audio Books, Literature | December 13th, 2014

Schwartz_Reed

 

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.

This read­ing has been added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lou Reed Rewrites Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” See Read­ings by Reed and Willem Dafoe

Rock and Roll Heart, 1998 Doc­u­men­tary Retraces the Remark­able Career of Lou Reed

Teenage Lou Reed Sings Doo-Wop Music (1958–1962)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Digital Dostoevsky: Download Free eBooks & Audio Books of the Russian Novelist’s Major Works

in Books, Literature | December 10th, 2014

Fyodor_Mikhailovich_Dostoyevsky_1876

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Dig­i­tal Niet­zsche: Down­load Nietzsche’s Major Works as Free eBooks

Watch a Hand-Paint­ed Ani­ma­tion of Dostoevsky’s “The Dream of a Ridicu­lous Man”

Watch Piotr Dumala’s Won­der­ful Ani­ma­tions of Lit­er­ary Works by Kaf­ka and Dos­to­evsky

The His­toric Meet­ing Between Dick­ens and Dos­to­evsky Revealed as a Great Lit­er­ary Hoax

Crime and Pun­ish­ment: Free Audio­Book and eBook

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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When Aldous Huxley Wrote a Script for Disney’s Alice in Wonderland

in Film, Literature | December 8th, 2014

alice hux

Many film­mak­ers have tried to adapt Lewis Car­rol­l’s Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land, but none, in the esti­ma­tion of most enthu­si­asts of either Alice or ani­ma­tion, have ful­ly suc­ceed­ed. Maybe the episod­ic nature of the book gives them trou­ble, maybe the humor and unex­pect­ed log­ic of its much-cel­e­brat­ed “non­sense” don’t real­ly trans­late from the print­ed word to the spo­ken, or maybe Car­roll knew how to han­dle the bound­ary between the real and the unre­al in a way no oth­er cre­ator can imi­tate. Nobody knows how many Alice adap­ta­tions have, con­se­quent­ly, implod­ed before even begin­ning. But when Walt Dis­ney, not a man of small ambi­tions, set about to bring Car­rol­l’s world to the sil­ver screen, he pressed on until it became 1951’s Alice in Won­der­land — about 20 years after the idea came to him in the first place.

“No sto­ry in Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture has intrigued me more than Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Won­der­land,” Dis­ney told the Amer­i­can Week­ly in 1946. “It fas­ci­nat­ed me the first time I read it as a school­boy and as soon as I pos­si­bly could after I start­ed mak­ing ani­mat­ed car­toons, I acquired the film rights to it.” The ani­ma­tor found spe­cial per­son­al res­o­nance in the fact that “peo­ple in his peri­od had no time to waste on triv­i­al­i­ty, yet Car­roll with his non­sense and fan­ta­sy fur­nished a bal­ance between seri­ous­ness and enjoy­ment which every­body need­ed then and still needs today.”

Oth­ers attempt­ed to bring Car­rol­l’s non­sense and fan­ta­sy up to date on film in 1903, 1910, and 1915, and Dis­ney him­self had begun plan­ning an abort­ed Alice movie with silent-era icon Mary Pick­ford in the ear­ly 1930s, but by the end of the Sec­ond World War, a defin­i­tive Dis­ney adap­ta­tion had yet to appear. Enter, in the fall of 1945, Aldous Hux­ley: author of Brave New World, scriptwriter on pre­vi­ous film projects like a life of Marie Curie as well as adap­ta­tions of Pride and Prej­u­dice and Jane Eyre, habitué of the bor­der­lands between real­i­ty and fan­ta­sy, and, in Dis­ney’s words, “Alice in Won­der­land fiend.” Dis­ney need­ed such a fiend, hav­ing start­ed to fear that his desired mod­ern­iza­tion of the mate­r­i­al might upset the Car­roll faith­ful.

Hux­ley’s script, a com­bi­na­tion of live action and ani­ma­tion, deals with the friend­ship between the Oxford don Charles Dodg­son (known, of course, by the pen name Lewis Car­roll), held back from attain­ing his dreamed-of life as a librar­i­an by the uni­ver­si­ty’s stern vice chan­cel­lor, and Alice (based upon Alice Lid­dell, the real-life inspi­ra­tion for Car­rol­l’s fic­tion­al Alice), held back from all things imprac­ti­cal by her even stern­er gov­erness. Though Hux­ley enjoyed doing the work, Dis­ney found it “too lit­er­ary,” and noth­ing of it made it into the 1951 movie. Even then, the final prod­uct dis­pleased the exact­ing ani­ma­tion vision­ary, as it still does quite a few Dis­ney fans.

While the full text of Hux­ley’s screen­play has­n’t sur­vived, and much of what Hux­ley wrote to pro­duce it burnt up in a 1961 house fire, you can read a thor­ough syn­op­sis of it and more of the back­sto­ry on the project at Mouse­plan­et. For even greater detail, see also “Hux­ley’s ‘Deep Jam’ and the Adap­ta­tion of Alice in Won­der­land,” an essay by David Leon Hig­don and Phill Lerhman in the Hux­ley vol­ume of Harold Bloom’s Mod­ern Crit­i­cal Views series.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See The Orig­i­nal Alice In Won­der­land Man­u­script, Hand­writ­ten & Illus­trat­ed By Lewis Car­roll (1864)

See Sal­vador Dali’s Illus­tra­tions for the 1969 Edi­tion of Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land

Alice in Won­der­land: The Orig­i­nal 1903 Film Adap­ta­tion

Curi­ous Alice — The 1971 Anti-Drug Movie Based on Alice in Won­der­land That Made Drugs Look Like Fun

Lewis Carroll’s Pho­tographs of Alice Lid­dell, the Inspi­ra­tion for Alice in Won­der­land

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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