Haruki Murakami’s Passion for Jazz: Discover the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar

in Jazz, Literature, Music, Writing | July 31st, 2014

Any serious reader of Haruki Murakami — and even most of the casual ones — will have picked up on the fact that, apart from the work that has made him quite possibly the world’s most beloved living novelist, the man has two passions: running and jazz. In his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, he tells the story of how he became a runner, which he sees as inextricably bound up with how he became a writer. Both personal transformations occurred in his early thirties, after he sold Peter Cat, the Tokyo jazz bar he spent most of the 1970s operating. Yet he hardly put the music behind him, continuing to maintain a sizable personal record library, weave jazz references into his fiction, and even to write the essay collections Portrait in Jazz and Portrait in Jazz 2.

Image comes from Ilana Simons’ animated introduction to Murakami

“I had my first encounter with jazz in 1964 when I was 15,” Murakami writes in the New York Times. “Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers performed in Kobe in January that year, and I got a ticket for a birthday present. This was the first time I really listened to jazz, and it bowled me over. I was thunderstruck.” Though unskilled in music himself, he often felt that, in his head, “something like my own music was swirling around in a rich, strong surge. I wondered if it might be possible for me to transfer that music into writing. That was how my style got started.”

He found writing and jazz similar endeavors, in that both need “a good, natural, steady rhythm,” a melody, “which, in literature, means the appropriate arrangement of the words to match the rhythm,” harmony, “the internal mental sounds that support the words,” and free improvisation, wherein, “through some special channel, the story comes welling out freely from inside. All I have to do is get into the flow.”

With Peter Cat long gone, fans have nowhere to go to get into the flow of Murakami’s personal jazz selections. Still, at the top of the post, you can listen to a playlist of songs mentioned in Portrait in Jazz, featuring Chet Baker, Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, Bill Evans, and Miles Davis. (You can find another extended playlist of 56 songs here.) Should you make the trip out to Tokyo, you can also pay a visit to Cafe Rokujigen, profiled in the short video just above, where Murakami readers congregate to read their favorite author’s books while listening to the music that, in his words, taught him everything he needed to know to write them. And elsewhere on the very same subway line, you can also visit the old site of Peter Cat: just follow in the footsteps taken by A Geek in Japan author Héctor García, who set out to find it after reading Murakami’s reminiscences in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. And what plays in the great eminence-outsider of Japanese letters’ earbuds while he runs? “I love listening to the Lovin’ Spoonful,” he writes. Hey, you can’t spin to Thelonious Monk all the time.

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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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Hear Roland Barthes Present His 40-Hour Course, La Préparation du roman, in French (1978–80)

in Literature, Online Courses, Philosophy | July 30th, 2014

A key figure in such academic areas as semiology, structuralism, and post-structuralism, and author of such theoretical classics as Mythologies, The Pleasure of the Text, and S/Z, Roland Barthes is familiar to students across the humanities. His prolific output encompassed books on literary theory, philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, and theoretical essays on photography, music, fashion, sports, and love. In addition to his wide-ranging writings, Barthes lectured in the U.S., Switzerland, and at the Collège de France, where he was elected Chair of Semiology in 1977.

Barthes’ 1978–1980 lecture course at the Collège de France—titled The Preparation of the Novel—has been preserved in an English translation by Kate Briggs. Speakers of French, however, can hear Barthes himself deliver the lecture series in audio archived at Ubuweb. Listen to the first session from December, 1978 at the top of the post, and hear the fifth, with some musical accompaniment, above.

Delivered shortly after publication of the seminal texts mentioned above, these lectures, writes editor Nathalie Léger in her introduction, “form a diptych—the two parts can be accessed independently of each other, yet each one is indispensable to the other.” The last two lecture courses Barthes taught at the Collège de France, both, Léger writes, represent not a systematic theory, but “the peregrination of a quest,” exploring “one question and one question only: that of literary utopia.” Such probing investigations propelled Barthes’ entire career, and opened up new critical paths for a great many thinkers who dared to trace his winding intellectual steps and often intensely personal explorations.

La Préparation du roman will be added to our list of Free Online Literature Courses, part of our larger collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

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

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Experience James Joyce’s Ulysses in Virtual Reality, Using the Oculus Rift Headset

in Literature, Technology | July 29th, 2014

If, like Virginia Woolf, you could never read James Joyce’s Ulysses from start to finish, then here’s another way to experience the modernist classic. Virtually rather than textually. According to The Creator’s Project, “an Irish filmmaker named Eoghan Kidney is designing a virtual reality video game that uses an Oculus Rift headset to put the player in the shoes of Stephen Dedalus as he meanders through Dublin on June 16th, 1904.” On his Fundit page and in the video above, Mr. Kidney (not to be confused with Leopold Bloom’s burnt kidney breakfast) gives us an example of how the “In Ulysses” project will work:

My “In Ulysses” project is another way of experiencing the book — this time, using the virtual format. It will be a virtual reality videogame that will allow a user to inhabit the characters of Ulysses and experience the density of Joyce’s language in a fun and accessible way.…

As a user of “In Ulysses” walks along a virtual Sandymount Strand, the book will be read to them — they will hear Stephen’s thoughts as they are written — but these thoughts will then be illustrated around the user in real-time using textual annotations, images and links. A user can stop walking (therefore stopping Stephen walking) and explore these illustrations, gaining insight into the book and adding to the enjoyment of it.

“In Ulysses” has already raised €4000, enough to fund its prototype. No target date for its release has been announced. And, from what I can tell, the consumer version of the Oculus Rift won’t be released until next year. So, like any good reader of Ulysses, you’ll need to have a little patience.

H/T Eric O.

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Greek Myth Comix Presents Homer’s Iliad & Odyssey Using Stick-Man Drawings

in Comics/Cartoons, Education, K-12, Literature | July 28th, 2014

The next time some know-it-all moralist blames any number of social ills on violent video games or action films, ask them if they’d rather kids stick to the classics. When they invariably reply in the affirmative, you can smugly direct their attention to Greek Myth Comix’s astonishing infographic detailing the multitude of gruesome killings in the Iliad. Homer’s epic unflinchingly describes, for example, in graphic detail, the death of Lycon, who in Book 16 has a sword thrust through his neck: “nothing held but a piece of skin, and from that, Lycon’s head dangled down.” And if you’ve held on to your lunch, you may be interested to know the grisly circumstances of the other two candidates for “grimmest death.” Just below, see a section of the comic celebrating “stand out performances in battle.” Can Zack Snyder’s King Leonidas match kills with Homer’s Achilles? Only one way to find out….

The Iliad graphic is great fun—as well as a succinct way to render modern scolds speechless—but Greek Myth Comix doesn’t stop there… Oh no! Fans of Homer’s Odyssey will not be disappointed; Books 5–7, and much of 9, 10, and 12 also get the “comix” treatment. The artwork is admittedly crude, but the text comes from a much more authoritative source than 300, no disrespect to Frank Miller. Lauren Jenkinson is a “Classical Civilisation and Literature teacher, writer and, apparently, artist,” and her online adaptations are intended primarily to help students pass their GCSE (OCR), the British secondary exams whose nearest equivalent in the States might perhaps be the SATs.

But Greek Myth Comix won’t only appeal to struggling students in the British Isles. Educators will find much to love here, as will lovers of mythology in general. Online access to the site is free, and you can purchase copies of the comix in PDF—either individually, in bulk, or in poster-size resolution. The site’s full archive has other goodies like the above, “What Makes a Homeric Hero?” And with such recent updates, no doubt Greek Myth Comix has much more in store for those struggling to enjoy or understand Homer’s bloody-minded epics, and those who simply love their myths in comic form as well as ancient lyric.

via HolyKaw

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

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Dante’s Divine Comedy Illustrated in a Remarkable Illuminated Medieval Manuscript (c. 1450)

in Art, Literature, Poetry | July 23rd, 2014

Few writers have inspired so many artists, so deeply and for so long, as Dante Alighieri. His epic poem the Divine Comedy (find in our collection of Free eBooks) has received striking illuminations at the hands of Gustave Doré, Sandro Botticelli, Alberto Martini, and Salvador Dalí — to name only those we’ve featured before here on Open Culture. The names Priamo della Quercia and Giovanni di Paolo may mean relatively little to you right now, but they’ll mean much more once you’ve taken a look at the illustrations featured here and at The World of Dante, which come from an illuminated manuscript of the Divine Comedy at the British Library known as Yates Thompson 36. Produced in Siena around 1450 for an unknown original patron, “the codex belonged to Alfonso V, king of Aragon, Naples, and Sicily,” and includes “110 large miniatures and three historiated initials.” (See all here.) Della Quercia illustrated the Inferno and Purgatorio and all three historiated initials; di Paolo illustrated Paradiso.

“This makes for two distinctly different styles,” continues The World of Dante’s page. “Priamo’s work reflects the more realistic style of late fifteenth-century Florentine painting, an influence which is particularly noticeable in his use of contours and outlines in the depiction of nudes. Giovanni di Paolo’s style is closer to that of late fourteenth-century Sienese artists,” producing results “greatly admired for their visual interpretation of the poem: the artist doesn’t just transcribe Dante’s words but seeks to render their meaning.”

The British Library’s medieval manuscripts blog describes it as “certainly a lavish production” that “must have been an expensive undertaking,” given the status of the men doing the illuminating as “two of the preeminent artists of the day.” But when it came to visualizing Dante’s journey, quite literally, to hell and back in 15th-century Italy, no artist ranked too highly. Even today, I can’t imagine any artist reading the Divine Comedy, illuminated or no, without getting a few vivid ideas of their own.

More images can be found on the British Library web site (scroll down the page). A Yale course entirely dedicated to Dante appears in our collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

Gustave Doré’s Dramatic Illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy

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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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Akira Kurosawa & Gabriel García Márquez Talk About Filmmaking (and Nuclear Bombs) in Six Hour Interview

in Film, History, Literature | July 18th, 2014

You know you’re doing something right in your life if the Nobel Prize-winning author of 100 Years of Solitude talks to you like a giddy fan boy.

Back in October 1990, Gabriel García Márquez sat down with Akira Kurosawa in Tokyo as the Japanese master director was shooting his penultimate movie Rhapsody in August — the only Kurosawa movie I can think of that features Richard Gere. The six hour interview, which was published in The Los Angeles Times in 1991, spanned a range of topics but the author’s love of the director’s movies was evident all the way through. At one point, while discussing Kurosawa’s 1965 film Red Beard, García Márquez said this: “I have seen it six times in 20 years and I talked about it to my children almost every day until they were able to see it. So not only is it the one among your films best liked by my family and me, but also one of my favorites in the whole history of cinema.”

One natural topic discussed was adapting literature to film. The history of cinema is littered with some truly dreadful adaptations and even more that are simply inert and lifeless. One of the Kurosawa’s true gifts as a filmmaker was turning the written word into a vital, memorable image. In movies like Throne of Blood and Ran, he has proved himself to be arguably the finest adapter of Shakespeare in the history of cinema.

García Márquez: Has your method also been that intuitive when you have adapted Shakespeare or Gorky or Dostoevsky?

Kurosawa: Directors who make films halfway may not realize that it is very difficult to convey literary images to the audience through cinematic images. For instance, in adapting a detective novel in which a body was found next to the railroad tracks, a young director insisted that a certain spot corresponded perfectly with the one in the book. “You are wrong,” I said. “The problem is that you have already read the novel and you know that a body was found next to the tracks. But for the people who have not read it there is nothing special about the place.” That young director was captivated by the magical power of literature without realizing that cinematic images must be expressed in a different way.

García Márquez: Can you remember any image from real life that you consider impossible to express on film?

Kurosawa: Yes. That of a mining town named Ilidachi [sic], where I worked as an assistant director when I was very young. The director had declared at first glance that the atmosphere was magnificent and strange, and that’s the reason we filmed it. But the images showed only a run-of-the-mill town, for they were missing something that was known to us: that the working conditions in (the town) are very dangerous, and that the women and children of the miners live in eternal fear for their safety. When one looks at the village one confuses the landscape with that feeling, and one perceives it as stranger than it actually is. But the camera does not see it with the same eyes.

When Kurosawa and García Márquez talked about Rhapsody in August, the mood of the interview darkened. The film is about one old woman struggling with the horrors of surviving the atomic attack on Nagasaki. When it came out, American critics bristled at the movie because it had the audacity to point out that many Japanese weren’t all that pleased with getting nuked. This is especially the case with Nagasaki. While Hiroshima had numerous factories and therefore could be considered a military target, Nagasaki had none. In fact, on August 9, 1945, the original target for the world’s second nuclear attack was the industrial town of Kita Kyushu. But that town was covered in clouds. So the pilots cast about looking for some place, any place, to bomb. That place proved to Nagasaki.

Below, Kurosawa talks passionately about the legacy of the bombing. Interestingly, García Márquez, who had often been a vociferous critic of American foreign policy, sort of defends America’s actions at the end of the war.

Kurosawa: The full death toll for Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been officially published at 230,000. But in actual fact there were over half a million dead. And even now there are still 2,700 patients at the Atomic Bomb Hospital waiting to die from the after-effects of the radiation after 45 years of agony. In other words, the atomic bomb is still killing Japanese.

García Márquez: The most rational explanation seems to be that the U.S. rushed in to end it with the bomb for fear that the Soviets would take Japan before they did.

Kurosawa: Yes, but why did they do it in a city inhabited only by civilians who had nothing to do with the war? There were military concentrations that were in fact waging war.

García Márquez: Nor did they drop it on the Imperial Palace, which must have been a very vulnerable spot in the heart of Tokyo. And I think that this is all explained by the fact that they wanted to leave the political power and the military power intact in order to carry out a speedy negotiation without having to share the booty with their allies. It’s something no other country has ever experienced in all of human history. Now then: Had Japan surrendered without the atomic bomb, would it be the same Japan it is today?

Kurosawa: It’s hard to say. The people who survived Nagasaki don’t want to remember their experience because the majority of them, in order to survive, had to abandon their parents, their children, their brothers and sisters. They still can’t stop feeling guilty. Afterwards, the U.S. forces that occupied the country for six years influenced by various means the acceleration of forgetfulness, and the Japanese government collaborated with them. I would even be willing to understand all this as part of the inevitable tragedy generated by war. But I think that, at the very least, the country that dropped the bomb should apologize to the Japanese people. Until that happens this drama will not be over.

The whole interview is fascinating. They continue to talk about historical memory, nuclear power and the difficulty of filming rose-eating ants. You can read the entire thing here. It’s well worth you time.

via Thompson on Hollywood H/T Sheerly

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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.

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

in Letters, Life, Literature | July 17th, 2014

Charles Bukowski—or “Hank” to his friends—assiduously cultivated a literary persona as a perennial drunken deadbeat. He mostly lived it too, but for a few odd jobs and a period of time, just over a decade, that he spent working for the United States Post Office, beginning in the early fifties as a fill-in letter carrier, then later for over a decade as a filing clerk. He found the work mind-numbing, soul-crushing, and any number of other adjectives one uses to describe repetitive and deeply unfulfilling labor. Actually, one needn’t supply a description—Bukowski has splendidly done so for us, both in his fiction and in the epistle below unearthed by Letters of Note.

In Bukowski’s first novel Post Office (1971), the writer of lowlife comedy and pathos builds in plenty of wish-fulfillment for his literary alter ego Henry Chinaski. Kyle Ryan at The Onion’s A.V. Club sums it up succinctly: “In Bukowski’s world, Chinaski is practically irresistible to women, despite his alcoholism, misogyny, and general crankiness.” In reality, to say that Bukowski found little solace in his work would be a gross understatement. But unlike most of his equally miserable co-workers, Bukowski got to retire early, at age 49, when, in 1969, Black Sparrow Press publisher John Martin offered him $100 a month for life on the condition that he quit his job and write full time.

Needless to say, he was thrilled, so much so that he penned the letter below fifteen years later, expressing his gratitude to Martin and describing, with characteristic brutal honesty, the life of the average wage slave. And though comparisons to slavery usually come as close to the level of absurd exaggeration as comparisons to Nazism, Bukowski’s portrait of the 9 to 5 life makes a very convincing case for what we might call the thesis of his letter: “Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.”

After reading his letter below, you may feel a great deal more sympathy, if you did not already, with Bukowski’s life choices. You may find yourself, in fact, re-evaluating your own.

8–12-86

Hello John:

Thanks for the good letter. I don’t think it hurts, sometimes, to remember where you came from. You know the places where I came from. Even the people who try to write about that or make films about it, they don’t get it right. They call it “9 to 5.” It’s never 9 to 5, there’s no free lunch break at those places, in fact, at many of them in order to keep your job you don’t take lunch. Then there’s OVERTIME and the books never seem to get the overtime right and if you complain about that, there’s another sucker to take your place.

You know my old saying, “Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.”

And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don’t want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does.

As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can’t believe it. What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same things that they did?

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: “Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?”

They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds.

Now in industry, there are vast layoffs (steel mills dead, technical changes in other factors of the work place). They are layed off by the hundreds of thousands and their faces are stunned:

“I put in 35 years…”

“It ain’t right…”

“I don’t know what to do…”

They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. I could see all this. Why couldn’t they? I figured the park bench was just as good or being a barfly was just as good. Why not get there first before they put me there? Why wait?

I just wrote in disgust against it all, it was a relief to get the shit out of my system. And now that I’m here, a so-called professional writer, after giving the first 50 years away, I’ve found out that there are other disgusts beyond the system.

I remember once, working as a packer in this lighting fixture company, one of the packers suddenly said: “I’ll never be free!”

One of the bosses was walking by (his name was Morrie) and he let out this delicious cackle of a laugh, enjoying the fact that this fellow was trapped for life.

So, the luck I finally had in getting out of those places, no matter how long it took, has given me a kind of joy, the jolly joy of the miracle. I now write from an old mind and an old body, long beyond the time when most men would ever think of continuing such a thing, but since I started so late I owe it to myself to continue, and when the words begin to falter and I must be helped up stairways and I can no longer tell a bluebird from a paperclip, I still feel that something in me is going to remember (no matter how far I’m gone) how I’ve come through the murder and the mess and the moil, to at least a generous way to die.

To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.

yr boy,

Hank

via Flavorwire

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

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Great Opening Lines of Fiction on Old School IBM Punch Cards

in Literature, Technology | July 17th, 2014

Looking to kill some time during the dog days of summer? Here’s one option that John Ptak came up with. On his intriguing blog, The History of Ideas, he writes: “Isn’t this great? I bumped into a wonderful site called kloth.net that provides a free-to-all and unrestricted use of their punch card emulator. It was found while looking for dating ideas for an IBM 5081 card that I have that has programming information for the BINAC computer (ca. late 1940’s), and kloth.net had info on the history of IBM cards as well as the emulator–plus other stuff. Completely distracted from the BINAC quest, I created some cards using some great first lines of literature. You can play too!” I created two of my own, using The American Book Review’s list of 100 great opening lines.

What exactly is a punch card, our younger readers might rightly ask? An IBM web site tells us:

Perhaps the earliest icon of the Information Age was a simple punched card produced by IBM, commonly known as the “IBM card.” Measuring just 7- 3/8 inches by 3- 1/4 inches, the piece of smooth stock paper was unassuming, to be sure. But taken collectively, the IBM card [like the floppy disks that came later] held nearly all of the world’s known information for just under half a century—an impressive feat even by today’s measures. It rose to popularity during the Great Depression and quickly became a ubiquitous installment in the worlds of data processing and popular culture. What’s more, the punched card [see examples from Columbia University here] provided such a significant profit stream that it was instrumental to IBM’s rapid growth in the mid-twentieth century.

Now punch away.…

via The Paris Review

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