Vintage Photos of a Young Virginia Woolf Playing Cricket (Ages 5 & 12)

in Literature | January 14th, 2014

Scenes, I note, seldom illustrate my relation with Vanessa; it has been too deep for ‘scenes’. Vanessa and I were both what we call tomboys; that is, we played cricket, scrambled over rocks, climbed trees, were said not to care for clothes and so on.

Until she was fifteen indeed, she was outwardly sober and austere, the most trustworthy, and always the eldest; sometimes she would lament her “responsibilities”. But beneath the serious surface … there burnt also the…passion for art. …Once I saw her scrawl on a black door a great maze of lines, with white chalk. “When I am a famous painter-” she began, and then turned shy and rubbed it out in her capable way…She was awkward as a long-legged colt.

This is how Virginia Woolf remembered her sister Vanessa Bell in correspondence that’s been revived by a Smith College web site. Later in life, of course, Woolf wrote some of the finest modernist works of the 20th century. Meanwhile Vanessa became a respected painter — see 142 of her paintings here — and a central member of the avant-garde Bloomsbury Group. As adults, they both had a lot of cultural clout. But during another time — during their “tomboy” years — they were just kids looking for a good game of cricket. Above, we have an 1894 picture of Virginia (in the front, about 12 years old) and Vanessa, playing cricket at St. Ives. Below we have a shot, courtesy of Smith’s web site, of 5‑year-old Virginia playing cricket with her little brother Adrian Stephen (also later a member of the Bloomsbury Group) in 1886.

Works by Woolf can be found in our Free Audio Books and Free eBooks collections.

via The Paris Review

Virginia Woolf Writes About Joyce’s Ulysses, “Never Did Any Book So Bore Me,” and Quits at Page 200

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Read 12 Masterful Essays by Joan Didion for Free Online, Spanning Her Career From 1965 to 2013

in Literature, Writing | January 14th, 2014

Image by David Shankbone, via Wikimedia Commons

In a classic essay of Joan Didion’s, “Goodbye to All That,” the novelist and writer breaks into her narrative—not for the first or last time—to prod her reader. She rhetorically asks and answers: “…was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was.” The wry little moment is perfectly indicative of Didion’s unsparingly ironic critical voice. Didion is a consummate critic, from Greek kritēs, “a judge.” But she is always foremost a judge of herself. An account of Didion’s eight years in New York City, where she wrote her first novel while working for Vogue, “Goodbye to All That” frequently shifts point of view as Didion examines the truth of each statement, her prose moving seamlessly from deliberation to commentary, annotation, aside, and aphorism, like the below:

I want to explain to you, and in the process perhaps to myself, why I no longer live in New York. It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city only for the very young.

Anyone who has ever loved and left New York—or any life-altering city—will know the pangs of resignation Didion captures. These economic times and every other produce many such stories. But Didion made something entirely new of familiar sentiments. Although her essay has inspired a sub-genre, and a collection of breakup letters to New York with the same title, the unsentimental precision and compactness of Didion’s prose is all her own.

The essay appears in 1967’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a representative text of the literary nonfiction of the sixties alongside the work of John McPhee, Terry Southern, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson. In Didion’s case, the emphasis must be decidedly on the literary—her essays are as skillfully and imaginatively written as her fiction and in close conversation with their authorial forebears. “Goodbye to All That” takes its title from an earlier memoir, poet and critic Robert Graves’ 1929 account of leaving his hometown in England to fight in World War I. Didion’s appropriation of the title shows in part an ironic undercutting of the memoir as a serious piece of writing.

And yet she is perhaps best known for her work in the genre. Published almost fifty years after Slouching Towards Bethlehem, her 2005 memoir The Year of Magical Thinking is, in poet Robert Pinsky’s words, a “traveler’s faithful account” of the stunningly sudden and crushing personal calamities that claimed the lives of her husband and daughter separately. “Though the material is literally terrible,” Pinsky writes, “the writing is exhilarating and what unfolds resembles an adventure narrative: a forced expedition into those ‘cliffs of fall’ identified by Hopkins.” He refers to lines by the gifted Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins that Didion quotes in the book: “O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap / May who ne’er hung there.”

The nearly unimpeachably authoritative ethos of Didion’s voice convinces us that she can fearlessly traverse a wild inner landscape most of us trivialize, “hold cheap,” or cannot fathom. And yet, in a 1978 Paris Review interview, Didion—with that technical sleight of hand that is her casual mastery—called herself “a kind of apprentice plumber of fiction, a Cluny Brown at the writer’s trade.” Here she invokes a kind of archetype of literary modesty (John Locke, for example, called himself an “underlabourer” of knowledge) while also figuring herself as the winsome heroine of a 1946 Ernst Lubitsch comedy about a social climber plumber’s niece played by Jennifer Jones, a character who learns to thumb her nose at power and privilege.

A twist of fate—interviewer Linda Kuehl’s death—meant that Didion wrote her own introduction to the Paris Review interview, a very unusual occurrence that allows her to assume the role of her own interpreter, offering ironic prefatory remarks on her self-understanding. After the introduction, it’s difficult not to read the interview as a self-interrogation. Asked about her characterization of writing as a “hostile act” against readers, Didion says, “Obviously I listen to a reader, but the only reader I hear is me. I am always writing to myself. So very possibly I’m committing an aggressive and hostile act toward myself.”

It’s a curious statement. Didion’s cutting wit and fearless vulnerability take in seemingly all—the expanses of her inner world and political scandals and geopolitical intrigues of the outer, which she has dissected for the better part of half a century. Below, we have assembled a selection of Didion’s best essays online. We begin with one from Vogue:

“On Self Respect” (1961)

Didion’s 1979 essay collection The White Album brought together some of her most trenchant and searching essays about her immersion in the counterculture, and the ideological fault lines of the late sixties and seventies. The title essay begins with a gemlike sentence that became the title of a collection of her first seven volumes of nonfiction: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Read two essays from that collection below:

“The Women’s Movement” (1972)

“Holy Water” (1977)

Didion has maintained a vigorous presence at the New York Review of Books since the late seventies, writing primarily on politics. Below are a few of her best known pieces for them:

“Insider Baseball” (1988)

“Eye on the Prize” (1992)

“The Teachings of Speaker Gingrich” (1995)

“Fixed Opinions, or the Hinge of History” (2003)

“Politics in the New Normal America” (2004)

“The Case of Theresa Schiavo” (2005)

“The Deferential Spirit” (2013)

“California Notes” (2016)

Didion continues to write with as much style and sensitivity as she did in her first collection, her voice refined by a lifetime of experience in self-examination and piercing critical appraisal. She got her start at Vogue in the late fifties, and in 2011, she published an autobiographical essay there that returns to the theme of “yearning for a glamorous, grown up life” that she explored in “Goodbye to All That.” In “Sable and Dark Glasses,” Didion’s gaze is steadier, her focus this time not on the naïve young woman tempered and hardened by New York, but on herself as a child “determined to bypass childhood” and emerge as a poised, self-confident 24-year old sophisticate—the perfect New Yorker she never became.

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

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How Hunter S. Thompson — and Psilocybin — Influenced the Art of Ralph Steadman, Creating the “Gonzo” Style

in Art, Literature | January 14th, 2014

Though the two men only occasionally collaborated over their long friendship, the work of Kentucky-born “gonzo” journalist Hunter S. Thompson and that of British illustrator Ralph Steadman enjoy a cultural symbiosis: Thompson’s style of writing puts you in the mind of Steadman’s style of drawing, and vice versa even more so. At this point, I have a hard time imagining any suitable visual accompaniment to the simultaneously clear- and wild-eyed sensibility of Thompsonian prose — “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone,” he famously said, “but they’ve always worked for me” — other than the bold strokes and violent blotches with which Steadman renders visions of highly controlled madness. The clip above, from Alex Gibney’s documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, explores the origins of their aesthetic and psychological partnership.

“I think what he saw in this connection was somebody that somehow saw the thing in pictures as he saw it in life,” says Steadman. “Our chemistry there made gonzo possible.” We then see the relatively tame, conventional style in which he drew before Thompson roared into his life, bearing a handful of psilocybin. Their paths had converged at the Kentucky Derby, which Scanlan’s magazine had assigned them to cover, and the drugs made the already grotesque scene even more vividly troubling. “I was a quiet boy,” Steadman remembers. “Decent. An innocent abroad. So I guess it was attractive, that kind of raciness. I think the birth of gonzo happened when the evil came out of me in the drawings.” You can read the groundbreaking fruit of their hallucinogenically enhanced labors, “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved,” at our collection of Hunter Thompson articles online. For more on Steadman’s technique and career, which continues today, watch the Economist’s visit to the “savage satirist’s” studio just above.

You can find a fairly comprehensive compendium of Steadman’s art in the 1998 book Gonzo: The Art, which features an introduction by Thompson himself.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, literature, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Facebook page.

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Read 700 Free eBooks Made Available by the University of California Press

in Books, e-books, History, Literature | January 12th, 2014

The University of California Press e‑books collection holds books published by UCP (and a select few printed by other academic presses) between 1982–2004. The general public currently has access to 770 books through this initiative. The collection is dynamic, with new titles being added over time.

Readers looking to see what the collection holds can browse by subject. The curators of the site have kindly provided a second browsing page that shows only the publicly accessible books, omitting any frustrating off-limits titles.

The collection’s strengths are in history (particularly American history and the history of California and the West); religion; literary studies; and international studies (with strong selections of Middle Eastern Studies, Asian Studies, and French Studies titles).

A quick browse yields a multitude of interesting possibilities for future reading: Shelley Streeby’s 2002 book about sensational literature and dime novels in the nineteenth-century United States; Luise White’s intriguing-looking Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (2000); and Karen Lystra’s 2004 re-examination of Mark Twain’s final years. (The image above comes from another Twain text by Randall Knoper.) Two other noteworthy texts include Roland Barthes’ Incidents and Hugh Kenner’s Chuck Jones: A Flurry of Drawings.

Sadly, you can’t download the books to an e‑reader or tablet. Happily, there is a “bookbag” function that you can use to store your titles, if you need to leave the site and come back.

As always, we’d encourage you to visit our collection of 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices, where we recently added texts by Vladimir Nabokov, Philip K. Dick and others. Also find free courses in our list of 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

Rebecca Onion is a writer and academic living in Philadelphia. She runs Slate.com’s history blog, The Vault. Follow her on Twitter:@rebeccaonion.

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Behold Pablo Picasso’s Illustrations of Balzac’s Short Story “The Hidden Masterpiece” (1931)

in Art, Literature | January 10th, 2014

Pablo Picasso had a long and complex relationship with book illustration. The modern painter hated to work on spec and resisted taking commissions. Nonetheless, when it came to literature, he made well over 50 exceptions, illustrating the work of scores of authors he admired. As John Golding writes in The Independent, Picasso had always gravitated toward the literary; he wrote prolifically, was “attracted to art that had a literary flavor,” and “preferred the company of writers, particularly poets, to that of other painters and sculptors.” Golding writes of the artist’s particular love for the Spanish Baroque poet Luis de Gongora, whose work he illustrated in a 1948 edition, and who was to “affect the future development of Picasso’s art in a way that his other literary collaborations did not.” But this may be a hasty judgment. As it turned out, Picasso’s 1931 illustration of a short story by Honoré de Balzac, “The Hidden Masterpiece” (Le Chef‑d’oeuvre inconnu), would affect him greatly, and indirectly contributed to the creation of his most famous work, the enormous anti-war canvas Guernica.

Picasso accepted the Balzac commission from art dealer Ambroise Vollard (see the title page and frontispiece at top, Picasso’s portraits of Balzac above) and completed the thirteen etchings in 1931 for a centennial edition (see ten of the illustrations here). Many have considered these etchings “landmarks in the history of engraving.” Balzac’s story, admired by other painters like Cézanne and Matisse, is among other things a tale of an artist ahead of his time. Set in the 17th century, “The Hidden Masterpiece” tells of an aging painter named Frenhofer, who obsessively labors over a work he has kept secret for years. When two younger admirers, painters Poussin and Porbus, finally manage to see Frenhofer’s secret canvas, they are appalled—it appears to them nothing more than an indistinct mess of lines, colors and shapes—and they mock the older artist and assume their celebrated friend has gone insane. The next day, Frenhofer destroys all his work and kills himself.

Picasso, writes Thomas Ganzevoort, “had faced something of the same dumbfounded reaction from fellow artists upon showing them his groundbreaking proto-Cubist masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” He later claimed that the ghost of Balzac haunted him, and he found himself so compelled by the story that in 1937, he chose for his new studio a 17th century townhouse located at 7 Rue des Grands-Augustin, the very house many believed to be the setting of the opening scene in “The Hidden Masterpiece.” In April of that year, German warplanes bombed the Spanish Basque city of Guernica, and Picasso abandoned all other projects and set to work on his famous large canvas, which he completed in June of that same year (below, see him in his Grands-Augustin studio, at work on Guernica). Like his earlier, cubist work, Guernica divided critics and perplexed some of his peers. At its unveiling in the 1937 Paris Exhibition, the painting “garnered little attention.” Unlike the tragic Frenhofer of Balzac’s story, however, Picasso did not succumb to self-doubt and lived to see his work vindicated. See this site to learn more about Balzac and Picasso, including discussion of a disputed 1934 drawing some believe to be Picasso’s own “hidden masterpiece.”

Watch Picasso Create Entire Paintings in Magnificent Time-Lapse Film (1956)

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

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George Orwell Explains in a Revealing 1944 Letter Why He’d Write 1984

in History, Literature | January 9th, 2014

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Most of the twentieth century’s notable men of letters — i.e., writers of books, of essays, of reportage — seem also to have, literally, written a great deal of letters. Sometimes their correspondence reflects and shapes their “real” written work; sometimes it appears collected in book form itself. Both hold true in the case of George Orwell, a volume of whose letters, edited by Peter Davison, came out last year. In it we find this missive, also published in full at The Daily Beast, sent in 1944 to one Noel Willmett, who had asked “whether totalitarianism, leader-worship etc. are really on the up-grade” given “that they are not apparently growing in [England] and the USA”:

I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and © all sorts of petty fuhrers of the type of de Gaulle. All the national movements everywhere, even those that originate in resistance to German domination, seem to take non-democratic forms, to group themselves round some superhuman fuhrer (Hitler, Stalin, Salazar, Franco, Gandhi, De Valera are all varying examples) and to adopt the theory that the end justifies the means. Everywhere the world movement seems to be in the direction of centralised economies which can be made to ‘work’ in an economic sense but which are not democratically organised and which tend to establish a caste system. With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer. Already history has in a sense ceased to exist, ie. there is no such thing as a history of our own times which could be universally accepted, and the exact sciences are endangered as soon as military necessity ceases to keep people up to the mark. Hitler can say that the Jews started the war, and if he survives that will become official history. He can’t say that two and two are five, because for the purposes of, say, ballistics they have to make four. But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it. That, so far as I can see, is the direction in which we are actually moving, though, of course, the process is reversible.

As to the comparative immunity of Britain and the USA. Whatever the pacifists etc. may say, we have not gone totalitarian yet and this is a very hopeful symptom. I believe very deeply, as I explained in my book The Lion and the Unicorn, in the English people and in their capacity to centralise their economy without destroying freedom in doing so. But one must remember that Britain and the USA haven’t been really tried, they haven’t known defeat or severe suffering, and there are some bad symptoms to balance the good ones. To begin with there is the general indifference to the decay of democracy. Do you realise, for instance, that no one in England under 26 now has a vote and that so far as one can see the great mass of people of that age don’t give a damn for this? Secondly there is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side. Indeed the statement that we haven’t a Fascist movement in England largely means that the young, at this moment, look for their fuhrer elsewhere. One can’t be sure that that won’t change, nor can one be sure that the common people won’t think ten years hence as the intellectuals do now. I hope they won’t, I even trust they won’t, but if so it will be at the cost of a struggle. If one simply proclaims that all is for the best and doesn’t point to the sinister symptoms, one is merely helping to bring totalitarianism nearer.

You also ask, if I think the world tendency is towards Fascism, why do I support the war. It is a choice of evils—I fancy nearly every war is that. I know enough of British imperialism not to like it, but I would support it against Nazism or Japanese imperialism, as the lesser evil. Similarly I would support the USSR against Germany because I think the USSR cannot altogether escape its past and retains enough of the original ideas of the Revolution to make it a more hopeful phenomenon than Nazi Germany. I think, and have thought ever since the war began, in 1936 or thereabouts, that our cause is the better, but we have to keep on making it the better, which involves constant criticism.

Yours sincerely,
Geo. Orwell

Three years later, Orwell would write 1984. Two years after that, it would see publication and go on to generations of attention as perhaps the most eloquent fictional statement against a world reduced to superstates, saturated with “emotional nationalism,” acquiescent to “dictatorial methods, secret police,” and the systematic falsification of history,” and shot through by the willingness to “disbelieve in the existence of objective truth because all the facts have to fit in with the words and prophecies of some infallible fuhrer.” Now that you feel like reading the novel again, or even for the first time, do browse our collection of 1984-related resources, which includes the eBook, the audio book, reviews, and even radio drama and comic book adaptations of Orwell’s work.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, literature, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Facebook page.

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Read Dictator Kim Jong-il’s Writings on Cinema, Art & Opera: Courtesy of North Korea’s Free E‑Library

in e-books, Film, Literature | January 8th, 2014

Kim Jong-Il (1941–2011), son of North Korea’s despotic Kim Il-sung and a tyrant in his own filial right, had as many titles as he did talents, with honorifics including the Sun of the Nation and the Shining Star of Paektu Mountain. Highfalutin nicknames aside, the younger dictator was a pretty able guy. North Korean sources assert that the Dear Leader once shot a 38 under par with 11 birdies (in his first and only game of golf), and could alter the weather using the power of his mind. Having turned his intellect to academia, Kim wrote 1500 books while studying at university. He also theorized extensively about art, cinema, and opera.

Kim once served as the Movie and Arts Division Director in North Korea’s Propaganda and Agitation Department, and was a renowned cinephile. As befitting a man whose personal video library reportedly housed over 20,000 titles, Kim (or some unfortunate ghostwriters) published numerous lectures and pamphlets on film, some of which are available in the Democratic Republic of Korea’s E‑Library. In his text The Cinema and Directing, for example, Kim shows off his talents for writing stilted academic prose while discussing ideology:

The ideological kernel of a production is the seed which the director and all the other creative workers should bring into flower through their collective efforts and wisdom. It is not only the basis of the interpretation by the individual creative workers, but also the foundation on which they all combine to produce one single cinematic presentation. When all interpretations are conducted on the basis of one seed, they form the components of one cinematic presentation because they are built on the same foundation [et cetera, ad nauseum].

Kim also pontificated on matters of literature. The treatise, entitled Life and Literature, offers the Ever-Victorious, Iron-Willed Commander’s thoughts on the essence of writing:

Literature belongs to the domain of humanics [sic]. The essential characteristic of literature as a humanics [sic] consists of describing real people and serving man… To say that literature portrays people means that it describes people and their lives, people who live, breathe, think and act as they do in real life. That literature serves man means that it solves urgent and important human problems through people and their lives and thus teaches them what life is and influences them to lead an honourable life. It is only through an accurate portrayal of people and their lives that literature can provide proper solutions for valuable human problems, and exert a great influence on people.

The key words here are “people” and “lives.” Got it?

Lest you dismiss these writings as pseudo-intellectual nonsense, it’s important to note that some philosophical interpretation is required. It’s the meanings behind the words, and the things that Kim leaves unsaid, that make up the real meat and potatoes of the piece… Or something.

You can find more of Kim Jong-il’s writings (alongside those of his father, Kim Il-sung) at the Democratic Republic of Korea E‑Library. Other titles include On the Art of the Drama and On the Art of Opera, which gets some pretty stellar reviews on Amazon. Take for example: “With over five books published per year in North Korea, it is a challenge to pick a single favorite. However, this book is a standout for North Korean opera connoisseurs and beginners alike.”

Ilia Blinderman is a Montreal-based culture and science writer. Follow him at @iliablinderman.

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Cartoonist R. Crumb Assesses 21 Cultural Figures, from Dylan & Hitchcock, to Kafka & The Beatles

in Art, Comics/Cartoons, Film, Literature | January 3rd, 2014

Any fan of “underground” comic artist Robert Crumb knows that the man has no shyness about his preferences: not in jazz music, not in politics, and certainly not in the female form. Alex Wood, co-operator of the official R. Crumb site (pictured with Crumb above), has discovered that the artist’s opinions offer a vivid window into the artist’s mind. “Over the years, talking with Robert about many different things, I’ve been surprised by some of the things he likes and dislikes,” Wood writes. “We all know he loves old music from the early part of the last century, and doesn’t like rock music. But then he says he likes Tommy James and the Shondells, and Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs? So in a discussion in May, 2011, I asked his opinion on a list of people in the news past and present.” This became part one of the series “Crumb on Others,” which has at this point grown to seven full pages.

Below, we offer you a selection of the roughly 150 figures from music, film, visual art, and letters Crumb has so far assessed, his reactions ranging from high praise to outright dismissal to amusing anecdotes of his own encounters with the luminaries in question. With these, you can see how your notes on the likes of Bob Dylan, Alfred Hitchcock, Philip K. Dick, and Charles Darwin compare with those of the creator of Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural, the hand that gave us “Keep on Truckin’,” and the leading light of of Zap Comix — a luminary who has generated no small amount of high praise, outright dismissal, and amusing anecdote himself. Here are the remaining parts. Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and Part 7.

On Mark Twain: “Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn don’t do that much for me. But his later stuff, he gets more cranky as he gets older. His critique gets more interesting. When I was 15, I read What Is Man? and it made a profound impression on me. It changed my life. It’s all about predestination versus freewill. He was a big believer in predestination. He didn’t think we had any free will.”

On Bob Dylan: “I hate his voice. I can’t stand to hear him sing. I thought some of the songs that he wrote in the mid-60s were kind of clever, with clever lyrics. But I just can’t stand to hear him or see him perform. And I think his heart is in the right place a lot of times, you know. Someone told me he was an aficionado of old 20s, old time music, and that he listens to the same kind of stuff I like.”

On Walt Disney: “When I was a little kid in the 50s, we were profoundly enthralled by Disney, and profoundly affected by the Disney vision. But to my taste, the whole thing starts to decline in the early 1950s. The last one that I think is a truly visionary work is Alice In Wonderland. Beginning with Peter Pan circa 1953 it starts to slide into something too corporate.”

On Janis Joplin: “Sad case, very sad case. She tried to act like she was hard and tough, but she wasn’t at all. She was soft and vulnerable. She drank a lot, and got a lot of bad advice. She was surrounded by vultures and vampires and scoundrels, and they just did her in. She finally ended up face-down in her own vomit alone in some hotel room; too much heroin and alcohol, 27 years old.”

On Alfred Hitchcock: “I talked to somebody who knew Kim Novak, some older woman, and Kim Novak told her shocking things about Alfred Hitchcock and his sexual proclivities. That kind of surprised me. I don’t know why. I guess when you look at Hitchcock you don’t see a guy with an aggressive sexual libido. Just goes to show you can never tell a book by its cover. I ought to know that by now.”

On The Beatles: “Some of the last stuff they did, you know, it kind of gets dark, and that’s more interesting to me, the last stuff they did before they broke up. Well, that and the music they did before they actually started recording under Brian Epstein. The only way you can hear that, I think, is to see the documentaries where it shows them playing in Hamburg and the Cavern Club. Before Brian Epstein got ahold of them and cleaned them up and made them over into those cute mop-tops and put them in those mod suits. Before that, they were greaser guys – leather jackets and greasy hair. And they just played this sort of driving, hard rock-a-billy music. And they were really good at that.”

On Pablo Picasso: “I once wrote that I envied Picasso, because he was the type of artist who didn’t let anything stand in the way of his art. He would just slam the door on his wives, his girlfriends, his children – anybody, when it was time to do his art. I always envied that about him. Also his powerful, penetrating, hypnotic way with women. I envied that about him too.”

On Franz Kafka: “Before I did that book on Kafka, I had never read him and didn’t know anything about him. But once I took that book project on, then I had to read all his stuff. And then I really got to like him. And while working on that project, I felt a very close kinship with Kafka. It was very strange. I started feeling deeply connected to Kafka somehow. Something I hadn’t expected at all.”

On Charles Bukowski: “Love ’im, love his writing. He was a very difficult guy to hang out with in person, but on paper he was great. One of the great American writers of the late 20th Century. [ … ] The last time I saw Bukowski, he came to this party in San Francisco, it was a poetry reading. And these two women that I knew they just kind of closed in on Bukowski. One was talking to him in one ear and the other was talking to him in his other ear. He was standing there with a beer bottle in each hand and getting drunk as fast as he could. And the last moment I saw him, they were leading him off to the bedroom.”

On William Burroughs: “He was a very eccentric character; very eccentric ideas and thoughts. He tried all kinds of strange, avant-garde psychotherapies. He was into psychic experimentation. He built himself an orgone box based upon the theories of Wilhelm Reich. He later got involved in Scientology and had this E‑meter and used it as a way to psychically clear himself. He said it was his electrical Ouija board. He tried other stuff too, like out of body experience. I can relate to all that stuff because I’m interested in all that fringe, psychic experimentation also. But he was very serious about that stuff.”

On Bettie Page: “She had the most perfect body and the cutest face of all in that pinup era of the 1940s and 1950s. She was the gold standard. There was nobody superior to her physically. And her poses, she always looked cheerful and wholesome, she never looked sleazy. It didn’t matter if she was posing in a sadomasochistic setup with those high heel boots and whips, it always looks like it’s just a funny game to her, you know? She could have a ball-gag in her mouth and she looks like the girl next door just having fun.”

On Woody Allen: “One of my favorite movies of his was Crimes and Misdemeanors. It was a great movie. In that movie, there was an esteemed ophthalmologist, very respected in his profession. He has this mistress, this neurotic woman and she’s threatening to expose him and the secret affair he’s having. She threatens to come over to his house and make a big scene and ruin his life. He also has a brother who’s involved in the crime syndicate. So he goes to the brother and the brother has her killed by a professional. All the main male characters in the movie, I’ve come to suspect that they’re all parts of Woody Allen’s personality. The respected ophthalmologist is part of him; this nerdy, idealistic documentary film-maker — that’s part of him. And there’s this really arrogant comedy writer/director played by Alan Alda who plays such a jerk, and that’s part of Woody Allen also; very interesting. And I suspect that movie is kind of — and I don’t even know how aware of it he was — a confession. It was right around the time that whole scandal with Mia Farrow’s daughter happened — maybe right before — because Mia Farrow was in it. But, the ophthalmologist gets away with it.”

On Philip K. Dick: “I’ve actually never read any of his books. All I ever read was interviews with him and that account he gave of his religious experience — his mystical experience. The whole experience… the way he described it, it was great. I should read his books but I never got around to it. I was never big on science fiction, but he was always more interesting and imaginative than a lot of science fiction writers.” (Crumb illustrated Dick’s “meeting with God.”)

On Charles Darwin: “I never really read Darwin or studied much about him. I have the most broad, general idea about his theories of natural selection and evolution. But I do know that when a lot of upper class English people started reading his books, and his theories began to be widely known in the 1870s, it created a huge change that hasn’t been widely recognized by historians, to my knowledge. People’s attitudes toward religion changed due to his book, particularly in the upper classes in England, they stopped considering it their absolute duty to go to church and be a good church-going person. A lot of the upper class dropped out, let their church membership lapse. Before that. they all went to church, for appearance sake if nothing else. But after Darwin, that all changed.”

On Jack Kerouac: “When I was 17, I read On The Road, and it sickened me, because my reaction was, ‘Oh God, these guys are out there having so much fun. I’m not having any fun at all. I’m just sitting here in my parents house. But them — the girls, the adventures, they’re just like having a fuckin’ lark On The Road.’ ”

On Jean-Paul Sartre: “A funny guy, Sarte’s a funny guy. You know, people don’t think of him as funny because he was so serious about existentialism and communism and stuff like that. [ … ] He wrote a book about his childhood that was pretty funny. It’s very self-deprecating, and he writes about what a little bourgeois, arrogant shit he was as a kid. Funny guy, I like Sarte.”

On Michelangelo: “The guy is just like glorifying the male body. It’s all about writhing, muscular male bodies. And even the women, they have male bodies with tits pasted on. The guy’s not into women, you can tell. He’s not into feminine at all. He’s not interested in the round, elliptical charms of the female form. No, he’s interested in the lumpy, muscular male body. And the whole [Sistine] Chapel is nothing but that.”

On Henry Miller: “Just like Kerouac, I was about nineteen when I read him, and again, I was devastated because he was having too much fucking fun. He was fucking so many women. He was so successful with women, it made me sick. He’d brag about how he came on to some woman on the street and ended up fucking her in the bushes. I thought, ‘God, how does he do that?’ It made me sick with envy. But trying to read him later, I thought he was way, way, too long-winded. I thought he needed serious editing.”

On Orson Welles: “I don’t understand why some people are so impressed by that guy. The most entertaining Orson Welles thing I’ve ever heard was some outtakes from a radio commercial that he was doing. And he’s really in a bad mood and he’s insulting the producers and technicians in the studio and telling them, ‘This is a lot of shit I hope you know.’ ”

On Hunter Thompson: “I met him a couple of times. He used to hang out at that Mitchell Brothers Theater on O’Farrell Street in San Francisco, which was a strip joint run by the Mitchell Brothers. There was this kind of like Irish-Journalist-Mafia that used to hang around there. He and these other Irish characters from San Francisco who were into journalism there, newspaper guys, they hung around there for some reason, I don’t know why. But Thompson did a lot of cocaine and drank, and then he would go on these long ‘cocaine raps,’ ranting and raving. But by the time I met him, y’ know, he was already well-advanced to being really fucking out of his mind.”

On Martin Scorsese: “I think Goodfellas is probably the best film about the modern American crime syndicates. Casino was kind of a follow-up to Goodfellas, and I didn’t think it was quite as good. Probably Goodfellas got so much praise it kind of went to his head so everybody got together and made this indulgent film. It had it’s good parts, it was good, it just wasn’t as good as Goodfellas. For one thing, there were too many close ups on DeNiro’s face. I just kept wanting the camera to back-off. OK, you think the guy’s great looking, but Jesus, OK, it’s enough, back-off!”

Record Cover Art by Underground Cartoonist Robert Crumb

A Short History of America, According to the Irreverent Comic Satirist Robert Crumb

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

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, literature, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Facebook page.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

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