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

in Literature | October 23rd, 2014

We can­not prop­er­ly speak of hor­ror fic­tion with­out men­tion­ing the name H.P. Love­craft, any more than we could do so with­out speak­ing of Edgar Allan Poe, whose com­plete works we fea­tured in a post yes­ter­day. Even now, as some of Lovecraft’s real­ly vicious atti­tudes have come in for much crit­i­cal reap­praisal, the Love­craft­ian is still a dom­i­nant form. Win­ners of the World Fan­ta­sy Award receive a bust of the author, and dark mod­ern mas­ters like Stephen King and Joyce Car­ol Oates admit that Love­craft was “the twen­ti­eth century’s great­est prac­ti­tion­er of the clas­sic hor­ror tale” and “an incal­cu­la­ble influ­ence on suc­ceed­ing gen­er­a­tions of writ­ers of hor­ror fic­tion.” His work, writes Salon, has influ­enced “every­one from the Argen­tin­ian metafic­tion­ist Jorge Luis Borges to the film direc­tor Guiller­mo del Toro, as well as untold num­ber of rock bands and game design­ers.”

The ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry author spent almost his entire life in the New Eng­land of his birth, draw­ing on its many odd­i­ties in obscure sto­ries pub­lished in pulp magazines—notably the influ­en­tial Weird Tales. Hypochon­dri­ac, hyper-sen­si­tive, and reclu­sive in lat­er life, Love­craft sur­vived on a dwin­dling inher­i­tance and nev­er achieved much recog­ni­tion. But in death, he has spawned a for­mi­da­ble cult who immerse them­selves in a uni­verse cre­at­ed from ref­er­ences to the occult, demonolo­gy, and var­i­ous mytho­log­i­cal arche­types. How­ev­er over­wrought his prose, Lovecraft’s work can be sit­u­at­ed in a long lit­er­ary tra­di­tion of influ­ence, and a Love­craft cir­cle con­tin­ued to expand his vision of sci­en­tif­ic and super­nat­ur­al hor­ror after his death.

Cen­tral to the Love­craft cos­mos are “The Old Ones,” a col­lec­tion of pow­er­ful pri­mor­dial beings, and their cult wor­shipers, first intro­duced in “The Call of Cthul­hu” in 1926. At the top of the post, you can hear a dra­mat­ic read­ing of the sto­ry by Gar­rick Hagon. Just above hear a radio drama­ti­za­tion of “The Colour Out of Space,” which was col­lect­ed in The Best Amer­i­can Short Sto­ries in 1928, one of the few of Lovecraft’s works to receive such an hon­or in his life­time. You’ll find much more Love­craft read aloud on YouTube, includ­ing clas­sic sto­ries like “The Dun­wich Hor­ror,” “At The Moun­tains of Mad­ness,” and “The Hor­ror at Red Hook.”

Lis­ten­ing to Love­craft is an excel­lent, as well as con­ve­nient, way to expe­ri­ence his work. His florid, often archa­ic, and melo­dra­mat­ic descrip­tions lend them­selves per­fect­ly to aur­al inter­pre­ta­tions. Luck­i­ly for us, we have not one, but two audio book col­lec­tions of near­ly every­thing Love­craft ever wrote. Just above, stream his com­plete pub­lic domain works, and see the Inter­net Archive for anoth­er audio­book set of his col­lect­ed works. One of the rea­sons audio of Love­craft is so plen­ti­ful is that most of his work is in the com­mons. SFF Audio has yet anoth­er huge col­lec­tion of Love­craft sto­ries read aloud, down­load­able as MP3s. Final­ly, if you some­how can’t find what you’re look­ing for at any of those links, you’re bound to at The World’s Largest H.P. Love­craft Audio Links Gate­way.

Should lis­ten­ing to Love­craft whet your appetite for more, you may just be ready to start read­ing. Although Lovecraft’s fic­tion fea­tures what may be some of mod­ern literature’s most dread­ful mon­sters, the hor­ror in his work is most­ly exis­ten­tial, as char­ac­ters con­front a vast, malev­o­lent and thor­ough­ly alien uni­verse that has no regard for human life what­so­ev­er. But the per­sis­tent bleak­ness and doom of his vision is coun­tered by an inex­haustibly rich imag­i­na­tion. In one of the open­ing sen­tences of “The Call of Cthu­lu,” Love­craft writes, “the most mer­ci­ful thing in the world, I think, is the inabil­i­ty of the human mind to cor­re­late all its con­tents,” per­haps the truest descrip­tion of his own fic­tion­al cos­mos. Love­craft schol­ars and fans spend life­times sift­ing through his mas­sive store­house of weird­ness. Whether you’re inclined to join them in the deep end, or just dip in a toe, you can find all of Lovecraft’s pub­lished work in var­i­ous forms at the loca­tions below.

Giv­en these resources, you should have no trou­ble becom­ing a Love­craft expert by Hal­loween. Or, at the very least, pick­ing out a few of his scari­est sto­ries to lis­ten to and read aloud around a flick­er­ing jack o’ lantern or your col­lec­tion of Cthul­hu fig­urines.

Love­craft’s works per­ma­nent­ly reside in our twin col­lec­tions: 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free and 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Love­craft: Fear of the Unknown (Free Doc­u­men­tary)

Read Hun­dreds of Free Sci-Fi Sto­ries from Asi­mov, Love­craft, Brad­bury, Dick, Clarke & More

Down­load The Com­plete Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Macabre Sto­ries as Free eBooks & Audio Books

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

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Download The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Macabre Stories as Free eBooks & Audio Books

in Books, Literature | October 22nd, 2014

With Hal­loween fast approach­ing, let us remind you that few Amer­i­can writ­ers can get you into the exis­ten­tial­ly chill­ing spir­it of this cli­mat­i­cal­ly chill­ing sea­son than Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849). And giv­en that he lived and wrote entire­ly in the first half of the 19th cen­tu­ry, few Amer­i­can writ­ers can do it at so lit­tle finan­cial cost to you, the read­er. Today we’ve col­lect­ed Poe’s freely avail­able, pub­lic domain works of pure psy­cho­log­i­cal unset­tle­ment into five vol­umes of eBooks:

And five vol­umes of audio­books as well (all the bet­ter to work their way into your sub­con­scious):

And if, beyond per­haps read­ing here and there about pits, pen­du­lums, ravens, and casks in Italy, you’ve nev­er plunged into the canon pro­duced by this trou­bled mas­ter of let­ters — Amer­i­can Roman­tic, acknowl­edged adept of the macabre, inven­tor of detec­tive fic­tion, and con­trib­u­tor to the even­tu­al emer­gence of sci­ence fic­tion — your chance has come. If you feel the under­stand­able need for a lighter pre­lim­i­nary intro­duc­tion to Poe’s work, hear Christo­pher Walken (speak­ing of Amer­i­can icons) deliv­er a sur­pris­ing­ly non-exces­sive­ly Walkeni­fied inter­pre­ta­tion of “The Raven” at the top of the post. Below, we have a 1953 ani­ma­tion of “The Tell-Tale Heart” nar­rat­ed by James Mason:

After watch­ing these videos, you’ll sure­ly want to spend Hal­loween time catch­ing up on every­thing else Poe wrote, after which you’ll under­stand that true scari­ness aris­es not from slash­er movies, malev­o­lent pump­kins, or tales of hooks embed­ded in car doors, but from the sort of thing the closed-eyed nar­ra­tor of “The Pit and the Pen­du­lum” means when he says, “It was not that I feared to look upon things hor­ri­ble, but that I grew aghast lest there should be noth­ing to see.”

The Com­plete Works of Edgar Allan Poe per­ma­nent­ly reside in our twin col­lec­tions: 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free and 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the 1953 Ani­ma­tion of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Nar­rat­ed by James Mason

Down­load a Free, New Hal­loween Sto­ry by Neil Gaiman (and Help Char­i­ties Along the Way)

Watch Goethe’s Haunt­ing Poem, “Der Erlkönig,” Pre­sent­ed in an Art­ful Sand Ani­ma­tion

“A Haunt­ed House” by Vir­ginia Woolf

Watch Nos­fer­atu, the Sem­i­nal Vam­pire Film, Free Online (1922)

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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Typed Portraits of Literary Legends: Kerouac, Saramago, Bukowski & More

in Art, Literature | October 15th, 2014

Artists have used all sorts of odd media to cre­ate por­traits, every­thing from gui­tar picks to dice to wood­en eggs. Add to this list Brazil­ian type artist Álvaro Fran­ca, who uses the type­writer. Instead of com­pos­ing lit­er­ary por­traits of his heroes, Fran­ca types out lit­er­al por­traits. The prin­ci­ple of the pic­tures are the same grey-scale print­ing used in news­pa­pers or, if you spent time in the com­put­er lab in the 1990s, those dot matrix images that were such the rage among com­put­er nerds. Using a com­put­er, Fran­ca breaks the image down into dis­crete pix­els and adds one or more key­strokes to that pix­el. ‘I’ and ‘O’ seem to work for lighter greys while visu­al­ly dense let­ters like ‘x’and “m” are used for the dark­er end of the spec­trum.

As he writes in on his web­site:

Type­writ­ten Por­traits is an exper­i­men­tal art project. Dur­ing my exchange in the Cam­bridge School of Art, I devel­oped a tech­nique for imag­ing gray scale with the type­writer and, from there, I made por­traits of five of my favorite authors in lit­er­a­ture who worked on type­writ­ers. The series is still ongo­ing and there are plans for five more pic­tures.

You can see a time-lapse video of Fran­ca cre­at­ing a por­trait of beat icon Jack Ker­ouac above. And below you can see a few more pic­tures includ­ing Charles Bukows­ki and Jose Sara­m­a­go here.

bukowski typed

 

via Boing Boing

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 vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Draw­ings of Jean-Paul Sartre

James Joyce, With His Eye­sight Fail­ing, Draws a Sketch of Leopold Bloom (1926)

Jorge Luis Borges, After Going Blind, Draws a Self-Por­trait

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7 Free Stephen King Stories: Presented in Text, Audio, Web Comic & a Graphic Novel Video

in Audio Books, Comics/Cartoons, Literature | October 10th, 2014


In Stephen King’s first tele­vised inter­view from way back in 1982, the hor­ror writer revealed that he sleeps with the lights on. He may have grown out of the habit by now, but it’s no won­der if he hasn’t. A macabre imag­i­na­tion like his prob­a­bly sees all sorts of creepy things lurk­ing in the dark. In any case, King has cer­tain­ly learned a thing or two since then about mak­ing his fears more mar­ketable. In the past sev­er­al years he’s been pro­mot­ing his work on the Inter­net to reach new audi­ences.

In 2000, his novel­la Rid­ing the Bul­let debuted exclu­sive­ly online, and in 2008 he part­nered with Mar­vel Comics to pro­mote his first col­lec­tion of short sto­ries in six years, releas­ing one short graph­ic video episode at a time adapt­ed from the 56-page novel­la “N.” See all 25 episodes above. It’s a sto­ry, writes Time, “about a psy­chol­o­gist whose obses­sive-com­pul­sive patient is entranced by a mys­te­ri­ous plot of land.” King calls the adap­ta­tion “kind of a video com­ic book,” and while the “point of the exer­cise,” says his edi­tor Susan Moldow,” is to stim­u­late book sales,” I think you’ll agree it’s a pret­ty nifty bit of sto­ry­telling on its own.

King Comic

On King’s web­site, you’ll find links to all sorts of mul­ti­me­dia prod­ucts, includ­ing a Life­time orig­i­nal movie, Big Dri­ver, a film titled A Good Mar­riage, now out on video-on-demand, and the lat­est from graph­ic nov­el series Dark Tow­er. You’ll also find a com­ic adap­ta­tion of the short sto­ry “Lit­tle Green God of Agony.” See the first pan­el above, and read the full sto­ry here.

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Long before Youtube and online comics, there was the audio­book. King has nar­rat­ed his own work for years, and it’s also been read by such big names as Kathy Bates, Sis­sy Spacek, Willem Defoe, Anne Heche, Eli Wal­lach, and many more. Just above, hear char­ac­ter actor John Glover—a name you may not know, but a face you’d recognize—read “One for the Road,” a sto­ry from King’s first, 1978, col­lec­tion Night Shift. It’s a vam­pire sto­ry, but a par­tic­u­lar­ly deft one, writes Noah Char­ney at New Haven Review, one that “deals in arche­types that are the heart of good hor­ror fic­tion.” King’s sto­ries, Char­ney asserts, are “beau­ti­ful­ly-writ­ten, high­ly intel­li­gent. They hap­pen to fea­ture mon­sters of all sorts, from nat­ur­al to preter­nat­ur­al, but that is sec­ondary to their core as great sto­ries, well-told.”

King has long defend­ed pop­u­lar fic­tion to the literati—in his accep­tance speech for the Nation­al Book Award, for example—and lashed out at “the keep­ers of the idea of seri­ous lit­er­a­ture,” whom he says “have a short list of authors who are going to be allowed inside.” It may have tak­en a few years, but King got in, even­tu­al­ly pub­lish­ing in such august out­lets as The Atlantic and The New York­er. Read four sto­ries from those pub­li­ca­tions at the links below. And if you’re still in need of a good scare in the days lead­ing up to Hal­loween, make sure to check out “The Man in the Black Suit,” a short film adap­ta­tion of anoth­er sto­ry pub­lished in The New York­er in 1994.

“A Death” (The New York­er, March 2015)

“Her­man Wouk Is Still Alive” (The Atlantic, May 2011)

“Pre­mi­um Har­mo­ny” (The New York­er, Novem­ber, 2009)

“Harvey’s Dream” (The New York­er, June 2003)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen King Reveals in His First TV Inter­view Whether He Sleeps With the Lights On (1982)

Stephen King’s Top 20 Rules for Writ­ers

Stephen King Cre­ates a List of 96 Books for Aspir­ing Writ­ers to Read

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

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The 430 Books in Marilyn Monroe’s Library: How Many Have You Read?

in Education, Film, Literature, Poetry | October 6th, 2014

marilyn reading

If you’re a read­er and user of social media, you’ve like­ly test­ed your life­time read­ing list against the BBC Book Quiz.

Or per­haps you’ve allowed your worth as a read­er to be deter­mined by the num­ber of Pulitzer Prize win­ners you’ve made it through.

The Nation­al Endow­ment for the Arts’ Big Read, any­one?

The 142 Books that Every Stu­dent of Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture Should Read?

The 50 Best Dystopi­an Nov­els?

Being young is no excuse! Not when the Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion pub­lish­es an annu­al list of Out­stand­ing Books for the Col­lege Bound and Life­long Learn­ers.

So… how’d you do? Or should I say how’d you do in com­par­i­son to Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe? The online Mon­roe fan club Ever­last­ing Star used pho­tographs, inter­views, and a Christie’s auc­tion cat­a­logue to come up with a list of more than 400 books in her pos­ses­sion.

Did she read them all? I don’t know. Have you read every sin­gle title on your shelves? (There’s a Japan­ese word for those books. It’s Tsun­doku.)

Fem­i­nist biog­ra­ph­er Oline Eaton has a great rant on her Find­ing Jack­ie blog about the phrase “Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe read­ing,” and the 5,610,000 search engine results it yields when typed into Google:

There is, with­in Monroe’s image, a deeply root­ed assump­tion that she was an idiot, a vul­ner­a­ble and kind and lov­ing and ter­ri­bly sweet idiot, but an idiot nonethe­less. That is the assump­tion in which ‘Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe read­ing’ is entan­gled.

The pow­er of the phrase Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe read­ing’ lies in its appli­ca­tion to Mon­roe and in our assump­tion that she wouldn’t know how.

Would that every­one search­ing that phrase did so in the belief that her pas­sion for the print­ed word rivaled their own. Imag­ine legions of geeks lov­ing her for her brain, bypass­ing Sam Shaw’s icon­ic sub­way grate pho­to in favor of home print­ed pin ups depict­ing her with book in hand.

Com­mem­o­ra­tive postage stamps are nice, but per­haps a more fit­ting trib­ute would be an ALA poster. Like Eaton, when I look at that image of Mar­i­lyn hunched over James Joyce’s Ulysses (or kick­ing back read­ing Walt Whit­man’s Leaves of Grass), I don’t see some­one try­ing to pass her­self off as some­thing she’s not. I see a high school dropout caught in the act of edu­cat­ing her­self. If I saw it taped to a library shelf embla­zoned with the word “READ,” I might just sum­mon the resolve to take a stab at Ulysses myself. (I know how it ends, but that’s about it.)

See below, dear read­ers. Apolo­gies that we’re not set up to keep track of your score for you, but please let us know in the com­ments sec­tion if you’d hearti­ly sec­ond any of Mar­i­lyn’s titles, par­tic­u­lar­ly those that are less­er known or have fad­ed from the pub­lic view.

Mar­i­lyn Monroe’s Read­ing Chal­lenge

(Thanks to Book Tryst for com­pil­ing Ever­last­ing Star’s find­ings)

1) Let’s Make Love by Matthew Andrews (nov­el­iza­tion of the movie)

2) How To Trav­el Incog­ni­to by Lud­wig Bemel­mans

3) To The One I Love Best by Lud­wig Bemel­mans

4) Thurber Coun­try by James Thurber

5) The Fall by Albert Camus

6) Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe by George Car­pozi

7) Camille by Alexan­der Dumas

8) Invis­i­ble Man by Ralph Elli­son

9) The Boston Cook­ing-School Cook Book by Fan­nie Mer­ritt-Farmer

10) The Great Gats­by by F Scott Fitzger­ald

11) From Rus­sia With Love by Ian Flem­ing

12) The Art Of Lov­ing by Erich Fromm

13) The Prophet by Kahlil Gilbran

14) Ulysses by James Joyce

15) Stoned Like A Stat­ue: A Com­plete Sur­vey Of Drink­ing Clich­es, Prim­i­tive, Clas­si­cal & Mod­ern by Howard Kan­del & Don Safran, with an intro by Dean Mar­tin (a man who knew how to drink!)

16) The Last Temp­ta­tion Of Christ by Nikos Kazantza­kis

17) On The Road by Jack Ker­ouac

18) Select­ed Poems by DH Lawrence

19 and 20) Sons And Lovers by DH Lawrence (2 edi­tions)

21) The Portable DH Lawrence (more…)

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Open Culture Picks Our 10 Avant-Garde Favorites on Ubuweb: Joyce, Borges, Sontag, Wittgenstein & More

in Film, Literature, Music, Philosophy | October 2nd, 2014

samuelbeckett-ubuweb

If you know about Open Cul­ture, sure­ly you know about Ubuweb. If you don’t, its slo­gan says almost every­thing you need to know about it: “All Avant-Garde. All the Time.” This vast online repos­i­to­ry of cut­ting-edge cul­tur­al arti­facts from a vari­ety of eras also adheres stead­fast­ly to the prin­ci­ple of keep­ing all of its mate­r­i­al free: free in the sense of charg­ing you noth­ing to read, hear or view it, and free in the sense that you can do what­ev­er you want with it. Need­less to say, the site, found­ed by poet Ken­neth Gold­smith in 1996, has made many fans, and Ubuweb itself has tapped quite a few of the high­er-pro­file ones to curate top ten lists. Assem­bled by peo­ple like New York­er music crit­ic Alex Ross, nov­el­ists Hari Kun­zru and Rick Moody, alter­na-pop star Nick “Momus” Cur­rie, these help the poten­tial­ly (and under­stand­ably) bewil­dered find their way through the trove of Ubuwe­b’s media, which is uni­ver­sal­ly influ­en­tial and van­ish­ing­ly obscure, vis­cer­al­ly trans­gres­sive and ver­tig­i­nous­ly intel­lec­tu­al, eter­nal­ly excit­ing and delib­er­ate­ly bor­ing.

This month, Ubuweb called upon our fear­less edi­tor here at Open Cul­ture for a top ten list. Most of the picks have been pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured on OC. The list runs as fol­lows:

1. Finnegans Wake (1939), Read by Patrick Healy
Open Cul­ture: Hear All of Finnegans Wake Read Aloud: A 35 Hour Read­ing

“The sheer plea­sure one can derive — con­ven­tion­al expec­ta­tions duly set aside — from the almost tac­tile qual­i­ty of Joyce’s prose, its earthy, ancient, elven sounds, seems more to the point of appre­ci­at­ing this odd, frus­trat­ing work. Per­haps, like any well-writ­ten poem, one sim­ply needs to hear it read aloud. Joyce him­self said so, and so you can.”

2. The Craft of Verse: Jorge Luis Borges’ Nor­ton Lec­tures, 1967–68
Open Cul­ture: Jorge Luis Borges’ 1967–8 Nor­ton Lec­tures On Poet­ry (And Every­thing Else Lit­er­ary)

“Near­ing both 70 years of age and total blind­ness, Borges nonethe­less gives a vir­tu­osi­cal­ly wide-rang­ing series of talks, freely reach­ing across forms, coun­tries, eras, and lan­guages with­out the aid of notes. Enti­tled ‘This Craft of Verse,’ these lec­tures osten­si­bly deal with poet­ry. Alas, like many lit­er­ary geeks, I know too lit­tle of poet­ry, but if Borges can’t moti­vate you to learn more, who can?”

3. Three Rare Films by Susan Son­tag
Open Cul­ture: The Film­mak­ing of Susan Son­tag & Her 50 Favorite Films (1977)

“Son­tag, they say, ‘sought to lib­er­ate art from inter­pre­ta­tion (which is a bit iron­ic, of course, for some­one who was essen­tial­ly an exalt­ed crit­ic). When it came to her own film, she made some­thing that intend­ed to delib­er­ate­ly con­found the notion that there was any sort of under­ly­ing mean­ing beyond exact­ly what the audi­ence was see­ing on the screen direct­ly in front of them.’ ”

4.  M.A. Num­mi­nen Sings Wittgen­stein (1983 / 1989)
Open Cul­ture: Lud­wig Wittgenstein’s Trac­ta­tus Gets Adapt­ed Into an Avant-Garde Com­ic Opera

“Giv­en the Trac­ta­tus’s fire­bomb­ing of an entire area of human endeav­or, it’s no sur­prise it hasn’t fared well in many tra­di­tion­al depart­ments, but that hasn’t stopped Wittgenstein’s work from find­ing pur­chase else­where, influ­enc­ing mod­ern artists like Jasper Johns, the Coen Broth­ers, and, not least sure­ly, Finnish avant garde com­pos­er and musi­cian M.A. Num­mi­nen. This odd char­ac­ter, who caused a stir in the 60s by set­ting sex guides to music, took it upon him­self to do the same for many of the Trac­ta­tus’s propo­si­tions, and the results are, well…. Lis­ten for your­self.”

5. Aldous Huxley’s Vision­ary Expe­ri­ence
Open Cul­ture: Aldous Hux­ley, Psy­che­delics Enthu­si­ast, Lec­tures About “the Vision­ary Expe­ri­ence” at MIT (1962)

“Hux­ley had already gained world­wide fame for his views on bet­ter liv­ing, which was some­times achieved, he believed, through psy­che­del­ic drugs. This might have already sound­ed like old hat in, say, the San Fran­cis­co of the late 1960s, let alone the 70s and onward, but in these record­ings Hux­ley says his piece in — I still can’t quite believe it — the MIT of the ear­ly 1960s. But diag­nosed a cou­ple years before with the can­cer that would claim his life the next, he had noth­ing to lose by spread­ing the word of his sub­stance-induced dis­cov­er­ies.”

6. Jacques Derrida’s Inter­view with Ornette Cole­man [PDF]
Open Cul­ture: Philoso­pher Jacques Der­ri­da Inter­views Jazz Leg­end Ornette Cole­man: Talk Impro­vi­sa­tion, Lan­guage & Racism (1997)

“Trans­lat­ing Coleman’s tech­nique into ‘a domain that I know bet­ter, that of writ­ten lan­guage,’ Der­ri­da ven­tures to com­pare impro­vi­sa­tion to read­ing, since it ‘doesn’t exclude the pre-writ­ten frame­work that makes it pos­si­ble.’ For him, the exis­tence of a framework—a writ­ten composition—even if only loose­ly ref­er­enced in a jazz per­for­mance, ‘com­pro­mis­es or com­pli­cates the con­cept of impro­vi­sa­tion.’ ”

7. Joey Ramone Sings a Piece by John Cage Adapt­ed from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: “The Won­der­ful Wid­ow of Eigh­teen Springs,”
Open Cul­ture: Hear Joey Ramone Sing a Piece by John Cage Adapt­ed from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

“Ramone’s inter­pre­ta­tion of the piece is enthralling sim­ply as a piece of record­ed music.  But it’s also a fas­ci­nat­ing piece of cul­tur­al his­to­ry, rep­re­sent­ing a con­flu­ence of the fore­most fig­ures in ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry mod­ernist lit­er­a­ture, mid-cen­tu­ry avant-garde music, and late cen­tu­ry punk rock.”

8. The Avant-Garde Project
Open Cul­ture: The Avant-Garde Project: An Archive of Music by 200 Cut­ting-Edge Com­posers, Includ­ing Stravin­sky, Schoen­berg, Cage & More

“Every sphere of record­ed music has its crate-dig­gers, those hap­py to flip through hun­dreds — nay, hun­dreds of thou­sands — of obscure, for­got­ten vinyl albums in search of their subgenre’s even obscur­er, more for­got­ten gems. This holds espe­cial­ly true, if not in num­ber than in avid­i­ty, for enthu­si­asts of the 20th-cen­tu­ry clas­si­cal-exper­i­men­tal-elec­troa­coustic tra­di­tion that The Avant-Garde Project takes as its preser­va­tion man­date.”

9. Alice Tok­las Reads Her Hashish Fudge Recipe
Open Cul­ture: Alice B. Tok­las Reads Her Famous Recipe for Hashish Fudge (1963)

“In this 1963 record­ing from Paci­fi­ca Radio, Tok­las reads her noto­ri­ous recipe. The snack ‘might pro­vide an enter­tain­ing refresh­ment for a Ladies’ Bridge Club or a chap­ter meet­ing of the DAR,’ Tok­las notes in her reedy, dig­ni­fied voice.”

10. Jean Bau­drillard Sings!
Open Cul­ture: Jean Bau­drillard Reads His Poet­ry, Backed By All-Star Arts Band (1996)

“Known to hip aca­d­e­m­ic types and avant-garde-ists, Bau­drillard’s maybe the kind of thinker who gets name-dropped more than read (and he’s no easy read). But in the audio clip above, he reads to us, from his poet­ry no less, while backed by the swirling abstract sounds of The Chance Band. It’s an odd, one-time, assem­blage of artists and thinkers Ubuweb describes as ‘unbe­liev­able but true!’ ”

If you’ve already seen every­thing on it, con­grat­u­la­tions: you can con­sid­er your­self a true, shall we say, OC OG.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Avant-Garde Media: The UbuWeb Col­lec­tion

Exten­sive Archive of Avant-Garde & Mod­ernist Mag­a­zines (1890–1939) Now Avail­able Online

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of the 1913 Exhi­bi­tion That Intro­duced Avant-Garde Art to Amer­i­ca

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 Free Cartoon Biography of Ayn Rand: Her Life & Thought

in Comics/Cartoons, Literature, Philosophy | October 2nd, 2014

rand cartoon bio

Ayn Rand is one of the most divi­sive fig­ures in 20th Cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can thought. In some cir­cles, par­tic­u­lar­ly on Wall Street and in Wash­ing­ton DC think tanks, she’s seen as a patron saint of lais­sez faire cap­i­tal­ism. She preached the virtues of indi­vid­u­al­ism and decried gov­ern­ment hand­outs and tax­es before it was cool, after all. In oth­er cir­cles, her best­selling books are thought to be lit­tle more than jus­ti­fi­ca­tions of socio­path­ic behav­ior couched in stilt­ed, preachy prose. Whit­tak­er Cham­bers famous­ly dis­missed her final book, Atlas Shrugged, in a review for William F. Buck­ley’s Nation­al Review: “Out of a life­time of read­ing, I can recall no oth­er book in which a tone of over­rid­ing arro­gance was so implaca­bly sus­tained. Its shrill­ness is with­out reprieve. Its dog­ma­tism is with­out appeal.”

Yet Rand’s thought found a great deal of appeal among Amer­i­can con­ser­v­a­tives. Alan Greenspan, the for­mer head of the Fed­er­al Reserve, was a mem­ber of Rand’s inner cir­cle. For­mer vice pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Paul Ryan and like­ly pres­i­den­tial con­tender Rand Paul are both not­ed fol­low­ers. Whether you agree with her or not, Rand is some­one you need to under­stand if you want to get a sense of what’s going on with Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. So for those of you who might blanche at the thought of wad­ing through one of her phone­book-sized tomes, check out Dar­ryl Cunningham’s car­toon biog­ra­phy of Rand.

Cun­ning­ham traces her life — her family’s loss of wealth and prop­er­ty at the hands of the Bol­she­viks dur­ing the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion, her immi­gra­tion to Amer­i­ca at age 21, and her even­tu­al rise in fame and for­tune. Ele­gant­ly and con­cise­ly, Cun­ning­ham not only lays out Rand’s phi­los­o­phy but also paints a com­plex por­trait of a deeply con­tra­dic­to­ry per­son. All with the help of car­toons.

Rand preached the virtue of indi­vid­u­al­i­ty but she ruth­less­ly excom­mu­ni­cat­ed any­one in her cult-like inner cir­cle who devi­at­ed from her ide­ol­o­gy. She praised rea­son over emo­tion but her spec­tac­u­lar­ly com­pli­cat­ed per­son­al life was rid­dled with pet­ty jeal­ousies and long sim­mer­ing feuds. She abhorred gov­ern­ment aid for the poor but she lived on Social Secu­ri­ty at the end of her life. And per­haps strangest of all, con­sid­er­ing the cur­rent Amer­i­can polit­i­cal cli­mate, Rand vocal­ly sup­port­ed both athe­ism and abor­tion rights, but she has been utter­ly embraced by the Amer­i­can right.

You can see a page of Cunningham’s work above, or you can read his entire work, 66 pages of com­ic good­ness, at ACT-I-VATE.

via io9

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Eco­nom­ics & Eco­nom­ic The­o­ry Explained with Comics, Start­ing with Adam Smith

William F. Buck­ley Flogged Him­self to Get Through Atlas Shrugged

Ayn Rand Talks Athe­ism with Phil Don­ahue

Great Shake­speare Plays Retold with Stick Fig­ures in Three Sim­ple Draw­ings

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

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 one new draw­ing of a vice pres­i­dent with an octo­pus on his head dai­ly.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

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Art Garfunkel Lists 1195 Books He Read Over 45 Years, Plus His 157 Favorites (Many Free)

in Literature, Music | September 25th, 2014

Image by Nation­aal Archief, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

If you’ve been won­der­ing what Art Gar­funkel has been up to late­ly, the answer is that it seems that he’s been read­ing. A lot.

The lanky, curly-haired num­ber two guy for the sem­i­nal folk-rock band Simon & Gar­funkel has been keep­ing track of every sin­gle thing he has read from June 1968 until Octo­ber 2013 and he’s post­ed all of them  — 1,195 texts — on his web­site. The first item on his list is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Con­fes­sions and the last is Witold Gom­brow­icz’s Cos­mos. In between, Gar­funkel has knocked through some seri­ous­ly daunt­ing tomes –War and Peace, Ulysses, Mid­dle­march, Remem­brance of Things Past and Immanuel Kant’s Foun­da­tions of the Meta­physics of Morals. He even report­ed­ly read the entire Ran­dom House Dic­tio­nary.

His tastes gen­er­al­ly run towards the greats of the West­ern Canon with some more pulpy works thrown in along the way. J.K. Rowl­ing, Anne Rice and Dan Brown make appear­ances, as does E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey. For those who find it daunt­ing to look at a list of 1,1195 books, Gar­funkel also pro­vides a list of his 157 favorites, which includes many great pub­lic domain works found in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books col­lec­tions. You can 15 of Art’s favorites here:

“I read for the read­ing plea­sure, not for the gold star,” Gar­funkel told Nick Paum­garten of the New York­er in an inter­view a few years back. “Read­ing is a way to take down­time and make it stim­u­lat­ing. If you’re in the wait­ing room of a dentist’s office and don’t want to twid­dle your thumbs, you turn to Tol­stoy.”
Garfunkel’s list, or “library” as his web­site calls it, cre­ates an expec­tant­ly inti­mate por­trait of the artist. In the win­ter 1970, when Simon & Gar­funkel released their biggest sell­ing album, Like a Bridge Over Trou­bled Water, just as the duo was break­ing up, Gar­funkel blew through Moby Dick and Goethe’s The Sor­rows of Young Werther before mov­ing on to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nau­sea and then lat­er Bertrand Russell’s The Con­quest of Hap­pi­ness. When the duo reunit­ed to play their famous con­cert in Cen­tral Park in 1981, Gar­funkel pol­ished off Dick­ens’ Nicholas Nick­le­by. And when Simon & Gar­funkel was induct­ed into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Jan­u­ary 1990, he was read­ing Antho­ny Trollope’s An Auto­bi­og­ra­phy.

The one type of book he doesn’t read is post­mod­ern lit­er­a­ture. His list of some 1195 books con­tains no men­tion of the likes of Don DeLil­lo, Don­ald Barthelme or Thomas Pyn­chon. “I tried Gravity’s Rain­bow, and I thought it was fraud­u­lent,” Gar­funkel said.

Image above tak­en by Eddie Mallin.

via @pickover

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Steven Soder­bergh Posts a List of Every­thing He Watched and Read in 2009

Joseph Brodsky’s Read­ing List For Hav­ing an Intel­li­gent Con­ver­sa­tion

Carl Sagan’s Under­grad Read­ing List: 40 Essen­tial Texts for a Well-Round­ed Thinker

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

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 one new draw­ing of a vice pres­i­dent with an octo­pus on his head dai­ly.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

 

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