Ernest Hemingway’s “Love Letter” to His “Dearest Kraut,” Marlene Dietrich (1955)

in History, Letters, Literature | May 28th, 2014

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We think today of Ernest Hemingway as that most stylistically disciplined of writers, but it seems that, outside his published work and especially in his personal correspondence, he could cut pretty loose. One particularly vivid example has returned to public attention recently by appearing for sale on a site called auctionmystuff.com: a letter from Hemingway to legendary singer-actress Marlene Dietrich, dated August 28, 1955. “In the intimate, rambling and revealing letter,” writes the Wall Street Journal’s Jonathan Welsh, “Hemingway professes his love for Dietrich a number of times, though the two are said to have never consummated the relationship.” He also, Welsh notes, “talks about staging one of her performances, in which he imagines her ‘drunk and naked.’ ” The full letter, which spares no detail of this elaborate fantasy, runs as follows:

Dearest Kraut :

Thanks very much for the good long letter with the gen on what you found wrong. I don’t know anything about the theater but I don’t think it would occur to me, even, to have you introduced even to me with strains of La Vie En Rose. Poor peoples.

If I were staging it would probably have something novel like having you shot onto the stage, drunk, from a self-propelled minnenwerfer which would advance in from the street rolling over the customers. We would be playing “Land of Hope and Glory.” As you landed on the stage drunk and naked I would advance from the rear, or from your rear wearing evening clothes and would hurriedly strip off my evening clothes to cover you revealing the physique of Burt Lancaster Strongfort and announce that we were sorry that we did not know the lady was loaded. All this time the Thirty ton S/P/ Mortar would be bulldozing the customers as we break into the Abortion Scene from “Lakme.” This is a scene which is really Spine Tingling and I have just the spine for it. I play it with a Giant Rubber Whale called Captain Ahab and all the time we are working on you with pulmotors and raversed (sic) cleaners which blow my evening clothes off you. You are foaming at the mouth of course to show that we are really acting and we bottle the foam and sell it to any surviving customers. You are referred to in the contract as The Artist and I am just Captain Ahab. Fortunately I am crazed and I keep shouting “Fire One. Fire Two. Fire Three.” And don’t think we do not fire them. It is then that the Germ of the Mutiny is born in your disheveled brain.

But why should a great Artist-Captain like me invent so many for so few for only air-mail love on Sunday morning when I should be in church. Only for fun, I guess. Gentlemen, crank up your hearses.

Marlene, darling, I write stories but I have no grace for fucking them up for other mediums. It was hard enough for me to learn to write to be read by the human eye. I do not know how, nor do I care to know how to write to be read by parrots, monkeys, apes, baboons, nor actors.

I love you very much and I never wanted to get mixed in any business with you as I wrote you when this thing first was brought up. Neither of us has enough whore blood for that. Not but what I number many splendid whores amongst my best friends and certainly never, I hope, could be accused of anti-whoreism. Not only that but I was circumcised as a very early age.

Hope you have it good in California and Las Vegas. What I hear from the boys is that many people in La Vegas (sic) or three or four anyway of the mains are over-extended. This is very straightgen but everybody knows it if I know it although I have not told anyone what I’ve heard and don’t tell you. But watch all money ends. Some people would as soon have the publicity of making you look bad as of your expected and legitimate success. But that is the way everything is everywhere and no criticism of Nevada or anyone there. Cut this paragraph out of this letter and burn it if you want to keep the rest of the letter in case you thought any of it funny. I rely on you as a Kraut officer and gentlemen do this.

New Paragraph. I love you very much and wish you luck. Wish me some too. Book is on page 592. This week Thursday we start photography on fishing. Am in charge of fishing etc. and it is going to be difficult enough. With a bad back a little worse. The Artist is not here naturally. I only wrote the book but must do the work as well and have no stand-in. Up at 0450 knock off at I930. This goes on for I5 days.

I think you could say you and I have earned whatever dough the people let us keep.

So what. So Merdre. I love you as always.

Papa

“To him she was ‘my little Kraut,’ or ‘daughter,’ to her he was simply ‘Papa’ — and it was love at first sight when they met aboard a French ocean liner in 1934,” writes The Guardian’s Kate Connolly of the two icons’ unusual relationship. “Hemingway and Dietrich started writing to each other when he was 50 and she was 47, remaining in close contact until the writer’s suicide in 1961. But they never consummated their love, because of what Hemingway referred to as ‘unsynchronised passion.’ ” A fan of both Hemingway and Dietrich could presumably desire nothing more than one of the original pieces of their correspondence, but this particular letter, with a starting price of $35,000, drew not a single bid — perhaps a sale, like the physical expression of the Old Man and the Sea author and “Lili Marleen” singer’s love, fated never to happen.

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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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Lewis Carroll’s Photographs of Alice Liddell, the Inspiration for Alice in Wonderland

in Literature, Photography | May 27th, 2014

One of the great polymaths of the 19th century, Lewis Carroll (pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) —mathematician, logician, author, poet, Anglican cleric—took to the new medium of photography with the same alacrity he applied to all of his pursuits. Though he may be described as a hobbyist in the sense that he never pursued the art professionally, he nonetheless “became a master of the medium, boasting a portfolio of roughly 3,000 images and his very own studio.”

So says a recent article by Gannon Burgett on Carroll’s “24-year career as a photographer,” during which he made a number of portraits, including one of then-poet laureate of England Alfred, Lord Tennyson. His subjects also included “landscapes, dolls, dogs, statues, paintings, trees and even skeletons.”

Carroll excelled at a developing method called the wet collodion process, which replaced the daguerreotype as the primary means of photographic image-making. This process seems to have been something like painting in oils, requiring a great deal of dexterity and chemical know-how, and similarly subject to decay when done improperly. Carroll particularly valued this method for its difficulty (he described it in detail in some lines added to a poem called “Hiawatha’s Photographing”)—so much so that once a dry developing process came into being, he abandoned the medium altogether, complaining that it became so easy anyone could do it. Carroll’s obsessive focus on process mirrored an obsession with his favorite photographic subjects, young children, including Tennyson’s son Hallam (above). Most famously, Carroll obsessively photographed the young Alice Liddell (top and below as “The Queen of May”), daughter of family friend Henry George Liddell and inspiration for Carroll’s most famous fictional character.

Many of Carroll’s photographs of Alice and other children can seem downright prurient to our eyes. As Carroll’s biographer Jenny Woolf writes in a 2010 essay for the Smithsonian, “of the approximately 3,000 photographs Dodgson made in his life, just over half are of children—30 of whom are depicted nude or semi-nude.”

Some of his portraits—even those in which the model is clothed—might shock 2010 sensibilities, but by Victorian standards they were… well, rather conventional. Photographs of nude children sometimes appeared on postcards or birthday cards, and nude portraits—skillfully done—were praised as art studies […]. Victorians saw childhood as a state of grace; even nude photographs of children were considered pictures of innocence itself.

Woolf admits that Carroll’s interest, as scholars have speculated for decades, may have been less than innocent, prompting Vladimir Nabokov to propose “a pathetic affinity” between Carroll and the narrator of Lolita. The evidence for Carroll’s possible pedophilia is highly suggestive but hardly conclusive. Burgett summarizes the claims as only speculative at best: “The entire controversy is an almost century-long debate, and one that doesn’t seem to be making any major progress in either direction.” In a Slate review of Woolf’s Lewis Carroll biography, Seth Lerer also acknowledges the controversy, but reads the photographs of Alice, her sisters, and friends as representative of larger trends, as “brilliant testimonies to the taste, the sentiment, and perhaps the sexuality of mid-Victorian England.”

A great part of this Victorian sensibility consists of the “recognition that all life involves role-playing,” hence the recurring photos of the girls in dress-up—as figures from myth and literature and exotic Orientalist characters, such as the photo above of Alice and her sister Lorina as “Chinamen.” “These are the tableaux of Victorian melodrama,” writes Lerer, “images on stage-sets of the imagination.” We see another of Carroll’s favorite photographic subjects, Alexandra “Xie” Kitchin, daughter of a colleague, also given the Orientalist treatment below, posed as an off-duty tea merchant.

Carroll’s carefully staged child photographs are very much like those of other photographers of the period like Mary Cowden Clarke and Julia Margaret Cameron, who also photographed Alice Liddell, even into her adulthood. Cameron’s photographs also included child nudes, to a similar effect as Carroll’s—the depiction of a “state of grace” in which children appear as nymphs, “gypsies” or other such types supposedly belonging to Edenic worlds untouched by adult cares. Given the context Woolf, Lerer and others provide, it’s reasonable to view Carroll’s child photography as consistent with the tastes of the day. (Though no one suggests this as an alibi for Carroll’s possibly troubling proclivities.)

As it stands, the photographs of Alice and other children open a fascinating, if sometimes discomfiting, window on an age that viewed childhood very differently than our own. They also give us a view of Carroll’s strange inner world, one not unlike the unsettling fantasy realm of 20th century folk artist Henry Darger. Unlike Darger, Carroll’s work brought him widespread fame in his lifetime, but like that reclusive figure, the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass was a shy, introspective man whose imaginative landscape possessed a logic all its own, charged with magic, threat, and longing for lost childhood innocence.

See a galleries of Carroll’s photographs of Alice and other children here and here, and see this site for more general info on Carroll’s photography.

See Salvador Dali’s Illustrations for the 1969 Edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Free Audio: Alice In Wonderland Read by Cory Doctorow

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

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Ralph Waldo Emerson Writes a Job Recommendation for Walt Whitman (1863)

in History, Literature | May 26th, 2014

While we often recommend Letters of Note for the hits of history’s most illuminating pieces of incidental correspondence, do consider also making a regular visits to Slate’s history blog The Vault. There you’ll find such written artifacts as the one pictured in part above, astutely written up by occasional Open Culture contributor Rebecca Onion: “In 1863, as he considered seeking a government clerkship, Walt Whitman asked his friend and advocate Ralph Waldo Emerson for a letter of recommendation. Emerson, for decades a respected name in American letters, knew the secretaries of state and treasury personally, and Whitman hoped that a note from him would help the younger poet secure steady employment in Washington.” This note runs, in a transcript from the Walt Whitman archive, as follows:

Concord Massachusetts
10 January 2, 1863

Dear Sir,

Mr Walt Whitman, of New York, writes me that he is seeking employment in the public service in Washington, & perhaps some application on his part has already been made to yourself. Will you permit me to say that he is known to me as a man of strong original genius, combining, with marked eccentricities, great powers & valuable traits of character: a self-relying large-hearted man, much beloved by his friends; entirely patriotic & benevolent in his theory, tastes, & practice. If his writings are in certain points open to criticism, they show extraordinary power, & are more deeply American, democratic, & in the interest of political liberty, than those of any other poet.

A man of his talents & dispositions will quickly make himself useful, and, if the government has work that he can do, I think it may easily find that it has called to its side more valuable aid than it bargained for.

With entire respect,

Your obedient servant,

R. W. Emerson.

Hon Salmon P. Chase, | Secretary of the Treasury.

Any of us, I feel certain, would love having such an eloquently praise-filled letter of recommendation sent on our behalf by a friend, a teacher, a former employer, or a pillar of American Transcendentalism. But even with that, the author of Leaves of Grass didn’t find the road to a day gig particularly smooth — in large part, of course, because of having written Leaves of Grass. Whitman, whose “reputation preceded him in job interviews, reported that Salmon Chase, the secretary of the treasury and addressee of this letter, was vehemently against the idea of employing the author of Leaves, a book that celebrated open sexuality in a way that Chase found distasteful.” He would even get fired from another job specifically “because of objections to his poetry.” Well, they can’t say Emerson didn’t warn them about Whitman’s “marked eccentricities” — such as his tendency to write some of the most enduring verse in American history.

via The Vault

Hear Walt Whitman (Maybe) Reading the First Four Lines of His Poem, “America” (1890)

Find works by Whitman and Emerson in our twin collections: 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free and 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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Read 4,500 Unpublished Pages of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary

in History, Literature | May 25th, 2014

Why study a language like French? For the unparalleled pleasure, of course, of reading a beloved, respected, and enduring novel like Madame Bovary in the original — or so literarily inclined Francophiles might argue. After all, they’d rhetorically ask, can you really say you’ve read the book if you haven’t actually read the very same words Gustave Flaubert wrote? But now, literarily inclined Francophiles who also have an enthusiasm for the web (not an overwhelmingly large group, wags may point out) can insist that you haven’t really read Madame Bovary unless you’ve read it all in the original: all 4,500 pages of it. Yes, the French do tend to write longer sentences than most, but that impressive length has less to do with a national literary style than with thoroughgoing completism, an impulse that brings together all of the 1856 novel’s originally published pages as well as all of those cut, censored, or revised, free to read online at bovary.fr.

“After a marathon effort of transcription by 130 volunteers from all over the world, including a cleaning lady, an oil prospector and several teenagers,” writes the Independent’s John Lichfield, “all the variants of Gustave Flaubert’s masterpiece can be consulted on a new website. This is believed to be the first time that the complete process of creation, and publication, of a classic novel has been made available on the internet,” much less on a site that “contains not only the published text and images of the barely legible manuscripts but interactive controls which allow the reader to re-instate passages corrected or cut by Flaubert or his publishers.” Despite this unprecedentedly vast and accessible trove of Madame Bovary resources, struggles over the proper interpretation of the once-scandalous novel will doubtless only continue, not only at the level of just which word Flaubert intended to write on the fourth draft of a particularly crucial paragraph, but at the level of whether to consider the whole book tragedy, comedy, or something in between. Enter the Madame Bovary Archive here.

See F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Handwritten Manuscripts for The Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise & More

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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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William S. Burrough’s Avant-Garde Movie ‘The Cut Ups’ (1966)

in Film, Literature | May 22nd, 2014

In 1920, Dadaist extraordinaire Tristian Tzara described in his manifesto how to write a poem, Dada-style. It involved cutting up the words from a text, dumping them into a bag and then pulling out the words randomly. “And there you are,” he wrote. “An infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.” Who would have thought that Tzara’s avant-garde methods would be adapted into a successful line of refrigerator magnets?

In 1959, William S. Burroughs had just published his notorious non-linear masterpiece Naked Lunch (heard him read it here) when he came across the “cut-up” methods of British artist Brion Gysin, which were influenced by Tzara. Soon the author started using cut-up techniques explicitly in his own work, particularly in his The Nova Trilogy. Unlike Tzara, who believed that cut-ups would reveal the utter absurdity of the world, Burroughs argued that language was a means of control that locked us into traditional ways of thinking. The cut-up was one way of blunting that control with new, unexpected juxtapositions. Excited by the possibilities of the cut-up, he experimented with it in a number of different media.

The 1966 short The Cut-Ups is probably Burrough’s best-known foray into experimental film, which he made with filmmaker and renowned smut/horror distributor Antony Balch. The film features random, repetitive shots of Burroughs in New York, London and Tangiers spliced together in precise lengths but with little regard for the content of the image. The audio is a cut-up conversation with the words “Yes” and “Hello,” getting looped over and over and over again.

The film is a trippy, mesmerizing experience. The mind struggles to make sense of the chaos. It feels like you’re watching a dream that has somehow short-circuited. When the film first premiered, film audiences were reportedly freaked out. Some declared that the movie made them feel ill while others demanded their money back. You can watch it for free above. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

And if you’re in the mood for some more avant-garde cinematic goodness then you can check out Burroughs and Balch’s first collaboration Towers Open Fire below. It’s NSFW. More avant-garde films can be found in our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

William S. Burroughs on the Art of Cut-up Writing

William S. Burroughs Reads His Controversial 1959 Novel Naked Lunch

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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Jonathan Safran Foer, Toni Morrison & Steven Pinker Cultivate Thought on Chipotle’s Cups and Bags

in Business, Literature | May 21st, 2014

If you walk into Chipotle, order a drink, and look at the cup, you might see the following literary text:

TWO-MINUTE SEDUCTION
by TONI MORRISON

I took my heart out and gave it to a writer made heartless by fame, someone who needed it to pump blood into veins desiccated by the suck and roar of crowds slobbering or poisoning or licking up the red froth they mistake for happiness because happiness looks just like a heart painted on a valentine cup or tattooed on an arm that has never held a victim or comforted a hurt friend. I took it out and the space it left in my chest was sutured tight like the skin of a drum.

As my own pulse failed, I fell along with a soft shower of rain typical in this place.

Lying there, collapsed under trees bordering the mansion of the famous one I saw a butterfly broken by the slam of a single raindrop on its wings fold and flutter as it hit a pool of water still fighting for the lift that is its nature. I closed my eyes expecting to dissolve into stars or lava or a brutal sequoia when the famous writer appeared and leaned down over me. Lifting my head he put his lips on mine and breathed into my mouth one word and then another, and another words upon words then numbers, then notes. I swallowed it all while my mind filled with language, measure, music, knowledge.

These gifts from the famous writer were so seductive, so all encompassing they seemed to make a heart irrelevant.

Other cups and brown paper bags feature short thoughts by Malcolm Gladwell, George Saunders, Steven Pinker, Michael Lewis, and Sheri Fink, among others. The initiative, dubbed Cultivating Thought, was actually the brainchild of novelist Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close). Years ago, he met with Chipotle’s CEO and posed the question: why not give people a little food for thought on your cups and brown paper bags? Just last week, the Cultivating Thought Author series was launched, with Safran Foer serving as its “curator.”

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Jack Kerouac’s Poems Read by Patti Smith, John Cale & Other Icons (with Music by Joe Strummer)

in Literature, Music | May 21st, 2014

Jack Kerouac was cool before it was cool.

Kerouac’s breakout novel, On the Road, influenced generations of artists, writers and musicians. His prose was vital and messy and new. He wrote frankly about sex, drugs and spiritual yearning. He was young and movie star good looking. And he was a friend with just about every other literary rock star of the era – William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Neal Cassady — many of whom ended up characters in his books.

Though Kerouac was best known for his novels — Dharma Bums happens to be my personal fave — he also wrote poetry. His poems read like distilled versions of his prose – freeform, flowing and musical, laced with themes of death, drinking and Buddhism. He once wrote that he wanted his poetry “to be considered as a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jazz session on Sunday.”

So it isn’t surprising perhaps that back in 1997 some very cool people like Hunter S. Thompson, John Cale, Joe Strummer and Michael Stipe got together to record the spoken word tribute album Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness (download on Amazon or iTunes), which sets his poems to music. Or hear it below on Spotify.

Patti Smith, the godmother of punk, reads his poem “The Last Hotel” accompanied by music from Thurston Moore and Lenny Kaye. You can listen in the video above and read along below.

The last hotel
I can see the black wall
I can see the silhouette on the window
He’s talking, at a rhythm
He’s talking, at a rhythm
But, I don’t care
I’m not interested in what he’s saying
I’m only interested in the last hotel
I’m only interested in the fact that it’s the last hotel
Deep, discordant, dark, sweet
The last hotel
The last hotel
Ghosts in my bed
The goats I bled
The last hotel

Perhaps Kerouac’s best-known poem is “Bowery Blues,” which combines Buddhist notions of “sansgara” (aka samsara), the karmic cycles of birth and death, with a very Beat-like disgust of contemporary American culture. You can imagine this being absolutely spellbinding when read out loud in a smoky coffee shop. Lydia Lunch’s reading is above. The text below.

The story of man
Makes me sick
Inside, outside,
I do not know why
Something so conditional
And all talk
Should hurt me so.

I am hurt
I am scared
I want to live
I want to die
I do not know
Where to turn
In the Void
And When
To cut
Out

For no Church Told me
No Guru holds me
No advice
Just stone
Of New York
And on the Cafeteria
We hear
The Saxophone
O dead Ruby
Died of Shot
In Thirty Two,
Sounding like old times
And de bombed
Empty decapitated
Murder by the clock.

And I see Shadows
Dancing into Doom
In love, holding
TIght the lovely asses
Of the little girls
In love with sex
Showing Themselves
In white undergarments
At elevated windows
Hoping for the Worst.

I can not take it
Anymore
If I can not hold
My little behind
To me in my room

Then it’s goodbye
Sangsara
For me
Besides
Girls aren’t as good
As They look
And Samadhi
Is better
Than you think
When it starts in
Hitting your head
In with Buzz
Of Glittergold
Heaven’s Angels
Wailing

Saying

We’ve been waiting for you
Since Morning, Jack
Why were you so long
Dallying in the sooty room?
This transcendental Brilliance
Is the better part
(of Nothingness
I sing)

Okay.
Quit.
Mad.
Stop

And finally, you can listen to Kerouac read his own poem “MacDougal Street Blues” set to some beats laid down by the late, great Joe Strummer.

Written in Jim Hudson’s window lookin’ out on MacDougal Street
Summer of 1954, when he left me his whole apartment
He went away with his girl someplace:

Parade among Images
Images Images Looking
Looking -
And everybody’s turning around
& pointing -
Nobody looks up
and In
Nor listens to Samantabhadra’s
Unceasing Compassion

No Sound Still
S s s s t t
Seethe
Of Sea Blue Moon
Holy X‑Jack

Miracle
Night -
Instead yank & yucker
For pits & pops

Look for crashes
Pictures
Squares
Explosions
Birth
Death
Legs
I know, sweet hero,
Enlightenment has Come
Rest in Still

In the Sun Think
Think Not
Think no more Lines -
Straw hat, hands a back
Classed
He exam in atein distinct
Rome prints -
Trees prurp
and saw

The Chessplayers Wont End
Still they sit
Millions of hats
In underwater foliage
Over marble games
The Greeks of Chess

Plot the Pop
of Mate
King Queen

- I know their game,
their elephant with the pillar
With the pearl in it,
Their gory bishops
And Vital Pawns -
Their devout frontline
Sacrificial pawn shops
Their stately king
Who is so tall
Their Virgin Queens
Pree ing to Knave
The Night Knot
— Their Bhagavad Gitas
of Ignorance,
Krishna’s advice,

Comma,
The game begins -

Jean-Louis
Go home, Man

- So tho I am wise
I have to wait like
Anyotherfool

Lets forget the strollers
Forget the scene
Lets close our eyes
Let me instruct Thee
Here is dark Milk
Here is Sweet Mahameru
Who will Coo
To you Too

As he did to me
One night at three
When I w k e i t
P l e e
Knelt to See
Realit ee
And I said
‘Wilt thou protect me
for ‘ver?’

And he in his throatless
deep mother hole
Replied ’ H o m ’

Pull My Daisy: 1959 Beatnik Film Stars Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg

Jack Kerouac Reads from On the Road (1959)

Jack Kerouac’s Naval Reserve Enlistment Mugshot, 1943

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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Philip K. Dick’s Favorite Classical Music: A Free, 11-Hour Playlist

in Literature, Music, Sci Fi | May 20th, 2014

Image by Pete Welsch

What did Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and A Scanner Darkly author Philip K. Dick, that visionary of our not-too-distant dystopian future, listen to while he crafted his descriptions of grim, psychologically (and sometimes psychedelically) harrowing times ahead? Mozart. Beethoven. Mahler. Wagner.

Yes, while looking textually forward, he listened backward, soundtracking the constant workings of his imagination with classical music, as he had done since his teenage years. As Lejla Kucukalic writes in Philip K. Dick: Canonical Writer of the Digital Age:

After graduating from high school in 1947, Dick moved out of his mother’s house and continued working as a clerk at a Berkeley music store, Art Music. “Now,” wrote Dick, “my longtime love of music rose to the surface, and I began to study and grasp huge areas of the map of music; by fourteen I could recognize virtually any symphony or opera” (“Self-Portrait” 13). Classical music, from Beethoven to Wagner, not only stayed Dick’s lifelong passion, but also found its way into many of his works: Wagner’s Goterdammerung in A Maze of Death, Parsifal in Valis, and Mozart’s Magic Flute in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

At his Forteana Blog, author Andrew May credits Dick with, given his pop-cultural status, “a decidedly uncool knowledge of classical music.” He cites not just Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen in the introduction to A Maze of Death, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis in Ubik, or the part of The Game-Players of Titan where “a teenaged kid forks out 125 dollars for a vintage recording of a Puccini aria,” but an entire early story which functions as “(in my opinion) a pure exercise in classical music criticism.” In 1953’s “The Preserving Machine,” as May retells it, an eccentric scientist, “worried that Western civilization is on the point of collapse, invents a machine to preserve musical works for future generations” by encoding it “in the form of living creatures. Unfortunately, as soon as the creatures are released into the environment, they start to adapt to it by evolving into different forms, and the music becomes distorted beyond recognition.”

Though no doubt an astute speculator, Dick seems not to have foreseen the fact that our era suffers not from too few means of music storage but, perhaps, too many. None of his visions presented him with, for example, the technology of the Spotify playlist, an example of which you’ll find at the bottom of this post. In it, we’ve assembled for your enjoyment some of Dick’s favorite pieces of classical music. The songs come scouted out by Galleycat’s Jason Boog, who links to them individually in his own post on Dick, classical music, and May’s writing on the intersection of those two cultural forces. Listen through it while reading some of Dick’s own work — don’t miss our collection of Free PKD — and you’ll understand that he cared about not just the anxieties of humanity’s future or the great works of its past, but what remains essential throughout the entire human experience. These composers will still appear on our playlists (or whatever technology we’ll use) a hundred years from now, and if we still read any sci-fi author a hundred years from now, we’ll surely read this one.

The 11 hour playlist (stream below or on the web here) includes Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis and Fidelio, Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Wagner’s Parsifal, and Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (Resurrection). If you need to download Spotify, grab the software here.

Robert Crumb Illustrates Philip K. Dick’s Infamous, Hallucinatory Meeting with God (1974)

The Penultimate Truth About Philip K. Dick: Documentary Explores the Mysterious Universe of PKD

Philip K. Dick Theorizes The Matrix in 1977, Declares That We Live in “A Computer-Programmed Reality”

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 ( 7 ) |

Ernest Hemingway’s “Love Letter” to His “Dearest Kraut,” Marlene Dietrich (1955)

Lewis Carroll’s Photographs of Alice Liddell, the Inspiration for Alice in Wonderland

Ralph Waldo Emerson Writes a Job Recommendation for Walt Whitman (1863)

Read 4,500 Unpublished Pages of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary

William S. Burrough’s Avant-Garde Movie ‘The Cut Ups’ (1966)

Jonathan Safran Foer, Toni Morrison & Steven Pinker Cultivate Thought on Chipotle’s Cups and Bags

Jack Kerouac’s Poems Read by Patti Smith, John Cale & Other Icons (with Music by Joe Strummer)

Philip K. Dick’s Favorite Classical Music: A Free, 11-Hour Playlist

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