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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

H.P. Lovecraft Highlights the 20 “Types of Mistakes” Young Writers Make

in Literature, Sci Fi, Writing | December 5th, 2014

lovecraft hp

Image by Lucius B. Trues­dell, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

H.P. Love­craft is remem­bered as a bril­liant fan­ta­sist, a cre­ator of a com­plete­ly unique uni­verse of hor­ror. He’s also remem­bered, unfor­tu­nate­ly, as a big­ot. But the author whose head—to the cha­grin of some—provided the mod­el for the World Fan­ta­sy Award is not often remem­bered as a par­tic­u­lar­ly good writer. Or rather, I should say, a par­tic­u­lar­ly good styl­ist. His writ­ing can sound sti­fling­ly archa­ic, over­stuffed with Vic­to­ri­anisms. “His prose, “writes Scott Malt­house, “can be turgid and adjec­tives suf­fo­cat­ing,” and “his char­ac­ters tend to be as thin as the paper they’re print­ed on.”

Writ­ers love him, Malt­house argues, because he was such an orig­i­nal “world builder,” not because he was a fine artist. Eliz­a­beth Bear at Tor echoes the sen­ti­ment, writ­ing that Love­craft’s work is “crit­i­cized for its style, for its pur­ple­ness and den­si­ty and fail­ures of struc­ture,” yet still evokes such a potent response that “the Love­craft­ian uni­verse must be con­sid­ered a col­lab­o­ra­tive effort at this point,” since so many writ­ers have fur­thered his “appeal­ing­ly bleak” vision. You can down­load a good part of his col­lect­ed works in ebook and audio­book for­mats here.

So per­haps he isn’t such a bad writer after all? In any case, he’s cer­tain­ly a very dis­tinc­tive one whose style, like Joseph Conrad’s, say, or even William Faulkner’s, endears read­ers pre­cise­ly for its fever­ish excess­es. Love­craft him­self was very self-con­scious about his craft and took writ­ing very seriously—enough to have pub­lished a lengthy, high­ly detailed essay called “Lit­er­ary Com­po­si­tion” which tack­les in sev­er­al para­graphs a host of issues the writer must con­tend with: gram­mar, “read­ing,” vocab­u­lary, “ele­men­tal phras­es,” descrip­tion, nar­ra­tion, “fic­tion­al nar­ra­tion,” “uni­ty, mass, coher­ence,” and “forms of com­po­si­tion.” We won’t recite the whole of his advice here—you can read the whole thing for your­self. But to give you some of the fla­vor of Lovecraft’s ped­a­gogy, we bring you his list of twen­ty “types of mis­takes” young writ­ers make.

See his com­plete list below.

  1. Erro­neous plu­rals of nouns, as val­lies or echos.
  2. Bar­barous com­pound nouns, as view­point or upkeep.
  3. Want of cor­re­spon­dence in num­ber between noun and verb where the two are wide­ly sep­a­rat­ed or the con­struc­tion involved
  4. Ambigu­ous use of pro­nouns.
  5. Erro­neous case of pro­nouns, as whom for who, and vice ver­sa, or phras­es like “between you and I,” or “Let we who are loy­al, act prompt­ly.”
  6. Erro­neous use of shall and will, and of oth­er aux­il­iary verbs.
  7. Use of intran­si­tive for tran­si­tive verbs, as “he was grad­u­at­ed from col­lege,” or vice ver­sa, as “he ingra­ti­at­ed with the tyrant.”
  8. Use of nouns for verbs, as “he motored to Boston,” or “he voiced a protest,”
  9. Errors in moods and tens­es of verbs, as “If I was he, I should do oth­er­wise”, or “He said the earth was”
  10. The split infini­tive, as “to calm­ly ”
  11. The erro­neous per­fect infini­tive, as “Last week I expect­ed to have met”
  12. False verb-forms, as “I pled with him.”
  13. Use of like for as, as “I strive to write like Pope wrote.”
  14. Mis­use of prepo­si­tions, as “The gift was bestowed to an unwor­thy object,” or “The gold was divid­ed between the five men.”
  15. The super­flu­ous con­junc­tion, as “I wish for you to do this.”
  16. Use of words in wrong sens­es, as “The book great­ly intrigued me”, “Leave me take this”, “He was obsessed with the idea”, or “He is a metic­u­lous”
  17. Erro­neous use of non-Angli­cised for­eign forms, as “a strange phe­nom­e­na”, or “two stratas of clouds”.
  18. Use of false or unau­tho­rised words, as bur­glarise or supremest.
  19. Errors of taste, includ­ing vul­garisms, pompous­ness, rep­e­ti­tion, vague­ness, ambigu­ous­ness, col­lo­qui­al­ism, bathos, bom­bast, pleonasm, tau­tol­ogy, harsh­ness, mixed metaphor, and every sort of rhetor­i­cal awk­ward­ness.
  20. Errors of spelling and punc­tu­a­tion, and con­fu­sion of forms such as that which leads many to place an apos­tro­phe in the pos­ses­sive pro­noun its.

Most of this is sol­id, com­mon sense writ­ing advice. Some of it isn’t. As with all things Love­craft, you would be wise to use your dis­cre­tion. A full read of Lovecraft’s trea­tise on com­po­si­tion will give you some sense of how to begin writ­ing your own Love­craft pas­tiche. For even more of his advice on the writ­ing of fiction—particularly, as he called it, “weird fic­tion,” see his list of five tips for hor­ror writ­ing, which we fea­tured in Octo­ber.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

H.P. Love­craft Gives Five Tips for Writ­ing a Hor­ror Sto­ry, or Any Piece of “Weird Fic­tion”

H.P. Lovecraft’s Clas­sic Hor­ror Sto­ries Free Online: Down­load Audio Books, eBooks & More

Love­craft: Fear of the Unknown (Free Doc­u­men­tary)

Stephen King’s Top 20 Rules for Writ­ers

Writ­ing Tips by Hen­ry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Mar­garet Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Thug Notes Demystifies 60 Literary Classics (from Shakespeare to Gatsby) with a Fresh Urban Twist

in Books, Comedy, Literature | December 2nd, 2014

Gen­tle read­er, if you feel your knee jerk­ing at Thug Notes, may I sug­gest tak­ing a moment to gaze beyond the gold bling and du-rag favored by its fic­ti­tious host, lit­er­a­ture lover Sparky Sweets, PhD.

Or do we think YA author John Green should hold the monop­oly on wit­ty, break­neck decon­struc­tions of clas­sic lit­er­a­ture? No shade towards Green. The Crash Course empire he’s cre­at­ed with his sci­en­tist broth­er, Hank, pro­vides a great and enter­tain­ing ser­vice to stu­dents of all ages. His cute-nerd vibe makes him an appeal­ing host.

But there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

A poor choice of metaphor, giv­en the fic­ti­tious Dr. Sweets’ soft spot for baby felines. It’s not some­thing he talks about on the show, but he fre­quent­ly tweets pho­tos of him­self in their oh-so-cud­dly com­pa­ny, tag­ging them #kit­ten­ther­a­py.

He (or per­haps head writer / pro­duc­er Jared Bauer) also turns to Twit­ter to dis­sem­i­nate quotes by the likes of Cer­vantes (“Dili­gence is the moth­er of good for­tune”) and Orwell (“Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does”).

Thug Notes’ tagline “clas­sic lit­er­a­ture, orig­i­nal gangs­ta” may be its punch­line, but the humor of incon­gruity is not its sole aim.

Come­di­an Greg Edwards, who plays Sparky Sweets, told The New York Times that the project is “triv­i­al­iz­ing academia’s attempt at mak­ing lit­er­a­ture exclu­sion­ary by show­ing that even high­brow aca­d­e­m­ic con­cepts can be com­mu­ni­cat­ed in a clear and open fash­ion.”

Amen. As Sparky Sweets observes fol­low­ing Simon’s mur­der in the Lord of the Flies above, “Whoo, this $hit (is) get­tin’ real!”

Is there a dan­ger that white teenage boys who love com­e­dy and hip hop, who are indif­fer­ent to lit­er­a­ture, and who know few black peo­ple and/or urban dwellers, might run around imi­tat­ing their favorite parts of these videos, not real­iz­ing that their attempt to embody the char­ac­ter is per­pet­u­at­ing a stereo­type in a bad way?

Yes.

Is there an equal or greater dan­ger that a reluc­tant stu­dent might be prod­ded in a pos­i­tive direc­tion by Sparky’s zesty, insight­ful take on their assigned read­ing?

Resound­ing­ly, yes.

Thug Notes’ dis­cus­sion of racism as por­trayed in To Kill a Mock­ing­bird is not the longest I’ve ever heard, but it is the most straight­for­ward and brac­ing. It got my blood going! I’m inspired to drag my dog eared paper­back copy out and give it anoth­er read! (Maybe I’ll have a Scotch and play some clas­si­cal music. Sparky does that too.)

I’m hop­ing the kids at the high school a cou­ple of blocks away — who, for the record, look and sound far more like Sparky than they do me — will be encour­aged to sup­ple­ment their read­ing of this book, and oth­ers, with Thug Notes.

As an out-of-char­ac­ter Greg Edwards, bear­ing as much resem­blance to Sparky Sweets as Stephen Col­bert does to his most famous cre­ation, told inter­view­er Tavis Smi­ley:

We don’t want to stop kids from read­ing the book. We just want to open up doors. Maybe teach­ers can use it. It’s hard being a teacher nowa­days. You’re under­paid, you’re over­worked, the class­rooms are full, the kids are crazy, so throw this on and maybe it’ll spark one kid’s atten­tion.

As of this writ­ing, Thug Notes has tack­led dozens of titles (you can watch them all here, or right below), a heap­ing help­ing of banned books, and four of Shakespeare’s plays (above).

New titles will be added every oth­er Tues­day. I can’t wait.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alexan­der Hamil­ton: Hip-Hop Hero at the White House Poet­ry Evening

The Can­ter­bury Tales Remixed: Baba Brinkman’s New Album Uses Hip Hop to Bring Chaucer Into the 21st Cen­tu­ry, Yo

Do Rap­pers Have a Big­ger Vocab­u­lary Than Shake­speare?: A Data Sci­en­tist Maps Out the Answer

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Albert Camus: The Madness of Sincerity — 1997 Documentary Revisits the Philosopher’s Life & Work

in Literature, Philosophy | November 30th, 2014

Open­ing with a child­hood sto­ry from his life, the doc­u­men­tary above, Albert Camus: The Mad­ness of Sin­cer­i­ty, tells us that the philosopher/journalist/novelist’s first love was “the howl­ing and the tumult of the wind.” It’s a beau­ti­ful image for a writer who con­front­ed the pain, joy, and con­fu­sion of human exis­tence with­out the ready-made props of reli­gious belief, nation­al­ist alle­giance, or ide­o­log­i­cal con­for­mi­ty. Camus’ “mad­ness of sin­cer­i­ty” pro­duced endur­ing work like The Stranger, The Plague, The Rebel, The First Man, and The Fall and won him a Nobel Prize in 1957.

His con­vic­tion also cost him friend­ships as he turned away from mass move­ments and pur­sued his own path. It was a cost he was pre­pared to bear. As he would write in The Fall in 1956, “How could sin­cer­i­ty be a con­di­tion of friend­ship? A lik­ing for the truth at all costs is a pas­sion that spares noth­ing and that noth­ing can with­stand.”

After the wind, of course, Camus had many more loves, and many lovers. A few of them appear above, along with Camus’ daugh­ter Cather­ine and son Jean to dis­cuss the great themes of his work in three chap­ters: the Absurd, Revolt, and Hap­pi­ness. With dis­cus­sion and excerpts—read by nar­ra­tor Bri­an Cox—from Camus’ work, the doc­u­men­tary traces his life from birth and a dif­fi­cult child­hood in French Alge­ria, to his dai­ly edi­to­ri­als for Com­bat dur­ing the French Resis­tance, his turn against Com­mu­nism and deci­sion to live in near-exile in the ‘50s, and his pre­ma­ture death in a car acci­dent in 1960 at the age of 47. All in all, the doc­u­men­tary leaves us with the impres­sion of Camus as a mag­net­ic indi­vid­ual, and a deeply prin­ci­pled one, who held true to the words quot­ed from his Nobel accep­tance speech ear­ly in the film about the writer’s task, which is always, he said, “root­ed in two com­mit­ments… the refusal to lie about what one knows, and resis­tance to oppres­sion.”

Find more thought-pro­vok­ing films in our col­lec­tion, 285 Free Doc­u­men­taries Online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Albert Camus Deliv­er His Nobel Prize Accep­tance Speech (1957)

Albert Camus Wins the Nobel Prize & Sends a Let­ter of Grat­i­tude to His Ele­men­tary School Teacher (1957)

Albert Camus Writes a Friend­ly Let­ter to Jean-Paul Sartre Before Their Per­son­al and Philo­soph­i­cal Rift

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow Finally Gets Released as an Audio Book

in Audio Books, Literature | November 27th, 2014

gravitys rainbow audiobook

A quick heads up for Thomas Pyn­chon fans. Four decades after its pub­li­ca­tion, you can final­ly get Gravity’s Rain­bow as an audio book — pos­si­bly even as a free audio book.

Accord­ing to The New York Times, “Since the mid-1980s, a George Guidall record­ing [of the 1973 nov­el] has been float­ing around, like some myth­i­cal lost rock­et part — no one had heard it, but all Pyn­chon fans knew some­one who knew some­one who had — but in Octo­ber a new ver­sion, autho­rized and rere­cord­ed… — hit the stands.”

The new release, which runs 40 hours and 1 minute, is also nar­rat­ed by Guidall. It’s avail­able on Audible.com. (Hear an audio sam­ple below.) And there’s a way to get it for free. As we’ve men­tioned before, Audi­ble lets you down­load an audio book for free if you sign up for their 30-Day Free Tri­al. And even if you decide to can­cel the tri­al, you can still keep the audio book and pay no mon­ey. That said, I dig Audi­ble’s sub­scrip­tion ser­vice, as I’ve spelled out before, pre­cise­ly because you can get big long audio books for a real­ly rea­son­able price.

Learn more about the Free Tri­al pro­gram here, and to get Grav­i­ty’s Rain­bow, sim­ply click here and then click the “Try Audi­ble Free” link on the right side of the page. NB: Audi­ble is an Amazon.com sub­sidiary, and we’re a mem­ber of their affil­i­ate pro­gram.

 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Thomas Pyn­chon Edits His Lines on The Simp­sons: “Homer is my role mod­el and I can’t speak ill of him.”

Take a Cin­e­mat­ic Jour­ney into the Mind of Thomas Pyn­chon and His New Book, Bleed­ing Edge

1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

George Orwell’s Final Warning: Don’t Let This Nightmare Situation Happen. It Depends on You!

in Books, History, Literature | November 26th, 2014

More than 60 years after his death and the close­ly pre­ced­ing pub­li­ca­tion of his best-known nov­el 1984, we look to George Orwell as a kind of prophet of the ills of cor­po­ratism, social­ism, author­i­tar­i­an­ism, total­i­tar­i­an­ism — any pow­er­ful ‑ism, essen­tial­ly, in which we can find nasty, free­dom-destroy­ing impli­ca­tions. The BBC doc­u­men­tary Orwell: A Life in Pic­tures, which we fea­tured a few years back, makes a point of high­light­ing Orwell’s “warn­ing” to what he saw as a fast corporatizing/socializing/authoriatarianizing/totalitarianizing world. In the film’s final dra­ma­tized scene above (watch the com­plete film here), the re-cre­at­ed Orwell him­self makes the fol­low­ing omi­nous pre­dic­tion:

Allow­ing for the book, after all, being a par­o­dy, some­thing like 1984 could actu­al­ly hap­pen. This is the direc­tion the world is going in at the present time. In our world, there will be no emo­tions except fear, rage, tri­umph, and self-abase­ment. The sex instinct will be erad­i­cat­ed. We shall abol­ish the orgasm. There will be no loy­al­ty except loy­al­ty to the Par­ty. But always there will be the intox­i­ca­tion of pow­er. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of vic­to­ry, the sen­sa­tion of tram­pling on an ene­my who’s help­less. If you want a pic­ture of the future, imag­ine a boot stamp­ing on a human face, for­ev­er. The moral to be drawn from this dan­ger­ous night­mare sit­u­a­tion is a sim­ple one: don’t let it hap­pen. It depends on you.

This fic­tion­al­ized Orwell — much like the real Orwell — does­n’t mince words. But as with most unminced words, these mask a more com­pli­cat­ed real­i­ty. Though Orwell fans may find each indi­vid­ual piece of this speech rec­og­niz­able, espe­cial­ly the bit about the boot and the face, the man him­self nev­er spoke it — not in this form, any­way.

It mix­es doc­u­ment­ed state­ments of Orwell’s with words from the text of 1984, and its dra­mat­ic clos­er [“Don’t let it hap­pen. It depends on you!”] comes, as writes Barnes and Noble’s Steve King, from a post-pub­li­ca­tion press release direct­ed by pub­lish­er Fredric War­burg toward read­ers who “had mis­in­ter­pret­ed [Orwell’s] aim, tak­ing the nov­el as a crit­i­cism of the cur­rent British Labour Par­ty, or of con­tem­po­rary social­ism in gen­er­al.” The quo­ta­tion from the press release was “soon giv­en the sta­tus of a last state­ment or deathbed appeal, giv­en that Orwell was hos­pi­tal­ized at the time and dead six months lat­er.”

You can read more at georgeorwellnovels.com, which pro­vides a great deal of con­text on this press release, which runs, in full, as fol­lows:

It has been sug­gest­ed by some of the review­ers of Nine­teen Eighty-Four that it is the author’s view that this, or some­thing like this, is what will hap­pen inside the next forty years in the West­ern world. This is not cor­rect. I think that, allow­ing for the book being after all a par­o­dy, some­thing like Nine­teen Eighty-Four could hap­pen. This is the direc­tion in which the world is going at the present time, and the trend lies deep in the polit­i­cal, social and eco­nom­ic foun­da­tions of the con­tem­po­rary world sit­u­a­tion.

Specif­i­cal­ly the dan­ger lies in the struc­ture imposed on Social­ist and on Lib­er­al cap­i­tal­ist com­mu­ni­ties by the neces­si­ty to pre­pare for total war with the U.S.S.R. and the new weapons, of which of course the atom­ic bomb is the most pow­er­ful and the most pub­li­cized. But dan­ger lies also in the accep­tance of a total­i­tar­i­an out­look by intel­lec­tu­als of all colours.

The moral to be drawn from this dan­ger­ous night­mare sit­u­a­tion is a sim­ple one: Don’t let it hap­pen. It depends on you.

George Orwell assumes that if such soci­eties as he describes in Nine­teen Eighty-Four come into being there will be sev­er­al super states. This is ful­ly dealt with in the rel­e­vant chap­ters of Nine­teen Eighty-Four. It is also dis­cussed from a dif­fer­ent angle by James Burn­ham in The Man­age­r­i­al Rev­o­lu­tion. These super states will nat­u­ral­ly be in oppo­si­tion to each oth­er or (a nov­el point) will pre­tend to be much more in oppo­si­tion than in fact they are. Two of the prin­ci­pal super states will obvi­ous­ly be the Anglo-Amer­i­can world and Eura­sia. If these two great blocks line up as mor­tal ene­mies it is obvi­ous that the Anglo-Amer­i­cans will not take the name of their oppo­nents and will not dra­ma­tize them­selves on the scene of his­to­ry as Com­mu­nists. Thus they will have to find a new name for them­selves. The name sug­gest­ed in Nine­teen Eighty-Four is of course Ing­soc, but in prac­tice a wide range of choic­es is open. In the U.S.A. the phrase “Amer­i­can­ism” or “hun­dred per cent Amer­i­can­ism” is suit­able and the qual­i­fy­ing adjec­tive is as total­i­tar­i­an as any­one could wish.

If there is a fail­ure of nerve and the Labour par­ty breaks down in its attempt to deal with the hard prob­lems with which it will be faced, tougher types than the present Labour lead­ers will inevitably take over, drawn prob­a­bly from the ranks of the Left, but not shar­ing the Lib­er­al aspi­ra­tions of those now in pow­er. Mem­bers of the present British gov­ern­ment, from Mr. Attlee and Sir Stafford Cripps down to Aneurin Bevan will nev­er will­ing­ly sell the pass to the ene­my, and in gen­er­al the old­er men, nur­tured in a Lib­er­al tra­di­tion, are safe, but the younger gen­er­a­tion is sus­pect and the seeds of total­i­tar­i­an thought are prob­a­bly wide­spread among them. It is invid­i­ous to men­tion names, but every­one could with­out dif­fi­cul­ty think for him­self of promi­nent Eng­lish and Amer­i­can per­son­al­i­ties whom the cap would fit.

Read­ers can still find plen­ty to quib­ble with in Orwell, but sure­ly that counts as a point toward his sta­tus as an endur­ing­ly fas­ci­nat­ing writer. The les­son, how­ev­er much we may mis­in­ter­pret its deliv­ery — and indeed, how much Orwell him­self may some­times seem to mis­de­liv­er it — holds steady: don’t let it hap­pen. How not to let it hap­pen, of course, remains a mat­ter of active inquiry.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

George Orwell Explains in a Reveal­ing 1944 Let­ter Why He’d Write 1984

For 95 Min­utes, the BBC Brings George Orwell to Life

The Only Known Footage of George Orwell (Cir­ca 1921)

George Orwell and Dou­glas Adams Explain How to Make a Prop­er Cup of Tea

George Orwell’s Five Great­est Essays (as Select­ed by Pulitzer-Prize Win­ning Colum­nist Michael Hiltzik)

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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

Dostoyevsky Got a Reprieve from the Czar’s Firing Squad and Then Saved Charles Bukowski’s Life

in Literature, Poetry | November 25th, 2014

Yes­ter­day we fea­tured Charles Bukowski’s first-ever record­ed read­ings. Per­haps you found them, in their way, inspi­ra­tional, but for me the feel­ing of inspi­ra­tion always leads to a ques­tion — who inspired my inspir­er? In the case of Bukows­ki, the poet has, in his work, clear­ly named one of his main inspi­ra­tions: the work of 19th-cen­tu­ry Russ­ian nov­el­ist Fyo­dor Dos­toyevsky. The author of Crime and Pun­ish­ment might at first seem to have lit­tle in com­mon with the author of Ham on Rye, but often the most res­o­nant inspi­ra­tions don’t involve much direct resem­blance. And as Bukows­ki remem­bers in the poem he gave Dos­toyevsky’s name (albeit in one of the oth­er stan­dard spellings), his ances­tor in the world of let­ters did more than just get him writ­ing:

Dos­to­evsky

against the wall, the fir­ing squad ready.
then he got a reprieve.
sup­pose they had shot Dos­to­evsky?
before he wrote all that?
I sup­pose it would­n’t have
mat­tered
not direct­ly.
there are bil­lions of peo­ple who have
nev­er read him and nev­er
will.
but as a young man I know that he
got me through the fac­to­ries,
past the whores,
lift­ed me high through the night
and put me down
in a bet­ter
place.
even while in the bar
drink­ing with the oth­er
dere­licts,
I was glad they gave Dos­to­evsky a
reprieve,
it gave me one,
allowed me to look direct­ly at those
ran­cid faces
in my world,
death point­ing its fin­ger,
I held fast,
an immac­u­late drunk
shar­ing the stink­ing dark with
my
broth­ers.

You can also lis­ten to “Dos­to­evsky” read aloud at the top of the post. Those with a work­ing knowl­edge of its name­sake’s life might think back to Dos­toyevsky’s time in prison, recount­ed briefly in the “Siber­ian exile (1849–1854)” sec­tion of his Wikipedia page. Arrest­ed on trumped-up charges of con­spir­a­cy for sim­ply read­ing the wrong books, he was sen­tenced to “eight years of exile with hard labour at a kator­ga prison camp in Omsk, Siberia, fol­lowed by a term of com­pul­so­ry mil­i­tary ser­vice.” Today, any of us can read Bukowski’s rough-and-tum­ble verse to get us through hard times; we can also, as Bukows­ki did, read Dos­toyevsky (see our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks). But Dos­toyevsky him­self, con­sid­ered par­tic­u­lar­ly dan­ger­ous by his jail­ers, was “per­mit­ted to read noth­ing but his New Tes­ta­ment.” Hard times indeed.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear 130 Min­utes of Charles Bukowski’s First-Ever Record­ed Read­ings (1968)

A Read­ing of Charles Bukowski’s First Pub­lished Sto­ry, “After­math of a Lengthy Rejec­tion Slip” (1944)

So You Want to Be a Writer?: Charles Bukows­ki Explains the Dos & Don’ts

Charles Bukows­ki Rails Against 9‑to‑5 Jobs in a Bru­tal­ly Hon­est Let­ter (1986)

Crime and Pun­ish­ment by Fyo­dor Dos­toyevsky Told in a Beau­ti­ful­ly Ani­mat­ed Film by Piotr Dumala

Fyo­dor Dos­to­evsky Draws Elab­o­rate Doo­dles In His Man­u­scripts

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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Literary Remains of Gabriel García Márquez Will Rest in Texas

in Literature | November 24th, 2014

marquez ransom
Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez’s notes for The Gen­er­al in His Labyrinth (1989) via The Ran­som Cen­ter & The New York Times

Quick note: The Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter, a human­i­ties research library at UT-Austin, announced this morn­ing that it has acquired the archive of Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez, the Nobel Prize-win­ning, Colom­bian nov­el­ist who passed away ear­li­er this year. His lit­er­ary remains include “orig­i­nal man­u­script mate­ri­als for 10 books …; more than 2,000 pieces of cor­re­spon­dence, includ­ing let­ters from Car­los Fuentes and Gra­ham Greene; drafts of his 1982 Nobel Prize accep­tance speech; more than 40 pho­to­graph albums doc­u­ment­ing all aspects of his life over near­ly nine decades; the Smith Coro­na type­writ­ers and com­put­ers on which he wrote some of the 20th cen­tu­ry’s most beloved works; and scrap­books metic­u­lous­ly doc­u­ment­ing his career via news clip­pings from Latin Amer­i­ca and around the world.”

All of this mate­r­i­al, The Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter goes on to say, will con­ve­nient­ly site along­side archives of oth­ers authors who inspired Gar­cía Márquez — most notably, Jorge Luis Borges, William Faulkn­er and James Joyce.

The New York Times has a small gallery of images show­cas­ing pho­tos in the new­ly acquired col­lec­tion. Take a quick spin through it here.

via The New York Times

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read 10 Short Sto­ries by Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez Free Online (Plus More Essays & Inter­views)

Jorge Luis Borges’ 1967–8 Nor­ton Lec­tures On Poet­ry (And Every­thing Else Lit­er­ary)

Car­los Fuentes: “You Have to See the Face of Death in Order to Start Writ­ing Seri­ous­ly”

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast