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

in Books, Film, Literature | June 5th, 2014

The look of this 1982 video magazine interview with Stephen King comes right out of a Laverne and Shirley episode, which makes it doubly charming. Broadcast at the time only in Bangor and Portland, this University of Maine production marks the first “up close and personal” TV interview with King, who represents one of the school’s “high achievers,” many of whom Henry Nevison interviewed for the local series. The interview takes place at King’s home in Bangor. Nevison describes the circumstances on his website:

At the time, King had just finished writing his novel “Christine” and one year earlier had starred in Creepshow, a campy horror/sci-fi movie based on several of his shorter stories. Initially, I conducted a radio interview and we discovered that we had a lot of similar interests, most importantly the same warped sense of humor. He then agreed to an extended “sit-down” television interview, even though he had avoided that concept up to this point. I think he did it because he knew it would be good for the university.

In his video intro, Nevison points out that King had published most of the horror novels that made his career—including Carrie, The Dead Zone, The Shining, The Stand, and Firestarter—and had already sold movie rights for those books. Which means he was a veritable pop-lit superstar even at this early point in his career. Through a bushy beard the size of a small woodchuck, King genially opines on whether leaving the light on at night keeps the monsters away (“bottom line,” it does) and how he keeps the scares fresh after so many stories and novels. We see him hunt and peck on an ancient, hulking word processor (perhaps composing “Word Processor of the Gods”) and look generally creepy but good-natured.

King and Nevison spend most of the nearly half-hour interview discussing the differences between books and film (they’re “diametrically opposed”). It’s a subject King has returned to several times over the years, often in complaint, venting for example over Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 take on The Shining. King glosses over his hatred of Kubrick’s film here, saying the book will outlive the movie (not likely, in this case). He also talks Hitchcock, and we see clips from a fairly decent student film production of his story “The Boogyman.” Much of the credit for this engaging interview should go to Nevison, who does what a good interviewer should: keeps the conversation going in new directions without getting in the way of it. It’s vintage King and sets the tone for the hundreds of televised interviews to come.

via Network Awesome

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

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Illustrations of The Lord of the Rings in Russian Iconography Style (1993)

in Art, Books, Literature | June 4th, 2014

Given the detail with which J.R.R. Tolkien describes his fantastical yet earthily grounded characters and landscapes, you’d think illustrators would have an easy time putting pictures to the words. You might even assume that any artist who tried his or her hand at the job would produce more or less the same visual interpretation. And yet the history of illustrated editions of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy hasn’t gone that way at all. Different publishers at different times and different places have commissioned very stylistically different things. We have shown you examples of Tolkien’s Personal Book Cover Designs for The Lord of the Rings Trilogy as well as what Where the Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak could come up with. And, in March, we featured a playfully visualized Soviet LOTR edition from 1976. Now, take a look at the large set of images here, pulled from a 1993 edition illustrated by Sergey Yuhimov (more information, albeit in Russian, here and here), and you’ll get the sense that the Russians may have a knack for visualizing the goings-on of Middle-Earth.

Still, the illustrations from Russia’s Hobbit and almost 30-years-newer Lord of the Rings could hardly share less of a sensibility. A Metafilter post on the latter draw a number of attempted descriptions by Tolkien fans: “LOTR translated almost as Christian iconography.” “They leap around about 1000 years of art history.” “Mad, but also charming.” “They would make great tarot cards.”

Objections may arise to the accuracy of the characters portrayed — as always — as well as the artist’s adherence (or lack thereof) to the traits of one period of art or another, but we can hardly ignore what an aesthetic impact these illustrations make even just on first glance. Some of the Metafilter commenters express their wishes for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (“used in Russian primary school curricula, or was during the Communist era”) illustrated this way, or maybe a Lord of the Rings “in the style of Hieronymus Bosch.” But from these vivid, stylistically Medieval, religious-icon-saturated images, I personally take away one conclusion: when the idea first came to find a director to bring Tolkien to the screen, they really should’ve hired Andrei Tarkovsky.

You can see a gallery of images in four parts: Part 1 — Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

Our thanks go to @zeljka8 for helping find background information for these illustrations.

Discover J.R.R. Tolkien’s Personal Book Cover Designs for The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

The Only Drawing from Maurice Sendak’s Short-Lived Attempt to Illustrate The Hobbit

Two Beautifully-Crafted Russian Animations of Chekhov’s Classic Children’s Story “Kashtanka”

Watch Soviet Animations of Winnie the Pooh, Created by the Innovative Animator Fyodor Khitruk

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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Eudora Welty Writes a Quirky Letter Applying for a Job at The New Yorker (1933)

in Letters, Literature | June 3rd, 2014

“Eudora Welty is one of the reasons that you thank God you know how to read,” writes an online reviewer of her autobiography One Writer’s Beginnings. It’s a sentiment with which I could not agree more. Whether in memoir, short story, or novel, Welty—winner of nearly every literary prize save the Nobel—speaks with the most highly individual of voices. (Welty once told a Paris Review interviewer that she doesn’t read anyone for “kindredness.”) Her prose, so attuned to its own rhythms, so confidently venturing into new realms of thought, seems to surprise even her. Indeed, teachers of writing could hardly do better than assign Welty to illustrate the elusive concept of “voice”—it’s a writerly quality she mastered early, or perhaps always possessed.

Take the 1933 letter below in which she introduces herself, a young postgraduate of 23, to The New Yorker in hopes of securing a position doing… well, whatever. She proposes “drum[ming] up opinions” on books and film, but only at the rate of “a little paragraph each morning—a little paragraph each night” (though she would “work like a slave” if asked). She also offers to replace cartoonist (and author of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”) James Thurber “in case he goes off the deep end.” The letter brims with winsome self-confidence and breezy optimism, as well as the unselfconscious self-awareness she makes look so easy: “That shows you how my mind works,” she writes, “quick, and away from the point.” The magazine staff, points out Shane Parrish of Farnam Street, “ignored her plea […] missing the obvious talent,” though of course they would begin publishing her stories just a few years later.

Read the letter in full below and marvel at how anyone could reject such a delightfully enthusiastic candidate (she would do just fine as a junior “publicity agent” for the WPA).

March 15, 1933

Gentlemen,

I suppose you’d be more interested in even a sleight‑o’-hand trick than you’d be in an application for a position with your magazine, but as usual you can’t have the thing you want most.

I am 23 years old, six weeks on the loose in N.Y. However, I was a New Yorker for a whole year in 1930–31 while attending advertising classes in Columbia’s School of Business. Actually I am a southerner, from Mississippi, the nation’s most backward state. Ramifications include Walter H. Page, who, unluckily for me, is no longer connected with Doubleday-Page, which is no longer Doubleday-Page, even. I have a B.A. (’29) from the University of Wisconsin, where I majored in English without a care in the world. For the last eighteen months I was languishing in my own office in a radio station in Jackson, Miss., writing continuities, dramas, mule feed advertisements, santa claus talks, and life insurance playlets; now I have given that up.

As to what I might do for you — I have seen an untoward amount of picture galleries and 15¢ movies lately, and could review them with my old prosperous detachment, I think; in fact, I recently coined a general word for Matisse’s pictures after seeing his latest at the Marie Harriman: concubineapple. That shows you how my mind works — quick, and away from the point. I read simply voraciously, and can drum up an opinion afterwards.

Since I have bought an India print, and a large number of phonograph records from a Mr. Nussbaum who picks them up, and a Cezanne Bathers one inch long (that shows you I read e. e. cummings I hope), I am anxious to have an apartment, not to mention a small portable phonograph. How I would like to work for you! A little paragraph each morning — a little paragraph each night, if you can’t hire me from daylight to dark, although I would work like a slave. I can also draw like Mr. Thurber, in case he goes off the deep end. I have studied flower painting.

There is no telling where I may apply, if you turn me down; I realize this will not phase you, but consider my other alternative: the U of N.C. offers for $12.00 to let me dance in Vachel Lindsay’s Congo. I congo on. I rest my case, repeating that I am a hard worker.

Truly yours,

Eudora Welty

Welty’s letter appears alongside dozens more remarkable missives in the beautiful new book, Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience.

via Farnam Street/Brain Pickings

Read Rejection Letters Sent to Three Famous Artists: Sylvia Plath, Kurt Vonnegut & Andy Warhol

Gertrude Stein Gets a Snarky Rejection Letter from Publisher (1912)

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

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John Cheever Reads “The Swimmer,” His Famous Short Story, in Its Entirety (1977)

in Audio Books, Literature | June 3rd, 2014

The Stories of John Cheever, a collection of 61 stories chronicling the lives of “the greatest generation,” was first published in 1978 with much fanfare. The critics liked it. The weighty, 700-page book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1979. The people liked it too. The Stories of John Cheever, Michiko Kakutani wrote in Cheever’s 1982 obit, was “one of the few collections of short fiction ever to make The New York Times best-seller list.”

The collection features some of Cheever’s best-known stories: “The Enormous Radio,” “Goodbye, My Brother,” “The Five-Forty-Eight,” and “The Country Husband.” And also perhaps his most famous short piece of fiction, “The Swimmer.”

First published in The New Yorker in July, 1964, “The Swimmer” was originally conceived as a novel and ran over some 150 pages, before the author pared it down to a taut eleven pages. Those eleven pages apparently take some 25 minutes to read. Above, you can hear Cheever reading “The Swimmer,” in its entirety, at New York’s 92nd St. Y. The audio was recorded on December 19, 1977, and it’s otherwise housed in our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.

Bonus: you can also hear author Anne Enright read “The Swimmer” over at The New Yorker. This version was recorded in 2011.

via The Paris Review

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James Joyce’s Dirty Love Letters Read Aloud by Martin Starr, Paget Brewster & Other TV Comedy Actors (NSFW)

in Comedy, History, Letters, Literature | June 2nd, 2014

(Be warned, these videos are Not Safe for Work. And unless you can deal with strong language, you should skip watching these clips.)

Last year we featured James Joyce’s “dirty letters” to his wife, originally written in 1909 but not discovered in all their cerebrally erotic glory until this century. For Valentine’s Day, the sketch comedy video site Funny or Die capitalized on the availability of these highly detailed, fantasy-saturated Joycean mash notes by having them read dramatically. For this task the producers rounded up five well-known actors, such as Martin Starr from such comedically respected television shows as Freaks and Geeks and Party Down. You can watch his reading above. “I would like you to wear drawers with three or four frills, one over the other at the knees and up the thighs, and great crimson bows in them, so that when I bend down over you to open them and” — but you don’t just want to read it. You want to hear such a masterpiece performed.

Off raising the children in Trieste, Joyce’s wife Nora wrote replies of a presumably similar ardor-saturated nature. Alas, these remain undiscovered, but that unfortunate fact doesn’t stop actresses as well as actors from providing oral renditions of their own. Just above, we have Paget Brewster from Friends and Criminal Minds reading aloud another of Joyce’s love letters, one which moves with surprising swiftness from evoking “the spirit of eternal beauty” to evoking “a hog riding a sow.” This series of readings also includes contributions from The Middleman’s Natalie Morales, The Kids in the Hall’s Dave Foley, and Saturday Night Live’s Michaela Watkins. They all reveal that, with his textual creativity as well as his close acquaintance with those places where the romantic meets the repulsive, James Joyce would have made quite a sexter today. You can have that idea for free, literate sketch comedy video producers of the internet.

PS Apologies for the lengthy ads that precede the videos. They come from Funny or Die and we have no control over them.

James Joyce Plays the Guitar, 1915

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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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19th Century Caricatures of Charles Darwin, Mark Twain, H.M. Stanley & Other Famous Victorians (1873)

in Art, History, Literature | May 30th, 2014

Students and lovers of Victoriana, we have a treat for you. The 1873 book above, Cartoon Portraits and Biographical Sketches of Men of the Day, offers caricatures of forty-nine prominent men, and one woman, of the 19th century, some of them less-than-famous now and some still veritable giants of their respective fields.

Accompanied by lively biographies, the portraits were all drawn by illustrator Frederick Waddy, who is perhaps best known for the drawing on page six of a white-bearded Charles Darwin (above) entitled “Natural Selection”—often reproduced in color and found hanging on the office walls of biology teachers. Darwin appears second in Cartoon Portraits, preceded only by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton of “It was a dark and stormy night” fame.

In addition to professor’s offices, you may also encounter some of Waddy’s work at the National Portrait Gallery in London. In his time, Waddy was one of the foremost caricaturists of the day—an important position in periodical publishing before the advent of cheaply mass-reproducible photography. All of the portraits originally appeared in a magazine called Once a Week, founded in a split between Charles Dickens and his publisher Bradbury and Evans, who started the journal with editor Samuel Lucas in 1859 to compete with Dickens’ All the Year Round. Once a Week ran until 1880, publishing pieces on history and current affairs and occasional poems by Tennyson, Swinburne, Dante Rossetti and others. Its popularity was buoyed by Waddy’s drawings and the detailed illustrations of several other graphic artists. Above, see Mark Twain riding his celebrated jumping frog, and just below, poet and critic Matthew Arnold does a high-wire act between two trapezes labelled “Poetry” and “Philosophy.” Twain’s portrait is titled “American Humour”— and he is the only American in the series—and Arnold’s is called “Sweetness and Light.”

Though the book’s title promises only “Men of the Day,” it does include one woman, Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (below, simply titled “M.D.”), the first Englishwoman to officially work as a physician. Her biographical sketch begins with a long and somewhat tortuous historical defense for female doctors, stating that “social prejudices are almost as hard to eradicate as those of religion. It was not till quite lately that the feeling against woman’s rights as regard education was successfully combated.” Once a Week was a progressive-leaning magazine, its editor a noted abolitionist, and it regularly published the work of women writers like Harriet Martineau, Isabella Blagden, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, though one wonders why they didn’t warrant caricatures as well.

Below, see Waddy’s portrait of central African explorer Henry Morton Stanley, standing twice the height of the native African next to him. It’s a fitting image of colonial ego, though the scene may be drawn after a photo of Stanley with his adopted son Kalulu. The title refers to his search for—and famous exclamation upon discovering—Scottish missionary David Livingstone. All in all, Cartoon Portraits gives us a fascinating look at Victorian visual media and a representative sample of the most popular literary, scientific, and political figures in England during the middle of the century. While the names of Waddy and his fellow comic artists are hardly remembered now, the authors of The Smiling Muse: Victoriana in the Comic Press assert that in their day, “they were the ones who had their fingers on the pulse of what we now call the ‘popular culture’ of the time.” See The Public Domain Review for more highlights from the book.

via The Public Domain Review

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch William S. Burroughs’ Ah Pook is Here as an Animated Film, with Music By John Cale

in Animation, Literature | May 29th, 2014

The work of William S. Burroughs can be by turns hilarious, opaque and profane – filled with images of drugs, insects and other oddities. Though it might be fascinating, if difficult, on the page, his work really comes alive when read aloud, preferably in Burroughs’s signature deadpan drawl. And if it’s accompanied by some trippy visuals, then, all the better.

The above video is exactly that. In 1994, animator Peter Hunt made this appropriately grotesque stop motion animated film, Ah Pook is Here, with audio taken from Burroughs’s 1990 album Dead City Radio. (You can read along to the video below.) John Cale provides the music. The winner of 10 international film awards, the short film has been archived in the Goethe Institut.

Ah Pook is Here started in 1970 as a collaboration with artist Malcolm McNeil. Originally it was slated to be a magazine comic strip but when the publication folded, Burroughs and McNeil decided to turn it into a book. Ah Pook is Here and Other Texts was finally published in 1979, though without McNeil’s illustrations. You can see them here.

When I become Death, Death is the seed from which I grow…

Itzama, spirit of early mist and showers.
Ixtaub, goddess of ropes and snares.
Ixchel, the spider web, catcher of morning dew.
Zooheekock, virgin fire patroness of infants.
Adziz, the master of cold.
Kockupocket, who works in fire.
Ixtahdoom, she who spits out precious stones.
Ixchunchan, the dangerous one.
Ah Pook, the destroyer.

Hiroshima, 1945, August 6, sixteen minutes past 8 AM.

Who really gave that order?

Answer: Control.

Answer: The Ugly American.

Answer: The instrument of Control.

Question: If Control’s control is absolute, why does Control need to control?

Answer: Control… needs time.

Question: Is Control controlled by its need to control?

Answer: Yes.

Why does Control need humans, as you call them?

Answer: Wait… wait! Time, a landing field. Death needs time like a junkie needs junk.

And what does Death need time for?

Answer: The answer is sooo simple. Death needs time for what it kills to grow in, for Ah Pook’s sake.

Death needs time for what it kills to grow in, for Ah Pook’s sweet sake, you stupid vulgar greedy ugly American death-sucker.

Death needs time for what it kills to grow in, for Ah Pook’s sweet sake, you stupid vulgar greedy ugly American death-sucker… Like this.

We have a new type of rule now. Not one man rule, or rule of aristocracy, or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decision. They are representatives of abstract forces who’ve reached power through surrender of self. The iron-willed dictator is a thing of the past. There will be no more Stalins, no more Hitlers. The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push.

You can find Ah Pook is Here in the Animation section of our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

William S. Burroughs on Saturday Night Live, 1981

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

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

Click to enlarge

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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Ernest Hemingway’s Delusional Adventures in Boxing: “My Writing is Nothing, My Boxing is Everything.”

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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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

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

Illustrations of The Lord of the Rings in Russian Iconography Style (1993)

Eudora Welty Writes a Quirky Letter Applying for a Job at The New Yorker (1933)

John Cheever Reads “The Swimmer,” His Famous Short Story, in Its Entirety (1977)

James Joyce’s Dirty Love Letters Read Aloud by Martin Starr, Paget Brewster & Other TV Comedy Actors (NSFW)

19th Century Caricatures of Charles Darwin, Mark Twain, H.M. Stanley & Other Famous Victorians (1873)

Watch William S. Burroughs’ Ah Pook is Here as an Animated Film, with Music By John Cale

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

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