Many of us came across our favorite book serendipitously. No surprise: it’s easiest to be completely blown away by a work of art or literature when you approach it without any pre-existing expectations. For BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow, that book was Lewis Carroll’sAlice In Wonderland. Doctorow, now a prominent author, journalist, and technology activist, first came across Carroll’s tale of a young girl who falls down a rabbit hole in 1978:
“In 1978, I walked into my Crestview Public School grade two classroom in Willowdale, a suburb of Toronto, and, on the spur of the moment, took Alice in Wonderland off the shelf. My teacher was Bev Pannikkar, who had the amazing empathy and good sense to let me be after I hunkered down behind the low bookshelf and started reading. I spent the entire day back there, reading. I never stopped.
If you’re looking for a version with a few more bells and whistles with regards to production value, we’ve included a 1996 audio version of the book, below. This one is narrated by Susan Jameson and James Saxon, two actors and veteran audiobook readers, who do a wonderful job of injecting the story’s tongue-in-cheek humor into the recording.
“Everyone’s got to start somewhere,” a banal platitude that expresses a truism worth repeating: wherever you are, you’ve got to get started. If you’re John Updike (who would have been 82 years old yesterday), you start where so many other accomplished figures have, the Harvard Lampoon. If you’re Charles Bukowski… believe it or not, you actually start in an equally renowned publication. Bukowski’s first fiction appeared in Story, a magazine that helped launch the careers of Cheever, Salinger, Saroyan, Carson McCullers and Richard Wright.
But if you’re Charles Bukowski, you come out swinging. Your first published work in 1944 is a nonsense story written as an eff you to the editor, Whit Burnett. You feature Mr. Burnett as a character, along with a cat who shakes hands (sort of), a prostitute named Millie, a few card-playing drunks, an imperious “short story instructress,” and a mysterious “bleary-eyed tramp.” Oh, and you open the story by quoting verbatim one of Burnett’s rejection letters:
Dear Mr. Bukowski:
Again, this is a conglomeration of extremely good stuff and other stuff so full of idolized prostitutes, morning-after vomiting scenes, misanthropy, praise for suicide etc. that it is not quite for a magazine of any circulation at all. This is, however, pretty much the saga of a certain type of person and in it I think you’ve done an honest job. Possibly we will print you sometime but I don’t know exactly when. That depends on you.
Sincerely yours,
Whit Burnett
I won’t spoil it for you—you must read (or listen to below) “Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip” for yourself—but the letter sets up a typically Bukowskian punchline: wry and sarcastic and wistful and lyrical all at once.
Bukowski was 24 and had only been writing for two years by this time. He later recalled being very unhappy with the publication. For one, writes Booktryst, “it had been buried in the End Pages section of the magazine as, Bukowski felt, a curiosity rather than a serious piece of writing.” However, Bukowski had already sent Story dozens of what he considered serious pieces of writing before penning “Aftermath,” which he admits he tamed for the sake of Burnett’s sensibilities. In an interview near the end of his life, Bukowski remembered submitting to the magazine “a couple of short stories a week for maybe a year and half. The story they finally accepted was mild in comparison to the others. I mean in terms of content and style and gamble and exploration and all that.”
Bukowski may have been bitter, but his first publication, and last submission to Story, might deserve credit for inspiring a lifetime of boozy material: looking back, he recalls that after the perceived slight, he “drank and became one of the best drinkers anywhere, which takes some talent also.” Everybody’s got to start somewhere.
Booktryst has more to the story, as well as several images of the rare 1944 Bukowski issue of Story. Above, in two parts, listen to the story in the wonderfully dry baritone of Tom O’Bedlam, whom you may already know from our previous posts on Bukowski’s poems “Nirvana” and “So You Want to Be a Writer?”
According to Ted Morgan, author of William S. Burroughs biography Literary Outlaw(which Burroughs hated), the hard-living Beat writer added “teacher” to the list of jobs he did not like after an unhappy semester teaching creative writing at the City College of New York. He complained about dimwitted students, and disliked the job—arranged for him by Allen Ginsberg—so much that he later turned down a position at the University of Buffalo that paid $15,000 a semester, even though he desperately needed the money. That Burroughs had recently kicked heroin may have contributed to his unease with the prosaic regularities of college life. Whatever the story, he later remarked that the “teaching gig was a lesson in never again.”
What then could have lured Burroughs out to Boulder Colorado five years later to deliver a series of lectures on creative writing at Naropa University? He’d picked up his heroin habit again, and his friendship with Ginsberg—who co-founded Naropa’s writing program—must have played a part. Whatever the reasons, this assignment differed greatly from his City College stint: no student writing, no office hours or admin. Just Burroughs doing what came naturally—holding court, on literature, parapsychology, occult esoterica, violence, aliens, neuroscience, and his own novels Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine.
Burroughs’ lectures are heavily philosophical, which might have turned off his New York students, but surely turned on his Naropa audience. And if you stopped to listen, it will probably turn you on too, in ways creative and intellectual. Ostensibly on the subject of creative reading, Burroughs also offers creative writing instruction in each talk. His discussions of writers he admires—from Carson McCullers to Aleister Crowley to Stephen King—are fascinating, and he uses no shortage of examples to illustrate various writing techniques. Fortunately for us, the lectures were recorded. Says Dangerous Minds, who provide helpful descriptions of each lecture: “now you can have your very own creative writing class from William S. Burroughs, all thanks to the wonders of YouTube.” Hear all three lectures above, and be by turns inspired, instructed, enlightened, and warped.
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Today, those who get “turned on” to Aldous Huxley (as they might have said back in the 1960s) get it through his books: the dystopian novel Brave New World, usually, or perhaps the mescaline memoir The Doors of Perception. But during Huxley’s lifetime, especially in its final years from the late 1950s to the early 60s, he made no small number of adherents through lecturing. Having transplanted himself from his native England to California in 1937, he eventually achieved great regard among the region’s self-styled intellectuals and spiritual seekers, giving talks at such mystically high-in-the-zeitgeist places as Hollywood and Santa Barbara’s Vedanta temples and even Big Sur’s famous Esalen Institute. But the prolific speech-giver also went farther afield, to far squarer venues such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There, in 1962, he recorded the album Visionary Experience: A Series Of Talks On The Human Situation, which you can hear on Ubuweb, or right below.
At that point, Huxley had already gained worldwide fame for his views on better living, which was sometimes achieved, he believed, through psychedelic drugs. This might have already sounded like old hat in, say, the San Francisco of the late 1960s, let alone the 70s and onward, but in these recordings Huxley says his piece in — I still can’t quite believe it — the MIT of the early 1960s. But Huxley, diagnosed a couple years before with the cancer that would claim his life the next, had nothing to lose by spreading the word of his substance-induced discoveries. These would, as you may remember, even facilitate the death itself, Huxley’s final visionary experience. To learn even more about all those that preceded it, see his collection Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience (1931–1963), that’s available on the Internet Archive. While we here at Open Culture don’t endorse drug use, we do endorse the words of Huxley as a substitute, and perhaps an even more vivid one.
Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass often makes its way into the hands of oversized American characters of, shall we say, uncertain repute. We learned, for example, under scandalous circumstances, of Bill Clinton’s admiration for the book, and we’ll never forget the role it played in the rise and fall of similarly alliteratively named, power-mad Walter White.
Another fictional mastermind—Sideshow Bob—quotes gleefully from Leaves of Grass in a recent Simpsons episode. And perhaps the most outré character of them all—the florid speech of the rogue and pimp Al Swearengen in HBO’s Deadwood—derives in part from the “barbaric yawp” Whitman describes as his native tongue in the poem from which the book’s title comes, “Song of Myself.”
One of the many reasons this particular poem from Leaves of Grass captures the imagination of outlaw intellectuals (and narcissists) may be Whitman’s invention of a new American poetic idiom for the eloquent assertion of stridently defiant personal identities. (As Ezra Pound put it, Whitman “broke the new wood.”) The Guardian placed “Song of Myself” at the top of a 10 best American poems list for the “peerless self-performance” of the poem’s hypnotic cadences. Who better to interpret those lines than another self-invented American contrarian, Orson Welles?
During some difficult times in the fifties—in part due to Welles’ IRS trouble—the great actor/director/multi-media impresario found work on radio plays in England, including The Lives of Harry Lime (based on his character in The Third Man) and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (as Moriarty). In 1953, the BBC contracted with Welles to record an hour of readings from “Song of Myself.” BBC 3 broadcast the session, and it later saw release as an LP, now sadly out of print. Fortunately, however, much of this recording has been digitally preserved. At the top, hear Welles read section VI of the poem, and directly above, hear him read the heretical section XLVIII. The Mickle Street Review, an online journal of Whitman studies, hosts a small part of Side 1 and, it appears, all of Side 2 of the record, below. The text of the poem was too long for a full treatment, and Welles, it seems, abridged and adapted some of the work himself. His reading was apparently very well received by the UK press.
Side 1:
Side 2:
While the BBC commissioned the recordings—and Welles no doubt needed the money—he already had an affinity for Whitman. In the same year he completely re-invented American film with Citizen Kane, he also began broadcasting the Orson Welles Show on CBS Radio, on which he and his guests gave dramatic readings from drama, poetry, and fiction. Welles produced 19 episodes, though only 8 have survived. One of the lost episodes, from December 1, 1941, featured Welles reading from Leaves of Grass. As further evidence, we have this photograph of Welles reading Gay Wilson Allen’s The Solitary Singer, a critical biography of the poet.
What draws Welles, and restless personalities like him, to Whitman, and especially to Leaves of Grass? One answer lies in Whitman’s own life. Early on, PBS’s American Experience tells us, Whitman staked out “radical positions… putting him in near constant opposition to society’s prevailing sentiments.” He never moderated his views or his voice, though faced with charges of blasphemy, obscenity, bad writing, and various other public vices at the time. Whitman’s steadfast commitment to his political and artistic vision brought him worldwide acclaim, as well as censure, in his lifetime. A particularly scathing 1882 Atlantic review of the second printing of Leaves of Grass catalogues Whitman’s literary abuses and concludes that “the book cannot attain to any very wide influence.” Despite this terribly wrongheaded prediction, the reviewer at least recognizes Whitman’s “generous aspiration,” a quality held in common by all of Whitman’s admirers, be they heroes, villains, or just average people responding to the poet’s raw self-assertion and capacious, grandiose, and particularly American, form of longing.
Every revolutionary age produces its own kind of nostalgia. Faced with the enormous social and economic upheavals at the nineteenth century’s end, learned Victorians like Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold looked to High Church models and played the bishops of Western culture, with a monkish devotion to preserving and transmitting old texts and traditions and turning back to simpler ways of life. It was in 1909, the nadir of this milieu, before the advent of modernism and world war, that The Harvard Classics took shape. Compiled by Harvard’s president Charles W. Eliot and called at first Dr. Eliot’s Five Foot Shelf, the compendium of literature, philosophy, and the sciences, writes Adam Kirsch in Harvard Magazine, served as a “monument from a more humane and confident time” (or so its upper classes believed), and a “time capsule…. In 50 volumes.”
What does the massive collection preserve? For one thing, writes Kirsch, it’s “a record of what President Eliot’s America, and his Harvard, thought best in their own heritage.” Eliot’s intentions for his work differed somewhat from those of his English peers. Rather than simply curating for posterity “the best that has been thought and said” (in the words of Matthew Arnold), Eliot meant his anthology as a “portable university”—a pragmatic set of tools, to be sure, and also, of course, a product. He suggested that the full set of texts might be divided into a set of six courses on such conservative themes as “The History of Civilization” and “Religion and Philosophy,” and yet, writes Kirsch, “in a more profound sense, the lesson taught by the Harvard Classics is ‘Progress.’” “Eliot’s [1910] introduction expresses complete faith in the ‘intermittent and irregular progress from barbarism to civilization.’”
In its expert synergy of moral uplift and marketing, The Harvard Classics (find links to download them as free ebooks below) belong as much to Mark Twain’s bourgeois gilded age as to the pseudo-aristocratic age of Victoria—two sides of the same ocean, one might say.
The idea for the collection didn’t initially come from Eliot, but from two editors at the publisher P.F. Collier, who intended “a commercial enterprise from the beginning” after reading a speech Eliot gave to a group of workers in which he “declared that a five-foot shelf of books could provide”
a good substitute for a liberal education in youth to anyone who would read them with devotion, even if he could spare but fifteen minutes a day for reading.
Collier asked Eliot to “pick the titles” and they would publish them as a series. The books appealed to the upwardly mobile and those hungry for knowledge and an education denied them, but the cost would still have been prohibitive to many. Over a hundred years, and several cultural-evolutionary steps later, and anyone with an internet connection can read all of the 51-volume set online. In a previous post, we summarized the number of ways to get your hands on Charles W. Eliot’s anthology:
You can still buy an old set off of eBay for $399 [now $299.99]. But, just as easily, you can head to the Internet Archiveand Project Gutenberg, which have centralized links to every text included in The Harvard Classics (Wealth of Nations, Origin of Species, Plutarch’s Lives, the list goes on below). Please note that the previous two links won’t give you access to the actual annotated Harvard Classics texts edited by Eliot himself. But if you want just that, you can always click here and get digital scans of the true Harvard Classics.
In addition to these options, Bartleby has digital texts of the entire collection of what they call “the most comprehensive and well-researched anthology of all time.” But wait, there’s more! Much more, in fact, since Eliot and his assistant William A. Neilson compiled an additional twenty volumes called the “Shelf of Fiction.” Read those twenty volumes—at fifteen minutes a day—starting with Henry Fielding and ending with Norwegian novelist Alexander Kielland at Bartleby.
What may strike modern readers of Eliot’s collection are precisely the “blind spots in Victorian notions of culture and progress” that it represents. For example, those three harbingers of doom for Victorian certitude—Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—are nowhere to be seen. Omissions like this are quite telling, but, as Kirsch writes, we might not look at Eliot’s achievement as a relic of a naively optimistic age, but rather as “an inspiring testimony to his faith in the possibility of democratic education without the loss of high standards.” This was, and still remains, a noble ideal, if one that—like the utopian dreams of the Victorians—can sometimes seem frustratingly unattainable (or culturally imperialist). But the widespread availability of free online humanities certainly brings us closer than Eliot’s time could ever come.
Today is the 92nd birthday of author and cultural icon Jack Kerouac. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922, Kerouac was one of the troika of writers – along with Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs – who formed the core of the Beat Generation. He wrote shaggy dog stories — thinly veiled autobiographical tales about sex and drugs, friendship and spiritual yearning. His style was spontaneous and off-hand, yet he crafted passages of such poetic beauty that they make the reader gasp. He wrote his hugely influential book On the Road — legend has it — during a 20-day writing bender. He went so far as to tape together strips of paper into one continuous scroll of paper so as not to break his flow.
It’s hard to imagine Hunter S. Thompson and his distinctive brand of journalism without Jack Kerouac. Both wrote brilliant, rambling tracts about America. Both could turn a phrase like nobody’s business. Both had political philosophies that didn’t fit comfortably on either the left or right side of the spectrum. The difference is that Kerouac was doing all of this while Thompson was just hitting puberty.
So it might be surprising to learn that Thompson apparently loathed Kerouac’s writing when he was a young man. In a letter penned when the future gonzo journalist was a mere 21 years old, he savaged the Beat writer.
The man is an ass, a mystic boob with intellectual myopia. The Dharma thing was quite as bad as The Subterraneans and they’re both withered appendages to On The Road — which isn’t even a novel in the first place…If somebody doesn’t kill that fool soon, we’re all going to be labeled “The generation of the Third Sex.”
Is this a sincere opinion or is this bluster? Or is it both?
Thirty years later, it’s hard to see if Thompson’s opinion of Kerouac has evolved. In a recording from 1998, which you can listen to above, he seems to praise Kerouac while at the same time slipping in the shiv. In the video, an obviously inebriated Thompson can be heard readinga poem dedicated to the author.
Now I want to tell you.… In fact he (Kerouac) was a great influence on me.… So now I wanna put out my poem…This is my Ode to Jack Kerouac, who remains one of my heroes…Uhhhh…How about this… This is called, let’s see…This is called ‘Hippy Ode To Jack’…
“Four dogs went to the wilderness, Only three came back.
Two dogs died from Guinea Worm, The other died from you.
Jack Kerouac.”
Well, Jack was not innocent. He ran over dogs…Just think of it…OK…That’s enough of that for now…Thank you very much. And.…Ahhh…Ya, well…Jack was an artist in every way…I admire the dog thing most of all.
So Happy Birthday, Jack. Hunter brings insults and backhanded compliments with a side of innuendo.
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.
Until I read J. R. R. Tolkien’sThe Lord of The Rings, my favorite book growing up was, by far, The Hobbit. Growing up in Russia, however, meant that instead of Tolkien’s English version, my parents read me a Russian translation. To me, the translation easily matched the pace and wonder of Tolkien’s original. Looking back, The Hobbit probably made such an indelible impression on me because Tolkien’s tale was altogether different than the Russian fairy tales and children’s stories that I had previously been exposed to. There were no childish hijinks, no young protagonists, no parents to rescue you when you got into trouble. I considered it an epic in the truest literary sense.
As with many Russian translations during the Cold War, the book came with a completely different set of illustrations. Mine, I remember regretting slightly, lacked pictures altogether. A friend’s edition, however, was illustrated in the typical Russian style: much more traditionally stylized than Tolkien’s own drawings, they were more angular, friendlier, almost cartoonish. In this post, we include a number of these images from the 1976 printing. The cover, above, depicts a grinning Bilbo Baggins holding a gem. Below, Gandalf, an ostensibly harmless soul, pays Bilbo a visit.
Next, we have the three trolls, arguing about their various eating arrangements, with Bilbo hiding to the side.
Here, Gollum, née Smeagol, paddles his raft in the depths of the mountains.
Finally, here’s Bilbo, fulfilling his role as a burglar in Smaug’s lair.
For more of the Soviet illustrations of The Hobbit, head on over to Retronaut.
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Many of us came across our favorite book serendipitously. No surprise: it’s easiest to be completely blown away by a work of art or literature when you approach it without any pre-existing expectations. For BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow, that book was Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland. Doctorow, now a prominent author, journalist, and technology activist, first came across Carroll’s tale of a young girl who falls down a rabbit hole in 1978:
