Download the Complete Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Masterpiece

in Books, Literature | November 4th, 2014

I still remember the thrill I felt when I happened upon a set of the complete Sherlock Holmes stories at an antique store. For a mere ten dollars, I acquired handsomely bound, suitably patina-of-age-bearing editions of each and every one of the sleuth of 221B Baker Street’s adventures that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ever wrote. In addition to this thrill, I also got a few surprises: first that all of those stories combined — the stories that made Holmes and his assistant Dr. John Watson into household names of nearly 130 years’ standing — fit into two not-especially-large books; second, that Holmes solved his mysteries not just in 56 short stories but four novels as well; and third, that many of those short stories and novels differed intriguingly in tone and content from my expectations. So many modern adaptations — all those television series up to the BBC’s new and expensive-looking Sherlock, the early CD-ROM computer game, Hayao Miyazaki’s steampunk animation Sherlock Hound, Guy Ritchie’s Robert Downey Jr.-showcasing Hollywood films — have convinced us we “know” Sherlock Holmes, which makes it all the more fascinating to investigate, as it were, the original literature.

These days, especially given the recent ruling (just re-affirmed by the Supreme Court) that Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories “are no longer covered by United States copyright law and can be freely used by creators without paying any licensing fee to the Conan Doyle estate,” you can download the complete Sherlock Holmes canon in a variety of ebook formats, from PDF to ePub to ASCII to MOBI for Kindle. If you prefer listening to reading, Librivox has made available three different versions of Sherlock Holmes in audiobook form. However you choose technologically to experience the Sherlock Holmes canon, I recommend taking it on chronologically, beginning with the 1887 novel A Study in Scarlet — less a mystery, to my mind, than the scary tale of a murderous Mormon sect — to 1927’s “The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place,” Holmes’ final Conan Doyle-penned adventure. Somewhere in the middle — in 1893’s “The Final Problem,” to be precise — Holmes’ creator tried to kill the beloved detective off, but the reading public would have none of it. What about Sherlock Holmes stories had got them so hooked that they could successfully demand a resurrection? Now you, too, can find out, without even having to spend the ten dollars, let alone go to the antique store.

Bonus: Below, you can listen to The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, an old-time radio show that aired in the US from October 2, 1939 to July 7, 1947.

Arthur Conan Doyle Discusses Sherlock Holmes and Psychics in a Rare Filmed Interview (1927)

Arthur Conan Doyle & The Cottingley Fairies: How Two Young Girls Fooled Sherlock Holmes’ Creator

Arthur Conan Doyle Fills Out the Questionnaire Made Famous By Marcel Proust (1899)

1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices

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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J.K. Rowling Publishes New Harry Potter Story About the Malevolent Dolores Umbridge

in Literature, Sci Fi | November 1st, 2014

Although J.K. Rowling wrote the final book in the Harry Potter series in 2007, she continues to give Potter fans an occasional fix, publishing short works that add a little more color and detail to the Harry Potter story. Ardent fans know that Rowling wrote a short Prequel in 2008. Also, earlier this year, she began writing new stories about the 2014 Quidditch World Cup Finals for Pottermore, the website for all things Harry Potter. She later followed with a story that takes the form of an article published in The Daily Prophet (“Dumbledore’s Army Reunites at Quidditch World Cup Final”), which gives us the first glimpse of the adult Harry Potter.

Now, on Halloween, we get “The Story of Dolores Jane Umbridge” — a short fictional essay that gives us a more complete personal portrait of the character that readers found so easy to dislike. In the essay [SPOILER ALERT], we learn that Umbridge was, gasp, a half blood, who had demonstrated a certain capacity for wickedness at a young age: “Even at seventeen, Dolores was judgemental, prejudiced and sadistic, although her conscientious attitude, her saccharine manner towards her superiors, and the ruthlessness and stealth with which she took credit for other people’s work soon gained her advancement.”

Rowling then appends some personal comments to the story, explaining the origins of the Umbridge character. She writes:

Once, long ago, I took instruction in a certain skill or subject (I am being vague as vague can be, for reasons that are about to become obvious), and in doing so, came into contact with a teacher or instructor whom I disliked intensely on sight.

The woman in question returned my antipathy with interest. Why we took against each other so instantly, heartily and (on my side, at least) irrationally, I honestly cannot say. What sticks in my mind is her pronounced taste for twee accessories. I particularly recall a tiny little plastic bow slide, pale lemon in colour that she wore in her short curly hair.… [H]er tendency to wear frills where (I felt) frills had no business to be, and to carry undersized handbags, again as though they had been borrowed from a child’s dressing-up box, jarred, I felt, with a personality that I found the reverse of sweet, innocent and ingenuous.

To learn more about the fictional and non-fictional sides of Dolores Umbridge, read Rowling’s new piece here.

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

in Literature, Writing | October 29th, 2014

Image by Lucius B. Truesdell, via Wikimedia Commons

Though the term “weird fiction” came into being in the 19th century—originally used by Irish gothic writer Sheridan Le Fanu—it was picked up by H.P. Lovecraft in the 20th century as a way, primarily, of describing his own work. Lovecraft produced copious amounts of the stuff, as you can see from our post highlighting online collections of nearly his entire corpus. He also wrote in depth about writing itself. He did so in generally prescriptive ways, as in his 1920 essay “Literary Composition,” and in ways specific to his chosen mode—as in the 1927 “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” in which he defined weird fiction very differently than Le Fanu or modern authors like China Miéville. For Lovecraft,

The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain–a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.

Here we have, broadly, the template for a very Lovecraftian tale indeed. Ten years later, in a 1937 essay titled “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction,” Lovecraft would return to the theme and elaborate more fully on how to produce such an artifact.

Weird Fiction, wrote Lovecraft in that later essay, is “obviously a special and perhaps a narrow” kind of “story-writing,” a form in which “horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected,” and one that “frequently emphasize[s] the element of horror because fear is our deepest and strongest emotion.” Although Lovecraft self-deprecatingly calls himself an “insignificant amateur,” he nonetheless situates himself in the company of “great authors” who mastered horror writing of one kind or another: “[Lord] Dunsany, Poe, Arthur Machen, M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood, and Walter de la Mare.” Even if you only know the name of Poe, it’s weighty company indeed.

But be not intimidated—Lovecraft wasn’t. As our traditional holiday celebration of fear approaches, perhaps you’d be so inclined to try your hand at a little weird fiction of your own. You should certainly, Lovecraft would stress, spend some time reading these writers’ works. But he goes further, and offers us a very concise, five point “set of rules” for writing a weird fiction story that he says might be “deduced… if the history of all my tales were analyzed.” See an abridged version below:

Prepare a synopsis or scenario of events in the order of their absolute occurrence—not the order of their narrations.

This is a practice adhered to by writers from J.K. Rowling and William Faulkner to Norman Mailer. It seems an excellent general piece of advice for any kind of fiction.

Prepare a second synopsis or scenario of events—this one in order of narration (not actual occurrence), with ample fullness and detail, and with notes as to changing perspective, stresses, and climax.

Write out the story—rapidly, fluently, and not too critically—following the second or narrative-order synopsis. Change incidents and plot whenever the developing process seems to suggest such change, never being bound by any previous design.

It may be that the second rule is made just to be broken, but it provides the weird fiction practitioner with a beginning. The third stage here brings us back to a process every writer on writing, such as Stephen King, will highlight as key—free, unfettered drafting, followed by…

Revise the entire text, paying attention to vocabulary, syntax, rhythm of prose, proportioning of parts, niceties of tone, grace and convincingness of transitions…

And finally….

Prepare a neatly typed copy—not hesitating to add final revisory touches where they seem in order.

You will notice right away that these five “rules” tell us nothing about what to put in our weird fiction, and could apply to any sort of fiction at all, really. This is part of the admirably comprehensive quality of the otherwise succinct essay. Lovecraft tells us why he writes, why he writes what he writes, and how he goes about it. The content of his fictional universe is entirely his own, a method of visualizing “vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions.” Your mileage, and your method, will indeed vary.

Lovecraft goes on to describe “four distinct types of weird story” that fit “into two rough categories—those in which the marvel or horror concerns some condition or phenomenon, and those in which it concerns some action of persons in connection with a bizarre condition or phenonmenon.” If this doesn’t clear things up for you, then perhaps a careful reading of Lovecraft’s complete “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” will. Ultimately, however, “there is no one way” to write a story. But with some practice—and no small amount of imagination—you may find yourself joining the company of Poe, Lovecraft, and a host of contemporary writers who continue to push the boundaries of weird fiction past the sometimes parochial, often profoundly bigoted, limits that Lovecraft set out.

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

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Maya Angelou Tells Studs Terkel How She Learned to Count Cards & Hustle in a New Animated Video

in Life, Literature | October 29th, 2014

Blank on Blank returns with another one of their visually-distinctive animated videos. This one lets us time travel back to 1970 when Studs Terkel, the great American author, historian, and radio broadcaster, sat down with acclaimed poet Maya Angelou. The interview took place shortly after Angelou published her 1969 autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and the conversation turns, amusingly, to her childhood years, when she learned how to hustle and count cards from her step father, Daddy Clidell. I bet Bukowski is applauding wherever he is. Blank on Blank made this video in partnership with the Studs Terkel Radio Archive, which we featured on our site late last year.

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

The Fall of the House of Usher: Poe’s Classic Tale Turned Into 1928 Avant Garde Film, Scripted by e.e. cummings

in Film, Literature | October 28th, 2014

Last week, in deference to the approach of Halloween, we featured the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe as Free eBooks and Free Audio Books. If you give them a read, a listen, or both, you’ll discover that few creators, using nothing more than the written word, can disturb quite so effectively as Poe. But his written words have also provided inspiration to frightening works in other media, including the previously featured 1953 British animation of “The Tell-Tale Heart” and, today, the short-film version of “The Fall of the House of Usher.” That 1839 story perhaps most perfectly (and most viscerally) realizes such pet themes of Poe’s as illness, dread, and live burial, and as such has served as material to a great many filmmakers as defiantly lowbrow as Roger Corman and as uncompromisingly idiosyncratic as Jan Švankmajer. But here we offer you one of the most interesting cinematic “Usher“s ever made: James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber’s 13-minute avant-garde adaptation, scripted in part by poet e.e. cummings.

“Despite their importance as leading figures in the film world,” writes Tara Travisano, “Watson and Webber’s work is often overlooked and not given sufficient credit.” Though they got their shooting script from the modernist-influenced cummings, the filmmakers, “not fans of modernism,” “preferred to have their films described as amateur.” Their Fall of the House of Usher, the best-known work they ever produced, “hardly follows a narrative, but is valued for its creative use of repetition and variation and for the film’s dramatic lighting.” And don’t worry if you haven’t read the original story in a while; according to Travisano, Watson and Webber chose to film it because they themselves hadn’t read it in a while, and thus “would be free of its influence.” But after experiencing the brief but unsettling cinematic dream they managed to make out of this half-remembered Poean material, you may want to seek out its influence by going back and reading it again — or listening to it, or trying to sleep and re-dream it for yourself.

You can find Fall of the House of Usher in our collection, 285 Free Documentaries Online.

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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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A Quick Introduction to Literary Theory: Watch Animated Videos from the Open University

in Education, Literature | October 28th, 2014

Just what is an author? It might seem like a silly question, and an academic dissection of the term may seem like a needlessly pedantic exercise. But the very variability of the concept means it isn’t a stable, fixed idea at all, but a shifting set of associations we have with notions about creativity, the social role of art, and that elusive quality known as “genius.” Questions raised in the Open University video above—part of a series of very short animated entrées into literary criticism called “Outside the Book”—make it hard to ignore the problems we encounter when we try to define authorship in simple, straightforward ways. Most of the questions relate to the work of French poststructuralist Michel Foucault, whose critical essay “What is an Author?”—along with structuralist thinker Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author”—disturbed many a literary critic’s comfortable assumptions about the creative locus behind any given work.

In the 18th century, at least in Europe, the author was a highly celebrated cultural figure, a status epitomized by Samuel Johnson’s reverential biography of John Dryden and edition of Shakespeare—and in turn Johnson’s own biography by his amanuensis Boswell. The 19th century began to see the author as a celebrity, with the hype and sometimes tawdry speculation that accompanies that designation. In the mid-twentieth century, even as the idea of the film director as auteur—a singular creative genius—gained ascendance, the inflated role of the literary author came in for a bruising. With Foucault, Barthes, and others like W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley—whose essay “The Intentional Fallacy” more or less ruled out biography as a tool of the critic—the author receded and the “text” gained primacy as, in Foucault’s words, a “discursive unit.”

This means that questions of authorship became inseparable from questions of readership, interpretation, and influence; from questions of historical classification and social construction (i.e. how do we know anything about “Byron” except through biographies, documentaries, etc., themselves cultural productions?); from questions of translation, pseudepigraphy, and pen names. Put in much plainer terms, we once came to think of the author not simply as the writer—a role previously delegated to lowly, usually anonymous “scribes” who simply copied the words of gods, heroes, and prophets. Instead, the author became a god, a hero, and a prophet, a godlike creator with a “literary stamp of approval” that grants his or her every utterance on the page a special status; “that makes even the note on Shakespeare’s fridge a work of profound genius.” But that idea is anything but simple, and the critical discussion around it anything but trivial.

Ditto much of the above when it comes to that other seemingly indivisible unit of literature, the book. In the even shorter video guide above, Open University rapidly challenges our commonplace ideas about book-hood and raises the now-commonplace question about the future of this “reading gizmo.” For more “Outside the Book,” see the remaining videos in the series: “Comedy,” “Tragedy,” and “Two Styles of Love.” And for a much more sustained and serious study of the art of literary criticism, delve into Professor Paul Fry’s Yale course below. It’s part of Open Culture’s collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

Introduction to Theory of Literature – Free Online Video – Free iTunes Audio – Free iTunes Video – Course Materials – Paul H. Fry, Yale

h/t Catherine

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

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Stephen Colbert Reads Ray Bradbury Classic Sci-Fi Story “The Veldt”

in Literature, Sci Fi | October 27th, 2014

I rarely think back to memories from that busywork-intensive containment unit known as American elementary school, but when I do, I usually arrive at listening to a Ray Bradbury story — something about a faraway planet, something about monsoons, I can never remember which one — during read-aloud time. Even then, on some level, I understood that the author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles (not that I yet had any idea at the time about books like Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles) wrote with the human voice in mind. Not necessarily the momentarily defamiliarized voice of a teacher reading to a post-lunch classroom of ten-year-olds, and not necessarily the flawlessly pronouncing and pausing, many-takes-recorded-per-sentence voice of the professional audiobook narrator (though Bradbury’s work did provide material for a few proto-audiobooks), but, perhaps, the voice of the mind. Of all Bradbury’s tales we love to read aloud, few seem quite so effective in this way as “The Veldt.”

The story first appeared, according to the web site of public radio station WNYC, in a 1950 Saturday Evening Post “with the title ‘The World the Children Made,’ which is a good description of what goes on in this eerie tale. It imagines the ‘model home’ of the future, including a programmable nursery that becomes the site of a power struggle. [Fellow speculative writer Neil] Gaiman says that Bradbury’s tale raises complex questions: ‘Are our children our own?,’ and ‘What does technology do to them?’ ” Public Radio International commissioned no less a speaker than Colbert Report and future Late Show host Stephen Colbert — a satirist highly attuned to the ironies inherent in mankind’s visions of its own future — to read it for their “Selected Shorts” series, and you can hear the whole thing above.

Given how much progress our pursuit of total automation and virtual stimulation (and our parallel desire to escape those conditions) has made in the past 64 years, “The Veldt” has grown only more relevant. Pair it with “There Will Come Soft Rains,” Bradbury’s other famously read-aloudable story of the home of the 1950 future, for a richly funny and troubling double-feature of the mind.

For another sonic angle on the material, see also our previously-featured radio adaptations of “There Will Come Soft Rains” on Dimenson X and “The Veldt” on X Minus One — or you can hear Leonard Nimoy read both of them in the 1970s.)

Some of the readings listed above appear in our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.

Dimension X: The 1950s SciFi Radio Show That Dramatized Stories by Asimov, Bradbury, Vonnegut & More

X Minus One: More Classic 1950s Sci-Fi Radio from Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury & Dick

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 Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Hear Beowulf Read In the Original Old English: How Many Words Do You Recognize?

in English Language, Literature | October 24th, 2014

I was as surprised as most people are when I first heard the ancient language known as Old English. It’s nothing like Shakespeare, nor even Chaucer, who wrote in a late Middle English that sounds strange enough to modern ears. Old English, the English of Beowulf, is almost a foreign tongue; close kin to German, with Latin, Norse, and Celtic influence.

As you can hear in the Beowulf reading above from The Telegraph, it’s a thick, consonant-rich language that may put you in mind of J.R.R. Tolkien’s elvish. The language arrived in Briton—previously inhabited by Celtic speakers—sometime in the fifth century, though whether the Anglo-Saxon invasion was a hostile takeover by Germanic mercenaries or a slow population drift that introduced a new ethnicity is a matter of some dispute. Nevertheless it’s obvious from the reading above—and from texts in the language like this online edition of Beowulf in its original tongue—that we would no more be able to speak to the Anglo-Saxons than we would to the Picts and Scots they conquered.

So how is it that both the language we speak and its distant ancestor can both be called “English”? Well, that is what its speakers called it. As the author of this excellent Old English introductory textbook writes, speakers of “Old English,” “Middle English,” and “Modern English” are “themselves modern”; They “would have said, if asked, that the language they spoke was English.” The changes in the language “took place gradually, over the centuries, and there never was a time when people perceived their language as having broken radically with the language spoken a generation before.” And while “relatively few Modern English words come from Old English […] the words that do survive are some of the most common in the language, including almost all the ‘grammar words’ (articles, pronouns, prepositions) and a great many words for everyday concepts.” You may notice a few of those distant linguistic ancestors in the Beowulf passage accompanying the reading above.

Beowulf is, of course, the oldest epic poem in English, written sometime between the 8th and early 11th century. It draws, however, not from British sources but from Danish myth, and is in fact set in Scandinavia. The title character, a hero of the Geats—or ancient Swedes—travels to Denmark to offer his services to the king and defeat the monster Grendel (and his mother). The product of a warrior culture, the poem shares much in common with the epics of Homer with its code of honor and praise of fighting prowess. And here see vocalist, harpist, and medieval scholar Benjamin Bagby perform the opening lines of the poem as its contemporary audience would have experienced it—intoned by a bard with an Anglo-Saxon harp. The modern English subtitles are a boon, but close your eyes for a moment and just listen to the speech—see if you can pick out any words you recognize. Then, perhaps, you may wish to turn to Fordham University’s online translation and find out what all that big talk in the prologue is about.

And for a very short course on the history of English, see this concise page and this ten-minute animated video from Open University.

The image above comes from the sole surviving medieval manuscript of Beowulf, which now resides at the British Library.

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 11 ) |

Download the Complete Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Masterpiece

J.K. Rowling Publishes New Harry Potter Story About the Malevolent Dolores Umbridge

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

Maya Angelou Tells Studs Terkel How She Learned to Count Cards & Hustle in a New Animated Video

The Fall of the House of Usher: Poe’s Classic Tale Turned Into 1928 Avant Garde Film, Scripted by e.e. cummings

A Quick Introduction to Literary Theory: Watch Animated Videos from the Open University

Stephen Colbert Reads Ray Bradbury Classic Sci-Fi Story “The Veldt”

Hear Beowulf Read In the Original Old English: How Many Words Do You Recognize?

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