If you call yourself a Tolkien fanboy or fangirl, you’ve almost certainly kept up with the various film and television adaptations of not just the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but of its predecessor, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again. Tolkien’s first children’s novel (or so the literary world first received it). The story it tells of the reluctant hero Bilbo Baggins and the band of raffish compatriots who drag him out to claim some treasure from Smaug the dragon offers understandably irresistible material for adaptation: the richly detailed, often funny high-fantasy adventure has, over the decades, made for numerous productions on the stage, radio, and screen.
Known in English as The Fairytale Journey of Mr. Bilbo Baggins, The Hobbit and in Russian, in full, as Сказочное путешествие мистера Бильбо Бэггинса, Хоббита, через дикий край, чёрный лес, за туманные горы. Туда и обратно. По сказочной повести Джона Толкина “Хоббит,”the hourlong TV movie debuted on the Leningrad TV Channel’s children’s showTale After Tale in 1985. This unlicensed adaptation frames itself with the words of a Tolkien stand-in called “the Professor,” using live actors to play the main characters like Bilbo, Thorin, Gandalf, and Gollum, portraying the more exotic ones with either puppets or, according to Tolkien Gateway, dancers from the Leningrad State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre. The fact that this version of The Hobbitonly recently became available with real English subtitles (as opposed to goofy parody ones) goes to show just how seriously the Tolkien fandom has taken it, but it does retain a kind of handcrafted charm. Plus, it gives the internet the chance to indulge in the obligatory Yakov Smirnoff gag: in Soviet Russia, ring finds you.
In her New York Times review of Haruki Murakami’s latest, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Patti Smith writes that the novelist has two modes, “the surreal, intra-dimensional side” and the “more minimalist, realist side.” These two Murakamis often coexist within the same work of fiction, as the fantastic or the supernatural invades the real, or the other way around. Like one of his literary heroes, Franz Kafka, Murakami’s work doesn’t so much create alternate realities as it alters reality, with all its mundane details and humdrum daily routines. As Ted Gioia put it in a review of Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, “this ability to capture the phantasmagorical in the thick of commuter traffic, broadband Internet connections and high-rise architecture is the distinctive calling card of Murakami”—he “mesmerizes us by working his legerdemain in places where reality would seem to be rock solid.”
In Colorless Tsukuru TazakiMurakami works this same magic, as you can see in this excerpt published in Slate last month. Textured with granular realist details and straightforward narration, the scene slowly builds into a captivating supernatural tale that slides just as easily back into the weft and warp of waking life. In one piece of dialogue, Murakami sums up one way we might read all of his “surreal, intra-dimensional” flights: “It wasn’t an issue of whether or not he believed it. I think he totally accepted it as the weird tale it was. Like the way a snake will swallow its prey and not chew it, but instead let it slowly digest.” Given the jittery, distracted state of most modern readers in a technological landscape that pushes us to make hasty judgments and snappy, ill-considered replies, it is surprising how many of Murakami’s fans are willing to take the time. And it is no subset of cloistered devotees either, but, in Patti Smith’s words, “the alienated, the athletic, the disenchanted and the buoyant.”
Murakami finds readers across this broad spectrum for many reasons; his prose is accessible even when his narratives are baffling. (Gioia notes that “when the Japanese publisher of Kafka on the Shore set up a website allowing readers to ask questions of the author, some 8,000 were submitted.”) His perennial preoccupation with, and immersion in, the worlds of jazz, rock, and classical music, baseball, and running, draw in those who might normally avoid the Kafka-esque. But when we come to Murakami, Kafka-esque is very often what we find, as well as Salinger-esque, Vonnegut-esque, Pynchon-esque, even Philip K. Dick-esque, as well as the –esque of realist masters like Raymond Carver. Whether you’re new to Murakami or a longtime fan of his work, you’ll find all of these tendencies, and much more to love, in the four short stories we present below, all free to read at The New Yorker for a limited time (the magazine will go behind a paywall in the fall).
Take advantage of this brief reprieve and enjoy the many riches of Haruki Murakami’s fictive worlds, which so deceptively impersonate the one most of us live in that we feel right at home in his work until it jolts us out of the familiar and into a “weird tale.” Whether you believe them or not, they’re sure to stay with you awhile.
And last but surely not least, we bring you “The Folklore of Our Times” from The Guardian (published August 1, 2003), one of Murakami’s involved realist coming-of-age narratives notable for the mature, almost world-weary insights he draws from the seemingly unexceptional fabric of ordinary experience.
Yesterday we featured Jorge Luis Borges’ review of Citizen Kane. But as a film critic, the writer of such influential short fictions as “The Aleph,” “The Garden of Forking Paths,” and “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” didn’t start there, with perhaps the most influential motion picture ever produced. Flicker has more on the movies that caught Borges’ critical eye:
He was a passionate admirer of Charlie Chaplin. In a wonderful sentence that typifies his writing style, Borges writes, “Would anyone dare ignore that Charlie Chaplin is one of the established gods in the mythology of our time, a cohort of de Chirico’s motionless nightmares, of Scarface Al’s ardent machine guns, of the finite yet unlimited universe of Greta Garbo’s lofty shoulders, of the goggled eyes of Gandhi?”
Borges’ film reviews were often quite humorous. When discussing Josef von Sternberg’s version of Crime and Punishment (1935), he writes, “Indoctrinated by the populous memory of The Scarlet Empress, I was expecting a vast flood of false beards, miters, samovars, masks, surly faces, wrought-iron gates, vineyards, chess pieces, balalaikas, prominent cheekbones, and horses. In short, I was expecting the usual von Sternberg nightmare, the suffocation and the madness.”
But the film-reviewing Borges’ masterpiece of dismissal takes on King Kong, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s most iconic giant-ape disaster movie of them all:
A monkey, forty feet tall (some fans say forty-five) may have obvious charms, but those charms have not convinced this viewer. King Kong is no full-blooded ape but rather a rusty, desiccated machine whose movements are downright clumsy. His only virtue, his height, did not impress the cinematographer, who persisted in photographing him from above rather than from below — the wrong angle, as it neutralizes and even diminishes the ape’s overpraised stature. He is actually hunchbacked and bowlegged, attributes that serve only to reduce him in the spectator’s eye. To keep him from looking the least bit extraordinary, they make him do battle with far more unusual monsters and have him reside in caves of false cathedral splendor, where his infamous size again loses all proportion. But what finally demolishes both the gorilla and the film is his romantic love — or lust — for Fay Wray.
As Mourdaunt Hall’s contemporary New York Times review of this “Fantastic Film in Which a Monstrous Ape Uses Automobiles for Missiles and Climbs a Skyscraper” put it, “Through multiple exposures, processed ‘shots’ and a variety of angles of camera wizardry the producers set forth an adequate story and furnish enough thrills for any devotee of such tales,” but “it is when the enormous ape, called Kong, is brought to this city that the excitement reaches its highest pitch. Imagine a 50-foot beast with a girl in one paw climbing up the outside of the Empire State Building, and after putting the girl on a ledge, clutching at airplanes, the pilots of which are pouring bullets from machine guns into the monster’s body.” That sight must have struck the (still not overly thrilled) Hall as more impressive than it did Borges, but then, Borges, that visionary of dizzying labyrinths, eternities, and infinitudes, had already seen true visions of enormousness — and enormity.
When we discover Jorge Luis Borges, we usually discover him through his short stories — or at least through his own highly distinctive uses of the short story form. Those many of us who thereupon decide to read everything the man ever wrote sooner or later find that he ventured into other realms of short text as well. Borges spent time as a poet, an essayist, and even as something of a film critic, a period of his career that will delight the sizable cinephilic segment of his readership. “I’m almost a century late to this party,” writes one such fan, Brendan Kiley at TheStranger, “but I recently stumbled into the movie reviews of Jorge Luis Borges (in his Selected Non-Fictions) and they’re fantastic: gloomy, sometimes bitchy, hilarious.” He first highlights Borges’ 1941 assessment of Citizen Kane, which Interrelevant provides in its incisive, unsparing, referential, and very brief entirety:
AN OVERWHELMING FILM
Citizen Kane (called The Citizen in Argentina) has at least two plots. The first, pointlessly banal, attempts to milk applause from dimwits: a vain millionaire collects statues, gardens, palaces, swimming pools, diamonds, cars, libraries, man and women. Like an earlier collector (whose observations are usually ascribed to the Holy Ghost), he discovers that this cornucopia of miscellany is a vanity of vanities: all is vanity. At the point of death, he yearns for one single thing in the universe, the humble sled he played with as a child!
The second plot is far superior. It links the Koheleth to the memory of another nihilist, Franz Kafka. A kind of metaphysical detective story, its subject (both psychological and allegorical) is the investigation of a man’s inner self, through the works he has wrought, the words he has spoken, the many lives he has ruined. The same technique was used by Joseph Conrad in Chance (1914) and in that beautiful film The Power and the Glory: a rhapsody of miscellaneous scenes without chronological order. Overwhelmingly, endlessly, Orson Welles shows fragments of the life of the man, Charles Foster Kane, and invites us to combine them and to reconstruct him.
Form of multiplicity and incongruity abound in the film: the first scenes record the treasures amassed by Kane; in one of the last, a poor woman, luxuriant and suffering, plays with an enormous jigsaw puzzle on the floor of a palace that is also a museum. At the end we realize that the fragments are not governed by any secret unity: the detested Charles Foster Kane is a simulacrum, a chaos of appearances. (A possible corollary, foreseen by David Hume, Ernst Mach, and our own Macedonio Fernandez: no man knows who he is, no man is anyone.) In a story by Chesterton — “The Head of Caesar,” I think — the hero observes that nothing is so frightening as a labyrinth with no center. This film is precisely that labyrinth.
We all know that a party, a palace, a great undertaking, a lunch for writers and journalists, an atmosphere of cordial and spontaneous camaraderie, are essentially horrendous. Citizen Kane is the first film to show such things with an awareness of this truth.
The production is, in general, worthy of its vast subject. The cinematography has a striking depth, and there are shots whose farthest planes (like Pre-Raphaelite paintings) are as precise and detailed as the close-ups. I venture to guess, nonetheless, that Citizen Kane will endure as a certain Griffith or Pudovkin films have “endured”—films whose historical value is undeniable but which no one cares to see again. It is too gigantic, pedantic, tedious. It is not intelligent, though it is the work of genius—in the most nocturnal and Germanic sense of that bad word.
“A kind of metaphysical detective story,” “a labyrinth with no center,” “the work of a genius” — why, if I didn’t know better, I’d think Borges here describes his own work. Welles himself didn’t go ignorant of his film’s Borgesian nature, or at least of the tendency of others to point out its Borgesian nature, not always in a positive light. “Some people called it warmed-over Borges,” Welles recalled in a conversation 42 years later with the filmmaker Henry Jaglom. Nor did he forget Borges’ own critique: “He said that it was pedantic, which is a very strange thing to say about it, and that it was a labyrinth. And that the worst thing about a labyrinth is that there’s no way out. And this is a labyrinth of a movie with no way out. Borges is half-blind. Never forget that. But you know, I could take it that he and Sartre” — who thought the film’s image “too much in love with itself” — “simply hated Kane. In their minds, they were seeing— and attacking — something else. It’s them, not my work.” Defensive though this may sound, it identifies the impulse that had the author of Labyrinths seeing all those labyrinths in the movie: to quote Anaïs Nin, a writer contemporary though not often brought into the same context with Borges, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
In a previous post, we brought you the voice of Italian fantasist Italo Calvino, reading from his Invisible Cities and Mr. Palomar. Both of those works, as with all of Calvino’s fiction, make oblique references to wide swaths of classical literature, but Calvino is no show-off, dropping in allusions for their own sake, nor is it really necessary to have read as widely as the author to truly appreciate his work, as in the case of certain modernist masters. Instead, Calvino’s fiction tends to cast a spell on readers, inspiring them to seek out far-flung ancient romances and strange folktales, to immerse themselves in other worlds contained within the covers of other books. Not the least bit pedantic, Calvino possesses that rare gift of the best of teachers: the ability to make Literature capital “L”—an intimidating domain for many—become wondrous and approachable all over again, as in our early years when books were magical portals to be entered, not onerous tasks to be checked off a list.
Calvino’s short essay, “Why Read the Classics?” (published in The New York Review of Books in 1986), resounds with this sense of wonder, as well as with the author’s friendly, unpretentious attitude.
He lays out his reasoning in 14 points—slightly abridged below—beginning with the frank admission that all of us feel some sense of shame for the gaps in our reading, and thus often claim to be “re-reading” when in fact we’re reading, for example, Moby Dick, Anna Karenina, or King Lear, for the first time. Calvino states plainly the nature of the case;
The reiterative prefix before the verb “read” may be a small hypocrisy on the part of people ashamed to admit they have not read a famous book. To reassure them, we need only observe that, however vast any person’s basic reading may be, there still remain an enormous number of fundamental works that he has not read.
Point one, then, goes on to argue for reading—for the first time—classic works of literature we may have only pretended to in the past. The remainder of Calvino’s case follows logically:
1) ….to read a great book for the first time in one’s maturity is an extraordinary pleasure, different from (though one cannot say greater or lesser than) the pleasure of having read it in one’s youth.
2) We use the word “classics” for those books that are treasured by those who have read and loved them; but they are treasured no less by those who have the luck to read them for the first time in the best conditions to enjoy them.
3) There should therefore be a time in adult life devoted to revisiting the most important books of our youth.
4) Every rereading of a classic is as much a voyage of discovery as the first reading.
5) Every reading of a classic is in fact a rereading.
6) A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
7) The classics are the books that come down to us bearing upon them the traces of readings previous to ours, and bringing in their wake the traces they themselves have left on the culture or cultures they have passed through.
Calvino introduces his last 7 points with the observation that any formal literary education we receive often does more to obscure our appreciation of classic works than to enhance it. “Schools and universities,” he writes, “ought to help us to understand that no book that talks about a book says more than the book in question, but instead they do their level best to make us think the opposite.”
Part of the reason many people come to literary works with trepidation has as much to do with their perceived difficulty as with the scholarly voice of authority that speaks from on high through “critical biographies, commentaries, and interpretations” as well as “the introduction, critical apparatus, and bibliography.” Though useful tools for scholars, these can serve as means of communicating that certain professional readers will always know more than you do. Calvino recommends leaving such things aside, since they “are used as a smoke screen to hide what the text has to say.” He then concludes:
8) A classic does not necessarily teach us anything we did not know before.
9) The classics are books that we find all the more new, fresh, and unexpected upon reading, the more we thought we knew them from hearing them talked about.
10) We use the word “classic” of a book that takes the form of an equivalent to the universe, on a level with the ancient talismans.
11) Your classic author is the one you cannot feel indifferent to, who helps you to define yourself in relation to him, even in dispute with him.
12) A classic is a book that comes before other classics; but anyone who has read the others first, and then reads this one, instantly recognizes its place in the family tree.
Finally, Calvino adds two points to explain why he thinks we should read old books, when we are so constantly overwhelmed “by the avalanche of current events.” To this question he says:
13) A classic is something that tends to relegate the concerns of the moment to the status of background noise […]
14) A classic is something that persists as a background noise even when the most incompatible momentary concerns are in control of the situation.
In other words, classic literature can have the salutary effect of tempering our high sensitivity to every breaking piece of news and distracting piece of trivia, giving us the ballast of historical perspective. In our current culture, in which we live perpetually plugged into information machines that amplify every signal and every bit of noise, such a remedy seems indispensable.
Haruki Murakami’s 13th novel,Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage: A Novel, was first published last April in Japan, and, within the first month, it sold one million copies. This week, the novel (translated by Philip Gabriel) finally arrives in bookstores in the U.S. If you’re wondering where this novel will take readers, you can read an excerpt of Murakami’s novel recently published in Slate, and then Patti Smith’s book review in The New York Times. Smith, the “Godmother of Punk,” won the National Book Award for her 2010 memoir Just Kids. She knows something about writing, and she’s clearly no stranger to Murakami’s body of work. While planning to go on tour, Smith once wondered what books to take along, and wrote on her personal web site:
The worse part, besides saying goodbye to my daughter Jesse, is picking out what books to take. I decide this will be essentially a Haruki Murakami tour. So I will take several of his books including the three volume IQ84 to reread. He is a good writer to reread as he sets your mind to daydreaming while you are reading him. thus i always miss stuff.
Sophocles and Aeschylus may be spinning in their graves. Or, who knows, they may be taking some delight in this bizarre twist on the Oedipus myth. Running 8 minutes, Jason Wishnow’s 2004 film puts vegetables in the starring roles. One of the first stop-motion films shot with a digital still camera, Oedipus took two years to make with a volunteer staff of 100. But the hard work paid off.
The film has since been screened at 70+ film festivals and was eventually acquired by the Sundance Channel. Separate videos show you the behind-the-scenes making of the film (middle), plus the storyboards used during production (bottom). This video first appeared on our site in 2011, and, stellar as it is, we’re delighted to bring it back for readers who have joined us since. Hope you enjoy.
Anyone remember Michael Crichton’s Westworld (or the Simpsonsparody)? In this dystopian 1973 sci-fi, tourists visit a triumvirate of fantasy theme parks staffed by robotic historical re-enactors: Roman World, Medieval World, and the titular West World, with its “lawless violence on the American Frontier.” When a virus infects the parks’ androids, James Brolin must fight a ruthless robot gunslinger—played by a stone-faced Yul Brenner—to the death. The film may look laughably dated, but the fears it taps into are anything but: 2001, Terminator, Battlestar Galactica, I, Robot, and even a Westworldremake in the works—the perennial theme of man vs. machine, as old in film at least as Fritz Lang’s silent Metropolis, becomes ever more relevant in our drone-haunted world.
But are evil—or at least dangerously malfunctioning—robots something we should legitimately fear? Not according to visionary sci-fi author and Disney enthusiast Ray Bradbury in a letter to English writer Brian Sibley, penned in 1974, one year after the release of theme-park horror Westworld. The main body of Bradbury’s letter consists of a vigorous defense of Walt Disney and Disneyland, against whom “most of the other architects of the modern world were asses and fools.” Sibley recalls that his initial letter “expressed doubts about Disney’s use of Audio-Animatronic creations in Disneyland.” “At the time,” he explains, “I… had probably read too many sci-fi stories about the danger of robots taking over our human world—including, of course, some by Ray—and so saw it as a sinister rather than benign experiment.”
After his praise of Disney, Bradbury writes two agitated postscripts exploding what Sibley calls “ill-informed and prejudiced views” on robots. He classes automated entities with benign “extensions of people” like books, film projectors, cars, and presumably all other forms of technology. Notwithstanding the fact that books cannot actually wield weapons and kill people, Bradbury makes an interesting argument about fears of robots as akin to those that lead to censorship and enforced ignorance. But Bradbury’s counterclaim sounds a misanthropic note that nonetheless rings true given the salient examples he offers: “I am not afraid of robots,” he states, emphatically, “I am afraid of people, people, people.” He goes on to list just a few of the conflicts in which humans kill humans, religious, racial, nationalist, etc.: “Catholics killing Protestants… whites killing blacks… English killing Irish.…” It’s a short sampling that could go on indefinitely. Bradbury strongly implies that the fears we project onto robotic bogeymen are in reality well-grounded fears of each other. People, he suggests, can be monstrous when they don’t “remain human,” and technology—including robots—only assists with the necessary task of “humanizing” us. “Robots?” Bradbury writes, “God, I love them. And I will use them humanely to teach all of the above.”
Read a transcript of the letter below, courtesy of Letters of Note, and be sure to check out that site’s new book-length collection of fascinating historical correspondence.
June 10, 1974
Dear Brian Sibley:
This will have to be short. Sorry. But I am deep into my screenplay on SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES and have no secretary, never have had one..so must write all my own letters..200 a weekl!!!
Disney was a dreamer and a doer..while the rest of us were talking ab out the future, he built it. The things he taught us at Disneyland about street planning, crowd movement, comfort, humanity, etc, will influence builders architects, urban planners for the next century. Because of him we will humanize our cities, plan small towns again where we can get in touch with one another again and make democracy work creatively because we will KNOW the people we vote for. He was so far ahead of his time it will take is the next 50 years to catch up. You MUST come to Disneyland and eat your words, swallow your doubts. Most of the other architects of the modern world were asses and fools who talked against Big Brother and then built prisons to put us all up in..our modern environments which stifle and destroy us. Disney the so-called conservative turns out to be Disney the great man of foresight and construction.
Enough. Come here soon. I’ll toss you in the Jungle Ride River and ride you on the train into tomorrow, yesterday, and beyond.
Good luck, and stop judging at such a great distance. You are simply not qualified. Disney was full of errors, paradoxes, mistakes. He was also full of life, beauty, insight. Which speaks for all of us, eh? We are all mysteries of light and dark. There are no true conservatives, liberals, etc, in the world. Only people.
Best,
(Signed, ‘Ray B.’)
P.S. I can’t find that issue of THE NATION, of the NEW REPUBLIC, which ever it was, with my letter in it on Disney. Mainly I said that if Disneyland was good enough for Captain Bligh it was good enough for me. Charles Laughton and his wife took me to Disneyland for my very first visit and our first ride was the Jungle Boat Ride, which Laughton immediately commandeered, jeering at customers going by in other boats! A fantastic romp for me and a hilarious day. What a way to start my association with Disneyland! R.B.
P.S. Can’t resist commenting on you fears of the Disney robots. Why aren’t you afraid of books, then? The fact is, of course, that people have been afraid of books, down through history. They are extensions of people, not people themselves. Any machine, any robot, is the sum total of the ways we use it. Why not knock down all robot camera devices and the means for reproducing the stuff that goes into such devices, things called projectors in theatres? A motion picture projector is a non-humanoid robot which repeats truths which we inject into it. Is it inhuman? Yes. Does it project human truths to humanize us more often than not? Yes.
The excuse could be made that we should burn all books because some books are dreadful.
We should mash all cars because some cars get in accidents because of the people driving them.
We should burn down all the theatres in the world because some films are trash, drivel.
So it is finally with the robots you say you fear. Why fear something? Why not create with it? Why not build robot teachers to help out in schools where teaching certain subjects is a bore for EVERYONE? Why not have Plato sitting in your Greek Class answering jolly questions about his Republic? I would love to experiment with that. I am not afraid of robots. I am afraid of people, people, people. I want them to remain human. I can help keep them human with the wise and lovely use of books, films, robots, and my own mind, hands, and heart.
I am afraid of Catholics killing Protestants and vice versa.
I am afraid of whites killing blacks and vice versa.
I am afraid of English killing Irish and vice versa.
I am afraid of young killing old and vice versa.
I am afraid of Communists killing Capitalists and vice versa.
But…robots? God, I love them. I will use them humanely to teach all of the above. My voice will speak out of them, and it will be a damned nice voice.
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